(by Napoleon Ato KITTOE)
The Pain of Book Gestation
Book gestation is the closest to childbirth pains. The biological process takes nine months, but expression of facts and experience could take nearly a lifetime. A 19th-century English poet, Christina Rossetti puts it as: _”Next to the pain of childbirth, the pain of writing a book is the worst.”_ She compared mental and emotional labour to physical labour. Rossetti arrived at this conclusion after the grind on her heavy book _Goblin Market_ – long hours of writing, self-doubt, rewritings. When babies are born, mothers heal in three months. When books are written, authors heal in three years. Do you see the difference? Yet the sages place writing next to labour in women. There is no pain relief writing under the pressure of journalism, or even leisurely towards a voluminous book. In the womb of words is where stories grow before readers see them.
Literature Turns Blood Into Ink
Norman Mailer put it blunt: _”The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”_ He also warned: _”If a nation loses its best storytellers, it loses its childhood.”_
Childhood is not nine months. It’s birth to preteens – years of formation, scars, and memory. Childcare is hellish, which is why delinquency has haunted us for ages.
Losing childhood, Mailer indicates, means losing the archive. It is books that retrieve mankind’s experience from the historical depths since life’s evolution. Comparing the excavation work of books to mining for minerals? The latter is child’s play.
Books: Plane, Train, and Paradise
Russian-American Isaac Asimov loved books. He authored 500 of them. His statement: _”Any book worth banning is a book worth reading”_ tells a lot about books as having the potency to go to the deeper reaches with little or no assistance – just research, intuition, and plain experience. Mailer dovetails this: _”A good book is one that opens the world of new possibilities to the reader.”_ A book is a device that takes you to the ends of the world without moving your feet. Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges imagines heaven in book libraries: _”I have always imagined paradise in libraries.”_ Anna Quindlen of the USA adds: _”Books are the plane, and the train, and the journey. They are the destination and the journey.”_
Books as Medicine for the Mind
Books are stress killers. Mental health experts say six minutes of reading drops stress by 68 percent. It shifts your brain from fight mode to story mode. Reading calms high blood pressure, depression, and anxiety. Regular readers have 32% decline in cognitive malfunction. In short, books are a boon to health. This writer once sat in Accra reading a vivid account in one of Robert Greene’s books and appeared physically in Brazil’s Amazon Forest. The description was so graphic I could palpably feel the images there.
The Forest as School of Mastery
For Greene, forests represent complexity, uncertainty, danger, but also opportunity. _”The path to mastery is like walking through a dark forest”_ – inspirational for those straining to have their paths paved to the top. _”The novice walks through the forest and sees wood. The master walks through and sees time. Each ring in a tree is years of war and peace. Each mushroom equals death feeding new life. Each insect is a system at work. The forest is a school if you know how to read it.”_
Shakespeare: Weaponizing Language
Metaphors and euphemisms are part of the raft of language devices writers employ. William Shakespeare was best at it. He birthed many aspects of English by creating his own words. He weaponized language. He didn’t say life is hard. Rather, he said: _“The world is a stage and people in it mere players.”_ He thought aloud in soliloquies, using characters to debate themselves. Shakespeare entertained everybody by mixing the high and the low: _“Kings speak poetry and gravediggers speak slang.”_ That’s the recipe for guffaw, and his works remain relevant since his death on April 23, 1616. Shakespeare described death as _“To die, is to sleep”_ and Greene would say _“He died in his forest.”_
Books Train Readers Like Teachers Don’t
Books train readers. Punctuation is the breathing coach. Every comma, full stop, semicolon is a lesson. Full stops give a punch to sentences, and the absence of commas injects urgency to speeches. Books, however, don’t correct readers like a teacher does. Books train by exposure. A teacher exposes us to knowledge and corrects mistakes. That’s why the beauty in writing is in variety. Some take the short, brutal punch style. Some write on without a break to flood you. Long sentences teach us how to link many ideas with semicolons and dashes.
The Power of Books and Big Men
Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary, said Jim Rohn. Cicero was blunt: _“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”_ Nelson Mandela: _“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”_ But there is an angle for each society – given by Chinua Achebe: _“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”_ Africa’s sense of awareness grounded in Pan Africanism is cemented by Achebe’s thoughts.
Chinua died in Boston on March 21, 2013. In June that year, there was a full celebration of his life in Washington DC, where letters read on behalf of US President Barack Obama and Michelle described Chinua as _“A revolutionary author, educator, and cultural ambassador.”_ In September, Ghana’s Leader John Dramani Mahama joined Chinua’s wife and other academic luminaries in Bard College near Hudson Valley, New York to celebrate him. I was there, and loved it.
Lest I forgot: Ghana’s first president, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah was a “big man” for writing books – nearly a dozen – to change mindsets and society. If the effect of your spoken words or books performs the same role, you are a big man. At this point I sing the same tune as German scientist Albert Einstein, whose notions on profundity had nothing to do with money but knowledge. Italy’s Galileo Galilei, one of the fathers of modern science, would conclude: _“A journalist may be seen as anything between a bartender and the madam of a whorehouse, but they know the world is spherical.”_
Books Are War Machines
Books are the bombs of the mind. They are war machines. They hit harder than gunpowder. Books have caused wars, revolutions, and collapse of empires. The books about British civilizing mission justified the colonization empire. Chinua Achebe’s _Things Fall Apart_ and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s _Decolonising the Mind_ fired back. That was a war of narratives for Africa’s soul.
Abraham Lincoln allegedly met Stowe and said: _“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”_ It sold 300,000 copies in year one. It turned slavery from “politics” into “moral crisis” for Northern readers. The US Civil War 1861-1865 followed. That was the power of the book called _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ by Harriet Beecher Stowe, outdoored in 1852.
The book _Mein Kampf_ – 1925, written in prison by Adolf Hitler – laid out Nazi ideology, anti-Semitism, and plans for expansion. It was not the only cause of World War II, but it trained nine million German minds to see war as destiny. Books talking.
Sour e: TNP NEWS
