Two weeks ago, we found out all about Nigerian literature; this time, as the climate gets considerably chilly at home we’re diverting to an altogether different kind – that is, the South American republic of Chile (please excuse the terrible pun…). Our tour guide is former Communications intern Mike Butler (who previously showed us around the literary delights of Iraq), who examines two of Chile’s finest writers…

‘We were going to be perfect, we were going to be brave, we were going to be beautiful’ – Jorge Guzman

If September 11th 2001 signalled the end of the 1990s, when the end of history had been declared and we were set to live under the aegis of a prosperous and triumphant liberal democratic system, then, as Christopher Hitchens observes, September 11th 1973 could be seen as the day when the curtain fell on the optimism and idealism of the 1960s. This was the date of the Chilean military coup led by Augusto Pinochet and backed by the White House administration of Nixon and Kissinger, which saw the bombing of the Presidential palace in Santiago and led to the death of the socialist-leaning President Salvador Allende; the rule of the ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1990.

Pablo Neruda, the most famous Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, died twelve days later in unrelated circumstances. (The celebrated theatre director and folk singer Victor Jara was imprisoned, tortured and killed in what might be called ‘related circumstances’.) Neruda is best known for his early collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, a series of sensuous and melancholic poems whose imagery draws heavily on the nature and wildlife of southern Chile. He was a member of the Chilean Communist Party and was a close associate of Allende, and his political awareness is displayed in poems such as The United Fruit Co. (the identification of whose corrupting influence in Latin America presaged that company’s role in the US-sponsored anti-socialist coup in Guatemala in 1954) and They Receive Instructions against Chile (‘they decide from above, from the roll of dollars, / … / and the trunk of the tree of the country rots’). Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, joining his compatriot Gabriela Mistral, who became the first Latin American writer to win the prize in 1945.

‘Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.’  If you enjoyed reading that sentence, from his 1999 novella Amulet, then you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Roberto Bolano’s oeuvre, most of which has been translated into English only since his death in 2003. He left Chile for Mexico at the age of fifteen and returned in August 1973 ‘to help build socialism’, although this ambition was soon thwarted by the circumstances outlined above. He was briefly imprisoned following the coup and left Chile for good soon after, although his work is haunted by the events of that year and the brutality of the subsequent junta and dictatorship.

Most of his stories and novels are about fictional or fictionalised poets and writers, although they express ambivalence and suspicion about literary writing: Nazi Literature in the Americas is a series of fictional biographies of Fascist or Fascist-sympathising writers; The Savage Detectives is centred on a pair of poets, including one ‘Arturo Belano’, whose work is largely forgotten. Bolano’s own writing has an unmannered and inconclusive style that brilliantly captures the messiness and disorder of real life; avoiding the imposition of any kind of false order or lyrical grandiosity and disregarding conventional narrative authority and clarity, it could be described as a kind of anti-fascist aesthetic.

Neruda also had a certain distrust of literature and books: ‘I am a man of bread and fish / and you won’t find me among books’, he writes in Such is my life, following Wordsworth and Whitman in giving an apparently self-negating precedence to direct experience over words on a page. In a similar vein, he writes that ‘poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.’ Neruda and Bolano seem to offer differing views on the importance of writing: for Neruda, ‘the poet of my people’, who read his work to a stadium of 70,000 of his compatriots after collecting his Nobel Prize, poetry is a vital part of the life of a society that should transcend books and learning; for Bolano, poets are frustrated outsiders who squabble amongst themselves and leave little of value behind. Either way, it’s hard not to be swayed by Neruda when he says that ‘the poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time’ – and there was certainly enough fire and darkness to keep Latin American poets well occupied during the twentieth century.

The latest instalment comes from one of our Hope Readers Dave Cookson, who is exploring Nigeria… (if you want to catch up on any of our previous Readers of the World posts, you can take yourself on a mini round the world trip right here)

Nigeria has the 7th largest population in the world, and English is its official language, often used in educational settings and is used by many as a second language.

The diversity of Nigeria means there is a wide range of literature in a variety of languages. Yoruba is spoken by 20 million, with the first novel in this language (The Forest of a Thousand Demons by D.A. Fagunwa) published relatively recently in 1938. Hausa is spoken by 25 million and the language’s first novel emerged from a competition ran by Northern Nigeria’s Translation Bureau. The winner was Muhammadu Bello’s 1933 work Gandoki. Igbo is a language spoken by some 20 million Nigerians, and The Proverbs of Omenuko by Pita Nwana was the language’s first novel, published in 1933, when another famous Igbo person was just three years old: Chinua Achebe.

Despite his Igbo background Achebe wrote in English, producing one of the most highly-acclaimed and widely read African books in history: Things Fall Apart. The novel is fiercely anti-colonial whilst acknowledging the flaws of pre-colonial society, following the deeply-flawed protagonist Okonkwo as he tries to dominate the village of Umuofia and then prevent it succumbing to the English colonialists. Things Fall Apart clearly drew on the proverbial influence of the Igbo culture demonstrated in the very first Igbo novel and throughout its rich history of story-telling.

Achebe’s novels are examples of the power of good story-telling, but his own experiences of storytelling and its benefits are not limited to politically-tinged novels. In the essay ‘My Daughters’ he tells of a time when his two-and-a-half year old daughter, Nwando, would cry on the way to her new American nursery school, not speak to anyone once she was there and on the way back would seem ‘desolate’. What happened next was beautiful:

“In the end we struck a bargain that solved the problem. I had to tell her a story all the way to school if she promised not to cry when I dropped her off. Very soon she added another story all the way back. The agreement, needless to say, taxed my repertory of known and fudged stories to the utmost. But it worked. Nwando was no longer crying. By the year’s end she had become such a success in her school that many of her little American schoolmates had begun to call their school Nwando-haven instead of its proper name, Wonderhaven.”

Despite being a country with such a short history involving the English language Nigeria has consistently produced brilliant writers including poets Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka; author of The Voice, Gabriel Okara; Booker Prize winning author of The Famished Road, Ben Okri and author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The frustrating thing about Nigeria and its rich literary history is that reports claim around half the country suffers with literacy problems. In a bid to combat this, President Goodluck Jonathan introduced the ‘Bring Back the Book’ initiative in December 2010. This was a national pledge to protect libraries, conduct readings of the country’s literature in educational institutions, research issues relating to reading and support organisations conducting reading-related activity. The ultimate aim of the initiative is to revitalise a reading culture in Nigeria.

BBB has incorporated numerous events into the initiative, with authors nominated for the Nigeria Prize for Literature being paired with children to read. However, the event took a surprising turn when an argument about witches erupted between a high school pupil and one of the nominees! At the same event a cultural activist claimed foreign cartoons were killing the folk tale tradition of Nigeria, and cartoons did no good to a child’s moral upbringing.

To take a nationalistic view of the merits of writing, particularly in English, Nigeria is a literary giant. If you’ve never read anything by one of Achebe, Okigbo or Soyinka then it’s about time you right that wrong.

 ‘Iraq is steeped in history.

It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.

Tread lightly there.

You will see things that no man could pay to see

– and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.

You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing.’

Colonel Tim Collins, 19 March 2003

For someone my age, growing up in the 90′s and 2000′s, it’s hard to think of Iraq as anything other than a desperate, war-torn country, but Tim Collins managed to do so on in a speech to his battalion on the eve of the invasion of the country in 2003, when he acknowledged the history and mythology of its people. Much of the rest of his speech is coloured by the belligerent rhetoric and delusional self-justification that dominated newspapers and airwaves for several years following the attacks of September 11^th 2001, but here was a rare glimpse of the human face behind the panorama of destruction.

Iraq is part of Mesopotamia, which is widely considered to be the birthplace of recorded history and writing itself, in the form of cuneiform script. The name of the region means ‘the land between two rivers’, and it is the civilisations that emerged around the Tigris and Euphrates, including the Sumerian and Babylonian empires, which have led to Mesopotamia being frequently identified as the cradle of civilisation. Although events since then might suggest that human civilisation wasn’t such a great idea after all, there is no doubt that the region around modern-day Iraq exerts a profound and lasting influence on human history.

The region produced one of the first works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the titular king of Uruk’s adventures with his companion Enkidu and his quest for immortality. The poem predates Homer’s Odyssey, and its creation and flood myths are believed to be the origin of those found in the Bible, underlining its influence on Western culture. Some of the tales from One Thousand and One Nights are derived from Mesopotamian folklore and literature, emphasising the richness of the region’s storytelling tradition.

In modern times, some of the world’s most powerful figures have similarly devoted themselves to making up fantastical stories about Iraq, with disastrous consequences. We’re left to wonder what kind of stories the people of Iraq are telling each other today, and how they explain to themselves the various disasters that have befallen their country.

Given to me as a gift last Christmas I’ve finally got round to reading Orhan Pamuk’s part autobiographical account of his home city. I’d been putting this book off somewhat in favour of other, seemingly more exciting, ‘stories’ but have found myself pleasantly surprised.

Starting with a black and white photo of a boy, Pamuk tells of how as a five year old he was terrified by the idea that another ‘Little Orhan’ existed across the city identical to him and would be able to displace him from his own family without anybody noticing. To this day Pamuk says he is still haunted by this notion. What follows is a non linear progress of an ‘Istanbullu’ life, one that has a fierce familial bond at its centre but is also struggling to understand its new historical placing and the value of its borders.

Driven by a joyous melancholia, hüzün, Pamuk thrives in the darkness of his city and finds a comforting warmth in it all. For decades, it seems, he has wandered the backstreets of his city in sweet tristesse, lovingly storing in his mind every last minutia of what he sees and hears and smells, and relating it all to what he imagines:

When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening streets on a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past.

I’ve never been to Istanbul but its past, present and future are coursing through this book. Perfect for reading as the long nights creep in.

Alice Ozma of Millville, New Jersey, on the US east coast, found in books a deep and lasting form of communication between herself and her father. When she was nine years old, they set themselves a reading challenge – he would read to her every day for 100 days. This so captured Alice that when they had achieved this, she suggested that they read for 1,000 nights. This grew into a reading relationship that they came to call ‘The Streak’. It lasted nearly nine full years, right up until Alice left home for college.

They both found that ‘The Streak’ helped them to stay connected in the midst of family fracturing: her parent’s divorce and mother’s departure, her father’s management of single parenting, her sister leaving home. Alice remembers one book that they shared about a brother and sister who are abandoned by their mother (Journey by Patricia MacLachlan), that provided a parallel world for father and daughter to navigate together, safely.

This is a lovely example of how sharing reading strengthens families. As Alice puts it in an interview with The Guardian, ‘I can’t imagine what our relationship would have been like without it. It gave us something to talk about, because there isn’t always something to talk about – we’re 40 years apart. We have quotes in our vocabulary that are from books that we use without even thinking. It’s become our shared language’.

At The Reader Organisation, as we read with children and young people every day in groups and one to one in their homes, we are watching our young people find increased confidence, resilience, broader horizons, and better relationships through shared reading. Alice Ozma felt so strongly about the importance of reading for pleasure between children and their carers that she has written a memoir of her experience in The Promise, which she hopes will inspire its readers to begin their own reading ‘Streak’ with the children they care for. She says, ‘It would mean a lot to me if parents would at least give this a try’. Here are some of the reasons we are with Alice on that one:

• Shared reading transports the child to many different worlds. Some are imaginary, but others are real places that exist outside the child’s perception of life – thus expanding their horizons.

• Sharing reading introduces the child to difficult experiences – they can learn from the ways that characters in books handle difficult situations and use this as a model for their own behaviour.

• Issues dealt with in the story can often quell fears; seeing characters in a book having similar experiences to them can often reassure that it is ‘normal’ and ‘ok’; that they are not the only ones.

• Reading can act as a support; it can help a child to feel better if they are having a bad time. It is relaxing and allows you to slip into a story different from the reality of your own life. In this way, the book can often take the role of a comfort blanket.

• Reading together can act as a starting point for discussion between child and adult. Sometimes this discussion can be simple, other times it indirectly addresses issues that have been bothering the child in a way that makes them feel safe and able to confide.

• Shared reading is quality time spent together, a bonding experience that fosters one-to-one communication between adult and child.

• Reading with a child helps to reassure them that they are important to you and that you enjoy spending time with them.

• Studies have shown that children whose parents / carers have been involved with their reading development show greater emotional and social development (Allen & Daly, 2002). This includes having a greater resilience to stress, greater life satisfaction, more self-control, greater social adjustment, greater mental health, more supportive relationships, greater social competence, more positive peer relations, more tolerance, more successful marriages, and fewer delinquent behaviours (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003).

A fortnight ago, Niall started our worldwide literature journey off by taking us all the way to Brazil; now we’ll jump from South America over to Central Europe, as I’ll be your tour guide for exploring the literary sights of the Czech Republic.

Before it became a popular stag and hen party hotspot, Prague – the capital city of the Czech Republic – was regarded for two quite famous literary exports. The first, a person: the author of many of the 20th century’s most notable novels and short stories, Franz Kafka, who was born in the city in 1883 (when it was still a part of pre WWI Austria-Hungary). The second, a book: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, written in 1984 by Milan Kundera. The novel immortalises Prague in the midst of what was one of the most difficult and significant times in the Czech Republic’s history – the Prague Spring of 1968, an attempt to reform Czech communism, of which Kundera himself was involved. Despite its title, the book may be considered anything but ‘light’ in its subject matter; dealing with the fate of the individual and suggesting that in the end, such a fate is meaningless as in an infinite universe the life of one person is insignificant – or as Kundera would put it, unbearably light.

The Strahov Monastery Library

Given this cheery philosophical outlook, it might be worth considering how best to spend an ultimately futile existence. Surely a pretty good way of going about things would be to soak up the contents of as many books as possible, as does one of the novel’s main characters, Franz (perhaps named after Kafka? Seems like a handy coincidence). Franzes both of the fictional and the Kafka variety would certainly be happy that they lived in a city containing such a historic, intricate and well-stocked library as the Strahov Monastery Library. Part of the Strahov Monastery, the library is 868 years old and has withstood such perils as fire and army invasion to hold over 16,000 books alongside 110,000 volumes of monastic writings – one of the oldest collections in the Czech Republic. With its beautiful and incredibly ornate Baroque interior and several special library rooms, the Strahov Monastery Library is as much of a tourist attraction as a library. Unfortunately given the rare and ancient quality of many of the books housed there, so much as a human breath would be likely to adversely affect their preservation; therefore most of the library is strictly off-limits to up close and personal inspection. You can however go on a virtual 360 degree tour of the library (also handy if you can’t afford the air fare to Prague).

Something that allows much wider access to literature for the Czech Republic’s readers – and those beyond – is the Libraries For All project. The Multicultural Center Prague is a partner in the project, which has the goal of upgrading local public libraries in the city (as well as also operating in Austria, Sweden and Germany) to ensure that they fully serve the needs of the Czech Republic’s migrant community. Libraries For All is working to make libraries in the Czech Republic truly multicultural, involving, diverse and democratic – an aim that Kundera with all his political activism would surely be proud of.

Well, now I have your attention, so let us start with our first country or as they say in Brazil: numero um.

I’m going to try to do this without explaining Spanish colonialism in Southern America. So let’s see how that works out. Brazil is the 6^th largest country in the world with a population of over 192 million people; it’s the largest country in South America and the fifth largest country in the world! It’s even got nice weather.

The culture of Brazil and its people is very mixed – a bit like our own. It involves mainly Portuguese, African and Native Indian ideas and customs mixed into the melting pot of European and Western values.  Which I think makes it a beautiful country…

On to the main event: in Brazil there is a mythological creature called Saci who is widely regarded as the most popular figure in Brazilian folklore – folklore being something I have always been interested in, probably because they were the first stories told around the campfire to keep the children from being naughty and well let’s be honest they were quite imaginative and entertaining. Saci is a little prankster with dark skin, a magical red hat, holes in his palms and the smoker of a pipe – I forgot to mention he only has one leg and at one time was on the receiving end of most of the blame for the country’s small problems e.g. ‘who threw that egg?’ ‘Saci’ ‘who soured the milk?’ ‘Saci’ ‘who smashed the pottery?’ ‘Saci.’ This little prankster was probably like a mini god-send for all mischievous Brazilian children – and adults.

Still want to know more about him? How’s about this:

He can make himself invisible, transform into a bird called a Matitaperê, he will lose his powers if he runs across a stream and if you leave him some tobacco he will be appeased for a while (sounds like some people I know).

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Same place, two weeks time, to hear all about the Czech Republic.

Is the interest in global literature evidence of a rootless cosmopolitanism, hostile to the influence of the social and political realities of a particular author’s nationality and cultural background? Are we kidding ourselves we even understand works in translation? Is great national literature universal because it is great, or great because it is universal?

These questions and more will be debated by the speakers, but let us know your own thoughts on the matter – do you read literature in translation? Does an author’s nationality affect how you read their work?

The New International? Literature in an age of ‘globish’

Thursday 20 October, 7.00pm until 9.00pm

Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA

£7.50/5: buy online or by calling 0207 269 9220

Using poetry to make a stand against various political movements and to comment on the burning social issues of the day is not a new occurrence. Many of the most memorable poems in existence have become so due to their profoundly emotive descriptions of war, poverty and large-scale anguish. Yet in a climate that is apparently apathetic – or perhaps on the other hand makes too much noise about the most unimportant of things – activism of the literary kind could be mistakenly perceived as being on the wane, or as not making any impact at all. Because “poetry makes nothing happen”; didn’t one of the greatest contemporary poets, W.H. Auden, say just that? Well yes he did, but that quote is often misinterpreted and like much else, when removed from its context ceases to mean much itself. He used the line in In Memory of W.B. Yeats, a self explanatory tribute to an immensely politically minded poet who with his words actually did make a lot of things happen. It may be true that verse may not automatically transform the plans of the government or put an end to world wars. But, to attribute to Auden the full sense of his words, “it survives”, is “a way of happening, a mouth”. Surely that is a longer standing testament to its agency.

So in the spirit of poetic protests, here is a poem from the aforementioned W.B. Yeats taken from what is considered to be his most famous and most politically concerned work, The Tower. In actual fact this is a section from a longer poem, Meditations in Time of Civil War, which was not just a significantly political piece describing the effect of war on an individual trying to some extent to isolate themselves, but is the most personal representation of Yeats’ feelings and experience of his family background. Filled with metaphor and rich images, I find this a typical Yeats poem in that it is so evocative, especially in its darkly beautiful last stanza which also serves as a prophetic warning.

The Stare’s Nest By My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

An introduction to Central-American post-civil war literature, with
readings from authors Arturo Arias (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos
Moya (El Salvador), and many more…

Download the invitation Literature Event

If you wish to attend, you can go to www.liv.ac.uk/businessgateway/events/ to register (although it is fine to just turn up on the day) and get a full programme of the afternoon.