Once a year, local volunteers involved in the international Human Library organization come to Columbia Public Library and become “books.” On Oct. 12, titles included “Muslim American,” “young caregiver,” “postpartum psychosis,” “morbidly obese,” “witch,” and more.
What does it mean to be a book? It means during thirty-minute conversations around small tables in the Friends Room, these volunteers open up their lived experiences (some titled crudely to reflect society’s normative labels) for reading. And what does it mean to attend as a reader? It means I take a seat across from someone labeled “convicted felon” and ask them everything I want to know.
First we all agree on some guidelines, because such vulnerability can be dangerous without a collective intention to prioritize curiosity and respect. So I sit with my fellow readers and try to imagine how the next hour is going to feel while a library manager reminds us that this is a brave space for conversation, that all “books” are in mint condition and should be returned the same, that your “book” is a resource for information and should be questioned carefully and freely, that these rules serve to create a safe framework for sharing. Then the books walk in to a soft rush of applause, and it is time to read.
My first reading is with a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a smiling person with whom conversation feels like a bubbling over, a kind of excitement and warmth I associate more with catching up with a friend than with meeting someone for the first time. They speak about homeschooling their seven children, about the joy of watching each child discover themselves bit by bit, about parenthood as an exercise in faith. They tell me about Jesus, and I can see that language is not enough — that the kind of love they are trying to express is beyond words. But they try, and I write down: Redeemer, Savior, Foundation.
A few of my questions feel like dead ends, and I doubt myself. But the Latter-Day Saint walks me generously through the parts they want to share, and where I falter, the reader beside me offers bright new threads of inquiry. (Silence and tension are important parts of conversation, like rests in music. Creating rhythm, signaling shifts.) I leave the conversation with new questions about a community whose complexities and histories I had only ever guessed at before. And why guess, why assume, when you can ask — when you can read?
A 15-minute break, then our second reading begins. I am sitting with the person titled “convicted felon” and one other reader. Everyone is smiling. The formerly incarcerated person speaks about the daily phone calls to their spouse — lifelines which kept them tethered to the world outside, to their goal: to reunite with their family, and to “give back what I did not get” to the community. My co-reader asks, “Is there anything you miss?” I imagine them combing through the memories in their mind, 17 years of incarceration: “The honesty,” they answer, and my reality shifts for a moment to reveal the daily dishonesties, excuses, and exaggerations of civic and professional life.
I ask about the charges. They speak about childhood and chaos and violence and survival. My co-reader asks: “Has anyone every apologized to you before? That you had to be around that, and see that, and carry that?” No, never. “Well, I’m sorry you experienced that.” I blink at these two people and consider the miracle of this exchange. Around me, conversations continue, coffee is poured, and I watch people listen to each other with an earnestness and a benevolence so rare all I can do is settle into my astonishment.
I leave the Human Library feeling curiosity lighting up new pathways in my mind, a sense of awe and tenderness expanding towards everyone around me, a growing, glimmering awareness of all the conversations to be had with every passing stranger, the conversations I have not yet had with the people I already know. I think about the answers I’ve heard today. What do you miss? The honesty. I wonder what it would be like to center honesty all the time.
In a 2020 interview with Krista Tippett for the “On Being” podcast, writer Ocean Vuong spoke about fire escapes — as physical structures, and as linguistic spaces. During a long walk after receiving the news of his uncle’s suicide, Vuong imagined an alternative to the impenetrable courtesies of daily conversation:
I remember, when I heard of his suicide, I was a student at Brooklyn College in New York. And I went for the longest walk. And I kept seeing these fire escapes. And I said, what happens if we had that? What is the linguistic existence of a fire escape, that we can give ourselves permission to say, “Are you really OK? I know we’re talking, but — you want to step out on the fire escape, and you can tell me the truth?” And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture — “Not at the table. Not at the dinner table. Don’t say this here. Don’t say that there. Don’t talk about this. This is not cocktail conversation,” what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet, still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.
To me, the Human Library was that “something else.” A model for depolicing access to ourselves. Stepping out of the crowded apartment, its half-heard, half-hearted conversations, making room on the fire escape. Who are you? What have you been through? What do you hope for? These are not just questions for the fire escape, or for the Human Library. And even when there is no air in the room for such questions, maybe we can make room in our minds to wonder. Because that kind of deep curiosity, even unvoiced, can transform us, infusing care into our treatment of each other where we have previously gone through the motions and stuck to the script.
Human Library volunteers will return to DBRL next year. I hope you’ll consider reading!
-Karena
