If I could bathe in books, I would. Maybe if I do a Google search, I can find a company that shreds my favourite books into bath salts, and I can luxuriate in the words of Audre Lorde and James Baldwin and soak up all they’ve ever written, as I flip through Octavia E. Butler with a glass of wine. I wonder what that bath might smell like? If the clinging smell of stale books in libraries might somehow transform into the lilt of lavender and mint or orange blossom and vanilla? The joy, of course, is that books don’t need to be shredded and poured by the fistful into a steaming bath to be truly enjoyed. The luxury, the intimacy, is in the act of reading. Books, and all the knowledge crammed within them, are tools of great emotional development. I remember my first time reading through Audre Lorde’s essays and understanding, in the deepest parts of myself, that every feeling I’d ever felt was valid. Feelings and experiences that previously had not found words or sentences robust enough to speak could finally be arranged to make sense in my own mind in what would become an ongoing exercise in flexing a more substantive emotional literacy.
Her words became the building blocks of my feminism and helped ground me firmly in my experience as a Black lesbian mother and woman, and it is upon this foundation that I’ve been able to rise up as a warrior, fighting for all those who might feel like me. Books have also been sites of great safety for me. In public spaces, burrowing into books provides a break from the sometimes unbearable weight of being different and the equally harsh glare of invisibility. They’re also a great way for me to indicate how approachable I am that day – if I whip out Why I’m No Longer Speaking To White People About Race on the tube, you know to tread carefully. Conversely, on my more triumphant days, I might cart around David Olusoga’s Black And British, a behemoth of a time that is less for reading in public than for brandishing as a statement of pride and intent.