Read Online Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa'Thiong'o - Free Book Online Page A

class exercises, and tests: Is that the best you could have done? Even when I tell her proudly that I scored ten out of ten, she asks the question in different ways, until I say yes, I had tried my best. Strange, she seems more interested in the process of getting there than the actual results.
    I drift through the initial classes, not quite understanding why I have been moved from sub B to sub A to grade one, all within the same quarter, a skipping of classes that continues from term to term so that within a year I am in grade two, and still my mother continues to ask: Is that the best you could have done?
    I don’t know about the best that I could have done; all I know is that one day I am able to read on my own the Gĩkũyũ primer we used in class titled
Mũthomere wa Gĩkũyũ
. Some sentences are simple, like the one captioning a drawing of a man, an ax on the ground, his face grimacing with pain as he holds his left knee in both hands, drops of blood trickling down. The picture is more interesting than the words:
Kamau etemete. Etemete Kuguru. Etemete na ithanwa!
Kamauhas cut himself. He has cut his leg. He has cut himself with an ax! I tackle long passages that do not have illustrations. There is a passage that I read over and over again, and suddenly, one day, I start hearing music in the words:
    God has given the Agĩkũyũ a beautiful country
Abundant in water, food and luscious bush
The Agĩkũyũ should praise the Lord all the time
For he has ever been generous to them
    Even when not reading it, I can hear the music. The choice and arrangements of the words, the cadence, I can’t pick any one thing that makes it so beautiful and long-lived in my memory. I realize that even written words can carry the music I loved in stories, particularly the choric melody. And yet this is not a story; it is a descriptive statement. It does not carry an illustration. It is a picture in itself and yet more than a picture and a description. It is music. Written words can also sing.
    And then one day I come across a copy of the Old Testament, it may have belonged to Kabae, and the moment I find that I am able to read it it becomes my book of magic with the capacity to tell me stories even when I’m alone, night or day. I don’t have to wait for the sessions at Wangarĩ’s in order to hear a story. I read the Old Testament everywhere at any time of day or night, after I have finished my chores. The biblical characters become my companions. Some stories are terrifying, like that of Cain killing his brother Abel. One night at Wangarĩ’s their story becomes the subject of heateddiscussion. The story, as it emerges in this setting, is a little different from the one I have read about but it is no less terrifying. In this version Cain is condemned to wander the universe forever. He carries the mark of evil on his forehead and travels at night, a tall figure whose head scrapes the sky. Some of the storytellers claim that late one night they had encountered him and they ran home in terror.
    Most vivid in a positive way is the story of David. There is David playing the harp to a King Saul of contradictory moods. Their alternations of love and hate are almost hard to bear. Years later I would completely identify with the lines of the spiritual:
Little David play on your harp
. But David the harpist, the poet, the singer is also a warrior who can handle slingshots against Goliath. He, the victor over giants, is like trickster Hare, in the stories told at Wangarĩ’s, who could always outsmart stronger brutes. When later I learned how to make a sling attached to a Y-shaped twig, I would be thinking of David’s, though I never met my Goliath in war. David, the warrier-poet, remains an ideal in my mind.
    Some acts and scenes are simply magic within magic: Jonah swallowed by a whale and then vomited out unhurt on another shore; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, an angel among them, walking about unscathed in a fiery furnace; Daniel