A Memory of Reading

After some long discussion in which she tried to explain why I couldn’t go with her to boarding school — she was moving to a girls’ only school but the concept was alien to my young brain because our primary school was mixed so school meant the same thing to it — she finally came up with a winning proposal. She would surrender the new dictionary my mum had bought her to me, and teach me how to find the meanings of words on my own. We tested this out on a chapter of the first book our parents had bought for her — Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s The River Between —  and I had done very well so the dictionary was slipped into my bed after the parents had inspected her metal box before taking her to her new home.

Because I was the only child in the house who did not have afternoon classes, and a certain episode in which my friends and I had been reported for playing Shaka Zulu in the rain, I was banned from afternoon play during school days and the help was instructed to lock the door when I was brought back from school. My parents did not trust me to come straight home on my own. I had to suffer the shame of being picked up (only the Head Teacher’s house separated the school from the block of flats where we lived) and watching my friends play from the window of our third floor flat.

I buried my nose in books to fill up the hours.

I read so much, and so fast — thanks to the dictionary teaching me words I didn’t know — that by the time I was in P.5 I had already read every book, magazine, and old newspaper in the house. Around that time, the then State Minister for primary schools, Fagil Mandy decreed that all primary schools should have a library. Our school set its library in a tiny box room near the P.7 class, where no child from lower classes could go, I was a shoe behind its keeper when it was opened for the first time. Those piles of boxes upon boxes of pacesetters and teen novels were heaven to me.

When other kids were skipping class to jump the school fence and go on fruit hunting expeditions or settle grudge fights with kids from Bat Valley and Nakasero Primary Schools, I was skipping class to read books. Buganda Road Primary School was a hard place to hide, but I knew every nook where one could bury oneself in a book without looking out for teachers. I even made friends with an amiable carpentry teacher who would let me read at his workshop when my favourite hiding spot had been routed. By the time we got to P.7, I had read every book that existed in that library. I simply went back for the ones I’d enjoyed the most.

Problems came when P.7 was done and my book supply was suddenly cut. I was at a loss for what to do so I summoned the courage and approached my mum with an ask that was wild for most 90s kids. I asked my mom to buy me a book. Millennials will not get how big a deal nor understand the gravity of this breach. Money was scarce for most families in the 90s, and there was an unwritten law between parents and children that barred the asking of anything that was not required for school, health, or a treat that couldn’t be shared with your siblings. My mother’s first instinct was to say no. But being an avid reader herself, albeit being limited in her tastes in my snobbish opinion (she read only romance lit), she had a change of heart and took to me to Aristoc a few days later.

My mother was a big believer in teaching kids to make decisions for themselves, but she had an endless bag of tricks for making you chose the options she wanted you to take. I was aware of this, when she planted herself at the teen-lit shelf and gently ‘ood’ and ‘aad’ at teen novels I had read two years. I was browsing opening chapters in the adult novels (not in the porn sense) section. That is how I landed on Elizabeth Adler’s The Property of a Lady. My mom was flabbergasted at my choice.

She tried sending me in the directions of Hardy Boys and whatnot, which I had already read, and when that failed, she tempted me with Grisham. But I had already read the first chapter of this book and was impressed with the writer’s hand. I wanted to see how the story ends. With a very heavy heart and much hesitation, my mother made her peace and paid for the book. That would be the last time she would take me to a bookshop. Years later I would understand why. Elizabeth Adler had a reputation for romantic lit, a genre my mum was a fan of but wasn’t territory she wanted her pre-adolescent exploring.

When I made my choice that day none of this was on my mind. I hadn’t even looked at the book’s title, which is what probably sent alarm bells ringing all over my mother’s head. I hadn’t given any thought to the fact the author of this book was a woman. To me, books were just books. I read anything that was in print, and if I was captivated by the style, there was nothing you could do or say to get me off it. I was not yet alive to the landmine of gender politics that permeates every aspect of life in this country.

Later in my reading life I would notice that none of my male friends read any female authors. Outside of the classical authors who were required reading in literature classes, male readers read male authors, and female readers, for the most part, read female authors. I never made any conscious connection to this phenomenon until Ibua Journal’s editor asked me to write an essay on female authors that have left a mark on me. I couldn’t name more than four off head.

That evening I sat at my desk and started the essay with the question, why is it that most guys who read don’t read female authors? I had just come out of a memory trip and was shocked at how this desert of female authors had unconsciously crept into my literary canon. The last time I saw the Adler book was when I joined what I dubbed the book underground in Ntare School. It was an informal chain of readers that exchanged books and it stretched into every secondary school in which a reader could be found. The only rule of this underground was that nobody owned a book. You got in by surrendering a book that would never return to you, but it made sure that we never suffered from a shortage of books to read.

The book chain would come to dominate how I interacted with books. I relied on this informal network all the way up to university, and when I joined the Lantern Meet of Poets in 2007, this community of writers became my only source of reading material. Whatever the circle was reading is what I was reading, and because the bigger percentage of my friends in this circle was male, I somehow found myself reading mainly male authors. This is not to say that there was a Men’s Conference that sat somewhere and ruled that guys should not read female authors. What it suggests to me is that there is an unconscious prejudice that is created and reinforced by society’s shifting sands on gender.

Ten years ago I was introduced to this phenomenon by a speaker named Gwada Ogot. He has since become a pastor, but back when he still ran his speaking circuit, one of his favourite topics was ‘The Age of the Woman’: a forty-five-minute presentation that declared the new cosmic cycle we are presently in — known as the Age of Aquarius in astrological circles — as an age when women rise from the subordinate state of the previous age (which came to a terminus in 2012, according to most astrological calendars) and take centre stage in local and global power. He cited Angela Merkel and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the only renowned female leaders with a seat in the UN, as precursors of this trend. I watched him give this talk more than thrice, and each time the audience responded with polite acquiescence. Ten years down the road, the rising number of women in global positions of leadership seems to vindicate his theory.

Thinking back on these things I found it odd that just a handful of men actively read female authors. When I put the question to a few friends, none made the overt admission that they had misgivings about reading female authors, but it was evident in the subtext — the unsaid stuff — that having a female author on one’s canon somehow reduced their sense of masculinity.

When I sat down to write my own canon of female authors whose books had left an indelible mark on my imagination, it dawned me that these ladies had all made an imprint on an important aspect of my writing style. I had picked up my preference for subtlety and indirection from them.

The Property of a Lady may have been the only Elizabeth Adler novel that I read, but its rich tapestry of multi-generational and cross-national characters built in me an inclination to create plots with dots across different times, and to create narratives through which I could re-imagine how major historical events affected fates of families that lived through them. My debut novel (which is still in development) assumed this character without my noticing it. She introduced me to historical fiction.

The other author on this list is Nigeria’s most celebrated author of the present age, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I didn’t enjoy her other works as much but Half of a Yellow Sun is, in my book, one of the greatest novels ever written. I read it from cover to cover in one sitting when it came out. I simply could not put it down. That book gave me an example of how to do something I had wanted my writing to do but couldn’t figure out how — it showed me how to confront the inescapable tragedy of our violent history in a way that dignifies Africa.