How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

Books, as world-encompassing as they are, aren’t the destination; they’re a waypoint.

How to dismantle the forms of interpretation we’ve inherited;

means nothing if we can’t read it—if we don’t have the tools to understand its context, meaning, and effect in the world.

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

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.

uncompensated overtime from writers of color who, often in lieu of engaging in detail about the actual book they’ve actually written, find themselves instead managing the limited critical capacity of mostly white readers, here offended by the appearance of a non-English word, there alienated by a conversation not translated for their benefit.

making their narrative about adapting or not adapting to “America,” which is always a code for adapting to whiteness.

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.

We read them like they were just books, and they had things to say, and they were sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful; just like I was a person, and I had things to say, and I was sometimes very powerful and fragile and beautiful.

Moreover, so I could expect to be read like that, in my own life: like a scroll of worth poured out of me, and it was all mine—not something to be bartered or made palatable so I would one day have value in the world.

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.

Sure, critical reading is an intellectual exercise, an aesthetic exercise, and a profoundly private, emotional, and visceral undertaking—while also being an ethical act; a civic act.

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.

(although I do recommend reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss only after reaching one’s thirties; books about childhood always break you best when you’re an adult).

What all of these acts of violence share is the way Loser deliberately and repeatedly obfuscates, how slippery his hold on right and wrong: alternately defiant, recriminating, justifying, downplaying, self-aggrandizing.

but 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.

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.

A book for an invented, incurious marketplace, where the sensationalized trauma of communities of color is commodified—barbed-wire decorations!—to produce the ethno-porn that spoon-feeds empathy to a readership that is expected to do little more than swallow.

continually asking writers of color to produce a comment from the hot-take jukebox on the latest fuckup perpetrated by a dementedly racist and tone-deaf publishing industry is asking those writers to wipe a shit they did not take.

The fact that I was an unexpected reader—an interloper, in so many worlds—meant that I was very rarely in any assumed complicity with a writer or the world she created.

meant, moreover, that I took books fucking seriously, because I loved them, and because the stakes in them were often high, knowing every book meant I had no guarantee of explanation or safe passage; I had no light to guide me but the light that books themselves throw off, with every page.

An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.

This art(ist) doesn’t want to know how it is made possible, because it wants to neither be made nor possible: it wants to just be.

It wants to remind everyone of its uniqueness; it doesn’t want to be reminded of its debts.

What if art was the space not for us to enjoy our freedom, but for us to encounter our bondages—and our bondedness? That in our art making and our art consumption, we paid attention not just to the things that made us feel free, expansive, containing multitudes, but to the things that remind us we are not just free but delimited—the things that make us feel our smallness, our ordinariness, our contingency, our vulnerability and reliance? The things that make us feel not neutral but named—actually known by the world, so that we might be truly in it, and of it?

but instead, to know oneself as one small flawed part of a whole? To know that the contours of our lives are drawn by each other; that the history that made us is the history that makes us?

decolonial work might look like on an institutional level; how that work is fundamentally cooperative.

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.

Monumentalizing is already an act of editing (and censoring) the past; it already allows us to pretend to have a different history.

Where is that much-romanticized—and much-instrumentalized—love of history when it comes to understanding just whom that history is actually built and peopled by?

The more sober—yet no less vital—companion to this unabashed freedom is the way Mita confronts the fact that gendered liberation, and in particular sexual liberation, is incomplete without both reproductive rights and the dismantling of the patriarchal oppression that would withhold those rights.

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.

The crux of that artistic anxiety is at once performatively self-annihilating and productively self-aggrandizing: “contemporary art-making only produces mere laTe caPiTaLiSt coMmoDiTieS; I can’t do anything about it but register my anxiety about it; having done so is sufficient discourse; place lampshade here and screw in.”

“Tracking one’s carbon footprint” was instead an invitation to enter into an endless pantomime of individual piety, nihilism, and learned helplessness; eco-friendly, as opposed to eco-furious.

“The revolution isn’t just running out with a gun,” Mita says in the film. “If a film I make causes indigenous people to feel stronger about themselves, then I’m achieving something worthwhile for the revolution.”

For marginalized kids who have seen ourselves in these stories, it comes as no coincidence—those stories have literally been built off of the lives of people like us, our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors.

taking stories of oppression and marginalization, stripping them of most of their racial and historical specificity (leaving just enough to add a frisson of exotic/erotic flavor), and recasting them with white bodies—is at the heart of most white fantasy, and thus is also the source of the incongruence that minority readers later struggle with, when those authors turn out to care little at all about the oppression they once so beautifully illustrated.

these were stories that deliberately hinted at solidarity, without ever doing the actual work, aesthetic or otherwise, of solidarity.

But his life shows him that the violence that led him to believe in that heroic fantasy is the same violence that will wake him from it.

the persistence of intergenerational trauma and its effect on a person’s physical and emotional growth; the unforgiving war of attrition that the pursuit of justice can often feel like, especially for those restlessly seeking it alone, against an indifferent world.

the work of justice was never meant to be solitary.

We inherit that work from each other; we inherit it from people we don’t even know. Our history is in each other, like deposits in the bones, there in the blood and saliva. In this we are not special.

fails to make the effort to do what a verse like Vuong’s attempts: trying to solve the impossible calculus of one’s family lineage, in its relation to sex, power, and imperial violence, and asking the answerless questions about how that lineage makes a life.

delivering a well-crafted and precisely placed zinger, meant to say everything in the hopes that no one will notice it doesn’t really say anything—meant

Of course, like most such apologist literary narratives about the romance of divorced adult men wanting to fuck teenagers, the girl in question is preternaturally cool, mature, and self-possessing.

like the guest at the party who knows just what specific-enough details to drop so he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about in every conversation.

“These hypersensitive past years” is a description that would be at home with the sweatily pious conservative commentators who call progressive activists “snowflakes”; a way of pathologizing and thereby intellectually minimizing the effect of the political movements of the 1960s,

In fact, there is perhaps no description that captures Didion’s work better than to say that it is consummate pick-me writing.

Is this what writers know? Is this what writers do? Force themselves to never look down into the depths beneath the tightrope they’re walking, just in order to write?