The World Explained by a Couple of Squished Oranges

Owl’s family is full of doctors, engineers and business people. Owl spends family reunions pretending she has grand plans for a financially solvent future. The only exception is Owl’s aunt who went off and got a master’s degree in Hindi literature.

The last time Owl saw her aunt, Owl had a grand epiphany. Compadre! Ally! Owl and her aunt would spend all future reunions blissfully discussing literature and cultivating their souls.

Owl’s aunt was probably relieved that Owl had grown out of the standard Aunt greeting—‘Did you bring me a present?’ ‘Is it good to eat?’—because she poured out some chai and settled in for some serious book chat. Only—

Owl had never heard of any of the writers her aunt mentioned.

In fact, Owl never thought about the literary landscape of India. She didn’t know it had one. She’d heard stories about how few opportunities there were outside of doctoring, engineering, and civil servanting. She imagined Indians who wanted to write shut that up in some closet of their soul and soldiered on through life as best they could.

Owl realized her conception of Indian literature is as follows:

[1000 A.D.] Gods and sages with mystical powers roam the earth. When they die their bodies turn into the texts of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Upshinads, the Vedas, and um, other stuff?

[1913] Tagore wins the Nobel Prize for his poetry. Tagore is probably another god who was a bit late to the party. 

[1990s] A breed of English writing Indian authors such as Kiran Desai, Andruhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry hit the bestseller lists. Children of the gods? Possibly.

Owl was embarrassed. This is her understanding of the literary world.

America—The literary bread bowl.

Britain—The mother land.

Australia—mini Britain minus the classics plus some aborigine folktales

Canada—L.M. Montgomery, Alice Munro

Spain/Latin America—What Owl had to read in Spanish class

Greece—a country that hasn’t produced any writers since togas became passé

Italy—see Greece + Italo Calvino. Owl frequently mixes up Greece and Italy.

Russia—Eleven really depressed writers who all look up to Papa Pushkin

France—FREE LOVE, and um, Montaigne

Germany—Hesse & Mann, Nietzsche doesn’t count since he was crazy

Japan—Manga, Haruki Murakami, Tale of Genji, haiku, pillow books

China—Pearl Buck, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, assorted philosophers, books on why Mao sucks

India—see previous explanation

Middle East—Arabian Nights, cryptic poets

Scandinavia—sagas nobody reads, disturbing psychological thrillers everyone reads, cute books about moomin trolls

Korea—Bad manga

South Africa—J.M. Coetzee

Nigeria—Chinua Achebe

Everywhere else: NON-EXISTENT

The book world according to Owl

Originally Owl wanted to make a cartogram so that each country would be proportionally to the number of authors Owl had read or heard of, but when Owl plugged her data into the cartogram software, America and Britain turned into two massive blobs and all other countries disappeared. The map liked like two squished oranges.

The book world as explained by oranges

Owl would like to imagine this is solely because Owl speaks English and a smattering of Spanish. But when Owl was in high school a teacher told her 90% of the books published in the Democratic Republic of Congo are written by Western authors. Owl had a spastic attack. If someone grows up in DR Congo, either they’re reading books where DR Congo is never mentioned or it’s a place filled with heathens and barbarians.This must have an excellent impact on the psyche.

Owl remembers reading several British classics as a child. African and Eastern countries were never mentioned, or if they were, they were strange and backwards places full of idols. (Latin America never made it in unless an author wanted one of their characters to get rich quickly). Since many of Owl’s relatives pray to said idols, she found these descriptions upsetting and decided British authors were a very ill mannered breed. Owl's psyche had several tantrums.

What Owl found most troubling however, was that Asian and African countries never appeared in her history books at school. (Owl learned about Latin America because of Spanish class.) Owl knew the Asian ones had histories at least because her parents came from them and would occasionally tell her stories about emperors but somehow these emperors never made it into her textbooks. China was a couple chapters on communism. India’s Gupta empire was reduced to one page while the Dark Age of Europe was about half the book. It was even called the Dark Age, the period where Nothing Happened and Owl still had to learn about it for several semesters.

As for Africa, well, Owl has a very hazy notion that Africa was filled with tribes and then decimated by imperialism and slavery. If this was totally inaccurate she would not be surprised.

Owl asked her teachers about this omission. Her teachers gave her confused looks. Some of them said it was a tragedy. Others cited the Palmer (A History of the Modern World, the standard text for AP European History) argument, these countries had no influence on the shaping of the modern world and therefore they have been left out of the curriculum.

Owl understands that one can only pack so much information into a curriculum. It is not possible to teach or to read about every single culture that has walked across the face of the planet, but when it comes to the population cartogram, China and India are the two squished oranges on the face of the map. 

Legit Cartogram*

Given the number of times these countries are appearing in the news, their overwhelming numbers in terms of population and their exploding economies, Owl is a little frightened when she realizes that her education—the education most of her peers had—did not prepare her to deal with a non-Western-centric world. What Owl finds particularly disturbing is despite the fact India and China had civilizations that endured for thousands of years she, her classmates and her teachers, accepted that yes, these two countries were not relevant to the modern world.

90% of the books Democratic Republic of Congo publishes maybe from Western authors, but that does not mean Congolese writing does not exist, or that other countries do not have their own literary cultures. Owl went to a Korean bookstore the other day. On the bestseller table she found translations of The Kite Runner, Harry Potter, and a couple dozen other bestsellers that were originally written in English. But the rest of the bookstore was filled with Korean authors. Owl has never read a Korean author. Owl can’t name a single Korean author. 

One of the easiest ways to understand a culture is to delve into its literature. For example, the Bhagvad Gita (Owl recommends Stephan Mitchell’s translation) may have been written thousands of years ago, but for many Indians it still serves as a moral foundation that informs everything from personal to business ethics.

Owl is challenging herself to read books from as many different countries as possible. Owl would love your recommendations. Bonus points if the work is a translation.

Note: Owl is aware that she's mixed up all other countries in a most deplorable fashion, but she begs you to forgive her. She's read at least two or three times as many American books (she isn't even counting British ones here) than books from all other countries in the world combined.

*Legit cartogram source.