Making art in difficult times with Musa Okwonga

This is the seventh in a Q&A series available to paid subscribers of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. Know someone who might like this newsletter? Forward them the subscribe link here.

Author, journalist, poet, and musician Musa Okwonga started our Zoom call by apologizing. “Everything that’s happening 1000 miles to the east has really been distracting me,” he said. 

And how could it not? It was a fitting start to a conversation that spanned the gamut of our troubled times: war and climate collapse, racism and Twitter, voodoo and therapy.

I thought of interviewing Musa because recently, I’ve been wondering how we’re supposed to all keep making art during these times, and whether doing that even matters. I first met him when I spent a month in Berlin (where he still lives now) some years ago after being introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, following his work and presence online has felt like keeping track of a reassuring beacon off in the distance. I think he stands out in the sea of ~content~ because it is clear he is moving through the world not only with a fierce intellect and talent, but also an open heart and generous spirit to match.

Musa has written multiple books, most recently In the End, It Was All About Love — an auto-fiction novella that follows the narrator from nights out as a newcomer in Berlin to his therapist’s office to his late father’s village in Uganda — and One of Them: An Eton College Memoir, about his time as a scholarship student at Britain’s most prestigious boarding school in the 1990s, a time when there were very few Black pupils. He also hosts the Stadio football podcast on the Ringer network and contributes to numerous publications. Oh, and he’s a musician too.

I think art, in its most expansive definition, is anything that makes us feel less alone while we’re making it or consuming it. While reading In the End, It Was All About Love, I felt like I was in the best of hands. Musa talks about how he considers this relationship with the reader — of what they might need to hear and feel right now — before he even starts his books. That empathy shines through his writing.

There was a lot I had to cut from this interview, because talking with Musa is an endurance sport — except the really fun kind where you don’t actually want to reach the finish line. As a writer with all kinds of fledgling ideas for projects, I finished our conversation ready to get to work. I hope you will too.

Rosie: Artists are sensitive beings, but being online is caustic and awful. How do you deal with that when so much of being an artist means being online today? I’m curious if you have any processes built in.

Musa: There’s some very pragmatic things I do. I have a post-it note above my desk right now which says “four tweets a day,” so when I’m working on a book I take myself down to four tweets a day so everything I share will be absolutely vital. Another thing I do to get separation at times like this is I mute a lot of stuff on Twitter. I don’t need to read anymore about Brexit. That’s done. I’m curating my space so I can take in news in a way that’s healthier. 

Also in terms of how I create, it sounds a bit pretentious but creating is an act of resistance, so when I wrote One of Them or In the End It Was All About Love, I thought to myself: “Everyone is overwhelmed, what kind of books can I write that people will absorb? What kind of length will they be?” I want people who are overwhelmed to still be able to pick up a book of mine. If the book is 400 pages long, that cuts out a huge percentage of people. But if the book is 30,000 words, you capture a lot of people who are on the brink of being overwhelmed and just want some kind of respite. 

Another thing that I do is if in doubt, start something new fairly quickly. Even if it’s not writing, sketch out ideas. So have momentum so you’re not intimidated by the last thing you created. 

R: The age-old dilemma of being an artist, which you grapple with in In the End, is what right do I have? Why me? People have already said/done this/made this, so what’s the point? That’s doubly the case when there is so much suffering in the backdrop and uncertainty in the future. How do you speak to that voice these days, how do you not let it win?

M: This is going to sound bleak, but I have said to my friends that I sometimes feel that dictators and leaders of totalitarian states respect artists more than a lot of other people do. Because when they’re trying to crack down, those are the first people they go after: people that try to be vulnerable. The first thing they attack is vulnerability.

It’s weird because as artists, a lot of the best work we do will not be rewarded by capitalism. So that vulnerability is often at odds with paying your bills. And of course that creates a sense of anxiety and sometimes even self-loathing because we’re like “what the hell are we doing, we’re doing this work that’s ephemeral, that no one cares about, that doesn’t pay the bills a large percentage of the time, what are we doing?” 

But in times of emotional intensity, people look to artists. When you’re getting married or at a funeral people are like, “I can’t find the words” and they’ll ask a writer to find the words. When people have a child who’s ill in hospital some comfort might be a mural on the wall to create some warmth.

We saw it in the pandemic as well; in times of desperation people need something, they need someone to root for them, and art is such a powerful thing for that. Remind yourself what people are like when they are most emotional or alone or desperate — that’s where artists come through time and again. Toni Morrison, rest her soul, talked about “this is the time to go to work.” When it comes down to it, people need art to make sense of things. 

R: I was reading a Guardian review of your book which did something I really hate: It described your writing as “earnest.” Ostensibly smart people often say this, as if displaying genuine feeling is a bad thing. As if creating a connection with the reader through intimacy and vulnerability is not the entire point of this exercise of writing. 

Sometimes I feel like this highly material, intellectual culture we live in is such a block to making our world better. We insist on seeing humans as only half of what they are — rational, not emotional — and so we silence so much of our capacity for change and transformation because we’re just trying to convince each other with serious facts and evidence. But I don’t think that’s what drives humans at their core. I sense a lot of balance in your writing between those two sides of yourself, one might call it your “masculine and feminine” sides. Does that resonate at all with you? You’re nodding…

M: The word earnest is a defense mechanism. It’s a defense mechanism against having to feel something. I have never had so many emotional responses from reviewers than from this book. An interviewer said to me, “why do you talk about money struggles as an artist?” And I just simply said “because I’m not ashamed of them.” I thought it was interesting. He didn’t put it in the article, but that question exposed him. 

In terms of the balance, I try to do that because I don’t want people to escape looking in the mirror. It’s why I use the second person present tense. I want people to have a process of self examination. It’s why I write the articles I write. It’s much more powerful to write stuff which is rigorous in terms of the argument, but it’s also highly emotive. 

I’m not even sure if I want to give men or masculinity credit for rationality because currently, we have arguably the world’s richest man, president of the world’s largest land mass, and he’s not happy. He is carpet bombing the country next to him because having all of that isn’t enough. The spiritual dearth of that man, the spiritual vacuum of Putin – all those yachts, all that money, it’s not enough. Isn’t that wild? He can’t just sit on a deck chair and chill. He can’t just sit at the best seat in the opera and soak it up. He can’t just eat the best steak every night and enjoy it.

R: The thing that drives me insane about our world is that nobody talks about that stuff. I’ve written about how it’s very obvious that Boris Johnson is acting out his parental abandonment wound from boarding school on the entire country. It’s just escalating displays of bad behavior because his inner child is desperate for his parents to notice him. It’s so obvious that there is a psychological emotional deficit that is causing this behavior but we’re like “oh, it’s political gamesmanship.” There’s such a disconnect there. 

M: The thing I’m realizing now is that I think that he’s acting out and people know he’s a liar and a cheat but they say “I’m still going to vote for him.” And it’s because he embodies them. This is the terrifying thing: There are millions of people for whom Boris Johnson acting out with impunity makes them feel empowered. Trump acting out his or reenacting his childhood psychodramas empowers people who were treated like Trump or who feel like Trump. 

They became politicians in order to act out. Because of our complacency in our society, we allow people and structures to elevate these people. And voters will continue voting for them because it’s cathartic to see Boris up on that stage. 

R: Something that you conveyed so deftly in the book is the weight that racism has played over your entire life. It’s never not been there despite everything you’ve achieved. It’s crushing.

Many people (white people, people like me) have no experience of having to live, and indeed try to find joy, amidst that ever-present burden. And yet in this climate future we face, some of us — and I’d count myself in that — are trying to figure something like that out for the first time. Asking: How do you keep going when there’s no guarantee it will get better, indeed it might get worse. Obviously no one should equate the two (racism and climate), but since the acceleration of crises since 2020, are you sort of like … “welcome to all this.”

M: I try to be charitable about this. So I’m not so much like, “oh finally you get it.” A few years ago before the pandemic I put a poll on my Twitter asking if anyone who reads my work who’ve considered not having children because of climate collapse. This poll was answered by thousands of people, 64% said yes. That is a stunning number. If you’d asked that question five years ago, it would be different I think. 

I think about this all the time: All my work, every book is a climate change book. In the End, It Was All About Love is a climate change book because it ends with a collective solution to a personal problem. And every single book I’ve written has a collective solution to a personal problem. Because the solution always lies in community. 

I’m always thinking, in a world of climate collapse, what are we going to need? And all those apocalyptic visions of what climate collapse will look like, all these movies made by men of people becoming hunter gatherers and going town to town and killing people — that is just a male revenge fantasy. The real climate apocalypse is going to be people doing mass cookouts. It’s going to be like the pandemic, the pandemic was a preview of what climate collapse will look like: people can’t get essential supplies, people pooling their resources. You’re going to have people doing reading schools for kids, mass cookouts, delivering food for vulnerable people — that’s what it’s going to be like. And that’s what all my work is preparing for. 

R: I really love that answer. Thank you.

I was so relieved in the book when the protagonist goes to therapy. And I loved the way there was that element of mystery — or in the book, “voodoo” — involved in his healing. I believe deep healing is like that: it can’t be peer reviewed, it’s a little different for everyone, the journey reveals itself to you if you let it. If you are willing to share this, I’d love to know if therapy is something you’ve done, and if so how that has influenced your life and work as an artist. 

M: The magic realism and voodoo is foreshadowed quite early in the book. There’s magical realism in each of the poems that start each section. And with that therapist character, he’s not real, but I wanted to show someone that had been mocked for trying to say that racial pressure in a certain area is almost like an atmospheric unit. 

In terms of therapy, it’s absolutely something I have done, and without therapy, two of the three books I wrote recently would not exist. So, “In the end it was all about love” is actually a sentence I spoke in a therapy session. I was talking about the creative journey, all the things I was working on, what I wanted to achieve as a writer and I was like, “you know, it’s about writing stuff and meeting other people so that one day you might meet someone in the middle of that journey who you might fall for, so I suppose in the end it was all about love.” I paused and I said “oh my god I’ve got to write a book and call it that.”

And when I wrote One of Them my therapist said, “you talk a lot about your race and your sexuality, but you never talk about private school. Maybe you should.” I probably owe my therapist a commission at this point. It’s amazing to think you have a 50 minute conversation with someone and that conversation sets you years forward. It changes your life. 

R: I’ve been finishing these interviews with the same question: Where are you finding the most meaning these days?

M: In my friendships. I find so much meaning in my work, don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible and it gets better and better with each project. But at the heart of my work are people that will never be mentioned in my books. 

If you put that kind of heart at the center of what you do — if you write from that place of love and vulnerability — everything you do has a much better chance of connecting. You know in science, where you put force in at one end it comes out the other with the same intensity. If you put enough love and vulnerability on the page it can emerge at the same point in a different person. And the way that you get to that place is the more you enjoy your friendships, the more you enjoy helping supporting those people you love and care about, the more open hearted and vulnerable your work becomes. 

The more vulnerable, the more open to my friends I am, the better the art gets. 

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You can follow Musa on Twitter and Instagram. Listen to his podcast here and find his books here and here.