Arriving at Collaborative Writing: Meeting and Holding a Gaze

Samara Jundi, Augustus Reid, Mridula Sridhar, Fiona Murray

This paper is the child of a community, a community, where brave hearts and souls chose to come together, and have conversations of a provocative nature. Our group is called, ‘Provocations and Conversations: finding way to write/study/work/be together’, a community of students and staff who come together to think about how to be together in difference and in true, deep and right relationship with each other inside the troubling container of an old British university. We created a pocket within a classroom where big open arms, hearts and free-thinking minds welcome one another. We aimed to create a warm but ‘brave space’ (Arao & Clemens, 2023, p.135) where societal and cultural conditioning can be questioned, challenged, and if necessary massaged away from the blinding Enlightenment’s authoritarian personality (Adorno, 1950) and, the power of the institute. Five of us, (now four) chose to explore the question of how we might think through the same question of how we may work together by ‘writing to it’ (Wyatt & Gale, 2018, p.119). By writing together in such a manner (provocatively and intimately), we explore what it means to write collaboratively in 2025.

We don’t just work together cross-culturally but also cross-ontologically. We each carry our own ontological way of working, our own sense of what it means to be, to know, to write. Yet our approach did not come from any one of us but from within the community itself. Communities have a funny way of making a mockery of our theories and they undo our a priori ontological and epistemological assumptions simply by asking us to primarily stay in relationship. The rhythm of this paper emerged from community.

The process was, on the surface, turn-taking. One of us arrives and then another responds. But beneath that rhythm, something else was rumbling. We were refusing to bypass each other. The power of collaborative writing is in how it works against the individualism of the academy but through our group we were now an individual of the community. Each voice had to be met as a person shaped by history, culture, inheritance, and longing. The community did not erase individuality but instead re-situated it. What mattered was not the individual as the academy imagines it to be, as autonomous, authored, self-contained but instead the individual-in-community, individuals as a constellation of lineages meeting each other across time. Our collaborative writing assumed individuals as ecological, spiritual and interconnected:

Augustus – A pause before delving into this exploration, this abyss, I wonder why we even question the natural ways of being, coming, working, and studying together. Do we question the sunset kissing the earth and the sea goodnight. Do we question the autumn leaves migrating from the mighty oak, or grey ash trees? I guess the inquiry is our process: what does come together, working within privileged white spaces look like. As we move, evolve, develop, produce, and reproduce ourselves in these spaces, we share something powerful – beautiful: The will to be together! The will to work and study together, to be strong in our position and conviction together yet, soft enough to be vulnerable and open in connection with each other.

***

There were five us, now four (Augustus, Mridula, Samara and Fiona) who decided to think through what it might do if we wrote together, collaboratively. What does it take to come together and put words on a page. The page that we huddle around has a deceiving blankness. We often question how to make the first mark. But it already holds faint outlines of words, legacies, histories already written, lived and felt before we met in this arrangement today.

The page where we gather is not

We sit round the not so blank page. How do we do this intimate-together thing? How do we…

Mridula takes the first step and writes us into a starting place. The provocation is to ask what it truly takes to arrive to this page together and to collaborate in true relationship. In other words, what does it take, not just to arrive in this university café, but to arrive at a point where we can truly look each other in the eye?

Mridula’s Arrival Story

As we arrive together to think, read, and write as a community, I am struck by what it takes for us to truly arrive. Multiple idea-sharing attempts and follow-up clarifications have left me wondering what does it even mean to arrive? To wholly be here with one another as we attempt to be/read/write together? While it is only 12 noon, I have already had quite a busy morning. I am aware of bits and pieces I am carrying from artwork I experienced at an exhibition this morning. Evocative art that allowed me to arrive at the space, that took me in, and that held my gaze, thereby preventing me from being anywhere else but there. Is this what it means to arrive? To feel the space around me? To be taken in? To have my gaze met and held?

What do we see when we intentionally meet someone’s gaze? What does it feel like to have one’s gaze met? If my gaze were met, would you see that I have not yet arrived or that I am in the process of arriving? What am I arriving to? Well, perhaps –

To my body, as I recognise the violence and erasure but also yearning and hope that it carries, the sharing of which has not always felt met by other groups I have been a part of, especially at the University. This takes me to a question I posed to a large group during my Master’s training as we uncomfortably skirted around acknowledging racial experiences – what do you see when you look at me? Harney and Moten (2013) note that the subversive intellectual, that is, the one who does not conform to the University’s structures of professionalism and coloniality, is dangerous, disruptive, and always at war. What does it mean to be thought of as being at war when one is simply (or not so simply) being oneself? Is arriving with the whole of myself viewed as threatening? As an act of war? When you meet my gaze is this what you see? Do you see the threat of your own destruction in the face of my ‘other-ness’?

Being viewed as the ‘other’ does not allow me to truly arrive; it only allows for certain parts to arrive. Overtime, this becomes a self-perpetuated other-ing, thereby limiting even my own experience of my complexity, that is, causing a fragmentation and possible destruction of my selfhood. Expanding on Fanon’s (2008) call, we need an ever-new understanding of what it means to be a (human) being, to discover and embrace our own and each other’s complexities. To do so, do we not need to see each other? To gaze into our humanity beyond the identity labels that keep us trapped in binarised ways of relating? While the word ‘gaze’ is contaminated with precisely this identitarian objectification, I seek to reclaim the word by invoking a gaze that is intent on knowing an-other rather than knowing about the other, to recognise and be recognised as a subject and an ‘equivalent centre of being’, rather than an object of another’s projections (Benjamin, 2004, p.6). What if you met my gaze and saw me as more than an objectified brown woman?

To my writing – as I realise how I have not truly left the artwork or my history behind, that they have an impact on me as I tune into the space I am in, staying with the in-between of damage and desire (Tuck, 2009), of missed communication and the hope of connection, of feeling invisible and having my gaze met. And I recognise how I feel the need to pause here. To meet the gaze of my co-writers, to stay with what they are carrying – their own artworks from the morning, their histories, and their hopes. And with this I now look up from my writing, to meet and possibly, to be met.

***

Following Mridula, we all wrote to her with our responses. Then we each wrote our own story of what it takes to arrive, and again each of us responded to the other. Below we repeat the pattern of sharing one response to each arrival story from all four of us. At some points in the paper, we take pause to think through our processes.

***

Augustus’ Responds to Mridula

Mridula, I hear you, I see you and sit with you while wondering: what does it mean to arrive? To feel the space around you? To be taken in? To have your gaze met and held? I read this as your desire, a submission – a surrendering to a space, a safe… yet… provocative space, a space where open arms and hearts, of brave souls meet. When you arrived, I noticed you in the right corner of my eye, our gazes met, you and I then smiled. Although, I did not hold your gaze. I ask myself if I caught your gaze sensitively and did I, hold it caringly or did I, capture it within a net. Taking you away from the evocative vibrant colours and artist strokes that previously held your gaze, that currently holds your mind, captive.

Mridula, I felt it so deeply when you asked, ‘what does it mean to be thought of as being at war when one is simply being oneself?’ Because I am also puzzled by this question and I wonder, is this a separate experience for those who unintentionally, subconsciously and unwittingly fall under the gaze of the patriarchal enlightenment?

I think when Black and Brown colours encroach upon white canvas’/spaces, like war torn refugees – fugitives, it is viewed as a threat, a threat to the status quo, the fallacy of race/whiteness, a disruption. A Hiroshima bomb dropped/placed in academia. Thus, a declaration or an act of war – not of roses – but thorny nettles drawing the unwanted blood of the dominant patriarchal discourses. A self-destruction in the face and captivating presents of what is perceived/discarded/mistreated as ‘other’ – us, undercommons (Harney & Moten, 2013).

***

A Pause to Process

What is our writing doing? We write to find a way of being with each other inside the university’s walls, without a sense of belonging to them. We write to the hope of being seen for our wholeness, our uniqueness and to be recognised, and seen here. Our collaborative writing is producing a way of tending to relation and therefore to our community. The writing becomes a site where care is enacted, where we hold each other’s stories without demanding resolution, placing them carefully, interwoven with the already written. We pause to think about how in this tending to each other we may ostracise our readers, placing them outside. We are uncomfortable speaking in terms of an inside/outside binary, yet we bring different felt experiences that refuse to deny the presence of such binaries in our everydays. We can still hold uncertainty alongside extremity. As Harney and Moten remind us, ‘to be undercommon is to live incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion’ (2021, p.122). Our incompleteness is not lack but a space where others, including the reader, might also arrive and join us, where arrival may find care. What follows arises from this shared tending.

***

Augustus Arrival Story

I wonder if when we arrive, if we do so comfortably or, whether we are even conscious of arriving at all. Have we arrived at the agreed space, where we intended, the cafe? Or, within ourselves. Do we first need to arrive within ourselves, before arriving anywhere else. Do we start our journeys from a place of comfort, discomfort, contentment or is it a place of uncertainty, not knowing where we are or where we want to go.

Upon my arrival I felt like pieces of me were left crumbled up like an unwanted love letter. Unwanted and thrown away under the bed of the Pentland hills, in a ground floor room. I had an online supervision in this room, and I was gifted with some depleting yet constructive criticism. The baggage from this encounter accompanied me to this space and is filled with ambivalence and used up bandages enmeshed laced with imposters blood that limit my presence, focus, attentive gaze. Did I even need to bring that up or even write about that here – now – with you both – or for you, the reader to hold. As I/we sit at a round table, the artificial light hovering above feels warm yet the cold haze from the front door wins holding my attention taking me away from this warm space, my garden of creativity. In this garden lay vast field of dreams, where I escape, where I like to go when I am unsure where to go. I wonder where do you go, my fellow co-authors, when you are unsure of where to go?

I can hear the voices of academia whispering – how do you come, arrive in these spaces…I arrive, come to you as, Augustus (Reid) – or do I? I question this position – this surname: (Reid) and wonder whether it was bestowed upon a well performing ancestor – a good strong strapping oak of a man – an enslaved African – a former king or Goat herder. Or. A well-spoken, obedient, polite Black and beautiful African Queen demoted to the sugar plantation’s melting fields of Jamaica, lash with a marinade of salty sweat, blood and tears. I wonder whether the unwanted name (Reid) was the family name of an enslaver, an enlightened white Scottish, or Irish man.

Now I can hear the bellows of the liberal privilege – speaking of, researching and promoting de-colonialism. This is why I am researching myself albeit, a non-privileged within a privilege space. I am the great grandchild of a rapist coloniser, a living, walking and breathing legacy of the gluttonous sexual fetish of chattel slavery. My great grandparents were unwanted yet, needed Tabacco, sugar, or cotton hands, on the maroon hills and Jamaican Slave plantations.

So, when I arrive in any space, it is my body, my shade, my electromagnetic conductor, my positive and intimate relationship with the sun, my melanin – my beautiful Black/Brown/, Caramel skin that you see first. Before my soul, before my humanity.

Before my name, although I resonate more with the two names my parents gave me: Augustus Nathaniel, not as a controlled purchase, possession, but as a proud gesture.

This is how I come to you.

I think I am only one of two or three Black people in the university of Edinburgh’s entire Counselling and Psychotherapy department. I wonder what this produces in me – in my body. I wonder what this information produces in you – your body – my fellow writers – and you the readers, if it even produces any somatic feelings at all.

Fiona Responds to Augustus

Augustus Nathanial, I sit with the name Reid. I recognise and know this name so well. A Scots name meaning ‘red’ for the Scottish colouring of fair skin and red hair, the colour that features in my own family but is not reflected in your beautiful Black/Brown/Caramel skin. Reid, the last name of my best friend at school in the north of Scotland. Reid the last name of my baby-sitter as a young child. Reid, the last name of many of the people I grew up with again in the north of Scotland.

For a moment, I look down to my keyboard, away from your eyes. I take time to deeply feel into your loss of knowledge of blood and bones lines that were severed by the ruthless greed of the Scots (or Irish), and where the lost names of your ancestors were made to disappear into dust and erased from memory. Akomolafe (2025) speaks of a para-politics and in this moment, I understand that this is the politics that is the along sidedness of our collaborative writing. In this moment, I receive the force of that proud gesture of your parents. It pushes back, it hits home, hits me right in the heart. And though this para-politics doesn’t arrive as solution or even comfort (Akomolafe, 2025), through it, I look up and in the holding of your gaze I find I am grieving alongside you.

***

A Process Pause

This we of this writing, of this community of collaborative writers, is an emergent fielding of a we. It is a we that refuses to come easily despite our open hearts and minds. We can call ourselves a we but it would refuse to speak in its own name, and we’d know it and feel it because it would be a we that couldn’t truly hold a gaze. It is a we that refuses to flatten our differences in the beating of its own heart. It is a we that must be mutually disturbing as it won’t make itself into a territory with a half-assed sense of belonging. It demands a thorough and slow relating. In our writing we are rehearsing how, through care and friction, what it takes to form community in an academic space. We are learning how to say we and mean it.

Fiona’s Arrival Story-

I asked the group if we could meet later than originally planned. I had a doctor’s appointment that lead to a series of tests and questions, questions about family history and health. The questions were mainly around my grandfather, or Papa as we often call grandfathers in Scotland.

I leave the doctors and walk to our writing group; thoughts of my Papa start to blur with thoughts of how the writing group can write together. My Papa was a structural engineer and for a period he was the only person left in the world who could stamp wire ropes with a British kite mark, meaning if bridges such as the Forth road bridge were to be built, they needed his stamp of approval. He was in demand, not just in Britain but in many countries that couldn’t build bridges, homes or lives, without the British seal of approval. He travelled a lot. He was offered gifts for priority bookings. My childhood was time stamped around when my Papa was home and when he was in India.

I used to think colonialism was a historical thing, and more historical than my Papa. But I remembered on the way to our group that morning, that he was in India when I rang him to tell him I was getting married. He came home with swathes of ivory raw silk. He told me he had been gifted the silk and I had thought the gift-givers were kind. I got married in this silk, proudly telling people my Papa had brought it back from India, not thinking then about, how I was profiting from colonial traditions, no more than I was thinking about how the marriage itself was doomed to fail. My Papa’s work takes on new meaning and it jolts, hurts, shames. I am confused. He was my safe man, and I loved him. My beloved Papa was a coloniser, and I feel the charge of that debt. Where the force of colonialism feels too big, too wide, too heavy and renders me helpless, the repayment of my own Papa’s debt, and the debt of my lineages calls me to account.

As my fellow writers type their stories on their laptops, I wonder how our paradoxical and confused truths and stories can co-exist on the same page. And as I lay mine out on the table in the present moment of now, I wonder how a we can ever be formed. The only thing I can feel between us is a forever grief that I wasn’t present with before we wrote in the coffee shop, not until we were called to hold each other's gaze. A blank(et) page of grief is our meeting place.

I write this story to meet in truth, to have truth as a starting point. But truth also hurts. Later when we read our stories out loud, and we get to my part, I see Mridula’s foot start to swing under the table. Truth itself doesn’t repair or undo. I am left sitting here with my Papa beside me, and I feel his strong embrace. Whiteness is not my ancestor. Whiteness is my ancestor (Iversen, 2020).

I look up and watch my co-writers' hands and mine over our keyboards, I see hands, older hands, placed on top, and another on top, and another, layers of hands, of time. Our writing is only ever overwriting of writers’ past (Robinson, 2020).

Samara Responds to Fiona

Fiona, that was such a deeply evocative, complex, tender, reflective piece. Thank you for sharing it with us. I am wondering many things. How it is that you reconcile in your own mind the ‘duality’ of your grandfather. What it is you may have liked to say to Mridula when you noticed her foot swinging under the table.

I was struck by your sentence:

‘I wonder how our paradoxical and confused truths and stories can co-exist?’

And this is the question, isn’t it. How do we all feel, reading each other’s truths and stories, and what might that mean for how we write collaboratively?

What do we say and not say; what do we want others to know?

Fiona, I wonder: what is it that you would like us to know? Through tenderly expressing how coming to awareness about your grandfather’s involvement in the colonisation of India brought you emotions of jolting, hurt and shame, how has that influenced how you may have navigated the group?

I am touched by your vulnerability.

***

A Pause to Process

After Fiona’s arrival story, we pause again. The air between us feels foggy, thick with both love and discomfort. How can we write collaboratively when some stories cannot be woven together. How do we stay together when our proximity aches? These tensions sit between us. What happens when histories of harm and belonging touch? Our community holds us, our gaze holds us, our slow forming we holds us, while it also reveals the fault lines that move through and between us and our writing.

***

Samara’s Arrival

It feels important to write what I’ve realised I was really writing about in my initial piece about arriving here. I’ve come in, wanting to have had more time to get to know everybody. I’ve felt deeply touched by everyone’s arrival pieces; by the vulnerability it takes to let your pain be seen and witnessed by others.

Feeling touched and moved by peoples’ expressions of what they carry with them; from cultural histories of oppression, to coming to terms with one’s own close family members having been part of colonisation ….

Reading everyone’s writing, I wish to ask: and so, how does this impact how you feel in the group and consequently what you’re sharing and not sharing?

I reflect on how we are somewhat nascent when we try to navigate interpersonally what is societally repressed, and how it can therefore feel like those tensions are brimming to the edge in our interpersonal relationships. I feel emotions of rage, sadness, yearning for connection and mutual empathy, helplessness and guilt about my own privileges, when I think about racism. I realise I’ve said barely anything about my own identity.

I’m a 29-year-old only daughter of two parents who immigrated (interesting word …) to the UK at differing points in their lives. My father; born in Egypt to a Palestinian mother and a Lebanese father, grew up in Lebanon and moved with his family to England in 1974 to escape the Lebanese civil war. My mother, born in Northern Cyprus, also cosmically (cosmically in terms of her meeting my dad, as I believe this must have been subconscious in their meeting) lived through the civil war in Cyprus in the same year, 1974, but her family did not leave. I grew up in a deeply non-British household, speaking Turkish with my mum, watching Arabic news and Turkish soap operas on the TV, and spending 2 months in the year every year in Northern Cyprus.

Simultaneously, I grew up in London, England, socialised in a British school and in British society, and am outwardly often perceived as European-but-perhaps-a-little-Middle-Eastern. I also have a ‘posh’ English accent, most of the time, unless I’m speaking to my parents (too long to get into here!)

By explaining my cultural identity and family history, I am trying to tell others in the group the paradoxes present for me: that in some ways I get it, and in some ways I never can. I’m trying to create connection as I notice what it might mean for someone to express their experiences of otherness in this group. Maybe I am avoiding pain and the helplessness I feel when I think about my own privileges.

When I read about peoples’ experiences of being othered, I recall all the other conversations I have either been a part of or witnessed around forms of racist othering. Many of those conversations have been unproductive in terms of navigating the tensions, distance and pain, and I wondered if we could do it differently here.

This makes me want to ask: What do we want others to know here? What do you need from me, to make it easier to be you in the group? What do you all feel and see when you look at me? What things may pose challenges to connection? What would make it easier? What does it mean that we have all written about pieces of our family histories but not yet talked about it with each, voice-to-voice? Has writing actually made it easier to express these emotions?

And so I arrive to the group, holding paradoxical parts of myself that in some ways, are societally privileged and allow me to feel confident, comfortable and self-assured; and in other ways, make me feel able to relate to the pain expressed about being othered.

I am so grateful to everyone for rendering themselves so vulnerable in their writing. It's indeed rare and that’s what makes it so special.

Oh, and something else you should know about me – I despise autocorrect.

A Response to Samara

Samara’s reponse is missing as we were five, and are now four. We offer a response to Samara below.

You ask earnestly what it means to arrive

with one hand full of privilege

and the other trembling with empathy.

We do not answer.

You sit between accents and language, your questions, like little birds

circling above our steaming cups.

We do not answer.

Our silences have roots

that like the oak

touch underground.

Our stories are carefully leaning in, in the hope of a connection

that can help us to feel the warmth

of another world forming.

Thank you for connecting us more deeply.

So…

How do we come/work/study and be together? This question permeated the paper massaging our wonderings. As we wandered our collective minds, we unearthed and explored what it might mean to arrive and to hold each other’s gaze. Through our collaboration we have navigated our individual challenging journeys and complex family histories. We explored our collective desire to reproduce, re-illuminate ourselves, knowledge, and how we arrived-raised out of the basement from within the university’s dark shadows of enlightenment. We wrote together as a love-in-action for the world.

For us, collaborative writing in 2025 was a writing that insisted on us working towards an imaginary where we no longer write to the question that asks what it means to be together.

Do we question the sunset kissing the earth and the sea goodnight. Do we question the autumn leaves migrating from the mighty oak, or grey ash trees?