Essay: Avenge Your Silence
On Becoming a Woman Who Writes Too Much
Mona at six months, 18 months, three years, and five.
I have become obsessed with legacy and death.
Maybe because I am childfree by choice, so I am the full stop at the end of me.
Maybe because I am perimenopausal—(the micro)—during a global plague—(the macro)—and it feels like both have gone on for so long now that I have forgotten what came before and cannot see what lies ahead, caught in a purgatory-like state, a fog or fugue that in its stasis forces upon me a contemplation that I could ignore were I able to dilute it with the distractions of “outside.” Instead, I am perpetually stewing in it, inside.
Maybe because five members of my extended family have died in the past eight months: a cousin in May, an uncle in August, an uncle in September, an aunt in October, and an aunt just last week.
Every time a member of my extended family dies, I feel a connection to Egypt sever – even if we were not close, because I left Egypt when I was seven and returned just once when I was 13 before I moved back when I was 21. I know my extensive network of cousins were much closer to our aunts and uncles, having grown up with them.
Each loss takes me back to memories of what was. Who they were. Who I was. And what can never be. Each loss takes me to my childhood and their youth. Each death takes me closer to mine.
One day in Cairo in the 1990 somethings, I was on my knees in the rubble of what used to be my childhood home, digging frantically in the dirt for myself.
I was looking for the Mona I used to be; for pictures of me as a child that I had been told had not been retrieved before the demolition of the two-storey building where my parents had rented an apartment when I was a toddler, now recently torn down to make room for a high rise in the increasingly popular neighborhood.
Armed with the shamelessness that is the gift of perimenopause and the urgency that is death by global pandemic, I started this newsletter because I knew it was time to write all the things I never dared to before; to become a woman who writes too much.
I don’t know what I thought I could achieve, digging with my bare hands. But I was driven by a need to find myself. I needed to see who I had been; to find the foundation of me. I was a seven-year-old who spoke Arabic when we left Egypt. And I returned 14 years later: a twenty-one-year-old who spoke British-accented Arabic, a language she still understood because her parents spoke to her and her siblings in Arabic, but whose first language was now English. My thoughts and my dreams were in English. I needed the pictures of the girl I used to be so that I could interpret the woman I had become.
When my hands tired of turning over the rubble of what had once been my childhood home and I despaired of finding the pictures of the girl I had once been, I felt as if I myself had been demolished.
Many years later, I interviewed an architect about a building project that had been suspended because archeologists believed ancient Egyptian artifacts lay underneath. “Every inch of Egyptian land contains artifacts from ancient Egyptian times. We have to balance the needs of the living against the treasures of the dead,” he told me.
His words took me back to those hours of digging in the dirt. In a way, I had been doing the work of an archeologist at a dig. I was excavating a past, as they do, that I needed in order to explain the present, again as they do, with the treasures they find. The pictures I was digging for were to be my own personal Rosetta Stone that I would use to decipher me.
Surely to have a legacy you must have a past.
“Every inch of Egyptian land contains artifacts from ancient Egyptian times. We have to balance the needs of the living against the treasures of the dead.”
My parents were 31 years old when they left Egypt on a scholarship to study in London. They left Egypt with a foundation that gave them a self-knowledge I did not have. I thought if I found the pictures of the girl I was before we left Egypt–the fragments of me–I could construct a foundation in retrospect. I was an archeologist of pre-Contemporary me.
I wrote about exile and nostalgia and the effects it has had on my family and plan to examine those themes more.
Part of the grief of losing five members of my extended family in the past eight months has been a recognition that with their passing, I am losing a part of a history over which my hold was tenuous at best. Each loss takes me to my childhood and their youth. Each death takes me closer to mine.
How can I remember my life, when those who remember parts of my life that I have lost, are now themselves lost to me? What history do I want to piece together so that I can tell the story of me, knowing that some of that history has now left this world along with the relatives who have died?
The pictures I was digging for were to be my own personal Rosetta Stone that I would use to decipher me. I was an archeologist of pre-Contemporary me.
If we are alive so that we can be known as the ultimate act of revolt against silence, then surely that knowledge requires self-remembrance which itself is tempered by the metronome of time, its tempo steady, unrelenting, and caring little whether we respect its urgency.
The combination of my perimenopause and the pandemic–more like a collision, being frank–has sharpened my respect for that metronome and inspired me to start digging once more. Not in the dirt for childhood pictures but to excavate the silences within which I once found solace.
With bell hooks after one of her events at the New School in New York City in 2014.
Armed with the shamelessness that is the gift of perimenopause and the urgency that is death by global pandemic, I started this newsletter because I knew it was time to write all the things I never dared to before; to become a woman who writes too much.
That is a title of one of my favourite bell hooks essays. When she died in December, I started to reread her book Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, which includes “women who write too much” and which I had read as an ebook in 2014 when I lived in Cairo. I gasped at the paragraphs I had highlighted back then.
“Time remains a central concern for all women writers. It is not simply a question of finding time to write–one also writes against time, knowing that life is short,” hooks, who was 69 years old when she died, wrote in the chapter “women who write too much.”
“Annie Dillard urges us to ‘write as if you were dying.’ A large number of black women writers both past and present have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers,” hooks wrote in 1999.
bell hooks was urging herself as well as Black and women of colour who read her to think about legacy, to write too much, because “death hovers.”
“One of my favorite literary mentors was Lorraine Hansberry, who died in her mid-thirties,” hooks continues. “I often pondered the paths Hansberry might have taken had she lived longer. Her death and the early deaths of Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, to name only a few, stand as constant reminders that life is not promised–that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”
If your community is ready for you, you are too late. But waiting for your community to be ready is fucking hard. It is a reminder: be shameless and remember that death hovers.
I probably won’t have a tombstone when I die because they are not part of Muslim burial rituals but if I were to have one, it would capture my legacy thus: fuck the patriarchy.
I wake up every morning convinced that today is the day that I will destroy patriarchy. And I go to bed each night knowing that patriarchy will most likely outlive me.
Within those parameters, how do I fashion a legacy?
Shamelessness loosens my tongue and I say the unsayable; I frighten and discomfort myself so that my writing shapes me as I shape the world. In the past year alone, I have written about my two abortions, perimenopause, queerness and polyamory in ways I never imagined. And there will be more.
Death hovers; when it comes for me, I want to be buried lightly, not burdened with silences and taboos.
“My writing was an act of resistance not simply in relation to outer structures of domination like race, sex, and class; I was writing to resist all socialization I had received in a religious, southern, working-class, patriarchal home that tried to teach me silence as the most desirable trait of womanliness,” hooks wrote in a chapter called “class and the politics of writing.”
Death hovers; when it comes for me, I want to be buried lightly, not burdened with silences and taboos.
Next to my laptop I keep this note I wrote to myself a few years ago: if your community is ready for you, you are too late. But waiting for your community to be ready is fucking hard.
It is a reminder: be shameless and remember that death hovers.
And next to it, I’m now adding this:
“Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first,” Cherrie Moraga wrote in The Last Generation. “ I see the same impulse in my students–the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated–turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.”
bell hooks includes it in her essay “women who write too much.” And it is a reminder: be a woman who writes too much.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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