Reading as Revolution
I seem to have caused a bit of a stir with my little project to only read books by non-white writers for twelve months. The Washington Post asked me to dig deeper into what I found for inclusion in a special section on the publishing industry in the paper this weekend, and as the piece went online, a few familiar comments from those decrying my “racism” have been popping up.
But I certainly won’t be backing down.
Reading is a revolutionary act and it has been throughout history. Consider the fears of those concerned by the technological advances of the printing press and the translation of the Bible, allowing the masses to read it without its ideas being filtered through an anointed intermediary. Without dismissing the importance of oral traditions, the inherent political power of reading and literacy can be seen in banning of books and burning of libraries by those desperate to cling to authority. Words are powerful, and from Alexandria and the Nazis, to the destruction of the Jaffna library in Sri Lanka and the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the siege of Sarajevo, attempts to suppress a community by destroying its books are tales as old as time.
So I suppose I should not have been surprised by the anger that I inadvertently stirred up when I wrote about my deliberate choice to abstain from reading books written by white people for the whole of 2014. I hope now it’s clear that I did not seek to instigate “white genocide” in doing this — rather, I was hoping to address my own reading practices arising from growing up in Australia, a country dominated by white privilege.
I only decided to do this simply as an exercise to expand the types of perspectives and ideas I was putting into my head, and to be conscious of how I was spending what precious little time I had to read for pleasure. Of course, I hoped that discussing my intentions would mean other people might find the idea interesting and consider their own reading habits and choices. But the response to my first article in The Guardian about my project and the follow-up twelve months later made it clear that this was a far bigger deal than I ever could have imagined.
It was perhaps naïve to have not realised at the time that people would inevitably get upset and offended. I should have known that any act, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, that questions mainstream biases and norms is going to annoy those who are quite happy with the way things are.
There’s no need to address the train of thought below the line on those pieces raging that I was being racist in deliberately eschewing white authors for a year. I am bored of arguing about the definition of racism on the internet. (But, if you are interested: Saladin Ahmed, a writer I heard about during my project and whose novel The Throne of the Crescent Moon I read last year, waded into the comments to take a look at the responses to my piece and others that discussed reading books that aren’t written by white men.)
However, the question of why it might be a good thing to engage in apparently-discriminatory reading practices is probably something worth examining in a bit more detail, and that was why I agreed to delve into the topic again.
Rather than being a soft and fuzzy side-dish of Serious Society, all forms of art and culture — literature, visual arts, music, performance — matters deeply to us and our communities. The power of the arts and culture comes through the way it both reflects and influences the world we live in — or want to live in. That is why it matters when Shonda Rhimes talks about “normalising” television. That is why women were excited about the all-female remake of Ghostbusters. And that is why Ayesha Siddiqi, editor in chief of The New Inquiry, doesn’t just talk about Kanye West as a hobby:
I became interested in pop culture as part of the conscious discovery to find what constitutes being “American”. When I’m talking about these figures, I’m never really talking about them, I’m talking about us.
Rather than being a trivial distraction, although sometimes it can be, popular culture matters because it expresses who we are. And in questioning the way popular culture represents society, as well as in seeking out more diverse (and normal) portrayals, we are also asking for this reflection to show a more actuate picture.
This effort is a concerted effort to step up and say we no longer live in a time where the marginalised are “voiceless” — it’s about amplifying those who are, as Arundhati Roy so perfectly described it, “the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard”.
The results of this year’s Women in Literary Arts (VIDA) annual study of gender balance in the book reviews in several major publications show progress is slowly but surely being made. Interestingly, this year was the first time the numbers for women of color were considered. And the findings are…… galling.
But the fact that they are finally counting this is perhaps a positive development in itself. The invisibility of women of colour in the literary world is now very clearly exposed, and the conversation can hopefully move forward.
We at VIDA believe it is time to begin surfacing visibility and promoting discussions around race. For this first annual WOC 2014 VIDA Count, our dataset is incomplete, and that is the key point we wish to begin interrogating. As with any discussion around race, we fully anticipate a certain amount of resistance. We have five years of experience now with attempts to derail and distract from the implications of considering gender in publishing practices. We are happy to report the patient is doing well as the conversation we initiated has grown and impacted others far beyond our group of VIDA volunteers. The desire for change is palpable as so many challenge and interrogate the implication of bias in academia and the publishing industry, right on down to inquiring about the contents of personal bookshelves. We are still a young organization and our initial thrust continues to propel us forward: Ours has always been a desire to make visible what we suspect and sense but have not been able to recognize and articulate.
In commenting on the previous year’s analysis, VIDA noted:
Change happens because individuals make it happen. We may feel like small readers and writers in a big world, but we shape the world with our voices. Our voices change worldviews, and those voices should be multiple and varied.
This movement is calling for a pretty modest revolution: better representation of who we are in the books that are published, reviewed and read. And I feel wistful joy in thinking of the kids who will hopefully grow up seeing themselves better reflected in their world.
And if this upsets a few status-quoers on the way, so be it.
