Commemorating books

Books are equivalent to a gun – though it thankfully cannot kill a human being and shed blood, it can kill human stupidity and shed light where once was ignorance

• World Book Day fell on 23 April

By Surya Vishwa

For most persons, life would be an impassable trail if not for the biennial reprieve offered by books; that enigmatic wonder, often killed in the alley of childhood by that stricture called school.

Forced and regimental study makes books seem like boring bricks stuffed into the brain – sticking out at all four corners, much of the information jutting out and evaporating with the noon breeze on the afterschool journey back home!

Yes, we are talking about books. One week later from the date that it should be ‘officially’ spoken; World Book Day, also known as Book and Copyright Day initiated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to celebrate reading, publishing and copyright and commemorating the first World Book Day on 23 April in 1995.

Writing and books are synonymous in togetherness as blood and veins. They are so conjoined and the binding cover of this link is the human need to communicate.

As the book ‘Writing; the story of Alphabets and Scripts,’ a publication by Thames and Hudson/New Horizon, explain, amongst the oldest examples of writings were those on clay tablets from Sumer, from an ancient temple complex from Uruk, signifying a time frame of 4th millennium BC and where the written records were practical agrarian matters such as those connected with listing of grain and cattle. 

The Egyptians believed that it was god Thoth who created writing as a gift offering to man. The word hieroglyph means writing of the gods and refers to the characters ancient Egyptians used in their writings.

Communication, knowledge, writing and reading is therefore the binary of the expedition that is a book, the history of which dates back to when paper was invented and book publishing ushered into the world.

Modern printing was believed to have been first carried out in China and thereafter in Europe, with Johann Gutenberg inventing metal type movable printing. 

Since the advent of modern printing, books have influenced people’s minds, hearts and lives, whether it is in the realm of spirituality, myth, history, poetry, literature, art, industrial development, nature protection, human rights, economics, socio-political vicissitudes, and countless other inter-connected themes. 

The Greek and Indian mythical poetry, namely the Greek epic poem, Iliad and the Odyssey and the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha were some of the earliest works that cut across the realms of poetry, myth, histories and spirituality. Greeks did not use gods as architects of religion creation but rather to preside over concerns of humans as needed and served as a primary source of inspiration to poets. 

Iliad and Odyssey, said to have been composed by the Greek poet, Homer in the 8th century is woven around the most formidable and well known Greek champion of the Trojan war which is factually believed to have taken place before the time of Homer and its mythical roots inspired by the marriage said to have taken place between Peleus and Thetis, a sea goddess. In the epic poem Iliad, the gods and goddesses plot their snares and rescues as per their fancies after Helen, the wife of the Greek King is abducted by her Trojan lover and the infuriated king sets about destroying Troy. Ramayana and Mahabharatha bind us in narrations that merge fact and fiction in varying proportions that we may not be able to decipher. 

Books speak to us across the siege of time and much could be written about its influence. For example novels by British writer Charles Dickens such as Hard Times and Oliver Twist laid bare the hypocrisy of the so called Victorian values such as charity that jostled with the poverty, exploitation and misery of the large slum that much of Britain was at the time when coal mines swallowed the dignity of men who had once worked in farms under the feudal system and now were helpless and uncared for cogs in the wheel of capitalism while children were forced to leave school to work in factories as their poverty struck parents were thrown into debtors’ prisons. 

These were social novels. Rather than provide entertainment they used the route of literature to lobby for change in mindsets and thereby policy. The England that we know today looks out for its people and no one has to suffer the fate Charles Dickens did as a child which inspired him to write the classics that help change his country’s attitude to its poor. 

Literature, that includes novels, short stories and poetry is a key component of global publishing and holds an important key to communicating empathy on social conditions and has helped to shape a more humane world. 

Let us look at some books that contributed to the anti-slavery movement and the Harlem Renaissance that influenced the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.  Books such as The Slave Community by John W. Blassingame shows the horrors of how free and dignified African people were hunted out by invading foreigners to bring back to Europe for the slave trade. The book describes how these persons were transported and their unimaginable suffering. British poets such as William Blake contributed to abolishing the slave trade by writing interspersing humanistic metaphor from the Christian faith with the inhumanity of the slave trade.

The book ‘Black Voices’ provides earliest prose writings that go back to 1790 and includes the autobiographical pamphlet titled “A narrative of the uncommon sufferings and surprising deliverance of Briton Hammon.”

The book ‘The life and times of Frederick Douglas is a classic of Black Emancipation, tracing the story of how Frederick Douglas, a former slave, learned to read and write. Holding a key place among books that influenced the ending of slavery is the 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, selling over 10,000 copies in the United States and setting that country on the path towards freedom and equality. The story is about a man who only knows the inheritance of slavery his entire life and significantly the author was a young daughter of a priest who was a teacher, wife and mother. Apart from the US, the book spearheaded the anti-slavery movement in Britain after it sold one million copies there. 

Freed from slavery was not however the end of the suffering for the people originally from Africa. Slavery was abolished after the civil war in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln but freedom did not mean equal opportunity and the concept of slavery took on a new phase with the freed slaves working as maids in the houses of the former masters and the public segregation being the norm whether in education or religious matters. 

The civil rights movement that followed the abolition of slavery in the United States campaigned for the ending of disenfranchisement, discrimination and racial segregation and the sphere of literary communication played a major role – where taking up satirical poetry, short stories and novels, a significant number of the persecuted professional artistes waged a war on the minds of the oppressors which were in general the everyday citizens one accosts – the shopkeeper who was used to only entertaining persons based on skin colour, the bus driver used to people sitting separately using the same inane thinking which was the formal policy.

The book the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes has poetry written from 1926 to the 1960s tackling the everyday concerns of racial prejudice and how it impacted lives.

In one poem titled ‘The Black man speaks,’ the author queries how democracy includes everyone but him and in another titled ‘Freedom,’ Hughes speaks of how freedom cannot be postponed as a futuristic utopia while many poems tackle the senselessness of defining human beauty based on boundaries of black or white. 

Books therefore are equivalent to a gun – though it thankfully cannot kill a human being and shed blood, it can kill human stupidity and shed light where once was ignorance. 

The wonderful thing about the modern book age is that there are also books about all the books you should read!

‘The 501 Must Read Books,’ first published in Great Britain in 2006 by Bounty Books, a division of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd., traces categories of children’s fiction, classic fiction, history, memoirs, modern fiction, science fiction, thrillers and travel. 

Among the books listed in the children’s fiction category is the book Sophie’s World which is the story of philosophy, communicating complex philosophical arguments to a 14-year-old who becomes part of a strange and illusory philosophy course and a plethora of letters she gets addressed to another girl her age from her father, that begins with the question ‘who are you?” and “where does the world come from?,” taking the reader through the history of philosophy. Although it is generally written as a children’s book, it is by now a classic that explains the ebb and flow or philosophy through the ages. 

Children’s books are profound because to write for children one must master the art of simplicity in communication. This is a major success factor that makes children’s literature attractive for adults.

Among the children’s books which is supposed to have a notable and proven social impact on how gender identity is communicated to children is the work Pippi Longstocking written by Astrid Lindgren, first published by Viking Press in 1950. The story is about a freckled nine year old – Pippi Longstocking – with hair the colour of carrots, who turns niceties upside down – living her strange life of freedom – by herself in a large villa – villa villekula, with a monkey and a horse she is strong enough to carry. She has no scruples about dancing with burglars and playing tag on the roof with policemen who come to try to take her off to the children’s home. Her father was a sea captain and now she thinks that he has become the king of an island inhabited by cannibals.

This book is attributed to the gender equality that Sweden boasts of – where the stereotypes set around the genders of children – boys and girls are comparatively amongst the lowest. It is interesting to note that the book highlights strength – Pippi Longstocking is so strong that she can lift up the strongest man in the world – the mighty Adolph. 

To write about books and celebrate books cannot be crammed into one day. Celebrating life, celebrating knowledge and celebrating writers we do every day when we read – and whether we like it or not we read books every day, whether for professional, educational or pleasure.

However, having a glimpse into the history of writing, publishing and the all-encompassing world of books will show us that this vital component of communication has helped mould a better humanistic world.