In search of a reading culture

Image from here

It's often struck me that books are not part of the fabric of everyday life in South Africa. You're unlikely to see books occupying people as they wait in queues or for taxis or snuck under the tables during lectures or resting on restaurant tables. Phones on the other hand, are everywhere, all levels of society equally obsessed and constantly connected. On a functional level, magazines and newspapers are read, but it is not often that one sees someone lost in a book for the pure, simple enjoyment and escape it offers.

Reading for pleasure is just not a priority, both in homes and in the classroom. It gets drowned out by more desperate, immediate things like focusing on the mechanical ability to read rather than wanting to read for enjoyment. Most homes are not filled with books and sadly, the same can be said for most schools too (read an old post about this here). As a result the culture of reading doesn't develop, which has far reaching implications for education. In a paper on implementing a communal reading project at the University of Johannesburg, Janse Van Vuuren describes the typical first year student:

"A high percentage of these learners are from very poor environments where buying books is not an option with the result that they grew up without the benefit of access to books. Many of these young people who are currently enrolled at universities are battling to overcome the disadvantage of growing up without books and an established reading culture. Academic staff at South African universities increasingly comments on the fact that students lack sound reading and writing skills."

That culture is so important, but not acknowledged. Students wonder why bother to read the book when one can just as well watch the movie, missing the point entirely. And so the cycle continues because books are so absent, so missing; considered relics that belong into some other world and have no relevance for the rhythms of daily life. So I was incredibly happy when I came across this heartwarming story of, Philani Dladla,  a homeless man who sells books on the streets of Johannesburg to make a living. On my average drive to work, each time I stop at an intersection I get offered phone chargers, seasonal fruit, plastic coat hangers, and outstretched hands cupped around the empty nothingness of desperation. I am even offered the opportunity to have my windscreen cleaned for some loose change while I wait for the green light. Depending on where you drive in town, you can probably buy anything through your car window.

But books are absent from that picture.

They're not part of the economics of survival. They're not a feature of the vibrant informal pavement trade. Yet, here is the story of a man who lives hand-to-mouth, who takes his stack of books to grubby city intersections around Johannesburg and peddles reviews and books through car windows. A simple act of survival with stories as his tools, that suddenly becomes so much more...

What do children want to read?

Children and stories and reading go together. I like seeing a pile of books next to the kid's bed, or finding her asleep, her hand still resting on a current favourite, or tripping over them on the carpet, or seeing them piled on the coffee table.

But sadly this seems to be the exception. Children don't read anymore or, at best, don't read enough. We hear this repeated throughout the various loops of educational circles. The remedy it seems, is more regimented reading programmes and carefully manufactured books. However, Jack Zipes, expert on the fairy tale and critic of Disney, argues that our response to this decline in reading among children and young people is based on "misreading" the situation. This misreading has resulted in the state, its education departments and the publishing industry ushering in an array of reading programmes and an unhealthy quantity of books without substance.

His is an interesting argument that challenges the response to the reading crisis and one that cautions us about the direction these interventions have taken. In particular he takes to task national reading surveys (for example the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA which looks at the decline in reading for pleasure) for not discussing the quality of books that are being manufactured for young people. He points out that we are simply looking at a skeleton of numbers.

I'm particularly interested in the questions Zipes asks, those questions that the skeleton remains mute on: "What is a book for children? How are children exposed to reading materials and taught to use them? What are the diverse socio-cultural contexts in which children read? Do other media complement the reading of books? Hasn't the screen replaced the book to produce multimodal reading? Why read what we read, and do we have a choice? What role does social class, race, and gender play in learning how to read?" (2009:31).

So what should children be reading? I've written about my disappointment with what is on offer in most toy stores in South Africa before, with the narrowing of literature to easy-to-sell products. When it comes to access to books the range is incredibly limited, which doesn't do much for answering the question of what children should be reading.

Zipes takes Disney to task for making the book a product that is pushed onto children. The Disney approach moves seamlessly from movie to book to toy to CD. Disney artifacts are everywhere and the stories are lost somewhere among them. Tinkerbell is appropriated and repackaged and lost to J.M. Barrie. Cinderella and Belle and Snow White are transformed into two dimensional shadows of their former selves and children loose touch with the roots of those old stories.

Zipes states, "One might argue that the example of Disney is not typical of the book publishing industry for children. But that is not true. The impetus to produce books that will replicate themselves, books to produce films that replicate the books, films to produce books to replicate the films, books that will sell books of the same category - this impetus can be found throughout the industry. As far as the publishers are concerned, books are to be manufactured to sell other books, and in the process, the tastes and values of children are to be molded to suit the tastes and values of the culture industry en large, for a book is no longer a single commodity but closely connected if not intertwined with other similar products. If children are to read, they are basically encouraged to consume more and more of the same."

I'm a bit torn on this one. Part of me says read... just read... anything that takes your fancy... it's okay to just wander. Another part wants to direct, to map, to plan out the journey of the reader. More of the same might be comfortingly familiar, particularly to the developing reader, but in order to grow we have to try new things... pick up that unfamiliar story not associated to a familiar TV character or the well-worn spin-off from a movie.

That is where the problem lies and Zipes' argument is that the book as commodity can't solve our reading crisis, that in fact, if anything, it deepens it. 

It's February

It's February. Days clamoring hot, sitting too close and intimate in the week; one day melting into the next. The whirring of aircons is a constant, like some mechanical breath. A temporary coolness. Beyond its reach the air, moist and soupy, condenses on your skin. Slippery. Damp. It's the month of moisture, where nothing ever feels really dry. We prevail, as everyone must, with daily tasks, punctuating them by dipping in and out the cool circle of our plastic pool:  after breakfast, before school, after grocery shopping, before work, after cooking, before sleep. On hot afternoons, we watch from the veranda the air thickening with the promise of a storm. All too frequently clouds of clenched fists hold spitefully onto the rain. Thunder grumbles, no relief comes. We wait...

Over the last couple of weeks, I've had to acknowledge a dip in my productivity. This blog has become a somewhat silent place. I'd like to blame February (my accusation is that it's too hot to think). Writing, like most end-of-the-day tasks, gets neglected, and finally ignored.

But of course it's not really February. It's not the heat or the sapped energy.

It's the reality of living and working and mothering. It's a finite amount of time sliced thin. It's the lived modality of the "musts" before the "would like to's". So, instead of feeling constantly defeated by it, I have decided to post less often here. I'm sure I will get to the "would like to's" again soon, but for now there'll have to be a pause.

Dear readers, thank you for your support and kind words so far. I hope that you do stick around for posts that emerge sporadically, spontaneously, as and when there's a moment to spare!

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!