In Dr. Keith Gilyard’s 2000 essay “Literacy, Identity, Imagination, Flight,” he makes a number of compelling arguments about the way that readers and writers (people equipped with “literacy skills”) view and synthesize texts. He defines “literacy” in a number of ways, but essentially defines literacy as one’s ability to read and synthesize the resultant worldview into some form of discourse. He makes the argument that the hope to be found in literacy and literary discourse comes from its potential to “burst into a more open state” which allows for the ideas and discourses of all people, regardless of background and methodology (Gilyard 268). This hope for a more inclusive view, while unfortunately cyclical in its reification of the constrictive bubble of academic institutions it hopes to “burst,” helped to illuminate my perspective on the origins of own literacy and what I hope to achieve in pursuing and refining that literacy.

Thinking back on my development as a literate person, my mind quickly goes to a quote from Marita Golden’s interview with Pearl Cleage in The Word. “[I]t makes such a difference if you want to write as a Black person if you not only have books in the house, but if there are books written by Black authors. Then it’s not something mysterious and exotic to you. My parents never told my sister and me that there were any books we couldn’t read…” (Golden 51). This passage serves as a near-perfect summation of my early life as a reader and writer. In my youth, my mother made every effort to foster a rigorous and unabashedly intelligent home. Whether it was reading passages from the works of Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled or openly criticizing the racist laws and statutes she was forced to learn throughout her tenure in law school (which she ultimately left in order to get her Ph.D.), my mother’s influence on me as a reader, writer, and thinker cannot be overstated. Her open-armed embrace of subversive academia as a liberatory force (what Gilyard terms “productive tension”) became not just the catalyst for my advance into higher education, but also what led me to seek out the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois, three of black academia’s more transgressive figures (Gilyard 268). These figures, much like my mother, understood just how impactful educated discourse could be in creating opportunities for social and political liberation. Fred Moten, an English professor at the University of California-Riverside and close colleague of author and professor Claudia Rankine, notes in “The University and The Undercommons: Seven Theses” that “[i]t cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can” (Moten 101). This near-symbiotic idea concerning academia and, in particular, academic institutions, also comes from my view of my mother’s work as a college professor as well as my own experiences within academic spaces. Throughout my elementary and middle school experiences, I struggled in reconciling my mother’s proud Pan-Africanism with the erasure that I experienced in school. Black History Month would come and go, its only acknowledgment the half-hearted reading of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech from a teacher openly voicing its pointlessness, making clear that her half-hearted concession that Black people exist (and made history no less) was made on my behalf.

In terms of honing in on the literacy skills that I possessed, I owe that push to two people: my twin sister Danielle and Albert Camus. Growing up with a twin sister, storytelling (especially through writing) was just another form of play, something that passed the time between school and The Legend of Zelda. We would tell stories to each other, later envisioning their adaptation into movies and television shows. Usually her stories, lithe and impactful, were the direct contrast of my lengthy and impenetrable epics. She would challenge me to be less obtuse and more immediate in my writing and storytelling, telling me to take the roaring space operas and gritty cop dramas that populated folders of our shared Acer laptop and cut them down to their essential cores. She and her minimalism influenced all elements of my literacy, both in leading me towards texts that share her refined worldview (like Tao Lin’s Taipei) and by forcing me to craft a personal and literary identity separate from hers. Danielle’s approach to literacy, unlike my mother’s, was distinctly unacademic, a contrast that helped me to see the non-revolutionary and more enjoyable aspects of literacy. 

The second influence, and perhaps the most destructive, is Albert Camus. My first encounter with the French existentialist came, strangely enough, as a result of my sister’s brilliant economy of language. In my quest to understand the essence of her writing (as well as add another piece of philosophy to my debate arsenal), I took to Camus’ books. The Rebel, Myth of Sisyphus, the whole deal. The element of his writings that truly ensnared me was the fundamental disconnect between his worldview, almost quotable in its simplicity, and his languid prose. His works, much like the works of David Foster Wallace, alluded to the impactful brevity that characterized my sister’s work, but relied heavily on runaway sentences and rampant grammatical showboating. I was swept away by not just his deeply internal worldview (I was a moody teenager), but also by the way it was conveyed. I worked to emulate his style, even going so far as to memorize entire passages from The Myth of Sisyphus in the hopes of elucidating his style. And as a result, my writings suffered. My research papers became unreadable. The stories I so eagerly presented to my sister as proof that I too had gained the inimitable skill of powerful writing are among the worst ever written, reading more like a poor man’s End of Evangelion than anything worth time or consideration. But in this I learned a valuable lesson concerning the emotional power of writing. It can’t be staged, faked, or learned. The power of emotional writing is in its direct connection to the will and ideals of the author. What made my sister’s art so powerful was its disregard of convention and embrace of emotion. She didn’t care if her stories ran on forever or if they barely cleared a page. 

To me, there’s something distinctly subversive about the literacy of my family, something that does more to “burst” society’s bubble than any Camus or Wallace book could. Cleage describes it as a “way of understanding” the world, a method of converting the events around you into something concrete and substantial (Golden 52). My mother and my sister, in their own ways, understood that the way to truly change the world was by coloring it in a shade distinctly their own. My mother, all throughout her academic career, has worked to make the stuffy and largely Eurocentric world of higher education less fixed and more transgressive. She’s adapted her andragogy to incorporate elements of spirituality and philosophy that others deemed dissonant. In the words of Moten, she’s working to expand the “undercommons[2]” (Moten 114). She, like the theorists and academics cited by Gilyard, is working to burst the “bubble” that has come to define literary thought and the academic discourse surrounding literacy (Gilyard 268). And my sister, in the simple act of living and learning, has proven just as transgressive a figure to me by deftly navigating the academic and social spaces while continuing to hone her own emotional power. These two, more than anything else in my life, have helped me to refine and expand my literacies while also seeing beyond the simple and obvious applications of it. To be literate, to read and write and feel, goes beyond writing essays and getting degrees. It’s an ontology unto itself, and one that offers great rewards.