How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

the way we read now is simply not good enough, and it is failing not only our writers—especially, but not limited to, our most marginalized writers—but failing our readers, which is to say, ourselves.

When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read our world now. How to read films, TV shows, our history, each other. How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited; how those ways of interpreting are everywhere and unseen.

Anyone who is perfectly comfortable with keeping the world just as it is now and reading it the way they’ve always read it—is, frankly, a fed, cannot be trusted, and is probably wiretapping your phone.

Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity.

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.

The unfortunate influence of this style of reading has dictated that we go to writers of color for the gooey heart-porn of the ethnographic: to learn about forgotten history, harrowing tragedy, community-destroying political upheaval, genocide, trauma; that we expect those writers to provide those intellectual commodities the way their ancestors once provided spices, minerals, precious stones, and unprecious bodies.

yet another instruction manual for the sociocultural betterment of white readers. I don’t know any writer who, if asked what they wanted their work to do in the world, would reply: “Make better white people.”

At heart, my issue with how we read is as much an existential grievance as it is a labor dispute: the industry is simply not serving its employees equally.

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, living under white supremacy.

It was a worth that resisted being misread, but was not diminished when misreading came knocking.

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.

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. Not just when a particularly gifted author has managed to make a community’s story come alive for the reader who’s come for a quick zoo visit, always remaining on her side of the cage.

It’s not without some irony that I look around and note that the writers and artists who are the most disdainful of art’s edifying function, the people who seem most openly suspicious of—and threatened by—the idea of politics in fiction, or indeed empathy-building in fiction, are also the people who have historically benefited the most from the universal goodwill and empathy that is afforded someone living in a cis, white, middle-class body. Because what more powerful empathy machine do we have than heteropatriarchal white supremacy?

the idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions.

it’s a political choice to protect and continue to narrowly read certain writers, while willfully ignoring choice parts of their oeuvre (reading Handke’s books, “at least the non-political ones”).

It’s a political choice to say that certain artists make Real Art That Must Be Protected, and other artists (seemingly always writers of color, queer writers, minoritized writers) make only socialist realism or sentimentalist dogma.

In the end, we can’t say we believe in things like diversity in fiction or decolonizing our art (our screen, our pages, our readerliness) if we don’t think something of value—something which is not solely aesthetic, and which bears something beyond the literal political value of a vote—occurs when we encounter a work of art.

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.

Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

Most of all, to give up our permission not to know—not to know that reality, which is the enemy of the powerful, and which is all there is for us to love: there where loving is a kind of knowing, and knowing, a kind of loving.

That isn’t the art we need; it’s just the art we’ve been delegated.

How can we think about storytelling not just as a wholly innocent or politically neutral act, but as something that carries within it the capacity for epistemic violence and erasure, a kind of power we’re often reluctant to acknowledge when we want to unilaterally praise the moral good of reading and storytelling?

But the truth is, for many of us, neither an indigenous name nor a Spanish name actually indicates much of anything: because of the decree, both types of name were words put in a book by our colonizers, for our ancestors to choose from.