Darren McGarvey: My failure to read books could have killed me '“ but now I've written one

Darren McGarvey says he found reading a struggle, leading him to the spoken word instead. Picture: Getty

People like me don't write books '“ or so my head keeps telling me even now, despite having written one that a few people have said is really good. Then again, I don't know why I'm so surprised. When I think back, it's hard to see what else could have become of me, professionally speaking, given the fact that language has been an obsession since I learned to speak.

Since my schooldays, how words look, sound and what they mean has been my main interest. As a child I was keen to engage grown-ups in conversation, always ­trying to add new words my vocabulary. I’m told that by the age of five I was precociously correcting my ­mother’s terrible grammar, much to her annoyance.

By the time I was ten, I was formulating my first short stories, borrowing heavily, as one does, from my main influences at the time: Granny and Batman. But I don’t remember reading any books.

I do recall occasionally picking them up and flicking through a few pages, or delving for a specific piece of information, such as the capital city of Turkey (which is not Istanbul). I don’t remember the life-changing moment so many people speak of – finishing the book that ignites their passion for reading.

I do, however, retain vivid memories of struggling with books and being intimidated by their physical size and word-count. Just the thought of a big book was enough to defeat me. In secondary school, when my ability to write put me in the top English class, I was out of my depth when it came to literature. People would tell me I just hadn’t found the right book, that I should persevere. They insisted that all I had to do was work my brain like a muscle until reading became less of a chore. But I secretly resented this advice – and those who dispensed it.

Instead, I settled on the belief that there was some unseen ­barrier ­preventing me from connecting with literature. It’s not as if I was the only one at my school who struggled. Regular readers were the exception.

Reading was not regarded as a leisure activity, more a necessary evil. Where I diverged from many of my classmates was that I privately longed to read every book I picked up. However, to my frustration and later, resignation, I always found, not long after starting one, that I could never see it through.

Lightweight paperbacks were deceptively small, often luring me in with an interesting cover, but I’d quickly return them to the shelf when I discovered the absence of illustrations. Those books were so crammed with words that they appeared cluttered and chaotic – filling me with the sort of dread an imminent house move triggers when you think about it for too long. Tiny lettering, coupled with tight paragraph spacing, gave off a sense of impossibility that only got worse.

I was still imbibing a lot of new words, increasingly from newspapers. But I came to depend on ­listening to other people discuss and debate as a way of ­grasping what I might otherwise have learned from books. Discussion was more engaging and fun, and was not an endurance test like reading. By talking and listening to what ­others had to say – and paying attention to how they said it – I developed an ability to communicate with different types of people on a broad range of subjects, which might even have suggested I was an avid reader.

Had I attended secondary school in a community where being smart was more socially acceptable, ­perhaps I would have been a ­better reader. In poetry, I found only frustration and confusion which is, again, ironic given I would later become a rapper. It wasn’t just the opaque metaphors and bizarre punctuation, but also the subject matter. These poems were couched in such high language that they seemed to sneer at me. I was sceptical that anyone could understand or enjoy it.

My struggle to find meaning – or rather, to find the meaning ascribed by the curriculum, in order that I pass a test – led me to take an increasingly hostile attitude towards poetry and poets, which matched my now belligerent attitude towards reading and readers. However, beneath my ­disruptive behaviour lay an aggrieved sense of rejection and exclusion, and a crushing feeling of personal failure. In my frustration at not being able to read a book and the sense of exclusion this instilled in me, I gradually adopted a world view that would place me at odds with nearly every person, place and thing I’d encounter. The beliefs I formed about public institutions and authority, generally, would later become the lenses through which I would view everything else in life. There came a point when such ­scepticism was not only self-defeating and dishonest, but potentially life-threatening. I became unable to discern between enemies and allies, truth or falsehood, and this partly fuelled a resentful descent into destructive drinking for nearly ten years. I stayed angry and adversarial until one morning I woke up drunk in a police cell and realised my life had to change radically.

The idea that people like me don’t write books still rings in my ears – even though I have one coming out. It’s called Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass and it’s my attempt to explore how early formative childhood experiences can evolve into deeply held beliefs about ­ourselves and the world – regardless of whether they are true or not.

I have no doubt that greater books than mine have been written about poverty. I just haven’t read them.

Darren McGarvey is also known as Loki, a Scottish rapper and social ­commentator @lokiscottishrap. An extract from his book, Poverty Safari, will be published in The Scotsman on Thursday.