"Surprised by Joy"
1981; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.0.1345
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Resumo"Surprised by Joy" Samuel Pickering Jr. Click for larger view View full resolution I spent the past year teaching at Tishreen University in Lattakia, Syria, and there I had an experience that confirmed the value of children's literature for me. The university was new and when I arrived the Faculty of Letters did not contain a single book. The English Department had three full-time members, including me, and over two hundred students flooded composition classes. Most students majoring in English knew little of the language and had no hope of ever completing their studies. Last week I received a letter from one saying, "Please write to me informations about how to go on in this department. [End Page 1] We here are not too much glad because we have not any teacher like you. Our wishes are to find like you again." Poor boys and girls with poor backgrounds from poor villages, they came and still come to me carrying dreams brighter than rainbows. After a day of teaching them, life hung heavy and the long walk home through the close, rubbish-strewn streets did little to dispel the gathering sadness. Polio is epidemic in Syria and children with twisted legs thrust and claw their ways like crabs along the sidewalks. Strife is always present. Beset by external and internal enemies, Syria and consequently the lives of my students tottered on the brink of dark unknowns. Click for larger view View full resolution Life there was not always gray, however, like Wordsworth I was forever surprised by joy. Beside the Faculty of Letters was a building belonging to the Baath Party—the governing political party of Syria. In front of the building ran the road to the harbor. Lattakia was Syria's largest port and along the road huge lorries rumbled all day, many of them loaded with shells and pulling cannons. Several times a week, however, buses stopped at the Baath building and Pioneers, elementary school age children, dashed out and their laughter breathed life into the building. The Pioneer group is modeled on Eastern European and Soviet youth organizations, and the child-member, besides exercising, playing games, and going camping, learns patriotic songs and nationalism. One cold, early December day, the kind of day in which one is certain that the Great First Cause must have abdicated heaven and that nothing is right with the world, I walked gloomily past the Baath building. Hundreds of sheets of paper were dumped in the mud outside. Bored and not eager to arrive early for my class, I stopped and began looking at the papers. As I picked up handfuls, the day metaphorically brightened. On the sheets were pictures drawn that morning by young Pioneers. All were radiant with color and the joy of life. The children drew meadows bursting with flowers, green valleys cluttered with goats and sheep, and small villages in which the houses were summery reds and yellows and blues. Peasant women with purple and pink bundles on their heads walked beside country roads shiningly free from garbage while bedouins led camel caravans across improbable orange and brown deserts. In city markets red and black stickmen pushed carts heaped with apples, lemons, and tomatoes. As I looked at the pictures I thought how different they were from those I had drawn at a similar age, which my mother later packed away for me in the attic. Beginning school in 1947, I rarely drew flowers. In my drawings, thunderclouds of B-29s stormed over Germany while tidal waves of battleships sank Japan beneath the sea. Only one of the pictures I found on the ground depicted war. In a country in which military equipment and soldiers are everywhere, in which there is gunfire almost every night, in which war seems just around the next historical corner, the absence of such drawings seemed remarkable—if not miraculous. Surprised by the pictures I went to class in better spirits. Maybe, I thought, some of my students would be able to clamber beyond their poor backgrounds and finish their university studies and become, as they hoped, village schoolteachers. Like those pictures in the mud, children's literature has a capacity...
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