My Polish Teacher's Tie, by Helen Dunmore

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By Aurora Ledesma

 

HELEN DUNMORE

 

Helen Dunmore was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children’s writer. She was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1952. She was the second child of four children of Betty (née Smith) and Maurice Dunmore. Her father managed industrial firms, but loved poetry, and Helen learned many rhymes, hymns and ballads during her childhood.

She attended Nottingham Girls’ High School and studied English at York University (1970-1973). She lived for two years in Finland, where she worked as a teacher.

In 1980, she married Frank Charnley, a lawyer, and they had two children: a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Tess. Frank had a son, Ollie, from a previous marriage. Helen died from cancer in 2017.

Her best-known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry was Inside the Wave (2017). She won the inaugural Orange Prize for fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.

Her writings for children include short stories, and novels for older children, such as the Ingo Chronicles (2005). Some of Dunmore’s children’s books are included in reading lists for use in schools.

Dunmore’s readers will not be surprised to learn she loved gardening, and she knew about wild flowers. She was a brave and strong swimmer, venturing into the sea on cold days in a wetsuit. She loved art, buying as much as she could afford and enjoyed collaborating with artists and musicians.

The final poem Hold Out Your Arms, is an intimate and powerful poem of how the novelist recounts her thoughts and emotions as she faces her final days. She invites death to “hold out your arms for me” describing the figure of death coming to take her away. Death is not something to be feared, but caring and gentle. The poem, written just days before she died of cancer on June 2017, was included in her poetry collection Inside the wave. She was ‒first and last‒ a poet.

 

MY POLISH TEACHER’S TIE

 

My Polish Teacher’s Tie was first published in 2001 in the short story collection Ice Cream. The protagonist, Carla Carter, works as a part-time catering staff at an English School. She is half-Polish, but the teachers don’t know that. She is a single mother with a daughter, Jade. Carla’s mother was Polish, and she came to England after the war. She taught her some Polish children’s songs full of rhymes, so Carla spoke Polish till she was six, but her father forbade her to speak Polish before she started school, and that’s why she has forgotten most of it.

One day, Carla overhears the school’s headmaster saying that some Polish teachers want to improve their written English and are looking for pen friends in English schools. Carla asks the headmaster for one of the Polish teacher’s addresses, and she begins writing to Steve. Days later, she receives the first letter from him, and she realises that he thinks that she is an English teacher. When Carla writes to Steve, she doesn’t want to tell him anything about her employment. She tells him about her daughter Jade and about the songs that her mother taught her. Steve tells her that he writes poetry and sends Carla beautiful poems. At first, they write once a week, but later, twice. Their letters become friendly and personal, and a connection between them builds up.

Some time later, the Head announces that a teacher will be coming over from Katowice the following month. His name is Stefan Jeziorny. Carla feels a bit surprised, because she hadn’t read his last letter yet, in which he tells her about his visit. Carla dreads meeting him, knowing he will discover her real job, and thinks he will be disappointed. When he arrives, he will be staying with Valerie Kenward, a teacher at the school. Valerie complains that she can’t understand Steve, because of his accent, and she also makes fun of his tie.

As soon as Carla sees him in the staff room, she goes over to introduce herself. When she sees that he is pleased to meet her and does not care what job she does, she becomes more confident and positive. To her surprise, Steve sings a Polish song. She recognizes it from her childhood, and the two of them sing together.

 

Some Reflections

Sometimes, as happens with the characters in the story, having a low-level job and being a foreigner could make us feel ashamed, insignificant and even invisible.

On one hand, Carla hides her origins from her colleagues and her job from Stefan, she’s ashamed of being just a server. On the other hand, Stefan feels isolated and misunderstood, he just smiles like a child, because he doesn’t know anyone. His way of dressing, his accent and his manners are cruelly criticized by Valerie.

When Stefan shows a warm and inclusive approach towards Carla, regardless of her job, she becomes more confident. She realises that there is so much more to a person’s identity than their surface.

QUESTIONS

-What can a tie, a piece of clothes, a dress... tell us about the person?

-What is more important for you, your mother tongue, or another tongue you have learned along your life? Why do you think so? When are we ashamed of our accent or of our mother tongue?

-Sometimes we feel inferior, and sometimes superior, in front of a stranger. What are the circumstances for every case?

-In your view, can art be really appreciated by somebody without education? What is your opinion about the saying "There's no accounting for taste"? "Good taste" is something natural or something learned?

VOCABULARY

overall, kitty, tipping, chucking, OFSTED, serving-hatch, bin, sod it, stage-whispered, squiggles, swim, bumbled

The Silence, by Murray Bail

 

By Núria Lecina

BIOGRAPHY

Murray Bail (born the 22^nd of September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, a second son of Cyril Lindsay Bail (1914-1966) and Hazel Bail (née Ward). His father worked in the tramways and his mother was a housewife and a milliner. He has two brothers.

He has been married twice. His first wife was Margaret Bail (née Wordsworth). They got married in 1965 and divorced in 1988.

His second wife was ​Helen Garner; they got married in 1992, and they divorced in 2000. She also was a well-known Australian writer.

He has lived most of his life in Australia, except for sojourns in India (1968-70), England and other parts of Europe (1970-74). After working for advertising agencies in Adelaide and Melbourne, he moved with his first wife to India in 1968, where he worked for an agency in Bombay. During his travels, he became ill of amoebic dysentery and went to London for treatment. Once there, he decided that the novel he had written in India was worthless and threw it in the trash.

For recovering, he remained in London for five years (1970-1975), spending the first year on unemployment benefits. He then wrote for many newspapers, which encouraged him to publish his first novels once he returned to Australia. This travel’s experience influenced him. Many of his works reflect which he, an Australian, thinks when observing his country from outside, its culture, and the way people live.

Now he lives in Sydney.

Before dedicating himself to literature, Bail worked in galleries and as an art critic. He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

 

Bail is considered one of the most innovative Australian writers in short fiction, classified as very interesting, unique and an intellectual of the 20th century.

He is known for his dry humour and for challenging the traditional narrative. Bail used to say that novels should not be stories with a beginning and an end, but that they should be instruments for thinking. That inspiration comes from mistakes. When nothing goes as you expected, imagination begins, he says.

He did not believe in sudden inspiration, he believes in thought and patience. He could spend years revising a work. He is an admirer of Kafka, Borges, Nabokov and Calvino —all writers who play with language and with the way people tell stories.

He had often said that Australians were too practical, and that the local culture did not value invention or fantasy.

He says it with irony, but it is a real criticism: he wanted Australian literature to stop being just stories of the outback and survival, and become a more philosophical and universal literature. He doesn’t have a very extensive body of work, but he does have a lot of work to do. He says that writing is like making furniture with words: few pieces, but well-made and useful. This is in line with his passion for cabinetmaking and object design.

 

HIS WORK

 

-Novel

Homesickness (1980)

Holden’s Performance (1987)

Eucalyptus (1998). He has been awarded several times for this work. This is the story of a botanical fairy tale. It is his most famous novel, where realism and fairy tale are mixed. A father promises that only he who knows the name of all the eucalyptus trees of his property will be able to marry his daughter. Curiously, Eucalyptus was to be made into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, but the production was cancelled at the last minute due to artistic disagreements between Bail and the director.

Camouflage (2000)

The Pages (2008)

The Voyage (2012)

 

-Non-fiction

Ian Fairweather (1981). This work was written when Murray was working on the National Gallery of Australia; it’s a biography of this artist, an Australian painter who was also eccentric and solitary, who lived in a cabin made of drums and scrap wood.

Longhand (1989)

 

-Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)

He (2021). The last book, only 164 pages to explain his autobiography. He writes it in the third person; he doesn’t like to use the first. It’s curious that he describes why he started writing his memoirs: it was dissatisfaction of his way of working, sitting at a table writing every morning and at weekends. And he admits that the inspiration for his fiction is found in his childhood memories and travels. He says that he has lost interest in art, and that music occupies more of his free time than looking at paintings.

 

-Short fiction

Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975), republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Here is where we can find our short story, The Silence.

 

 

SUMMARY

 

Let’s set the scene:

Australia is a continent of seven and half millions square kilometres. It’s the largest world island. In spite of this extension, there are only 28 million inhabitants and the population density is of 3,4 residents for square kilometre.

The first residents arrived there 42,000 years ago. They were nomads, hunters and collectors. Their spirituals values were revering the earth and believing in the dream time. Nowadays, Aboriginal people keep this culture even though the political changes. It’s the country less world populated, where the ninety per cent lives in the urban areas. The big portion inside is arid and desert.

It would be in one of these deserts, some years ago, that we could imagine at our character, Joe Tapp.

The Silence seems a simple history. Joe Tapp lives in the desert, in an enormous landscape, alone, in a campsite where he has a tent, a freeze, a petrol drum, firewood that obtain from some cut trees and a lot of rubbish. All of it scattered.

It’s not clear if Joe is an Aboriginal Australian, but his habits and his behaviour make us think that he is very close to this culture.

His life is very repetitive, the story explains his daily routines. For over a year he has been there, in the desert, hunting rabbits that live hidden in the dunes. He sets traps so that they are stuck in the rabbit’s neck. His activity is in the morning, he goes with sacks on his back to collect the corpses. Once in the camp, he skins and cleans them, removes the pelts and puts them in the freezer. He rests, and at sunset, he returns to the trap area to prepare them again. He sleeps and starts the new day again.

Joe is an introverted person, rooted in the environment where peace and silence reign; tranquillity is only broken by some animal noise. It’s the silence of nature.

All this activity, which aims at his survival, is altered every two weeks when Norm Treloar arrives with his noisy red truck, to buy and pick up the dead frozen rabbits. This is the only relation with another human. Joe doesn’t feel well at all when Norman arrives. Norman is a communicative man, and always, like a social routine, greets him, asks him how everything is going. Then, they load the meat on the truck, they have a tea, and finally Norman leaves, raising the desert’s dust. All return to natural state, the silence!

Joe feels worse and worse each time. He is overwhelmed, often thinks about the meeting with Norman, and suffers waiting for the next time. Every time he feels the meeting more intrusive. Breaking the silence bothers him, disturbs him. Norman’s words and noise offend him. He doesn’t want this relationship, he even throws to the fire the newspaper that Norman lefts. He wants silence, but also humanity disconnection. But he needs to go on with the business.

Joe thinks about his work, enjoys his peace, he loves to be there, surrounded by nature, he spends hours squatting. Like an Aboriginal.

And when suddenly he heard the truck’s far noise, Joe knows what he would do. He runs to the sand dune and hides behind the bushes. From there, he can see the campsite, and he lets Norman do the work. The truck driver looks around, searches for Joe, honks the horn, smokes a cigarette, and finally goes to the freezer, fills the truck with the meat, and leaves.

The silence returns, and Joe comes back to the campsite ready to carry on his work. Now he can go and setting rabbit’s traps, happy to have had a resolution.

 

My opinion

Silence is the absence of all sound or noise. In this story, it is the fact of stopping talking little by little. Joe is becoming more and more silent. For what reason?

Joe decided to be there more than a year ago, in the desert. We don’t know where he came from or what he did before, or why he came there. He chose to live in a place where it was easier to find himself, to be in contact with a silent world, to live at his own pace.

I think that the environment has been absorbing and integrating him in the nature, and he has finally found an inner peace and a meaning to his life. Possibly we, who live in a completely different place, don’t understand this. We live in a continuous communication, sometimes very crazy.

Silence can also be a kind of non-verbal communication, and maybe Joe’s story wants to transmit this other lifestyle to us. Maybe it’s not necessary to speak a lot and think more.

 

QUESTIONS

-Hunting with traps today here is forbidden: What can be the rules for an "ethical" hunt?

-Now and then there is a rabbit pest, or a locust pest, or any kind of pests. If they are natural phenomena, must we fight them?

-What are the benefits of being alone? And the damages? Do we need moments to be alone? Why are we nowadays more individualistic?

VOCABULARY

singlet, drums, burrowed, gears, whine, melt, sport, juice, grub, saltbush, billy, rowdy, strain, stunted, revved

 

The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas, by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

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By Glòria Torner

Biography

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 and grew up in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the celebrated anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, who chronicled the life of the last member of the Yahi tribe, Ishi. The Kroeber family had a large collection of books, and they received a big number of visitors, as members of the Native-American community, or well-known academics such as Robert Oppenheimer. Though she was brought up in a non-religious household, she took her personal spiritual beliefs from Taoist and Buddhist traditions.

Le Guin attended Berkeley High School. From 1947 to 1951 she took a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Renaissance and Italian literature at Radcliffe College, and later, undertook graduate studies at Columbia University. From 1953 to 1954, she won a Fulbright grant to continue her studies in France. While travelling to France, she met the historian Charles A. Le Guin, and they married in Paris in 1953. She began doctoral studies, but abandoned them after her marriage. From 1957, they settled in Portland, Oregon, had three children, and she began writing full-time, publishing for nearly sixty years. She died in 2018.

Her oeuvre includes twenty novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five collections of essays and four works of translation.

There are two main topics in her novels: science fiction, following the literature of Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, or Isaac Asimov, and fantasy works following the steps of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Le Guin wrote a cycle of books of science fiction about the Hainish universe, beginning with World (1966). The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is considered one of the most acclaimed books of science fiction. The Word for World is Forest (1973) was the source of inspiration to James Cameron to create the film Avatar. The Dispossessed (1974) is an anarchist utopian novel. The book Always Coming Home (1985) redefined the scope and style of utopian fiction.

She published her masterpiece of fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea, in1968, and during thirty years, she went on writing this popular fictional world, a cycle of five books called the Books of Earthsea.

She translated Tao Te Ching from Lao Tzu. And Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet. Her final publications included non-fiction books, as Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, and her last collection of poems, So Far So Good, all of which were released after her death.

She became one of the most well-known writers in the USA for her speculative fiction, winning, among many other honours, the National Book Award, six Nebula Awards and the Kafka Prize. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America. Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

 

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

It’s a philosophical science fiction short story, first published in the anthology New Dimensions 3, in 1973, and later as an independent publication, in 1993. It is one of the author’s best-known short stories.

The story, written by a single narrator who is not a character in the story itself, can be divided into two parts:

First part: The happiness

The story begins with a long description with many details of the first day of summer in the utopian city of Omelas, a town by the sea. The arrival of the summer solstice is celebrated with a glorious festival: processions, music, full of horse races, old people, smiling children, mothers with babes… They are going to the north side of the city, called “Green Fields”.

Suddenly, the narrator breaks the telling and speaks directly to the reader using a second person addressing him as a participant, creating thus a sense of intimacy. He wonders how is possible to describe such joy and happiness in this community.

The story follows with a second, longer description about the life of the citizens. Now, the reader discovers that this isn’t a traditional tale, but an irreal allegory or a thought experiment. And the writer, second shifting to a more philosophical and direct address, changes the style using not only the third person, also the first person, singular or plural. The citizens of Omelas don’t have monarchy, police, soldiers, the bomb, priests, or slavery, and they don’t need a stock exchange or advertisements in Omelas, but they are not barbarians, they are intelligent, sophisticated, and cultured.

On the last day before the festival, people from other towns are arriving by train or trams to Omelas to join its inhabitants. The magic atmosphere of orgy, with beautiful nude people, nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman…, and a little of “drooz” (drug), is the demonstration of the contentment of all the people.

The processions have arrived to the Green Fields, and suddenly a child of nine or ten plays on a flute, a trumpet sounds, the young riders form a line, the crown waits for the horse racing, they announce that the Festival of Summer has begun. Everything appears perfect but…

2n part. The sadness, the horror, the suffering child

With the sentence “Then let me describe one more thing”, the narrator introduces the horrific truth: the antagonist. He is an unnamed ten-years-old child, who is imprisoned in a small, putrefied broom closet or disused tool room. He is covered in festering sores. He suffers horribly because he is hungry, dirty, and always alone.

All the inhabitants of Omelas know that the child is there. Some would like to help the child, but they know that, in that case, the prosperity of the town would be destroyed. Nobody wants to rescue this child.

If everything has appeared perfect, the happiness of the population depends on the eternal suffering of this single child. The inhabitants of Omelas prefer happiness to guilt, accepting the child’s misery as a necessary sacrifice for their joy.

But, at the end, some inhabitants of Omelas decide to walk away. They leave the city to feel free from culpability, because they can’t accept happiness based on a child’s suffering. The narrator says that the place where they go is possible that doesn’t exist, but this people know where they are going.

The narrator reflects that “Omelas sound in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time”.

And Ursula Le Guin has written a great dystopia!

QUESTIONS

-Do you think that free copulation with anyone can be a part of general happiness?

-Is a society with fewer rules happier?

-What does these sentences suggest to you: "Happiness is something rather stupid" and "Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting"?

-Is technology an obstacle to happiness?

-What do you imagine it will happen when the poor boy in the tool room dies?

VOCABULARY

rigging, shimmering, dodged, halter, bit, manes, pranced, dulcet, pedants, goody-goody, godhead, manned, sticky, seeps, second-hand, wither, snivelling

The Universal Story, by Ali Smith

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Analysis

Video analysis

 

Maria Feijoo writes.

BIOGRAPHY
Ali Smith is a contemporary Scottish author known for her experimental and internationally award-winning novels, short story collections, and plays.
She was born in Inverness, in 1962 in a working-class family. Her mother was Irish and her father English, but her education was Scottish until she began her doctorate at Newham College, Cambridge, after having studied English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen.
During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays and, as a result, did not complete her doctorate. Some sources also refer that she had to leave the university because she was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and could not pursue her academic career. 
After some time working in Scotland, she returned to Cambridge to concentrate on her writing, focusing on short stories and freelancing as a fiction reviewer. In 1995, she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, and won her first award.
By now, she has published twelve novels and six short story collections. Her fiction though being defined as experimental; it has an easy, pleasant, and moving style. She also writes for The Guardian, The Scotsman and The Times Library Supplement.
She now lives in Cambridge with her partner, the filmmaker Sarah Wood. They both participated in 2022 in a series of debates held in the CCCB in Barcelona, around Orwell and the Language of politics.

SUMMARY
In this short story, the narrator firstly seems to hesitate on what story to tell and discard some clichés before fixing the narration around a second-hand bookshop in an isolated rural village. The bookseller is a woman, living by herself in the first floor, and downstairs, the shop is a sort of cemetery of old books, usually empty.
The reader will not know much about the woman because the writer then fixes her attention on a fly, which she describes in detail, almost like an entomologist.
As the fly lies on the corner of the Penguin 1974 Edition of The Great Gatsby, the writer bounces into the story again to change the point of view, and focuses on the book itself, in his singularity, just as if it was a human being: its birth, the context of its birth, and its story. This book certainly had a very rich story, belonging successively to the most diverse owners, who bought it for as many diverse reasons, until it ended up in the window of a second-hand bookshop. The story takes place here, in a time after 1997, and in a moment when a fly rests on its cover to enjoy the sun, but flies away when a man enters the second-hand shop.
Again, the writer modifies his focus and now concentrates on this man and his sister. There is a hilarious scene with the bookseller, as the man wants to buy as many copies of The Great Gatsby as possible. The bookseller, who feels tired of receiving “another Great Gatsby” in her shop, is happy to sell five books, moreover five copies of this book.
These copies and some hundred more are bought by the man for his sister, who makes artistic happenings by building boats out of impossible things, like flowers or, in this case, books. When she tries to navigate the boats, they invariably sink. This special issue of her art will be called “Boats against the current”, and she is convinced that her grant would therefore be continued.
The story ends knitting all the threads: the boat sinks, Dante’s Divine Comedy replaces Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, the bookseller decides to remove the dust of all the books, and the narrator closes with the initial “men dwelt by a churchyard” who supposedly lived for long and then died. 
 

OPINION 
This short-story is puzzling and leaves the reader with more questions than answers.
We may wonder which is the universal story of the title: The Divine Comedy? The Great Gatsby? The life and death of books, flies, boats, and men? The story written by Ali Smith, as it contains all these stories?
Is it even a story? As the writer breaks all the rules of narration and address commentaries directly to the reader, the reader seems committed to participate in the elaboration of the “story.” Thus, may the universal story be the fiction itself and how it works?

QUESTIONS

-What can you tell us about The Great Gatsby and Tender Is The Night?

-Do you by second hand-books? What interesting books did you find?

-Have you seen the film Definitely, Maybe? Do have an especial collection of books?

VOCABULARY

riffled, bleached, bypass, veering, bask, stout, cleg, midge, wad, maggot, spell, pupa, eave, slitted, fly,-swat, snuff out, dapper, smuggled, starred first, fiver, grant, beat on, daffodils, unravelled

Physics and Chemistry, by Jackie Kay

 

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A BIT OF BIOGRAPHY
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh in 1961. Her biological mother was Scottish, and her biological father, Nigerian. She was adopted soon after being born by a politically activist couple, John and Helen Kay from Glasgow. This couple had previously adopter her brother.
As a curiosity, Jackie worked for some months as a cleaning woman for John Le Carré, the spy novels writer.
She wanted to be an actress, but after reading the stories by Alasdair Gray, she decided to be a writer. She studied English at the University of Sterling.
She writes poetry, novels, short stories and plays. Her topics are adoption, gender, sexuality, activism and family relationships.
Her most famous book is Trumpet, about a jazz musician who, once dead, they discovered he was a woman.
Our short story appeared in a book called Why don’t you stop talking?
Now she works as a professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
About her private life, we can say she had a son with another writer, then she had a long relationship with a poetess who had a daughter with a poet. So, a life full of books and writers.

 

SUMMARY

This is a story about two middle-aged female teachers. In the story, they don’t have names, they are referred only by the subject they teach, Physics and Chemistry. A part of being workmates, they’ve been living together for a long time, and they know each other very well. Physics is serious and introvert, and Chemistry is more open and doesn’t have problems expressing her emotions.

They are good teachers and in general are respected by their colleagues. Perhaps somebody can think they are a typical pair of spinsters, but if somebody does, they keep their opinion by themselves.

One day, after being in a concert they liked very much, they make love for the first time. For both of them it was a very satisfying experience, and it even changed a bit of Physics character: from this day on, she was less shy and maybe a bit daring. However, they go on being cautious about this new twist in their relationship. Moreover, they are modest and avoid talking to each other openly about their physical encounters.

But some time after this new path in their lives, a pupil’s parent comes to the school accusing the two teachers of being lesbians. Of course, the headmaster has to talk to them and explain the resolution he has decided to take.

 

QUESTIONS

-According to you, what is the best way to share the domestics tasks?

-How do you feel talking about sex? Why do you think people are usually shy about this topic?

-When you introduce yourself, do you think you have to define your sexual orientation? What aspects of your life do you think you must communicate to your boss or to your workmates?

-Can someone be fired because of their sexual orientation?

-What do you know about these new terms/concepts: gender versus sex, binary/nonbinary, gender-fluid…?

-In the story, something causal has chanced the life of our protagonists. In your opinion, what is more decisive in our lives, chance or will? Why do you think so?

 

VOCABULARY

poaching, shade of emulsion, serviced the car, seeped, glee, blissfully, put my foot in, wallop, fumed, gaffes, lemon grass, wee jug, marking, shoogle, had…round, bubbling, has been up, giving…notice, bobbles, plain/purl

Tomorrow is too far, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BIOGRAPHY

About her biography, I send the link of another work in the English Book Club:

https://blanesbookclub.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-thing-around-your-neck-by.html

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Written by Elisa Sola:

A little introduction about Nigeria and its ethnic and linguistic diversity 

Nigeria is a very ethnically diverse country with 371 ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo.

In spite of this diversity, Nigeria has one official language: English, as a result of the British colonial rule over the nation. Nevertheless, it is not spoken as a first language in the entire country because other languages are majority in terms of number of native speakers. Nigeria stands out as one of the world’s most linguistically diverse nations, with over 500 languages, spoken among 223 million people. Some of the most popular languages spoken in Nigeria are: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Edo…

Chimamanda Ngozi was born into an Igbo family in Enugu (Nigeria), and in her formal education, Chimamanda was taught in both, Igbo and English. Although Igbo was not a popular subject, she continued taking courses of Igbo in high school.

 

SUMMARY

 

Tomorrow is Too Far tells the story of a family tragedy and the consequences it has on the protagonist and on all of her family.

The main character is a twenty-eight-year-old woman (we don’t know what is her name) who clearly relives the moment when her older brother (Nonso) died eighteen years earlier, when he was twelve years old. She, who was ten at the time, reveals that she caused Nonso’s death by challenging him to climb an avocado tree and then scaring him by telling him there was a dangerous snake (echi eteka), the “Tomorrow is Too Far” snake.

The story takes place in Nigeria, in Gradmama’s yard, in a humid and warm summer. The atmosphere is important because it shows us an exuberant and ripe nature, which is about to explode, like the feelings of the girl, who was torn between the hate and jealousy she felt towards her brother (for the preferential treatment he received  ̶ patriarchal upbringing) and the love and desire she felt for her cousin Dozie, thirteen years old.

A fatal triangle is drawn that will bring tragic consequences and will dynamite not only the relationship of all family members between themselves, but also their entire lives.

The decision to keep the secret for all these years in order to try to achieve the love and recognition of her parents means that she has not been able to overcome the facts, and at this moment, eighteen years later, she’s still not able to understand what happened in the “amoral kingdom of her childhood”. Things being like this, when she receives the news of her Grandmama’s death, she returns to the scene of the crime in a state of shock.

The fact that the story is told in the second person by an omniscient narrator helps to picture the image of a girl who is shocked, and she has difficulty expressing herself: everything we know about her is told us by this narrator who is inside her, but she is silent, blocked.

The representation that we have of the cousin is of a passive and sad character, overwhelmed by the events. When the girl asks him “what did you want that summer?”, trying to share the blame a little, his answer is categorical: “What mattered was what you wanted”.

The story ends with a beautiful image of ants, because, in fact, she and the entire family is like a “column of black ants making his way up the trunk, each ant carrying” a bit of guilty and a lot of sorrow.

 

QUESTIONS

-Apart from being the name of a snake, has the title another meaning in the story?

-In your view, the "kingdom of childhood" is amoral? Is / was childhood a paradise, for you?

-Why do you think the story is narrated in the second person (you)?

-There is a raw sex scene in all the story, but only one, and there's no more references to it. According to you, what is the purpose of this?

-In your opinion, Nonso's death was a crime out of jealousy, or only an accident due to a misplaced joke?

VOCABULARY

cashew, mat, soggy, pluck, limb-free, nudge down, padded, pods, moult, harmattan, makeshift, coaxed, choking, clogged, petting, clucked, cinnamon, cowries, toddler, mar, inching, fluff, roiling