Book Reflections

When president Obama was elected I wrote about this moment with my nieces in mind. Three of them. I was amazed that they would live only in a world where a black president was possible. A world, that until that election, I didn’t think I’d ever see. 

It felt like such a turning point. It felt so hopeful. Never mind the racist posts that greeted Obama after his election. Never mind the bulletproof glass he and Michelle stood behind just in case.

I lived in “just in case” for at least a year. Then I settled into the assumption that although the racism would continue, he was safe. What I didn’t count on was that the rest of us weren’t. 

Truthfully, I never thought wearing black skin was safe. I knew better. I understood what black people have always understood, that things happen to us when there are no prying eyes to observe, and if you survive, no one will believe your version of what happened. 

Such dark thoughts.

I’ll return to thoughts of my nieces now, with something more like the hope I found myself cloaked in in 2008. I want to spin them dizzy in a world where black presidents are possible and black skin a gift. Fiction seems the best respite. Fiction seems the most realistic place for that kind of optimistic landscape. Fiction can weave in the reality of a black man in the White House and make a kinky haired black girl the hero in the story.

Yesterday I began my search…again. It wasn’t the first time I went in search of books for my nieces. Thinking back to my beloved books growing up, I notice now that the books of my youth have one thing in common. Not a single main character looks like me. Not Anastasia Krumpnik, or Harriet the Spy, or Ramona Quimby. Not Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, not anyone from the Lion the Witch and Wardrobe or from Bridge to Terabithia. As integrated as my parents made my toybox, the bookshelf proved more palely homogenous.

Books for children seem to have gotten more diverse since I’ve gotten old; there are folks of all kinds of backgrounds in books these days. But I am difficult, and diversity isn’t enough, I have a few other requirements for what I’d most like to present my nieces with:

1.       Person of color protagonist 

2.       No historical stories 

3.       Female protagonist 

4.       No love interest to live “happily ever after with."

 

What I’ve found is that two out of the four requirements is highly probable in a book, three out of four possible, and four out of four I am having difficulty in finding. I can’t claim to have exhausted the children’s book section of any bookstore or library but oh how frustrating my internet searches have been as I find books with great stories no doubt, but ones that don’t reflect my nieces or the values I want them to have. 

My 11 year-old-niece adores dystopian novels. Hunger Games, Divergent…I went in search of something in that genre for her. I found Tankborn. Tankborn met three of the four (1,2, and 4) but romance snuck its way in. 

The things is, my requirements aren’t arbitrary. I want protagonists of color because I don’t want my nieces to believe that the default or norm, is whiteness. I want them to understand that the world, and the people in it, is a varied place. I want them to see themselves and others reflected in that world not during black history month or for special messages, but just because it is a Tuesday and someone is walking to the store. 

I also don’t want the brownness of characters to relegate them to some historical context of suffering and overcoming. I don’t want stories that have characters that reflect my brown and fuzzy haired nieces to have to relate to the civil rights movement or slavery. I want it to be in the here and now or in the dystopian future where historical context doesn’t limit the types of stories or triumphs they can have.

I want them to see girls and women as the protagonists because the Bechdel test is a low bar and yet so many movies and books fail it. Having a female protagonist isn’t a guarantee that the threshold is met but it goes a long way in showing that girls don’t have to be helpless and boring…girls can be smart and funny and kickass or make mistakes and learn from them. All traits I hope my nieces possess.

Finally, point four is about NOT having a romantic interest. I’m not anti-love. One day I hope my nieces are cloaked in the love of a partner. But at the tender ages of 7,9, and 11 I don’t want them focused on that. I don’t want them to fall into the trap of believing that happily ever after is the result of someone “completing them” or some such nonsense. I want them to understand that people can be friends – deeply and meaningfully- and not have to be more than that. A person can be special and not be a boy/girlfriend. 

While Hunger Games doesn’t fixate on the romance angle (although the movies elevate it in importance to some degree) it is still a component of the books. Still a component of Katniss’ world. Divergent does the same. Fairy tales are based on the premise of one true love. It is all so cloying and transparent. Not yet teens, I want my nieces to explore a world where they and their friends are enough to tackle any new adventures.

Finding books that meet my threshold has proven difficult. I’ve gone back to the classics…maybe classics is a stretch…I’ve gone back to my childhood, back to my love of Judy Blume and Madeline L’engle who meet some of the rules and fall short in others. I’ve researched The Lost Girl and will check it out to see if it is any good (even as I already know it fails rule 4). More than anything I realize that rather than complain I need to do pull a J.K. Rowling and write what I want to see in the world…I hope inspiration hits me soon because my nieces aren’t getting any younger and their minds are being filled…and not according to my preferred rules.

A

Does anyone have a good idea for a children’s book?

What photos say

Dusty feet, torn dress, beaming smile. Round belly, smudged face, big eyes. 

Closing my eyes I can conjure the pictures I’ve taken, and not taken, from my own travels. The little girl in a village in Uganda, petrified by the pale skin of the American interns- hell, scared of my peanut butter colored skin. She ran from me initially, but when confronted with the blonde hair and almost translucent blue eyes, she reached for me, clung to me, even as she cried. I was the lesser of the evils but some unknown evil nonetheless.

Part of me wishes I had a picture of that moment. Some part of me wishes I had a lot of pictures of random moments in the various countries I’ve visited and lived. But in recent years I have tried to be mindful of the pictures I take, of the stories they tell- whether I intend to tell those stories or not.

The most ubiquitous photos of the African continent are the quintessential animal/safari shots, the stark/lush landscape, and the disheveled/adorable child. And as frequently as there are photos of small smiling children, there is inevitably a picture of a white/western person holding them or their hands, crouched down at eye level or in some close proximity to that child. A clean person. A smiling person. A well fed person. And harmless as that photo is in the moment, it perpetuates a host of thoughts and expectations and narratives about a continent that already has too many “others” communicating stories on its behalf.

So for me, the picture of the “African” child is the hardest for me to take. Weighed down by the potential untruths or half-truths or full truths with no context that I am spreading, I find it difficult to snap a shot of a smiling Ugandan, Liberian, Ethiopian, child in anything that resembles the stereotypical narratives that already saturate our understanding of those places.

We are inundated with narratives every day without realizing it. We absorb starving and squalored “norms” like breathing, without realizing we are doing anything at all. And so we come to believe that Africa is a place that only knows elephants, famine, and war. There are no cityscapes, not cars- save safari jeeps, and no elegant dining. There is no middle class, no internet, no university.

 

When I returned from Uganda my niece’s teacher invited me to talk to the fourth grade classes about my time there. I pulled together a slide show that focused on wells and potable water in the villages – a story that in many ways keeps with the narrative of rural and poor African nations. A true story but not the only story.

My first slide wasn’t of a village or even a well though; my first picture was of the Kampala skyline. 

When I asked the kids where that picture was taken, they guessed wildly of American cities. And when I told them that modern-looking city was in a country in Africa they looked surprised and then absorbed it…just like that. Their teacher on the other hand, she seemed to struggle with an Africa that looked more like Houston than the Serengeti. The difference, she’s been absorbing specific ideas about Africa for far longer than the kids. That photo contradicted what she’s been taught – often passively – about the perceived singularity of African life. 

But the kids…the kids haven’t yet. They are still early in what they are consuming and so it is possible for them to understand the world not in absolutes but in shades of gray. I want their understanding of the African continent, and Asia, and everywhere in the world, to be nuanced and textured and layered. Taking pictures of little kids with running noses and dirty feet doesn’t do that, unless they are displayed beside photos of kids dressed in prep school uniforms in front of spotless cars. Without the later, I find it too difficult to shoot the former, the perpetuating harm is mostly inadvertent but still too great.

Skin Deep Talent

“What I want to know is, what are you good at? What are your talents, or what you think you were born doing well?”

The question was well-timed, coming as it did, on the heels of an older woman who had managed to hijack the five-person youth panel discussion with a 10 minute rant. Not a rant but definitely a hushed lecture responding to most of the points the panel had made directly or indirectly in their 30 minutes on stage. 

The question was a bright spot- a positive way to not only return the panel to the panel (in an audience full of black and brown folks, no one really wanted to interrupt a gray-haired elder) and wrap it up on a high note. The moderator smiled brightly and turned to the three young men and two young women on the stage, to offer them the floor. 

Jace, deep bass voice steaming out of a dimpled baby face, answered first. “Running. My family says since I was a baby I’ve been running. I’m good at running.” He pushed the microphone over to the young woman to his left. She shook her head a little. The rest of the group sat quietly, even as the moderator revisited the question. 

“I think everyone should answer this one.” She focused her attention on the young woman Jace had motioned toward. “What are you good at?” 

The question was met with silence. “I mean, you are gorgeous. Let’s just start there. You are gorgeous – you both are,” she nodded at the other young lady on the panel, “how do you use that gorgeousness toward other talents?”

I may have misquoted that last line but she said something closely resembling that. I was shaking my head violently and looking for somebody, anybody, to share my derision of this turn of conversation. Everyone seemed to be looking intently at the stage. 

A few more moments of silence and as the facilitator finally ended the panel the young woman leaned in slightly toward the mike, “biology…” her voice trailed and was swallowed by the shuffle of people leaving the stage. 

You are gorgeous? Seriously? A woman’s talent is how gorgeous she is? Even more heinous to me, that notion of “pretty as credentials” was presented by a woman in a leadership capacity.

What do we do with that?

Already the young women spoke the least. The young men answered questions first and most often. Each of the young women spoke no more than twice – less than five minutes combined of a 30 plus minute presentation.

I know that beauty – regardless of gender- is a commodity in this country. Beautiful people get paid more, beautiful children get attended to better. But beauty isn’t a talent. Beauty can be an asset, but it is an asset with precarious spikes. Precarious because beauty – by mainstream American standards – is a fleeting thing that (especially for women) recedes with age. But more importantly, viewing beauty as a talent can minimize the way a young woman sees herself and her potential. That biology talent fades into the shadow of the beauty one.  And while biology talent can lead to confidence in her ability to compete and a STEM career, “beauty” demands external judgments and validation…to what end? 

How many pretty girls become models or actresses? Beautiful as their only acknowledged talent, what else is there to aspire to?

My sister made fun of me when my nieces were born. I was careful in my language to compliment them, even as infants, on how smart I knew they’d become, trying to counter each, “aren’t you so cute” that sailed- with the best of intentions – their way. 

Hell, I’m guilty of it too. I see a tiny nugget laughing joyously or sleeping peacefully and I think, how adorable—I say, “how adorable.” Being adorable isn’t the problem, acknowledging adorable at the exclusion of everything else is. Beauty as single identifier. 

Beauty may be all we know of someone when we are meeting them for the first time, but when they are offered an opportunity to introduce themselves to the world I hope they are able to express more than what is skin deep, I hope we adults encourage them to know what is more than skin deep.

When the young woman returned to the seat in front of me I tapped her on the shoulder; all I could think to say was, “your talents are more than your beauty.” Lame, I know. She smiled uncertainly at me and said thank you. And then she returned to her day. We all returned to our day.