My Reading Revolution!

I was moving house a few years ago, but because I didn’t own a car and I was only moving down the road, I enlisted the help of a cabbie. He took one look at my boxes and cases and burst out laughing, then charged me 4 times the going rate. I had, to be exact, 4 VERY large boxes of books (not school related). A few years and many donations later, including my first World Book day (2011), here I am: trying to recall how I developed my addiction to reading in the first place, and what it means to me.

According to my mother, I started reading at an early age, when I was about 2.5 years old (disclaimer: she’s obviously a little biased). My first recollection of reading though was Friday evening Bible study as a family. It was my opportunity to read in front of my much older siblings, without fear of being taunted when I couldn’t pronounce a word. It also cultivated a love of big words: thou, thine, offspring, commandment, covenant, gnashing, iniquity, redemption, revelation, ascension...and much simpler words like ‘I am’. Advancing age and an incapacity to understand my dad, who often said ‘imbecile’ and ‘uncouth’, made me seek out other books, and soon I was lost in the world of tiny fonts, illustrations and fantasy.

I waded through the Sweet Valley series, wishing for a sister, and piqued my interest for adventure while solving mysteries with Nancy Drew and Famous Five. I lived in my brothers’ shadows, and the only way to get noticed was to show them fancy words that would rid them of the pox of 3 Ns and U (innuendo) when playing Scrabble. I flirted with Mills and Boon, but my mother felt that was a little precocious, and pointed out that she’d assumed I could do better. There’s nothing like a bit of sarcasm to push one to greater heights, and so I fell in love with classics, with Mr Knightley and his loving reproach of Emma. Austen and I developed an intricate dance: I waltzed with Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice), and tangoed like Marianne did, even crying when her heart broke and falling in love with Mr. Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility). I took up poetry, reading about great loves, Shakespeare’s tragedies and Oscar Wilde’s plays. My older self began to yearn for a more African identity, something I was warned would happen, but at 13 I loathed to accept. Chinua Achebe helped me put my fractured identity back together, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o made me announce to all that would listen, how amazing it was to be Kenyan. More recently, Chimamanda Adichie embodied my desire for a deeper understanding of history and my quest for Africanism in her short stories and novels, especially Half a Yellow Sun.

Books are my best friends. Don’t get me wrong, I love people, but it’s the books that I read that often helped me meet these people. It’s hard to ignore the book that will invariably be in my hand, and it means we’ll always have something to talk about. I’ve learned about history: from the Israel 6 day war, to Somalia in 1993 and the history of Al-Qaeda. I’ve lived in 19^th Century Latin America following a family for 100 years (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and I have seen the dark side in the Picture of Dorian Gray, and in modern day Sweden (Stieg Larsson trilogy). I have been a lady (Little Women), I have been a vagabond (Oliver Twist), I have been a slave (Maya Angelou), I have been on a mail ship (Rudyard Kipling), I’ve been naive and awkward (the Great Gatsby) and I’ve been crazy (Oliver Sacks). I now know Mussolini was a little mad (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), and that one’s future can be in a name (Freakonomics). I experienced not knowing oneself (Middlesex), to perhaps knowing a little too much (On Chesil Beach), and I have truly seen the measure of a man (Poitier).

Books offer an adventure, a journey into a page, into someone else’s mind, and ultimately into another world. They create possibilities, and for a moment in time, make improbability a tenuous argument. They open up the hearts of children to the lives of others, allow them to relate to the imaginary, and then haul them back into reality. Reading is mental acrobatics; my brain does a back flip every morning and every evening before I drift to sleep, I absorb one ‘last’ chapter- my brain is held in a virtual tree pose as I feel my thoughts rise to another world, and the disappointments of this one become a fragment of my imagination. That is why I read, and why I wish everyone would too.

The Kenyan Reading Revolution think so too, and that’s why they’ve organised this fantastic event, which aims to get the largest number of people (25 000) reading out loud together in a single place. Details and registration here >> http://readingrevolution.co.ke/breaking-the-world-record/register-here/ If you are in Kenya on the 16^th of June or know someone that is, please get them to go to this! It will be a record well worth breaking!

Have you met Mojo?

(To all my faithful and much loved readers, sorry if I am a bit out of commission for the next few weeks...minor issue of major exams to be passed...I will still tweet crap, so feel free to engage. Oh and before I disappear...

This is a story about Mojo. Or rather, how I met Mojo.

I was 19, and vanity had smacked me in the face, and then held my hand. I thought I was alright looking, and my hair was doing things unbeknown to my younger self, bouncing every which way and swishing in the wind. Gyms had sorted out legs, and a year of pretentious debates about ‘space and place in economic Geography’ while expounding on the nuances of protein function had left me itching for smart conversation constantly.

I was back in Kenya on holiday and the sun was out, as were the sandals and the abbreviated dresses, as my mother affectionately refers to my wardrobe. I was in a supermarket buying a phone that would see me through the break. Over my shoulder, a rather commanding voice tried to sell me something. I chose not to turn around, but because it/he was well spoken, I replied with a ‘no thanks, not today’. As I waited to be served, I noticed my two friends crouched in one of the aisles pointing at something behind me. My immediate thought was ‘bastards! They left with a snake about to kill me’. Then I realised they were giggling, and making eyes at something. You know those eyes a girl makes that say ‘come hither mister, spread whatever it is boys spread’. I screwed my eyes at them and that did not deter them, so I decided this must be serious. I turned around and behold, it was Hallelujah’s understudy, because that’s all you could say when you saw that man: Hallelujah. But because that is a rather Godly term, and this post is anything but, we’ll call him Mojo.

Mojo’s arms were muscle-y. In a ‘I am a man, but I dislike steroids’ way, and his smile was disarmingly skewed, not perfect, but also just right. I literally swooned and held onto the table in front of me (tossing my hair as I did so- never one to waste an opportunity). He looked like he smelt nice and his bottom and calves, though unseen, felt like they would also look good. He was one of those beautiful people that you didn’t have children with...you’d be the least hot person in the house. Now, BWTB doesn’t like to brag, but I actually possess a genuine smile, appreciated by many people, and I find it easy to make friends. So I smiled; one of those where my eyes screwed up a little, and my lazy dimple kicked into action. In the sweetest voice I could muster (which given I am a proper alto, is rather deep...), I accepted his business card, ‘to pass on to my mother’, obviously.

Two days’ later, I sent Mojo a message, you know, totally nonchalantly. ‘Hey, it’s B, girl from X. I thought you were cute, so hi’. He waited for a perilously long time, about 2 hours, before he replied. One has to assume that he was trying to work out who I was, then trying to decide if I was a serial killer or not. He decided not, and we began to chat and text message. It turns out he was intelligent, enough to feed my pretentious brain. Of course, as is B’s nature, my intentions were so much less honourable. And because he was fascinated by my white dress and gold shoes, we met for a drink after work. Well work for him, gallivanting for me. But that’s neither here nor there. Physical attraction was definitely there- I had mentally undressed him so many times that he was running out of virtual boxers.

We kept at the tea dates, lunch dates, phone flirting...and yet, B could not get her man. My vanity was taking a serious dent. I decided that perhaps his problem was ‘poor signal reading’ (ref to ‘Old man and the sea’), so I would help a brother out. We’d been out for an evening coffee and he walked me to the car, hands around my waist and all. It was perfect. I had parked in the basement, and had a car that required a step ladder (I am not very tall) to get into, so of course he would have to give this damsel a hand. I was also wearing a dress. I figured he liked dresses. Or rather, legs. Anyway, we descended the stairs to the basement, me lamenting at how cold it was, him getting the hint and pulling me closer. $$$$$...#winning. All of the above. I opened the door, and he helped me in. It was now or never, so I said, ‘thank you for a lovely evening’. ‘You’re welcome gorgeous’. *Hug*. As he pulled away, I went in for the kiss, just as he said ‘I have a bet with...’ < I stopped listening. It sounded like something that would disappoint me, but more importantly, I was now falling out of the car. It wasn’t a dramatic fall, not in the slightest. It was simply an I-am-throwing-myself-at-you kind of motion. I would like to say *to be continued*, but after that performance, I was sure he would decline. We said our goodbyes.

Life sentence at 13.

‘Unfortunately the news is as we had expected’.

‘What?’ Lip smack...

‘Remember, we discussed this before you went in? That we were trying to exclude various serious things.’

‘Yeah, sort of,’ X replied, furiously chewing the largest piece of gum I had seen. I sat there staring at her, incredulous that someone could be so dense. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to chew gum as a child (I know...my dad’s old school!)- Direct correlation to stupid (her, not me)?! I wouldn’t like to say...

‘Well, the tests confirmed what we suspected, that you can never have children’.

I was sitting in the room as the doctor told X, a 13 year old, that she can never get pregnant naturally. She should have been sad, but honestly, she simply appeared not to understand a single word that had been said. You could imagine her thinking ‘Kids?! WTF are those?’ I was frustrated for her, and I’m usually pretty chilled, I don’t get frustrated on account of other people. Not often anyway.

A recent #t about childhood memories reminded me of X, and how different our lives are/were. At 13, I was starting to like people as well as books, and stop thinking of boys as ‘disgusting’. I was trying to wear slightly more feminine shoes, and I wore dresses more regularly (of course, after my father rescinded his ban because I was no longer falling all over the place and ruining my legs with scars). I was a little bothered by being ‘older’ than I was, but I didn’t pursue it relentlessly. I was most definitely NOT having sex. So you can imagine my angst with X. She had pelvic inflammatory disease, something I didn’t know about until university. Basically, she’d had an STD for so long that it had clogged up her lady bits and so she would never be able to successfully deliver an egg to her uterus. Now, most people find this out when they’re older and try to have children but can’t. And it’s devastating for them. The problem was that she didn’t understand what an STD was, let alone the disease or its implications. Which begs the question: what the hell was she doing having sex in the first place?!

Here’s a bit of a generalisation: given she was alone in the clinic, didn’t seem to have parents to speak of, chewing gum (!) and smelt heavily of cigarette smoke, I was judging her background a little bit, and blaming what I thought was a failure of parenting and lack of education. But of course this is unfair, because I didn’t find out enough about her to know why she was in that particular position. It did make me think about all the things we do, for fun, as part of life, and whether or not we think about the responsibility and the consequences. So here are a few medical truths for you, while you’re horizontal today:

• HIV is the big bad scary wolf, but its little cousins have just as big an impact on your life. At 13 you don’t know you want kids. Hell, in my tweenies I don’t know that I want kids. But I bloody well want the power to make that decision.
• Get yourself PROPERLY checked out (not once in a life time- it’s gotta be regular people!). Great, you’re HIV negative. So?! There’s Chlamydia, gonorrhoea, LGV, syphilis, HPV (àcervical cancer). My rule is if I’m going to do something, I want to know the ways in which it gets fucked up. So I can avoid them. For example, did you know STIs in pregnancy could cause miscarriages?! Educate yourself! Google is your friend...No nookie till you do.
• Why the hell do you not have a condom?! Right now, at this moment in time, in your wallet/makeup bag/bedside drawer...Seriously?! *smack yourself twice*

Forgotten toothbrush

So at some point in the last 2 weeks, #4 and I sorted out our issues, and for the duration of my holiday, were doing the ‘fling thing’. It was pleasant, exciting, and it certainly distracted from the mountain of work I had to do. I spent an evening at his house in the second week, which was excellent, for many reasons, not least because I learnt that he is a bit of a freak. I walked into his impeccably clean house (what is it with men and keeping their houses clean as bachelors? Something to hide?! Hmmm?) and found my way to his room. I took of my sweater and nonchalantly flung it across a chair, in a ‘no biggy’ way. I turned around for 10 seconds to remove my sandals, and when I turned back, my sweater was on a hanger and in the wardrobe. I kid you not. He also folded away my clothes when I was not looking...cute.

I was very careful in the morning, ensuring that I retrieved all my wares, and folded them as I packed my overnight bag. He was watching after all, and is clearly a neat freak. I got home, and as I unpacked, realised I had forgotten my toothbrush. *cow* *fudge* *ship* (and all other faux-expletives). I decided to ignore it because after all, it was unintentional, and it was only a toothbrush; my favourite one, but still. He could throw it if he even noticed it. I totally forgot (not really) about it, until I received a humorous email from #4 saying ‘you left your toothbrush. I see you have territorial tendencies J’. I laughed, because it was typical of him, using as few words as possible to try and convey as much information as he could, while asking a subtle question i.e. am I territorial? I responded in kind, assuring him that if I was territorial, I would have parked a car with my name, two photographs of myself and all my shoes (which are VERY VERY many...Imelda Marcos is my hero) inside his house. If he wanted to get rid of signs of me, he’d have to get movers.

The incident made me think that girls are going about this all wrong. If you want to put your stamp on a man’s house, forgotten toiletries and cushions are not the way to go. Things that fit into bin bags will end up exactly there. What you need is something that is immovable, for example, engraving a sweet ‘him and me’ message on his bespoke bed post, or using a candle to burn a loving message on his wall. You need something that requires him moving away from the house, possibly after burning it down, and changing all his identifying features in order to be rid of it. That’s a sure fire way to brand a man as something you would like to own. Because after all, only a freak would think that is the way to a lasting relationship. If you feel that he needs little things to remember you by, I would suggest that you have a problem. I think branding of things should be left to cows in volatile cattle rustling environments. But that’s just me...missing my favourite toothbrush. *sad eyes*