#unfortunately my high school was in Small Town Racism Texas and the chances of someone un-satirically writing that same essay were. high

[dearqueerdeers]

no wait actually as an avid reader English classes pissed me off so bad in high school. before high school I just found them vaguely annoying because it was super easy stuff— the author says in paragraph 3 that daisy is mad. Which of these word is a synonym for “mad”?— but in high school they really started to lean into analysis that was deeper than “surface level”. Here’s the thing. I’ve been writing fanfiction since I was 11. I know how to read between the lines. I know how to analyze shit. Been doing it forever. So I get to English classes where they’re asking me to do that and I go “great! this will be fun!”— only to be told that I am, in fact, wrong, in my interpretation of whatever current book we were reading.

This happened a lot for a lot of books (I am autistic lmao), but the one that infuriates me to this day is when we read Things Fall Apart in my senior year English class. Note that we did not read Heart of Darkness, which supposedly this book was a response to, so I could very well be missing a chunk of analysis here. It essentially followed a man living in Nigeria pre-colonialism and followed his life as European “missionaries” slowly started invading the surrounding area & eventually his home. According to my English teacher, Heart of Darkness portrayed the indigenous people in African in a very negative light and erased a lot of their culture, and Things Fall Apart was written as a rebuttal to showcase the rich culture and interior lives of the people portrayed as “savages” in Heart of Darkness.

And yes, the book did a wonderful job of showcasing the presence of a thriving culture and the personhood of those living in Nigeria! However. This teacher absolutely refused to hear any analysis that painted the main character in a bad light. If you pointed out that any of his actions were bad and suggested that he had personal growth to do, she’d shut you down immediately. I specifically was told “it’s a different culture and you can’t judge them based on our cultural standards.” My class was told the protagonist was a good guy trying his best, & that’s what the book was trying to showcase. If you listened to my English teacher without ever touching this book, you’d probably think it was about a guy doing his best and who therefore didn’t deserve the violence he experienced at the hands of the colonizers. (Disclaimer here that shouldn’t need to be said but I’m saying it anyways: You can’t “deserve” to be colonized. No culture or individual person should ever be forced to endure colonization. Full stop, period, end of story.)

Here’s the thing. This dude sucked balls, guys. He murders his adopted son. He hits his kids. He abuses his wives. & the whole time shows no learning from any of these actions. And those actions formed my analysis of the book! My analysis was that this guy sucked hard and the point of the book was that even when people suck, colonization is bad. My TEACHER’S analysis (and the only analysis she allowed us to discuss) was that this guy was a good guy and the point of the book was to make us feel bad that a good guy was the victim of colonization. I don’t even think I need to unpack why that’s totally bullshit, y’all have reading comprehension skills lmao.

To this day I still bitch about this book and this unit to my friends who were in that class. Not that any media analysis should ever be considered “right” or “wrong,” but to be told I was wrong in my analysis when I so very clearly was not was infuriating.