Beverley Naidoo, The Other Side of Truth

(2000)
INTRODUCTION:
P 330-331
 Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth, published in 2000, is an
exemplum of social realist fiction with a political agenda. A white South
African exile to England.
 The novel takes on the task of depicting children who struggle against
injustice and other difficulties in the persons of two Nigerian refugee
children who arrive in Britain seeking safety after the political assassination
of their mother and the enforced disappearance of their journalist father.
 Her novel aim to reveal the impact of the wider society and its politics on
the lives of young characters, and are calculated to move the child-reader
beyond concerns, centred on their own immediate lives and choices to
consider the workings of society at large.
 Political oppression, war, displacement, migration and forging a new life as
a refugee are the topical concerns of The Other Side of Truth.
 The innocence of the migrant child protagonists is juxtaposed with the
bullying meted out to them by their peers in a British school and with the
harshness of a bureaucratic state focused on controlling immigration to the
point of committing gross injustice.
 Before being rescued into a happy ending, the children are successively let
down by welfare and social systems, adults, and other children in a story
that challenges child-readers to empathise with outsiders and to question
the fairness and humanity of the society in which they live.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 Some notes from the First Essay by Naidoo:
 Information through letters, phone calls, news items in relation to their
father. Past/dreams flashbacks photos nightmares - a way of
communicating their background, including memories of stable family,
grandparents, cousins, etc. Environmental issue linked to political crisis
and trauma.
 The story is from the viewpoint of the girl who is more mature than her
younger brother. Seeing events through the eyes of a young person
always encourages a freshness of vision. It helps to research from a
particular viewpoint, to be extremely observant and to make leaps of
imagination. The child's perspective often thrown up sharp contradictions
between what the child expects and what happens. What child getting
ready for school, preparing her schoolbag, expects to her their mother
screaming, followed by gunshots?
 Memory was to become an important theme in the novel as Sade
experiences the loss of mother, family, home. The images in Sade's head
play an important in creating her interior life. She also holds on to voices,
recalling Mama's favourite proverbs help Sade survive. The threads of
how she remembers her parent's words are already woven into her
consciousness from the first chapter. When Papa is quiet in the face of
Uncle Tunde's exhortations, Sade recalls what might have said in other
circumstance: "The truth is the truth. How can I write what's untrue?
 Sade's love of words had helped her but Femi's emotions were locked
inside him and potentially explosive.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 What is The Other Side of Truth?
Jana Giles P342-351

Jana Giles's essay places The Other Side of Truth in relation to the
postcolonial politics of Nigeria whilst also foregrounding its ambition to
be a 'critical' text. She argues that Naidoo incites her child readership to
an act of critical literacy, which she characterises in terms of a
disruption of assumptions and beliefs as well as a confrontation of
issues of power and choice. At heart, she concludes, Naidoo's fiction
challenges young people in societies such as Britain and the USA to
reconsider their own received histories, both personally and nationally.
This chapter considers Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (2000)
in the context of contemporary historical and social conditions in
Nigeria and African generally.
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Introduction: children's literature and critical literacy

 Beverley Naidoo's work can be viewed as a commentary on the

historical and social contexts that she has experienced in Africa and
Britain.
 Naidoo's fiction features child protagonists in situations which
challenge received views and asks for a critical engagement with sto ries
from the past and the present.
 The book juxtaposes two children from post-colonial Nigeria with
young people in contemporary Britain.
 The main protagonists struggle with physical and psychological
hardship as well as ethical dilemmas winch question the notion of truth
and its value, learnt from their family.
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 343
 Tensions exist around children's literature which deals with politically
or emotionally difficult issues, because many of those involved in the
business of children's books are also concerned to preserve what they
regard as characteristics of childhood: innocence, lack of experience,
and an optimistic attitude to the future. It could be argued that texts
which explore topics such as racism, substance abuse, bullying, divorce,
death and disability in realistic ways require their readers to acquire
kinds of knowledge that impinge on innocence and make optimism
seem naive and misplaced. Children who are experiencing oppression
and victimisation, the question of the appropriateness of knowing the
brutal facts of history is moot: they do not have the luxury of reading
about it as outsiders; they are living it.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

 Attitudes towards children's literature have changed in recent years,

reflecting the general changes in attitude towards marginalised and
oppressed groups that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. There has been an
increased foregrounding of marginalized people as the central
characters.
 The Other Side of Truths is about Nigerian refugees and members of the
greater African diaspora, emphasizing global interconnectedness.
 Naidoo argues that there is a tremendous need in this society for
literature that enables young people to cross boundaries . . . that
enables them to explore issues of 'race', class and gender. She
attempts to stimulate reading with a critical eye towards historical,
social and political contexts, as well as examining issues of
representation and power, self and other, and agency.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Widening the context: Nigeria and Somalia

 The Other Side of Truth is set in the late 1990s, and moves beyond South
Africa to a more global contemporary context which involves the
experience of Nigerian children as political refugees in Britain.
 It is set initially in Nigeria just after the execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa
in 1995.
 The Other Side of Truth also draws on the troubled history of Somalia.
 Folarin, Sade's father in the novel, is a journalist attempting to expose the
wrongful death of Saro-Wiwa and other human rights violations by the
Nigerian government, while the story of Mariam and her family is indica-
tive of those who left Somalia for Kenyan refugee camps during the early
years of the Civil War.
 Naidoo endeavors to create books for children which both engage readers
in the lives of the characters and promote a critical appreciation of their
social, cultural and historical contexts.
 For Naidoo, then, literature and education should engage both our heads
and our hearts to enable critical literacy.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

What is 'the other side of truth'?

 The book's title indicates its major theme, asking the reader to examine
critically what 'truth' may mean.
 One way in which to interpret 'the other side of truth' is in terms of how
we view the world differently depending on our context: Western
audiences may be unaccustomed to reading a book from the perspective of
African child refugees; Sade and Femi discover that their view of
themselves as middle-class children is challenged when they escape
 political oppression in Nigeria only to confront racism and
misunderstanding in Britain.
 Another way is to see 'the other side of truth' as expressing novel's central
moral conflict; Sade struggles with her parent's dictum to tell the truth her
father's journalistic truth-telling led, inadvertently, to her mother's death.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

 Naidoo wants her readers to both identify with and be challenged by the
text is the opening line P1.
 We learn that Mama has been killed in a drive-by shooting, political
retaliation for her husband's work as a journalist.
 Naidoo engages her Western readers with the familiarity of the 'English
book' and the 'schoolbag' while simultaneously defamiliarising their
experience.
 The Other Side of Truth may be written in English and take place largely in
Britain, yet presents a set of experiences potentially disturbing to those
who have been oblivious to the experience of refugees.
 Sade and her family are members of Nigeria's professional middle class.
 Also, stereotypes are both confirmed and challenged when the children
confront people in the UK who repeatedly ask them if they speak English,
which they do very well (93, 110), in addition to Yoruba and pidgin.
 These African children are trilingual, unlike their British counterparts, and
in many ways better educated and disciplined.
 Finally, Naidoo performs a classic act of good writing in juxtaposing the
peaceful ease of reading a book with the sharp cracks of gunshot: in two
sentences the action moves from what appears to be a bourgeois tale of a
 school-age child, to one in which that child's world is ripped apart by vio-
lence.
 In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote that successful writing begins in medias res,
or in the middle of the action, because that immediately engages one's
emotions and further curiosity.
 The harrowing events unfolding may incite empathy for a child who
experiences her mother dying before her eyes. Thus, before readers might
set up an 'us versus them' framework for reading they find themselves
caring about what happens to Sade.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

 Ideas themselves take on different meanings - different 'truths' - depending

on one's context and knowledge.
 At the airport Sade encounters an African American man wearing African
dress who praises air travel for having created a global village: his life's
ambition had been to travel to Nigeria and discover his roots (30).
 But while Sade had dreamt of flying, she had not anticipated that it would
be as a refugee (33).
 Her present reality as political exile stands in sharp contrast to his
romantic search for a lost past.
 The children's experience of the UK contradicts the messages they have
absorbed from the BBC World Service about British ideas of justice and
fairness.
 When the children ask for help after Mrs Bankole abandons them at
Victoria Station, they are treated like beggars (50).
  From the bus they see a 'postcard' London, but it seems dreamlike
compared to the reality they face on the streets where they are first
robbed and then accused of being robbers (58-64).
 Unlike in Nigeria, however, where the police set up roadside blocks to
collect bribes (21).

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

 Naidoo's representation of the school experience is not flattering to British

children but the kinds of students who torment Sade and Femi might be
some of the audience for whom she is writing.
 Sade and Femi encounter bullies who are white children, but not essentially
different from the military police in Nigeria in their attitudes towards those
who are different (120-4)
 She remembers that her father says you have to stand up to bullies: 'Other-
wise they get inside your head. That's how they succeed in controlling as'
(118).
 Internalised oppression can happen anywhere, and may come from letting
the bullies take over our internal dialogue.

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

 Sade's parents have raised her to be truthful.

 Her mother tells her, 'Truth keeps the hand cleaner than soap' (74), and

Folarin's journalism career is centred around his view that the bully gets

away with it because others let him (22).

  Folarin puts himself and his family in danger by publishing pho tos of

students killed in a political demonstration (64-5) and writing articles

protesting that Saro-Wiwa and his fellow leaders would not be given a fair

trial (78-9).

 Mama says that he should take care because the Nigerian government

isn't interested in what the rest of the world thinks; Folarin says that he

has to face himself in the mirror and show his children that bad men

succeed when we look the other way. But only a few days later Mama is

shot, and now Sade is confused: doing the right thing can lead to awful

consequences (78).

 The potential dangers of truth-telling are highlighted in other ways. Sade

and Femi lie constantly to the British authorities to protect their father.

Sade gives in to the school bullies and steals a lighter from the store owned

by the family of her friend, Mariam, because she is coerced by threats that

Femi will be hurt.

 But when Sade learns that Mariam is also a political refugee, she tries to

make amends. Mariam's uncle says there is no point in righting bullies, but

Sade thinks her father would never accept that, so 'How did people know

what was the right thing to do?' (196)

‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Truth and the media

 Writing, news and the media play an important role in The Other Side of
Truth.
 Folarin's journalistic activity and the dangers it brings represent the
challenges many face in speaking out under difficult conditions.
 Speech and writing become acts, not only abstractions, because they lead
to actual consequences, such as exposing human rights violations and
encouraging political activism, or being persecuted for doing so.
 Naidoo has her protagonists become or work with political activists
conveying the feeling that hope remains if some are willing to act, even if
this comes at great personal sacrifice.
 The news media in Britain offer opportunities for national and international
exposure and dialogue that are not guaranteed in Nigeria.
 Since the press is censored in in Nigeria, the family first heard about Saro-
Wiwa's execution on the BBC World Service.
 Sade's efforts to make her family's situation known to the Seven O'clock
News brings attention to Folarin's plight and mobilises his release despite
resistance from immigration authorities.
 Her mastery of the English language gives her the skills needed to navigate
London alone and communicate with the news broadcaster.
 As a result of her own efforts, Making News wants to make a programme
on refugees with her class (161-2), and in the end even the school bullies
wish her well.
 Folarin quotes to her from a letter sent by an American university, 'Our stu-
dents need to hear you. We need more people like you who are prepared to
tell those hidden stories. We might not have assassination squads here but
there are many other ways of making journalists keep quiet' (212).
 Readers are reminded that freedom of expression does not guarantee that
one will be heard.
 An answer to the problem of truth-telling is suggested in the folktale of the
Tortoise which Folarin writes to his children in a letter from prison.
 Tortoise is captured by Leopard, who plans to eat him but grants a reprieve
during which Tortoise scratches the earth deeply so that everyone would
know an animal struggled for life there.
 Folarin writes: 'If we keep quiet about injustice, then injustice wins. We
must dare to tell.
 Across the oceans of time, words are mightier than the sword' (193).
 The message seems to be that we must strive to tell our stories non-
violently so that the 'other side of truth' can be known.

 At the end of the novel, Sade writes a letter home to her grandmother who

has lost her daughter and grandchildren and is now all alone. Early in the

novel, Sade sees a friend of her grandmother's, an old woman who now has

to sell oranges as a street vendor because she has lost all her children (20).

Was it worth Mama's death, Grandma's poverty, and their own new status

as migrants to tell the world the truth about