Close Reading

I recently read powerful and important pieces by two current Yale English majors, Adriana Miele and Dhikshitha Bajali. Rather than attempt to summarize their stories, I encourage you to read for yourselves. And I hope you’ll allow me to share some stories of my own.

Perhaps I got lucky; perhaps I am blind. A lot can change in two years, but my experience of the English major was quite different from that of others. In fact, I wrote this sentence in a blog post two years ago, before my last semester at Yale: “Being an English major has dispelled certain misconceptions I once had about literature: that it was written by a bunch of crusty dead white guys, that it has no bearing on contemporary situations.” I came to Yale with this mentality—that Literature with a capital L was written by white men—but Yale somehow convinced me to leave those notions behind.

Perhaps I was lucky enough to take classes taught by faculty who, consciously or not, included a diverse group of writers on their syllabi. In Amy Hungerford’s The American Novel Since 1945, we read Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, and Junot Díaz, to name a few. In my senior seminar, American Literature and the World with Wai Chee Dimock, I devoured Monique Truong, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Olaudah Equiano. In Langdon Hammer’s Poetry Since 1950, I laid eyes on Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankine, and Thom Gunn—who may be my favorite poet of all. Granted, I’ve only named the authors I can, at this moment, easily recall; the rest are on my bookshelf at home, two thousand miles away. And of course, they are not enough. Yet it would have been difficult for me to traverse the Bluebook without reading them at all: the classes were simply too well taught to drop.

I was also fortunate in my Bluebooking that even courses such as David Kastan’s Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies—the ultimate veneration of a single, white male—could not avoid bringing context into the picture. I read Othello and The Merchant of Venice with awe as I realized that what made Shakespeare truly timeless was his decision to express on the stage the racism he witnessed in his society, and I am angry that his work remains relevant 400 years later. Without the guidance of Lawrance Manley and my teaching fellow, I would have been too slow to realize that since all actors in Shakespeare’s time were male, “female” characters who disguised themselves as men onstage added an extra layer of irony that, in my opinion, was not lost on the Bard. I took two Shakespeare lectures in order to fullfill the department’s pre-1800 requirement. Left to my own devices, I would have skipped them entirely.

Another favorite was Ruth Yeazell, who proved to me that you can wear leather pants and heels at 70 and knock my socks off. In The Victorian Novel, a class I took solely to fulfill the pre-1900 requirement, we read the Brontes and George Eliot, all of whom published under male pseudonyms, and Thomas Hardy, whose novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles was ahead of its time in its candid discussion of gender inequality. I believe The Victorian Novel was the first class I took in which exactly half the syllabus was composed of female writers. It hadn’t occurred to me until now.

I recall being neither satisfied nor dissatisfied by my course offerings. But I do remember relating to the works I read. Not all of them, certainly. (How many of us can relate to John Donne, anyway?) But it was enough for me to believe that I, too, could write and be read. After all, Monique Truong was once an English major at Yale, and here she was, in 12-point font on my course syllabus. I am incredibly grateful that my Creative Writing faculty—especially Richard Deming and Anne Fadiman—supported me every step of the way as I shared my most intimate stories in my Writing Concentration project and encouraged me to publish my work, keeping in touch long after their teaching duties had ended. The faculty I encountered never doubted that my peers and I would one day write ourselves into the English canon. Neither did I.

Perhaps the English Department’s greatest failure in awarding me my degree is that I still don’t feel equipped to answer this question: What is canon? Some have called for the abolition of Major English Poets, which I admit was my least favorite class. Yet the thought of abandoning entirely it gives me pause. As outrageous as it is to graduate from the English major without reading a single writer of color, so, too, would it be to graduate without reading Milton or Shakespeare, whose words have shaped the English language itself. Many rightfully argue that this is all a matter of bias—which writers make up the canon and which are relegated to oblivion. Yet I believe that to learn any discipline requires an understanding of its origins. To study English literature is to study the written heritage of a language. The earliest writings in the English language were, to my knowledge, published exclusively by white men. Pre-1800 English writers of color are few and far between. I would love for the English Department to require all majors to take at least 1 course that features writers from marginalized communities. We could even eliminate one of three pre-1800 requirements to accommodate this. But I’m not sure we ought to rid ourselves of a foundational course, or distributional requirements, altogether. It seemed to me less like “the erasure of history” and more like eating my vegetables. First, learn where this language came from. Then, the world is yours. We must teach Major English Poets within a framework that questions why certain works are canonized while others are neglected, what it means for a literature to be founded on the voices of the few, and the impact of literacy (and authorship) on our reading of history.

There is clearly more work to be done. Many have pointed to the lack of faculty diversity in the English Department and Elizabeth Alexander’s departure, which point to a greater problem at Yale University and around the country. The English Department, in addition, must bear the burden of teaching a discipline founded on a canon both historically and presently at odds with the society at large. Centuries of accumulated injustice cannot be undone with one fell swoop, and what steps the department has taken may seem too little, too late. Yet a department is at once abstract and human. By and large, the humans I personally encountered inspired my admiration, despite the criticisms their department have provoked. Yet I am prone to believing the best of people, and perhaps believing the best simply doesn’t get the job done.

A year ago, I had lunch with Langdon Hammer, the Chair of the English Department and my former freshman adviser. He excitedly told me about hiring Susan Choi, who now teaches fiction writing. Last month, I was ecstatic to hear that Claudia Rankine, whose poetry I read in Prof. Hammer’s class, will be joining us next fall. Just after New Year, as I boarded the plane back to medical school, I was touched to find an email from Anne Fadiman, asking alumni of her nonfiction writing classes to suggest even more writers of color to add to her course syllabi. When I landed in New York, I raced to my apartment and scoured my bookshelves, disappointed to find only Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate, jammed between two medical textbooks. I wondered if it was a metaphor for my life: a writer, jammed inside a white coat.

I know that, two years out, I am selectively remembering the brightest moments of my bright college years. There were certainly times when close-reading became too close for comfort and I left Linsly-Chittenden discouraged, rather than enlightened. But those moments, for me, were few. My story is no balm for the pain of others, nor am I representative of the “average” English major at Yale, whomever that might be. And I cannot speak for students who have felt marginalized, in Linsly-Chittenden or in any space on this campus. Yet I fear if I had read Adriana Miele’s and Dhikshitha Bajali’s pieces before coming to Yale, I would not have chosen the English major. Perhaps it would have been for the better—if this is the new norm, I am heartbroken for what students endure. I want nothing more than for future generations to find the joy that I, and many before me, have found: to lose themselves in words, to leave their hearts on the page, to be loved, to belong. Who else will write for us?