Moses prayed, «My Lord! Uplift my heart for me, and make my task easy, and remove the impediment from my tongue so people may understand my speech»
[Surah Taha 20:25-28]
In his BBC Reith Lectures, Edward Said noted that to be an intellectual (or the more approachable term, a public writer) is to live in exile. Not only literally, but also a metaphorical kind of exile. According to Said, to be a public writer is to be perpetually restless, not entirely satisfied at any moment. External narratives cannot be relied on, as they are the object of your scrutiny. One has to make do with being unaccommodated, burdensome, and embarrassing. The public writer must remain suspended, alert, and suspicious of anything presenting itself as a universal answer, or a comprehensive how-to-guide.
Most importantly, writing is to be a public service, specifically for those who are disenfranchised and marginalized. For the public writer, writing is not an indulgence. As Frantz Fanon noted, such work is characteristic of the European tradition we ought to transcend:
A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state, where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words, and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words.
Despite this compelling argument, there is no straightforward way to separate your neurosis from your vocation. At what point is scrutiny self-indulgent? When does specificity turn insular, self referential, not rooted in the material world? How can you know when nothing you say matters to anyone or anything, except to amuse yourself?
After spending a great amount of time mulling over these questions, I realized I was looking for validation from a place that would not offer it to me. If writing is all the things Said noted and Fanon discouraged, then seeking answers to such questions is akin to wanting permission to be a problem. It is to want to be a public writer without the necessary pain of getting it wrong, the many detours, and the charred ego.
At its core, these questions are based on fear; the desire to refer to the status quo to justify your claims, despite the nature of the work having to reside outside of established inoffensive truths. If you are unable to stand firm in your emotionally driven, value laden, highly ideological work — it will lose precisely the thing that makes it valuable to begin with.
Of course, the public writer cannot be unintelligible; you have to utilize established norms, talking styles, and shorthand to be understood. But the point must be creative, to offer new perspectives.1 It is not merely holding the established sensemaking responsible, as in policing when there has been a breach (e.g pointing out the many instances of western hypocrisy).
Given the precarious nature of inhabiting such a space, the public writer needs a great deal of self respect — the Didionan kind. It is to stand firm in your claims, to let the world see you and not cower when it wants to tear you down. To truly believe that your intuitions are valid, that these feelings are enough, on their own to proceed into a project. In the case of the public writer, feelings and intuitions must inform choices, and be unaccompanied by what is deemed to be justified according to the status quo.
This has admittedly been difficult for me. I often feel the urge for the coherence of my being to be accessible to everyone: to make sense, as a whole, universally, and consistently, despite the diminishing returns of inhabiting such a state. I don't even make sense to myself most of the time. I don't know what feelings of mine are warranted, if any. I do this as much as it has been done to me. I spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, pondering the metaphoricity of everything I encounter — in the sense that, of course this would happen to me, because I seem to be living in a tragic russian novel, or an episode of Everybody Hates Chris.
How tiring the mind of a writer is, to turn this ability to scrutinize against oneself so readily and unprovoked. I suspect it is an occupational hazard. For the public writer, the self becomes a whetstone. Only after I’ve become sharp at my own expense, dulling my sense of self, can I offer this ability to scrutinize as a public service.
***
Working with technology is the exact opposite. Despite the vocation being associated with breaking things, your day-to-day consists of utilizing languages and methods that have strict laws. When I used to code, I was immediately given feedback on whether what I was doing was wrong or right. An answer existed, outside of myself, free of any ambiguity, no self scrutiny required.
Given this, as well as the prestige accompanying working in tech, people find my refusal to utilize my programming skills unusual. Some even find it offensive, and are expecting a really good reason as to why I’m letting this gift atrophy. Admittedly, these conversations usually ended in pity, because I became so frazzled by what should be an innocuous question.
There are many types of pity. There is the one that grieves, peering down at you like a shriveled-up corpse. Such a shame. To have all the potential sucked out of you before you had the chance to be something.
Then there’s the accusatory pity, that by any means wants to avoid the truth that your hurt implies. It asks follow-up questions, like did you try xyz? When what it means to say is: You’re at fault here, for how wrong it went. You must be.
Lastly, there is the one who realizes exactly the weight of your situation and shuts down any attempt at talking about it, like a sort of irrational fear that speaking about it somehow resurrects the evil that took place.
I’ve reflected quite a bit on what the possible correct answer to this question might be, outside my actual reasons for quitting. What are good reasons to switch professions? What does it mean, really, to be justified?
I imagine it would be something amounting to sustaining a brain injury, specifically leaving the part of the brain responsible for coding shattered, everything else left intact — like a modern-day Phineas Gage. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone would buy that.
The film Hidden Figures, the 2017 adaptation of the story about three prominent black women’s journeys at NASA during the height of segregation, encapsulates the essence of being justified.
We follow them, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), their journey through NASA as mathematicians, and the various points of friction that their black womanhood created. All of them were highly educated and skilled. They carried themselves with quiet brilliance and discipline, an air of approachability that did not in any way undermine their intellect.
This kind of aura usually meant they did not make much of a fuss unless absolutely necessary, which became evident when Vaughan and her sons were kicked out of the library for perusing the white section. What’s most noteworthy to me was the scene right before it, when they walked past anti-segregation protests, and she tells her kids not to pay attention to it, that they are not part of that trouble. Her kind of trouble (reading books reserved for whites) was justified, those picketing for civil rights were not.
Another instance where trouble was warranted occurred when Johnson was confronted by her boss about her absence during large parts of the workday. Johnson was the only black woman on the team, plucked out of obscurity and placed among this homogenous group. Her absence was due to the building not having a bathroom for black women. She revealed this fact angrily, and by causing a scene. She could not do any good work under such terrible conditions.
Hidden Figures is one of my favorite movies. I cannot help to be enthralled and inspired by it; watching these brilliant black women is nothing short of nourishing. Despite this, I do have issues with the film— particularly the specific kind of respectability politics it depicts.
The bathroom scene with Johnson reminds me of how Fanon described the unliberated black man as always waiting for the day the white man slips up and accidentally calls him a negro. That glorious day is when he will truly be free. If someone says he's being too cruel, he can show him the permission slip, detailing the time and place he was called the slur. There it is, like sent from the heavens, a legible, explicit, commonsensical reason to whip out this scathing speech he’s rehearsed for so long, that he's been itching to unload. Everyone around him will revel in his brilliance, applaud him for his candor, his sharpness, his devastating revelations.
This tells me two important things: First, the only people who can be justified are those who have done everything imaginable right. It is the rational, mathematical, logical idea of being justified. If we isolate the resources at one’s disposal, we can calculate if they have been utilized to their fullest potential. Have I used every moment of the day I’m not eating, sleeping, or shitting? If I haven’t, then obviously my hurt is not attributable to anything external to me. To be justified is mathematically deducible; reducible to a number or a true/false statement.
The second is in the context of blackness in particular, and how to be justified requires transcendence, in the sense of reaching a goal despite not having sufficient resources. Katherine Johnson's having to run for 40 minutes just to go to the bathroom shows the effort required to be justified. You are expected to burst the seams of possibility to access basic amenities. Blackness warps the equation; it creates its own branch of mathematics.
By now, many are intimately familiar with the refrain that black excellence means being twice as good but only getting half as much. What is less frequently highlighted is the fact that such endeavors leave you twice as devastated when they turn out to be unfulfilling.
Katherine McKittrick speaks often about the mathematization of blackness. In her book Dear Science, she discusses the various ways black people have been enumerated and documented as object-commodities: not only during the transatlantic slave trade, but to the current moment with algorithms calculating and predicting black death. First, our worth is enumerable, calculatable. How many black people have to die for people to care? How much suffering do we have to endure? 2
Secondly, All that was explicated about blackness was related to death and misery. Thus, what it means to be justified as a black person orbits around this. Anything outside these pre-vetted conceptions of blackness is unreliable, incalculable, and thus irrelevant.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a reason that justified my unhappiness in the tech industry; something external, something more than just my hurt feelings. If I were to follow Johnson’s steps, I would have had to endure my misery as opposed to using it as a reason to leave. Instead of finding such a reason, I have stumbled upon something else entirely. I seem to have internalized, somehow, by pure miracle, that I don’t want that kind of life; the one that expects me to kill myself for scraps. I finally grasped myself firmly, a new kind of sense breathed air back into my lungs.
I no longer desire to mutilate myself to fit inside these narrow notions of what it means to be justified. The kind of justified I want to be resides outside of this conception of blackness. As McKittrick put so aptly: if black death is the only legible thing, then black life must exist outside of these systems of logic altogether:
What happens to our understanding of black humanity when our analytical frames do not emerge from a broad swathe of numbing racial violence but, instead, from multiple and untracked enunciations of black life?
***
Clarity is seductive, as social epistemologist C. Thi Nguyen put eloquently. We experience clarity as pleasant, it is like the human equivalent of being petted as a dog. No wonder we become emotionally invested in it, why we so desire it to correspond with our lived experience.
There is a subtle difference here, between justification and clarity. Clarity, as any other phenomenon, is something that simply happens. Clarity is harmony. It might be innate, to be gravitated towards it, like breathing and burning calories. Our attention frays whenever we try to engage with something disjointed; we pause and try to make the pieces fit together into a cohesive narrative.
Justification however, is to assign morality to clarity. What is clear is attributed to truth, what is the right thing to do. Most likely, this is a cartesian hangover, the belief that, if nothing is reliable, if it is plausible that an evil demon is tricking you into believing you are self-determined, then all you have is this ability to think, to make sense. It says: This will be my tool when navigating the world. It will defeat any foes, become a bridge between me and other people. It is my companion, my medicine, my walking stick.
Upon observing Descartes’ claims about truth, fellow french philosopher Gilles Deleuze noted somberly that western philosophy has not yet learned what it means to think.
Deleuze was hostile toward static sense-making. He wanted to uproot any presuppositions that functioned as a ball and chain to thought. Any sense you make from him writhes and slips away from your hands when you think you’ve finally grasped it.
Thought is inherently creative according to Deleuze, not representative (re-presenting what is already known). He encouraged a kind of sense-making that participates in the world as opposed to being on the sidelines, merely content with drawing a map of it. To think is not to think about something. Rather, thought is something as alive as the supposed object of our thought.
Many of Deleuze’s contemporaries believe his approach was impractical, and often bordered on irresponsibility. I am enthralled by its potential, constantly gravitating toward the odd little world he made for himself.
Deleuze’s project may come across as flowery and frivolous, but his notion of sense creates ample ground for the public writer. It mirrors Fanon’s notion of intellectual work having to revolve around the material world and life itself, not merely meshing words together and seeing the consonance it creates.
In her book Água Viva, Clarice Lispector describes written work as the aftermath of something that has taken place. There are traces and clues present, but the event itself cannot be replayed by revisiting the text, it has already passed:
What I say to you is never what I say but something else.
I don’t want something already made, Lispector continued, but something still being tortuously made. This sentence has been at the forefront of my mind since I first encountered it. The truth of it overwhelms me.
In the same vein, my work is like the skin a reptile sheds and leaves behind. Provoked by something inside me; a faint tickle, hint of movement, then an unbearable itch. Whatever it is has conspired with my nervous system and made me dig a hole for it to burst through. I am whatever came crawling out.
It changes you fundamentally, this need for permission, the desire to be justified. It reveals precisely one’s lack of self-determination. Truthfully, all I want is this process: the ability to scrutinize, unjustified and unlawfully, then skittishly run away from the scene of the crime.
updated: 20.02.24
Rationality seems to have a temporal quality to it. Sense is something that happens after the fact; it perpetually belongs to what has past. This creates an accessible reference point for the public at large. Sense is suspended in time; intellectual work, however, is shackled to the ever-present now.
Although I' am speaking about blackness, the violence of enumeration is evident with other marginalized groups. In his piece A Thousand Eulogies Are Exported to the Comma: Of Syntax and Genocide, Nicki Kattoura touches on the same tendency in regards to the reports tied to the current genocide against Palestinians:
Typically, when reciting the devastation of genocide we tend to rapid-fire statistics. To date, 26,000 Palestinians have been martyred (comma) over 60,000 have been injured (comma) over ten thousand are trapped underneath the rubble of buildings and presumed dead (comma) 2 million people have been internally displaced (comma) millions are starving (comma) dehydrated (comma) dying of disease… The comma neatly separates a list of things that are completely entangled, and in the process obscures the degree of violence happening to each individual person . . . A thousand eulogies are exported to the comma, a tiny line or symbol, that just cannot bear the weight of the lives and aspirations of this many people. People whose lives are as intricate and multi-faceted and contradicting as our own. These sentences are not incantations for resurrection; they are a reality that is unfathomable to people with conscience, and they prove, with ease, the futility of the writing endeavor to either capture apocalypse or mourn its victims.