At the prompting of various friends and colleagues, I’ve launched a tumblr at matthewfinch.tumblr.com, where you can see photos and other media from recent adventures on the road in literacy, outreach and community education.
After this: more on my Antipodean experiences, Hong Kong visit and the long-awaited Scandinavian project. Stay tuned…
Tonight, Thursday 1st September, I’ll be the guest speaker at the opening dinner of Paint the Town REaD’s Annual Convention in Sydney.
You can find them online at their new home, http://paintthetownread.info/
To discover more about this amazing Australian community literacy scheme, read my recent piece on the website of New York literacy organisation Behind the Book:
Find the first part of this interview here.
One of the most distinctive inventions of Nnedi Okorafor’s new novel Akata Witch is chittim – a currency earned by magical practitioners when they learn an important lesson, delivered in the form of a shower of varying-sized metal rods falling from the sky.
‘I liked the idea of earning something for your knowledge, for learning,’ says Nnedi. ‘The rods are based on objects used in real-life 
magical practices, but I don’t know where they come from in the world of the novel! They’re not from God, they just…fall from the sky when you learn something new.’
Like most writers and teachers, I could always do with some extra currency, and I love learning, so I adored the idea of chittim.
Nnedi offered her own example of a ‘chittim moment’ from her teenage years as a tennis player:
‘When I was about seventeen, I was in California playing the nationals. I don’t know what part of the draw I was at in the tournament. It was early on. Not the finals or semi-finals or anything. I was playing this girl. Both of us were there alone. No parents or friends or siblings had come with us. But we were battling. We were evenly matched. We had no audience.
‘As our match drew on for hours, other kids finished playing each other and went home for the day. But she and I kept slugging it out. We split sets (she won one set, then I won the second). We played for over FIVE HOURS. No one knew we were there on that far tennis court in the sun. No one cheered. No one was on the edge of his or her seat. But we were battling. We both wanted to win even if no one else cared.
‘I eventually won and there were no cheers. We sat together drinking water, quiet, smiling occasionally, sweaty as heck. It was awesome. It didn’t matter who won, that’s what I learned that day. It was all about the game, pushing yourself, and playing your brains out.’
Nnedi’s perspective on education is shaped by such experiences, and the notion that learning as embodied by chittim is not about formal study:
‘I was a late bloomer – I struggled with tests, and didn’t blossom until grad school. I felt I had missed out because of assumptions made at an early age about which class you were put through.
‘Exams and learning are sometimes really in conflict. It’s not about passing the test, it’s what you learn, the things you choose to develop. I don’t know how many chittim you would get from taking a formal exam…maybe one if you were lucky!’
‘I feel that kids should be given space to change. There’s so much pressure now on young people to achieve and conform. The whole idea of “Tiger Mothering” and “Helicopter Parenting” is also connected to people trying to control fate.
‘As a mother, I understand parents wanting to choose the destiny of your child. But you must let your child become her/his own person – and resist your urge to take control!’
With her writing appealing to a young adult audience, Nnedi has taken her work into high schools in the U.S. and beyond.
‘My last school visit was in Trinidad, a peaceful place where I was very comfortable! They really got Zahrah, because the world of Ginen reflects that same mix of peoples and cultures you find in Trinidad. They identified with that.
‘I had the students do a writing exercise – to work together and create a character, as a group.
‘I was delighted with the result – a mixed-race boy with pink hair…and he could fly!’
Nnedi’s future plans include more schools outreach work and contact with inspiring young writers like the students in Trinidad. In the meantime a film of Who Fears Death is in the works and, of course, Akata Witch is available in all good bookstores!
>I’m sure many UK readers will have seen the news today about the primary school league tables, whose results have just been published.
Angela Harrison of the BBC reports that almost 1 in 10 of schools with validated and published results failed to meet minimum standards in the SATs. But how many of these schools will be located in the most challenged areas of this country, where pupils and parents alike need support and encouragement, rather than teachers bound to a regime of relentless formal assessment?
Teaching in a London school where a high percentage of pupils had English as an Additional Language, I was incredibly frustrated by the box-ticking mentality, especially in literacy.
Such an attitude encourages teaching to the test rather than a love of reading and writing. The best teachers in the world will find themselves sitting with an “underperforming” student on the day results are due in, thinking, “Just let me tick one more box so I can move you up another sub-level!”
My class made great progress in their literacy skills – but more from an attitude on the part of our year group that we would make learning fun, engaging and creative.
A poetry unit was delivered to rap music – our class gave themselves rap names and learned to freestyle to The 900 Number (“I like / chocolate / I want / CHOCOLATE CAKE!”). I knew we had made an impact when months later one of our pupils, who had little English and numerous educational needs, was still using the rap names with his friends in the playground.
In another class, we created a ‘living comic book’ together, using a whiteboard for each panel of the story of ‘Melon Boy’, a superhero who transformed into a caped, flying cantaloupe when he consumed too much of the fruit in question.
The story was inspired by a boy in our class who had given himself a laughing fit that morning, when he said, ‘My mum says if I eat too much melon, I might just turn into one.’
It was the first time he had ever given himself an attack of the giggles. He couldn’t stop, and the whole class ended up laughing along with him.
By using that moment as a springboard for our literacy lesson, the entire class became enthused and empowered to apply their own creativity to reading and writing.
When the education system mandates ‘teaching to the test’ in the very earliest stages of schooling, which should be about fostering a love of learning…
When teachers have their performance management directly linked to children’s formal levels….
It becomes incredibly difficult for classroom practitioners to be confident, creative and…dare we say it…a little subversive.
With the best will in the world, teachers find themselves ‘playing it safe’ and delivering mediocre education under such a system. Check-boxes will never prioritise the kind of passion for learning which brings together parents, pupils, and teachers – the kind of whole-community commitment which schemes like Paint the Town Read deliver so well in Australia.
It’s frustrating that around the world, so much of the ‘heavy lifting’ of encouragement and enthusiasm in education – work which is actively frustrated by the league table/”No Child Left Behind” mentality – falls to committed, creative, subversive teachers – and to those generous members of the community who commit to schemes like Volunteer Reading Help, Reading Partners, or Paint the Town Read. It’s time for the authorities to rethink their priorities and put a love of learning before league tables.
Well, that’s almost it for 2010. Next time on Books and Adventures, our review of the year, along with some sneak previews of features, interviews and guest writers for 2011!
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Patricia Wrightson’s Shadows of Time (1994) is a strange and powerful novel. It recounts the journey of an Aboriginal boy and English colonist girl who, by the gift of spirits, ‘travel in a timeless dimension’ – drifting without ageing or changing through Australian history. En route they are chased as devils, encounter various supernatural creatures and even come across a mysterious stone figure who may be the protagonist of the earlier Wirrun books. Although Wrightson had to some extent ‘let go’ of indigenous subject matter by this period, Shadows unmistakeably revisits some of the themes of her earlier novels.
Mark Macleod links Shadows to the Australian bicentenary of 1988. ‘That itself was a problematic anniversary. Indigenous Australians had already renamed Australia Day (26 January, the day when Captain Phillip took possession of the country in the name of the English king) ‘Survival Day’. And as the Bicentenary approached non-Indigenous Australians were increasingly asking ‘What is there to celebrate?’
The timeless quality of the children’s journey in Shadows, ‘given the privileges of water – to flow wherever is natural’, allows for a meditation on Australian history and, thereby, on Wrightson’s concept of culture.
As Mark Macleod explained in our recent interview:
‘In Shadows of Time, Wrightson invents a spirit character that seems very like those she borrowed from Indigenous culture in earlier works, but is in fact her own. For a writer who speaks repeatedly of borrowing only the equivalent of European ‘fairies’ and being careful not to touch the spirits of creation mythology, and who speaks of her terror of misrepresenting the spirits she does borrow, this is almost a defiant move, coming as it does after she has acknowledged that time has overtaken her whole project. The novel is therefore a coda to her major work, reasserting the mutability of cultures and her right as an artist to let her imagination flow where it will. Her readers and Wrightson herself might have changed their views over time – but not entirely.’
As time continues to flow, and Wrightson becomes a posthumous figure to be considered primarily through her legacy, there are challenges ahead for those who wish to preserve her work and circulate it for a new generation.
Mark Macleod comments, ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people.’
But it is precisely the encounter with Wrightson’s texts which dispels that idea, while at the same time forcing us to consider the complex and uncomfortable connections between storytelling and the legacy of colonialism.
A fantasy writer ‘cannot restore the original context for mythic stories, but she can create new contexts – as living cultures themselves do constantly. The fantasist can use all the resources available to the contemporary novelist to fill gaps within and around the story, and at the same time can alert the reader to some of what was lost.’ – Brian Attebery
Brian Attebery makes a distinction between a fantasy writer like Wrightson and any self-appointed white spokesperson for Aboriginal people: ‘Her job, as a writer, is to work out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape. Her strategy has been to bring in Wirrun and other characters to share the task, going where she cannot go. These fictional collaborators remind readers that we need to invite other collaborators, fictional and real, to help us extend the quest for understanding beyond the boundaries of the text itself.’
Attebery’s comments raise so many questions worthy of debate. That fantasy writer ‘alerting the reader to some of what was lost’ sounds like those white 1930s poets busy writing on behalf of the Aboriginal culture they perceived to be dying, which leads us back to asking: Who set Wrightson the task of ‘working out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape’? And what do we make of the notion of a ‘fictional collaborator’?
These are questions to which there’s no final answer, but they are thrown up by the challenge of Patricia Wrightson’s legacy today – which forms the basis of our final instalment, next time on Books and Adventures.
You can go to the fifth and final part of this feature by clicking here.
Nnedi Okorafor is hardly short of positive reviews at the moment, but I just wanted to drop a few lines about her 2005 Young Adult novel Zahrah the Windseeker, which I picked up this month.
The book sees thirteen-year-old Zahrah venture into a forbidden jungle on a quest to find the antidote to a poison which has claimed her best friend Dari. On Zahrah’s travels there are encounters with giant scorpions, psychic baboons, and a city of gorillas, as well as the small-mindedness of Zahrah’s native town to contend with.
There’s been a lot of praise for both the Afrocentric sci-fi setting Okorafor has imagined, and for Zahrah herself as a strong, yet vulnerable and credible, heroine. However, what I really loved about this novel was its focus on the importance, and future of, the book.
The charming, rebellious Dari whom Zahrah must save is a hero precisely because of his bookishness. Dari may not be up to the jungle quest which Zahrah undertakes, but his thirst for knowledge, driven by reading, helps to upset the stagnant and self-satisfied society which Zahrah challenges.
An erratically functioning ‘digi-book’, The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, plays a vital part in Zahrah’s journey. Her relationship to this frustrating, inspiring piece of technology makes neat comment on the various brands of e-book reader, at once incredibly useful and unbelievably irritating. Every time she tries to access its pages for advice on a particularly fearsome beast, the otherwise indispensable guide can be counted on to malfunction.
The literary lineage of this chatty, occasionally useful device is hinted at by another reference, made in the novel by a talking frog which Zahrah encounters:
‘“Like every other human explorer I’ve met, you want to know the meaning of life […] The answer is forty-four. That machine was off by two,” the frog snapped.’
Which is up there with Doctor Who’s dressing gown as the neatest Hitchhiker’s reference you will see this decade!
Zahrah the Windseeker isn’t as jokey as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but somehow Okorafor has seen straight to the heart of the Hitchhiker’s series and the sense of wonder that permeates it.
She also makes a neat swipe at the current vogue for ‘adding value’ to books with interviews, extraneous material and reading-group prompts when Zahrah mentions her favourite novel:
‘I’d read it four times. But not once did I read the rambling thoughts of the author – on how to cook the perfect holiday fowl – that came stored in the digi-book along with the story. Of course, as I read the book, every ten pages a little window would pop up on the bottom, saying “Hey, why don’t you read a bit about my thoughts on glazed bush fowl? As you can see, I write brilliantly. I cook even better!’
You can find out more about Nnedi Okorafor at her website, The Wahala Zone, here.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 