Deconstruction Deconstructed

I submitted four, maybe five, games to the 200 Word RPG Challenge while it was running.

These were all written in the manner of automatic writing – all at once, without revision of any sort. I’d generally been thinking about the game for a few days beforehand, sometimes even rehearsing the words in my head.

One year I wrote a game at the point of submitting it via the form. Sure enough, it contained typos.

One year this approach worked – or at least, I think it did.

I didn’t realise how personal a game Deconstruction was as I wrote it: it comes over like so much pretentious flimflam about the work of Jacques Derrida. 

I now realise it’s about my inability to read until I was nine years old & about the degrees of shame & disavowal that surrounded me as a consequence.

I was five or six years old when someone first told my mother I couldn’t read: she wouldn’t accept this. I memorised the passage I’d been asked to read by listening to the other kids read it aloud & then pretended I could read it by reciting it word by word.

I got away with being illiterate by pretending I’d learnt to read the piece as homework.

I went to primary school in Brixton between the ages of seven & nine & got found out again. This time, every kid in my class took a reading examination with the new headmistress individually; Lambeth Education Authority was following up on the Scarman Report into the Brixton riots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarman_Report

Some of us were learning phonetically (very often those kids conversant in Jamaican patois whose parents had taken part in the riots) & some of us were learning by looking at words on a page. My teachers were astonished that I could do neither.

Things changed when I moved to an all-white Church of England primary school in Cheltenham. I was asked to stay in my first breaktime & it soon became clear that I couldn’t hold a pen properly – I’d grasp it like a dagger in my fist.

This wasn’t acceptable – not for a white kid. White kids enjoyed a basic degree of education. White kids went places due to their superior education.

I was made to stand against a wall away from the other white kids. I soon learned to read. I’d read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson by the end of my next year at primary school & moved from identifying words like ‘Frodo’ in The Lord of the Rings to sort-of nearly reading the trilogy. I wanted to read because I wanted to roleplay.

Pretty soon, I’d learnt to argue like a white person – in sentences & paragraphs & with certainty in the superiority of my own viewpoint. I went to university.

I’ve come to understand that you’re not better than someone else because of how well you’re educated.