Half of a Yellow Sun

It feels like January is whizzing past with a rustling of hot wind ringing in my ears. The newness of the year and all its demands has kept me rather busy of late. But in that time, somehow, there have been pauses well spent with Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book that you can feel viscerally, in your gut. Gracefully devastating, tragically human, humorously hopeless, it makes its mark on the postcolonial literary landscape.

It is set in the 60s, in a newly independent Nigeria bearing the deep tribal scars of colonial rule, and tells the story of Biafra, a country that existed for three years from 1967 to 1970 and represented the nationalist aspirations of the Igbo people. The novel centers around the Biafran war (or Nigerian civil war as it's also known) which gave the world the tragic images of starvation as two million people starved to death due to Nigerian blockades. It is deeply disturbing to think of starvation being viewed as a legitimate weapon in war.

As much as the story is about this segment of Nigerian history, it is also about three characters whose lives intersect: Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, who works as a houseboy for a university lecturer; Olanna, a young, beautiful woman who rejects her wealthy parents' life of luxury in Lagos to live with her revolutionary lover (the university lecturer); and Richard, a shy Englishman who falls in love with Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. It is the force of these characters that drives the story forward, and you follow, even if you sometimes don't want to go, because you must find out what happens to them. And this curiosity is not simply for how they survive the war, but how they live: how circumstances shape and change them and their relationships with each other. Of this emotional truth that shines through the ground of history, Adichie states, "If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally keen to be true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it."

I think what was so tragic about it was the sense of pointlessness - of a dream that existed for three years in the grotesque and brutal form of war, and yet, remained one that people still, somehow, had the heart to believe in. Of that, Adichie states, "the wonderfully restrained sense of deep disappointment reminded me of how similar the histories of many African countries are, how passionately people believed in ideas that would eventually disappoint them, in people that would betray them, in futures that would elude them."

While there's something horribly familiar about the postcolonial tragedies that litter Africa, Adichie's novel doesn't completely fit that label. In the heartache, there is humour, in the devastation, pockets of resilience. It was one of those reads where I felt devastated to turn the last page and know that it was over.

Don't forget to make some art

So, as the final days of 2015 melt away into the South African summer, I thought I'd just pop in to leave you with these thoughts from Neil Gaiman:

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art - write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself!"

Summer

Summer is here. The air is so moist you can almost wear it on your skin like a tangible, physical thing. The house is thrown open to any passing breeze, the veranda becomes its heart. The kid reports daily on the approach of Christmas according to her advents calendar; the little one steals baubles off the tree, their sparkles too irresistible for her little reaching fingers as she toddles about. We bake on a mercifully cooler day, with friends, stars and moons and hearts with floury hands. A few days are spent in a rustic beach cottage on the South Coast overlooking the ocean. Salt, sand mingling, our constant companions. Rock pools are explored. The Indian ocean dragging at our feet, leaving sea life treasures in the coarse sand as it recedes momentarily. Time for reflection, for appreciating the year gone by, for a pause before casting eyes forward.  Words wind down lazily. Thoughts slowly disintegrate into the now.

The art of browsing

Image from here

There's something special about the act of aimlessly browsing bookshelves. That act of letting the eye glide over the bumps and ridges of book spines like they're some new and undiscovered landscape. That easy, inquisitive searching for something you're not sure of yet. The way you allow yourself detours and unexpected pauses and forgiving seductions in unfamiliar directions. There's a satisfying and restorative absorption that goes with it. Time folds in on itself, a creased moment sheltered from the rest of the day.

I thought about this the other day when I discovered The Reader's Corner, a new, independent bookshop in Durban, and allowed myself that pause to just browse a bit and think about nothing but reading; what I had read and what I still wanted to. The experience reminded me of how the significance of browsing a bookshelf often goes unnoticed and yet it represents one of the first steps of the journey into books. It entices fingertips to reach for spines and pull out unexplored treasures. Of course, there's an art to the act of selection that might overwhelm an inexperienced reader, but the thrill of the new and unexpected is still there. It's powerful. To see. To touch. To page through the possibilities.

It doesn't matter how extensive the bookshelf is, or where it is; if it's at home or in a library or in a bookshop. As long as it's there and provides the opportunity for reader and book to meet. It made me wonder if more people wouldn't become readers then...

Image from here

The Readers Corner is a charming, really well-curated bookshop and well worth a visit if you're in Durban!

Pen and paper

Where has the time gone? Why are there Christmas decorations up when I go grocery shopping? All of a sudden I feel like I'm peering at the bottom of a cup, examining the dregs of the year, feeling a bit cheated, like there wasn't much tea to start with.

And in all of this, I'm trying to capture moments of stillness. They're so rare and precious these days. To just sit and think without being compelled to do something. To fight off the electronic distractions.

For some reason I don't consider a pen and notebook a distraction. They're tools of thought, the paper quiet and blank, the pen single-minded and present. Among our many electronic tools, we often forget the inalienable link between thought, hand, pen and page. They become one process. The page blankly reflects my own thoughts without offering up other distractions. The pen can take me nowhere else.

And so, by committing pen to paper, there are still moments of stillness to be found.

#FeesMustFall

Image from Daily Maverick

What a week of turmoil! I've been glued to my twitter news feed, following the tide of student unrest sweeping across tertiary institutions around the country. Processing the shock of watching the police's brutal response to unarmed protesting students. Thinking how protest has such an uncomfortable history in South Africa and the response is a quick, often fatal, knee-jerk violence. Facing the inadequacy of the political response - at first the "this isn't a crisis" denial by Blade Nzimande (our minister of higher education), then his tired reflex to Struggle-rhetoric (an "Amandla" booed by the students) to scrambling opportunism by a range of parties (also rejected by the largely nonpartisan nature of the FeesMustFall movement). Having to acknowledge the reality that education does not liberate people from poverty if access is denied for financial reasons - that it just wedges them further into the crevice between no hope and a handful of faded "rainbow nation" dreams.

The state of higher education in South Africa is a puzzle with too many pieces and anyone who proclaims they can put it together in the aftermath of this week is misleading us. Each piece carries much weight and as one picks it up and considers it, that particular one seems to grow in proportion until one eventually puts it down again and considers another. Will no tertiary tuition fees mean equitable access? What about the disadvantages and inequalities bequeathed to tertiary institutions by a sick school system? What about the language mess? What about the reality that many first-generation students are grossly underprepared for university study? Unarguably, schooling is a universal right, but is access to university a right or a privilege? And who make up the privileged population who manage to exit with a degree? Will no fees bring about equity and stability to a system that is wracked by strikes and disruptions annually? Or will it simply usher in the sort of slow, crumbling decline that we see all too often in the postcolonial context? Will it polarize our education system further where the wealthy opt-out and flee to private institutions (a feature we have come to see as normal in our schools)?  Will it bring in the sort of educated, free-thinking electorate that we need in a one-party democracy like ours?

By the end of the week students had won the victory of no increases in tuition fees for next year. Many breathed a sigh of relief, but for many more the same day-to-day struggles to survive still exist. The protests, I think, also whisper of a wider restlessness, a growing dissatisfaction with the complacency and corruption of the ANC. Too many pieces to hastily solve in one week, but at least the long-overdue debate has started.

Image from Faces of FeesMustFall

Dear Monday: on the border of day and night, we become their novelist

I feel like the day has crumpled up around me, lost its structure like a tent with its poles removed. A softly collapsed mess devoid of its former shape. Me still stuck somewhere in it.

I think I may have underestimated the demands of two little ones and working motherhood. Certainly of managing two sets of needs: there are after school swimming lessons AND nappies, lunchboxes AND bottles to prepare, soothing and rocking AND bedtime stories. The end of the day does seem to collapse in on itself at times, the automatic routine of feeding and bathing and unpacking and repacking and washing and sorting and playing and fixing and listening, gaining the sort of momentum that eventually undoes itself.

And then just as suddenly, the frenzy is over, and it's bedtime. The little one popped into her cot with her bottle first, then the bigger one tucked into bed, snuggled up close for a story. The day seems to somehow regain its structure. I can recognise myself again. A full stop at the end of the sentence. All makes sense once more.

There's never a night without story time, no matter where we are, no matter how tiring the day was or how late it is. There's a magic in it that can't be skipped. It made me think of a section in Daniel Pennac's charming The Rights of the Reader. I thought I'd share his reflections on parents and that magical reading that takes place on the border of day and night, here:

We were in a state of grace during those early years. Our total sense of wonder in the face of a new life transformed us into geniuses. For them, we became storytellers. As soon as they emerged, blinking, into the world of language, we told them stories. It was a talent we didn't know we had. Their enjoyment inspired us. Their happiness gave us voice. We created character after character, adventure after adventure, ratcheting up the plots. We invented a whole world for them, much as the aging Tolkien did for his grandchildren. On the border of day and night, we became their novelist.

Not that it would have mattered if we'd had no talent for storytelling. If we'd told them other people's stories - badly, groping for words, mispronouncing names, mixing up adventures, muddling the beginning of one with the ending of another... Even if we hadn't made up stories at all, if we'd just read aloud, we'd still have been their personal novelists, their special storytellers helping them slip into their dreamy pajamas every evening before dissolving under the sheets of night. More than that, we were the book.

Remember that intimacy. There's nothing like it.

How we loved scaring just for the thrill of consoling! And how desperately they wanted to be scared! They weren't fooled, even then, but they trembled all the same. They were real readers, in other words. What a playful partnership we formed: they the cunning readers, we the book!

So beautiful!

(recent travel pictures: Slovakia)