In The Arena with... Hawwa Alam (Hawwa, Etc)

Why did your parents decide to home-educate you and your siblings and how do you think this has shaped who you are today?

One of the reasons my mum always emphasises is their desire to raise us with a strong sense of self and identity. They wanted us to find our own path in life and work out what we enjoyed doing so they gave us as much freedom and opportunity to explore different avenues/hobbies as possible and they also wanted us to be proud of who we were, as people in general, but also as muslims. They didn’t want us to feel like we needed to compromise our faith or our values because of peer pressure or societal expectations and discrimination, so they tried to make sure we had a solid grounding for growth and development without feeling insecure or likely to be swayed/influenced by what people may say about us.

“They didn’t want us to feel like we needed to compromise our faith or our values because of peer pressure or societal expectations and discrimination.”

I think that has definitely shaped who I am today, but I didn’t realise until I went to school (college) for the first time, and met so many people who had never had that environment to grow up in and hence were very easily influenced by peer pressure, or did not have much confidence in who they were because they’d grown up not really having that space to work it out. Seeing how other people struggled with their identity made me realise how confident I was with mine because of the privileges I’d been afforded. Now, if I ever have to deal with racism or discrimination or any kind of negativity as a result of my identity, the fact that I have this strong sense of self helps me deal with it. I laugh sometimes, because the point of all that negativity is usually to make someone feel weak or small and question themselves – but it just makes me angry and want to be more obviously myself. Instead of making me want to back down and make my identity less explicit, it makes me more determined to shout about it.

Where did your love for photography come from?

I can’t remember exactly but my dad always used to take photos and videos of us whenever we went on holiday as kids so I’m sure that influenced my interest. I remember asking for a camera of my own and being given one for Eid when I was younger and taking black and white photos of everyone thinking I was massively creative. I love capturing colour and light and shadow more than anything. Often it’s not really a ‘subject’ that I’m taking a photo of but more a feeling or an atmosphere that I’m trying to capture, so photography for me was the perfect mix of appreciating those things whilst being creative. I saved up to buy a second-hand DSLR when I was 18 (which I actually still use, the only thing I’ve upgraded since are my lenses), discovered the photography side of Instagram and have been falling ever since.

If I had to explain it, looking at photos – of nature, skies, oceans, clouds, colours, light and shadow – makes my heart squeeze inside my chest because it’s so beautiful. It honestly makes me feel a type of way that I don’t think art ever has, because what I’m looking at in the image is a direct snapshot of real life, whereas art is a personal interpretation. I’m always in awe when I look at photographs – like: that really exists? That world you hate living in is beautiful too Hawwa, stop being so miserable all the time!

In 2015 you were featured by Instagram on their main feed, which must have been a massive signal boost for your art! What is your relationship with the platform like now?

That day still makes me laugh actually. I got my first phone when I was 16 and started college, and it was so rubbish I couldn’t download more than one app on it, so I deleted everything else because I wanted to use Instagram. The quality of the camera was also awful, but it was the only one I had so I just made do (and to be honest, on my tiny phone it didn’t seem like the images were that pixelated – when I look back now though I just want to cry…).

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I say it makes me laugh because it was so cool to me, that someone at Instagram had seen one of those terrible quality images and thought I was deserving of being highlighted on their own blog and Instagram account. But when they shared my work I started getting a massive influx of followers and like I said, I had a terrible phone, so it crashed. I literally had to switch it off and leave it for an entire day and then try to switch it back on again in the evening when things had calmed down.

“It makes people – especially artists – feel awful when they aren’t churning out work every day, which is unrealistic and unfair.”

My relationship with Instagram now is very much a love-hate situation. It’s taken me 7 years to build any sort of engagement and meet new people and involve myself in different communities and gain opportunities as a result of all those things, but I absolutely hate all the new updates, how everything is just turning into a money-making scheme, and how absolutely no one knows how to deal with the algorithm and how it affects smaller accounts so negatively.

To me, it’s really become an app that just glorifies productivity to a problematic level i.e. everyone needs to post Reels and IGTVs and standard posts and guides and stories and add shop products and be active every day and sell your soul to the algorithm if you even want to get a chance of reaching an audience and I hate that. Because it makes people – especially artists – feel awful when they aren’t churning out work every day, which is unrealistic and unfair. I’ll still stay on the platform because I’ve invested so much effort in it, but I personally barely ever spend time on it anymore.

Why did you choose to study History at university over a creative subject?

I enjoy academia as well as being creative, and I always knew I wanted to be able to do both, or at least have the choice to pursue both. I enjoy being creative too much to ever make it my full-time role – because I knew I’d start hating it and I also knew what types of art I already enjoyed and I was happy to stick with those and teach myself anything new if I wanted to. History was the perfect balance because it involved things I love doing, like reading and writing, but it was a more academic avenue so didn’t turn me away from any of the things I already enjoyed. Although saying that, I haven’t read any new books since I graduated – mainly because my brain needs a break!

Tell us about your art book ‘Rice’ and the motivation behind it?

‘RICE’ was something my friends and I have been wanting to do since we met in first year. We all loved university, but being some of the only people of colour on the entire course also meant we had a lot of conversations surrounding identity, and education and discrimination during our time there. We dealt with a lot of situations and experiences during our degree that made us frustrated, or sparked debates/discussions between us about things we wish could change, or aspects of the education system that we thought were problematic. ‘RICE’ translates all those conversations and frustrations into a creative form, using written pieces, poems, art and memes to convey all the topics that we’ve discussed since we met in first semester.

© Hawwa Alam - Spread from the art book ‘Rice’

What challenges did you face throughout the process of making and selling ‘Rice’?

Oh gosh. Well besides the 10,000 rounds of edits due to seeing new typos every day which resulted in me wanting to delete InDesign, throw my laptop out of the window and never create anything ever again, I think the main one was pricing/costs. A lot of people who aren’t involved in the creative industry don’t realise how much time and effort and money goes into creating, and something I find quite ironic is that even those in the creative industry are sort of conditioned by society’s expectations to also not truly appreciate what a ‘fair’ price for work is.

“A lot of people who aren’t involved in the creative industry don’t realise how much time and effort and money goes into creating.”

At the start of the project, I asked people on my Instagram Story what they thought a reasonable price would be for the art book, based on expenses (printing, shipping, packaging, extra items such as prints and stickers), time and the actual finished product, and the suggested costs ranged from £2-40. Most of the creatives that replied answered on the lower end, and it made me really sad to think that so many artists/designers/photographers are doing themselves a disservice by undervaluing their work or not charging a substantial amount.

If I had charged £10 and below, I would have literally lost money in the process. We didn’t create this with the aim of making a massive profit, we are donating it to an education charity (The Black Curriculum), but regardless, I would have had to use my own savings to even produce the art book in the first place. So, I guess the hardest part was working out a price that meant people were actually willing to buy the art book – because the whole point was to get people to read it and think about the things we discussed! – whilst also being able to actually afford to produce it in the first place.

Alongside your own freelance work, you’re also a digital producer at Manchester Museum and a comms officer for Doctors Worldwide. Why have you chosen to pursue multiple career paths? And do you see yourself ever streamlining these?

To be honest that’s just me not being able to stay in one place doing the same thing for very long. I like involving myself in lots of different things because so many different pathways pique my interest. I always joke that it’s my parents’ fault for home-educating me – because I was given the time and space to actually love learning and appreciate all the subjects I was taught (besides physics and chemistry, please never try to make me study those….), I ended up not knowing what I wanted to do in life, because I wanted to try everything. But also as I always like to say, my ideal job since the age of 5 has always been retirement…I have simply never had a ‘dream career’ because I would like to not work. Goodbye capitalism hello, living on the moon?

“My ideal job since the age of 5 has always been retirement…I have simply never had a ‘dream career’.”

My two current roles are fairly similar in terms of actual tasks, one is just more design heavy and on a project basis because it’s a flexible/temporary role whereas the other is a permanent and more full-time role so it involves everything from social media management to lovely analytic and comms strategy/reporting. And yes, I can definitely see myself trying to streamline the two and find something that melds all my interests together, but again, I want to try everything.

I want to somehow get into book publishing one day, when I was younger I wanted to try journalism, I’m currently working in digital production/marketing, I still love writing – at this point I’m just going with the flow, because COVID messed with so many original plans anyway!

How did you secure your current jobs? And did graduating during a pandemic pose any additional challenges?

I started working part-time for Doctors Worldwide whilst I was still at university actually, because they had a Comms Officer role opening and they needed someone to start as soon as possible because it was a busy season during Ramadan. The Digital Producer role I found on social media in the summer, someone tweeted about it and then a whole bunch of different people on Instagram started sending me the job post saying they thought I should apply because it would be perfect for me, which was lovely. I actually was originally hired by the Museum to work on the UK’s first ever South Asian Heritage Month. It was a role that was only supposed to last until late August/early September 2020, but my manager was able to extend my contract indefinitely/until October 2021 due to all the other internal Museum projects there were to get involved in, which my fellow producers and I are very happy about!

Actually, every single role I had bookmarked for myself to apply for after graduation was cancelled due to COVID. I’d also been so excited to do my photography more seriously and try to book more jobs, but then obviously they were all cancelled too so I’ve not had any photography work for over a year. The jobs I currently have were things I looked for within Manchester as alternatives, so as much as I moan about the working life I’m very grateful that I even have one job, let alone two – because when I first graduated I literally felt like I was just falling off a cliff. That post-graduation depression merged with COVID depression and decided to live rent-free in my head, so I tried to keep myself as busy as possible wherever I could.

You’ve created a strong network through Instagram over the years, including someone you might even consider to be a mentor. How valuable is this person’s advice to you and how would you recommend anyone looking for a mentor, finds one?

I will forever talk about how much @yeahokayali has helped me. Anytime I don’t know what to do with a freelance commission or even if I need any kind of business/advice in general I always ask him. I’m surprised he hasn’t blocked me yet, I’m sure I’m very annoying. It’s always ‘please help I don’t know what to do’ and never ‘hi how are you’ hahahaha (sorry). He’s one of the first people I met through Instagram that actually was open with freelance work and was willing to provide advice to anyone who asked. I found that when I first started talking to people about getting into everything, no one was willing me to be transparent with their prices and it was so hard for me to understand what to do or how to approach situations when I knew absolutely nothing.

Now I’ve been doing it for a little while I’ve become that person that people ask for advice when they’re first starting out, which is wild to me considering I still am just winging it and asking for help when I’m stuck. I try anyway though, (and mainly just regurgitate Ali’s advice to other people) because I know how insanely helpful it is for people. I don’t think anyone benefits from gatekeeping knowledge and advice because especially within the creative industry, we all end up just losing out in the end. We allow other people to be exploited and paid less than their worth which just creates a normalised culture of doing so and then nothing changes.

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s about finding a dedicated ‘mentor,’ I just think it’s important to network/make friends within the industry that you’re in and find a community that’s supportive and understands the challenges that you face. Because then when you do need advice, they’ll be there to help you and vice versa.

What’s the most important lesson you learnt in 2020?

Your worth is not tied to your productivity.

I feel like this is (still) a lesson I’m trying to learn, because I’ve always been the kind of person that needs to do things and accomplish things and not stay still for long, and as a person (not even just a ‘creative’) that’s active on social media, seeing everyone else achieve their goals and be ‘successful’ (whatever your idea of success is) chips away at you whether you realise or not; especially if you’ve just graduated and your entire focus is no longer on studying and getting good grades. I feel like I always have an itch and I’m always restless because I feel like I’m not doing enough. But as my friends keep telling me, sometimes doing enough is taking a break. Because that is what you need.

“Your worth is not tied to your productivity.”

And also the very idea of ‘productivity’ is just a capitalist concept anyway. A person’s value should not be tied to how many hours they work each day and overworking to the point of suffering mentally/physically/emotionally shouldn’t be glorified. So I guess I’m trying to get myself to live more. Like, actually live and appreciate my surroundings and the present rather than moving through time and space with my head down, so focused on being ‘productive’ that I miss out on the beauty around me along the way.

(Which brings me to my final point: go and watch Soul everyone).

Recommended reading

Postcolonial Banter by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (Poetry Collection)

I Refuse to Condemn: Resisting Racism in Times of National Security by Asim Qureshi (Anthology)

Peanuts/Charlie Brown Collections by Charles M. Schulz

Recommended listening

Ted Talks

On Purpose Podcast with Jay Shetty

Breaking Binaries Podcast with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Recommended follow

@fusemanchester / @thebrownhijabi / @furrylittlepeach

Follow Hawwa