She was 11 when she first wished she were dead. But killing yourself takes a bit of work, and she could not figure out how to do it. At that very young age, she fantasised about her non-existence: “I have started to think of death. I start to think of suicide. I think of it often now. I want to leave my body, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I have no idea how to do that, how to escape myself. I have resorted to living with self-hatred instead.”
No child should ever wish they were dead. Nor should they replace suicidality with self-hatred. This happened, in part, because nothing she did ever seemed to please her dad. Her mom role-modelled stoicism but did not fully shield her from the constant rebukes. She was unable to figure out what occasioned dad’s fury and disappointment in her, and so she was left guessing that maybe he was unhappy that she was not the overachiever her siblings were.
This led to a miserable time at school and university. Suicidality and unhappiness, interspersed with nuggets of apparent familial love, became the recurring motifs of her early life. By the time she was in her 20s, journalist and author Haji Mohamed Dawjee was well acquainted with anxiety and depression, being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, consuming a cocktail of antidepressants, trying to kill herself several times, but surviving to write about these various existential crises in her excellent first essay collection, Sorry, Not, Sorry, and in her latest offering, Here’s The Thing.
You wouldn’t guess her past traumas and ongoing struggles when you meet her. I have met her several times. She is married to a very dear friend of mine, her fellow journalist and author, Rebecca Davis. I am, as I am typing this book review, staring at the cover photos of Dawjee on both of her books. She is enviably gorgeous. But our inner lives can be radically different from how we are seen by others. She has a quiet conversational presence, listening closely and genuinely rather than waiting to speak.
One of the reasons both of her essay collections are worth owning, reading and meditating on is precisely because they are testimonies to the depth of our vulnerabilities that we do not perform on social media, within the workplace or even in the presence of loved ones and friends. Not because we are addicted to fantasies or being inauthentic but because living is just bloody hard. Equally, it is hard work to share the full depth of our inner struggles every time we meet.
A good essayist, however, leaves it all on the page, as Dawjee has done again in Here’s the Thing. The excerpt at the start of this review is from Depression: A Journal, an essay in Sorry, Not Sorry. Dawjee expands on her experiences of and interest in mental illness and health generally in Here’s The Thing, writing candidly about ageing, as a woman who is marching towards 40. Though we will all die and, unless we tragically die young, we will all age, there is a bizarre reluctance from many of us to go there conversationally, casually and frankly.
In Pears and Other Body Types as well as Here’s The Thing About Being A Woman, Dawjee battles openly with weight gain, debates whether to undergo liposuction or fat freezing (find out in the book what she concluded!), whether to dye hair that starts to grey, and other realities that come with the journey from cradle to grave. It is great that these essays are plainly written. I recall thinking, midway through my reading pleasure, what a hot mess this book would have been had an academic written it. It is a book about all of us, for all of us, and is not exclusionary.
What can be more universal than disappointing your family, learning to love your parents despite the mistakes they make, your dad learning to ask for forgiveness, experiencing illness, witnessing a parent dying, allowing yourself to grieve without policing your emotions, and learning to be kind to yourself and others? This is just part of the thematic range of this gentle but incisive collection of essays. That it is jargon-free, in a world in which we sometimes wrongly equate incomprehensible writing with intellectual rigour, should not mask the fact that the book is filled with nuanced thinking and moral clarity in respect of some very complex issues.
It is taboo to speak openly about how challenging parenting is. It is not fun and games every minute of the day.
In And So, I Was Shamed, for example, Dawjee writes delicately about online lynching by Twitter mobs when they disagree with something you said or did. She herself was a victim of such online violence just because some readers did not like a piece of narrative journalism she had produced. Despite being “woke” herself, and not being a fan of those who want to evade accountability for their work by pretending cancel culture is fascist, Dawjee allows herself space in this essay to map out the complexity of the ethical issues. She concludes: “In our current mood, militarism may seem inspirational, but this approach will result in an unavoidable struggle. If backlash is blanketed, it ends only in self-defeat. So many questions, so few answers. We live in a society that prefers answers, but what we desperately need is one that is willing to ask questions. And that’s what I am trying to do, I’m asking questions.” This kind of essay cannot be reduced to a Twitter thread.
Sometimes Dawjee rehearses well-known arguments and does not necessarily improve on them much. Separating The Art From The Artist, for example, is a very good summary of the familiar dilemma many of us have experienced of whether we can separate Woody Allen or Bill Cosby from their work as artists or whether that is a perverse attempt to justify enjoying the output of morally indecent humans. I enjoyed the fluency of her discussion and how she personalised the well-known arguments, locating them within her own world.
Still, the book would have benefited from more prepublication engagement, focusing specifically on argumentation. For example, the seemingly basic conceptual distinction between an artwork, “existing” on its own, and a forgotten creator requires some ontological weirdness to be sustained for some of the discussion in this essay to cohere. Dawjee should have been engaged a bit longer on her rumination before signing off on the essay. This is true at several points across the collection. While most of the book is aiming to be meditative in style (and succeeds on that score), that is no reason someone as sharp as Dawjee could not be given the gift of further critical engagement.
Also, this collection should not, in my opinion, be marketed as a humorous collection of essays, as I fear the publishers may be tempted to do. Most of the essays are, mercifully, written in a very serious tone, and the best moments within each of the essays are when the author adopts an unashamedly critical and intellectual tone. I don’t care if you do not laugh when you read this collection. I, for one, did not care much for the witticisms and found them to be OK but not the point of this work. The issues that are explored are mighty important, and the vulnerability the author has taken a generous chance on and surfaced deserves our earnest engagement.
This is not YOU magazine one-liner quips; it is serious and worthy essay writing. Both Dawjee and Davis are seriously committed to debunking the myth that women, and black women in particular, cannot write a collection of humorous essays. I share that view but would caution against unintentionally detracting from the substantive aspects of this collection that come alive most powerfully when the author is not being, uhm, punny. The three essays I enjoyed the most you will have to read for yourself beyond my allusion to them. Dawjee was very brave to open up a set of conversations about the difficulties of parenting in The Pain In The Arse That Is Parenting and Parenting — What’s To Love? She loves her son Miles deeply and (probably) unconditionally.
As does her wife Rebecca. But it is taboo to speak openly about how challenging parenting is. It is not fun and games every minute of the day. In these two essays, her love for her boy is juxtaposed with some brutal realities that they could not have anticipated when they took him home. Thousands of parents who love their children but secretly also struggle with parenting will recognise themselves in these two essays. They are honest, funny and a brave examination of the lie that parenting is beautiful and joyous all the time or even the majority of the time. As she plainly says, “You can love your child and wonder what’s to love about parenting at the same time. And it is OK to think about these things.”
But arguably the single best and most moving essay in this second book is the very first one, Letter To My Father: A Fire, A Torch, A Tree And A Hero. It will leave you in tears and, if he is still alive, make you reach out to your dad, even if he was possibly one of the sources of your childhood suicidality. It complements two essays from her first book, one about her mother — My Mother, the True Radical — and another about her grandfather — My Anti-Establishment Hero, or grandad, What are You Doing? Dawjee’s letter to her father at the beginning of Here’s The Thing is pure love, finish en klaar. The book is justified just on account of her letter to her father, and yet there is still so much gorgeousness that follows thereafter.
— McKaiser is a contributor and analyst for TimesLIVE
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