During Covid, out of necessity, I packed away my red shoes and began ranking insects. The virus had shut down the travel industry, along with its accompanying journalism, and I had very little work. For a couple of years, it was regarded as too dangerous to share magazines in the pocket of the seat in front of you on the airplane, so those stopped being produced too. Men’s Health shut down.
For a while I eked out a wage by laying out academic reports in Portuguese and Russian and writing the occasional feature for architecture magazines. Then I decided to try teaching English. While I was studying and doing my practice lessons at a large government school in Durban, South Africa, one of the teachers became ill and I was offered a part-time position.
Teaching is a very tiring job. While some of the clients can understand metaphors by the time they are teenagers, many have not fully developed the capacity to interpret the world in a non-literal way. They are children, with brains that are growing. To some poetry is clearly ridiculous.
Once we studied a poem by Margaret Atwood called A Red Shirt. In the poem, the speaker is sewing a red shirt for her daughter. She recalls a time when a man told her that “young girls should not wear red”. Instead, the man says, “A girl should be a veil, a white shadow …not dangerous.” And she should “avoid red shoes, red stockings, dancing. / Dancing in red shoes will kill you”.
In order to understand what Atwood was trying to say, we read the fairy tale, The Red Shoes by Hans Christian Andersen which the poem clearly alludes to. We discussed symbolism and all the connotations of the colour red. We talked about how dancing in red shoes could be interpreted metaphorically and what the red shoes could represent.
But when asked in an exam whether the advice the man gives the poet is reasonable, one learner answered (sensibly) that it was not. She said that she has danced in red shoes many times and that she was fine. By still being alive, she said, she is living proof that dancing in red shoes is a safe activity.
Another time I was trying to explain symbolism in a set work called The Mark, a futuristic, dystopian novel by South African author Edyth Bulbring. In the book the police are called ‘locusts’ and the head of police ‘Cockroach’. There are a lot of flies especially in the first part of the book and quite a bit of ‘swarming’. Only the bad insects have survived the apocalypse.
Despite this genre being seemingly more accessible – thanks to the Hunger Games and Divergent, many learners could not easily understand what the creatures symbolised. Ants are ants. I gave it my best shot, but eventually gave up and instead of trying to interpret the novel metaphorically, we ranked insects from the most awesome to the least. Bees, stick insects (obviously for their aura) and butterflies topped the charts.
Teaching successes come and go, and I realised I am interested in writing about what South African teenagers find in the literature post-Apartheid schools have decided they should study. The high school curriculum includes a large number of African, Asian and American writers, but the old favourites remain: Shakespeare, Miller, Golding, Plath, Blake, Yeats and Heaney. So I have tentatively put my shoes back on, and while also ranking and ticking off lists, I am also writing small essays about what teaching has taught me (and to some extent the children) so far. I hope you enjoy them.