“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley…”
Sitting shotgun in Mama’s Honda, six-year-old me thumbed through pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, shakily sounding out and stumbling through each syllable. Earning each word through patience and persistence, Mama and I collected fragments of the passionate voice I would carry for the rest of my life.
Though my Potterhead years are behind me, literature will always remain my favorite subject. Reading was not just a means of strengthening fluency in English, but also a passage for self discovery and introspection. Unlike anything else, art is not bound by facts. Emotional and personal; every individual interprets the same work differently. As a queer woman, I am drawn to classic literature because of my desire to see myself represented in history. To know that I am genuine, and not alone.
Analyzing literature gave me a way to organize my haphazard identity and participate in the bitterly fun scavenger hunt that is searching for hints of queerness. Beyond the quagmire of overused essay prompts (who cares about green lights and scarlet letters anyway?) and so called ‘right answers,’ novels are full of excitement, intrigue, and homosexuality. Frankenstein and Clerval. Horatio’s devotion to Hamlet. The line “you’re not unnatural…you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else.” As a 12-year-old girl who had just begun to consider that she maybe, quite possibly, might not be 100% straight, detached scavenging was enough of a reminder that I wasn’t alone.
The truth is that in a world where queer people have been erased from history, I see literature as one of the only mediums that affirm our existence throughout humanity. After all, it was Sappho—the lesbian Greek poet—who once said, “Someone will remember us, even in another time.”
I remember her. It is completely irrelevant that she was a Greek woman living in antiquity and that I am an Indian-American girl that has never seen a year before 2006. I know exactly why Sappho wrote “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.” I lived those lines while admiring a friend’s entire explanation on some journalism assignment because I was too busy admiring her instead. We remember her today, albeit subtly. The word “sapphic” comes from her name.
Art is created to comprehend reality, and the books that mean the most to me are not silly tales of fictitious lust; but rather urgent calls to hold a mirror to my own life and reckon with my deepest most innate anxieties. Most notably, my sexuality.
The best part? Someone else might read the same words as me, and come up with their own meaning. They will read between the lines and come up with something completely different. And neither of us are wrong.
This time, I’m the one driving. Keeping my eyes on the road and my heart in my chest, I declare myself to my family.