What happened to all the book worms?

Book MONSTER!
material: 100% worsted
Size:10'
Stitch: Single crochet

....the book monsters ate em all! Growing up I was never really too big on books, mostly because up until I was in grade three I had trouble reading. The weird thing is that I always used to read with my mom before going to sleep as a child, but for some reason when in school the ability somehow escaped me...so I used to attend after school reading classes with my homeroom teacher. Since then I have developed a healthy appreciation for reading, I have come to the conclusion that it stems from past inability! My appreciation has manifested its self in different ways throughout the years, and reading has developed beyond an action or pass time to a deeply personalized experience.

I first started reading novels by black authors when I was in high school. It first started off with black erotica, anything from Eric Jerome Dickey to Mary, B Morrison was a must read, which is probably attributed to underlying teen sexual frustration haha! But more importantly while reading I started to realize that it was hard for me to imagine black characters in novels, and to this day it honestly still proves to be a challenge for me. I thought "oh gosh, has my mind been white washed?" This was really a troubling thought for me, so I started to look for books that distinctly addressed historical events pertaining to the black diaspora. Books like, Roots By Alex Haley, The Book of Negros By Lawrence Hill and so on. While this proved to be helpful, I hated the idea of black populations not being represented beyond traumatic events of displacement, and mostly I did not relate to these stories because my experience of 'blackness' is fragmented between being a racial minority and being of East African decent.

While searching for 'new' types of stories, to my surprise (not really) the only ones I could find in school/public libraries & book stores were stories about slavery,  war/political/civil unrest, travel guides or half-assed romanticized Eurocentric novels about African countries. Never stories of the Africa (I am using this term loosely) I have known, lived and understood. I also started to wonder why novels by African authors outside of those themes are so inaccessible. A lot of novels available on African countries tend to speak to non-African understandings of those countries experiences, so stories of love, families and everyday life outside of trauma, poverty and despotism seldom matter or exist in the conscience of the reader, or more frequently, the idea that these themes can not exist seperately. In the search for new literature my eyes were forced open to ideas and questions that extend beyond the books themselves.

I only recently started to think critically about the novels I had been forced to read throughout primary and secondary school. What obligation or responsibility does a white author have to represent bodies of colour? Should schools be forced to teach black diasporic history beyond slavery? What implications/ repercussions does ignoring contemporary African history have on the black diaspora? How has the absence/under representation of bodies of colour in government school curriculum, and mainstream media affected how and where people of colour place themselves within these exclusive and selective outlets, and how does this effect the way we navigate ourselves through everyday life? While all these questions require larger discussions and subsequently greater actions, my first step is to change the limitations my socialized imagination by inserting characters of colour into contemporary western stories that I read to challenge normalized ideas of white bodies as a neutral or default characters, and secondly to continue reading novels by various African authors past and present.

Books by various African authors

My favourite novels by African authors:
1. Ambiguous Adventure - Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Senegal)
2. Tsotsi - Athol Fugard (South Africa)
3. Tales Told by the Son of Kenya - Aggrey Chepkwony Sambay (Kenya) 
4. Going Down River Road - Meja Mwangi (Kenya)
5. A Grain of Wheat - Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Kenya)
6. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
7. On To Kilimanjaro - Brain Gardner (this book is an exception because is not by an African author, but it gives you a very clear definition between self representation, and othering )

If you're a book worm like me, don't let the book monsters take away the ability to exercise your imagination by keeping truly reflective stories out of reach. Go out and look for a good book.

Smiles :)

Tuly Maimouna

P.S. If you are interested look up Roots (Alex Haley) vs.The African (Harold Coulter)...a really interesting back story to our friend Kunta Kente and the so called "timeless American Saga"