Last week, I went to an event that featured Junot D??az. He read from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and then fielded questions from the audience.
Towards the end, a woman asked about his intention behind including passages of untranslated Spanish. “Ah, the Spanish question,” he quipped. Many interviewers have asked the same, and I’m sure he gets it at almost every Q&A.
It’s a question loaded with assumptions about language, power, and privilege, and I’ve always been impressed with how he addresses these assumptions (keeping it real, as he says here).
What interested me this time was how he posited reading “as an invitation to community.”
“Make a new friend ??? start a conversations about what you don’t understand in the book,” he said, and he pointed out that the book actually contains many more obscure sci-fi references than Spanish words.
According to D??az, any good novel cannot fully be understood by one person reading alone. You need a roomful of people to bring their collective perspectives, experiences, and histories to bear on the work ??? hence literature courses. And, I would argue the same goes for any good poem.
As he spoke, I remembered a class I took on Ulysses and the works Gertrude Stein as an undergrad at Fairhaven College. We sat in a pool of lamplight in Donald McLeod’s large office, reading aloud, puzzling through, and delighting in the difficult texts we balanced on our knees.
Don, who – up until his death a few years ago – refused computers and typed up his handouts on a manual typewriter, his white hair a soft whirlwind, his long fingers gesturing, led us patiently through the wilds of Stein’s sentences, the labyrinth of Joyce’s prose. My twenty-year-old self would never have fallen in love with Stein’s work had it not been for that community of readers with whom she read ??? my very fine valentines.
I’ve thought a lot about how writing is a solitary act that needs to happen in the context of community. I think I’ve spent less time thinking about how reading also needs to occur in that kind of context.
And I mean something more than just book clubs, classrooms, or Goodreads.com. I’m thinking about the alchemical transmission of understanding that occurs between writer and page, page and reader, reader and community. And how that happens in unexpected moments and places ??? a conversation on the subway between strangers, a beloved childhood book that spurs similar memories in two adults, a good chunk of an electorate inspired by a book about hope.
Speaking of community, this is one of sorts, I think.
I invite you, then, into participation: Do you agree with D??az’s statement that reading is an invitation to community? What does that look like for you? How does it manifest in your life as reader? As a writer?