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Nairobi, KENYA - I love to read. As a child, I would read novels for two reasons.
A.J. The first had something to do with secrecy and my father's description of them as frivolous. He valued books and reading, but novels to him were worse than the flimsy, chatty magazines filled with glossy pictures, sensationalism and melodrama. Novels were not intellectual and therefore not worth reading.
As an adult, I look back and I even remember him frowning on novels by women authors. In a typical patriarchal fashion, he was suspicious of female, and therefore unworthy, topics. The watershed moment for him was probably Zarina Patel's Challenge to Colonialism, resonate as it did with his Mombasa childhood and Dawoodi Bohra upbringing.
I remember the excitement I would gain from hiding away and reading a novel. Secretly, ravenously consuming page after page, determined to finish the book in one sitting. I would even wake up early to have the house all to myself before starting a new book.
In other words, the first reason had to do with me.
The second reason had to do with the actual book. I loved the predictability of the story line. Even its moments of suspense, woven into the quasi twists, were comforting in that they followed a formula. In the fast changing world of puberty and maturity, these novels assured me, in a way that no adult could, that all would be well and that everything would work out.
I haven't read a novel for at least 5 years.
It isn't because the above two reasons no longer apply. If anything, as one experiences more of life, the need to escape and the need for assurance increase. Instead, I find it is because the novels of my childhood have failed to grow with me. I have become a more discerning reader.
There are few books that I read as a child and which I continue to enjoy today, such as Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery), My Family and other Animals (James Herriot). The true sign of quality: books that can be read and re-read, even after each dialogue has been memorized, each reader response perfected ... But the greater numbers are ones that I have enjoyed as a child and returned to as an a dult only to feel cheated by my memory which portrayed them as so much more than they actually are. But that happens with everything I suppose. We have an in-born urge to romanticize everything past in our lives: items, events, even people.
As I went through university, I gained exposure to many different authors and stories. Of course the classics, which are the foundation for any avid reader, the exploratory fingers into post- modernism and then the feminist novels of which my personal favourite is Woman Hollering Creek (Sandra Cisneros). Each novel I read allowed me to explore a slice of my own character and the more I read, the more identities I found in myself, and -- strangely enough -- the more relaxed I became. Confident that "I was not alone" and that it wasn't just "my" struggle.
Actually I lie. It isn't true that I haven't read a novel in five years. A few weeks ago I read the latest Harry Potter, and a few months before that the Da Vinci Code. I meant to say that I haven't been in a novel reading stage for at least 5 years.
I haven't carried a novel in my bag, for casual absorption, for five years. These one-offs don't count. They are merely a breath of air in the smog of life. Not a sustained period of literary rejuvenation, like a sabbatical, which is what a true novel reading period should be.
Before university, my all time favourite was Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird. I left university with a new favourite: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The change marked my development as a reader. A Mocking Bird was a light read, the kind that you read a chapter at a time and close, without an unsettling feeling. With Midnight's Children, I savoured each word, letting the descriptions course over me, craving the next page which would heighten the pleasure I would receive from the pages already consumed. And as I read more of Rushdie's books I delighted in the inter-textual references I could draw on; I would sit back for hours making links in my mind to extracts of his previous books that existed in my memory.
An example: Driving to work the other day, fighting the flu, I wondered whether if I sniffed really hard I too could gain a supernatural power that would allow me to communicate telepathically with hordes of other adults, as did Saleem Sinai. I smiled all the way to work that day, my drippy nose no longer seeming so irksome.
My post graduate studies mark another epoch in my life as a reader. Now I ask why?
Reading, for me, is an intensely private activity. I have often been told that I could never lie because my emotions are present for all to see on my face. The same goes for reading. The joys and sorrows of experiencing a book travel across my face, and I hate for anyone to watch me. I feel vulnerable. For others this nakedness of emotion is brought on by movies; one of the reasons, I feel, that theatres, with their darkness and solitude, are so popular. They allow movie goers time to don their pubic faces before the lights come on.
So why is it that public displays of emotion and affection are avoided? I would argue that it is the same reason people dislike airports and hospitals -- because this is where raw emotion is unveiled, available for all to see.
But why are we afraid to show emotion?
I shall venture a guess at this question ... on the next "Day One".
As our Harvest Season poll seemed to be a non-starter for you, we decided to drop it and offer you won that will help one of our writers, A J, with her research. She asks for your responses to the following question:THE POLL QUESTION: Are you afraid to show emotion? Please explain your response, thank you.
DEADLINE: 15 OCTOBER, 2005. The responses and results will appear in A's DAY ONE column at the end of this month.
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