Today's children need literature they can relate to

Pupils of Thika Road Primary School during the 17th Edition of Nairobi International Book Fair in September 2014. [ PHOTOS: JONAH ONYANGO]

NAIROBI: There was a time I used to drink all day, a Scotch every hour, starting at nine am,” the great writer J.G. Ballard once said. “Postponing that first drink until six in the evening was an epic battle. It was like the Battle of Stalingrad.”

Today, many Kenyan children are faced with not a drinking problem — although that one, also, in some quarters — but an epic thinking problem when it comes to issues of deciphering literature.

Do not let all those rising As fool you. For the nth year in a row, English was once again the worst performed subject in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examinations.

That is risible, considering that it is the official language of communication for everything in Kenya.

And we will not go into the “Oh, is that so? So let us make Kiswahili our formal language” debate here.

The language debates are the luxury of old gentlemen like Ngugi wa Thiong’o who can literally afford to indulge in sentiments of “let us write in mother tongue” as they wax nostalgic over age-glossed memories of growing up in the rural idylls of Central Province.

But we have a crisis with the children. The teens and young adults, who are our collective tomorrow.

The problem begins not even in a divergence of opinion about what languages of literature we should be exposing our children to.

I read an interesting piece by Teresa Okoth-Oluoch who teaches at the Masinde Muliro University.

She was arguing that according to UNESCO, “teachers need to instruct children below eight years in the language of the catchment area.” Which then begs the question — if they are from an area without water, say nomads roaming harsh and arid lands, has UNESCO then suggested that we are allowed to instruct them in English?

Spuriousness aside, the serious threat to literature is the pervasive, all-threatening technologies creeping on the Third World like hyacinth on Lake Victoria, although there is an argument that Kindle can be used to rekindle the children’s interest in literature.

But let us not debate the form and Tablet. As the global success of the Harry Potter series of books showed us at the turn of millennium when this debate was at its height, that is bosh!

In fact, the books spawned a supporting technological cast of box-office smashing films worldwide, toys, video games, costume crazes, a new “wizard” vocabulary as well as very odd new playground games, especially in England, like Quidditch.

The real threat is that “relevant” corrupt ideas are being imparted to the youth through perverted films like Project X instead of through their literature books.

Young people, like adolescents, may be drawn to the negative but exciting images of such a film compared to lessons from a staid book such as The River and the Source.

Borrowing from Ballard’s work from his own boyhood in Shanghai stretched and fictionalised in the book Empire of the Sun with its typical title chapters such as The Terrible City, we can see how to make use of the childlike amorality in these types of works that will resonate, for good and for the good of, a lost generation of teenagers before they lose literature altogether after “clearing” Fourth Form .

Let us look at the loneliness of adolescence squarely in the eye in the literature that we write and recommend for our children today. Let us make it Kenyan.

Let us have the unmistakable lilt of both local music and foreign “Wap” pop in our high school books alongside examination anxiety that leads “losers” to plot school infernos, especially in the second term in schools across the country.

These new texts for high school students should not shy from exposing the violence of our politics.

The endemic corruption that a poll showed fifty percent of our youth so admire must NOT be rewarded in the novel as it is in real life Kenya.

If the guilty get away scot-free in this rotten nation, then at least one use of our literature should be to punish the plunderers on paper, and pass on the fiction that no bad deed, indeed, goes unpunished.

Perverts and molesters, some of whom are the teachers themselves, must be artfully dealt with in these new young adult “literatures”, to be a warning beacon to trusting youth, especially the girl child.

And with the likes of al Shaabab even setting up schools for future killers and mass murderers in the name of God, it behooves us writers to boldly tackle the terrorism issue in our young adult works.

It is this contemporary material that I myself have mined, no pun intended, for my new teen novella titled Run, Cheche, Run. It is upon us, the contemporary Kenyan writers, not just to look at the lexicon of the forgotten, disused, colonial, drained, ruined, drowned and vanished pictures of the past, that which has already passed from Dust to dust. But to also be in the present moment, to be relevant to our youngsters.

To create the literary landscapes of what our modern Kenyan youth are going through today, that will withstand the test of tomorrow — including post-KCSE examinations.

Which millennial readers can pass through, pardon the pun, and stand in the wonder of self recognition instead of just wandering through tottering totems written by literary icons of the mid-sixties, mid-seventies, mid-eighties and even mid-1990s.

So that Generation Project X does not have to ask “why?” They will understand from its ABCs from the story books they are reading in school.

And we will avoid Project Zzz, which is where everyone falls asleep in class on a Wednesday afternoon as an earnest English teacher drones away from a book the teens think missed its true calling as a modern-day lullaby.

The writer is one of the 2016 winners of The Burt Award for African Literature.