.tajjaisen: America doesn’t know how to read the work of Black writers
igh school English didn’t ask much of us. We were assigned two books a year, one of them a Shakespeare play and the other short, cynical, and 20th century. Never anything later than the ’50s, as if literature had expired along with Willy Loman in. We peered into stories like windows, not mirrors: Look at these people and their odd, brutal lives that are nothing like yours. But they were.
It’s easy to look back, from an era drenched in the language of representation, and heckle myself like a horror-movie victim for not asking what seems like the obvious question: literally, what is behind the locked door? I’m fine with never having been a reader in whom the need to feel seen bloomed spontaneously, if it ever bloomed at all—if anything, it made me a better reader. But it also made me, at least at first, into a very specific type of writer.
This basically sums up the MO of my childhood: impress the boys and get out alive. From school and my fanatical supplements to it, I intuited something similar to what Watkins describes: the books agreed upon as “great” shared a certain grammar. The way we generally talked about books—as things that sparkled with objective, dissectible beauty—thrilled me.
Even now, as the white reading public reappraises canonized works for their depreciation and Morrison has a Nobel Prize to her name, people still look toas a guide for unlearning racism rather than an aesthetic achievement. The surge of antiracist reading lists was yet another reminder that the work of Black artists gets read, as Morrison put it back in 2003, “as sociology, as tolerance, but not as a serious and rigorous art form.
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