Everything here is completely different from everything back
home. It all makes sense in its own way,
of course, but that can’t keep things from being pretty overwhelming sometimes. You realize pretty quick on arrival that your
cultural references are invalid, your sense of humor is off, your speech is a
little too fast, and your voice is entirely too loud. It’s okay; you start to pick things up, if
you pay attention. Interactions get
smoother. Still, you can’t really be the
person you were back home, and that takes a lot of energy. I do love the drain, I think, and I am
learning so much from putting in all this effort, but every once in a while I feel
the intense need to turn off all my overworked sensors and forget where I am
for a long second.
Hellooo,
Mr. Tolstoy.
Since I
first touched toe to African soil I have tumbled through Infinite Jest, The Four Loves,
Winter of Our Discontent, The Road, War and Peace, Striving
for the Wind (a famous Kenyan novel), Atonement, and The Great Gatsby. I don’t think I’ve read so many pages in so
short a time since those endless middle-school summers when life revolved
entirely around the pool, the blacktop, and the sunny armchairs in the living
room—and it feels great. I won’t lie, it
was difficult to pick the habit back
up at first, and I honestly don’t know if I could have done it without the help
of the late Foster Wallace’s impossibly
engaging prose, but as soon as the groove was got-back-in I’ve had to fight to
put down books and actually get my rear end in bed at night. Right now I’m 150 pages from finishing
Sometimes a Great Notion, and Ken Kesey is threatening the education of my students at every
turn.
“So, uh, today is silent reading
day, kids! Teacher Samuel has…business…to
attend to.”
As it turns
out, my students are safe from this threat, because silent reading would
actually be impossible in my English classes; the children don’t own any
books. Most of them don’t even have the
one book required for class, a two-dollar abridged copy of Oliver Twist. Alex and I have been making 100 copies of
each chapter at a time, because otherwise there would be 8 or 9 kids sharing a
book. Ugh.
I
understand I might look insensitive here, but almost every single one of these
kids (and certainly everyone in the Boarding School) could scrape up the money
to buy a copy of Oliver Twist, and they also have a library to raid. The problem isn’t funds (they are all paying
to constantly text on their cell phones), it’s a complete lack of desire, and a
relative lack of consequences. Past
Senior 2, literature becomes an elective.
All you have to do is learn enough of the character’s names to score
above a 40 on your final exam, and you never have to read a novel again. Oh goodie.
At the same time, few of the teachers read (I haven’t caught one at it
yet), and parents don’t really either, laying a foundation of exactly two
positive literary role models: Alex and Sam, the Bazungu Brothers!
To make
myself feel better about this trash-seeming-talk, every Ugandan I’ve spoken to
agrees that there is a serious problem with the reading culture here, the heart
of which is that there isn’t a reading culture here. Reading isn’t seen as a societal imperative
or mark of intelligence as it is in (parts of) the States; our friend Ronald,
one of the most intelligent and worldly Ugandans I’ve met, who oversees all of
Father John’s projects, called us ladies when he caught us nose-deep in novels
before rosary. Because, you know, books
are for girls.
Which would
be great, because then at least books would be for someone.
I learned
after my last bout of righteous indignation that it does not pay to get upset
about these cultural differences, so instead I chose to investigate the matter
with Alex. What we have gathered about
Ugandan anti-literacy stands as thus:
First of
all, none of the myriad local tribal languages of Uganda had a written system
before colonization. Thus, no history of
writing/reading, and when writing/reading is introduced, it is done so by foreign invaders with moustaches, monocles, and
safari hats.
Second, most Ugandans, urban and
rural, have a distinct lack of decent lighting in their homes. This means that during the dark hours—about
the only time family members young and old aren’t desperately trying to make
ends meet—reading is close to impossible; at the very least it is wrecking your
oh-so-necessary (because glasses are hella expensive) vision.
Third, community engagement is
paramount in Ugandan culture, and reading is a necessarily solitary
endeavor. As mentioned in a previous post,
alone time is not a recognized concept in these parts. Solidarity was vital on the savannah, important
in villages, and still highly valued in the city. Kids who don’t want to spend the appropriate
time with others are considered a little off-kilter, and the nerdy kid who goes
off to read constantly can become a downright pariah. Would you read if it meant everyone thought
you were broken? Honestly, I don’t think
I would have.
So it turns out that there are
really legitimate reasons for the state of Ugandan booklessness. The problem is, the more and more I read, the
more and more I realize how important novels are to me becoming the kind
of person I want to be.
Lev Tolstoy wrote over 500
characters into the pages of War and
Peace, and many of the characters go through serious change at some point
(a million points) in the novel. As I read
the book, without really thinking about it, I was constantly finding those
pieces of characters that I wanted to emulate and those that I wanted to avoid, those that I already exhibited and
wanted to magnify, and those I exhibit that I would rather went away. Tolstoy gave me a million facets of
personality to play with, and it immediately changed how I’ve interacted with
people here. And that was just one book!
The best part is, a great author
won’t just do that with characters, he/she’ll do it with places and truths and
dreams and goals. The more you read the
more evidence you have to base your choices around. I know most of you probably understand this
already, but it never really hit me deeply until now just how important this evidence is.
To be fair, it is entirely possible
to get all of these things from the people around you. Parents and leaders can teach you morals and
positive traits and the proper ways to live; the problem is, they only have so
much experience themselves. And without
different concepts to test against, ideas very quickly become dogmatic and
stifling. If I have the desire and time I
can read books from all over the world, from every age, and in this way receive
the choices of the whole world. What if
the tenets of a Zen Buddhist best fit my existence? Or the actions of an Ivanhoe? How about the deep thoughts of the Brothers
K? These are things you cannot get from
a grandma who also did not read. They
are also things that you can’t get from all the politicians on T.V. who hoard
power and money and prestige.
Ugandans are reaching out and
connecting with others at an unprecedented rate these days. Through T.V., radio, and the internet they
are starting to absorb the culture and ideas of places around the country and
world. There is incredible potential
here. The problem is, I don’t think
there is enough substance in these visual-and-auditory level ideas to allow
their responsible, proper, informed use.
To use something responsibly, properly, and informedly you have to think
about it. And to think, truly think, and
to have the symbols and ideas and substance with which to think, you need to
read. In any case, reading is pretty
darn helpful.
I’m doing my best to help my
students enjoy the books and poems we’re reading in class, but I understand
from my own time as a snotty kid how difficult that task can be. I am left hoping hope that the path Uganda’s
careening “development” takes will open up a lane for reading culture (hurray
for electric lights!), and that the internet and T.V. won’t step in to
completely block the path. Thankfully,
as a warrior in this battle, it isn’t too hard to find good resources; I’ll
just go read a book about it!
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