BY MULUGETA GUDETA
Not so long ago, when present-day adults were still were still younger and energetic, they were the vanguards of urban culture with its unwritten rules and etiquettes. To be modern in the 1970s through roughly 2000 meant to be modern, educated and, to go smart with books they used to carry in their pockets. The pocket books of yester years have now disappeared for good. It was a mark of culture to carry your books in your pockets and read them whenever you felt like it be it on buses, taxis or simply while walking in the streets because the streets where not as crowded as now and cars were rarities compared to the present time.
There were voracious readers in our midst like the famous bookseller gone writer books Hailu Minas alias Awgechew Terefe (his pen name) who was famously said that he would read a dictionary if there was no book around him. Awgechew was famed for reading non-stop once he started reading a book until he finished it. There were rumors circulating among the reading fraternity like his ability to finish reading a long book in one night and telling about it in detail the next day to anyone who cared to listen.
One of the reasons why Awgechew became a book vendor was his love for reading and get books more easily. He had no appetite for making money out of his engagement because it was unimaginable at that time to become rich by selling books unless you were one of the many cheats that appeared on the book market later on by defrauding the writers and small distributors and have subsequently brought untold ruins on so many promising writers in their insatiable appetite to make money on the labor of unsuspecting and good-meaning scribes.
Take the case of another bookworm, the equally famous Sibhat Gebregziabeher who carried his books in a plastic bag and read them in the street walking like a snail. He was undistracted by anything around him, even the pretty women that walked around in the summer sun with dresses that were blowing in the wind.
In those days, one could meet Sibhat sitting on the stairs of the Berhanena Selam printing press and reading a book, not caring about anything that came and went around him. This was a weird thing to do by any measure. However, he was not showing off or claiming the mantle of “reader of the year”. Had it not been for Sibhat whom almost everybody in the city knew him for his eccentricities, the guards could have rushed to the place and taken him away by force. Sibhat was the most eccentric reader and writer by excellence. His life outside literature was equally unconventional but this is not our focus here.
In those times when you enter any pub, you could see half of the customers deeply engage in reading a book or a newspaper oblivious of the time and the place. Newspapers displaced books as sensational news and political disputes were the order of the days. One of the most famous reader in drinking houses was the late Teshome Adera who always carried foreign journals with him such as the Times of London and other British newspapers and read from page one to the last page, sipping his beer that he kept near him and away from rumors and backbiting the capital was abuzz at that time.
When he finished reading, Teshome paid his bills and left the place in silence to continue his reading somewhere else maybe in Piaza or at Jimma Bar up there near Abune Petros monument. Speaking of the book warms of those times, one would not forget some of them who went to the extreme of eccentricity, one of them reading his book while peeing at a street corner, holding the book in one hand and his ‘peeing apparatus’ with the other. This may not be an admirable behavior but it shows the extent of obsession some readers had with books and readings.
Many people were also addicted with reading in beer joints. When I left my work I walked downtown and then to Senga Tera area near Mexico square and further down Bulgaria Embassy area and go into my favorite beer joint that served the foaming drink in huge glasses that were heavy to carry with one hand. I carried my book with my other hand. I remember reading “Down and Out in Washington” a very entertaining and humorous by American satire columnist Art Buchwald and laughed alone reading the funny stories. Sometimes the women who were serving us looked up at me and frowned with apparent disgust at a man who was laughing at a book instead of calling one of them to exchange romantic stories.
Whenever most young people of the time met, they asked one another about new books that might have appeared in the bookshops or about what they read lately. They discussed books and recommended others to read the new titles available in the bookstores. Nowadays, I presume that the first thing youngster ask one another whenever they meet must be about the mostly useless and often lurid videos they had watched on YouTube or Tik Tok or the latest exchanges of insults and allegations by self-styled activists, most of whom are fighting among themselves to imagine the most effective words against real or imagined enemies on the invisible side of the cyber world.
Reading then was something tangible and palpable and therefore more real than the computer and phone screens of these days that do not allow you to read if you don’t charge them with money or electric power. You have to spend a lot of money to have them in the first place. In those good old days, you did not need to pay for reading books and you did not depend on other factors to read books except your own curiosity to know things and your love for books.
You may love a smart phone for letting you make calls but cannot falling love with a smart phone for allowing you to read books because it is something relatively outside your control, remote and something functioning on condition that you have enough money to own it. In the old days, books were cheaper and possible to borrow from anyone and read them because you love them.
Nowadays, the book titles available online are so overwhelming that they often confuse you as to what to read and what to ignore. They kind of order you to read this title rather than the other one. In a way, they shape your mind and subtly dictate your choices and make you into a man or woman you did not intend to be. This may a kind of “dictatorship of technology” and the loss of real personality of not identity.
It is now difficult to love phone or laptop screens because they do not really belong to you because they can be snatched from you by robber from one minute to the other and you live in constant fear of losing your expensive gadgets whenever you board a taxi or walk in unsafe streets. In the old days there was practically no one who would dip their hands into you pockets or snatched books from your hands. If they did so you would have welcomed such a move because the robbers must have been fond of reading or they needed money for this or that purpose. If you went to the old book vendors in Mercato, you could find your stolen book sitting on a shelf, ready to be sold. You could thus buy your beloved book and go back home smiling. There are so many stories of readers and writers flying around from the decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s that are now lost for many reasons.
Loss and fading memory have become their ultimate fate in a country where the reading culture has gone from sweet passion to garbage recycling. That may be why we are now mentally poorer than we were then and our quest for knowledge has ended up in the gutters in a county that boasts of thousands of years of reading and writing culture who people are now consuming all kinds of daily trash flickering on the screens of expensive laptops and mobile phones, showing off money and not knowledge.
The Ethiopian Herald may 7/2023
