Sh*t To Help You Show Up October 27, 2023
We're all just soup
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Do you know why people ban books?
It’s not, despite all their protestations about offensive or inappropriate content, about what’s in the book. It’s about what reading the book can do.
Reading books about characters who live vastly different lives on the surface than we do only to discover that once you peel back the layers they’re just as human on the inside as we are engenders empathy and compassion.
People who ban books are deeply invested in an Us vs. Them view of the world and there is nothing more threatening to that sort of binary tribalism than empathy and compassion.
When I was 11 years old I read Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, one of the most banned books in the history of modern America. Many might argue The Bluest Eye is not appropriate reading for 11-year-olds, and they might even be right. The fact that I read it was kind of a fluke, honestly.
Back in those days there was this national program called R.I.F. (Reading is Fundamental) which provided elementary school-age kids books. So, on R.I.F. day when I was in 5th grade, I trooped down to the library with my class to peruse the tables and pick out a book to take home. Looking back now, I suspect whoever was responsible for providing the books and laying them out for our benefit had never heard of Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye had only been published a decade before and, like all of Morrison’s books up until that point, it had been marginalized by the literary establishment. Writing about the rich, complex, epic inner lives of Black people? Maybe someday she’ll live up to her vast talent and write about the “real” world (read: White people), critics opined.
In other words, Morrison was not the icon she is today, so the organizer of the R.I.F. tables probably looked at the cover photo on that small paperback and thought it must be a children’s book. I looked at that cover photo and felt like I was looking at myself in a funhouse mirror (a young White girl with Black siblings whose mother had refused to buy me new baby dolls unless they were Black). I’d loved those baby dolls, as little girls so often do, while at the same time I yearned for one that looked like me.
Oh! I thought, looking at the cover. She’s like me!
It was only when I read the slim novel (multiple times over the next handful of years) that I realized how much the main character, Pecola Breedlove, and I had in common, despite the fact that she was a poor, Black girl growing up in a small town in Ohio in the first half of the 20th century and I was a middle-class, White girl growing up in D.C. fifty years later.
Pecola and I were both victims of incest. We were both surrounded by addiction and violence. Most importantly, we were both consumed with deep self-loathing fueled by the misapprehension that all of the pain and trouble being experienced by the people around us, and by us, was our fault. We both believed that if we could just be different (better and beautiful) then all of it— the pain, poverty, violation, and violence— would stop.
I resonated deeply with Pecola. To witness her experience and suffering made me feel for the first time in my life like I wasn’t alone in my darkness. The true magic of the narrative for me, though, wasn’t my identification with Pecola and how it affected my sense of isolation. It was the fierce love that Morrison clearly felt for her.
Morrison didn’t fix things for Pecola. She didn’t manufacture a happy ending so that Pecola’s story would be redeemed, because that’s not actually the way the world works for most Black girls in America. Instead, she showed, with incredible tenderness and unwavering honesty, that the tragedy of Pecola’s life wasn’t Pecola, her abusive father, addiction, judgmental religion, or poverty. The tragedy was the system of racism that twists and wrecks Black people’s lives— on the outside, and deep, deep on the inside. Morrison gazed upon a poor, dark-skinned, tortured, Black girl and her world unflinchingly, while insisting at every step on Pecola’s inherent nobility.
Morrison’s love for Pecola planted a seed deep in me— the idea that I might also, in all of my feelings of broken wrongness, be worthy of that kind of fierce love. And if Pecola was worthy of it and I was worthy of it, then in fact, all sorts of seemingly broken people who by all accounts were nothing like me, were worthy of it.
No wonder folks want to ban the book— all that revolutionary, subversive love.
Why am I telling you all of this? Believe it or not, it’s because my thoughts have continued over the last week to be consumed with the war in Israel and Gaza. Particularly, I’ve been thinking about listening— how important it is and how we learn to do it.
Last week I wrote about the war— how I was wrestling with my own complicity with violence, and how allowing myself to feel the discomfort of that was helping me keep my heart open to everyone on all the different sides of this conflict. Then, about six hours after I published, a Zionist friend of mine reached out via Facebook Messenger. As soon as I saw the message come in I was filled with dread. What would she say? What was I going to say? Oh, god, this is going to be awful.
My brain spun and spun, rehearsing all the ways I could defend myself— listen to her while simultaneously preventing any change to myself or my position. In other words, I was trying to figure out how to perform openness to her while actually staying completely and utterly closed.
I didn’t read the message when it first came in. I still didn’t read it when I awoke at 3:30 in the morning and saw it there, staring at me. I just lay there and watched my brain scramble to protect my ego until finally some other part of me inserted herself and pulled me up short. Twelve hours ago you insisted that you were humbly staying open to everyone, she noted, wryly. How’s that going for you?
At which point, I opened the message… to find that none of the things I was afraid of were happening. My friend didn’t attack me. She didn’t say anything about Palestinians that I disagreed with. In fact, I do agree with her deep concern about the actions of Hamas. What she really wanted to tell me, though, was that she was hurting and scared, which makes perfect sense. So, that’s what I told her. That her feelings make sense, that I was so thankful that she reached out to me, and that I was sending her so much love.
I thought about writing about listening skills this week, but that thought, quite honestly, left me cold. Over the years, I have studied reflective listening, non-violent communication, and other sets of skills that are useful when wading into emotionally volatile conversation. I recommend that work to support your integrity practice. But that’s not where I first learned to listen deeply to other people.
I learned to listen deeply to other people through reading books.
Reading books didn’t turn me into some kind of saint. I’ve despised people and considered them my enemy (ask my ex-husband). I’ve spent years utterly convinced that some people are simply irredeemable (my abuser). But ever since I was 11 years old there’s also been a Toni Morrison-shaped space in my heart which keeps insisting while I hold people to account I also remember that on the inside they are vast and complicated and maybe even, in their brokenness, worthy of love.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. — James Baldwin
I can hear the voices even now that respond, But what about Hitler? Was he worthy of love? To which I will say this: sitting in a room with Hitler, Donald Trump, the leaders of Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other violent, fascistic world leader and finding love in my heart for them is not the job I got assigned this go ‘round.
My integrity practice, however, does require understanding what my job is, and committing to do that job to the best of my ability. That job, as I understand it, is to love the people I can reach, that I am connected to in my face-to-face life and online, regardless of whether we agree on everything. It is to step outside of my own experience and allegiances to see that even if the balance of their ingredients on the inside is different than mine, it’s all the same ingredients. We’re all just soup. And, man, do I love soup.
Let me also argue, while we’re at it, that understanding all of the intricate details of the history of the modern Israeli state and the current conflict is also not my job and it’s probably not your job either. Which is not to say that educating yourself on the history is not a worthy thing to do. I hope to do some of that myself. I’m also not arguing that you shouldn’t take action to participate in the ways that fit your conscience. Call your political representatives, write letters to the editor, and donate money to organizations who share your values. I have.
But none of that is your job. Your job is to dig deep and find some sense of shared humanity with the millions of people impacted by this conflict. Then you can actually listen, really deeply listen, to everyone, regardless of their perspective. Or, at the very least, you can try. It’s called “practicing” integrity for a reason.
To that end, let’s all step away from the doomscrolling and urge to take sides and read some books, shall we? Below are some lists of great contemporary books— some fiction, some memoir— written by Israelis and Palestinians. I haven’t read any of them (yet), so I can’t recommend them, per se. But in my experience, even if you don’t love a book the experience of deeply witnessing another’s interior life is never wasted, so why not choose one?
The Best Contemporary Israeli Fiction, an interview with Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
7 Novels and Memoirs About Palestine and Palestinians
9 Best Israeli Books: Discover Israel Through Its Most Compelling Stories
Six Palestinian fiction books to read
If you read some of them, come back in the comments and let us know? I will, too.
Sending y’all so much love.
XO, Asha
thank you so much for sharing these resources ~ i find i learn as much if not more through fiction and memoir as i do through the lens of news and nonfiction
Thank you for this.