The Weight of Debt, The Art of Words

Creative Writing Exercises to Help You Write Your Debt Story

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

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My name is Maddy, and I’m the creative media strategist for the Debt Collective. Although my background is as an artist whose mediums primarily deal with words and performance, writing hasn’t always come easy to me. There’s no shortage of catastrophes going on in the world. How does one speak truth to power, let alone amplify an issue above all the noise? Well, I love to start with memory.

One of my fondest memories of my father comes from when we went to see a movie together when I was about fifteen. Does anybody else’s parents talk during movies? Well, to my embarrassment, my dad didn’t just talk during the film — he literally yelled at the screen.

The movie we were watching was Life and Debt, a documentary about austerity measures imposed by the IMF and World Bank on Jamaica. Jamaica is where my dad was born and spent most of his life. Between his bombaclots and throwing popcorn at the screen, I realized something: unjust debt enraged him. Before that moment, I thought about debt in terms of numbers. But watching my dad react to the film, I began to understand that debt is more than math. It’s a psychological exchange between borrower and creditor.

After my father passed away when I was sixteen, I began traveling to Jamaica often and eventually obtained dual citizenship. During those visits, I saw the consequences of Jamaica’s national debt crisis etched across my family members’ faces. I heard about the sacrifices they made crossing borders for better wages. And I kept asking myself: why? Why did the descendants of people who survived the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade — whose unpaid labor built the British Empire — owe billions to their former colonizers? The question didn’t stop with Jamaica. I began to see similar moral-financial hypocrisies in the history of Haiti and in the experiences of Black Americans in the United States. Who owed whom?

You see, too often we dismiss righteous anger and miss how it can help reveal imbalances of power. Anger is rarely a solo emotion. It carries with it companions like grief, confusion, heartache, and the unruly desire to get free. It is a discerning emotion. When we use anger precisely — without letting it destroy us or others — it can become a kind of compass.

For debtors and our allies, anger is often the beginning of political clarity.

Now, I have a question for you. Have you ever tried to tell your debt story but weren’t sure where to start?

Try these next exercises. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised where they take you.

Writing About Unjust Debt

One great place to begin is with sentence starters. You’ll see examples below each sentence starter, but you can choose to focus on any and all debt types. The trick is to let the words flow freely, to be compassionate instead of critical, to trust the dream-side of your mind. You can edit later. Right now, you want to get words on the page.

Finish these lines without judgement. Think of this exercise as a brainstorm:

• I took out a loan because…

Example: I love to learn. Plus, everyone told me knowledge is power, and that higher education was my ticket to better wages and a meaningful career.

• Being in debt makes me feel (use specific emotions)…

Constrained, anxious, angry, and heartbroken. My student debt shapes my life choices. It has caused me to delay marriage, starting a family, and saving for retirement. I feel scammed.

• Being in debt impacts my community because…

All my friends — mostly women-identified — owe student debt and many of us suffer in silence. We’re told we should have been “more financially savvy,” as if financial literacy could solve a systemic crisis.

• My debt politicized me because…

I realized college should never be a debt sentence. College was free in California in the 1950s, and it can be free again. Education shouldn’t be reduced to a “return on investment.”

Take a look at what you’ve written. Did anything surprise you? Do you notice any patterns? What about moments from the past that might pack meaning. What are you more curious about?

Now, Go Deeper

Figurative language is powerful because it pulls the reader in, taking them to a place where logic and statistics can’t take them. Use poetry and metaphor to describe debt in detail. First, read the poem below to help inspire you.

What lines stick out to you? How did the poet, Tim Seibles, incorporate sensory detail, repetition and more? How does his poem both travel to different places while also describing his body and the bodies of other characters?

Photo by Daniela Krautsack on Unsplash

The Debt

By Tim Seibles

I have the blood of the conquerors in my veins

and the blood of the enslaved and the slaughtered,

so where shall I rest with this

mixed river of blood painting my heart—what city

wants me, which woman will touch my neck?

Nigeria is sleeping in the angles of my skull

and maybe two small French towns—

one in each leg—are also sleeping, and of course,

the first people in this land, with their long

black, black hair, seven of them

are napping along my ribs

             And with all these people

adrift my body, I am asleep as well—

dreaming their good wishes, their strained whispers,

sleepwalking all over America.

But it’s alright, in my country,

everyone is asleep: at the wheel, on the job, even

with their fingers on the trigger, asleep

with their distant continents, the glittering

silence of their shattered histories

and the long pull of a thousand

thousand moons inside them.

             They don’t remember

how once we swam inside our mothers, that

once our mothers floated inside their mothers,

just as their mothers once waited inside those

before them and before that it was the same—

all the way back to the first mother

in Africa,

     that slim, short, quick-tempered woman

whose children crawled all over the planet,

then got big and started

hurting each other—with the conquerors

in their bright armor, trying to finish everything.

I know where the blame falls. I know

I could twist my brown skin, my mixed nations,

my kinky hair into a fist. I know.  I know.

But I hear a stranger music in my bones—

the windy shimmer of long fields, a quiet of birds

stunned by dusk, the singular tree of all blood

rising, the future awake singing from these wounds

and what is the lesson of history, if not

that we owe each other more bread, more

friendship, fewer lies,

less cruelty.

The Art of Words

Now, either build upon your previous sentence starters or go in a completely new direction with these, more poetic, prompts. Try to write for at least ten minutes straight. You might even want to set a timer.

New sentence starters inspired by The Debt poem:

• The true lesson of history is…

• We owe each other…

Here are some other options:

• Describe the “cost of living.”

  Capitalism is cruel. What does the cost of living feel like in your body and your environment? Use sensory details — sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell.

• Create five metaphors or similes for the debt you owe.
  Debt is my sister’s anchor. She’s floating but unmoved, just above the waves.
  Debt is as haunting as a ghost in my house of flesh and bone.

How did that feel? Did you write anything interesting?

Share in the comments. And remember: you are not a loan.

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