Storied Formation: Getting There

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A few weeks ago I read a book.

A book that shook my core so profoundly that I sobbed through the last 50 pages. Not just trickle of tear here and there. Sobbed. Like "end of Old Yeller" sobbed.

My friend Maija and I have been PhD Candidates under the same professor. Part of our tutelage has been being immersed in this professor's philosophy of the formation of our storied selves, the autobiography of our professional (and personal) personas as informed by our Reader personas. In Maija's more eloquent terms: We are the books we held.

It doesn't always happen in childhood, although for many of us it is where it starts. The first story that you became captivated by, or in...the first narrative that you imagined yourself in place of.... I mean how many American little girls wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House books? How many Canadian girls lost themselves in Anne of Green Gables? [Here I note a gendered and  hetero-normative specific bias to my formational book lists]

As a reader, I continue to be able to lose myself in story - something my friend Maija has a harder time doing. I can forget my critical "academic" mind and dissolve into the pages.  Perhaps because reading, even academic reading, has been mostly pleasurable I have never disassociated reading from bliss.

Therefore, when a story extends a papery finger and places it in spots so tender and unguarded as to make me sob? I notice. I attend.  I ponder. I ruminate and reflect.  I get uncomfortable and fret until I can articulate what got inside and how it did so.  The castle walls, after all, are not made to be breached. Therefore that which does demands close and particular attention.

The book had sat on my shelf since February. As I began my stumbling and inelegant dog-paddle back from my grief, I ignored the books on my shelves.  They had to wait until I was ready to read again.

This summer I have been reading like a fiend.  All the books that have been accumulating in stacks next to my bed? Now is their time.  This particular book was one of three I had ordered when the furor over the bitch.com YA Feminist Lit list and it's subsequent removal of books from the list using means that still befuddle my imagination.

Being an oppositional bitch myself, any pulling/boycotting of a book signals to me that I MUST read this book. It's just the way I am built. Forbid me and you will find me climbing over barbed wire to get to the glittery contraband.  More than that, however, is my deeply held knowledge that someone will object to Everything.  Therefore, if you are going to go all "100 best list" on people, double down and have the ovarian fortitude to weather the storm, dammit.  Because there will be a storm.

I could make a "Best Vegetables In the World" list and get into a fight with someone over why Lima Beans were left off. Aside from my personal conjecture that Lima Beans are, in fact, the devils legume (Blech, Blech, Blech) I can entertain that there are humans who may like them. I would be highly suspicious of those humans ( if that is what they ARE), but I could accept it. That wouldn't mean I was changing my list.

Censorship, particularly of books, really chaps my ass.  There is never a good enough reason to decide for others what words they consume.

"But Dawn", say You, "What about obnoxious hate speech and racist rants".

"what of them?", I answer.

We will never be rid of hurtful and hate filled ideas. Allowing it to go underground only pushes it out in a more pus-filled and virulent form. While banning may bring comfort to the handwringers who allow themselves to be comforted by token and empty gestures, it does nothing else.  It doesn't stop Hate. It doesn't End Rape. It doesn't Change Oppression.  What it does do is to ingrain a code, a double speak, so that the preachers of these noxious and foul schema can continue while hiding in plain sight.

The satisfaction of censorship, to those misguided do-gooders who seek to do so, does not lay with the removal of the words, per se, but with the Ideas. And we all know that Ideas simply can not be stopped. 

10 Baleful Regards:

Dawn said...

Part two is being written, I promise.

Gurukarm said...

Is that where we find out *what* book?? Dying, here... ;-)

MarciaAnn said...

I was going to say ... but what was the book that had you sobbing ...

Cagey (Kelli Oliver George) said...

WHAT BOOK. You're killing me.

Also, I DO love lima beans. What's it to ya? ;-)

Dawn said...

@Kelli - I Knew you People were out there. Living it up with your Lima BeanFeasts.

Justin said...

Lima Beans are the bomb.

Dawn said...

Argh - you lima bean lovers. I just don't understand you. But I am not changing my mind...

Dawn said...

Oh, and I hope to have part two written for Friday, but it is Hard. Harder than I expected. I can't quite find the right words to describe - but I will.

Anonymous said...

1. what the HELL? All that and you didn't tell us which book! Geez.
2. I love lima beans and so does Sarah B. Arthur, on the other hand, is in your camp.

Anonymous said...

Yum! Baby Lima Beans steamed to fork tender perfection, smothered in butter and seasoned with salt and pepper! Aunt Needy....

 
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