How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

Most days when I look back at my childhood, it feels like first I became a reader; then I became a person.

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.

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.

inevitably, there’s always the sense that those people and their expected reader or viewer are talking among themselves, that I am walking in on a conversation I wasn’t meant to witness,

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. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding.

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.

The show points to the lone vigilante in American culture and reveals that he has always been a lie: 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.

When I think about reading and writing, I necessarily also think about silences, erasures, oblivions and misremembrances, pockets of inarticulacy; things that are nameless in me, which might touch or be touched by things that are nameless in others.