Morning. ♥️

I’m in the middle of reading Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, getting increasingly frustrated with the portrayal of women in it, and realizing that in having that frustration, I am fulfilling the prophecy of my ninth grade English teacher.

This is about that prophecy.

BOOKS & PARENTS

Something that I’ve realized, having studied literature collegiately, is that books are not perfect.

When you’re young, I think that you assume published writing is perfect and all-knowing simply because someone published it. You see the books in your little hands as holy vessels of information that exist to enlighten and enhance your mind. Which, they are. But you don’t know the half of it yet. You don’t yet know how to critique them, not really. You just accept them and what they teach you, never questioning those lessons. They are kind of like parents in that way.

But then you grow up and you learn how to think critically about the world around you. You learn that most things, all things, are imperfect and that it is actually your life’s work as a human to discern what those things are.

NORWEGIAN WOOD BOOK REVIEW

I’ve been crawling through Murakami’s Norwegian Wood for a while now and as beautifully written as it is (mouth-watering prose), I find myself feeling angry after many of its scenes. Assuming most of you are not familiar with it, I will avoid alienating you by launching into the nuances. I’ll just say that when every female protagonist exists solely for the male gaze and only acts in service of the male protagonist’s sexual pleasure and never her own, it get’s to be pretty off-putting.

Especially knowing that if I were fourteen reading it, I don’t know if I would have had the sagacity to recognize that objectification. I would have just internalized it somewhere in my “how to” manual of being a girl. I talk more about that in this post, if you’re curious.

Granted, it was written by a man in 1987, which, mind you, was not exactly the prime time of striking down the patriarchy, but nonetheless.

My point is, somewhere in the space between fourteen and twenty-one, I have slowly learned what it means to think critically about not just a text, but about everything.

Let’s start at the beginning.

HERDING SHEEP

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here before, but I grew up within the harrowing, haunting confines of Catholic school until eighth grade when my parents decided I had suffered enough indoctrination and sent me off to a public, drug-filled, purple hair and septum piercing high school. It was amazing.

But the thing about that stint of religious education, especially considering that my family is by no means religious, is that, among other things, it never allowed for free thought. I could get past the suffocating conformity of grey polo shirts, the censored, fear-inducing versions of sexual education, and even all of the times that I had to sit alone in the back of the church while the baptized and confirmed children got to confess their sins, but when it came to indoctrinating us all into one, narrow way of thinking? Literally failing us if we ever colored outside of the lines, let alone asked for a blank page?

That was too much.

So free thought became a dangerous thing, a flame to be kept small, so as not to feed the flames of revolution. Even our art projects had strict rules and grading rubrics. We were being molded into identical followers, not multifaceted thinkers.

THINKING FOR YOURSELF

So fast forward to freshman year of high school where I sat utterly bewildered at what my English teacher was explaining: our upcoming socratic seminar.

Throughout the year, she told us calmly as if this were not a revolution, we would all circle up, in our brilliant fourteen-year old glory, and critically discuss an idea. We would be encouraged and rewarded for speaking freely and voicing independent thought. We would be encouraged to color outside of the lines. It was her prophecy that we would all venture to recklessly do so.

This was, to say the least, a foreign concept to me. You want me to what? Think critically for myself? Engage in intellectual debate with my stoned peers? No sign-in sheet of punishment for speaking too freely or questioning what the teacher was preaching? I was game.

And that was just the beginning.

Another teacher of mine, senior year this time, encouraged us to just speak, without raising our hands. He would assign a text and we would come to class and discuss it conversationally, as if at some regal dinner party. If all of the guests were half-asleep, seventeen year old delinquents, pretending to have actually read whatever was assigned, plus me.

I remember how rule-breaking it felt. To not raise your hand? To just speak? As a youngest child and a girl, used to being cut off and talked over, this was a bold and intoxicatingly empowering endeavor. You had to have a quick confidence to your tongue or you wouldn’t get to speak.

TODAY

College only furthered this project of radical thinking to the point where now, as a senior, I can never quite seem to shut up in my classes. This probably isn’t surprising, considering the whole blog thing we’ve got going on here where I pour out my thoughts for all of you.

But the thing is, I didn’t really realize how second-nature independent, critical thought had become until noticing myself actually having something negative to say about Murakami’s writing. I knew that I could wax poetic about prose all day long, but to actually be angry with an author, that’s far more rare for me. It made me realize that I don’t just passively absorb things like I used to, but rather might actually be filtering everything through the lens I have been working to construct since that fateful day of freshman year English class.

I didn’t know it then, but those awkward ninth grade seminars planted the seeds that I am still watering all of these years later.

Trying to anyway.

Love, m.

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