LAST year Professor Subramani addressed an education conference at FNU’s Lautoka campus, so did Dr Reddy, Minister of Education. Both men have talked of plummeting standards of English literacy, Reddy pleading not long ago for a “culture of reading”. Linguist Paul Geraghty has also weighed in (FT November 27 & 28 2014), while Satendra Nandan’s articles regularly address the significance of literature. All have fed into something I’ve long been concerned with.
First, the dearth of children’s books and well-stocked libraries in Fiji – attractive, affordable books for young people, and well-resourced school and public libraries; not just books in English but in iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages; well-written and where appropriate well-illustrated
The reason for this famine is commercial non-viability. Hence, no publishers, or bookshops worth the name, save one at USP. What published authors there are, get published abroad, and write predominantly for adults. Their market is small. Most Fijian writers of Indian descent fall into this category. iTaukei writing — fiction or otherwise — by contrast is almost non-existent, which is tragic seeing how oral literature elsewhere has fuelled indigenous writing.
India, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean have produced a wealth of authors writing in English or translated into English. Some of their work appears regularly in our high schools and universities as prescribed texts. Yet work like this, important as it is in stretching the imagination, fails to address the need for homegrown stories where young and old alike can lose and find themselves (perhaps for the first time).
Apart from religious tracts and the odd newspaper most homes lack reading material in vernacular or English. Thus two plays in the iTaukei language, Lakovi and Na iLulu, by Apolonia Tamata and Larry Thomas, are exceptions to the English-only rule, and will soon be used in high schools.
So, is it too late to turn to oral literature to help reignite youth’s interest in reading books written in their own or other peoples’ language? And are schools and universities sufficiently promoting oral and written literatures in ways that could counter the seemingly inexorable decline of iTaukei and Fiji Hindi and improving English literacy, as Dr Geraghty believes they can?
Further, do schools sufficiently stimulate student to invent stories, poems, songs and plays in the vernaculars or English, with a view to committing them later to paper or performance? Or in the well-intended rush to lift the quality of education, do stressed-out teachers have time, talent, or motivation to do so?
The Kula Film Awards and dance competition for young people are a major step in the right direction. So perhaps are USP’s “poetry slams” and high school newspapers. But they aren’t enough.
The return to public examinations in primary schools and abolition of “scaling”, however laudable, is squeezing rounded-education flat. Dedicated classes in physical education, music, art and craft (PEMAC) have been devalued. Extra-curricula activities like scouting, girl guides, and Red Cross are there in name but not in practice.
To higher ground
A conspicuous absence of Fijian girls of Indian descent in sport, and a musical education lacuna, deprive children respectively of exercise and a “path to higher ground”. The number orientation should not quash youth’s physical, social, and spirit sides.
Storytelling is central to literacy and takes different forms; spoken, recited, painted, acted, drawn, and sung. Done properly in one or other way, exploring family memories and life-stories, probing myths and beliefs, and speaking of experience, entails more than mere recording (though there is value in that too), it stimulates curiosity, questioning, energises conversation, and hones narrative and listening skills.
Managed well, storytelling boosts a child’s self-confidence, ability to step into another’s shoes, and may be an outlet for anxiety. The Beatles’ Paul McCartney said, song writing “is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your own thoughts through. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person”. You could say, and not just song writing.
More emphasis on the pupil’s voice might also counteract the out-dated practice of copying notes from blackboards. Mute learning would give way to more student questions, lateral thinking, and teacher explanation. Schools should also shift from time-honoured oratory to debating.
Debate and oratory
Debate is democratic and foundational, oratory is performance and aesthetic. Good debaters make good leaders and reasoned followers — with this caveat.
iTaukei oratory is an art form learnt and perfected in villages and schools because of ceremonial significance. When adapted it also lends itself to religious preaching. Either way, for the speaker, it is a legitimate and respected mode of speech that contrasts with conventional group reticence. At its best it is eloquent and moving: the star-turn in a dramatic tableau.
Fiji Hindi oratory is less rooted in social action. Like iTaukei oratory it is usually formulaic, scripted, yet open to the performer’s embellishment. However it turns up predominantly in school contests or as (to somewhat stretch the case) entertainment in rural community song-duels where the function is different from iTaukei oratory whose functions is to unify groups who initially face-up as “different”. Fiji Hindi oratory of the sort I’ve just mentioned, at least, begins and ends with “difference”, and in one case I know ended in such discord the qalawi had to be abandoned.
More amicable ways of testing difference are the playground challenge-songs in rural “Indian” schools, where Fijian of Indian descent and iTaukei children occasionally face-off.
Oratory mainly rewards the soloist. Debating usually rewards a team, as well as the audience. One speaks of debating “societies” but not oratory ‘societies’. Debating involves rational argument before an open-minded audience. What would appear at first sight to end in oratory-style “win-loss” is, on reflection, a “win-win” for the two teams and audience alike.
All move on, together. The issue isn’t closed. Conversation continues.
Like any other art debating is learnt and must be practised if one is to acquire rhetorical, reasoning, and listening skills, as well as nimble thinking.
Reading at university
When Prof Subramani was at USP I worked with Dr Ruth Finnegan, a leading authority on the sociology of literacy and literature who had previously conducted research in West Africa. Ruth held the position of reader, a label I regret to say — not just for sentimental reasons — no longer exists in university handbooks. What lecturer today has time to read copiously, let alone be recognised for doing so?
Anyway, Ruth devised a hefty first-year introductory course to sociology, which ran to eight or nine volumes of selected readings and exercises, a textbook or two, and two full-length case-studies of a couple of Pacific Island societies — Yap and New Guinea’s Kapauku Papuans.
By today’s standards — and I judge as much by my last stint teaching in Australia as much as by the performance of my old USP students — that load (for a single course) would be inconceivable today, partly because of the decline in literacy levels, concentration, and sticking power, and partly because universities have been forced to “dumb-down” (see Narsey, FT August 1) to retain numbers and make money.
Finnegan published in the sociology of literature where one of her most enduring lessons was that being unable to read and write was not the same as being illiterate or non-literate in the usual sense of those terms. Later, in Australia, I used her work on oracy and literature to teach a course on dance, drama, music, and ritual. As Islanders know you can be orally literate (with or without writing capacity) and celebrated for it.
Classic examples are the ancient Greek narrators of myth whose work Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Ovid transcribed and made available to Plato, Aristotle and Christian thinkers to refine into the written philosophy underpinning “Western civilisation”. Simple equation — no writing, no civilisation. And why end there?
Traditional praise singers (griots) in Mali, West Africa, sparked internationally acclaimed poet-musicians like Ali Farka Toure and Ousmani Sacko.
Without its oral tradition Nigeria would not have produced Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart, became a high school text in Fiji. Icelandic sagas have inspired contemporary Icelandic writers, and the ancient art of the Irish-storyteller, seanchai or shanachie, lives on, not just in contemporary seanchaide, but also in the value placed on conversation in Ireland, as well as in its literature where James Joyce immediately springs to mind.
That this loquacious small nation has produced more Nobel Prize winners for literature than any other, is no coincidence, the last was the northerner Professor Seamus Heaney, in 1995, and before him WB Yeats, Bernard Shaw, and Sam Beckett.
The oracy/literary bond is evident in the Persian poets, and in the lyrics of Bob Dylan who took his name from the Welsh versifier Dylan Thomas, was inspired by French poet Rimbaud, and named one of his sons after Byron. Considering Heaney’s praise for rappers, we should not forget them either, or the sounds of Australian Aboriginals Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Yothu Yindi, and Pigrim brothers whose compositions are rooted deeply in “country” — vanua.
In 2014 Gurrumul played at London’s Albert Hall, a venue best known for the works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and the rest, whose music, incidentally, is never heard on Fijian radio, or rarely if ever in Fiji’s schools. Yet Mozart and Beethoven belong to the world, no less than Shakespeare, and not to a particular ethnic group or nation. Ask the Chinese, Venezuelans, or Japanese, and consider the Globe Theatre’s recent production of Hamlet in Suva. Fiji has turned out great church choirs (so has USP), and has many gifted musicians, so why is this oral/aural “path to higher ground” neglected in so many schools?
* Continued on Sunday
* Christopher Griffin is a contributor, the views expressed are his and not of this newspaper.
