To Alexis, Eighteen Years Old:
Remember when we read Their Eyes Were Watching God in AP
Literature and Composition? I recall hating that book at eighteen. It felt
simultaneously too foreign and too familiar to enjoy. Zora Neale Hurston’s
writing pushed against everything we’d been taught was “good writing.” At the
time, at your time, books like The Great
Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye
seemed to fit the bill, but Their Eyes
Were Watching God was just strange; the heavy dialect, the sexualized
protagonist, and the fuzzy plot structure were too unfamiliar to my
unaccustomed mind. On the other hand, don’t you notice something uncanny about Hurston’s
writing? Something that just makes perfect sense?
That feeling is
what I want I want to write to you about. I haven’t stopped pursuing that
elusive secret buried in texts written by authors who are a little “different”
than the usual run. The secret is frightening, which is probably why I – why
you – chose not to uncover it at eighteen. The secret is this: you see yourself
in these texts. You see the self is that absent in almost every other book
you’ve been forced to read your entire life. You see your mother, your
grandmother, and your dead babuta –
all of whom share little in common with Daisy Miller, but quite a bit with
Janie Crawford. This is not to say you should stop loving all of your favorite
books, just that your views about everything will widen considerably in the
next few years; I like to think that I’ve come dangerously close to
understanding that ethereal feeling.
This year has
been an exciting one for me. I just finished my classes for the semester, all
of which have changed me considerably. I’m about to embark on an exciting,
terrifying journey – the road to an academic career that consists of an odd
mixture of English, comic books, queerness, gender, race, education, history,
nationality, religion, language, folk tales, and performance. I’m at an
authoritative place where I feel comfortable writing to you without feeling
phony, as Holden Caulfield would put it. I want to reflect on the course of my
life, where I’m coming from, what I have to offer to the world. I want to show
you how you will turn the things you love, the things that scare you more than
anything else into the world and transform them into something insightful,
uplifting, and productive, both for yourself and the people around you. I want
to show you how that feeling has dogged your writing since the very beginning,
and how coming to terms with the world is also coming to terms with the self.
Remember when we
had to write a letter in the eighth grade as the person we thought we’d become
in the future? I lost the letter, but I remember it was pretty bleak: a failed
writing career, estrangement, general unhappiness. Why, at twelve, did we think
this was to be our fate? Looking back, I suspect part of the despair came from
the fact that we’d never known of any successful female authors. I think the
first exposure would come years later – a Virginia Woolf story about a parrot.
And, what’s more, all of the women in my life were broken, battered, and alone,
so the lack of confidence isn’t really all that surprising, if you think about
it. Who would have told us it was possible? That we could follow our dreams, if we were willing to fight tooth-and-nail
for it?
I took a Women’s
Literature course this semester. (Yes, I am a feminist. I also stopped shaving
my legs and armpits, so maybe even a radical
feminist, if such a thing exists.) I’ve been introduced to a multitude of
women’s writing at this point, so I wasn’t expecting to be that astonished. I
was wrong. The sheer volume of material – from different times, different perspectives
– was, I’m embarrassed to say, shocking. I had thought for so long that women,
that people in the margins, just didn’t make art. I suppose part of me still
held on to these (hetero)sexist, racist, classist notions which have told us
“NO” all our lives. Reading Summer, I
could see our poor mother, falling again and again for the comforting bullshit
fed to her by the men who flitted just as quickly in as out of her life. I
felt a lot like her, wanting to believe that everything I’d been told, all the
forces controlling my life, were not just some collection of benevolent lies
with all the best intentions and absolutely no substance. I wanted to believe
that I wasn’t collateral in some larger cultural war.
The more I read,
the more I realized maybe it wasn’t quite that
simple (the ambivalent interactions between the female subject and culture of
both Sula and Jasmine being the perfect example of this complexity), but
something was still very wrong here. Why hadn’t I read about my own
experiences, and the related experiences of women from different
positionalities, sooner? Why had I
been denied the solace and validation of reading something that made me feel
less alone? Realizing this was not easy; my life suddenly existed in a whole
new context. I understood that I have long hated being born a girl, that I have
hated my mother for not doing more, and that I have hated my father for creating
the volatile environment of our home in the first place. Although (I am happy
to say) I don’t feel like this anymore, I know this internalized hatred of
difference has had a profound effect
on my life, namely how I perceived myself and the objects and people around me.
I can’t help but question: what if I had read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” sooner? I
might have been spared years of guilt, depression, and self-harm just by
knowing I wasn’t crazy.
You might be
wondering why I wrote this letter specifically to the eighteen year old
incarnation of myself. I promise you this is not yet another comforting, narcissistic
illusion. I know what you are going through. I know that you are being abused,
that you have lost forty pounds, and that you are friendless and alone. I know
that you have struggled with your sexuality, your gender, your destitution, your
family, and your body. I am writing to tell you not to ignore what you recognize, both in yourself and what you
read. I am writing to remember that these are not just stories to me; there is
something lurking under the surface. Nothing is what it seems. Introspection is
vital. You will find the strength to confront the abyss.
-Alexis, Age Twenty-One
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