Reading could a be pillar against lurking depression

Because reading is a personal encounter between one individual and another. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • There are stories that are similar to this bizarre case of Covid-19, just as there are other stories that ‘foretell’ other doomsday scenarios.
  • For those who can’t afford to buy new books, start with what you have — recheck the bookshelves and you will find that book you had bought but never read.

These are desperate times. Days, weeks, and months are turning into an endless cycle of waiting.

For what? For the unknown. Yet the human mind is always afraid of the unknown. Human beings don’t really like surprises — even the romantic dinner or happy birthday types of surprises.

Human beings like predictability. Very few people would wake up in the morning and stay the whole day without following a routine.

In other words, our lives are very much ritualised. And one of the most important of human rituals is to speak to others — to tell stories; to gossip; to exchange rumours; to enquire about this and that.

Yet Covid-19 has created official ‘social distance’ between people. It has induced the fear of the unknown even between individuals who know each other very well.

STORY CREATION

Masks to cover the mouth and nose have always been items of camouflage or specialised use, as in hospitals.

Popular culture had designated the covering of the face as a ritual for a Muslim woman, a doctor/nurse, or a thief.

Now, Covid-19 has normalised the separation of the individual from the most identifiable features of the human — the face.

The one significant consequences of this bio-politics (covering one’s face and social distancing, although purportedly medical/health issues are now politicised through the law) is that social spaces, too — pubs, salons, markets, sports grounds, gyms — are closed, thus separating people and cutting off the everyday conversation.

Stories can still be told, but largely through the medium of technology. Yet stories need to be made up, if they are to be told.

For stories to be created, writers/authors/storytellers, need to meet others. They need to hear (eavesdrop) conversations. They need to smell, touch, taste, hear whatever senses are in their environment.

But in many parts of the world, such is not happening. However, there are millions of books that human beings have written/published since the invention of writing and publishing.

The printing press and its product, the book, are celebrated as probably the most revolutionary of human inventions ever.

Yet the book is just a medium for the human story that the manuscript carries. Consider that the biblical story had been around for several centuries but only accessible to a few people until the printing press and translation made it available to millions all over the world.

PICK A BOOK

The transition from the orality of a few priests who had read the Bible but could only retell the story to the personal encounter by the reading public recreated not just religion but humanity itself. How?

Because reading is a personal encounter between one individual and another — just that the reader need not even know the writer personally.

Millions of people today cite Shakespeare, or Achebe, or Dostoevsky, or Ngugi, having only read their books.

They will never meet them, never even know their full names, never know where they came from or lived, who they lived with, what career other than writing they worked in, et cetera.

But the book makes it possible to meet all these individual storytellers, across ages, races, regions, religions, social classes, convictions, languages, et cetera.

These times, when the unknown lurks, it will surprise one to find that history has recorded such phenomenon from the past, but that creative writers have imagined them in the future.

There are stories that are similar to this bizarre case of Covid-19, just as there are other stories that ‘foretell’ other doomsday scenarios.

Writers always dream up these situations. Still, the same writers always offer a glimpse into how human beings can overcome or outlive or bear such tragedies.

ANTIDOTE

In other words, fictive stories, or even hard science writing, always suggest that human beings may not reach utopia but will not be overwhelmed by dystopia, such as threatens humanity now.

These are the times to read any book you can lay your hands on. Imagine yourself as a prisoner — which we really are right now — in solitary confinement, without any luxury but a few books in the cell, and jailed indefinitely.

Would you choose what to read? I doubt. Some newspapers, websites and even publishers have been offering readers their choices of books with which to weather this storm.

But this is largely for those who can afford to order books from the shops and libraries online. For those who can’t afford to buy new books, start with what you have — recheck the bookshelves and you will find that book you had bought but never read.

Borrow your children’s schoolbooks. Take the challenge posed by your religious studies teacher years ago to read the whole Bible or Quran.

Read on economics, politics, environment, culture, music, fashion, et cetera. Read those ‘difficult’ Kiswahili stories.

Read the books in your mother tongue. Reading is an antidote to all the seeming depressing news around us.

Or, follow news to lead you to what to read. This is the time to read about the Chinese or your own country’s history or the history of epidemiology or bio-politics (how biology can be politicised) or how media works or about fake news.

AFRICANS IN CHINA

It is also the time to reread that book you read some time back but didn’t figure out what it was all about. As for me, I took time to reread Black Ghosts by Ken Kamoche. Why?

Because Kamoche had written about the likely scenario when African students go to China to study, about five years ago.

Kamoche’s novel, Black Ghosts (East African Educational Publishers, 2015), was inspired by stories of Africans who lived in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and probably remains the only novel by an African to dramatise the lives of Africans in China.

The title of the story is possibly borrowed from the pejorative reference to Africans in Mandarin or from “The Black Ghosts”, a short story by Pu Songling, published in 1740.

The story is about Chinese officials who purchase two ‘black ghosts’ (African slaves) and what happened thereafter.

Kamoche himself knows a thing or two about China, having lived and worked there from 1998 to 2007.

Why is this story worth reading now? Because just last week, complaints by some African students about racial prejudice directed against them by the Chinese appeared to be just innocuous posts on a few WhatsApp groups.

Some responses dismissed them as cries of Africans who had overstayed in China. Now it is an international news item.

African ambassadors have been forced to complain officially to the Chinese government.

Predictably, the Chinese officials have denied the accusations and have claimed that the reports are a conspiracy to spoil the good relationship between the Chinese and their ‘African brothers’.

RACISM

But this story of racism against Africans in China is not new. It has a history. It is almost inevitable that even if it were addressed today, it will reappear in the near future. Why?

Because racism is a difficult animal to tame. Yet as China becomes a big global political and economic player, it will need Africa and its people, and in return Africa will need it.

If it were only a matter of trade between China and Africa, it would be easy to manage the interaction between the two races.

But the relationship also involves students — thousands of young Africans today study at Chinese universities. They will naturally mingle with their Chinese colleagues beyond the classroom.

Such relations come with their own dynamics. Where young people are involved, it is difficult to police emotions.

Romance often happens, which could lead to cohabitation or marriage, which may produce children. For a society that still sees itself as a monoculture, racial mixing is not easily accepted.

This may be one of the undercurrents of the new racism seemingly deriving from Covid-19. Read the rest of the story of Black Ghosts and you may begin to see the drama in China differently.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi; [email protected].