I think the first book I really read was Golding’s Lord of the Flies. By read, I mean, enjoy, and not just be proud of getting through however many pages it was. I was a diligent student in high school, and somewhere along the way grades and achievement began to define why I was doing the thing. This book shook me out of that, beyond my suburban existence, there was someone out there who was thinking about what would happen if we youths all ended up on a deserted island and tried to figure it out and maybe kind of ended up killing each other.
I went about university also making good grades and learning new languages. The languages led to literatures, and at some point, I came across Tayyeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I remember being amazed at how intimately I felt like I got to know the personalities of this fictional village in Sudan, as if I had met them. They were real, and their realness was both in and beyond their place. After university, I expanded more. I went back to nature with the poetry of Mary Oliver, and beyond to the fantastic jinn-filled lands of S. A. Chakraborty’s Daevabad trilogy. Recently, I’ve had the pleasure to visit Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, a fictional village whose historical bearings are not Tayyeb Salih’s nor my own but nevertheless feel powerfully familiar.
I’m never entirely sure why I read, or write, but it definitely always feels like a reminder. A reminder that words, enough of them, might explain problems that I can’t or get me out of cyclical thought patterns or allow me to explore new ways of being in the world.
At some point in grad school, I learned how to read critically decently well. How to get inside a text and dissect it and come out again with a well-articulated point of my own. After a few years of doing that, I have taken the time (afforded to me by a global pandemic) to remind myself to read not just for critique (which, thankfully, I do not think I can make go away), but for relatability. The characters, maybe those mysterious person(s) behind them, have problems and fears and hopes that are mine and not mine, and we really just need to talk about those. Maybe then they will even critique me, too.
