Last night’s Decolonize Your Bookshelves event was a success! Thanks so much to Grace Talusan for coming to talk to us about her memoir, The Body Papers, and to Enoch Pratt Free Library for sponsoring the event!
I would also like to thank the Filipinx online community for being so supportive of this event and for recognizing the importance of literature and reading. Several similar clubs to Decolonize Your Bookshelves have sprung up in the past six months alone and we all managed to find each other on social media! Everyday I see people post about how books change lives, in big ways and small, and the profound realization that nobody is ever alone in how they feel and see the world. There is someone out there who faces the same fears, the same confusions, the same identity issues, the same griefs, and the same joys.
Chatting with Grace during the book discussion. By the way, Wheeler Auditorium at Enoch Pratt Central is GORGEOUS.
Reading is a way to live more lives, to experience more worlds, to meet people we care about and want to know more about, to understand others and develop a compassion for what they confront and endure. I took a long break from blogging and podcasting this summer to just observe the world around me, spend time with my family, read more books and watch more movies. I probably read about forty books since June. Something that I was thinking about a lot over the summer was that for all our fascination with technology, we’ve forgotten how transformative a simple book can be.
Books have been at the forefront of my own decolonization process. It started with The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. Little by little, we change and grow as we read. And there are some significant books that change us substantially and put us on a new path. I’m privileged to say that Grace’s Talusan’s book had a similar effect on me.
The Body Papers is Grace’s memoir, told in a collection of essays in which the notion of the body is a central theme. Rather than addressing her own sense of embodiment, Grace examines the body through how it is read by others, how it has been harmed, how it has been cut up and put together. She presents "the concept of 'the body' as a concentric circle that expands outward: the female body, the body of the family, the body of the Philippines, the body of a writer's work."
*The next Decolonize Your Bookshelves event will be on Saturday, November 23rd, 12-2 PM, at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore. Randy Ribay will be our featured author and we will be discussing his novel, Patron Saints of Nothing. This event will be sponsored by Malaya Movement Baltimore/DMV.
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan.
Enoch Pratt Central Library. 400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD.
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