How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies,

White supremacy is a comprehensive cultural education whose primary function is to prevent people from reading—engaging with, understanding—the lives of people outside its scope.

rarely as artists whose works are approached not just as sources of history or educational potential but specific and sublime sensual immersion: sites of wonder, laughter, opulence, precision; a place to sink into the particular weather of a particular town; a place to pang at the love of strangers, thwarted or salvaged.

It successfully centers whiteness in a minoritized person’s story—making their narrative about adapting or not adapting to “America,” which is always a code for adapting to whiteness. It also mistakes difference for oppression, which is not the same thing: to be the only Asian person in an otherwise white town is just as much an indicator of privilege as it is of oppression, because most economically disadvantaged minorities do not live in majority-white towns.

My father died penniless and indebted, and I inherited nothing from him—nothing but my entire life: the frequency at which my attention to the world resonates, and most of all, that bone-deep, soul-shaped pride, which to this day I feel move in me, like a chord that will not go silent.

The problem with this type of reading is that in its practical application, usually readers are encouraged—by well-meaning teachers and lazy publishing copy—to read writers of a demographic minority in order to learn things; which is to say, as a supplement for their empathy muscles, a metabolic exchange that turns writers of color into little more than ethnographers—personal trainers, to continue the metaphor. The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific—and go to white writers to feel the universal.

Being capable of engaging with both Austen’s work and the historical realities of its time period is not a mutually exclusive exercise, but a mutually formative one, the very stuff of being a reader in the first place. To insist otherwise only reinforces the false universalizing of our art that Morrison once called tantamount to a lobotomizing of our art. The people who think that upholding a heavily edited and whitewashed truth about an author’s historical context is the only viable way to truly protect and honor that author’s work, are in fact protecting and honoring something else entirely.

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.

At the time, I was intrigued by these writers and their profoundly internal, often speechless fiction (especially as a high schooler who was annoyed by the twang of speech in most of the largely white American fiction that was assigned to us; a twang that was always implicitly and sentimentally sold to students as the American voice); the knife-edge of clarity and madness that many of these books balanced upon; most of all the singularity of their brutally lonely, often suicidal characters.

its portrait of an aggrieved white man with a victim complex, beset by a hostile modernizing world, feels distinctly contemporary; there’s a through line from Loser to the kinds of people who say things like “reverse racism.”

to someone who has lived under what people often call Trump’s America, which, in the end, is just America; the America that was always there, but which Trump’s election gold-plated and armed with assault rifles.

how Loser’s long history of violence is obscured, and his major crime transmuted into an overarching story about the universal condition of mankind; the literary version of a headline that describes a white rapist as an upstanding athlete.

in the benevolent macro, and not the more sharply defined micro.

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.

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.

Readers do half the work of a book’s life;

It’s not easy to have a people; to come from a people. It’s not easy to not just be a super-special, historically unique subject railing against the world (Loser, indeed) but someone instead pinned by context, easy to trace—someone who shows up in the census. I don’t just mean the people you’re born to, although that’s one way of having a people. And your people are not always the ones who keep you safe or sane, and sometimes you need to run from them—certainly I’ve belonged to a few peoples in my time, and I’ve run away from one or two of mine. 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.

Many of us already come to our art that way, and always have—never having tasted the sugared privilege of that neutral freedom in the first place; having always been already marked, delimited, named, othered.

Because none of this work is meant to be done alone. Reparatively critical reading is not meant to be work performed solely by readers and writers of color. But the logic of empathy would have us believe so: it would have us believe that other people tell stories, which are there to make us feel things, the line between the two neatly delineated. The logic of empathy says “I feel your pain”—but the logic of inheritance knows this transaction has always been corrupt at its core. 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. This work has left a will, and we are all of us named in it: the inheritances therein belong to every reader, every writer, every citizen. So, too, the world we get to make from it.

when a writer of color wants her work to be read beyond the autobiographical, for example—people seem very keen to connect the art and the artist in that case—but

The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude.

And like so many great American wizards, the effect of much of Didion’s writing, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem to the equally fetishized White Album, has the spell-like effect of a particularly impassive astrologer, an evasive Sactown psychic phoning it in. Didion’s writing divines more than it diagnoses. Her auguries retain just enough blurriness at the edges for anyone—well, almost anyone—to see themselves in the fortune told.

Always flitting about her pages is the hypochondriac terror of Kurtz’s ghost, going native. “Funny that every place Joan Didion visits is falling apart,” Prickett remarks.

Its vise grip on the comic reminds us that people familiar with genocide are usually pretty funny—there has to be at least a little laughter on the other end of survival, to make it worth anything.

It would be easy to describe Pico’s Nature Poem as the act of a queer Native poet reclaiming the pastoral genre from its white colonial history, but what Pico is doing is so much more complicated than reclaiming (“Reclamation suggests social / capital,” he writes), and resists the simplified heroics of these kinds of literary reparations: the idea that it must be necessarily positive for minoritized writers to “reclaim” spaces in which they have been erased, that the Western genre can be redeemed if we just populate it with the Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian people who actually made Western history possible in the first place (a favorite posture taken up by the tired, corporate-friendly “representation matters” crowd). It’s a seductive thought (and it certainly is a popular way to get people of color on the page and onscreen nowadays—which, hey, I use my Netflix subscription, too), but poetry like Pico’s knows to be wary of the claiming impulse in the first place. “Who is the ‘I’ but its inheritances,” he writes.

to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down”—again mistaking her own myopia and impotence as everyone else’s),

La Rabbia [Rage], I would say, is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening in the world with unflinching lucidity. (There are angels drawn by Rembrandt who have the same gaze.) And he does so because reality is all we have to love. There’s nothing else. JOHN BERGER, “THE CHORUS IN OUR HEADS”

the school of literary interpretation that says our readerly focus should be trained on important men and their fine sentences, and not the women-shaped detritus left in their great wake. It was the tepid school of literary interpretation that valued things like silence and mystery and especially indeterminacy (that golden calf of contemporary, sometimes protofascist, sometimes neolibertarian, philosophy) when it came to selectively reading and protecting the work of certain authors, by not interrogating their self-servingly indeterminate descriptions (and tacit defenses) of sexual assault—yet would not think to ask students to engage with the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) silences and mysteries and indeterminacies that a book like The Turn of the Screw asks us to bear witness to. It was the school of literary interpretation that, by its deliberate omissions, teaches us how not to read, what not to read—what we ought to let perish in silence.

our human right to honor all the unspoken and unspeakable things in our lives—it’s a difficult line: reality is all we have to love. Berger knew that the presumed binary between the real and the imaginary was a false one; it was not reality as opposed to fantasy that he was honoring in this line. And not realism, either, as a moral or as an artifice and aesthetic—but: reality. The reality of our lives, the material realness of them—in the world, and to ourselves.

“Reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held—I am tempted to say salvaged,” Berger continued. “Reality is inimical to those with power.”

What does bear some questioning is the subtle implication that the only way to write about abuse or trauma is through the courtroom logic of testimonial and confession, through the sensational drama of exposing a psychic wound (not a particularly English practice, in any case), or through the finiteness and finality of judgment and denunciation. And not also, for example: art.

The way a student bringing up rape in a discussion of Rousseau supposedly reduces our analysis of Rousseau’s language; the way bringing up Benedict Anderson’s rebuttal to James Fenton supposedly reduces our discussion of Fenton’s journalism (if indeed that is the word for it). It’s of a piece with the train of thought that thinks engaging with identity politics in art is necessarily a diminishment of its artistic quality, because our working concept of identity politics rarely ever includes those whose identities, politics, and pasts get to remain unmarked, and thus are never seen as potentially contaminating (or, indeed, contaminated). But why can’t “Woven, Sir” vibrate, tautly, in the tension of all those things? It can; it does. We do.

“The voices speak out,” Berger wrote of the voice-overs in Pasolini’s La Rabbia, “not to cap an argument, but because it would be shameful, given the length of human experience and pain, if what they had to say was not said. Should it go unsaid, the capacity for being human would be slightly diminished.”

many women know that their silence is precisely what holds entire families and communities together. Many of us stay, and instead we’re the ones who break; many of us leave, in lieu of speaking out. Ria’s face during this scene, when Lalit cups her face, knows intimately the future of compromise, silence, and incomplete forgiveness that’s being asked of her. It’s on her face when they have to take family wedding photos, and the unknowing photographer asks her to sit at the knees of her abuser. The shutter of the camera catches each movement of Ria’s face, from smiling performative compliance to deep pain and grief.

And this is the gift I’m giving to myself now: to not be there. To not bear witness to his eventual death. To not console him, or be with those who would console him: my other brothers and sister, my nieces and nephews, my grandnephews. To not pray that our thousandfold gods, large and small, protect him and keep him here; to not send him off with goodwill into the path of our bygones; to not ask our ancestors to bless him, and carry him, and look upon him kindly. To refuse, in this knife-shining instance, to offer any form of succor, comfort, or indeed, love. To know that—unlike Antigone, perhaps myth’s most famous younger sister—I do not owe it to him to unlock the house of the dead, there where our father will be waiting. To be, in other words, and finally, a bad sister.

I have no resolutions, nor any half-conclusions that might help me close this chapter in my life; that’s just not how any of this works. I do know that I feel freer, today, than I did before—freer (if not fully freed) to never again be any brother’s keeper. Freer to abandon that role, and abandon the place that figure carved out in my person, in my life, in my story. This is not to erase that place; nothing I ever do in this life will accomplish that. But to simply leave the grave untended—something I will have to stumble on, every now and then: in the middle of a laugh with my cousins, or a movie about siblings, or having to safeword out of a kiss with a man I love who has never, ever hurt me. Like living near the field where a mine once went off; having to learn by heart how to trace a daily route around that place’s quieted craters. Living with it, in other words. In whatever words there are that day.

As a cinematic choice, as a way of showing—and crucially, not showing—emotion, it’s one of my most beloved scenes in any film. I don’t think I can even express here how uniquely moving I found it then and still find it now: this showing, without showing. This grief that remains private, remains someone’s—this acknowledgment that the role of the cinematic spectator is not to always see everything, but to also sometimes bear witness to that which cannot and will not be revealed; reminding us that seeing is a feeling—and that sometimes the only way to really see is to feel it. Who doesn’t know what it feels like to hide your face while you cry?

Loss is nearby; that makes it feel like life.

watched over by someone who’s given me the space to be both safe and naked; like a whorl in a patch of bark, whose soft and small openness provides a kind of ear, a kind of mouth; where the secret whispered into it might also be, not quite a kiss, but a kind of mouth-to-mouth—a breath that brings you back to life.

It’s about learning the painful fact that it isn’t just trauma that takes a toll on us; repair takes a toll. It’s about learning that justice is labor, and if we try to do it alone, that monumental burden—its loneliness, its weight, its corrosive rage and pain—will be crushing. It’s about sobering to the adult realization that there are some things we cannot do alone—and there are also sometimes places in ourselves we cannot reach with community.

things that make life meaningful: love, repair, intimacy, connection, solidarity, and the promise of the daily.

Because when art gets made to check a box for positive representation, you feel it—you feel its intellectual limits, its political lassitude, its flat affect where a complex emotional life is supposed to be. “Representation matters”–type art is interested in people the same way Didion is interested in people, which is to say, not at all. People—the spiky, uneven feeling, striated with joy and boredom and grief and wonder, of being a living person in the world—don’t

matter to positive-representation art. Only representations matter, and representations in art perform a function not unlike monarchs in constitutional monarchies, or presidents in parliamentary republics: a figurehead function, meant as a living symbol, with no real power—except, of course, for the enormous and indelible “soft” power they wield as symbolic incarnations of everything their country supposedly means, values, and venerates. Representation Matters Art wants delegates, not people; a Crazy Rich Asian, an Asian Cowboy, an Asian Brad Pitt, an Asian Superhero, an Asian Joan of Arc, One Asian to Rule Them All. Representation Matters Art thinks we can save the settler colonial Western fantasy if we just make John Wayne Filipino this time.

that the existence of Marvel’s Black Panther somehow softens the edges of the anti-Black carceral state,

People often say—certainly my old classics professors did—that the entire Homeric world, the entirety of classical antiquity, really, is founded upon this idea of hospitality, this practice of xenia. But that’s not quite it. The Homeric world is founded not on hospitality but on the absolute limits of hospitality: who expects hospitality and never gives it, who deserves hospitality and never gets it. The idea of hospitality here is really an idea of civilization. Xenia is the way to describe what it meant, for the people within that civilization, to be a guest; what it meant to ask for favor from another; what it meant to enter into the home, and therefore world, of another. Xenia was also a type of enclosure; it was a way of understanding who we were, and who they were.

This is also the genius of the trap Odysseus sets—a trap that is, fundamentally, a social structure. His impunity lies in his ability to dictate the terms of his visibility, his knowability. He makes Polyphemus blind not only physically but socially: for now he can no longer know, or even name, the one who has injured him. Odysseus shows us how to destroy a life without ever having to be accountable for it. Does the life of a savage even count as a life?