Shakespeare and Me

Long before I became the bibliophile I am today, I was a young black kid in Prince George's County, Maryland. I was good at reading but was not doing it actively and I was at that age very much into black literature and simply ignored white literature (something that was easy to do in 1990s to early 2000s). Towards the end of my 8th grade year, I read Ralph Ellison and became an official book-reader/book-lover. When I was in high school I started to read books with purpose and read white writers, but I still had little patience for one specific white writer.

For most of my life, the mainstream (i.e. white) culture has pushed Shakespeare in the academy, institution, and pop-culture as the paradigm of institutional power of letters in the Western world. Because of this, I was not encouraged to like him on my terms and like many black people I felt Shakespeare irrelevant to my experience because of how he'd been taught to me throughout my grade school life. I knew the story and the plots and famous quotes of R&J, Hamlet, and Macbeth, but I felt like none of it spoke to me the world I lived in and witnessed. I was still under the mis-teaching of the institutions that taught this (hat-tip to James Loewen).

It was when I got to university that things changed. In between and after classes I use to go to the library because it was quiet, had one of the best bathrooms at the school, and the nicest building. It was a rainy day so I decided (I can't remember why) to watch an adaption of Hamlet that was on YouTube (this was when you could still post movies there) starring Mel Gibson. It entertained me enough, but I realized it was an abridged adaptation. I tracked down the full adaptation by Kenneth Branagh and it knocked the hell outta me. From that point on I knew I would have to really get into Shakespeare on a totally different level and this marked my start.

I had to re-evaluate what I had read before and now look with new eyes on the rest. When I could read and watch these plays for myself, it changed everything. I heard the lyrics and saw the story of people living and dying like folks around my way. I understood that the humanity in Shakespeare and the humanity of the people I knew were not distant at all. The ability to show the great and mighty as regular-ass folks who worry and are as vulgar as we are is one of the great strengths of Shakespeare, but there is more...

His use of language and poetics is what really gets me. He can tell dirty jokes and contemplate all of existence in back to back lines. Shakespeare made iambic pentameter the default verse of the English language and literally invented words that we all use till this day. The influence on all of our favorite writers from him is absolute. He not only showed us he instructed us.  I can go on (will probably have more to say on this), but let me turn it over to another convert to Shakespeare, James Baldwin:

  "The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love —by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it —no time can be easy if one is living through it.I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer —to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not —I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.

 That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people —all people! —who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there."

Part 2 of My "Biblio-Memior" from Goodreads

Though I had been reading a fair amount of books given to me up to the winter of 2004-2005, It would be an assignment to do a report on Ralph Ellison that would make me open my eyes to the world (and my place in it) in-general, and make me a serious book-reader in-particular. I do not consider myself a "bibliophile" at that time, but I was now on my way.

I have always felt it difficult to describe the impact that Invisible Man had on me, but it woke me from my dogmatic slumber. I had, as most did, gone through a world in which I knew things were more precarious arbitrarily cruel for me because my ethnicity, but I did not truly question—or should I say had the question put to me why this was in such an intense way. In truth, I was not aware enough to question why or what it meant to go through life as a black man— always having a set of rules to go by that were different from…the “mainstream” Americans that I heard of on T.V. Life in my neighborhood was a precarious one in which danger and the threat of death was the ever-present miasma. Into this I sat down and opened a borrowed, beat-up copy of Invisible Man and read that incredible first paragraph of the prologue:

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”

By the time I had read the whole prologue, I was Godsmacked. I had felt like lightning had been written into my soul and was trying to understand what I had read. I was coming into my 14th year on this Earth and had never read any lines like that in my life. Maybe in the Bible there were epic passages close to that, but to find something that summed-up what my—and many peoples around me—life looked like and I had only read the first twelve pages of the novel. After a few months just reading that prologue and finally feeling confident enough to go on, I proceeded to read the rest of the novel and decided that I must read everything by this man and understand how to understand the world as he did. Outside of books my world was changing drastically; I became convinced to leave my hometown for a time and move to less hostile lands in the central Virginia country-side, I had asked my mother to purchase me the book of essays I saw listed in the book called Shadow and Act for me to read after I finished the novel. Though I did not know it at the time, this would be my road-map to becoming a “book-reader.” I started tracking-down the books and the writers mentioned in Shadow and Act. Writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky & T.S. Eliot were now on my radar. My follow-up novels to Invisible Man would be Go Tell It on the Mountain & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I started doing closer rereads of writers from my childhood like Langston Hughes. As I found more writers that I liked, I started reading who they liked.

Now I must disclaim now that because I took in so much literature during this time, I do not always remember when I read something or everything I read (really, most things before 2015 is a blur). For example it was during this time that I read both The Color Purple & The Third Life Of Grange Copeland. I also read The Fall of the House of Usher every October around this time, but can't recall the first time I read it. Same goes for Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. I was introduced to Maya Angelou, William Faulkner and Elie Wiesel. I also encountered my first fraudulent non-fiction author with Greg Mortenson. The Handy History Answer Book started my love of history in earnest, but don't ask me when I first read it.

I encountered William Shakespeare in high school, but was still not a fan of him. I read The Haunting by Shirley Jackson and liked it. I was also becoming a bigger fan of Edgar Allan Poe's work. Outside of high school, I was becoming a big fan of Modernist literature; I toyed with reading fan-fiction (being a blerd, I was pre-disposed to such things), but could not really engage with it. The consequence that I would be more or less engaged with classic literature and not into contemporary literature or Young Adult.

If my love for literature needed stoking, it would find that in my 11th grade literature class. This was not an advance class with an Ivy League teacher, but it was a class filled with what was supposed to be the bottom-of-the-barrow being taught by the Cross-Country coach. It turned out to be the best literature class I ever had. I would not have traded it for any class in the world. We were not meant to have as good an experience as we did, but a miracle occurred. I can’t remember what we were reading-aloud (I believe it was A Christmas Carol), but we sort-of started to get into these characters, first as in obvious joke and mockery of the text, but then in-earnest. It became something very rare in the American public school system: we were looking forward to participating in class! I never quite witnessed the phenomenon again (not even in university), but it was amazing to be a part of something special like that.

Despite my love of that class it was my social studies teacher who had the deepest impact on me. Mrs. Pamela Lobb was of Monacan ancestry and had a strong sense of what we call social justice. She was probably the “woke-ist” teacher in that school and her teaching of history, Afro-American studies, and comparative religion was crucial. She introduced me to books like The 20th Century: An Illustrated History Of Our Lives And Times and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (seriously my history teacher gave me this book). She was that teacher that told us to question what we are being told and not just apathetically accept things.

As I transitioned from high school to university, my tastes were developing further. I went from reading mostly fiction in high school to reading a lot of non-fiction in my early undergrad years. I read a book by a black senator running for President of the United States & I read Going to the Territory. Having access to a university library was like a windfall for me because now I could indulge my taste to my limit. I expanded the amount and difficulty of literature I was reading with writers like W.B. Yeats and books like The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I also read The Divine Comedy (under the influence of T.S. Eliot) and read the short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates. I also read the autobiographical writings of Anne Frank, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs.

The biggest development of my early college years was my finally being converted to Shakespeare. It was a rainy day and I spent my time after class in the L. Douglas Wilder Library. I decided (I can't remember why) to watch an adaption of Hamlet that was on YouTube (this was when you could still post movies there) starring Mel Gibson. It entertained me enough, but I realized it was an abridged adaptation. I tracked down the full adaptation by Kenneth Branagh and it knocked the hell outta me. I have been a devotee ever since.

I spent many years of my undergraduate years going from school to school before I graduated, but I will condense time by focusing on the books solely, as much as possible. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and was not a fan. I read my only Stephen King with Different Seasons. I read Lessons in Disaster which was really popular during the first months of 2009. I read Lord of the Flies & The Kite Runner (which was one of the most emotional books I ever read). I read my first Russian literature with Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground and read Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

My second year in college was also my introduction to philosophy and the second writer to change my life. I took a Philosophy 102 class where I received Classics of Western Philosophy; I read The Republic, Leviathan, Critique of Pure Reason, and selections of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Of all the one's I studied, Søren Kierkegaard had the deepest impact. He reordered the way I thought about religion and introduced me to Existentialism. His book Fear and Trembling was the beginning of my reintroduction to ecclesiastical. In 2011 I read Conversations With Myself, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Portable Chekhov and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Given that it was 10 years since 9/11 and the Arab Spring had occurred I read Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War Against the Taliban and The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda. Both helped me gain context to the endless war in central Asia. By this time I had also joined Goodreads.com, but would not start using the site actively until 2012.

I started reading excellent plays by people like Tom Stoppard, Eugene O'Neill, Sophocles, George Bernard Shaw and Molière. I also built-up my Shakespeare in-take, and read my first full Russian novel Crime and Punishment. It was a new experience of a novel for me and I was excited to do a thorough follow-up with The Brothers Karamazov. I discovered the beauty of John Keats' verse around this time, as well. I listened to my second audiobook with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and really enjoyed it. The end of 2012 saw me read The Prince, Spunk by Zora Neale Hurston, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Richard III and Paradise Lost. New Years' Day of 2013 saw me finish reading The Communist Manifesto and inaugurated the busiest year I ever had reading books it was the year that I graduated from being just a "book-reader" and became a bibliophile.

I read a lot of philosophy during the beginning of the year notably The Trial and Death of Socrates and The Guest, my introduction to Albert Camus. I was also rapidly finishing The Sickness unto Death.

This era of my literary life was capped when I finished this sentence: “ ‘And eternally so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!’ Kolya cried once more ecstatically, and once more all the boys joined in his exclamation.” The Brothers Karamazov was an epic journey for me. It tested everything in me physically, mentally, spiritually, philosophically and emotionally. I went down in the valley with this book. The story of this family, their community, and ultimately their country made me truly see what great power books had. To see a whole world of folks trying to figure-out why they are suffering the way I’d been before I read Ellison. Folks who were on a hard journey to search for love—and the devastatingly horrifying things they were willing to do to each other to find this elusive thing (though the “hero” finally finds it at the end of the book). Though Invisible Man is still my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov is the perfect novel in my eyes. After reading this book I had an emotional breakdown and something in me was loosed. Fire shot up in my bones and my reading abilities went into overdrive. I feel that 2013 was the year I could’ve read a million books if I wanted to. I never had a better year before or since. Dostoevsky took the mental inhibitors off me for a year. I’ve not read anything that hit me as hard since. Taking it for what it’s worth, I realized that I loved to read.


July 2020 Postscript: I still am not sure if I will continue the story, but it has been interesting to read over this. To think that I hadn't read any Baldwin essays or any Morrison when I finished TBK, had not read One Hundred Years of Solitude or any of Chekhov's plays. I had not even picked up a comic book and had not read a manga beyond my old Pokemon one from when I was 8. A lot covered in these two parts, but much left to be told...

Part 1 of My Goodreads "Biblio-Memior"

This is from the little writing section they give you in Goodreads, I flirted with using it for a time, but it never caught on enough with me. If you want to see the original post, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/570087-biblio-memior?chapter=1



This portion will cover my life from the earliest books I remember reading until right before I read Invisible Man, which means it is a very short part that leads into the real years of me becoming an active reader.


I obviously do not know exactly when I gained any kind of literacy. My mother was a widow at that time and I learned through a combination of her and the preschool I went to operating in the basement of a local Baptist church in Temple Hills, Maryland. I was literate enough to be able to read and “write” by the time I went to start my primary school education. The school I went to was mostly attended by African-Americans as the effort to re-segregate American public schools was well under-way by the time I was born (1990). Green Valley Elementary School was the base of my education and the teachers and librarian I had in those years were vital to me, though I only recognize this now. In particular, my school librarian of those years, Mrs. Montgomery (neé Pickett) was a big influence. But like all things I start at home.

My mother supplied me with the usual kid’s books, the ones I remember being the Dr. Seuss canon, Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts franchise and The Bible. I also received my first comic book from her, a collector’s issue of the X-Men that I read a little, but quickly discarded and cannot remember the issue number. She also took time after her work to have me trace over sentences she had dotted-lined herself, ensuring that I would have some sort-of writing ability when I started school.

At school I picked-up a well-sprung of knowledge. I was not a conscious book-worm at that time, but I probably took to reading books more than the average child did. I discovered more of the “mainstream” children’s western cannon like Maurice Sendak, Curious George and Madeline, but now demographics come into play. Because the make-up of my school was overwhelmingly African-American (and this being the years before Federally-mandated testing could wreak havoc with a teacher’s lesson-plan) in the aftermath of the federally-mandated plague of crack-cocaine, the school's teachers and principal felt that extraordinary methods could be taken to make sure that getting an education was shown to be necessary and important. What were these extraordinary methods? They had the nerve to teach young African-American kids…about themselves and their history…outside of the month of February! It was the 1990s: the era of Malcolm X’s legacy being rehabilitated, the Million Man March was happening, the era where Hip-Hop showed it was not gonna die-out as some wild fad like Disco. In the D.C. area we had the influence of Chuck Brown and Go-Go that shapes the heart of every black partisan of The “D-M-V.” These exterior influences trickled into our classrooms and meant that I got exposed to the works of Ezra Jack Keats, whose works were so rooted in urban culture that I thought he was an African-American for many years until I found-out that he was a WWII veteran and the son of Jewish immigrants. Books like Abiyoyo, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, Anansi The Spider, and Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears were some of the cornerstones of my literary education. The poetry of Langston Hughes and Shel Silverstein also had a big impact. Silverstein is the eternal poet laureate of rebellion for every adolescent youth, while Hughes is the poet among poets for African-Americans. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a very big influence with me absorbing his speeches and endless biographies about him. I would not get a formal introduction to Malcolm X until I read Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary.

The latter part of my elementary to early middle school years saw a growing interest in two specific parts of my identity. Firstly, it was thought by the general culture at that time that my generation would benefit from knowing our culture and history. So my mother started giving books on African-American history and culture. We regularly frequented a Pan-Africanist bookstore in the area called Caravan Books. These books aged from young readers to adult and in the beginning I mostly looked at the pictures. I was not allowed to watch T.V. during the week so this and my toys (and later video games) were my constant companions. The Black Americans of Achievement series was a well-spring of knowledge on the who’s-who of famous African-Americans. I learned a lot about the history of African-American culture in those years thanks to book like that and Profiles of Great African-Americans. But it was not just books about African-Americans that I read, but also works like Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes which would prep me for more mature works in the future like The Diary of a Young Girl and Night. I also started reading Paul Sloane’s Lateral Thinking Puzzles which would be some of the first explicit material that challenged the status quos of my life up-to-that-point (it is ironic that those books were given to me by my grandmother: gate-keeper of the status quo). Also, though I still read The Peanuts in The Washington Post, a new comic-strip started to appear that had my peers and I mesmerized: The Boondocks. In a world of Charlie Browns and Garfields and Doonesburys we had a comic-strip that spoke are language and existed in a world like ours. I started to venture into different styles of music and after watching a PBS documentary at the end of 5th grade, Jazz would be the first style of music I would dip into outside the bubble of Hip-Hop/R&B/Gospel that I was raised in.

Middle school years (2001-2004) at Thurgood Marshall Middle School were difficult for me. I was a magnet for bullying and the neighborhood which I moved to after my mother remarried was, at the time was, in a hard decline. I have not used dates a lot in this narrative so-far because like with any history, the earliest years are as much legend and myth as fact. I find it hard to remember what has happened from what I think happened. This was before I became serious about reading books and I did not always really read what I was reading. During my dark middle school years, I would be given an assignment by one of the worst teachers of my school career to research an author. I would have to read some of his book as research for the assignment. This would mark the end of myth and the beginning of history for me as a reader and person.

End of Part 1.