Hello, my name is Roisin, and I’m Sick of
Reading.
Hello friends, and welcome to my Queer Lit
Readathon wrap up. I had intended to vlog
this week, as do with the readathons in which
I participate, but this week I didn’t manage
it, for a few reasons. One of those reasons
was because of the murder of George Floyd
which brought back into the mainstream the
Black Lives Matter movement and lead to worldwide
protests and a huge change in which the online
community is talking. It also led to huge
backlash from the police, particularly in
the USA and their treatment of Black protesters
which was abhorrent. I spent a lot of time
when I was not reading queer lit this week
reading and listening to Black people who
have been talking about this, there has been
so much to read and listen, and also so much
to think about. I spent a lot of time reflecting
and planning, and I didn't have the time or
the headspace to vlog, I felt like there were
better ways I could use what little voice
I have. In the description below I have left
links to Black creators talking about what's
going on in the world and also talking about
racism in the booktube community more specifically,
as well as racism in the US and the UK more
generally. I have left links to articles,
places to donate, petitions to sign, instagram
posts with lots of information for you. These
links are different to the ones that were
in yesterdays video and will be different
from the ones that are in tomorrows video,
as I want to be constantly giving as much
information as I can for the next week, and
going forward.
On a note of less global importance, a more
personal note, for the past few weeks have
been getting sicker again. For those of you
who don’t know I have psoriatic arthritis
and a few other autoimmune conditions. I’ve
been on immunosupressants since January, and
while they worked in the beginning and I began
to feel a lot better, their effectiveness
has slowly started to wane over the past three
months. Combined with pandemic anxiety (stress
is a major trigger for pretty much all autoimmune
conditions) this means I have been getting
progressively worse over the past couple of
months, which is hard physically and mentally
I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis two
years ago, after two years of fighting to
get that diagnosis, and so it has felt like
a long journey trying to try and get something
to treat this condition. It’s frustrating
and disheartening when something with potential
falls through. I have been fatigued and in
pain, walking around in a fog for a lot of
the past few weeks. I don’t feel able to
articulate well, which is why I have been
scripting my videos recently, which is not
something I ever did before and also why I
couldn't just turn on the camera and try and
be engaging. So I didn’t vlog.
But, I am here to talk about the books that
I read during the queer lit readathon. Originally
I had a TBR that I hoped represented a diverse
range of LGBTQ+ voices, but with what’s
been going on in the world I decided instead
to focus on mainly reading books by Black
LGBT+ people. They were all books I had been
intending to read, or I already owned, which
it felt necessary for me to read now, with
the exception of the graphic novel because
I don't generally read graphic novels. I’m
really glad I finally got round to reading
them, I read some excellent books this week.
The first book I’m going to mention quickly
because I DNF’d it, and that is Tonguebreaker
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha. This
is a poetry collection by a self-described
brown queer disabled femme. As a disabled
poet myself I wanted to read this collection
and see how other people had written about
disability in poetry, and I wanted to read
about the intersection between queerness and
disability and race, which is obviously not
something that I, as a white person, have
experience of. But unfortunately this collection
of poetry was not for me, it is not my style
of poetry at all. This felt very stream of
consciousness and probably works better as
spoken word than as page poetry, but I couldn’t
find a discernible rhythm or poetic word choice
– not that I mean all words in poetry have
to be highly lyrical but each word should
be carefully chosen for both the meaning and
sound. This felt more like personal essays
with line breaks, and so didn’t really connect
with me and the type of poetry I prefer.
But I didn’t want to just not read a poetry
collection, so after DNFing Tonguebreaker,
so I went looking to see if I had access to
any poetry collections by Danez Smith, who
is someone I have seen highly praised on booktube
for their collections Don’t Call Us Dead
and Homie. Danez is a Black non binary queer
poet from the USA, and is someone who I have
seen performing spoken word on youtube videos
before, so I knew I liked their style of poetry,
although sometimes spoken word doesn’t translate
to page poetry perfectly. I couldn’t find
either of the collections I mentioned, but
I did find Black Movie on Scribd. This is
a very short but powerful poetry collection
that was published in 2017 and discusses all
the Black lives that have been lost to police
and vigilante justice in recent years through
the medium of pop culture and particularly
film. There is a group of poems based on a
rewriting of the Lion King that beautifully
discusses the short childhoods of Black children,
especially Black boys, the myth of the absent
father, and the absence in many stories about
the mothers of these children murdered. There
were two prose poems in this collection, a
form which I often find has trouble keeping
the poetic and can quickly turn into pure
prose, but which Smith handles masterfully,
reducing the amount of punctuation as we hurtle
towards the end of the poem called Dear White
America with increased urgency and tension,
the repetitions and call backs are powerful.
And contrasting this directly afterwards is
a poem called Notes for A Film on Black Joy,
a poem that ignores the White people who are
spoken to in the previous poem and instead
is centred on Black life and Black joy, in
the self centred way The Artisan Geek spoke
about in one of their videos which I will
leave in the cards above. This poem centres
blackness and Black lives, and also queerness
within that. My Favoruite poem was perhaps
Dinosars in the Hood, a poem which imagines
a movie mash up of Boyz in the Hood and Jurassic
Park, and begins with the image of a Black
boy holding a toy Tyrannosaurus Rex. This
poem eviscerates the film industry and tokenised
representation, imagining a blockbuster film
with an all black cast not reduced to being
a “black film”. This collection is powerful,
well crafted, and humorous, and I definitely
want to read more of Smith’s work.
Next I read the The Avant Guards, which is
a graphic novel.
One of the prompts for the Queer lit readathon
was to read a Graphic Novel, which is not
something I read regularly at all. I searched
for a graphic novel about queer Black people
written and drawn by queer Black people but
it can be difficult to find out about the
identities of all of the artists in a small
indie comic, which I believe this is. I may
have not done my research properly, but I
don't know much about the comic world, so
I found it quite difficult. What I do know
is thatThe Avant Guards volume 1, which is
a bind up of four comics in a series has a
mostly black cast and is full of cute sapphic
characters having cute sapphic moments. I
loved the art style, the pink and blue hues
of everything was still be very war, warm,
and the main couple, Charlie and Liv had some
very cute moments. It was nice to have something
light to read about cut happy queer Black
people just having a cute time when the most
they have to worry about is amateur basketball.
But it moved very quickly and this is only
volume one, but the characters felt very shallow.
I’m not someone who reads comic books so
I can’t really tell if that’s a medium
thing rather than a specific thing to this
comic, but while it was cute and pretty I
didn’t really feel drawn to read anymore.
I gave it three stars because I do think it
did what it set out to do, but it’s just
not something that I'm really interested in.
Next I read Freedom is a Constant Struggle
by Angela Davis. This is a collection of essays
and interviews and talks given by Angela Davis
between 2013 and 2015, around freedom fighting
and the Free Palestine movement as important
as an internationalist movement, about Ferguson,
and Black Lives Matter, and the prison industrial
complex and how capitalism profits from putting
Black people in jail and from building walls
around Palestinian homes.
This collection was really accessible, I think
that's one of the most important things about
it is that, although Angela Davis is an incredibly
famous scholar and activist, her writing is
not difficult to read if you are not a scholar
or nor well versed in the jargon of activism.
Her work is clear and concise and uses language
that is accessible to people whether this
is their first foray into scholarly writing
about racism and the prison industrial complex,
or whether this is something that they know
about. She is still insightful and powerful
and has a lot to say drawing parallels between
different freedom fighting moments. Talking
about Nelson Mandela and about Ferguson and
about the civil rights movement in the 1960s,
and about Palestine. The way that she talks
about the mythologisation of the civil rights
movement and specifically of having a charismatic
man as the leader of a movement. When Martin
Luther King Jr himself, for example, knew
that it was the power of the collective of
the movement that caused change, not himself
as an individual, although he was a great
man. The way that she weaves in economics
is also, I think, very powerful. Although
this book does not really talk about queerness,
she does give a quite vocal defence of and
need for the support for trans people, and
trans lives and the violence perpetuated particularly
against Black trans women. But she doesn't
talk about her own queerness or her own experience
of that and I wouldn't say it was a book that
centred queerness, but it is a book that felt
important to read now, because of the way
that she talks about fighting for freedom,
and the way she talks about how media and
the government will manipulate the image that
is put forward of people fighting for freedom.
Such as the way that people from Palestine
are seen round the world regardless of the
fact that they are just fighting for freedom.
If you go back to my mum's home town, the
place where my mum lived there are lots of
Palestinian flags because people in Derry
know what it's like to fight for their freedom.
The next book that I read was Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
It took me a little while to get into this
book, to be honest. The first few essays about
Sweet Valley High and the show Girls by Lena
Dunham felt a little outdated, like the conversation
she was having, the things she was discussing
were things that we had kind of moved on from
in terms of pop feminism, I guess, and not
things that are, they're quite surface level,
and don't necessarily, still necessarily a
part of our discussion. Reading the book six
years after it's publication of the book I
didn't feel they'd aged that well. The female
friendships chapter felt boring and perhaps
for a different generation maybe? I went to
an all girls school and after the age of about
14 have never dealt with competitiveness in
any of my female friendship I really enjoyed
the personal parts of the first few essays,
particularly the essay on Scrabble, Roxane
Gay is a very funny writer, and I enjoyed
the essay about her being a Black professor
and her relationships with her Black students,
who often felt like she was pushing them too
hard, and discovering that some of her pupils
couldn’t read at a university level. But
it was about a third of the way through, I
began taking more notes in my reading journal,
and copying out whole long quotes. This book
is a collection of essays that are a mixture
of the personal and cultural commentary. Gay
covers pop culture including Quentin Tarantino,
Tyler Perry, and Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen
the director, not Steve McQueen the actor.
She also talks about her own experience of
rape and rape in the media, connecting the
jokes of comedians and Law and Order SVU to
problems of rape culture. Gay gives a smart
and insightful look into culture and how patriarchy
and white supremacy are reproduced, and I
found myself nodding my head or taking notes.
Sometimes I don’t agree with her, I don’t
agree with her stance on trigger warnings,
and I would have liked a little warning before
the rape chapter, which although not graphic
was enough for me to need to walk away from
the book for a little while. I also found
the chapter about fatness and fat camps, based
around the criticism of a book called Skinny
to be full of diet culture and the trauma
= fatness myth. Her chapters writing about
film were my favourites, the discussion of
12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained mirroring
conversations I have heard recently about
Black trauma narratives, and conversations
that I have had before about women’s suffering
in media for the furtherment of male characters.
Gay covered the intersection of this with
the obsession with Black people’s physical
suffering and particularly Black women’s
suffering. She eviscerated the help with humour
and a sharp knife. I was surprised, after
the detachment I felt for the first third
of the book with how much I learned from and
how much I ended up liking it. I gave it four
stars. There is some mention of queerness
in this book, but not much though I think
that is more in Roxane Gay's more recent works.
I also read If Beale Street Could Talk by
James Baldwin.
This is the first work of fiction by James
Baldwin that I have read, having previously
read only articles he wrote and interviews
with him, and it’s also the longest form
of anything I’ve read of this. I’m not
sure it 100% sure it counts for the queer
lit though, because none of the characters
in this book identify as queer in any way.
But in terms of classic queer authors, particularly
Black Classic Queer authors, I felt that Baldwin
is one of the most important, and this was
the book to which I had access through my
library once I had decided to add Baldwin
to my reading list. Being a story about the
racial injustice in the justice system, and
about racist policing and incarceration, it
also felt like a novel that is highly relevant
today during this resurgence of global Black
Lives Matter in reaction to police brutality.
This novel is the story of Tish and Fonny,
two Black people who grew up on the same street
in Harlem, New York and end up falling in
love. But before the beginning of the book
Fonny is falsely accused of raping a Puerto
Rican woman. The story is told from Tish’s
perspective, and flashes back to before the
arrest, and now to when she is pregnant and
her family are fighting to get Fonny freed.
This story is about racism in the police force,
the criminalisation of black people like existing
like Fonny, and like his friend Daniel, who
is picked up for possession of a small amount
of cannabis and pressured into pleading guilty
for stealing a car when he can’t even drive.
It is about the abuse that happens in prisons
and about the fear of living as a black person,
particularly a black man, in a white supremacist
world. But it is also a story about love,
about the intense love between Fonny and Tish,
written with such tenderness and passion,
the way that they are determined to hold onto
one another, and find their way back to each
other. And the love of Tish’s family, the
love and protection the feel for her, and
the fierce way they will fight to save Fonny
from the injustice. There are complex family
dynamics here, where Fonny’s mother and
sister are cruel and dismissive of him, there
are some examples of colourism, and the way
that they act hurts his chances of freedom.
And the Puerto Rican woman who has been rapped,
although we never doubt the fact that Fonny
is innocent of this crime, is just as much
a victim of this system as Fonny, and her
story is just as tragic. The writing is stunningly
beautiful, it is easy to tell that Baldwin
wrote poetry as well as fiction and non fiction.
And in the way that he does not hold a white
readers hand but celebrates blackness even
as he decries the struggle of being Black
in a white supremacist country, it reminds
me of the stories of Zora Neale Hurston, which
I reviewed in another video which will be
in the cards. I gave this book five stars,
and I will definitely be reading more Baldwin.
The final book I am going to talk about is
Swimming in the Dark and I'm not really going
to talk about it at all because
I have started it but I haven't finished it
yet. I didn’t manage to finish it during
the readathon, I actually didn’t start it
until today, which is after the readathon
is over. But I wanted to talk about it anyway,
because so far I’m enjoying it so far and
it’s nice to have a non anglophone perspective,
the culture of 1980s Poland under soviet control
being very different again from the US and
UK queer stories I read comes from. I’m
fingers crossed going to be finishing and
you will hear about it in my June reading
wrap up.
Thank you for watching my Queer Lit Readathon
wrap up. I feel like I didn’t read enough
books about queer relationships and queer
love, despite all these books being written
by queer writers. I supposed I read a fair
amount of non fiction and poetry that was
centred on different topics, but I felt like
it was necessary to centre blackness in my
reading this week, especially. But I will
be reading more books by queer authors and
with queer characters, and hopefully by the
time the next Queer Lit Readathon rolls around
I will feel like focusing on queer love stories.
Thank you for watching, please remember to
like this video if you liked it, and remember
to subscribe, because I will be back with
another video tomorrow. Thank you for watching,
bye bye.
