The Reading
Her reading voice was a soft-grained monotone that sifted through the open minds of the audience like sand from a clenched fist. They were practised listeners, mostly, lovers of literature and keen observers of political developments in the South, two hundred and fourteen of them according to the receipts at the door, gathered together in the Literaturhaus to hear the sorrowful story of Maryam Akello’s life. She read in her native Acholi, and except for her guardian, who sat in the middle of the front row, no one in the room understood a word. They could no longer recall if they had ever heard the language spoken in a seminar or on some documentary soundtrack. They were therefore in no position to judge whether she was reading badly or well, nor to ascertain which passages of Sugar she had chosen to present, and this knowledge would have to wait until the second part of the programme, when her translator would read the same passages from the German version just published by Kleinbach.
That was the translator Hans Günther Basch on the podium, with his chair pushed back from the table and angled ever so slightly towards the lectern where she stood reading, his faceted crew cut tilted deferentially, deflecting the audience’s attention to her and capturing a modest portion of it for himself. Although he appeared to be listening, Basch’s thoughts were elsewhere. The fact is he too understood no Acholi. In preparing his German version, he had relied on the English and French editions already published and the commentary of a friend at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, an East Africa specialist. Akello herself spoke English well and they had discussed his translation in depth. He felt he knew his way around in her world. Now, as a dusty cloud of Acholi rose before his window on Africa, obscuring the landscape of the text, his thoughts returned to the introductory talk given by Prof. Horst Grundmann, another friend in the academic world, a fellow Africanist. There he was in the front row of the audience next to the writer’s guardian, with his long legs stretched out, his bearded chin on his chest, the shiny top of his head aglow.
The two of them had served together for several years now on the board of the Literaturhaus. This evening’s reading was an important one, the first in a series by Writers under Fire, as they called it, writers threatened or restricted or silenced by oppressive states, or driven from their countries by conflict or persecution, like Maryam Akello. It had taken a great deal of time and effort to raise the money and win the backing of the city and the sponsors, and so this inaugural event was crucial. All in all, Horst had made a good job of the introduction, Hans Günther thought, he had spoken passionately about the need, in our post-9/11 world, to celebrate difference and support dialogue, to create networks of understanding and solidarity, reminding the audience of the many countries where, even now, writers were afraid to put their own names on their texts, let alone read from them in public, and choosing your words was still a matter of life and death. Basch, who had thought himself inured to such appeals, was stirred. Yes, he had to hand it to Horst, he had done a good job of it. It was a speech calculated to assure the funders that they had spent their money wisely and the audience that they had taken a small but meaningful stand against tyranny.
With the exception of a young man towards the back of the room, who had come here with a new girlfriend to demonstrate the sincerity of his interest in her interests, every member of the audience had been to a literary reading before. A majority had been to a dozen readings or more, and a handful to hundreds. Among them, they had seen and heard thousands of writers read from their work. By the time Maryam Akello reached the bottom of the first page and peeled it over on the lectern, and while the less experienced listeners were still absorbing her tones and gestures, examining her clothes, her face and the complicated weave of her hairstyle, the old hands had already found a place for her on the shelf.
In general, they found writers easier to classify than their books. For all the variation, from the studied sing-song of American poets and booming declamations of African praise singers to the weather-report burble of certain English novelists, they fell into two broad classes: those who were at ease on the stage and those who were not. Those who gestured and projected and gave their characters accents and mannerisms, and those who simply read in their own voices, as well as they could, until it was over.The performers and the rest. Yet it was not obvious who the crowd-pleasers would be. Melodrama was always an ill-judged grimace away and some of the whisperers and mumblers made you sit up and listen.
Prompted by Akello’s floury monotone, Prof. Steffi Ziegler was dwelling on these things. The professor, who lectured in twentieth-century American theatre at the University of Cologne, found herself thinking about Edward Sheldon, an all-but-forgotten playwright. She had been browsing lately through Eric Barnes’s biography of Sheldon, The Man Who Lived Twice, and a wisp of the story was still drifting in her mind.
Like many lives touched by catastrophe, Sheldon’s fell open into two unequal chapters. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he had established himself, precociously, as one of the stars of the American theatre. His play Romance became the stage sensation of the war years, running for season after season on Broadway, touring everywhere, going on to record-breaking runs in London and Paris. But when he was still in his twenties, he was struck down by a virulent form of arthritis, which rendered him immobile. By 1925 he was bedridden; by 1930 he was blind.
Sheldon spent the last twenty years of his life flat on his back in his Manhattan penthouse, unable to move a limb. Yet the remarkable thing is that he remained at the centre of the theatre world. Despite the severity of his affliction, he sustained friendships with hundreds of people, guiding marriages and careers, offering advice on life and work, amusing and inspiring everyone he knew. His generous, resilient spirit moved one friend to remark, ‘It would have been an impertinence to pity him.’
Prof. Ziegler had written several papers on Sheldon’s troublesome plays, notably The Nigger and The Princess Zim-Zim, troublesome because, despite their audacity and charm, they were disfigured by the prejudices of his time. But these concerns belonged in her scholarly work. She was musing now on the question of reading aloud. After he went blind, one of Sheldon’s main pastimes was being read to. He slept little and fitfully, and every waking moment, night or day, when he was not receiving a visitor, was passed reading. Even his night nurses had to be accomplished readers and he had very specific requirements in this regard. He did not enjoy expressive reading at all. He favoured a blank monotone that allowed him to apply his own emphases, like tints on a black-and-white photograph, ‘as though he were receiving the words directly from the printed page’, as his biographer puts it. This he called the ‘sewing machine’ style of reading, a precise, regular tacking along the lines of type, seaming one imagination to another.
Maryam Akello was that kind of reader, Prof. Ziegler thought. But without knowledge of the language, it was impossible to add a single bright thread of your own to her white linen. In fact — and at this thought Prof. Ziegler made a small, surprised sound that irritated the woman next to her — you could not even be sure it was linen. Or white.
Akello came to the end of another page — her book had yet to be published in Acholi and she was reading from a typescript — turned it over and flowed on. Shutting her eyes, Prof. Ziegler concentrated on the stream of sound. She could almost feel the little beads of it striking her eyelids. Not a sewing machine, she decided, but a more robust contraption, a planter perhaps, scattering seeds onto the harrowed earth.