15 MINS with AFUA HIRSCH

Revolutionary TV presenter, documentary maker, former barrister and author of Brit(ish) and Decolonising My Body Afua Hirsch spoke to us about the importance of breaking down Eurocentric ideas, and prioritising rest and silence in order to fantasize freely.

In your opinion what role (if any) does ancestry and the place in society of black women have on their fantasies and their journey to make them a reality?

It's impossible to separate any parts of ourselves and our relationship with our bodies, our sexuality, our life mission, our sense of identity, our tastes. As a black woman living in a society like Britain, you're so saturated with ideas that come from a place radically disconnected from your ancestry. It takes work to start rejecting those ideas and creating space for yourself and discovery, that requires a lot of discipline, knowledge, determination and intention. If not you're just saturated with the ideas that this society wants you to imbue and they're not necessarily based on what's good for you. They're based on capitalism, consumerism and Eurocentric ideas about gender and history.

Do you think Eurocentric beauty standards have had an effect on our understanding of fantasies or kind of placed holds or limitations on them?

So deeply. An obvious one is body image and what is beautiful, attractive and sexually desirable. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and was convinced that a kind of thinness and whiteness that I was being exposed to in beauty, fashion and entertainment was objectively desirable, and that I was less desirable to the extent I failed to conform to that ideal. I think every single human has to go on a journey to understand who they are in terms of their sexuality, their fantasies, what they find attractive, what they desire. Often we've been raised by people who've also internalized those ideas, because they've been subject to the same influences as well, it's almost in your mother's milk. It took me a long time to realize that what I thought was objectively attractive was not in any way authentically connected to me, you have to scrape that all away which can take a long time.

WANT has inspired the idea of not settling. Is there anything unexpected you don’t settle on anymore?

Rest. I won't compromise on that anymore and it's radical. I used to believe that you were useful to society to the extent that you grind, empty and drain yourself. By the time I went on my year of adornment in my early 40s I no longer settled around doing work I didn't believe in or having relationships that didn't resonate with me, but I had not made that connection around rest. I was often burned out and exhausted and thought that that was good, based on the programming from generations of women in my family.

Prioritising rest has allowed me to center my wellbeing in a way that doesn't feed into something I'm a bit skeptical about: the wellness industry. The idea that wellness is going to a specific spa and paying a certain amount for sound bath, or doing a particular Pilates class alienated me because it seemed just further based on Eurocentric and capitalist ideas. Rest was a radical change for me. If you're not exhausted, you can connect more deeply with your sexuality and your fantasies. You can be more creative, you can use your imagination, you can have much more profound connections with people that you love. Everything takes on a different quality when it's not coming from a place of exhaustion.

What does rest look like for you? How do you fill yourself back up?

Stillness and silence, I'm a very sociable person, super curious, love travelling and meeting people. If you're quite a high functioning person, use a lot of exertion, you need a lot of recovery, and the fact that it doesn't come naturally is probably testament to how much you need it. If you feel mission oriented and you care about social or racial justice, or feel connected to global struggles, you can feel like it's not justifiable to rest or to slow down because you’re so hyper aware of the level of suffering and unfairness that exists in the world, but there's also a kind of narcissism in that as well. It doesn't begin and end with us and if you want to actually be part of a change that is lasting, you have to find a way of doing it that also doesn't deplete and damage you.

I've learned to be home, to be still, to be comfortable, to slow down. My home wasn't a place that filled me up because I hadn't invested in it. I had to make it serve me and when it did I realised the power of being in it (by the way I live in a flat, it doesn't matter what the space is, you can make it a space that serves you). As I speak to you, I’m on my sofa, under my electric blanket with a large cup of tea, looking at the garden, and I'm not going anywhere today, and that just, you know, in the past, I wouldn't have done that. Managing my energy as an actual task, to be taken seriously, and listening to my body and understanding that sometimes it's time to go fast and sometimes it's time to go slow.

What would you say to someone who knows that things need to change, but is unsure where to begin?

I would say, read the books. Start engaging with the work of people who have dedicated their lives to helping us on that journey. Once somebody makes an argument that is irrefutable, then I can't help changing my behavior, because I can't unsee what I've just seen. I can't unlearn what I've now learned. I used to say to myself “I keep getting burned out. I'm doing something wrong”, then I read Rest is Resistance and that immediately reached me in a way that decades of fretting had not. We respond well to knowledge and people’s experiences.

I wouldn't try and shed the knowledge you have, humans don't work like that. You need to replace it with something that makes more sense, and society isn't going to give that to you. You have to seek it out. Then you can go on a different journey.

In the many roles and spaces you've occupied, how has your imagination and fantasies given you the ability to redefine what's expected of you?

It’s been a guiding light that has a divine origin. I'd been on this trajectory that you do what you're supposed to do, running through the motions of this well established path and my imagination and sense of creativity have always tried to bash down those boundaries. I was encouraged to see them as enemies, trying to distract me, but they're not; it's a divine message from the universe reminding me who I really am. Following those voices has been the most important thing I've done in my life, really embracing, developing, centering and allowing them to actually guide me.

However, like everything else we've said in this conversation, you can't do that if you don't rest, you can't tap into your imagination creativity if you're exhausted.

Did reading WANT change any element about the way you view the notion of fantasy?

When a powerful woman like Gillian rejects the binary and is unapologetic about the fact that somebody like her is deeply interested in desire, sexuality and fantasy, I find that so helpful. You're reading a serious publication, not porn - it's a quality, beautifully curated experience.

It models how somebody like me can also talk about my sexuality, fantasies, desire, relationships and wants. It feels funny saying that because surely we're way past that - but reading the book reminded me that we're not and that is still a really powerful thing to do. I was having to work so hard to be taken seriously as a person with a brain, if I exposed myself as a woman with fantasies, dreams and fears it would undermine me. That’s nonsense and a construct of patriarchy. The realm of the erotic is not some trivial thing. It's connected to imagination, creativity, spirituality and purpose.

If you could sum up the experience of reading WANT in one word, what would it be?

I hate one word answers! Stimulating.

If you could gift a copy to anyone, who would it be?

Every single woman I know. Especially women who would never openly buy, read or express something about sexuality and desire.

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