Comics’ Books: Dangerous memoirs, African authors & Pockets of Happiness
22.07.2020
I recently started a podcast. Yes, I’m one of those people now I’m afraid. I’ve wanted to do it for a while but it wasn’t until the delightful Joe Bell of Sideburn Panda hopped on board that it actually happened (probably because he’s simultaneously super hardworking and incredibly calming). So now we have a podcast. It’s called Comics’ Books and it allows me to call up (during lockdown) some of my favourite comedians and have a chat with them about books. Books that have been significant to them throughout their lives. Books that they love. Books they couldn’t finish. Books they hate.
It’s a framework that gives me free rein to chatter to funny, talented people that I admire about one of my favourite pastimes. It’s been as delightful an opportunity as I imagined it might be. I’ve had great book recommendations and learned about the childhood reading habits of some of my favourite people. What has come as a surprise though is the tangents that the conversations go off on and the stuff I’ve learned from them. From Sindhu Vee explaining about the reverence with which Hindus treat books to Ben Bailey Smith discussing the literacy rate amongst White working class and Black boys, I’ve learned as much about a variety of cultures and countries as I have about the comics and their books.
This week’s episode featured comedian and author Njambi McGrath who recently wrote her own book Through the Leopard’s Gaze which is a fantastic exploration of her experiences growing up in Kenya as well as a deep dive into the history of Kenya. For the books she wanted to discuss on the podcast she selected all memoirs: Wild Swans by Jung Chang, The Pianist of Yarmouk by Aeham Ahmad and Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane. We discussed how you can often get more of a sense of a country’s history through autobiographies written by the people who were actually there than you can from history books. A quick google led me to this article which shows that Chang’s work is still banned in her homeland of China. When I posited this to Njambi we talked about how powerful stories can be and how history is so often obscured, rewritten or whitewashed and why diversity in publishing is also important.
The aspect of the interview that I can’t stop thinking about is our discussion about the books she read as a child growing up in Kenya. As she was listing off the books her and her friends had swapped - which included romance (some would even say erotica) by way of Mills and Boon and aggressive crime thrillers by James Hadley Chase - I asked about Kenyan authors. Did they not have any books by local authors that they read? Njambi explained that they didn’t, not really. That even the books they studied in class were very English - King Lear and The Mayor of Casterbridge. This, Njambi told me, is a side effect of colonialism. That Africans stopped being proud of their own culture, their own literature. That it was only as she grew older that she began reading work by African authors and the difference in how the world around them and their experiences were portrayed struck her, waxing lyrical to me about Chigozie Obioma (The Fisherman, An Orchestra of Minorities').
In the podcast I talk a lot to guests about reading as entertainment, reading as passion. About no book being one you ‘should’ read and about never being ashamed of the ones you do read and enjoy. I love other podcasts like Sentimental Garbage that glory in the books that are too often written off (EXCUSE THE PUN) as light, frothy, chick lit. But I’m also full of awe for the books Njambi forces herself to read. The history books written by colonialists, the ones that refer to White men as the first inhabitants of Nairobi. She reads them and she accepts that everyone has a different viewpoint on history and she wants to know them all. Even when she literally feels nauseous while reading. I thought that was amazing.
I’ve always read fairly diversely although the majority of my reads are still very White. Very Western. I’ve been making more of an effort lately and it’s still early days so I won’t bang on about that. Talking to Njambi though spurred me on greatly to kick that up a notch and to think further than the books that social media and my usual newspapers are recommending. I felt grateful that Njambi spent her time with me discussing so many issues pertaining to books and reading that I, as a White woman, wasn’t always aware of. Amongst everything we touched upon there was one thing about books that we both absolute love. As Njambi so beautifully put it, the memoirs she picked showed hardship and sadness, but they also communicated that humans will always manage to find little pockets of happiness to get them through.
In this, The Pianist of Yarmouk, it was the music that kept them going. It is the music that reached the world and touched the world with his piano in the rubble, singing with all these children, giving children a purpose. So amongst all of this devastation there is hope and people trying to find happiness. There are little pockets of happiness.
Njambi McGrath
Full episode HERE.
Full transcript HERE.