Coming to Reading….
Posted in Uncategorized on August 30th, 2005 by timmwestThe first book I ever fully read was the Bible. I am the son of a preacher who shunned all things secular, so our world growing up was filtered through the rigid lens of a circumscribed Christianity. I must have been born a rebel, or became one quite early. Having what seems an early sense of awareness about all things that were wrong with the world– my family’s poverty, racism, my father’s righteous patriarchy, and even my sense that who I might choose to love as an adult would deem me a moral criminal-seemed to color the lens through which I read this book that was the meat and potatoes of conversation 7 days a week. I hated this book as much as I loathed my given name. I stuttered on m’s and eventually renamed myself. The name Timothy never felt welcome in my mouth; it referenced some biblical apostle who honored the God who hated me, so I got over the speech impediment but changed my name. This practice of deconstructing language to create new language was as much about seeing world beyond the one described at church and family discussions about sinners.
I was a child who loved finding the contradiction in things, because my reality seemed so contradictory. A loving God would not have me and so many others live in such destitution and shame-so this awareness was the foundation for my penchant for literary criticism. I learned to love to read to dismantle and deconstruct. I longed to find the words between the lines, the items that may have been edited out, whatever the author didn’t want me to know. I wanted a deeper understanding than the books provided where the fairy tale ended and there was no complexity beyond the joyous redemption of some tragic hero, be it Jesus or Job, Cinderella or Snow White. So I hated most books for whatever ideas I felt they left out.
I don’t know what it was about the book “Grendel”, this attempt at giving voice to this creature slain by the mighty Beowolf, but it was among the first book that captured my attention. I wanted to know the story behind the big bad wolf, behind with evil witches, behind Lucifer-wanted them humanized and themselves worthy of redemption, forgiveness, a good life. “Grendel” offered the other story-attempted to give voice to the unnamable, the invisible, the abject, and so I identified with its complex attempt at creating empathy for the “villain”. I wrote my first poetry after reading this book as a young teen. I knew that there must have been other stories that people were writing that were on somebody’s “banned” list. Those are the books I wanted to read. Those were the books I wanted to write. I’ve learned that most of the banned books are, interestingly, also the great books.
I no longer believe that I’m hellbound or that God hates me; though I am not Christian either. It’s not my intention to connect my love for literacy to this more painful struggle towards self-acceptance, but it is relevant. When I got to college, I sought out the opinions and ideas that I had been sheltered from for my own “supposed” protection that left me without a lens to clearly see myself-see myself as beautiful, worthy of a good life, capable of being somebody else’s hero or “savior”. I am now able to translate this penchant for literary criticism into any and everything I read; so this loathing for force-fed literature (be in the bible, or the canonical works of high school English) enabled me to see all literature as something that would tell a story beyond its actual words, beyond the intention of the author. Reading became a tool for moving hidden, scorned, abject things to spaces of visibility.
As an English teacher, I am often concerned about how to make literature “relevant” to students who often don’t see what they are reading as “relevant”. There’s a nugget there for everyone, and the task of the good teacher is to help the student get in touch with whatever is said, unsaid, or needs to be said that can transform their world-view. It’s kind of like reading the bible these days, without the criminalizing subtext of fire and brimstone, but empowered to look critically at even a biblical apostle like Timothy, and imagine him a beautiful, fallible, stuttering human-trying desperately, like most of us, to find the roadmap to his heaven. Books prior to the “Grendel” moment were essentially the monstrous impositions of the world as other people wanted me to see it-with multiple choice answers about which characters did what when. Boring…. I want the good scandalous stuff; the debate, the devils advocate, the controversy-not so much for the sake of argument, but because somebody somewhere might find themselves in that brave space to speak against what is accepted as normative; and write a new book: a “color purple”, a “giovanni’s room”, a “native sun”, a “history or sexuality”, or a “coming to writing”.
How someone’s interpretation of a monster thinking, talking, having feeling, could awaken such feelings and a love for literature is perhaps still a bit of an enigma to me. I don’t even remember Grendel’s author or many of its finite details. But there are lots of other authors, who I may have never found had I not found “Grendel”. No, I am not a monster. Maybe I am just an author seduced by some teacher many moons ago to read this “Grendel” book. Maybe I’m a teacher who will guide some kid who is hiding from themselves, the impetus to be okay with whatever reality they live with, and locate the larger communities of hope waiting for their story to be told.
