I am currently reading Yeonmi Park’s memoir about her escape from North Korea, the prison state where all literature is carefully censored and curated to align with government propaganda. When, after escaping to freedom, Park began reading, she describes how her mind was opened. I thought this was such a beautiful description of the liberating effect of books, and of the language arts in general.
“I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts. In North Korea, the regime doesn’t want you to think and they hate subtlety. Everything is either black or white, with no shades of grey… I was starting to realize that you can’t really grow and learn unless you have a language to grow within. I could literally feel my brain coming to life, as if new pathways were firing up in places that had been dark and barren. Reading was treating me what it meant to be alive, to be human.