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Abstract

h a jumble of utilitarian metal shelves covered with dusty dust-jacket covered books. Having unlocked the door with due solemnity the teacher would allocate us a short amount of time to select “whatever we liked”, which in my case seemed to be biographies of Marie Curie or books from the Sue Barton Student Nurse series (I believe biographies of Florence Nightingale may have followed). I was the tail of the alligator, the taper, the single person at the end of the line. The others gossiped in whispers while I surveyed the shelves: “900–999 history, biography, geography and other related disciplines”. I remember the teacher letting me take more books than allowed when I couldn’t choose. I was resentful of the special treatment. I only saw being singled out again, not the kindness of it.At home I had the freedom of the bookshelves which were scattered hither thither in every house we lived in. The problem was only in finding something fit for Martian me. There were romances and Bible-related texts (my mother); reference books (my father); boy books (damn those brothers had got there first); and a few classics including The Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician’s Nephew was missing). These last I read and reread many times in the hope that doing so would make the missing volume magically appear — at which point maybe the whole thing would make more sense — what happened with Susan in the end? How cruel of Aslan to leave her out of dying.The “girl books” were at my grandmother’s. Novels suitable for 1940s and 1950s young misses — awarded to my mother and her sisters for learning sections of the Bible by heart. School Ma’am Trudy, What Katy Did, and Almond Blossom (a Muslim girl who martyrs herself for Christianity — declared apostate and dies for her love of Christ) — typical reading, or so I believed, for a young child.I kept reading and rereading for lack of anything different. The world was a puzzle and the books, I was convinced, held clues to solving it. And nothing was banned, nothing deemed unsuitable. Judging books by their covers, by their genres, by their titles, was not something I’d been taught. My Methodist mother would slip expletives off her good Christian tongue to check I knew the correct definition before handing over some coveted treasure (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) — not realizing that it was not the individual words I would fail to understand. So long as we were reading, and could define and spell the new words we learned, she was happy. I was a spelling champion, my vocabulary colorful, but no matter how many books I read things didn’t get better at school. None of it made any sense and so neither did the stories.At some point, and from none of these places, I acquired a copy of something different. A large hardback, plain and white, and uninviting. I still have it, a library copy with yellowed pages that feel like sugar paper. Inside it says: “DISCARDED”. I am happy that I didn’t steal it from the library, sad that someone judged it “surplus to requirements”, “no longer wanted”, “not enough space”. I wonder whether the librarians had judged the cover and not the book — perhaps if it had a picture of a film star on the front it would still grace their shelves, or at least have graced them for a little longer, until the next bestseller came along.What if the Librarian had picked instead The Martian Chronicles with a picture of a Rock Hudson on the front? The idea of this TV show ticked all my boxes except Doris Day. A “one chance only ever to see” mini-series that I missed. My father clear it finished far too late for me to watch. A forbidden fruit of television which my brothers got to see and talk about incessantly, as if it was the best thing ever, from which I was excluded, the story of my life. If I’d found that book maybe me and this book would not have met — my stubborn streak would never have allowed it — Rock Hudson or not.But in the UK the book was released as The Silver Locusts. A title fit f

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or poetry, or delicate handcrafted jewellery, or a Buddhist treatise on humanity. And this is the title, in small plain lettering, covered in fading plastic, on the front of the book. It is not a conventional novel, but short stories strung together to make a greater whole, compartmentalized but cohesive. Of course I didn’t know this, I didn’t know anything for all the books I’d read already. That was clear in the playground if not in the classroom.The Silver Locusts…this had a different tumble to it on the tongue. It wriggled its way into my imagination and made cicada calls incessant in the head until I had to release them by opening the book and letting out the words.“The white canopy ballooned on the night wind, flapping softly, tied by a thousand green ribbons to the birds.”I remember the thick dry page under my fingers as I read the book in bed.“…the birds leaped, burning, towards the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under; the blue hills drifted by, drifted by…”Just like at nursery my surroundings were obliterated by my focus on the words, words placed one after another, words formed like the steps of a dance, and these words were sinuous. My mind merged in intricate design with the pages, and the words on the pages, and swirled inward with them, spiraled with ideas and thoughts and new imaginings, the shine of the silver illuminating parts of my brain where possibilities slept. I remember because this is the moment when I truly fell in love with words, with the silken lusciousness of them, the tumbling tangled miscellany, not to put too fine a point of it, this was my first glimpse of transcendence — lifted, smoothed, lightened by the flow of the prose where meaning didn’t matter — the joy was in the journey.“…leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks.”There in my bed, my fingers on the page of an unwanted second hand book, I paused, I stepped out of the story. I was distant from the words looking at them, and inside the words, a part of them. I’d understood something, a level of uncontrolled control. These weren’t slips of paper trapped in a sterile tin box to be laid out blankly on a table.This was before I knew about so-called discernment, or that science fiction wasn’t literature, or that TV shows weren’t the same as the book. I would be told later that I lacked judgement, as I reveled in my Bradbury, my Philip K Dick, my Samuel R Delany, my Margaret Atwood — they were not “proper”. But the words had told me that I could see it my way, that’s how the world made sense to me, if they thought different let them pick another book, and not mind mine. And the glory of words and books is that there’s always another way to string them and another one to open.Words in books are patient. They await your understanding. They do not talk back, or demand you change, they give you time to think, consider, and make your own reflections. They offer a meaning, but you can choose a different one. As many meanings as there are readers. Words, in books, are forbearing friends willing to accommodate all manner of understandings. The stories can be cruel but the words still beautiful, and there’s no need to take it personally. I take them to heart, but in the shape I’ve chosen.In The Silver Locusts there are all kinds of cruel, and all sorts of lonely. Displacement and isolation are part of who we are, so is beauty, so is grief, so is longing. We wear masks and wonder that the world doesn’t see who we really are. I was lonely, I was different, but I was not alone. This new topography of words, this exotic panorama, this twist of perspective, allowed me to see the world as myself. The first step was to read, the next to understand, the final to write my own.I looked at my reflection in rippled water and the Martian stared back at me, but I didn’t mind.</article></body>

How a discarded book helped a Martian live on Earth

Image courtesy of Sttefan on pixabay.com CCO

The flame birds waited, like a bed of coals, glowing on the cool smooth sands. The white canopy ballooned on the night wind, flapping softly, tied by a thousand green ribbons to the birds.

Ylla laid herself back in the canopy and, at a word from her husband, the birds leaped, burning, towards the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under; the blue hills drifted by, drifted by, leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks.

The Silver Locusts (Ylla) by Ray Bradbury

As a child my family moved us around a lot. They plopped me down in alien landscapes and sent me off to make new friends at new schools in new places. Being an alien came with its own bias. It should have been second nature. My elder brothers, not ones to restrict themselves to clichés, had not only told me “you are adopted” but that I was from an orphanage on Mars, where no one wanted me, so they’d whitewashed my green skin and sent me down to earth where I wasn’t welcome either. They even knew my Martian name, and would shout it on repeat at any opportunity. I would tell you what it is but there is still too much power in it. On the one hand I knew it wasn’t true, on the other I couldn’t comprehend why they would perpetuate the story as though I thought it was. My face would puff up red with indignation and shout back at their lies. And then again, the alien part made a kind of sense, I didn’t belong, landscapes new and old were difficult to map, the languages of my peers (ostensibly still English) impossible to understand.

The bookshelves of my childhood were a source of both refuge and consternation. I couldn’t quite get the hang of the how the stories worked or the cataloguing system. But they were a good place to hide.

Wherever we landed I always loved reading even when it was just single words on tiny slips of paper kept in a tin. The nursery school teacher would shake and tap the little metal box before opening. I’d wriggle on the chair, eyes fixed on what was to come, palms pressing the scarred wood of the table. The tin looked precious, but when opened it had a smell of metallic lozenges, the odor catching in my throat and making me grimace. But then they’d pour the words out onto the table in pieces, tip them over and slide them into place for me to read. Once I’d read each word I could pattern them into phrases, I remember fixating on the little fragments, pushing them around with my finger, everything small and manageable. In my dreams, my nursery school, the huge echoing hall around me, was stalked by the wolf. He’d try to eat my toes as I squeezed through the high and tiny windows. But in ordering the words that was forgotten; instead the cat sat on the mat, and the cat had a hat.

The next stage was to work my way through the green squares (“see Spot run”) to the red triangles (actual stories). And I did so as quickly as they would let us change books. Words were simple things to learn, came in manageable doses. I could do this, I was in control. I would take off with each story, launched toward a possibility, and promised that everything would work out right. But the words themselves still rested flat on the page, they hadn’t taken off yet. Still, I looked for secret messages in these new vistas so unfamiliar to me.

Another school, another library. Our class marched there in select groups, paired alligator style. It was a small dark room, habitually locked, filled with a jumble of utilitarian metal shelves covered with dusty dust-jacket covered books. Having unlocked the door with due solemnity the teacher would allocate us a short amount of time to select “whatever we liked”, which in my case seemed to be biographies of Marie Curie or books from the Sue Barton Student Nurse series (I believe biographies of Florence Nightingale may have followed). I was the tail of the alligator, the taper, the single person at the end of the line. The others gossiped in whispers while I surveyed the shelves: “900–999 history, biography, geography and other related disciplines”. I remember the teacher letting me take more books than allowed when I couldn’t choose. I was resentful of the special treatment. I only saw being singled out again, not the kindness of it.

At home I had the freedom of the bookshelves which were scattered hither thither in every house we lived in. The problem was only in finding something fit for Martian me. There were romances and Bible-related texts (my mother); reference books (my father); boy books (damn those brothers had got there first); and a few classics including The Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician’s Nephew was missing). These last I read and reread many times in the hope that doing so would make the missing volume magically appear — at which point maybe the whole thing would make more sense — what happened with Susan in the end? How cruel of Aslan to leave her out of dying.

The “girl books” were at my grandmother’s. Novels suitable for 1940s and 1950s young misses — awarded to my mother and her sisters for learning sections of the Bible by heart. School Ma’am Trudy, What Katy Did, and Almond Blossom (a Muslim girl who martyrs herself for Christianity — declared apostate and dies for her love of Christ) — typical reading, or so I believed, for a young child.

I kept reading and rereading for lack of anything different. The world was a puzzle and the books, I was convinced, held clues to solving it. And nothing was banned, nothing deemed unsuitable. Judging books by their covers, by their genres, by their titles, was not something I’d been taught. My Methodist mother would slip expletives off her good Christian tongue to check I knew the correct definition before handing over some coveted treasure (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) — not realizing that it was not the individual words I would fail to understand. So long as we were reading, and could define and spell the new words we learned, she was happy. I was a spelling champion, my vocabulary colorful, but no matter how many books I read things didn’t get better at school. None of it made any sense and so neither did the stories.

At some point, and from none of these places, I acquired a copy of something different. A large hardback, plain and white, and uninviting. I still have it, a library copy with yellowed pages that feel like sugar paper. Inside it says: “DISCARDED”. I am happy that I didn’t steal it from the library, sad that someone judged it “surplus to requirements”, “no longer wanted”, “not enough space”. I wonder whether the librarians had judged the cover and not the book — perhaps if it had a picture of a film star on the front it would still grace their shelves, or at least have graced them for a little longer, until the next bestseller came along.

What if the Librarian had picked instead The Martian Chronicles with a picture of a Rock Hudson on the front? The idea of this TV show ticked all my boxes except Doris Day. A “one chance only ever to see” mini-series that I missed. My father clear it finished far too late for me to watch. A forbidden fruit of television which my brothers got to see and talk about incessantly, as if it was the best thing ever, from which I was excluded, the story of my life. If I’d found that book maybe me and this book would not have met — my stubborn streak would never have allowed it — Rock Hudson or not.

But in the UK the book was released as The Silver Locusts. A title fit for poetry, or delicate handcrafted jewellery, or a Buddhist treatise on humanity. And this is the title, in small plain lettering, covered in fading plastic, on the front of the book. It is not a conventional novel, but short stories strung together to make a greater whole, compartmentalized but cohesive. Of course I didn’t know this, I didn’t know anything for all the books I’d read already. That was clear in the playground if not in the classroom.

The Silver Locusts…this had a different tumble to it on the tongue. It wriggled its way into my imagination and made cicada calls incessant in the head until I had to release them by opening the book and letting out the words.

“The white canopy ballooned on the night wind, flapping softly, tied by a thousand green ribbons to the birds.”

I remember the thick dry page under my fingers as I read the book in bed.

“…the birds leaped, burning, towards the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under; the blue hills drifted by, drifted by…”

Just like at nursery my surroundings were obliterated by my focus on the words, words placed one after another, words formed like the steps of a dance, and these words were sinuous. My mind merged in intricate design with the pages, and the words on the pages, and swirled inward with them, spiraled with ideas and thoughts and new imaginings, the shine of the silver illuminating parts of my brain where possibilities slept. I remember because this is the moment when I truly fell in love with words, with the silken lusciousness of them, the tumbling tangled miscellany, not to put too fine a point of it, this was my first glimpse of transcendence — lifted, smoothed, lightened by the flow of the prose where meaning didn’t matter — the joy was in the journey.

“…leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks.”

There in my bed, my fingers on the page of an unwanted second hand book, I paused, I stepped out of the story. I was distant from the words looking at them, and inside the words, a part of them. I’d understood something, a level of uncontrolled control. These weren’t slips of paper trapped in a sterile tin box to be laid out blankly on a table.

This was before I knew about so-called discernment, or that science fiction wasn’t literature, or that TV shows weren’t the same as the book. I would be told later that I lacked judgement, as I reveled in my Bradbury, my Philip K Dick, my Samuel R Delany, my Margaret Atwood — they were not “proper”. But the words had told me that I could see it my way, that’s how the world made sense to me, if they thought different let them pick another book, and not mind mine. And the glory of words and books is that there’s always another way to string them and another one to open.

Words in books are patient. They await your understanding. They do not talk back, or demand you change, they give you time to think, consider, and make your own reflections. They offer a meaning, but you can choose a different one. As many meanings as there are readers. Words, in books, are forbearing friends willing to accommodate all manner of understandings. The stories can be cruel but the words still beautiful, and there’s no need to take it personally. I take them to heart, but in the shape I’ve chosen.

In The Silver Locusts there are all kinds of cruel, and all sorts of lonely. Displacement and isolation are part of who we are, so is beauty, so is grief, so is longing. We wear masks and wonder that the world doesn’t see who we really are. I was lonely, I was different, but I was not alone. This new topography of words, this exotic panorama, this twist of perspective, allowed me to see the world as myself. The first step was to read, the next to understand, the final to write my own.

I looked at my reflection in rippled water and the Martian stared back at me, but I didn’t mind.