Reading Beyond the Page

by Kyessa L. Moore

I have been reading in one way or another my entire life.  In my first semester of graduate school, after a class on literary theory, I felt called upon by a deep sense of injustice to explain the reasons for a female Indian professor’s choice of a sari attire when she teaches her university classes – she chooses to wear a sari rather than “regular clothes.”  Regardless of what I said – spinning together feminist and race theory into a pot that I hoped would hold water – or what her conception of the truth is regarding her clothes, the fact is that she makes a conscious choice to carry herself in a specific way. Her brilliance, as well as her humanity, demands a hesitation in hasty judgments.  We all calculate our behavior, even those of us who do not appear to. 
 

What, you probably demand, does this have to do with reading?
 

After loving reading for so long, I find I cannot think about it as a static activity of book in hand, in two dimensions, anymore.  Ideas take flight and swirl around me, affecting the shape of all I knew before and how I will think about things in the future. The more I read, the less stable the world around me appears, because the very act of reading changes the nature of reality, and once I began with books I could not stop myself from reading everything–including other people.  Its what it felt like to put on glasses for the first time at ten years old, when I hadn’t been able to see well for years.
 

Prisons Are Built with Stones of Law

by Robert Waxler

I have been following Cholly Breedlove’s tormented journey from the day he was born (thrown in a garbage heap by his mother, abandoned for a dice game by his father). And now, about three-fourths of the way through Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, I spot him “staggering home, reeling drunk” on a Saturday afternoon. He sees his daughter, Pecola, washing dishes in the kitchen. And he brutally attacks, rapes her.

There’s no excuse for Cholly’s behavior, no justification for what he has done, I begin to think. Yet Morrison has given me the long and tortured history of this man, the complex intricacies of his story. If he appears to be a monster, he is, nevertheless, human. He is not a stereotype, but a man. Through her poetic narrative, Morrison makes clear that Cholly Breedlove is a complicated mixture of hatred and tenderness, of lust and love, guilt and pity. Reading Morrison’s words with care, I realize the possibility that, if I walked in Cholly’s shoes, his rage could be mine. I cannot forgive him, but suddenly I feel compassion for Cholly.

Sometimes judges reading this book tell me that Cholly’s story compels them to see from a new perspective offenders appearing before their bench. Each offender has a richly complex story, the judges say. It makes judgment difficult, raises questions about the perplexing relationship between mercy and justice, compassion and judgment.