For most of us, the writing life is not a real life. You can be serious and write a ton but if nobody is publishing or reading them then you can’t say you write for real, can you? If we’re honest, your seven readers on Substack, Medium, or whatever don’t count in the grand scheme of things. Writing life becomes real life when you can answer the question “What do you do?” with “I’m a writer” and be able to direct people to published works that are making you enough money to live by.
My name is Sumayya Khalil and I am not a writer. However, I have been constantly writing for about a decade and a half now. This will be my last short story if it doesn’t get accepted. I won’t be quitting writing. Rather I will simply move on with my life by becoming an online content writer. Mid-thirties, with no breakthrough short story, my novelist ambitions have faded away. Novelists are not poets; we they don’t get better with age like poets do. I figured if I’m doing one last hoorah at fiction, I may as well make myself a part of it. So, this is a story about this author and her struggles with finding the right story to tell in this capitalist writing industry.
I envy people who have had a formal creative writing training like at a university. The access to the inner workings of the industry and being a part of a serious writing community has to be impactful in one’s career. Meanwhile, my husband doesn’t read. The closest he comes to reading is skimming news pieces on his phone. He doesn’t even read long WhatsApp messages. I envy people who have spouses who are also writers. I imagine it’s very nice to have a spouse who has literary insights. Someone who has great taste and recommend awesome books to you. Someone who gives you useful notes after reading your draft and genuinely encourage you to sharpen your craft. William Carlos Williams wrote an awesome poem THE RED WHEELBARROW and Mary Reufle in turn wrote a retort poem RED which is equally awesome. They’re a generation or two apart, but imagine if such great writers were married together. I wonder how many of their respective poems would have been messages to one another and how many of their poems would have been inside jokes between them. Imagine how much fun it would be to fool the world into thinking of all the meanings to a poem except for one truer meaning known only to you and your spouse. I wish my husband wrote stories too. We could have had characters in our stories after each other or something. Anyway, my husband says he “loves my use of words”. I try, from time to time, to find some positive utility to this compliment.
As an adult writer, your community can only support you for so long. People close to a writer are quick to praise them in the beginning. It may be insincere at first, but they might later come to see the writer’s potential and those praises become genuine. Then they’ll start offering the writer help. They’ll become their proofreaders, beta readers, promoters, recommenders, and scouts for magazines and publications. But the truth always prevails. No one likes a loser. The writer has to win worthy publications fast and have people outside their community become their helpers and carry them like a baton and keep passing them until they get to the finish line of fame and a bestseller career. The writer’s community won’t root for the writer for more than ten years. Ten years is the minimum years any writer needs to have something of a foundation for their career. However, ten years is a mighty long time for civilians who aren’t writers. The writer must then spread their needy tentacles outside of their community before their community begins to let go. This writer missed that window. No one wants to support the author who no one wants to read. My community have simply moved on. And I understand.
I recently saw a movie called THEY CLONED TYRONE and I can’t help but think that writers are just like the main characters in the movie. We’re a carefully selected sample, copied, and strategically placed in our communities to play the role of “talents” but never to achieve success. I remember my friend who died young and left behind an unfinished manuscript. He was very good and he would have made it. The death of my friend Tyrone, not his real name but you understand, made me realized that one of my biggest fears is dying and leaving behind an unpublished manuscript. His dead made me question whether the long-time commitment of writing a novel is worth it. Especially when you’re not represented and you just don’t know how you’re going to sell it. As I said, it feels like we’re cloned and placed in our communities to speak of the presence of potential talent albeit an almost successful talent, a-would-have-been success story. I feel strongly about this now more than ever. It inspires hope to glimpse at something of a talent in your neighbor because then people will begin to believe that perhaps they’re capable of possessing some talent of their own too. Perhaps, they simply need to find it. Secondly, it is inspiring to see the possibility of success in your neighborhood because then you begin to believe that your community is capable of breeding success stories. And they keep this belief going by introducing younger talents every decade or so to show that even if success is not possible for you, then maybe it’s possible for someone else coming up.
I’ve always wanted to carve out a niche of interesting, fun, ordinary, and everyday stories in African literature. I want to help bring something else to the table. There has always been a certain expectation about African literature, isn’t it? The expectation used to be that publishable stories had to be in relation to colonialism and slavery. Then it became stories of hardship in relation to system failure and bad governance. Poverty porn is still a thriving theme because Africa isn’t short of these materials. I can’t write poverty porn because even though I’m poor, I’m not that poor and I’m vain. Now the concentration is on the individual, personal tragedies and emigration. I hoped to write a story about my miscarriage instead of this, but I’m not good at Tragedy porn either. Perhaps I don’t have a lot of practice because I haven’t experienced a lot of tragedies in my life. Then again, this can be a tragic story of an artistic failure if it isn’t hilarious or insipid. Surviving to tell the story of a tragedy that befalls you is happy ending enough, isn’t it? No one queries the author about how they’re really surviving. And I hold Surviving stories with contempt. The author has to sugarcoat and downplay the struggles of surviving lest they cease being “surviving” stories and fall back to being Tragedy stories. I was good at writing heartbreak stories, but then I realized early in life that princes and not all heroes. In fact, most of them are villains and my readers didn’t appreciate that realization as much as I did. I felt they were conditioned to love the fairy tale princes more. Romantic stories without happy endings don’t sell. So, I stopped. The customer, they say, is always right.
It is also demoralizing to notice the constant disappearance of God from literature. I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were discussing how Christianity is big and solid enough in the Western world to withstand all the bashings thrown at it. Unlike Islam which started off on a wrong foot in the West so every Muslim must be a saint and its bashing should be minimized to help its acceptability. While listening, I remembered my former Editor-in-Chief once rejected a poem I loved and wanted to publish because it had insinuations of praying to a Christian God. I fought hard for it to be published and lost. They said the magazine wasn’t a religious magazine. The thing is, a writer can say “f*+k god” but not “praise God” because then it becomes “religious”. It’s high time we accepted the efforts of disbelief in God as a religion. The religion of Disbelief says the writer can have a religious character but the writer must not have a religious voice or POV because then it’s indoctrination. Meanwhile, the religion of Disbelief doesn’t indoctrinate, it liberates. Most times I feel like no one wants to hear my indoctrinated Muslim voice. In thinking about it, this section shouldn’t make it to the final draft. Kolwe Lit might also be an “irreligious” magazine and reject this story entirely.
It is funny when you find it hard to pronounce the name of your favorite Lit magazine, isn’t it? I can understand a puzzling name and the aesthetics of finding a unique name but I struggle to understand decisions behind names that are a mouth full. I can understand when this is personal, like for your baby or some business, but not a magazine. You’d have to spell it out to civilians when you tell them where you got published for them to find it. Anyway, the great quality of their content absorbs them of all naming sins.
My good friend May just got his novel published. The book is all about the suffering of his people. I am happy for him, I really am. It’s just that I’d rather read something uplifting, ordinary, and exciting about Africa and African lives. Sometimes, suffering seems to be all that the literary industry publishes. I’d say the religion of Disbelief has something to do with this because joy and happiness are also religious for Africans. Having fringe things like joy, happiness, enjoyment, and excitement in our picture creates an atmosphere of religion, authority, and God. Africans find serenity and tranquility in their deities. And we’re trying to disappear God.
A writer has to see their life as a story. It’s the only way it makes sense. Writing is a cult for people full of disbelief for their work and success; a people full of disbelief for their luck even. The personification of the writer is a tortured artist, remember? Notes, feedback, comments, reviews and everything else lethal are the initiation rituals to disillusion me of self-confidence. It is easier to see humor and silver linings when my life is a story. Seeing myself as the protagonist makes a lot of things tolerable. The protagonist is someone who wins at the end or dies a noble death at least. My life is a story, this I manifest.
When my husband tells people that I write, he says it in a way that clarifies that I’m not a writer.
“My wife writes stories” he’d say, as if to say, She’s a normal person. Writing is something of a serious hobby for her. She’s not some hopeless person waiting for the miracle of success.
It is hard to tell people that your partner is a writer if they’re not successful, I get it. When you introduce someone as a writer, people quickly think of the Stephen Kings or J. K. Rowlings and then look at that person. That person doesn’t stand a chance, do they?
On the other hand, when you say your partner writes, it instantly instigates words of encouragement and they go “Oh, really?! That’s so cool. You should try and get published” or they’ll be like “You should write a book”.
I always want to scream, “Cousin…what the hell do you think I’ve been trying to do?!”
****
Here goes nothing. After months of waiting in torture, this story was rejected by Kolwe Lit. However, they rekindled the novelist spark in me with their rather awesome rejection letter. It wasn’t one of those boring template rejection letters. This one had that editor’s personal touch to it that is palpable on one’s shoulders. The kind I’d written to that poet a few years ago. I imagine that my editor also fought hard for my piece and sparked a debate that forced the Editor-in-Chief to call for a vote but my editor narrowly lost by a vote. I am beginning to believe that my work is important for literary debates and I can’t help but think that my work can in fact find its place in the literary world.
My real name is Aisha Muhammad Bello and I still want to be a writer and a novelist. My husband is looking at me. He recognizes the pensive look I wear when I’m writing stories. He thinks I’m inspired, renewed, and writing something new. He’ll be disappointed to find out that I’m here adding this section and some initially deleted sentences to give this story an extra layer and perhaps fine-tone it into completion for the next editor to have more reasons to accept it. Perhaps that editor is you and this story gets accepted. Perhaps that reader that I’m writing for is you and you’re reading this now and saying to yourself “This is the next best thing since sliced bread”. Then my dream would survive. Then I’d survive as a writer.
Ibrahim Oga is the author of the Ibrahim Oga’s Belvedere newsletter. His short story is selected for The Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize 2025.
