What do you write a writer, who writes as you write?
She can recognize all the tricks that writers use: the sleights of hand; the slices we present of our imagined worlds, the carefully constructed reality filled with just enough detail to bring it to life. How we steal from experience, and garnish it in the telling of the tale.
So what do you write a writer, when she can see through your performance because she knows all the techniques?
But perhaps there is a way. We cannot observe the inner worlds of others, but that gives us license to imagine.
So we observe what is extant: the smiles, the expressions, the subtle feeling-clues that flit across the face all day long.
And from this we guess at what is hidden and cannot be known: the private thought never expressed, the internal sigh of pleasure, the feeling of warmth or of anger, the dull spike of jealousy, the warmth of hands caressing gently on your scalp, your head in the lap of someone you’re in love with…
– I’m an old soul, she says, and I wonder what that means, what it would feel like to be one.
I imagine a persistence across Time; returning always, forever experiencing what it means to be Gambian: what it meant in the past, what it means now, what it will come to mean. And what it has always meant: the thread that links us to our ancestors and is passed down to our descendants.
To see it all, to feel it all, to know it all. Becoming one with the Mother herself: Gambia.
Always an artist, always a cataloguer of the Age… always writing herself into the next one..
…At a hangout, with friends. It is 2016; the fitna that started the year has just ended, eliciting a national sigh of relief.
They sit under a grove of mango trees on the beach. The evening darkens and deepens around them; the shadows assume more complicated forms. And the heat has dissipated; and there is a joint in her hand. The banter ebbs and flows around her.
But she has withdrawn, she is not there with them anymore. A piece is coming, insistent and impatient. Threatening to depart unless she scribbles it down and renders it a part of the real world.
And she writes: about an autistic girl in Gambia…
…the boundaries between her dreams and the waking world dissolving: sometimes she cannot remember if an event happened only in her mind.
Everywhere she is, she is and she is not. Autism, she hears over and over again as her parents take her to one Dr after another. Pills and diet suggestions; pills and advice; pills and serign tu; pills, pills, endless pills that cure nothing because there is nothing to cure. She can see the hope in her parents’ eyes flicker and die each failed time. She can feel their disappointment…
And so she sits lost in her own inner world, imagining pieces that no one else will ever see.
Her imagination is a hall of mirrors, but she cannot see herself in them, only the reflections of other people’s stories.
And so she explores it, tries to find the key to a door that will lead her back to the real world, one in which she is the daughter they want.
But all exits become entrances, and she cannot escape the hall of mirrors. And so she wanders it, looking for reflections of others to write about.
She writes about a time in the past…
…In this period, women do not write; women only house-wife. Women do not go to school, or learn to read.
But when did that ever stop a true artist? The stories she writes stay only in her head. Not diminished by transition into written form, they are vivid and life-like, unlike anything ever placed within the bounds of a codex. In the outdoor kitchen she pounds and dices and fries; but she is not there. She is in a waking dream, occupies another reality.
And as she continues to create – day after day – these thought-poems, her inner ear becomes more finely attuned. Words have a rhythm; words are a song. They can croon in your ears, or set your heart racing. They can build you up, and tear you down again. Words have a magic, all their own.
And in her imagination, she writes herself into a future Gambia…
…a 100 years later. There is no Gambia now, only the Confederation of African States & Territories. She sits in the back of a driverless car, headed home from work. These are her favorite times of the day: the inside of the vehicle a virtual nawett thunderstorm raging around her. And sitting there alone, she writes.
She writes about a girl, growing up in the old Gambia, the one that exists now only in the history books. The girl is slight of frame, a little awkward in her movement. But her mind is always alive, worlds within worlds filling every nook and cranny.
Words make the World in which she resides. They are powerful and magical, and she has learnt to manipulate them. She can make them light as forinj, or heavy as taapa laapa. They are her playthings.
When she weaves her word-spells, the awkwardness disappears, as if cast aside; her eyes come alight, her face glows. These are the times when she is most glad to be alive, when the drudgery of experience becomes more than worth it.
She turns to me.
– Write me a story, she says, one that is mine and only mine.
These are her terms, her sharrta. But what do you write a writer, who writes as you write…?
