Who Are These People?
In 2021, amid the cluttered throngs of short and long-form fiction on my desk and in my files, I was interrogating my interior landscape and the matters surrounding it. And I was trying to say something.
While fiction was – and is – a great vehicle to say what I wanted to say, while it was a medium I had always known since childhood when I wrote on blank papers and scrawled with coloured pencils, while it was my first love, I needed to strip off a certain kind of distance between myself and the story. The self had become a subject of inquiry. And my muse needed me to write the truth as it was, void of that freedom to invent. It demanded a mind willing to return to an experience, interrogate its memories, question its assumptions, and discover what remained unresolved.
All of this would lead me to write some of my earliest body of essays, including the award-winning The Slipping Away (while actively writing fiction).
To write a personal essay is to undress yourself in a certain context. It is to scoop out a part of your life to submit to whoever is reading. To share solace with them. But it is not a venture into some sort of sentimentalized voyeurism. No. To write the personal essay is to contribute to the larger conversations across the world. It is no longer about the writer. The writer, in fact, is irrelevant; he dies a kind of death after writing. This is how I explain it to my students whenever I teach the nonfiction writing:
Think of the olden days, say, biblical times, and imagine a bottle. When a person of letters writes about himself, he slips the scroll into a bottle and casts it into the sea. Someone finds it, perhaps years later, perhaps centuries, and has no idea who wrote it. But the writer is no longer important. The scroll is theirs now. They use it to make sense of their own lives, to find solace in the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has felt what they feel. And this is the joy of the person of letters: to borrow a part of his life to share with others, never knowing whose life it might touch or what it might mean to them.
In my years of writing personal essays, there has been a great divide: those who read my work and think of themselves, and those who read my work and think of me – this being a smaller fragment. I am grateful for the former, but I do not take the latter for granted, either, even though I do not always know what to do with them. Sometimes, I want to say, “No, this is for you to think about, not for you to think about me.”
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It is true that, because the personal essay emerges from lived experience, one cannot help but think of the writer, whether favourably or otherwise. But it is reductive to read the personal essay as a form concerned merely with the writer’s life. To do so is to mistake the subject for the purpose and the bottle for the scroll. The writer may be where the essay begins, but the writer need not be where it ends.
Take Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, for example, that poignant memoir-in-fragments about the death of her father. I remember reading the book, and how it made me think about my own parents dying, about my own mortality, and about the urgency with which I ought to approach life. The words, “Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself,” sank so deeply into me that I remembered them years later, when I stood face-to-face with an agbero who had tried to bully me three years earlier, while my father was in the hospital. I screamed in his face, leaving both of us shocked. Unlike Adichie, I had not experienced a death, but I recognised in her words the anger that grief can awaken in us, and found in them a language for my own response. This, too, is one of the possibilities of the personal essay: that another person’s experience can burnish our own, sometimes giving us the words – or even the courage – to act in ways we might not have imagined.
With personal essays, you choose the parts of your life you wish to share because you believe they might be necessary to someone out there. Because you believe that someone might need your story to survive. And I think one of the most interesting things about the human condition is how given we are to synecdoche: taking parts for wholes, glimpsing fragments of a person and assuming we have apprehended the entirety of them. I have survived health conditions that I have not and may never write about. I have loved people I will never write about. I have experienced joyful and sorrowful things I may never write about. Why? Because not everything that matters in my life calls to be written. Some experiences, however significant, are not stories I feel compelled to tell. Vivian Gornick affirms this in her book The Situation & The Story: “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”
Once, at a book event, I met a reader who thought my work brilliant and asked a question about something “outside the essay.” I remember finding the question disturbingly funny and dismissing it jocularly. When I got home, though, I remember thinking, “Who are these people?”
On this note, it is imperative that we approach the personal essay as the form of art that it is. We must read with an interest in mirroring. And even when we read with the understanding that the essay is a window into another person’s life, we must recognise that we are not merely looking at the writer, but at the many other people in the world who inhabit that reality. When a woman writes a personal essay about her pregnancy and divorce, she is not writing for herself alone. She is giving language to the experiences of other women caught in similar dilemmas, perhaps even helping them imagine a way out. She is also writing for the men who do not understand this reality, with the hope that her words might enlarge their understanding and change their hearts.
I shall end here with James Baldwin’s words: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” I draw from this quote because what matters to me, truly, is the honesty I bring to the page and the care with which I turn the little experiences I share into art.
