i wrote this essay 4 u.

on what we owe our readers.

when i finally croak, how will they remember me? there are so many versions of ayan, i sometimes wonder if i’m suffering from some sort of personality disorder. today i feel almost repulsively self- assured; i saw my face at an angle yesterday in the reflection of a passing car. i do not know when i started to bear the face of a woman instead of a girl, or who exactly she is with all her sharp angles and sensual eyes, but i simply want to gorge myself on her. i wrote a chapter i am proud of (even as you read this, i am tussling with the pages of this novel, trying to not cringe at the earnestness i see in its prose) and made an elderly woman laugh as she fed some pigeons at our park (fucking terrorists. rats with wings. men in feathered form. deserving of starvation, not day old brioche bread and the company of fashionable, fascinating women. i hate those birds the way lena dunham hates new york: with childish insolence and an alarming hypocrisy).

if you saw me today, you would never have imagined the near total breakdown i had last week. it’s hard to believe i know, but i am not usually the dramatic type. my lows are- thankfully- never really entirely despairing. they’re sort of quiet and lethargic. the only times i feel those unbearable lows are when i am drafting. i think it’s because i have to put my mask down and reckon with myself. with my words and when they fall short. i’ve spoken a little about perfectionism’s grip on creatives. that was focused on us, the artists. i find myself now wondering who i need to please beyond myself.

who am i performing this genius for?

i used to say that i write for my own self-satisfaction, to scratch an itch, one only i could reach and feel but with some self-interrogation, i’ve discovered that that is nothing but a pile of dogshit. i write for you, person in my phone. yes, you. the black woman who gave up trying to articulate her worries because the world keeps telling you that you are simultaneously too much and never enough. for the voyeur who wants to know me and understand my political proclivities, even if it’s just to disagree with them. i write for anyone who has ever felt moved by a piece of work and tried to find the words to love it outloud. i write to hear: i did not have the courage to say this thing: thank you for saying it for me. with some clamoring at a keyboard, i untie your tongues and crack open your chests. and it is a responsibility i both relish and, as of late, fear.

what happens if i fall short? what happens when the floor is mine and i forget to pull one of you up with me? this is not a question for you, but for myself: what happens when i find myself lacking? did baldwin ever re-read an essay and feel bitterness at having excluded some of his people? when he sat opposite nikki giovanni in that now infamous dialogue and his limitations were laid bare, did his skin feel flush with embarrassment? i want glory, of course, but i swear on everything that i am, on the brilliant blue of mogadishu’s sea, on the laugh of my mother and the name of my grandmother, i want more than anything for my people to be able to depend on me.

certifiably nauseating.

how many times have i watched the thinkers i admire sell us out?

look at me dunk on the young people who had the audacity to protest genocide while i did nothing but write faux academic essays disparaging them so the literary elite could call me clever. watch me abandon the mask now that i’ve made it. i wonder what obama’s mother would make of him. in fact, i wonder what barack at twenty, the one who read edward said’s work and took his classes would think of him now. we are all complict he said of the genocide in Palestine once. i detect guilt and hubris in that sullen admission. the we might as well be a placeholder for his name. does his arsehole not tire from being planted so firmly on the cocks of the morally bankrupt?

the oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.

i am physically incapable of giving a baguette muncher credit (the french were one of the colonisers who ransacked somalia; my blood simply will not allow it) but simone de beauvoir was known to nibble from time to time. somali’s have a word for the ethically unmoored: hoorgaale. it translates roughly to ‘politically bastardized.’ a bad seed whose mind has been inseminated by the colonisers. it is a violently shaming turn of phrase; i wish i could kiss whoever dreamed it up on the forehead. when i read my work back, i see so many flaws. points made without enough force, calls to action that are flailing or unconvincing. there are early essays of mine i want to take a flame to and burn. every attempt at awareness was dampened in those early days by a youthful need to not be seen as too radical.

they already think you are unruly black muslim girl. don’t prove them right.

i can see myself trying to abandon my responsibility in those pages. i’ve realized lately that my perfectionism isn’t just one obsessed with form and syntax and genre and the rhythm of my prose. it is a moral perfectionism too. there will be inconsistencies in my work. how do i live with them? how do i live with myself? i feel shame sometimes when i know that a lot of people have read something i’ve written. do they see how many books it took for me to reach these barely original conclusions? how many drafts it took to mould blubbering, desperately incoherent pleas for us to do better and see clearer into an essay that resembles something eloquent and astute? ngugi wa thiong'o’s prose feels so sharp to me. i have consumed the words of so many brilliant thinkers; which lines are mine and which are, in reality, shallow, toothless mimicries? i never regret the times i have been sharp tongued, only the wired sentences i swallowed out of fear.

there are people counting on me to remain clear-eyed. moral flaccidity is quite simply not a choice. and i know i’m not some harbinger of truth- i have many, many comrades in this fight- but i must not kid myself and bury my head in the sand just because acknowledging that i now have a ‘platform’ makes my skin crawl. i am somewhat audacious now. will i remain so in ten years time when i have things to lose? will you leave all of these people behind at the first sign of a cheque? i am of the belief that we writers do owe our readership something. some think it is access to us or more of our work; i believe it is loyalty. we must be loyal. we mustn’t abandon them even as they help us build these lives and livelihoods. we musn't abandon them even if we do not get their love in return. that is what it means to be in community. i hope that when i die, all they’ll have to say about me is that i loved my people, even when it was inconvenient. that for all my flaws, i always chose to pull you up too.

let my tombstone simply read:

she tried, for our sake.