Sofia Leigh

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on the atlas — 7

highlights — 19

I want you to consider this world’s collapse inevitable. The question remains: what happens after this one? who is being born? will we be here to catch that baby, this newborn world and raise it up for us? for our kindness? for the sake of our love? or will this world be worse than the one leaving? make yourself an enemy of hopelessness and complacency. do not listen to the voices, internal and external, that tell you you cannot. you can. read. read. read. you must.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
There are histories, blueprints, stories we can only access through the pages they’ve been printed on. If that was not important, we would not lock university libraries behind several hundred thousand dollars paywalls. If there was not agency and power to be found in reading, the empire would not work so hard to burn your hands away. If video learning is truly as harmless and neutral as we think, why are there screens everywhere in this world? Why are there so much advertisements, so much incentives, to spend all day looking at someone else making you feel? Can you see the seams? Have you ever…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Short form video land finds its successes in giving you the fullness of the human experience back to us in bite sized pieces— almost like an emotional ventilator. it does not require you to concentrate. It doesn’t require you to do anything but receive the educative words of someone who more than likely read and engaged in long-form researched to make the video that you’re watching. Do you know how much your oppressors read? Do you know how much they read?
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
I read too because I witness, on the other sides of the world, Palestinian scholars, journalists, poets be exploded, entire universities be leveled be swept from the earth. I witness the most internally displaced people in Sudan be a population of children, who may never read and write because of what their world becomes. Colonialism necessitates systems of education turned to rubble so that they alone make the stories and the images and the vehicles of emotion. And we in the United States buy into the lie it’s just coincidentally “too hard” to read.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
I read specifically because I notice how much my brain expands his capacity when I force him into the mode of expansion. Expansion is itchy! It’s uncomfortable!! Reading does not always feel good, just like going to the gym or doing your dishes or eat vegetables does not feel good (especially if you haven’t done it in a long time) and yet!! I sigh in relief when it’s been done. When reading defines my habits, I think noticeably easier.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
The challenge of reading is to navigate the narrative without the overtures of overt feelings. There is no face to latch onto, no music that sways you. Words on a page especially cannot compete with screen-time. They’re not meant to. The boredom opens up space in your mindscape to your own thoughts, opinions, and feelings.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Feeling with the person on screen is… not necessarily a bad thing. And: your emotions can most definitely be hijacked into buying, supporting, adopting things outside your best interest if you are not careful. As an educator, I don’t just want you to feel what I feel. I don’t want you to consider me correct because I said it beautifully. I want to sharpen your critical thinking skills and your world-making capacities. I absolutely do not leave emotion out of that! Emotions are as central as the written, verbal, numeric, social, ecological knowledges we are able to gain to navigate this world a…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
You all take my word for it WAY too much for my liking! I am able to inject emotion into you from video with a sickening ease. Reading what I write, sans my beautiful speaking voice and pretty face, gives you a moment to taste the words in your mouth to see if you ACTUALLY agree. This is not to say emotions do not contribute to our sense of knowing. I did a whole talk with Boston Ujima where we as a thinking community highlight our bodies and emotions as important sites of knowledge. I am saying here: social media television is designed to embue you with emotion. You are supposed to be so lade…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
I worked hard in the classroom to teach students to critique me constantly, to protect themselves from my nonsense; but let’s face it, the teacher-student relationship we’ve been trained with is very colonial in nature. It’s fraught with dangers. The power given to teachers over students’ minds, students’ spirits, students’ development— my God! To rise above that, to insist of myself and of them that we refashion that relationship along progressive lines demanded a great deal of courage, imagination, energy, and will. Writing was a way to “hear” myself, check myself. Writing was/is an act of d…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
I do not think literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has its potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community… like the fact that the simple act of cornrowing one’s hair is radical in a society that defines beauty as blonde tresses blowing in the wind;
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Reading fiction as a child opened up three very important conclusions: (1) that reading could feel good, (2) that other worlds were possible, and that (3) it was possible to make up worlds.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
The far easier route: traumatize the kids. Make them hate reading. Tie plenty of guilt, shame, and fear in the process of returning to reading in adulthood. Make them feel like it’s an innate talent— you have it or you don’t— rather than a skill you need to learn, hone, and practice. You never have to burn the books if no one ever wants to read them in the first place. And this means you can allow texts that chronicle blueprints for our collective liberation to hang out in plain sight. The internet age is the most collective access to information we have ever had as humans in every iteration o…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Just look at Cuba, beating our US adult literacy rates despite decades of overt economic warfare. Your relationship with reading is fucked up because burning books is a bad look. The empire utilizes overt, violent oppression like that as a last resort, because it makes it near impossible to seamlessly convince people they are not oppressed. And to hide an empire like this? Of this size? People need to not know.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Many of us were given reading as homework exclusively— never as a fun or revolutionary tool, a tool of imagination— so it often feels like drudgery, even still. None of us have a neutral experience with the discipline of reading and that is by design. We live in a world ran and ruled by the written word. Similar to money, right? The tool itself is not necessarily bad. However, in this iteration of world-making, proper literacy in reading and writing (as well as financial literacy) are often the difference between agency, freedom-seeking, and autonomy for self-determination and working in someo…
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
Reading is a site of trauma your body holds onto for most of us. Anyone that suggests reading must not understand what you went through. Every objection imaginable will materialize when someone suggests that you try to read.
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
If you were lauded for reading, put on a pedestal in front of your peership, it might be stress-inducing to return to work the muscles you know have atrophied. Are you still good or worthy of help if you cannot read voraciously, like you did as a child?
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
The ruling class (law and policy makers, oligarch businessmen, celebrity, hedge fund managers buying up single-family housing, etc.) want you literate enough to be able to work for them, but not so literate that you realize how badly the working class gets fucked over in this world-making. Read enough to be able to consume and to execute, not to consider critically, certainly not enough to create. Because then what? A mass of people realizing we can create and recreate everything we see and touch to something kinder for us? Ghastly. Absolutely
you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).
With the internet, the individual could be summarily extracted from the one-way street of consumerism and could, at the small price of entering into a technological system, participate in a thrillingly new two-way discourse in which the possibilities of expression appeared to be limitless. But it didn’t work. The sheer numbers of people on the internet appeared to drown out any self-expressing individual, and new technologies emerged that both capped expression (the 250 character count) and that rewarded easily-digestible ideas that fit within approved frames of discourse (the like button). Na…
Against Branding (and Sarah Fay) - by Sam Kahn - Castalia
In their daily lives- in their jobs, in their church, in their friend groups- social capital is gained solely through other men. So they didn’t care if women felt disrespected by them. They cared if men respected them. And the price of gaining mens’ respect often comes at the cost of disrespecting women. And these men aren’t sexual predators. These men aren’t criminals. These men aren’t abusing or cheating on their wives.4 These are society’s GOOD men. They get to proudly wear that title of “good” man WHILE not respecting women, not listening to women, not liking women. Treating women like an …
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