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Seeing a big picture requires a lens shaped by multiple streams of information. If you live within the confines of a cave, everything you know is defined by its walls. Not so?
It follows that how you respond to events is determined by the knowledge that you have to work with. How many of us are equipped with sufficient experience and data—tools if you will—to help us negotiate our ways through an increasingly complex world that challenges us at every turn?
It’s not an idle question, not even a rhetorical one. It’s one worth exploring given the remarkable level of myopic thinking flouncing about the place. I say flouncing a bit irritably, because it seems to me that it is the main characteristic of the most unthinking and vociferous among us.
So we have access to the Internet and platforms to air our views, do we really have to be on a social media parade every couple of hours? Often, you see people posting comments on articles and columns and especially, gossip.
Political nonsense is always the first item on the agenda. It is tiresome, vitriolic and often practically illiterate venom spouting like a burst water line on the main road, flooding the place for no good reason.
It would not be unreasonable to form the opinion that we are a nation of empty vessels—loud, vituperative and close-minded. What makes a mind so closed up that it cannot be open to different ideas or new ways of seeing?
A life that has been dulled by the absence of stimuli; that flow of ideas and experiences that encourages us to think beyond the humdrum routines of the practical day-to-day getting by. The life of the cave.
I was going through some old notebooks a few days ago and I came across notes I had taken from an interview I had been listening to. (The Exacting Gift, Interviewer: Sue Ann Barratt, Subject: Jackie Hinkson, Occasion: International Men’s Day 2021.)
Two things he’d said jumped back into my head. He was talking about his art and his identity.
“I suppose I don’t think of myself as a man, really. I think of myself as an artist.”
That was the first thing, but it is the other that ought to have been my segue here; the part where he talks about how people perceive artists. He said that one of the annoying things is when people ask him: but what do you really do?
“As if being an artist is not real, is not useful. Something is only useful if you can see a tangible connection financially.”
It’s hard to explain why it seemed so important for me to invoke it at this particular point, but I suppose it led me to where I want us to go. The art that has kept Jackie lively and alive has its version for me in reading. I genuinely believe that in my fraught life, reading has been the saviour, and writing has been the salvation.
Image: Jackie Hinkson
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that without access to books, without access to other worlds and new ideas, I could never have entered the life of the mind.
True, that place has been as much sanctuary as it has been torment. Whatever the role, it has allowed me to see the world from outside the cave.
I grew up hearing mainly complaints that my head was always buried in a book (when I should be doing household chores, Lynette!). Nobody encouraged me to read or write because they were not considered financially rewarding activities.
I was fortunate to have stumbled into journalism; at least that earned some income, but that is not the case I am trying here to make. Our society suffers because of its own contempt for reading.
People scoff at readers for seeking knowledge, especially from traditional sources such as books. Using a device is their way to go. Fair enough, but it is not the medium really—it is the act of reading.
Our education system has failed us here with its focus on certification and passing exams. I was not good at exams, but I was good at reading and understanding what I read, so I could reason out what was required.
Astonishingly, the Caribbean has produced wonderful writers, full of imagination, wisdom, beautiful language and imagery, and stories that allow us to see ourselves as people worthy of immortality in our stories.
Not long ago, Raffique Shah made a list of regional books that he recommended for us. Debbie Jacob has been indefatigable in her book lists. Others have begged for regional books to be included in our school curricula.
It’s a grievous failure that this has not happened from early childhood. I believe books are still subject to taxes, unlike electric cars and guns. Reading, to be fair, is not a school activity—it is something you can learn to love anytime and anyplace.
Our National Library has been working hard to provide encouraging environments. I applaud their efforts.
But unless we as parents and educators do not see the value in teaching our children to love reading, to see it as a way to activate imaginations, and embark on adventures for the soul, we will continue to breed people who cannot make sense of their world—and who are content to spew ignorance just because they can.
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Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
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