"Reading as a Form of Protest" by Gracie Bialecki
This spring, a few chapters into Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig, I had to go look up Myanmar on a map. The historically accurate novel spans two generations and shows the impossible untangling of warring bodies after the British occupation. But reading Myanmar’s Wikipedia page after having read the novel, the dates and facts about the colonial rule, the Burmese involvement in World War II, and the ensuing civil war, elicited far less emotion in me than the story of the native woman who marries a British solider.
Khin and Benny begin their lives together without even speaking the other’s language, and the novel is as much about the endless struggle of communication and human connection as it is about the civil war which harms them and their country. Amid the shockingly brutal moments of Khin being raped and mutilated or Benny being tortured for weeks, there are moving passages of humanity—Khin unable to show Benny her ruined body, their daughters not recognizing their father when he’s finally freed. As a reader who had never experienced similar hardships and knew nothing about the historical moment, these scenes gave me an entry point into the text and brought me close to its foreign characters.
In novels, history becomes more than a series of dates and names, dots on a timeline. It mutates into its true shape, an endless web, connecting unexpected lives. Facts are necessary to give us context and ground us in a common reality—the reason why I turned from Miss Burma to Wikipedia—yet logical arguments rarely change our opinions. As much as we may try to fight it, so many of our decisions and judgments are made on an emotional level. Reading is a way of combining these two facets, of giving us information while also shifting our beliefs on a deeper, emotional level.
In Roman Krznaric’s book Empathy: Why it Matters, and How to Get It, Krznaric lists reading as one of the six ways we can develop our empathy and the means to understand the cultures of others. He defines empathy as "the imaginative act of stepping into the shoes of another person and viewing the world from their perspective.” Reading is “armchair empathy” and Krznaric has even founded an online Empathy Library with reviews of novels, children’s books, and films which offer diverse perspectives.
Empathy as a social and political act is not a new idea. In her “Race 101” seminar, racial educator Rachel Cargle has a simple formula for audience members who want to engage in anti-racist work: “Empathy, knowledge, and action.” Reading allows us to find an entry point, a crack in our perception, which can lead to deeper understanding and therefore more meaningful action. In our current political climate, empathy means trying to understand the other side rather than arguing against them. Imagine a society where we had empathy for those with opposing views. Imagine a society where we read more and fought less.
One of the most powerful books I’ve recently read is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Its fifteen year-old protagonist, Starr, is the only witness of a police shooting in a gang-violent community where her uncle is a police officer and her boyfriend is white. Written as a YA novel, the narrative voice is refreshingly direct; even when Starr is talking about her “normal” life where she attends private school, her honesty is searing. On top of dealing with police and gang violence, warring families, protests, and inter-racial relationships, we see a teenager who is forced to spend entire days thinking about how she sounds and acts because of the color of her skin.
“I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang, some attitude, but not too much attitude, so I’m not a 'sassy black girl.' I have to watch what I say and how I say it, but I can’t sound ‘white.’”
It’s one thing to read news articles about police and gang violence, inequality in schools, or the crack epidemic, and another to spend hundreds of pages experiencing them through the eyes of a fifteen year-old girl. Thomas does an incredible job writing Starr’s character with a mix of courage, conviction, and vulnerability. And even though I’m twice her age and have experienced none of the same prejudice, I could relate to Starr’s moments of doubt. As a reader, I believed everything she described and wanted her to succeed and live in the justice and peace she deserves. I want this for all girls like her, in a more visceral way than ever before.
Toni Morrison’s Sula struck a different chord. Among moments of magical realism—burning bodies and plagues of robins—one of its most vivid scenes is Black women peeing in a field. It’s 1927, and Helene and her daughter are traveling by train from Ohio to New Orleans. After Tennessee, there are no longer any colored bathrooms, and when Helene asks another Black passenger what she could do, the woman says, “Yonder,” and points to a bushy copse. Helene doesn’t immediately understand and when the train stops, she searches in vain for a “colored women” sign. But all Helene finds are “Some white men … leaning on the railing in front of the station house. It was not only their tongues curling around toothpicks that kept Helene from asking information of them.” Only when she spots the other woman’s head peeking out from the field does Helene realize what she meant.
“… by the time they reached Slidell, not too far from Lake Pontchartrain, Helene could not only fold leaves as well as the fat woman, she never felt a stir as she passed the muddy eyes of the men who stood like wrecked Dorics under the station roofs of those towns.”
The phrase “Wrecked Dorics” creates a haunting image of being watched by something which is part of the architectural structure of society. The white bodies are pillars of racism and Morrison uses them to replace the image of segregated toilets. No longer do I picture identical doors with separate signs. Now, I can see the white men leering as a Black woman walks past to relieve herself in the grass.
In a similar way, Black Boy by Richard Wright deepened my perspective of U.S. history. The haunting narrative unabashedly recounts the racial injustices that Wright had lived through—he was threatened, arbitrarily fired, and assaulted by white people—less than a hundred years ago. But among this violence, few scenes in the novel pass without him mentioning how he longs to eat, calling hunger “a vital part of my consciousness.” Even his ill-fated attempts at work revolve around food; he keeps a job with an abusive white family because, Wright writes, “I had rarely tasted eggs and I would put hunks of yellow butter into a hot skillet and hurriedly scramble three or four eggs at a time and gobble them down in huge mouthfuls…”
Black Boy is an autobiography of Wright’s Mississippi childhood in the 1920s and 30s, and he spends most of its three hundred pages scrounging for food, picking up odd jobs only to be mistreated by white people, occasionally attending school where he’s too hungry to focus, and resigning himself to eating cornmeal mixed with ashes. While reading, I’d put it down and find myself rummaging around the kitchen and uneasily munching almonds. My reaction wasn’t one of jealousy for buttery Southern meals, but of a sense of scarcity. As I read, I absorbed Wright’s hunger and my mind kept drifting beyond the narrative, hoping for him to find a square meal and then another and another. I felt starved alongside him, dazed by what he’d experienced, and awed that he’d made it from those beginnings and went on to live a brilliant, artistic life.
When Black Boy was published in 1945, The New York Times book reviewer, Orville Prescott wrote "if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy." In this sense, democracy means social equality, a principle our nation has yet to make significant progress in achieving. And as we continue to strive for universal fairness, political action doesn’t need to be limited to the external—protests, petitions, and posts on social media.
The act of empathy is increasingly important in our polarizing country, and literature has always connected us to ideas and people we never would’ve encountered. It allows us to explore subversive, oppressed, or previously unimagined perspectives. If anything which challenges unfair structures and moves us closer to universal justice can be considered protest, then reading is one of its oldest forms.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France.
