TYPE Talks to Fariha Róisín
Jess interviews author Fariha Róisín about her book Who Is Wellness For?, which explores the wellness industry’s colonizing and appropriation of Black, brown, and Indigenous healing traditions.
In 2021, I participated in a virtual writing workshop led by the writer Fariha Róisín. The course was intended to help writers think through what it means to write from a place of vulnerability. We read Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and Anne Boyer. We wrote together. We were twenty strangers scattered across the world but we pushed past our time differences and showed up every week to commune and listen to one another’s stories. In the depths of the pandemic and collective push toward abolition, we carved out a space to move through the specificity of the times, as a community brought together by Róisín’s vast body of work.
If you are not familiar with Róisín, the common thread in her writing and artistic practice is her commitment to integrity. She goes deep and uses her personal experiences to understand and unravel topics such as abortion, police brutality, and illness. One of my favourite pieces by her is an essay on celibacy as a form of survival that was published by The Cut. Vulnerability is her mode of transportation while traversing complex terrain and in doing so, she leaves space on the page for readers who also dream of healing in a world that valorizes numbness and self-alienation in the name of capitalism.
In her latest book, Who is Wellness For, she fuses memoir and journalism as a way to unpack the wellness industrial complex. She asks readers to reflect on how healing practices, such as plant medicine and yoga, have been decontextualized from their Indigenous origins and marketed as services that are predominantly available to the wealthy. What happens when exploitation and extraction are key forces that shape the existing wellness industry? And, how do we shift away from the illusion of healing to achieve transformative, community-oriented change? Róisín provides extensive research on the topic but also tells us her own stories, bravely unfolding her experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse. We are encouraged to do the same: to affect change by starting small and looking at our own lives. In Róisín’s own words: “It is important for you to speak about your life because you have the specificity of experience and that is extraordinary, and it’s so painful and so grief-stricken, especially when it is in your body. That kind of writing is so sacred. That’s why we need to speak. To say what you need to say is so validating and empowering.”
In July of 2022, I reunited with Róisín to talk about this thought-provoking book. She answered the video call from her home in L.A. I was in my apartment in Toronto, buzzing with nerves. I could feel myself battling with the fear of wanting to seem impressive to a writer whom I respect and admire. My mind was slowly separating from my body until Róisín joined the call. She answered from her bed, the sun shining through her window. I snapped back into myself as an unspoken understanding took shape: performance was unnecessary. This was a space for our honest, full selves. I find it difficult to get to that place of fullness while navigating the machine that is white supremacy but Róisín’s work, and her way of being, is a gentle invitation to try, try, and try again.
Jessica Kasiama: You recently shared on Instagram that releasing work often feels like a form of death. I can’t help but think of Barthes saying: “[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Can you expand on this feeling and what it has looked like across your various book projects?
Fariha Róisín: I think I have been in denial for the last couple of books. And now, with Who is Wellness For, I am realizing the somatic cost, I am realizing the spiritual cost, and I am realizing the depletion that I feel. It just doesn’t feel satisfying to me right now, in all honesty, to have excavated what I did… and to feel this low, misunderstood, afraid… and I think within that, there is a death of the expectation of what I want this book to mean out in the world. I think there is an expectation that I had with this book and I am experiencing a death now because my expectations weren’t met. So what does that mean for me now? How can I hold this work and myself when I feel like this? It’s a death of self.
Weeks after our conversation, Róisín wrote a newsletter on the topic of expectations. She acknowledged that societally, we are conditioned to constantly ask for more. Our desires are rarely satiated in a culture that is designed to value novelty above everything. However, she found herself comforted by the guiding words of a friend who said: “When we resist the flow of the universe, that is what causes us pain.” These words opened her up to releasing expectations and embracing the miracle of the present moment.
This moment exemplifies that while it is useful to have the page as a way to move through complicated feelings, it is also useful to have a community that will ground you. The life of a writer can be a lonely one and with the excess of projections that occur online, it is easy to feel disoriented and ungrounded when sharing work.
She experienced the brunt of this firsthand after writing a newsletter that juxtaposed the mythology of New York City and the American dream with the visibility of class disparity in the city. After she posted an excerpt of the piece on Instagram, people came out of the woodwork to erode her reflections without meaningfully engaging with the ideas presented. The projections only reinforced Róisín’s observations on the violence of American patriotism, as it was evident that many of the most brutal comments were coming from users who had not gone beyond the screenshot she had shared from the dispatch.
Strong boundaries keep the author centered while navigating the internet. “So much of the spiritual understanding and infrastructure one has to build is how to protect yourself from others. As somebody who is writing about the times, in a way that not a lot of people are, I am always going to be subject to critique. In a way, I am accepting that I might always be an outlier because these aren’t necessarily things people want to hear.”
Who is Wellness For is a book that will challenge you. This complexity implores you to move through the text carefully to reap the full benefits. As someone who struggles to face their own health issues, it was especially uncomfortable for me to read the chapters in which Róisín dives into her experience with IBS. Thankfully, the author approaches the topic with precision and care. On page 156, Róisín writes: “Learning to understand that my IBS was trying to speak to me, that it was reminding me that the PTSD and panic attacks weren’t a reflection of my hysteria—but rather a communication that I needed to decipher—made me realize the vast layers of knowledge that are coded in un-wellness, in chronic illness. What if we listened? What if we paid attention? What if that’s all that healing is—just listening to yourself?”
Earlier in the book, in the chapter On Body Dysmorphia, Róisín expresses her reverence for the writings of Susan Sontag, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde – all of whom wrote about illness and grief and later died due to cancer. I asked her how reading about pain from these women shaped her approach to writing it. “I love reading about pain so much because it is the clearest mirror and reflection that I get,” she reflected, “[With] survivors, especially child sexual abuse survivors, there is a shared languaging of people who have experienced a lot of grief.”
When Róisín discovered that among her favorite writers, such as Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker, another shared reality was a tumultuous relationship with their mothers, it was a significant moment. It was clarifying to identify the presence of the mother wound in the lineage of artists and writers before her.
These synchronicities are a portal back to the topic of dehumanization. When I asked Róisín to expand on the spiritual death of releasing work, she touched on how dehumanizing it can be for people to read about your life and continue to discard you, only seeing “a mirage of a human being.” This happens often with public-facing figures, especially in a culture where images of trauma are often decontextualized and turned into memes and clickbait before they are meaningfully seen and understood. Róisín brings up the question of how, as a culture, we remember writers and artists who wrote about their hardships. How do we remember them holistically instead of simply romanticizing and projecting narratives onto them?
We talk about one of Audre Lorde’s foundational texts, The Cancer Journals. It is one of Róisín’s favorite works but she acknowledges that there are moments to be read with a heavy heart as Lorde often is dismissive of her own experience. These moments convey how even the most intellectual people in our society often struggle in their wellness journeys. We are all taught to silence ourselves - our pain, our joy, our self-expression, to survive. Lorde identified the trouble with this herself: “Your silence will not protect you.” Why? This is a key idea in Who is Wellness For. Silences, or unmetabolized pain, can calcify. Róisín speculates, “I think that disease happens through trauma and I think the way that disease stays in the body and becomes other things, is when you can’t express it.” In writing the book, she realized that “you have the ability to transmute disease and you have the ability to transmute the violence of your life and create a holistic, healed body.”
Furthermore, Róisín cites Pedro Almodóvar, Satyajit Ray, Mahasweta Devi, and Arundhati Roy as guiding forces in her creative life. Her eyes light up when she mentions Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, the documentary about the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. She notes that he is one of many artists who resonate with her astrologically: “I obviously relate to so many Capricorns. Hayao Miyazaki. Susan Sontag. Eartha Kitt.”
Beyond the artists that have helped bring shape to her inner life, she finds inspiration in everything - art, design, and architecture. This is evident in a special edition series of her newsletter, twenty things, where she shares sources of inspiration.
FR: Design is something I think about a lot, even in the way that I live. I think that as people that come from oppressed peoples that had to struggle immensely for their livelihood, beauty is so vital in our humanity. To invest, to feel, to touch, to experience all of that is so important. I struggle as an anti-capitalist and artist who is going to navigate capitalism in very tricky and slimy ways. How do I stay cognizant and not buy into the system whilst also obtaining enough beauty to give to myself and redistribute helpfully? I have been thinking a lot about my political education. I grew up on Noam Chomsky and leftist ideology and as I have gotten older, I have shifted and changed and accepted beauty in my life. Pursuing art holistically has made me accept the fact that I am curious and interested in so much.
We linger on the topic of beauty, connecting the dots between everything from public health to urban design. What is the relationship between beauty and wellness? What even is beauty beyond a surface level? True, life-giving beauty? And what happens when it is missing, or rather intentionally taken away, from communities?
FR: They’ve thought about every layer possible. They think about it with architecture, with public transportation, public health – every facet of being [is touched by capitalism]. Imagine if these governmental bodies, these corporations, cared about the individual. Money isn’t bad if we’re putting it back into society. Why is it that there is such a divorce and dissonance between the very wealthy and the very poor? And there is no desire for the elite to give back to the ordinary citizen and to make life more equitable. This feels very North American. There are countries in the world where the government does take care of you and you do have social equity and your urban environments aren’t as devastating. I don’t know if you ever read Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton but he writes about how architecture is related to contentment. What does it mean to live in a beautiful area and a beautiful space? We could revolutionize things if it was beautiful for everyone. If it was just fair, society would be so different.
In addressing the intentional failures of the system, Róisín states her investment in the fall of America, adding: “I’m also really ready for no other empire. I know that’s a big claim but we are in a state of evolution. We’re sort of at this nexus point of — where are we going next?”
She is inspired by people who do the internal work of investigating themselves and being vulnerable. What would our society look like if we were all empowered in looking at the uncomfortable truths of who we are? Recently, Róisín realized that she is interested in becoming a death doula. “That work goes hand in hand with the work that I do in making people look at the wound and all of the things that they think are ugly that is actually not that ugly,” she reflects, offering us a portal to think about the relationship between abolition and wellness. The philosopher Bayo Akomolafe is a foundational resource in articulating her visions for the future. She explains that he writes about chaos theory to “push us to a future of understanding that chaos is implicit and an important part of society. None of us are going to stop harming one another. We’re going to try to be as good as we can but we have to make space for the chaos of life and spiritual ontologies outside of mainstream monotheistic religions.”
As our conversation comes to an end, Róisín tells me about Kali, a Hindu deity of chaos and transformation, as an example of the inherent messiness and depth of human beings. “I think that we are all archetypes. We are all a complex ecosystem and webs of information and dissonance and complexity. Understanding our failures and foibles, and all the things that make us really particular, will be helpful in the future and in the creation of a society that holds and makes space for the dimensionality that is human. That, to me, is where we need to go.”
Fariha Róisín recommends:
Punks by John Keene
Witches, Witch-hunting and Women by Silvia Federici
Self Defense by Elsa Dorlin
Calcutta by Amit Chaudhari
Who is Wellness For? is available in-stores and online.
What a great read! Thank you Jess and Fariha!