Grace's Reading Biography: Life & Literacy

 

Figure 1. Word Cloud of Grace's Favourite Books

 This "word-cloud" contains all the book titles showcased below.

Age 0-12 (Nursery-Primary School)

Textual Literacy

“So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, 

go throw your TV set away,

and in its place you can install, 

a lovely bookcase on the wall.”
― A limerick by Roald Dahl

 From infancy, my world was filled with words. 

Piaget posits that all infants leave the sensorimotor stage 

with an acquisition of symbolic (language) abilities. With an educator for a mum, I plunged

into a world of Piagetian-based books. Leapfrog, Peter & Jane Reading Program and Nursery Rhymes 

filled my early lexical schema.  My mum, an English and Literature teacher, would pour a stack of word-cards onto the floor, playing word-recognition games while I was a toddler.  

Phonics-based books filled my first foray into the world of written words.

In primary school, I recall re-reading three autobiographies  that captured my interest:  

La Prisonniere (set in Morocco), The Torn Veil (set in Pakistan), Totto-Chan (set in Tokyo).

In the wake of the Asian Financial crisis (1997-1998), travels abroad were brought to a halt. 

Instead, I traveled from my home to the library, seeking books that transported me through 

the musty gaols of Morocco,  down the cherry-blossom-lined streets of Tokyo and 

into the political prisons of Pakistan. As a primary school girl, these books served to broaden

my paradigm of what the world was like, beyond Singapore's sunny shores. Till today, these books

occupy a special place on my bookshelf at home. A glimpse of their book covers would trigger

the fond memories of a childhood spent poring through the pages of tears and quiet chuckles to myself.

 

Age 13-16 (Secondary School) 

New Media Literacy

New Media Literacy was the buzzword in my Secondary School, a Microsoft Future School. Studying the different modalities in which meaning was carried (videos, plays, blog posts, concerts, forum theatre, debates) enriched my understanding of how texts function to make meaning. My exploration of new media literacy laid the framework for my current studies of Semantics and how meaning is conveyed through proxemics (facial gestures, postures, etc.), not just words. In secondary school, I read Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, An Enemy of the People and The Joy Luck Club as part of my school's Literature syllabus. The school I was in was a Microsoft Future School, which provided us with a multi-modal exploration into the texts we read. The play An Enemy of the People arrested my attention with its vivid portrayals of character assassination. In a girl's school where inter-class politics ran amok, certain Literature lessons were charged with tense undercurrents. Our Literature teacher intentionally selected certain classmates to enact scenes from the play that would mirror the actual interpersonal dynamics in my class. For example, the class bully would be 

selected to play an antagonist while a soft-spoken girl would be selected to play a victimized character from Henrik Ibsen's play. A hushed silence would fall as the scene unfurled before our eyes - an unnerving and uncomfortable replication of the power play in our Secondary 3 class. This experience exhibited the potential of Literature as a pedagogical tool, using dramatizations of characterization and themes to teach interpersonal dynamics and manage an unruly class.

 Age 17-18 (Junior College)

Cultural Literacy

In Junior College, understanding inter-cultural dynamics piqued my interests and was a criteria in my selection of leisure-reading texts. Studying Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Economics, the little free time I had was spent delving into the realm of cultural studies. My interest was in exploring the confluence of seemingly clashing cultures (e.g.: Faith vs Science). With the advent of the Apple iPod, I filled it with audio recordings of Ravi Zacharias' lectures, a fellow from Oxford whose breadth and depth of discussions informed much of my cognitive framework for analyzing General Paper questions. During long breaks between lessons, I would read Creation magazine which presented and discussed scientific evidence for the origins and development of humanity and the cosmos. These books, magazines and audio recordings were a channel through which I peered into great minds. Listening and learning from them, I felt that the texts enriched and challenged me to fortify my visceral understanding of the conflicts and challenges that cause factions and divisions in local cultures, international culture and sub-cultures.

Age 19-22 (University) 

Political Literacy

In University, I came across the Machiavellian notion of "moral-less politics", which disturbed and disrupted my prior trust in the institution of government. Inducing some sleepless nights, I read Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian humanist writer who famously declared in his seminal work, The Prince that "politics have no relation to moral". Meeting humanists who unabashedly subscribed to Machiavellian ideas and maxims of politics triggered my frantic search for support of a morally-affirmative political system. A quote by Dante spurred me on in my quest for texts that portrayed politics as more than a vehicle for self-serving aggrandizement by power hungry politicians.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain 

their neutrality in times of moral crisis. "
Dante Alighieri

The books which consumed my thoughts were essays on the nature of geopolitics - books such as Illiberal Education, The World is Flat and The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy were fuel for the thought and carried me to uncomfortable places where my preexisting ideas of the world were confronted. 

Soon, though, I felt too discouraged from all this reading and found a oasis of refreshment in the form of Luci Shaw's poems in the collection Polishing the Petoskey Stone. In addition, a local collection of Singaporean poets, Ceriph, gave me access to a community of local poets who shared a common love of conveying meaning in the form of words, stanzas and lines (see addendum for an excerpt). After ploughing through readings that I found laborious, these new set of books brought me much emotional relief and respite. Ironically, the same act of reading, which conjured confusion and sadness in me, also carried me into brief moments of calm and peace. I lapped up the thesis of Peter Brooke's The Empty Space, thoroughly intrigued by the finiteness yet creativity of the human mind. Extending my interest in Peter Brooke's idea of the infinite imagination, I explored research about the right hemisphere of our human brain in the book A Whole New Mind (by Daniel Pink). As a future educator, the thrill of finding research that supported the scholastic pursuit of "right-brain" activities (e.g.: Creative Problem Solving competitions - Odyssey of the Mind) gave me fuel for my journey as an advocate of Literature as a subject in the Singapore classroom.

Traveling through the four stages of literacy development - text, new media, cultural and political, I have discovered that these spheres of literacy are more often inter-connected than disjointed. Texts, as a vehicle for meaning have taught me much, though their various modes of expression. Reading functions as a two-pronged key for me. The first key, as a bridge between my heart and head. Secondly, opening up worlds previously inaccessible, through the fascinating portal of an open book.

ADDENDUM

 Hi friends :) As promised, here is a poem from Ceriph, a local publication:

HOMILY

by Derrick Cham

We are not defective,
And it behooves us to know this most when we think we are,

For deep in our shadows and dark places,

Burns the same primordial fire that forg'd the immortal stars.

We are not apparitions,

Still-born in this late hour,

To hover empty castle corridors in the gloam,

Haunting rooms of pale ambitions and aisles of dead power.


We are not these men of antiquity,
Our glories will not be writ on Grecian jars,
But on the chords of angelic choirs in the high hour, of a place - not far,
And in song, in verse, and the flight of the westward stars.

For indeed there is majesty of an empire in being,

And princely pleasures on a throne,
But the houses of the dead do not want for living,

And the dead always keep their own. 



We are not then, who we ought not to be,

We walk not the path of avoiding tumult,
But of living, deliberately,

And in considered living,
Becoming unfettered, as free -
as the charge of wild horses,
the wildness of a single tree;

the marching notes of a chorus,
the blazing colours of the sea;

the fury of a red rose in bloom,
the flash of ignominy;

the pen stroke's queiscent thunderclap,

a wooden cross on calvary.



Thus and only thus,
Can man truly live,
Unapologetically.