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| Me in third or fourth grade. That's actually a passport photo from my report card |
I
remember growing up as a child and learning to read and
write – ha! ha! That’s a laugh – I couldn’t read worth a darn
until fourth grade. But I could write and it was a
thrill to know there was no law against that.
The
first big vocabulary I taught myself to spell (it’s never quite
escaped my memory, you know) was the word: Because. Go
ahead and laugh your head off if you have to but back then in third
grade, Because was a whole mouthful for me. I can
recall sitting in the middle of the classroom, inside one of those makeshift
school buildings called Jakande Blocks; the then governor of Lagos state, Mr. Jakande had set off building of low-cost
classrooms at the onset of the Free Education
Program. I was staring at the chalkboard and wondering for the
life of me if ever I was going to master the English
language with so many vocabularies to
memorize.
Things
and places have souls. I think I can attest to that fact being one weaned by
the navel of the soul. Childhood dreams which, by and large shape our adult
lives are one of these things with souls.
I
hydroplaned through first to third grades having my examination and test papers
read to me by my class teachers. Was that fair? It wasn’t a special privilege, if
that’s the question on your lips; there were several other pupils as dumb as I
was, and a few were royally bird-brained. At least my teachers didn’t have to
feed me the answers. Give me that much credit.
You
see, I was a smart kid trapped behind the language
barrier. The last time I checked even diplomats were
not beyond the ugly beast. Why else would they hire the service of an
interpreter?
My
life has always been a drive to decipher the mystery of language, to interpret
its nuances, the tone and mood of sentences, and the rhythm of words. It seems
to me that my entire life is hooked on the poetry of language.
And
here’s the reason, I think, that ties it all together and gives my thirst
wholeness of purpose: as a child, I copied sentences from books and the
dictionary–my family owned this early hardcover edition of The Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (Of or in,
I can’t remember which though; I think one was replaced with the other by the
publishers in subsequent editions.)
“What do you think you’re doing,
Eneh? You know you can’t read!”
I
do remember my brothers teasing me. Often, if I could afford the luxury of
altercation, I gave my enthusiastic reply:
“Yeah, but someday I’ll be able to
and then, I’ll return to these pages and figure out for myself what exactly I
was up to all that time!”
I
think that fixed them though, I don’t think they meant any harm. I suppose they
were just curious.
Many
waters have passed under the bridge since that bout of analphabetism was
broken. The force of the realization was as audible as cymbals clapped really
close to one’s ears. I’ve devoured books spanning literally every subject under
the sun since my childhood years.
It
appears to me that my fascination with books and language thus far has been in
defiance of the humiliation I endured growing up preliterate; I feel renewed
like a leaf going its metamorphic rounds each time I read or write. It’s like a
message from that kid copying notes he couldn’t read:
“I guess I figured it out for
myself, after all!”
Keep
your pens bleeding.
Akpan
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