Can Books Convert Us?

 

For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her author website. 

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Can Books Convert Us?

 

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I lost my homophobia. It was 1983--three decades before my native and adopted countries both achieved historic marriage equality victories.

It was a Saturday morning.  I was lying in my single bed in a third-floor bedroom in my rented flat over the town butcher shop in the Irish midlands.  A year earlier, at age 20, I had graduated from college and moved from my Dublin campus to that one-street town and my first "real" job as a primary school teacher.  That flat was always freezing, so that Saturday, I snuggled under my duvet to finish my current library book, the “The Well of Loneliness.”

“The Well” is an autobiographical lesbian novel that, once published in the U.K. (1928), got banned on the grounds of its "indecent" content (it had none). The novel was eventually released in 1959, but still, I’m baffled as to how a book like that made it into the Fiction stacks of that town library down the street from my flat.

Ever since childhood, I have loved public libraries. Ever since childhood, I had a habit of reading beyond my age and outside the spoken or spoken "lines." The now quaint-seeming Walter Macken novels were my antidote to the anti-men and -sex screed of my convent secondary school.  The works of Irish authors John McGahern's and Edna O'Brien also took me outside the boundaries of what was proper for a young girl. So did the works of German author Heinrich Boll. 

That morning in my flat, I finished my novel and then, I lay there and wept over a fictional love affair that was so sad, so poignant, that it permitted a heterosexual girl like me to empathize with a life that was, in 1980s Ireland, illegal and unspoken. More important, that book had the power to make the alien personal and, by extension, equal.     

Now, let's switch to Massachusetts, where I live now. In 2004, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to legalize gay marriage. These days, it's tempting to be smug, to superimpose a grown-up, enlightened self and state upon an unenlightened, myopic past. So I want to separate fact from memory here.  I want to avoid a revisionist version of that morning in the Irish midlands in 1983.  

No. In this case, I am telling it straight. I lay there cradling my paperback while knowing, deep in my bones, that me and my life were about to change. Never again could I be the compliant, small-town teacher girl—to quote from Samuel Beckett, “not with the fire in me now.”   

Then and since, I’ve often wondered: How does one book covert us from one set of beliefs to its antithesis?  Are we writers really that evangelical?  Or does the conversion factor depend not on the writer, but on some secret symbiosis between the text and the reader?

Exactly three years after that Saturday morning, I emigrated from Ireland to New York (where “The Well of Loneliness” had, following an unsuccessful lawsuit, won the right to be published in 1929).

  

Two months after landing at JFK Airport, I bought a second-hand copy of “The Middleman and Other Stories,” a collection of short fiction by Indian-born author Bharatee Mukherjee. When I finished those stories about southeast Asian expatriates, I wanted to telephone this Calcutta-born woman to personally thank her for teaching a girl from County Mayo that, far from being the provenance of the Irish, immigration is a worldwide condition. More, her writing granted me a much-needed language for the confusion and terror I was feeling in a new country. Most important, those stories gave me permission to start writing. 

     

While still working a hodgepodge of low-wage jobs, I went back to college to study for a master’s degree. In one evening class, we were assigned Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” As white folks, that (white) professor promised, Morrison’s novel would be our window into “the American black experience.” 

It was. 

Over 10 years later, in 2010, journalist Rebecca Skloot  published “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," a non-fiction narrative about a black woman who died of cervical cancer in the Negros-only section of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1951. Unbeknownst to Henrietta or her children, her malignant tumor cells were harvested and cultured to create the first known human cell line for worldwide medical research.  Skloot’s depiction of Ms. Lacks' girlhood and marriage and death broke my heart. 

Mind you, Mukherjee’s, Morrison's and Skloot’s books were more enlightenment than all-out conversions. I didn’t and don’t profess to know what it's like to be non-Caucasian in the USA or anywhere else. But I’m not, I hope, a xenophobe or a racist. I do not, I hope, presume that these stories are less-tellable than my own. And I wonder: How much can I credit my world view to all the authors, past and present, who had the power to change how one country girl (me!) saw and sees her local and larger world?

Still, I had my blind-spot prejudices, and one was the American military.   For years I blamed our slashed arts education budgets, our unequal healthcare access and a boatload of other national problems on America's inflated national defense budget. In the absence of a World War II-styled conscription, doesn’t every military man and woman willingly sign up for their government-paid job and that job’s inherent risks? So how, I reasoned, can you throw a national and nationalistic pity party?

Then, I read Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s “The Watch,” a huge and haunting novel about a group of soldiers in an isolated military base in Kandahar. In “The Watch,” the plight of the civilian Afghan woman with no family and no legs (she lost both when her mountainside village got American bombed) is no less or no more heartbreaking than the plight of the young soldiers trying to hold it together amid the chaos and trauma of war. This book, too, made me cry. 

The U.S. defense budget still ticks me off.  But, just like the “Well of Loneliness,” the exquisiteness of Roy-Bhattacharya’s writing let me transcend the governmental for the personal. Now I see a service man or woman--from any country--sitting in an airport departure lounge and I worry, á la Tim O’Brien, about the things that soldier carries.   

Walk by any urban playground. Visit any gay or heterosexual bar or nightclub, and it’s clear that we are often forced (or we choose) to ghetto-ize, to stick with our own kind. From Manhattan to Mullingar to Melbourne, how many of us go entire seasons without sharing a drink with folks who look, act, speak, worship or love differently from ourselves?   

Until we do, we must have books. 

This essay was first published in the hard-copy version of "Books Ireland."