Paulo Coelho
F O R
L
Paul Auster
I T E R A C Y
Margaret Atwood
N. Scott Momaday
W
Amitav Gosh
R I T E R S
Nadine Gordimer
Toni Morrison
Franceso Sionil José
Wole Soyinka
The Alphabet
of Hope
Amy Tan
Miklós Vamós
This volume features texts published
on the occasion of International Literacy Day 2007.
It is presented by UNESCO and is not for sale.
The Alphabet of Hope
Banana Yoshimoto
W
R I T E R S
F O R
L
I T E R A C Y
The Alphabet
of Hope
W
R I T E R S
F O R
L
I T E R A C Y
The authors are responsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts contained in
this book and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those of UNESCO
and do not commit the Organization.
The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this publication
do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the
legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning
the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
Published in 2007 by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
7, Place de Fontenoy F-75352 Paris 07 SP, Paris
Coordination : Martina Simeti
Graphic design : Gérald Sanspoux
Photographs : François Gaudier
Printed by UNESCO
Aknowledgments:
Namtip Aksornkool
Linda Tinio
ISBN 978-92-3-104071-9
© UNESCO 2007
www.unesco.org/publishing
All rights reserved
Printed in France
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
WRITERS
FOR
L I T E R A C Y qFO GSQQAZEWN
A poor woman learns to write
© Margaret Atwood, 2007, excerpt from The Door, McClelland & Stewart.
Somebody’s daughter
© Margaret Atwood, 2007, O.W. Toad Ltd,.
Reading with Flaubert
© Paul Auster, 2004, excerpt from Moon Palace, Faber & Faber.
The moment when the hand opens
© Paulo Coelho, 2005.
Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.
The image and the word
© Nadine Gordimer, 2005.
To the young writer
© Francisco Sionil Jose 2006.
The testimony of my grandfather’s bookcase
© Amitav Gosh, 1998. First appeared in “Kunapipi, A Journal of
Post-Colonial Writing” (UK.), Vol. XIX, n. 3.
The value of literacy
© N. Scott Momaday, 2007.
The signature
© Toni Morrison, 1977, Excerpt from Song of Salomon, Alfred Knopf.
I am going to school
© Wole Soyinka, 1981, excerpt from Ake: The years of childhood, Rex Collings.
Mother tongue
© Amy Tan, 1990. First appeared in “The Threepenny review”.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
Chekhov on the bench
© Miklòs Vàmos, 2007.
The power of words
© Banana Yoshimoto, 2007.
Translated by Michael Emmerich.
5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
fSXO q
Margaret Atwood
10
18
22
28
32
38
40
44
48
52
60
68
Paul Auster
Paulo Coelho
Nadine Gordimer
Amitav Gosh
N. Scott Momaday
Toni Morrison
Franceso Sionil José
Wole Soyinka
Amy Tan
Miklós Vamós
Banana Yoshimoto
0 8 / 0 9 / 2 0 0 7 I N T E R N AT I O N A L L I T E R A C Y D AY
FOREWORD
D
R
O
W
E
R
O
F
This volume, part of a new series produced by UNESCO, brings together a collection of short texts in English by a number of internationally
acclaimed writers. The Alphabet of Hope: Writers for Literacy is published by UNESCO to advocate for Literacy for All and the promotion of
a sustainable literate environment.
These texts capture the unlimited and surprising possibilities of the use
of literacy by living masters of the written word.
Conceived as a powerful advocacy tool on literacy and its benefits in
terms of achieving the goals of eradicating poverty, reducing child
mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and
ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy, this book is
also about the joys offered by literacy and the act of reading as such.
A variety of literacy practices employed by female and male authors is
expressed in this inspiring collection of writings. Taken together, these
texts reflect the plurality of the notion of ‘literacy’ in today’s complex
world, where people acquire and apply literacy for different purposes
in a range of contexts, all of which are shaped by culture, history, language, religion and socio-economic conditions.
qFOREWORDUNIPEDCOGSQQAZEWNf
The book is offered by UNESCO on the occasion of International
Literacy Day 2007. As the leading agency and international coordinator
of the United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012), UNESCO is grateful to the authors who joined their voices to raise awareness about the
literacy challenges in the world today:
• Some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills;
• One in five of the world’s adults are still not literate;
• Two-thirds of them are women;
• 72.1 million children are out of school;
• Access to reading material through appropriate publications
and libraries is lacking and does not allow neo-literates to sustain their skills.
Let us act now, together, to build a literate world, sharing both the
benefits and the pleasure provided by what Scott Momaday calls the
“gift of literacy”.
fSXO q
Koïchiro Matsuura
Director-General of UNESCO
0 8 / 0 9 / 2 0 0 7 I N T E R N AT I O N A L L I T E R A C Y D AY
Margaret
Atwood
CA N A D A
Margaret Atwood is the author of
more than forty books of fiction,
poetry, and critical essays. Her
books include the 2000 Booker Prize
winner, The Blind Assassin, Alias
Grace, which also won the Giller
Prize in Canada and the Premio
Mondello in Italy, The Robber Bride,
Cat’s Eye, and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Her most recent book, Curious Pursuits, a collection of essays, reviews
and personal prose, was published
in 2005. Margaret Atwood lives in
Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
A poor woman learns to write
She squats, bare feet
splayed out, not
graceful; skirt tucked around ankles.
Her face is lined and cracked.
She looks old,
older than anything.
She’s probably thirty.
Her hands also are lined and cracked
and awkward. Her hair concealed.
She prints with a stick, laboriously
in the wet grey dirt,
frowning with anxiety.
Great big letters.
There. It’s finished.
Her first word so far.
She never thought she could do this,
Not her.
This was for others,
She looks up, smiles
as if apologizing,
but she’s not. Not this time. She did it right.
What does the mud say?
Her name. We can’t read it.
But we can guess. Look at her face:
Joyful Flower? A Radiant One? Sun On Water?
11
WRITERS
FOR
L I T E R A C Y - M A R G A R E T A T W O O D qFO GSQQAZEWN
S o m e b o d y ’s d a u g h t e r
Few remember that to learn to read and write is one of the great victories in life.
- Bryher, The Heart to Artemis (p.14)
Akluniq ajuqsarniqangilaq:
In times of scarcity, there is much opportunity for innovative thinking.
- Inuit saying, from Nunavut, Canada.
Some time ago, I received a message from UNESCO asking me to write something to advocate for Literacy. By a great coincidence, I was already involved in a Literacy programme –
Somebody’s Daughter, a two-week camp that takes place in Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic.
So, as reading and writing are never learned in outer space but under specific local conditions, I will tell you a little about that programme.
Life has never been easy for the people of the far north. For many centuries they lived
in one of the most unforgiving climates on earth: no trees, no agriculture, extreme cold and
darkness for many months of the year. Using tools made of stone and bone, wearing clothing
made of skins, relying largely on fish and on the meat of seal, caribou, polar bear, walrus, and
whales, they had a culture finely tuned to their environment. In this culture, men and women
were interdependent: hunters provided most of the food, but their clothing was made by
the women, and unless it was made very well the hunter could die: a leaky kamik could
mean a frozen foot. Each set of skills was known to be necessary to the survival of all, and
each was respected.
Then came the Europeans, and the gathering of a nomadic people into settlements,
and exposure to many of the more negative aspects of “white” culture, including excessive
drinking and violence towards women; there was a break with traditional ways, and a sharp
increase in suicides. Children were forced into residential schools in an effort to wrench them
into the twentieth century, and two generations have undergone extreme culture shock.
One of the worst effects of this has been the fracturing of families. In the old culture, sons
were taught their hunting skills by fathers and uncles, daughters their sewing skills by
mothers and aunts, but now many younger people are cultural orphans. There are still a
number of elders-living treasures who remember the old ways – and Somebody’s Daughter
aims at a reconnection of the generations.
Somebody’s Daughter is run by Bernadette Dean, the Social Development Coordinator for her district of Nunavut. Bernadette’s Inuit name, Miqqusaaq – mica, or sparkling
13
rock – describes her well: scintillating and clear, but tough underneath. Like many who
confront similar social problems, Bernadette knows that to improve the overall health of a
community and its families you must improve the well-being and confidence of the women.
Somebody’s Daughter is a two-week camp for women in their twenties, thirties and
forties who never had a chance to learn traditional Inuit sewing. Most of them have experienced tragedy, violence, or separation from their families. Bernadette explained the programme’s name to me: “Not everyone is a wife, not everyone is a mother, not everyone is
a grandmother; but every woman is somebody’s daughter.” Immediately the participants
are given a sense of belonging.
The “daughters” go out on the land with a group of elders and teachers. They live in
tents, and make an article of clothing the old way, scraping, stretching, and softening the
animal skin first, then cutting the pattern with a women’s curved knife or ulu, and sewing
it with sinew – the best thread, as it expands in water and makes a garment watertight.
It’s hard to describe the joy that learning this skill can give.
But an improvement in literacy is also part of the plan, because Nunavut exists in the
same twenty-first century we all do. Computers and office jobs are now common, and for
these and the money they can bring, literacy is needed. That is why two writers were invited
to join the group: myself and children’s writer Sheree Fitch, who had been there the two previous summers. We both felt very lucky to be there.
But how to teach writing to women whose experience of it at school may well have
been negative? Sheree told me that it could prove very difficult to get these women to set
pen to paper: they might be shy, or afraid of writing; or they might not see the use of doing
it at all.
The campsite this year was on the shore of Southampton Island, which is situated at
the top of Hudson’s Bay and is as large as the land mass of Switzerland. It has one settlement, Coral Harbour, with less than a thousand people. It also has two hundred thousand
caribou and a lively population of polar bears. We traveled from Coral Harbour to the site on
a 30-foot long-liner – a trip of sixty miles that took over five hours because of the large
waves.
We set up our tents at a spectacular location – austere and beautiful, with the sea on
one side and the land rising up behind us in a series of earlier shores. On the top ridge were
some Dorset Culture dwellings many centuries old – rocks set into the ground in a circle,
14
WRITERS
FOR
L I T E R A C Y - M A R G A R E T A T W O O D qFO GSQQAZEWN
with a tunnel entrance and some fox traps and graves nearby. The ground at our site was
smooth white limestone rocks, so our tents could not be pegged; instead their ropes were
tied to large boulders, a good plan in view of the 80-mile-an-hour winds we soon experienced.
We had three expert hunters with us, to help with the site, to provide food, and to
defend our camp. They immediately bagged a caribou, which was skinned and cut up immediately; some of it became caribou stew, some was soon to be turned into mittens and
kamiks; nothing would be wasted. We weren’t the only hungry ones around, however:
through the twilight came a large healthy male polar bear, intent on dinner. The hunters chased it off on their Honda ATVs, then took turns standing guard all night – just as well,
because the bear came back four times. “Next time it’s dinner,” said one hunter. The bear
must have heard him. “The elders tell us to be alert at all times,” we were instructed.
The next day the women met with the elders and teachers in a large round communal
tent, where they received the skins they would work on. “What do you want to make?” they
were asked by the elders, in Inuktituk. Then, “Who is it for?” (Sizes vary according to age,
patterns according to gender.) This question – “Who is it for?” – gave Sheree and myself a
thread to follow. During our first writing session, we said that writing, like sewing, took one
thing and made it into another; and that writing, like sewing, was always for someone, even
if that someone was yourself in a future form. It was a way of putting your voice on paper
and sending it – to someone you might know, or else to someone you might never meet,
but who would be able to hear you anyway.
Then I explained that I was going to write a piece for UNESCO. Somebody’s Daughter,
I said, was part of a much larger movement – a movement to improve the lives of women
all over the world. Some of these women – unlike themselves – might not even be able to
write their own names yet. So for their first writing assignment, I would like them to send a
message to these other women. I would be their post-person, I said: I would deliver their
message.
Every single woman wrote a message. Every message was positive and encouraging.
Here is a sampling:
Whoever you are. I am a woman. I am proud of being me. You can be proud of who
you are and be proud of yourself. Don’t ever think that we’re nothing. But we the women
are the most pretty inside and out because we are always helpful to our families and other
people. Just think of yourself that you can do everything.
15
This message is coming from the North. To the women all over the world, take good
care of yourself because you are the most needed in a family, you are a home to them so
take good care of yourself. We women are all the same and we are as one. Remember,
everyone is created equally and that means if he cannot handle abuse neither should you,
but please remember that we have to help and love our neighbours.
I’d love to teach when I learn more.
A message to the ladies in the world. Remember that you are loved very much and
that you are not alone.
Please let your life be good and don’t forget you’re strong and a helper.
To all the women in the world from someone in the north – no matter what you look
like you are very special. Always keep this in your mind.
And finally:
Learning begins when the learner feels safe and comfortable, provide an atmosphere
of safety and comfort. And keep trying!
Writing messages of encouragement was in itself encouraging to the writers. The
big round tent became a place of safety and comfort and healing for the women in it, and
their writing also became – for most, I think – a place of safety and comfort and healing.
In the tent, and also in the writing, the women laughed and joked and told stories, and also
grieved: in this culture, grieving should be done – it is said – out loud, and with other people.
Grieving in this way leads to healing, it is said.
Each of the women, with the help of her individual elder or teacher, completed the
sewing project she had set out to do. Each continued to write – to expand their handling of
the written word through daily journals, letters, and small poems. Confidence came through
identity and achievement, and on the final day, at the suggestion of one of the women, the
“daughters” wrote a communal poem, each of them contributing a line.
I’ll use the last line of this poem to show how the sewing, the writing, and the healing
all came together through this inspired programme:
After I finished sewing the hard part of the kamik I feel like an eagle, so free and fly
wherever I may go.
16
WRITERS
FOR
L I T E R A C Y - M A R G A R E T A T W O O D qFO GSQQAZEWN
Margaret Atwood
17
Paul Auster
USA
Paul Auster was born in Newark,
New Jersey, on 3 February 1947. A
poet, translator and film director, he
is the author of numerous novels,
screenplays and works of non-fiction. Through his rich and unexpectedly dream-like prose, Paul Auster
is widely regarded by critics as one
of America’s greatest living writers.
He is best known for his three experimental detective stories, The New
York Trilogy (City of Glass, 1985;
Ghosts, 1986; The Locked Room,
1986). He lives in Brooklyn, New
York with his wife, the author Siri
Hustvedt.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
Reading with Flaubert
It didn’t take me long to get the hang of the wheelchair. There were a few bumps on the
first day, but once I learned how to tilt the chair at the proper angle when we went up and
down curbs, things went fairly smoothly. Effing was exceedingly light, and pushing him
around caused little strain on my arms. In other respects, however, our excursions were
rather difficult for me. As soon as we got outside, Effing would begin jabbing his stick into
the air, asking in a loud voice what object he was pointing at. As soon as I told him, he would
insist that I describe it for him. Garbage cans, shop windows, doorways: he wanted me to
give him a precise account of these things, and if I couldn’t muster the phrases swiftly
enough to satisfy him, he would explode in anger. “Dammit, boy,” he would say, “use the
eyes in your head! I can’t see a bloody thing, and here you’re spouting drivel about ‘your average lamppost’ and ‘perfectly ordinary manhole covers.’ No two things are alike, you fool,
any bumpkin knows that. I want to see what we’re looking at, goddamit, I want you to make
things stand out for me!” It was humiliating to be scolded like that in the middle of the
street, standing there as the old man lashed out at me, having to take it as people turned
their heads to watch the uproar. Once or twice, I was tempted just to walk away and leave
him there, but the fact was that Effing was not entirely wrong. I was not doing a very good
job. I realized that I had never acquired the habit of looking closely at things, and now that
I was being asked to do it, the results were dreadfully inadequate.
Until then, I had always had a penchant for generalizing, for seeing the similarities
between things rather than their differences. Now I was being plunged into a world of particulars, and the struggle to evoke them in words, to summon up the immediate sensual
data, presented a challenge I was ill prepared for. To get what he wanted, Effing should have
hired Flaubert to push him around the streets – but even Flaubert worked slowly, sometimes
laboring for hours just to get a single sentence right. I not only had to describe things accurately, I had to do it within a matter of seconds. More than anything else, I hated the inevitable comparisons with Pavel Shum. Once, when I was having a particularly rough time of it,
Effing went on about his departed friend for several minutes, describing him as a master of
the poetic phrase, a peerless inventor of apt and stunning images, a stylist whose words
could miraculously reveal the palpable truth of objects. “And to think,” Effing said, “English
wasn’t even his first language.” That was the only time I ever talked back to him on the subject, but I felt so wounded by his remark that I couldn’t resist. “If you want another language,” I said, “I’ll be happy to oblige you. How about Latin? I’ll talk to you in Latin from now
on if you like. Better yet, I’ll talk to you in Pig Latin. You shouldn’t have any trouble under19
standing that.” It was a stupid thing to say, and Effing quickly put me in my place. “Shut up
and talk, boy,” he said. “Tell me what the clouds look like. Give me every cloud in the western
sky, every one as far as you can see.”
In order to do what Effing asked, I had to learn how to keep myself separate from him.
The essential thing was not to feel burdened by his commands, but to transform them into
something I wanted to do for myself. There was nothing inherently wrong with the activity,
after all. If regarded in the proper way, the effort to describe things accurately was precisely
the kind of discipline that could teach me what I most wanted to learn: humility, patience,
rigor. Instead of doing it merely to discharge an obligation, I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself how to look at the world as if I were discovering it
for the first time. What do you see? And if you see, how do you put it into words? The world
enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our
mouths. I began to appreciate how great that distance was, to understand how far a thing
must travel in order to get from the one place to the other. In actual terms, it was no more
than two or three inches, but considering how many accidents and losses could occur along
the way, it might just as well have been a journey from the earth to the moon.
My first attempts with Effing were dismally vague, mere shadows flitting across a blurred background. I had seen these things before, I told myself, and how could there be any
difficulty in describing them? A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the
pavement – they were deeply familiar to me, and I felt I knew them by heart. But that did
not take into account the mutability of those things, the way they changed according to the
force and angle of the light, the way their aspect would be altered by what was happening
around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything was
constantly in flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they
could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the
same. It was wearing out, imperceptibly crumbling under the effects of the atmosphere, the
cold, the heat, the storms that attacked it, and eventually, if one could watch it over the
course of centuries, it would no longer be there. All inanimate things were disintegrating, all
living things were dying. My head would start to throb whenever I thought of this, imagining
the furious and hectic motions of molecules, the unceasing explosions of matter, the collisions, the chaos boiling under the surface of all things. As Effing had warned me at our first
meeting: take nothing for granted. From casual indifference, I passed through a stage of
intense alarm. My descriptions became overly exact, desperately trying to capture every possible nuance of what I was seeing, jumbling up details in a mad scramble to leave nothing
out. The words burst from my mouth like machine-gun bullets, a staccato of rapid-fire
20
WRITERS
FOR
L I T E R A C Y - P A U L A U S T E R qFO GSQQAZEWN
assault. Effing constantly had to tell me to slow down, complaining that he couldn’t keep up
with me. The problem was less in my delivery than in my general approach. I was piling too
many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in
fact obscuring it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions.
The important thing to remember was that Effing was blind. My job was not to exhaust him
with lengthy catalogues, but to help him see things for himself.
In the end, the words didn’t matter. Their task was to enable him to apprehend the
objects as quickly as possible, and in order to do that, I had to make them disappear the
moment they were pronounced. It took me weeks of hard work to simplify my sentences, to
learn how to separate the extraneous from the essential. I discovered that the more air I left
around a thing, the happier the results, for that allowed Effing to do the crucial work on his
own: to construct an image on the basis of a few hints, to feel his own mind traveling toward
the thing I was describing for him. Disgusted by my early performances, I took to practicing
when I was alone, lying in bed at night, for example, and going around the objects in the
room, seeing if I couldn’t get any better at it.
The harder I worked, the more serious I became about what I was doing. I no longer
saw it as an aesthetic activity but as a moral one, and I began to be less irritated by Effing’s
criticisms, wondering if his impatience and dissatisfaction could not eventually serve some
higher purpose. I was a monk seeking illumination, and Effing was my hair shirt, the whip I
flayed myself with. I don’t think there was any question that I improved, but that does not
mean I was ever entirely satisfied with my efforts. The demands of words are too great for
that; one meets with failure too often to exult in the occasional success. As time went on,
Effing became more tolerant of my descriptions, but I can’t say whether that meant they
were really any closer to what he wanted. Perhaps he had given up hope, or perhaps he was
beginning to lose interest. It was difficult for me to know. In the end, it could be that he was
simply getting used to me.
Paul Auster
21
Paulo Coelho
B R AZ I L
Paulo Coelho was born in 1947 in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the city where
he currently lives. He worked as a
theatre director and actor, lyricist
and journalist. His own life has been
as varied and unusual as the protagonists of his novels. His books
include The Alchemist, The Pilgrimage, The Fifth Mountain, Eleven
Minutes and The Zahir. Translated
into over sixty languages, his novels
have not only topped the bestseller
lists but have also received numerous awards.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
The moment when the hand opens
The right hand starts to pull slowly on the string, while the left keeps a firm grip on the bow.
This takes an enormous effort – the equivalent of lifting a suitcase weighing 35 kilos along
a horizontal plane – but I must not shake, I must keep both eyes open, my feet must be
firmly planted on the ground. I go into a kind of trance: I am, at one and the same time, the
bow, the arrow and the target in front of me, 28 meters away.
And then, when I ‘feel’ the moment has come, my hand opens and the arrow sets
off towards its goal. From that point on, all that remains for the archer is to contemplate
its flight, knowing that he has given of his best, that he remained in control and felt joy
throughout the whole process of shooting the arrow. There is an obvious paradox: I put all
that effort into bringing close to my chest, close to my face, something that I must let go
the following moment and whose course I cannot then modify in the slightest.
I can hear the phone ringing, but it can wait. I am accompanying the arrow in its
flight, and that flight is similar to the moment I am living through now in my career: my new
book is coming out on Monday, 21st March, in four days’ time. What does the archer feel
after he has released the bowstring, but before the target has been reached? What does the
writer feel when he knows that very shortly his work will be in the hands of those people for
whom it was intended – the readers, those who will plunge into its pages and understand
(or not) the emotions I have tried to share?
If I could sum it up in two words, those words would be ‘excitement’ and ‘joy’.
The old Zen archers used to say that each arrow is a life, and that a man must respect this. Each book is an arrow, a little of my life that is revealed, first to me, and then to
my readers. Obviously, I have published books before, and each has provoked in me a different emotion, but there is something different about The Zahir: it is more about myself than
any of my other books, apart, perhaps, from The Pilgrimage. In that book, I followed the road
to Santiago, searching with longing and persistence for my sword. Now I am sharing with
other people what I have done with that sword.
The arrow is the archer’s intention: it is the arrow that brings together the strength
of the bow and the sweetness of the target. This intention, therefore, must be crystal-clear,
straight and balanced. Once the arrow has gone, it will not come back, it is, therefore,
better to interrupt the shot – because the movements leading up to it were not sufficiently
23
precise or correct – than to act carelessly simply because the bow was fully drawn and the
target was waiting.
I’ve done this many times: I have erased whole drafts of books from my computer
because in them I was failing to give clear expression to my ideas and feelings. But I have
never not released my arrows, my books, simply because I was afraid of making a mistake. If
the movements I have made are correct, then I open my hand and let go of the bowstring.
If I am fully part of every word I have written, then the words no longer belong to me,
the target becomes a mirror, I see myself reflected in my readers’ eyes.
The telephone rings again, my private number.
Only five people know that number, and so this time I answer. It is Mônica Antunes,
my friend and agent, who has just arrived back from the London Book Fair. She had met my
various publishers there, who are very excited; after all, there is to be a first print run of 8
million copies worldwide. She says they have all agreed that I will give only one interview per
country (the exception being my own country, Brazil). She starts telling me that the British
are producing an advertisement to be shown in cinemas, and that the Japanese publisher
will be placing posters in the Tokyo metro.
‘That gave me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, Paulo. Those advertisements
in the metro cost a fortune.’
I prefer to end the conversation there. After what she said about Tokyo, I don’t want
to hear any more details. I add another expression to the two previous words: excitement,
joy and… a cold feeling in the pit of the stomach.
Best to go back to my bow and arrow. There are two types of shot.
The first is the shot made with great precision, but without any soul. In this case,
although the archer may have a great mastery of technique, he has concentrated solely on
the target and because of this he has not evolved, he has become stale, he has not managed
to grow, and, one day, he will abandon the way of the bow because he finds that everything
has become mere routine.
The second type of shot is the one made with the soul. When the intention of the
archer is transformed into the flight of the arrow, his hand opens at the right moment, the
sound of the string makes the birds sing, and the gesture of shooting something over a distance provokes – paradoxically enough – a return to and an encounter with oneself. For this
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to happen, you must be aware of the effort it took to draw the bow, to breathe correctly, to
concentrate on the target, to be clear about your intention, to maintain elegance of posture, to respect the work involved.
The arrow cannot leave before the archer is ready to shoot, because its flight would
be too brief; it cannot leave after the exact posture and concentration have been achieved
because the body would be unable to withstand the effort and the hand would begin to shake.
It must leave at the moment when bow, archer and target are at the same point in
the universe: this is called inspiration.
I ponder this word in The Zahir, because the main character is a writer. Now writing
is one of the most solitary activities in the world. Once every two years, I sit down in front
of the computer, gaze out on the unknown sea of my soul, and see a few islands – ideas that
have developed and which are ripe to be explored. Then I climb into my boat - called The
Word - and set out for the nearest island.
On the way, I meet strong currents, winds and storms, but I keep rowing, exhausted,
knowing that I have drifted away from my chosen course and that the island I was trying to
reach is no longer on my horizon.
I can't turn back, though, I have to continue somehow or else I'll be lost in the middle
of the ocean; at that point, a series of terrifying scenarios flash through my mind, such as
spending the rest of my life talking about past successes, or bitterly criticising new writers,
simply because I no longer have the courage to publish new books. Wasn't my dream to be
a writer? Then I must continue creating sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and go on writing
until I die, and not allow myself to get caught in such traps as success or failure. Otherwise,
what meaning does my life have: going to live in a mill in the south of France and simply cultivating my garden? Giving lectures, because it's easier to talk than to write? Withdrawing
from the world in a calculated, mysterious way, in order to create a legend that will deprive
me of many pleasures?
Shaken by these alarming thoughts, I find a strength and a courage I didn't know
I had: they help me to venture into an unknown part of my soul. I let myself be swept along
by the current, and finally anchor my boat at the island I was being carried towards. I spend
days and nights describing what I see, wondering why I'm doing this, telling myself that it's
really not worth the effort, that I don't need to prove anything to anyone, that I've got what
I wanted and far more than I ever dreamed of having.
25
I notice that I go through the same process as I did when writing my first book: I wake
at nine o'clock in the morning, ready to sit down at my computer immediately after breakfast; then I read the newspapers, go for a walk, visit the nearest bar for a chat, come home,
look at the computer, discover that I need to make several phone calls, look at the computer
again, by which time lunch is ready, and I sit eating and thinking that I really ought to have
started writing at eleven o'clock, but that now there are various things I need to do: I go to
check my e-mails and realise that there is something wrong with the connection, I’ll have to
go to a place ten minutes away where I can get on-line; but couldn't I, just to free my
conscience from these feelings of guilt, couldn't I at least write for half an hour?
I begin, then, out of a feeling of duty, but suddenly 'the thing' takes hold of me and
I can't stop. The maid calls me for supper and I ask her not to interrupt me; an hour later,
she calls me again; I'm hungry, but I must write just one more line, one more sentence, one
more page. By the time I sit down at the table, the food is cold, I gobble it down and go
back to the computer – I am no longer in control of where I place my feet, the island is being
revealed to me, I am being propelled along its paths, finding things I have never even
thought or dreamed of. I drink a cup of coffee, and another, and at two o'clock in the morning I finally stop writing, because my eyes are tired.
In The Zahir, the main character has exactly these same thoughts: to write is to reveal
the untold story to yourself, to travel to the unknown island, and try and share it with your
fellows. And it is a constant source of surprise to me to discover that other people were also
in search of that very island and that they find it in my book. From then on, I am no longer
the man lost in the storm: I find myself through my readers, I understand what I wrote when
I see that others understand it too, but never before.
I am watching with admiration the flight of the arrow: with it goes my heart, and
I am sure, absolutely sure, that despite the joy, the excitement and the cold feeling in the pit
of my stomach, I will sleep peacefully tonight: with that arrow flies my heart.
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Paulo Coelho
27
Nadine
Gordimer
A
C
I
R
F
A
SOUTH
Nadine Gordimer was born and lives
in South Africa. She is the author of
fourteen novels, numerous short
story collections and works of nonfiction. Three of her books were
banned in South Africa during the
Apartheid regime. She has received
numerous awards, culminating in
the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1991.
She is a Goodwill Ambassador of
UNDP. She recently edited an anthology of stories featuring twenty-one
international authors, all profits in
aid of HIV/AIDS victims, now published in fifteen languages worldwide.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
The image and the word
In the beginning was the Word. The Word that was Creation. Its transformation into the written word came to us when it was first scratched as a hieroglyph or ideogram on a stone or
traced on papyrus, and when it travelled from parchment to print in Gutenberg. That was
the next genesis: of literacy. It was and is the miraculous ability that humans alone possess
within the miracle of creation. (We have devised the means to take to the air.)
Our new millennium, stated as dedicated to defining and upholding human rights,
surely should list literacy as an inalienable one?
Yet UNESCO reports that over 700 million adults in our era cannot read or write and
more than a 72 million children do not go to school, deprived of their rightful heritage, literacy. In South Africa, where I write these words, illiteracy is almost 50% in certain rural areas.
What are the reasons, world-wide or nearer wherever one’s home may be? Poverty
and lack of educational facilities are the obvious ones in poor and developing countries. The
disastrous economic effect is seen from the humble levels – at an automobile assembly
plant in South Africa, research found that many workers on the line could follow only spoken
orders, unable to read any written notification. At the level of higher education for the professions, universities are faced with the problem of students ostensibly qualified for entry
who do not have the vocabulary or skilled use of the written word necessarily assumed for
university courses. The shortage of suitably competent candidates for positions essential in
development of governance, social services, industry and commerce, is thus evident.
President Mbeki recently said that in order to serve the needs of South Africa’s fast-growing
economy – the leading one on the African continent in terms of resources and infrastructure – he believes we shall have to import qualified individuals from other countries to fill
the vacancies while assisting to raise the capabilities of South Africans to fulfill such positions,
particularly in industry. An upgraded version of the adage, each-one-teach-one.
But we come back to the absolute. It shouldn’t need to be stated, but has to be, it
seems. Literacy is the basis of all learning. Even if one goes on to the differently profound
numero-ideogrammatic knowledges of science.
And on the way back to the source that is the written word we arrive at a presently
prevalent intermediate condition of literacy: semi-literacy. This is no doubt exacerbated in
multilingual countries where as a result of long colonisation a foreign language became and
29
remains a lingua franca, the second language, not the mother tongue, the natal Word of the
inhabitant. One would accept that you are unlikely to be able to read and write the lingua
franca as confidently, precisely, as, once master of the alphabet, you surely could read and
write your own. But a distinguished writer and academic, Professor Es’kia Mphahlele, tells
me that black South Africans emerge from their schooling semi-literate in the reading and
writing of their own mother tongues just as white South Africans and those of other ethnolinguistic backgrounds are semi-literate in theirs. To be able to read the legend on a billboard
and the bubble-enclosed dialogue of Spacemen in a comic book, while unable to understand
the vocabulary of a poem or follow in prose literature the meaningful variations of syntax, the
use of words in ways that open up new depths of self-comprehension – that is not literacy.
It is not what every individual should have by human right.
The developing countries, although with more reasons for producing only the halfway to literacy, are not alone in this cultural state. Colleges in the USA report the same result
of their educational system, reflection of current cultural values of their society. In Britain
there is the same dismay at young men and women, born and educated in the country of
the birth of the English language, who cannot read or write using the great resources of their
mother tongue.
So while poverty and lack of educational opportunity are responsible for the great
void in our world that is illiteracy, this tragic situation is not the prime cause, let alone the
justification for the widespread phenomenon of semi-literacy.
The fact is that we are conjoined, all countries long developed or struggling to develop across the abyss between rich nations and poor, under threat of the Image against the
Written Word. From the first third of the 20th Century the image has been challenging the
power of the written word as the stimulation of the imagination, the opening of human
receptivity. The bedtime story of middleclass childhood has been replaced by the hour in
front of the TV screen; in shack settlements all over the poor countries of the globe the TV
aerial signifies the battery-run screen where no book is to be found. School and community
libraries don’t exist in villages and towns where video cassettes are for hire. Yes, TV images
are accompanied by the spoken word, sometimes by text, but it is the picture that decides
how secondary the Word’s role shall be.
The American writer William Gass defines best the Written Word, in its home, the
book: ‘We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons
have… if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold
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its lines of language safely together… Words on a screen have virtual qualities, to be sure…
but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts they’ll be
gone. Off the screen they do not exist as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they
only wait to be remade, relit.’
Yes, the Image of text, of the Word, disappears off the screen; to recall it, along with
the other visuals, you have to have an apparatus, a cell, a battery, access to an electric power
connection. The book needs none of these. Simply held in the hand it can be read, turned
to again and again, on a bus, in the subway, in the bath, on a mountain top, in a queue.
This is no fuddy-duddy turning away from progress. The vast advances in communications technology are an information revolution that has great possibilities for social development if well used, which means made economically available to the millions in the world
whose lives will otherwise be bulldozed by the financial oligarchy of globalisation.
But information does not, it cannot, ever replace, outmode illumination – searching
knowledge of the human intellect and spirit that, all readers know, comes in communication
with the Word in its infinitely portable, available home between hard or paperback covers.
First it became the book of the movie.
Now it is the book of the website.
Don’t let it happen.
Nadine Gordimer
31
Amitav Gosh
INDIA
Amitav Gosh is one of the most widely known Indians writing in English
today. He was born in Calcutta in
1956. He studied in Delhi, Oxford
and Alexandria, Egypt. He worked for
The Indian Express in New Delhi and
he earned his doctorate at Oxford
before he wrote his first novel. His
books include The Circle of Reason,
The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta
Chromosome and most recently, The
Glass Palace. Amitav Gosh lives with
his wife, Deborah Baker, and their
children, in Brooklyn, USA.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
T h e t e s t i m o n y o f m y g r a n d f a t h e r ’s b o o k c a s e
As a child I spent my holidays in my grandfather’s house in Calcutta and it was there that
I began to read. My grandfather’s house was a chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large
number of uncles, aunts, cousins and dependents, some of them bizarre, some merely
eccentric, but almost all excitable in the extreme. Yet I learned much more about reading
in this house than I ever did in school.
The walls of my grandfather’s house were lined with rows of books, neatly stacked in
glass-fronted bookcases. The bookcases were prominently displayed in a large hall that served,
amongst innumerable other functions, also those of playground, sitting-room and hallway.
The bookcases towered above us, looking down, eavesdropping on every conversation, keeping track of family gossip, glowering upon quarreling children. Very rarely were the bookcases stirred out of their silent vigil: I was perhaps the only person in the house who raided
them regularly, and I was in Calcutta for no more than a couple of months every year. When
the bookcases were disturbed in my absence, it was usually not for their contents but
because some special occasion required their cleaning. If the impending event happened to
concern a weighty matter, like a delicate marital negotiation, the bookcases got a very thorough scrubbing indeed. And well they deserved it, for at such times they were important
props in the little plays that were enacted in their presence. They let the visitor know that
this was a house in which books were valued; in other words that we were cultivated people. This is always important in Calcutta, for Calcutta is a bookish city.
Were we indeed cultivated people? I wonder. On the whole I don’t think so. In my
memory my grandfather’s house is always full – of aunts, uncles, cousins. I am astonished
sometimes when I think of how many people it housed, fed, entertained, educated. But my
uncles were busy, practical, and on the whole successful professionals, with little time to
spend on books.
Only one of my uncles was a real reader. He was a shy and rather retiring man; not
the kind of person who takes it upon himself to educate his siblings or improve his relatives’
taste. The books in the bookcases were almost all his. He was too quiet a man to carry much
weight in family matters, and his views never counted for much when the elders sought each
other’s council. Yet despite the fullness of the house and the fierce competition for space,
it was taken for granted that his bookcases would occupy the place of honour in the hall.
Eventually, tiring of his noisy relatives, my book-loving uncle decided to move to a house of
his own in a distant and uncharacteristically quiet part of the city. But oddly enough the
33
bookcases stayed; by this time the family was so attached to them that they were less dispensable than my uncle.
In the years that followed, the house passed into the hands of a branch of the family
that was definitely very far from bookish. Yet their attachment to the bookcases seemed to
increase inversely to their love of reading. I had been engaged in a secret pillaging of the
bookcases for a very long time. Under the new regime my depredations came to a sudden
halt; at the slightest squeak of an hinge, hordes of cousins would materialize suddenly
around my ankles, snapping dire threats.
It served no purpose to tell them that the books were being consumed by maggots
and mildew; that books rotted when they were not read. Arguments such as these interested them not at all: as far as they were concerned the bookcases and their contents were a
species of property and were subject to the same laws.
This attitude made me impatient, even contemptuous at the time. Books were
meant to be read, I thought, by people who valued and understood them: I felt not the
slightest remorse for my long years of thievery. It seemed to me a terrible waste, an injustice that non-readers should succeed in appropriating my uncle’s library. Today I am not so
sure. Perhaps those cousins were teaching me a lesson that was important on its own terms:
they were teaching me respect, they were teaching me to value the printed word. Would
anyone who had not learned these lessons be foolhardy enough to imagine that a living
could be made from words? I doubt it.
In another way they were also teaching me what a book is, a proper book that is, not
just printed paper gathered between covers. However much I may have chafed against the
regime that stood between me and the bookcases, I have not forgotten those lessons. For
me, to this day, a book, a proper book, is and always will be the kind of book that was on
those bookshelves.
And what exactly was this kind of book?
Although no one had ever articulated any guidelines about them, so far as I know,
there were in fact some fairly strict rules about the books that were allowed on to those shelves. Textbooks and schoolbooks were never allowed; nor were books of a technical or professional nature – nothing to do with engineering, or medicine or law, or indeed any of the
callings that afforded my uncles their livings. In fact the great majority of the books were of
a single kind; they were novels. There was some poetry too but novels were definitely the
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mainstay. There were a few works of anthropology and psychology; books that had in some
way filtered into the literary consciousness of the time: The Golden Bough for example, as
well as the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, Havelock Ellis and
Malinowski on sexual behavior and so on.
But without a doubt it was the novel that weighed most heavily on the floors of my
grandfather’s house. To this day I am unable to place a textbook or a computer manual upon
a bookshelf without a twinge of embarrassment.
This is how Nirad Chaudhuri, that erstwhile Calcuttan, accounts for the position that
novels occupy in Bengali cultural life: “It has to be pointed out that in the latter half of the
nineteenth century Bengali life and Bengali literature had become very closely connected
and literature was bringing into the life of educated Bengalis something which they could
not get from any other source. Whether in the cities and towns or in the villages, where the
Bengali gentry still had the permanent base of their life, it was the mainstay of their life of
feeling, sentiment and passion. Both emotional capacity and idealism were sustained by it...
when my sister was married in 1916, a college friend of mine presented her with fifteen of
the latest novels by the foremost writers and my sister certainly did not prize them less that
her far more costly clothes and jewelry. In fact, sales of fiction and poetry as wedding presents were a sure standby of their publishers.” (1)
About a quarter of the novels in my uncle’s bookcases were in Bengali – a representative selection of the mainstream tradition of Bengali literature. Prominent among these
were the works of Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore, Bibhuti Bhushan, Bonophul &
Syed Mustafa Ali. The rest were in English. But of these only a small proportion consisted of
books that had been originally written in English. The others were translations from a number
of other languages, most of them European: Russian had pride of place, followed by French,
Italian, German and Danish. The great masterpieces of the 19th century were dutifully represented: the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, of Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal,
Maupassant and others. But these were the dustiest books of all, placed on shelves that were
lofty but remote.
The books that were prominently displayed were an oddly disparate lot – or so they
seem today. Some of those titles can still be seen on bookshelves everywhere: Joyce,
Faulkner and so on. But many others have long since been forgotten. Marie Corelli and
Grazia Deledda for instance, names that are so little known today, even in Italy, that they
have become a kind of secret incantation for me, a password that allows entry into the
35
brotherhood of remembered bookcases. Knut Hamsun, too, was once a part of this incantation, but unlike the others his reputation has since had an immense revival – and with
good reason.
Other names from those shelves have become, in this age of resurgent capitalism,
symbols of a certain kind of embarrassment or unease – the social realists for example. But
on my uncle’s shelves they stood tall and proud, Russians and Americans alike: Maxim Gorky,
Mikhail Sholokov, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair. There were many others too, whose places
next to each other seem hard to account for at first glance: Sienkiewicz (of Quo Vadis),
Maurice Maeterlinck, Bergson. Recently, looking through the mildewed remnants of those
shelves I came upon what must have been the last addition to that collection. It was Ivo
Andric’s Bridge on the Drina, published in the sixties.
For a long time I was at a loss to account for my uncle’s odd assortment of books.
I knew their eclecticism couldn’t really be ascribed to personal idiosyncrasies of taste. My
uncle was a keen reader but he was not, I suspect, the kind of person who allows his own
taste to steer him through libraries and bookshops. On the contrary he was a reader of the
kind whose taste is guided largely by prevalent opinion. This uncle I might add was a writer
himself, in a modest way. He wrote plays in an epic vein with characters borrowed from the
Sanskrit classics. He never left India and indeed rarely ventured out of his home state of West
Bengal.
The principles that guided my uncle’s taste would have been much clearer to me had
I ever had an interest in trivia. To the quiz-show adept the link between Grazia Deledda,
Gorky, Hamsun, Sholokov, Sienkiewicz and Andric will be clear at once: it is the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
Writing about the Calcutta of the twenties and thirties Nirad Chaudhuri writes: “To be
up to date about literary fashions was a greater craze among us that to be up to date in clothes is with society women, and this desire became keener with the introduction of the
Nobel Prize for literature. Not to be able to show at least one book by a Nobel Laureate was
regarded almost as being illiterate.” (2)
But of course the Nobel Prize was itself both symptom and catalyst of a wider condition: the emergence of a notion of a universal ‘literature’, a form of artistic expression that
embodies differences in place and culture, emotion and aspiration, but in such a way as to
render them communicable. This idea may well have had its birth in Europe but I suspect it
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met with a much more enthusiastic reception outside. I spent a couple of years studying in
England in the late seventies and early eighties. I don’t remember ever having come across
a bookshelf like my uncle’s: one that had been largely formed by this vision of literature, by
a deliberate search for books from a wide array of other countries.
1 Nirad Chaudhuri, Thy Hand Great Anarch, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1987, pp. 155.
2 Ibid.
Amitav Gosh
37
N. Scott
Momaday
USA
N. Scott Momaday’s work as a novelist, scholar, painter, print-maker
and poet, combines modern AngloAmerican literary methods with
Native American traditions of poetry
and story telling. He won the Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction in 1969 for his first
novel House Made of Dawn. He founded the Buffalo Trust, a non-profit
foundation, to preserve, protect and
restitute Native cultural heritage. In
2004 he was appointed UNESCO
Artist for Peace.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
On the value of literacy
As a poet, I cannot imagine a life without words. Language is the element in which the mind
lives, and it is the very basis of human being.
It is that which distinguishes Man from all other creatures. To speak, to read and write,
to encounter the power and beauty and magic of words – these are gifts that enrich and
ennoble our existence. It seems almost miraculous to me that a child, only two or three years
of age, can learn the complexities of language. But children take possession of language
naturally, as a birthright. And it should be by birthright also that the child learns to read and
write, and is therefore enabled to discover the riches of the world and to share those riches
with others. I believe with all my heart that every person in the world is entitled to the gift
of literacy. We must provide that gift to the best of our ability, for doing so ensures our
humanity and makes possible the realization of a more nearly perfect world.
N. Scott Momaday
39
Toni
Morrison
USA
Toni Morrison is the first AfricanAmerican woman to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1993). In
her novels, she focuses on the experience of black Americans in an
unjust society and the search for
cultural identity. Born in 1931, in
Ohio, Morrison is considered one of
the best contemporary novelists. Her
works include The Bluest Eye, Song
of Solomon, and Beloved, which won
the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Along with her novels Paradise and
Love, Morrison wrote several children's books, including The Book of
Mean People, and The Ant or the
Grasshopper?, with her son Slade.
Retired from her professional post
at Princeton University in 2006, she
lives in Princeton and upstate New
York.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
The signature
At fifty-two, Macon Dead was as imposing a man as he had been at forty-two, when Milkman
thought he was the biggest thing in the world. Bigger even than the house they lived in. But
today he had seen a woman who was just as tall and who had made him feel tall too.
“I know I’m the youngest one in this family, but I ain’t no baby. You treat me like I was
a baby. You keep saying you don’t have to explain nothing to me. How do you think that
makes me feel? Like a baby, that’s what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!”
“Don’t you raise your voice to me.”
“Is that the way you treat your father treated you when you were twelve?”
“Watch your mouth!” Macon roared. He took his hands out of his pocket but didn’t
know what to do with them. He was momentarily confused. His son’s question had shifted
the scenery. He was seeing himself at twelve, standing in Milkman’s shoes and feeling what
he himself had felt for his own father. The numbness that had settled on him when he saw
the man he loved and admired fall off the fence; something wild ran through him when he
watched the body twitching in the dirt. His father had sat for five nights on a split-rail fence
cradling a shotgun and in the end died protecting his property. Was that what this boy felt
for him? Maybe it was time to tell him things.
“Well, did he?”
“I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or
five we worked together. Just the two of us. Our mother was dead. Died when Pilate was
born. Pilate was just a baby. She stayed over at another farm in the daytime. I carried her
over there myself in my arms every morning. Then I’d go back across the fields and meet my
father. We’d hitch President Lincoln to the plow and… That’s what we called her: President
Lincoln. Papa said Lincoln was a good plow hand before he was President and you shouldn’t
take a good plow hand away from his work. He called our farm Lincoln’s Heaven. It was a
little bit a place. But it looked big to me then. I know now it must a been a little bit a place,
maybe a hundred and fifty acres. We tilled fifty. About eighty of it was woods. Must of been
a fortune in oak and pine. We had a pond that was four acres. And a stream, full of fish. Right
down in the heart of a valley. Prettiest mountain you ever saw, Montour Ridge. We lived in
Montour Country. Just north of the Susquehanna. We had a four-stall hog pen. The big barn
was forty feet by a hundred and forty – hip-roofed too. And all around in the mountains was
41
deer and wild turkey. You ain’t tasted nothing till you taste wild turkey the way Papa cooked
it. He’d burn it real fast in the fire. Burn it black all over. That sealed it. Sealed the juices in.
Then he’d let it roast on a spit for twenty-four hours. When you cut the black burnt part off,
the meat underneath was tender, sweet, juicy. And we had fruit trees. Apple, cherry. Pilate
tried to make me a cherry pie once.”
Macon paused and let the smile come on. He had not said any of this for years. Had
not even reminisced much about it recently. When he was first married he used to talk about
Lincoln’s Heaven to Ruth. Sitting on the porch swing in the dark, he would recreate the land
that was to have been his. Or when he was just starting out in the business of buying houses, he would lounge around the barbershop and swap stories with the men there. But for
years he hadn’t had that kind of time, or interest. But now he was doing it again, with his
son, and every detail of that land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President
Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow, General Lee, their hog. That was the
way he knew what history he remembered. His father couldn’t read, couldn’t write; knew
only what he saw and hard tell of. But he had etched in Macon’s mind certain historical figures, and as a boy in school, Macon thought of the personalities of his horse, his hog, when
he read about these people. His father may have called their plow horse President Lincoln
as a joke, but Macon always thought of Lincoln with fondness since he had loved him first as
a strong, steady, gentle, and obedient horse. He even liked General Lee, for one spring they
slaughtered him and ate the best pork outside Virginia, “from the butt to the smoked ham
to the ribs to the sausage to the jowl to the feet to the tail to the head cheese” – for eight
months. And there was cracklin in November.
“General Lee was alright by me,” he told Milkman, smiling. “Finest general I ever knew.
Even his balls was tasty. Circe made up the best pot of maws she ever cooked. Huh! I’d forgotten that woman’s name. That was it, Circe. Worked at a big farm some white people
owned in Danville, Pennsylvania. Funny how things get away from you. For years you can’t
remember nothing. Then just like that, it all comes back to you. Had a dog run, they did.
That was the big sport back then. Dog races. White people did love their dogs. Kill a nigger
and comb their hair at the same time. But I’ve seen grown white men cry about their dogs.”
His voice sounded different to Milkman. Less hard, and his speech was different. More
southern and comfortable and soft. Milkman spoke softly too. “Pilate said somebody shot
your father. Five feet into the air.”
“Took him sixteen years to get that farm to where it was paying. It’s all dairy country
up there now. Then it wasn’t. Then it was… nice.”
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“Who shot him, Daddy?”
Macon focused his eyes on his son. “Papa couldn’t read, couldn’t even sign his name.
Had a mark he used. They tricked him. He signed something, I don’t know what, and they
told him they owned his property. He never read nothing. I tried to teach him, but he said
he couldn’t remember those little marks from one day to the next. Wrote one word in his
life – Pilate’s name; copied it out of the Bible. That’s what she got folded up in that earring.
He should have let me teach him. Everything bad that ever happened to him happened
because he couldn’t read. Got his name messed up cause he couldn’t read.”
“His name? How?”
“When freedom came. All the colored people in the state had to register with the
Freedmen’s Bureau.”
“Your father was a slave?”
“What kind of foolish question is that? Course he was. Who hadn’t been in 1869?
They all had to register. Free and not free. Free and used-to-be slaves. Papa was in his teens
and went to sign up, but the man behind the desk was drunk. He asked Papa where he was
born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, ‘He’s dead.’ Asked
him who owned him, Papa said, ‘I’m free.’ Well, the Yankee wrote it all down, but in the
wrong spaces. Had him born in Dunfrie, wherever the hell that is, and in the space for his
name the fool wrote, ‘Dead’ comma ‘Macon’. But Papa couldn’t read so he never found out
what he was registered as till Mama told him. They met on a wagon going North. Started
talking about one thing and another, told her about being a freedman and showed off his
papers to her. When she looked at his paper she read him out what it said.”
“He didn’t have to keep the name, did he? He could have used his real name, couldn’t he?”
“Mama liked it. Like the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past. Wipe it
all out.”
To n i M o r r i s o n
43
Franceso
Sionil José
S
E
N
I
P
P
I
L
I
PH
Francisco Sionil Jose has been called a Philippine national treasure.
Born in 1924, he is one of the most
widely-read Filipino writers. His
series of novels and short stories
depict the social underpinnings of
class struggles and colonialism. He
attended the University of Santo
Tomas after World War II, but dropped out and plunged into writing
and journalism in Manila. In subsequent years, he edited various literary and journalistic publications
and started a publishing house. The
Pretenders is his most popular
novel.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
To t h e y o u n g w r i t e r
In a moral crisis such as what grips the country today when a handful of Congressmen betray
the people’s trust in obedience to their powerful leader, what can the ordinary Filipino do?
What can a writer do?
The German writer Stefan Heym who lived through Nazism and East Germany’s communist regime had this advice: “the writer’s duty is to survive.”
“What” I asked, “if survival means acquiescence or surrender?”
“Then,” he replied, “survival is also a test of his moral strength.”
Do our writers today have that strength? Every so often, when I am asked by young
writers for advice, this is what I tell them:
Memory and sentiment are never enough. You must master the craft of writing and
use the language you know best – respect the word and know the rules before you break
them. Having mastered the word, use it then as one would create a window – polished,
untarnished, so that you can see clearly beyond the crystal. Don’t cover the frame with frills
and fancy drapes for it is these decorations that will attract, and hide the view. Review,
revise, rewrite till it hurts, till the hand that holds the pen is numb, till every sentence reads
easily, every word in place and you know by then that the window is made.
You are a storyteller, a singer – so learn rhythm, music, resonance, narrative technique,
until these are in your marrow. You can learn all these by writing letters, notes, exercises,
journals. That concert pianist, that prima ballerina – everyday they practise and limber up
before they go on stage.
Do not be waylaid by the latest literary fads, by fashionable ideologies. They will surely
pass as unremembered seasons and what will remain are those verities – love and death,
faith and forbearance, which you have made permanent in prose. Look at your craft with
humility, and be your own severest critic. Do not for once believe that ancient panegyric that
the pen is mightier than the sword. Nunca! It is always naked power which triumphs and
rules, against which you must always rail till your voice hoarsens. Beware, too, of early praise
for it can destroy, and remember again that only time will tell if your work will prevail.
Write with all your senses, and some of your ulcers working, so that what you write
will throb with life. Live, be observant, be the eternal child aglow with awe and wonder of
45
the world, amass memories for they will all be retrieved as dialogue, color, plot, action.
Ask yourself, what is literature, who is your audience. Literature is the noblest of the
arts and writers should, therefore, be of noble bearing, affirming in their very lives the
Socratic precepts of virtue and excellence. This is difficult to achieve; perhaps, it is enough
that you strive to be able to look at every man straight in the eye and to sleep soundly at
night without the nightmares of a bad conscience.
Be an honest witness to your time, and be strong when they revile you for telling the
truth. Your vocation will also condemn you to solitude, but remember – he who stands alone
is the strongest. Even in your shattering loneliness, remember you are writing, not for critics,
academics, or other writers, but for your own people who, in their silence and perhaps
poverty, cannot express their aspirations and anguish. You are their voice but only if you have
not deserted or betrayed them.
Whatever suffering might be heaped upon you, never, never lose your equanimity,
your humor. Much of what you will write be bleak – just the same, learn to laugh at yourself
first, and your critics, and certainly at the antics of the wretched among your countrymen.
Nurture in yourself that abiding sense of urgency, of passion – deep and volcanic –
but always keep it in control and with it, that profound melancholy wrought by our history,
by our own leaders – no matter how effulgent our fiestas and how bright our smiles. This
passion, this melancholy, must surface as literature if you are to be an artist. So Lenin said all
art is propaganda, but remember, not all propaganda is art.
I make writing seem difficult because it really is. Worse, it may not even make you live
comfortably, and you will grow old like so many of us who tried without ever being appreciated in your own country. Just look at all those books piled in bargain counters – nobody
buys them for though we have a novelist as a national hero, we do not read novels.
Why then must you write at all? Do it because there is so much hypocrisy and cussedness in us and, who knows, you may be able to exorcise a bit of these. Do it because
many of us have lost our moorings, and it is in literature where history lives, where we can
know best ourselves so that we can then live ourselves and be rooted again in native soil. Do
it because it is a vocation which will give you such pleasure, so lasting and so deep – it transcends anything those sybarites and sensualists covet. I assure you, this old man knows.
What, after all, is literature but pain remembered. In remembering, we adorn it with
our imagination, our craftsmanship, ennobling it perhaps, imbuing it with permanence; it
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then exists beyond our puny lives, a testament to our humanity for all the world to witness.
And having witnessed it, it is our hope that what we have written will evoke compassion, for
it the end, this is what draws all men together.
One final word: write wherever you can do it best, in exile perhaps, but never, never
leave your village, your town, your beginning. Enshrine it in the heart, sanctify it in your mind
for your beginning gives you your soul, your humanity. In remembering with passion, you will
be writing about a particular place and a particular people but you shall have given them
also what all men will recognize, the universality of man and of art itself.
Franceso Sionil José
47
Wole
Soyinka
NIGERIA
Wole Soyinka is a Nobel prize-winning playwright, poet, and novelist,
Born in Nigeria, Soyinka is considered by many to be Africa’s finest writer. His work serves as a record of
twentieth-century Africa’s political
turmoil and struggle to reconcile
tradition with modern culture.
Soyinka has published over forty
works in a career that spans five
decades including most recently
Ake: The Years of Childhood and You
Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir
(2006). He was appointed UNESCO
Goodwill Ambassador in 1994.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
I am going to school
“I am going to school,” I announced one day. It became a joke to be passed from mouth to
mouth, producing instant guffaws. Mother appeasingly said. “Wait till you are as old as your
sister.”
The hum of voices, once the pupils were within the buildings, took mysterious overtones. Through the open windows of the schoolroom I saw heads in concentration, the
majestic figure of a teacher who passed in and out of vision, mumbling incantations over the
heads of his attentive audience. Different chants broke out from different parts of the building, sometimes there was even direct singing, accompanied by a harmonium. When the
indoor rites were over, they came out in different groups, played games, ran races, they
spread over the compound picking up litter, sweeping the paths, clipping lawns and weeding flower-beds. They roamed about with hoes, cutlasses, brooms and sticks, retired into
open workshop shed where they wove baskets, carved bits of wood and bamboo, kneaded
clay and transformed them into odd-shaped objects.
Under the anxious eyes of ‘Auntie’ Lawanle, I played by myself on the pavement of
our house and observed these varied activities. The tools of the open air were again transformed into books, exercise books, slates, books under armpits, in little tin or wooden boxes,
books in raffia bags, tied together with string and carried on the head, slung over shoulders
in cloth pouches. Directly in front of our home was the lawn which was used exclusively by
girls from the other school. They formed circles, chased one another in and out of the circles,
struggled for a ball and tossed it through an iron hoop stuck on a board. Then they also vanished into classrooms, books were produced and they commenced their own observances of
the mystery rites.
Tinu became even more smug. My erstwhile playmate had entered a new world and,
though we still played together, she now had a new terrain to draw upon. Every morning she
was woken earlier than I, scrubbed, fed and led to school by one of the older children of the
house. My toys and games soon palled but the laughter still rankled, so I no longer demanded
that I join Tinu in school.
Instead, I got up one morning as she was being woken up, demanded my bath at the
same time, ate, selected the clothing which I thought came closest to the uniforms I had
seen, and insisted on being dressed in them. I had marked down a number of books on
father’s table but did not yet remove them. I waited in the front room. When Tinu passed
49
through with her escort, I let them leave the house, waited a few moments, then seized the
books I had earlier selected and followed them. Both parents were still in the dining room.
I followed at a discreet distance, so I was not noticed until we arrived at the infant school.
I waited at the door, watched where Tinu was seated, then went and climbed on to the
bench beside her.
Only then did Lawanle, Tinu’s escort that day, see me. She let out a cry of alarm and
asked me what I thought I was doing. I ignored her. The teachers heard the commotion and
came into the room. I appeared to be everybody’s object of fun. They looked at me, pointed and they held their sides, rocked forwards and backwards with laughter. A man who
appeared to be in charge of the infant section next came in, he was also our father’s friend
and came often to the house. I recognized him, and I was pleased that he was not laughing
with the others. Instead he stood in front of me and asked,
“Have you come to keep your sister company?”
“No. I have come to school.”
Then he looked down at the books I had plucked from father’s table.
“Aren’t these your father’s books?”
“Yes, I want to learn them.”
“But you are not old enough, Wole.”
“I am three years old.”
Lawanle cut in. ‘”Three years old wo? Don’t mind him sir, he won’t be three until July.”
“I am nearly three. Anyway, I have come to school. I have books.” He turned to the
class-teacher and said, “Enter his name in the register.” He then turned to me and said, “Of
course you needn’t come to school every day – come only when you feel like it. You may
wake up tomorrow morning and feel that you would prefer to play at home…”
I looked at him in some astonishment. Not feel like coming to school! The coloured
maps, markers, slates, inkwells in neat round holes, crayons and drawing books, a shelf laden
with modelled objects – animals, human beings, implements – raffia and basket-work in
various stages of completion, even the blackboards, chalk and duster… I had yet to see a
more inviting playroom! In addition, I had made some vague, intuitive connection between
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school and the piles of books with which my father appeared to commune so religiously in
the front room, and which had constantly to be snatched from me as soon as my hands
grew long enough to reach them on the table.
“I shall come every day.” I confidently declared.
Wole Soyinka
51
Amy Tan
CH I N A
Amy Tan is the author of The Joy
Luck Club, a bestselling novel which
explores the relationships between
Chinese women and their ChineseAmerican daughters. One of her
books, Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese
Cat, was developed into a popular
children’s television series on PBS. In
her off-hours, she is the lead singer
for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a
rock band made up of fellow writers,
including Stephen King and Dave
Barry – they make select appearances
in support of literacy programmes
for children.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
Mother tongue
In 1989, I was invited to speak at a conference, “The State of the English Language.” Upon
learning that I would be on a panel with noted academicians and writers, I wrote this apologia the night before. Wendy Laser of The Threepenny Review later asked to publish it, and
subsequently it was included in The Best American Essay 1991.
I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal
opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.
I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language.
I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the
power of language – the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a
simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all – all the Englishes I grew
up with.
Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a
talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen others
groups. The talk was about my writing, my life, and my book The Joy Luck Club, and it was
going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk
sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard
me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying
things like “the intersection of memory and imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus” – a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses,
conditional phrases, forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through
books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
Just last week, as I was walking down the street with her, I again found myself
conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the
price of new and used furniture, and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.”
My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I
realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we have been together I have often used
the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become
our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family that, the language
I grew up with.
53
So that you’ll have some idea of what this family talk sounds like, I’ll quote what my
mother said during a conversation that I videotaped and then transcribed. During this
conversation, she was talking about a political gangster in Shanghai who had the same last
name as her family’s, Du, and how in his early years the gangster wanted to be adopted by
her family, who were rich by comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far
richer than my mother’s family, and he showed up at my mother’s wedding to pay his respects. Here’s what she said in part:
“Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off-the-street kind. He is Du like Du
Zong – but not Tsung-ming Island people. The local people call putong. The river east side,
he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like
become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until
that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. Chinese
way, came only to show respect, don’t stay for dinner. Respect for making big celebration,
he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life that way. If too
important won’t have to stay too long. He come to my wedding. I didn’t see, I heard it.
I gone to boy’s side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen.”
You should know that my mother’s expressive command of English belies how much
she actually understands. She reads the “Forbes report”, listens to “Wall Street Week”,
converses daily with her stockbroker, reads Shirley MacLaine’s books with ease – all kinds of
things I can’t begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand fifty percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand eighty to ninety percent. Some say
they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother’s
English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It’s my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it,
is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the
way I saw things, expressed things made sense of the world.
Lately I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like
others, I have described it to people as “broken” or “fractured” English. But I wince when
I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken,” as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and
soundness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as
bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of the limited-English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English
limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflec54
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ted the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly, her
thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact
that people in department stores, at banks, and in restaurants did not take her seriously, did
not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not
hear her.
My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was a teenager, she used to have me call people on the phone and pretended I was she. In this guise,
I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been
rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her
small portfolio, and it just so happened we were going to New York the week, our first trip
outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not
very convincing, “This is Mrs. Tan.”
My mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me
check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing my money.”
And then I said in perfect English on the phone, “Yes, I’m getting rather concerned.
You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.”
Then she began to talk more loudly. “What he want, I come to New York tell him front
of his boss, you cheating me?” And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while
telling the stockbroker, “I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week.” And
sure enough, the following week, there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and
I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at
his boss in her impeccable broken English.
We used a similar routine more recently, for a situation that was far less humorous.
My mother had gone to the hospital for an appointment to find out about a CAT scan she
had had a month earlier. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no
mistakes. Still, she said, the hospital staff did not apologize when they informed her they had
lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any
sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exact diagnosis, since both her
husband and her son had died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her any more
information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that.
So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn’t budge.
And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English – lo and
55
behold – we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call
on Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for
a most regrettable mistake.
I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as
well. Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person’s developing language
skills are more influenced by peers than by family. But I do think that the language spoken
in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe that it affected my results on achievement
tests, IQ tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were never judged poor, compared with
math, English could not be considered my strong suit. In grade school I did moderately well,
getting perhaps B’s, sometimes B-pluses, in English and scoring perhaps in the sixtieth or
seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved A’s and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.
This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas,
for me at least, the answers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience. Those tests were constructed around items like fill-in-theblank sentence completion, such as “Even though Tom was ___ Mary thought he was ___.”
And the correct answer always seemed to be the most bland combinations, for example,
“Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was charming,” with the grammatical structure
“even though” limiting the correct answer to some sort of semantic opposites, so you
wouldn’t get answers like “Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he was ridiculous.”
Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could have
been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that.
The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words for which you were supposed
to find some logical semantic relationship, for instance, “Sunset is to nightfall as ___ is to
___.” And here you would be presented with a list of four possible pairs, one of which showed the same kind of relationship: red is stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is
to boring. Well, I could never think that way. I knew what the tests were asking, but I could
not block out of my mind the images already created by the first pair, sunset is to nightfall
– and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the moon rising, the lowering of
a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words – red, bus, stoplight, boring – just threw
up a mass of confusing images, making it impossible for me to see that saying “A sunset
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precedes nightfall” was as logical as saying “A chill precedes a fever.” The only way I would
have gotten that answer right was to imagine an associative situation, such as my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turned into a feverish
pneumonia as punishment – which indeed did happen to me.
I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more AsianAmericans represented in American literature. Why are there few Asian-Americans enrolled
in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering? Well,
these are broad sociological questions I can’t begin to answer. But I have noticed in surveys
– in fact, just last week – that Asian-American students, as a whole, do significantly better
on math achievement tests that on English tests. And this makes me think that there are
other Asian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described
as “broken” or “limited.” And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away
from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me.
Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled
as pre-med. I started writing nonfiction as a freelancer the week after I was told by my boss
at the time that writing was my worst skill and I should hone my talents towards account
management.
But it wasn’t until 1985 that I began to write fiction. At first I wrote what I thought to
be wittily crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the
English language. Here’s an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way
into The Joy Luck Club, but without this line: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent
state.” A terrible line, which I can barely pronounce.
Fortunately, for reasons I won’t get into here, I later decided I should envision a reader
for the stories I would write. And the reader I decided on was my mother, because these
were stories about mothers. So with this reader in mind – and in fact she did read my early
drafts – I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to
my mother, which for lack of a better term might be described as “simple”; the English she
used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”; my translation
of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as “watered down”; and what I imagined
to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese
57
structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her
passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded
where it counted when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict:
“So easy to read.”
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A m y Ta n
59
Miklós
Vamós
Y
R
A
G
N
HU
Miklós Vámos is one of the most
respected writers in his native
Hungary. He has taught at Yale University, served as The Nation’s East
European correspondent, and presented Hungary’s most-watched
cultural television show. Vámos has
received numerous awards for his
plays, screenplays, novels and short
stories, including the Hungarian
Merit Award for lifetime achievement. The Book of Fathers is considered his most accomplished novel.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
Chekhov on the bench
He was standing around at the edge of the court, till night fell on him. His flat feet were hurting a lot, so he sat on an umpire chair. Around nine he started to shiver, climbed off the
chair; from his pocket he pulled out the brightly-polished, double-edged key, closed the
metal gate he once painted blue, exactly like he did at the end of each and every day for
many-many years. This time unnecessarily though. “Why?” He opened it again. Then closed
it after all. “Everything must be in order. Or should be...” The brick-red quadrangles of the
´´ urged
three hard courts were glowing in the twilight. “Well, come on, let’s go!” – Vello
himself. Yet he was unable to start for a long time.
It was not easy to grasp that there was not going to be a tennis court there any more.
The whole zone was being sold, the sports centre was going to be closed down, the deserted
and desolate colossal concrete buildings of the screw factory were to be pulled down, just
like the blocks of one-room flats of the neighbouring streets. It was said that a shopping centre
´´ – or as the majority
was going to be built here, as if there were not enough of them. Vello
call him, Velo
´´ – was an old-age pensioner from the following day. His father was mocked
even more than him for his name, because he was called Vellöschaer, an ethnic German
Schwabian, who then Hungarianised his name in patriotic zeal, whereupon his parents
disowned him.
(1)
´´ learned of this only by hearsay. His father disappeared (they say he
Vello
tottered off to America) when he was on mother’s milk in a miserable house in Kispest, like
the ones waiting to be bulldozed here.
´´ was already working at the age of ten. He took the washed and ironed clothes
Vello
to his mother’s customers, first balancing the wicker basket on the top of his head – otherwise
he was not able to carry it. He was over thirteen when he became a ballboy at the tennis
courts of DAC, the Detective Athletics Club, near the bridgehead on the Pest side of the
Margaret bridge, on the banks of the Danube. After the war he became the warden. When
the DAC was liquidated, he went to the Újpesti Dózsa, and then came here to the distillery
sports centre in Budafoki street – it is hard to say – almost fifty years ago.
Every day he rose at dawn to arrive at the courts by quarter to six. He watered the
hard courts, carefully raked and netted the evening before. He pushed the wheelbarrow
around, he scattered a shovelful of new red clay here and there in the small holes hollowed
out by shoe heels, and trod the clay in. As long as it depended on him, they ordered the best
quality Champion clay. Then with chalk powder he filled up the machine which rolled on
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little wheels and drew the lines. By the time it was ready the players were already drifting in.
The team of the distillery was competing in the first league for a while; in the mid-fifties they
fell back to the second. By now they had dropped even behind the third and could only take
part in district competitions. However, Vello’s
´´ clay and lines stayed first class.
Nothing else is like it used to be. Nets now are black, balls are yellowish-green, competitors’ clothes are gaudy and flashy, wooden rackets and strings made of intestines went
out of fashion, instead of having sprinkled lines the stripes are made of small white plastic
cards fixed into the ground… Gentleman’s sport is a thing of the past, swearing is common
and rackets are flung everywhere. On Vello’s
´´ courts it was only flies that flew around; it is all
over now. He might as well work somewhere else. They sent word to him from a private tennis club, they would take him on as a tennis-court worker, paid by the hour, under the counter to save social insurance and VAT. It is also possible, explained the messenger, a young
´´ could ask
man with a briefcase (he played in the distillery’s group before), that uncle Vello
for a entrepreneur’s certificate at the local authority, possibly for a secondary occupation,
depending on what worked out better. Then, of course, he would have to pay social insurance and VAT. In this case, if he opted for an activity involving VAT, he would need a good
bookkeeper, who knew his way round the system – he kept winking. Vello
´´ was shaking his
head, “thanks,” he thought, “but that’s the last thing I need … a bookkeeper and VAT… if my
pension is enough to make ends meet, I would rather sit on my bum and do nothing. It’s a
crazy world… they would send me to a bookkeeper, only to become an unskilled worker,
everyone’s dogsbody. I’m too old for that sort of thing.”
During the last working days he was sorely tempted to take the old and worthless
Slazenger racket that somebody had forgotten on Court 3 some twenty years ago, and serve
a few balls on Court 1, pretentiously named the Centre Court. Balls, he had plenty of. Kids
kept throwing them away and he collected them in a wooden case. Not all were dead, there
´´ gave out most of
were some quite stringy ones among them. Every now and then Vello
them on playgrounds to kindergarten children who still welcomed gifts like this.
As a farewell gesture, it might have been nice to hit a dozen balls precisely into the
corner of the serving area, as it has to be. I could also practise against the wall, he thought.
In his mind’s eye, past champions he once saw playing tennis popped up. He wondered
which one he would prefer to have a game with and what the result would be of a three-set
game. In the end he opted for “Little Gulyás,” Hungary’s eternal champion.
´´ spent all his life serving the “white” sport without having played once. As a child
Vello
he never thought he would pursue this high-society pastime. Later he felt ashamed to admit
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that he had never played. Newer and newer generations followed on the courts bordered
´´ even at the age of thirty. Some tennis veteby white lines, and they called him “Uncle Velo”
´´ He was last called by his
rans much older than him adressed him as “Sports comrade Velo.”
first name probably at the DAC (not counting the Boy Scouts
(2),
by the caretaker there –
who preceded him – “Mister János, would you be kind enough to level Court 2 urgently…”
´´ was still at primary school. The dashing young boys were disappearing
– at that time Vello
one after the other from the field, the war was going on, and they were receiving their callup papers.
´´ had failed to fill his life
The first day of his retirement passed painfully slowly. Vello
with children, objects or passions. He had been married for not more than fourteen months,
at the end of the fifties. In those days the Board of Directors of the tennis section had allocated a one-room council flat to him in the Vaspálya street where he had lived ever since.
At the time they got acquainted, Anna, his wife, was working as a secretary in the club´´ I love someone else, forget me!” – forget-mehouse. She left a brief farewell letter: “Vello,
´´ could hardly remember her face; only her
not was the plump woman’s favourite flower. Vello
clear blue eyes shone in his memory.
´´ took his time to wash, iron and clean up. For lunch he prepared a lecsó. (3) After
Vello
eating he took a nap, tried to sleep, but sleep eluded him. Later he went for a walk. At the
third corner he found himself short of breath. “Of course, because I am hurrying…” – he did
not wander around aimlessly like this. Even though his working time had also been fixed at
eight hours, he spent at least twelve at the sportsground. After work he drank a fröccs (4) in
the run-down pub on the corner. During dinner he would watch TV. He often fell asleep with
his head lying on the edge of the table. At weekends sometimes he went to see a film at
the old cinema.
Now the idea flashed through his mind to buy something for himself. But he could
not think out what it should be. He had one thousand forints on him. Up to that day he felt
that a green Hungarian banknote was a sizable sum of money. However for a long time one
thousand notes had replaced one hundred notes in the pay packets. He decided to pop into
the first shop he found on his way. He was unlucky. He came across a second-hand bookshop
with a worn sign. “It’s all the same to me...” He went down the steep, creaking wooden stair
into the rectangular basement. The tinkling of the bell above the door recalled childhood
memories: his mother used to serve customers in a grocer’s shop for a few years in Maglód
with the same tinkling bell. In that shop the oiled strip flooring used to creak welcomingly,
and the unavoidable smell of the chemicals weighed heavily on the air. In the second-hand
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bookshop his sandals shuffled noisily on the rusty brown linoleum, the grains of dust were
visible floating in the beams of light filtering in through the two small windows. “Can I help
you?” asked the shop assistant, a man of Vello’s
´´ age, looking at him from above the half´´
moon glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose. “I am just looking around,” mumbled Vello
disgruntedly, ready to leave. “As you wish,” and the shop assistant went on reading the book
lying on the counter.
He envied the man for the attention that kept him absorbed in his text… “I might as
well read too,” he thought. He was deciphering the names and titles on the spines of the
volumes. He discovered the “Low-price Library” series. He knew this one; his mother collected it while she was still alive. Thinner ones cost three forints, thicker ones were four.
´´ scolded her. She would smile
“Mother, are you reading again? Why strain your eyes?” – Vello
to herself: “I have found a thick, boring book; it helps to pass the time.” He could never
understand this. “What pleasure can you find in something that is boring?” “Forget it, my
son,” said his mother, “I do not want any more excitement.” Vello
´´ tried to remember where
those yellowish uniform volumes had gone after having buried his mother. Obviously he had
given them away as a present to the two neighbours with red-rimmed eyes, just like the rest
of the jumble.
He took the small books, which felt old and dusty in his hand, he even remembered
the title page of a few. Suddenly a kind of dizziness came over him. “Mother had this book,
that’s for sure!” At that time the simple drawing on the cover looking at him was engraved
on his mind: the idiotic portrait of an ugly fat old woman with a cross-shaped medallion
hanging around her neck on a red ribbon, a lamenting woman figure in the background,
her dress of the same red colour as the ribbon. Chekhov: Anna on her Husband’s Neck.
Short stories. (5)
He hardly ever read, at the most he browsed People’s Sport or the weekly illustrated
magazines left on the field. The stream of letters in this book barely made complete words.
“Translated from Russian, a collected edition of twenty volumes published in Moscow bet´´ ´´ Editor Etel
ween 1946-1951, by Erzsébet Devecseri Guthi, Sarolta Lányi, Klára Szollosy.
Gordon. Published by the Director of New Hungarian Publisher. Editing Director: Irén Leszev.
Technical Director: Béla Siklós. Number of copies: 48.000, 14,1 (A/5) sheet size …” “Wow!”
He was soaking in sweat.
He was surprised that the bespectacled seller asked not more than twenty-two forints
for the “Chekhov.” If it is such an inexpensive form of entertainment, in the end I will get into
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the habit of reading. An age-old advert came into his head, but slightly changed: “Tell me,
cow, what makes you grieve?” “Books are even cheaper than meat.”
He settled down on a bench at the playground. “Now, it’s reading time.” The late
afternoon sun was shining encouragingly, it painted the pages brightly. “After the wedding
they had not even light refreshments; the happy pair simply drank a glass of champagne,
changed into their traveling things, and drove to the station.” (6) This is how the book title
´´ of his own Anna”. I could
story started, Anna on her Husband’s Neck. This reminded Vello
not actually say that she was hanging around me too long… – he closed the book. Once
again he looked closely at the drawing on the book cover. He realized that it was not an old
woman but the husband and the medallion hanging from his neck was certainly portraying
his wife, Anna. “This is how the title should be understood,” he thought. He only kept one
photo of Anna, the one of the wedding, in which the newly married woman squinted into
space gloomily, leaning her head with her elaborate hairdo on the husband’s shoulder.
“Come on, old man, stop daydreaming, and start reading!” – he forced himself to return to
the text “Instead of a gay wedding ball and supper, instead of music and dancing, they
´´ took a break at
went on a journey to pray at a shrine a hundred and fifty miles away.” Vello
the full stop. He laid the open volume flat on his knees, closed his eyes. Circles of light were
sparkling in his head.
They even put an epilogue printed in italics in the Chekhov book, written by Irén
Leszev. “Maybe I will understand the whole thing better if I start with this.” “The son of the
grocer from Taganrog was twenty years old when he arrived in Moscow in the autumn of
1879 to enrol at university.” “A grocer’s… that must be the same in Tangawhatever as here”
– Mother was bustling about behind the counter which was covered by chipped glass. “Son,
come on, greet Uncle Nirts, properly!” – Mother was continually afraid of bringing the
owner’s wrath down on her and she would lose her good job. For Uncle Nirts was a gentle
soul with a pince-nez, he was hardly ever angry at mother, or anyone else. He used to
bounce him on his knees: “Ride a cock horse!” Uncle Nirts’ children died, one after the other.
´´ heard this apologetic statement at least a
“Poor things, their lungs were too weak…” – Vello
hundred times from the old grocer. “Well… that’s it… one has to accept it… you at least are
´´ what are you going
thriving like cabbages from Zala, isn’t that so… then, tell me, ‘Little Velo’,
to do when you grow up?” “Professor of medicine,” he replied, knowing this was what
Mother wanted to hear. In reality he wanted to be a high-ranking army officer with countless
decorations, with a tasselled sword, a white horse. “That’s right,” approved Uncle Nirts, “a
clever child like you should go to university… if only I had strived for that myself.”
65
Uncle Nirts went bankrupt unexpectedly, just before his shop and he himself were
´´ did not aspire to an Army career.
swept away by the war without a trace. After that Vello
University was totally out of the question, as first he should have completed secondary
school. “What was in the past of the young man who was quietly looking around?
Troublesome years, a childhood without ever really being a child, misery, humiliation.” “They
could just as well have written this about me,” thought Vello.
´´ At this moment he felt Anton
Pavlovics Chekhov to be a close friend who only lived forty-four years in this world (1860—
1904), because – as it turned out from the meticulous paragraphs of Irén Leszev – his lungs
were at least as weak as those of the Nirts children. “He used to like the natural sciences,
´´
thus he became a medical student.” “His mother must have been delighted,” thought Vello.
All that Irén Leszev revealed about Chekhov’s mother was that she earned a modest living
by sewing after the father’s bankruptcy of his grocer’s shop. “So father Chekhov was exactly
the same as Uncle Nirts… still they could not have been as extremely poor as us… Bankrupt
or not, a grocer can always make ends meet…” – hairline cracks were appearing in his sympathy.
“Chekhov’s plays met with tumultuous success in the theatre world. His beloved Olga
Knipper, one of the most famous actresses of the age…” – at this point the mild but gradually recognizable antipathy changed into hatred mixed with sorrow. Since his wife left
him, Vello
´´ barely considered womankind worthy of attention. “But an actress… after all…” –
Vello
´´ stuck alluring front page images of the magazine Theatre and Cinema (later to be Film,
Theatre, Music) all over his kitchen walls. Margit Bara. Violetta Ferrari. Mariann Krencsey.
“Well, these were real women!”
“Not only a medical degree, money, but – as Irén Leszev wrote: – ‘fame and immor´´ envied him the most.
tality’, Chekhov also had one of these buxom actresses.” For her, Vello
“My Anna, let’s admit it, was not pretty… Not even she wanted me. Of course, I too am
somewhat ugly, and apart from my two hands I don’t have anything else… never have I
had…” – he was sweating a lot, grief overcame him. “His life ended in a strange country –
at a German spa – but he lies buried at home, in Moscow, the capital of his country.”
´´ mused about what kind of woman that Irén Leszev could be. Bespectacled. With a bun.
Vello
Ink-blot and lump on her finger from writing.
The sun was still glowing above the roofs, the playground packed with children, their
noise fused in one monotone melody. Vello
´´ sighed. He turned the pages back to the beginning to continue Anna on her Husband’s Neck where he had stopped. “People said, too, that
Modest Alexeitch, being a man of principle, had arranged this visit to the monastery
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expressly in order to make his young bride realize that even in marriage he put religion and
´´ got lost in this longwinded and complicated sentence, he
morality above everything.” Vello
got to the end only after a second reading. He remembered his mother. “Would she find
Chekhov boring enough? As for the thickness of the book, not so bad.”
“When the train started, Anna saw her father run a little way after the train, staggering
and spilling his wine, and what a kind, guilty, pitiful face he had.” Vello
´´ was sighing heavily.
His interest cooled, his eyes got tired too. “The letters are too small…” – he would hardly
read this book all the way through, nor another one, he was too old to begin reading, it was
beyond him, too complicated, like almost everything else in this life.
He left the “Chekhov” on the bench, he was about to leave for home. A shrill children’s voice rang out behind him: “Hey mister!” He stopped short. A tiny young boy in dungarees was running after him: “You’ve forgotten this!” – holding out the book to him, his
´´ took it, “thank you,
grimy fingers covering the husband’s head on the book cover. Vello
you’re a nice boy… what’s your name?” “Sajó.” “Hacsek and Sajó,” said Vello
´´ spontaneously.
´´
´´ “Then you are the könyvello!”
The little boy nodded: “And you?” “Vello.”
(7)
– he grinned,
´´
´´ Köny-vel-lo!”
then he sang cheekily: “Könyv-ello!
´´ would dearly have loved to give him a slap across the face. “But he was only a
Vello
child…” He felt ashamed, and placed the volume in the little boy’s hand: “Take this, it’s
yours!” The child grasped it contentedly: “OK… but I cannot read yet.” “Neither can I,” said
´´ The little boy laughed, he thought the old man was joking.
Vello.
Velo´´means bone marrow in Hungarian.
In the original: Levente, a military youth organisation in Hungary, 1928-44.
Lecsó is a vegetable dish made from red, yellow or green peppers, tomatoes and onions.
Fröccs is a popular summer drink made from wine and soda water.
The Hungarian translation reads Anna on her Husband’s Neck.
The order of St. Anna: Russian decorations came in different grades; lower grades would be
placed in a buttonhole, while higher grades were pinned on the chest or hung around the neck.
6 In the above text, quotations from the short story come from Constance Garnett’s translation of Anna
on the Neck. She translated and published 13 volumes of Chekhov stories between 1916 and 1922.
7 Vello,
´´ Könyvello´´ – a play on words in Hungarian: könyv means book, and könyvelo´´is bookkeeper.
1
2
3
4
5
M i k l ó s Va m ó s
67
Banana
Yoshimoto
JAPAN
Banana Yoshimoto was born in 1964.
She is the author of Kitchen, N.P.,
Amrita, Asleep, Goodbye, Tsugumi,
and Hardboiled & Hard Luck. Her
works have been translated and published in more than twenty countries. Her writing has been awarded
numerous literary prizes around the
world. She lives in Tokyo with her
family.
THE ALPHABET
OF
HOPE
The power of words
Once I went on a trip with a friend whose mother had just died. She cried every night in our
cottage there, on one of the southern islands. Of course I would comfort her, and then I’d
get to see her smile. But there was nothing I could do for her. I was powerless. When we left
our cottage during the day to walk on the beach, a Japanese mother and daughter were
always out there walking. Their timing was terrible. The woman, who was just entering old
age, and her daughter, who was in her late twenties, strolled along the shoreline like the best
of friends. Each time my friend saw them, her eyes filled with tears. Until a few years earlier,
she and her mother had been like that, too: they had taken trips abroad together, and quarreled, and shared delicious food, and gone shopping. Seeing her so sad was all the more
heart-wrenching for me because I knew that. But still there was nothing I could do for her.
One evening when I was starting to give way under the pressure of being unable to
help, after my friend had fallen asleep – having exhausted herself crying, or maybe having
struggled successfully to keep from crying – I found myself unable to drift off, and so I was
reading a mystery I had borrowed from my friend. The story, which revolved around a rather
lackluster detective, was incredibly dark. And yet I doubt any other book could have comforted me at that moment as perfectly as that one did. The world created by that book was
able to make room for my worn out, lonely heart, which had nowhere else to go – to take it
in and give it pleasure.
I have another story like that. When you’re traveling in a group, someone always gets
into an argument. Once, when I was riding a claustrophobically small boat in Egypt and there
was nowhere to escape and the atmosphere just got to be too much, I got totally wrapped
up in a popular fiction sort of novel by Ryu Murakami that a friend had lent me, and before
I knew it the suffocating closed-in feeling was gone. That book, which hardly seems likely to
be counted among the best works of that writer, had saved me. I don’t know, maybe if I’d
been in Japan I wouldn’t have read it with as much attention as I did. But I remember that
there, during those travels, the breathtaking Japanese prose Ryu Murakami writes seemed to
sink right into me.
It’s possible that the ability to read something that’s been written down, to read a
book, say, is only able to open up the world that much more – to do the little things it did
for me on the occasions I’ve described. Maybe the ability to read isn’t something one absolutely needs to get by in this world. Still, if there are people who have the desire to read or
69
write but are never given the chance, that’s not right. The world matured long enough ago
that it ought to be able to give that chance to everyone.
There’s no need to insist that people read masterpieces or communicate important
information, or that they study, or even contribute to the future by learning to read and
write. It seems to me they really ought to be given that opportunity solely for their own pleasure, and to broaden the horizons of their own individual lives.
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B a n a n a Yo s h i m o t o
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Graphic design Gérald Sanspoux Belgium
Paulo Coelho
F O R
L
Paul Auster
I T E R A C Y
Margaret Atwood
N. Scott Momaday
W
Amitav Gosh
R I T E R S
Nadine Gordimer
Toni Morrison
Franceso Sionil José
Wole Soyinka
The Alphabet
of Hope
Amy Tan
Miklós Vamós
This volume features texts published
on the occasion of International Literacy Day 2007.
It is presented by UNESCO and is not for sale.
The Alphabet of Hope
Banana Yoshimoto
W
R I T E R S
F O R
L
I T E R A C Y