I have been cultivating my bookshelf for over a decade now. It is the perfect representation of who I am as a person with an inbuilt tracker that lets you trace back the origin of most of my thoughts throughout all my years of schooling and young adulthood. With each book I read, I opened myself up to another part of the world that had so far been hidden from me.
Never once, however, did it occur to me that maybe my interests and reading preferences, too, were a slave to the white patriarchal world we live in. Inspired by this article, I created a spreadsheet detailing all the books I had read in the past four years. These years haven’t been my best reading years in terms of the number of books I have read, and hence, the data presented in my spreadsheet is arguably skewed. In spite of this, there is a lot to be said of everything I garnered from this experiment.
The year 2017, the first one I recorded, saw me read only four books – all four of which were by authors of colour. This, however, can easily be written off as a coincidence since this pattern is not continued in the following years. In 2018, out of the 14 books I read, only four were by authors of colour. In 2019, it was one out of three books that I read that year. And finally, in 2020, so far, out of the nine books I have read, three have been by authors of colour.
On average, only a third of the places on my reading list have been occupied by writers of colour. This ratio is still a relatively more balanced one when seen in comparison to a lot of other people’s analyses that I have gone through. This is because even now, many of us are not conscious of the ways in which non-inclusive reading lists affect us. There has been a huge celebration of diversity in books in the past few years but inclusivity is yet to make an appearance in most discussions.
And while my current argument is limited to the mention of race, lack of inclusivity extends to gender, sexual orientation, ableism, and many other experiences that are considered different from what is perceived as the norm, which is, white-male-cis-het.
Being more inclusive in your reading might seem deceptively simple but it actually requires a very conscious effort. There is already a scarcity of books penned by writers of colour because they face more stigma and bias when attempting to get published (as most publishers fear their accounts would not be "relatable enough” or may be “too niche”) and even when they are published, they don’t receive as much attention or applause as their white counterparts.
Unless a countercultural force prevails that demands such books and such accounts, little change can be made. The importance of representation in literature is staggering – The more you hear of accounts different from your own, the more you increase your perspective, understanding, empathy, and tolerance to those around you. It is important because it teaches you of cultures and histories that you have previously turned a blind eye to; it provides models for people of that particular community and helps them feel better understood in society.
Consider this a plea for more stories, as varied and diverse as they may be.
I am trying to do the same!
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