In the 1940’s in British Guiana, in the village where I was born, there were no radios, no movie theaters, no juke-boxes, TV was unheard of, community libraries were in your dreams.

But our home was filled with books stuck in bookshelves, in cupboards, in boxes under the beds. My father was an avid reader and I imagine, he must have read them all. By the time I learned to read, I began forraging through the shelves to find something at my reading level.

Many times, we children had to make a paste with flour and water, or use the berries of the gum-cherry tree, painstakingly find and sort out the pages of a book and paste them together in order to read. It was a glorious experience – putting yourself into the pages and moving along with the characters.

I myself collected and pasted together the scattered pages of Zane Grey’s “West of the Pecos”, Dumas’ “The Black Tulip”, and Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe”.

My older sisters were all avid readers and would spend hours of their free time immersed in books like “The Charterhouse of Parma” and the romances told in the pages of books like “When Knighthood was in Flower.”

When two of my sisters were born, my uncle, who lived with us chose names out of “A Thousand and One Nights” to name the babies – Arjamand and Mihrun Nisa.

My story concerns a village experience. Because many of the older villagers were illiterate, stories of their lives and news of the surrounding villages were passed down orally, to be told and retold and remembered.

I do not know how it first came about that my father became the story-teller of the village. Each Saturday night, starting at around 8:00, when the children were fed, kitchens cleaned, chickens in their coops, goats and sheep penned, the women would come over to our house, cleaned and nicely dressed to hear the stories from the books that my father had read.

He sat in a chair. The listeners including my mother, sat on the floor on clean jute bags in a circle around him. Then he would begin. No! In case you’re wondering, he didn’t read from a book. He narrated the stories in his own way and from his memory. No sound, no movement, all eyes would be fixed on him as the listeners gathered to themselves every word, every nuance of the narrative, every change in tone, and colored it with their own imaginings to relive a tale that was older than themselves.

As any good story-teller might do to keep the suspense, he might stop at the crucial moment.

“Wha happen aftah dat?”

He might wait a few momemts to heighten the suspence, pinch his nose and pull it to the side as he was wont to do and then resume the tale. When he told the story of Dumas’ “The Black Tulip”, he deliberately omitted the part where Cornelius kissed Rosa through the bars of his prison cell . He wanted to spare the blushes of his female audience.

And yet again, like Scherazade might have done with her king, he would stop the story a crucial point. They would have to come back next Saturday for Episode 2 or 3.

The story would be discussed all week among them and predictions might fly to and fro as to how things might pan out.

When the narration of one book ended, they wanted more, and from his vast memory of the classics he pulled out Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Shakespeare, Baroness Orczy, Thackeray.

There is no one alive now who was a part of this oral, literary adventure. I believe that this shared experience was a good thing because they understood the power of the written word and were moved to send their children to be schooled to become active participants of the literate world.

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