getting comfortable with uncomfortable reads

why the books that make you squirm are the most important

My day-job is that of a classics editor: reading older books is my work and my passion. This does, however, mean that I read a lot of racist books, colonialist books, prejudicial books, books whose language makes me squirm. Yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Call me perverse, or call it a reaction to living in an era where many people prefer to avoid such language, have it called out—or changed altogether. (See Roald Dahl) Either way, I believe that closing ourselves off from the prejudices of the past is dangerous, for a few reasons.

First of all, I think contemporary readers conflate a book with prejudicial language with a prejudicial book. Sometimes authors use racist language to highlight the cruelty and injustices of racism: ugly words with vile, entrenched histories should make us deeply uncomfortable. Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, the first novel to tackle colorism in the Black community, is filled with racist language. But I would argue that the book itself is, if not anti-racist, at least an active argument against the racism undergirding colorism: the book ends with the dark-skinned heroine casting aside the colorism of her family to pursue her own happiness. Thurman was himself dark-skinned, probably queer, and far more radical than (and critical of) Black writers like W. E. B. Du Bois whom he felt shaped Black art to white audiences; regardless, I believe that Thurman is woefully under-read, perhaps in part because his work was so willing to use prejudicial language, to confront ugly truths with ugly words.

Too, language evolves in surprising ways. I am very much in love with the writing of Edith Maude Eaton, pen name Sui Sin Far, the first Asian American woman writer. In her short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Eaton often refers to people of Asian descent as “Oriental” and Chinese people specifically as “Chinamen”—because she was writing in the late 19th century, and that was the polite nomenclature at the time. Her work is also anti-prejudicial, though, as the astute C Pam Zhang pointed out, it was written to combat the prejudices of a white audience, which gives Eaton’s work a certain flatness. On the other hand, Eaton’s essay “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” is—again, despite its semi-offensive term for biracial folks—an absolute banger, calling out the racism, sexism, and disgust she faced for allying herself with her Asian heritage, rather than her white background. (This essay is included in this edition of Eaton’s work which, full disclosure, I published and edited)

We should not believe that our contemporary moment occupies a cultural or moral high ground. Believe me, the one thing that reading old books has taught me is that every age gets something wrong, that we are collectively blinded by our current cultural mores. The readers of the future may excoriate our casual references to meat-eating; they may decide that the terms “Asian American” or “queer” or “Latinx” are offensive. That is their prerogative: but I hope that they will still extend today’s artists an ounce of grace. By extension I believe, then, that the contemporary reader should extend a similar grace to older works.

The ugliest works do not always use ugly language. I have long loved Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: it was the work that opened my mind to literature, because it was the first time I’d read an adult who could understand children, who remembered that secretive, enclosed world we leave behind. And yet my view of this work has utterly changed since reading Tyrese L. Coleman’s “Reading Jane Eyre while Black” 2017 essay in LitHub:

Bronte…[illustrates] untoward and morally corrupt characters in terms of their relationship to nonwhiteness or non-Englishness. She describes Mrs. Reed, a hateful character till the day she dies, as having “dark and opaque” skin. And she writes of John Reed, Jane’s spoiled and entitled male cousin, that “ . . . he called his mother, ‘old girl,’ too; sometimes reviled her for her dark skin, similar to his own.” Before we even approach Thornfield, the estate where Jane meets Mr. Rochester and falls in love, we are introduced to several characters with dark features and dark hair. This indicates foreignness, that their non-Christian like deviancy in treating the fair and small Jane Eyre with contempt is related to some aspect of their breeding and ancestry.

All of the characters mentioned are white, and I had read Jane Eyre dozens of times, yet never noticed the thousand and one ways that Bronte decries darkness of any kind. I have read the book since, and while I still adore Bronte’s depiction of childhood, still swoon over the romance, my discomfort has lingered. The white Christian supremacy is embedded in the architecture of the book, even though there are no obviously prejudicial slurs in the novel itself.

More notably, Margaret Mitchell’s pro-Confederacy romance Gone With the Wind largely avoids the n-word. In fact, the word is more often used by Black characters referring to other Black characters than by white characters. And yet who could argue the inherent racism and inherently white supremacist nature of this book? I remember reading GWTW at ten and twelve (largely for the outfits; Mitchell is unparalleled on dresses) and then again at fourteen—and realizing that the “gentlemen’s riding club” that Scarlett O’Hara’s elderly, faintly ridiculous second husband belonged to was, in fact, the Ku Klux Klan. Talented, skilled writers can inveigle you into their world-view without drawing attention to its moral ills.

If you’re squirming and still reading, something is happening. I’ve just finished W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 short story collection The Casuarina Tree, which is set in deeply colonial, British-occupied Singapore and Malaysia. While Maugham is undoubtedly a classist snob, he is also confusingly anti-colonialist. He is racist, in the sense that he believes in the notion of race and uses prejudicial language…but I’m not sure that he’s a white supremacist. These distinctions matter, if only because The Casuarina Tree illuminates how one can be born in a racist, colonialist culture predicated on the importance of “good breeding”—and yet feel compelled, artistically, to depict all the ways that colonialism is a corrupt enterprise, “white supremacy” a joke, and that all human beings are motivated by secret passions. (Especially when contrasted with a one-note celebration of colonialism like, say, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”)

Intersectionalism is very, very new. We are only just beginning to examine and articulate the ways that racial, socio-economic, gender, and sexual identities intersect to create hierarchies of privilege! Nor can we even agree on what these identities are, historically. There is a lot of scholarship on how “whiteness” expanded to include groups not previously considered “white,” such as the Irish and the Italians. Sometimes minorities form alliances (yay!) but historically, minorities of all persuasions have often predicated their advocacy for equality on their proximity to whiteness or being “better” than another group. Our literary canon—just like our culture—is born from these twin histories of oppression and resistance. To demand literature that elides these histories is to overlook both the progress we have made and blind ourselves to the cost of relapsing.

Here endeth my sermon, which is perhaps best summarized by the following scene from “American Fiction” (at least through 1:21, though the entire movie is great!):