The Way of the Words

A History of My Personal Literacy. This is my Историја Писмености. Una Historia de la Alfabetización. 識字的歷史. Une Histoire de l'Alphabétisation. eine Geschichte der Alphabetisierung. Istorija Pismenosti. ਸਾਖਰਤਾ ਦੀ ਇੱਕ ਇਤਿਹਾਸ. История Грамотности.  Una Storia di Alfabetizzazione. تاريخ من محو الأمية.

Before I begin any sort of autobiography, I would like express my discontent with the assignment. I am not one, nor have I ever been one for succinctness. Shakespeare may have said that “Brevity is the soul of wit”, but who cares about Shakespeare anyways? Just because he did some good things, doesn't mean that every little thing he has ever said needs to be taken as true. It is ironic and strange to put a limit on an assignment about literacy! I refuse to be bound by such oppression! I have a lot of say, and I think that I am extremely interesting. I feel like editing anything out would be equivalent to committing an injustice against myself. So, I, for one, have no intention of keeping this short and sweet. Now, sit down, pour yourself some tea, and get ready to pay attention to me!

The founder of Moscow State University, Mikhail Lomonosov, said that “...the Hispanic tongue was seemly for converse with God, the French with friends, the German with enemies, the Italian with the feminine sex, and the Slavic with all.”

It could just be my patriotism, but in my mind, truer words were never spoken. My parents were refugees from the Yugoslav Civil War. As a result, the first language I learned was Serbian. Serbian is a completely phonetic, Slavic language that uses Cyrillic script. Today, being someone who is fluent and proficient at Serbian, French and English, I can truly say that Serbian is a language which is impossible to fully master, unless spoken from birth. It features 8 different conjugations, for each tense, for each gender. In layman's terms, it's very difficult. That being said, Serbian is, in my opinion, a far more beautiful language than English. But, let's be real: English simply isn't a nice language.

By the time I was four years old, I knew all the letters in Serbian, according to my mom. Very soon, I started reading in Serbian. It was not perfect, but it was a start. Around five, just before I was supposed to start my first year of school, the Serbian Church in Vancouver hosted a cultural event. They required artists, singers, folk-dancers, and cooks; all to create things that would be reminiscent of the motherland. My father asked me if I would like to participate. My desire to fit in with the adults, and the fact that I was very confident in my abilities, led me to agree. My dad then produced the Aleksa Šantić poem “Moja Otadžbina”, told me to read it and informed me that I would be reciting it.

Being that my days were fairly free, I spent every day, for three weeks, perfecting the poem recitation with my mom. She drilled me hard, until my cadence and memory were perfect. When I got up on the stage at the church, I remember lowering the microphone to my level, and looking through the audience in attempts to find my mom. I saw her, cradling my new born sister in her arms, and already crying hard. I smiled at her, as if to reassure that I was going to be great. I was very confident and my recitation did go off without a hitch. To this day, I can still recite that poem on command. Reading in Serbian was confidence-building and great, but then school came along, and with it came English.

When I started Kindergarten, I barely spoke English. My secluded, Serbian-speaking world was all I knew, and all I loved. The ugly, Germanic-sounding English language was not just hard to accept, but hard to learn. I, however, was lucky. Being that Vancouver is such a diverse city, a lot of my school peers were in the same predicament. With two years of Rosetta Stone and ESL, I learned English, and began excelling at it. In grade one, I completed all the phonics workbooks in my class before my classmates; I was exceeding everyone's expectations.

My school suggested me for cognitive testing. I scored very highly, and this got me put into a special program, at a different school, for gifted children. Even in this special school, my peers writing was not stunning, nor was their reading. Our teachers took no time to give us concrete grammar lessons, or concrete reading; they simply went with the motions. When a mistake was made by the majority of the class, the teacher would discuss it. If no mistake was made by the majority, too bad for you – you would have to figure it out on your own. It was strange schooling system for my mom to comprehend. She was appalled at the fact that our schooling here in Canada was far less rigid than that of hers in Socialist Yugoslavia. She believed, and still does, that repetition is the way to learning. Due to her dislike of the system, she pulled me out of school to home-school me for a year.

Mom recognized my lack of talent in the writing sector. She, despite her limited English, was more than displeased with my writing after seeing a few samples. She explained that my conventions and grammar, Serbian or English, were terrible. It was time to kick it into overdrive.

She went back to my school and raided the book room, taking any workbook she saw as potentially helpful. First, she studied them. Then, she explained them to me and got me to complete a truly gigantic amount examples. I hated it all, but especially subject and predicate. I still remember her shrill, disgusting and fear-inducing voice yelling at me. She would ask me in Serbian “Where is the subject and where is the predicate?” I would guess. She would look at me with a stone-cold seriousness. At some point, she took it to another level. “Natasa, you're bright. I know that with a little focus you will be able to figure this out. So, I need you to get off your ass, turn on your brain and try. If you don't, I will make you chicken liver for dinner, and take away your toys.” To Anglo-Saxon folks, this sounds inhumane. How could someone speak to their young child like that? But, as a victim, I will say one thing in defense of her tactics: they work. There was a reason that Socialist Yugoslavia and Soviet Russia were prosperous in their times – the intense methods of study. I learned more, and just about everything I know, from my ESL mom's English courses.

I remember reading George Orwell's classic, dystopian novel 1984 in grade 5or 6. At one point in my life, my parents had arrived at the conclusion that the only cure for my intense hatred of reading was force. They pulled out an assortment of classic, English novels. Their theory was that, if they force these well-written novels on me, I would absorb the literary construction of the novels and improve my own writing – they were, again, right. My writing improved leaps and bounds. A small child is very impressionable, and exposing them to excellent writing early makes it stick with them. Even if only subconscious, the effect is evident. I didn't read anything new. My parents knew what was good. I mean, think about it; I hated reading in general – nothing interested me. In that case, why not thrust only the good ones on the reader? They could have, for example, made me read Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story, but that wouldn't have done me any good. That book is as severely riddled with the filler-form of the word “like”, as Kim Kardashian is with fat cells on her overly-plump lips. That wouldn't do me any good.

Rather, they made me read things like The Jungle Book, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and, my personal favorite, Around the World in 80 Days. The Jungle Book was the first book that ever evoked tears from me. Treasure Island was a thriller, which got me interested in black dots and pirates, and even inspired my Halloween costume. And Around the World in 80 Days was just ineffably good. I felt like I had traveled with the character, and I felt so transported. His journey was just so mesmerizing.

These books were all solid, and my writing was consistently getting better because my mom had devised a way to ensure that I was reading while simultaneously helping my writing – keeping a journal. I had to read a chapter a day, and then write a summary of it in my journal. At the end, I had to write a review of the book I had just finished. Maybe that's where I get it from. All these critiques, which rest lazily on my blog, have only my mom to thank for being born through the ink in my pen. Later, I progressed to reviews about cheeses and cereals. It made me feel important – the fact that someone cared for what I said.

When I grew up a little, and started staying awake until 11:30pm just to see the nightly news. When I started discussing political ideas with my dad. And, when I just generally became more interested into the happenings around me, my dad introduced me to the next book I would be forced to read.

He explained that 1984 was a novel which was prevalent in themes even today. He explained how Orwell predicted that such a society would be in existence in 1984, and that we were, indeed, slowly inching our way to Orwell's dystopia. With my new-found fascination with politics and government, I was, even as a book-hater, a little excited to read it.

After flipping through every page, I was disappointed. 1984 was a slow book, with themes too complex for me to understand and appreciate.

When I went back to school, I was light-years ahead of my pathetically weak-reading peers. I read aloud better, I wrote better and I wasn't even a native speaker. Ha, take that!

Going back to school meant that I was free from the forcible confinement of reading. I didn't have to do anything with books anymore, and I exploited the opportunity.

Book trends would pass through my school. I would notice kids reading certain books, and feel inclined to read them myself to fit in. I would read the first page, and spend the rest of the silent reading time staring at the word-filled page, glassy-eyed. Nothing seemed to interest me. Until the trend turned to frat-boy books (at least that's what we called them). Bringing Down the House was incredible. I read it and then reread it. It was that good. My parents were naturally happy at the fact that I was reading; they didn't care about the subject matter. Afterwards I read London Calling, by Edward Bloor, which was also an excellent and compelling novel. I finally reached the pinnacle of my reading career when my grade 8 crush lent me The Book Thief. The Book Thief changed my outlook on books completely. I no longer judged books based on their thickness, but rather on their content. It was poignant, and sad, and painful and, a whole spectrum of other emotion.

When I started high school, I joined the debate team because they were offering cake to anyone who did. It ended up being, to this day the wisest decision I ever made. Debate changed my life; it gave me some sort of direction. Additionally, it guided my literary career into unexplored territory. For debate, I began reading articles. The New Yorker emerged to be my favorite because of its provocative and intellectual content. Good stuff. So good, in fact, that it still remains my favorite thing to read. Books simply never appealed to me.

My grade eight crush was intellectual and artistic; he read through books faster than he skated down the school halls on his skateboard. When we parted ways due to his moving out of the country, he gave me one token to “remember” him by – a book. Actually, it was an anthology of poetry. On the first page was a messy note:

“For Natasa,

Poetry isn't bad, or lame.

Read up, as I go to wander lonely as a cloud/ That floats on high o'er vales and hills,...

If you ever feel bad about me leaving, or something cliche like that, flip to page 122.

Love, and lots of it to you, my pleasing but short-lived flower!!!”

This just made things a whole lot more interesting. The note was like an assignment almost. I knew that he had used poetry in it, and to find out which poems exactly, I would have to read through the book.

So, I began. Quickly, I finished. I highlighted the poems used in the note. On page 105 was William Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. On page 97 was Mary Leapor's “An Essay on Woman”, which described “[a] woman” as “... a pleasing but a short-lived flower,...” And on the fabled page 122 was Lord Byron's “When We Two Parted”.

I had hated the poetry that they had made us read in school. I had come to believe that no good poets existed in the English language. Every poem I had ever read in Serbian was beautiful, but no English one thus far could compare. This anthology changed my view.

I realized that it wasn't English literature that was terrible, but just the teachers' selections. In the anthology, I specifically came to love the three poems mentioned, along with “the mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks and a few of Shakespeare's sonnets. I felt like I was getting acquainted with each poet as I read. It was as if each stanza was a glimpse into their soul.

But that time passed. I lost touch with my wandering, lonely cloud. My romantic era was over.

In grade 10, my English teacher forced me, along with the rest of the class, to open a blog. Here we could post whatever we wanted. I stopped ranting at my friends, and started ranting at my keyboard. It faithfully obeyed and listened to every complaint of mine. With a touch of my mouse pad, my words were boundless. Any human being with Internet access could get a taste of me. One complaint, in particular, galloped beyond all expectations and ended up published, alongside Maclean's magazine. Even whining can get you somewhere.

Today, I read articles in Serbian and English. I enjoy being in-sync with society; with the events in the world. I skim through the novels I am assigned at school, as to manage a basic level of understanding, so that I can effectively write an essay. The issue is my reading: I read very slowly. I need to reread one small paragraph at least 3 times before I can understand it. I do not know if this is thanks to a lack of interest or focus, but either way, it's difficult to deal with. In fact, it discourages me from reading altogether, in a way. The only writing I can effectively synthesize in my mind is non-fiction prose, like newspaper articles.

As a young child my writing was pathetic. I had terrible grammar; one sentence of mine was equivalent to a regular person's paragraph. My English vocabulary was very limited, and as a result of this, my writing suffered tremendously. My mom buckled down, and broke through her ESL barrier to teach me how to write properly. My grade ten English teacher gave me a platform – a blog. For some peculiar reason, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot seem to take pleasure in reading. Oh, how I would like to. I take such great enjoyment in writing, so how is it then that I take such depression in reading, especially in English. The Serbian language, like Lomonosov said, has soul and grace, the English does not – it is for business and debate, not art. For the record, I love learning new languages, especially when they sound poetic.

My entire life, I have had people ramble and throw words into my ears about how important and wonderful reading novels is. My entire life, I have doubted such a notion, but now, I guess I'm just not sure what to think.

Thanks a lot for confusing me, Ms. Thomson. But hey, at least you're making progress in this fight against reading-phobia.