Suleika Jaouad shares wisdom, meditations on creativity
Suleika Jaouad, New York Times best-selling author of the 2024 First-Year Experience summer reading selection “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” shared poignant lessons of in-betweenness, resilience, creativity, and connection with Skidmore’s Class of 2028 during a “full-circle” visit to the College.
In conversation with panelists Ben Bogin, associate professor of Asian studies; Barbara Black, professor of English and Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters; and Kieron Dwayne Sargeant, assistant professor of dance, Jaouad explored the themes of her inspiring story, which chronicles her time in the kingdom of the sick and the kingdom of the well and ponders what it means to begin again. Her campus visit was part of Skidmore’s First-Year Experience (FYE) program, which welcomes students to campus with creative, cross-disciplinary learning opportunities, from mentorship to engaging Scribner Seminars.
Jaouad is also the author of the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column and video
series “Life, Interrupted” and founded her weekly newsletter, “The Isolation Journals,”
at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to help people transform life’s interruptions
into creative grist and community. A vocal advocate for prison and healthcare reform,
she has served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel and was the recipient of
the inaugural Inspire Award from NMDP (formerly Be the Match) for her work to expand
and diversify the national bone marrow registry.
Along with her husband, musician Jon Batiste, Jaouad is a subject of the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary “American Symphony,” a portrait of the two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows and a meditation on art, love, and the creative process. Jaouad and Batiste met while Batiste was a student of Skidmore Jazz Institute.
To kick off the Sept. 16 event in Arthur Zankel Music Center’s Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Professor Bogin highlighted the first-year class’s own state of in-betweenness as they begin their college experience.
“In my own research on Tibetan Buddhism, I study a tradition called the bardo tradition that identifies betweenness as a space where there can be challenges from the uncertainty, anxieties, and fears that come from the unknown, but also as a time of tremendous opportunity,” he said in inviting Jaouad’s reflections.
“I remember so distinctly the in-betweenness of being a new freshman back in 2010 and the sense of excitement and also the terror that I felt on that first day when I arrived on campus,” said Jaouad, who took a nontraditional path into higher education, leaving high school at age 16 to attend a New York City conservatory on a music scholarship while also taking some classes at Skidmore, where her father, Hédi Jaouad, was a professor of French. “But I think that transition to college perfectly encapsulates in a way the peaks and valleys of the bardo, of being in between, where some of you might be feeling your own sense of nerves as you’re starting classes, figuring out who your friends are, and thinking about what it is you might want to do.”
In her experience, she said, the in-between moments have granted an invitation to re-examine her values, reshuffle her priorities, and take a leap and try something new.
I urge you, in this own moment of in-betweenness in your life, to try something unexpected. To follow something that you’re curious about but that doesn’t quite fit into your plan. To take a class that might not be one you intended to. And to give yourself the freedom to really be present within that transition, and to pay attention.”
Dance Professor Sargeant, the son of a Nigerian-American father and a Trinidadian mother, asked Jaouad, a Tunisian-Swiss-American, about in-betweenness as it relates to cultural identity.
As the holder of three passports, Jaouad recalled having a fractured sense of identity from an early age.
“Because I couldn’t really fit in as much as I may have wanted to and tried, I think that sense of being a misfit became something that I had no choice to own and came to see much later as its own kind of superpower. Because when you're constantly carrying that sense of in-betweenness, it invokes the need for creativity. And so little by little I found my fellow misfits, who shared that experience of not quite knowing where you can feel fully understood and making a home within the wilderness of that in-between.”
First-year students filled Arthur Zankel Music Center to hear from Suleika Jaouad, author of the 2024 FYE summer reading selection “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted."
Creativity within the cataclysmic was also a prominent theme of the reading, noted English Professor Black, relaying to Jaouad, “Our students were struck that ‘Between Two Kingdoms’ was as much about a battle for your creative life as it was for your physical life.”
Upon receiving her leukemia diagnosis at age 22, all expectations – both self-imposed and external – disappeared, Jaouad said. Her singular goal was to survive, to make it through the day, to make it through the next biopsy and to the next round of chemo. She began writing her blog, “Life, Interrupted,” which became the award-winning New York Times column, from her hospital bed.
“I was writing it because I felt deeply alone,” she recalled. “The subject did not make sense. It didn’t seem like it would be interesting to other people. Frankly, I thought it might be off-putting and even depressing to potential readers. But to quote the great Toni Morrison, ‘If there's a book you want to read and it doesn't exist yet, then you must write it.’”
Though extreme in its particulars, Jaouad insisted that her story is not unique. All of our lives will at some point be interrupted. All of our lives were collectively interrupted in 2020, she pointed out.
“It’s not a matter of if or when something is going to bring you to the floor, but when you are on that floor, look around. Grab whatever’s within reach – be it a pen or a paintbrush, or the urge to dance – and make something that wasn’t there before. Make it in your own words, on your own terms.”
Turn the thing that plagues you into something endlessly interesting and curiosity-provoking, because ultimately, that to me is the gift of creativity. There are a lot of things that are beyond our control. And yet when you engage in that process of tapping your intuition, of sculpting something, you become the handler of your fears, not the handled.”
After reading a passage from “Between Two Kingdoms,” Jaouad took questions directly from the Class of 2028, leading her to speak on her creative process, forgiveness, connection, resilience, and self-discovery.
Of her memoir-writing process, Jaouad described having to alleviate some of the pressure by “tricking her brain” and drafting informally in a journal. The process also required her to write numerous drafts for herself, to “excavate the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth.”
This book was a hard book for me to write. I had a Post-It note above my desk that said, ‘If you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself.’”
Writing the book, she reflected, was another exercise in facing and overcoming her fears.
“I’m going to go on record and say I’m a deeply fearful person. I have so many fears and doubts about my ability to contend with those fears. And every time I’ve done the thing I’m afraid of, even if that means baby-stepping my way toward it, it’s always been a process of profound discovery.”
“Between Two Kingdoms” was first and foremost about relationships, she said – to self, to friends and loved ones, to the body – and the ways in which those relationships are challenged.
“For me, that first seed of forgiveness lies in acknowledging our very human fallibility. That we don’t always do the right thing sometimes. We don’t do it because we can’t. Sometimes we don’t do it because we don't know how. But we’re all capable of showing up for each other in extraordinary ways."
Having been the recipient of so much love and support in times of illness, I’ve been astounded by the ways in which we can show up for each other, and it’s often not the perfectly worded email. It’s not some grand, dramatic gesture. It’s the simple act of showing up of saying, ‘I don't know what to say, but I’m here and I love you.’ It’s doing perhaps the thing you already knew how to do and offering that in service.”
It's the little acts of showing up that forge deep bonds, create long-term community, and bolster our sense of resilience when we might otherwise be feeling alone, she said.
Now in its 20th year, the FYE summer reading program is one way in which Skidmore students start learning together as a community even before setting foot on campus, said FYE Director and Professor of Mathematics Rachel Roe-Dale in introducing the event at Arthur Zankel Music Center. “It helps establish that intellectual engagement and education is not confined to the classroom or to academic calendars. Rather, learning is ongoing and transcends campus boundaries.”
The event was made possible through funding from Skidmore’s Office of Special Programs and the McCormack Artist-Scholar Residency Fund.
