The NGC Bocas Lit Fest begins officially on April 26 this year, but Friday gone there was a "pre-festival" event, a reading at artist Wendy Nanan's exhibition of her work Books and Stupas. The work is a series of sculptures of giant books, and to compliment this theme, writers Barbara Jenkins, Vladimir Lucien, Anu Lakhan and I were invited to read pieces about books in an evening of art and literature. This is the piece I read. The first book I remember was a hardcover, illustrated children's story called Too Many Kittens. I loved that book. I don't remember it ever being new. I remember it scrawled upon, col-oured over, with words underlined on torn pages hanging precariously from loosened binding string. I loved that book hard and read it just the same way. Who knew where Too Many Kittens would lead? Now I love cats, and I love books more. Books are my refuge and my soul. They are my succour and my surcease. When I am sick or sad I wrap myself in a sheet and read for hours or days and eventually emerge, bleary-eyed and gasping at the world I have just re-entered. Books have taught me about the world beyond my vision and the world outside my reach, eventually teaching me that there was no world I could not envision, and no world I could not reach. Books have taught me possibility. I come from a family of readers. My father, though educated only up to primary school level, collected books and read every day.
He had shelves of books, mostly old, hardcover fiction, but also Reader's Digest condensed editions of stories and novels; encyclopaedia addenda–the set from Britannica came with volumes of children's stories from around the world–and non-fiction, mostly about war. I first learned about the possibility of nuclear winter in those bookshelves, and I read that book with the same avid interest as I read Rafe. In my mother's house–they lived apart–we had no bookshelves. Instead we kept books in boxes under the beds. My sisters, who were eight and ten years older than I, kept all their old schoolbooks there and I read everything, from a heavy tome on human and social biology, to Selvon's Ways of Sunlight, to a book of Greek and Roman myths, and Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. My mother read Mills and Boons romance novels religiously, and those were in the boxes, too. Later, my sisters brought home Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon books and I fell in love with those, too. When I had to wash wares, I would use clothespins to hang the book on the line over the kitchen sink, propping the book at the bottom on a swizzle stick and a spatula. I remember the feeling of hastily dried, still soapy fingers turning pulp pages, the awkward scramble when the book fell anyway, thump-splash! into the dishwater.?
When I was about 12, my father took me to Long Circular Mall and loosed me in the bookshop. I got three books: A House for Mr Biswas, To Kill a Mockingbird, and a book whose name I do not remember. It was about a general slogging through the mud and mosquitoes in the South American jungle to make a revolution; maybe I bought it because Daddy liked war stories and I wanted to impress him. Biswas I read and put it into the boxes of books under the bed. But To Kill a Mockingbird I must have read 20 times since then. I still have the copy Daddy bought me. It is crumbling and fragile and musty; but if you crack it open you still see my name and address written in gold marker in my 12-year-old hand on the title page. It is a piece of me. In a world where this cultural artefact we call a book is an endangered object, we consider new possibilities of what it means to read and be a reader. We see a world where that dog-eared, frayed, falling-apart copy of Too Many Kittens cannot exist –do children nowadays colour on their Kindles? Do they chew the covers of their iPads?–and I can't help but feel a little sad. One day I'll show my grandchild what a book used to look like. "Really, Grammy?" And you'd hold it in your hand and turn the pages with your fingers? How strange is that!" The monks must have cried after Gutenberg, too. Books and Stupas closes April 24 at the Medulla Gallery, 37 Fitt Street, Woodbrook.