All Literature is a Love Letter

Paul Louis Martin des Amoignes, In the Classroom (1886)

“To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written." So said Jean Jacques Rousseau.

But all literature, in its essence, is a love letter.

To build a good novel you ought to begin without fully knowing what you are about to write, and you ought to finish without quite knowing what you have written.

Today’s essay is no different perhaps… Hence I start with a small word: gowpen.

I find it precious that the English language has a word to describe the hollow of two hands cupped together to make a bowl. That tiny space formed between our palms when we keep them side by side. It is also a measurement, a quantity that fills the void formed when we join our hands. Hence we say, for instance, ‘a gowpen of sugar,’ or ‘a gowpen of salt’ and so on.

Every week on this platform, I try to bring you a gowpen of stories.

This week I was delighted, deeply moved and honoured to receive the British Academy President’s Medal. In her very kind and generous speech, Professor Dame Julia Black said that this award was for my “exceptional body of work which demonstrates incredible intercultural range.” Traditionally, the President’s Medal has been presented to public champions of humanities, arts, literature and social sciences. Its interdisciplinary nature is very close to my heart.

As a storyteller and a novelist, I am not only interested in stories, past and present, but also in silences. Literature is a natural bridge-builder; it connects hearts and minds, cultures and continents, “us” and “them”, “I” and “the Other”. It makes the invisible a bit more visible, brings the ‘far away’ much closer, and rehumanises those who have been pushed to the periphery and forgotten, or even dehumanised.

I am interested in novels of ideas that draw upon multiple disciplines of learning, knowledge and meaning. I am equally interested in connecting written culture and oral culture. Fiction opens up a much needed and nuanced space for even the most sensitive and complex issues of our times. It encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times.

I am very grateful to the British Academy for this recognition.

After the ceremony, I took a cab. The driver, an immigrant in the UK from Eritrea, was a gentle mannered man. We started chatting. He asked me about what I did for a living, and when he learned that I was a writer, his face brightened.

‘My daughter,’ he said with such tenderness and pride. ‘She will become a writer someday. I know she will.’

His daughter is named Betty. She is the youngest of three. The children have lost their mother when they were very little. The father became a mother and father to them. The oldest two are boys, and the youngest, a girl—Betty. She was only eight years old when she lost her mother. She wrote a speech to read during the funeral. Even as she choked on the words, she read it in full.

‘And then she started writing stories,’ said the cab driver.

It was very powerful to listen to this and to observe a single father, a hard working immigrant, doing his incredible best to raise his children, but also to support their dreams of art and creativity and literature.

He said Betty, like many young people, found it hard to open up her feelings, hurts or scars. He said he understood that but he did not want his daughter to think that she must always be “strong”, always “successful”, always “smiling.”

‘Writing became Betty’s friend’, he said. ‘She loves books. She even talks to them.”

So many of us, no matter how different our journeys and life experiences may have been, can relate to the feeling that books have been, and still are, our companions.

My cab driver was a gentle soul, a good and proud father, a hard working person who had dealt with so many difficulties, and had still not lost his compassion. I felt deep respect for him, but also for young Betty.

‘There is this platform,’ I said, ‘where writers, poets, readers, creatives of all backgrounds meet. It is called Substack. Will you tell Betty about it? Maybe she would like to publish her writing, build a space for herself and for others.”

Immediately, he produced a piece of paper and a pen, and handed them to me.

‘That is fabulous. That is interesting. Write it, please.’

So I wrote it down. I gave it to him, at the end of the ride, alongside several of my novels, all signed for Betty.

Will she join, I do not know. Maybe someday. Let us all keep an eye out for young Betty—and for all other writers, newcomers, of every background, who are struggling today and need a gentle boost, a word of encouragement, a platform, a page, or a “room” of their own to write their stories and their poems.

A gowpen of space for independence, freedom, creativity, connectivity, both individuality and humanity… that is where words come from and that is where literature lives, thrives, and works its magic.

A gowpen of love in the hollow between our cupped hands…