The revolutionary act of writing only for yourself

Responding to Silk by Martha Williams

It felt like someone was looking over my shoulder. The presence was palpable, so much so that I physically turned around even though I knew no one would be there. When I turned back to my laptop to finish the personal essay I’d been working on for about two months, the sinking feeling that someone was judging me returned. That voice in my head repeated the questions I kept trying to swat away: “What will they think?” “Will I be treated differently if I write this?” 

These enquiries felt detached from my personal intentions and yet they seemed to linger forever. Looming behind me, my spectator was somehow integrated into my being, even as they unravelled me emotionally. Perhaps a lover, friend, or the white imagination – as creators and dramatists, once we survive our own self-doubt, we must also encounter, contend with, the perception of potential readers we may never meet.

Listening to Martha Williams’ captivating poem Silk made me think about what it means to write only for ourselves; to reject the gaze of an audience, to offload the burden of speaking for others and to relish in the chaos of our interior spaces. Williams explores these sometimes uncomfortable and contradictory turns in a way that seems to unfold naturally, like silk itself. The speaker’s soft voice caresses each line as they declare that they are “writing into where there are no words yet, only sensing.”

Performed solo to camera, Silk sees a permeability between the acts of seeing, writing and reading. It begins boldly with a sense of mission; speaking against silence, putting language to work to uncover the ineffable.

“I am writing for what is wide, and deep, and wonderful 

for the ache, for the dirty, the sweaty, the desired”

Taking us outside of words alone, the performance celebrates the act of writing and the swirling senses which our words unleash. That writing doesn't belong to a point in time, or even a piece of paper; rather, it penetrates surfaces, suggesting levels below or beyond what meets the eye. The speaker finds expression in the "break, in the folds, in the forging...in the margin" – a process that doesn't have a beginning, middle or end. Even as the speaker carefully describes each sensation, the reason for their writing is never revealed to us. Instead, the first-person speaker achieves a glade of justified pleasure or solace without external voices, carving agency within their own language. 

This is the kind of boundless power that rumbles inside of me every time someone hears me and is taken aback by my “good English”, as though my own physical appearance betrays the accent-less sound of my speech. As time goes on, each new conversation starter on my racial identity – sometimes honest but often ignorant or taunting – feels more jarring. Even in my suburban hometown of Milton Keynes where I grew up, a man came up to me at the bus stop to ask if I “needed help reading the timetable.” More flummoxed than upset, I silently scream, “sorry to make you jump, but I can speak your language, too. I graduated with an English literature degree from Oxford.” I was staring deep into the face of one of society’s most frightening barriers, consistency – the perilous resistance to growth and change. It frightens me to think people still hold the same assumptions or opinions as they did 10 years ago. 

To be an East Asian immigrant in white society is to be buffeted between the expectation that you represent a submissive high achieving ‘model minority’ and a simultaneous disbelief that you can be anything more than an outsider. Because of this, the act of writing “in the margin” – as Williams’ speaker does – feels doubly transgressive. Even now, I’m writing in the very language used against us. Capable of “good English” and storytelling, I stake my claim to those literatures which for so long had caged us in the margin.

Coming from a family of refugees so heavily entrenched in the keep-your-head-down mentality, I’ve come up against resistance from within, too. Writing publicly about my family history feels like dangling our cocoon-like existence off a cliff. I feel guilty for exposing our vulnerabilities and our fragile place in the fallout from war. “Why don’t you write about...I don’t know, lemon drizzle cake?!” a family member would advise, with one fearful eye toward the communist government that had curbed her generation’s freedom of self-expression. As humans, we cherish exchange and debate, but to write our own thoughts without any audience, or pressures in mind, is a revolutionary act: it’s an act of exposure.

The magical accomplishment of writing is that it can use language both to clear a space and to recreate the mess, providing “the texture of pain”. Williams’ metaphor of writing as silk is set against a harsher, uncaring response to language from an undefined “them” – a sharp contrast pulled out in the poem’s final lines: “for them, it is burlap and for us, it is silk.” By the performance’s end, we’re empowered to both reject the gaze of an audience and seek something new beyond it. The last line dramatises the poet’s yearning for energy, space, and an identity untethered to others’ claims. It is explosive, “But it is us, I am writing for.” 

The poem spirals out a great distance to us as spectators and creators, advocating for comity with the earth and with our fragmented, chaotic selves. Though it is hard not to tie my worth to what I write, I now see into a deeper, cathartic value of our own words and language, which serve not only as a platform to refract my experiences but also as a vital buffer against the stormy world outside.

Silk was part of the Sorry I Was On Mute series, curated by Hannah Lavery for Fringe of Colour Films 2020.