The Return of “Read This Or Else”
What does it feel like to live through a genocide? My student Chiemela’s father knows: He was a boy in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, which according to a reporter on the scene in 1968, “deteriorated steadily from a war in which the original motivation was the reincorporation of the breakaway east into Nigeria into a spectacle of racial hatred run amok.”
Chiemala has just published his account of his father’s recollections on our composition class blog, Or Else. Read it and weep, thinking of the children suffering similar trauma in war-torn regions right now. Please do remember that the writer’s a student and drop him an encouraging comment if you feel so inclined.
And this means that it’s that time of the term again: The blog is back. Individual students and writing teams have got all sorts of interesting entries in the works. So, please do bookmark the site and visit frequently or, even better, subscribe.
Chiemela’s father’s story reminds me of so many of the stories that my students from places like Sudan and Rwanda have told in speech class. Their voices, and those of their classmates who’ve experienced the inherent and often explicit violence of urban poverty, are not often-enough heard. We’ve been talking about it in class and we agree: People who have experienced such things know things that external observers cannot see. Please do tune into Or Else for some stories and viewpoints you might not encounter otherwise.
