| Infos sur la journée organisée à la BiBliOlivier: https://miladyrenoir.org/2026/07/02/ateliers-pre-textes-sous-titres-a-la-bibliolivier-le-dimanche-20-decembre-de-10h-a-18h-troubler-lambiance-arpentage-et-atelier-decriture/ Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Get a No Out so that Others can follow!Sara Ahmed Sep 17 READ IN APP  No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining is out in paperback today! I am so glad to be launching the paperback at Pages of Hackney with Janine Francois, whose complaint activism I have learnt so much from.I am so glad to have the book in paperback. Cheaper. Lighter. More accessible.I wrote the book because people kept telling me how much it helped to hear other people’s stories of complaint. It can be how you come to know, to feel in your bones, you are not alone, you are not the problem. Sometimes taking up the most impractical task, the one they tell you will end your career, perhaps even your hopes for happiness, can be how you find your people, those who get it, who’ve been there, in that difficult place. The book does not offer a forward-thrusting story of resilience, of the overcoming of difficulty, even by collectives; nor does it make light of the violence, the breathtaking cruelty of hostile environments that have taken too much from too many, the how-can-it-be-so warping of ideas of freedom or safety into justifications for causing yet more harm to others.In fact, if you complain -in the expansive sense of expressing your refusal to accept a situation – that violence comes even closer.When I say the words in the title no is not a lonely utterance I think of how we learn; we find each other in our effort to find a way through the violence.Not all no’s are noteworthy. A no can be polite, an answer to a question, yes or no.We know more about no, the more trouble it causes to say it.When you have trouble with no, you end up on a journey.One that does not begin with no.Sometimes we have to work to reach a point when you can say no even to yourself.No, this is not ok. No, I do not accept this.I will always remember a moment in one of my interviews. Andrea is explaining why it took her so long to recognise that the professor on her course was acting abusively. Why she wavered. Doubting herself. Worrying she was seeing things. She told me about the moment when it became clear that what he was doing was wrong. Violence has to get in before a no comes out. When Andrea spoke of her no coming out, her no came into the interview. The sound of it. The feel of it. What it meant. And when she said no, she said it again; she said it four times, each time louder than the time before, “I was like, no, no, no, no, things are wrong not just in terms of gender, things are desperately wrong with the way he is teaching full stop.”When a no gets out, it might seem a lonely little no. But it might bring others with it, the not-fully-suppressed nos that you could not quite say before.A delayed no can still participate in the building of a momentum.I hear here a killjoy maxim: get a no out so that others can follow!By “others” we can think of other nos. By “others” we can think of other people who in hearing a no might be encouraged to express their own.Andrea said no because she did not want what happened to her to happen to others.No can be what you have to do to stop the same things from happening.It is hard to do that work on your own. We don’t just need to say it more. We need more to say it.“No means no,” is an old feminist slogan that we write on the walls because when women say no, refusing to give our consent, we are not always heard as meaning it.  No means no, we say no again; we have to be stressful, to give stress to our meaning.“No means No. Not convince me. Free Palestine.”A companionship of nos.When no has to be bold, what you have to insist on, the boldness does not come from within. It tells you something about the world, the need to be louder if some information is to get out.I had a conversation with Laura about the complaints she’d made about racism. The word that got under her skin, she said, was the word brave. She explained, “Whenever I do a talk on institutional racism in my work so many people come up to me and say you are so brave. And my response it I don’t think its bravery it is something I have to do, you have to do; it is not bravery, it has to come out.” Laura added, “I never see myself that way. Just regular.”Using the very language of institutional racism is a way of saying no to institutions. It takes work for racism to “come out,” because of how institutions obscure racism.If the point is to get a no out, bravery puts that no back in.Where it does less, yes.The very perception that no-sayers are brave might be how some people hide behind a yes. As if you can’t say no and be “just regular.”And, if no-sayers turns their nos into stories of heroism, they bring their nos back to themselves, which is another way of hiding behind a yes.Some nos are much bolder than they should have to be.You should not have to be bold to say no to genocide. To say free Palestine.When the artist Macklemore took to the stage as a support act for Ed Sheeran he said, “One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour, and day two words that are very near and dear to my heart. Free Palestine. I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank.”A no said louder, just to be clear, so it can be heard by the people whose freedom you are fighting for. The point of saying no is who can hear you.When Macklemore was removed as a support act on Ed Sheeran’s tour, and it is no secret who had a hand in that removal (within organisations, hands are mostly more secretive, in the shadows), it was striking how hard he worked to stop the no being made about him. The point, he stressed, was the Palestian people who are still being murdered every day, who are fighting for their freedom.He set no free by saying it’s not about me.Macklemore quoted a brother who told him of an Arabic proverb,لا شكر على واجبLa shukra ala wajebThere is no thanks for a duty.A duty: the self becomes a conduit not a stopping place.Oh, the hope in how all the support acts have since pulled out, reminding us of what can be achieved when refusals are shared!Oh, the hope in seeing how many people see it, the violence of silence, the complicity of neutrality, a complicity that declares itself not to be so, denying or “both siding” genocide!Oh, the hope of seeing how many people see that the world cannot be free until Palestine is free; that there is only side to freedom, to justice!The global gaslighting is failing, but the genocide goes on.And so must we.When the person who speaks of genocide is the problem, genocide is not treated as a problem, as if making that person go away, makes the problem go away.That’s an old killjoy truth: those who expose a problem pose a problem.The no-sayer becomes the problem; all eyes on them. Not on what they object to.And so, when you say no to the system, the system stops it from being heard.In his brilliant book Perfect Victims, Mohammed El Kurd writes about how many nos gets redirected, “But how many hours have you wasted defending against ad hominem attacks (No, our men are gentle fathers!) or assuaging the paranoias of strawman arguments (No, “from the river to the sea” is not a secret call to genocide!) or navigating slippery slopes (No, a free Palestine will not lead to a second Holocaust!) or pausing for red herrings (No, there are no tunnels under the hospital!) or appealing to authority (Even the Israeli scholars agree that it is a genocide!) or debunking equivocations (No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!).”Nos can be buried by the weight of what Palestinians have to deny.To affirm their right to freedom.So manys nos buried under the weight of too much discourse.To say no to an institution – not just in but to- is to feel that weight.If this point seems to obvious to say, the obvious needs to be said:To have power over people is to have the means to make it costly for them to say no.That’s why we likely need to say no more, the more it is made costly.Institutional fatalism is not just an idea that institutions can only take the same form (“institutions will be institutions!). It is how some people acquire power by being willing not to say no, becoming conduits for the smooth transmission of messages that always come from somewhere else and someone else.As if it’s out of their hands.It is not out of their hands.We have to force their hand. Or force the hand out.There are behind us many who said no refusing to accept the lies of institutional fatalism. In Common Sense and its Others, a book that is now in production (I am thinking of it as a sequel to Queer Phenomenology), I describe how the projection of negativity onto the outsiders is one method of convincing people they cannot do much else about anything else, the economic justices that give so much to so few. Being unconvinced is a step on a journey to freedom. Step by step, we learn that change is made hard because it is possible. If it is impractical to complain about the capitalist system (let alone within it), or unjust laws that designate certain populations as lesser and lower, or abuse and harassment that remain, despite being against the law, normalised in so many institutions, we work to make it less impractical for others to complain.We need to make the actions intended to change a culture less impractical until they are no longer necessary.That my complaining companions are travelling with me into the new work is not surprising. The companionship forged from common complaints is a lifelong companionship. Well, that’s a weary hope. If it is sometimes hard to hold on to, it’s one to hold on to.A no passed on, like a baton.Remember, keep it up, in the air.When it feels as if you are not getting anywhere in your fight for justice or for room to live your life or do your work, remember this: they tried to make us smaller, but they failed. Remember also: they tried to keep us apart, but they failed.And so, we end up here, sharing our work the best we can, even in these compromised spaces and places, with so much more work to do. So much more to say no to.In solidarity with everyone complaining for a more just world,Sara xxThanks for reading feministkilljoys! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Pledge your support feministkilljoys is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell feministkilljoys that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won’t be charged unless they enable payments. Pledge your support  Share  Like Comment Restack © 2026 feministkilljoys 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 |
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