Below is the text of a lecture I gave for a symposium Feminist, Queer Translation, Affect and Decoloniality on February 28th 2025, University of Birmingham. It is lightly edited for clarity, with some references added. Thanks to Michaela Baldo, Elena Basile and Samuele Grassi for curating such a special event.
I dedicate this post to all the killjoy translators out there! Thank you for all the work and all the creativity!
I want to begin with Chicana Palestinan feminist Sarah Ihmoud’s important question “What does it mean to practice feminism in a moment of bearing witness to genocide?” We can be guided by that question. Translation too can be guided by that question. We make our practice that witnessing, the proliferation of witnessing, to translate, to move something, to transform, to mutate, and thus also, to keep alive.
When Israel murdered Rafaat Alareer, Palestinian poet and scholar, on December 6, 2023, his poem, “If I Must Die,” was translated into many different languages, quickly, urgently, translating as a way of fulfilling an instruction, of receiving a message, that if he must die, then we must live to tell that story. Salih J. Altoma notes that the poem too “has a story.” He explains that “If I Must Die,” was one of only a small number of poems Alareer wrote in English. Altoma quotes Alareer who explains “we need to train ourselves to express our concerns in the target language, here English…. Palestinians who are able to speak for themselves in other languages should do that directly.” English becomes a “target language” because of the need to get the message to as many people as possible.
Translation can be an expansion of reach; more trails, more tales.
And a poem can be a gift of many images.
Alareer gives us an image of a piece of cloth, and some strings, becoming a kite, “flying up above,” so that a child somewhere in Gaza, might see it and “thinks for a moment an angel is there, bringing back love.” That cloth, those strings, words strung together, becomes a story we live to keep telling. Rafaat’s story, yes; but also, as Yousef M. Aljamal described in his preface to the posthumously published book If I Must Die, “the story of a people under a brutal regime, who have been fighting for their freedom by any means necessary.”
The poem, “If I must die,” to write as to fight for freedom, has had and will have many lives, entering different languages, and also different zones; poems becoming placards, placards, kites, lines, the snap of slogans, stories carried onto the streets, taking up space; poetry, persistence, protest.
How to speak amidst so much shattering? Returning to Sarah Ihmoud, she writes precisely of the need to speak through grief, to break out of ‘this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.” I hear an echo of Audre Lorde who teaches us that what makes it difficult to speak is why we need to do so.
I want to pause here and acknowledge that there is so much that is difficult right now, so much that is depressing and exhausting. Even using the words to name what’s happening right now puts you at odds with what is happening right now, words like genocide, treated as extremism, words like transphobia, treated as censoring. The reasons for doing the work can sometimes be confirmed by the consequences of doing it. When they try to stop you, doing what you are doing, being who you are being, we need others all the more, to lend a hand, to carry that weight.
We need to become each other’s resources. Today I want to think about that need for translation as a resourcing for movement, not just how we keep each other’s words alive, the work alive, but how we speak courageously into the wind despite being warned of the consequences of doing so.
Going Back
After I agreed to share some thoughts for this event, I did point out to Michela that I don’t work on translation. Yes, I was making a rather anxious point. It seems rather strange to be giving a keynote for an event on translation with many of you who are in fact translators, doing that work. The labour of translation is, of course, shared. And it matters practically. So much of our activism requires finding a way to communicate across our differences -or with them. So, I will offer some reflections on what I have learnt from being translated as well as on how translation has come up in my work, whether explicitly or not.
Thinking about how translation has come up explicitly meant going back over some old trails. And funnily enough, in my 2006 book, Queer Phenomenology, when I first began writing of old trails and well-worn paths, I related going back and looking back to translation. I wrote then, “looking back…this glance also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us.”
I had thought the first time I wrote about translation, or to be more specific wrote about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writing about translating Mahasweta Devi into English, was in my book, Strange Encounters, published in 2000, 25 years ago. I had forgotten that I had written about Spivak and Devi in my PhD thesis that became my first book, Differences that Matter published 2 years before that. So, I have been travelling with translation from the beginning.
I was inspired by how Spivak wrote of translation in her preface and afterword to Imaginary Maps. She writes,
I have, perhaps foolishly, attempted to open the structure of an impossible social justice glimpsed through remote and secret encounters with singular figures; to bear witness to the specificity of language, theme, and history as well as to supplement hegemonic notions of a hybrid global culture with this experience of an impossible global justice.
I think what really caught my attention was the idea of “secrets.” Spivak emphasises what does not get across, the imperfection of translation. The point of translation might be how it attunes us to limits, to know that however much we seek to learn about others, or from them, something does not move, something will remain secret.
Secrets are rather sensational. Looking back to this early work on strangers, those who are not at home, who are seen as out of place, as not from here or not really, I sense that translation might mattered less as a topic and more as a sense and situation. I can hear my younger feminist self, struggling to get out of theoretical languages and paradigms that I had adopted but was not quite at home in including I would say a certain style of postcolonial theorising.
I was not just writing about not being at home.
I was writing from not being at home.
I am going to shift now into a more personal register, which was not what I planned to do when I first began writing this lecture. Translation as a topic led me this way. As a writer I follow the words.
I think of English, my only language, the language of the coloniser, the language of world domination.
But is it my only language? Or was it? My mother is English, my father Pakistani. I have been told my first spoken words were in Urdu. That’s because my mother became very ill when I was around one year old. I was sent to Pakistan to be looked after by family there. My first words were spoken to aunties and grandparents and cousins.
I don’t remember any of this myself. But my family has spoken of it often. And I have photos of me from then and there. The photos are in my mother’s album, currently in my sister’s house, in Adelaide.
This one is of me in Karachi from 1971.
Here’s another.
In this photo I am being held by one of my aunties with her children standing. I look a little grumpy.
Somebody wrote on the back of the photo as if from me:
Am very fond of my aunties and cousins I was just in a little off mood.
This translation of my expression was probably meant to reassure my family back in England I was being looked after, not really sad just a little off. A killjoy-to-be, I would one day find my own way to express what it meant or felt to be off, whether a little or a lot.
Almost a year later my mother had recovered and I came back to England. I am told I confused my sister with my cousin. Even though I cannot remember any of this, even though I know I was loved and looked after through all of it, I understand the trauma of leaving homes and loved ones, not just once but twice, was not just my own.
As a family of five, we migrated to Australia a couple of years later, further away from not just from England and Pakistan but from my first words. They were forgotten. We did not speak Urdu or Punjabi at home. My father might possibly assumed English would be a passport out of a certain lot in life as immigrants, that speaking English would mean a brighter future, going up and away, not back.
Later, he came to regret this decision. We were told to learn the language and were given books and tapes. I didn’t. It was one of many of my father’s instructions that I refused. Of course, I now regret letting my rebellion from my father get in the way of learning the language.
But my father is not the point of the story. Where there was loss there was possibility, one that I had to grasp in another way. I came to have my own relationship to family in Pakistan. That was not only because my Aunties and I could speak to each other in English. My eldest aunt Gulzar Bano, was a feminist and human rights activist. This is a picture of us together from 1971.
Gulzar communicated her passion for justice to me in so many ways. These are fragments from a letter she wrote to me on September 2nd 2011; she had written another letter the day before.
She begins with a reflection on the accident of birth and then makes a second reflection, “POVERTY IS A COMPREHENSIVE VIOLATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS.” I hear her voice in the capitalised letters: she was always willing to shout if that is what it took to be heard, even if that meant being heard as shouting.
Gulzar was also a poet. I am not sure why, I should have asked but never did, but Gulzar’s poems were mostly written in English. Her poems ended up in anthologies such as Poetry of Pakistan.
Gulzar’s story of becoming a poet was entangled with Partition. She said, “I came from Lucknow to Lahore in a military special train without my parents in November 1947. My only piece of luggage included a few books and paintings. Intensive concentration as a single working woman in a large family made me neglect my aptitude for the arts. However, words can be drawn without paint and brushes. Often on notepapers here and there I started writing poems…. many of them lost.” Later Gulzar self-published a volume of poems, “Lost Found, Found Lost.”
Gulzar taught me there are many ways to work with words, using whatever materials we can find, given what has been lost or left behind. It might be the impress of her hand on mine, that I came to be so enchanted with words, the sound of them, the rhythm; the rhyme, how words tell time. I became especially intrigued by how words move and mutate, how happiness, for instance, lost its hap or how diversity has been used so much that now all we seem to hear is the sound of busyness, that buzz; diversity as a buzz word. Of course, now, that sound of a buzz seems to have become more of an alarm.
If I had forgotten my first words, it does not mean they did not matter. Or do not matter. In Queer Phenomenology, I wrote about being a child from a mixed background, and how some of the most precious objects in my family home were old volumes of Shakespeare. They were precious to me not because they were classics of English literature but because of the story I had been told of how they came to be in my family’s hands; they were found in a house in Lahore that became their home after Partition.
Maybe translation is also a story of how objects travel, what comes with them, who comes with them.
In 2020, there was a special issue on Strange Encounters to mark 20 years since it was published. A dear friend of mine, a killjoy sister, Sirma Bilge wrote one of the pieces. And she wrote about what she found her in her book:
There are two dried silvery branches between the leaves of my used copy of Strange Encounters. They come from a Russian olive tree, olivier de Bohème. They were in blooms when I was in Turkey reading Strange Encounters that Summer. Their exhilarating sweet fragrance saturated the night. I took two tiny branches to have some morsel of Mediterranean Summer back in Montreal and put them in the book I was holding in my hands. I smuggled them in my book back to Canada, unremembering they were there. That souvenir from my home, from an ordinary tree on the street in Ayvalik, Turkey, was renamed strangely in the languages I used in Canada. It was attributed to other places, Russia and Bohemia. While rereading Strange Encounters during the lockdown, I have found the branches in-between the leaves of my copy. They had lost all their scent but kept their distinctive silver green leaves.
What a gift that Sirma happened to have my book in her hands so they could carry that morsel, that memory. Those dried silvery branches pressed in the pages of an old book carry more, even without scent they evoke places. When we move, worlds move with us even when some things are lost or things are given different names.
I love old books because of how past readers leave traces of themselves behind. In my 2019 book, What’s the Use, I included this photograph from a page of a book on hands.
Why, I wondered then, did you circle that word.
I was left wondering because of what you left.
Translating Killjoys
What’s the Use also included this image of the well-used path.
Use can clear our way, making it easier to go way. We might be directed: go that way. I used the path with different captions, which I guess was its own kind of translation project.
The more a path is used, the more a path is used.
The more he is cited, the more he is cited.
Heterosexuality, a path that is kept clear.
A career can also be a path. Sometimes, we have to leave that path to realise what it meant to travel on it. I left a career path in 2016. I had been an academic. I would no longer one. I resigned to protest how my university had not addressed the problem of sexual harassment – or had addressed it, silently, quietly, hush, hush.
Silence can be a wall.
I was resigning to protest the silence. So, it was important not to resign silently. When I shared my reasons for resigning, addressing colleagues and killjoys then, as I am addressing you now, I shared information about what had been going on. To lift the lid, is to become a vandal, the cause of damage. I did not realise this at the time, but I had made it very unlikely I would be able to return to that academic path even I had wanted to. I hope I would still have made the same decision if I had realised this.
I was still working on universities, but I was no longer at one. And I began to wonder if I needed to write differently, to write to readers without assuming the university as the go-between. I was thinking in a way about how translate some of my ideas into different more accessible forms. It might seem like a simple-enough switch: from academic books to trade books. But I have found the world of trade publishing confusing and disorientating as I guess most worlds are when you are not used to them.
I chose to write my first trade book with feminist killjoys. Why? I had learnt from speaking of feminist killjoys, bringing them into the room, how people from different walks of life connected with that figure. I noticed how the atmosphere would change, becoming electric, snap, snap, sizzle.
The feminist killjoy became a communication device. Something about this figure translates very well.
The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, my first trade book, was also the first time I gave the feminist killjoys a book of their own although I had written about them many times before. I began their book by setting a scene: I am at a table with my family, having polite conversations, trying hard not to react to sexist comments made by my father. Invariably I would fail and end up saying I had a problem with what he said. And then, the atmosphere would change, becoming tense, as if I had created a problem rather than pointed one out. I heard these words often, ‘Sara, another dinner ruined!’
I became a killjoy because I was not quite willing or able to be silent or compliant to keep peace with a patriarch or to sustain the illusion that all was well. At times I did feel like I was on my own. Thinking back to my aunt Gulzar, so willing to shout her convictions, becoming a feminist killjoy was also another kind of inheritance, a path that led back to her. I was not alone even if I did not always know it.
I did not call myself a feminist killjoy back then. The feminist killjoy is, in fact, a stereotype of feminists: those miserable feminists who make misery their mission. Misery is not our mission. So why claim the name? We claim that name because if doing the work causes misery, that is what we might need to cause.
When you claim that name for the work you do, you end up in conversation with other people who, like you, can hear in it a promise. I made the feminist killjoy’s book a handbook, because I think of it as a hand, a helping hand, an outstretched hand, also a handle, how we hold on to something. I offer killjoy truths, which I also call hard-worn wisdoms, killjoy equations, killjoy commitments, and killjoy maxims as well as killjoy survival tips; my first tip to surviving as a feminist killjoy is to become one.
To become a feminist killjoy is to hear yourself in history. A history can be a handle. It can help to know that where we are others have been. One reader wrote to me , “I am a Feminist Killjoy, and I didn’t know these two words described everything I’ve ever been all my life.” The feminist killjoy offers another way of describing ourselves, being ourselves, and of finding each other, those who get it because they have been there, in that place.
The handbook took me to different places, I went on my first ever book tour. I loved sharing the work in independent book stores and feminist libraries being surrounded by feminist and queer walls like these ones from The Feminist Library and Gay’s the Word. It lightened the load to be surrounded by a history of feminist and queer activism! Walls can be wise. Or, we can choose our walls wisely.
To write a trade book, you need an agent who works between you and the publisher. And one unexpected and important consequence of having the rights of the book held by an agency (rather than handing world rights to a publisher) was that I became more involved with translations of my work. I ended up in direct correspondence with editors and translators from many different publishing houses, travelled to different places to talk about how killing joy can be a world making project including last year Spain, France, Poland and Italy. One form of travel can lead to another. When I travelling to talk about feminist killjoys, I was following a path they opened for me. And I have been hearing about the conversations people had about how to translate the word killjoy. Here are some translations.
Killjoy
Aguafiestas
Psujzabawa
Guastafeste
Rabat-joie
Oyunbozan
Pretbederver
If translation can be a form of travel, moving words and ideas between languages and not everything moves across, something else happens. I was glad to read Magdalena Kunz’s preface to the Polish edition of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. I could do this of course because they had translated her preface into English. Magdalena reflecting back on the difficult conversations they had about how to translate the killjoy; the road that led to settling on psujzabawa was, perhaps unsurprisingly, bumpy rather than smooth. It might tell us something about killjoys that they are hard translate! Magdalena asks,
Did I ultimately love her as my own? Yes: psujzabawa is, after all, my translation child: wayward and stubborn – but that’s why she is so special and extremely dear to us. It’s not easy to persevere in a relationship with her: she comes and goes; she can be our sister, our dearest friend, a source of support and strength, a ray of hope; but she can also pick up, tear down and destroy, turn our world upside down without looking back. From time to time, you can step into her shoes, but it is impossible to become a psujzabawa once and for all.
Feminist killjoys: if we sometimes step into their shoes, they too might step on ours. So many steps in each journey. Each one, precious. Even an ouch. There are many steps in how feminist killjoys move through different translations.
After I shared a newsletter about different translations of “killjoy,” a Turkish feminist Irem Aydemir replied on social media. She said,
killjoy has been translated as “oyunbozan” (word by word translation: game ruiner) mostly in Turkish but I think “keyifkaçıran” (joy repellent) resonates more because this is exactly how I feel as a killjoy, this annoying feminist who makes people uncomfortable 🧹 but we also ruin the game of course!
What I learn from translating killjoys is the important of feeling, that the task of moving the killjoy across different languages is also one of trying to capture the feelings that the figure embodies or the feelings we might have in embodying that figure. Sometimes words come out of us to express a feeling. We feel words. Words feel.
In Paris, I worked with translators Emma Bigé and Mabeuko Oberty in three events at a radical bookshop/community centre, a queer bookshop and an art gallery, back in March of last year. Emma and Mabueko co-translated posts from my blogs given the name “Queer Vandalism” as well as The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. There was an argument at one of the Paris events about whether the spirit of the killjoy was “caught” by the translation. I could not catch the words myself since I do not speak French. But I heard the heat of a tussle.
In a way, I think the killjoy is best translated in the arguments we might have about how to do that translation.
When we don’t agree on how to translate her, she moves.
The killjoy teaches us then that what make something “translatable” might be what makes it difficult to translate; translatability as difficulty.
It is important, however, not to reduce difficulty to the words or to present a too-happy version of what it might mean to encounter difficulties in practice. I had to withdraw from one event, a radical book fair in Rome because they had invited a man to speak who was on trial for domestic violence, with the director justifying the decision because he must be presumed innocent and therefore given the freedom to speak. I wrote a letter to Italian feminists on my newsletter:
In the past I have accepted platforms to speak in venues only to be told later that they were not accessible to the people I most wanted to address. I think of one time I gave a lecture at a university in a theatre that had been used earlier to discuss complaints about sexual violence. Some students told me they could not come to my lecture because they would be retraumatised by entering that space. It is one of my killjoy commitments to do what I can to make sure that the people most affected by the forms of power and violence discussed in my work can participate in discussions of it. I know there are some people who are not free, because of their experiences and commitments, to enter the space provided by Più libri più liberi. I thus cannot bring feminist killjoys to the fair.
Given translation involves many actors and organisations, it can involve relationships of trust that are hard to develop in a capitalist system based on profit and extraction. I have had translators write to me about not being paid properly, not having their own work recognised as creative labour, not being given the opportunity to write prefaces so they can explain their contributions and creative choices.
One translator, who initiated the translation of the handbook, had to withdraw from it. She ended up removing her name from the work itself. She spoke of specific decisions the publishers made that she had to resist, or at least try to, which showed they did not only get the work but enacted what it critiqued.
One example was their proposal to translate the word “cop” in an Audre Lorde poem into “human being.” Cop to human: what a translation! Let’s give the problem its name: a racist translation.
She spoke also of how they wanted to polish the work even though it offered a critique of polishing. She spoke of she was kept being undermined, her views disparaged or disregarded. She described,
Everything you write about in the book has come true in this process of translating it…. I haven’t expected so much trouble. The publishing house attitude to be critical, anti-racist and feminist, unfortunately is only there in theory, not about the way they act and work in practice.
There is so much killjoy truth in these words.
When we complain about what we encounter, we encounter what we complain about.
Translating No
Speaking of complaint, the title of my new book is No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining. This is my second trade book. It draws on the research I first shared in my academic monograph Complaint! , interviews with students and academics who had made complaints about harassment, bullying or discrimination at universities.
I think of my method as becoming a feminist ear. To become a feminist ear is to give complaints somewhere to go. An academic wrote to me, “I want my complaint to go somewhere rather than round and round in my head.” Round and round in my head: it can be a lot of movement not to get very far. Complaints can also go round and round institutions: more movement not to get very far. One student described her complaint as an energy zapper. I was reminded of the bunny in the old advert for Duracell batteries. When the batteries last long, you just spend more time going round and round.
To be a feminist ear is to hear how we are heard. I think of a conversation I had with a lesbian professor about the complaints she made and did not make over her career. She could hear herself complaining as she was talking about complaining. She said, “I am moaning now, I can feel that whining in my voice [makes whining sound].” I replied, “We have plenty to moan about.” We can hear the complainer arrive in our own voices as well as each other’s. She then said “if you have a situation and you make a complaint, then you are the woman who complains, the lesbian who complains. And you can feel the change in your voice and the dynamic in meetings. And you don’t like to hear yourself talking like that, but you end up being in that situation, again.”
I hear so much in that “again.” To become a feminist ear is to hear again. We are heard as broken records, stuck on the same point. Repetition does not begin with our complaints but with they are about.
We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.
You have to keep making the same complaints when the same things keep happening.
As soon as I began to release the data of complaint, people told me that the same things were happening in other workplaces. So, in the new book, I make connections between the stories I collected for my research and those that have entered the public domain because they ended up in courts or by being shared by whistle-blowers or investigative journalists.
No is not a Lonely Utterance did not begin with that title. It was going to be called, A Complainer’s Handbook. My editor wanted something more poetic and less prosaic to capture the feeling of the writing. Hence the title is already a story of words being moved. I resisted the new title at first because I was committed to the idea of a handbook as a helping hand or handle. But in the end, the title was freeing, allowing me to focus on the feeling of the work or in it. Complaints can make you feel smaller, alone, apart. Complaints procedures are designed to make you feel that way. You might be told not to talk to anyone else about what is going on. You might not even know what is going on.
Many of the stories of complaint seem to be about pushing very hard not to get very far. There is sadness in these stories, without question. I noticed how often people expressed sadness, sometimes breaking down in tears, not so much when they were describing their complaints but when they were telling me what they had loved doing before the complaint or before what happened that led them to complain. They expressed grief for what they had lost not because of what the complaint did, but what it did not do, probably could not do, which is allow a return to how it was before it happened, what led to the complaint being necessary in the first place.
In grief, there is grievance.
I too ended up circling around that word grief. You might imagine that complaining would mean being left rather discouraged. That might be true for some people, but it is not true for many others, including me. I left fighting. I am left fighting. Doing the research did not leave me feeling discouraged either. I was encouraged, indeed inspired, by how hard people were willing to fight whether for their own jobs or for other people’s.
Complaints can be how we say no to violence. They can be why we say no. We might say no to get the violence out from behind closed doors, to bring the institution to account. But so many complaints can be buried. One student, said her complaint was “shoved in the box.” Another student, said her complaint went ‘into the complaint graveyard.’ A filing cabinet can be a place that complaints do go to die.
I think back to how translation can make you aware of secrets, what does not get across. Institutions have secrets; what they do not want revealed. Sometimes their secrets are our complaints. Complainers know a burial has happened. And this might be another way complainers have a kinship with translators, knowledge of burial.
That complaint graveyard might not be just then where complaints go to die, but where we gather to bring our stories to life. I shared that image of a “complaint graveyard,” with a senior researcher. She said,
You have to think about the impact of doing this. Because having yet another complaint, it means that you give more credibility to the one who comes after you. When you talk about haunting, you are talking about the size of the graveyard. And I think this is important. Because when you have one tombstone, one lonely little ghost, it doesn’t actually have any effect; you can have a nice cute little cemetery outside your window, but when you start having a massive one, common graveyards and so on, it becomes something else; it becomes much harder to manage.
Let me address you: killjoy translators. When we become more, we become harder to manage. We become something else, something more explosive. To be buried together is to haunt together. That too is a hope: that our complaints will return to haunt the institutions, a reminder of what has not been dealt with. Complaints tell us another story about time, queer time, how complaints that have been filed away, buried, made to disappear, have not gone.
Complaints have not gone because of what goes on. That’s why we keep having to say no. Or do it. That makes no a translation project.
No
Non
Nie
Nien
아니요 (aniyo)
いいえ (Īe)
nihen
ਨਹੀਂ (Nahīṁ)
La
Hayir
Bù (不)
No can be a small word with a lot of work to do. To get a no out we might have to open the door of our own consciousness. Feminist of colour Heidi Mirza wrote about her experiences of being sexually harassed when she was a student; experiences that were “so painful” that they “lie deep in [her] soul in the place of shame.” She describes “writing about it now” as” unlocking the doors of shame,” so that she “can begin to exhale.”
It is not simply that our truths, when spoken, so they are “out there,” will change institutions. Even killjoy truths don’t have the power to do that. But when we unlock a door, and a no comes out, something shifts. I think of one student who said no to a professor only to be warned he was an “important man.” She did not heed the warning because she did not want the past to be perfectly translated, “she did not want other students to go through the same practice.”
She did not start out by saying no; it took her time to say it because of how she doubted herself. But then she said, “I was like, no, no, no, no, things are wrong not just in terms of gender, things are desperately wrong with the way he is teaching full stop.” Once one no came out, others followed, no, no, no, no; an army of nos. That’s why complaint can be an activist affect: that feeling of release when what has been held in is let out.
Get a no out so that others can follow!
Others can be a reference to other nos. Or others can be a reference to other people who in hearing your no might be encouraged to express their own.
Saying no has consequences. When she shared her testimony with me, she said she had wanted to do a PhD. But then “that door is shut.” A no can be a shut door.
But a shut door is not the end of the story. It might even be the beginning of another one. She shared with me recently that she is now teaching at another university and is considering doing a PhD. Having had one door shut, she eventually found her way “to a much more supportive and kinder environment.” She explained “I refused to walk to the beat of the institution, to bend to patriarchal abuses of power in order to get ahead on a particular path.” She added, “I’m so, so glad I shut [that] door.”
When you say no out of commitment, you don’t just lose a path, you make it possible to find another one. And not just for yourself: I think of the feminist values she is now able to pass on to her students, the different paths she might make lay for them. A refusal can be an opening.
Of course, it does not always work out this way.
It can require a leap of faith to shut a door, to commit to an action that, once completed, might mean the end of a path you’d started on. But that no can open up another path contradicts what are warned: that to say no to “an important man,” or to the institution that enabled him, is to end up with nowhere to go.
We need to give no somewhere to go.
I spoke to an early career lecturer who left her post and profession after her university did not give her the time she needed to return to work. As a neuroatypical person, she needed that time to do her work. She described her experience of complaint as “a little bird scratching away at something.” When I heard that little bird scratching, I remembered the words of a diversity officer who had described her job as a “banging your head against the brick wall job.” A job description as a wall description. Diversity work can feel like scratching at the surface, giving you a sense of the limits of what you can accomplish.
When she resigned, she made her complaint again. She describes, “I wrote a two-page letter, and it was really important to me to put everything in there that I felt so that it was down on paper. And then I asked for a meeting with the Dean. I kind of read the letter out in a performative kind of way just to have some kind of event.” Her complaint filled the room she left. But she wanted to do more. She wanted to put her resignation letter on the wall: “I just thought I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.” We have to help each other get the words out.
This lecturer later came to a lecture in which I shared words from her testimony. The words she gave to me, I gave back to her. She wrote to me after, “it was only after the lecture that I realised how undignified these complaint processes are, and how yes, my dignity was stripped. In my dealings with the union, they had advised me at the time that my dignity at work had been breached, but that word did little then for me, as it felt like another procedural piece of jargon – but when I felt a swell of pride at the lecture, indeed, when I felt a sense of dignity about it all, I realised that this must have been somewhat lost.”
Words can be emptied of meaning, becoming polish, how we are removed from our own stories. When we share our complaints with each other, giving them to each other, they acquire a different meaning and value.
Words sent out come back. And when they do, they sound different.
We hear each other scratching away, “little birds,” that sound as labour. I recall a conversation I had with an Indigenous student. She made a complaint about white supremacy in the classroom. Using that word can certainly get you into trouble. She became in her terms a monster and had to complete her PhD off campus. But she said “an unexpected little gift,” was how other students could come to her: “They know you are out there and they can reach out to you.” She used that expression twice, “an unexpected little gift.” Even though her complaint led her to leave, by complaining she left enough of herself behind for other people to find.
A no can be what we pass on. Also, how we hold on.
We are not aways here at the same time. But that does not mean we cannot hear each other.
Sound matters because of how it travels.
The sound of complaint can be sharp and piercing. Or dull and low. Zehay Liva Bocretsion wrote to me about how she turned her complaints about racism into songs, which she sent to cultural institutions such as museums. She explains, “I got the idea because in Danish klagesang (complaint song) carries both the meaning of elegies, the retelling of a tragedy, and a more sarcastic meaning, like someone who is just wailing on about all the things not going their way.” Zehay sings her complaints with a “monotonousness” which “becomes a point in itself,” as a way “to express the matter-of-fact ways in which a lot of people try to disregard the complaints I have had.”
We can turn the sound of frustration, of not getting through, into another way of expressing our complaints. I think back to how a line of a poem can become the snap of a slogan; the repetition of a chant on a demo.
Sound travels. Sound builds.
I hear the sharp sound of the direct-action group, Sister’s Uncut, setting off 1000 rape alarms to mark the anniversary of the Clapham Common Virgil for Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer in 2021. The police had beaten and arrested many women on the day, coming down because of who came out. I hear the rallying cry of feminists in Argentina, saying Ni una menos (Not one woman less), a “collective scream against machista violence,” words that spread to other places, other collectives, repeated, echoed, amplified, passing between bodies, travelling across time and also space: translational; transgenerational; transnational.
We hear you. We hear you fighting to be heard. We are louder not just when we are heard together but hear together.
Sometimes, we have to stop what we are doing, to take it in. Audre Lorde tells us of one time when she was driving her car and heard on the news that a white police officer had been acquitted of the murder of a black child, Clifford Glover. This was in 1973. History repeated. Too many unheard complaints. Lorde stops the car, to let it in, the violence of the police in, of white supremacy. She stopped the car and a poem, “Power,” came out, with its electric line, not to let our power “lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire.” If there is something poetic in complaint, in the manner or form of its expression, a complaint can be a poem. What Lorde let in, what she gets out, we read.
Sometimes, we need to stop the car, stop what we are doing, whatever we are doing, not just to let the violence in but to express our refusal of it. A no can be an occupation, we occupy the buildings, taking up as much time and more space as we can. I think back to when I gave a lecture on complaint and common sense entitled “Changing Institutions,” at Oxford University of May 7, 2024. It was a couple of days after students had set up a Palestinian solidarity encampment on campus. The solidarity of the encampment leaked into the lecture theatre, that space, so often solemn, heavy with hierarchy and history, was full of energy and electricity. I had a sense of: another university is possible.
When I visited the encampment after the lecture, to express my killjoy solidarity with the students, with everyone fighting for a free Palestine, I was asked if I wanted to speak. I did not. I wanted to listen and learn. And I listened and learnt. I learnt how the students were working out how to look after each other, how they were negotiating differences and conflict with a shared consciousness of who does the work and who gets to speak whilst shouting “no to business as usual whilst our institutions profit from and facilitate genocide.” To assemble, to say no, to do no, throws so much open. We throw ourselves into projects that are urgent and necessary, doing what we can, when we can, however we can, in the wear and the tear, for as long as it takes.
The harder it is to get through the more we have to do. We end up with so many materials.
What a mess!
In both my books on complaint, I use this image of messy lines with different captions.
A Complaint
A life
A queer map.
A queer map tells us where we have been, our comings and goings.
Perhaps this could also be a picture of translation, too; many threads.
We can add another caption:
Translation
So much work not to get very far, each line, heavy-going. But think of this. Each line can be a conversation, one that you had to have, a conversation that can open a door, just a little, just enough, so that someone else can enter or hear something. Each line can be time, the time it takes to get somewhere, to do something, time as a queer line, going round and about as how you find things out. Each line can be a path, the places you go, the unlit rooms, the shadows, the doorways, who you find on your way there. Each line can be a trace, how we go back, how we come to know more, hear of others who were here before. Each line can be a promise, a leak as a lead, how those who came after can pick something up from you, because of what you tried to do, even though you did not get through, even though you just scratched the surface. Yes, those scratches; we are back to those scratches.
The scratches that conveyed the limits of what we can accomplish can sometimes be enough.
To scratch a record can stop it from going around, making the same old sound.
A scratch can be testimony, how we say, we were here, how we create room for ourselves here, in our effort to make our lives or our work possible.
But then when our complaints are buried, possibility might seem to be buried, too.
I hear here the beautiful words of the Greek poet, Dinos Christianopoulos, “they tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds,” echoed by so many activists, world over.
A complaint as a seed, buried in the ground or deep in a pile, to come up later, plucked by those who come after.
A possibility can be buried. In burial is possibility.
That’s a killjoy truth, alive to possibility.
To make something is to make it possible
Possibility is still a fight; what we have to fight to bring about.
I opened this lecture with Sarah Ihmoud’s fighting and grieving words. Let me return to her call for us to “speak loud and courageously into the wind.” When people use the expression “shouting into the wind” they usually mean it is pointless to make noise against the flow of air. But when the situation is urgent, there is always a point. The word translate is said to have replaced an old English word wend “to take one’s course or way, proceed, go.” It is not far from wend to wind, to turn, weave; wind, to move by turning and twisting.
Maybe translation is like wind.
We blow words out. Blow them about.
Remember: a line of a poem becomes the snap of a slogan.
Poems become placards.
Placards become kites, lifted by the wind, carried further, so more can see that message, that rebellion, that hope.
To keep the kite flying is to give the story air.
