精彩。幸運的小學生，有緣遇到代課老師畫地圖教哥倫布之夢……
要分享的同道故事在非洲，我快忘掉您如何畫它，當年外國史少談它。沒想到有個英國代課老師講哥倫布的故事，一路畫，一路“史地史詩”——那年西班牙將穆斯林逐出格拉那達……
那年他才七歲……去年，得了諾貝爾文學獎……
您如果在世，我會為您讀那二頁書，不朽的故事……
Nobel Prize
·
2021 literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and grew up on the island of Zanzibar but arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s. He was eighteen years old. Not until 1984 was it possible for him to return to Zanzibar, allowing him to see his father shortly before he died.
Gurnah began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and even though Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool. During his literary career, Gurnah has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s disruption runs throughout his work.
Read some excerpts from his books: https://bit.ly/3q2yANy
#MigrantsDay
紀念謝立沛老師：德國、比利時壯遊 (謝立沛、謝偉強、鍾漢清，1991年7月)不萊梅、格林兄弟的故鄉哈瑙、Kassel: 、漢堡；柏林、比利時布魯日、布魯塞爾、2022.1.6
https://www.facebook.com/hanching.chung/videos/466834688316056
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秋惠文庫 Formosa Vintage Museum
1970年代台南孔廟
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收到您的錄音紀念家父，告別式背景相片是1991年7月我們共遊的比利時布魯日。
附上幾張當時旅遊的相片。
偉強
補充 "1991年7月壯遊 、Sanssouci in Potsdam、柏林The Siegessäule or "Victory Column" (謝立沛、謝偉強、鍾漢清)
https://www.facebook.com/hanching.chung/videos/1539172999793045
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Gorgeous Bruges is a tourist's dream.
This is Belgium's most perfectly preserved medieval town — its beautiful architecture attracts millions of visitors every year. The historic city center is a prominent World Heritage Site of UNESCO. If you get the chance to visit Belgium, Bruges should be at the top of your list of places to see.
Have you been to Bruges yet?
Bruges, Belgium
https://www.instagram.com/albjola_photography/
I've been to Bruges several times.
It's a nice little town that deserves a day trip.
播放 GIFTenor
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Berlin, Germany
德國童話之路（Deutsche Märchenstraße），是聯邦德國政府為紀念童話大師格林兄弟誕辰200周年，於1975年規劃而成的一條道路。德國童話之路南起格林兄弟的故鄉哈瑙，蜿蜒向北約600公里，抵達著名不萊梅的音樂師故事的發生地不萊梅。這條道路經過了格林兄弟居住的各個地方，以及其經典作品的發生地。
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brothers Grimm Memorial in Hanau, by Syrius Eberle
The German Fairy Tale Route[1] (German: Deutsche Märchenstraße) is a tourist attraction in Germany originally established in 1975. With a length of 600 kilometres (370 mi),[2] the route runs from Hanau in central Germany to Bremen in the north. Tourist attractions along the route are focused around the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, including locations where they lived and worked at various stages in their life, as well as regions which are linked to the fairy tales found in the Grimm collection, such as The Town Musicians of Bremen. The Verein Deutsche Märchenstraße society, headquartered in the city of Kassel, is responsible for the route, which travellers can recognize with the help of road signs depicting the heart-shaped body and head of a pretty, princess-like creature.[3]
Deutsche Märchenstrasse logo
Plan of the German Fairy Tale Route
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Prose
Watch Abdulrazak Gurnah read the excerpt from By the Sea.
Excerpt from By the Sea
I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.
The first map I saw, though I must have seen others in innocence before that, was one a teacher showed us when we were seven years old. I was seven anyway, even if I can’t say for certain about the ages of the multitude which shared this experience with me. There or thereabouts, anyway. For some reason, you had to be below a certain age before you could begin school. I have never properly considered the oddness of this before and it is only now as I think it that I realise its strangeness. If you were over a certain age, it was as if you had gone over the point beyond which you could be instructed, like a coconut that had overripened and become undrinkable, or cloves that had been left too long on the tree and had swollen into seeds. And even now as I think of it I can’t come up with an explanation for this stern exclusion. The British brought us school, and brought the rules to make school work. If the rules said you had to be six and no older than six to be allowed to start school, that was how it would be. Not that the schools had things their own way, because parents shaved off however many years it was necessary to have their children allowed in. Birth certificate? They were poor, ignorant people and never bothered to obtain one. Which was why they wanted their son to go to school, so he wouldn’t end up a beast like them.
In our own lives, everyone had been going to chuoni for generations. Chuoni, that was where we went to learn the aliph-be-te so we could read the Koran and listen to the miraculous events which befell the Prophet throughout his lifetime, salallahu-wa-ale. And whenever there was time to spare, or the heat was too great to concentrate on the nimbly curling letters on the page, we listened to stories of the hair-raising tortures that awaited some of us after death. Nobody bothered with age in chuoni. You started more or less as soon as you were toilettrained and stayed there until you could read the Koran from beginning to end, or until you found the nerve to escape, or until the teachers could no longer bear to have you around, or your parents refused to pay the miserable pittance which was the teacher’s fee. Most people had made their escape by the age of thirteen or so. But at school you started when you were six and progressed as well as you could, year after year, all of you the same age together. There were always stragglers, those who had been required to repeat a year, one or two in every class who lived with their shame throughout their school life. For the rest of us, we were all the same age, on paper. You could never be sure how old class-mates really were, and as we grew a little older, some developed moustaches at a tender age and some disappeared for a few days and returned with eyes alight with secret knowledge, followed by whispered rumours of quiet weddings in the countryside. We did tend to marry early in those days. I don’t know what happened in girls’ schools and wish now that I did. Perhaps the girls would have just disappeared from school, there one day gone the next, and everyone would have guessed they had been married. Married off, married by, done to. I try to imagine what that would have felt like. I imagine myself a woman, feeble with unuttered justification, unutterable. I imagine myself defeated.
But I was talking about the first map I saw. I was seven when the teacher showed it to us, even if I can’t say for certain the ages of the other boys in the class. Seven is a propitious number, and I have been here for seven months, though that is not why I cling to that number for the moment of my first map. I know I was seven because it was my second year at school, and I have the integrity of the British Empire to bear me out, since I would have been six the year I started, as the rules required. The teacher introduced his subject in a dramatic fashion. He held up a hen’s egg between thumb and forefinger. ‘Who can tell me how to make this egg stand up on its end?’ That was how he introduced Christopher Columbus to us. It was a fabulous and unrepeatable moment, as if I too had stumbled across an unimagined and unexpected continent. It was the moment at the start of a story. As his story developed, he began to draw a map on the blackboard with a piece of white chalk: the coast of north-west Europe, the Iberian peninsula, southern Europe, the land of Shams, Syria and Palestine, the coast of North Africa which then bulged out and tucked in and then slid down to the Cape of Good Hope. As he drew, he spoke, naming places, sometimes in full sometimes in passing. Sinuously north to the jut of the Ruvuma delta, the cusp of our stretch of coast, the Hom of Africa, then the Red Sea coast to Suez, the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, India, the Malay Peninsula and then all the way to China. He stopped there and smiled, having drawn half the known world in one continuous line with his piece of chalk. He put a dot halfway down the east coast of Africa and said, ‘This is where we are, a long way from China.’
Then he put a dot in the north Mediterranean and said, ‘This is where Christopher Columbus was, and he wanted to go to China, but by following a route in the opposite direction.’ I don’t remember much of what he told us about the adventures of greedy Cristobal, so many other stories have silted up over that innocent moment, but I remember that he said that Columbus set out on his voyage the same year as the fall of Granada and the expulsion of Muslims from Andalus. These names top were new to me, as were so many of the others, but he said them with such reverence and longing – the fall of Granada and the expulsion of Muslims from Andalus – that I have never lost the moment. I see him now, a short plump man, dressed in a kanzu, kofia and a faded brown jacket, his face pitted with smallpox scars yet composed into a look of forebearance and tolerance. And I remember the fluency with which he created an image of the world for us, my first map.
The egg? This was the story. The sailors on Columbus’s ships had never sailed west into the Atlantic, nobody had. For all anyone knew, the ocean suddenly ended and its waters fell into a gigantic chasm and then travelled through caverns and gorges under the earth to a depthless pool infested with monsters and devils. Then also the journey was long and difficult, the ocean empty, no glimpse of Cathay however sharp-eyed the lookout. So the rabble grumbled and plotted. We want to go home. In the end Columbus confronted them, holding a hen’s egg between thumb and forefinger. Which of you can make this egg stand on its end? he asked. None of them could, of course. They were only sailors, doomed to play superstitious bit parts in such high drama, and grumble and cook up improbable plots. Columbus gently cracked the end of the egg – the teacher demonstrated with his own egg – and then stood it on the quarter-deck rail. I am not sure now whether the moral was that in order to eat an egg you have to crack it, and therefore in order to find Cathay you have to put up with suffering, or whether it was just to demonstrate that Columbus was a great deal cleverer than the sailors and was therefore more likely to be right about the most sensible course of action. In any case, the sailors immediately gave up any thought of insurrection and sailed on in search of the Grand Khan. As I would have done when I was seven. The teacher carefully put his hard-boiled egg down on his desk for later consumption.
We never had that teacher again, although he was a regular teacher at the school. Our class teacher was absent that day and he was looking after us for the morning. At the end of the morning we trooped out to go back to our class, and when I peeped in later to see the world he had shown us, the map had been wiped off the board.
Hussein would not have known about this, would have had no idea how it was that maps began to speak to me, but he knew how I loved looking at them and collecting them, and he sent me his grandfather’s old map to placate me because he owed me money. I laughed with pleasure when the gift arrived, but I was also almost certain that I would not see Hussein again. Why would he want to come our way to sell bits and pieces of sandalwood and rosewater when he could be trading in Rangoon and Shiraz and other such far-flung places in the great world, places hard to reach and therefore beautiful because of that?
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