The Stability of Principles over A Fluidity of Perspectives: A Case for Creative Nonfiction
10.14.2023 | Sana Khan
I am compelled to go back to the words of my Creative Writing professor from this past summer—we are all little creatures living in our own heads. Though her intention behind this reminder was geared towards our literary choices—recognizing the biases in our stories, driving us towards more thorough research into the realities of those who inhabited vastly different living experiences— the truth behind those words could not be more relevant to the current, and perhaps the worst, turmoil in the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
It is not a coincidence that more than the coverage of the current (and recent) ongoings in that region, much of the journalistic efforts and written space is directed towards the historical nature of this conflict, delving into the reasons for why this is happening, what are the root causes of this conflict that is perhaps one of the most long-standing, if not the most long-standing, strife among people in human history.
People who believe in their respective causes. Who see the plight of their own with ease, but are simply unable to see it when the same happens to “the other”. Who have no problem with invoking aspects of morality when it serves the cause of their own, but conveniently push it under the rug, out of sight, when it must serve the cause of “the other”.
Simply, people who are all little creatures living in their own heads.
For when we live in our own heads, the historical narratives that reinforce our causes become our lifeline. We feel so grounded in these narratives, so sure of our causes and their truth, that the truth right in front of our eyes becomes meaningless. At this point, no matter what our physical eyes actually “see”—feel free to insert any type and level of abhorrent imagery— we are utterly blinded by our perspectives, which, ironically, have become more important to us than our principles.
This blindness is debilitating. No matter what happens around us, it forever traps us in a bubble of whichever perspective has convinced us. A perspective that is so hardened, so irrefutable, that we are willing to risk the very thing that sets us apart from animals—our principles, our morality, our ability to discern right from wrong, and our choice to follow what is right because we believe in its rightness, not because it is justified by a narrative.
Recognizing we are all little creatures living in our own heads means acknowledging that our perspectives are just one of many perspectives. It necessitates courage in pointing that needle up to puncture the seemingly secure bubble of our perspectives, and stepping out into the chaos of other perspectives, driven by our principles. The principle of morality that is independent of perspectives and narratives.
Because without principles that exist, persist, and endure the tides of human life on this earth, who are we and how are we supposed to survive?
As a reader and writer, one very effective way I have come across to challenge my own narratives, to puncture my own safe bubble and step out into the vast world of the perspectives of others, is through Creative Nonfiction.
When I, for instance, read about a Syrian woman, strolling in her veranda and sipping her morning coffee thousands of miles away, in a culture and political system that I will never experience first-hand, the creature in my own head is transported out of its familiar habitat, and becomes aware of that of another. From a safe distance, it is provided the luxury to simply observe, absorb, feel, and understand a perspective it was removed from, the walls of its own narrative having isolated it so thoroughly, it forgot that anything else even existed.
There is a world of literature classified as Creative Nonfiction out there. Amidst the heart-wrenching ongoings that surround us, I urge you to select a title about someone other than yourself. Someone you don’t give a second thought to as you go about your daily life. From the safety and comfort of your own home, be willing to step out of your head, and be willing to just observe and inhabit the bubble of another. May the magic of discovery be with you.
I will end with my personal recommendations for Creative Nonfiction titles that had a lasting impact on me. These are great starting points amidst many other inspiring titles. Do share your finds with us!
Jessica Goudeau’s ‘After the Last Border’ (Penguin 2021)
Rebecca Skloot’s ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' (Crown 2011)
creative nonfiction:
Intellectual Humility in Writing
08.29.2023 | Sana Khan
The other morning, something strange, and rather unexpected, transpired minutes before I was due to sign in on my phone for a virtual medicine shift, where my first patient would soon be logged in and awaiting my arrival. I had been getting ready for the shift, pinning my hijab and making myself look presentable in general (a challenge with anything virtual that I, after 3 years, am still trying to navigate), when suddenly I realized my phone was missing.
You know those times when something suddenly hits you and you have absolutely no memory of what came before? Like a black hole of sorts, where time and space compress all matter into a single point, erasing everything that came before it. As dramatic as I am aware that sounds when dealing with something most people likely go through multiple times in a week, if not in a single day—a misplaced phone—this was more than just the need to refresh my Gmail (hey, you never know when a life-altering email may come through) or sift through pictures of my son’s first day of school for the fourteenth time since that morning. In just a few moments, four minutes to be exact, my first patient, a 24-year-old male who tested positive for Covid just the day before, would be waiting for the doctor he paid a not insignificant amount of copay to see. If that wasn’t bad enough, the long list of patients for the day were all scheduled precisely within 15 minutes of one another, leaving no room for the catastrophic loss of short-term memory I was suddenly experiencing.
Where did I keep that phone? I could hedge my bets (in an alternate world of course where betting for Muslims wasn’t impermissible) on the fact that I had been holding the familiar rectangular device, with its blue hard outer case, in my hands only moments ago. But no matter how much I wracked my brains, I drew a complete blank. The moments between the time I placed my phone down in that mystery spot and now were as good as being compressed on a space-time continuum into a single point—the awareness of something missing, but having absolutely no access to it. If you have never experienced this before, believe me when I say it’s a terrifyingly paralyzing feeling. Gone is the familiarity, the concreteness, the absoluteness with which we go about our days. You feel so small and powerless, feelings only augmented by the nanoscopic problem at hand—your utter inability to access something from your own memory that just happened a few minutes ago.
As the mild annoyance turned into a disquieting state of affairs, I was fittingly reminded of just how dependent my brain really is; much less the inventor of novel ideas, or an expert retriever of infinite amounts of data, it is wholly dependent for even something as simple as a single memory.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon (To Allah we belong, and to Him we return)—the words we learn to recite from the Islamic tradition in the face of a loss, whether it is that of a life or an inanimate object, naturally began flowing from my lips repeatedly. With three minutes to go until the first patient, I had scoured the entire room innumerable times, even those spots I was sure I hadn’t been around since the night before; my search yielding everything from the lost bracelet I had been trying to find for weeks, to a copy of my son’s immunization records neatly folded inside of my Harrisons (so that’s where it was!)—but no phone. I realized with a pang that I had no way of even reaching anyone at the physical clinic because lo and behold, the two-step verification process to log into the clinic network required a code, which would be sent to… yep, you guessed it.
I sighed, and sat down on the bottom stair just outside the room. The only thing to do now was to wait for my husband to return from dropping off our kids to school, and use his phone to call mine, and hope it wasn’t on silent mode, or else I would be really…
And then, I was staring at it. At eye-level from me, on top of the carry-on right outside the bedroom door. Within seconds, of course, it all came rushing back—I had grabbed my hijab from the staircase banister, and put the phone down before going to the bathroom mirror to secure the silk cloth over my head, intending to come out after a few seconds to pick up the phone and get on with my day—something that almost didn’t happen.
I am happy to report I was actually early to see my Covid patient, and also that he is doing well.
This ordeal, spanning a mere ten, maybe twelve minutes, has stayed with me since. Even now, days later, I can remember the feeling of perfect helplessness; like being in the dark with flawless vision but no access to light. SubhanAllah, it has made me understand my blindness, my thoroughly confined knowledge, my sheer inability to think and access anything beyond what Allah, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise grants to me, in a way I have never understood it before.
This understanding will have indisputable implications on my mindset and process as a writer. I realize now with more clarity than ever before how dependent I am for my very thoughts and ideas that eventually translate to words and sentences on a page. It is only from the Mercy of Allah that the opening for a new idea, a new purpose, a new intention is created, from which subsequent goals, plans and outcomes flow. If Allah does not grant this to me, I will never be able to access it, and unlike my temporary memory black hole experience, I will never know what inspiration escaped me.
Indeed, having intellectual humility isn’t just a noble characteristic for a writer to cultivate, it is entirely indispensable.
My words of (limited) wisdom to writers out there, including myself, are seemingly simple, yet difficult in practice: work hard at your writing, put in those hours reading craft books, take classes to learn from others, but don’t forget to seek and ask God, The All-Knowing, The All-Wise (Al-Aleem-Al-Hakeem)—the Only infinite source of all inspiration, knowledge, and wisdom that countless numbers of books, classes, or other people, could never possess, nor provide.
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Great Writing comes from Great Living
08.08.2023 | Sana Khan
Dictionary.com defines the term cultural appropriation as follows:
[the adoption, usually without acknowledgment, of cultural identity markers from subcultures or minority communities into mainstream culture by people with a relatively privileged status.]
If you are a writer of fiction, you are aware of the context (usually negative) of cultural appropriation. In the simplest of terms this is when someone (say a white author) assumes the identity (not deceptively or illegally, rather in the literary sense) of someone of a different culture or experience (say a Syrian refugee), and writes from this point-of-view. Without even going beyond this notion, you can probably see the problematic nature of this assumption, which includes but isn’t limited to misrepresentation, paternalization, imposition (most often unintentional than not)—you get the point. The long-standing debate around this continues to unfold, with writers on both sides of the issue arguing their points, only some in it to exploit the opportunity, while most, sincere.
As a minority author (Muslim, hijab-wearing, woman, physician), my interest in cultural appropriation has little to do with assuming the identity of another (I would happily exhaust the thousand other things I want to write about from within my own skin before I even begin to think about writing from say, the perspective of an African American teenager growing up in the US), or even taking offense to being represented by an author culturally diverse from myself (if a white author wants to write about what it’s like do a virtual visit as a hijab-wearing physician with a racist patient, I say all the more power to them); the question that tugs at me and that I continue to ask my writer-friends is: why? Why write from beyond what you know, what you have experienced, what you feel in your own body and skin? It wasn’t until I began to ask this question, and more importantly, paying attention to the answers, that I realized what a gift being a culturally diverse, minority writer, truly is.
“We are just little creatures in our own heads,” one of my favorite instructors in my Master’s program likes to say at least once every class. I agree with her. We go about our days seeing from this very limited lens, made up of our past experiences, our worldviews, belief systems, our very specific memories. It’s inevitable, really. Yes, we can, with effort, with travel, with reading, go out of ourselves, but even then, we can only really make sense of what we come into contact with through the little creature in our heads whom we cannot escape. That same instructor (who is white Australian) once tried to write a book from the perspective of a Syrian protagonist. Being the thorough and excellent writer she is, she jumped headfirst into the research, committed to reading as much as she could to write this character. But after months of this painstaking work, she gave up, not because she couldn’t translate all that research into a character within a novel, but because she couldn’t do it with authenticity. She couldn’t, she told us, her humility intriguing, because she hadn’t lived in the skin of a Syrian refugee.
In the world of non-fiction, one way around the conundrum my instructor found herself in would be to do what Jessica Goudeau does in her book After the Last Border- a work of creative nonfiction, centered around two women whom Goudeau knew intimately by virtue of her friendship with them, and whom she interviewed thoroughly for the book. By positioning herself as the storyteller, the skin she inhabited in true life outside the pages, she is able to write with authenticity; her unique way of storytelling (and personal brand of writing, which is nothing short of excellent) becoming her invaluable contribution to the world of literature.
But the opposite isn’t certain either—those of us who find ourselves in skins underrepresented in the world of literature will not automatically and consistently write great things worth reading. Just as my white, Australian instructor realized that the absence of having lived the life of a person from Syria made her the wrong author for that character, so too must I realize that just inhabiting the body and skin of a Muslim/hijab-wearing/woman/physician is not enough. Writing characters authentically from any of these perspectives necessitates living authentically in these identities first. Thus, my rendering of a virtual visit with a racist patient writes itself long before I physically type a single word on the page; it is in those moments of allowing the prejudiced behavior to register, contextualizing it within the framework of being a Muslim, holding onto the commitment of remaining professional, and stretching beyond the comfort zone to respond with gentleness as in the footsteps of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (saw), where the stuff of life first takes place. What pours out on the page a day, a week, months, or years later, is simply a transcription.
Would you still write if no one reads your work?
08.20.2023 | Sana Khan
When I first walk into a bookstore, my mind can’t help but fixate on two things: the whiff of pages fresh off the printing press (I know those books aren’t really fresh off the printing press, I just like to think they are), and the sheer human effort and time commitment that surrounds me, compressed within thousands of books lining every wall I turn my head towards.
There was a time when admitting that I can never possibly read all the books out there used to cause me real, physical pain. Right in the top center of my chest, where my heart sits. Those days are thankfully behind me, having reached the realization that even if I could, I wouldn’t want to inflict upon myself the torture of reading about medieval court structures in prehistoric Britain (my sincere apologies if you are into that kind of thing).
But even now, with those first few steps inside the bookstore, as my eyes catalog the titles, the colorful dust jackets, authors, old and new, a different kind of question begins to emerge: what if no one ever reads that book in the corner of the shelf that looks like it has not been touched since the sales associate who is now long gone placed it there? But even this question is not the source of my wistfulness so much as the ones that follow it.
—
What if the authors of those books no one seemed to be reading stopped writing?
Would people still write if no one read their work?
And then the real question: would I still write if no one read my work?
—
I would be lying if I said the answer was a resounding YES, OF COURSE! for me. As anyone in the creative arts will tell you, having an audience at the end of all that time and effort is not an insignificant impetus to finishing the project, and to embarking on the next one.
But there is something else. Something outside the realm of a simple explanation. It sits deep inside, out of reach, perhaps as abstract to the artist as it is to the audience. As someone who finds indescribable exhilaration in writing, I can attest to the irresistible nature of the pull that is felt towards an action, a pull that is independent of outcomes and the approval of others.
But though I always acknowledged and followed this pull towards creative expression through writing, I have only begun to understand it from the lens of a beautiful and authentic Hadith of Prophet Muhammad (saw):
Ali (RA) reported that Prophet Muhammad (saw) said, Do good deeds, for everyone is facilitated in that for which they are created. (Sahih Muslim)
The profoundness of these simple words leaves me speechless. In merely fourteen words, our beloved Prophet Muhammad (saw) not only validates that there is a pull placed inside each of us—towards that for which each of us is created—but also that it is an obligation on us to follow this pull, to use it to do good. SubhanAllah.
So, would I still write if no one read my work?
YES! The fulfilment of my destiny depends on it.
