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Sparkle (2)
During a job interview a few years back, the Chair of the English department asked, Why English?
I didn’t have to think of the answer.
Literature saved my childhood. It filled my loneliness and the many silences I tolerated as a child with words and characters and worlds I had not known.
A young girl, I had no adult voices that volunteered to guide me or help me make sense of my experiences with violence, abandonment, adoption, two very different mothers and two equally different childhoods. I lived in a world without words or communication, but in books I discovered what was lacking in my life. Reading gave me the words with which to articulate and understand my pain, my loneliness, the complex people I had known, and the reasons for which they behaved as they did. An astute and eager student, I somehow learned the value of literature and listened intently to the messages they sent me through their characters. The following writers carried me safely from elementary school all the way to college, comforting me during my adoption; they were my real mothers, my teachers, and my only sisters:
Beverly Cleary: As a child, Beverly Cleary introduced me to the adventures and mischievous deeds of Ramona, the kind of girl I wasn’t given the freedom to be. Confined to the public walls of the library or the stifling rooms of my mother’s apartment, my childhood was filled with great silences and loneliness. But Ramona showed me a normal childhood: she rode bikes, played with friends, got into trouble, and was allowed to learn lessons that only came from making mistakes. Through Ramona and her many experiences, I witnessed the kind of childhood I had never had myself, and I grew with her in laughter and tears, in mischief and playfulness, even though it was only by leafing through the pages of her fictional life.
Judy Blume: During my teenage years, Judy Blume’s characters in Forever, Kathryn and Michael, instructed me on the complex nature of love and sex, how first love leads to intimacy and your first sexual experience, and that it is OK if the relationship ends. When it comes to first love, end is inevitable for it is an experience of growth and development for girls and boys. Not allowed to date until college, I learned about dating through books, and I learned that kissing and loving another human being wasn't a sick or disturbing notion; it was a way of life among normal people.
Emily Dickinson: A child-poet, I spent hours trying to analyze the complex messages entrenched in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. We shared loneliness, and she helped me discover that being different was an empowering struggle. And different I was. Emotionally isolated in an austere home with an equally cool and emotionally detached mother, I didn't have much interaction with other people. Like Dickinson, I stared out my window and watched life go by, and I wrote about it as she did. Awkward, shy, and dejected, I discovered a sister in her; I felt empowered by her wisdom, her powerful language. I imitated her dashes in my poems, and I dreamed of contracting TB so that I would die as she had. There was this calmness in Dickinson and her work that made me feel at home with myself; as if being me wasn't so bad despite what my mother told me. She gave me the courage to revel in my difference.
Charlotte Bronte: Without the friends that my son relies on for his social development, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre became my childhood friend. She and I suffered parallel lives, and the first time I met her, when I was around twelve, I couldn't believe someone had imagined my childhood. Jane Eyre and I were both orphaned at a young age; while her parents had died, mine had separated and agreed on giving me away.
