One Fragile World: Beverley Naidoo
Carnegie Address, 22 September 2001
Imagine a narrow school hall with about 60 girls, twelve to thirteen
years old — calm, attentive, engaged. They have read the
opening of The Other Side of Truth — about the event
that catapults Sade and Femi into becoming refugees — and
I am now talking to them about South Africa and the background
to my writing. I show them pictures of Nelson Mandela and his
group of friends who together faced the death sentence in 1964,
when I was a young woman just out of university. The group defy
apartheid’s classification of human beings. Alongside the
black South Africans is a white South African whose Jewish family
escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Next to him is a man whose
Muslim ancestors came from India. I play the girls a tape of Nelson
Mandela saying the final words of his famous speech to the judge:
I have fought against white domination and I
have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal
of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together
in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which
I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal
for which I am prepared to die.’
We talk about racism and how it was for me to be brought up as
a white child in what was known for many years as the world’s
most openly racist country. I show them pictures of black South
African children who demonstrated in 1976 for a decent education
and the right to be taught their lessons in English — a global
language that could allow their voices to be heard beyond South
Africa. When their demonstration was met with terrible violence,
the young people were incensed and intensified their struggle.
They took on the apartheid state. The photographs sped around
the world. Armed police and soldiers shooting at children attending
funerals with placards, and later with stones. I weave extracts
from my fiction into my talk. One of the girls puts up her hand.
‘Is justice only a dream or is it sleeping? Who will wake
up justice?’ she asks. The question is profound. I do not
know the answer. All I can offer is that we have to keep trying.
Her question reveals the depth of emotional and intellectual
tension beneath the calm exterior of these young students. They
are third, some even fourth, generation refugee children whose
grandparents and great-grandparents fled for their lives —
losing land and possessions — as they escaped the terror
meted out by Zionists in establishing the state of Israel. These
young Palestinians in Nuzha 1 Elementary School for Girls near
Jaba Nuzha camp in Amman, Jordan — where I met them on Tuesday
through the British Council - know only what it is to be a refugee.
Their parents have known only what it is to be a refugee. At the
end of my session, while we are clapping each other, a child stands
up and says she wants to say something. ‘Our family was killed
in Palestine,’ she says. Her words are simple, plain, painful.
Later when I talk with Matar Saqer, Public Information Officer
for UNRWA, I begin to get a glimpse of their trauma. Matar talks
with passionate intensity about his own childhood — born
and brought up in a tent with parents who, in their total dispossession,
placed all their hopes and aspirations on their son to become
educated so that he might help them. It was a childhood of fierce
hardships, growing up with the humiliation and trauma of one’s
parents. Ironically, the only other person I have heard speaking
with a similar intensity about growing up with traumatised parents
is a rabbi from Bournemouth. His parents had survived the holocaust
in The Netherlands but their distrust of strangers — and
life - profoundly scarred his childhood. In the rabbi’s case,
the future held out hope. Matar’s circumstances remain deeply
conscribed and he tells me how fearful he is for his own children.
From the time he was a child - queuing for rations, queuing for
water, queuing at an UNRWA clinic, attending an UNRWA school,
he and 3.8 million other Palestinian refugees have been totally
dependent on UNRWA.
How do young people cope when they grow up surrounded by such
desperation? Matar’s perseverance led him eventually to university.
He chose English Literature and became a teacher in an UNRWA school.
We talk about literature as a wonderful forum for developing our
understanding of life, of different perspectives, of other worlds.
Matar is articulate, passionate, humane, reflective. I ask myself,
why is it that in the West we do not hear voices like Matar’s?
All this week — the week after the destruction of the World
Trade Centre in New York - I have been reading the opinion pages
of The Jordan Times. Each day there is a spread of at least 6
reflective articles by writers including Muslims, Jews, Christians.
All decry the appalling, tragic loss of life in America while
provoking readers to think about our fragile world that changed
so irrevocably on September 11th with the attack on
the heart of the world’s most powerful nation. Their tone
is totally different to the gung-ho talk of revenge. I return
to Britain, asking why we do not wish to hear these voices calling
for reflection more widely? Voices that echo Martin Luther King’s
words: ‘We live together as brothers or die together as fools’
or if I may slightly rephrase them: We live together as brothers
and sisters or die together as fools.
On September 12th when The Guardian carried 16 pages
on the events that shook our world, it published the obituary
of a pioneering black publisher. Glenn Thompson, an American,
believed passionately in the power of literacy as a route to opening
the minds of the oppressed. He was the founder of Centreprise
— the London bookshop, community publishing agency and cultural
meeting point in Hackney. Centreprise was founded in the late
1960s - around the time I first taught in London - and it still
survives over 30 years later. Thompson was a publisher activist,
passionate about the power of books to open minds, to assist oppressed
people in their own liberation. I still have a copy of its first
publication, the haunting poems of a twelve-year-old Hackney boy
Vivian Usherwood whose first poem ‘Life’ begins:
Life is playing me up
Spite is having an affair with me
Re-reading those poems after many years, I realise how much this
reminds me of my own Femi in The Other Side of Truth. Here is
the deep sense of alienation of the young black male child in
a society largely dominated by white men that remains with us
today, thirty years later. Frankly, we don’t seem to have
made much progress in addressing such fundamental issues of exclusion.
Not in Britain, not in the USA, not in the world.
Glenn Thompson’s mission was not only to provide a forum
in which the excluded could speak as part of their own empowerment
but to encourage others to hear them. He wrote that
‘Publishing is about communication. To communicate from
one group to another, to take something very parochial and make
it international, that’s what it’s all about.’
Adding to Glenn’s obituary, John Berger quotes from the
poet Asha Bandele whom Glenn published in the USA:
& if we don’t start it up
move it along
make some noise
then
those of us who know
will never convince
those of us
who don’t know
I am reminded of the story that Papa tells Sade and Femi in The
Other Side of Truth about Tortoise. When he scratches those final
marks on the ground before he is eaten by Leopard, Tortoise is
also moving it along, making some noise, drawing attention to
the injustice of his plight. Throughout the ages, there have been
storytellers and writers who wish to ‘make some noise’
about our common humanity… who believe that the creative
enterprise of crossing boundaries imaginatively might help us
to understand more about ourselves, each other and our shared
world.
In these perilous times, I believe this enterprise is more important
than ever. This is not simply a moral imperative. It is a matter
of our survival. Imagination is more vital than ever. We need
the ability to imagine each other. In my first novel Journey to
Jo’burg, Naledi’s brother Dumi is arrested during the
children’s demonstrations and emerges from prison angrier
than ever at the injustice of apartheid. He flees South Africa
and later writes to his family that he is now studying and one
day will return to help in the fight for freedom. Naledi lies
in bed wondering about the word FREEDOM. What would you learn,
she wonders, ‘in a school with FREEDOM’?
Freedom could simply be the freedom to dominate others, to ignore
their plight in pursuit of one’s own aggrandisement and greed.
I like to think, however, that ‘a school with FREEDOM’
would be buzzing with imagination, communication and enquiry.
Imagination is essential because it opens the way for hope —
and hope for striving. But underlying all of these, we surely
must have a commitment to a common humanity. Far too frequently,
one person’s freedom is another’s imprisonment. One
person’s freedom to acquire vast wealth is premised on another’s
poverty. One person’s freedom to acquire pleasure is the
freedom to ignore another’s pain… to put up the fence,
the wall between us, higher than before.
The title story of my collection Out of Bounds is set in South
Africa in the year 2000, six years after the first democratic
elections. Political apartheid has been dismantled but the walls
and fences show little sign of coming down. When poverty-stricken
squatters set up their shacks on the steep slope of a hill, the
well-off house owners above find them uncomfortably close. Rohan’s
father builds their wall higher, topping it with barbed wire.
Rohan and Solani, a boy from the squatter camp below, are each
faced with a personal challenge of entering the other’s domain
and ultimately each takes a risk. In that lies hope. But the reality
of fences, walls, barriers and boundaries with mutual incomprehension
are with us everywhere.
In Fortress Europe, politicians and others daily attempt to pull
up the drawbridges. I live near a ferry. Recently five people
were discovered on a motorway nearby clinging to the underside
of a lorry. In passing, the news report mentioned one was twelve
and another fourteen. We must reflect on what desperation makes
people hazard their lives to make a journey into an unknown future
— and why it is now, more than ever. What has changed?
I researched The Other Side of Truth on the streets of London
and used my imagination before asylum became such an issue. Sade
attempts to hang on to reason but Femi is silent and potentially
explosive. In the West we now desperately need leaders with imagination
who will strive to address the fundamental inequality, injustice
and disrespect shown for oppressed and poor people’s lives
in a world that is dangerously unbalanced. We need politicians
who will not simply be thinking of how to win the next election
by appealing to the basest of our human instincts. We need electorates
who will be weaned away from quick-fix solutions to an understanding
of the complexity of our fragile global organism.
Young people’s librarians have a most important role. More
than ever, we need to widen the range of young people’s reading,
to encourage them to make journeys across time, place and cultures
into other people’s hearts and minds. We also need to make
the time to talk with young people. This to me is what the Carnegie
shadowing scheme, at its best, is about. We also need to embrace
creative ways of reaching socially excluded young people, taking
a lead from the case studies in your new publication All Our Children.
It is vital that this work should be recognised as integral to
education — not, as all too frequently happens, an add-on
extra.
Despite these dangerous times, we have to maintain hope. Before
the events of September 11th, Philip Pullman was on
record saying that he was 51% optimistic. I tend to go with Anton
Gramsci’s formulation: Pessimist of the intellect, optimist
of the will. I find it possible still to hope when I observe young
people striving to make sense of our world. However many complacent,
apathetic, self-occupied young people I sometimes meet —
and some were there in Jordan too - I am encouraged by other young
people with curiosity and with the intellectual honesty to ask
themselves profound questions. When I receive poems like this
one below from an eleven-year-old English boy in Hampshire, how
can I not be encouraged?
Response to Beverley Naidoo
Painful feelings, black and white.
Racism growing in might and might.
Is it fair? Why is it so?
Should we put the blacks down?
Should we split Africa?
Should we not?
Should we give money? Little or lot?
Is it our fault? What have we done?
We can't help being better off!
Should we be grateful?
Should we want more?
Should we send scraps from the kitchen floor?
What can we do?
How can we help?
Should we stop fighting?
Could we stop fighting?
Why do the blacks get treated differently?
Why are we racist?
Putting them down?
Can we help it?
It’s how we’re brought up!
Are we too generous, should we care?
Should we leave the pains to the people there?
Richard Cogley
We need to value young people’s imagination and their capacity
for freshness of thought. I witnessed it flourishing in Nuzha
1 Elementary School. Here is wonderful example that I shall never
forget.
‘Black people and white people all like
the colours of flowers. What is your comment?’
I leave you with this Palestinian child’s poignant question.
Other Conference items
Social Inclusion
— Targeting Social Need
More Or Less? Delivering
A Best Value Library Service For Children — John Dunne
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