…and there were books.

The Mauritian education system has evolved a long time ago but I’m from that generation that was torn between the traditions that the parents were trying to keep under control, and our lives ny the way, and a more modern world with huge western influence. Depending on how “cool” your parents were you were either the “Beverly Hills 90210″ fan or just the nerd round the corner who could only watch “Samachar”.

Reading was an IMPOSED activity. I remember that when I was in standard 5 and 6, no kid in my class had the right to play, not even run, during the recess to keep us in under constant working pressure. Well, you could be a rebel like Johnny Depp in “21 Jump street” but corporal punishment allowed the teachers to easily stop you from dreaming of becoming a hero. We were 9-11 year old race horses and the major part would leave the competition grounds quite quickly in the years to come. You had to be a successful race horse.

We had to read. You had to read. They had to read. English books being a preference. We still talked English like Italian shepherd dogs but still had to read loads of books. If I recall, we had those two books in French and English where we started learning to read: “Rémi et Marie” & “Robin & Rita”. By the age of 5 you were already reading your first book.

Looking back, I was not the type of kid prepared for any reading spree. I was living my wonderful villager kid’s life in the North of Mauritius. But one thing, one sole thing changed everything. It was not the forced reading at school, it was the compensation for absent parents when they left and moved into the city. Like many Mauritian families, the parents worked from dawn till dusk. Along with that they’ve always been pretty traditionalist, so forget about being open-minded and all that.

My parents had as much confidence in me as they would have in a man-eating tiger and always thought that I would be up to some sort of mischief. And it got worse when holidays came by, this somehow explains why I hate holidays. To cope with the burden of having me at home, my father had his secret weapon. His work’s library! This made most of my “collez” holidays were the most bitterly anticipated moments of my life. My father’s workplace had a huge library which turned out to become my prison for weeks.

What could I do? I had the choice between going there or having a good thrashing and then going there. No wonder I chose the first option. I did go there dragging my feet. In the end you try to kill time before it kills you and just start reading what falls in your hands. I made friends with the librarian and after some time I would ask for specific books and authors that got on his orders. I got to read all the books “new”, then other people’s kids would have them. I was like a one person recommendation board for teenage books. At the age of 13 I read my first Terry Pratchett book which would bring me to Tolkien, Herbert and a lot of other precious fantasy authors while discovering Anne of the Green Gables, the Rougon-Macquart series and Sir Conan Doyle.

As years went past, I was granted access to the most interesting section of the library for a 16 year old testosterone-filled and high on hormones teenager… the Gerard de Villiers and adult erotic section. There I simply carried on reading those SAS (Son Altesse Sérénissime) books which were a mix between James Bond, Dan Brown (had he written at that time) and, well I have no other reference to erotic literature, but some pretty agile person who would transform primal sensations into words. When thinking about it I read those mainly for adventure as the erotic parts were only 0.05% of the books.

These teenage days actually have an impact on our adult life. When my wife and I moved to our new city some 4 months ago, I was amazed by the number of book filled boxes we had. I sold nearly my comics and manga collections over the past 3 years but still had loads of books around. This is where you find out that you just carry on reading all the time.

I really don’t know about the other people of my generation but having books around and reading is just natural now and we don’t even buy them just to say “I’m reading books”. If you want to have an idea of my recent reading these are the books I read over the past month: Terry Pratchett’s (UK) Unseen Academicals, Natacha Appanah’s (Mauritius) Blue Bay Palace and I’m halfway through Ananda Devi’s (Mauritius) Le Sari Vert, along with a long term run of Guthrie Govan’s (UK) Creative Guitar Techniques.

Tags: Books, chronicles of a mauritian blogger, education, education system, everyday life, mauritius, reading

Category: Chronicles