Memorable lectures

1 – Speech to the 27th International Congress of the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, September 2000
2 – Inaugural Lecture of the First National Meeting for the Encouragement of Reading (Ministry of Culture, Education and Sport) – Murcia, March 2003



Speech to the 27th International Congress of the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, September 2000

A WORD CALLED COMMITMENT

When a person are an alcoholic, you get up on an Alcoholics Anonymous platform and say “My name is Fred Bloggs and I am an alcoholic”. I normally get up on platforms and say “My name is Jordi Sierra i Fabra and I’m a writer”. Of course it’s not the same, but in my case it helps to describe a whole world, the world of what one is, what one expects, what one is after. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing else. I just have to keep writing more and more and more, as Ray Bradbury said, till I’m completely satiated.
So.Welcome to you all and thank you. My name is Jordi Sierra i Fabra and I’m a writer. I was born on Planet Earth and today I’m very happy. I’m in friendly territory, surrounded by friends, and by books given the subject of this Conference. I don’t know really if the conference is opening the door to the twenty-first century or bringing down the curtain on the twentieth, but either way it is a beautiful proposal for the future.
When Günter Grass was given the Principe de Asturias Prize for his literary works, he said something with which I immediately identified. The great German author said “I just wanted to be a writer, till Germany came into my life”. Just like him, when I was a boy I wanted to be a writer, to live, to feel, to travel, to make people happy, to tell beautiful stories and be loved for them. But if Nazi Germany, Hitler and the Second World War came into Günter Grass’ life and made his writing far from complacent, for me it was the world, the whole world, that came into my life. And that world is today an essential and fundamental part of my narrative work.
I have always been an inveterate traveller, a devourer of images and words, a visionary that has been perplexed by, frightened by, gladdened by, in love with and above all in solidarity with everything I have seen. I am also na?ve, an awestruck kid who can’t give up his dream, his utopia, the passion with which he imagines that one book is everything, absolutely everything. I still believe that hope is the greatest weapon of our faith. But we must feed hope with actions, gestures, help, strength, more words. This is why every book we write is an act of faith and hope. And every reader is our ultimate reward.
I love literature more than anything else in the world. I would never dream of doing anything that would tarnish it or that could be used by anyone wishing to attack it. This is why I know that when I am telling a harrowing tale, some people may be upset or offended. But I cannot betray what I am and what I believe in. Every time a child says to me “I hate reading”, I feel an enormous burden weighing down upon my soul, because it is as if that child was saying “I hate breathing, feeling or living”. But for all those children who don’t read, don’t read very much, or even hate reading, there will always be others who enter the pages of a book with excitement, with a thirst for knowledge and with an empty space in their mind which the stories we tell in our books will help to fill. But how can we fill this space? What stories should we give the children?
Fifteen years ago my writing was transformed and radicalized by a change of consciousness on my part, when I stopped travelling with rock-stars and went to much tougher, much more difficult corners of the world. I thought I would end up sidelining myself as an author, but I didn’t care, I wanted to describe the reality I encountered on my travels. Artists must always do what they believe, without dwelling on any other considerations. They must write about what they feel, when they feel it and how they feel it. The surprise for me was that since then my realist books have become more and more popular.
In my country, Spain, there has been a controversy in the last ten years as to whether children or young people should be given books to help them or books that are aimed at making them think. And not only in Spain, I have heard similar debates in other places I have visited. Some people think that children should be given happiness and nothing but happiness, because there’ll be plenty of time later to find out about the world’s problems. I cannot agree with that idea. I also write happy books, and funny books, of course, but the proof that thousands of children and young people expect and want something more lies in the sales figures. My socially committed books are not only my biggest sellers but have also become recommended reading in a lot of Spanish schools.
I have written about child slaves, child refugees, organ transplants, juvenile violence, drugs, intolerance, racism, emigration, the power of new technologies, endangered species and fundamentally, as this is another constant theme in my work, some of the big issues that have devastated Latin America in recent decades: the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, the extinction of indigenous tribes in Brazil, the struggle in Chiapas and the killings of peasants in Guatemala.
My commitment has been based on recounting what I have seen and fighting for what I believe in. And in the case of the reader, as opposed to TV violence which happens and passes into history without going beyond its role as a news item, a novel will have a hundred, a thousand times greater impact, because the novel contains the whole story. Reading the novel will help them reason, make up their own minds and face up to the reality that surrounds them and to life itself. In my opinion literature must be a mirror in which we can portray both ourselves and the reality of our lives. It must make us happy, but it must help us too.
The second half of the 20th Century has given us communication at a worldwide level. Everything that happens can be seen on TV screens around the world in five minutes. There is maybe even too much information, a saturation, but the news items we hear every day are like little advertising slots that peck away at us and leave a greater or lesser mark, to such an extent that in the end we lose our historical perspective on what is happening, and what is more serious, we lose sight of the roots, of the reasons why a certain thing is happening. A lot of wars or conflicts start at a given time and finish years later. Who remembers the causes? Even if young people watch TV news or read newspapers, they have no historical perspective before the time they were born. Everything that happened before is pure prehistory. I have become used to young people telling me, after reading one of my books, ìNow I understand the problem, the root. Nobody had told me what happened before especially in a way that I can understandî.
I am not saying that all of us have to write tough, direct, socially committed literature, because every writer is his/her own universe and the word respect is fundamental in art, but there are authors who must take the risk of being less pleasant and more real, because we have this world that runs through our lives and only by making it known will we enable future generations to improve it. This is our commitment. I think that those of us who write for children and young people can’t just think about what they are going to like, satisfying their innocence only with easy books, nor can we think solely about how to earn the money to pay the bills. Those of us who write for children and young people do it for readers to whom we must give sincerity and honesty, value and truth, telling them “That’s the way it is. Now it’s up to you”. And I don’t think that’s an enormous weight to put on their shoulders, quite the opposite in fact. At heart, the great majority of them want to be in this world to do something. All we have to do is motivate them, nothing more. Or is it better to protect them from the wolf by denying that it exists? Going even further, is it that some of the writers realise that when, through their questions and their interest, the children find out the truth, they are sometimes being told that the world they are being bequeathed is a cruel world and that makes the writers feel bad?
I vote for truth and honesty, for the struggle for ideals and the endurance of hope, for the power of the written word and the light that arouses the reader. I champion this cause because amongst all the fantasy or galactic worlds and the happy, funny stories that light up the eyes of a child, we must also accept the commitment to tell the truth wherever we may find it, and offer it to our readers with passion and sincerity, forgetting whatever the latest fashions may be and forsaking our own purely financial interest. Only with a responsible childhood will we create just adults. Only from culture and knowledge will we make that far from Utopian dream of making the world a better place come true. The challenges of the twenty-first century are going to be enormous, so big that we cannot even imagine them, because we are not prepared for them yet. The children and young people of today and of the immediate future can expect something intense, incredible, possibly spectacular, maybe even devastating, but always fascinating, because that is life, evolution and progress. We can begin to deal with it now by being honest with our reality. And our reality has a lot of bitter points and stories that people must be told, even if only to try to prevent them from being repeated.

Inaugural Lecture of the First National Meeting for the Encouragement of Reading (Ministry of Culture, Education and Sport) – Murcia, March 2003

HOW TO READ IN THE 21ST CENTURY?

I must start by saying that I have not come here just to make a speech about what a wonderful thing reading is or how great it is to write. This forum is too important for me just to do the easy stuff. Besides, this is a “Meeting for the Encouragement of Reading”. Encourage is the word. We are all committed to this idea. We must first encourage ourselves so that later we can encourage others. I don’t even know if I am the right person to be here, because all I am is a story-teller. I am not an intellectual or a pedagogue. I don’t have a degree, I lack the abilities of a teacher or the sensibility of an educator. What is more, sometimes people don’t like what I say, they think it’s too direct or too controversial. On some issues I’m a radical, but my aim is certainly not to offend anyone, at most perhaps to shake up people’s consciences. We all want the same, to defend the pleasure of reading and the need to read, to make young people love reading. I think I am here because I have been a writer for 30 years, and because of your support, which has made me one of the ten most recommended and most frequently read authors in our schools according to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, and of course because of the over 2,000 meetings I have had over the last 18 years with young people from Spain and Latin America.
I am a product of reading not of studying. What I know is what I got from the books I read when I was a boy, and as an adult from my travels around the world. However, despite the fact that my childhood was wonderful because of reading, it was also terrible because of the things we didn’t have. Nobody ever came to the school to tell us anything, and I swore that one day, if I could, I would devote some of my time to doing that. I also promised myself that I would never turn my back on any boy or girl, because I know what it feels like to be alone when nobody believes in you or your dreams. So far I think I have kept my promise. I have always been an inveterate traveller, a devourer of images and words, a visionary that has been perplexed by, frightened by, gladdened by, in love with and above all in solidarity with everything I have seen. I am also na?ve, an awestruck kid who can’t give up his dream, his utopia, the passion with which he imagines that one book is everything, absolutely everything. I still believe that hope is the greatest weapon of our faith. But we must feed hope with actions, gestures, help, strength, more words. This is why every book we write is an act of faith and hope.
We are lost without passion in many aspects of life including some of the most mundane. Art is passion. Literature is passion. Teaching is passion. Life is passion. But something is going wrong somewhere when the main focus of our work is left cold when faced with a book, when in spite of everything in Spain let’s face it we have such low reading rates at all ages, when we have to oblige children to read through school. Why are we different? Is it something in our genes, our culture, in our history? Some people say that a lot of countries, and particularly the English-speaking ones, have a more deep-rooted habit of reading, because the Bible was always read at home from early childhood, whereas we come from the Judeo-Christian religion in which the same Bible was read to us from the pulpit, not explained to us at home. But whatever the reasons for our limited inclinations to read, we cannot just stop trying. The problem did not appear today, ten years ago or twenty years ago for that matter. Our backwardness is secular and we have inherited it. In schools today, the children read more than ever, but we still don’t read very much, and what is more serious, we have not been able to create more adult readers from the base established in childhood at school. My father did not want me to be a writer and even forbade me to become one, because he said we lived in a land of asses, in which nobody read books and I would therefore not be able to earn a crust to live on and I would starve. He said that over 40 years ago.
So once again we have to consider the big issue, the big challenge, How can we instil a love of literature? How can we transmit a love of reading when we have just entered a new century in which everything seems to be working against us, from TV to Internet, from videogames to the latest mobile-phones? What should we do when the drive or enthusiasm or even the resources are missing?
We always talk about books as an essential part of our lives and of growing-up, of our leisure and of our culture, however the contempt with which books are sometimes treated is appalling. Here are some examples:
On the night of the 5th January I took more than a hundred new books from re-editions of my works to an organization that organised collections of toys for children on the Day of the Three Kings (6th January – Traditional day for giving presents at Christmastime in Spain). The person who was collecting looked at me with a puzzled expression and told me they wanted toys not books. I reminded him that a book was just as good a present as a toy and I had almost to persuade him to take them. I would like to know how many parents or grandparents are in the habit of giving books as presents at Christmas. And I would like to know when a book stopped being a present for a child.
Second example. The Sunday edition of El País on 3rd February this year presented a 14 page in-depth study of today’s adolescents. Life, habits, likes’. the word “book” did not appear once on those 14 pages. The questions were about whether they had a mobile phone, a video-console, a DVD, if they went to the cinema, out dancing, for a few drinks, what they did with their free time. Books were absent, as of course was reading, from the lives of those interviewed who were supposedly an accurate reflection of the current generation of Spanish adolescents.
Third example and for me the most devastating. Operacion Triunfo (Spanish version of Pop Idol, Fame Academy) last January. One of the 6 finalists, Miguel Nández, proclaimed in one of the daily highlights programmes broadcast on Channel 2, that he had never read a book in his life, and that it was nice for him that the first one was in the Academy because he was reading one (which we did not see). I swear I felt like sending him a box of books. I didn’t do it because I thought it would be a waste of time or because somebody would think I was doing it to get myself known. I felt embarrassed for him. One of their heroes was telling them that he was there, almost about to win (he was one of the favourites then), without ever having read a book. He was encouraging thousands of young people to argue what was obvious, that to be something in life, to be successful, reading was of absolutely no importance. No programme manager from TVE (Spanish National TV Station) decided to cut out this aberration. When they were editing the day’s filming for the short half-hour highlights programme, someone must have thought that this comment was important. Perhaps they thought it was unusual, funny. Or perhaps they did it as a way of portraying the lad? I don’t know, although I don’t think so. But this comment encouraged hundreds of youngsters to strengthen their convictions that reading is boring and completely useless.
I won’t give any more examples because these are sufficient. A book is never in the hands of a leading actor in “Un paso adelante”, “Operacion Triunfo” or any other youth-market programme with which they may identify. It is not their job to preach the virtues of literature, but neither is it to advertise drinks and a lot of young people appear with a glass or a can in their hand, sometimes deliberately advertising a particular brand. These programmes create tendencies and fashions and try hard to follow the young look. But it is completely unthinkable at the moment for anyone in these programmes to appear at any time with a book or to talk about something related to one.
We are fighting almost without anything and against everything. We have made books disappear from our lives, either through apathy or ignorance. Books no longer exist. Nor do we writers. Books for children and young adults only have a place once a year at Christmastime in most national newspapers and never on private or public TV stations. A year ago we created a manifesto against invisibility which was published in some of the media specialising in books for children and young adults, and only in them, and we are still invisible, as invisible as our books are in terms of the publicity they are given. Those who should be reading us, know nothing about us. I’m not saying we should create some sort of artificial star-system to make us known and that our books be read because of our good looks or because of the scandals we get involved in, but it is obvious that the writers of Children’s Literature are not a reference for them, and in this case the blame must be shared by the publishers, the media and by part of the powers that be. How do you make someone read something he knows nothing about? How can they value someone who they don’t know exists? Not even the sales of books, which in some cases run into millions, are newsworthy. If I myself have spent two decades visiting schools and have first-hand information, why am I never asked about the way I see the country and its future generations?
I have always said that school is the cornerstone of the current system, and this has earned me applause from a lot of teachers and an angry response from others who claim that their duty is to teach and that’s it. I stand firm on this idea. Today more than ever. Today home is not the first reference point for cultural support, instead it is a meeting-point in which a lot of different forces converge. There is a TV in each bedroom, work or studies create a diaspora in which there is less contact between the members of the household, different timetables, closed doors. We have homes formed by the typical married couple, but we also have single-parent families, either because the couple have divorced or because one of them has chosen to raise a family in this way. It is difficult for a child to see his father, mother or elder brother reading when there is less family life, more rushing around, more isolation. And we’re moving towards a future that is even more uncertain. A future in which the book more than ever before must become a part of our lives, not just a decoration in the lounge. Books must be present, not forced upon us. A book must be entertainment as well as culture. Please, let’s not create any more robots, more young philistines who will soon turn into atrocious, irresponsible, intolerant, violent, sexist, narrow-minded and limited parents, without any values, with football as their only guiding star, isolated from each other. If we educate people, we prevent this intolerance, this racism, urban or domestic violence, lack of understanding, egoism, the impunity with which we are exhausting our planet’s resources and many more etceteras. Culture is not just about doing a degree, or even reading a book. It is about absorbing life, having your own ideas and your own opinions, maintaining your individuality within the community. And this is what we have to instil in them. How? I suppose by investing more and more in libraries, teachers, resources, but definitely not by advertising campaigns or slogans which they laugh at, because let’s not deceive ourselves, at 15 years old, very few kids ever think they could possibly get AIDS or that if they don’t wear a helmet when they’re on their motorbikes, they could get killed, or that reading could be the difference between having a chance and condemning yourself in advance to a life of emptiness. Scorning risk is a part of their lives. And given that perspective on life, books don’t even appear necessary. We live in a high-speed world in which the idea of stopping to read a book seems totally absurd. And yet this is the only possible stop. But also, when we talk about culture, we mustn’t forget that it is everything. It is easy to govern a country full of asses. And what is easy is also comfortable. The challenge must be to govern in a country that is worth governing, whoever is in charge.
The fact that a pupil reads a book a term is not reading, because if you read a chapter a week, or a page a day, and not a line more, you won’t understand anything. Let’s not kid ourselves. A lot of you say to me “OK, but it’s better than nothing” or “What can I do about it?”. The work here must be a joint effort and we’re not going to achieve it overnight or next year even. It begins in high circles with the Ministry, the Culture Departments of each Regional Government and ends with the schoolmaster or mistress lost and forgotten in a mountain village with hardly any resources apart from their own enthusiasm, which is normally very strong. Sometimes one person is enough to change things. In Bolivia, a woman told me that every month she carried books in the saddlebags of her donkey through the mountains, and gave out and collected novels which the villagers devoured. I was moved both by the facts of the story and by how thrilled she seemed when she was telling me it. “Do you know what, Jordi?” she said. “Your books are the ones they ask for most, especially the youngsters”. A grain of sand. Maybe. But we are all grains of sand. Each one of you teaches a small number of students. Sand. And in a whole life, that sand may not even fill a bucket. In the same way, a book is also a grain of sand. It takes a lot to become rocks, a lot of time and patience, but what other choice do we have? We cannot oblige anyone to read, but we must strive to make them understand why it is necessary. And we have to do it in the context of the 21st Century, because nothing can ever evolve or develop from intransigent, outdated attitudes. The title question of my speech is “How to read in the 21st Century?” It should also be extended to “What to read in the 21st Century?”
I am proud to be number 8 of the top 10 most recommended and read authors for students of between 12 and 16 years of age behind Bécquer, Lorca, Galdós, Baroja or García Márquez. But do we really believe that just by reading Becquer’s rhymes or “La Regenta” or “La Celestina” we will make readers? We live in a time of different interests and concerns with a generation that counts in euros, talks about computers and has lost a lot of the values with which we grew up, of whatever kind, moral, spiritual, social etc. It is a new time, which requires a new approach. We must read Clarín, Lorca, Gald’s and Baroja of course, but this new world in which we live does not appear in their works and can only be found in contemporary novels. I was obliged to read Cervantes, and God knows how much I hated him. I only appreciated the quality of Don Quixote when years later I reread it by choice. Today students have the chance to meet the author whose books they have read, something which is important and creates a relationship, mutual understanding, closeness. It is important to arouse their curiosity. Today’s generation wants to feel involved in the books they are reading. There is a lot of “I can’t be bothered”, a huge amount, but there is also a great spirit of solidarity with a lot of young people working in NGOs, in social action full of commitment.
The second half of the 20th Century has given us the chance to communicate at a worldwide level. Everything that happens can be seen on TV screens around the world in five minutes. There is maybe even too much information, a saturation, but the news items we hear every day are like little advertising slots that peck away at us and leave a greater or lesser mark, to such an extent that in the end we lose our historical perspective on what is happening, and what is more serious, we lose sight of the roots, of the reasons why a certain thing is happening. A lot of wars or conflicts start at a given time and finish years later. Who remembers the causes? Even if young people watch TV news or read newspapers, they have no historical perspective before the time they were born. Everything that happened before is pure prehistory. I have become used to young people telling me, after reading one of my books, “Now I understand the problem, the root. Nobody had ever told me what happened before (the events), especially in a way that I can understand”. For me this is placing a book at the service of society, providing both escapism and learning. That is why I keep going on about the importance of contemporary literature in the battle for gaining and keeping readers. I ask those people at the Ministry of Culture, Education and Sport who organize the syllabus not to wipe out readers by forcing them to read the classics and nothing but the classics, and I ask teachers in schools to remember the times we are living in. I don’t know how many of today’s authors will still be read a hundred years from now. But in the last forty years an excellent generation of authors have emerged who deserve a chance and who are fighting on the front line, with their books, with their professionalism, visiting schools. For every classic that the children are obliged to read, they read three modern books, without being told which titles to read or being limited to any particular field, a free choice.
But there is more: young people are not idiots. They feel misunderstood, yes, and pushed aside, and trampled all over for a lot of reasons while they are crossing the threshold of adolescence, but they are not stupid. When they read something that interests them, they immerse themselves in it. When someone shows them a new horizon, they go towards it. There are also those who believe that a book for young people should be different, simple, trivial, stuffed full of adventures and little else. I disagree. Literature for children and young people is Literature with a capital ‘L”. When you produce good literature you get a response.
At the beginning of the nineties my books started to get tougher. They became books of protest, of absolute social commitment which has been their hallmark ever since. I have written about child slaves, child refugees, organ transplants, juvenile violence, drugs, intolerance, racism, emigration, the power of new technologies, endangered species. My commitment has been based on recounting what I have seen and fighting for what I believe in. And in the case of the reader, as opposed to TV violence which happens and passes into history without going beyond its role as a news item, a novel will have a hundred, a thousand times greater impact, because the novel contains the whole story. Reading the novel will help them reason, make up their own minds and face up to the reality that surrounds them and to life itself. In my opinion literature must be a mirror in which we can portray both ourselves and the reality of our lives. It must make us happy, but it must help us too. This has been my personal quest. That’s why I stopped travelling with rock-stars and started going to much tougher, more difficult corners of the world. I thought I would end up sidelining myself as an author, but I didn’t care, I wanted to describe the reality I encountered on my travels. My philosophy is that authors must always do what they believe, without dwelling on any other considerations. They must write about what they feel, when they feel it and how they feel it. The surprise for me was that since then my realist books have become more and more popular. I was writing “Noche de Viernes” (Friday Night) because I felt this urge to do so and I said to myself “I think my books are going to stop selling and we’re going to go hungry, because of this, or they’re not going to publish this or it’s going to put people’s backs up”. It was published, there have been 30 editions so far, almost 200,000 books sold and it is considered a reference point, an example. It began with personal recommendations from one teacher to another and then the pupils started doing the same and that was enough. Young people have that rebellious side, that spirit of solidarity, that semi-tragic mark of adolescent heroes, and the word “Commitment” means a lot to them. All of my work over the last 13 years has that commitment and this is what has sold best. The two things must be related. These issues interest young people. This is why I have made commitment my cause. This is why I travel around the world, recounting what I see, and I talk to boys and girls from the five continents, not from the privileged position of a writer but from a position of equality as human beings. I normally tell them not to look at me as anything special, because I am like them but with a small difference, I am older and have more experience.
I am absolutely convinced that a person who does not read is doomed to fail in life, unless he/she has some special quality that enables them to overcome this enormous gap in their lives. Nine out of ten people that grow up in ignorance are candidates for difficult lives, uncertain employment, frustrations as adults, depression, retirement in precarious circumstances, emptiness and silence. But if neither AIDS nor pregnancies can make young people take precautions when they have sexual relations, which is something very immediate, how do you make them see that absorbing knowledge through books will mean they will have a better life in the future? If we are not imaginative, in ten years time we will be here again having the same meeting to discuss the same questions.
We must not rule anything out, or lower our objectives or the level, but we must adapt it, create synergies, be smarter than them, because let’s face it we’re older than they are. Some years ago, a schoolmaster asked me in desperation what he could do to make his pupils read. I proposed a plan to him. I told him to bring a book into class with all his notebooks and papers and to put it on the table in such a way that only the spine could be seen, not the cover. I told him that the pupils, who out of habit observe the way you dress and what you do, would make an effort to read the title and that that day or the next, one of them would be sure to ask him what he was reading. Then the teacher would say something like “Oh, nothing. It’s just a novel.” This would have to be like a “What’s it about?” from one of the pupils, to which the teacher would add “You wouldn’t like it, it’s too shocking for kids your age”. This is the trick, to provoke a reaction from the kids, to make them say. “Why can’t I read it? Does he think I’m stupid? Maybe it’s about sex and wild nights out on the town?” And the game cannot stop there. I told the teacher to tell them a bit about the plot, with passion, while insisting that it wasn’t suitable for them and finally to propose to them “If anyone wants to read it, I’ll pass it on to them when I finish it”. Something he should not do immediately in order to arouse anxiety and questions like “Haven’t you finished it yet?” He shouldn’t leave it too long though.
He rang me a few months later and told me it had worked, that about half a dozen kids who previously had never read books, were now reading. The game of provocation, laying a trap, creating a mystery was the solution. These students were reading novels undreamt of before. It worked. Another grain of sand, but this is the way. And this way must be found in every village, every area, every Community, each with their own specific problems. And later, together, all of us can work and work and work. Tirelessly. Because every boy or girl who lets reading into their lives is another hope. On top of everything we’ve done wrong in the past, we must build each proposal for the future. We must be capable of analysing the many mistakes we have made rather than the few successes, and we must not believe that one success is enough. This is a never-ending battle, because every year new boys and girls are entering school, and every five years the norms and customs of society change at incredible speed. We must start now by training librarians who understand what their role, and of course their job, is. And sometimes it’s not just a question of money. Imagination is another important aspect. A library must also be a play centre. We must make school the genuine cultural motor for the future, not a place to park your children, or an obligation for children and adolescents. I sincerely believe that today we can no longer argue that school is solely a place you go to learn things. I think it is instead the place in which they will be educated and formed.
I would like to refer to my experience as a regular visitor to schools, high schools and universities in recent years. I do this as an example and a summary of what I was saying earlier that school is the place where we should be working on culture and the pleasure of reading.
In my years as a giver of talks at schools I have encountered cases and habits that must disappear. One of the most frequent is to ask the publisher to send an author, whoever it may be, because it is necessary to give a bit of a shine to a Culture Week, as if there were no difference for example between Pérez Reverte and Miguel Delibes, or between Bruce Springsteen and Placido Domingo in music. Another case is the school that proudly announces it has managed to organize visits from 15 authors in one year, as if the important thing was to score points against rival schools in the area, when what matters is who visits, what they say and how well this goes down with the students. If there is anything worse than a boring book, it is an author that sends them to sleep. In recent years school visits have fallen into a dangerous routine. There are schools that don’t read any books from a certain publisher, unless they send them the author, which means they will never read Roald Dahl or Michel Ende, or any living author who is either too busy or too old to visit the school. They prefer a mediocre book to a good one just because the author visits the school. Other schools cannot invite a particular writer because the maths teacher vetoes them at the staff meeting, or refuses to give up his classroom so that the pupils can participate in the event. The publishers are not blameless either in the current madness, as it is not unusual for them to propose a minimum sale in exchange for sending the author, who is almost always unaware of these deals hatched behind his back.
In spite of this, I still think that in the absence of more, better, updated libraries and more and better campaigns to publicise our works in Spain and abroad, the writer-student contact is the best method available today. My books have been published in 25 languages and are available in 50 countries, but it has been a laborious, slightly amateurish job shared between myself and my publishers. The scorn shown by publishers from English-speaking countries is notorious. Translate a Spanish author, who has not been translated before, why? If you, the teachers, did not read and recommend our books, we would surely all starve to death.
It is often said that if an adolescent sees her parents reading, she will get into the habit of reading too. It is better to have parents who read, of course, but given that these days, children, out of the need to rebel against their old folks, tend to do the opposite to what their parents do, the fact that their parents read does not necessarily mean that the children will too. Parents that are smokers often have children who become non-smokers and vice versa. Friends of mine who don’t read at all have children who devour books and accuse their parents of being “ignorant”, and other friends who read a lot find that their rebellious sons and daughters show no interest whatsoever. A father and a mother acquire the responsibility of parenthood when they decide to have children and form a family, but if they have never been told that reading is a fundamental part of their children’s mental development, their responsibility is confined to feeding and dressing them and doing the best for them as they see it, but it will be hard for them to understand that their children’s future may depend on something other than studying or working. These are the parents that complain that books are too expensive, while they smoke two packets of cigarettes a day, and if their son has read a book this term, “what does he want another one for?” These are the parents that associate reading with homework, as most adolescents do. Parents complain at school that their children are given too many exercises to do as homework, one of which is reading. Not long ago, a father told me, “My daughter spends all day reading. That can’t be good, can it? She doesn’t even watch TV. She’ll end up stupid or something like that”. It took me a long time to convince him that for his daughter reading every day was like doing three degrees, although without receiving a diploma.
Something I often find when I come to a village in Spain somewhere where there are two schools, is that in the first one I get a fantastic reception with banners, music, filming on video and a party to celebrate the arrival of the writer, and in the other an hour and a half later, completely the opposite, no enthusiasm, indifference, boredom. The reactions of the boys and girls from the different schools matched the different receptions. And it does not matter whether the writer is able to win over the two audiences in the same way. The important thing is that before the writer arrived there was someone who was capable of generating enthusiasm to confront that indifference that is even more contagious. Why in two schools in the same village is a writer received in two completely different ways? Because in one of the schools there is a teacher who has managed to light a flame in his pupil’s souls and in the other there is not.
In fifteen years, I have met a lot of enthusiastic teachers, fighters at various stages of exhaustion. Why not? Teachers of the sort who don’t give up, because in every class there is a group of boys and girls who expect “something”, and there may be even a potential writer, who may be left to wither or may blossom into something. These teachers are able to laugh, to transmit their enthusiasm, to earn the pupil’s confidence without losing their respect. I prefer them to the terrible “beaks” of my time at school. You started trembling immediately you saw them, even before they opened their mouths. This is a teacher who doesn’t give orders, though he’s clearly in charge, who rather suggests, invites and joins in. He is the first to read the book that the class will have to read or who talks about a book which he hasn’t told them to read but which he thinks is good. There are lots of ways of teaching and not all of them have to be during class time.
I know that schools are becoming the centre for everything and anything in education: be it road education, sex education, environmental education. A lot of students go to a dozen talks a year which have nothing to do with the syllabus itself. But if they don’t read, they cannot think, reason, write or study. When a maths teacher doesn’t let his students go to a talk by a writer who is visiting the school, “because mathematics are more important than literature”, he is using cannonballs to kill ants and what is worse he is shooting himself in the foot. These students will know how to add two and two together, but will they know how to write it? I tremble when I hear a teenager saying “I don’t like reading” or worse still “I hate reading”. I feel an enormous burden weighing down upon my soul, because it is as if that child were saying “I hate breathing, feeling or living”. I am amazed when a boy or girl tells me “Your book is the first book I have ever read in my life and I enjoyed it. I’m going to read another one”. It’s like living in another world. And it is sad to have to make them read out of obligation. I know. When a teenager asks me if it is good that they should be made to read, I normally answer “No it isn’t, but’ when you are ill, they take you to the Doctor, and even if you don’t like it they give you medicine to make you better, or they operate on you. If you don’t like reading you are ill in the soul, in the head, and in many other places, so the only remedy is the good aspirin of a book, whether you like it or notî.
Given that an uneducated country is a lost country, teachers have an enormous responsibility, something which not all of them are willing to accept. Parents accuse them when their children fail at school. If they are strict, they accuse them of being strict, and if they are soft, of being soft; and we have all heard the typical comments about a fabulous life with three months holidays and all the rest; or that they pick on their children etc. etc. Violent parents, lack of understanding, loneliness, loss of respect, nerves stretched to breaking-point, sensation of impotence, of struggling in vain, unrewarded effort’. Teachers today bear a much bigger responsibility than the one they opted for and they are badly-paid too, oh yes, I know, we know! They deserve the highest salaries for everything they do and for the responsibility they must bear. They are the base on which the system stands. Sorry you are the base on which the system stands. The essence of the question still remains the same: they chose it, you chose it. To a greater or lesser extent you believed in it. You don’t sell potatoes nor do you make esparto knickers, which is not to imply any lack of honour or merit in these two professions. A father or a mother who arrives home exhausted by their work, or with their nerves in shreds because they are out of work, turns on the TV whether the sun’s shining or it’s raining cats and dogs, whether their daughter has misbehaved or their son has broken the spin-dryer. This is their world. In other words, no fathers or mothers ever choose beforehand the type of life they want and even less the lives of their children. The majority improvise and adapt to events as they happen. But every working day in the world from September to June, teachers do know why they are doing what they do, and because of their education and their intellectual level they know a lot of things about which a lot of parents have no idea. These teachers should not be too concerned about what there is at home, if the family read or not, if the parents are aware of the value of reading. They should cast all of this aside and think only of what they can give this boy or girl. They are teachers after all. When a father in India sells his son for $15 to a carpet-maker, he does it perhaps to be able to feed his other ten children. Perhaps. We can judge him, shudder from our Western viewpoint, think of him as inhuman, and perhaps we will work to recover this child, to drag him out of slavery, give him an education, help him to improve, because above all else, he is a child. Here in Spain, parents do not sell their children, but there are a lot who in other ways are just as irresponsible, ignorant and inhuman as the man in India who sold his son. We have to forget worrying about whether parents teach their children to read or not. We have that peculiar, beautiful thing that is capable of changing the world called a book. We believe in it. It is our weapon and we must use it.
“How to read in the 21st Century?” is a question which can initially be answered with another question, “How to present books in the future?” and another, “How to make books everyday objects?” “How to convince people of their value?” “How to sell books alongside so many other free-time activities with which they must compete?” We as politicians, teachers or authors must forget about the competition, stop complaining about the TV or videogames. If the book has got this far, it means it is in good health and has resisted five centuries of change. In itself a book is magic. In itself a book is the best and the healthiest of all drugs, the only one that causes addiction out of pleasure and does not kill. It is not necessary for teenagers to take ecstasy to light up their minds, as sadly they often believe. A book will do it a thousand times more. But we’re not going to convince them with a stupid poster and a standard slogan, but by convincing ourselves that it is possible, believing in it, tirelessly transmitting enthusiasm, equipping ourselves with the necessary resources. We live in a complete and permanent state of emergency. We are all asking each other for help. We all need each other. We urgently require a display of resistance culture and each one of us must keep the fight going as best they can. Every time a teenage reader disappears, part of the human conscience dies. Every uneducated reader is a lost seed and an opportunity for a dictator, a bigot or a murderer to appear through the crack they leave behind them. I often get carried away by the passion I feel for this issue, but I am being most sincere when I say that I believe in the fight, in this fight, because it is the fight of humanity against barbarism. It is not a question of imposing ideas. Quite the opposite. You can find everything in books. It is a question of shouting out loud, ìhey you, kids. You’ve got a chance. Are you going to let it slip away?
On 15th February, Enrique Vila-Matas wrote this story: “Canetti, in his work “The Profession of the Writer” talks about the astonishment and indignation he felt in the 1950’s when he read a note left behind by an anonymous writer. It was a note dated 23rd August 1939, a week before the outbreak of World War II. The note said “There is nothing to be done. But if I was really a writer, I should be able to prevent the war”. Canetti thought, “How ridiculous! How pretentious! What could a single individual have done? And why a writer?” For days, Canetti mulled over this question in his mind, until he realised that the writer of the note had a profound awareness of the power of words. Canetti’s mood then changed from indignation to admiration. On closer examination, instead of seeming an idle boast, the anonymous writer’s opinion appeared the confession of his absolute failure, and perhaps even more, the confession of a “responsibility”, in precisely the situation (and this seemed to him to be the most fascinating aspect of the story) where responsibility in the normal sense of the word could least be invoked. Canetti saw that his initial indignation had been caused by the idea this person had about what a writer should be, and the fact that he considered himself to be one until the war destroyed his ideals. “And it is just that irrational claim of responsibility” writes Canetti, ìthat makes me think and attracts me about this case. A writer then would be someone who attaches great importance to words. While there are still people who take on this responsibility for words and feel them with the maximum intensity when they acknowledge their total failure, we will have the right to conserve one word, that of “writer”, which has always been used to refer to the authors of works without which we would have no conscience of what really constitutes humanityî.
In this story there is a clear lesson, which I feel as a writer, and which we must all feel as people, as well as in our roles as teachers, educators or politicians. We will fail too if we do not convince our young people that confidence in the word is confidence in their lives and in their future.
To finish up, I admit that I individually do not have a magic wand to change things, or wonderful ideas for converting non-readers into readers. Neither do I like using nice-sounding words that are void of meaning. However, I do have some clear ideas, a sort of basic ten commandments in which I believe and which could be an accurate summary of everything I have said. I would like to finish this speech by listing them and sharing them with you. My code of ethics is based on respect, hope and honesty, so this is my only truth.
1. Books, like Art in general, must be present in a natural and habitual way in the lives of young people.
2. A book is not just a cultural asset, it is also another source of entertainment in a world which every day has more and more global leisure options on offer.
3. A book is like a record, a film, a video or a game: pure escapism.
4. The library is the biggest (free) amusement arcade in the world and there is always a library more or less near you.
5. Reading makes us independent, it gives us personality, power, strength, our own ideas, it sets us apart from others.
6. Reading is the main key to the door called freedom.
7. Reading is the only drug that genuinely opens our minds, lights us up and changes us.
8. When we read, when we feel, we remember that we are alive and that this is a privilege.
9. When the world tries to catch us and sicken us, reading is the only thing that can return us to our human condition.
10. Reading is like making love. It’s you and the book, alone together sharing everything.
Thank you for being here and taking part in this experience. Good Night.