How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

It is hard to believe that it has been four years since I read America is Not the Heart, but time has flown. My eldest also read and enjoyed the book, and we discussed it. 

 

When we heard that Elaine Castillo was coming out with a book of essays, it went on our lists. 

How to Read Now is a provocative, and unashamedly confrontational book. Castillo tackles the problems of how the white establishment reads, and how it needs to change in order to stop marginalizing and fetishizing people of color. 

 

For the most part, the book is about and directed toward white liberals, not conservatives. This is for the simple and obvious reasons: conservatives tend not to read, at least outside of their ideological ghettos and genre fiction, and even when they branch out, they are committed to being “anti-woke” and closed minded. This is not really debatable - even in supposedly non-partisan fields such as science, there is a large gap. It is rather unlikely that the average conservative reader - let alone a MAGA reader - is going to seek out books written by people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and so on. 

 

[Related: my parents’ devolution from thoughtful people who taught me anti-racist values has tracked well with their change in reading from broad and thoughtful to religious and political silos.] 

 

This isn’t to say that conservatives cannot read broadly - I certainly did during my conservative period. But that is also one reason I have grown more liberal over time. When you engage in good faith with other perspectives - those outside the white, conservative, middle class, religious subculture - you often end up changing your mind about the ideology. 

 

Castillo’s target, then, is the kind of people that she has dealt with her entire live within literary circles - the publishing industry, academia, literate society - that tends naturally to skew liberal. 

 

This includes people like me these days, I guess, when to be open-minded and empathetic means “liberal.” As someone who is temperamentally conservative - incremental, preservational, reform-rather-than-revolution - to be labeled as a leftie still feels really weird. 

 

The eight essays in this book are all related, but separate. They all relate to the idea of learning to read better, but their focus is varied. For example, there is an entire chapter devoted to Asian Film, as it relates to Castillo’s life and experience. And another that mostly focuses on Joan Didion - and it is quite a takedown. But the essays all link, and they build on each other, so they should be read in order. 

 

I would also say that this book is not intended to be comprehensive. It isn’t an instruction book, it doesn’t cover all of the facets of bad reading. But it does give an important perspective - that of a woman, a Filipino, an outsider to white culture who is, honestly, better read and educated than most people. 

 

So many of the episodes she recounts are seriously cringy - but I know people like she talks about, particularly the certain liberal-ish white woman of my parents’ generation, who is totally blind about her biases. To be fair, in general my friends and acquaintances are trying harder, doing better, and looking beyond the standard platitudes, but blind spots are a problem for us all. Castillo shines a light into these dark corners, and encourages the reader to think differently when reading. 

 

This is, of course, deeply uncomfortable. The United States can’t even admit it is an empire, a colonialist empire that has caused tremendous damage and destruction around the world - and are thus continually blindsided that we aren’t seen as the great (white) saviors we think we are. 

 

Before getting into the quotes and ideas in this book, I wanted to start with one thing:

 

Ms. Castillo, if you, by some miracle run across this post, I want you to know that I very much felt your pain about The Turn of the Screw. I too would have been completely appalled at the way the teacher just blew off the need to read it, not just because, like you, I firmly believe in doing the assignments, but because I too love that story and think it is a fertile ground for discussion. I would have loved to have discussed it with you, had I been in that class. 

 

And also, that isn’t even a hard read, despite what the teacher said. The Wings of the Dove is difficult, but not The Turn of the Screw, which anyone who can read, say Hawthorne or Dickens should have zero difficulty reading. 

 

With that, here is what stood out to me about the book. This line, from the author’s introduction to the topic, is excellent. 

 

I don’t want a book called How to Read Now to speak only to the type of people who read books and attend literary festivals - and in the same vein, I don’t want it to let off the hook people who think they don’t read at all. I can’t write a book about reading that tells people there’s only one type of reading that counts - but equally, just because you don’t read books at all doesn’t mean you’re not reading, or being read in the world. Of course, How to Read Now runs off the tongue a little easier than How to Dismantle Your Entire Critical Apparatus. 

 

Castillo’s dad was a well-read man, and the two of them read a lot together when she was a child - this was formative for her - but she also missed at that time the understanding of the very white and middle-class ways of reading the classics that she later discovered to be dominant. Eventually, she decided that she needed to write a book about the racial politics of reading - that is how this book came to be. 

 

But there was the intellectual idea of writing a book called How to Read Now, in a critical attempt to contend with the racial politics and ethics of how we read our books, our history, and each other - and there was the actual lived practice of writing that book, in the midst of the historic social upheaval brought to us by a global pandemic whose grotesquely racist coverage and criminally incompetent mismanagement under Trump’s America has not only utterly laid bare the outrageous truths many of us have always known, in particular regarding the true value of Black and Brown lives in this country, where systemic injustice and government neglect has meant predominantly poorer Black and Brown communities have borne the brunt of COVID-19’s destruction. 

 

I can remember the early days of the pandemic - when most people pulled together, stayed home, tried to prevent the spread. But I also remember a shift in mood. It occurred when it became clear that Covid was killing far more poor and brown skinned people than middle-class whites. At that point, the MAGA crowd shifted to “open everything up” and “no masks.” Black and Brown lives  didn’t matter to them. And they still do not. 

 

I also concur with Castillo’s assessment of the criminal incompetence in managing the pandemic. It is estimated that he US’s terrible policies - failure to enact mandatory safety and distancing rules early on, refusal to test returning white travelers, failure to mandate vaccines (and the anti-vax misinformation), and so on led to nearly one million avoidable deaths - this is compared to most of the rest of the first world. And, to blame for most of them is Donald Trump, whose border policies were based on xenophobia, not germ theory, and who apparently thought that if he ignored the pandemic, it would go away, and he would be popular again. 

 

Don’t get me started on Trump and the pandemic. Every one of you who voted for him, ignoring the fact that he is literally incompetent at everything except “reality” television - is either stupid or racist. Take your pick. You cost the lives of nearly a million Americans with your foolishness. 

 

I honestly could quote the entire first chapter. The premise is that white supremacy creates terrible readers. And it does. The problem, as she points out, isn’t ignorance, per se, but overeducation in the wrong ideas. 

 

Most people are not, in fact, all that ignorant, i.e. lacking knowledge or simply unaware. Bad reading isn’t a question of people undereducated in a more equitable and progressive understanding of what it means to be a person among other people. Most people are vastly overeducated: overeducated in white supremacy, in patriarchy, in heteronormativity. Most people are in fact highly advanced in their education in these economies, economies that say, very plainly, that cis straight white lives are inherently more valuable, interesting, and noble than the lives of everyone else; that they deserve to be set in stone, centered in every narrative. It’s not a question of bringing people out of their ignorance - if only someone had told me that Filipinos were human, I wouldn’t have massacred all of them! - but a question of bringing people out of their deliberately extensive education. 

 

She goes on:

 

When I say that white supremacy makes for terrible readers, I mean that white supremacy is, among its myriad ills, a formative collection of fundamentally shitty reading techniques that impoverishes you as a reader, a thinker, and a feeling person; it’s an education that promises that whole swaths of the world and their liveliness will be diminished in meaning to you. 

 

This is the problem - it reduces non-white characters and writers to cardboard cutouts. And it resists anything that makes one feel uncomfortable about one’s own country, nationality, or race. 

 

The next chapter is an exploration of the “art-for-art’s sake” crowd. You know, the ones who complain when art gets “political.” This whole discussion was fascinating, honestly, and gave me reason to re-examine a number of 19th Century authors who I otherwise love. 

 

On my mom’s side, I am descended from a branch of the Wedgwood family - Josiah Wedgwood founded the famous pottery company, and was first cousin to Charles Darwin. My ancestor was close enough that my mom actually inherited a small sum back in the day. 

 

I bring this up because the Wedgwood company made some interesting styles during the Regency period - that’s Jane Austen era. They actually made anti-slavery themed teapots. A bit of abolitionist kitsch, one might say - and one that you rarely see in museums, despite, as Castillo points out, the museums owning said items. 

 

But this raises the question: since slavery and racial injustice was widely discussed during that period, why does Austen never mention it? Wouldn’t a more accurate portrayal of the period include the commonplace political discussions? 

 

A significant part of this chapter ends up devoted to Austrian writer Peter Handke, who managed to win a Nobel prize despite being a pretty open fascist sympathizer. (Also, the passage starts with a column by Bret Stephens, who is pretty damn close to a fascist himself at this point, unfortunately.) 

 

Having never read Handke, I am not well equipped to analyze Castillo’s analysis of his books - but she is, having read them herself. The reason he comes into this chapter is because his books are considered “non-political,” but, as she reveals, there is a lot more of politics - nasty, hateful politics - in the books. It just isn’t recognized as such. 

 

Writers like Handke might be lionized by articles like The New York Times one “because they did not choose politics as their vocation,” but the idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics - the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice - is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling - and the stunted readership it demands - asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal. It asks us to keep those bodies, characters, stories, forever safe from politics - forever safe, period.

 

And this as well:

 

[W]e have to push back against the idea that engaging with our art in ways that look beyond the aesthetic is a cheapening of our engagement. Not least of all because the people who are so eager to police the borders of our critical engagement are reading politically: it’s a political choice to protect and continue to narrowly read certain writers, while willfully ignoring choice parts of their oeuvre (reading Handke’s books, “at least the non-political ones”). It’s a political choice to declare that not reading writers like Handke or protesting the Nobel’s legitimizing of his work is tantamount to a foreclosure of readerly curiosity and openness - and not, for example, consider that it might be equally incursions of a reader to vociferously defend the right to read supposedly nonpolitical white European men, and not seek out the chance to make space on one’s helf for the apparently-inherently-politicized Everyone Else. It’s a political choice to say that certain artists make Real Art That Must Be Protected, and other artists (seemingly always writers of color, queer writers, minoritized writers) make only socialist realism or sentimentalist dogma. 

 

Castillo also explores a more general phenomenon, which she calls the “expected reader.” For us white people, we are very acculturated to being the expected reader, of having the writer write for us, for our concerns, for our experiences. 

 

When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable - as many I heard from claimed - by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness” - but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding. This tourism dynamic means that even when writers of color tell their own stories, those stories must cater to the needs and wishes of that expected, and expectant, reader: translations, glossaries, indexes, maps, rest stops along the way. 

 

I also had to laugh at this quip: “white feminism, that overused stage name, meant to obscure its legal name: Ye Olde Garden-Variety White Supremacy - Now Available in Girlboss.” 

 

Certainly, Castillo’s novel does not cater to this “expected reader” - it contains a lot of untranslated words and phrases, and expects the reader to do their own research to understand the culture of the story. As an unexpected reader of that book, I appreciated that - I am perfectly capable of using the Google. 

 

The next chapter, “Honor the Treaty,” is an exploration of colonialism - I highly recommend it, particularly for people who do not know how badly we fucked up the Philippines back in the day, and how we continue to treat it as a colony. I won’t get into all of it here, but it is well worth reading. 

 

One key insight is that the reason we have a diaspora is that we have an empire. Every time I hear someone whinging about immigration, I wish I could get through their heads that it is our empire that has created this in the first place, but our stealing of a continent, and our continued exploitation of the third world. 

 

I’ll also mention the loathsome Boris Johnson and his claim that removal of statues of slaveholders in London was somehow “editing” the past. The Guardian dryly pointed out that one of the statues hadn’t been erected until…1997. Castillo makes another point well:

 

Even if that statue hadn’t, sickeningly, been put there in the twentieth century, the argument Johnson and zealous tradition-defenders like him often make - we have to protect our history, our traditions, our legacy - still doesn’t hold up. Monumentalizing is already an act of editing (and censoring) the past; it already allows us to pretend to have a different history. Those statues don’t just teach us about our past - they teach us how to read our past, and thereby how to live in our present. 

…

Firs, roses, statues - and the placards that adorn them - are like history books in public: they’re civic sites of collective reading, where the statue tells us to read the ground we’re standing on; to interpret it in a specific way. A statue of a slaveholder, on land stolen from Native peoples and developed and enriched by enslaved labor, is demanding a specific reading of that place; that building; that country. To challenge these monuments - to question the old story they’ve had so long to tell - is not only a vital act of civil disobedience. It’s a revolutionary act of reading. 

 

This is the key to understanding the fury directed at those who wish to remove monuments to the evil men of the past. The removal forces a change in how the past is read - no longer can the white supremacist approach be codified by a monument. 

 

[Note: context matters. Nathan Bedford Forrest on a horse, looking “noble” even as he founds the KKK is not good. A statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest burning in Hell while those he enslaved and terrorized are comforted in Heaven? Now that’s a biblical approach I can vote for.]

 

I also can’t resist recounting one of the funniest scenes in the book. Castillo was speaking at a writers festival event in New Zealand, when an older white woman (of course it was!) with an American accent (of course it was!) demanded a list of Filipino and Filipino-American writers to read, followed by “GO!” (of course!) To be fair, the audience was appalled too. But Castillo’s response was gold.

 

“First of all, PayPal me the fee for that labor, because Google exists.” 

 

The next chapter, “The Limits of White Fantasy,” was a bit harder for me to follow, because it involves TV shows I haven’t seen, and a lot of references I didn’t get. The main points were excellent, but I know I missed some nuance. What I didn’t miss, however, was this:

 

Another day, another shit show involving J. K. Rowling; I’m starting to think there’s a schedule. Now, I’m not particularly interested in rehashing the stale trans-exclusionary non-feminism that characterizes not just Rowling’s work but her public persona, especially of late - particularly as it increasingly feels as though any sustained engagement with her scientifically and morally indefensible ideas around biology and gender only continue to give oxygen to those ideas, and reinforce the presumption that the existential reality of trans women’s lives is a subject open for debate in the first place (not least of all, that it is open for debates led by and between cis women.) For the purposes of this book, I want to focus on the effect her very public statements have had on the way people read her work, in an effort to rethink the way we’ve customarily read the mainstream white-authored fantasy narratives about identity, oppression, and justice that have become cultural touchstones for so many across the globe. 

 

Serious bonus points for pointing out that “TERF” is an inaccurate term: trans-exclusionary people are not even feminists, let alone radical ones – they are generally heterosexual, white, and privileged.

 

The underlying problem for Castillo is that these fantasy narratives center whiteness, even while appropriating the histories of oppression from actually marginalized communities. 

 

The truth is, these worlds may have only ever nominally been interested in oppression and difference - that shallow, cosplay-like understanding of oppression makes itself clear when authors like Rowling are taken to task for their actual opinions on marginalized people. I can no longer muster up disappointment when white authors whose works supposedly deal in equality and justice show themselves (and the reactionary readers who love them) to not be remotely interested in either equality or justice - not when both the inception and the material effect of that work necessitate lifting from the historical struggle of racial, sexual, and economic minorities, and replacing those bodies with white, cis, straight characters. Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language - its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

 

That really is the question, isn’t it? Everyone wants to be the hero in an underdog struggle - American Revolution hangover, perhaps. Or just white guilt finding expression and projection. 

 

The next chapter, “Main Character Syndrome,” is all about Joan Didion. I confess again that I have read only one Didion book, and not the ones discussed in this chapter. And, while it did seem a bit self-absorbed, the topic of the book was all about the death of her husband, so really it wasn’t surprising. Her fiction, in this case Democracy, certainly sounds solipsistic as Castillo describes it. 

 

Democracy sometimes reads like a funhouse mirror Eat Pray Love - they are cut from the same still-somewhat-lucrative cloth, wherein white people, very preoccupied with their own melancholy, are adrift in Asia or Africa or Latin America, the exotic background providing just enough texture and detail to make the old operatic agonies novel again. The inevitable redemption arcs are always scaffolded by the one or two noble-hearted natives in the piece, who usually end up dying in the finale, stage left. 

 

The extended examination of how native characters are used as plot devices, rather than fully-realized humans, is excellent, and applies to so many white-written books of the 20th Century. 

 

He exists to be the soothing voice on the end of a phone number, the capable arms hauling the dead body to the car; like many characters of color in such works, he operates primarily as a satellite to the central white narrative, the way queer characters will often function as reflective handmaidens in central hetero narratives, with those narratives expecting readers and viewers to be grateful for the existence of those characters at all. Representation matters, etc. 

 

Castillo also takes issue with Didion - and those like her - for writing about California as this ominous place, without examining why. As a native Californian myself, I concur - this seems to me as well as a kind of exoticism of my homeland, writing for non-Californians not that differently from how right-wing politicians demonize the state. 

 

An alien place, haunted - by the Mojave. Devastated - by the hot dry Santa Ana wind. The passive voice Didion deliberately chooses puts us into the aggrieved, nervy body of a white settlor, who sees the Mojave and the Santa Ana as enemies, with the same cocktail of attraction and repulsion to the natural landscape and its visceral effect on White European immigrants that Toni Morrison so aptly identified in our early American literature. 

 

I love the Mojave Desert - although I greatly respect it. And, when I lived in Los Angeles, I loved the Santa Ana winds - I probably miss that part of living there the most, honestly. Bakersfield has far too little in the way of good wind - we save all of ours for nasty dust storms that bring no rain. 

 

Castillo also takes on the fetish of thinness that white women of a certain sort have - Didion included. 

 

Incidentally, whenever I hear the line “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” a line attributed to Kate Moss - another bona fide Skinny Legend; often venerated by those who venerate Didion - a line the model later wisely distanced herself from, I am reminded, as someone who lived and thus was obligated to eat in England for many years, that the indigenous cuisine of the white English populace is not, shall we say, universally esteemed as one of the globe’s great culinary treasures. Obviously nothing tastes as good as skinny feels if all you’re eating is tale underfried chips and cucumber sandwiches, but - to paraphrase June Jordan - some of us did invent seasoning.

 

I’m afraid it is all too obvious that I think many things taste better than skinny feels. Oh well…

 

The chapter on Asian Film was actually pretty fascinating, even though I have never heard of most of the films mentioned. For good reason: most were never released in the US, and the author watched them on bootleg DVDs from the Philippines - sometimes it helps to have connections I guess. Castillo’s writing about them, though, is excellent. She also interlaces stories from her own childhood - including her molestation by her much older half-brother. 

 

This whole episode is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, her parents did mostly the right thing, removing the (adult) brother from the home, protecting the young Elaine. However, they were not able to report him to the police, because of his undocumented status. (Like many in the family - America is Not the Heart has a lot of these liminal characters, where contact with law enforcement could mean full destruction of their lives.) 

 

Despite this good beginning, the family never really talked about it, and the author had to endure the presence of her abuser for years afterward. Now, apparently, he is dying, and she has decided not to see him again. 

 

And this is the gift I’m giving to myself now: to not be there. To not bear witness to his eventual death. To not console him, or be with those who would console him: my other brothers and sister, my nieces and nephews, my grandnephews. To not pray that our thousandfold gods, large and small, protect him and keep him here; to not send him off with goodwill into the path of our bygones; to not ask our ancestors to bless him, and carry him, and look upon him kindly. To refuse, in this knife-shining instance, to offer any form of succor, comfort, or indeed love. To know that - unlike Antigone, perhaps myth’s most famous younger sister - I do not owe it to him to unlock the house of the dead, there where our father will be waiting. To be, in other words, and finally, a bad sister.

 

This passage has haunted me so much. While my sister will likely outlive me, this will indeed be my own approach should she die first – her destruction of our family due to her NPD has never been acknowledged, let alone addressed. And, while I haven’t closed the door on the possibilities, this will probably be my approach to my parents when their times come. I am increasingly skeptical of “death-bed reconciliation.” It seems manipulative - people who couldn’t be bothered to reconcile while they were alive think of manipulating a reconciliation so they can glide off into eternity with a supposedly clear conscience. I cannot be a party to that lying hypocrisy. The time to make things right is now, not on one’s death bed. 

 

I’ll also mention in this connection the film The Assassin, which explores the problem of separating from an authoritarian upbringing. 

 

A young girl is abducted, and trained in the art of assassination, and eventually given the job of killing a blood relative. She rejects that lifestyle at the end. Castillo’s analysis is fascinating. 

 

But most of all, most of all, the film is also about what it is to build a personal life for yourself after trauma…Yinniang is deeply internal and reserved, someone who’s lived much of her formative years outside of the context she was born into and under a system of strict daily control…she’s just slightly out of step with everyone else she meets, as a testament to her years of isolation and training…someone in the process of slowly realizing that it might be possible for her to break out of the structures she’s beholden to, whether the authoritarian influence of Jiaxin or the larger dynastic politics of her work, assassinating select government officials deemed to be corrupt (by whom, and for what ends, becomes one of the self-actualizing questions Yinniang has to ask herself.) So much of what gripped me in this film was the genuinely edge-of-your-seat experience of watching someone try to figure out what a good life, on her own terms, might look like. What her convictions might be if she honored them; what her desires might be if she followed them; what it might feel like to be decent, loved, or known. It’s a portrait of a woman coming into herself, trying that decent, knowable life on like a coat; minor, meaningful. 

 

As a survivor of an authoritarian religious upbringing - with all those expectations that I would continue to be a soldier in the culture wars against everyone outside the tribe - this really resonates. When I moved out, and started asking myself what a good life, on my own terms, might look like, I had to work through the process - and the trauma. It was a long process, eventually leading to the loss of both my birth family and my religious tribe - thanks a fucking lot, Trump! - and eventually leading to my choosing to reject the hate and bigotry that is so central to the culture wars. 

 

So this movie does indeed sound fascinating. 

 

I also want to quote the passage on “positive representation.” This is a fraught topic, of course, because positive representation is an improvement of sorts on the very negative portrayals of people of color (and LGBTQ folks) in the past. But it is also incomplete - full representation would include the freedom to be fully human.

 

I hate the idea of positive representation; always have. I get, grudgingly, where it’s coming from; we need positive representation, or so the old argument goes, to provide a contrast to every other Life Aquatic, every Scarlett Johansson cast to play my mom (a joke past its expiration date, or evergreen, I can’t quite decide). And in some basic way I know that this argument is not entirely morally bankrupt - though most days I wouldn’t be able to muster up the strength or inclination to defend that somewhat annoying knowledge. It’s the drive to positive representation that gives me pause; the way it so often delimited and waters down the art that gets to swim its way into the mainstream. Because when art gets made to check a box for positive representation, you feel it - you feel its intellectual limits, its political lassitude, its flat affect where a complex emotional life is supposed to be. “Representation matters” - type art is interested in people the same way Didion is interested in people, which is to say, not at all. People - the spiky, uneven feeling, striated with joy and boredom and grief and wonder, of being a living person in the world - don’t matter to positive-representation art. Only representations matter, and representations in art perform a function not unlike monarchs in constitutional monarchies, or presidents in parliamentary republics: a figurehead function, meant as a living symbol, with no real power - except, of course, the enormous and indelible “soft” power they wield as symbolic incarnations of everything their country supposedly means, values, and venerates. Representation Matters Art wants delegates, not people: a Crazy Rich Asian, an Asian Cowboy, an Asian Brad Pitt, an Asian Superhero, and Asian Joan of Arc, One Asian to Rule Them All. Representation Matters Art thinks we can save the settler colonial Western fantasy if we just make John Wayne Filipino this time. 

 

Wow, there is so much there. And that last line is superb. And also this one:

 

Representation Matters Art is late capitalism’s wet dream, because it sublimates the immense hunger and desire for wide-ranging racial, sexual, gender, and economic justice into the Pepsi commercial of that justice. 

 

The chapter ends with an account of how Castillo’s mother was assaulted in a store while pregnant with Elaine (by an older white woman….of course.) The problem of anti-Asian hate has only accelerated with Covid - and a certain ex-president-and-convicted-felon calling it the “Kung Flu. Castillo looks at the challenges of addressing prejudice, particularly since it is all too easy to fragment groups. 

 

To mobilize any polity is difficult enough, and the politics mobilized around immediate tragedy have a historically understandable tendency toward triage: treating the life-threatening symptom before addressing the life-shaping cause. 

 

Minorities within minorities are asked to “wait their turn,” which ignores the oppression within the oppressed. I love Castillo’s hopeful ending to the chapter. 

 

Solidarity is not nothing. It is a labor - like building a person, a love, a body of knowledge. And that labor, its peopled dailiness, has a tangible, vibrating effect in the world, radiating liveliness like a furnace throws off heat in the cold. And the art that I truly love, the art that saved me, never made me just feel represented. It did not speak to my vanity, my desperation to be seen positively at any cost. It made me feel - solid. It told me I was minor, and it showed me my debts. It held me together. And a little like my mom, who went on to have the kid that white woman once wanted to kill: it gave me life. It brought me here. Hi. 

 

The final chapter is shorter, and wonderful in so many ways. But not quotable. Castillo does a re-mix of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus the cyclops from the reversed point of view. Odysseus is a conqueror, and the cyclopses the indigenous people of an island. It actually makes sense, and resonates well with the problems that my kids have had with Odysseus as a character. 

 

I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares about literature, about justice, and about humanity. Castillo will challenge your assumptions, reorient your perspective, and enlighten you as to events that have been rather whitewashed by mainstream historians. 

 

And also, go read more books by women of color in general, and by LGBTQ authors - you will probably be made uncomfortable, but if you read with your empathy and an open mind, you will be reading well.