Em Kwissa is a young writer who has already achieved so much: she is a founding member of Canada’s first rural spoken word collective, who, at the age of fifteen, was the first minor to compete nationally at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, as well as competing in two other festivals; she runs popular writing workshops for youth in their schools, and has been involved in the Champions for Kids Foundation; she was a Poet of Honour at Canada’s first national youth poetry slam; and lastly, she is a passionate advocate against domestic and dating violence, attending youth events, protests and meetings with legislative assemblies as an advocate for abuse survivors. This last focus of hers is what caught my attention, when I read about her activism in the feminist blog Jezebel. I asked her to write about the experience of having her memoir, Am I Not, made unavailable by ebook publishers Lulu.com, in an act of censorship I find astounding and senseless. Check out her website: http://thekwissa.com/
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My mom used to be the kind of person who kept
everything. She had a big filing box full of paintings, participation
certificates, and handwriting samples from my grade school years. One of the
things in this big filing box was a book that kept track of who I was. Every
year, my school picture was glued onto a page and beside it I would fill out
information like my favourite colour and my best class and what I wanted to be
when I grew up. This is how I know that I always wanted to be an author. I was
writing before I knew how to write. I was making up stories in my head and
acting them out, or living in them as I fell asleep at night.
When people ask me why I write, I don’t know
what to tell them. My mother wrote in her adolescence, but she never wrote in
front of me and I was never told that it was something that I ought to do. All
the same, it’s always been something that I’ve done – on napkins and paper
towels when I can’t find paper, on my phone in the middle of the night, in my
head at bus stops, in waiting rooms, during boring lectures. Why do I write?
Because I am a writer. I do, therefore I am. I am, therefore I do.
The better question, or at least, the question
with the better answer, is why I wrote a memoir, and why of all the books I’ve
written it was the first I tried to publish. The answer is that it has always
been my instinct to write myself out of corners. For most of my childhood and
adolescence, I tore voraciously through entire sections of the library looking
for a book that would speak to my experience. I never found one. All through my
first year of university, I felt my creativity growing stagnant as I tried to
figure out what my next writing project would be. I wrote a memoir because it
was the book I wanted to read that hadn’t been written, and because it was the
story I needed to tell that I wasn’t telling. I published it because I’m not
alone. There are other people who need to read this story so that they can tell
stories of their own.
My first forays into the publishing world were
traditional. I sent query letters to literary agents seeking representation. I
was met with silence, form letter rejections, and the occasional personal
response. Finally, one agent was kind enough to tell me that I probably wasn’t
going to find someone who would be willing to get on board with my project,
just because of the subject matter. I decided to publish it myself. I
chose Lulu.com because it was recommended to me by a friend. In the first few
weeks of its availability, the book sold twenty-six copies. This was more than
I expected. I didn’t anticipate that the number would ever go above fifty, and
even that would be a dream come true.
At no point was this process about the man who
abused me. If you have read the book, you already know that he was at the center of my life for a lot of
it, and he was not a good thing to revolve around. When I finally came to a
point in my healing at which I could forget about him for whole days at a time,
I decided not to put him at the center of my life ever again. I released my
anger, I let go of my hatred, I forgave all and I moved on. The book was not a
letter of hate and its publication was not an attempt to stick a thorn in
anyone’s paw. That man is not at the center of all of this. I am. The book is
about me. The publication is about me. If it weren’t, his name would be in the
book.
So when he complained about the book’s
publication, and when his complaint led to my book being removed from
availability on Lulu.com, it was a black comedy of sorts. The man who abused meis
very skilled at hanging around in my life and the lives of my family,
especially in the instances when he’s wanted least. I published a book for
myself, and here was the once-sun of my life, barging in and demanding to be
recognized as the book’s main villain, demanding that it all be verified as a
giant lie with him in the very center. The comedy of it is that one would think
he would be relieved for me to say, “I didn’t write these things about you. You
are not the center of my life anymore.” But instead of being glad that my words
were not an attempt to defame him, he is angry that he is no longer the center
of my life. After the care I took to make my book about me, he still wants it
to be about him.
The book is the same. I haven’t edited it or
added his name to it. But the backlash that has come from Lulu.com’s censorship
of my book, and the part he played in having the book removed, though in
support of me, has been about him. All of that anger, all of that retribution,
all of the poison that naturally comes with anything that requires this much
fire in the belly, belongs to him. I have claimed the support for myself – I
have spoken to the survivors who have read my book and have been hugged by
friends and family who are there to make sure my story is heard. But the bile
that must be spewed at those who have done wrong... it belongs to them. That
part is about him, and he can be right in the middle of it. He has earned that
for himself.
Since it was taken down from Lulu and I started
offering digital copies free, my memoir Am I Not has been
downloaded hundreds of times by people all over the world. I have received
messages of support from people in the United States and the UK, from people in
China and people in Poland who share my last name. I have spoken to supporters
through different experiences and through language barriers. We don’t talk
about him. We talk about us. There is so much good out there, and all his anger
and cruelty has done is given me a direct line to it. I am grateful to him in
the same way one is grateful to the volcanic ash that enriches the soil. I am
grateful that he underestimated my strength and made me even stronger.
In time, the world will forget about my book.
People will stop talking about it. It will probably never be an international
news sensation or even a trending topic on Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be.
It has already done what I needed it to do. I needed it to say the words that have
been living in my heart since before I knew what words were, and I needed it to
say them to the people who have seen what I’ve seen. We were only thirty-some
before, altogether. Now we are hundreds. With the force of his selfishness,
that man pushed me into the center of all these people. After all that has
happened in my short life, I feel that I have been brought to exactly where I
was supposed to be.
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