The same or different? (Anne Rooney)

This post was going to be called "Gargoyle blindness", but you'll have to wait for that one, because I left my camera in my college office with all the photos on it. Instead, I'm picking up on Keren David's excellent and thought-provoking post of yesterday.

Keren said that she felt unrepresented in books when she was a child because there were no Jewish characters. I wholly respect that position, and don't want to excuse the publishing industry, the non-Jewish community, or anyone else. But I want to make a slightly different point - don't all children feel isolated and alienated? And isn't that one of the reasons we read? Reading helps us to find a community of made-up people we can feel like, that make us say, 'oh, yes, it's just like that!'

I was not black, or gay or Jewish or disabled or a member of any other group that is/has been under-represented in children's books. But children will always find something to pick on in others (and themselves). I was bullied for - I don't even know what. Being different. But we're all different. We just don't all have a nameable 'different' group. I suppose I could say that I did see children like me in books because there are books about children who feel different. There are a lot of them. Which might give us a clue: all (almost all?) children feel different, excluded, isolated, not like everyone else. Of course, if you also belong to an ethnic minority or under-represented group, you probably feel even more different, as you have the Keren-flavour of difference as well as the universal, existential difference.

Perhaps there are two distinct kinds of children's books. (OK, there are lots of kinds - but this is one way of dividing them.) There are books about a single protagonist and how they are different and suffer/triumph as a result. These are books like Peter Rabbit and Eleanor and Park, Twocan Toucan and The Little Princess, Heidi, Elmer and The Bunker Diaries. (There's a good exam question in that - how are Elmer and The Bunker Diaries alike?) Then there are the stories that offer a gallery of characters and invite readers to identify with one of them. A gazillion Enid Blyton books, and any number of multi-authored My Little Alien Unicorn Space Fighter series are the most obvious examples. But there are more thoughtful books, too - The Silver Sword, for one. And there are books that pretend to be the second and are actually the first, like Little Women - because is there anyone who preferred another character over Jo? (Doesn't just choosing to read the book align you with her?) Or Harry Potter, which pretends to be the first type but over the course of the series becomes the second type.

The different functions and appeals of the two types are too complex to consider here, but the first deals most thoroughly with the feeling of being different and becoming comfortable with it, discovering one's own strengths and weaknesses. The second is more concerned with fitting in - with seeing there are other people like you that fit comfortably into a group, and little differences are not a barrier to acceptance. I think, perhaps, it's the second type that in particular needs to be careful to represent as many different types of child as possible as they are the books that invite children to pick the character like them to follow through the story.

Is there a division between children along these lines - preferring one type of book over the other? I'd be interested to hear in the comments which you preferred. I overwhelmingly preferred (and prefer) the first. I had no time for Famous Five, Malory Towers or any of that. The Little Unicorn, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Mrs Pepperpot and Dr Dolittle were my favourites.

Confession time. My favourite book, when I was five, was Little Black Sambo. That's an unacceptable book now, of course. But I didn't know it was unacceptable (and indeed it wasn't in the 1960s), and I can remember why I liked it. The boy was so cool. He could outwit tigers! I can remember the first reading, when I was so upset that he lost his colourful clothes - and then it was all OK. He had the life I wanted (including good weather and blue trousers) - he defeated the bullies and, in true fairytale style, ate them so that they were definitely gone.

How was Sambo different? Because he wasn't a tiger, and tigers were in charge. Not because he was black. How was he like me? He was bullied by people who weren't like him (people who were tigers, but hey, it counts).

There were no black children in my school until a year or so later (this was rural Hampshire), but I can remember that him being black didn't affect my identification with him - he just lived in a country where people were black. (Sri Lanka, as it happens - Little Black Sambo is Tamil.) Now, the Mumbo/Jumbo thing bothered me, but not because I had heard of mumbo-jumbo as I hadn't. But I thought if his mum was called Mum[bo] his dad should be called Dad[bo] or something similar. And Jumbo was the name of an elephant, which his dad clearly wasn't. I rationalised that the local word for 'Dad' must be 'Jum'. And then that was OK. (I was familiar with different languages as my parents spoke in French when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying.)

No chance: I had to wear Hansel-and-Gretel shoes
- those shoes that show kids being abandoned
in the forest on the poster. Great. That makes
you keen to go shoe-shopping.

The point was that I could empathise with Sambo because he was a child in a spot of bother. Quite a big spot of bother, actually, with those predatory tigers. It was *just* like being bullied at my primary school. 'If you don't give me your apple/pencil/scarf...' Little Black Sambo was a child like me. Except that he lived somewhere warm and got to eat butter made out of melted tigers. How amazing was that? And those shoes! I wanted shoes like his.

In some of my other favourite books, the characters weren't even human. I could empathise with Moomins - no problem there. Or animals. I could read those stupid stories set in boarding schools, even though I knew no one who had ever been to a boarding school, even though I didn't really like them. I read books about boys. None of it mattered, because I was reading books for the bits that are the same no matter who you are, the bits that are part of the human condition - and that included the existential angst of realising that no one is like you. But on the other hand people (or moomins) can look very different and be just like you.

I read books about people who were not superficially like me and found comfort in the characters being like me at a deeper level. Which is not to say we don't need more diversity in children's books, or that we shouldn't endeavour to show children of all types. But what I think is most iniquitous is when books show children (or adults) of a particular group or type in a consistently bad light (or only one type - white, pretty, athletic - in good positions). When all the Jewish characters are like Fagin, or all the fat girls in boarding school stories are stupid, or all the ginger kids are freaks, that's bad. Because we see past superficial differences unless they come to stand for something. So while in one way there were no children like me in the books I read, in another way there were a lot of children like me because they were humans (well, living beings) and they were individuals.

But I couldn't outwit tigers.




Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Latest book (probably) A Bird in the Hand, Readzone, 2014

Black and White and Everything In Between by Savita Kalhan

According to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin, of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013 in the US, just 93 were about black people. The UK fares little better by all accounts.

Leila Rasheed has blogged about the importance of non-issue based children’s books featuring children from ethnic backgrounds, and why she finds it hard to write about non-white characters.  http://leilarasheeddotcom.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/permission-to-write-my-experience-of-being-a-british-asian-reader-and-writer-of-childrens-books/

Tanya Byrne has written about this on the Guardian books blog where she calls for more books featuring children of colour. https://href.li/?http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/mar/20/tanya-byrne-top-10-black-characters-in-childrens-books?CMP=twt_gu

The dearth of non-white characters was raised by Dean Myers, in his article: Where are the People of Colour in Children’s Books. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?_r=1

And then again by his son Christopher Myers in The Apartheid of Children. https://href.li/?http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html

There is now an increasing debate and demand for more diversity in children’s literature to reflect our increasingly multi-ethnic and multi cultural society.

Almost thirty years ago Verna Wilkins set up Tamarind Press in an attempt to redress the lack of books with children from non-white backgrounds being published in the children’s market. But ‘mainstream’ publishers have yet to catch up, and there is clearly still a huge lack of such books.

As a British Asian, who is 100% Indian in terms of heritage, but who is essentially more British than Indian, and as a big reader during my childhood, it was always a surprise when I found a book about a child who shared my skin colour. A nice surprise. Yes, often those kids were beset by problems such as racial abuse and stereotyping, but that wasn’t a problem for me because growing up in the UK at the time did in fact necessarily involve having to face those issues to a greater or lesser degree.

What bothers me now is the fact that, as all of the above authors have pointed out, there are still very few books that feature children of colour, whether or not they are issue-based or are 'normal' non-issue based stories .

Children are growing up in a society which is far more culturally mixed and diverse. But, for today's children, not much has changed from when I grew up, in terms of seeing and reading about a diverse range of children like themselves and their friends in literature.

That’s a problem.

I completely agree with Malorie when she talks about diversity of multi-cultural voices in children’s literature being of paramount importance, not least because it would promote awareness and understanding, and tolerance.

On a personal level, as a writer, I have written books featuring all white characters. People have often said that The Long Weekend could have been written by a white Anglo-Saxon. That’s fine. I find it quite amusing. It’s my fully Indian name on the spine. In another novel, Amnesia, the main character is an English boy, but his best friend is Indian and his girlfriend is half Italian. The book I have just completed is about an Asian girl and features predominately Asian characters of different backgrounds. I don’t feel that because I’m Asian I have to write about Asian characters all the time, or that I should feel obliged to.

What’s important in children’s literature is that a diversity of characters in terms of ethnicity and culture is depicted, and that their voices are heard, and that a child is no longer surprised when they find more than one book featuring someone of their ethnicity, culture or colour. Sadly, that’s not happening yet.

 www.savitakalhan.com

The Long Weekend Book Trailer

Twitter @savitakalhan