Nervous Laughter with Hamja Ahsan, author of Shy Radicals - Part 1

Oriana interviews Hamja Ahsan, leader of the introvert revolution. They discuss their mutual affliction, shyness. Or is it in fact their superpower? Oriana admits to feeling very guilty for having tried to convert shy people ever since Hamja made her painfully aware of how much of a sell-out she's been to the extrovert supremacy.  Will he convince her to wholly embrace her shyness or, better yet, to take pride in it? Listen and find out!

Dr Oriana Fox is an artist with a PhD in self-disclosure. She puts her expertise to work as the host of the talk show performance piece The O Show . Be sure to check out the "Killer Conversations" episode, which is discussed on this podcast. 

Hamja Ahsan is an artist, activist and the author of Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert (2017) published by Bookworks. Among his many accolades, Ahsan won the Grand Prize at the 2019 Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts. The film Shy Radicals, produced by Black Dog Films, about Ahsan's life and work, was released in 2020. For information about Ahsan's past political campaigning for his brother Talha visit: freetalha.org.

This podcast contains short quotations from Susie Scott's book Shyness and Society: The Illusion of Competence (2007), Palgrave Macmilan.

Credits:

• Hosted, edited and produced by Oriana Fox
• Recorded with the assistance of Chris Halliwell at City & Guilds of London Art School, Kennington
• Post-production mixing by Stacey Harvey
• Themesong written and performed by Paulette Humanbeing
• Special thanks to Katie Beeson, Janak Patel, Joshua Sofaer, Anna Colwill, Althea Greenan, Ceren Özpınar, Felicity Allen, Hilary Robinson, Helena Reckitt and others I'm forgetting and or not sure they need/want thanking, who patiently listened to and commented on my first edit!

Would you like to see your name in the above credits list? In a couple of short steps you can make that happen by supporting this podcast via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/orianafox

Visit www.theoshow.live for regular updates or follow us on Instagram.

Transcript

Oriana Fox:  Hello, this is Oriana Fox. Thank you for tuning in to the very first episode of Multiple Os, the spin-off podcast for my talk show The O Show. The O Show is a live performance piece that mines the conventions of daytime TV talk shows for all that they’re worth. It features artists and other experts who have little to no difficulty ’spilling the beans’ about their lives and opinions especially when they define norms and conventions. So if you’re interested in candid confessions non-conformity creativity and mental health you come to the right place!

[Theme music]

OF: Hi there, welcome to the first full-length episode of Multiple Os. I’m your host Oriana and I’m an artist with a PhD in self-disclosure this week I’m talking with the artist activist and author Hamja Ahsan. Hamja is an advocate for introvert rights who adamantly refuses to recover from his shyness. But, he likes to go around talking about it in front of large audiences. In his book Shy Radicals, which documents the political demands of shy, quiet and autistic spectrum peoples, he describes talk show formats as having “paved the way toward extrovert supremacist imperialist domination.” This is perhaps why his appearance on the 2018 O Show episode entitled You’re only as sick as your secrets was ’laugh out loud’ funny. I’m so pleased to have him back in the hot seat today to talk about all things shy. Hello! Sorry. Thank you so much for being on my podcast.

Hamja Ahsan : Hello.

OF: This is where we chat. Thank you for being on the show.

HA: I was immediately thinking about the difference between TV show formats and radio and podcasts, I guess and listening, just as you’re speaking, I was thinking of a time in which Jerry Springer was on Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 and he came across as such as like sensitive, deep, introspective soul and that was just the effect of like Radio 4. 

OF: So, is that what you were feeling about me? That I’m a deep introspective soul? No. I must explain that in preparation for today I asked Hamja to watch an episode of the O Show from 2017, that is, before he and I had even met. The episode which addresses shyness and social anxiety is called ’Killer Conversations’ and it’s just been released on the worldwide broadcasting service youtube. You can watch The O Show on ’Killer Conversations’ at your leisure on TheOrianaFox youtube channel or OrianaFox.com. Perhaps I asked Hamja to watch this episode because I’m a glutton for punishment. In other words, I had the feeling that he would find it highly offensive not least because it encourages viewers to overcome rather than take pride in their shyness. I feel very bad about having tried to convert shy people and about buying into the value system of the extrovert supremacy class. My interests lie in what it takes or what it means to fly in the face of societal norms and values and yet I failed to fully question this particular ideal. So thank you Hamja for bringing that to my attention. I’m terrified but of course dying to know what you thought of ’Killer Conversations’. 

HA: I was terrified when I watched it. Actually the first 30 seconds, like if I was in that live audience I would have run away. I felt really… 

OF: Yeah, you can see that in looks on people’s faces sometimes, like when the when you see the audience…

HA: I wouldn’t have been able to survive though, like it was so in your face. The dance sequence at the start, I was just so like yeah, I just felt really shy. And then you did the mashed potato with everyone. I was like, if I had been there, I would have just frozen up. I think there’s a certain level like intolerance to this sort of, I don’t know, in your face liberalism. I think the reason is that I just have this solemn melancholic, so if I sat there with my head in my hands or staring into space, I mean, what would I? You know often in like private view, jolity situations, like I just want to talk about terrorism or suicide and they’re quite banal topics for me. But obviously that’s gonna disturb or make me unwelcome, or it wasn’t hospitable like, that’s how I felt. I felt really out of place. It’s, I can’t describe it, it’s like… I think that’s a certain level of it is is predicated on like culture difference, so a lot of my family and the people I grew up with are like quite pious Muslims. I don’t know where they’d quite fit in. There’s a certain pattern I’ve seen in migration in art world areas, so it’s more classically seen in like Tower Hamlets. So you’ll see this sort of like Muslim population from a sort of former colony of Britain, so the Bangladeshi community surround this art world in East London and obviously those two worlds don’t often intersect. Or, but that yes, sorry I’m going on a meandering thing.

OF : It’s fine.

HA:  I noticed those patterns in other areas of the world. 

OF: So it was like a culture shock kind of thing?

HA: Culture shock is not quite…

OF:  Like reaffirming this kind of boundary between… 

HA: Yeah

OF: Or the proximity but yet the distance. 

HA:  Yeah, but I don’t, but like obviously my parents wouldn’t enjoy it. But would your parents enjoy it?

OF: Yeah, my mom was there.

HA: Oh. 

OF: Yeah, she was there, and my dad likes my work too. Yeah, she was there, I think she had a good time.

HA: But I don’t think, you know, like as I say in the book, I don’t think these like static racial demographics are adequate descriptions. Like I relate to things like William Blake; Van Gogh’s letters; certain indie music I like, I like the band Low. Do you know them? They’re really like, they’re this trio of Mormons and they play this real like genre music which is sometimes called slow core. It’s like really slow minimal, sincere, like I don’t know.  

OF: Yeah, well I mean this kind of difference in taste came up when you were on the show because I picked a song and you found it repulsive. 

HA: But then on the other hand, like at the moment there’s a film being made of my book and it’s in production…

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: The film about Hamja has since been released. I have information about it in the show notes, if you’re curious.

[high-pitched ding sound]

HA: The film’s quite a serious portrayal of my depressive episodes...

OF: You said you wish it was directed by John Waters. And I love John Waters, so there’s some overlap in our taste.

HA: Yeah, but I think it’s John Waters has this degree of like knowingness and like like the particular irony operates in his work and self-awareness and self-consciousness. The the film of my books it’s quite a solemn serious portrait of my depressive episodes and my campaigning for my brother when he was in prison. It doesn’t have the provocation and irony of the book. 

OF: Do you see the parody in my work or you just experience it as alien?

HA: I feel really bad. It’s weird because I I’m doing this interview now and you’re like in your everyday clothes. And even when I met you today across the road and you’re wearing the same shades of like grey and dark green that I wear. 

OF: I find it always so weird how much people buy into the character, like they believe this character. I was at an event once where I introduced my work and I just put the wig on I didn’t do makeup I just had the wig and I had my young my  first born baby like a few weeks old and then when they finally saw the baby with me afterward without the wig someone was like, “I’d like to speak to the mother of the child.” Like as if it wasn’t me.

HA: Yeah. 

OF: So people really buy into the character. 

HA: Every time, though, it gets me every time I see you like outside of your makeup and shoulder pads and peroxide, it does like, yeah, it’s still like a shock, or like like some…

OF: Yeah.

HA:  Is that you?

OF:  Yeah, so I feel like, oh isn’t the parody of my work obvious? But I guess it’s got this weird, I don’t know maybe it’s hard for other people to read? Whereas, I think the parody’s so obvious. Or I think it’s so obvious that I’m not very good at it, like yeah, you know. My shyness comes across in certain places, like for example, when I ask for the volunteers.

HA:  Yeah.

OF: I don’t ask what their names are. That’s awkward. I mean that’s, most people would be like immediately ask what their name is and I don’t do that because I’m so nervous and I’m not the type of person who would think about it. Like I don’t have these you know, I don’t know these social niceties, like, I’m not very good at them. And then and I also forget to thank people it’s been awful. Like one time this person came on and spoke about this very intense project that was like extremely difficult for him to do and I just like and I was so thrilled to have him on the show. I really wanted him to be there, it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate any of it. It was just that I completely was like so nervous that I just didn’t even thank him when the interview was over and I just moved on to the next person. It was so awkward, then I had to go back and be like, “oh my god, I realised I didn’t thank you.” You know, it’s just so, yeah so I think people watching the show see that. Obviously when you watch the video you don’t see it because I’ve cut I cut a lot of those things out.

HA: Yeah.

OF:  Although I started keeping more of the mess-ups in because my camera crew always tells me they like it when I mess up.

HA: [laughs] 

OF:  And I never really know what they mean by that. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand watching it and seeing myself mess up. But that’s my, that’s my, as I talk about on the show in the opening monologue, I feel like that is my main insecurity is like being thought of as stupid because obviously on some level I believe that I’m stupid. 

HA: Right.

 OF: So I fear this being confirmed in other people’s perception of me so I will not like admit to not knowing things. And yeah, it’s really bad because…

HA: I think of my shyness more as a structure of feeling. It’s like some people in that room want to do the mashed potato, but I just don’t feel it in my limbs and body and that’s my zone of feeling and sensing.

OF:  I do, I feel that way a lot too! Like in high school or you know like at a dance or in a club like I definitely would have that same yeah feeling.

HA:  I wouldn’t even go in the first place. 

OF: Yeah, I probably wouldn’t go either, but I mean on the occasions when I do, it would take a lot to get me on the dance floor.

HA:  Yeah.

OF: And I love dancing so like I can dance in my work because I’ve set it up. I’ve picked the song I want to dance to and I’ve picked the moves I’m going to be doing.

HA:  Yeah.

OF: Whereas if it’s just like improvisational and I’m not choosing the music, I will sometimes just be like, even if I like the song, I might not get up. It’s just sometimes that kind of thing sets in and I…

HA:  I mean that particular form of on stage dancing as well it’s just not something I even, I just associate with like dread. The only type of dancing I like is like careful, high culture choreography. But like yeah it’s almost like a dread of this. I don’t know to what extent it’s like the type of parents I have and like… Like even, I don’t know which collective category to take. Like because  for example I’m from Bengal. Bengali cinema is very particular. It’s very like it’s almost like Iranian cinema. It’s very sort of slow meditative, like the film I watched with my mum when I was a child,  which was part of Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy and nothing happens in the film, you know. You watch like this rural area and you watch the like fireflies in the pond and like the train looking like this sort of Japanese ink painting. And it’s all just slow meditative film when nothing happens and the poetics of that and that’s a huge contrast to like Bollywood like…

OF: Yeah.

HA: But Bollywood cinema would like eat up like that Calcutta art film cinema, which is the best cinema in the world by the way.

OF: [laughs]

HA: And then Punjabi is like you know Bangra dancing and like Holi drums and these peacock feather type hats? That’s a hyper extrovert supremacist form and that tends to dominate like British Asian like definitions. I don’t know and there’s obviously… And then I remember when my parents and I went to, I won, I got shortlisted for this award the Liberty Human Rights award and it was a big award ceremony in Queen Elizabeth Hall and a lot of celebrities were there like Benedict Cumberbatch and Doreen Lawrence. It was almost like a ballroom atmosphere and my parents just sat at the side of this place. And that’s what I would have done and I don’t know how much that’s typical of, I don’t know like practicing Muslims from Bengal, like, not partaking. That just wasn’t anything I’d grown up with or remotely had, you know. They never had like alcohol in the house and that’s normal and banal and no one in my family drinks alcohol. So that in and of itself changes the entire, like, almost soberness. Even like weddings are quite sober, like even in comparison to like even other Muslim diaspora groups. So, I was briefly engaged to like a Jordanian Arab and like their weddings are quite, they like throw knives and I do this like wiggly dancing. So, but I don’t know how much to invoke that cultural difference because as I said I like this sensitive white man type music is something I strongly identified with. And the first things I identified with while developing individual identity and personality, like, I mean, it’s done on a globalised scale with like Kurt Cobain’s particular sensibility. And a lot of people gravitating towards that, I guess, the generation before that would be like The Cure or Echo and The Bunny Men. Could you imagine like Robert Smith on The O Show on ’Killer Conversations’, or a bunch of Cure fans just in the crowd and you told them to do the mashed potato?

OF: Yeah, that would be absurd, wouldn’t it? [laughs]

HA: I gravitate towards these things, like, I mean I don’t have you know like doom metal and it’s just totally like negative it’s talking about like death and it’s just really slow sludge like. I don’t know, that’s the zone of mind I’m in. 

OF: It would be quite funny to be like.. [laughs]

HA: I just wonder how much it’s embedded in like nationalities and like, you know, like when you go ’USA, USA, USA’, that’s obviously extrovert supremacist, right? 

OF: Yeah. No, it’s…

HA: …and it’s obviously embedded in… But, I wondered, like, because I totally didn’t relate to that show as a shy person and then my shy friend Helen, who’s more like a, she’d describe herself as a computer nerd and like me, she’s a bit overweight and clumsy and finds it difficult to make friends. We both watched it together and we were just like, this is for shy people? We were like, oh but then I thought about American politics generally. So I thought about, you know, the democrats are considered on the left in America, but by British or Scandinavian they’re like the right.

OF: Super centrist or the right, yeah.

HA: So it’s like the entire thing is shifted. So I thought maybe your conception of shy is measured from the same thing. So it’s like…

OF:  [laughs] Right, no I, actually…

HA: Maybe it’s like a Hillary Clinton conception of shyness…

OF: Yeah, yeah that’s so funny because yeah reading this book by sociologist Susie Scott Shyness and Society…

HA: I consider Susie Scott is like the Edward Said of shy people. 

OF: [laughs] Yeah. I did feel like, oh I’m not nearly as shy as some of these, as these people, you know. I feel like I’m on the you know… 

HA: To me you just passed that thing when you just said, “I enjoy dancing.” It’s like, it’s just we live in such a normative extrovert world that it’s taken as like, words like ’party’ and ’dancing’ are immediately associated with happiness, but whereas for people like me, it’s associated with, like, terror. 

OF: [laughs] Yeah, so I’m maybe, on the spectrum of shyness, maybe my shyness is…

HA: I don’t know if it is a spectrum. But like the whole atmosphere of that show felt oppressive, like a form of coercion. It felt like the office Christmas party.

OF: Oh god. Yeah. Well, to be fair that’s why I wanted to introduce it and explain what the show was really originally conceived to be about, was about conversation starters.

HA:  Yeah.

OF: That was the main and it was like Phoebe Davies’ project with the nails, I thought, I liked the idea of like people sitting intimately doing each other’s nails having a conversation. And then that being a visible cue…

HA: That, that’s really interesting, because if you compare that to like men going for a pint, it’s like a different…

OF: Yeah, so then having this visible cue that’s kind of strange like a face on your fingers and that being something that prompts a conversation…

HA: With eyes.

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: To clarify, I’m speaking here about Phoebe Davies’ project called Influences, which she made from 2013 to 2015.

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: …I love that idea. Unfortunately, she didn’t want to talk about that project because it’s, like maybe you’ll one day become that way about Shy Radicals? Like, oh I’ve I’ve talked about it so much…

HA: I do worry it might be like my “Creep” by Radiohead. Like Radiohead don’t play “Creep” because everyone wants them to play “Creep”.

OF: I know.

HA:  They’re like, oh it’s like my curse, like yeah…

OF: Yeah, I don’t know, if only I was so lucky to have something that was such a success people asked me to talk about it so much I’d get sick of talking…

HA: I don’t. Yeah. I just because that is all I do yeah.

OF: So it’s a question. Maybe in like a few years time you’ll be like, “I never want to speak about that.” But anyway, she was like that about that particular project. She didn’t want to talk about it and it was very awkward.

HA: I’m really interested in it, I’m going to ask her about it. 

OF: [laughs] Please do.

HA: I’ve spoken with Phoebe before actually, at this event…

OF: But she actually is quite shy. 

HA: Is she?

OF: Didn’t she seem so to you? To me seemed shy. 

HA: Honestly, no not at all I watched that whole thing. Again, I watched the whole thing and I’ve seen her speak before, thinking this is not my family or the like people I’ve grown up with…

OF: Maybe compared to Brian and Marcia she seemed shy to me.

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: I’m speaking about the artists Brian Lobel and Marcia Farquhar who were both interviewed on ’Killer Conversations’.

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: But yeah, well Marcia claims that she’s shy.

HA:  I mean she people say I’m not shy, so like…

OF: Yeah, I know, so there you go. So there’s that, the paradox of shy vocality and that Susie Scott talks about, like yeah there are certain contexts in which shy people can…

HA: I just I’ve dealt with that question, like firstly, I have a very straight answer to that which is that there’s only two reasons I speak in public which is one, I have to read lots of books about it, and two, I have to cried in my bedroom. 

OF: cried in your bedroom.

HA: Right, that’s the only condition. But then I just think there’s different types of public speech. So I mean Greta Thunberg, who I identify with strongly, she has selective mutism and didn’t find it easy to make friends. I think there’s particular types of public speech like the MTV presenter or like the Oprah or like the the weatherman or the air hostess, they’re like the types of public speech. Even contemporary politics as it is, there are particular type of synthetic public speech. If something’s spoken from like the position of like pure sincerity from like a cave, a head that’s been in the cave for a long time and then that comes out into light, I don’t regard that as extrovert speech or expert supremacy speech. And I’ve been tracing that in history, so I’m very interested in this figure from Irish anti-colonial history called Patrick Pearse who, I’ve just been to Dublin, and this huge celebration around the Easter Rising. So that was the first major anti-colonial revolt in 1916, which was a failed revolt, but inspired everyone from like Marcus Garvey, William Du Bois, people in Bengal and like around the world. It was like this spark of revolt and, but he was, he’s retrospectively diagnosed as an autistic spectrum. He was extremely awkward, extremely shy, but did these revolutionary militant speeches which could get right at the heart of like the most evil power in the world, which was like 90 per cent of the world being subjected to European colonialism. And even now his speeches are like incendiary, you know, they’re insightful. They could probably be taken as like, they’ll probably be prosecuted under terrorism laws or something like that. And they’re even more blood stirring than Malcolm X speeches, but he did all that as a shy, quiet introvert person. And then he set up this school in Dublin and it was like a school for sensitive boys. So it was both a form of revolutionary anti-colonial education and like a place where you could be sensitive. And I have this figure in my book called the sensitive g, which is like a cross between like the hardened like gangster rapper who you don’t f*ck with and like the  sensitive poetic introvert person. And I almost thought there was a certain embodiment of that within Irish Republicanism in that like the IRA were the most ruthless terror force in the world and yet they had this tradition of like poetry. And like this song, my favourite song of all time, is a song written in the H-block called ’Song for Marcella’, which is about Bobby Sands and it just sounds like a 1990s sensitive white man, Seattle angst song. I beg anyone to like google or look it on youtube. But it’s just, it’s and it’s so beautiful and moving in that way.

OF: Maybe someone could do a cover, some kind of merging of those two? 

HA: Yeah. Sorry, I don’t know if I’ve gone completely off tangent. But I don’t know, I think of shyness as a certain type of identification, like, they’re my type of people…

OF:  Yeah.

HA: …and that type you know, a lot of it’s like what I’m supposed to identify with, that you know, like my tribe politically is like the British left and the people behind Jeremy Corbyn and like the grassroots movements that support that. But I very strongly identify with T. S. Eliot and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which is embodiment of this sort of shy sensibility. You know, I view T. S. Eliot as embodiment of this deep shy sensibility. And then there’s a huge following for the Japanese quasi-fascist writer Yukio Mishima and that’s this very particular, it’s almost like Yukio Mishima is like Edward Scissorhands. Or like the way I came across Yukio Mishima was through Richey James Edwards of The Manic Street Preachers, like this sort of angsty sensitive, white man 1990s music. But just think about clinical identifications of shyness, like a lot of people get referred to to clinics, clinical psychologists and psychiatry because they’re too shy, they’re too quiet, they’re not speaking. No one gets referred to like a clinical psychologist because…

OF: …they’re too loud. 

HA: Yeah, they speak too much.

OF: I do, I do try to… yeah.

HA: It’s immediately connected with pathologisation and deviance and not functioning normally. 

OF: I’m sure somebody who was really extremely vocal might, I don’t know, to the point where they’re, I don’t know, anti-socially vocal, I think that might be [laughs] I think it’s possible…

HA: I don’t know, employment though favours though, that type of…

OF:  Yeah.

HA: Yeah, I felt really aggrieved that I would apply for the visitor services jobs in The Royal Festival Hall and I’d be rejected year after year after year. And I’ve been going to that place as a quiet person in my early teens like for decades. Snd then so I failed some notion of customer service and it’s like they’re saying I can’t serve people like myself. Like, I can’t serve people who like the quiet of of like the Poetry Library there or like the gallery setting. It’s like that’s the type of person I wanted to meet when I went there and there’s like they discriminate against me because I have my shy sensibility. 

OF: Do they literally say that to you, you’re too quiet? I mean, what is the, how did it happen?

HA: There’s a lot, like in an interview setting you have to, there’s a lot of tests that you do, I mean when I went to, I mean, when I was in The National Portrait Gallery, you had to sit in a circle and then pretend you were on the moon and then work out how you’d get off the moon together. And there were people at the side with clipboards assessing your assertiveness skills and body posture. And then you were made to watch Devil Wears Prada and do a test around it, so that’s that’s literally, like. The thing is, when I did that test for that employment in Royal Festival Hall, I’d done that exact same test before at the that the job centre. So it’s actually this very specific type of, it’s called ‘soft skills’, right. I actually once went for a job at Shrek World, there was like a new theme park around Shrek.

OF: Yeah. 

HA: Yeah and weirdly I got to the highest level of like, I got to the final stage. It was like three stages and you had to like you know like pretend you were like..

OF: An ogre?

HA: ..the donkey, but and then I just thought as a child, like, it’s a fallacy in children’s TV like children’s TV presenters and clowns they were, like, so like lairy and in your face. As a child, I’d want to sit in the corner and like draw with my crayons or plasticine. I wanted to be left alone and like I didn’t want this. It’s just, why is that a thing that’s normative or whatever?

OF: When I was a a temp like in my early 20s I definitely lost jobs because I wasn’t chatty enough. Yeah, that’s when I was told that I had hide my light under a bushel.

HA:  I’ve never heard this, by the way.

OF:  It was by the temp agency women, they’re like, you hide your light under a bushel. I was like, I’m American, I don’t know what that means. 

HA: When I watched that in the show and you said it’s like this is a very typical British thing and I was like, I’ve never heard that. 

OF: Really, alright, so it’s like, they’re like because basically my job was like going around giving people coffee and I just wasn’t, you know, I just wasn’t the type to be really chatty.

HA: I would be in a coffee shop on my own and I don’t want anyone to chat to me. I want to sit there and read a good book.

OF:  It wasn’t a coffee shop, it was in an office, like, where I had to go around. It was like a nothing job where you just go around and offer people coffee as they’re working, or you answer the phone, or I don’t even know what the job was, like I did it for a day and I can’t even barely remember it. But I just remember afterwards like they discontinued me and I was told I hide my light under…

HA: I also don’t buy into the like simple metaphor of shyness or something sort of hidden or under the table. I think of shyness as a form of extra sensory perception. You’re having this ultra feeling or ultra sensitivity; it’s like having a radar that senses things in the room that other people don’t. There’s times when I haven’t trusted my shyness and regretted it thoroughly. So, for example, I made friends with a New Yorker when I spoke at New York University and we were both fans of Patti Smith, so she was gonna take me around Greenwich Village and the place Patti Smith originally had coffee and she told me Cafe Dante was the place she drinks coffee. And so she had appointments and she had to go off, so I was there on my own in Greenwich Village and I walked past Cafe Dante like ten times and I didn’t actually go in because I was too shy. And then I broke and distrusted my shyness telling me that my shyness is foolishness and some false fear or whatever, and then I went and Cafe Dante was this new, gentrified place where firstly, it was odd that I walked in there in a hoodie, like not affluent, not white. And then I walked in there and I looked at the menu and they’re selling like negroni’s for like 20 dollars and it wasn’t the same bohemian place that Patti Smith hung out in, it was bought out, corporatised and it was so, like so… And then I ended up like, just to save face, I ended up spending like 20 dollars on this tiny little cocktail that I didn’t really want. I didn’t trust my shyness and therefore I ended up being ripped off, shortchanged, conned and going into this empty shell of a place. And there’s so many other instances like that I think like when I’m shy in a room, I’m sensing there’s some people in there who are like bastards. And it’s like the person who just shakes hands and smiles at everyone maybe doesn’t sense it in the same way. I just think there’s certain senses you develop through  shutting off other parts of yourself, you know like the blind man who has acute sense of hearing and like the trained dog who has like an acute sense of smell. I feel like something akin to that like just another form of like, you could discipline that sensibility to like empower you or like read things more deeply.

OF: Shy spies?

HA: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, maybe it could be like…

OF: Yeah. I remember actually once in college like hanging out with somebody who was very popular and like talking to them about their social circle and and he was like he’s like, “you just sit back and watch everyone,” like, “you know everything like, you just sit back and observe don’t you?” Like I knew everything about this clique that I wasn’t, that I was just on the margin of. I can’t even remember the details of what I knew about them, but that really stuck with me. Him saying that, like. “you just sit back and watch”.

HA: Yeah.

OF: But anyway, so okay, so it’s, even though it advertises itself, my show for shy people, the opening line of like the blurb is, “are you shy?” You’ll hate this. 

HA: And then when they pick up those signs saying, you’re not worthless, it was just like pop psychology and like you know that new hashtag ‘toxic positivity’?

OF: Yes.

HA: It was like that, sorry. Yeah.

OF: No. that’s fine.

HA: Yeah, I just I feel like, I feel shy in the room because sometimes I feel melancholic or aggrieved or solemn and then people just get really aggressively, why don’t you smile? Like just really like…

OF: I hate that. I used to get that a lot walking in the street. Yeah, people, men would say, “Cheer up love, it might never happen”, or whatever…

HA: That is funny because…

OF: … and I would get like enraged, I was just like, I might even like start screaming at them, curse, give them the finger. It’s like so out of proportion to what they’re actually saying to me, but I would just feel, because I wasn’t unhappy, like, the look on my face was just I’m not smiling at strange men. I don’t I don’t go around smiling at strange men, you know, like I just don’t do that.

HA: I remember seeing that in a museum in New York, because it’s associated with the women’s movement against Trump and stuff like that slogan. What’s my? But then I felt, I don’t know what’s the word, I’m not going to say disappointed because I’m not, because I strongly identified with it myself. One of my paradigmatic ways of like, a lot of behaviours, such as like man- spreading, like when your like legs are open on public transport and you take a lot of space or  talking over people. Men talking about people saying ’you don’t smile’, I feel like they’re embodiments of extrovert supremacy and embodiments of toxic positivity and so I also strongly identify and I also take like, I mean, I don’t know what position that puts me in? It’s like I strongly identify with the figure of Lisa Simpson in the Simpsons like she’s my hero. There’s no one in  public media I identify more strongly with. I think, like to me the way I describe Greta Thunberg is she’s the best person since Lisa Simpson in the public space, but then Lisa Simpson’s also claimed by women exclusive feminists. I don’t know. It’s the same way like Sylvia Plath, like, I identify with Sylvia Plath’s depressive moments. But, I don’t know, am I’m allowed to?

OF: I don’t think I ever really identified with Lisa Simpson I think because I don’t think of myself as smart, I can’t identify with someone so smart.  

HA: But do you identify with Homer?

OF: No, I don’t think I’m that dumb!

HA: I do, I think like in like the situation of depression, everyone becomes Homer in a depressed state.

OF: Right, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, but oh, so so toxic positivity, I don’t really know that much about that? I don’t do hashtag things. But, yeah, so i’ll just explain. I had a therapist who was a Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapist (REBT) and she told me about this thing called shame attacking, which is a therapeutic practice within REBT. And I realised that it’s something I’ve been doing already in my work and then my whole thesis was about shame attacking, this therapeutic practice, and comparing and contrasting it to ‘speaking truth to power’ by, you know, Foucault’s ideas about parrhesia, risky truth-telling. It’s written about in this, in Susie Scott’s book where she says, she’s talking about this person Garrison Keller. Anyway it’s written in like a shy pride text. “He presents a tongue-in-cheek manifesto of shy rights, on the one hand arguing that shy people have been discriminated against misunderstood and oppressed while on the other hand recognising the irony that this group’s reluctance to speak up for themselves makes it difficult for others to understand their needs.” So like for me, so my research was all about like people defying shame and speaking up about these things that other people would find shameful and that that necessitate, and that produces confidence. You may not feel confident and it may be very risky revealing these truths and that may be very challenging, but that produces a kind of confidence in you and therefore that’s, you know, anti-shy, in a way. It’s like, so that’s why I’m advocating for people to you know overcome their shyness because it’s a means of expressing…Maybe, but in doing that, neglected to kind of question the normative value of speaking up or confidence. Yeah? Does that make any sense? 

HA: Sure, but I mean you have particular forums in mind when we think of like speaking up. So I often use the format of the the long table which is the form in experimental theatre developed by Lois Weaver, where anyone can turn up at the table and sometimes people draw on the table. Or they, yeah and the way that’s been re-adopted by the neurodiversity movement. 

HA: Yeah, I’ve actually done an O Show at goldsmiths with the ableism discussion group. We did an O Show about, it was about imposter syndrome and like academia-phobia, it was called. It was about like kind of fear of living up to this kind of ideal of the perfect student or whatever. And it was started like an O Show where I interviewed one student, one former student and Windy Dryden and then it opened up to the long table like there was two parts and the second part was the long table, anyway go on…

HA: But the long table opens up, well, communication, yeah in a way that other forms of assembly and address and like public…

OF:  You say that, but I’ve been at long tables and still felt just as shy and not willing to participate. Like, I remember, actually it was at that same event with Phoebe Davies where she spoke about her project. It was like a feminist event at Live Art Development Agency, she spoke and a couple, maybe one other person spoke and then it opened into a long table. And I remember like really really wanting to speak and contribute and having something to say and then going up and sitting at the table and then just leaving… 

HA: I mean there’s variations…

OF: …without saying anything and without even writing anything, like still feeling so shy, and unable to. And I had to leave because I had a young baby at home and I had to get back. And I couldn’t really fully participate, anyway.

HA: So maybe you just completely negated and invalidated my point.

OF: Sorry. [laughs]

HA: I found there’s lots of people who would just like just draw elaborate mazes and patterns and puzzles and doodles on the table and it would open up...

OF: Actually, I didn’t mean to, because actually that event was prior to me actually employing it in my own work at Goldsmiths and finding that it was really good at getting students to to speak up and participate.

HA: I was just thinking of taking it out of the form of experimental theatre and putting it into like, either like it would just be standard regular communication, like going to the pub or having a coffee. Imagine that, like how would that change societies? And then I was thinking of parliaments and debate chambers and select committees and these institutions of democracy, how would it? What would it open up? Like what would it? 

I think, shyness is something that’s been with me since like childhood, like it’s a childhood like trait. When I was a child I had really long hair because I was too shy to get a haircut and they should call me Mowgli, you know, like Mowgli from The Jungle Book. So I’d get obviously bullied  and then I looked back at some of my earlier photographs as a nine and ten year old child with this long hair with a lot of affection and thought was quite a cute child. But the hairdresser at the time, it was there was a certain oppressive dynamic in it. So like my my parents would go to this,  they were like white men in their 50s and they’d always have like a page-three nude girly calendar in the background. And they’d put on country music radio and and they’ll just talk about Muslims and Asians as if we weren’t there, in a very derogatory manner. And my dad would just smile it away. He wouldn’t really and I was like, no one that’s ready to go into that place, like it thought of me as like second class or… And then in the 90s, like the later generation of Muslims set up their own hairdressers, which are funny again because I know they were done without irony. So you’d have these Pakistani men and they’d have like pictures of like The Backstreet Boys, these boy bands. It’s weird. And in the 1990s, before 9-11, there was very open talk about things like the the Mujahideen and the Bosnian war the Muslims in Bosnia were being ethnically cleansed and there were people from there who went to like fight for them and would openly recruit. And like they talk about the Afghan Taliban government and they’ll talk about the the war in Chechnya where Russia was again ethnically cleansing their population aspiring to independence, whilst cutting your hair. So there were all these taboo subjects. I go there and I still go there also because it’s really cheap; it’s like five pounds, it’s like ridiculously cheap. And then they have that immigrant ethic where they probably live on top of the shop and like have a sort of family business or whatever. And then I felt this sense of total comfort in there and there’s also this anti-aesthetic thing, like it wasn’t representative of any aesthetic choice, almost. I didn’t feel as shy, but then I did start to feel shy there when I wasn’t, because they have their own ideals of like men and like what I should be doing so…

OF: Yeah.

HA: …I wasn’t, I was entering into my mid mid-30s and I wasn’t married or like what, I don’t know, whatever, like in a stabilised nuclear family thing. So, then like that would make me feel shy. There were points also when after my first major depressive episode, I just wasn’t in education and I wasn’t in employment and I didn’t really do very much. So, the small talk thing of asking me what I do and stuff just entering this field of like dread. I don’t know if me not going for a haircut totally can be accepted as like the disabling form of shyness?

OF: It’s funny because my partner has the same issue, he hates getting his hair cut. He cuts his own hair, actually…

HA: Really?

OF: Yeah, and he cuts my hair and cuts everybody’s hair because we all hate going to the [laughs] We all have that in common. But he’s really much more extroverted than I am. He’s really, he’s really good with people, like he knows all the neighbours and…

HA:  It’s just, there’s all these problems,

OF: It’s weird, it’s really weird [laughs]

AH: Oh no, it’s just you said that “really good with people” straight away, like it’s just, sometimes shyness can be really good with people.

OF:  Yeah.

HA: To me, like there’s a phrase, again I saw it on a facebook meme, it’s called like, about being fluent in silence, like…

[silence. Oriana giggles.]

HA: Sometimes silence can be a compliment. 

OF: Yeah. 

KA: Because you’re saying I feel comfortable with you. 

OF: That’s true 

[high-pitched ding sound]

OF: That seems like an opportune moment to take a break from my discussion with Hamja Ahsan, which continues in episode 2 of Multiple Os… 

[Music “Next week on Multiple Os]

OF: I wanted to add now before I sign off that I had the realisation that Hamja was not in fact the first person to bring the value of shyness to my attention. It came up in a discussion with the curator Marianne Mulvey who I spoke with on resonance FM the day before The O Show on ‘Killer Conversations’ was filmed. In that discussion, Marianne highlighted the fact that in our society shyness is most often framed as a problem to be overcome and that the Killer Conversations episode of my show was going to perpetuate that very message by in effect aiming to kill off shyness. It’s not just a matter of my having a weak memory, but rather it’s a testimony to how pervasive such messages from mainstream self-help culture are that I have struggled to see the benefits of shyness. Again, I’m really grateful to Hamja for reinforcing this point and helping me to see shyness in a new, more positive light. If you’re still doubting its worth, all the more reason to listen to episode 2 of Multiple Os where I’ll continue to talk about shyness with Hamja Ahsan. Or,  better yes, go out and read Hamja’s book Shy Radicals published by Bookworks. See the episode notes for more details. Bye now. 

[Theme music]