Since it is no longer online and since issues of racial representation in writing are becoming major issues again in the critical discourse, I have decided to republish here an essay I wrote about the interesting response I had to a “cell phone novel” that I wrote in 2014, Kira Through A Looking Glass. [Note: This essay has been slightly revised from its original publication at CommonSense2.com]
“Of Cell Phones, Reading and Race: Reflections on writing Kira Through A Looking Glass”
A New Yorker article almost six years old reappeared in my consciousness as I flowed through page after page of a manga. After shying away from anything to do with comics, graphic novels and other forms of visual story telling (seeing them in the way of wannabe literary snobs as “trashy”) I found in my first year of college that not only were these various treats acceptable but that they seemed to be gaining ground with my generation. A generation raised by the internet, we are an image-centered culture—and as a generation never taught the delights of reading in the American school system, shied away from books. My love of printed pages was hardly an oddity—a random glitch in modernity similar to the man in the old Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” who wants to read in a culture that views all books as filth, or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—but it seemed that the majority of my classmates viewed reading as a chore. Reading was something to be suffered through. I began to see that the graphic novels and inventive, intensive works of visual storytelling (the work of Mark Z. Danielewski, Alan Moore and some of the works of Neil Gaiman) being read by my comrades had the complexity of the classic works that were being handed to us by our teachers.
The Library Never Closes 