As the GCLF draws closer--yes, the countdown has long started; we are just a weekend away--we will start our series of conversations with invited writers and guest authors and, eventually, other participants at the festival. We begin with Doreen Baingana, author of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning collection of stories, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe. She will facilitate the fiction workshop at GCLF 2012. We asked her about her favourite five books, and she had this to say: "I’ve read so many wonderful books that it's a shame to pick just five, and we all know lists can be arbitrary. However, the five books below changed my life as a writer and a woman."
Beloved by Toni Morrison: This book is so beautiful, sentence by sentence, with language as evocative as a poem or song. Morrison’s gorgeous and original style makes the horrendous topics she tackles, including slavery and murder, palatable. In it, a mother murders her child rather than let her become a slave, and the child comes back to haunt her. Beloved speaks for a people. Morrison portrays so well the terrible legacy of slavery so that we come to a more empathetic understanding of the history of African Americans. We are right there with her heroines and heroes as she brings to life this history through their struggles. Not only that, it is a great ghost story and a moving but unsentimental love story. No wonder Beloved was voted by American critics as the greatest American novel of the second half of the last century.
Burgher’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer: She, like Morrison, uses individual lives to explore weighty political themes. I came to a deeper understanding of how the apartheid system affected all levels of South African society—victims and perpetrators both—on a personal level through Gordimer’s books. Burgher’s Daughter is about a child of famous human rights activists who feels trapped by her parents’ heroism, and it explores her attempt to forge an identity separate from their legacy. Gordimer’s command of scene, language, tone, and character are masterful.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: This huge and brilliant novel traces a family’s fate during an era of political oppression and rebellion in a Latin American country. The author, well known for his use of magic realism, makes supernatural events completely believable. The book’s scope is so large and the language so delicious you can lose yourself in another world for days on end. This book taught me that fiction is the freest world there is.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke: Every writer and poet should read this book which discusses fundamental issues about this life choice. It is not fiction, but a series of letters that the great 18th century German poet wrote to a young man who wanted to be a poet. It has taught me deep and serious lessons about living one’s life with integrity and dealing with questions of spirituality, solitude, and love. He urges us to avoid convention and ‘trust in the difficult.’
Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinem: This book is my feminist Bible, written by one of the icons of the women’s movement in the US in the 70’s and 80’s. This well-researched book goes further than noting the gender inequalities in our societies; it argues that women and men need to excavate their own psyches to unlearn inherited ways of thinking and behaving. It is an intelligent and eloquent call to action, starting with the inner life, as Rilke’s letters do. And it has stood the test of time.
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