Extract: No Is Not a Lonely Utterance by Sara Ahmed
Read an extract from Sara Ahmed's forthcoming book, No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining – on the various ways in which we can engage in complaint, refusal, and resistance with our dignity – including whistle-blowing, song, language, protest, and more.
To release the data of complaint, that missing data, you can conduct your own research, interviewing complainers, buffering them with anonymity. I discussed previously how such reporting does not bypass the risk of defamation but transfers it from complainers to researchers and publishers. That risk can be transferred back again; because even when stories of complaint are anonymized, complainers can be recognized. There are some stories I have not shared in this book, which I have removed from it, to avoid the transfer of this risk. To unbury some nos is still to leave others buried. Maybe they will come out at another time, in another text.
To release the data of a complaint, you might become a whistle-blower. Even when there are laws protecting whistle-blowers, to blow the whistle is to risk so much and to act in a way that contradicts what you have been taught about professionalism (to be professional is to become an institutional closet, willing to keep the institution’s secrets). Whistle-blowers thus have long complaint biographies, of being blocked from getting the information to the institution about what is going on within it.
Take, for example, Susan Fowler’s memoir about her experience of blowing the whistle about sexual harassment at Uber. Susan published a blog post titled, ‘Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber’. It was an account of sexual harassment that was also a ‘meticulously, cautiously, deliberately crafted portrait of the company,’ written with ‘excruciating care, every sentence backed up by documentation’. Susan describes how the story was picked up by the media; she began to receive thousands of stories from other people who had had similar experiences at Uber. She says, ‘I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that so many powerful people inside the company had known about how terrible Uber’s culture was, yet none of them had taken their stories to the public until I had.’
Lifting the lid can loosen other people’s tongues.
Communication might matter more precisely because of how complaints can leave us feeling rather isolated. Viola, you might remember, used the word 'faded' to describe how she felt when she left — her colleagues did not speak to her out of politeness. Viola read her resignation letter out loud to her dean. But she wanted to do more. She wanted to put her resignation letter on the wall: ‘I just thought, I am not the kind of person who would put my resignation letter on the wall, but I just wonder what it is that made me feel that I am not that kind of person because inside I am that kind of person, I just couldn’t quite get it out.’
Perhaps we have to help each other get our complaints out. Viola came to a lecture in which I shared words from her testimony. The words she gave to me I gave back to her. ‘It was only after the lecture,’ she wrote, ‘that I realised how undignified these complaint processes are, and how, yes, my dignity was stripped. In my dealings with the union, they had advised me at the time that my dignity at work had been breached, but that word did little then for me, as it felt like another procedural piece of jargon — but when I felt a swell of pride at the lecture, indeed, when I felt a sense of dignity about it all, I realised that this must have been somewhat lost.’ Words can be emptied of meaning, becoming polish, how we are removed from our own stories. When we share our complaints with each other, giving them to each other, they acquire a different meaning and value.
We hear each other scratching away, ‘little birds’. To hear with a feminist ear is to hear that sound as labour. Complaint activism can involve changing the addressee: we address each other. Sometimes we do so literally, by writing each other letters or postcards. I think of actions undertaken by Time’s Up Ateneo (TUA), which was a coalition of students, faculty, and alumni from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, that began with an on-campus protest against sexual violence and impunity on 15 October, 2019. Three years later, TUA honoured the protesters by offering flowers at the protest site and distributing postcards to the Ateneo community and inviting them to write to survivors of sexual abuse. These postcards were published on social media and read out loud. One, from Jasmine, begins with: ‘One day you will celebrate a victory. It won’t be exactly what you want it to be, but it will be enough. It will fill your life with meaning.’
Words sent out come back to us. And when they do, they mean something different. They sound different. Sound matters because of how it travels. Remember Serena’s story, how in the middle of a meeting, when she received another harassing email, she let out a sound, eehhhhh, that alerted other people to what was going on. Serena’s queer complaint was a non-intentional, guttural sound. It was the sound of frustration.
Frustration is a feminist record.
However involuntary, that sound was an action. If bodies are key to how complaints become protest, so too is sound. The eehhhhh tells us that she could not take it anymore. Nor would she. The sound of complaint can be sharp and piercing. Or dull and low. Zehay Liva Bocretsion wrote to me about how she turned her complaints about racism into songs, which she sent to cultural institutions such as museums. She explained, ‘I got the idea because in Danish klagesang (complaint song) carries both the meaning of elegies, the retelling of a tragedy, and a more sarcastic meaning, like someone who is just wailing on about all the things not going their way.’ Zehay sings her complaints with a ‘monotonousness’ which ‘becomes a point in itself’, as a way ‘to express the matter-of-fact ways in which a lot of people try to disregard the complaints I have had’.
We can turn the sound of frustration, of not getting through, into another way of expressing our complaints. I referred previously to the art project ‘The Complaining Body’ on the emotional labour of workplace complaints. In a follow-up piece, ‘The Uncomplaining Body’, Ivor Southwood describes, with reference to his own experiences cleaning offices, how small sounds can be refusals:
'Even the slightest involuntary gesture can communicate insolence; a sigh or a way of walking can be read as insubordination. Although barely registering in the organization’s consciousness, these bodily complaints, by their very inarticulacy, are in a way more radical than a list of demands; in their negations, they do not propose alternatives or improvements; they reject the work-relation itself. They are forms of refusal where refusal is impossible.'
An uncomplaining body is a body that complains in another way, a complaint that is barely a sound and yet is one. Resistance is not always loud. It can be barely audible. A friend wanted to become a citizen to avoid the exhausting bureaucracy of living and working in the UK without being one. She had to pledge allegiance to ‘the Queen and her heirs’. She did not want to make any such pledge. She had no such allegiance. And so, she pledged allegiance to ‘the Queen and her hairs’. That barely audible difference, delivered solemnly, was on its way to being shared as a humorous story, a queer subversion.
Many of the smallest complaints, the slightest gestures, the tiniest of deviations, are not audible to every ear. They might need to be inaudible to be sayable. They can still be extended. Collective protests are sonic extensions of the bare sounds of refusal; the snap of a slogan; the repetition of a chant on a demo. I hear the sharp sound of the direct-action group Sisters Uncut setting off 1,000 rape alarms to mark the anniversary of the Clapham Common Vigil for Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer in 2021. The police had beaten and arrested many women on the day, coming down because of who came out. I hear the rallying cry of feminists in Argentina, saying Ni una menos (Not one less), a ‘collective scream against machista violence’, words that spread to other places, other collectives, repeated, echoed, amplified, passing between bodies, travelling across time and also space: transgenerational; transnational.
We might hear anger in that no, that refusal, but also a lament, the sound of grief. Chicana-Palestinian feminist Sarah Ihmoud writes of speaking through grief. She shares exchanges she has with Mona Ameen, a young Palestinian scholar in Gaza. She asks Mona if she has any messages for women and feminists around the world. Mona answers, ‘Keep posting and posting and posting about us . . . keep us in your prayers.’ Ihmoud invites us to break out of ‘this ةصغ/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind’.
What makes it difficult to speak is why we need to do so.
When people use the expression ‘shouting into the wind’, they usually mean it is pointless to make a noise against the flow of air. But when the situation is urgent, there is always a point. We might need to shout no now, so we can hear each other over what Ihmoud calls ‘the noise of complacency’. Time can be like the wind: a no is blown about. We don’t always know when it will be heard. Or how.
Remember: we are louder not just when we are heard together but when we hear together. Sound moves. Sound builds.
No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining by Sara Ahmed is published by Allen Lane on 18 September, 2025. You can preorder via our Bookshop.org page now.
