Essays - MarieB. Atelier

5 Easy Ways to Improve the Joy of Academic Writing

It was 2019 when I was asked to give a workshop on creative writing for PhD students at the University of Amsterdam. In retrospect, this was the start of the journey that has lead me to become a creative entrepreneur and to develop a series of workshops, such as Creative Writing for Academics and Storytelling for Grant Applicants.

This blogpost invites you on that journey, providing you with five tips to explore how to integrate creative writing into your academic work.

Curious about the foundation of this work? In my article Doing Academia Differently, I tell the story of what pushed me to explore creative writing as a tool in academic writing.

Tastes like more? I’m offering multi-sessions workshops for academic writers of all disciplines; workshops specifically designed for grant applicants; as well as personal coaching.

Contact me for an offer

The power of creative writing

Creative writing is an effective tool to catch readers’ attention while grounding them into scenes. It is also a tool that helps develop a narrative even though you may think that your work is not a story—it is.

Academic authors who insert creative writing into their texts provide their readers with splashes of sensory experience. They draw their readers into the world that they researched; they take them by the hand, cracking the codes of conventions to help them enter some of the most obscure areas of our brain, of our bodies, and of our societies. Smells come to life; colours become pointers for grounding the reader into a scene; the light signals specific moments in time; shapes arise, taking the form of human and non-human characters.

With creative writing, an author is no longer only telling, but showing what their research led them to discover, and what that means for our understanding of the world. Creative writing endows a text with more space and more freedom for readers to appropriate it. A creative text doesn’t tell the reader how to read; it creates a setting from which subtexts emerge, there for the reader to immerse themselves in an experience.

Tip 1. Ground your reader into a scene

A rule of thumb to get your reader immersed in your material is to ground them into a scene, again and again. A scene is like a zoomed-in photograph; it pauses on a specific moment at a specific place, giving cues for the reader to experience that moment. The broken white colour of the wall, the smell of coffee lingering around, the tic-tac-tic-tic-tac of fingers pressing laptops keys, the moist eyes of the dog looking at you while you write. Scenes transport the reader into another space and time.

A scene could be close to you, a moment during the research process, such as when you open a dusty, classified box in the archive; your first encounter with a respondent; your sensations when arriving nearby the embassy hosting a political refugee. But a scene can also be about something more distant. The setting of a speech, the atmosphere of the parliament, the mood of a crowd, the frame of a report.

Not all your writing needs to be staged as a scene. But inserting a scene regularly will make the reader come with you along your research journey. If you lose them along the way, they’ll find you back at your old woden desk, by the window, or at the river side. Just allow them to be on your side, wherever you are.

Tip 2. Evoke all the senses

Have you written your first scene already? Great! Now, check how many senses your scene evokes. The more senses, the stronger the scene becomes. Was the coffee bitter? Which noise came through? What kind of light shone on the walls? Was the room smelling of wooden floors, or was the building sweating with concrete off-gassing? Was the air crisp, thick, warm? Make your reader taste, hear, see, smell, and touch what you have been tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling and touching. Or even better: steer your reader’s experience by evoking those senses that will make them concentrate on the details you want them to see. Each sensory detail is a tool to attract their attention, paving the way for your theoretical and analytical claim to land naturally.

Tip 3. Keep the language as simple as possible

Academic writers are notorious for throwing expensive words at each corner of their sentences. Sometimes those words have their purpose; they bring in nuances or technical details that couldn’t be mentioned otherwise. Although they have qualities in common, metaphors and metonymies are not the same, and identifying a synecdoche can at times be helpful. But the most powerful texts remain those where jargon has been replaced by everyday language.

Your best ideas will especially land if you can convert them into simple and elegant images.

Take Virginia Woolf’s credo for instance: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” No one can claim not to understand her claim because of the language. And yet, her sentence shelters a powerful criticism of patriarchal societies, which has resonated worldwide for nearly 100 years.

Tip 4. Establish who and what are the characters of your story

While scenes should be cornerstones of your writing on a micro level, your narrative will especially thrive if you establish a conversation between different characters throughout your entire piece. A character can be human: yourself as the researcher, a respondent, a historical figure; but it can also be a non-human actor: a building, a document, a plant, a concept, a theory.

To get you going, here is a list of question that may spark a beginning: how do your characters feel? Are they introvert, extravert, complacent, stubborn, conservative, expanding? How do they make you feel and why? What would you like to know about them that you don’t know yet (think wild, imagine they are human)? Is it easy to communicate with them, why, why not, what do they keep secret? From experience, I noticed that these questions are particularly generative when your charachter is a non-human one.

The point is to establish dynamic relationships between the various characters in your work. As Helen Sword suggests in her fantastic writing guide Stylish Academic Writing, you may want to play around and copy classic plot structures, such as the murder mystery plot where the researcher searches for clues, follows a few hints, and applies their deductive power to solve the enigma. Or such as the Pride and Prejudice structure, where two seemingly incompatible concepts are brought into a single conceptual space, where they flirt, dance, argue and laugh to the point that they will never leave each other ever again. For more examples of possible plot structures, see Helen Sword’s chapter “The Story Net.”

Characters and their relationships will help you create focus into your writings; they will allow you to play around with points of view; and they will help the reader experience the different facets of your truth.

Tip 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece

Every writer experience at some point a writer’s block. I remember working on the introduction of my book and feeling completely lost in the myriads of possibilities to tell why I wrote the history of denaturalization law in the first place. I was saved by applying a very simple exercise: what was the story of that book? What happened? Why? And where was this going next? Instead of writing full paragraphs in all their details, I wrote a two-page sketch of my introduction plot. This allowed me to visualize the structure of the narrative. The rest came naturally.

In the end, every writer is a storyteller. Developing the overall arch of your story will help you find focus and directions, paving the way to insert scenes, sensory details, and character relationships.

Conclusion: From research to communication, and back again

Not only is creative writing an attractive means of communication for reaching a broader audience, but it is also a way to investigate the most complex aspects of our subjects of analysis.

Try it out, and you’ll be surprised by how creative writing doesn’t only change the way you write, but also the way you see and understand your own material in the first place. Five easy ways to start are: 1. Ground your reader into scenes; 2. Evoke as many senses as possible; 3. Keep the language as simple as possible; 4. Establish who and what your characters are; 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece.

As one of the participants in Amsterdam elegantly summarized: “When you are stuck, go and play.” A lesson that is not only valid for writing, but for life in general.

Need some help in starting to play?

Contact me for an offer

L’amour, c’est de ne pas avoir peur du vide, d’oser entrer dans le néant. L’amour, c’est ce moment d’écriture engagée dans le temps. Certains l’appellent écriture automatique.

« Donne-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot. » La générosité de cette comptine est peut-être au centre de l’activité de l’écrivain.e. Parfois, on a besoin de la plume d’un.e autre pour pouvoir écrire. Ou tout du moins, on croit avoir besoin de la plume d’un.e autre pour pouvoir écrire. Mais finalement, ce n’est pas la plume que l’on trouve, mais un cœur à qui se confier, une âme sœur peut-être. L’écriture s’arrête alors pour le moment d’un câlin. Ce qui reste c’est une connivence, un moment de partage. La porte s’est refermée, on ne les voit plus. Ce que l’on peut voir, c’est notre imagination. Deux corps qui s’étreignent, deux souffles qui mergent en un souffle pour le moment de l’étreinte. Un sourire qui nait, un soupir qui souffle les heures, les jours, les semaines d’angoisse emmagasinées dans le corps, là, juste au dessous du plexus solaire. Ce sont des choses banales, mais même les choses banales se transforment en tension. Le pain trop dur trouvé au petit matin. Le thé tiède. L’eau qui ne chauffe pas, ou qui est trop chaude et brule le bout de mes doigts. Le rythme de la langue qui tremble et qui claque, qui s’élance et se cramponne au dernier morceau de ligne, au dernier son de la tirade à peine entamée. Qu’est-ce qui pourrait apporter de la joie dans ce cocktail de détails oubliés sur le rebord de la fenêtre ? J’entends la voix de Christian Bobin interjeter le texte. « L’amour, c’est un morceau de soleil oublié sur un mur, c’est un fantôme en robe bleue. » L’amour, c’est un éclair qui caresse la peau. L’amour, c’est une étreinte qui ne serre pas. L’amour, c’est le coup de marteau qui nous révèle un monde juste à porté de main, jusque là caché par un rideau d’inquiétudes. L’amour, c’est l’endurance de la dance, la sueur de la valse qui n’en finit pas de tourner. L’amour, c’est le son qui s’estompe pour se transformer en vibrations internes. Ces vibrations qui révèlent le cœur sous la poitrine, qui éveillent un frisson oublié au coin d’une côte brisée. L’amour, c’est l’envie d’en faire encore un peu plus, le monde n’est jamais trop plein d’histoires, il en faut toujours plus pour révéler nos vies et nos destins. L’amour, c’est de ne pas avoir peur du vide, d’oser entrer dans le néant. L’amour, c’est ce moment d’écriture engagée dans le temps. Certains l’appellent écriture automatique, moi je l’appelle écriture créative. Écriture tout court, parce que finalement, écrire, c’est écouter son cœur, c’est-à-dire, écouter les vibrations de mes os qui se mettent à chanter. Mes os se sont mit à chanter par un samedi après- midi brumeux. Je marchais sur la route, portant mon poids en traversant la rivière, tombant sur les pierres. Leur chant se mit à gonfler comme une éponge, absorbant le sol, épongeant le flot, transformant le vent qui tombait sur les arbres de ma trachée…C’est un de mes poèmes qui résonne ici. Écoutez-le en entier, c’est par ici.

Of Finite and Infinite Games: A Meditation on How to Turn Walls into Bridges

Picture by Autonomous Artists Anonymous.

It was in London, on a Monday afternoon. It was still before the lockdown kept us all in confinement, and so we were sitting in an office at university, having an honest face to face conversation about work; about life with work; about the fact that although it might be true that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” it is f***ing hard to live when examining our lives. And that Socrates may have wanted to acknowledge that.

“There is one more book,” he said towards the end of our conversation. “It’s a strange book. It might be the weirdest book I know. It’s even weirder than de Sade or Nietzsche. But I’ve read it over thirty times, and each time I read it, I learn from it. I think it’s time you start and read it. When you’ve read the first couple of pages, let me know, and we’ll meet again.”

We said goodbye, and I ordered the book. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James P. Carse. Little did we know that a couple of weeks later, we would all find ourselves confined. And that thinking of life in terms of finite and infinite games would become a strategy for turning those walls into bridges.

The book arrived quickly. I read; I kept reading; and by now I’ve already read parts of the book a couple of times. For instance, I’ve re-read it while waiting to be virtually let in to do a job interview. I’ve re-read it when thinking about creativity as method in the social sciences. And I’ve re-read it just for the pleasure of re-reading it. It is a strange book. A collection of propositions that offer a vision of life as play and possibilities. Megalomaniac? Perhaps. But I’d rather say profound, intuitive, and thought through to some greatest details.

Since meeting again face to face will have to wait, here are some bits and pieces that I would have thrown into our conversation. To be continued. How could it be different when being introduced to playing for the sheer purpose of continuing the play?

***

The book’s departure point is elegant:

“There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

A seemingly simple proposition, whose elegance nonetheless competes with equations such as E=MC2. Simplicity at its best, holding tremendous powers, for better or for worse.

In the game equation, two things unite the two kinds of games: in both cases, no-one can play a game alone; and in both cases, no one can play who is forced to play. Whoever plays, plays freely.

What differentiates both games, in the most basic terms, is that while the infinite game will always go on, the finite game will come to an end when someone has won.

This was already enough fuel for me to run for some time. No-one can play a game alone. Whoever plays, plays freely. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing to play.

I sensed that the trick was to interpret life in view of these two game-strategies. And I realized that in too many areas, I had tricked myself into the rules of finite games. I had tricked myself into believing that I had to win that game. That I had, for instance, to clearly decide in which discipline I would continue working. That I had to decide whether I would continue to run an academic career or try something else. That I had to fix it all, with clear terms, clear targets, and clear ambitions. But I’m not interested in winning. I’m interested in learning. I’m interested in discovering. I’m interested in the poetic space. I’m interested in the silences. In the in-betweens. In the stories that connect that which has been disconnected. And so, the finite game strategy didn’t trigger the right assets for me. Instead, it kept me into a loop, contained within boundaries that I craved to transgress. What our conversation sparked was the possibility of finding ways to transgress those boundaries without destroying the whole thing.

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”

What I sensed was that the trick is to try and see where the infinite games are waiting to be played. Not everything can be an infinite game, but in many situations, the option is to the player. So, the trick is to shift, where possible, from a finite game mentality, to an infinite game mentality. It’s not about relegating our ambitions. It’s about seeing those ambitions from a different angle. With the infinite game mentality, the gains are no longer a disciplinary identity. The gains are no longer the articles that I want to have published. Nor are the gains the next job I will manage to secure. Instead, the gains become first and foremost the conversation. The genuine conversation. The conversation that makes me write these articles in the first place. The conversation that these articles may spark. The conversation that happens just because we felt like having a conversation. Whoever “we” may be.

From the infinite game perspective, the gains become the process of creation, and ever more so, the process of co-creation. And who says creation says messy process. Creation comes with many silences, and with many in-betweens. Creation comes with a lot of rough edges, with unfinished sentences, with unfinished thoughts. Creation is working with raw material. It is working with sounds—noise even—instead of words; it is working with threads instead of material; it is working with muds instead of bricks. But during the creative process, words emerge from the noise and become stories; threads become materials, which become cloths, or a kite that flies the winds above the horizon. During the creative process, mud does become bricks, and bricks become shelters, and bridges. The essence of creation is to play with boundaries while finding meaning in what we do. Be it in telling the forgotten stories of unknown citizens. Be it in highlighting the affective essence of institutional rules, showing paths where emotions flow like water, connecting the personal with the public, the rational with the affective, the juridical with the political, the poetic with the scientific. But also, the essence of creation is to embark on a journey with unknown destinations.

“The only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end.”

Now, it does happen that energy runs out, and that what once was a shelter becomes a wall, a fence, sometimes a prison. But the game goes on. And so, it’s about finding the bits and pieces that will make this whole into a meaningful whole. Beyond disenchantments. Beyond doubts. Beyond vengeance. Beyond anger. Beyond fatigue. Beyond resignation. It is about finding the spark in the machine. That tiny little bit of electricity that can move loads, turning the wheels, getting us on the move of discovery and admiration, bringing laughter on the table, there where seriousness threatened to take over.

“The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. … The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”

The finite play for life. The infinite play of life. The difference lies in a tiny preposition. One letter difference. But that one letter may turn, in time, a wall into a bridge.

And yet, although the finite game mentality may be somewhat closed and confined, the two elements that unite it with the infinite game mentality may be the bridge between the two. One never plays a game alone. And whoever plays, plays freely. In these times of confinement, where mobility and social connections are being reduced beyond our will, the finite game mentality may help to cope with the load of our new daily life. For instance, dividing a day into realistic tasks is a finite game. It is serious business. It is playing within boundaries. But winning that game is joyful, and enables the other game to continue, too.

“Finite games can be played within an infinite game.”

Perhaps, the trick of playing the infinite game is to identify where playing a finite game within the infinite game will open the horizon instead of closing it. In view of continuing to play the infinite game, we all play an archive of finite games. Each of them being a game in themselves. Played with some others. Played freely. Played with rules known prior to playing the game. And ending when someone has won. And each of these games participates in the infinite picture of the ongoing game of life. It’s a matter of perspective. The finite game is a step. The infinite game the path.

Finite games can help bring things closer to home. They can be a call to action—for instance: write a little every day, no matter what; spend at least one day a week researching the archive. They can create moments of connections—for instance: engage in a job opening procedure, for the sheer pleasure of connecting. They can make space to practice creativity, in whatever form. In the end, finite games can be that spark in the machine. The threshold that allows one to move from a finite perception into new horizons of play and possibilities.

Playing music: a method for working and living

I remember the time just before my first piano lesson. I was nine. My father is cellist, and he was playing sonatas with a wonderful pianist. A young woman, short hair, soft hands, eyes that were full of life. She rode a motorcycle. I found her one of the most fascinating women around. I loved her to be around, but I also felt very shy to address her personally.

I had decided for a long time already that I wanted to play the piano, and it was without a question that she would become my instructor. When the school year would begin, I would start with private lessons. During the summer, I would join the two-weeks chamber music retreat that my father organized for children, in the middle of the mountain area where we were living. I still see her approaching me one late afternoon, after their sonata rehearsals. I don’t remember what she said exactly, but I remember it was about me and her becoming pupil and teacher of one another. And I remember becoming very shy, to the point that I might have given her the impression that I was not really into this.

I was. I had been for years already. And it was just the beginning.

Since then, playing the piano has become one of my most precious moments in life. Almost everything else has changed in the twenty-six years that separate today from that summer. But playing the piano has remained. And as the years passed by, I started to realize that playing an instrument yield many a lesson for doing our jobs and for being humans.

Before anything else, playing an instrument requires concentration. In that concentration, technique finds precision to the extent that it can almost be forgotten. But as soon as the concentration breaks, technical weaknesses take over to the detriment of the play. Playing an instrument thus means training one’s ability to concentrate, which has served me many a times. It has served me when teaching, when reading, when writing, when brainstorming. The faculty to concentrate is a gift: it is one of the best tools we have to make space where we first see only chaos. In that space, meaning can emerge.

Playing an instrument also goes hand in hand with an intense training in listening. And that goes deeper than it seems. On the surface, we listen to the notes that we play: the melody they form, the harmony they carry, the rhythm that propels them forward, or that let them linger. To hear all of this properly already requires training and perseverance. And suddenly we start to hear more: we start to hear the details in-between: the silences without which the music would not sound; the interstice between the notes, forming in themselves melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. We start to hear the pulse of the piece, precise and steady as the heart of a living creature. In that listening, we enter the realm of music in all its magnitude, leaving behind the daily chores, our worries, and our ambitions. Listening makes us live the moment in all its dimensions, and that is a skill that has enriched my life and the relationships within it. From family to friends to students and colleagues, I have noticed many a times how much listening helps when things need attention. Listening allows emotions to be there, but to be there at rest. Listening creates a space of consciousness in which we connect to better understand, leaving space for the unexpected.

Above all, playing an instrument comes with a practice of knowing that has nothing to do with words, books, or encyclopedia. The knowing that we do through music has to do with being present. From the very first note of the simplest technique exercise, making music comes with a kind of devotion and intensity that is kind of unique. The body takes over in a matter of concentration that not only makes it possible to play a possibly technically difficult piece, but that also makes it possible to use flows of energy and flows of emotions as if these were words, sentences, and stories.

Just as language, music is all about communication. When I play a piece, I always see a story unfolding. It can be a simple bedtime story, but most often, it is a whole journey. I traverse magic forests where I meet trolls and giants. I hear thunderstorms and raindrops merging with the glittering of the sun. I hear people dancing of joy, sadness, or anger. I sense fear, regret, and hope, their relation and their separation.

Most of all, I sense the depth of respiration in which multiple layers of life connect with one another. It starts with the very physical sensation of my own breathing, the air moving through my lungs and filling up my belly; it grounds me in its quiet rhythm of in and out; and it provides me with the necessary stability to perform the technical rhythms of my play. Somehow, becoming attuned to the physical rhythm of breathing also opens the door to sensing the rhythm of life: from the banal flow of people and things in my direct surrounding, to a much bigger and diffuser reality. Sometimes, it even seems as if I can begin to sense the loop of time at a scale that is much bigger than a human life, and maybe even bigger than humanity. Sometimes, the scale is no longer about human breath, but about the breath of magma, of stones, of mountains, of rivers, of oceans. In music, the scales of million and of the infinitesimal cohabit.

Photo by Kimberleigh Aleksandra on Unsplash

And yet, playing music is one of the most sober experience I know. Without practice, no music. And practice has nothing to do with the grand sonata that we eventually want to play. Practice is about repeating a series of notes over and over again, in order to find the physical sensation that will allow to eventually play the notes with musicality. For an amateur like myself, we are not talking here about ten times. Not about fifty times. It’s about hundreds of times, sometimes even thousands. It’s incredible what it takes to find the right balance between tonicity and relaxation. Without tonicity, the music cannot take off. Notes won’t be precise, and the rhythm will disaggregate and wither away. Without relaxation, notes will sound hard and dry, and it won’t take long before muscles stiffen and slap your body with cramps.

In that practice of repetition lies a life lesson that I find both humbling and sobering. Humbling because music is infinitely bigger than what I will ever be able to express in words. Sobering, because with patience, practice and repetition, we can train our body to make music. One note after the other. If we find the discipline to repeat those notes, we can reach the beating heart of the grand sonata, and with it, feel, just for a moment, the whole cycle of life.

Poem of the researcher

Somewhat lost in the literature on affect, I decided to switch gear and try to grasp “affect” in free poetic writing. The idea was not to craft a high quality literary poem, but to allow a different register to guide me in the process of understanding affect. My departure point was to make affect the main character in the poem. The rest followed. Here it is.

~~~

Affect is the voice that dares bring the illogical into the frame; that dares make claims with no arguments.

Affect tells the story of the unsaid and is there to contain.

Affect is a space of silence ready—or unready—to open up.

Affect knows the body just as well as it knows the interspace between bodies.

Affect knows the guts; it knows blood pressure; it knows muscle tension, and the nervous system.

Affect knows the touch of a skin against another skin. It knows the release; it knows the abandon—both may be confused but affect knows the difference.

Affect knows when it knows, and affect lets go when it doesn’t.

Affect colours the voice.

Affect reads the ungraspable, and signals it knowing in return.

Affect transmutes.

Affect travels.

Affect repeats.

And affect transforms.

A Room of One’s Own

The best thing about receiving a prestigious scholarship such as the Marie Sklodowska-Curie is without doubt the vitality that comes from Virginia Woolf’s credo: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”

A Room of One’s Own was often on my mind in the past years, when I was meditating about my urge to write more, and my urge to be financially independent. I had decided to work less to be able to write. But working less meant earning less, and I experienced how quickly creative energy recedes when the space to write has no official space to be. I published articles, I published a book, but somehow, the joy that comes with writing kept escaping me. I felt like a fish out of water, gasping for air, trying to swim in an environment where swimming had been turned into springing. I was a resilient fish, I kept springing, but my goodness what was I tired.

Receiving this scholarship was the unexpected gift that enabled me to re-unite writing with work. There was my water. I felt like a whale finding its way back to the ocean, after having evaded the danger of the shore nearby. I’m sure those around me could spot jets of joy escaping as I rolled my senses in the comfort of my new habitat.

My own room is not a room set in stone. I’ve noticed that I work best when being in transit—I might be a real fish in the end—sitting at new places where nothing belongs to me, except for my writing gears: a laptop, a notepad and a pen. Libraries, cafeterias, coffee houses of all sorts. I do return to places I liked. Together, they form a network of power sockets feeding my creative energy. They connect the different cities I live in (Amsterdam, London, Paris), providing me with ephemeral anchors in the sea of images and ideas that inhabit my inner life. The lack of belongings makes me focus. I just sit, and let my senses submerge my thinking. My concentration arises, my tong starts moving (I always mumble when writing), my fingers tingle and press the keys. Images become words; words become images. In those moments, I feel intensely connected.

The room of my own may be especially my own by the fact that I’m not owning it. But the money makes more of a difference than I’d perhaps like to admit. I’ve always told myself that living the bohemian life had its benefit too. Knowing how to cook a delicious diner with just a couple of ingredients found in the house that evening. Try the pasta with slowly caramelized garlic and paprika, a couple of parmesan chips and some pepper. It’s comfort food in disguise. But the lack of financial independence was a constant reminder of those power relations through which women have been belittled, infantilized, and kept in the custody of financial dependency. I was earning the wage of an intern, working more than twice the number of hours for which I was being paid.

I remember a conversation with a friend who asked me what kept me from doing the things I dreamed of doing. I then realized that being paid like an intern makes you feel like an intern, regardless of education and experience. The lack of financial recognition made me feel numb. It cut my wings down.

Don’t get me wrong, being an intern can be wonderful. It can give you the space to discover and try things out. Acting like the empresario you always wanted to become. Drafting your first contract while you dream of becoming a legal expert. The thin paycheck that comes with it, can, when well timed, make you feel like you are flying because you never experienced earning your own money. I have experienced the joy of the intern, but that was 15 years ago. Life moved on. I settled, had a child, earned a PhD, published, organized conferences, taught for years, managed teams of lecturers, bearing the responsibility to fix whatever had to be fixed. So, instead of feeling my world expanding by means of sheer discovery, I now felt it shrinking behind the wall of shame that came with the reality of not seeming to be able to make a living out of my own skills.

Being financially safe—and to be safe, one must be independent—is a key to unlock spaces of creativity. When money is there, space can be created in whatever way suites. I feel the water around me, and my senses attune to the webs of connection I’m about to traverse. I do not know where this journey will end, but one thing I know for sure: the ocean has many stories to tell. I’m all ears, ready to catch them and offer them to you. Stay tuned.

UK: Was Jack Letts’ deprivation of citizenship really necessary?

It’s not hard to imagine why Jack Letts was eventually also deprived of his citizenship. The government had experienced pressure. They had to explain why they hadn’t yet deprived Letts had of his citizenship while Begum has lost her months ago, even though Begum had no other nationality, while Letts was a binational.

The juxtaposition of Shamima Begum’and Jack Letts’ case was one more example of the extent to which politics of citizenship are stained with racial power inequalities, where the white subject appears to have more rights than the non-white and non-Christians. The difference was just too blatant. Although the government had claimed that Begum’s deprivation of citizenship was legitimate because she could potentially acquire Bangladeshi nationality through her mother, the Bangladeshi Minister of Foreign Affair had been quick to comment that Begum was not welcome in Bangladesh and that there was no way she would acquire Bangladeshi nationality. De facto, Begum has thus become stateless with Sajid Javid’s decision to deprive her of her citizenship, making her deprivation of citizenship an illegitimate deed from the UK government.

In parallel, Jack Letts was known to have committed the same crime—both Begum and Letts had joined ISIS—but Letts was not immediately deprived of his citizenship, while he did have another nationality: he was a Canadian British dual national.

For the UK government, the easiest way to make up for the unequal treatment was to repair the inequality by also depriving Letts of his citizenship. He had also joined ISIS. Had admitted that he had been an enemy of Britain. And there is this law, allowing the state to deprive a citizen of their citizenship when the state consider them a fundamental threat to the country. The rhetoric about foreign fighters is clear: all citizens who travelled to Syria are considered fundamental threats to the country. So, the government had all the tools to also deprive Letts of his citizenship.

That was the easiest way. But that shows what kind of stamina the government is prepared to display. Don’t get me wrong. In this case, the stamina is weak, very weak.

I can imagine the pressure experienced when faced with the fact that one’s political play is stained by racism. This was not about subtle power relations. This is in plane face. But does the government really think that the racist stain on their politics of citizenship is by now resolved?

I do believe they are cleverer than that. Perhaps, they believe that for some of their electorate, Letts’ deprivation of citizenship will resolve the anger and set the doubts at rest. Perhaps they even believe that Begum’s family will lose their appeal based on the ground of unequal treatment between their daughter, the girl from Bethnal Green, and the boy from Oxford.

But sooner or later, they will have to face the fact that the very nature of a law such as the law allowing for citizenship revocation is profoundly disturbing for our democratic lives.

When the state reserve themselves the right to deprive a citizen of their citizenship based on claims of security and enmity, we should not only be concerned about questions of statelessness. Statelessness is a symptom of something way deeper. Something that I call, using Hannah Arendt’s term, the totalitarian infection of our democracies.

Begum’s deprivation of citizenship is certainly doubly disturbing because she has become de facto stateless. But Letts’ deprivation of citizenship is disturbing too. Certainly, terrorism is a grave matter that needs to be dealt with the greatest care. But everyone knows that depriving citizens of their citizenship is not making the state safer, nor is it making the social body friendlier.

To the contrary. Depriving citizens of their citizenships makes it harder for the state to know where those potentially dangerous citizens are, and to proceed against them. By revoking their citizenship, the state also revokes itself the tools to bring those citizens in front of a criminal justice court. In other words, the state dumps those citizens they say are the most dangerous to the rest of the world. Since borders are not hermetic, it could well be that those citizens will still reach home. It may—or may not—have the gravest consequences for society.

That is one: the deprivation of citizenship makes society, whether national or international, rather less safe than more safe.

And then there is the co-lateral damage. It is unquestionable that those institutional norms legitimizing acts of citizenship revocation by state send a repressive message to social groups with dual citizenship, and even more so to those with a non-white and non-Christian background. For how can a teenager understand the state’s persistence to revoke Begum’s citizenship, if not by concluding that the country they live in make some citizens more vulnerable to the loss of citizenship than others? For everyone with dual nationality or a non-white and non-Christian background, the deprivation of citizenship becomes the token of a potential threat to their own safety. Indeed, the deprivation of citizenship reveals that citizenship might be a privilege more than it is a right. And that the contingency of the privileged ones follows a spectrum of norms of oppression that we know all too well.

I do understand that it requires tremendous stamina for a state to reverse denaturalization laws so that it is no longer possible for a state to deprive a citizen of their nationality once they have acquired it. It requires admitting a certain number of faults: first of all, the fact that the government made believe that the deprivation of citizenship would be an effective security tool; second, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship threatens fundamental human rights, such as the right to have a nationality; third, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship also erodes fundamental principles of the rule of law, starting with the principle of equality before the law; and fourth, the fact that the deprivation of citizenship is a symptom of the racist stain on our politics of citizenship. Now, everyone knows that admitting one’s faults requires tremendous courage and strength.

So, in a moment of pressure, where fatigue is lurking, I can understand the choice for the government to cosmetically masking inequality rather than to fundamentally question their doings. Many of us might do the same in our daily lives. Who doesn’t take the painkiller if that may delay the annoyingly difficult and fundamental examination of our body? The decision to make oneself vulnerable, perfectly knowing the pain that one will go through, and perhaps even knowing that the pain might become even greater than one can imagine, is a difficult decision.

But if that pain could provide some relief for ages-old pains of oppression, then it must be worth it. In the long run, fostering belonging will always benefit the public good.

Surely, abolishing citizenship revocation laws would be just the beginning. But at least it would be a beginning. And it can be done. Others have done it. Canada is the most recent example that comes to mind.

So, let us imagine. Instead of depriving Jack Letts of his citizenship, the UK government would have redressed Begum’s citizenship, and with hers, the citizenship of the more than 150 citizens who have been deprived of their citizenship in the past decade. And the government would have apologized to the communities who felt increasingly threatened of un-belonging. How much time would that take? Pragmatically, a couple of minutes, some hours at best.

Stories are dangerous, said the Judge

It was an afternoon in early summer 2019, in Amsterdam. We were celebrating our teaching program’s fifth anniversary, just as much as I was saying goodbye to those colleagues who had been my community for the past four years. Sipping a beer and laughing at students’ jokes, I was chit chatting with a colleague who happen to be a judge at the Dutch supreme court—one never just happens to be a judge, but one happens to have a colleague who is a judge at the supreme court. My colleague judge was asking me about my new research project that had just started in London.

“I’m writing about denaturalization law,” I answered.

I’ve been writing about denaturalization law for years now, so that has become my primary reflex answer. Judges do know what is at stake in denaturalization law—they know the stakes of the principle of equality before the law; they know what is at stake when depriving someone’s of their citizenship rights; they also know that security is a tricky topic that can sometimes bring democratic ideals into shaky grounds. I saw in his look that he was interested and that he understood why such a topic was worth years of research. That look changed slightly when I added: “But denaturalization is more a tool to write about something else. What I really do is to show that law and politics are driven by affect and emotions. And then I also want to make the argument of fiction as methods of inquiry and communication within the academia…”

Where most of my academic colleagues up to now had reacted positively intrigued—who wouldn’t want to see creativity come back in an institution of knowledge and education?—I sensed that my colleague judge had his doubts about it.

“Stories are dangerous,” he said, pausing. “Stories are a huge problem in law, making it very difficult for judges to know where to draw the line—a line that they do have to draw.”

I agreed. Stories are dangerous. But the point is, stories are as old as human communication. So, I told my colleague judge that my starting point was precisely to see the dangerous potential of stories. In fact, it was when studying such a repressive measure as the deprivation of citizenship, studying the logics that has justified practices of denaturalization throughout history, that had made me realize the power of imagination when it becomes captured in language. Repression is indeed based on stories. Stories drive people to do the most horrific things imaginable. Wars; Slavery; Genocides. These are based on stories. Stories make people believe that some people are better than others. Worse, stories make people believe that some people are more human than others.

The arguments in stories are no rational arguments. Instead, the arguments are anecdotes, figurative language—metaphors in particular—framing…all ingredients needed to make a good story.

Stories are nothing new in law and politics. They’ve always been there. And yes, they are dangerous.

So, we better learn acknowledge their presence and learn to recognize them.

“You’re very right,” said the judge.

I’m certainly not the first to claim that law and politics are intricately related to storytelling. For instance, Ronald Dworkin is famous for understanding the law by means of the chain novel metaphor. Central to his law philosophy, the chain novel metaphor represents law as literature, but then literature of a specific kind. It is a collective work, for which novelists write in chain, each continuing the chapter of the previous writer. This means that each writer must interpret the work of their predecessor, as well as add their perspective on the story unfolding. It is no free writing though: in Dworkin’s vision of law as a chain novel, each writer must respect the logic and the chronology of the work as a whole. No postmodern experiments, not poetical interludes—at least, not in the guidelines.

What I like about Dworkin’s vision of the law as a chain novel is that it makes salient how the law is “doing language,” to speak in Toni Morrison’s terms. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may the be measure of our lives,” she reminds us in her Nobel Prize Speech. When seeing the law as a chain novel, we must pay tribute to the work of interpretation that goes hand in hand with working with the law. And we must acknowledge the creativity involved for laws to be drafted in the first place.

Yet there is another layer to acknowledging the stories that make our laws and drive our politics. Uncovering stories is one thing, writing stories is another. But they go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin. If stories yield power, they are also empowering, and perhaps even more so when they are stories about power relations, of those power relations that require a story to uncover them.

More than any academic text will ever be able to do, stories yields the potential for readers to relate to the complexity rooted in the politics of law, or in the law of politics. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile is a wonderful example. Her “meditation on the aftermath of the war on Bosnia” does a tremendous job at plunging the reader into the context of the war and its atrocities. No academic text could have made us experience what is at stake in circumstances of life and death, such as when a man deserts an army. Dauphinee’s creative text does. It is a page turner in which the narrator makes us feel the soldier’s line of flight. But The Politics of Exile does more than that. It also makes us feel how complex it is to write on the aftermath of war in the first place. Because, how could one possibly write about the aftermath of war when not having experienced war in the first place? Can war be known to those who have not experienced it?

Dauphinee’s work makes us feel the existential negotiations of a writer who feels the urge to expose power in its most destructive form. Just as it makes us feel the writer’s anxiety when negotiating their ability and responsibility to find truth. The voice examining the aftermath of war necessarily needs to remain plural, and open for radical transformation. Creative writing is indeed a great tool to achieve such complexity without having to name it complex.

More than any juridical comment will ever be able to do so, stories allow for people like you and me to understand what is at stake in norms of belonging and repression. Stories empower the dispossessed to connect, to speak, to speak-back. Stories are paranoiac as much as they are reparative, to speak in Eve Sedgewick terms. They are paranoiac because they seek the (com)plot behind our governing norms. But a good story is always stronger than its plot, yielding layers of connective emotions that make us practice our job at being human. And that is what makes them reparative.

The power of creative writing

Tip 1. Ground your reader into a scene

Tip 2. Evoke all the senses

Tip 3. Keep the language as simple as possible

Tip 4. Establish who and what are the characters of your story

Tip 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece

Conclusion: From research to communication, and back again

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