Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Northern Europeans require a room of their own, that’s what you would think by our behaviour. After spending three weeks travelling, twelve of us stayed in a rented house on the outskirts of Bamako.
There were three bedrooms, the kitchen and a common room. The owner of the house slept on a sofa in the front room, while we split ourselves into groups and distributed ourselves through the other three rooms.
It was my first time in Africa, and the images from the past three weeks vied for attention in my mind, darting about and appearing in unexpected parts of my ideas and thoughts. It was 45 degrees, the heavy air cloying to my skin as Bamako waited for the rainy season, and the food, the water, the sounds, everything was so different.
Bamako is an incredibly busy town. It is considered to be ‘the most African of cities’ and the least altered by colonialisation or subsequent investment. In fact, it has been developed a lot in recent years, but behind every new road, behind the white-walled United Nations Building, are endless potholed dirt streets with ubiquitous markets. The world-famous rhythms and chants of Mali music floated round every corner, as I drank coconut milk out of pierced polythene bags sold by street traders. Battered old Peugeot cars threw themselves down the newly constructed highways, and passengers of the rusting crowded minibuses held their arms out to signal a stop by the pavements, on which motorbikes flew past, tearing down pedestrians who suddenly leapt to one side, a young man in Western clothing driving, and a young woman with braided hair and traditional dress on the pillion seat.
Returning to the crowded house, with relations now deteriorating into argument and each day someone buying a ticket back, ranting about the dreadfulness of the drinking water, the polluted torment of the steaming sauna city air, I felt the urgent need to weep. Not out of sadness or anything, just for the sake of it! The need to be by myself.
When I slinked into my room to sit alone, a panic ensued. The Africans living there were most upset, and the hysteria spread to the Europeans, even the woman with the new boyfriend, who hated the sight of me.
‘Are you sure you’re alright, Jill’ she asked, stroking my shoulder, ’You can talk to me, you know, we women must stick together.’
‘I just want to be alone’.
‘Are you ill,’ asked Yussouf, ‘Shall I sit with you? Shall I get my wife?’
‘I just want to be alone’.
What is it that makes us want to be alone? In the post war period of social provision of housing in the UK, the State stipulated that every child had the right to a room of their own, and council houses were provided with the correct number of rooms. I had my room, my brother had his, and my parents were in the main bedroom. My mother, I thought later when I married, didn’t get her own room.
The title of this week’s column is a lecture given by Virginia Woolf about women and fiction. I originally recalled it as ‘a room of my own’, which is how I’d remembered it. I had totally personalised it in my mind, and when I think about this I realise that I had taken it so personally because it is the basic truth of civilisation. Woolf left it in the third person because it isn’t just women who need a room of their own to write, to blossom, to contribute to their society, it is everyone.
Despite this idea that we should have ‘a room of one’s own’, we aren’t living in isolation. The room is needed for a person to have to space and the time to quietly reflect, to produce something perhaps which is distinct, new or put in a new way, which will benefit everyone. He or she comes out of this room with gifts, gifts of knowledge, understanding or of invention, gifts for us all.
It’s is noticeable that in areas which are developed, people tend to feel they have the right to privacy. It is reasonable to say you need some solitude to think things through, to work something out, to get a piece of work finished. People come home from work to ‘work on it in peace’.
Civilisation is perhaps defined as people living together, and development is the ability of civilisations to work as one, to co-operate, to put the resources of everyone together over a period of time in an agreed and general plan. The need for solitude is as if only by having the space to define oneself as an individual can one interact fully with one’s society, and contribute generously to the well-being of the nation as a whole. Only by being apart, can one come back together.
We teachers gave a show at the end of one of our week-long intensive English courses in Istanbul, Turkey, a country that likes to think of itself as being committed to development in the European style. The children put on a little show in English in their classes, and then received certificates saying they had completed the course.
Usually this is an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of the school and of all the children in the community. In this school, however, as soon as their own child had received their certificate, the parents left. This meant that the last class only had the children’s own parents watching in an almost empty hall. We were horrified at the lack of community spirit. The school teachers and managers were also ‘very disappointed in the parents’. That selfishness, the lack of celebrating the success of everyone in your community, is what differentiates developed and under-developed communities.
It is vital to understand that every individual is important, and the success and achievements of one person is the success of the whole community. Similarly, if a member of the community sequestrates funds from the community and runs off to Maitama with the packet under his arm, the community will not develop. Like the three musketeers, we must be in it with the spirit of ‘All for one and one for all.’ Respect the individual’s need for silence, show consideration of his or her own destiny and gifts, but also insist that each and every individual then dedicates those abilities to the community as a whole.
President Kennedy famously said in his inauguration speech, ‘Do not ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’ These are the interpretations of society, its rights and duties, that determine if a nation becomes developed, or remains in the barbarism of non-co-operation and stagnation.

1,135 words
© Jill Rees
12 October 2008

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