.. a new breed of readers is sought ..

From the blog of Cheryl Lawrie

"I would like to make a suggestion. There is no doubt that more oppressed voices should and must be heard… But unless there is a whole new breed of readers to take those texts upon themselves, to read in them “new visions of how to live,” not much will change. It is on the readers that we must concentrate, not the writers, on the readers who will make use of the text and “make something happen.” Unless this education of the reader occurs, no number of new voices will change anything, because they will echo among a deaf crowd. And if these readers learn to seek out, to interpret, to translate, to put texts into a variety of contexts, to transform the texts through multiple layers of reading - if we, readers, train ourselves to do this - then we won’t be needing any voices to be silenced, because we will be able to make choices. A silenced voice, whether silenced voluntarily or not, never disappears. Its absence becomes enormous, too enormous to ignore. Surely it’s not another absence we want, another vacuum for a hundred or a thousand years, but a period of redress, in which those voices come up and share the audibility that for so long those in power have usurped.

I am also convinced that hope lies with individuals, and that solutions don’t lie in crowds. One of the greatest triumphs of any oppressor is to convert the oppressed to his methods. A reader need not embrace a writer’s methods, or even those of another reader. A text allows in itself more freedom than we usually think possible, which is why governments are never really keen on literacy, and why it is usually writers and seldom deep-sea divers or stockbrokers who are imprisoned, tortured and killed for political reasons.

- Alberto Manguel, The Age of Revenge"