From sand witches to sandwiches

As a child growing up, I was not a very fond reader. In fact my command of English was rather abysmal. At one point I was confusing sandwiches and sand witches and the only way I could spell Singapore was through humming that tune of S-I-N-G-A-P-O-R-E. Shameful really. My teacher, Mrs Menon (funny how easily I can dredge my memory and come up with her name while the memory of lunch two week’s ago lies as forgotten as yesterday’s lunch) was the one who suggested I start reading and so I did.

From then on, I spent my days accompanied by a plethora of books but I fondly recall curling up to read most of the Enid Blyton collection: Willow Farm (All 3 books in that trilogy), Malory Towers, Far Away Tree (Wonderfully fascinating and otherworldly), Famous Five, The Secret Series and on and on.

As secondary student, I gradually found myself meandering more toward the Three Investigators, The Hardy Boys and even a little bit of Nancy Drew. Then I got into Christopher Pike’s various series of horror/thriller, and moved into Sidney Sheldon (I think I possibly read all of his works that were published at the time) and read books ranging from fantasy to a variety of other genres.

I moved onto to Polytechnic and my tastes did not so much change as mature slightly. I’d finished C.S. Lewis’s seven books on Narnia, read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings once (I’d eventually read it a second time with much the same results of incomprehension, frustration and tedium), dabbled a bit with Terry Pratchett (I’ve read all 37 books of Discworld so far as I know) and finally got to David Gemmell. Ah Gemmell. He is an author I particularly love. It is not so much the sparseness of his wordcraft nor is it the grim reality I find omnipresent in his works, I can’t say if it boils down to his use of the blackest of humour which makes its startling appearances on the pages of his books. Perhaps it might be easier to say it is a sum greater than the whole of its parts. To sum the entirety of his oeuvre in so little words seems difficult, perhaps this quote best encapsulates his authorial concerns: “If there is one sound that follows the march of humanity, it is the scream” (David Gemmell).

After poly, I made my way into the shaved hair ranks of my fellow national servicemen and my time for reading was a lot harder to come by. In fact, I could even say it pattered, then trickled, and eventually ground to a halt completely in that first year. After that I started reading again but I did not find any books particularly memorable.

So you can imagine my shock when I enrolled in NTU’s English department and was faced with a mountain of words, novels, plays, dramas and poems. DH Lawrence, Samuel Beckett (there is something about Beckett that I’ve always wished to capture, perhaps I found echoes of the sparseness, brevity and bleakness of Gemmell in Beckett that calls out to me somehow). There was also Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and a whole host of other texts too numerous to name. More significantly I was introduced to the various literary theories (some call it a bane, for myself they were a boon so I have no complaints about them).

While I am able to carry out close readings to an extent, the introduction of literary theories allowed me to view a text far more critically and I was able to use the theories to bolster my arguments about a text (though at times I found myself wondering if I used them more as a crutch than an actual complement to my textual analyses).

It was through a great professor that I started reading about Salman Rushdie (Shame, Midnight’s Children), Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, JM Coetzee’s Foe, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace from there I started to explore on my own and began to read about Jhumpa Lahiri and other such Postcolonial writers. I was introduced to the intricate and multifaceted dialogical imagination of Mikhail Bakhtin and this eventually led me to coming into contact with Jean Marie Gustav Le Clézio.

I would eventually write my undergraduate final year project about Le Clézio and later his works would form the crux of my Masters thesis. Le Clézio is perhaps not the most riveting of writers (his style encompasses vast natural landscapes and slow gradual developments of his characters’ psyche) but there is something in his works that is, for want of a better word, beautiful.

But it is not just beauty that I detect in his novels but something more as well, a sort of drive towards a social and cultural responsibility. I find that I too now read through a Postcolonial lens. While I do recognize that texts can (and should) be read for the pure aesthetic pleasures of it—certainly Night Circus—springs to mind quite readily I find that when I write of texts, I must find some sort of meaning and purpose to it. When a text lacks such a purpose, I find such a text while interesting visually and aesthetically, lacking in change making.

Now that I’ve come full circle and now I’m in the position to influence my students’ reading habits, one thing I hope to achieve is to instil the love of reading in them. Sure I think that Postcolonialism does offer a plethora of possibilities and analytical perspectives but I only arrived at this point after starting from decidedly unpolitical texts.

So the most important thing of all for me is for a student to first love reading. Academic concerns, theories and critical readings can come later.