hi everybody!
it’s been awhile. i’m writing a book, but yall knew that! i’m changing the format of my newsletter to be more connected to that process.
Each instalment will now include.
✨my active reading list (writing a book means reading a lot of books, baby!)
✨some reflections from the research
✨links to my latest videos on the topic
✨the newsletter topic/piece
i’m hoping this nourishes my writing process, and allows me share an up close and personal pov of my process, interviews, how i’m working with and developing these concepts, and exploring the themes that led you all here in the first place💕
if you hate it, please tell me!
Feel free to listen or read along to this weeks piece :)
You can find the link to my GoFundMe here - every share, and donations has changed my life. if there are people you know who would be interested in my work, please pass it along. I’m so grateful.
in kinship,
Jamila
Week 2 Campaign Update for "In Kinship"
Hi, it’s week two of the official campaign launch for my book In Kinship. There’s something profound about the fact that this book is being brought into reality through community. I woke up this morning and found that we’ve reached the halfway point of my 10,000 Euro goal. I can’t express what this means to me as a person, writer, and creative. If you’ve contributed in any way—whether by responding to comments, sharing my GoFundMe, or engaging with my content—I feel like you’re here with me. I’m incredibly inspired and motivated by the proof of concept and the belief in me.
To commemorate this milestone, I want to start sharing some foundational themes and concepts of the book. These ideas have surfaced through significant research and a general wayfinding process regarding what this book is about and who it’s for.
Exploring Relationships
About three weeks into researching and writing In Kinship, I realized I had made a mistake—writing about relationships is incredibly difficult. One of the first things I’ve learned is that relationships, technically, don’t exist. They are concepts we create, co-constructed meanings that aren’t physical. This realization highlighted a paradox in how we talk about relationships versus how we understand them.
When we describe relationships, our language often suggests that they exist between two people. However, our interactions within relationships are directed toward another person, focusing on understanding and communication. This contradiction surfaced early on as I attempted to define relationships and kinship. Instead of defining these terms, I began exploring where relationships are located, which has guided my understanding and will shape the book.
Illustrating Relationships
I started with a simple illustration that reflects a common myth: when we’re in relation to others, we often believe we’re directly interacting with them. We think we’re communicating directly, like skipping past the receptionist to speak to the CEO. However, research shows that relationships are more complex; there’s a space where things occur between individuals.
In this space, interactions aren’t direct—both people are engaging with something in between. Understanding this concept helps explain why relationships sometimes become fraught or conflictual. For instance, a simple gesture like a smile and high-five can be interpreted differently based on personal experiences, leading to miscommunication.
This realization led me to explore three key dynamics in relationships: the self, the other, and the space where interactions occur. By triaging our emotional state and the other person’s, we can better navigate this space, fostering connections that are relationally nourishing.
The Table Metaphor
I then imagined this space as a table where things are offered back and forth. In an ideal relationship, this space becomes an altar—a sacred place where meaningful exchanges occur. However, societal norms and systems, like white supremacy and capitalism, often restrict our ability to be creative in this space. These constraints can make us feel threatened by the idea of breaking away from the script.
To build diverse and highly curated relational spaces, we must become experts in the people around us—understanding their stories and what works for them. Additionally, by deconstructing harmful belief systems and addressing internalized issues, we can expand what we’re willing to offer and receive in relationships.
Reclaiming Kinship
The book’s fundamental thesis is that when we abandon ourselves, it leads to the abandonment of our relationships, communities, and responsibilities. This abandonment fosters estrangement, damaging our ability to reclaim belonging and kinship. The concept of operational estrangement—where maladaptive traits become norms—explains many modern issues, such as political extremism and loneliness. Reclaiming kinship requires confronting these issues and understanding the risks and vulnerabilities involved.
Self-Interview
In this section, I interviewed myself about the writing process:
Q: Hi Jamila, it’s so great to have you here. It’s amazing to see the progress that you’ve made, not only on the campaign but on the book.
A: Thank you so much. I’m beyond excited—you have no idea. This is one of those moments in my life where I was experiencing so much chaos with my health, the suggestion that I be evaluated for multiple sclerosis, transitioning from one country to another, and my own relationship stuff. There’s something quite interesting in that I always wanted to be a writer ever since I was little, and now, almost in this very high-stakes clutch moment, it feels like it’s really happening and really possible for the first time in my life.
Q: That is just so incredible, Jamila. It’s amazing to have you here. Just on the surface, what has it been like to start writing a book for the first time? Has it been scary? Has it been really natural and fluid for you?
A: It’s a good question. I think my process with the writing has been to meet myself where I’m at. I’ve learned about myself in this process that I am a preparation procrastinator. What that means for me is that I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and reading a lot of books about relationships, and for a while, even before I announced the book, I was doing a lot more prep on how to write a book than actually putting pen to paper. Now I’m realizing that with where my health is, and the symptoms of my health—often affecting my eyesight and things like that—I’ve found a process that really works. It’s actually working from where I’m speaking. I’m trying to spend a good amount of time talking about the different structural components of the book as if I’m teaching someone, and then taking that transcription and using it as the foundation to write from. This process has really made it so much more helpful. I don’t know that I would be able to sit down formally at a computer and stare at a screen for six hours a day. I also don’t know, with the mobility issues I often have in my hands, that I would be able to write with a pencil as quickly as my mind is moving around some of these topics. So I’m glad there’s a lot of technology support, and I’m glad I’m doing it in a time like this. But it’s really hard. It’s really hard.
Q: Yeah, I mean, I think starting new things in general is incredibly hard, so it’s amazing to hear you speak so transparently about your process.
A: Thank you. I am so grateful you said that because there’s a small part of me that wants to pretend that I just took to it like a duck to water, but that’s just not the case.
Q: Well, that’s good, and you know, we’re happy to hear from you no matter what. So, when you think about your long-term strategy with the book, you’re talking about some of these foundational themes and elements. What do you expect that final product to look like?
A: That’s another terrifying question—thank you for asking me. I think, for the final product of the book, I’m more focused on how the content is structured right now than turning it into a behemoth. It’s a very simple concept that I want to lay out, and anybody who’s watching this who has worked with me will know that I have a tendency to add on, and I have a tendency to get inspired really quickly. The basics of the book are really this: there are ways that we abandon ourselves, and then that abandonment turns into abandonment in our interpersonal relationships, which turns into our abandonment of our communities, which turns into our abandonment and abdication of responsibility to larger issues—whether it’s Palestine, the Congo, racial issues, gender issues, whatever the case may be. It feeds a sense of internalized helplessness. That abandonment of self, of community, also ends up creating estrangement. That estrangement damages our ability to reactivate those levers of belonging that we’re really looking to reclaim, which is the fundamental thesis of the book—kinship. When we self-abandon, when we abandon our relationships and partnerships, when we abandon our community, and we operationalize estrangement, we begin to take on the behaviors, the maladaptive traits of estrangement as norms for how we are and how we are supposed to be, how our families are supposed to work, how our friendships are supposed to work, and what we can feasibly ask from people.
Because we are operating in a fully onboarded operating system that only knows to be estranged—estranged from our own needs or holding at a distance the willingness we’re willing to invest in other relationships, etc. So then the concept of being asked of very much antagonizes this operational estrangement and I think creates a lot of the issues that we’re dealing with today—whether it’s around political extremism or just an incredible epidemic of loneliness. To reclaim kinship, I think, is to confront a lot of these things—the ways that we abandon self and are encouraged to, the way estrangement is cultivated and put into practice, and frankly, the very real threats and risks of kinship in the world we live in. There’s a reason people are afraid to connect to each other; there’s a reason. It’s almost beautiful and horrific by design that in order to co-regulate, in order to have our internal systems work the way they’re supposed to, we need systems of inter-reliance, we need co-regulation, and the things that have traumatized the majority of us the most in life are other humans, are other people. There’s a lot of work in understanding the very real dangers of kin and belonging, the risks and vulnerabilities, and also a toolkit, if you will, on how to at least start to feel comfortable working towards that and seeing a value in that after there’s so much very, very real fear and pain associated with it.
That was a long answer, I’m sorry. Well, I sound like a crazy person for interviewing myself, but I wanted to offer a little bit of my process with you all. This is my first time doing something like this, so if you have notes or thoughts, I would love to hear them.
Stand outs:
This process comes with a ton of research. Here are some passages from my active reading list that cracked my brain open.
Abolish the Family: A manifesto for care and liberation
Sophie lewis
I will hazard a definition of love: to love a person is to struggle for their autonomy as well as for their immersion in care, insofar such abundance is possible in a world choked by capital. If this is true, then restricting the number of mothers (of whatever gender) to whom a child has access, on the basis that I am the "real" mother, is not necessarily a form of love worthy of the name. Perchance, when you were very young (assuming you grew up in a nuclear household), you quietly noticed the oppressiveness of the function assigned to whoever was the mother in your home. You sensed her loneliness. You felt a twinge of solidarity. In my experience, children often "get" this better than most: when you love someone, it simply makes no sense to endorse a social technology that isolates them, privatizes their lifeworld, arbitrarily assigns their dwell-ing-place, class, and very identity in law, and drastically circumscribes their sphere of intimate, interdependent ties.
The second quote I’m featuring from this book speaks to a newly emerged purpose for my book, which is a call to action for the reclamation of kin. this quote identifies one of the many ways that kin, community and belonging have come to be associated with risk and liability.
Family values are bourgeois economics writ small. As Melinda Cooper demonstrates, under the sign of the family, starting in the late seventies, neoliberals and neoconservatives both essentially reinvented welfare along Elizabethan "poor law" principles: rendering kin, instead of society, responsible for the poor. Even in the original legislation four hundred years ago, concepts like
"market freedom," "the liberal individual," and debt were slowly erected on the plinths of kinship obligations and family bonds. Without family, in short, no bourgeois state. The family's function is to replace welfare and to guarantee debtors. Masquerading as the choice, creation, and desire of individuals, the family is a method for cheaply arranging the reproduction of the nation's labor-power and securing debt repayments.
