Cal, thank you so much for these thoughts. I just requested both the Enrigue and Luiselli books from my library, and when I did, a recommendation popped up for a novel with apparently similar "themes" called Border Child--as far as I can tell, wholly about a Mexican couple, written by a white woman (Michel Stone). The currents that keep dragging us back to white voices are strong (why didn't I get Cristina Henríquez recommended to me?). I don't know if you have read Jacqueline Woodson's essay "Who Can Tell My Story?" (https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=who-can-tell-my-story)--maybe it is in the Rankine anthology, which is now also on my list! From my perch, I think a lot about being a white reader rather than writer, and the ways in which whiteness shapes our response to (ultimately, our co-creation of) the texts we read. Reading is a kind of inhabitation, too; Woodson might well ask, who can read my story? Who can make meaning of it? Who can translate it? Who can make a career out of commenting on it, with each new commentary inevitably an appropriation of sorts, a rewriting of sorts? And, in what ways does whiteness inevitably shape these very conversations about ownership, authorship, and appropriation (MY story) as well as drive the relentless either/or binarizing you rightly characterize as FUCKING BORING? We colonize the worlds inside of books, but they also colonize us (and in so many ways, I'm so happy for the ways in which what I read as a child invaded me and converted me and seduced me away from my own culture and family! And even now, that sense of BEING inhabited is the most thrilling part of reading--I have spoken to so many literature scholars who say they have lost that; that they can ONLY read critically now, formulating theses as they go. I believe I will die if that ever happens to me). I wonder, as a writer who is publishing a book (!), how you feel about releasing your stories to be rewritten by each reading and reader, even as your stories will rewrite various ideas in readers' minds. Because not you, but your work, now, IS preparing to "move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power" (not really, of course; as my automated "but have you seen this WHITE-authored book about brown people?!" library recommendation reminds me, the movement of books is also subject to all kinds of gatekeeping--but don't we HOPE for this kind of free migration of books?). I have no thesis here. But I do have to say, and in response to your question, that it feels good to have the energy previously devoted to massive election anxiety newly freed for getting back to thinking and reading as well as action. I haven't been able to read anything but YA for many months, and the reason I curl up in YA is not because it feels like an "escape" but because it invites such intense emotional response--it keeps me alive when I really want to numb out. So does teaching. I keep seeing admonishments that the "work isn't over!" now that Trump's out (I guess this is one feared form of Biden-era liberal stupidity), but for me, the relief of Biden's win is precisely that I feel like I can finally fully get back to "the work," that all that energy consumed in reacting and fearing can be channeled towards acting, and responding, and reflecting.
Cal, thank you so much for these thoughts. I just requested both the Enrigue and Luiselli books from my library, and when I did, a recommendation popped up for a novel with apparently similar "themes" called Border Child--as far as I can tell, wholly about a Mexican couple, written by a white woman (Michel Stone). The currents that keep dragging us back to white voices are strong (why didn't I get Cristina Henríquez recommended to me?). I don't know if you have read Jacqueline Woodson's essay "Who Can Tell My Story?" (https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=who-can-tell-my-story)--maybe it is in the Rankine anthology, which is now also on my list! From my perch, I think a lot about being a white reader rather than writer, and the ways in which whiteness shapes our response to (ultimately, our co-creation of) the texts we read. Reading is a kind of inhabitation, too; Woodson might well ask, who can read my story? Who can make meaning of it? Who can translate it? Who can make a career out of commenting on it, with each new commentary inevitably an appropriation of sorts, a rewriting of sorts? And, in what ways does whiteness inevitably shape these very conversations about ownership, authorship, and appropriation (MY story) as well as drive the relentless either/or binarizing you rightly characterize as FUCKING BORING? We colonize the worlds inside of books, but they also colonize us (and in so many ways, I'm so happy for the ways in which what I read as a child invaded me and converted me and seduced me away from my own culture and family! And even now, that sense of BEING inhabited is the most thrilling part of reading--I have spoken to so many literature scholars who say they have lost that; that they can ONLY read critically now, formulating theses as they go. I believe I will die if that ever happens to me). I wonder, as a writer who is publishing a book (!), how you feel about releasing your stories to be rewritten by each reading and reader, even as your stories will rewrite various ideas in readers' minds. Because not you, but your work, now, IS preparing to "move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power" (not really, of course; as my automated "but have you seen this WHITE-authored book about brown people?!" library recommendation reminds me, the movement of books is also subject to all kinds of gatekeeping--but don't we HOPE for this kind of free migration of books?). I have no thesis here. But I do have to say, and in response to your question, that it feels good to have the energy previously devoted to massive election anxiety newly freed for getting back to thinking and reading as well as action. I haven't been able to read anything but YA for many months, and the reason I curl up in YA is not because it feels like an "escape" but because it invites such intense emotional response--it keeps me alive when I really want to numb out. So does teaching. I keep seeing admonishments that the "work isn't over!" now that Trump's out (I guess this is one feared form of Biden-era liberal stupidity), but for me, the relief of Biden's win is precisely that I feel like I can finally fully get back to "the work," that all that energy consumed in reacting and fearing can be channeled towards acting, and responding, and reflecting.