Wednesday, January 24, 2007


On why I write.

In a world where I never measure up, writing is the place where I know what I’m doing.

I am socially inept, ever with the wrong thing to say or do. I am basically immature, although most people think it’s of my own doing. I always just barely scraped by school with As or Bs, and I didn’t really stand out that much -- not in the fields that mattered, anyway. I am temperamentally short-fused, with little patience and a very poor ability to concentrate. Physically, I never seemed to match up to the standard idea of beauty, or even prettiness, though truth be told, I never saw what was so unacceptable about me. In a world where I was beginning to be judged purely by how much I scored in my exams, I seemed to have barely failed everything else.

I’d always felt so lost all those years before I rediscovered my deen, my Islam, and in those times, where all I had were my emotions and my tears and God, I would find myself with paper and a pen/pencil, and I would write. I would live out my daydreams of ridiculously soap opera-scenarios in a small spiral notebook I hid under my sock basket. I would jot down my incoherent anger (although it seems a tad harsh a word) and frustration in my journal, and release my feelings of loneliness and ineptitude in my poetry, which was basically just metaphoric prose.

When I let myself down, I immersed myself in writing, where there are no rules, other than maybe making sense. In poetry, I could say even more, and still safeguard my private thoughts. I enjoyed my despair because it sounded nice in writing. It gave me an illusion of profundity I could hide from the world, and it showed me sides of me I never knew.

Looking back and reading my work, I can understand the pain, although I no longer feel it. I no longer loath myself, because learning and understanding about the person God made me to be has made me accept myself better. I face criticism with careless abandon where the occasion calls for it; otherwise I deal with it with (what I hope is) patience and tolerance. I relish the fact that God made me the way I am, and with a little effort on my part, I could be better if I wanted to be; if God willed it. But I could also be content with the fact that God made me the way I am for reasons I may not know, all the while knowing that it is what’s best for me. And when all else fails, God would be enough.

With these relatively new principles in mind (and heart), I can see my writing grow with me, or on me; depends on where you’re looking. I used to be obsessed about huge, impressive words not usually used amongst humankind; now I prefer simple words that say more. I used to want to relate to pop culture; now I want to relate to now and forever. I used to allow my imagination to run wild, justifying that it’s all unreal; now I hold responsibility for the things I say, and I prefer to keep my feet grounded on firm reality, painful though it might be.

I think I’ve said this before: I want to spark change, open minds and provoke thought.

Words are such heavy loads in our lives. People use words to tell a story and captivate millions; you can affect politics with the phrasing you choose; you can turn words into a war, or you can bring it to a halt. Mightier than the sword, I believe the saying goes.

In retrospect, I understand why the first verses of the Quran that were relayed from Gabriel to Prophet Muhammad were:

‘Read!
In the name of your Lord and Cherisher who created,
Created mankind out of a clot of congealed blood.
Read, and your Lord is most Bountiful;
He who taught men the use of the pen
Taught man that which he did not know.
Know, but man does transgress all bounds in that
he looks upon himself as self-sufficient
Verily, to your Lord is the return of all.’

It seems ironic to me, that a person who is so well-known for doing so little, should choose so important a medium. But I did not choose this, exactly. Were the decision up to me completely, I would have chosen something simpler, plainer, quicker to get over with, so that I could get on with my life, easy. But words, instead, pulled me in their direction; forcing me to take another look, another perspective; give another try and see what it means. At times, inspiration will come to me, and when I am done, I cannot believe all this came out of ME. It can get quite scary, although it makes sense. Scary sense, but still.

Now I understand, the way humankind understands everything -- from a purposely stunted point of view. I suppose that God wanted to show me from the start that life is a journey, not mere play, and as Robert Frost once put it --

-- 'The best way out is always through'.

Wassalamualaik.


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this has been a rant by Syazwina Saw at 2:13 am

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