Learning to Love Ireland (4 page)

Like everyone else on the ECDL course, I'd applied for a job at the new Dunnes Store to open shortly at the Gorey Shopping Centre. Like everyone else, I'd been interviewed. And like most of the others, I hadn't heard a word since the interview. Elizabeth, one of the exceptions, had been offered a job and was being trained in Arklow.

I was also helping Larry edit
Once an African.
This was not an easy job, as we frequently argued about my suggestions and alterations.

‘You have just eliminated the most important section of my chapter,' he'd say through gritted teeth. ‘What are you trying to do? Make it into some bland, grammatically correct essay?'

We'd both read Stephen King's book
On Writing.
He comments: ‘the road to hell is paved with adverbs'. I went back through my most recent draft of
It's a Little Inconvenient,
the book I was writing about the situation in Zimbabwe, and scoured my manuscript for pointless adverbs. There were plenty. He also talks about ‘shooting the attribution verb full of steroids' – one should use ‘said' instead of ‘gasped', ‘shouted' or ‘grated'.

Another wise imperative is: ‘kill your little darlings...even when it breaks your...heart'. You write something that you are sure is really clever. Absolutely brilliant, in fact. Yet, somehow, there is a sense of dissonance. You re-read it several times, resolving to be brutally honest. Finally, you're forced to admit that it isn't brilliant or subtle. Like an anal retentive, you long to hang onto it, because you think it's clever. But it's a pretentious ‘little darling' that has to be jettisoned. So you hit ‘delete'. It hurts, but – yes – it was there for effect.

I'd thought that South Africa was the obvious market to target, in view of its close relationship with Zimbabwe, but none of the South African publishers I'd approached had shown any interest, so I needed to start looking elsewhere.

The Zimbabwean crisis was having an adverse effect on South Africans at every level.

Although estimates varied, it was generally thought that up to three million black Zimbabweans had escaped to South Africa as foreign migrants and asylum seekers, swelling the number of people from other parts of Africa fleeing conflict in their own countries. Every week thousands more attempted to cross the border into South Africa illegally. Some died while trying to swim across the crocodile-infested Limpopo River. Others fell prey to robbers and thugs lying in wait on the other side of the 12ft high electric fence topped with razor wire. Those caught by the South African authorities were placed in a detention centre and then deported. Invariably, they tried again. It was better than failing to support a starving family.

Desperate Zimbabweans were prepared to work for lower wages. The local people whose jobs they'd ‘stolen' became hostile, triggering violent xenophobic attacks on immigrant workers and asylum seekers. In 2008 a riot broke out in the township of Alexandra (in the north-eastern part of Johannesburg) and spread to migrant settlements in other parts of the country. Sixty people died and thousands were displaced.

Yet South African President Thabo Mbeki refused to acknowledge that Mugabe and his regime were guilty of human rights abuses or that Zimbabwe's political and economic crisis required an urgent resolution. He merely conceded that the problem was ‘something we have to live with' and continued with his ineffectual ‘softly, softly' approach.

The Zimbabwean crisis was having an adverse effect on South Africans at every level.

I decided to postpone submitting my book to agents and publishers in Ireland and the UK until I'd finished my course of talks.

‘If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.'

These were the words of Lyndon B Johnson, thirty-sixth President of the United States, as early as September 1964, when he signed the Wilderness Act.

He also said:

‘Despite all of our wealth and knowledge, we cannot create a redwood forest, a wild river, or a gleaming seashore...'

President Johnson is probably remembered more for his role in escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War, for his ‘War on Poverty' and for his domineering personality, than for his eloquent defence of the environment.

What did
Brave New World, Never Let Me Go
and
Oryx and Crake
reveal about cloning? What did Morrie Schwartz tell us about how to live and die? Or Christopher Reeve and Stephen Hawking teach us about courage? Had Daisy and Gatsby distorted and diminished the American Dream through being grossly careless and irresponsible?

Novels, poetry, plays and short stories often had more impact than factual accounts and predictions in the media, didn't they? Ralph, Jack and Piggy; Napoleon and Boxer; Winston and Julia; Daisy, Tom and Gatsby were as real to us as raging fires in California or an earthquake in Japan. Weren't they?

I didn't sleep much the night before my first lecture.

I arrived at the bus stop two or three minutes early. The bus was already there. But, as I was about to get on board, the door closed in my face with a rush of air. I hammered on it frantically. Much to my relief it opened, but an angry, red face glared down at me.

‘Who d'ye think y'are, banging on my bus like that?'

If I'd been less nervous, I'd have been reminded of the Three Billy Goats Gruff.

But I was pathetically, cringingly grateful to be on my way to Enniscorthy.

‘I'm so sorry,' I grovelled.

Ugh.

The Enniscorthy reading group was interested, enthusiastic and patient. I had trouble pronouncing such names such as ‘Niamh', ‘Áine' and ‘Aoife'. I discovered that Enniscorthy accents were different from Gorey accents, even though the towns were close to one another. They were curious to hear about a tyrannical dictator's effect on a country and its people. How could Robert Mugabe have been allowed to get away with so much for so long?

During the second lecture, we discussed Ray Bradbury's story, ‘A Sound of Thunder'.

A group of time-travellers returns to the present after a visit to the Mesozoic Age. Not everything has gone according to plan, however. One of the hunters strayed from the path and trod on a butterfly. As they emerge from the time machine, they find that the present is, somehow, slightly out of kilter:

‘The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not sit behind quite the same desk... Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear...'

They learn, to their horror, that the result of the recent presidential election is different. Deutscher, ‘an iron man', ‘a man with guts' has won.

The death of an ancient butterfly has changed the course of history.

Perhaps some minute blip in the eco-system 65 million years ago influenced the result of the US presidential election in 2000. Many Americans still believe that Al Gore was the legitimate winner of that extraordinarily close contest, not George W Bush. If the US Supreme Court had not ruled in favour of Bush, would there have been a 9/11? Would there have been a war in Iraq? Might we be closer to a settlement in the Middle East?

Ruthven Todd in his poem ‘It Was Easier' shows how we prefer to ‘avoid all thought' of unpleasant reality. The ‘shaped grey rocks' are more easily imagined as ‘pleasant water colour for an academic wall' than as ‘cover for the stoat-eyed snipers'.

It is always easier to do nothing.

We considered
Lord of the Flies.
What might have happened if a group of girls rather than boys had found themselves on an uninhabited island? Did women have the same ‘darkness of heart' as men? Did they have the same latent tendency to give way to their primitive instincts when society's balances and checks were removed?

The general consensus was ‘yes'.

In
The Road
the child is appalled by the discovery of a cellar in which living people are being stored for food. Later, he and his father come upon a smouldering fire and see ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit...'

Was cannibalism ever defensible? We reflected on the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in 1972. Piers Paul Read's
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
has been described as ‘a classic in the literature of survival'. One of the survivors, Nando Parrado, had also written an account –
Miracle in the Andes –
chronicling the dilemma he and his friends had faced.

I'd found a fascinating book by the historian, Hywel Williams, entitled
Days That Changed the World.
Williams selects 50 defining events starting with the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC when the Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet. Event 49 is Nelson Mandela's release from prison and Event 50 is 9/11.

His book provided a valuable springboard for debate.

We discussed the theme of betrayal in several of the texts, with particular reference to Orwell's
1984.

Incarcerated in a cell in the Ministry of Love, Winston is brutally tortured by O'Brien. Often, the pain is so bad that he loses consciousness. On one of these occasions, he recovers to find himself sitting up, with O'Brien's arm supporting him.

‘For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it...'

In February 1974, Patty Hearst (a wealthy young heiress whose family owned the Hearst media empire) had been kidnapped by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of armed radicals. She was blindfolded, imprisoned in a closet for two months, raped and subjected to death threats. On 3 April she announced that she had joined the SLA, assuming the name ‘Tania'. On 15 April she participated in a bank robbery. When she and her companions were captured eighteen months later, she declared herself to be an ‘urban guerrilla'.

Patty Hearst was regarded by many as a victim of Stockholm Syndrome – a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, where the hostage shows loyalty to a powerful abuser. In 1973 a bank robbery had taken place in Stockholm, Sweden, during which the bank robbers had held bank employees hostage for six days. The victims had become emotionally attached to their victimisers and had even defended them after they were freed from their ordeal.

If the definition of ‘betrayal' is ‘the act of violating a trust', was Winston false to his lover, Julia? Was Patty demonstrating treachery and duplicity, or was she doing what was necessary in order to survive?

Just in time for my final lecture, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, obligingly released The Kindle, Amazon's new electronic book reader. It was a wonderful topic for discussion, this eco-friendly device that would, as one commentator remarked, ‘change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish'.

The Kindle would be able to hold 200 books at a time and hundreds more on a memory card, eliminating the need to carry around heavy loads of books. The font size could be changed, converting every book into a large-type edition for people with poor sight. The device was perpetually connected to the Internet, enabling a reader to venture onto the Web, search using Google and follow links from blogs and other Web pages. One of the most persuasive advantages of the new technology was the fact that it would eliminate the need to chop down trees.

What about people who took ‘a fetish-like pleasure in physical books'? What about that trance-like state that readers enter into when reading for pleasure? What about ‘the rabbit hole of absorption' that books drew you into? Could an electronic device or ‘service' (as Bezos termed The Kindle) replace the magic of the book?

I concluded the course of lectures with an arresting quotation from Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip and author of business commentaries, social satires and experimental philosophy books: