Reflections on Reading

I haven’t posted yet, because I haven’t known how to start. But I think I learned this week why I’ve had so much difficulty participating fully in class, so I thought I would start with a reflection on that. I see now that withholding my participation is also stunting my learning. I’m hoping it’s not too late to engage differently.

Before last week’s class I wanted to get up early so that I could read all of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother in the 5 hours before class. I slept in, so I only had two hours and only got through the first 100 pages. This is how I read, now, at the end of an English masters degree. Reading is more like consumption than anything else. I read to identify argument, plot, key tensions/problems, technical execution. It’s like a check list.

The frustrating thing is that I knew, when this class began, that that’s exactly the type of reading we weren’t supposed to be doing. I heard the conversations about listening, about hearing. I knew in theory that I wasn’t supposed to be reading for the sole purpose of finding something to take from the work, some paired down account of a text’s argument to prove comprehension and competency.

The first time I met with my supervisor in September to talk about Moten’s In the Break he even said to me, don’t read it to just take things away from it for your thesis. It doesn’t work like that. I think a lot of the works we have read don’t work like that. And I entered into this classroom space to try to NOT think like that. To try to listen, to try to learn from the voices I was hearing, to let them shape me and move me, and not to simply consume them, to extract from them what I need.

I realized while attempting to read Lose Your Mother at 54 seconds per page on Thursday morning that I still had it wrong.

I’m self-conscious about posting this because it is not the kind of academic response I’m used to. On further reflection this week I realized that I am not used to being vulnerable in school settings, I’m not used to performing my learning, I’m not used to allowing the works I read to implicate my own self and my own politics. Turns out, a non-traditional classroom space makes me nervous.

When I think on my consumption style reading I see that it was definitely born of an education system that demanded it of me. I would trace it back to a conversation with a prof where he timed my reading and told me that I better speed up. I wasn’t reading at an acceptable pace for university study—at my rate of reading I should not be able to complete the work demanded of me for a bachelors degree. He told me not to read every word on the page, but rather to keep your head absolutely still, moving only your eyes across the lines at a consistent pace, ingesting words in groups of 2-4 for basic comprehension, never stopping or slowing.

I am aware too, however, that this kind of reading is also aligned with whiteness. It is what Fred Moten cautioned against in his lecture at Concordia this fall. He called it “masterful reading.” The literary critical cannon is filled with “masterful readers”, mostly white. Moten pointed out their “tendency for brutality.” “Masterful reading” he says, “is utterly sure that it understands what’s going on in black poetry.”

Last year I wrote a term paper on M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! that my professor suggested I turn into a longer paper to meet the thesis requirement (major research paper) for my degree. Part of auditing this class was to see if I could do that ethically. If I should do it. If I could do it without “masterfully reading”. I met with Erin and she emphasized the importance of not reading to say something smart about this work, but of reading to learn, to listen. I’ve been trying to learn and listen and be shaped by the work we’ve been encountering in class.

My reading of Lose Your Mother reminded me that the seeds of whiteness and of a university education given by mostly white educators go deep.

I’m thankful for this class and the opportunity to listen and to try to hear. I am trying not to read to consume, and I’m thankful for the myriad of incredibly thoughtful voices in this class that have been showing me how to do this. I’m hoping I too can give, and not just take from this space.