Some are reading

Today: Yemisi Aribisala, writer, editor, essayist, painter, and author of Longthroat Memoirs.

Issue No. 159

Books and Ruined Women
Yemisi Aribisala

Books and Ruined Women

by Yemisi Aribisala

My mother was convinced that reading was ruining me. No, it had ruined me retrospectively. She grasped her justification with both hands when books became a bone of contention in my marriage and my bookshelves were banished from the living room of my Calabar home. You only needed to read so much if you had exams ahead or if there was some other inescapable obligation. Obviously reading was a necessary skill but it should not collide with sociability or hospitality. If it does, then there is no dispute on which one of the two needs humbly to step down. If you were a married woman and had not fully interiorised these simple (simplistic) premises, then there was a problem indicative of stubbornness and arrogance on its face, and stupidity not far beneath. Reading could not seriously be one’s favourite pastime, to cut a long story short. My mother has a postgraduate degree and understands well the functionality and desirability of reading, but it was something else entirely if you chose to stay in your room for long hours, if you had no friends, if you refused to engage with the friends that your benevolent family had grown concerned enough to match-make for you. 

She asked me pointedly one day what the middle of a book was for. The beginning and the end of it surely sufficed to get the gist of the tour, especially when the book in questions was the seven-book series under the heading of The Chronicles of Narnia. I was ten and she was being facetious but I had no sense of humour where my mother was concerned. We weren’t friends or anything like that. We lived in the same house and she was responsible for my well-being. I stood at the opposite end of the room searching for an answer to the question and finding none, kept mute. I had brought the books back from New York on a trip with my Uncle and Aunty, a beloved set in a glossy cardboard case. I spent more hours stroking the books and looking at the case and book covers than reading them. But that admission would have been so much worse for me in cultural court than saying I was just reading the books. The real fear, for my family, was the unfamiliar quirkiness in a person—the root cause of the stroking of books.