Sharing the Love of Reading: A South African Story

Abstract

Sharing the Love of ReadingA South African Story Dorothy Dyer (bio) I am South African, and as a voracious reader as a child, I had this half-conscious idea that writers colluded to create a fantasy world where wildflowers grew in leafy woods, snow came down in winter, and streets had quaint little ancient shops. Even when I was a bit older and realized that the books I read came from the northern hemisphere, it still affected my relationship with the landscape of my home. I distinctly remember feeling, one school outing, that the thorny acacias, stony hard ground, and brown muddy river just couldn't compare to the tumbling brooks and soft meadows of my books. It was only later, as I started reading South African books, that I realized my world was, in its own way, as beautiful, and that I was allowed to love it—to love the dry deserty karoo, the granite outcrops, the small fine flowers of fynbos—and see that my land had its own different beauty. Then as I grew older, South African books also helped awaken me politically. My family was politically aware and active, but it was reading André Brinks's Dry White Season, and other titles, that made the brutality and anguish of apartheid more real to me. These books also offered me an identity, of somebody white, but deeply critical of the government—I could be part of something bigger, I could belong somewhere. My old copy of True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist is falling apart, I read it so often as a student, and is full of underlinings and notes I made in the margins. Click for larger view View full resolution I also still remember that powerful moment when I read a book about a white teen girl growing up in apartheid—concerned about injustice, but also about boys, and about making sense of her own life in a complicated world. It was a profound moment of realization, what Walter Myers (a great African American writer) called a "shock of recognition," that my world was worth a story, my world was worth a book. (I found the book at a secondhand shop recently, and was dismayed by its colonial attitudes, its racial understandings. I can't read it again. But it came to me at the right time, and I will always be grateful to it.) At university, writers such as Mongane Wally Serote and, further afield, Ama Ata Aidoo opened my eyes to black experiences that otherwise I could never have known. Other books such as The Color Purple stirred me [End Page 73] deeply, giving me windows onto worlds I had never considered, which in turn made me think about my own sense of who I was, what mattered to me. I learned so much from books about the world I lived in. So, many years later, when I taught English at a school for black students, one of my main aims was to share the joy of reading with them too, so that reading could provide for them what it had for me. I wanted reading to impact their lives as it had mine. And, on a more immediate level, I also knew it was one of the best ways to improve their English. But, unlike me, most of these learners had never been initiated into the pleasure of reading. They came from homes where there were few books, where reading aloud wasn't part of their childhood experience. They associated reading with school—they knew it was good for them, but it was a chore, something most of them left behind with relief when school was done. Some learners in my classes did get hooked on the lovely books in our little book collection, but many struggled with my weekly reading periods, surreptitiously checking their cell phones under the desk rather than losing themselves in a book. The glossy covers, with mainly white protagonists, had lives far removed from those of my students, and in many cases the language was too sophisticated, as my students didn't speak English as a home language. And the books with English that my students...