If Women Had Written the World

how our perspective shapes the stories we tell

There have been some requests to hear more about what I am studying in seminary here on this Substack. Here’s the teensiest slice, certainly not the most consequential but perhaps the most entertaining, chosen because of a choice quote in Willie Jennings. In the end, I bring it around to story-telling and writing - how do we see, interpret, and present the world?

The quote comes from Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

Again, as Columbus reflected on his discovery of a new continent and offered his famous observation that the earth is pear-shaped or like a “woman’s nipple on a round ball”…¹

This particular quote was new to me, and somehow, unsurprising (and made me laugh and send a text to a couple of friends who share my juvenile sense of humor. The text led to a delightful trail of messages of the kind that are necessary relief for PhD students.) This quote reads as one example among many that demonstrates how our world is shaped by the words and visions of men.

Here’s another example, and also how I attempted to reframe it through a woman’s words and vision:

There are two hills outside Hargeisa, Somaliland. They are known as Nasaha Hablood, or “Girls’ Breasts.” I’m not sure who named the hills, but I feel pretty confident that it was a man. Had it been a woman, based on what I observed when I climbed them, they would possibly be called something like “Happy Men” or “Missing Foreskin”.

As a grand finale, on my fifteenth wedding anniversary, I hike to the nipple tip of what is referred to as the younger of the Two Girls’ Breasts hills, ‘younger’ because it is slightly perkier than her twin to the west. I tell Tom later—he was stuck at the University of Hargeisa collecting surveys—that from the top, the breast looks more like a circumcised penis.²

Other examples of the male gaze on how the world has been crafted are more complex than the shape of hills or the shape of the earth (though one might argue that Columbus’s idea of the shape of the earth might be one of the more massively consequential ideas of history).

Here are just two from my Somali studies.

One scholar cites an example of how the erasure of women from colonial-era scholarship skews an understanding of women and broader societal realities and trajectories. From 1922 to 1941, while Italy controlled southern Somalia, colonial authorities forced adolescent and adult men to work on Italian estates all week. Deciding they would be more productive if they had wives along, Italians instituted nikaax talyiani (Italian wedding), which allowed a man to contact the Italian authorities and tell them his choice of wife. He could then take her as a wife without requiring her or her relatives’ consent. The result was social chaos remembered differently by men and women. Men recall the freedom in marrying without going through traditional constraints, and that they could both work and have women to sleep with. Women remember being married against their will or their parents’ will, before menstruation, before proper initiation, and without the usual gifts friends and relatives would provide (Declich 1995, 111-2).³

Failing to consider the women’s perspective led to the “misleading conclusion that ‘because women rarely had much of a choice of marital partners prior to the coloniya [colonial period] most marriages were arranged - this practice of forced marriage did not represent a substantially greater degree of oppression for the female labourers. Instead, the group which considered itself the injured party in this injustice was the family of the brides, who were denied a bridewealth payment for their daughters’” (Declich 1995, 112).

In other words, the conclusion that this arrangement was no big deal because arranged marriages had always been the norm ignored the women’s perspectives. Women were married too young, without proper preparation from their families, and without gifts and dowries, which were an essential part of the arranged marriage system.

Another example is from Somali studies scholar I. M. Lewis⁴, who developed an extensive clan lineage system in his book, A Pastoral Democracy. It includes charts and genealogical trees, highlighting how women’s fertility was transferred between families upon marriage, death, or divorce. Women become what Christine Choi Ahmed sardonically calls “womb[s] for rent” and she then wonders how Lewis can describe women this way and still claim Somali society as “democratic” (Ahmed 1995, 161).⁵

There are all kinds of issues with Lewis’s claims, from the limitation of his study being on nomadic populations in the north and ignoring urban realities which challenged his conclusions, to how his theories deny the impact of the historical colonial context within which he wrote.

But – my point here is that his male view couldn’t see how women being “wombs for rent” should have influenced whether a community is considered democratic.

I’m not trying to sound anti-man. I’m pointing out how one’s personal perspective and bias shape, literally, how we see the world, who we talk to in seeking understanding, which other perspectives we hole as more valid than others, and how we interpet our observations.

I have the same issue - I have a particular lens and see the world through a particular perspective. Much of the work of PhD studies is to try to see our lenses for what they are, and then to try and see something else, to strip them off as much as possible, and to put on other lenses, to compare visions, to interrogate conclusions, to question assumptions, to not take for granted that my view is the right one, or the only option.

It is hard work and it takes thousands of pages of mind-numbing reading. So when I come across great lines like “wombs for rent” or nipple-topped pear-shaped earths, I take a moment to giggle and reflect, and then I keep turning the pages.

As a writer, it is essential to be aware of one’s lens. It isn’t necessarily a negative thing, but being aware of it will help us to write more clearly and to ask better questions, to explore new territories. If your world is pear-shaped with a nipple on top, what might that mean for what you discover when you set sail?

How aware are you of the lenses you wear? How do you think they impact your interpretation of the world?

1. Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300163087, 30.

2. Rachel Pieh Jones, The Proper Weight of Fear, in the Delacorte Review.

3. Declich, Francesca. “‘Gendered Narratives,’ History, and Identity: Two Centuries along the Juba River among the Zigula and Shanbara.” History in Africa 22 (1995): 93–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171910.

4. Upon his death, Said Samatar said of Lewis’s scholarship on Somalis, “he was not only the Founding Father, but also its reigning prince.” Said, Samatar, 2014. https://wardheernews.com/m-lewis-1930-2014-great-tree-fallen/

5. Ahmed, Christine Choi. “Finely Etched Chattel: The Invention of a Somali Woman.” In The Invention of Somalia, edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed, 157–90. Lawrenceville, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1995.

What Happened When I Lost My Literary Agent. Twice.

when quitting is not an option

(this was originally published on Jane Friedman’s website)

Learn more about how to work with me here.

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In 2012 I published a Modern Love essay in the New York Times. The essay led to landing a literary agent for a memoir. For two years, I wrestled with the proposal, which never quite satisfied her standards. I developed a second proposal, which also failed to meet her approval. A third, same failure. There were some bizarre email exchanges and eventually, I ended the working relationship.

I failed. I’d had my chance. I had an agent, but couldn’t produce a book worthy of being published, or even shopped around. I thought this was the most discouraging thing that could happen in my writing career.

A year later, I summoned my courage and sent another round of agent queries for that third book proposal, narrative nonfiction based in Africa. I signed with a new agent! After a cursory round of edits, she sent out the proposal. An editor at a big five publisher was interested. We had an encouraging call but she came back a devastating “no.”

I was told readers didn’t care about Africa. I was told my proposal sounded more like a magazine piece than a book. I was told this wasn’t the time for global stories or biographies.

This agent and I parted ways.

I thought that first agent failure was discouraging. But now, I had been so close, the Big Five! And I’d failed again. It felt like running a marathon and collapsing fifty meters from the finish.

What was wrong with me? I expressed my despair to a writer friend, said I would quit. He said, “You can lay on the floor and cry for one day. Tomorrow, get up and get back to work.”

I did exactly that. But this time I interrogated why, exactly, had I come up short with these proposals, agents, and editors? Was it my writing, my ideas, my methods?

I refused to believe that American readers didn’t care about Africa or that now wasn’t the time for biographies. I knew my story was a book, not a magazine article. It was an epic adventure spanning several decades and multiple countries, a story that turned conversations about race, faith, humanitarian aid, and sexual violence upside down. I’d been told my writing and this story were powerful.

What was I doing wrong?

After a few months of wallowing in my perceived failures, I realized I had not really done the work of targeting. My book was an international story focused on issues of contagious disease, interfaith relationships, and social justice. These words were much more specific than “narrative nonfiction” or “biography.”

I searched for publishers with books in these categories, who would take me without an agent. I wanted to pitch the story the way I saw it, as a woman who lives in Africa and engages in development work, not through the lens of a New York City literary agent.

I sent the proposal to Plough Publishing. We had a phone call. I knew immediately this was the place for my book, I could tell they would honor the story, they understood what made this story resonate now. We signed and the book was published October 1, 2019. Then they bought my next proposal, which was loosely based off the proposal that landed my first agent way back in 2012.

Here’s what I learned, lessons I believe apply to writers at every stage.

You are not a failure

Your book may have failed to connect with an agent or an editor. This is not a reflection of you, the human. You are not an idiot, loser, or disappointment. You are not ridiculous.

I spoke all these words over myself and they were all lies. I felt disappointment, like I had failed, like I had reached ridiculously above my abilities. But I had tried something hard, had made brave choices, hadn’t quit, and knew what I wanted, even if I didn’t quite know how to achieve it.

Press through discouragement

Don’t give up. If this is what you want, keep doing the work. Speak words over yourself like brave, persistent, creative, strong, resilient. Feel the discouragement, don’t deny it, but then don’t settle there, either.

Have a writing community

Find that friend who can let you cry for a day and who will then push you back up. Do the same for your writing friends on their rejection days.

Tweak

Listen to feedback, especially the rejection feedback, and revise. Decide what you are willing to change and what is essential. Yes, kill some darlings. But don’t necessarily kill them all, or you’ll risk losing distinctiveness.

Focus the pitch

Know your niche. The more specific you can be, the stronger your pitch will be, and the easier it will be to target the right agent or publisher, and eventually, the right reader.

Take a risk

Maybe it is time to drop the agent with whom you just aren’t connecting, or who doesn’t grasp your story and vision. This requires courage and humility. It feels really good to say, “my agent.” But if it isn’t a great fit, that phrase might not ever transform to, “my book.” Maybe it is time to google off the beaten path and find a unique publisher or different agent.

Find your people

Your book is not for everyone. I wrote a guidebook to the country where I live, Welcome to Djibouti. You should not buy it, unless you are coming here for work or touring. Knowing who your book is not for can help you know who it is for. Identify your audience as precisely as possible, even in the early pitching stages.

Know your story

Knowing what happens chronologically is one thing but being able to describe what it means is another. The ‘what happens’ keeps a reader reading, but the ‘what is it about’ compels a reader to feel connected to a story, and this is what will eventually sell the book to an agent or publisher, and your reader.

I’m thankful for the input I received from the two literary agents, even though we weren’t successful together. My writing and my understanding of the publishing world are better because of our interactions. But I’m also glad I was willing to step out on my own and not give up.

You can do this, don’t take no for an answer. Hear it, adjust as necessary, and press on. There is an audience for your work, you just need to find it.

Learn more about how to work with me here.

Interreligious Dialogue and the Need for Tender, Courageous Curiosity

In June I spent a week at a Jewish retreat center in Maryland participating in an Emerging Religious Leaders event with the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. Six Christian scholars, seven Jewish scholars, and seven Muslim scholars gathered for five days of learning how to have difficult conversations about challenging topics while committing to stay in relationship with one another.

I am still processing the experience. We talked about Gaza and Israel, LGBTQIA+, missionaries, Christian Zionism, religious rituals, our perspectives on orthodoxy and orthopraxy. On the last night there, Israel attacked Iran. I came home on Friday and woke up Saturday morning to an assassination and a manhunt ten minutes from my house in Minnesota. The world was, and still is, on fire.

We didn’t solve anything that week. Even in our “co-religionist” groups there were a lot of different opinions and complexity. But we didn’t devolve into factions and divisiveness, either. There were hard conversations followed by teary hugs and commitments to stay in relationship, to honor the dignity of the other, to respect another opinion even while strongly disagreeing and even potentially feeling wounded by that other opinion. There were disagreements while standing firm in the value of listening to the others’ story.

The point wasn’t to seek agreement or to change minds. The goal, in my opinion, was to increase empathy, to experience how my convictions land on someone else, to hear and observe the beauty in other traditions. There was holy envy (Barbara Brown Taylor) and holy discomfort. The conversations felt sacred, even while they sometimes stung.

What does it feel like to be a queer Jewish rabbi, listening to the traditional Islamic perspective on gender?

What does it feel like to be a Christian, listening to the history of how the religion I identify with has done deep damage in its pursuit of political power?

What does it feel like to be a Palestinian American or an Israeli American when your phone lights up with messages that people you love have been ordered into bomb shelters?

What does it feel like to love people holding a green card during ICE raid protests in LA and the government crackdown?

What does it feel like to cherish your religious tradition and heritage and to have an Evangelical say you will burn forever in conscious torment in hell?

The week was the opportunity for a bunch of religious nerds (we were all students of one form or another, guided by two leaders from each religious tradition) to ask anything of the others, and to expect to be asked anything by the others. There was a session of anonymous question-asking but also every meal or break time or roommate conversation was rich with curiosity.

We each came with the explicit posture of openness, encouraged to remain steady in our convictions while hearing the perspectives of others. This was not an attempt at forming theological unity. It was not a simplistic, “we’re all the same” or “let’s just get along” event. It was faith seeking understanding. Faith seeking to listen. How does my theology sound to someone else? What looks strange or confusing to an outsider? What questions do others have about my tradition? What do Christians from across denominational commitments share and not share? How do we manage to still come together, within the boundaries of my religious tradition and by crossing boundaries?

It was intense.

It was exhausting.

I’m still not totally sure what the practical outcome might be.

Personal transformation. Fresh commitments to interfaith engagement. New ideas about what interfaith engagement can entail and must require. Better understanding of what interfaith engagement isn’t. Exposure to communities I’ve not had deep conversations with previously.

I do know that I have a fresh and (hopefully) abiding tenderness toward my religious footprint. Often in my life abroad, we referred to American expatriates as the proverbial elephant in a China shop. Meaning, American expatriates tend to stomp around unaware of our size, our noise, and our impact on the beautiful aspects of other cultures. The result can be breakage and harm, as though an elephant tried to be gentle with your grandmother’s set of China teacups.

American Christians can behave in the same way. Unaware of our size, our noise, and our impact. Unaware of how we are being received or understood. Unaware of our lack of gentleness, humility, respect, and tenderness.

I also know that I have a fresh appreciation for story. It is far too easy to look at someone and see only a headscarf or body or skin color or style of clothing or to hear an accent or to see a religious symbol or to learn someone’s name…

…and to judge. To jump to conclusions. To make assumptions. To compare.

It takes much more work to get curious and to ask questions, to seek to hear the story of what has formed that person. What experiences and ideas and influences have shaped them? What brings them joy and what breaks their heart?

Learning the others’ story is the necessary and good work of being a person of faith and of seeking to love God and to love my neighbor.

May we (I) continually learn to love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly (tenderly) with our God (Micah 6:8), especially as we attempt to engage across religious difference.

How do you navigate hard conversations across difference? What are some guiding principles?

Every Story Has Been Told

no story is finished being told

When Rachel Held Evans published Evolving in Monkey Town (which later became Faith Unraveled), I remember feeling angry with myself for letting someone else tell my story (and tell it better!). I remember thinking, “Well, there’s no point to writing my story now. The story has been told.” Khalas. Finished. I even remember the dusty couch I was sitting on in Djibouti when I thought this, and how sweat dribbled down my back, pooling at my waistband.

The story has been told.

Later, one of my sisters said, “Rachel, you need to write Evolving in Djibouti Town.” I told her I already had a file on my computer with that exact title. The drafts in that folder eventually became Pillars, my book that tells a story similar to but in no way the same as Rachel Held Evans’s story.

When I felt angry and disappointed that someone else had gotten to my story before I had, when I told myself, “That story has been told” with the unspoken but assumed next words being, “give it up, loser, you have nothing to add here”¹, I was wrong. So, so wrong.

And also right. Partly, partly right.

There is nothing new under the sun.

What else can still be written about falling in and out of love? What else could possibly be written about cancer or car accidents or divorce or war? What still remains to be said about running marathons and raising children and dull office coworkers turned into superheroes? Is there anything not written already about pets and travel and barbecue and outer space and goblins and pregnancy and religion? What can be added to the tomes of grief, delight, rage, envy, murder, politics, or joy?

Every story has been told but no story is finished.

Every story is a retelling and no story is done being told.

We have written every story about heartbreak and revenge but we are not done telling the story of heartbreak and revenge.

We have written every story about marathons but we have not finished the story of marathons.

We have written every story about grief but we will never finish the story of grief.

There is nothing new under the sun but there is also nothing finished under the sun. There is nothing wholly new, wholly unlinked to anything gone before. But, there are always new angles and new examples and new characters and new generations and new twists and new combinations.

We have told every story that can be told but we have not plumbed to the depth of every story that can be told.

The work of the creative is not to search out the one story that has not yet been told.

The work of the creative is to join the stream of what has gone before and contribute to what is being made, to what is yet to be made.

The work of the creative is to participate in the ongoing work of telling every story again, deeper, more.

What story drives you into needing to know or tell it deeper? What universal story has gripped you and is not yet done, and you know your work now is to dig into it, to keep telling it?

1. Yes, I’ve needed to grow in self-compassion and kinder self-talk. Work in progress.

Where is Home When No Place, or Every Place, Feels Like Home?

my talk from the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing

Listen to my talk at the CFFW 2024 here.

Every other April I used to sit in Djibouti and read about the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing (CFFW) online and feel so deeply jealous. All those writers! All those books! All those talks and publishers and editors and readers and magazines! And I was so far away.

Then, in 2021, Pillars: How Muslims Led Me Closer to Jesus was set to be released in April (on my birthday!) and my publisher arranged with the CFFW to book me as a speaker! I had a book coming out! I was going to attend – and speak at – the Festival of Faith and Writing! Sure, I would have to fly around the world to do it but that wouldn’t be a problem. We would just have to book the flight around my launch party which included Barbara Brown Taylor (BBT) and Abdi Nor Iftin!

For someone who is anti exclamation point, you may have realized by now that this was quite exciting for me. All those acronyms: CFFW. BBT.

And then.

2021.

COVID was still upon us. Travel was still complicated. Large events were still being cancelled.

The launch event was online and if BBT in real life is anything close to what she is like online, I am 100% right in remaining a huge fan.

CFFW was cancelled.

I was, yet again, in Djibouti in April, wondering if I would ever have a chance to attend CFFW.

And then the festival was rescheduled for April 2024 and I was re-booked as a speaker. And there was great rejoicing. I didn’t have a new book to talk about but I can always talk about my older books and work out new content.

I went. I spoke. I got terribly, terribly sick.

It wasn’t COVID. But I hadn’t yet been living in the USA for a year at that point and my body struggled with Minnesota sicknesses.

I made it through both of my speaking events but at dinner on the last night, I was eating pizza with New York Times journalists and Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter who is the executor of her estate and I was so sick that I had to leave the table early.

Did you hear me? NYT journalists and Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter and I walked away. I would have cried all the way back to my room but my eyes were so swollen no tears could have made their way out.

Maybe I will have another opportunity to attend, maybe even to speak at the CFFW. For as long as I was alert, I had a fabulous time.

Here’s one humbling real-talk memory: I had a book signing scheduled and at this book signing I was seated next to The Modern Mrs. Darcy. Yes, her. At the other end of our table was Mary DeMuth. Yup, her.

They both had lines reaching out the door. Out the door.

I signed two books.

One was the book I gifted my student guide.

Thank you to the other woman who trekked across campus with my book in your arms! I will never forget you!

All this is simply preamble to say that two weeks ago, the podcast associated with the Festival of Faith and Writing aired my solo talk.

“In Episode #69 of Rewrite Radio, Rachel Pieh Jones joins us to explore how writing cultivates the humility, curiosity, and delight necessary to create a sense of home when nowhere, or everywhere, feels like home.”

You can listen to it here.

What does home mean for you?

How do you write home?

How do you write your way home?

Let’s keep talking about how writing helps us create home…