A GEM Journal Installation
Welcome to Embodied & Messy,
This series began as a sequence of journal entries between Azeezat Johnson, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Audrey Sebatindira and Shereen Fernandez. Our entries were feeling through our intentions and hopes in creating GEM as a space, and what Geographies of Embodiment meant to us.
A year later, members have both left and joined us. As a result the entries in our first installation were written by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan and Azeezat Johnson, though we were always in conversation with others, too. Both of us are thinking through what it means to dream with our bodies, and how we might imagine worlds that tend to our different realities.
Importantly, we see the Embodied & Messy GEM Journal as an open-ended dialogue: we hope it creates opportunity for others to journal and share your own in-conversation pieces with us, too.
Join our mailing list, or follow us on twitter to join in and follow unfolding reflections and installations that grow from this.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
11 December 2020
In terms of what I would like to get out of this conversation, I have been thinking a lot about how to write in a way that’s really honest to what my feelings are. So not having this separation of modernity (e.g. the separation of body/mind/soul) which I think feeds into my writing.
For example, I’m currently writing this book about Islamophobia, spending time, investing emotional and intellectual energy, crafting the arguments etc etc, but the majority of my actual headspace is preoccupied with thinking about my grandparents and their wellbeing – which I erase completely from the writing. I am constantly thinking about all the work my mother does to care for my grandfather and grandmother (Nana and Nani), in the middle of this pandemic. All of my thoughts and fears and anxieties often surround them and those contexts. And so I’ve really felt recently that there’s something dishonest about writing my book in a way that dislocates the “big” structures of violence from the everyday looming concerns we have for each other’s wellbeing. And in fact, my desire to build a world that is safe from violence, is a desire which already knows that interpersonal and state violence, physical and mental illness, and systemic oppression are completely interconnected. When I write this book, and when I think of my grandparents as I am writing, these are not distinct projects, as I have convinced myself – through my organisation of time, or through chiding my own “procrastination” – that they are. Instead, they are both/all about protecting my loved ones (individually, communally).
Imagining a world in which the trauma of migrating and being a working-class Muslim man in England did not leave wounds on my grandfather’s mind, or did not lead him to have to so repress his emotions that they come out now only in unintelligible ways, is the same task as imagining a world free from structural violence. But there is a clinical academic way in which we are made to talk about structural violence so that it seems overly-complex and unrelated to our everyday lives.
Embodiment, to me, feels that it must do away with that abstraction and dislocation and allow us to connect where we are in our nervous systems and our hearts, to where we are writing from, to what we are writing about. So that eventually there is no “about”, there is only congruency. So that when I say ‘coloniality has mutated our relationships to each other’, I am not only talking about the creation of nation-states and foundation of white supremacy, but also about my family. I am also, perhaps selfishly, thinking about the fact that I do not want all the racial traumas I experience to manifest in in a haunted way in me when I am older – but also thinking about the fact that they already are in me.
And all of this seems to come back to another truth about congruency, which is that consistency is not only a political virtue, but that for us to be able to be consistent in our beliefs (if you oppose oppression outside the house them oppose it inside your house), we must also have the space to be consistent in ourselves. We must be able to say how much pain we are truly in, or to not say what we do not truly believe. And all of that comes back to thinking about resistance as something that begins inside us, in protecting our nervous systems and processing our pains, because the violence of coloniality lives in us and lands on us despite being everywhere else in theory.
I think of the Quranic verse, ‘Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is inside themselves’, and this speaks to me also about the relevance and relatedness of what is ‘inside us’ – deep in our bodies, our hearts and our minds – our fears, our privately held notions etc – and what we want to see in the world on a global scale.
What I would like to get out of this is a space to develop my thinking and my writing in a direction that is more holistic and that enables me to really be honest when I write, whilst also hoping to grow and be unafraid to be wrong, and willing to be better. For me, the reasons I do not yet feel I can write like that all the time is because of all the gazes upon us when we write/live. Which boils down the question of Embodiment for me, into: what would it mean to write and live truthfully/honestly?
Azeezat Johnson
15th December 2020
Hey m’dear, thank you so much for writing – it honestly made me feel so rooted in the possibilities of this work and just super excited and grateful that I get to do this work here, with you. One of the things that I’ve realised in therapy was how deeply I had internalised a clinical relationship to my body. I think of the many healthcare professionals who assured me that “you could never tell you were wearing a prosthetic”; and how I learned to see my body as something to be masked, to mimic that which it was not. And with the return of the cancer… any part of my body became a potential problem that needed to be fixed, ignored or overcome – and if that was not possible, I felt broken, as if my body had failed me. So I feel particularly awestruck by these words of yours Suhaiymah:
“Embodiment, to me, feels that it must do away with that abstraction and dislocation and allow us to connect where we are in our nervous systems and our hearts, to where we are writing from, to what we are writing about. So that eventually there is no “about”, there is only congruency. So that when I say ‘coloniality has mutated our relationships to each other’, I am not only talking about the creation of nation-states and foundation of white supremacy, but also about my family. “
Everything you wrote was so beautiful, but I need to keep repeating and reminding myself of these ones in particular. Cos here, in this space we’re building together, I see how our framing of embodiment can’t fit within the constraints of faulty/functioning (bodies). We’re sitting with the reality of our material world, and choosing to build ease and comfort from there. And I can only see that as an act of true bravery.
But yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to show up for my entire embodied reality and how impossible that feels within the world I’m currently living in.
For example, today I had an appointment at the long-term condition centre for another prosthetic fitting. This requires several back and forth appointments (on top of oncology appointments, haematology, physiotherapy….). And this is all happening in the shadow of waiting to hear back re my latest set of scans to see whether there have been any further tumour growths after the radiotherapy. So I’m just sitting in and with so much physical and mental discomfort and grief, and I don’t know how to begin writing about this in my work. I don’t know how to do this without getting stuck in dehumanizing conversations about everyone else’s imagination of me (from “thoughts and prayers” to telling me how “brave” I am to continue living the life I’ve been dealt).
And honestly, I also don’t know how any of this can fit within the confines of academic institutions. The theory of my life always feels so much more palatable to academics than the knottedness of my reality. Even within the ever-growing delegation of academic activism, I can’t see how they help me to speak and connect to my reality. Not as an outlier statistic, a hashtag in the making, nor someone to be villified, pitied or victimised; but as someone who deserves the fullness of life. Someone who deserves to be respected and protected, even and especially when I disagree (or am angry) with ppl that can fit in a world that continues to view my body as collateral damage.
But lately I’ve been wondering: maybe the real issue is that I’ve never felt safe enough to trust that the entirety of who I am could be accepted, even within the context of my own writing. I now see how I tried to use my work as an academic to escape some of the embodied trauma that was simply too big for me to process for so long. And so I internalised academia’s distance from the reality of my life to perform the role of scholar activist. But all of that – from quips about Britain and Empire, to antagonising the latest white (and white-adjacent) lefties who imagine themselves as the saviours of our world – all of that is still masking, still growing spikes to protect the parts of me that felt/feel so deeply wounded. And actually, that’s not how I want to move through this moment. I want ease and rest. I want to spend my time tending to my wounds… and that requires turning away from ways of writing and working that make me tense even further, preparing for the next blow.
I guess that’s what I’m hoping this space can intervene against: I want to think about how we do this work while tending to our very real and fleshy existences. How we actually care for our own and eachother’s embodied realities as fundamental to liberation work. I want to develop a practice that works from honouring our embodied realities and knowledges.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan
18 Dec 2020
I am loving reading and hearing the echoes in each other’s thoughts here. It is clear that something we’re saying in different ways is that the things we really want and need to speak about and say, are things we do not feel have the space to be said, or have always been deferred by others (or ourselves) to be spoken about later, or at the right time, or when things are better. But we all sense that that later/better time can only come through our saying these things…
Azeezat, you said, you don’t know how to write without “getting stuck in dehumanizing conversations about everyone else’s imagination of me” which obviously brought to mind Audre Lorde’s “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive”.
Both these sentiments make me think about how much we struggle to see ourselves through our own eyes. I would like this project also to enable me to be differently, not just think or write differently. But if we’re talking/teaching/writing/thinking about resistance, or imagining ourselves in more complex ways, I want to also be able to apply that to myself/ourselves. In a sense, not only writing in embodied ways, or valuing our embodied realities, but also embodying the world we would like to see, from what we have learnt from our bodies about the violence of the world.
Azeezat Johnson
20th September 2021
Note: The cancer has now progressed beyond treatment
How do you write about 12 hours of non-stop agonising chest pain? How do you describe the way that pain arrests your body so that you’re sure this will be the only experience you can remember or even imagine?
You don’t. Or rather, I won’t. I’ll write about the tenderness that I’m working on to ease the reality of that pain, to ease the realities we’re asked to experience in this world. I can’t force myself to explain the details of how and when I feel myself crumbling. I’m not doing that, not for anyone. So yeah, my work moving forward is gonna hinge on the possibilities of us tending to ourselves. And that feels like a risk, but it’s a necessary one.
I honestly have so much to say, so much to feel about this reality. Not just in marketing or exposing sources of profound pain, but really tending to my being. My being deserves all the tending and tenderness that I can muster.
And I think that’s been made clearer through this dialogue with you m’dear. We are here ready to prioritise our collective right for ease, even and especially as we work through the knottedness of our different lived experiences. We deserve to tend to our own realities as a focal point for who we are and how we are in this world.
I’m so grateful to see this transformation in myself, and in us as a collective. Because we’re not gathering more evidence to explain our lives to/for anyone. Instead of focusing on a desire to show truth, to witness and expose the brutalities of this world… after all of that, the wounds that have been exposed still need tending to.
So I want to say thank you to the parts of me that grew spikes or masks to protect my own open wounds; but I’m ready to start tending to the wounds instead of simply masking them.