Rifling Through a Mysterious Box
A Feature Review of
Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life
Sofia Samatar
Paperback: SoftSkull, 2024
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Reviewed by Liz Harmer
Is it still possible, now, to have an accidental experience, an experience uncurated, unintended, untouched by the algorithms? Like Sofia Samatar and the friend she addresses throughout Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life, I too have desired an annihilation of the self, the I. I too have desired an ecstasy, “a writing method … less like writing and more like living” (3), and “the transmission of a feeling, something breathable and contagious, a vast, raw, yet untethered emotion” (56). Samatar writes of the wish to be influenced, to copy, to collect: “I wished to be under the influence. Porousness, I wrote. Vulnerability to literature. What Roland Barthes called ‘the essential sting’” (95).
The desire for an unmediated experience has been with me for decades, since I was a devout Christian having a mental breakdown and then an undergraduate with a crush on her TA, a TA who told us that most experiences are mediated by all the many scripts and narratives and frames we live with, and that moments unmediated the way I so desired would be fleeting. It was, I knew, a search for God. Since then I have endeavored to travel without researching places beforehand, and to look at artworks without reading placards—always seeking the sort of experience Samatar references in this book, of electricity along the nerve-endings, the shock of recognition one hopes art will deliver.
But it is difficult for a person who has made her life in books to come across a work totally unaware of what it is beforehand. I chose Opacities from a list of books to review partly because of its gorgeous cover and partly because of its title, which put me in mind of a craft lecture I had recently listened to by the novelist Torrey Peters called “Strategic Opacity.” The subtitle led me to believe that this would be a book on craft or craft-adjacent things, a genre I have read assiduously and of which I have several shelves full of examples. But then I opened Opacities the way one opens a mysterious box and began to rifle through the contents.
This was, incidentally, the ideal way to read Samatar’s latest work of nonfiction. In the opening passage, she writes, “I wrote to you of a writing method: Take notes on index cards and put them in a shoebox. When the box is full, the book is done” (3). She writes of the things that get in the way of a writing that might feel more like living, such as the “blood-soaked arena of the publishing world” and its speaking gigs and hype and explanations and demands, especially for a woman of color, of representation,
“the cultural practice I called the diversity side-show, the question of whether confession was a source of radical power or a trap that sewed up in one’s own carcass, the question of whether it was in fact shameful to draw attention to one’s race and gender in literary discussions or whether what was really shameful was leaving these things out, and the possibility that the idea of literature as a privileged spiritual ground was romantic, reactionary, dangerous, and dumb” (7).
Opacities is a commonplace book, a collection of aphorisms and ideas and quotes, sentences which push against demands that an author be understood through markers of identity and against demands for psychological transparency, which to me reverberated also with the problem of the trauma plot, where novelists explain characters’ motivations through some trauma lurking in the backstory: “Édouard Glissant,” she writes, “didn’t even want to see straight: ‘Give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.’ It was a recoil from transparency” (11).
My copy of Opacities is filled with underlining. It will not tell you how to extend a metaphor or build a scene, but many writers become exhausted by “technique” at a certain stage of their so-called careers. Many search for a way back to the freedom one feels in making art before one knows it will be seen or even what it is. That naked vulnerability, that mess. That act of love. Can one write without becoming a “writer,” pulled down into that blood-soaked arena? Can one emerge from the blood-soaked arena with their love for literature intact? “Was there,” Samatar asks, “then, a necessary link between community and incompleteness? Was the desire for a never-ending book, which I had thought so personal, even individualistic, related to this need for others?” (25-6)
Opacities, with such elegant sentences and sentiments that you find yourself immediately wanting to return to it, leads you outside itself, since it is, mainly, a book of conversation and of connection. Samatar quotes myriad writers and poets and critics, from Rilke to Fanon to Lispector, and Opacities led me to search out Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene, Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project, and then Samatar’s other collaborations with Kate Zambreno, her friend and the addressee, the “you” in Opacities.
I thought often, while reading, of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which obliquely tells the story of a heartbreak in a text about the color blue. Opacities also tells the story of a friendship, a collaboration, “The letters were what remained when we had largely withdrawn from the public sphere . . . to go on writing to friends, to write intensively to friends, pouring out everything there, the thoughts, the quotations, the cries. It was a way to stay alive as a writer” (16). I also thought of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction, which, even at its most personal, seems to obscure the self. I thought of David Shields’s Reality Hunger, a collection against fiction-writing and woven together through aphorisms and quotes by other writers and thinkers.
Certainly Opacities will offer different things to different readers than the ones it offered me. It will offer me different things the next time I read it. Samatar suggests that her method of writing might be called “the Nightmare Tarot,” but like Tarot it is: a spread with different meanings depending on who is reading the cards and which questions you are asking.

Liz Harmer
Liz Harmer is the author of the novels The Amateurs (2018), finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and Strange Loops (2023). Her award-winning stories, essays, and poems have been published in Hazlitt, The Walrus, Image Journal, the Globe and Mail, the Malahat Review, Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere.
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