Half a Yellow Sun

It saddens me how expensive books are these days and so much like when I go into a good clothing store and more often than not end up leaving empty handed so to do I leave with nothing to show from book stores. But, like a sign from the god of all things student, our school gave us a shining gift of an ExclusiveBooks voucher at the end of last year which has been sitting waiting patiently inn my empty purse while I search for the right book to spend it on.

I had two requirements: 1 the book be about Africa and written by an African and 2 it must be written by a woman. These are difficult requirements to be filled considering literature trends are set by the ‘oh-so-great Canon of Literature’ (yes sarcasm) which was decided on and written by, years ago, old white men (not a common species to write about Africa) but after 5 months of debating I decided to spend the cash on Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. A Black, Female, Nigerian writer. Yes these are all important attributes as all three are rare in the literature industry and so make it harder to achieve in the sadly elitist world of storytelling.

It was good decision making on my part and very good writing on Adichie’s and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I have always had sympathies for the Middle East specifically Palestine and surrounding areas because of my readings of Khaled Hosseini’s books. Brilliant well written novels which tell the Palestine and Muslim story from another more misunderstood (by the ‘West’ at least) point of view.

I was struck by the similarities in Adichie and Hosseini’s writings. They were about different wars between different cultures for different things and yet ultimately the raw human sacrifice, courage and terror which they wrote about were similar. They shared stories with such real and intimate detail that for me they shared a bit of the human suffering soul.

What I was also struck with was how little I knew about Nigeria’s history and trauma as the story was set in the countries turbulent 60s. I had never heard this story on any level and I was angered. The ignorance that I live in when it comes to my own continent is astounding and the misuse of the tools of novels to help educate myself that I withstood was depressing. This is where in part I blame my school system. I had a brilliant education but when it comes to literature (the understanding and discussion of it) I was limited and disappointed. I, in my high school career, have learnt the great lessons that 6 Shakespeare plays have to offer (not very enlightening), I can tell you what and when Anne Frank ate in her last days and most absurdly have read not one but two works on the Salem witch trials (very topical – I know) but have studied the grand total of one African work which was a South African Novel called Disgrace by J M Coetzee which was studied in an additional English class not even the mainstream one. How is it plausible? I think as young people growing up in a vibrant developing and AFRICAN city we should be learning about the world around us. Trust me I learnt far more life lessons from Adichie’s characters in a Nigeria-Biafra war time than from a pubescent Romeo’s deathly love.

As far as the actually book goes (as opposed to my literature outbursts). It is an extremely well written novel about human tragedy in a time of war. It portrays in a brilliant collection of words the story of Biafra and Nigeria. I couldn’t put it down. It felt good to stay up all night reading and forgo my cell phone for the sturdy pages of my book. The writing is undeniably brilliant and stories perfectly placed. The book enthralled and educated me and I was left feeling deeply moved by the experience of reading it. I went away feeling ignorant about my world as well as newly educated (a rather odd Catch 22). This book is not stereotypical or simple but it does make some very complex issues easy to read and understand. It manages to cross many cultural divides both between the Nigerian people and those outside its borders. There are issues of love, there are issues of hate and there are issues of faith in a cause, in education and in religion. The novel calls for us to think about everything that we have and do. It shows how easily one can lose everything and when that happens how all you have left is your ideas, your morals and your brain and how losing the physical can put the abstract ones to test. I felt more educated then I ever felt on a book in school and I certainly walked away with a better lesson.

So for goodness-sake take Shakespeare off the damn menu and give us a taste of the real world… our world.

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with a cup of my favourite cinnamon tea

Shantaram

So after 3 and a half months (yes seriously) I have finally finished the Everest of a read which is Shantaram. It has never taken me this long to read a book and there were moments where I felt compelled to give up just by the size of the book itself but I couldn’t because the story was so brilliant and the writing, so inspiring that I could not and would not put it aside.

I went to India once on exchange and when I came back I was asked by many who I told my story to, if I had read this great novel (although I am still perplexed as to why they would have expected a 15 year old to have read the 933 page text). Ever since I have been drawn to it, partly so that I could really challenge my abilities as a reader and partly out of curiosity that Google searches could not suffice. So at the end of last year I got my hands on the novel and plunged into the depths of its pages.

Now simply put (not that this piece is one that should be simply put) the idea behind the novel is about good and bad, it is about justice and honour, it is about how “sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons”.

The story follows the journey of an escaped Australian convict, ex heroin addict, who finds his way to India, Mumbai (an ambiguous city then as the time period is when the cities name was changed and so in fact in the book it is more commonly referred to as Bombay). When reading one cannot believe the situations in which our protagonist, known as Lin, finds himself. By extreme and unfortunate luck we follow Lin as he becomes a slum doctor, a black market business man, a Bombay Gangster and an Afghan warrior. But the actual events of the story, although intriguing and spectacular, are not what makes this book amazing. Rather it is the incredible fluidity and beauty which the author, Gregory David Roberts, uses words to package the story for us as readers and the fundamental philosophies and questions about life which he raises are what truly make this book unforgettable.

Now near the end of the book Lin has a conversation with the Great Mafia don Abdel Khader Khan as they sit in a small war torn village somewhere in Afghanistan, Khader explains the importance of two questions, “what is an objective, universally accepted definition of good and evil? And What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?” Now this book does not answer either of those questions but rather it displays a collection of people and stories and how their lives individually correspond to those questions. Before I read the book, I always ‘deeply’ understood that there were things in the world that were good and there are things that were bad and I knew on which side I sat. For the most part Pure Goodness and Pure Evil where things set in stoned but after reading this book I no longer believe this. I know that I do not know what is good and what is bad and I have no fixed idea any more. Don’t worry this is not a negative attribute of Shantaram but rather it is an achievement. Sure I have to now rethink my life and my role in it which is exhausting and will not be short or easy but it made me think, it opened my eyes to such a degree that my world was turned on its head.

The life that Lin and his friends, both native to India and foreigners, lived was one of excitement, one of change and one of emotion. This book may have taken me for ever to read and this is not only due to its physical length but the grasp that it takes on your mind and, if you believe in one, soul is exhausting and one has to take it at a slow pace because of this, but it was worth it and I think it is important that a book that is truly great (and I genuinely believe that, despite the author’s supposed failures and lies, this book IS truly Great) becomes part of life for a considerable length of time for the story and it’s ideas need to be felt rather than understood.

I wish that I could explain the strength of emotion that I feel for this book but my skills with words are not adequate. “Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and it’s duty, sorrow and it’s truth. In the end that’s all we have – to hold on tight until the dawn.” This book induced every kind of emotion inside of me. It helped me understand how to feel, how to know what I am feeling and how to allow myself to let my logically overly analytical mind be swept up and engulfed in the emotions of my heart.

I read Shantaram with a vile-green coloured highlighter in hand that I swept through the book with. It is not that I disrespected the pages in anyway but rather I could not let those words pass over my head without being recorded or remembered in some way. This book and these words retaught me an appreciation for writing.

Some of the ideas I do not understand and I think it would be extraordinary for a person to understand everything in this book but there were quotes which despite my ignorance still allowed me to understand them emotionally. Such as : “ When the wish and the fear are exactly the same… we call the dream a nightmare.” But there were also common ideas which I have never seen so perfectly described such as this acknowledgement of the people living in the Bombay slum, “there is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor.”

I implore everyone to read Shantaram. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but one-day pick up the heavy red and blue covered novel and invest some time and maybe a piece of your soul into reading it because you might enter as someone and exit as someone else (and this is rarely a bad thing).

Oh and what I didn’t mention is that this is the story of India. Sure it is the depths of it’s poor and criminal world but nothing has as honestly shown the beautiful nature of the Indian people.

“ ‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ He said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and bad deeds. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil.’ ”

Dr Seuss Speech – Anecdote

The difficulty which comes when writing blogs is finding time to write them and when you are in your last year of school and for no logical reason you take a dozen extra things it is particularly difficult to fit blogging in. I’ve been sick lately. A ghastly bit of flu which I was bound to get when I spend so many hours of the day in confined classrooms with at least one sick person. Along with this I had the biggest and last English Oral of my high school career as well as a History preprelim (a pre pre final exam – yes it is a bit over the top) and so I have been running around, or more walking as flu slows one down slightly, like a headless chicken trying to prepare. But now today is over so I can blog but inspiration combined with laziness struck me so I thought “Why not just use the piece of writing you’ve been working on all week?”. I know pure indolent genius.

So I have decided to give you my speech. We were given no topic which posed difficulties. I mean you want to end on bang but not a flop so I in the end decided to talk about a person who I admire.

From now on pretend this is being read to you by an almost 18-year-old girl with a slightly posh (or at least my friends call me posh in speeches) South African accent of medium frequency with a slight nasal backdrop and if you really want authenticity imagine a cough here or there.

When given absolutely no speech topic at all it becomes quite difficult to shift through all the things worth talking about, all the things that one loves to find a singular topic that is speech worthy. So I did what I always do and decided to fall back on the author and poet that keeps me going through everything… good old funky and fantastic Dr Seuss.

Dr Seuss was born in 1902 and no his surname is not Seuss and his first name isn’t Dr. He was born as Theodor Geisel but how did he become the famous Seuss? Well he, as most aspiring young literature lovers do, worked as a student journalist for a college magazine called Jack-o-lantern. One day however he and some friends were bust drinking which was quite a bad thing at the time considering that alcohol was prohibited by law so he got kicked off the magazine but he was after all in the making of becoming the incredible writer we know today and whoever ran the magazine noticed this and so he allowed Theodor Geisel to still write but under a pseudonym and Geisel chose his middle name Seuss.

This was the start of an incredible career of writing through which Mr Geisel decided to stick with the pen name rather than his own.

I won’t tell you every detail of his career except that it took him a while to find himself both as a writer and of course an illustrator and to gather the momentum that his fame has today but at around the end of world war two his career started really moving and he started publishing children’s books. He did some incredible things. One of his most famous books and a turning point in his career was the publication of The Cat In the Hat. He wrote this in response to an article that criticised children’s reading levels. This book was written with over 220 different words to help improve children’s vocabulary. After this he took a new more educational approach to writing to try and help children while entertaining them.

A book that always stuck out for me and that even today I find myself reaching to when I feel over worked or underappreciated is If I ran the circus. Seuss wrote it for his father and I used to make my own dad read it to me almost every week. It is about a boy who wants to start a circus, the Circus McGurkus. He spends the whole book dreaming of it starting from where he will put it to what it will contain and as you turn the pages the acts get crazier and the animals get weirder and it gets more and more stoo-pendous. The stuff that he has displayed, the “many surprises, You’d never see half it if you had forty eyses”. What a circus it was. And in true Seuss fashion every page was chocabloc full of incredible illustrations. I used to sit wide eyed and fascinated. Before I could read I would just open the book and take in the pictures. That alone was enough to inspire a little girl’s imagination. I think today the fact that I read so much and always have this itch in my very soul to be creative is due to this remarkable writer.

In Oh the Places you’ll go he writes “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” Dr Seuss strove to inspire children and in this quote and in fact the book it comes from he challenges readers to take their own initiative and move forward. There are hundreds of brilliant authors out there but I for one would never be able to appreciate any of them if Dr Seuss had not laid the ground work.

Children’s authors are the creators of readers. Whether they be Raold Dahll or Beatrice Potter but for me it was Dr Seuss and it always will be. No matter where I go, where I live or how the big book shelf in my house is I will always own at least one Dr Seuss.

(Still not quite sure how referencing works here so the header picture is from http://desmoinesparent.com/celebrate-dr-seusss-birthday/)

 

The Fault in Our Stars.

This is a review but not a book review per say rather a review of a movements which has followed a story in this case the huge success which has come from The Fault in Our Stars, both the movie and the book. Now I have read the book last December and I enjoyed it. I read it in a couple of hours while curled up in a camping chair in the middle of the Kruger National Park. I thought it was sweet and reasonable as far as a story goes but that was it. It didn’t make a lasting impression on me. It was just a book. Now this may be that I am cold-hearted but I think it might be because I have quite an extensive reading history and so it’s not that John Green isn’t a fantastic writer but rather that I have been exposed to such a variety or incredible writing and fascinating stories that The Fault in Our Stars just came a little bit late (plus my heart has never swooned at idealistic teenage romance – which does help in this kind of book).

About two months after I had read it (and I’m sure many others noticed this) the book really hit off steam in South Africa. It could be seen in the hands of even people who don’t enjoy reading (yes there sadly are people who don’t understand the pleasure of being lost in a good book) and I must applaud John Green for he re-enlightened my teenager fellows, even if it was just for a moment, into the love of reading (the last time this happened was Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars is definitely a step up)

Of course when the movie came out we had to watch it. Some of my friends hadn’t read the book and so were curious of what the big fuss was about. We watched. By the end of the movie I was handing out tissues to all four of my 18/almost 18-year-old friends who had come to watch. Me? I didn’t shed a tear. Some people don’t believe me. But I’m not a romantic and I’d already read the book (plus we had a bet about crying which I had to win). I’m not cruel or evil or cold-hearted I just found it hard to believe. I found it hard to believe that these children had come so close to death and were now travelling the world and seriously? their relationship is not realistic at all. The movie was well made and the actors were decent but I couldn’t connect with them. It was sensationalized and kind of obvious… (this is probably because I’ve read the book though). It was just a movie.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to the huge fandom which now exists for this book. Now I am not saying that Mr Green does not deserve it (although I wish that Markus Zusak or Khaled Hosseini received this kind of support from people my age) but it always makes me feel sad when people support books just because it’s popular and not because they love it. I am an idealist when it comes to reading and I always hoped (yes in a slightly snobbish manner) that reading was above that following-the-crowd nonsense but alas that is not true and one way or another I will have to deal with this. Another thing which disappoints me slightly is the view which many readers of the book have. Now I do realise that I am going to sound full of my self and hypocritical with what I say and please understand that I do believe that everyone’s opinion matters and everyone has a different experience when reading a book but it is far too much of common trend between teenage girls to ignore and this trend is: to only look at the Romance of the book. Now obviously it is a major part but there is depth beyond that to the book. The romance is idealistic, unrealistic and a bit over the top (although much better than the usual teenage romance and I must admit if I found a boy like Augustus Waters I wouldn’t ever let go) but the point is the romance is the thing with the least depth of the whole book and that’s what the majority of teenage fault-in-our-stars-fangirls talk about. I mean just go ahead and embrace the stereotype! I wish that with this new-found book-love came some bookish features. The least they could do is focus on how Augustus and Hazel bond over a love of reading rather than Champaighn-that-tastes-like-stars. But maybe I am asking too much. Maybe I just need to wait and if I’m lucky a generation of book worms will blossom.

I know this is unlikely but a girl can hope.

I am Malala

I am going to start, where I said I would, with a book review. Now I have read a fair share of books but it made sense to write about the last meaningful book that I have read. This happens to be an incredible semi-autobiographical novel called I Am Malala. It was written by a young woman by the name of Malala Yousafzai with the help of Christina Lamb. Malala is a Pakistani girl who is younger than I am. She is an education activist and was shot by the Taliban in 2012. Her story was remarkable but I don’t think the point of a book review is to summaries the story but rather to portray what the book did to the reader’s soul as their eyes took in the physical words off the pages. I found it strange reading the book. I’ve read stories of similar themes but they were fictional and not set in a time which I live in. It was also disconcerting reading a story written (with help) by someone younger than I am. I’m not naive. I understand that bad things happen in the world every day but it was still uncomfortable for me to be reminded so beautifully and perhaps the word would be ‘peacefully’ of the horror of this girl’s world. Part of me just didn’t want to accept that a human being could shoot a child for wanting to better her education. I don’t say this to put anyone off the book. I intend to do the opposite and encourage that you read it but it was a strange feeling that gripped me while soaking in her story. My mind really had to grapple with the idea of humanity when reading this.

The other thing that really struck me was my ignorance of the situation in Pakistan. I think the rest of the world (or at least what I am exposed to) gets distracted by the terror and American destruction in surrounding areas. The real issues that people in Pakistan and other countries get ignored and glossed over. I was truly shocked at how little I knew about the country and the huge problems it faces. Gosh I didn’t think the Taliban was there. When I heard Malala’s story on the news I thought she was from Afghanistan. I am truly sorry for this error. Another thing, which I have experienced in other similar books, was that Malala taught me about Islam. She speaks with such faith and honour about her religion and even though the Taliban shot her for the very same religion she holds no hate only respect for what she believes in. It’s incredible what this kind of book can teach you about perspective.

On the part of the actual writing style and form of the book I suppose I should say something. It’s not complicated or ground-breakingly poetic but it is honest and understandable. It will make you smile and laugh and cry and shout out of anger. It is so truthful. I have never before felt like I truly understood the author of an autobiography so well. Maybe it is because we are so similar in age but to read a book about a child’s life written by someone so young… there are no words to describe it.