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Doris Lessing: On not winning the Nobel Prize
Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2007
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I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told
there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred
remains of fires where, in '56, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all
now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe in the early eighties, and I am visiting a friend who was a
teacher in a school in London. He is here "to help Africa," as we put it. He is a gently
idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from
which it was hard to recover. This school is like every other built after Independence. It
consists of four large brick rooms side by side, put straight into the dust, one two three
four, with a half room at one end, which is the library. In these classrooms are
blackboards, but my friend keeps the chalks in his pocket, as otherwise they would be
stolen. There is no atlas or globe in the school, no textbooks, no exercise books, or
biros. In the library there are no books of the kind the pupils would like to read, but only
tomes from American universities, hard even to lift, rejects from white libraries, or
novels with titles like Weekend in Paris and Felicity Finds Love.
There is a goat trying to find sustenance in some aged grass. The headmaster has
embezzled the school funds and is suspended, arousing the question familiar to all of us
but usually in more august contexts: How is it these people behave like this when they
must know everyone is watching them?
My friend doesn't have any money because everyone, pupils and teachers, borrow from
him when he is paid and will probably never pay him back. The pupils range from six to
twenty-six, because some who did not get schooling as children are here to make it up.
Some pupils walk many miles every morning, rain or shine and across rivers. They
cannot do homework because there is no electricity in the villages, and you can't study
easily by the light of a burning log. The girls have to fetch water and cook before they
set off for school and when they get back.
As I sit with my friend in his room, people drop in shyly, and everyone begs for books.
"Please send us books when you get back to London," one man says. "They taught us to
read but we have no books." Everybody I met, everyone, begged for books.
I was there some days. The dust blew. The pumps had broken and the women were
having to fetch water from the river. Another idealistic teacher from England was rather
ill after seeing what this "school" was like.
On the last day they slaughtered the goat. They cut it into bits and cooked it in a great
tin. This was the much anticipated end-of-term feast: boiled goat and porridge. I drove
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away while it was still going on, back through the charred remains and stumps of the
forest.
I do not think many of the pupils of this school will get prizes.
The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school, whose
name we all know. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens.
These children here have a visit from some well known person every week, and it is in
the nature of things that these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils. A
visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.
As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind,
and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about
what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an
atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books
to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves. I tell these
English boys how everybody begs for books: "Please send us books." I am sure that
anyone who has ever given a speech will know that moment when the faces you are
looking at are blank. Your listeners cannot hear what you are saying, there are no
images in their minds to match what you are telling them – in this case the story of a
school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end of term treat is a
just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.
Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?
I do my best. They are polite.
I'm sure that some of them will one day win prizes.
Then, the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils
read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and
even universities.
"You know how it is," one of the teacher's says. "A lot of the boys have never read at
all, and the library is only half used."
Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are
questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of
education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some
speciality or other, for instance, computers.
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What has happened to us is an amazing invention -- computers and the internet and TV.
It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The
printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took
much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted
it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this
invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our
way of thinking, be changed by this internet, which has seduced a whole generation
with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are
hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our
great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us,
people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that
working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of
working men's libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.
Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education
reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it
is because they have not read.
We all know this sad story.
But we do not know the end of it.
We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" - and forgetting about jokes to
do with over-eating - reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history,
of all kinds of knowledge.
But we in the West are not the only people in the world. Not long ago a friend who had
been in Zimbabwe told me about a village where people had not eaten for three days,
but they were still talking about books and how to get them, about education.
I belong to an organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the
villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled
Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They told me that the villages, unlike what is reported, are
full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old
people. I myself paid for a little survey to discover what people in Zimbabwe want to
read, and found the results were the same as those of a Swedish survey I had not known
about. People want to read the same kinds of books that we in
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Europe want to read - novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective stories,
plays, and do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account. All of Shakespeare
too. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is
available, so a set book, like the Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular simply
because it just happens to be there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons, is the most
popular of all novels.
Our organisation was helped from the very start by Norway, and then by Sweden.
Without this kind of support our supplies of books would have dried up. We got books
from wherever we could. Remember, a good paperback from England costs a month's
wages in Zimbabwe: that was before Mugabe's reign of terror. Now with inflation, it
would cost several years' wages. But having taken a box of books out to a village - and
remember there is a terrible shortage of petrol - I can tell you that the box was greeted
with tears. The library may be a plank on bricks under a tree. And within a week there
will be literacy classes - people who can read teaching those who can't, citizenship
classes - and in one remote village, since there were no novels written in the language
Tonga, a couple of lads sat down to write novels in Tonga. There are six or so main
languages in Zimbabwe and there are novels in all of them: violent, incestuous, full of
crime and murder.
It is said that a people gets the government it deserves, but I do not think it is true of
Zimbabwe. And we must remember that this respect and hunger for books comes, not
from Mugabe's regime, but from the one before it, the whites. It is an astonishing
phenomenon, this hunger for books, and it can be seen everywhere from Kenya down to
the Cape of Good Hope.
This links improbably with a fact: I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut,
thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere there are reeds or grass,
suitable mud, poles for walls. Saxon England for example. The one I was brought up in
had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents
take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England
for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of
my young life. A mud hut, but full of books.
Even today I get letters from people living in a village that might not have electricity or
running water, just like our family in our elongated mud hut. "I shall be a writer too,"
they say, "because I've the same kind of house you lived in."
But here is the difficulty, no?
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Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
There is the gap. There is the difficulty.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the
magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the
air, he was connected with the great tradition.
Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of
his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would
visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.
Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the
tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one
of his classes, taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind.
In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with
libraries, books, with the Tradition.
I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a Black writer. He taught himself to read from the
labels on jam jars, the labels on preserved fruit cans. He was brought up in an area I
have driven through, an area for rural blacks. The earth is grit and gravel, there are low
sparse bushes. The huts are poor, nothing like the well cared-for huts of the better off. A
school - but like one I have described. He found a discarded children's encyclopaedia on
a rubbish heap and taught himself from that.
On Independence in 1980 there was a group of good writers in Zimbabwe, truly a nest
of singing birds. They were bred in old Southern Rhodesia, under the whites - the
mission schools, the better schools. Writers are not made in Zimbabwe. Not easily, not
under Mugabe.
All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I
would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded
encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for
standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked
mother, a fight for food and clothing.
Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember
that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandparents
of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two
generations there was the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to
books. What an achievement.
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Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world.
But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several
accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places
like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of
possibilities.
Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the
publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of
talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a
publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking.
Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a wordprocessor? an electric
typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space,
that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is
like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters
will speak, ideas - inspiration.
If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.
When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative
space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"
Let us now jump to an apparently very different scene. We are in London, one of the big
cities. There is a new writer. We cynically enquire, Is she good-looking? If this is a
man, charismatic? Handsome? We joke but it is not a joke.
This new find is acclaimed, possibly given a lot of money. The buzzing of paparazzi
begins in their poor ears. They are feted, lauded, whisked about the world. Us old ones,
who have seen it all, are sorry for this neophyte, who has no idea of what is really
happening.
He, she, is flattered, pleased.
But ask in a year's time what he or she is thinking – I've heard them: "This is the worst
thing that could have happened to me," they say.
Some much publicised new writers haven't written again, or haven't written what they
wanted to, meant to.
And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your
space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to
you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go."
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My mind is full of splendid memories of Africa which I can revive and look at
whenever I want. How about those sunsets, gold and purple and orange, spreading
across the sky at evening. How about butterflies and moths and bees on the aromatic
bushes of the Kalahari? Or, sitting on the pale grassy banks of the Zambesi, the water
dark and glossy, with all the birds of Africa darting about. Yes, elephants, giraffes, lions
and the rest, there were plenty of those, but how about the sky at night, still unpolluted,
black and wonderful, full of restless stars.
There are other memories too. A young African man, eighteen perhaps, in tears,
standing in what he hopes will be his "library." A visiting American seeing that his
library had no books, had sent a crate of them. The young man had taken each one out,
reverently, and wrapped them in plastic. "But," we say, "these books were sent to be
read, surely?" "No," he replies, "they will get dirty, and where will I get any more?"
This young man wants us to send him books from England to use as teaching guides.
"I only did four years in senior school," he says, "but they never taught me to teach."
I have seen a teacher in a school where there were no textbooks, not even a chalk for the
blackboard. He taught his class of six to eighteen year olds by moving stones in the
dust, chanting "Two times two is ..." and so on. I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than
twenty, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros, seen her teach the A B C by
scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust
swirled.
We are witnessing here that great hunger for education in Africa, anywhere in the Third
World, or whatever we call parts of the world where parents long to get an education for
their children which will take them out of poverty.
I would like you to imagine yourselves somewhere in Southern Africa, standing in an
Indian store, in a poor area, in a time of bad drought. There is a line of people, mostly
women, with every kind of container for water. This store gets a bowser of precious
water every afternoon from the town, and here the people wait.
The Indian is standing with the heels of his hands pressed down on the counter, and he
is watching a black woman, who is bending over a wadge of paper that looks as if it has
been torn from a book. She is reading Anna Karenin.
She is reading slowly, mouthing the words. It looks a difficult book. This is a young
woman with two little children clutching at her legs. She is pregnant. The Indian is
distressed, because the young woman's headscarf, which should be white, is yellow with
dust. Dust lies between her breasts and on her arms. This man is distressed because of
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the lines of people, all thirsty. He doesn't have enough water for them. He is angry
because he knows there are people dying out there, beyond the dust clouds. His older
brother had been here holding the fort, but he had said he needed a break, had gone into
town, really rather ill, because of the drought.
This man is curious. He says to the young woman, "What are you reading?"
"It is about Russia," says the girl.
"Do you know where Russia is?" He hardly knows himself.
The young woman looks straight at him, full of dignity, though her eyes are red from
dust, "I was best in the class. My teacher said I was best."
The young woman resumes her reading. She wants to get to the end of the paragraph.
The Indian looks at the two little children and reaches for some Fanta, but the mother
says, "Fanta makes them thirstier."
The Indian knows he shouldn't do this but he reaches down to a great plastic container
beside him, behind the counter, and pours out two mugs of water, which he hands to the
children. He watches while the girl looks at her children drinking, her mouth moving.
He gives her a mug of water. It hurts him to see her drinking it, so painfully thirsty is
she.
Now she hands him her own plastic water container, which he fills. The young woman
and the children watch him closely so that he doesn't spill any.
She is bending again over the book. She reads slowly. The paragraph fascinates her and
she reads it again.
"Varenka, with her w