Required Reading
I AM A HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER, which is to say a peddler of the canon. When I justify this job, mostly to myself, I argue that teaching literature means teaching where we come from, even who we are. Few of my American students, though, see their lives reflected in the texts I’m charged with teaching.
The same was true in my first teaching job, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal 19 years ago. Very few of my Nepali students wanted to do the assigned reading, but they all wanted me to visit their homes. When students like Rohit or Raj Kumar or Sabitri invited me for a meal, I always went. To get to Sabitri’s house, I followed her frizzy black ponytail while steering my bike through the muddy maze of the grain bazaar until we emerged onto a wide street I’d never seen before.
“Home,” Sabitri said, shy but proud.
In her concrete house, I sat on a lumpy couch and ate rice, black lentils, cauliflower curry, spicy pickled mango, and tiny, smooth-as-chocolate bananas. Sabitri’s mother clasped my hands and smiled like I belonged. Sabitri, beaming, watched me eat. Her younger sisters sat on either side, their slight thighs pressed up against mine.
Later, I bicycled home in darkness studded with the tiny orange fires on the carts of roasted peanut vendors. When I left, Sabitri and her siblings waved me off as if I’d never return, even though I would see Sabitri in class the next morning, where we would read Franz Kafka’s short story “The Hunter Gracchus.”
In this brief story, a presumably dead man arrives on a boat, only to wake up and begin talking to the burgomaster, or mayor, who is not surprised, since a dove had told him the dead hunter Gracchus was coming. Despite its simple language, the students found the story baffling. So did I.
“Is he dead or alive, miss?” they asked.
I read them what the hunter says: “Since then I’ve been dead … to a certain extent I am also alive.”
The hunter is trapped in limbo: unable to die and leave this world and, although he can talk and see, unable to live. He is doomed to wander the world, his identity born of his dislocation. The dark uncertainty of Kafka’s world did not resonate with many of these students, who were steeped in the steady, sustaining logic of community and tradition, of rice and lentils twice a day and a life style very much like that of their great-great-grandparents. My Hindu students believed that their soon-to-be-murdered king was an incarnation of Vishnu. At Dashain, the autumn festival, they slaughtered goats and built giant bamboo swings, on which everyone took a turn. My students told me, “We do not eat the cow because the cow is Laxmi.”
Maybe, though, Kafka’s world was not as foreign to my students as I thought. On foggy mornings in schoolyards, uniformed Nepali. “Beautiful, peaceful Nepal.” This line was both true and false. Nepal’s beauty could stop you short, a single pink hibiscus on a silver tray outside a temple, a woman’s hammered-gold nose ring pressed like a shield against her flesh. But half a mile from our school, a chemical plant was sending rivulets of burnt-orange and metallic-blue sludge through roadside ditches, and a poisonous smell threaded over the rice paddies. In Nepal, old men sat peacefully on benches for hours, staring at the sky, and children contentedly played games in the dust, yet in the hills 30 miles away, Maoist soldiers stormed villages with ancient weapons cast off from other countries’ wars. Students knew the darkness that Kafka again and again illumines. The point of great art may be that we all, somehow, have a line to its claim.
