My love affair with books and literature had the same happy beginnings as any child’s. Hours spent at the library reaching for the brightest covers, sneaking away during lunchtime to read ‘Nancy Drew’ in the hallway instead of running to the playground. Reading was a safe haven. It was the silence in which the world erupted, with fairies and magic and all that could ever be.
However, as I grew older, my relationship with stories began to grow hostile. I found myself, time and time again, looking into a world of blonde hair, of blue eyes and pale skin, lacrosse, milkshakes, Alices, Olivias and Tiffanys. It didn’t matter that I was a brown girl living in a metropolitan Indian city; those were the stories that piled the shelves at bookstores. It scared me, the day I realized I was an outsider to the world that once gave me solace.
It scared me, the day I realized that I couldn’t exist in my own “safe haven” as completely, vitally, and with as much complexity as my white counterparts.
The problem persisted even after I moved to America in high school. For all the diversity and color in my English class, we were somehow told to remain satiated by the two lined descriptions and gross stereotypes in popular novels (I’m looking at you, Parvati Patel). America may cite itself as being racially diverse, but it sure did a sub par job portraying this diversity in all the complexity, nuance and color that it deserves.
Society on whole merely shrugs in acceptance at the white norm that has come to define popular literature. It’s effects are far more pervasive than they may seem. Thousands of kids like me grow up with the sense that our stories don’t have a place in the world. When I first began to write, I found myself trying to stifle any hint of the culture that nurtured me. I felt insecure in my own skin, in the traditions that laced my early years, in the low growl of my mother tongue, in the ugliness, the chaos, and the breathtaking beauty shaped the places I had been. For all I knew, those kinds of things didn’t belong between the pages of a book.
So instead I forced myself into submission, wrote stories about the Olivias, Tiffanys and Samanthas I had spent my childhood reading about, my footsteps clunky and awkward on a terrain that wasn’t my own. It was only after I discovered Arundhati Roy, James Baldwin and Gabriel Garcia Marquez- writers who wrote fearlessly about their own race and the stories that defined them- did I finally find comfort in my own voice, and begin to unearth the stories, the differences that I had tried to bury.
I still walk into the teen section of my library, and I am still struck by the lack of diversity in the stories that mount those large shelves. I think of all the kids who have just begun reading, all the kids who will be met at every end by stories and characters that hold no echo of themselves. How they will come to see themselves as an “other,” whose voice don’t matter and whose experiences don’t hold intrigue. They will learn to abandon what makes them different and wonderful, because it isn’t the norm.
Some people may argue that novels and fiction are superficial, or that its value isn’t as “deep” as we make it out to be, but to young reader, books are a real world. They are echo chambers of the imagination, spaces where kids find solace and acceptance in who they are. But when the vast majority of books only speak to a singular, white experience, we as a society fail to accept millions of kids and their stories. We encourage silence among voices that should be celebrated.
This silence is toxic. It cannot be tolerated.
Not in a country that elected a misogynistic racist as president. Writers and artists are some of the greatest purveyors of social change that we have, and they need to be encouraged to get their voices heard. They need to feel accepted, and represented, and wanted. They need to see themselves in the books they immerse themselves in: all color, complex, and never compromised.
