What Literature Gives Us

Mr Geoff Purvis - lit teacher extraordinaire.

I was invited to give the opening speech at ‘Read, Annotate, Debate: A RAD Literature Collaboration’, held at Nan Chiau High School last weekend – which was attended by around 180 students (15 & 16-year-olds) from 6 schools.

The kids read and wrote poems, and took part in debates on their lit texts (‘The Crucible’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’). And I got the chance to take a decade-long walk down memory lane. Here’s an adapted version of the speech:

The year is 2012. Katy Perry and Maroon 5 are headlining the F1 weekend in Singapore, and The Amazing Spider-Man – yes, the one with Andrew Garfield – has just stopped showing in theatres. On the island’s eastern fringe, Changi Airport’s ‘Budget Terminal’ is about to shut its doors after six dismal years; while far in the west, construction has just begun for a new liberal arts college that will one day be known as ‘Yale-NUS’.

For my classmates and I, though, these developments are far from our minds. The dreaded ‘A’ Levels are round the corner, which for us humanities students means extra hours – or more accurately, extra days and nights – put in for Maths revision, especially if our Economics grades are already beyond rescue. As for our History and Literature exams, there’s at least some enjoyment to be had in going through the material, but it’s not immediately clear how we should prepare for what our parents remind us, time and again, are the most important exams of our lives.

Some of us decide to leave nothing to chance, preparing essay outlines for every exam question we can think of. Others scribble notes into the pages of their books, so that even the spaces between the lines are full of dense handwriting. Our teachers help us as best they can, organising revision lectures around all the essential elements of our set texts: the characters and their motivations, important themes and how they are portrayed, and every treacherous twist of plot and language.

At one of these sessions, I remember putting up my hand in response to a question, then feeling the fear build in my stomach as my literature teacher, who has been pacing the floor of the lecture theatre, comes to a stop in front of the first row of seats. At sixty-four, having taught literature for 40 years, Mr Geoff Purvis is at the peak of his powers – more than capable of skewering a smart aleck with a few choice sentences. On this day, thankfully, he does nothing of the sort. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and says, “Not bad, Theo”. Then he adds a curious compliment: “But I think you wouldn’t be a good debater”.

I’ve had years since then to ponder what Mr Purvis meant. You see, at school, I never was a debater. Debaters (and the same, I’m sure, goes for all of you) were always the cool ones. The funny ones. The ones who seemed to think in three bullet points. The ones who always had a wisecrack prepared, who were ready to leap to the defense of ideas both good and bad.

Me at fifteen: distinctively uncool.

I never was quite that kid. And though I basked in the brilliance of my many debating friends, I watched them with a sort of distant admiration. More so than my obvious lack of a “cool” factor, it always seemed that the ability to whip up an argument on one side of a debate or another, was something to be wary of. For sure, many questions deserved to be debated. But at least to my younger self, the thought of being able to concoct an argument in thirty minutes of preparation time seemed too quick, and too abstract. Didn’t all of these issues being debated involve real lives, real people? And even if they were about a piece of literature – as your debates today are – didn’t they involve real authors and real audiences, and speak into a real world?

Wouldn’t we be missing the point if we just treated literature as an intellectual exercise, something to be debated over?

In an interview that he gave shortly before his retirement, Mr Purvis seemed to agree:

“If Literature teaches us anything it is to dislike pretense, pretending to be what you’re not. I think we underestimate kindness – the value of kind acts and kind deeds. Feeling and showing compassion are two other ‘literary’ values. I do my best to try and care for people, care about people… These are some important values for me – integrity, compassion, concern for others… I think any teacher would tell you, that being ‘clever’ is not what it’s all about. What it’s about is being the kind of person other people want to be with.”

So: kindness, compassion, and empathy on one side; cleverness, speed, and the ability to spin arguments on the other.

Of course, in the years since graduation, I’ve come to realise that debating isn’t all I once made it out to be. My debater friends have all grown up – most of them, at least! – into kind, generous and thoughtful individuals, even if some are a little less cool than they were in school. If anything, debate has taught them not to jump to easy conclusions: that every question has two sides, that reasonable people can have different opinions on the same issues, and that it is a true test of both mind and heart to empathise with someone who disagrees with you.

On the flip side, I’ve also come to see that a love of literature does not make you a better person. Notwithstanding the efforts of Mr Purvis and other excellent teachers, many students of literature have gone on to do things their former teachers wouldn’t be proud of. These days, I might even disagree with Mr Purvis on one point – that if literature teaches us anything, it is really that there are few straightforwardly good, kind, and compassionate individuals in the world. These very terms are subjective. Someone else’s kindness and understanding may be, to you, an inability to hold their ground. And what is integrity to them may be inflexibility to you. So it is a difficult lesson literature teaches: to pursue some of the important qualities that make us human, yes. But also to recognise that in our humanness, we will so often disappoint ourselves and others.

In the years since leaving school, these lessons have come in handy. They have shown me the value of being forgiven for things I wish I never did, and welcomed into spaces I never imagined feeling at home in. Even as literature shows us how fickle and fallible humans are, it also shows us how rare and precious are the moments of goodness. At its heart, literature creates a space in which these human values can be explored, and experienced. And it reveals to us spaces where people with very different backgrounds and journeys can come together to share their lives. 

Being welcomed through storytelling (in the days before social distancing…)

As a small example, over the past few years, I have had the privilege to to support the work of the migrant writing community, right here in Singapore. Through events like the International Migrant Literary Festival or the Migrant Cultural Show, the organisers do their best to spotlight the stories and talents of those who have all taken long journeys to be here. Other efforts like the Mental Health Festival, or regular poetry readings and ‘Human Library’-style events, are organised for both locals and migrants alike – with the belief that regardless of your background and nationality, you deserve to be welcomed into a shared space of storytelling where we are all equally human. 

Now, how does all this relate to debating – which is after all why you’re here today? The truth is, it’s not easy to create such spaces of welcome. In many societies, the instinct is always to preserve our own privileges, to safeguard what is comfortable and familiar. Carving out spaces where those who come from different places, or speak different languages, can feel equally comfortable and at home, is an uphill task. It requires us to mobilise people and resources to make things happen. More importantly, it requires us to capture others’ imagination, with what a more equal and welcoming world could look like. To paint a picture so attractive and compelling that rather than saying – “I’m more comfortable where I am”, or “I don’t see the need to show kindness to others” – you’ll hear them say, “yes, that’s the world that I want to live in.”

And here’s where you come in. With the skills you pick up, not just in the classroom, but at debates like these, you are preparing one day to go out and persuade others to see the world not through the lens of what is, but through the lens of what can be. Writers have done so in novels, plays, poems, and films – creating worlds of the imagination in which so much else is possible. Debating hones your ability to do that too, through the medium of a good, sound, and persuasive argument. As with every powerful skill, I hope you will handle it with care. I hope you use it to change the world. 

Let me conclude. If literature, as Mr Purvis might have said, points us towards some of the values that make us human – values like kindness, compassion, and integrity – then debating, by contrast, gives us some of the tools by which we can persuade and convince others of the necessity of these values. It allows us to bring people together around a convincing vision of what a world shaped by these values might look like. 

None of this happens automatically: literature also shows us that we live in a world that tilts so often in the other direction. But all of you today, with the skills that you have honed, you have a choice – to speak wisely and in favour of something better. 

Thank you all for listening to me, and good luck.

~~~

(My gratitude to the organising team and teachers at NCHS for having me!)