- Venue
- Newcastle Libraries and Information
- Location
- North East England
Browsing the catalogue of the Human Library I am greeted with an array of troubling and lovely possibilities from a remarkable 19 year old with a brain tumour Something Wrong With My Head to a free thinking Muslim born in Sunderland Mackem Motor-Mouth Muslim. Stood beside the issue desk you cannot see the human library but I can’t help but indulge in the image of an old dark wood library shelf stacked with human-sized books which twitter and giggle, telling one another wonderful and secret stories…
The librarian issues me with a Reader’s Ticket and a Request Slip which lists all the titles stocked by the Human Library. The tactile quality of it all kicks me with a small pang of nostalgia for the library system before barcode readers and self service check in desks, when the date insert in the front of library books was an indexical history of use and, for those rare or outsized and dusty art books, you had to fill in a Request Slip by hand, invariably incorrectly, provoking the inevitable snorts and stamping of feet of the librarian.
It takes me a long time to choose a book, but eventually I decide to start with German and Proud. The Librarian asks me to make sure I’ve read and understood ‘The Rights Of The Reader’ and ‘The Rights Of The Book’ whilst she goes to collect the book from the bookshelf. I’m silently revelling in this delightful extended metaphor which includes in the ‘Rights Of The Human Book’: “Human Books have the right to be returned in the same condition in which they were issued” when my book arrives.
How do you start reading a book? That sounds like a ridiculous question, right?… usually you just start from the beginning and follow it through. Pursuing all the narrative twists, turns, denouements and metaphors, to the end. You don’t have to introduce yourself, or steer the plot developments, all this unfolds in your own private imagination, who you are and what you think is superfluous to the story itself. But, for the first time in my life, a book asks me, directly
“What do you want to know?”
German and Proud talks keenly about her family history and her German grandmother who suffered from prejudice all her life after moving from Köln to a small north east mining town in England. She tells me about the divide, in her own family, between the German and English branches, not from great cultural difference but simply through a lack of common linguistic ground. I tell her about my faltering German lessons and she says “The way to a man’s soul is through the language he speaks.” My book is full of real life fairy tales of her time in a corner of Southern Germany (monsters and all). Part of the way through she asks me if I have any questions and I ask her something I’ve been desperate to know for a long time…
“Where in the UK can you get REALLY good pretzels?”
With great gusto and animated gestures, she tells me the answer to my question… (If you want to know, I recommend you go and read German and Proud)…
When I return my book to the issue desk all of the other books are on loan so I decide to take a break. I wander up to the second floor and have a look at the Day of the Dead exhibition and all those wonderful, garish dancing skeletons. I look around the café and wonder which, if any, of these are human books. And then it dawns on me… They all are. Their titles may not appear in the catalogue of the Human Library but everyone is a book, unread, not to be judged by their covers, but full of stories and subplots, written and still in progress, possessing innumerable possibilities and interpretations depending upon the reader.
For my second title I choose The Dragon And The Monkey. This is a book of euphoric highs and devastating lows. The extended, central metaphors of the dragon and the monkey were a way of making manifest, explicable and (in part) comprehensible the two conflicting influences on the life and story of the book; the symptoms of Bi Polar disorder. My book asks me why I wanted to read his story and what relevance it has to my life and interests. For the second time today a dialogue is taking place between the book I am reading and myself; my motivations for reading are being interrogated. And this is important; that it isn’t a one way conversation. The Dragon And The Monkey tells me he questions everything. Twice.
The interior landscapes of The Dragon And The Monkey and his experiences of living with a mental illness are made manifest through elaborate metaphors; “The sleeping Dragon” refers to the dormant (but lethal) manifestations of the illness “…I have to keep him asleep…or he will burn me alive…”. Whilst the monkey is a benevolent character which symbolises the persistent need to keep the dragon, and all other chaos, in check. Containing 65 years of narrative this book is, none the less, tellingly light on details about his life story. The key moments which he refers to – his marriage, his moving back to the North East, his finding and loosing of an important job – parallel the metaphorical “sign posts” which he uses to navigate his way through “the dark city at night”. These similes and allegory’s function as keys into the illness for the reader as well as an insight into a sufferers means of coping with an often debilitating, invisible, illness.
As the story comes towards an end (though not a conclusion) I ask the book why he wanted to take part in the festival. What he tells me, I think, epitomises the purpose and intent of the whole Human Library project: “…to tackle stigmas… because most prejudice is born out of ignorance”. Reading a human book is not the same as reading a bound book of paper and ink; though it may present perspectives and illuminate concepts or possibilities previously unconsidered by a reader, a paper book is always contained within that form; it can be put down, fitted between bedtime and sleep or 5 minutes crammed in to a bus journey. A paper book exists in the finite space of printed text and internalised reading. A human book, however, exists in the real four-dimensional scope of human experience. The reader can’t skip bits or neglect their book, a human book requires fixed attention and, through that intimate engagement with another’s story, invites empathy through real human engagement.
