"Literacy Narrative: I Would Appeal to the Canon"

"There was no literary precedent to assist me. Elizabeth Bennet never had to correct Lady Catherine on a matter as fraught as the Opium Wars. Shakespeare’s Othello didn’t offer any practical advice about racial Othering. The canon I studied could not help me, and my rights to them had already been questioned for three years...

It sometimes feels like impossible cheek to look at the blank spots where ‘Here be lions’ or ‘Here be dragons’ are usually inscribed as a shorthand for ignorance, and to try and fill them in myself. ‘I would much rather appeal to the canon than improvise my own,’ I think, when I’m at a loss for a reaction to new microaggressions to calls in Cantonese I cannot answer, to expectations of gratitude for the Opium Wars; I would rather return to books that have yet to give me the answers I need. I entertain an image of myself stowing away a quill pen and leaving the map half-formed...

Sometimes I would be obscurely troubled as I re-read passages of Les Misérables, wondering if in a comma in the middle of a phrase I might insert myself into the narrative, if anything in my experiences echoed what was on the page. Was there a place for me, in these works I was taught were universal? I put great effort into imagining myself in the streets of nineteenth century Paris, or in sprawled on a divan in Victorian England, drawling out some witticism."

http://entropymag.org/literacy-narrative-i-would-appeal-to-the-canon/