Community, kinship, & "The Handmaid's Tale"

One of the most exciting things I get to do in my job is serve on the Board of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers. As a result of that involvement, the library is one of four major partners in Tulsa Reads, a city-wide reading initiative sponsored by the center, Tulsa Town Hall, the Tulsa City-County Library (TCCL), and the Tulsa World. 

This spring, Tulsa Reads will host Margaret Atwood. The library is partnering with the Margaret Hudson Program, which is an alternative school for pregnant teens and teenage mothers. Their English teacher is selecting half a dozen girls to receive from TCCL free copies of Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," free tickets to attend the author event, and a book discussion led by a TCCL librarian as a follow-up a few weeks later. 

When I spoke with the English teacher, she was so grateful to the library for thinking of her students. She said, "No one ever thinks of us." It made me feel so good to have an opportunity to make these girls feel special.
Sheena, library manager

My favorite definition of feminism is that it is the radical notion that women are human beings. In other words, if you are a feminist, it simply means that you believe that half the world's population is part of our community and deserves to be treated as such.

We celebrate National Library Week this month (this week, in fact!), and I can think of no better "small good thing" story than this one to exemplify both feminism and this year's theme of "Communities matter @ your library". The young women in this program are likely not used to being viewed as members of the community (and in fact may not see themselves that way, either), and yet the library is purposefully inviting them as community members to participate in an important literary event. Margaret Atwood is the big leagues when it comes to authors -- if she weren't Canadian, I'd say she was a national freakin' treasure, so instead I'll say she's a universal freakin' treasure.

But really, this little program also is also just an opportunity to read and discuss a terrific book away from the girls' new identities as mothers or mothers-to-be. "No one ever thinks of us," the school's English teacher said, and I'm sure that's true. One day you are just Judy, 16 and having fun, your future a big and beautiful blankness of possibility -- and the next you are Mommy, and your future has narrowed into a murky path.

Around the time I first read Sheena's story, I was listening to Gregory Boyle's Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion driving to and from work. Boyle is a Jesuit priest who has been working with gang members in L.A. for 30 years. It is an extraordinary book, made even deeper and funnier and sadder by Boyle's own voice as he tells stories and makes connections.

Boyle is constantly returning to the idea that humans are built for deep community. Our world's biggest problem, he says, is that we forget that we belong to one another. He believes that God (he is a Jesuit priest, remember) wants us to grow together in kinship -- in community -- in, ultimately, love.

Despite having seen immeasurable pain and suffering and senseless death and deep human cruelty over the years, despite burying nearly 200 young men and women he's worked with and loved (many killed by other young men and women he's also worked with and loved), Boyle says that even in the roughest barrios, in the most despairing moments and conditions, he sees evidence of people recognizing this kinship -- of gathering together in a larger community of humanity, or people-hood.

I'm sure this is part of the reason Sheena's story so captivated me -- it, too, is evidence of living toward kinship. The library will not add to the world's ills by forgetting that we each belong to one another. We will support community and kinship. (Though because we reflect all viewpoints in the community without championing one over others -- a bedrock value of public libraries -- we do not say it comes from God, as Boyle does. Atheists are part of our community, too, and pantheists, and agnostics.)

What's even more interesting, or relevant, is part of what makes the world in The Handmaid's Tale a dystopia is a severe dis-connection of this kinship model -- which is, of course, reflective of our own world's disconnection.

The marvelous thing about reading novels is that, so often, the act of entering their worlds does the exact opposite of this disconnection. You read yourself on the page, and you also read others on the same page, and those two things -- yourself and others -- come together in the reading so you understand that you are the same in some profound and deep way.

So I imagine these young girls reading Margaret Atwood, encountering her radically disconnected world (and one in which women are NOT treated as fully human), and, ironically, feeling connected, and valued.

Now that's something extraordinary.