Being Different

Challenging narratives

The refugee ‘crisis’ in The Boy at the Back of the Class; homelessness and bullying in The Night Bus Hero; historical and present day racisms in The Lion Above the Door; violence against women in The Star Outside My Window; and most recently, the everyday plights of Young Carers living below the poverty line in The Letter with the Golden Stamp: I think it’s safe to say I don’t choose the easiest of issues to place at the heart of all my stories. Nor do I give my narrators an easy journey of unravelling any of the above.

I have been asked countless times in schools across the world – from Singapore to Dubai, from a village school in Kent to university groups in Scotland, why that is. Why do I ask so much of the children of my book worlds and have them asking these big, seemingly unsolvable questions? Why place such a burden on their young shoulders and - through them - on my young readers too?

The answer is simple: because our children, whether they’re 5 or entering their tween years, know. They are fully, if not hyper aware of the issues my books are seeking to tackle. They hear and see everything. Be it wars raging and horrifically expanding in other parts of our small planet, or racist riots on our streets, or the rhetoric of politicians and media headlines regarding refugees, or indeed, the faces and stories they see missing in their WWII museums. We have in our midst, the most informed generations of children. Surrounded 24/7 by endless media platforms and voices telling them what is happening and oftentimes, what to think about it. Experiences and encounters that inevitably means our children have questions, lots and lots of questions. About all of it.

Which is why, in every single one of my stories, there is a character brave enough and empathetic enough to launch into a quest for An Answer to their own questions. Leo in The Lion Above the Door embarks on an adventure to find out why heroes from countries beyond

Europe and the USA are missing from his history books - and by extension, why others see fit to bully and disrespect his family. Whilst his sidekick, Sangita, is on a parallel quest to dig out the heroes of this world, asking why non-White women’s roles, faces and names who contributed to fighting Nazism in WWII were all but eradicated - or often actually were.

Meanwhile, Aniyah in The Star Outside My Window is numbed and confused on finding herself entering a foster home, and is on a desperate search for her mother’s star - a search that highlights the plight of far too many women around the world. Whilst the narrator in The Boy at the Back of the Class, on meeting a Syrian refugee boy who has borne and survived the unbearable, is desperate to take his plight to the most powerful figure - in their mind at least - in the country: the Queen herself. They do so because they aspire to be like that solver of mysteriesand rather lacking in superheroic powers, comic book hero, Tintin. Himself, an undercover reporter, perpetually on a quest for truth.

Tintin is, essentially, the crux of who my main characters really embody: they are a living, breathing, literary metamorphosis of Tintin, with heads full of questions about either their own situation or another’s, and chests that contain just enough bravery to go out and try and find their own answers. It is Tintin’s trait of never giving up, of never having those questions waylaid or silenced, that leads even Hector, the bully telling his tale in The Night Bus Hero, to truths he never wondered about, let alone faced.

Tintin’s trait of using questions as a super power - one that we all possess - is used by the characters in my stories to unravel and undo the confusing and sometimes hypocritical world of grown-ups as seen through the eyes of children. Simply put, without voicing their questions, the children in my books would never be on the adventures they are on. Their tales would not exist. I tell children wherever I go, without my questions of the world - often forged first in the domains of my primary and secondary school classrooms - I would not be here either, writing these stories.

And therein lies my hopes for coming generations: that they will use not just my stories, but all stories, to go on asking their questions about this world of ours and be brave enough to follow those questions through. Some of the most beautiful questions I have ever heard have come as a result of children reading and empathising with the characters of my stories. Many of them are based on wanting to know how to help - how to bring to life their own desires for change. It was receiving hundreds and thousands of such questions that led to the writing of my nonfiction activist’s guide, Hope On The Horizon. To me, any child asking questions signifies hope. I am hopeful that acts which harm and erase are being thought about, challenged, mulled over and, ultimately, explored by children and my own characters.

ONJALI Q. RAÚF Author

www.onjaliqrauf.org