Dear Editor,
One would believe that with the advent of electronic gadgets in the developed world, books would have become unpopular as a social pastime. There are many educational electronic gadgets to choose from and yet as you board a train or bus here in London, people’s heads are buried in a paperback. Many will have headphones stuck in their ears reading a novel of their choice.
Reading is so important that in a competitive electronic age, where we have the iPod, iPad and iEverything, we have the Kindle which is an electronic ‘iBook’, where you can download any book of your choice and continue reading in style.
The importance of reading can never be understated. The love for it must always be embraced.
In Guyana we spend a lot of time commuting to our various long and not so long destinations. The occasional attempt to read a newspaper will inevitably be marred by the blast of loud music from the boom boxes of our public transport. This has become so popular and accepted that our nation’s future, our schoolchildren, will seek out the most suitable bus for its boom capacity and a popular and particular music. At home, outside the strenuous task of quickly completing school assignments, we relax in front of the television, watch videos or play music. This is a generalisation and not applicable to everyone. But one might suspect that it is fair to say it is the general trend.
Reading increases ones capacity to understand, rationalise, reason and interpret. Reading sharpens the thought processes. You are transported into a world of different versions of others’ experiences, tragedies, successes and failures. The conclusion of most stories is set to positively benefit the reader. For example, one can become very rich and popular through crime but in the end crime does not pay, etc.
Almost every character you find in a story you can relate to someone you know or came across in real life. If you are an avid reader with good literary skills it is very seldom that anyone can mislead you into a world where they are able to use you to achieve their own ends, most times at the expense of our misery. It is therefore incumbent on the Guyanese society to begin to promote reading among our young people, whether it is novels, fiction and non-fiction, the newspapers, etc. For wherever you have a people with the love for reading you will find a people with the love for writing.
In Guyana, event after event, very significant and not so significant, has taken place, which may have made national, international and local news, but has never been preserved in the form of a book. Tragedy after tragedy has faced the generations before us, this generation, and will bedevil our future generations. The very few books published were written by intellectuals who are friends of our oppressors or those who are part of the oppressive system.
We must begin by capturing the Linden tragedy through the eyes of the oppressed. This must be put in a book form. It doesn’t matter if it is a book of poems, a story told in a fictional form or a non-fictional account of the events that took place. It doesn’t even matter if it is done in the form of ‘comic books’; we must begin to write our accounts from our perspective.
The reader has a personal relationship and is taken on a private journey in his/her world of reading. The characters in books are larger than life. We aspire to be like them. We are influenced by what we read. The first change begins in our mind through the cultivation of reading and understanding. Why are our 21st century heroes, local and national, not captured in magical pages bound together and preserved for centuries to come?
When we pick up a book and embrace the immortality of the Lincoln Lewis‘s Mark Benschops, Sharma Solomons, Karen DeSouzas, Andaiyes and Freddie Kissoons of our society, their struggles, contributions in social and other fields of endeavour, we will aspire to do greater things. In addition, there are sports personalities and other Guyanese who have contributed tremendously on the local and international stage. We will not be afraid to die for what we believe in. We would have known that our greatest form of immortality is found in books. Our life’s work recorded in the libraries of time for centuries and beyond.
I do not believe that Linden has a single bookshop apart from the National Library. We must establish one and ensure that it is visited as much as the internet cafes and video shacks. We owe our children the right to prepare them for a tomorrow that will be void of the visionless who have us in the condition we are in today.
There is a time for everything. This is our time to write books.
Yours faithfully,
Norman Browne
