A Modest Offer of Literary Reparations

I’m pretty sure Catcher in the Rye was my gateway drug. Or, it might have been The Bell Jar or maybe even The Sun Also Rises. I really can’t say for sure, but I do remember my Mother urging me to read certain books and then we’d talk about them and I’d ask for more suggestions and it wasn’t long before I understood that literature was a habit that took me places that no other thing could. I was hooked. 

And, that’s how most of us got into this business. We love great books. We believe in them, their power, their elegance, their profound ability to change us—and the world. We teach from the literary canon because it is where we fell in love with literature and we believe in the shared experience of certain books. To be an educated adult, a culturally literate adult, is to know these books—the classics.

Now please don’t get me wrong, we English teachers have known for some time that the canon is problematic and have been trying for years to teach beyond it—to add more titles by women and BIPOC. To find texts that center members of the LGBTQ+ community. We do pretty well in February, teaching poems and short stories from the Harlem Renaissance. We love The House on Mango Street and Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. But, when it comes to the cornerstone works of fiction—the book-length texts that define our courses—they have remained remarkably consistent over the past 50 years. According to the Good Reads catalogue, with the exception of Harper Lee, the authors of the 10 books most often taught in high school literature courses in 2021 are still white men. Still.

This shouldn’t be surprising to me, but it is. I am in so many conversations with thoughtful educators and we are always talking about new books, books that are written by and about BIPOC, books written by women. But I realize now that we need to do more than add a title here and there; We actually need to stop worshipping at the altar of the canon. Now. Especially now. Why?  Because it is an instrument of exclusion and oppression. Because, not only does it exclude and marginalize women, BIPOC and members of the LGBTQ+ community, but our unwavering commitment to it reinforces its power to continue to do so indefinitely. It is our job as English teachers—and de facto arbiters of cultural justice—not to eliminate the canon altogether (no, we’re not cancelling Shakespeare) but rather to disrupt it, to help our students understand it for what it is and to add to it in meaningful ways that make it more just. And, the most important part of this enterprise, the radical idea I am suggesting here, is that we need to have this conversation in view of and with our students. 

I call this a modest offer of literary reparations. 

But there just aren’t as many classic works of literature written by women and/or people of color, some teachers argue, when asked the question of why the traditional canon is not more inclusive. To that I say, just like there weren’t as many great Black baseball players back in the day, right? Oh yeah, it turns out there were, but they weren’t allowed to play in the big leagues, so we don’t know who they were. Relegated to the Negro Leagues, scores of talented athletes were denied the possibility of being baseball classics or of ending up in the baseball record books, i.e.—the canon—because they were Black. It wasn’t until a few months ago, six decades later, that Major League Baseball got it right and reclassified the Negro League as major league. Finally, we understand that there were always great Black ball players. We just didn’t know about them. 

Now, back to the English classroom. This analogy isn’t perfect, of course, because there was no second-fiddle location for authors who were not white men. No Negro Leagues for writers. There were only deeply entrenched cultural and literary traditions that excluded anyone who wasn’t white or wasn’t male. Would you be surprised to learn that Zora Neale Hurston, a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the author of one of the most important novels of the 20th century, died penniless and alone. Her seminal novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God was greeted with scathing reviews in 1937 and was essentially shelved until long after her death in the late 70’s. The sad fact that she was buried in an unmarked grave, along with her now iconic novel, was poetically rectified by another Black author, Alice Walker, who also wrote a pretty important novel, The Color Purple. Like Hurston’s novel, however, The Color Purple is often left off school reading lists due to its painful and sometimes graphic content. And, of course, the OG of all banned books, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Its interrogation of white beauty standards is violent and heartbreaking, so much so that it remains one of the most influential books that students are not allowed to read in school. Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening in 1899, but it caused such a stir among polite society that it was denounced and later ignored by both critics and the public until 50 years later, long after her death. Its central message, and terminal sin: Women also enjoy sex and should have agency in choosing how to live their lives.

I hope you’re seeing a pattern.

Yes, but these books can be added now. And they are, to some extent. But the truth is, and as anyone doing this job knows, these books are difficult to add to high school curricula. Especially now. They are constantly challenged for their language, their violence, the difficult things they suggest about our society. When you’re teaching a classic, say Of Mice and Men, no-one demands that you  justify the language in the book, or the murder at the end or the fact that the main characters visit a house of prostitution. It’s Of Mice and Men.  It’s important. It’s a classic. 

The books that were denied the possibility of being classics, or being part of the canon—and that we need to add to our curricula now—are filled with the difficult narratives of people on the margins. Those experiences are often joyous and beautiful, but just as often, profoundly sad and violent, characterized by a suffering that is not an incidental sidebar of their experience in America, but rather a central condition. When a teacher tries to add a text like The Bluest Eye to their English curriculum, they need to be prepared for a school board member to publicly read aloud the most graphic and disturbing part of this book, without context, and be asked pointedly why the young people in their classroom should be exposed to that language and to those ideas. No-one asks you to defend why you’re teaching a story about 14-year-olds falling in love and a few days later consummating their marriage when you’re teaching “Romeo and Juliet” or about the graphic violence as children savagely murder each other in Lord of the Flies and it still amazes me that middle school teachers are not censored more often when they teach a book in which the “N” word is used more than 50 times, as it is in To Kill a Mockingbird. Why? Because these are classics and their literary merit is established truth. 

To add to or change the established truth, is to put that new information—those new texts—under a microscope. And, in a world where kids have unfettered access to an internet full of sex and violence, you might be surprised to learn how many school boards/administrators/parents are hyper-focused on making sure our kids aren’t reading anything controversial in school. Whether intentional or just following the path of least resistance, protecting our young people from sex and bad language is the new method of preserving the canon—its white maleness, its exclusivity and its systematic suppression of diverse voices. 

Although I am an advocate for diversifying English curricula throughout all grade levels, I believe that the 12th grade is a unique—and ideal—site to disrupt the traditional literary canon and do a deep dive into the diverse voices that have been excluded from it. A few years ago, with the support of my administration, and the help of my colleagues, I was able to re-imagine our Senior English curriculum to reflect our goal of being more culturally responsive to our students. I use some of the texts I mentioned here, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Color Purple, The Awakening as well as a handful of new novels such as The Poet X and Everything I Never Told You. The year-long critical conversation we have alongside these texts is centered on the question of why we read what we read in high school—and why we don’t read what we don’t read. Students tend to be surprised and sometimes outraged by these institutionalized gaps in their literary education, but overall, there is a burgeoning realization that education not only reflects some of society’s worst problems, but it also perpetuates them. With this knowledge in hand, our students begin to examine and analyze these texts through the critical lenses that help them understand how bias, racism, homophobia and sexism can be disrupted by interrogating and understanding the status quo. By the end of the school year, many of my high school students begin to think and speak like college students and I realize that not only is this what it is to be culturally literate, but it is also the start of a meaningful reckoning—and what I hope can be a modest offering of literary reparations.