Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It explores drug use in America at a time when things were changing. The youth in America could have become either alienated or empowered, and as it turned out they became empowered.
Why do you recommend On the Road by Jack Kerouac?
Because it explores drug use in America at a time when things were changing. The youth in America could have become either alienated or empowered, and as it turned out they became empowered. I enjoyed this book because it explores how drugs, youth and culture are interrelated.
I also identified with the main character’s passion for roaming around and exploring the world. I wanted my character Deen, who is named after Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, to have those same characteristics.
Would you describe it as a pro-drug book?
The drugs in On the Road aren’t the class A variety – Kerouac mostly writes about marijuana. As a writer it’s not important to take a moral stance on drug use. It’s not our responsibility to do so. However I did take a moral stance – I wanted people to read my book and think ‘I will never do heroin.’ It was a conscious decision. Jack Kerouac didn’t take that stance and that’s fine.
There are also different sorts of stigmas associated with various drugs. There is the stigma of not talking about drugs at all – this is what I was dealing with. Jack Kerouac may have been dealing with the social stigma against softer drugs, a stigma that didn’t necessarily need to exist.
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Social psychologist Shazia Omar is the author of Like a Diamond in the Sky, a novel about Bangladeshi addicts. Omar is a founding member of Writers Block, an organisation that aims to promote the works of Bangladeshis writing in English. Drug addiction, she says, is a growing problem here. Many people are taking a drug called yabba, which comes from Thailand and is similar to speed. ‘It’s an expensive drug so it’s the well-off young people who are doing it. A lot of those I met while researching the book didn’t realise they were going to get hooked. None of them knew how harmful it is,’ she says. Having spent a month doing research in a rehab centre in Mumbai, she concludes that love, and not a punitive approach, is the answer to overcoming addiction.
