Tag: diverse books

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No Shame, Only Romance: Recommendation of Wrong to Need You

Tulip Majumdar

Every time I’m in a new city, I make it a point to visit at least one local bookstore. If I’m lucky, I get to check out a few independent stores, like The Ripped Bodice right outside of Los Angeles or Rhino Booksellers in Nashville. And if I’m there for a few days, I will always, without fail, end up at a Barnes & Noble.

Something that I’ve noticed at nearly every single Barnes & Noble location that I’ve visited is that a certain section is consistently empty. Fiction is always bumping, Starbucks is very nearly packed to the brim with people stealing wifi and sometimes drinking overpriced beverages, and even the graphic novels have a steady stream of visitors thanks to our superhero-saturated culture. But the one section that I rarely ever see readers in is the romance section.

bell hooks tells us in Communion: The Female Search for Love that patriarchal culture teaches women from a young age that they are the arbiters of emotional understanding and love in the world, but also that emotional intelligence and love are useless and shameful. This catch-22 means that women, in general, are likely to feel deeply ashamed of anything related to emotion. I see this at work in Barnes & Noble. Despite the fact that romance is a billion-dollar industry and made up at least one-third of the U.S. fiction market in 2015, people are not buying these books in public. 82% of romance readers are women, but I don’t see women buying these intensely emotional books at the store, and it’s a sign that the patriarchy is alive and well.

I used to be one of these people. I didn’t want to pick up a book with a muscular, naked torso on the front. I wanted to be seen as a “serious” reader, unwittingly buying into both the patriarchy and the incorrect notion that romance novels can’t be well-written. But I’m delighted to report that I have changed, thanks to Alisha Rai and her stupendous Wrong to Need You. This volume is the second in Rai’s Forbidden Heart’s trilogy, and is an outstanding testament to the idea that emotions are not useless – they are important, they are well-crafted, and we should all shamelessly flock to the books that tout them as essential to our culture.

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Family Drama is the BEST Drama (to read)

There’s a reason that soap operas like General Hospital and Days of Our Lives have been on TV for decades. It’s that people loooove drama. Specifically, we love drama that can’t be easily tied up in a season or in a movie, but that comes back to bite you in the ass when you’re least expecting it. We all have this kind of unresolved drama in our lives, often in the form of our family members, and it’s not fun to live through, but it is hella fun to watch.

Alisha Rai provides a decadent, sensational story in her Forbidden Hearts trilogy, in which she zooms in on a fictional town in upstate New York known for its Montague-Capulet levels of drama between two families, the Chandlers and the Kanes. Wrong to Need You focuses on Jackson Kane and his recently-departed brother’s wife Sadia Ahmed. Years ago, they were the closest of friends, but after being accused of a crime that he says he didn’t commit, Jackson fled, and Sadia married his older brother. Now that Jackson is back in town, he and Sadia have to navigate not only their intense (and now lust-filled) connection, but a town that can’t forgive the sins of the past.

Oh yes, y’all. Rai weaves a story rife with family politics which only amp up the emotional intrigue and romantic longing between Sadia and Jackson on every page. From the very first pages of this unforgettable story, I got major Cat on a Hot Tin Roof vibes. Each interaction between each character, even if it only lasts for a few minutes, breathes with tension because the drama goes back for years. I don’t know how Rai manages to infuse a past history that you haven’t read into the present, but she does it. Because I’m committed to writing mostly spoiler-free recommendations, trust me when I say that the drama is so worth it. (Sex. I’m talking about some really good sex after some epic drama.)

Characters that Make You Feel All the Feels

You can’t have a good story without characters that make you feel, and luckily for us, Rai gifts us two extremely sympathetic protagonists who just need some love in their lives. I loved getting to know Sadia and Jackson on an intimate level, mainly because Rai writes them outside of any stereotypes or tropes. Jackson is a muscle-laden, broody man, worthy of any romance book cover, but he broods mainly because he’s just always been quiet and kept to himself. Sadia is in full command of her bisexuality and her identity as a Muslim woman, confirming the fact that just because a character is marginalized doesn’t mean her story needs to be about oppression, and struggles instead with being a new widow and a single mom to boot.

Also, the character subplots in this book are incredible. Many contemporary stories forget that protagonists have parents or siblings, and instead focus on the families that we choose in life. That’s fine, but I really enjoyed delving into Jackson’s complicated relationship with his mother and Sadia’s competitive but loving bonds with her four (!) sisters. I haven’t often encountered books that make me want to know more about the secondary characters, but Wrong to Need You is so beautifully textured and realistic that I want more time with every character.

THE SEX IS REALLY GOOD

If you imagined me screaming that caption and then running away to hide behind the couch, you imagined correctly. Because I am both the product of the patriarchy and the biggest nerd you can imagine, I have a difficult time writing openly about sex. But Alisha Rai inspires me to try, to be shameless in my writing about her writing, so I’m going to try.

The sex scenes are just very, very good. I’ve read my fair share of romances, and they’re not always good. Some are PWP, which in Internet Land means “Porn Without Plot.” These types of stories function purely to satisfy the reader, and sometimes they get the job done. Rai’s writing destroys the idea of PWP and leaves it whimpering in the corner because her plot and her characters are transcendent, and her sex scenes work because her plot and characters are so good.

Nothing about Alisha Rai’s writing is standard. She evokes passion and emotion into every scene, whether it’s sexual or not. So when you get to the sexual encounters between Jackson and Sadia, be it a kiss or some hardcore grinding in an alley, it’s a sensory, evocative, and completely consensual experience every single time.

My Verdict:

Friends, come over to the light side. Come over to the aisle of Barnes & Noble where glorious, muscular torsos are on full display. Wrong to Need You is a jewel of the romance genre, and of fiction in general. Rai creates a page-turning plot full of juicy family drama, riveting characters that pull you into their textured lives, and sex that makes 50 Shades of Grey feel like 50 Shades of Meh. What else could you want?

Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

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The Batman We Need – Recommendation of Batman: Nightwalker

Tulip Majumdar

I grew up in the age of the excellent Batman: The Animated Series and the dark, gritty world of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy. These interpretations pushed me into the complex comic lore, endless T-shirts, an undying worship of Heath Ledger, and even a surprisingly interesting Batman and Philosophy book I stumbled onto at Barnes & Noble. My love of Bruce/Batsy runs deep. There’s a reason why the movie industry keeps returning to this iconic superhero and creating new franchises and media around him. A great origin story, a repertoire of unique villains, and some seriously fun gadgets and gear are just a few of the reasons I love Bruce Wayne, so you can imagine my utter delight when I found out that Marie Lu would be the next artist to dive into Batman’s world with Batman: Nightwalker.

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In this incarnation, Bruce is on the cusp of his eighteenth birthday and has just gotten into his first bit of Batman-esque trouble. After deciding to “assist” the police in their pursuit of a suspected Nightwalker criminal via a typical car chase, Bruce is forced to complete community service hours at Gotham’s favorite fun-time facility, Arkham Asylum. During his time there, Bruce meets the elusive yet alluring Madeleine Wallace, an inmate with a past just as complicated as Bruce’s, and whose intimate knowledge of the Nightwalkers suggests that she may be one of them.

I savored this book, and not just because it is about Batman before he was Batman. Marie Lu evokes the fraught and dangerous conversations between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs each time Bruce and Madeleine interact, and it’s always fun to watch Bruce Wayne deal with the feels. But Lu goes beyond the page and lore with her important commentary on privilege, diversity, and her suggestion that even the broodiest of superheroes needs friends.

Check Your Privilege, Batsy

Stories about the fictional city of Gotham, regardless of medium, have always had undercurrents of rich versus poor running through them. Bruce Wayne’s access to billions of dollars and the most advanced technology in existence is one of the prime reasons behind his success as a vigilante, and his persona as a rich snob helps keep the citizens of Gotham blind to his nightly crime-fighting.

Marie Lu deliberately expands on Bruce’s privilege in life by underscoring another aspect of it: his privilege as a white man. After Bruce gets in trouble with the police, his mentor Lucius Fox reminds him in a sharp, almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line that if he “didn’t look the way [he] did, the police might have shot [him] dead for pulling a stunt like that.” Bruce is immediately awash in guilt and shame, and realizes that “his pale skin may have saved his life.”

Lu didn’t have to include this piece of dialogue, but her decision to do so highlights her intentions as a storyteller. Batman: Nightwalker isn’t set in some alternate universe. It’s set in our universe, where innocent black men are shot and killed for holding objects that would never be mistaken for guns in the hands of white men, and where white teens suffer from affluenza and can’t be held accountable for their actions. Reading this brief but powerful scene reflects a calculated move on Lu’s part: she wants her readers to understand privilege, even if it’s just an acknowledgement of its existence.

Deliberately Diverse

I attended a wedding a few weeks ago in Atlanta, and because I am who I am, I got into an in-depth conversation about books with one of the groomsmen at the after party. In our conversation, I mentioned that I was writing a novel, and the groomsman gushed, “That’s amazing! You get to build a whole world.” The awe on his face was obvious, and while I explained to him that my genre of choice wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I quickly realized that he was absolutely right. All fiction writers, regardless of specific genre, build worlds and fill them with interesting characters.

In the world of Batman: Nightwalker, Lu purposefully populates Gotham with people of color. She describes the skin color of every major character in this novel in a way that doesn’t distract the reader, because she doesn’t want you to assume that everyone is white. She very easily could have relied on the mostly white world of Batman lore that we’ve experienced before, but it’s clear that she cares about depicting a diverse cast of individuals. Sure, characters like Bruce, Alfred, Lucius, and Harvey Dent stay true to what we’ve seen before, but Bruce’s non-canonical best friend Dianne Garcia is Filipina, and two of the women Bruce meets during his community service are brown women of color as well.

I love that Lu does this. It’s 2018, and either you care about diversity in books, or you don’t. Lu does, and the world of Gotham has never seemed more real.

Broody but Not Solitary, because BATMAN DESERVES HAPPINESS, OKAY?

The world of comics, Hollywood, and literature have long lauded broody male characters. You know who I’m talking about. Mr. Darcy, Severus Snape, and a good 75% of the heterosexual male leads in my favorite romance novels fit this bill. These men wallow alone in their intense oceans of pain while not understanding how to articulate their deep feelings, and in our heteronormative culture, we have been conditioned to really dig them because of their broodiness.

Batman is the epitome of broody angst in the comic book world, which is one of the reasons he’s still so popular, even after eighty years of heists and mayhem. So when you combine Bruce’s innately somber outlook on life with the often angsty YA genre, you would expect more of what we’ve seen already: a kid who is just always alone, haunted by his parents’ gruesome deaths, determined to make a difference. Thankfully, Lu continues her agenda of quietly subverting our expectations in this area as well, because Bruce has friends! He has always had Alfred and Lucius in his life, but seeing future-Batman interact with friends his age was a surprising delight. He’s certainly broody as hell, but the fact that he’s not utterly isolated from his peers made my heart happy. Young Bruce Wayne deserves happiness, because he has got a world of hurt headed his way.

My Verdict:

Batman: Nightwalker is an indulgent, important read, and it is the Batman story the world needs right now. Marie Lu’s take on one of the world’s most famous superheroes has everything I want as a modern reader: diverse characters, real-world commentary on race and privilege, and a hero I really want to root for. Go get this book, y’all.

 

Photo by Serge Kutuzov on Unsplash

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All You Need Is Self-Love – Review of Communion: The Female Search For Love

Tulip Majumdar

It physically pains me to say this, but I used to hate feminists.

I can distinctly recall talking on the phone with my sister while at college one afternoon. I remember rolling my eyes at the word “feminist” – like, why weren’t we all just equalists? Or humanists? What was the point in dividing people further with words like feminist?

Yeah, I used to be that person. Not in an overt way, but I used to think that we were past the point of fighting for basic rights, and for dignity and equal treatment under the law and in the eyes of our fellow humans. I didn’t think the feminist struggle was relevant anymore. I leaned away from the idea that I was inherently set up to fail in comparison to my male peers. After taking a slew of gender studies courses at UVA, I began to understand the systemic barriers, both social and political, that society has constructed over the past centuries. I will be forever grateful to those classes and those teachers, because without them, I don’t know if I would have ever realized that our fight to dismantle gendered norms and systems is far from over.

Thankfully, I have seen the light. But I’m troubled by the fact that I existed for 20 years on this planet and didn’t have this knowledge. I don’t want the next generation of children, whether they’re mine or not, to not have this knowledge. So, it is one of my many goals to share what I have learned with everyone I meet, especially young people. And now, having read Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks, I feel better equipped to do just that.

 

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Written as the conclusion to a trilogy all about the act of love, Communion chronicles hooks’ journey through the inception of the feminist movement in the United States and seeks to expand how feminism directly impacted the way men and women think and act about love. As is obvious by the subtitle, hooks focuses specifically on the way women perceive and react to love, and how our patriarchal culture subverts women from even being the caregivers and nurturers that they are “supposed” to be.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Communion offers extraordinary insight on every single page, and I could write for days about what I have learned from hooks and the wisdom she has accrued throughout her life. But, for your sake and for my own, I’ll stick to talking about the things that really shook me to my core, and transported me back to the good ol’ days of having my mind blown in gender studies.

Men Were All For Feminism – Until They Got to the Bedroom

hooks unleashes her wisdom carefully and precisely throughout her book. You learn about her upbringing with different types of male figures, and also about her romantic relationships with men when she grows older. She details the different strengths and weaknesses of those sexual relationships, and lets loose a cold, hard truth about even the most progressive male partners in that era of female revolution: men, for the most part, did NOT like hearing no in the bedroom. They could deal with women climbing the ranks professionally and demanding equal pay, but as soon a woman expressed a desire to, I don’t know, actually have ownership over her sexuality and her body, men were no longer on board with the whole feminism thing. After revealing this insight, hooks begins repeating her manifesto of “There is no love without justice” – meaning that if you’re not able to make sexual choices, as well as all other choices, freely and without interference from your partner, you are not in a loving relationship.

Growing Together = The Whole Freaking Point of Love

I have to admit, there is a LOT to unpack in this volume. Each chapter is its own spiral of ideas, and while hooks is making excellent and interesting points on every page, it can be easy to get lost along the various twists and turns of her story. I found myself wondering several times through my reading of Communion: “When is she going to tell me what love is?” And friends, you have to be patient, because hooks’ answer is not in boldfaced letters, or the title of a chapter, or even the title of a section within a chapter. hooks’ understanding of a truly loving relationship is one in which “mutual growth and development [are] the primary agenda.”

This isn’t necessarily the most earth-shattering revelation. Romantic or otherwise, I think that most people become aware, at some point in their lives, that the best relationships in our lives are the ones in which we grow and the other person grows too as a result of being together. But in the case of Communion, hooks discloses this in context of the patriarchal society in which we live. The patriarchy assigns the dominion of love and caregiving to women, but then doesn’t actively value those ideals, so women don’t even know how to be the caregivers we’re “supposed” to be. hooks is positive that women want to love and be loved, but because the patriarchy doesn’t take those things seriously, women don’t know how to go about doing those things in a healthy and adequate way. There is no handbook for women on how to fulfill these patriarchal expectations, and men certainly aren’t trained to be emotional paragons either. So hooks’ main question is not the definition of love, as I thought it would be. Her main question is: how can women learn to love?

Women Have to Love Themselves and Each Other

 hooks says it best in the middle of Communion: “Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.” And I think we all can agree with that idea pretty easily, especially with phrases like “self care” being thrown around all the time. But agreeing with the idea isn’t the issue for hooks. We have to implement and practice this self love daily, and constantly, because guess what? We still live in a deeply problematic patriarchy, where female self-care is still seen by some as an indulgence rather than as a necessity. hooks actually uses the words “constant vigilance” when describing the degree to which women have to watch them and the way in which they speak and act about their bodies and spirits and minds. Professor Moody would be proud.

Female self-love doesn’t end with the self. The book is called Communion for a reason, because hooks asserts that women who truly love themselves also surround themselves with others who are doing the same thing. She doesn’t deny the value of romantic relationships with other women, or heterosexual ones for that matter, but hooks is clear that a circle of love where you “come together and share your gifts” is the only way in which to experience life, and ultimately, fight back against that damn patriarchy.

My Verdict:

Y’all, read this book. Thanks to the depth and intricacy of hooks’ argument, Communion is like Game of Thrones for anyone who is interested in understanding patriarchy, the role of women and men in the feminist movement, and how we can use feminism to better our country and ourselves.

 

Cover photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash

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Mandatory Reading for All American Citizens: Review of Americanah

Tulip Majumdar

I’ve been thinking a lot about conversations lately, namely the conversations Americans are willing to have and not willing to have with their fellow citizens or residents. Conversations about politics and Confederate statues and race relations and a million other crucial topics. Sure, my Facebook and Twitter feeds are alight with these discussions, with various pundits or concerned citizens adding their voices to the backlit void. But what happens when we turn off our phones and return to our off-screen lives, to our jobs and our bills and our personal struggles?

Maybe this is a rhetorical question. But I know that I wrestle with verbal incoherence every day, especially in regards to these kinds of charged exchanges. I believe deeply in the necessity of speaking about our experiences and perspectives, and listening to others’ narratives. Only through these dialogues can we overcome the illusion of our differences and begin to understand each other’s struggles. Despite this fervent belief, I still find myself without words these days, and I turn to books to help me find them. And if I could create a syllabus with the intent of spurring American citizens, including myself, to finally engage with each other and talk about everything that we need to be talking about right now, Americanah by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie would be at the top of the list.

There are some books that are simply unclassifiable, because they do so much that shouldn’t be possible within the covers of any one novel. Americanah is one of these books. Ostensibly a love story between Nigerian-born Ifemelu and Obinze, both of whom find themselves on different immigrant journeys to America and the UK, Americanah takes readers on a deeply moving journey between continents and the barriers that we construct to protect ourselves and our hearts.

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A Living Stream of Consciousness

Adichie’s writing is absolutely transportive. She creates a narrative rooted in memory and conversations, and weaves seamlessly between past and present so well that you feel that your mind is Ifemelu’s or Obinze’s. Adichie centers the reader firmly in the sensory and mental experiences of her protagonists, and manages to pull you into their consciousness, without pause or apology. She pulls off the feat that every writer is trying to accomplish – she makes you walk around in her character’s skin, and feel what they’re feeling. And the wonderful thing about this? You forget that you didn’t grow up in Lagos, Nigeria, and you forget that you’re not the immigrant struggling with the acquisition of blackness in the United States. This forgetting is not insignificant or commonplace – you are truly able to relate to Ifemelu and Obinze through the incredibly nuanced and detailed world that Adichie builds. She invites you to join in the ultimate human act – empathy.

Not Just Any Love Story

It would be easy to reduce this book to the romance between Ifemelu and Obinze, because their relationship is beautiful. Their immediate, soulful connection begins when they’re both in secondary school, and they have a deep appreciation of the other from very early on. When political upheaval in Nigeria prevents them from getting the education they need (due to a series of strikes at their university), Ifemelu and Obinze are forced to part ways – Ifemelu immigrates to the U.S., and Obinze finds himself in London.

 As a proud connoisseur and avid lover of love stories, I find myself always waiting for the two romantic leads to find their way back to each other and resume the magic of their love affair. The remarkable thing about this particular story, however, is that Ifemelu’s and Obinze’s journeys back into each other’s lives are vastly better and more interesting than their actual romance. Reading about Ifemelu navigating America’s complicated avoidance of race, watching Obinze get caught up in the complicated wealth structure in Lagos, experiencing them both traverse romantic and familial relationships – that’s where this novel shines. So yes, hooray for love and pining and the one that got away, but I’ll take Adichie’s searing insights into race, personal identity, and assimilation over romance every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Intersectionality At Its Finest

Great storytelling is good storytelling on drugs, because it takes an already good story and textures it with layers and layers of the most inexplicable yet essential facets of human life on this earth. Americanah is great storytelling. Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie is at her best in this novel when she’s leading you through Ifemelu’s life. Simply put, she is a Nigerian immigrant woman trying to sustain a life and get an education in the United States. Adichie never tries to extricate Ifemelu from these different “labels” or “identities,” because she understands that to be human, you must be a deeply complicated combination of layers, each of which is more convoluted and treacherous than the last.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary added the word “intersectionality” to its pages this past April, and defines it as “the complex, cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect.” The dictionary goes out of its way to iterate that this term especially relates to “the experiences of marginalized people or groups,” – and this distinction makes this idea especially relevant for Americanah and the conversations I wish we would have more often in America.

Adichie’s story is both intersectional and provocative, because it’s not just about the female experience (with all of its glories and woes), or about the experience of being/becoming black in America, or about the immigrant experience. Americanah is about all of these elements working together to both impede and nourish people of color. Adichie makes it clear that no one narrative is correct or complete on its own, and we should use this novel as a tool to navigate our own dialogues in this country.

My Verdict

Americanah is a transformative, life-changing novel. It transports you into the very bodies that inhabit its pages and compels you to breathe with and live inside of Obinze and Ifemelu. It reminds you that love is good, but learning how to live and learn as an individual self is necessary too. And finally, Americanah lays the groundwork for understanding the diverse world that we live in, and helps us accept the sometimes ludicrous notion that the only way to understand others is to listen to others, without superimposing personal belief or judgment.

Cover photo by Dc Lovensky on Unsplash

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#ThursdayThoughts: The Burden of Diversity

Tulip Majumdar

When I decided to blog my venture into reading literature written by women of color, I did so for many reasons:

  • To expand my own reading past a library dominated by white men,
  • To understand myself better and to contextualize my position as a woman of color living in the U.S., and
  • To actually understand intersectionality and the experiences of women who don’t share my ethnicity.

All of these reasons are valid and well-intentioned, in my opinion. So, feeling proud of myself and my own growth as a human being, I began Googling and assembling my Avengers-esque lineup of WOC authors. Side note: who would YOU rather have at your side in battle – the Hulk or Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri?

My pile of books grew, and I threw myself into learning and reading with abandon. I lived a day in the life of a soon-to-be-deported Natasha in The Sun Is Also a Star. I learned what it means for a Nigerian woman to become black upon arriving to the United States in Americanah. I was pumped about my learning and sharing that learning with the world. And then, I read Wintersong.

After finishing S. Jae-Jones’ first novel and reveling in the wonderful story that she told, I found myself asking, “Why did she choose to write about a German girl and her encounters with the underworld?” S. Jae-Jones is Korean-American, so for some reason, I had assumed that her novel would be somehow related to that experience. The real question I was asking was, “Why didn’t she incorporate her ethnicity into this book?” And with that assumption, I unintentionally placed an all-too familiar burden on this author and her writing.

The literary world and society at large expects people of color, and especially women of color, to enlighten them about what it means to be marginalized or oppressed. To share some insight about their “ethnic” or “cultural” experience as someone who is NOT a white man. So if you’re brown or black, it somehow becomes your job to teach white people about your life and your experiences.

This is an egregiously unfair and completely unrealistic burden. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a person choosing to write about those experiences. We need more diversity in literature – diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, experience, etc. But we cannot box POC or WOC into a corner and expect that all they have to offer the world perfectly aligns with their marginalization. People are much too complex and interesting to be suffocated in this way.

I only realized that I too was adding to this systemic burden when I read this article on Fantasy Cafe, written by the author of Wintersong herself. Jae-Jones perfectly articulates the expectations we place on artists who happen to be non-white and non-male. She discusses the different cultural and literary influences that led her to write Wintersong.  And she also writes about how despite the fact that this story was hers in the sense that it was a beautiful amalgamation of so many stories and aesthetics she had grown to love, readers still questioned her authenticity, and ultimately her adequacy as a Korean-American woman. Somehow, she became less in the eyes of some of her readers, because she wasn’t writing a Korean-American story.

S. Jae-Jones is allowed to write a story about a German girl falling into the clutches of the Goblin King, because that is the story she wanted to write. That’s all that matters. She is more than just a Korean-American – she is a human being who has been deeply shaped by all of the books, movies, relationships, and experiences in her life. Who hasn’t? She shouldn’t have to justify what she writes about to anyone. And that includes me!

I am grateful for her story and the time that she took to eloquently educate me and the literary community about the burden of being a female writer of color, which she calls an “albatross about [her] neck.” And I also thank her for reminding me of my own complexity, and of the many varied and seemingly paradoxical influences in my life.

Just like S. Jae-Jones was shaped by Jane Eyre and The Phantom of the Opera, I can name W.B. Yeats and Joy Harjo as some of my biggest literary inspirations. I’ve also been equally molded by my love of romantic dramas and time travel. Maybe my first novel will be some great fusion of all of the above, or maybe it’ll be about an Indian-American girl growing up in Virginia Beach. Who knows?

All I do know is that it’s time for us to relieve people of color of this enormous weight. Artist or not, people of color are not responsible for educating or enlightening anyone about their marginalized experiences. We need that education, for sure, but we CANNOT demand it.

What do you think about this issue? Leave your comments below, and happy Thursday!

 

Photo by seabass creatives on Unsplash