Essays

We Deserve Thick Sentences

On reading with intention and valuing our stories.

I recently put a poll out on All Ways Black’s Threads account asking folks why they read books. It was exceptionally scientific and inspired by a Facebook group dedicated to Black women readers I’d recently joined. I was fascinated by a theme I saw recurring throughout the page’s discourse; many of the folks in the group knew and loved famous Black romance writers but weren’t so interested in, and were openly critical of, works by more “literary” Black writers like Octavia Butler or Colson Whitehead. I’m still processing what I read regarding their opinions of Toni Morrison. What I was experiencing in the group seemed to be a microcosm of a greater conversation about what and why Black folks are reading.

In February, Vince Staples was on The Breakfast Club talking about Black folks’ access to literature and how limited it is. On Threads a few months back scholar and writer @feministajones panned Morrison for how inaccessible her stories were despite stating that she wrote them for Black people. She goes on to say that if you look at the current reading comprehension stats only 23% of Black folks can understand books written at an 8th-grade level so how on earth could they read Beloved? It’s worth noting that the statistics aren’t much better for other demographics but considering how recent Black people’s access to literacy is one could argue that it is especially alarming.    

I take my work, reading and celebrating Black literature, seriously. A good book can change, save, and alter a life. It happens every day. I am proof of that. I am writing this column for you because of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye‘s profound impact on me. I’m not interested in policing what other people are reading but I am focused on the intention behind the choices. I’m also curious about what the average reader is consuming because while the act of reading, reading anything, does have positive benefits — it increases during the task, the act itself is one of discipline and requires a slowness that much of our modern life works against — the subject, message, and theme of a book also determines the book’s impact. It’s the ability to impact change.   

The truth of this conversation contains multiple explanations. First, perhaps most people aren’t reading for inspiration. They are reading to unplug, rest, and escape. I feel that. I love romance novels. I recently finished Emily Henry’s latest and loved it. I too read to go somewhere else much like I am always in the middle of Gilmore Girls. Y2K-era Stars Hollow is just so much simpler than my real life. Second, many books in the Black literary canon and the writers celebrated as our literary giants are considered inaccessible, highbrow, and elite. These two things would explain why, in a group of almost 100,000 black women, I regularly see titles that include the word stiff while folks are agitated that no one warned them Nickel Boys is not a light beach read.  

I have strong opinions about all of this. I am not anti-escape, I am anti-perpetual escape. It’s irresponsible. We have become obsessed with comfort. It’s destroying us, it’s destroying our planet. Whether we like it or not, being a human is a group project, and we all need to do the messy and complicated work of building a better world. It requires self-awareness, vulnerability, and so much empathy. Books and stories tasked with the painful job of reminding us of our humanity, as opposed to helping us forget, are masterful at helping us hone these skills.  That’s why they are important.  

The second hurdle around literacy is a tough one, that requires a collective reckoning. I want people to excitedly pick up the book that demands all their attention and emotion, but it would be absurd for me to act like most of us have the luxury to do that. I want us to work collectively to reframe our relationship with books. What if sitting down to read wasn’t always an act of leisure, what if it is something that you commit yourself to because you want to enhance the way you show up in the world? How can we make reading and engaging in critical thought a regular cultural and societal practice, that everyone has access to? How can we create a society where we all confidently identify as intellectuals and collaborate to fix the ills of the world in an informed and empathetic way? 

In many ways, we are in the first steps of this process. People desperately want to identify as readers — entry points be damned. I believe that, as a society, we see the value of reading. This is fantastic. The fact that there are almost 100,000 Black women who relish and celebrate books is not a small thing. Audiobooks and their destigmatization are changing the game. It’s making all types of stories and topics that were once too time-consuming to grapple with accessible and manageable. Celebrities want to be seen with books; they want to be considered thinkers, and obviously, they have influence, so that matters.                                                                                                             

We all have to engage in this cultural reframing with intention. I don’t want Morrison’s language to be considered “inaccessible” because of low reading comprehension rates. I don’t want her insistence on creating beautiful sentences to mean it wasn’t meant for us. That’s insulting. We deserve beautiful, lush, thick sentences. I dream of us valuing the discomfort of grappling with an idea or sentence because of how desperately we want to know what’s on the other side. I want us to read because, despite how hard it might be at times, we genuinely love and value it. We love and value critical thought. We love and value self-exploration. So then maybe, once we’ve fallen in love with books, we’ll start loving and valuing each other again.