SPECTATE: All our voices together
SPECTATE is a series of flash essays. It is an evolving record of words concerned with the act of looking.
Reading aloud in a room full of people. Their buggy eyes staring straight at my lips, ears pricked up watching for mistakes and slippages. It takes me back to primary school, where I remember sitting at cheap plastic desks on bright yellow chairs with my grey trousers fastened hard to the seat, learning to read. I stuttered and tripped over words and panicked when my classmate sitting next to me tumbled the last lines quickly out of their mouth. Suddenly I was aware that it was now my turn to carry on reading. I was a confident reader, just not in front of everyone.
Eventually I migrated through the ranks of school. The panic and stuttering dissipated, and I grew into bigger grey trousers more suited to reading than to playing football on the concrete, though I did both. Reading aloud became a chore, something I had to do to make it through class.
Uttering the word fuck out loud kept me engaged.
But it says it in the book, miss spoke my teenage brain trying hard to reason with the world.
Now that I’m older, I’ve fallen in love with reading loudly. I can’t break myself away from the power of hearing people read out loud, especially together. Hearing multiple voices speak the text into life, subsuming each other’s energy to carry on from where they last left off. Their fingers tracing the ink on the page, following it as if walking up and down A and B roads on an AA map.
I like to think I could measure the undulations and tones of their voices on a seismograph. I can imagine how it would capture the rise in their tones when a word on the page piques their interest, or the lowering of their voice when they aren’t too sure of what comes next. Then, when the room explodes in laughter, the needle might jump to the edge of the page and back again, marking every detail of breathy voices laughing in harmony, writhing out of open mouths to fill the corners of the room.
Reading groups have long been established, particularly by those most disenfranchised by governments and by the upper classes. There’s a storied history of radicalism and stoicism burrowed away in book clubs, reading groups, and storytelling circles. Reading together and being read to hold within beautiful rituals of shared love, knowledge, and care. Where the sharing of words happens through our voices, married to the cracks in our smiles and furrows of our brows.
I recently learned about the Allendale lead-miners’ libraries. Similar to the Miners’ Libraries in Leadhills and Wanlockhead, these were small reading rooms across Northumberland that were built and looked after by miners. Funded in part by the subscriptions of local working people, these libraries sheltering away in small, nondescript buildings were fundamental in supplying rural communities with books, manuscripts, poetry, magazines, and journals. They were places of commune, where literary societies and unions met and were founded and working men and women gathered knowledge.
Earlier this month I led a reading group at Staffordshire St in Peckham. I was always told I talked too much at school – that I yakked a lot – so I’ve named the group YAK!. What I learned, on that journey we took together through Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, was that reading groups can happen at any time and in any place. They can be held in my front room, in a friend’s kitchen, in the canteen at work, in the car and in the pub.
The physical space can be anywhere.
The action of reading, together and aloud, is what is most important.
YAK! happened on 01.09.2024.
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