About wisdom

Wisdom is the greatest asset of mankind, even more so in today’s world, where it seems wisdom is as rare as hen’s teeth.

The day before yesterday I spoke of wisdom, storytelling and reading during a meeting about Surinamese poetry and prose, which I had been invited to by my good friend Mariska de Jong, a Surinamese lady from Haarlem. Part of the meeting was a traditional water ritual, which has a great symbolic meaning to the Surinamese, as their ancestors were carried across the water from their birthplace.

Mariska de Jong and some other participants. Source: De Pletterij, Haarlem

 

It was great fun, especially when one of the Surinamese participants, after my lecture, asked me mischievously whether I might be another African. My reply was ‘yes, a white one,’ upon which we burst out laughing together. 

Here is a livestream of the event, unfortunately only in Surinamese and Dutch without subtitles, made by De Pletterij, a cultural and debating centre in Haarlem. My contribution starts at 21 minutes 20 seconds.

 

To make up for the lack of English, I'll give you an extract of the lecture I gave, and a conclusion.

THE ART OF STORYTELLING

How did our ancestors share their wisdom? All over the world, stories were told after dark, when people sat together with an oil lamp, a candle or a fire. In Europe we used to have folk tales, many of which were eventually re-told and collected by the Grimm brothers into a book of fairy tales.

Here, we only know these stories as fairy tales, but in the African culture, the art of storytelling is still very much alive. In West Africa, as I wrote before, many of these stories are about spiders, about Anansi, once the messenger of the gods, now an earthly scoundrel and a cheat who sometimes is cheated himself. The Anansi stories travelled with the slave trade to the Americas and the Caribbean, where they are even told today, centuries later.

In my recently published historical novel with the same title Anansi, a young girl called Efua tells the stories of Anansi to the children of her village. The first chapter looks like something out of a children’s book as she tells the story of Anansi who tries to steal all wisdom. This tale (I think) comes from a collection written down by the British africanist R.S.Rattray, about a century ago, but I backdated it to the 17th Century.

yours truly reading a chapter from his book. source: livestream by De Pletterij

Efua’s story ends in a metaphore: the river took the wisdom collected by Anansi to the sea, which spread it all over the world. And thus, a little wisdom lives in us all.

Soon, the innocent children’s book takes an horrible turn as Efua is taken from her village by slavers and subjected to all kinds of cruelty. Efua will never learn to read or write, not even as a grown woman, but she had preserved her ancestors’ wisdom in her memory, and would eventually take it to Suriname. She is, in my book, the embodiment of all those thousands of women and men, who took the knowledge of their ancestors with them across the ocean.

An English translation of the story Efua tells of Anansi and wisdom can be found HERE.

READING AND WRITING

Our early ancestors, whether we have African, Asian, American or European roots, usually couldn’t read or write. That was reserved for very few: even kings and chiefs often couldn’t read or write - they had wise men and priests to write for them. But lowly traders and farmers, even though they couldn’t write, often jotted down what was sold or harvested by scoring the amount on a stick, or a stone.

Over the centuries, book printing as well as education made reading and writing into an important factor shaping our society. And inevitably during the late colonial era, reading and writing were introduced in Africa, the Caribbean and other colonial regions.

Even so, the lack of reading skills today is a source of concern - it seems that one-third of the 15-year-olds lacks basic reading and writing skill needed to function in society. We have social media, breaking news, over-stimulation by almost everything thrown into your private life by television and the smartphone. Wisdom, or what passes for it, today is transmitted by television talkshows or by Facebook or Tiktok, so why should you want to read in the first place?

I feel that reading is a source of information, or possibly wisdom, which you can compare at leisure with other sources or even with the knowledge you already have. But reading also is a pleasant form of relaxation, even though you may have to learn appreciate it and take time for it. And the most enjoyable form of reading is reading to your children. I have recently become a grandfather and even now I am anticipating the joy of reading to my granddaughter when she will be one or two years old.

I learned to read thanks to my parents, who had cases upon cases of books and from a young age urged me to read. I still have many books from their collection, most of which are falling apart with age. Some of them I still re-read every few years. They feel like a worn old armchair that you don’t want to get rid of because it is so familiar. The advantage of reading is that you take the contents at your own pace without being hurried by images, sound and pace of a television. Reading awakens your imagination, makes you think, teaches you about other opinions and adds to your own wisdom, or perhaps to realisation how little you really know…

Thus, a book is a little like the river that took Anansi’s wisdom to the sea, which spread it all around the world.

 

I won’t claim that all I write is wisdom, on the contrary, most of it comes from a rich imagination that sometimes gets the better of me. But what is my goal? I mainly want to tell a gripping story that captivates my readers, much like the ancient storytellers of Anansi, or Reinaert the Fox, or Brer Rabbit. But I also like to do my homework because the background of my story has to be right. Perhaps that is the wisdom I try to convey in my tales.

A book is a form of entertainment: it has to capture your imagination and must be difficult to put away. When you have read a chapter, the urge must remain to turn over another page and then another. Emotion also plays its part in my work: there are parts I cannot re-read without feeling the emotion again that went into writing them. The protagonists in my books have become my friends, or perhaps my children. No wonder, as I created them myself.

The personages Evert and Efua in my book Anansi are the product of my emotion. I try to describe their feelings, how they come together and how they learn to cope with the adversity in their lives, but also the friendships with others who support them in their most difficult moments and help them along in life.

Isn’t emotion, next to wisdom, the most important quality of mankind?

Mariska de Jong and Cherida de Ziel

WISDOM IN TODAY’S WORLD

On the Dutch edition of this blog I recently wrote of my confusion and my doubts of today’s world, and the extreme cruelty of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which the world was plunged into once again by a malevolent dictator, by horrible terrorism and a trigger-happy populist, as if we haven’t learned a thing.

We haven’t learned from the Holocaust, not from the Nakba, not from colonial cruelties and our history of slavery, or Vietnam, Chile, Bosnia, Iran, Georgia, Aleppo, Afghanistan, Irak or Sudan. It is apparent in the hostility preached by slick politicians towards contrary opinions, towards foreigners, refugees and ‘fortune seekers’. Politicians that exploit the chaos created by a failing governance of their own making. It is always the other man’s fault, never our own. We are going through a dark age and I fear for the world that we leave to our children.

A people gets the leaders it deserves, said Joseph de Maistre in 1811 (Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite). As James Freeman Clarke, an American thinker, wrote several decades later (I can only mention him once again): The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.

Only statemanship can save us, but sometimes it seems the river that carried Anansi’s wisdom to the sea has dried out.

I wish you and us all a great deal of wisdom in the year 2024.