The world is full of marred men

But why are they marred? And can literature corrupt?

It can certainly seize and drive. The Gambia is a fluke of geography: a thin sliver of country tracking the Gambia river.  It is engulfed in Senegal which surrounds it on three sides; water is its fourth boundary.  It is a country of dry scrubland and mangrove swamps.  It is desperately poor.  And yet its beautiful people hunger for one thing before many: education, which reduced to essentials means literacy.

Wherever you go, children have one cry: "Any pen."  Schools and families are so poor that few have pens.  It is the same with writing materials.  In the capital Banjul's only bookshop, there is a sad sign announcing that regretfully each person is allowed a maximum of three exercise books.

That shop also has cyclostyled news-sheets.  These are not some quaint local society's publication, but the main source of news.  In March, no newspaper had been published since the middle of January.  At the airport, the first question you are asked as you enter the terminal and the country is: "Any newspapers?" Outside news is seized on eagerly: in The Gambia papers really are black and white and read all over.

How then should you respond to a request for a book?  Everyone has books when travelling; but hardly Shakespeare.  To refuse for this reason seems churlish and even cruel: words have a deep intrinsic value to this people, and to weigh niceties is an insult to their need. But where is the line to be drawn - when must you be cruel to be kind? 

To be specific: does the gift of Jackie Collins' The world is full of married men constitute a boon or a bane?

It could be argued that the ultimately risible salaciousness of her book would spur on the stumbling reader.  Her prose is also, to say the very least, simple.  But the language is worrying.  The tyro may welcome short words and a colourful vocabulary; too many of Ms Collins' short, colourful words have four letters.  It is also misleading: not everyone in the Western world foul-mouths quite so studiedly.  Whether or not they are totally obsessed with empty power and emptier sex is a moot point.  What appals is the fact that the representation takes it for granted that they are.  And it is this which makes Jackie Collins ultimately so damaging, particularly in a country like The Gambia which is predominantly Muslim and conservative, though in a relaxed rather than rampant way. 

Against great odds, its people seem genuinely happy.  This should not be confused with a bovine contentment with their lot: they aspire, and they are happy in their striving.  But this balance is all-too precarious; injudicious and unthinking actions from Westerners could wreak serious damage and upset that equilibrium.  It is as if we were visitors from another planet.  If we are to consider ourselves representatives of a benign civilisation we must never contaminate or corrupt others with our own culture.  Otherwise we will truly be men from the planet Mars.

(14.3.86)

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