A funny story shall now be told.
I joined a writer’s group so many years ago, when I was but a young smidgeon of my present self. I’d written and submitted, for collective critique, a story about travelling late on an African road with only one headlight (the other was broken and no replacement could be obtained from any supplier). So, we’re zooming along on a pot-holed road at about 140 km/hour, in the pitch dark, when suddenly there is this a figure who looks to be in a trance, walking directly towards us, in the middle of the road. The car swerves to miss him, and as I look back I see the guy hasn’t flinched, nor changed his general course of direction. He is still walking at a slow to even pace in the middle of the road.
“What was that?” asked my cousin, who was in the back seat, trying to get some sleep. “Was it an animal?”
“No,” her husband replied. “A munt.” A “munt” in the old, colonial lingo, is a slightly dismissive term for a black person.
As I recall, the guy’s eyes looked frozen. I wrote in my short narrative that his eyes looked like frozen egg whites.
I don’t recall whether or not my short story contained the term, “munt”, or indeed any kind of explanation of the term, but somebody did take the trouble to write back that it was absolutely pointless for me to use the term “eyes like frozen egg whites”, since nobody knew what it meant, and that I needed to use a more accessible term that ordinary people could understand.
Since then I've become gradually more and more acquainted with American “ordinariness” to the extent that I’ve pretty much concluded it has its equivalence in the term, “illiteracy”.
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