Doris Lessing’s reaction when she was notified that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature: “Oh Christ! … I couldn’t care less.”
Doris Lessing in 1956 (photo credit: telegraph.co.uk)
Friday night she gave her acceptance speech. In it she contrasted the children she saw in Zimbabwe starving for knowledge with more privileged children in the UK.
I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.
This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa”, as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover….
The rest is at The Guardian.
She goes on to say some not-so-kind words about the privileged kids wasting time on the internet instead of reading. Ironically, I read her speech on the internet. Perhaps the net is too new for Ms. Lessing, currently age 88, to fully appreciate. Is she aware that fully 88% of the internet is not porn? I believe that about 6% of the remainder is not tech/gadget sites. That’s quite a bit of space left for literature.
While I was writing this, my 5 year old crawled into my lap and asked me what I was typing. I told him about the speech and explained what Ms. Lessing said about African schools. I told him that some kids don’t have any books, but they want to learn really bad. They can’t afford paper or pencils, so they write their letters in the dirt with a stick. My son was clearly concerned.
He asked “How do they pick them up?”
“They can’t. It’s dirt. They can’t take them home to show their parents or save them in a notebook. Look at how many pencils we have, and look at all these books. It’s no good that we have all these books and they don’t have any.”
After a pause to consider how many books we have, he agreed. “It’s no good. What should we do?”
“Why don’t we send them some of our books?”
“How can we?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what the address is. I was going to find out how to do it later, but first I want to finish telling everyone that looks at my website that they should read her speech.”
“Maybe someone will see it and know the address. If they put it on the internet, we’ll know where to send them.”
If you know the address, please let us know.
