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- B-Monthly By Ryan #22
B-Monthly By Ryan #22
A twice-monthly newsletter by Ryan Jafar Artes
Ryan Artes
June 25, 2025
Here is a photo of the poet Ryan Jafar Artes during an author event at Viva Books in Baltimore, MD. Viva Books is a cozy shop with an awesomely curated selection of new and used books next door to a bar I used to frequent on North Charles Street. Photo by wren taube.
The isolation that being other often produces and that writing requires can be lonely. But being lonely differs from being alone, which is a solace that writers and readers often seek. Their love of stories, typically experienced in private, paradoxically offers them the chance to create a literary community once they emerge from their solitude. As a result, the world is transformed for writers and readers, which is not to say the world as a whole is remade. That kind of world-making requires readers to put their books down and take a different kind of action. But the gears of the world and the gears of the imagination interlock, and the scenarios fashioned in literary texts might yet impact the world that inspired them. So it is that the solidarity found among those like-minded others who create and read literature may find a corollary and a parallel with social and political movements that contest the imposed conditions of otherness, movements that depend on the storytelling ability to name injustice and to imagine a more just world.
Dear Friends,
Today I am writing about my relationship with books. I have always loved reading. I have always read eagerly on my own accord.
I started to dread reading when I first got graded for it, which was during my junior year of high school. My English teacher provided unnecessarily harsh critiques and grades as encouragement for reading and writing that I did not actually need to be compelled to read or write. After a particularly difficult exam, we were immediately given another drill.
I stood up and demanded ease, and time for rest—for both me and my classmates, which was never granted to us. I received an unfairly low grade that third quarter of my senior year, earning significantly lower marks than my performance warranted. When I returned to visit my high school during my first visit home from college after I graduated, as was a popular tradition to do, my teacher apologized to me, and admitted she graded me much more harshly than I deserved.
What else do I not know? What else do the books not say? What other library is out there with more to learn? Because knowledge seems to come in doses, like mathematics. When you’re little the teacher says only even numbers can be divided by two. Then the next year you learn about fractions and realize odd numbers too can be divided by two. So fractions exist but negative numbers don’t, there are no numbers smaller than zero. Then the next year you learn about negative numbers, so there’s an X-axis. Then you learn there’s also a Y-axis, but that’s it, you’re told. Then later it turns out there’s also a Z-axis, and together the three axes correspond to the three-dimensional space we inhabit, but that’s it. Then you study matrices and it turns out that mathematically there are plenty more dimensions, except only a few gifted mathematicians claim to sort of visualize them. And by the way, you can very much take the square root of a negative number. But all along you think, Well some things still hold, like the fact that the sum of the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, no exceptions. Then the university professor says, well, high school geometry doesn’t account for the curvature of space, which is a reality of the universe. For example, take two points along the Earth’s equator and draw a line to form the base of a triangle. Now, draw a line from each point to the North Pole and you have a triangle; the base angles are each ninety-degree angles, which is already 180 degrees but you still have to add the third angle at the top. So that high school lesson was also a kind of lie.
I wish I knew how to hold her more accountable. Instead, I easily forgave her. Before giving me the low mark, I had just nudged into the place of valedictorian.
The person I nudged as I moved into the place of valedictorian was also a white person, someone who I thought was a close friend. She immediately showed a side of her I had never before seen, telling me I did not deserve the position, rather than congratulating me. I had always been affirming and supportive of what I thought was our gently competitive friendship, which at that moment I realized was predicated on her being ahead of me.
This was when I learned, once again, how an emotional decision made by a white person could have lasting ramifications on me. Emotional decisions made by a white person could affect the rest of my life, and lifetime—and do. I learned this lesson over and over again.
Did you know that just like that time when you were fourteen
when Ms. Alford handed you The House on Mango Street
someone is going to hand a book you wrote to a young Latino boy, one who has never read a book cover to cover in his entire life.
He will approach you at an event, and his friends will be clowning on him as he tries to speak, and he will tell you that your book is the first he ever read,
and then,
he will say,
“I didn’t know we got to write.”
As an adoptee, the course of my lifetime was not only altered, but also completely changed forever as the result of an emotional decision made by white people—with purchasing power. White people set up the systems and structures to carry me away from India. I have a paper trail with so many holes, missing information which used to confuse me.
I now see clearly how, and that, I have been erased. My joy of reading came back to me, eventually, on a beach in Ecuador in 2009. I cried when I reunited with my joy of reading.
I was so happy to be where I was by the ocean. This was also when and where I first realized the ocean is my mother. She held me as I began learning by way of teaching myself how to let go.
Love, Ryan <3
Ongoing:
The next session of The Adoptee Open Mic is on Monday, July 7, 2025 at 7pm EST. I am moving away from Instagram to announce my event. Sign up here to get access to the link to join.
Please contribute to my GoFundMe campaign if you can afford to do so. Scrolling through the list of donors truly makes me feel so loved. Thank you for loving me y’all. <3
Check out my poem on The Quarry, A Social Justice Poetry Database curated by Split This Rock. I was most nervous about recording myself reading my work, so be sure to give that a listen. My nerves almost got the best of me but then I got it after only 12 takes (lol).
I am teaching the third run of Letters to Our Homes, a generative letter writing workshop for Black and Brown adoptees only, this fall. See Bi-Monthly By Ryan #20 for my most up-to-date course flyer. I will devote an entire newsletter to Letters to Our Homes in the future.
This photo makes me laugh! This is an accurate representation of how I feel about books—an indescribable, uncertain feeling; one I absolutely love. Photo by wren taube.