What Do You Write to Resist?
By Kelsey Allagood | January 8, 2024 |
Happy New Year, WU community! A slight content warning that this post mentions some heavy topics, though not in too much detail.
I’m reading an essay by Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet and professor, called “Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?” In his essay, Refaat recounts the times he told stories to his young children during the war of 2008-09 while sheltering them in the part of his house least likely to be hit by a stray missile.
“My stories were both an end and a means,” he writes. “As I told stories to my children to distract, soothe, and educate them, I felt very close to my mother and to my grandparents.” The stories he told his children were the same stories his own mother told him, or variations on them; he sometimes starred his children as the “heroes or saviors.”
For a while, when I was a young child plagued by insomnia and anxiety, my own mother invented stories for me before bed. I was usually the hero or savior of these tales, often saving my classmates or talking animal friends from danger. As I grew into a young person still plagued by insomnia and anxiety, I began to tell myself stories to get to sleep. These stories kept me from ruminating on distressing thoughts and turning every creak or gust of wind into an intruder coming to hurt me. They kept me safe.
Storytelling is an act of resistance. For child-me, far removed from the threat of stray missiles striking my bedroom, the stories helped me resist a different sort of fear.
I chose to say “storytelling” over “writing”—even though we are Writer Unboxed—because oral storytelling is equally a form of resistance. I’m thinking of the drifters of Fahrenheit 451 memorizing books to thwart the book-burning firemen, of course, but also oral storytelling evolving in tandem with human language, long before the written word; I’m thinking of the preservation of oral storytelling traditions among Indigenous cultures despite outside pressure to commit them to paper. Oral and written stories each have unique positive qualities. They are also complementary, and both are valid modalities.
We often think of resistance in its bodily form: taking up arms, throwing stones at oncoming tanks, sitting at lunch counters, chaining ourselves to trees marked for destruction. We might also consider famous works of resistance literature, such as The Grapes of Wrath, Maus, or Beloved.
Sometimes the act of speaking alone is resistance: a parent telling stories to comfort their children, or an Indigenous person speaking their own language.
While she is not always presented as a resistance fighter, Anne Frank’s diary is probably one of the greatest examples of writing as an act of resistance. Through its fame, The Diary of a Young Girl by itself preserved the memory of one of the many families partially or completely annihilated during the Holocaust.
And I don’t want to erase Anne’s own conscious resistance: in 1944, she started rewriting her diary, preparing it for publication in response to the Dutch government-in-exile’s request that individuals document the occupation. Fifteen-year-old Anne knew exactly what she was doing: standing up to attempted elimination by asserting unequivocally that she had lived.
At its most basic, we could look at writing and storytelling as resistance against death itself (rage against the dying of the light, and all that). But I don’t mean to say that every story we tell has to have some huge, noble meaning or brave moralistic stance—I’d even argue that the silly, light stories told for fun and entertainment are just as important as documenting the attempted elimination of one’s race or religion, but that’s probably a different post.
All of us, by writing, even if our work only reaches a small circle of readers, are asserting that we are here, leaving something of ourselves that has the potential to survive even after we’re gone.
“Writing is a testimony,” Refaat Alareer writes, “a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world.”
Those stories my mother told me and the ones I later told myself will never reach a global audience. But they helped me communicate with myself, to resist the anxiety and frustration of insomnia, to live without constant fear. Writing does not have to be for an audience to be resistance. As a child, I often had to keep quiet during the daytime, to minimize the noise of my play, to accommodate my disabled father’s disrupted sleep schedule. Writing became a way for me to use my voice. I write to resist my own silencing.
Refaat Alareer, his brother, sister, and several nieces and nephews were killed a little more than a month ago, on December 6, in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home. Refaat’s children, whom he once sheltered with words and walls, were staying elsewhere, and survived.
His last poem, “if I must die,” was written a month before his death, reads in part: “If I must die / you must live / to tell my story…If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.”
What do you write to resist?
Kelsey Allagood (she/her) is a writer, occasional photographer, and trained political analyst specializing in the causes of war and systemic oppression. This background led her to begin writing fantasy fiction steeped in the anthropology of conflict.
Her writing can be found in literary magazines such as Barrelhouse, GRIFFEL, Menacing Hedge, and Wanderlust. Her photography has been featured in RESURRECTION mag. She has also written on peaceful resistance movements, art as a form of political resistance, and countering violent extremist ideology.
Kelsey has a Bachelor’s Degree in international and cultural studies from the University of Tampa and a Master’s Degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University.
She lives in Maryland with her husband, mother, and a rescue dog named Henry.
[coffee]
Kelsey, what a profound and beautiful post. Storytelling when I was a child helped me live with and come to understand the loss of my father. Family stories of those times, but mostly joys…helped my mother and we three children bond for a lifetime. Now my younger brother is recently diagnosed with an unforgiving illness…and he is far away from me. Thus, with our stories we once again form a bond, that I hope will ground him in some happiness and laughter. We all live with stories, WE NEED THEM. Thanks for this.
Although I can’t imagine Refaat Alareer would want anyone to minimize his or her own resistance writing, to the point of not even answering your prompt, I’d rather pause in this moment to thank you for your post and in remembrance of him. Thank you.
This is an extraordinary post. Thank you.
Hello Kelsey, and thanks for your post.
Resistance for me as a writer has little to do with my subjects, more to do with how I try to treat them. A while ago, I wrote a jokey post for a Medium publication. In “What’s so wrong with flogging?” I assigned various forms of corporal punishment to well-known politicians and TV talking heads. I took them out to the woodshed for relying on the following words and phrases: problematic, remarkable, micro-aggression, not your first rodeo, inappropriate (my list was much longer, but there are only so many hours and column inches in the day). My aim was to underscore how hackneyed language reduces meaning. In my view, the resistance battle for writers is waged in the trenches: word choice, sentence structure, voice and tone. If it isn’t, the subject is going to be trivialized.
Excellent essay. I write my stories to resist fascism and antisemitism. My novels are set before and during WW2 in America, and they parallel the events of today.
Hi Kelsey. I write to hold space for my LGBTQIA+ family so that we know we’re not alone. I write to remember the struggles that my generation of LGBTQIA+ folks went through to achieve the semblance of equity we have today. I write to remember all that those who preceded us fought against because their struggles should be remembered and honored. We stand on their shoulders.
I write so the persecutions of the past will be remembered and–I hope–avoided in the future. And, I write so that the pain that families of origin can inflict are held to the light. That way, we remember why we built our families of choice and accurately measure what unconditional love truly looks like.
Great post, Kelsey. I don’t write enough resistance. Perhaps I need to change that.
Hugs,
Dee
Thanks for the essay!
For me, it’s antisemitism, fascism, and wokey anti-liberalism.
Thank you, Kelsey! What an inspiring post. Storytelling, in all its forms, does indeed explore and celebrate our shared humanity. The best of literature asks how we face the struggles of life, how we resist succumbing to despair. Thank you sincerely for reminding us of this. May we find peace and strength in the very act of sharing that is implicit in storytelling. It does, after all, necessitate the meeting of minds—writer and reader, speaker and listener.
Thanks for your post, Kelsey. I am reminded of Hemingway’s quote: write hard and clear about what hurts. There is so much hurt in our world. Storytelling is perhaps our only hope.
Powerful post, Kelsey. Thank you.
I write to resist the way society views and treats disabled and chronically ill humans – which, considering around 1 in 5 is disabled in a major way, seems shortsighted.
We have an Old Testament view of people who are disabled: they are being punished for something they or their ancestors did (or do). And it is a disaster to become one – your life will then be over.
One way to build empathy is to allow the able-bodied reader an easy way to BE disabled or ill, by becoming a sympathetic MAIN character – and then to leave that world when they close the book.
The disabled reader gets the opposite: validation.
I turn the trope completely on its head – the disabled character does not get well, remove themself from life for the convenience of the other characters, nor step aside in favor of an able-bodied character (The Hunchback of Notre Dame makes me itch).
All in the real world of this century. As realistically as I can in a story which spans the globe.
Alicia, in the story I am writing, the leader of the community is a war veteran in a wheelchair. He is the most respected character in the book, though not the protagonist. I don’t remember inventing him. I simply came around the corner, in the person of the protagonist, and Cam was sitting waiting for us. Mind you, he ordered us to go back to wherever we came from! Fortunately, my rebellious protagonist ignored that, and earned a place in the community, so we all got to know and respect Cam deeply. But I didn’t ever think of Cam as my token disabled character. His disability is incidental.
Zinsser edited a collection of essays titled Paths of Resistance: the Art and Craft of the Political Novel.
Thanks for reminding me of this gem. I write to give voice to those who have none.