Shelfie: Ivelisse Rodriguez Shares Her Bookshelf
Ivelisse Rodriguez discusses the overlaid stories of bookshelves.
A book lover is immediately drawn to other people’s bookcases, convinced she / he / they will unearth something about the owner of those splendid shelves — some special knowledge of her / his / their interiority. If someone looked at my bookcases, all six of them, along with some neatly piled books on the floor, they could discern some of the eras of my life. In the books from my college years, my graduate school years, my preliminary exam books, and the books I read for pleasure, one can glean that I love African-American literature, took a class on lynching in the U.S., and dabbled in early 20th century Chinese literature. I focused on love, sex, and gender in Japanese literature spanning several centuries, and tussled with a range of second-wave feminists and gay and lesbian literary theorists, as well. You can also probably pinpoint my alma mater because — like generations of Columbia students who have taken Literature Humanities — The Golden Ass, The Symposium, and The Odyssey populate the same shelf. I have race theory books that query who is black and posit how race is constructed in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. I have a plethora of books written by Puerto Rican, Cuban and Cuban-American, Dominican-American, and Mexican-American writers. And, of course, I have fiction writing and grammar books, too. From all of this information, you might furrow your brow and wonder about the sensibilities within me. However, a picture will surely emerge — one can deduce my belief in social justice, my concern for the wellbeing of a global population, and my respect and deep admiration for writers of color from the U.S. and around the world — because a bookcase tells a story. It tells a story of me, a story of you.
Yet the title on the spine and the description on the back of a book will only tell you so much about the owner. There are also invisible, associated stories the owner of these books has overlaid on them — stories you could not discern through a mere surveying of someone’s shelves. When I look at the cover for The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, a 600-plus-page novel about a man’s obsession with a woman, the unseen story I have braided into the book is how I became so enamored with Pamuk’s description of the promenade alongside the Bosphorus strait that I, too, had to take a walk along the Bosphorus, as the characters from the book frequently did. I had to see the city where Füsun and Kemal had fallen in love.
So when I landed in Turkey, it may be that I had loved it already, seeing it through Pamuk’s eyes, but Istanbul was clearly a city to love. Walking across the Galata Bridge that divides the city — from young to old, not from Europe to Asia — is when you first glimpse the Bosphorus, the channel connecting the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. You might be as delighted and surprised as I was to see the fishing poles lined up along the length of the bridge, plummeting into those waters. In the distance, you see the turrets and domes of ancient mosques that are stunning with their array of colors. Ancient palaces and bazaars also await in the old city. But at the end of the bridge, it is the promenade below that I turned to first. I strolled through, knowing the whole time that I was there because of a book; a book I read in Jersey City, New Jersey, propelled me to this concrete path alongside this water in this city in this country, imagining characters from a novel. Did Füsun and Kemal stand here trying to catch sight of the Princes’ Islands, or did this part of the promenade even exist then? Could Füsun have smoked one of her cigarettes here, one that once she discarded it, Kemal would have picked up, catalogued it, and added it to his collection of Füsun’s lipstick-imprinted smoked cigarettes? Or, or, or?
Invariably there are all these imperceptible stories glazed on other people’s bookcases that we will never get to hear or see. This is part of the magic of a bookcase — there are so many stories within stories within stories. Only if we heard these stories … only then we would get a fuller account of the dear person who has taken the time to arrange the books in a particular order, by color (shiver), by alphabetical order, by time period, or through some other modality that, if we knew them better, we would understand. Because a bookcase is more than wooden boards joined together; it is an altar to pay homage to segments of our lives — segments that tell of who we were, who we are, and who we will be. A bookshelf is a way to measure a life.
