Reading is a political act

I'm always surprised to hear people, readers and non, say that reading shouldn't be mixed with politics.

Reading, in itself, means venturing into something new, and very often it's about learning. Whether it's an essay or a romance novel, there's always something to learn.

Politics, whether we like it or not, is the foundation of our society, and for this reason it overflows from our actions, from our decisions, even in private life - if we read a novel set in Afghanistan, it will not be difficult to imagine it in the social context of closure of schools for women; reading an American story from the 1930s, it will be spiced with the flavors of the Great Depression.

Reading means creating connections with other cultures, even from the authors' ways of writing at times we can recognize their nationality - if I were to read Sartre, I would immediately understand that his is a French way of writing; in Dostoevsky's very long dialogues I would instead find the places of Russia; in the simplicity of banana yoshimoto japan.

The commitment to knowledge is a political act.

Is reading a political act?

In this 2015 article, Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, discusses the importance of fiction to democracy:

“Great fiction always questions us and brings to the foreground the essential human quesitons”

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It would have been too easy to start this article by quoting 1984 by George Orwell, so I wanted to leave it at the end. Books like this are a living expression of politics in literature, and why not remember how some of these have even been banned by regimes that do not allow adherence to ideologies other than the one they propagate. To think that even Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a children's story, not at all explicitly political, was censored in the United States in the early 1930s and again in the 1950s, because it allegedly promoted "unhealthy values" due to its female protagonist judged too independent for her time - this brings us straight back to what I was saying before: politics can be found in everything.

Orwell wrote:

"No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is in itself a political attitude”

- Why I Write, 1946

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Furthermore, it seems right to mention how reading is political also from a personal growth point of view: by reading, we are able to empathize with "the other", with the other culture, with different ways of thinking and living from ours, and this leads us to grow as people, to fight against oppression and to chase independence.

In conclusion, I must say that, whether you consider reading a political act or not, do it, so as to always have a way to free yourself from the cages of the mind in which we don't even know we live until someone puts it in front of us.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoyed it.

see you next time, flowers.

Denise.