I can almost guarantee that if you tried to play bingo with the books you’ve studied or seen as acclaimed by critics and other authors, it wouldn’t be long until you got a Full House.
Imagine for a moment that we’re playing an edition where everybody chooses 25 authors to add to their grid. Just adding a few well-known names would guarantee almost instant success. Shakespeare would be called out first, and proudly too, and you’d be crossing that off, glad that you’d spent all of that time studying Much Ado About Nothing. Then maybe they’d call out Thomas Hardy, or Charles Dickens, or maybe William Blake, or even George Orwell. It might take longer for some other names to be crossed off, Margaret Atwood, Harper Lee, maybe Benjamin Zephaniah. For the most part however, the names you would be crossing off would be startlingly similar, composed of white, European male authors.
As a world, we’re moving towards globalisation. More than ever before, culture is becoming interconnected. We enjoy all sorts of food from around the world, miso paste is suddenly a staple in our cooking, we enjoy going out for a Chinese takeaway and an Indian on the weekend. We listen to music in languages we don’t understand and we watch films made and set all across the world.
And yet, the literature we read is often incredibly Westoccentric, homogeneous, all the same.
I’m not saying even for a moment that Charles Dickens or William Blake aren’t worth reading. I’m in the middle of reading the long and amusing tale that is The Idiot at the moment. It’s a wonderful- if not hard to read book, full of idiosyncratic characters and remarkable events. So I’m not saying that we should substitute our bingo boards and refill them in favour of more niche authors, because that’s not right.
So what am I saying?
What I’m saying is that it is important to diversify our bookshelves.
Have you ever read the work of a d/Deaf poet? Have you read something written by an author from every continent? Do you read works in translation or just literature originally penned in English? Could we rewrite our bingo boards into a challenge grid, an explosion of new names and new works to try to read?
I believe that we can learn just as much from ‘world literature’ and ‘diverse authors’ as the Canon that we hold so dearly. By stepping into the shoes of an author with a different worldview from us, or even a different language, we are opening ourselves up to learn so much!
Recently, I’ve been learning about Spanish history and culture from Frederico García Lorca and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. I’ve been digging into Indian politics and the British occupation of India to see why the Nobel Prize winning Rabindranath Tagore is so unheard of in the Western world.
All of this reading is just as rewarding as reading Shakespeare, or Keats.
It’s challenging. It’s exciting. And it’s refreshingly new. After years of studying the same authors, from the same settings, this is welcome. I don’t for a moment believe that it stops us from growing our knowledge of literature, or that it doesn’t allow us to appreciate some of our most appreciated authors.
It opens up a door to further appreciation.
When we can compare someone like William Shakespeare with Arthur Miller or Kalidasa, or even Lorca, we can see plays from so many different angles. Should we write in verse, or is prose better? Do we need mixed casts or can we take a lesson from Lorca and experiment by just using women? Should our writing have a political message? Should we follow the three unities when writing tragedies? Can we bend the rules?
What Next?
Maybe the idea of reading more widely intrigues you, or is mildly interesting. Putting it into practice is a bit more difficult. We’re used to reading from a set list. Here’s some ideas about diversifying your bookshelf.
- Try Hitting Every Continent
Within reason. I don’t know if there’s any great literature from Antarctica (I could be wrong!) Nonetheless, I think that it’s worth trying to ask ourselves this question. Have you ever read anything from South America? Have you read anything from Africa? If not, then maybe it’s worth having ago. Have you ever read anything from Europe that wasn’t written in the UK? Maybe it’s time to look into French literature. Fall in love with Les Misérables by Victor Hugo or maybe join me in reading La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Lorca.
It’s a challenge that you probably won’t regret.
- Follow Links
If you read a poem by Rabindranath Tagore from his collection Gitanjali that you enjoyed, then maybe it’s time to think about the poets that have emulated him over time, or poets he was inspired by. By looking into authors that have influenced some of our favourites, we can find ourselves enjoying literature even more. Act like a detective and follow the clues towards other authors you might find fascinating.
- Look Into The History
The term ‘world literature’ was actually coined by the German poet, Goethe. At the time, his interest with literature from abroad was seen as strange and controversial. Looking into his conclusions on the topic is an interesting way of seeing how the idea of what we study has evolved. On this front, I’d also suggest looking into the critical lenses with which we study literature, for example from a post-colonialist standpoint. This may give text recommendations as well as a mechanism to understand them.
And finally…
- Keep Enjoying Yourself
Ultimately, whilst reading enriches us and is very much about education, I don’t think that we should ever forget to enjoy it. So ultimately, find the books that you love and that you will enjoy for years to come.
Rewriting Our ‘Bingo Boards’
To conclude, I’d dare to say that diversifying the list of authors and texts we’d put on our bingo boards for the literature that we read and study would be a beneficial and even enriching experience. So, in this time of quarantine when I’m reliably told that we have more time than ever to read (some of us are still pretty busy with school work!) I suggest delving into the concept of diversifying the books that you read and changing the way that we view literature by looking at it through a macro instead of a micro lens.
At least, that’s my challenge to myself.
Who’s with me?
An Attic Full of Paper 