What Does it Mean to be Literate?
I majored in English in college. I loved the great poets, the ancient works, and the beauty of language. Language, and more specifically the written word, wove intricate tales that evoked deep emotion and sentiments. When I became a Christian, I passionately clung to the King James Bible, pouring into the richness of its words and drawing life from the beauty within those pages. To read the Bible in the common English of the NIV or NLS detracted from its depths and made it seem less real, less true, less meaningful, and I believed being able to read and understand the old English of the KJV made me more literate than my counterparts. But the written word, while powerful, does not alone define literacy. I believe that in certain cultures, someone can be literate while being able to communicate only orally, and thus literacy is much more than simply being able to read and write. Instead, it is a person’s capacity to apply communication skills in order to effectively connect to others in their circle of influence in a meaningful way.
When I went on the mission field, I endeavored to use my wisdom and my ability to read and interpret the deep word of God to influence many. I wanted to write books on God’s glory and read deeply of the greatest preachers. Yet, I was stymied when I was taught to tell the wonders of our Lord in the childish manner that follows:
“Early one Sunday morning, just after sunrise, a group of grieving women stumbled along a path to a tomb. Their grief was even greater than normal for it was mixed with disappointment and confusion. Hadn’t Jesus proved he was God? Then how could he die? How could his mission end in the failure of death? Such a humiliating death. Everyone turned against him even most of his friends. How could the immortal die? How could the light of the world, descend into darkness?
Such must have been some of their questions.
If Jesus just died for us, no matter how self-sacrificial and undeserved that death was, then he achieved nothing. There is no story to tell.
However, when the women arrived at the tomb they found the huge entrance stone rolled aside and the body missing. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothing appeared and said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen! Remember how he told you the son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.” (Luke 24) (Dillon, C)
I had stumbled upon the process of storying, an effective way to share the Gospel in “non-literate” cultures. These cultures could not read or write, and passed down everything through the memorization of intricate stories. To memorize the story of Christ in the King James Version would not only be next to impossible, but also quite boring. While the language of the KJV is beautiful and poetic, it did not communicate well orally. So I was challenged to learn to tell the story of the Lord in a different manner, a manner that the “illiterate” people group to whom I was witnessing could relate.
Yet, were they really illiterate? If one follows the conventional definition of literacy, being able to read and write, then, yes, that people group was illiterate. The true power of literacy, however, does not just lie in the ability to read and write, but also in a person’s capacity to apply these skills in order to effectively and efficiently connect to others in an understandable and communicative way. Whereas literacy has traditionally been defined in merely the cognitive aspect of using perception, memory, judgement, and reason to decode written symbols and apply meaning to them devoid of emotional reaction, James Paul Gee proposes that the written word cannot be interpreted on its own, but, rather can only be taken within the context of the world in which we live: “How one ‘reads the word’ and how one ‘reads the world’ are heavily dependent upon each other. They are inextricably interdependent”. (Gee, 47) If a person, therefore, cannot “read” a text outside of the confines of his own world, then to expect a culture that has limited access to pen, paper, electricity and social media to express literacy through the written word as opposed to through the spoken word (their sole means of communication) is fallible at best and grossly negligent at worst.
True literacy is much more than simply its cognitive aspect; it also involves a more complex social and critical aspect. Social literacy can be defined as “an individual’s ability to successfully and deliberately mediate their world as family members, workers, citizens and lifelong learners”. (B,M. [n.d.]) While I was very much literate in America, in the outlying deserts of Senegal I was quite illiterate as I could not communicate, or mediate, their world in a way that made them “lifelong learners” until I learned how to teach the Bible in their language: the language of oral storytelling.
But what about the deeper meaning? What about being able to critically analyze a text or a message? H Coffee tells us that critical literacy “enables people to interpret messages in the modern world through a critical lens and challenge the power relations within those messages. Teachers who facilitate the development of critical literacy encourage students to interrogate societal issues and institutions like family, poverty, education, equity, and equality in order to critique the structures that serve as norms as well as to demonstrate how these norms are not experienced by all members of society”. (Coffee, H.) Can such critical analysis take place within the spoken word, or through a text filled with misspellings, grammatical errors, and written in a childish, story-like manner? Absolutely it can.
When we lost my grandfather 25 years ago, my young sister wrote a letter to our grandmother. Fraught with poor grammar, inconsistent sentence structure, and a lack of organization, it was typical of a child’s writing and would hardly be considered an eloquent piece of literature. Yet that letter has survived 25 years with every member of our family who received a copy. It challenged our way of thinking about life, family, ethics, kinship, hard times, and the way of small town Southern life as she captured it through her memories the life of my grandfather.
When I lost my second grandfather this weekend, I pulled the letter out and it evoked the same thoughts and sentiments it had years ago, and it challenged me to critically reexamine my life and values. While it has transcended time through its written form, it was most powerful in its oral form when she read it though tearful eyes with a cracking voice at my grandfather’s funeral so many years ago. It is powerful to me today because as I read it, I hear it as she told it. For me, the oral telling of the letter is what connects me to the past, to my family, to my culture, and ultimately to myself. It is what calls me to analyze the way I live and compare it to the way two great men lived their lives. If literacy is defined as having the ability to mediate your world, connect with those around you, evaluate and examine societal values, and relate to and define your existence within the world that surrounds you, then by all means even an oral society, or a society with seemingly child-like speaking and writing, can be viewed as a literate society. Literacy, thus, encompasses much more than the ability to read and write on a certain educational level, but should be judged more upon the capacity to communicate effectively in the given environment.
Works Cited
B, M. (n.d.). SOCIAL LITERACY TODAY A RESOURCE FOR PARENTS AND PROFESSIONALS. Retrieved September 5, 2017, from http://www.socialliteracytoday.com/?p=87
Coffey, H. (n.d.). Critical literacy. Retrieved September 05, 2017, from http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/4437
Dillon, C. (2012). A life-changing story to tell. Retrieved September 06, 2017,
Gee, J. P. (2015). Literacy and education. New York: Routledge.from http://storyingthescriptures.com/about-this-site/
