Month: March 2012

Movie Review: Doubt

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Doubt… We watched the movie last Saturday and it kept us awake into the small hours of the morning. The story line is quite flat, just like bad gossip: a superior nun,who’s also the principal of this Catholic school, suspects a newly appointed priest of inappropriate behaviour towards one of the pupils. She doesn’t have any evidence, only a few incidents brought to her attention by an eager and easily impressed young nun. But she convinces herself and everybody else involved that the priest has wronged the child somehow and makes him leave the school and the parish. The movie is on the other hand brilliant in exploring the human mind and its intricacies: it makes the viewer aware of how easily a “reality” can be created out of suspicion and self-justification.  As, indeed, nothing is explained in the end and the viewer is left battling a sea of endless possibilities and scenarios. Was the reality Sister Aloysius Beauvier constructed veritable or was it all in her head and she  blamed an innocent man? Or …

Teaching on the wrong side of town

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I was teaching today. I am what they call in the States a “supply teacher” or a “substitute teacher” here, in Northern Ireland. I get phone calls in the evening or even early in the morning, mainly from primary schools and go in when a teacher is sick or on a training course. Today it was a secondary school, for a change. A couple of years ago I had the privilege to work with some great kids there, from Thailand, Malaysia, India and China, who needed a bit of practice and encouragement with their English.  Today I wasn’t so privileged and had a battle on my hands with every new class who walked through the door. It wasn’t me they were fighting but the institution I represented, the authority they wanted to usurp from their lives because it doesn’t stand for anything meaningful to them.  They don’t see the point in studying and considering their backgrounds, I don’t blame them, really. For many of them, the sense of twisted peer  recognition coming from mocking everything …

Promised Book Reviews

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A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini and Harmattan, by Gavin Weston Okay, so chronologically these are not my two most recent readings. I finished Harmattan today but I can’t remember how long it’s been since I read A Thousand Splendid Suns. These days I recall events as “before and after the move” so I am sure I read it last year before October, before we moved to this part of Northern Ireland. Similarities? Both stories take place in the Muslim world (Afghanistan for A Thousand Splendid Suns, Nigeria for Harmattan), in countries ridden by war, poverty, and death. Both novels revolve around young girls whose lives are maimed by their unfortunate circumstances: war and the Afghan society’s prejudices in Mariam’s case; illness and the Nigerian society’s inability to look after its innocents, in Haoua’s case. In both cases, the girls are left without their mothers’ tender presence and vigilant protection from a young age, to the mercy of ruthless, uncaring, selfish fathers who perceive them as offsprings, but not as in the definition “a …