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I wanted to write about the reading culture I was seeing: the way it instrumentalized the books of writers of color to do the work that white readers should have always been doing themselves; the way our reading culture pats itself on the back for producing “important” and “relevant” stories that often ultimately reduce communities of color to their most traumatic episodes, thus creating a dynamic in which predominantly white American readers expect books by writers of color to “teach” them specific lessons—about historical trauma, far-flung wars, their own sins—while the work of predominantly
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Writers of color often find themselves doing the second, unspoken and unsalaried job of not just being a professional writer but a Professional Person of Color, in the most performative sense—handy to have on hand for panels or journal issues about race or power or revolution, so the festival or literary journal doesn’t appear totally racist; handy to praise publicly and singularly, so as to draw less attention to the white audience, rapt in the seats too expensive for local readers of color.
it seems to me that in fact many successful people of color in our mainstream media happen to be precisely the sort of people who grew up the only person of color in white towns. It is precisely because they grew up adjacent to whiteness and its social and economic privilege, precisely because they were well versed at an early age on how to adapt to and accommodate whiteness that they could thus use those skills as professional adults,
I can’t say I love this world or living in it if I don’t bother to know it; indeed, be known by it.
The problem is, if we need fiction to teach us empathy, we don’t really have empathy, because empathy is not a one-stop destination; it’s a practice, ongoing, which requires work from us in our daily lives, for our daily lives—not just when we’re confronted with the visibly and legibly Other.
So when the works of authors like Handke, Pinter, Saramago, and Grass are seen and interpreted as dealing with a universally legible and graciously apolitical soulfulness—and resolutely not seen and interpreted as also being the identity-politics-driven work of a specific white milieu—what we’re really offering them is that precious empathy, which white supremacy levies from us every day and never has to name.
When artists bemoan the rise of political correctness in our cultural discourse, what they’re really bemoaning is the rise of this unexpected reader. They’re bemoaning the arrival of someone who does not read them the way they expect—often demand—to be read; often someone who has been framed in their work and in their lives as an object, not as a subject.
I was inured to uncomfortable moments in storytelling, moments that were plainly not written for me, for my comfort, or even for my understanding; that was true of nearly everything I read, so I had to get used to it.
When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader.
And I don’t imagine it’s easy to go your entire life being the expected universal reader, and then to suddenly be named as the specific, contextualized, white middle-class reader. But we can only be each other’s people if we actually do the work of being each other’s people: looking our shared history in the face and really reading it. An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.
The story I’m telling is not just something for you to feel sympathy for, rage against, be educated by: it’s a story about you, too.
Willful misreading is a violence. To warp the history of a place to serve one vision of the past—and therefore, preserve a specific vision of the present and future—is an obscenity, and yet we live in obscenities like this every day.
That people in the past had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong doesn’t alter the fact that they were wrong—it cannot be controversial to ask us to agree that transatlantic slavery was a world-rending evil whose enrichment of the West has corruptively made the world we know today—and to memorialize those actors is to memorialize that wrong.
The decolonial point here is not to give voice to the voiceless, but to recognize the voices that have always been there—to recognize them, and to honor them.
In fact, there is perhaps no description that captures Didion’s work better than to say that it is consummate pick-me writing. Her pitiless, colonially inflected reportage, and the wider misapprehension of Didion’s style as unsentimental (usually dog whistle phrasing for “unfeminine, thank God”) is at the very core of Didion’s cultural popularity and critical approval. When Didion is praised, it’s often in a specific kind of chiaroscuro: she’s not like other women writers.
Didion’s sardonic yet succinctly self-serving vision of democracy encompasses the primal sense of the word—flush with all its history, from ancient Greece to early America: the early iteration of democracy as the noble dream of slaveholders and land thieves. Here, democracy is still just a parlor trick of equality, a half-written story—with a crew of side characters down in the depths, doing the dirty work.
That it was paramount for white settler colonials to believe the lie that the land they were occupying was “a blank page waiting to be inscribed,” that it was this lie that allowed America to tell the story of itself (and fifth-generation white Californians like Didion to tell the story of California)—is the lens through which all writing about the West must be scrutinized. Who is this writing for? What vision of California and the West is it upholding, and why?
“Funny that every place Joan Didion visits is falling apart,”
Soon enough a reader learns that whenever Didion says people, she doesn’t actually mean people—she means the only people that writers of her ilk consider people.
What is it, then, to love reality? Not just to love reality, but to know that reality is all we have to love?
many women know that their silence is precisely what holds entire families and communities together.
I admire the candor with which Park speaks about the slow and uneven journey of both his art and his politics, revealing the process of how artists come more deeply into the things they feel perhaps instinctively or subconsciously; in particular, how it takes concerted effort and self-examination to make art worthy of those instincts—how it’s not enough to simply say, “I had a feminist side,” or “I’m not a racist.”
Park reminds us that justice and violence are temporary friends, and that what actually makes justice meaningful are the same things that make life meaningful: love, repair, intimacy, connection, solidarity, and the promise of the daily.
But Representation Matters Art—and the extractive vision of the world it serves—absolutely relies on us mistaking visibility for things it is not: liberation, privilege, justice.
I cannot imagine ever wanting to trade that experience—the irreplaceable rush of humanness that blooms in us at every encounter with the art that matters to us—for something as tepid as positive representation.
Representation Matters Art is still, ultimately, just another armed wing of the attritive arts of white supremacy: it’s the kind of art you make when someone has told you to prove you’re a human—and you agree.
Our mainstream literary discourse continues to read writers of color ethnographically—as if they provide crucial data about a certain subjugated group of people—and white writers universally, regardless of the particularities of their artwork.
Knowing that there are knowledges that are never counted, never mind recorded, as knowledges: this is really the beginning of a decolonial reading, let alone writing.
If one of the great dubious bequests of coloniality is diaspora—from the Greek diasparagmos, being scattered and torn apart—then the act of decolonial re-membering might be about putting the splintered world back together.
Homer is showing Odysseus giving this speech because we’re meant to understand that he’s a civilized man: because where others might see wild nature, Odysseus sees the potential for agriculture. And one is further meant to understand that the Cyclopes are savages precisely because they have failed to do everything in their power to exploit all the land within their reach and beyond.
