Today I woke up and simply could not. Today, living in my skin — my scarred brown skin that took me years to accept, my skin that I spent my childhood desperately trying to lighten, my skin that reflects the sun-seared work of my foremothers, my skin that Westerners leer at, judge, debase — is painful, to the level of physical hurt. I struggled to get out of bed. It is evening now and I am still curled up under the covers, trying to wish the hurt away. I do not want to live in this world; I feel so very, very brittle.
I recently got a bit of money from a class-action lawsuit where I was a plaintiff. Originally I was going to put it into savings. In an act I can only describe as impulse/anger/screaming in my head after all the hurts of the past weeks, I decided I would use some of it to buy books.
I want to explain: I have always loved books. Growing up, we were the opposite of rich, but my mother found ways to buy us books. I remember reading in my room until the sun rose; I remember having trouble finding room to lie on my bed because the surface was piled high with books. All the money I made from art commissions, from when I was still very amateur and new, I used to buy books. When I migrated, my greatest loss was my library: hundreds of books I had collected, each one read multiple times.
It has taken me years to come to the realisation that I could have books, here, too. But listen, we have been struggling for so many years, our finances have been terrible. So it is not something I have allowed myself to do often, this book-buying. I have been lucky to have friends, both authors and readers, who have sent me books. They have been like oxygen for my mind, throughout years of steady asphyxiation.
I posted about wanting to buy books, and I said, “Consumption is not revolutionary, but saying I deserve to read is.” In response, a friend said, “Reading is revolutionary.”
Anyway. Here is the list of books I am going to get. I may tweak this list later. I have a rule that I cannot buy anything without taking a few hours to think about it first.
- Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde
- Mouth Full of Blood, Toni Morrison
- Motherless Tongues, Vicente L Rafael
- Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
- Maya Angelou: The Complete Poetry, Maya Angelou
- State of War, Ninotchka Rosca
- The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, Zen Cho
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang
- This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- The Year’s Best Science Fiction 2020, ed. Jonathan Strahan
- The Bone Witch, Rin Chupeco
- Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, ed. Anita Heiss
- Flood Damages, Eunice Andrada
- The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie
- The Broken Earth Trilogy, N.K. Jemisin
Some of these I have read before; some of these I already have, just in ebook form. But it will be such a comfort to have them as touchstones. Shelter. Comfort. Tethers to remind me: there are still things worth staying for.