Hola carissim*,
ho ricevuto questo testo da un carissimo amico e lo condivido con voi con molto piacere.
Grazie Alberto
Caire atque vale
Cari amici,
come saprete Doris Lessing ha ricevuto il Nobel per la Letteratura.
Per motivi di salute non ha potuto partecipare alla cerimonia a Stoccolma, inviando un discorso che è stato letto dal suo editore inglese.
L'ho letto sul sito di The Guardian e l'ho salvato.
Lo considero un grande discorso d'amore. Amore per i libri, per la conoscenza, per la letteratura, per l'Africa. Ma soprattutto amore per la vita e desiderio di un mondo più equo.
Ve lo mando nella speranza che susciti in voi le stesse emozioni che ha suscitato in me.
Con i migliori auguri di Buon Natale e buone festività.
Alberto
A hunger for books
Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa
and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while
those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the
internet
Saturday December 8, 2007
The Guardian
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where
I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of
stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most
wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat.
They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend
who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa", as
we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school
shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover. This
school is like every other built after Independence. It consists of four
large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three
four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these
classrooms are blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket,
as otherwise they would be stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the
school, no textbooks, no exercise books or Biros. In the library there are
no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only tomes from
American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries,
detective stories, or titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds
Love.
There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The
headmaster has embezzled the school funds and is suspended. My friend
doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from
him when he is paid and will probably never pay it back. The pupils range
from six to 26, because some who did not get schooling as children are
here to make it up. Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or
shine and across rivers. They cannot do homework because there is no
electricity in the villages, and you can't study easily by the light of a
burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they set off
for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people shyly drop in, and everyone
begs for books. "Please send us books when you get back to London," one
man says. "They taught us to read but we have no books." Everybody I met,
everyone, begged for books.
I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women
were having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from
England was rather ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and
cooked it in a great tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast:
boiled goat and porridge. I drove away while it was still going on, back
through the charred remains and stumps of the forest.
I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good
school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The
children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these
may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a
celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe
is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front
of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week.
Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map
pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell
them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these
English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." But
there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a
school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the
end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such
bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is,
and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always
hear when I go to such schools and even universities. "You know how it
is," one of the teachers says. "A lot of the boys have never read at all,
and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few
decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women,
who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have
read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance,
computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the
internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the
human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take
place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our
minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we
always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this
invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will
our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has
seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite
reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to
cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning,
education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that
when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would
pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and
women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men's
libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people,
talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education
reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of it. We think of
the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - reading makes a woman and a
man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.
Not long ago, a friend in Zimbabwe told me about a village where the
people had not eaten for three days, but they were still talking about
books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of
getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in
another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grassroots. They told me
that the villages, unlike what is reported, are full of intelligent
people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old
people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in
Zimbabwe wanted to read, and found the results were the same as those of a
Swedish survey I had not known about. People want to read the same kind of
books that people in Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science
fiction, poetry, detective stories, plays, and do-it-yourself books, like
how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare too. A problem with finding
books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a set
book, like The Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply because it
just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most
popular of all novels.
Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by
Sweden. Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have
dried up. We got books from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback
from England costs a month's wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's
reign of terror. Now, with inflation, it would cost several years' wages.
But having taken a box of books out to a village - and remember there is a
terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted with
tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a
week there will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those
who can't, citizenship classes - and in one remote village, since there
were no novels written in the Tonga language, a couple of lads sat down to
write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main languages in Zimbabwe and
there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of crime and
murder.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not
think it is true of Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and
hunger for books comes, not from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before
it, the whites. It is an astonishing phenomenon, this hunger for books,
and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to the Cape of Good Hope.
This links up improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was
virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always,
everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls -
Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms,
one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take
books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from
England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and
they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not
have electricity or running water, just like our family in our elongated
mud hut. "I shall be a writer too," they say, "because I've the same kind
of house you were in."
But here is the difficulty. Writing, writers, do not come out of houses
without books.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of the recent Nobel
prizewinners. Take last year's winner, the magnificent Orhan Pamuk. He
said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he
was connected with the great tradition. Take VS Naipaul. He mentions that
the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father
encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the
British Library. So he was close to the great tradition. Let us take John
Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the
tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I
was never in one of his classes; taught by that wonderfully brave, bold
mind. In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a
close connection with libraries, books, the tradition.
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a black writer. He taught himself to read
from the labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was
brought up in an area I have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The
earth is grit and gravel, there are low sparse bushes. The huts are poor,
nothing like the well-cared-for huts of the better off. There was a
school, but like the one I have described. He found a discarded children's
encyclopaedia on a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe,
truly a nest of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia,
under the whites - the mission schools, the better schools. Writers are
not made in Zimbabwe, not easily, not under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to
becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on
jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking
about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in
huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and
clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should
also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years
before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers
working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition
was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.
Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the
white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book
quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing
scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk
of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it
because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible
to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that
stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance,
encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked: "How do you write? With a word processor? an
electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?" But the essential question is:
"Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when
you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of
attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak,
ideas - inspiration." If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and
stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they
discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time.
"Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London,
one of the big cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire: "Is
she good-looking?" If this is a man: "Charismatic? Handsome?" We joke, but
it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of
hype begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the
world. Us old ones, who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who
has no idea of what is really happening. He, she, is flattered, pleased.
But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking: "This is the worst
thing that could have happened to me."
Some much-publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written
what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into
those innocent ears: "Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own
and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone,
where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don't let it go."
My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa that I can revive and look
at whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange,
spreading across the sky at evening? How about butterflies and moths and
bees on the aromatic bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale
grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water dark and glossy, with all the birds
of Africa darting about? Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions and the rest,
there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still
unpolluted, black and wonderful, full of restless stars?
There are other memories too. A young African man, 18 perhaps, in tears,
standing in what he hopes will be his "library". A visiting American,
seeing that his library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young
man had taken each one out, reverently, and wrapped them in plastic.
"But," we say, "these books were sent to be read, surely?" "No," he
replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even
a chalk for the blackboard. He taught his class of six- to 18-year-olds by
moving stones in the dust, chanting: "Two times two is ... " and so on. I
have seen a girl - perhaps not more than 20, also lacking textbooks,
exercise books, biros - teach the ABC by scratching the letters in the
dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa,
standing in an Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought.
There is a line of people, mostly women, with every kind of container for
water. This store gets a bowser of precious water every afternoon from the
town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the
counter, and he is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of
paper that looks as if it has been torn out of a book. She is reading Anna
Karenina. She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult
book. This is a young woman with two little children clutching at her
legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is distressed, because the young woman's
headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with dust. Dust lies between
her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of the lines
of people, all thirsty, but he doesn't have enough water for them. He is
angry because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust
clouds.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman: "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes
are red from dust. "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading: she wants to get to the end of the
paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta,
but the mother says: "Fanta makes them thirsty."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this, but he reaches down to a great
plastic container beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two
plastic mugs of water, which he hands to the children. He watches while
the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving. He gives her a
mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is
she.
Now she hands over to him a plastic water container, which he fills. The
young woman and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill
any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly but the paragraph
fascinates her and she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her white kerchief over her black hair, surrounded by the
children and gaily and good-humouredly busy with them, and at the same
time visibly excited at the possibility of an offer of marriage from a man
she cared for, Varenka looked very attractive. Koznyshev walked by her
side and kept casting admiring glances at her. Looking at her, he recalled
all the delightful things he had heard from her lips, all the good he knew
about her, and became more and more conscious that the feeling he had for
her was something rare, something he had felt but once before, long, long
ago, in his early youth. The joy of being near her increased step by step,
and at last reached such a point that, as he put a huge birch mushroom
with a slender stalk and up-curling top into her basket, he looked into
her eyes and, noting the flush of glad and frightened agitation that
suffused her face, he was confused himself, and in silence gave her a
smile that said too much."
This lump of print is lying on the counter, together with some old copies
of magazines, some pages of newspapers, girls in bikinis.
It is time for her to leave the haven of the Indian store, and set off
back along the four miles to her village. Outside, the lines of waiting
women clamour and complain. But still the Indian lingers. He knows what it
will cost this girl, going back home with the two clinging children. He
would give her the piece of prose that so fascinates her, but he cannot
really believe this splinter of a girl with her great belly can really
understand it.
Why is perhaps a third of Anna Karenina stuck here on this counter in a
remote Indian store? It is like this.
A certain high official, United Nations, as it happens, bought a copy of
this novel in the bookshop when he set out on his journeys to cross
several oceans and seas. On the plane, settled in his business-class seat,
he tore the book into three parts. He looked around at his fellow
passengers as he did this, knowing he would see looks of shock, curiosity,
but some of amusement. When he was settled, his seatbelt tight, he said
aloud to whomever could hear: "I always do this when I've a long trip. You
don't want to have to hold up some heavy great book." The novel was a
paperback, but, true, it is a long book. This man was used to people
listening when he spoke. When people looked his way, curiously or not, he
confided in them. "No, it is really the only way to travel."
When he reached the end of a section of the book, he called the
airhostess, and sent it back to his secretary, who was travelling in the
cheaper seats. This caused much interest, condemnation, certainly
curiosity, every time a section of the great Russian novel arrived,
mutilated, but readable, in the back part of the plane.
Meanwhile, down in the Indian store, the young woman is holding on to the
counter, her little children clinging to her skirts. She wears jeans,
since she is a modern woman, but over them she has put on the heavy
woollen skirt, part of traditional garb of her people: her children can
easily cling on to it, the thick folds.
She sends a thankful look at the Indian, who she knows likes her and is
sorry for her, and she steps out into the blowing clouds. The children
have gone past crying, and their throats are full of dust anyway.
This is hard, oh yes, it is hard, this stepping, one foot after another,
through the dust that lays in soft deceiving mounds under her feet. Hard,
hard - but she is used to hardship, is she not? Her mind is on the story
she has been reading. She is thinking: "She is just like me, in her white
headscarf, and she is looking after children, too. I could be her, that
Russian girl. And the man there, he loves her and will ask her to marry
him. (She has not finished more than that one paragraph). Yes, and a man
will come for me, and take me away from all this, take me and the
children, yes, he will love me and look after me."
She thinks. My teacher said there was a library there, bigger than the
supermarket, a big building, and it is full of books. The young woman is
smiling as she moves on, the dust blowing in her face. I am clever, she
thinks. Teacher said I am clever. The cleverest in the school. My children
will be clever, like me. I will take them to the library, the place full
of books, and they will go to school, and they will be teachers - my
teacher told me I could be a teacher. They will live far from here,
earning money. They will live near the big library and enjoy a good life.
You may ask how that piece of the Russian novel ever ended up on that
counter in the Indian store?
It would make a pretty story. Perhaps someone will tell it.
On goes that poor girl, held upright by thoughts of the water she would
give her children once home, and drink a little herself. On she goes,
through the dreaded dusts of an African drought.
We are a jaded lot, we in our world - our threatened world. We are good
for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn
out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost
their potency.
We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the
Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be
discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it.
Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of
whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a
clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance
and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit
world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when
they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and
this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and
the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always
with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that
we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our
cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is
our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for
ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even
destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is
our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her
children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of
food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an
education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.
© The Nobel Foundation 2007
