How creative writing can help you through lifes hardest moments Sakinah Hofler
Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
Have you ever seen something
and you wish you could have said something
but you didn’t?
A second question I have is:
Has something ever happened to you
and you never said anything about it,
though you should have?
I’m interested in this idea of action,
of the difference between
seeing something,
which is basically passively observing,
and the actual act of bearing witness.
Bearing witness means writing down
something you have seen,
something you have heard,
something you have experienced.
The most important part
of bearing witness is writing it down,
it’s recording.
Writing it down captures the memory.
Writing it down
acknowledges its existence.
One of the biggest examples
we have in history
of someone bearing witness
is Anne Frank’s diary.
She simply wrote down
what was happening to her and her family
about her confinement,
and in doing so, we have
a very intimate record of this family
during one of the worst periods
of our world’s history.
And I want to talk to you today
about how to use creative writing
to bear witness.
And I’m going to walk you
through an exercise,
which I’m going to do myself,
that I actually do with
a lot of my collegiate students.
These are you future engineers,
technicians, plumbers –
basically, they’re not creative writers,
they don’t plan on becoming
creative writers.
But we use these exercises
to kind of un-silence things
we’ve been keeping silent.
It’s a way to unburden ourselves.
And it’s three simple steps.
So step one is to brainstorm
and write it down.
And what I have my students do
is I give them a prompt,
and the prompt is “the time when.”
And I want them to fill in that prompt
with times they might have
experienced something,
heard something or seen something,
or seen something
and they could have intervened,
but they didn’t.
And I have them write it down
as quickly as possible.
So I’ll give you an example
of some of the things I would write down.
The time when, a few months after 9/11,
and two boys dared themselves to touch me,
and they did.
The time when my sister and I
were walking in a city,
and a guy spat at us
and called us terrorists.
The time way back when
when I went to a very odd middle school,
and girls a couple years older than me
were being married off to men
nearly double their age.
The time when a friend pulled a gun on me.
The time when I went to
a going-away luncheon
for a coworker,
and a big boss questioned
my lineage for 45 minutes.
And there are times
when I have seen something
and I haven’t intervened.
For example, the time
when I was on a train
and I witnessed a father
beating his toddler son,
and I didn’t do anything.
Or the many times I’ve walked by someone
who was homeless and in need,
they’ve asked me for money,
and I’ve walked around them,
and I did not acknowledge their humanity.
And the list could go on and on,
but you want to think of times when
something might have happened sexually,
times when you’ve been
keeping things repressed,
and times with our families,
because (In a hushed
voice) God bless them.
(Laughter)
Our families, we love them,
but at the same time,
we don’t talk about things.
So we may not talk about the family member
who has been using drugs
or abusing alcohol.
We don’t talk about the family member
who might have severe mental illness.
We’ll say something like,
“Oh, they’ve always been that way,”
and we hope that in not talking about it,
in not acknowledging it,
we can act like it doesn’t exist,
that it’ll somehow fix itself.
So the goal is to get at least 10 things,
and once you have 10 things,
you’ve actually done part 1,
which is bear witness.
You have un-silenced something
that you have been keeping silent.
And so after this,
you’re ready for step 2,
which is to narrow it down and focus.
And what I suggest
is going back to that list of 10
and picking three things
that are really tugging at you,
three things you feel strongly.
It doesn’t have to be
the most dramatic things,
but it’s things that are like, “Ah,”
like, “I have to write about this.”
And I suggest you sit down at a table
with a pen and paper –
that’s my preferred method for recording,
but you can also use a tablet,
an iPad, a computer,
but something that lets you write it down.
And I suggest taking 30 minutes
of uninterrupted time,
meaning that you cut your phone off,
put it on airplane mode,
no email,
and if you have a family,
if you have children,
give yourself 20 minutes, five minutes.
The goal is just
to give yourself time to write.
What you’re going to write
is you’re going to focus on three things.
You’re going to focus on the details,
you’re going to focus
on the order of events,
and you’re going to focus
on how it made you feel.
That is the most important part.
I am the guinea pig today,
and so I’m going to walk you
through how I do it.
I’m going to pick three things.
So the first thing I feel
very, very strongly about
is that time a couple months after 9/11
when those two boys
dared themselves to touch me.
I remember I was in a rural mall
in North Carolina,
and I was walking, just walking,
minding my business,
and I felt people walking behind me,
like, very, very close,
and I’m like, “OK, that’s kind of weird.
Let me walk a little bit faster.
There’s a whole mall around me.
What is happening?”
They walk a little bit faster,
and I hear them going back and forth:
“You do it!” “No, you do it!”
And then one of them pushes me,
and I almost fall to the ground.
So I kind of pop back up,
expecting some type of apology,
and the weirdest thing is that
they did not run away.
They actually went and just
stood right next to me.
And I remember there was
a guy with blond hair,
and he had a bright red polo shirt,
and he was telling the other guy,
like, “Give me my money. I did it, man.”
And the guy with the brown hair,
I remember he had a choppy haircut,
and he gave him a five-dollar bill,
and I remember it was crumpled.
And so I’m like, am I still standing here?
This thing just happened.
What just happened?
And it was so weird to be
the end of someone’s dare,
and also at the end to not exist to them.
I remember it kind of reminded me
of the time when I was younger
and someone dared me
to touch something nasty or disgusting.
I felt like that nasty
and disgusting thing.
A second thing I feel
very, very strongly about
is the time a friend pulled a gun on me.
I should say former friend.
(Laughter)
I remember it was a group of us outside,
and he had ran up
and he had the stereotypical
brown paper bag in his hand,
and I knew what it was,
and so I’m a very mouthy person,
and I started going off.
I was like, “What are you
doing with a gun?
You’re not going to shoot anyone.
You’re a coward, you don’t
even know how to use it.”
And I kept going on
and on
and on,
and he got angrier
and angrier
and angrier.
And he pulled the gun out
and put it in my face.
I remember every one of us
got very, very quiet.
I remember the tightness of his face.
I remember the barrel of the gun.
And I felt like –
and I’m pretty sure everyone around me
who got quiet felt like –
“This is the moment I die.”
And the third thing I feel
very, very strongly about
is this going-away luncheon
and this big boss.
I remember I was running late,
and I’m always late.
It’s just a thing that happens with me.
I’m just always late.
I was running late,
and the whole table was filled
except for this seat next to him.
I didn’t know him that well,
had seen him around the office.
I didn’t know why the seat was empty.
I found out later on.
And so I sat down at the table,
and before he even asked me my name,
the first thing he said was,
“What’s going on with all of this?”
And I’m like, do I have
something on my face?
What’s happening? I don’t know.
And he asked me with two hands this time.
“What’s going on with all of this?”
And I realized he’s talking
about my hijab.
And in my head, I said, “Oh, not today.”
But he’s a big boss,
he’s like my boss’s boss’s boss,
and so I put up for 45 minutes,
I put up with him
asking me where I was from,
where my parents were from,
my grandparents.
He asked me where I went to school at,
where I did my internships at.
He asked me who
interviewed me for that job.
And for 45 minutes, I tried to be
very, very, very, very, very polite,
tried to answer his questions.
But I remember I was kind of
making eyeball help signals
at the people around the table,
like, “Someone say something. Intervene.”
And it was a rectangular table,
so there were people on both sides of us,
and no one said anything,
even people who might
be in a position, bosses,
no one said anything.
And I remember I felt so alone.
I remember I felt like
I didn’t deserve to be in his space,
and I remember I wanted to quit.
So these are my three things.
And you’ll have your list of three things.
And once you have these three things
and you have the details
and you have the order of events
and you have how it made you feel,
you’re ready to actually
use creative writing to bear witness.
And that takes us to step 3,
which is to pick one
and to tell your story.
You don’t have to write a memoir.
You don’t have to be a creative writer.
I know sometimes storytelling
can be daunting for some people,
but we are human.
We are natural storytellers,
so if someone asks us
how our day is going,
we have a beginning, a middle and an end.
That is a narrative.
Our memory exists and subsists
through the act of storytelling,
and you just have to find
a form that works for you.
You can write a letter
to your younger self.
You can write a story
to your younger self.
You can write a story
to your five-year-old child,
depending on the story.
You can write a parody,
a song, a song that’s a parody.
You can write a play.
You can write a nursery rhyme.
I’ve read – I mean,
these a theories, though –
that “Baa, baa black sheep,
Have you any wool,”
“Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full,”
is actually about impoverished farmers
in England being taxed heavily.
You can write it in the form
of a Wikipedia article.
And if it’s one of those situations
where you saw something
and you didn’t intervene,
perhaps write it from
that person’s perspective.
You know, so if I go back
to that boy on the train
who I saw being beaten,
what was it like to be in his shoes?
What was it like to see all these people
who watched it happen and did nothing?
What happens if I put myself
in a position of someone who was homeless
and just try to figure out
how they got there in the first place?
Perhaps it would help me
change some of my actions.
Perhaps it would help me
be more proactive about certain things.
And with telling your story,
you’re keeping it alive.
So you don’t have to show anyone
any of these steps.
But even if you’re telling it to yourself,
you’re saying, “This thing happened.
This weird thing did happen.
It’s not in my head.
It actually happened.”
And by doing that, maybe you’ll take
a little bit of power back
that has been taken away.
And so the last thing I want to do today
is I’m going to tell you my story.
And the one I picked
is about this big boss.
And I picked that one because
I feel like I’m not the only one
who has been in the position
where someone has been above me
and kind of talked down.
I feel like all of us
might have been in positions
where we felt like
we could not say anything
because this person has
our livelihood, our paychecks,
in their hands,
or times we might have seen
someone who has power
talking down to someone,
and we should have
or could have intervened.
And so, by telling a story,
I’m taking back a little bit of power
that was taken away from me.
And I have changed the names,
and it’s been a decade,
so it’s going to be OK.
And it doesn’t have a happy ending,
because it’s just me writing down
what happened that day.
And so this is how I use creative writing
to bear witness.
At Lisa’s going-away luncheon,
I wanted to ask my boss’s boss’s boss
if he’s stupid
or just plain dumb
after he takes one look at my hijab
and asks me where I’m from
in Southeast Asia.
I tell him that it’s New Jersey, actually.
He asks where my parents are from
and my grandparents
and my great-grandparents
and their parents
and their parents' parents,
as if searching for some other blood,
as if searching for some reason why
some Black Muslim girl from Newark
wound up seated next to him
at this restaurant of tablecloths
and laminated menus.
I want to say, “Slavery, jerk,”
but I’ve got a car note
and rent and insurances
and insurances and insurances
and credit cards and credit debt
and a loan and a bad tooth
and a penchant for sushi,
so I drop the “jerk” but keep the truth.
“Tell me,” he says,
“Why don’t Sunnis and Shiites get along?”
“Tell me,” he says,
“What’s going on in Iraq?”
“Tell me,” he says,
“What’s up with Saudi and Syria and Iran?”
“Tell me,” he says,
“Why do Muslims like bombs?”
I want to shove an M1 up his behind
and confetti that pasty flesh
and that tailored suit.
Instead, I’m sipping my sweetened iced tea
looking around at the table,
at the coworkers around me,
none of whom, not one, looks back at me.
Rather,
they do the most American
things they can do.
They praise their Lord,
they stuff their faces
and pretend they don’t hear him
and pretend they don’t see me.
Thank you.