Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies

July 2012

Volume 2

Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH RAVENSHAW UNIVERSITY CUTTACK, ODISHA

Number 1

Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies

EDITOR

Dipti R. Pattanaik CO-EDITORS

Susmita Pani Urmishree Bedamatta EDITORIAL BOARD Paul St-Pierre Former Professor, Montreal University

Ellen Handler Spitz Honors College Professor of Visual Art, The University of Maryland (UMBC)

John Cussen Associate Professor, Edinboro Univesity of Pennsylvania

Thomas Kemple Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia

Himansu Mohapatra Professor, Department of English, Utkal University

Dr. Kerstin Shands Professor, Department of English, Sodertorns University

David Dennen Department of Music, University of California at Davis

Editorial Correspondence

Madhusmita Pati, Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack - 753003, India.

E-mail: pati.madhusmita@gmail.com Š 2012 Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is published once a year, in January by the Department of English, Ravenshaw University, Cuttack, Odisha, India in collaboration with the Ravenshaw English Alumni Association.

Included in the MLA index

Editorial

Sometimes it requires more courage to let go than to hold on, especially when the going is good. The going has been really good so far for our journal. Within a span of two years and three issues we have been able to carve out a distinct identity for ourselves. We raised a very responsive international Board of Editors. We got the issues peer reviewed so as to maintain scholarly excellence. Fortunately for us, many scholars who have already achieved a fair measure of excellence in their respective areas of interest came forward with their contributions for our fledgling venture. All this happened while many journals in India devoted to humanities and social science research were folding up due to a lack of publishable material and resource crunch. I cannot claim that we have not been affected by paucity of funds. In fact, we have not been able to make our distribution network efficient due to lack of resources. A few international publishing houses came forward to sponsor this journal and boost its quality of production and expand its distribution network. But for various reasons the deals could not be finalized.

But I am sure that if we continue to maintain the scholarly standard, its objective outlook and rigorous peer reviewing we will be able to tie up with some publishing houses engaged in the promotion of scholarship.

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I would therefore like to end with a note of optimism because this is probably the last editorial I am going to write for this journal.

Very selfish career choice is forcing me to leave the Ravenshaw Department of English. This was a difficult decision, especially because I was so involved with the journal. But I also realized that my colleagues at the Ravenshaw are prepared to continue the good work and help the Journal achieve new heights of excellence. With this assurance, my letting go has been difficult and easy; difficult because you need courage to give up a good thing and easy because you are assured of a better future.

A Surrogate Swan Song It is in the fitness of things that Ernest Bond should write the editorial of this issue. Our journal is structured in a way that allows maximum flow of outside knowledge and expertise into our midst. We had decided to invite scholars of international repute from time to time to guest- edit specific issues. After hosting an international conference in January 2012, we asked one of the keynote speakers to guest edit a special issue. Professor Bond, who is an authority in the field of children’s literature readily agreed to undertake the arduous task. The outcome after almost a year-long exercise is admirable. I thank him for his generosity and am happy that he has written the swan song for me.

With these words, I bid goodbye to all the supporters of this young journal and hope it will prosper further in my absence, extend its outreach, maintain its democratic structure and hold on to scholarly excellence as its principal value.

D. R Pattanaik

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Contents Editorial

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Preface Ernie Bond

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Reflections on Five Politically Inflected Children’s Books Ellen Handler Spitz

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Transforming the Political while Creating for Children Raja Mohanty

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Nature Biography in Unexpected Places Jen Cullerton Johnson and Mary Gove

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Understanding the Politics of The Mangrove Tree Susan L. Roth

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The Malayalam Experience of Children’s Literature Paul Zakaria

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Children’s Literature as a Personal Translation of the Political into Story Suzanne Gervay

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The Child as a Reader Communicating Belief Deepa Agrawal

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On Children’s Literature and Politics: A conversation in two voices about Hands Around the Library Karen Leggett Abouraya and Susan L. Roth

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Placing the Texts in their Contexts: A New Historicist Study of Shakespeare Adapted for Children Anita Mishra

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‘Nonsense’ as sense: Comic vision in two plays of Sukumar Ray Saurav Dasthakur Is Big Brother Watching? – State-Sanctioned Voyeurism Visualized in a Booker Contender: A Semiotic Analysis Anjali Pandey Contributors

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Preface

In January of 2012, Ravenshaw University convened an international seminar to discuss issues related to Children’s Literature and Politics. Each presenter at the seminar approached this confluence of ideas from a slightly different perspective, in a slightly different fashion, which made for an amazingly rich dialogue about the potential transactions that story, and literary worlds might have with power, access, and ideology. Among the currents of thought there appeared ideas about the impact of literature on children, the possible motivations of authors, the various ways in which people create and interpret narratives, and the political intrigues of forces within society.

Certainly the case can and has been made that every form that human expression takes is inherently political. Ellen Handler Splitz who gave the keynote address at the seminar, captured here in her essay “Reflections on Five Politically Inflected Children’s Books”, touches on the history of western notions of childhood while exploring five politically inspired picture books. Some of the motivations for writing these children’s stories are perhaps heavy-handed, even deplorable, while others are narratives that might actually impact critical thought in child readers.

Raja Mohanty makes the case that art, poetry, and literature acquire a special quality, “dhvani”, when they undergo the almost magical 1

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transmutation in the act of creation. He then proceeds in his article “Transforming the political while creating for children” to reflect on how that plays out in both his own works and within the larger context of children’s literature in India.

Jen Cullerton Johnson and Mary Gove explore how literature inspires young people to seek change in their world. In particular biographical narrative is explored as a way to shift perspectives and inspire collaborative action. “Nature Biography in Other Places” explores ecological oriented biographies that have in the examples given moved from stories focused on an individual’s life to community involvement in a movement. Similarly, Susan Roth, presents the story behind her biographical narrative that introduces an individual life connected to a community supported movement. In her essay, “Understanding the Politics of The Mangrove Tree” she explores the contextual politics, the individual’s story, the community movement which arose, and the publication process itself, providing a wonderfully holistic vision of the political forces at work on a particular children’s book.

Paul Zakaria as an author has experienced the impact of politics and literature first hand. He speaks unabashedly about the history and political context of children’s books in Kerala in his article “The Malayalam Experience in Children’s Literature.” His personal experience in the unfolding history of this literature provides amazing insight into this entire body of literature. Suzanne Gervay reaches deep into the personal political stories of her self and her family in “Children’s Literature as a Personal Translation of the Political into Story.” Gervay places her body of work into a narrative that explores how an author’s experiences impact literary creation.

Deepa Agrawal focuses on a particular political theme as it has evolved in her writing, that of the strong girl character who shatters the 2

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conventional mould. She explores the range of manifestations of this theme in her work, from stories wherein the character happens to be strong because she is based on personal experience to stories that are written explicitly as girl empowerment stories. How these narratives led into other types of social inequities and the impact that these stories might actually have on children’s attitudes are also touched upon.

The personal folds into the collaborative in the dialogue between Karen Abouraya and Susan Roth, who have co-authored a picturebook focused on an explicitly political event in Hands Around the Library.

In “On Children’s Literature and Poitics” the reader is provided with a conversation about both book creation and two interwoven understandings of a narrative that was envisioned as a political statement on the need to protect libraries around the world.

Anita Mishra departs form the personal to explore the historical and social forces which influence the creation of and reaction to literary works in her “Placing the Texts in Their Contexts: A New Historicist Study of Shakespeare Adapted for Children.” In particular she examines how the underlying depictions of racism and class differentiation have changed in various adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Each manifestation of the classic stories also carry the social and political norms of the respective time and place in which it was adapted.

Saurav Dasthakur in his article “‘Nonsense’ as sense: Comic vision in two plays of Sukumar Ray” applies the concept of the carnivalesque to understandings of the marginal characters found in the writings of the Kolkata-based playwright. The comic principle, as it plays out in Sukumar Ray’s texts, problematizes not only the common understanding of his works as “nonsense” literature, but also leads into questions about the nature of children’s literature itself.

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Finally, Anjali Pandey examines the semiotics underpinning the sociopolitical machinery of state-sanctioned voyeurism in a modern London as experienced by a young, protagonist hero of immigrant roots in the Booker contender, Pigeon English. Her article, “Is Big Brother Watching?”, examines the semiotic strategies employed by the author, Stephen Kelman. At the same time, the book renders a scathing indictment of a post-empire city of emigrated subjects.

Perhaps, Pandey suggests, the narrative even prods its young readers towards a critical vision of the politics of a modern police-state’s deployment of mass-surveillance.

The collection presented here is surely an incredible intersection of the divergent paths that our thoughts about politics and children’s literature might take. Hopefully each of these articles and the body of work as a whole will inspire further dialogue and new understandings about how literature for young readers is created, the impact that this literature might have, and the societies out of which it emerges.

None of this would have been possible without the oversight of Dipti R. Pattanaik, who together with other colleagues in the Department of English at Ravenshaw University, spent countless hours creating an international seminar that brought together amazing and unique voices to speak about and discuss this topic. Unfortunately not all of these voices could be represented in these pages, but hopefully those and many others will continue to speak, and write, and carry the dialogue forward.

Ernie Bond Guest Editor

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Reflections on Five Politically Inflected Children’s Books1 Ellen Handler Spitz

It is never easy to reach across one’s boundaries of familiarity and culture, and one may not even know quite where those boundaries lie until one takes the risk of venturing forth. To do so may be to grow closer to one’s international peers and to begin to learn how to negotiate differences, not by eradicating them, for differences and contrasts give our lives zest and piquancy, but rather by practicing empathy and by taking steps toward subtler understanding.

For centuries in the West, notions of childhood were other than those to which we subscribe today. Sancho Panza, Cervantes’ squire to Don Quixote, adored his daughter but couldn’t even say exactly how old she was. This is because childhood was, in the 17th century, a somewhat inchoate notion. Children were viewed first and foremost as property, as possessions of their parents and as possessions, perforce, of whichever religious and/or civic organizations held sway during a given epoch and in a particular given geographic region – city-state or polis, republic or empire, the church, the manor, the fiefdom, the crown or the state, and so on. Regardless of social class, children were dressed This essay is adapted from my keynote address at the International Seminar on the Politics of Children’s Literature, January 9, 2012, Cuttack, and I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Diptirajan Pattanaik who organized this conference. It also draws on my New Republic / The Book online column, 11/17/11.

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for centuries like miniature adults and perceived as possessing no distinctive subjectivity worthy of notice. Disregarded and for the most part left unrecorded, children’s wishes, fears, ideas, and imaginings – those stemming from antiquity and from the pre-modern and even the early modern period - are largely unknown to us, for children were thought not to have inner lives worth investigating or chronicling. Rather, they were alternately petted and abused, fed, housed, and treated not unlike domestic animals as well as like slaves or servants or perhaps like women, who were likewise thought to be cognitively inferior and emotionally undependable. Even as very recently as the days of the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf, English women of the upper middle classes were still considered unfit for a formal education. As many of you may recall, it was Virginia Woolf’s brother Thoby who was sent off to Cambridge University, whilst the supremely gifted Virginia and her artistically talented sister Vanessa were made to remain at home to educate themselves as best they could. With regard to child exploitation, it is shocking to realize that not until 1938 did the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sign The Fair Labor Standards Act, thus placing restrictions on many forms of child labor and to be aware that, even today, according to Human Rights Watch (http://www.hrw.org/), hundreds of thousands of children work ten hours a day as farm laborers in the U.S. and are exposed to dangerous pesticides and other toxic substances. I offer this picture at the start to focus our attention on the historical dimensions of our notions of “childhood,” a term that we really cannot take glibly for granted.

Even now there are many who imagine either because they genuinely cannot think otherwise or for expediency’s sake that children’s small bodies and minds merely produce simple thoughts and undergo no more than meager emotions. To the contrary of course, children feel intensely and passionately. They puzzle and wonder. They remember.

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Their minds are demonstrably and inherently philosophical. It is a child’s mind that asks: “If gravity pulls everything down, then how can a bird fly?” And it is a child who asks: “Why must I be good even when I don’t want to be?” And a child who asks: “How can I be sure, when I wake up in the morning, that the hands of the clock have gone round whilst I was sleeping for when I see them again they are in exactly the same place as they were when I went to bed?” None of these are simple questions, for, although they may seem so at first, they entail, as becomes instantly apparent the moment one attempts to answer them, a nesting set of time-honored philosophical conundrums in epistemology and ethics.

When we fully grasp the gravity and urgency of children’s questions and recognize the existence of their richly burgeoning inner lives, we can see the point of not offering them simplistic, silly books that merely entertain but bring them nothing of substance. Instead, we can accept the challenge of publishing and providing children’s books that honor the plasticity, the fervent nature, and the questing psyches of youth. Rather than seeing children as possessions to show off, exploit, or manipulate, we must regard them as future citizens of the world; a world which, today, in the 21st century, desperately needs ever keener and more empathic minds. Our children’s books should reflect new ways of understanding childhood and prove genuinely educational, for, as the political activist Emma Goldman said, “The most violent element in society is ignorance.”

In what follows, I shall focus on four American children’s books and one book published in Canada and Britain but pertaining to South Africa. The five are picture books aimed at children between the ages of four to ten years. Right at the start, I want to confess that I am not wildly enthusiastic about most of them and that indeed I am not keen on 7

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political books for children, that is, setting aside the point that all books are in some sense political. So, my remarks are critical, but my hope is that their substance will imply corrective directions although without prescription.

The first two books were published in 2010 and 2011, and their ostensible goal is to foster patriotism (a political goal if ever there was one) and to teach American children about their history. Let me say that I regard both of the two books, for somewhat different reasons, as failing in their mission, and I bother to address them because, despite their poverty and distortions, they have proven highly successful in national sales in the U.S., to wit, they are big money-makers. To me, this is deplorable. In my view, much of what is offered today by American publishers to children seems crass and poorly conceived, made with material gain in mind but with no strong, clear vision either of what is good for children or of what is good for society. My respected and prolific colleague in the field of children’s literature, Jack Zipes, joins me, I know, in these sentiments. For this reason, it seems important to point out what fails in such books so that we can forge new paths and not slip back into attitudes that mirror the past, that is to say, the undervaluation and exploitation of youth.

The third book I look at here, also recently published, deals with the tragic events in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001; cannily, it came out just in time for the memorial events that took place on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York and the massive damage to the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The fourth book, which I consider excellent, dates from 1996, and it appeared in print just two years after the first democratic, multi-racial plebiscite in South Africa; the historic election when Nelson Mandela became president of his apartheid-torn country. Lastly, we travel back even 8

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further in time and take a look at a strange book-a story, really-that dates from 1944. This one, called The Square World, relates a metaphoric, apparently humorous but profoundly chilling tale, released

by Walt Disney Publications in the United States during Adolf Hitler’s rule in Germany. The National Socialists were in power in Europe, spreading their noxious racial propaganda and systematically murdering Jews, gypsies, dissidents, and the mentally ill in a frenzy of monstrous genocide. Each of the foregoing books can well be considered political, and my hope is that by discussing them, this essay will raise some fruitful questions and debatable themes for further consideration.

One of the most renowned contemporary American children’s book writers and illustrators, Maurice Sendak, in his Nutshell Library of 1962, posed a memorable visual analogy between a little boy enjoying a bowl of nutritious soup and an alligator gleefully reading a book. Both of these activities-eating and reading- nourish children, albeit in different ways. Thus, with Sendak’s clever analogy, we see that serious authors and illustrators of notable children’s books regard their projects with gravity as well as with levity, and their youthful audiences with respect.

They themselves still recall the hot passions and curious puzzlements of childhood. They aim high. In defiance of their wisdom, however, American publishers seem bent on producing a spate of trivial children’s books conceived not by dedicated and inspired writers but by celebritiesmovie stars, pop icons, and political figureheads. The nutritive content of most of these books is nil and yet they meet with commercial success.

Mothers, who take great care to choose healthy food for their children’s bodies, unfortunately seem to take far less care when monitoring the cultural products that enter their psyches. Yet, just as the body grows, so does the mind.

A recent entry into the fray is an American history book in rhyme for the four-to-eight-year old set by Callista Gingrich, the third Mrs. 9

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Gingrich. It is not irrelevant that this author’s husband, Newt Gingrich, was formerly Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and vyed to be chosen as the Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States. His wife thus has, by affiliation, become a prominent political figure, at least for now. Her thirteen double-spread paged book - “13” standing for the thirteen original American colonies - features a cartoon elephant called Ellis. His name is a reference to Ellis Island, just offshore from New York City, which was the entry point from 1892-1954 through which twelve million immigrants, many of them poor and oppressed, from all over the world entered the United States in hopes of finding refuge and a better life. This book has achieved immense financial success. Its author, I am told, buoyed by a limitless purse, has traveled the country, accompanied by an actor dressed as an elephant, and promoted it shamelessly. Borrowing its title from the patriotic anthem “America,” the book serves up a propaganda dish of insipid right-wing political ingredients. Gingrich’s pages trade in the following: egregious oversimplification; the elimination of all conflict, suffering, or debate; mindless joviality; the complete absence of racial diversity; and an elephant-child character who, apart from symbolizing the author’s political party (the elephant is the Republican Party’s symbol in the United States; whilst the other major political party, the Democrats, have as theirs, a donkey) displays no discernible personality and undergoes no cognitive or emotional development of any kind. It is inconceivable that this book would have been published without its author’s high-level (political) connections.

At the start, a roly-poly toy elephant sits in the reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., “reliving” a brief romp through Gingrich’s badly distorted and truncated version of American history. Apparently for picaresque charm, a foolish-looking bald eagle, stripped of all the strength and power that, in 1782, made this bird the 10

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choice for the American national symbol, appears cheerily on nearly every page. Throughout the book, continuously and idiotically, no matter what is going on, the human and animal characters all, without exception, smile. The first president of the United States, George Washington and his men, during the long, wretched months of the Revolutionary War against England, when it was hard to feed and clothe the troops, battle ice floes while crossing the freezing Delaware River in a hackneyed version of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic oil painting of 1851, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and they smile. Marines, on another page, captured in bronze on the familiar Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, DC, plant the American flag on that Pacific island during World War II, and smile. (This image is based on the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph, which was taken on February 23, 1945, and reprinted constantly and obsessively ever since. Nobody is smiling in the original.) Boston colonists, before the outbreak of the Revolution, innocent of all the controversies swirling amongst them over their seditious act, toss tealeaves overboard into the harbor, and – once againthey smile.

On another page, volunteers assist the victims of a disaster (possibly a hurricane). What is the political significance of this? According to right wing American ideology, governments do not need to help disaster victims; volunteerism will solve all social ills! Thus, we find the victims here picnicking under cozy blue blankets while consuming quantities of donated picnic foods-sandwiches, apples, and chocolate chip cookies, and, of course, they too ridiculously smile.

American flags wave on more than half the book’s pages, often repeatedly within the same illustration. You will look in vain, however, for the depiction of a single African American person or for anyone of Asian descent. This is shocking when you consider the fact that only 11

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just less than 65% of the population of the United States is non-Hispanic white, according to the census figures of 2010, and the rest are all people of color. What a skewed and distorted picture to present to young children! This is a book that silently and stealthily erases the existence of nearly half of America’s population. Four innocuous female Native Americans, however, smile on a page devoted to the first Thanksgiving, in Sweet Land of Liberty’s solitary nod to the rich racial diversity of America’s actual population.

Next, what about Abraham Lincoln? Rather than struggle to tell children anything at all about how their nation was torn apart in a great Civil War (fought largely over the issue of slavery), rather than explain to them the painful tribulations of Lincoln’s presidency during those turbulent years, these pages portray the sixteenth American president as a contented boy in patched overalls relaxing under a tree. Nothing more. Yet, Lincoln famously wrote: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Are children 4-8-years old too young to learn those noble words and too young to associate them with this man? Naturally, in Mrs. Gingrich’s blanched-out history, Lincoln too is smiling.

The Ellis Island page, which is supposedly meant to teach children about immigration, even has the Statue of Liberty smiling, and children, while learning that people came to America “from distant shores, / arriving in a country they had never seen before/ Speaking different languages,” must stare here at a silly picture of New York harbor dotted with pleasure boats-speedboats and motor crafts-each bearing the Stars and Stripes: an absurd illustration for the subject of immigration. Are five-year-olds unready to hear a few lines by Emma Lazarus (1849-87), the Jewish-American poet of New York City, who wrote exquisite, 12

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unforgettable lines, which are engraved inside the monument of the Statue of Liberty: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she (Lazarus wrote) /With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

When children’s books evade uncomfortable truths and whitewash the history of what is real, they betray the past, the present, and the future. In addition to manipulating children and preying upon them, we adults, by writing, publishing, and purchasing books like this one, unpardonably underestimate, disrespect, and mistrust children.

Callista Gingrich, after blithely addressing herself “to American Patriots, young and old, who make America a special nation,” not only fails to teach American history: she withholds it. The only saving grace, one hopes, is that children themselves after flipping through these pages, will be sufficiently bored that no lasting impression is likely to be made.

Sweet Land of Liberty may have been intended, at least in part, as a riposte to the publication last year by President Barack Obama of his own attempt at a patriotic book for children. Of Thee I Sing borrows from the same anthem but takes a different phrase for its title. Surely we can admire a president who cares enough about children and their education to make such an effort. (President Theodore Roosevelt, apropos, wrote a rather militaristic book for children with Henry Cabot Lodge in 1895, and called it Hero Tales from American History.)

Obama’s book, however, addressed ostensibly to his daughters, who are named only on the jacket flap, serves up a concoction nearly as lacking in substance as Gingrich’s. Self-consciously politically correct, it consists of a medley of “snapshots” with no plot and no pretense of telling American history. Frankly and oddly ahistorical (Billie Holliday, 13

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for example, a jazz and blues singer who lived from 1915 to 1959, comes before George Washington, born two hundred years earlier), this book tries to introduce children- by a deft sentence or two- to thirteen (yet again) American figures of note. Among its pantheon of notables, you will find five women, five people of color, two artists, a scientist, a sports figure (the baseball player Jackie Robinson), three social reformers, and two American presidents. But the child reader learns almost nothing about any of them.

Owing to its extreme brevity of presentation, Obama’s book proves as lightweight as its Republican counterpart. Its illustrations resemble claymation figures and thus with few exceptions (the portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. is one), they produce an uncanny sensation of contrivance and weirdness, while at the same time the text tries to foreground the child reader by favoring direct address over rhyme. Yet this produces false notes of its own, because it comes across neither as genuinely personal nor as unashamedly impersonal. It rings inauthentic even as it tries so hard to be genuine. Obama’s “you” is everyone and therefore no one.

And then there is Lincoln: Of Thee I Sing at least shows the Illinois-born president grown up. He stands orating; a crowd has gathered round him including a few uniformed Union soldiers, the flag is waving, and a text reports that he “kept our nation one.” Always trying to reach his audience, Obama refers to our “enslaved sisters and brothers,” and he exhorts children to work together as part of a family. Gingrich, by contrast, informs her audience that Lincoln was called “Honest Abe” and was admired for his leadership qualities. The tone is very different: whereas Obama attempts to bring children in, Gingrich prefers distance and an odd conceit of “objectivity.” Neither book, however, places Lincoln in visual proximity to anyone of color, despite the fact that this is precisely 14

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what young children need to observe pictorially. Only Gingrich mentions war and neither author gives children any clear idea of the reasons why we honor and revere this beleaguered president.

Obama, too, provides his George Washington double-spread, where once again we find wintertime the chosen season. Here, instead of crossing the Delaware River, our first president places his hands on the shoulders of one of his ragged troops. Yet, this rare moment of truth (“His barefoot soldiers crossed wintry rivers, forging ever on”) is belied by the illustrator, who paints the men not barefoot, but shod in boots! Finally, a third comparison: both books devote a spread to Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk of July 20, 1969. Gingrich’s version predictably focuses attention on another enormous American flag that rises in an image with three additional flags, while Obama, talking again to his child readers, encourages them to imagine looking back at “the world from way up high” and channels the astronaut’s own words on that day by suggesting that they too can be “brave enough to take ... big, bold strides.”

What I find wrong here is that, rather than superficial glosses, what children need are histories that treat important matters importantly.

As the internationally acclaimed child developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner famously wrote, we can teach highly complex ideas even to the smallest children when we know our subject well and when we know the capacities of our audience. We all need good bookspreferably ones not written by celebrities–that teach twenty-first century children, all over the world, to value their own country’s past and present, not in isolation, but inserted rather into wide contexts that explore aspects of other countries as well as the planet itself-books of substance, books which connect children to greater horizons by challenging them with open questions and with unresolved problems, books that stimulate the growth of their innate powers of empathy, imagination, and responsibility.

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America Is Under Attack by Dan Brown, a new book about 911, raises a host of questions for those interested in the problem: How do we tell children about a politically motivated disaster that occurred before they (in many cases) were born but that continues to impact their lives? This book was widely distributed in the US last year and enjoyed heavy sales. My informal research has led me to the conclusion that many adults and children find it troubling and for a variety of reasons.

At the same time, none of my respondents has been able–at least on the spot–to come up with a more salubrious way to tell the terrible tale of 9-11. The facts are well-known: two hijacked passenger jet airplanes, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the tallest buildings in the world, and brought them down; two other hijacked planes were likewise involved, so that the killing, in less than two hours, totaled approximately 3,000 people. In addition, about 3,000 children, on that grief-stricken day, lost at least one parent. Some people might argue that children require protection and should not be told this story at all at ages 6 to 10, which according to the press release, is the audience at whom this book is aimed. But, if we stipulate that telling this history is important, then just how should it be told? What are our goals in telling it? What is the best, or even a good, way to do so?

I address this book not because I have resolved these hard questions, but because I know that we, who care about children and about their cultural lives, must not shirk them. Political traumas are far from decreasing in our century, and innocent children are being impacted by them, are living with them, and are living through them, and are dying from them or living on in spite of them–in many instances, suffering irreparable damage on account of them. As an example, we might cite the so-called “witness drawings” collected by Human Rights Watchmade by children trapped in ghastly circumstances of politically 16

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motivated murder, rape, and mayhem in Darfur. Children really have, it seems abundantly clear, the right to be educated concerning what is happening to them. If we withhold that knowledge–knowledge about the circumstances that impact their lives, how can we hope to see them rise up later on to create a better and more peaceful world?

My first problem with this book is its title: America Is Under Attack. Why use the present tense, after a whole decade has elapsed?

This seems inflammatory. Have we gained no perspective? And why focus on notions of violence and aggression? Rather, it seems to me, what needs to be remembered, ten years later, is loss-loss of life and loss of those majestic buildings themselves, so thrilling in their towering plenitude. Traveling north on the train toward New York City for years, those twin towers were always the first sign that the journey’s end was near: “Look!” all the children would exclaim, their noses pressed against the glass windowpane: “We’re almost there! I can see New York.”

But, now they cannot. For the landmark has disappeared forever. Don Brown’s aim in this book seems to be verisimilitude. He wants, apparently, to tell his child readers what actually happened in detail: facts and figures. On one page, he informs children: “The second hijacked jetliner had crashed through the 77th to the 85th floors of the South Tower. Massive flames spewed from the tower. Wreckage rained down on the street. It was 9:03 AM, seventeen minutes after the strike on the North Tower. People now understood the earlier crash was not a freak accident but a deliberate attack.” I am deeply in favor of telling the truth to children. Yet, what is the truth here? Above all, what is the value of all these numbers, figures, and quantifiers: the floor numbers of the buildings, the precise clock time-without reflection, and without interpretation? What do these numerical measurements mean and why do they matter? What can a child learn from them? And what have we learned ten whole years later? Later, we are informed, “at 9:59 AM the 17

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South Tower came down. In ten seconds the mammoth building was reduced to rubble.” Ghastly, but what can a child make of it? It seems too terrifying to imagine, and many a normal child, it seems to me, will instinctively build a high emotional wall against such information. For, to take it in and take it in seriously would be devastating. We know how the psyche splits under the impact of extreme stress and trauma. But is this what we really want to achieve in a children’s book?

An image I do regard as successful comes with an accompanying text that reads: ‘‘‘[The] whole area …became totally black,’ [the Fire Chief] said. ‘We stayed there until the rumbling stopped. I never even suspected that the second tower collapsed.’” What the picture conveys at this point is far more telling and potent than the text because it lets us imagine and experience the choking air and opaque atmosphere–the congestion of lungs and near-blindness, which smote so many people on that day. Through its gray and grainy texture, it conveys the way people–even grown-up, brave men–huddled together in the face of death: its mottled, scribbled wash and all the empty space say more than words.

A couple of pages later, in a truly scary picture, black smoke pours out, spreading itself all over the pages, and a helpless little police helicopter hovers, watching, but impotent to help. Another image tries to show the reaction of onlookers as the North Tower came crashing down. But the people look like ghouls–unreal, bizarre–and they seem as uncanny as the event they are meant to be witnessing, which makes them unreal and phony, somehow untruthful. I know the arguments for keeping faces vague (so that children can project into them), but perhaps it doesn’t work and simply alienates. The last picture I want to refer to from this children’s book about politically induced trauma is the New York City skyline with its signature twin towers dramatically replaced by columns of billowing smoke. Child readers are told: “In 102 minutes 18

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hijackers had destroyed the World Trade Center, crippled the Pentagon, and doomed four jet liners. 2,973 people were dead, more than the number of Americans killed at Pearl Harbor or on D-Day. It was the largest loss of life on American soil as a result of a hostile attack.”

What is wrong with this? Principally I would argue this book, America Is Under Attack, which was written presumably to teach children about an event that shocked the whole world and inaugurated– with wanton violence and innocent death– a new century in human history, seems parochial, perhaps even subtly vengeful and it relies on numeration to establish verisimilitude. But isn’t numeration itself a kind of primitive magic? For, actually, numbers do not constitute truth. We fetishize them. If I were asked in this context where, if not in quantification, shall we seek truth, I would say for starters, why not turn directly to children themselves, for they are a great gage? They know instantly when we adults are faking. They want and recognize truth. Along with Heidegger, I myself doubt it can be found in measures of quantity. We need other means–feeling and intellection.

Turning now to an excellent political book, which exemplifies both, The Day Gogo Went to Vote was written by Elinor Batezat Sisulu, who was born in Zimbabwe, and illustrated by artist Sharon Wilson of Bermuda. It recounts a story in which a little South African girl, Thembi, age six, cherishes close ties with her centenarian grandmother Gogo (‘gogo’ is the Swahili and Xhosa word for grandmother). These characters are depicted during the days surrounding the first democratic plebiscite in South Africa, when the renowned anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was elected president on April 27, 1994, thus establishing a long-awaited multiracial democracy in South Africa. Instead of giving statistics or even telling history or trying for a broad swath, the author here narrows 19

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her focus to the experience of just one small girl who, one imagines, will never forget the moment and never fail to grasp what it means to exercise the right to vote in a free election.

Apropos our discussion regarding the previous book, the subject of numeration and truth comes up right on the first page of this one, and we know we are in a completely different universe. Thembi asks her Gogo how old she is. Instead of answering the child with a meaningless number, this grandmother tells her something else. She says that when she was born there were no cars or airplanes and that, compared with her, Nelson Mandela is a young man. How much more real this is and how respectful of what a child really wants to know and can actually grasp. How much better than an abstract number! On the next page we learn that Gogo has a beautiful blue bag, which Thembi admires, thus foreshadowing events that are to come later. We understand the closeness of the relationship between grandparent and child not only because we are told that Thembi’s parents both work so Gogo cares for her after school each day but because, when we look at the illustrations, we can see the two of them touching and gazing fondly at one another.

Thembi’s father comes home with news about the election and we learn that there will be a special voting day for people who are old or sick. Gogo (who is both), announces she will go on that specially designated day, but Thembi’s parents protest they cannot take her because they will both be at work. In that case, Gogo insists, she will go with them on the regular voting day. She is, however, too frail for the journey in an overcrowded bus, they argue, and too weak to stand waiting on long lines at the polling place. Gogo, however, refuses to listen. “You want me to die not having voted?” she exclaims. And by conveying her character’s fierce determination, Sisulu shows her child 20

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readers just what voting can mean. She helps them experience vicariously the necessity and gravity of exercising this fundamental human right. Later, Gogo explains to Thembi: “black people have fought for many years for the right to vote. This is the first time we have a chance to vote for our own black leaders, and it might be my last. That is why I must vote, no matter how many miles I have to walk, no matter how long I have to stand in line.”

A car is arranged to take Gogo to the polling place but Thembi’s parents say Thembi is too young to go along. Gogo, however, contradicts them by saying that Thembi is needed to help carry her blue bag. I love this moment–which not only includes the child but does so by empowering her, giving her a task. At the polling place, Thembi is on the verge of tears because she has been refused entry into the voting booth with Gogo. The proffered explanation– that voting must be private and secret – makes no sense because, as she rightly says, she already knows whom her grandmother is voting for! Once again, Gogo saves the day by pointing out to Thembi that she must stay outside the voting booth because she is actually needed to hold on to the beautiful blue bag. Children want to be needed and to feel useful. They want to contribute, and instinctively this author and her character valorize that need.

When Gogo emerges, reporters photograph her, and Thembi’s mother explains that this is because she is the oldest voter in their township. Everybody cries, and Thembi cries too, although she doesn’t know why because she is very happy. Another moment of truth! Children rarely grasp the ways in which joy and relief and success after long effort can bring tears just as easily as sorrow. In the end, grandmother and granddaughter enjoy looking at their joint photograph in the newspaper together and read the words above it: “The past and the future: hundred-year-old voter Mrs. M. Mokoena accompanied by sixyear-old great granddaughter, Thembi.”

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A fifth book I would like to mention is much older than the others. “The Square World” was published well over a half century ago in 1944, and it actually existed, very briefly, as a story told within the pages of a book of collected stories called Walt Disney’s Surprise Package, which as stated above, was published during World War II in the United States by Walt Disney Enterprises. It has been almost impossible to track this story down because, although the book itself went into several editions during wartime and was evidently popular, the story itself was excised from nearly all of them. Therefore, if you search rare and out-of-print book venues, you may luckily turn up a copy of The Surprise Package, but you would in all probability not find this story. I have come to the conclusion that, for some reason, possibly to avoid offending American Nazi-sympathizers, it was permanently removed after just one printing. The copyright page offers no clues but on the Contents page of one copy, the story is listed. On all the other copies of the book I have searched, the story is missing.

The title page, likewise, offers no inkling of its existence.

Very temptingly to children, the book’s jacket resembles a gift all tied up with a ribbon that must be opened before its treasures can be enjoyed. Several of the characters met in its pages are depicted on the jacket and have already started to tug at the ribbon. A child might recognize, for example, Wendy, Tinkerbell, John, Michael, and a pirate from Peter Pan, which is adapted and abbreviated within. Thus, the jacket makes a clear analogy between the pleasure of reading and that of unwrapping a beautiful present.

Just two pages long, The Square World tells a story about a land called “What’s-Its-Name” where people look just like everywhere else, some short, some tall, some round, and so on. They all seem content with this diversity. A rascal called the “Mighty-Highty-Tighty,” however, 22

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who is the ruler of the land, growls that he does not like so many shapes: “My shape is the right shape. All other shapes are wrong. I do command that henceforth everyone be shaped like me. And that means square!”

Chuckling with horrid glee, he orders soldiers to measure people and stamp the square ones. Everyone else is carried off to jail.

A great squaring machine is set up in front of the jail, and the Highty-Tighty says: “Now…begins the fun…” People cry out in vain and one after another, they are crammed into the dreadful machine.

They tumble out absolutely square. But the Mighty-Highty-Tighty is not content and wants to square not only all the people but all the animals too. ‘Square me the birds, the fishes, and the worms!’ he commands.

The soldiers rush to the fields. Angry squawkings rent the air, as the shape of very living creature is molded into a square. The MightyHighty-Tighty now calls for the squaring of ‘everything in all the land.’

In spite of loud wailing the soldiers square bicycle tires, church spires, even the flagpoles, and the merry-go-rounds. Square children go off to their square schools riding on square school buses that bump along on four square wheels. People hail each other on the street with the sign of a square. The Mighty-Highty-Tighty brags that he has changed the shape of everything there is. “Now I must change the shape of everything that is to be. I must be sure that when I die my people still will be shaped like me. I do declare that henceforth all newborn babies must be square,’ he declares, ‘Tomorrow, let all the tiny newborn square tots be wheeled beneath my balcony!’

This time the haughty ruler goes too far. The next day when a parade of baby carriages comes in sight, he sees that the newborn babies of What’s-Its-Name look just like the newborn babies everywhere else. Each has an ordinary baby’s shape, and not a single one is square.

At this, the Mighty-Highty-Tighty gives a loud shriek of rage. Flinging 23

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himself from his balcony, he plunges into the pond beneath. The last anyone ever sees of him is a square bubble.

Many years ago when I was a child, this story burned itself into my impressionable young heart. Even all these decades later, it is impossible for me to imagine a more powerful parable for teaching small children the dangers of totalitarianism. In conclusion, after sharing these five politically inflected books, some more worthy than others, I am hopeful that an international and interdisciplinary dialogue can ensue with questions and directions for future exploration.

References Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. Trans. Jonathan Cape. New York: Random House, 1962. Print.

Brown, Don. America Is Under Attack. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2011. Print.

The Disney Surprise Package. New York: Walt Disney Productions, 1944. Print.

Gingrich, Callista. Sweet Land of Liberty. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011. Print.

Harris, Alexandra. Virginia Woolf. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Print.

Obama, Barack. Of Thee I Sing. New York: Knopf, 2010. Print.

Roosevelt, Theodore and Henry Cabot Lodge. Hero Tales from American History.

New York: The Century Company, 1895. Print.

Sendak, Maurice. The Nutshell Library. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Print.

Sisulu, Elinor Batezat. The Day Gogo Went to Vote. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Print.

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Transforming the Political while Creating for Children Raja Mohanty

Introduction: The dhvani of the apolitical It is said that our quarrel with the world, that leads to politics and poetry (and art and literature), emerges from the quarrel that we have with our selves. Like all aphorisms, this rather cryptic observation, deserves contemplation, “How does one quarrel with oneself?”

Presumably, this means that instead of voicing our disagreements, our discontent and our angst through the barrel of a gun or by burning a painting or a book, we pick up a pen, a pencil, some paints or a flute with which we transmute our uneasiness, into fragrances. This remarkable alchemy, known to those inclined to contemplation instead of quarrels, is particularly relevant when we set out to create literature for children. Without a good understanding of this, it is likely that our creations will carry our confusions instead of clarities. The ancients knew this well and speak of a quality they called ‘dhvani’, without which words cannot become poems and writing cannot become literature.

The word ‘children’ has for most an association with hope and freshness; literature is certainly not a ‘bad’ word and ‘politics’ has been 25

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given the status of a science or even an art, by those adept at it! In recent times, however, one tends to associate politics with the dirty, the petty and the corrupt. However, the act of living is often inescapably political and perhaps it would be in order to examine without being judgmental on the politics of literature for children. The juxtaposition of politics with ‘children’s literature, in the title of the collection is possibly an invitation to both creators and critics for a closer scrutiny of all that is created for children. For creators, this is an opportunity for a greater self-reflexivity towards their own works. For critics this is an invitation to dwell on the incorrectness. The biases of a particular era that willynilly make their way into a creation without the awareness of the creator.

In passing, one may observe with self-irony, that the very notion of creating literature specially for children, might be a peculiar side-effect of the age of commodification of all things natural. This results in the hill-God becoming minerals, the river-God becoming water and waterdisputes, and the special time in our lives called childhood becoming an opportunity for products called children’s literature, children’s toys, animation for children, and so on.

Part 1 I shall re-visit a few works created in recent times and look at the politics underlying these, before returning to the idea of the apolitical.

The first is a book titled The Parable of The Raintree– published in 1997, on the occasion of India completing 50 years of independence from colonial rule; the next example includes two works, The Circle of Fate (2007) and The Enigma of Karma (2011).

The Politics of ‘The Parable of the Raintree’ The Parable of the Raintree was a conception that appears accidental. As Jogesh Motwani (the co-creator of the book) was taking 26

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what would have been one of his uneventful evening walks, a raintree in one of the lanes of Colaba in Bombay (slowly changing to Mumbai), got uprooted and fell on a car that was parked below it. It was not yet 1997 and having grown up in a campus that was full of trees and debates on development, it came to pass that we began working on book that interpreted this ‘accidental uprooting’ as a wilful and political act of the raintree symbolizing a protest from nature. The car on which the raintree falls becomes the chosen manifestation of an aberration called progress.

The choice of the tree and the car as symbols seems to have happened quite naturally, from having lived amidst both - in the campus and in the city of Bombay.

Being a part of the academic community who connected with the critique of development by the activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, this work is clearly political, for it sought to question commonly held views on scientific utopia and progress. The work was not created with any single audience in mind - and it certainly was not created for children. However, done in a manner where image and text come to occupy an equal relationship within the body of the book, it possibly invites younger audiences to engage with the ideas in the book. The ending has a dark humour about it, and if one would be willing to classify this work as suitable for children, one would need to depart from notions of how a story for children should end - not with a whimper, but with a bang! The book starts off with the date 15 August 1997, when India was in a celebratory frame of mind in its 50th year of independence from colonial rule. The aspirations of the people of independent India, is satirized by a critique of the unbridled growth of material pursuits On ‘The Circle of Fate’ and ‘The Enigma of Karma’ Politics is essentially an outcome of unequal power relationships that we witness everyday in our lives. Children, because they are 27

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dependent, are vulnerable to the power of those on whom they depend.

What literature they read is decided by parents and teachers and I do remember a certain librarian who did not allow children to choose the book that they should read but helped them by giving them books that would be good for them. What this implies, is that the world in general is a terrible place - filled with violence and conflict, and unless there is the wise-censorship called parental control, their tender souls may suffer irreversible damages.

The Circle of Fate and The Enigma of Karma, grew from an interest to explore ways of recontextualising the traditional visual art of patachitra. They draw upon ancient stories, both of which touch upon subjects that might be considered as too abstract for children. While it is true that the deeper essence of these stories would not become evident to children, I would hesitate in passing sweeping proclamations in this manner. What may come across as surprising, is that despite fairly lucid explanations, some adults also fail to grasp the essence of these stories.

The Circle of Fate is a tale that speaks of how good intentions may lead to consequences that are not necessarily ‘good’. The tale, which at times is interpreted by readers as being fatalistic, has disturbed even adults who ask if one should not attempt to do what seems as good and worthwhile. What the subtler essence of the tale suggests is that if one desires to see the fruits of one’s actions then one may experience a sense of being disappointed - a ‘message’ that is similar to that of the Bhagvad Gita. The Enigma of Karma is a work that grew out of the questions of the nature of our actions and dwells on the debate between free-will and determinism and suggests that though there might be forces that foretell our fate and destiny, our actions have in them the power to alter what has been ordained. It would be in order to throw some light on the intended audiences for these books. It must

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be emphasized again that the works in their intent are not to satisfy some predetermined audience and were done because they were instrumental for my own intellectual and creative growth. The motivation when working apolitically is that if a work is infused with the right energies, it might reach out to very diverse audiences and very different age-groups. Such an approach does not bracket certain kinds of intelligence with certain age-groups. Such categorization might be needed when we are dealing with basic language learning and comprehension skills and should not always dictate what is appropriate for children and what is not.

It would also be in order to point out that these works are not primarily intended as a product. The act of book-making is an integral part of the creative process with these books that have been hand printed with much patience and care. The act of making these books may be regarded as an act of resistance against the mindless multiplication of objects that shall add up to the debris of our times.

While it is true that even a hand-crafted book is after all a book and may be regarded as much a product as any other that is sold and has to be an activity that is sustainable, one would miss the essence if the book comes to be regarded as just an object; the process is central to the creation of these works.

What could possibly be the politics of these books? Collaborating with an artist steeped in a traditional art has a political aspect to it.

Unlike the collaboration with Jogesh Motwani (a fellow-student), while working on The Parable of the Raintree, the interaction with Radhashyam Raut was very different. My own exposures and education were along the lines of the modern worldview; Radhashyam had lived all his life in a village in the outskirts of Odisha in eastern India, with little exposure to modernity. Art education in India took on entirely new directions as an outcome of the colonial encounter. The traditional arts 29

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survived as practices steeped with beliefs quite different from those of the modern movements in science and arts on the international scene.

The collaboration with Radhashyam would therefore appear as an interaction between unequal partners, but if I had the advantage of modern sensibilities, Radhashyam had the patience for very detailed work, imbibed during his education in patachitra art. Gita Wolf at Tara publishers, not only shared a belief in the beauty of the traditional arts of India but also a great regard for the practitioners. During the production of the book, she visited Odisha to interact with Radhashyam to understand the patachitra tradition. The production involved timeconsuming experiments to ensure that the screen-printed reproductions had a visual richness, that was at the same time contemporary and traditional. In the absence of a respect towards the art and the artist, the collaboration would easily take on the kind of appropriation that is often evident, when creators are driven by misplaced ideologies of ‘saving’ an art that no longer receives the patronage it once had. Clearly, there can be no politics when motivations seek to draw their sustenance from striving towards a beauty that is not determined by the desire for any quick returns. If the experiment in which the apolitical interactions between equals succeeds, this might serve as a political statement-ofsorts for those who may seek to emulate it.

Part 2 The politics between the text and the image There is another kind of politics that enters the making of an illustrated book for children - and this is the unequal power relationship between the writer of texts and the artist. This is often true of books for children in India. Publishers, though they have begun to demonstrate an understanding of the importance of the visual, have typically given the power to the writer and the text to dictate the visual. The use of the 30

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word ‘illustration’ clearly suggests that the image exists in order to supplement or illustrate the text. Such an approach essentially denies to the image the ability to evoke ideas in their own right. In this regard, one must acknowledge the contribution of artists, writers and publishers in the West in creating remarkable literature for children.

The political freedom of small and independent publishers Major publishers have to ensure a large number of publications across genres in order to support their investments for publishing and distribution. Small and independent publishers have a greater flexibility in this regard and can be sensitive to aspects that are difficult to address when decision making has to include several teams of decision makers.

There is much to be learnt from the work of small and independent publishers in this regard. The work done by Eklavya, Tara, Tulika, Karadi, Pratham Books, Seagull, Navayana (to name a few) have much to offer to those keen on embarking on a journey in children’s literature.

The politics of Indian-language publishing Organisations such as the National Book Trust have sought to create and distribute, imaginative, well-written and well illustrated books in Indian languages. Eklavya in Madhya Pradesh, started with a focus on science teaching and has over the years sought to include books in social science and literature, primarily in Hindi and to an extent in Urdu.

Eklavya’s politics are shaped by its vision to be a people-centred movement and a very concerted effort is made to keep the prices of books such that they are affordable to most. Pratham Books has also taken on a mission of making good quality books available at affordable prices to children in different Indian languages. A casual survey appears to suggest that interesting work has been done in the field of children’s literature in Bengali, Malayalam and Marathi. It would be in order to 31

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carry out a systematic study on this subject, but a more difficult task would be to actually start improving matters in various Indian languages.

I shall conclude with a few lines from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

‘Goodbye,’ said the fox.

Now here is my secret. It is very simple.

It is only with one’s heart that one can see clearly.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.’

‘Men have forgotten this basic truth.’ said the fox.

But you must not forget it.

For what you have tamed, you become responsible forever.

You are responsible for your rose ...’

Surely, individuals and organisations here today feel responsible for contributing to the world of children’s literature. One hopes that politics of children’s literature enables exchanges and interactions for the work ahead of us.

Works Cited de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine Woods.

Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943. Print.

Mohanty, Raja and Jogesh Motwani. The Parable of the Raintree.

Mumbai: Goldenbough, 1997. Print.

Mohanty, Raja. The Circle of Fate. Illus. Radhashyam Raut. Mumbai: Goldenbough, 2001. Print.

Mohanty, Raja. The Enigma of Karma. Illus. Radhashyam Raut.

Mumbai: Goldenbough, 2011. Print.

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Nature Biography in Unexpected Places Jen Cullerton Johnson and Mary Gove Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

In classrooms, there is a paradox of two visions. Education encourages young people to dream big; and when they do, we witness that fundamental message of hope: You make a difference. Your life matters. However, the opposing side of individualism claims, If I were to poof away, the world would not change much. Somewhere between these two points of view, we advocate for the voice of many individuals with multiple perspectives that works toward the vision of the collective. Working in a synergetic way with others creates sustainable change.

Contemporary Western society suggests that the efforts of an individual can change the world. One person trumps all. The hero saves the day. Open any comic book or graphic novel and you will see a super hero defeating the villain. Pow. Crash. Bang. The boogeyman loses. The superhero triumphs.

This message is not only presented in comics. The idea that one person can “save the day� is prevalent in Western culture: the individual is all-important in our thinking. We celebrate the singular. We praise the accomplishments of the brave. We salute the champion, root for the underdog, and cheer for the star. Inside all of us is a deep need to 33

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believe our actions have purpose and meaning. Our lens of understanding is through our own individual actions.

Just as John Donne elegantly wrote, “no man is an island,” we do not exist alone. We are who we are because of our connections to others. Our relationships define us and shape our world. Both humans and animals need to bond and have a desire to express that bond. The contributions of one individual add value to the collective and the collective supports the individual. Many assume there is a disconnection between the two. In fact, the opposite exists; both rely on each other in order to function.

In the United States and the West in general, kindergarteners are taught to believe that they can grow up to be anything, including president. Four years later, the message changes, and in fourth grade, young people begin to learn that problems within society are too complex and too out of control for one person to make a difference. This change in idea confuses children – and adults!

Although it is true that a young person has the potential to achieve whatever he or she desires, it may also be true that focusing on the magnificence of the individual may result in frustration. Urging young people to stand up for their opinions and telling the truth falls by the wayside when they confront the risk of going against the norm.

Overwhelmed and discouraged, young people’s hope to bring change to our planet fades. Subsequently, as young people grow into adults, they begin to experience community relationships and soon realize one of the most important lessons of life: we must work together to achieve our aspirations.

Many major institutions are in peril and have thereby eroded the public’s trust. Consider the impact of Wall Street’s downturn, the stalemate of No Child Left Behind in education, the disintegration of 34

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unions, and the loss of pensions because of corporate greed. Year in and year out, “ordinary folk” pay the price for institutions’ mistakes and in doing so they have lost confidence in how society treats its people.

Feeling disengaged, many lose hope.

Young students ask, If I help and nothing changes, why should I try?

How do we answer this question? What message can we instill in our young people so that they can discover answers? In many ways the question Why should I try? speaks to the reality that young people are not invited into the conversation about their role in the preservation of the environment. Lack of involvement translates into a deficiency of empathy for others and the world. We must consider how we can instill the concept of the Iroquois’ Great Law of Seven Generations, which urges us to think ahead and make decisions that will benefit children in the future. In doing so, we dissipate the great need and greed for instant gratification.

So how can teachers motivate children to connect, to care?

We pass down culture from one generation to the next. Through our storytelling and teaching, we explain that humans must experience progress in order to sustain motivation for a project. Consider the advent of the skyscraper, the development of the computer, or the foundation of medical advancement. No one man or woman can be attributed to any of these accomplishments. Instead, many people contributed to each of these achievements, and in turn, more growth and movement evolved.

Rarely do we stop to consider the truth that behind every “celebrated” individual there is a whole host of people who supported, shepherded, and shared that individual’s vision. In Africa, there is a 35

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famous proverb that has been used and misused in Western culture to sell products, including diapers, and run presidential campaign ads: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Translation: No one acts within a vacuum.

The web of our existence is collective and is formed through our relationships. Although on the surface this is obvious, even simple to understand, deeper probing demonstrates that sustainable change is not made through individual efforts alone but through the support of the collective whole.

In reading and literature classes, teachers and students alike acknowledge the acts of one important individual person: the main character. We consider the fate of the protagonist; the journey of one person whose life radically changes due to his or her heroic act. In literary analysis we ask if the character’s action is strong or weak?

Does she overcome obstacles? Does his action help the whole?

Biography in Unexpected Places Consider then the biography. We praise the pioneer spirit. The harder the job, the bigger the character becomes. The biography of one person may be symbolic for an entire community. Martin Luther King Jr.’s story does not represent all African Americans, yet most people recognize him as a symbol of Civil Rights, which involved many individuals working together. In his case and many others, the biography takes on mythic proportions that impact the community’s shared story.

A biography then is more than the narrative of one person’s life and often represents the universal truth within the community. The biography manifests into the story of community, as well as the individual.

As readers, we have a deep need to find ourselves within the text of a narrative. Do we identify with the story being told? A connection is paramount. As Nature writer Ralph Waldo Emerson affirms, “I can 36

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find myself in every fable,” so young people can find themselves in the environmental biographies of others. In this way, they may gain strength in character and wisdom in action, not only to support themselves but also to recognize the vitality in living things.

Biography, especially picture book biography, invites young readers to “live” a hero’s life. Text and image support imagination.

Armed with the ability to role play and a keen sense of wonder, young people imagine themselves doing courageous actions, similar to the acts in the text and illustrations. More importantly, the study of biography becomes the study of how one person’s life connects to others and how heroic feats become one of the many threads that weave through the story.

Biography of a Movement: Seeds of Change Historically, most biographies focus on an individual’s life. Most biographies rely on a balance of presenting facts and interpreting the meaning of events. There is a balance between giving voice and lending voice. Traditionally, we have read a biography through the lens of a single life. Now consider biography through the lens of those who supported the individual. The picture book, Seeds of Change, exemplifies a biography of both a person and a movement. One storyline centers on the leader and the catalyst of the movement. The other parallel storyline focuses on the movement and the people who supported and shared the leader’s vision. Both perspectives blend together to make a whole story.

Seeds of Change is a picture book biography of an environmental movement through the life story of Wangari Maathai, who was the first African woman, and environmentalist, to win a Nobel Peace Prize. She blazed a trail across Kenya, using her 37

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knowledge and compassion to promote the rights of her countrywomen and to help save the land, one tree at a time. The book is as much a biography of a Nobel Prize winner as it is the biography of a movement.

In many ways Wangari’s life story mirrors the Green Belt Movement, an organization she founded. At each stepping stone, people embraced her activism. Wangari’s vision became a mutual mission with others in the Green Belt Movement. The women dug in the dirt, carried seeds, and planted trees. Women traveled to towns and villages planting the rows of the Green Belts and women influenced other women to join the movement.

When Wangari (2004) accepted the Nobel Prize, she said, Although this prize comes to me, it acknowledges the work of countless individuals and groups across the globe. They work quietly and often without recognition to protect the environment, promote democracy, defend human rights and ensure equality between women and men. By so doing, they plant seeds of peace.

The Green Belt’s message to young girls and women was simple: work together and results will come. We can take the Green Belt’s message one step further and interpret its meaning as evidence that when working together our results have a domino effect, inviting others to participate with us. When we evaluate Wangari’s life and the lives of those within the Green Belt Movement, we realize that she represents a universal truth that touches all our lives. Through her life, young readers understand that troubling issues, like deforestation and poverty can be solved - if we work together.

Biography of Place: A River Ran Wild Lynn Cherry’s book, A River Ran Wild, is a biography of the Nashua River and its parallel relationship with people who lived and 38

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worked along its shores. Like a botanist’s field guide, the illustrations are mosaic and depict the changes of all the living things in that area, such as red tailed hawks, barred owls, geese, and deer. Readers see how one species is prevalent in one era only to become extinct in another.

The pictorial history of the river lends to the significance of the text, which offers the reader insight into ecological change. Each movement connects to a historical moment, and each shows the human impact on the health of the river. The story begins with the Native Americans who respected the river, moves forward to Colonial times when men claimed the river, and leads up to the industrial era when toxic chemicals from mills polluted the river until many decades later Marion Stoddard and a group of committed individuals cleaned up the river. The efforts of Stoddard and the Nashua Committee for Concerned Citizens helped pass the Clean Water bill and restored the river back to its natural state.

Unlike traditional biographies that require a human life to evaluate, Cherry provides us with an opportunity to shift our perspective.

This biography comes from the viewpoint of the animals, the trees, the fish and the river. The river is the protagonist. Humans are secondary, the antagonist. They pollute the river with toxic chemicals and sewage.

Shifting our perspective, we are invited to consider our humanness and how we impact the nature around us. In the end, we learn that we are not the only beings on the planet. Our negative actions have consequences. We must work together to restore the damage.

Biography of Activism: She’s Wearing a Dead Bird on Her Head Unlike Seeds of Change and A River Ran Wild, She’s Wearing A Dead Bird on Her Head is a fictionalized account of two women’s political activism that helped pass laws to protect birds. Their activism was tied to the conservation movement that eventually brought forth the 39

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founding of the Audubon Society. Harriet Hemenway and her cousin Minna Hall raised awareness about a species of birds that were becoming extinct because of women’s fashion. Fashion was indirectly linked to women’s rights and during the Victorian era women did not have the right to vote.

Nonetheless, women came together to lobby for equality, as well as for preservation of birds. They realized that a woman who wore a dead animal on her head for the sake of fashion would not be taken seriously and that women needed to reconsider this fashion trend. They worked with other women and men to pass laws that prevented the killing of birds for fashion, and then pushed for the laws to be enforced.

Women and men, with persistence and commitment in this same movement, worked together to usher in the 19th Amendment, which secured the right for women in the USA to vote.

Young people can learn the basic steps to become environmentally active. Through this story they are able to identify how to have a voice in the public arena even though their status is not valued. Since young people do not have the right to vote, like Harriet and Minna, they can start letter writing campaigns and influence government official by gathering information so that laws can be enforced.

These book choices are all biographies, but how do they fit together?

What messages do they suggest about the individual and his relationship with the community?

What messages do they suggest about the community and its relationship to the individual?

Let’s take a look. Consider Marion Stoddart and what happened to the Nashua River and Wangari Maathai and what happened to 40

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Kenya’s forests. Also, reflect on what happened to the fashion of wearing dead birds on women’s hats at the turn of the century. These women did not just simply do, but their actions connected them to others. Wangari Maathai, Marion Stoddart, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall valued strong connections between nature and human existence. They solved problems creatively and collectively. They understood too that if a community could come together, they could be more successful. They formed organizations, such as the Green Belt Movement, the Nashua River Watershed Association, and the Audubon Society. A committed group of individuals protested and worked together, and after years of hard work, trees flourished in Kenya, the Nashua River sustained healthy aquatic life, and women no longer wore birds on their heads!

In many ways these women were environmental pioneers in socio-ecological problem solving. They all had the ability to consider devastating and complex problems in their society. They evaluated how humans interact in their social environment and with nature. All of the women understood that we are connected as a planet. Most importantly, their actions were not carried out alone but with the support of the community.

Start Where You Are Wangari Maathai, Marion Stoddard, Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall started where they were, where they lived – a perfect place to start. It is possible that all of the women could have started their environmental work in other lands, in other states, or in different cities. And yet they did not. Their vision focused on what was before them: the local ecology. They acted locally. Their message of starting where you are is profound and deliberate.

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In Wangari’s hometown, people had begun to cut down the sacred mugumo tree, a tree in which the Kikyu believe is where their ancestors’ spirits rest. The mugumo tree is home to many animals. Trees had been slashed, and now mothers, like her, walked miles for firewood, had little to eat, and did not have enough money to support their families. There is a direct connection between cutting down trees and young mother’s lives: without trees, families starve. When Wangari returned to Kenya from the United States, she watched the forests being destroyed so that companies can use the trees for timber and the land for coffee plantations. She worked with others to change her community’s perception.

Marion Stoddard moved to the Nashua River area. The river was once a dwelling place for wildlife, including an abundance of fish and the native Nashua peoples. Marion too saw what was happening to the natural environment and experienced the negative effect on the people who lived there. She wanted her family and neighbors to enjoy the nature around them. Like many others, she understood that toxic chemicals cause cancer and ruin river ecosystems. She realized the mills along the Nashua polluted the river so that fish could no longer thrive. She worked with others to spread awareness about the river’s destruction.

Harriet and Minna made their high society and fashionable Boston friends - who wore dead birds on their heads - aware of what was happening to many species of birds as a result of their fashion statement.

They too did not work alone, but enlisted the help and support of many others.

There is a Swahili word that means let’s work together: harabee.

In a sense, harabee invites and welcomes anyone who hears the word to cooperate with others. Collaborating with others often brings about compromise. Many people in Western society fear that compromise

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shows weakness. Yet the truth is we cannot get our own way at each turn. There must be give and take between all in the group. Sometimes, the ideas that strengthen the group are implemented so that all can benefit. This often happens when there is compromise.

Works Cited Amnesty International. [Online]. Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/ [Accessed 14 April, 2012] Cherry, Lynne. A River Ran Wild. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Print.

Children’s Environmental Health Network. [Online]. Available at: http:/ /www.cehn.org/ [Accessed 5 April, 2012] Johnson, Jen Cullerton. Seeds of change. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books, 2010. Print.

Lasky, Kathryn. She’s Wearing a Dead Bird on her Head! New York, NY: Hyperion Books for Children, 1995. Print.

Maathai, Wangari. Nobel lecture. 2004 Nobel Peace Prize lecture [Online]. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture-text.html [Accessed 4, April, 2012] Maathai, Wangari. The Greenbelt Movement. [Online]. Available at: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org [Accessed 12, April, 2012] Zawilinski, L. HOT blogging: A framework for blogging to promote higher order thinking. The Reading Teacher 62.8 (2009): 650-661. Print.

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Understanding the Politics of The Mangrove Tree Susan Roth

History If it weren’t for politics, The Mangrove Tree might never have been written. During the Second World War, American citizens who happened to be Japanese-Americans were forced into internment camps in California for no other reason than that they were ethnically Japanese.

Amongst the many who were so exiled, living in the desert behind barbed wire fences, were Gordon Sato and his family. They were placed in a camp called Manzanar.

Brilliant, creative and curious even in that situation, Gordon Sato spent his time in Manzanar, playing the trumpet in the Manzanar’s jazz band, attending high school, and, also, figuring out how to grow corn in that California desert to help to feed his family.

After the war, when these innocent Americans regained their freedom, Gordon Sato completed his advanced education and became a world-renowned cell biologist, making major contributions in his field through research and biotechnology.

In the 1980s Dr. Sato decided to direct his energies and creativity in a new direction. He began to fight famine worldwide, eventually 44

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concentrating his efforts in war-torn Eritrea by introducing ways to grow mangrove trees in the salt water along the Eritrean coast. Beginning with the simple addition of elements needed for mangrove nourishment, Dr. Sato created and combined the linked segments needed to attain the balanced system that is now in place in Hargigo, Eritrea. This pilot now serves as a model for all coastal communities in need of food. The Manzanar Project (so called by Dr. Sato as a reminder that hope can grow from injustice) has already been brought successfully to Mauritania and expanded in Morocco to include ways to farm the desert there.

Politics Dr. Sato’s efforts in fighting hunger did not begin in Eritrea. When I met him many years ago he was just beginning experiments in growing blue-green algae along the coast of China. He had a plan that included seeding the area with brine shrimp (they eat the blue-green algae) in order to create a different sort of food chain, one still based upon the ocean’s innate ability to sustain food production. My first memory of him is with a small tape recorder (that’s how many years ago it was) hooked onto his belt and attached to an earpiece. He was teaching himself Chinese by listening to tapes during every available minute. He believed that being able to communicate in Chinese would help his negotiations with the government. In spite of the fluency he attained, the political bureaucracy in China finally forced Dr. Sato to find another coastline for his innovative scientific plans.

He moved his operations to the long coast of Chile until political issues again interrupted his efforts.

The famine conditions following its war with Ethiopia brought Gordon Sato to Eritrea. The political climate still is not stable there, but somehow he has been able to maintain his operations in Hargigo in 45

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spite of the fact that many of his original contacts, people who became friends, those who were instrumental in helping him with the project, are now in jail as political prisoners. In fact, visiting Eritrea is all but forbidden by the U.S. State Department. Just before Dr. Sato’s last trip several months ago, I suggested that he let me go with him. “Absolutely NOT!” he said. “It’s much too dangerous!” When I said in that case perhaps he shouldn’t go either, he just laughed. But even he was unable to get all the way over to the tiny village of Hargigo on that trip. Yet, partly by luck and miracle, I suppose, The Manzanar Project is still working well in Eritrea.

Ecology The system that Dr. Sato created in Eritrea sounds logical and almost simple. This is the story. Gordon Sato noticed that mangrove trees were growing naturally at the place where a sweet water river empties into the salt Red Sea. He saw that camels were feeding on the leaves of those mangrove trees. He blocked off the area with a simple fence, preventing the camels from eating all the leaves.The leaves were then fed to the sheep and goats in the village. The animals liked the mangrove leaves and did well with this diet.

Dr. Sato figured out that the sweet and salt water, when mixed together, contained nitrogen, phosphorous and iron. By burying small plastic bags of nitrogen and phosphorous (with a few pin-pricked holes in the bags) attached to thin iron rods stuck into the ground under the shallow salt water along the coastline, he provided what is needed to make mangroves flourish in seawater. In a drought-stricken country with little freshwater, his concept was as brilliant as it was simple.

When small mangrove seedlings were planted in the Red Sea (mostly by the village women), they grew fast and well into trees that 46

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are now part of the mangrove forest along the coast of Eritrea. The harvested leaves provide good food for the domesticated animals in the village, sheep and goats.The new forest of trees has invited birds to fly into the branches and fish to swim around the roots. Wood from the mangrove trees provides kindling for the people of Hargigo. The fish provide food and even some industry for the people of the village.

But the sheep and goats, although they were healthy and producing babies, were not able to sustain their young. This was because the animals were not lactating.

Dr. Sato determined that the sheep and goats were missing necessary nutrients required for lactation. He found the nutrients in the uneaten, discarded parts of fish: the bones, the heads and the tails. He ground these parts to form a fishmeal, sprinkled the fishmeal on top of the mangrove leaves that the sheep and goat were eating. The animals loved the addition and continued to eat with enthusiasm. This addition provided what they needed to produce enough milk to feed their young and even to provide dairy products for the people in the village.

Although by western standards the people in Hargigo still live very simply, by small Eritrean village standards they are quite prosperous.

Their flocks have increased substantially; this is a measure of wealth there. More importantly, the people are no longer hungry.

This extraordinary operation has provided the model for Dr. Sato’s continuing successful work in Mauritania and in Morocco.

Family and Friends How did this amazing story land on my drawing board? My scientist husband and Gordon Sato were friends for years. When we were still living in Bethesda, Maryland, my husband needed a scientific advisory board for his research work at the National Institutes of Health.

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He invited his friend Gordon to be part of it. The board met several times a year. After working all day, the group would come to our house for supper. We remained friends with Gordon after he turned his attention to world hunger and followed his efforts with interest. When he moved to Boston we would visit him every time we were in the area.

One time he told us about the Eritrean project. I immediately thought of it as a potential subject for a children’s book, but I was afraid to ask his permission to use it. I thought that perhaps he would think that making a picture book about something so serious, something that had taken so much of his energies and efforts, would somehow trivialize his monumental work. My husband thought I was being shy and silly, and he urged me to ask Gordon directly, but I could not bring myself to do it.

Once I sent a few of my picture books to his grandchildren.

Because I didn’t have their addresses, I sent the package to Gordon.

The next time we had lunch together in Boston, Gordon’s wife, Josette, as well as Gordon, showed special interest in my work. They were, in fact, so appreciative that I found the courage to ask my question right then. “Would you maybe consider letting me write and illustrate the story of the Manzanar project?” I sort of whispered. They were both very enthusiastic immediately. A champagne moment followed.

But then I had a very big, daunting responsibility. It was a scary proposition, writing this book. I felt very inhibited, almost as if Gordon were on my own scientific board. I imagined him sitting at his desk, red pencil in hand, just waiting for my first draft. I very much wanted to create this story for children, but I just did not know where to begin.

I called my friend Cindy Trumbore for advice and a little handholding. Years ago Cindy had been my editor at Dial Books For Young Readers. We have worked together on at least six books at that 48

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publishing house and when she changed houses we continued to work together on more. We have stayed friends all along. And so I told Cindy the story. “That book will write itself!” she said. “It’s perfect for a ‘House That Jack Built’ format.”

She explained what she meant: that using this building block style based upon the very old poem was a perfectly acceptable writing form, really not any different than writing in a sonnet form or haiku form. She urged me to try it and I did.

Some days later when I showed her my efforts she told me she wanted to edit it for me. A few days after that, she sent me a completed text. I loved what she did to it. “You are the co-author!” I declared.

“Am not!” she said. “Are too!” I insisted. I was right, and I won, and that was lucky because at that time we didn’t even realize how right I was, especially because of all the difficult writing yet to come.

Publisher Collaborating in writing, for me, is a wonderful way to work. It means that there is someone who cares about the little details at least as much as I do–like, for example, which sounds better: A Mangrove Tree or The Mangrove Tree? Even a very good friend would not be interested in the dilemma, but a collaborator definitely cares. The same is true when authors worry about where to send the manuscript when it’s ready to go.

This time, after we unanimously decided that Lee and Low would be the perfect place for The Mangrove Tree, we found that we almost had a third collaborator, our careful and thoughtful editor, Louise May. At the beginning we were not totally happy about this, however. Louise decided that we needed more substance for our readers. She said although she loved the story and the way it was told, that her readers 49

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needed extra information about this important project. This was a very annoying surprise to both Cindy and me. We had thought the book was finished, perfect as it was. We were so disappointed that we even considered pulling the book and looking for another publisher. Fortunately we listened instead.

What resulted is the page-turning format, with the slightly older, more informative prose on the right that heralds the illustration on the following spread, and the gentle, simple, building poem on the left. It became almost two books in one, understandable and accessible by very young children, yet with further information available for interested older children, too.

I could not have done this without Cindy’s participation that included her careful research developing into her clear, precise yet lyrical prose so beautifully balanced by the delicate poem on the facing pages.

And neither of us would have done this without the insight (and demands!) of our editor’s vision. We thank her and appreciate her talents and her patience.

Illustrations We need to return to the politics in children’s literature. I have never been to Eritrea and I was not able to go there, because the political situation was too unstable. Yet I had to create the collages for the illustration in this book, and they had to look like the Eritrean story it tells. Luckily Gordon has a few million good photographs from his many trips. Cindy and I studied them all, over and over again. She helped me to organize them in collections of subject matter making the inspiration searches considerably easier. And so the collages grew from the photographs.

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I was still sorry that I had not been able to travel to Eritrea to see these things with my own eyes, yet, by the time the illustrations were completed, I hoped that the renditions did not stray too far from the real Eritrea. Before I relinquished the art to Lee and Low, I drove to Boston to show my finished work to Gordon. This was to be sure that I hadn’t made a huge mistake or even missed a nuance that he alone would recognize.

Gordon was very appreciative. He said that I had done a good job and the book would be beautiful. I relaxed, then. Emboldened by his praise, I asked about my favorite spread, the landscape of pre-mangrove Eritrea, the one used for the endpapers. “I’m so thrilled!” I said. “This really DOES look just like Eritrea, then?” Gordon smiled a crooked smile. “It does not look just like Eritrea,” he said, “but it is reminiscent enough of Eritrea.” I asked him if I should try again, but he assured me that it was a fine interpretation. Politics permitting, I am still looking forward to being able to see Eritrea for myself.

As always, my collage materials know no politics and ignore all borders—even those with armed guards and walls. I collect materials from everywhere I go and determine what pieces to choose for the illustrations by judging their color, size, texture, and design.

And Finally What did Cindy and I learn from all this? What do we wish our readers could learn? Why should we choose subjects like this for books for children?

If children can learn from history, the bad as well as the good, and learn to turn their own sometimes painful stories into something good; if they can begin to understand politics and be prepared to become active in politics as the needs arise; 51

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if they can become educated about the ecology of our planet, and therefore can be moved to participate in saving and maintaining our resources and in behaving responsibly with them; if their relationships with family and friends can be warm and ongoing and giving and interesting and creative; if their professional relationships can be the same; if they can manage to find stimulating, satisfying, productive work that allows them their own special paths to follow; if, through all these venues, they can maintain a respectful, interested curiosity and appreciation of others of different countries and cultures and beliefs; if they can learn to stretch out open hands to others in friendship and generosity when they are young, before they ever hear of prejudice and hate; if there are enough heroes to emerge among these children to provide them with inspirational leadership when they are ready to follow‌ ‌then maybe the world will survive another generation.

If, in telling the story about our hero, Gordon Sato, Cindy and I can inspire a child to find his or her own pathway towards meaningful, generous contributions that make a better world, then we will have found the answers to our questions.

Works Cited Roth, Susan and Trumbore, Cindy. The Mangrove Tree: Planting Trees to Feed Familes. New York: Lee and Low, 2012. Print.

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The Malayalam Experience of Children’s Literature Paul Zakaria

Malayalam is a young language whose modernity is just over 100 years old. The first novel came out around 1900. Poetry made a break from the ancient mould in the first decades of the 20th century.

It was almost a one-man show of the poet Kumaran asan. The short story became an accepted literary form in the 1930s and 40s. One could say that the sensibility shift from romanticism to realism was first achieved by the short story.

The realist period merged into the progressive, with communism as the nascent energy, in the 1940s and 50s.The progressive phase shifted to the early modern in the late 1950s. One could say that from the 1960s, modernity in content and form became clearly visible in Malayalam.

By modernity I mean a shift in content and form that resonated to new and emerging trends all over the world in thought, craft and sensibility with broad humanist underpinnings.

If one were to look for a formal beginning of children’s literature in Malayalam, that would be in the 1930s when the Travancore king’s government asked well-known writers to contribute poetry and fiction, specially written for school textbooks for children.

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But it was as part of the progressive movement of the 1940s and 50s that children’s literature became a familiar literary format in Malayalam. I can briefly state that the progressive movement was the result of a number of factors which included the educational work of the missionaries, the work of the social reformer Narayana Guru and the influence of communist ideas.

There were many hands at work in the field of children’s literature. One of them was Mathew M. Kuzhively, who was the first to start a Malayalam publishing house only for children, in the 40s. He was the first to re-tell Greek, Roman and other myths for children. A few publishing houses noted the demand for children’s literature and responded to it. Retelling of fairy tales like those of Anderson and the Grimm brothers appeared on the scene.

I remember hanging on like a hungry dog to the story of Thumbelina, retold in large type, with drawings, in about 4 pages, in a little book called Anderson Kathakal. It must have been less than one-tenth of the original but it mattered. The Thousand and One Nights was another popular source for re-telling. Then came adaptations of tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha. I’m of course talking about printed texts. Oral traditions of folk tales, riddles etc. for children had always existed.

The breakthrough in children’s publishing came in 1971 under the auspices of the Writers’ Cooperative Society, which is said to be the first ever writers’ cooperative in the world. Later writers themselves degraded it into a bureaucratic den and a political playground and it is a zombie today, but that is another story. But in its heydays it was one of the most powerful instruments of social change operating in Kerala.

The writers’ co-op also started another reading revolution in Kerala: a home library movement under which you could pay for the 54

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home library in easy instalments. It was one of the foundation stones of Kerala’s cultural renaissance. The writers’ co-op also inaugurated a grand flow of translations of world classics into Malayalam, as also of works from other Indian languages.

As a young boy I could read Crime and Punishment or War and Peace or Godaan or Arogyaniketan in Malayalam. If I wished to read, the whole Das Capital was available to me in Malayalam. In fact, I tried to read it a couple of times and found Marx was not friendly to children. The year-end Gift Box of children’s books introduced and promoted by the writers’ co-op in 1970 became one of the turning points for children’s literature in Malayalam.

Another landmark of the progressive renaissance was the extraordinary library movement, spearheaded by a single person: P. N. Paniker. Libraries came up in every village and they brought a wealth of reading to the children. I, for example, am the product of a couple of village libraries.

Yet another milestone of the progressive renaissance was the work of the Sastra Sahitya Parishad, or the Science Literature Society, which was an important contribution of the Left to Kerala’s cultural life. It spread the message of a secular, democratic, enlightened society and spoke up for the first time in Kerala for the environment. It produced a series of books for children to bring them the progressive message and brought out a children’s version in Malayalam of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Children’s literature had finally come to stay.

Writing by children also found a place in popular literary journals with a column devoted to children’s writing. Some of the contemporary writers of Kerala began their career in those columns. Fiction for 55

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children began to be serialized in the prominent literary magazine, Mathrubhumi. Initially it was the puranas and mythology that did the rounds. Perhaps because material was easily available there for retelling.

A bizarre entrant into children’s literature in Kerala in the 1960s was Soviet Russia. As part of the soviet propaganda machinery, the Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, had a powerful presence in Kerala, with cheap, well-produced books in English and Malayalam, including selected Russian classics in translation. The Russians brought the first international class children’s books to Kerala. They were all stories about Russian children or for them, but translated to Malayalam.

These books were our first experience of well-designed, attractively illustrated, multi-color children’s books. The Russians gave us also our first Malayalam pop-up books.

So, along with Stalin, Lenin, Malenkov, etc. (who were not entirely engaging for most young readers), we also got lovely children’s books.

If the Soviets hoped to convert Malayali children to communism, it was a nice way of doing it. No tanks, no firing squads, no secret police. I know they succeeded in converting at least one person. That was me.

I was a hard-core communist by the time I was 12. So now you know what children’s literature can do if it wants to.

I am not surprised that the Catholic church too had a strong wing of children’s literature in Malayalam. Propaganda and cult-making lie at the heart of both Catholicism and communism.

Anyway, by the 1980s and 90s major publishers and media houses had entered the children’s book market. But the lion’s share of the writing aimed at children had a shallow, artificial, manufactured quality.

Mediocrity was the hallmark. Illustrations, with rare exceptions, were unimaginative and mechanical. Child characters were presented either 56

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as mindless puppets or smart alecs, or eternally weeping and wailing creatures. Values conformed to the worst kind of traditionalism, and everything was steeped in a cloyingly sweet romanticism.

Sermonising and talking down to children was the standard mode.

Instead of expanding imagination, the attempt was to subdue imagination.

But then a lot of the mainstream literature itself was proceeding along similar lines. In any case it was good that a body of writing for children thrived, in whatever shape.

By the 1990s, children’s books from the west also had entered the market in a big way. The so-called English-medium children went for the English books. The readers of the children’s books in Malayalam were the rural and small town children studying in Malayalam-medium.

They still constitute the lion’s share of the readership.

The entry of mainstream newspaper houses into the children’s literature market happened in the 1980s. Commercially, it was very successful but this had disastrous results for children. They created a massive output of frightening mediocrity, of empty sentiments and moronic jokes. These children’s periodicals are bestsellers, but diabolic in their content. They hold up no civilisational values for children.

On the other hand they are ruthless in reinforcing puritanical, retrograde values. They have no qualms about holding up ridiculous god-women and god-men and ramshackle politicians as role-models for children. In other words, these children’s publications are re-worked copies of their mainstream publications: oblivious of civilisational needs, callous to humanistic and democratic values and immensely opportunistic.

Another point to be noted is that while almost all writers of the progressive period and of the beginning of the modernist period wrote 57

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for children, the modernists did not. That certainly is some sort of a comment on modernism.

The setting up of the State Institute for Children’s Literature in 1981 was a step in the right direction but it was immediately degraded into a shelter for fortune-hunters and hangers-on of political parties begging for a placement, each time the government changed. The funds provided to the institute were farmed out to cronies to produce a long array of shabby, indifferent books.

It was the last five years that saw the institute fulfilling the purpose for which it was created, namely to produce books of excellence for children. This came about because, to everyone’s surprise, a publishing professional with national and international experience was given charge of the institute as director and allowed to run it.

But as soon as the new government took charge he was sacked and the institute handed over to a party man.

There was a hilarious sentence in the formal complaint made against the director by a trade union leader, which was used to sack him. It said that if the present director was allowed to continue, and since he was only in his early forties, nowhere in the near future will people of the political culture of the party in power be able to dominate the institute. So much for the value politicians place upon children’s literature!

In my opinion, children’s literature in Malayalam must attend to certain needs if it is to grow into an original field of creative writing that can help children develop their inner selves and grow up as large-hearted, cosmopolitan citizens of a secular democracy.

Identify new and talented writers.

Persuade well-known writers to write for children.

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Identify illustrators with original and contemporary styles.

Find ways to improve the quality of production without raising prices.

Pay conscious attention to the content in terms of affirmation of humanistic values: there is a need to be alert to responsibilities in terms of gender, socio-economic status, environmental stewardship, human rights, democratic and secular vision, freedom of the individual, stances against class and caste considerations, citizen’s rights… The list could go on much longer but these issues are vital.

The most serious challenge to children’s reading in Kerala comes from their own parents and teachers. They insist that children read text books only. Any other reading is considered unnecessary and put down with a heavy hand – except perhaps the popular children’s periodicals, and that too only up to a certain age. Children are seen as being successful only in terms of their ability to become rank-holders in exams and entrance tests, so the possibility of their becoming a good citizen and a good human being is not in the agenda.

I do not blame the parents. In the kind of brutal, vicious society that has evolved in Kerala under the iron hands of the political parties, parents are running away from an unidentified apocalypse. There is an overwhelming sense of insecurity. They see an escape only in becoming rich and richer, and they want their children to do that job.

So we have fine, promising children growing up to be doctors who treat each patient as a profit-centre, engineers whose so-called scientific minds are for hire by any bigot and managers for whom every social responsibility is a negotiable item.

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Children’s Literature as a Personal Translation of the Political into Story Suzanne Gervay

As a Hungarian girl, my mother Veronika studied with the first violinist at The Budapest Symphony Orchestra. Her father was a Professor at the university. She seemed like a princess to me in the few old photos that still remained. Her life was opera, theatre, balls. There was a servant who cleaned the silver in preparation for the evening meal in her house.

My father Zoltan was different — a farmer and a trader, who worked and loved the land. He also loved philosophy and was deeply interested in the tumultuous politics of the time.

My father had returned after terrible years in forced labour in Russia. He was now working for the Underground helping to create illegal Swiss passports, setting up illegal houses hiding orphaned children, allocating medicine. When the Professor became ill with TB, my mother who was only a girl, crossed the devastated city to find medicine for her father.

She found my father Zoltan. So began their journey together, surviving under communism, food shortages, human rights abuses. They made that frightening decision to escape Hungary. They left everything 60

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they knew – family, friends, home, culture, language. They escaped across the minefields with their small son to a refugee camp in Austria.

There they waited for a country to take them. They wanted to go to America but it was Australia that took them.

The story of war-torn refugees has been well documented, filmed, reported and in some ways become truisms, clichés, in an all too familiar political landscape. However the experience of war, escape, finding a new home can never become clichéd with its long reaching impact on the next generations. As the daughter of post war refugees, I was the child of war, migration, loss, re-establishment of home. I saw my father work long hours in the car factory; my mother work in the clothing factory and raise their children. They spoke with heavy accents, missed their culture, placed heavy expectations on their children seeking to heal from the political terrors they’d endured. However the driving force in their lives was a belief in family, love and the freedoms offered by the new world.

As a child, books and writing were an escape from my home life which was turbulent with parents working long hours, guilt at my own existence, wanting to make up for things I did not understand. My parents wanted to keep their children safe and entered into a conspiracy of silence. The silence was frightening.

I write to break the silence because young people feel everything. However they don’t have the experience to understand that they are not alone, that there are pathways forward. I am driven to write story underpinned by social justice. It is unconscious, political, as I navigate the refugee journey of my family and translate it into meeting challenges and empowering young people on their search for meaning, identity and home.

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My Jack books are rite-of-passage children’s novels in Australia.

I Am Jack is about school bullying; Super Jack is about blending families; Always Jack is about cancer and refugees. Darlison writes that my storytelling in Always Jack encapsulates: … the realism of a young boy’s life, yet still deal with big issues such as cancer, Death, Divorce, grandparents, sibling rivalry, friendships, refugees and the Vietnam War (…) Part survival manual, part therapy, part autobiography, part fiction, Always Jack succeeds in distilling a complex medical condition for young readers to digest.

(Darlison 9) However life is not a single narrative and the Jack books navigate the complexities of life with warmth, humour, family and community.

With my narratives I seek to engage young readers in social justice. I was privileged to represent Australia with my refugee story ‘To East Timor’ in the IBBY anthology Peace Story where twentytwo countries, twenty-two authors and twenty-two illustrators contributed youth stories for peace. An initiative of The Republic of Korea IBBY, it was launched internationally on Nami Island in the Republic of Korea.

One of the inspiring experiences of my life occurred recently when I was flown to New York to address the Burn Congress (by The New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College, the New York Firefighters Burn Foundation and The Phoenix Society for Burns). They asked me to speak about the power of my young adult novel Butterflies to travel with young people and community.

I was on the faculty with Kim Phuc, who was the nine year old girl running naked from napalm in Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo. That experience, impacted me profoundly and it impacted the 62

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narrative in Always Jack. When Jack and his best mate Christopher (whose parents are Vietnamese refugees) present their Vietnam project to the school assembly and their families, they end their presentation with: "Jack and Christopher (say) together: Kim Phuc, the girl running from the bomb, said, ‘Don’t see a little girl crying out in fear and pain. See her crying out for peace." (Always Jack 106) This 1972 image of the Vietnam War has become an international icon for peace. The effect of war on children through Kim Phuc’s story deeply connected to my own sense of war and dislocation and became integral to Always Jack.

My young adult novel Butterflies which took two years to research and write, was deeply embedded in my belief in inclusion.

I had a definite agenda. Butterflies would be medically accurate, but it would not be a medical book. It would be psychologically accurate in terms of child growth and development, but not a didactic textbook. It would reflect the stories and journeys of the young people and families whom I had interviewed. I wanted to write a story where disability is part of the fabric of life, but not life itself. The main character Katherine would be burnt but never be a one-dimensional stereotype. Katherine would be complex like all human beings with a real family, a background and a personality that reaches from the page into the lives of readers. Katherine’s life would show that disability does not separate burn survivors from the community, but unites them in the common bond of humanity.

Butterflies would be good literature and a powerful tool in understanding disability. (Gervay, Disability Studies Quarterly) 63

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Today Butterflies is recognised as outstanding youth literature on disability.

My recently released picture book Ships in the Field has taken a lifetime to create. It is the immigrant story; the refugee story; my story; your story. It is personal. My father made hats from the serviettes at dinnertime for the family’s amusement. My mother cooked chicken soup every night. My father worked in a factory and my mother sewed dresses both in a factory and at home. Their trips into the country were a happy family time, connecting with their new land, building family and the future. My father did see the ‘ships in the field.’

However through the personal comes the universal story.

Everyone knows what it feels like to be a child afraid of the night.

Everyone wants the security of family as a child, as a parent and adult.

Everyone feels the unspoken fear of silence, when parents have secrets.

Ships in the Field is deceptively simple. But it is not simple.

Anna Pignataro’s illustrations are deceptively simple. But they are not simple. In a very special collaboration, Anna has brought her EgyptianItalian refugee background to my Hungarian refugee background to create a book that will reach children and families engendering understanding, identification and inclusion. Ships in the Field is both personal and universal – the universal refugee immigrant experience of war, loss, migration, home.

Ships in the Field has on its back cover: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’ (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) Jeder hat das Recht auf eine Staatsangehörigkeit. German Svako ima pravo na dr•avljanstvo. Bosnian/Croatian 64

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Minden személynek joga van valamely állampolgársághoz.

Hungarian Setiap orang berhak atas sesuatu kewarga-negaraan.

Indonesian Sing saha bae boga hak dina nangtukeun kawarganagaraanana. Sudanese Her ferdin bir uyrukluk hakký vardýr. Turkish (Gervay, Ships in the Field, back cover) I seek to mesh the political with the creative to unlock journeys in children’s literature to create a better world.

Works Cited Darlison, Aleesah. "Tackling the tough issues with a light touch." Always Jack. The Sun Herald 21 Nov 2010 Australia ed: 9. Print.

Gervay, Susanne. Butterflies: Youth Literature as a Powerful Tool in Understanding Disability. Disability Studies Quarterly 24.1 (2004).

Gervay, Susanne. Butterflies. USA: Kane Miller, 2011. Print.

Gervay, Susanne. I Am Jack. Australia: HarperCollins, 2000. Print.

Gervay, Susanne. Super Jack. Australia: HarperCollins, 2003. Print.

Gervay, Susanne. Always Jack. Australia: HarperCollins, 2011. Print.

Gervay, Susanne and Pignataro, Anna. Ships in the Field. Australia: Ford Street Publishing, 2012. Print.

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The Child as a Reader Communicating Belief Deepa Agrawal

At a children’s literature festival in Srinagar, a young girl approached me. “Please give me,” she breathed, her grey eyes large and serious, “give me a few words that will guide me through life.” For a few moments, I was stumped. She looked so earnest that it made me nervous. What a terrible responsibility she had imposed on me! Finally, I gathered myself together and mumbled, “Always believe in yourself and never give up.”

It was not the first time a child had requested such a one liner.

Never, however, with such intensity.The incident reminded me yet again what children expect from us as writers—words that can act as a beacon in times of confusion and distress.

We know that a one liner, no matter how worthy the sentiment it encapsulates, cannot be the ultimate guide in the complex business of life, and somewhere I felt like a fraud. To bring more honesty into our interchange, I picked up one of my books from the book stall shelf. It was my title Not Just Girls. “Try reading this,” I said.

I hope she read that book, because it is about girls trying to believe in themselves and not give up and hopefully she found situations that illustrated what I said.

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Katherine Paterson (1995), one of the most respected children’s writers in the world says in her book, A Sense of Wonder: “I do believe that those of us who have grown up have something of value to offer the young. And if that is didacticism, well, I have to live with it. But when I write a story, it is not an attempt to make children good and wise—nobody but God can do that and even God doesn’t do it without a child’s cooperation. I am trying in a book simply to give children a place where they can find rest for their weary souls.” (59) She goes on to explain that she is trying to act as a companion to a confused and fearful child, reaching out through a story “…peopled by characters who are me but not simply me.” (60) The whole question of politics apart, we all know literary works are intrinsically linked to the author’s personal experience, social background, core beliefs and prejudices. While writing for children, writers may delve into their own childhood memories, sometimes just to share them, or to answer questions that baffled them when they were young, or raise issues that disturbed them. Your parents’ happy or unhappy marriage, the sassiness of your younger sister or the bullying ways of your older brother or his wimpyness will turn up somewhere in a story sooner rather than later.

Yes, in your writing, it is hard to get away from what and who you are and what and who you want to become. When I look back on my first published book, sometimes I cannot help wondering if it mapped a particular course for me, even though I know it is not strictly true.

The itinerary had been present somewhere long before I began writing.That year, Children’s Book Trust had announced a competition on the theme “Portraying Boys and Girls as Equals” and I decided to enter. Why? To quote from a paper I presented at a conference in Mangalore organised in 2008 by the Children’s Literature Association 67

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of India on the theme “Politics and Polemics in Children’s Literature”: “As the mother of three young daughters, the theme immediately struck a chord. And a picture book story Ashok’s New Friends (1990) – about young Ashok’s encounter with a boy who likes to cook and his sister, who is good at karate, was the result. The book went on to win the N.C.E.R.T National Award for Children’s Literature in 1992-93.”

The need to inspire my daughters and other girls to challenge stereotypes was definitely on my mind when I wrote Ashok’s New Friends. This book was a precursor to many other stories in which girl characters shatter the conventional mould. But it is also true that many of these characters sprang into my head without the impetus of a given theme. In fact it was a revelation when readers observed this element in stories where such noble notions were far from my mind. For example in an article, writer and critic Nandini Nayar (2006) states: “Agarwal pays special attention to the boy-girl equation in her books and attempts to be fair to both the sexes…But in most cases the girls display courage and initiative that marks them out as braver.” (322) Among others, Nandini has mentioned my second published title A Capital Adventure.

This book, however, grew organically and was conceived as a mystery story meant to entertain rather than influence. It was the storyline that grabbed the reins when I was working on it rather than the aim to depict strong girl characters.

Traveller’s Ghost is another book in which the narrative formed itself, though a girl named Kriti does take the initiative to deal with the spirit haunting her and her friends. Again in my fantasy novel Anita and the Game of Shadows, which appeared a few years later, the protagonist Anita is the one who has to confront and destroy the evil King of Shadows and rescue her parents. I think that when I was writing these stories it was absolutely natural for me to believe that a girl could accomplish those daring tasks as well as a boy.

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Several years later, I was commissioned to put together a collection of girl empowerment stories by Paro Anand for Rupa & Co, which appeared under the title Not Just Girls. When I was making a selection from stories that had appeared in magazines earlier, I was delighted to discover that I had enough to make up a book. One or two had indeed been written on a given theme. But there were also stories like “Delivery Girl” in which a girl opts for the dangerous choice of helping to arrest a criminal who has made use of her, and others like “Never Talk to Strangers” in which a timid girl strives to break out of her mould and trust her instincts.

Some of these characters could have been inspired by spunky girls I encountered in my childhood or diffident ones trying to stretch their comfort zones. But more recently I made a conscious choice to write two books with inspiring female protagonists. The biography Rani Lakshmibai, the Valiant Queen of Jhansi is one. The other is my latest book Rajula and the Web of Danger, a retold folk epic of Kumaon in Uttarakhand. I had heard about this unusual tale of a girl’s bravery and determination, rare in our oral tradition and was keen to write a book based on it. In this thousand year old story, the heroine’s daring and initiative and her spirited challenge to her powerful magician father makes her the perfect role model for the contemporary girl, and I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

Katherine Paterson (1995) also says in The Spying Heart: “It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations— something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.” (301-2) Right from childhood I have found it hard to make sense of social inequities and that is another question I have been attempting to answer 69

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through my stories. In one of my early picture books, The Toy Horse I tried to show that give and take at an equal level is possible between children of unequal means. In this simple tale, a middle class child covets Rami's [a banjara (gypsy) girl] toy horse. Rami gives it up, but the other girl senses that she is sacrificing something precious and impulsively hands over her own doll. A short story “Fire” from the previously mentioned collection Not Just Girls! examines this issue in greater depth through the complexities of the relationship between Puja and Paruli. Based on a childhood memory, this story is about a friendship between two middle class girls and a maid’s daughter, which founders when Paruli, the maid’s daughter tells a lie to avoid punishment. Puja adores Paruli but cannot forgive her for lying, till she understands Paruli’s compulsions, but by then it is too late. In the story “The Odd Weekend,” from the collection Everyday Tales, Mitu is jolted out of her complacency when her mother’s friend, the ‘crazy’ Zoya Aunty with whom her parents have left her for the weekend, takes her to a slum for social work. Mitu begins by wrinkling her nose at the scene: “Heaps of garbage rotted all around and smelly drains (which doubled as toilets) ran along the houses.

Didn’t anyone tell them about germs, I wondered? Well, Zoya Aunty did.” (37) Asked to narrate stories to the kids, a sulking Mitu soon finds wonderful warmth filling her up and leaves as reluctantly as she had arrived. This story too, is based on an unforgettable childhood experience.

Bringing domestic help into children’s fiction sometimes makes writers uncomfortable because they feel it indicates that the author is ratifying an exploitative practice. I am not so sure. All middle class families employ domestic help and often mothers bring young girls along to assist them in their chores. I feel that portraying bonds that sometimes develop spontaneously among children, makes a story more true to life.

Many urban children tend to distance themselves from people not of

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their social strata; are very conscious of differences and often have a stereotyped view of the other. Involving children from under privileged groups as active participants in the narrative rather than mere background figures helps to reinforce empathy and smooth the awkwardness that is responsible for the distance.

I also feel it is imperative to depict that any kind of sharing with a needier person should be free of condescension. In a very early title of mine – Three Days to Disaster the initial encounter between Sonali the protagonist and Kamli the banjara girl who helps solve the mystery, is based on a real life incident that had a deep impact on me. A brusque shopkeeper refuses to sell biscuits to Kamli because she does not have enough money. When Sonali offers her some in an impulsive gesture, she refuses. In the above mentioned article Nandini Nayar says, “She [Kamli] maintains both her dignity and the sense of awe at being noticed by the educated, well-dressed girl.” (322) When, in the course of the story, Kamli is in a position to assist Sonali and Gogi in capturing the criminals, “Kamli is terrified of the consequences of helping the children, yet she goes ahead.” (322) In my mystery novel The Hunt for the Miracle Herb, Harku the boy domestic helper plays an important part in locating the herb Rina, Ajay and Geeti are looking for, as also in apprehending the man who is putting obstacles in their way. Similarly, in The Capital Adventure, Mohini, the maid’s daughter, whom Shipra has befriended, is courageous enough to free Amit and Rohan from the criminals who capture them, at great personal risk. Better still, she daringly tries to get hold of the briefcase full of cash that the crooks have extracted as ransom. Caught in the act, she does not give up fighting till the others arrive with a rescue force. Thus, she not only displays initiative and guts but her participation becomes crucial for the successful resolution of the story.

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The big question, however, is—do such stories really influence children’s attitudes? Here I would like to quote from a blog post on The Toy Horse by a lady named Pallavi, which I stumbled upon. “It’s an invaluable book to have because it teaches in such a tender way the difference between haves and have-nots…” she writes. Again, “I read it out often to my daughter who is only 4 years old but really very moved by the story. It also gives us an opportunity to provide her with a perspective on things she will see and experience all around her in India.” (2011) In a review of Rani Lakshmibai: the Valiant Queen of Jhansi Rohini Ramakrishnan writes in The Hindu, “…it remains with you long after you have finished the book and through these [narratives] you relive the past and realise that here is a woman who can inspire you to face life, despite all the hurdles and hardship…” (2011) F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” The truth is, whether you fashion a story deliberately to educate children or let one emerge organically from the deep, dark well of your consciousness, unless you believe in the issue, the most diligently crafted words will slip through the reader’s mind like water through a sieve. You have to create a story that will resonate in the reader’s mind long after she has finished reading it. Where the child reader is concerned, it is not just about choosing politically correct themes. It is about communicating your faith, your conviction in the most honest way you can, so that it touches the heart of the reader and leaves a permanent imprint.

Works Cited

Agarwal, Deepa. Not Just Girls. New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2004. Print.

—. Ashok’s New Friends. New Delhi: Children’s Book Trust, 1990.

Print.

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—. A Capital Adventure. New Delhi: Children’s Book Trust, 1990.

Print.

—. Everyday Tales. New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1994. Print.

—. Three Days to Disaster. New Delhi: Ratnasagar Publishers, 1990.

Print.

—. Ashok’s New Friends. New Delhi: Children’s Book Trust, 1990.

Print.

—. Traveller’s Ghost. New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 1995. Print.

—. Anita and the Game of Shadows. Gurgaon: Scholastic India Pvt. Ltd. 2002. Print.

—. Rani Lakshmibai. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2009. Print.

—. Rajula and the Web of Danger. Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2011.

Print.

—. The Toy Horse. New Delhi: Children’s Book Trust, 1997. Print.

—. The Hunt for the Miracle Herb; New Delhi: Puffin Books, 1995.

Print.

Katherine Paterson. A Sense of Wonder. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Print.

Nandini Nayar. “Deepa Agarwal and Indian Children’s Literature in English: An Introduction”. Perspectives on Indian English Fiction. Ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006.

Print.

Pallavi. "Some bit of this and some bit of that." [Online] Available at: http://kinderwagon.blogspot.com/2011/09/toy-horse-deepaagarwal.html#comment-form. [Accessed May 16, 2012.]

Ramakrishnana, Rohini. I will ride ten elephants. The Hindu. May 9, 2011. [Online] Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/life-andstyle/kids/article2003345.ece. [Accessed May 16, 2012] 73

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On Children’s Literature and Politics: A conversation in two voices about Hands Around the Library Karen Leggett Abouraya and Susan L. Roth

Susan: For all my years I had dreamed of going to Egypt to see the pyramids. Four and a half years ago my family and I finally arranged to do this. But our grand plan was so discouraged by so many, even including our travel agent, that we ended up deciding it would be prudent to postpone the trip.

The reason? POLITICS. There were periodic violent events involving tourists in Egypt. Just before our scheduled departure a French woman was killed in the main marketplace. “Don’t take the chance”, we were begged. “You’ve waited this long, wait until it’s safer.” We canceled the trip.

When it was too late to change the plans again, I told my friend Karen Leggett Abouraya (at that time not yet co-author of Hands Around the Library). Karen is married to an Egyptian and has been traveling back and forth for years with her family. She had helped me with our itinerary and was dismayed to hear that we had changed the plans.

Karen “You’re going to Turkey instead?” I said to Susan, disappointed and incredulous. “That’s ridiculous! The whole world 74

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is both dangerous and safe. You have a greater chance of having an accident on the way to the airport than of having a problem in Egypt. I feel so sad for the tourist business in Egypt. It’s a major Egyptian industry, and tourist hysteria is a contagious virus and so damaging. Don’t keep waiting to go to Egypt.”

Susan On the way back from a safe, interesting trip to Turkey, we stopped in France to visit a friend. In her house I noticed Egyptian posters on the walls and books about Egypt on the shelves. It turned out that our hostess had just returned from her sixth trip to Egypt. “Why aren’t you scared?” I demanded. “Didn’t you hear about that French woman in the market?” “Egypt is completely safe!” she vowed. “I am totally comfortable, the people are gentle and caring, the art and archaeology are infinitely fascinating. About that poor unlucky woman?

It could have happened in New York or Paris, too.”

That settled it. In December, 2009 my husband, daughter and I arrived in Cairo with an itinerary that, thanks to Karen, included Alexandria.

My husband was skeptical. “Do you really want to bother leaving this incredible richness?” he asked, leaning over a case of ancient sketches for paintings on stone in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. We had already traveled to see most of the famous major sites. I think all of us would have liked to stay in that museum for at least six months.

But it was too late to change the plans, and soon we were off for Alexandria and the Library that Karen had promised was as important as the pyramids.

By this time I had fallen in love with Egypt and I had begun to search for an Egyptian story to write for children, brazenly confessing 75

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that what I really wanted was a legitimate excuse to return. Besides this, of course, I was fast realizing that there were wonderful stories here to share with children. We joked about my potential books as we discovered more and more things we loved about Egypt. What about a book about kosheri? (the delicious and unique street food of Egypt, made of lentils, pasta, rice, spicy tomato sauce and onions).

What about greywacke? (the funny-named hardest black stone used for the most exquisite, elegant and detailed carving in my most favorite of Egyptian sculptures).

Or what about the ridiculous traffic in Cairo? I was in love with ancient Egypt, yes. But I was also in love with Egypt-now.

Even so, I, too, had my doubts about the Alexandria Library.

After all, the original Alexandria Library was a lost wonder of the world.

The new Alexandria Library was probably just a contemporary building using the famous ancient name. Everyone knows that the ancient scrolls were long gone.

But when we walked inside the door and crossed over to the first balcony for the first glimpse of the extraordinary, dazzling space, I knew we had been mistaken.

I stood in silence for the first five minutes, filled with thoughts about other magnificent places and grand spaces: the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal, the Andes, the Alps, Petra, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Coliseum, everything larger than life. The Alexandria Library did not disappoint.

My daughter spoke first. “Here’s your book!” she said. She was right, too.

Karen Susan did not simply stand in awe at the Library. She jumped in with her whole being, visiting the Children’s Library, exchanging 76

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photos and emails with then-children’s librarian Shaimaa Saad, sharing possibilities for the future. Susan came home bursting with exclamation points.

Susan I tried to call Karen right from the Library, but my cell phone would not connect. We spoke as soon as I got home. “YOU write it,” I said. “It’s only reasonable. I never even would have seen it if you hadn’t made such a fuss!” “We’ll do it together,” she said. And so we began.

Karen I had always wanted to write about Egypt for young people – to let them know that there is so much more to this vast country than pyramids and mummies, fascinating as they are. I envisioned a nonfiction book with a story that would engage young readers in the mysteries of the ancient Library and intrigue them with the vast opportunities of the new Library – opportunities for the free thinking, free gathering and free questioning inherent in a democratic society.

My first draft began with a small boy standing amid the market clamor and aroma of the old port, waiting to carry scrolls to the ancient Library. It ended with an exercise in civil discourse based on Skype conversations that Susan and I organized between American students in Alexandria, Virginia, and Egyptian students gathered by Shaimaa Saad at the modern Library in Alexandria, Egypt. We were playing around the edges of politics, as these youngsters moved beyond stereotypes to acknowledging their similarities. “They discovered that they wore the same jeans and 77

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T-shirts,” we would ultimately write, “they all ate pizza, liked many of the same singers, and even knew some of the same professional wrestlers.”

Susan We sent word sketches to our editor and she responded to each try: too historical; too contemporary; too political; too idealistic; too dry; too capricious; too specific; too pedantic; not pedantic enough; not specific enough; too long; too short. We were very close to giving up.

Karen As Susan and I debated form and audience, voice and tone, our manuscript went through many upheavals. In the midst of it all, Egypt began its own upheaval on January 25, 2011, ending 18 days later with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

The Arab Spring was upon us. And that too would dramatically alter our manuscript.

Susan It had never occurred to either of us to write about the revolution itself. We could have imagined the editor’s responses to that: too violent; too dangerous; too unresolved; too political; too not-for-children. And besides, the revolution had nothing to do with the Alexandria Library… …until suddenly one day it seemed to have EVERYTHING to do with the Alexandria Library. My husband and I were driving, listening to the breaking news on the radio. The trouble was spreading in Egypt.

Protesters were gathering in Alexandria. And then we heard, live, talk about the Library and the people who had left the march to hold hands right then, around the Library, protecting it.

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“Your book!” my husband said. I called Karen from the car, and the rest is “Children’s Literature and Politics.”

Karen Dr. Ismail Serageldin, the Director of the Alexandria Library – officially retaking the ancient name Bibliotheca Alexandrina – waxed eloquent on the Library website and in media interviews about the youth who were leading the revolution. “This revolution in Egypt was a liberal revolution,” he said. “And I’m proud and happy that the Library of Alexandria may have contributed in some small way to supporting the kinds of ideas that have found their expression in the young people who led this revolution.”

The young people holding hands around the Library seemed a perfect ending to our story. The editors thought otherwise. They moved the ancient Library to the backmatter, relegated the small boy to memory and insisted on putting the revolutionaries’ protection of the Library – politics – on center stage.

The emails between editors and authors were as plentiful and intense as revolutionary Twitter posts. There had to be a balance – dramatic tension that did not swallow the facts, incipient danger that did not become random violence, a marketing dream that did not wreak havoc with the truth.

Susan It was a difficult balance to reach. Fortunately for the publication, (not to mention the people and their beautiful city), unlike in Cairo, things never got completely out of hand in Alexandria.

The immediacy and the changing times in Egypt was and is another political issue. The amount of time, from the moment of acceptance by 79

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the publisher to the moment of publication for any children’s picture book, is almost always more than a year. What if our book effectively were to become a period piece by the time it’s published in August, 2012? No one knows what might still happen in Egypt, though fortunately for our story, the event upon which we focus really did happen as we have told it. No matter what follows, the warm, hand-holding moment at the Alexandria Library is one that will live forever. We only hope that the political situation will settle soon, before more lives and livelihoods are threatened.

Karen Our book is a true collaboration – the essence of politics at its best. We compromised on form and style, but not on facts. I adopted Susan’s lyrical style; she accepted my journalist’s insistence on not embellishing the truth. We had hoped to address religious politics more directly.

Susan The picture book format (still my favorite) does have its limitations.

Under the heading of ‘just the right balance’ of harsh political messages should be included ‘just the right balance’ of religious messages. Maybe all the dinner table subjects that we are taught never to mention are mostly taboo for picture books, too.

One piece that we especially wanted to include was how Christians and Arabs were being so respectful of each other’s religious expressions during the initial protests. There were beautiful, true examples of diverse people being kind and helpful and decent to each other. Sadly, our mentions were mostly edited out. Of course, picture books have severe space and production constraints too, being usually 80

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no more than 32 pages, sometimes stretching to 40, so perhaps that was part of the reason for the exclusion.

I think it bears reminding at this point that book publishing is, after all, a business. The first objective is to create a book that will attract attention and sell. Certainly everyone would like all books to be interesting, intelligent, excellent, beautiful, original, lovely. But if the book doesn’t sell, the publisher cannot stay in business. It is the publisher alone who has the last word on that prediction. Will it or won’t it be likely to sell? No one knows, but it’s the publisher’s dice that are rolling.

Writers can either compromise or self-publish or not publish at all.

And then there are the pictures. Usually when I begin to work on a book, often before the text is complete, I have an idea of how the book will look. Even though I work in collage and even though process is really part of every finished piece, most of the time my early vision dictates the direction that the art takes. But this did not happen with Hands Around the Library. Awed by the huge physical structure of the Library, at first I was certain that I would make nothing but photomontages for this book. Instead, the pictures seemed to build themselves…dominated by the leitmotifs of the marching protestors and the signs that they carried.

A second theme grew out of the photographs of Egyptian art and artifacts that Karen’s daughter, Nadia Abouraya, provided. Most of these images came directly from the Abouraya home. The dominant inspiration for me was an appliquéd and quilted fabric that hangs on their wall.

This is actually part of a tent like those used now in Egyptian cities, to block off parts of streets for small urban celebrations such as weddings. The bright colors and infinite design variations adapted well 81

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to my collage medium, and I felt that these ‘design quotations’ substantiated and enhanced an important point of our book.

Karen The cover entailed more compromise. Susan and I wanted the background to be the magnificent granite wall of the Library, with its hundreds of unique characters from modern and historic languages. Thinking that too obscure, the publisher opted for the colors of the Egyptian flag – which does indeed make the cover dramatic and eye-catching. Susan walked a tightrope between my call (and my Egyptian husband’s) for fewer women in hijab and men in beards and the publisher’s desire to keep these images front and center as an immediate cue to buyers that ours is a ‘multicultural’ book. As a result, many Westernized Egyptians who participated in the revolution may see themselves in our text, but not on our cover.

Susan And so our countdown to publication date continues. Today the Library is still safe and open, although politics remain uncertain in Egypt.

Recently, Karen’s husband went to Cairo for a meeting, stopping in Alexandria to visit family and friends. While there, he managed to meet with Library Director Ismail Serageldin, one of the two featured characters in our story. Tharwat Abouraya hand carried folded and gathered sheets of Hands Around the Library, the still unbound but printed version, to give to the director.

Karen and I had both been anxious about possible objections.

What if he didn’t like that suit he’s wearing? (I mean the one I literally wove for him out of paper). What if he thought I made his glasses too 82

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big? What if he objected to turning such a serious event into a picture book? What if? What if?

But Serageldin was totally enthusiastic and absolutely supportive – including asking his staff to help implement our suggestion for a Library-sponsored symposium on children’s literature as part of the book launch. He invited us to return to Egypt!

Sadly, though, politics intervened again. Serageldin is facing his own challenges and we have been advised to postpone the symposium until a more peaceful time. Politics affect all of living, and children’s literature, too.

The recent event that we chose to highlight is about contemporary politics. This book is about NOW, not about pharaonic Egypt. We are talking about yesterday, this minute and tomorrow. We are waiting and watching with the rest of the world. We make our political statements loud and clear as we join hands with all those Egyptians who wish to protect their Bibliotheca Alexandrina. And we speak through our medium, the one that we love best, children’s books.

Karen The message implicit in our book is a celebration of libraries as a place to nurture those freedoms. (We shall be expanding on these themes on the book’s future website, www.handsaroundthelibrary.com.)

In the eighteenth century, the American Benjamin Franklin formed a group called the Junto Society to debate politics, morals and natural philosophy. It was this group that created the first American library, among numerous other public amenities. Today, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is reviving ancient traditions of teaching, scholarship, research and public discussion. There are countless efforts to bring literacy, books and libraries to communities around the world that are poor in resources but rich in spirit.

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Yet even in America, libraries are under siege – by politics.

American mayors have reported that hours, staff and services at local libraries were the number two area for budget cuts, second only to services at parks and gardens. All politics are local. Children’s literature – and our children’s ability to access literature – is at stake. Hands Around the Library in Alexandria is a metaphor for every library in every village, city, state and nation that cries out for our passion and our support.

Works Cited Roth, Susan and Abouraya, Karen. 2012. “Hands Around the Library” [Online] Available at: http:www.handsaroundthelibrary.com [Accessed 1 June 2012] Roth, Susan and Abouraya, Karen. Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books. New York: Dial, 2012.

Print.

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Placing the Texts in their Contexts: A New Historicist Study of Shakespeare Adapted for Children Anita Mishra

I Though William Shakespeare lived in 16th century England, his works have reached beyond time and space to grip the imagination of readers across the globe for centuries. Shakespeare’s plays, in particular, continue to be incorporated as part of both canonical and popular media. They are performed by prestigious theatre companies and have generated more than four hundred films across languages and cultures to date, besides inspiring countless literary interpretations over the centuries.

Several adaptations of Shakespearean plays are written for children. Adapting any text specifically for children aims at simplifying its plot, enabling young readers to access the sophisticated and eloquent language. A text is often chosen for adaptation based on its canonical status. Adapting canonical material for children introduces them to the hierarchic formulations of ‘good’ or ‘classic’ as opposed to ‘popular’ literature at an early stage, and teachers and parents often hope that adaptations will encourage children to read the texts in their ‘original’ forms. This early experience becomes an integral part of the cultivation of their literary tastes in the future.

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Shakespeare’s plays have been successfully adapted for children as novels based on single works, and collections of short stories about multiple plays. This paper analyzes how adaptors for children often direct their readers about what they should see in, and understand about, the writings of a man who wrote for the adult audience of a bygone time. Adaptors must translate such complexity into comprehensible clarity besides trying to form the critical and aesthetic senses of their readers, whose relative innocence and adaptability due to their youth makes them susceptible to suggestions. “Placing the Texts in their Contexts” looks at two collections of Shakespearean stories and studies how the adaptors attempt to modulate the readers’ responses towards prevailing issues like racism or class differences according to the norms of the society they have been recreated in.

The extent and nature of the relationship between a text and its various contexts have often been questioned in Literary Criticism. A text can be analyzed either in isolation, or in conjunction with the wider circumstances which, directly or indirectly, play a role in its creation.

The New Historicist School of critical theory, which began in the early 1980s, was developed by Stephen Greenblatt and gained prominence during the 1990s. It is not an entirely new concept, but borrows from earlier schools of thought like Marxism (treating literature as a product of the conditions in which it was created) and Post-Structuralism (different interpretations of the same text), and the Doctrine of Textuality which declares a continuity between a text and its surrounding context.

It demonstrates how every literary work is influenced by the time and society in which it was produced. In the words of D.G. Myers, “…practitioners of the new method are concerned with […] the recovery of the original ideology which gave birth to the text, and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture…”

(28-29)

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New Historicism continues to be a popular school of literary theory in the twenty-first century. Applying New Historicism, this paper associates two adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays with their respective periods in history to see if the texts are constitutive of, and constituted by, the contexts or not. Trying to find the imprint of social contexts on an adaptation is more difficult than on an ‘original’ piece of literature (the word ‘original’ has been used here for convenience; it does not indicate a hierarchy as adaptations are as ‘original’ as the text being adapted), since an adaptation has a double layer of contexts around it – the original writer’s and the adaptor’s - and the adaptor tries to preserve the original atmosphere and attitudes as far as possible. Due to this attempt by the adaptors, the influences of Shakespeare’s times and social conditions on the adapted tales are usually stronger than those of the adaptors’; especially in those tales which offer the plots of the plays in a simplified style without attempting to mould them to some other situation or context. Despite this, reading some modernized versions of Shakespeare will yield enough hints (albeit small) about the adaptors and their time to aid in understanding the texts themselves in better ways.

British history, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, is an extensive field. It encompasses the English Revolution of 1640-1660, the Great Fire of 1666, the Industrial Revolution, colonialism and its decline, the two World Wars, the Great Depression and similar landmark periods in the historical tapestry of social and political Britain. But, almost as important as these, are smaller and less conspicuous changes achieved within these four centuries. The last two centuries, from 1800 to 2000, were especially vital because of the importance given to humanism and equal rights for different communities across the Western world. After long-drawn-out protests, racial sensitivity and class equality were acknowledged as valid and essential to progress. The process started 87

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in the eighteenth century, and the changing perceptions about such demands were seen in the twentieth century in political provisions like anti-racism laws and the establishment of a welfare state. The prevailing attitudes towards these topics impress the adaptors consciously or subconsciously and come out in their works.

The adaptations to be examined for this purpose are those of The Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807, 1980 ed.) and Leon Garfield’s Six Shakespeare Stories (1988, 1994 ed.) and Six More Shakespeare Stories (1994).

There are two levels of contexts working around any text – that of the individual who is writing and his/her own ideologies, and that of the larger society in which he/she lives. This duality of influence has been described by Alan Sinfield in Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain (1997) as: The project of involving literature fully in its context seems unsatisfactory so long as we maintain a formulation like ‘the individual versus society’ - in which the individual is imagined as essentially autonomous and society is envisaged as an undifferentiated external force. But this formulation seems inadequate in each of its parts. Firstly, the individual exists and makes sense of himself or herself within society… Secondly, society is neither monolithic nor static; it is composed of diverse groups whose interests, opportunities and attitudes interact in complex ways in accordance with their relative power at different points. (8) Following from this, a brief glance at the lives of the writers to be discussed hereafter will be necessary. Charles (1775-1834) and Mary (1764-1847) Lamb were born into the upper-servant class of late 88

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eighteenth century England, children of an erstwhile manservant. Mary received little schooling and was a house-bound person for most of her life, though access to a good library made her a passionate reader and a self-taught scholar. The Tales were her first major work, in which the readers are introduced to the dramatic works of Shakespeare through contemporary Victorian English to facilitate their understanding. Her brother, on the other hand, was a prolific writer by the time the Tales came into existence. The siblings were conventional, and literary-minded in a domestic way.

Leon Garfield (1921-1996), on the other hand, was a product of the twentieth century. He was born into a strict Jewish family, but eventually separated from them. He had disinterred concentration camp victims during World War II, and this experience lent social awareness to his writing. Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories were written in an attempt to emulate the success of the Lambs and were moderately popular, though his ‘original’ books gave him more prominence in British children’s literature.

Coming from different times and societies, the Lambs and Garfield bring diverse perspectives into their work. The adaptor’s personal opinions of particular characters or situations, as well as his/ her moral stand on certain themes, come out while attempting to direct the readers’ tastes. This paper will now examine the ways in which the development of class and racial consciousness over time has left its imprint on the adaptations under question.

II Racism and class differentiations are an indelible part of the world’s history. The Chambers Dictionary (1998 edition) defines ‘race’ as “The descendants of a common ancestor, esp. those who inherit a common set of characteristics…”, and ‘racism’ as “Hatred, rivalry or 89

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bad feeling between races; belief in the inherent superiority of some races over others, usually with the implication of a right to be dominant; discriminative treatment based on such belief”. The Oxford Dictionary (2000) defines racism as 1. The belief that there are characteristics, abilities or qualities specific to each race; 2. Discrimination against or antagonism towards other races.

Racial discrimination had been common in the Western world since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries due to a rapid increase in exploration, expansion, slave trade, colonization and imperial domination, and continued openly till the twentieth century when imperialism declined and humanitarian ideologies captured the public imagination. The effects of racism have been traumatic too often and for too many. Most of the inhabitants of Western countries considered themselves to be superior to those whom they had colonized in every field of life; from social and religious practices and beliefs, to intellectual capabilities. They perpetuated mental, physical and economical atrocities in the name of ‘civilization’ on anyone racially different from themselves.

Shakespeare’s society also perpetrated this attitude, but his plays broke ground by attempting to understand diverse points-of-view.

Through soliloquies, Shakespeare’s plays have given a voice to the subaltern sections of English society like Jews, Moors, women, blacks, illegitimate children and Fools, and help audiences to understand the ‘other voices’ around them. Indeed, there are few black or white (metaphorically speaking) characters in Shakespeare’s plays; most of them are varying shades of grey. Portrayals of other races and ethnic groups are mostly seen in Othello, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, and comments on class are scattered sporadically across his works. His adaptors try to keep them intact in their rewritings, but 90

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often their own sympathies regarding these social issues become visible through their choice of omissions and inclusions in the adaptations.

The horrific French Revolution occurred in the late eighteenth century, and keeping English servants happy with their designated place in society was essential. Therefore, Mary and Charles Lamb purged their Tales of most instances of class conflict and kept the portrayal of different classes to a bare minimum. Their book was originally intended for young girls from the upper and middle classes, who seldom familiarized with those ‘below the stairs’ except to give directions. The ‘perfect’ servant-master understanding and the attitude expected of the ideal servant is demonstrated in The Tempest, in the scene between Prospero and Ariel when he chastises the latter for daring to ask for his freedom. Prospero is not domineering, and acts like a reproachful teacher chiding a disobedient student rather than a cruel master threatening dire consequences. Ariel also seems repentant of his mischievous rebellion, rather than frightened into submission.

“Ariel, thy charge is faithfully performed; but there is more work yet.”

“Is there more work?” said Ariel. “Let me remind you, master, you have promised me my liberty. I pray remember I have done you worthy service, told you no lies, made no mistakes, served you without grudge or grumbling.”

“How now!” said Prospero. “You do not recollect what a torment I freed you from. Have you forgotten the wicked witch Sycorax, who with age and envy was almost bent double? …Because you were a spirit too delicate to execute her wicked commands, she shut you up in a tree, where I found you howling. This torment, remember, I did free you from.”

“Pardon me dear master,” said Ariel, ashamed to seem ungrateful; “I will obey your commands.” (4, emphasis added) 91

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Ariel speaks respectfully while asking for his freedom, and Prospero, apparently, replies in kind. The threat to imprison Ariel in “the knotty entrails” of an oak goes unmentioned. Showing recalcitrant wives and servants being beaten into submission may have been considered comedy in Shakespeare’s time, but the eighteenth century audience was more socially aware and thus, gentle censure was thought enough to enforce the submissiveness expected of good servants.

Loyal attendants can also be found in ‘As You Like It’ and ‘King Lear’. Adam’s love towards Orlando is eulogized at length, as is Orlando’s speech regarding the services of the “good old man”; they are role models of the “faithful servant and his loved master” (49, emphasis added), and Lamb intensely focuses on their relationship. This portrayal remains faithful to Shakespeare’s play. Charles Lamb uses adaptor’s license when he includes the Fool in ‘King Lear’ to the list of devoted servants, and depicts him much more sentimentally than the original character created by Shakespeare: [The] poor fool clung to Lear after he had given away his crown, and by his witty sayings would keep up his good humour, though he could not refrain sometimes from jeering at his master for his imprudence in uncrowning himself and giving all away to his daughters...

(98, emphasis added) Thus the Fool is lauded as a faithful follower whose words help his master maintain sanity in distressful times, and his tendency of taunting Lear about his follies is shown expressly as originating from his concern for Lear’s well-being. Individual opinions might vary on this account, but Lamb projects devotion as the sole interpretation. Something is omitted in The Tempest, something is kept intact in As You Like It and something is added in King Lear to make these stories conform to the values which the adaptors want to advertize.

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Caliban from The Tempest stands at the borders of racial and class differences – he is an embodiment of both the colonized native, and the unwilling servant. Portraying Caliban was a sensitive issue, especially in a social climate that saw excessive colonization go hand in hand with humanitarian sympathy for the colonized. Mary Lamb chooses to justify Prospero’s treatment of Caliban – The lively little sprite Ariel had nothing mischievous in his nature, except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax.

This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape; he took him home to his cell and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax would not let him learn anything good or useful: therefore he was employed as a slave, to fetch wood and do the most laborious offices…

(1, emphasis added) Such a description alienates the reader’s sympathy from Caliban, while explaining his conditions as being the consequence of his own nature rather than the fault of the “lively little sprite Ariel” or the ‘benevolent’ Prospero. Caliban is “less human” - and consequently, not to be judged according to human standards. Lamb glosses over the character as much as possible; she omits the sub-plot of Caliban’s attempt to murder his master, as well as the tentative reconciliation between them at the end when Prospero acknowledges Caliban as “mine” and Caliban realizes the greatness of his master. The brightness of The Tempest seems to be marred for her by Caliban’s presence, as the island might have been for Prospero himself.

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A similar racial uneasiness is found in her rendition of The Merchant of Venice. Mary Lamb explains away the tragedy of an alien in a ‘civilized’ European city by making the character of Shylock extremely wicked, and hence deserving his ultimate downfall. Her characters are all either good or bad and lack the grey shades drawn

by Shakespeare in the play.

Shylock the Jew lived at Venice; he was an usurer, who had amassed an immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants. Shylock, being a hard hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent with such severity, that he was much disliked by all good men, and particularly by Antonio, a young merchant of Venice; and Shylock as much hated Antonio because he used to lend money to people in distress, and would never take any interest for the money he lent; therefore there was great enmity between this covetous Jew and the generous merchant Antonio. Whenever Antonio met Shylock on the Rialto (or exchange), he used to reproach him with his usuries and hard dealings, which the Jew would bear with seeming patience, while he secretly meditated revenge. Antonio was the kindest man that lived, the best conditioned, and had the most unwearied spirit in doing courtesies; indeed, he was one in whom the ancient Roman honour more appeared than in any that drew breath in Italy. He was greatly beloved of all his fellow citizens…

(69, emphasis added) Mary Lamb thus gives a subjective reading of the story. She does not show Shylock’s constant humiliation at Antonio’s hands, nor does she try to sensitize her readers towards the issues faced by Jews, as Shakespeare did in his play.

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Though she meticulously paraphrases Shakespeare’s famous soliloquies, the moving “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is omitted from The Merchant of Venice. The sorrow which Jessica’s elopement causes Shylock and her casual neglect of her father’s feelings are discarded, and she is simply a “daughter who had lately married without his consent to a young Christian, named Lorenzo, a friend of Antonio’s, which had so offended Shylock that he had disinherited her.” (76) The elopement is condoned and Shylock is made to appear as a misguided parent, acting churlishly due to prejudices. Finally, in Shakespeare’s play, Antonio, aided by the Duke, forces Shylock to turn Christian or else forfeit his life – thus actually leaving him no choice. But Mary Lamb makes her Duke say “…if you repent your cruelty and turn Christian, the State will forgive you the fine of the other half of your riches.” (76) Thus, here Shylock is portrayed as actually being given agency to choose his path, and it is his greed which makes him leave his own religion for Christianity, not the ‘generous’ Antonio. The good and bad characters are sharply divided, and her interpretation smacks of racism.

Compared to Shylock, Othello is given more sympathetic treatment by Charles Lamb. He is considered to be a great and noble man, and “Bating that Othello was black, the noble moor wanted nothing which might recommend him to the affections of the greatest lady.”

(211) In fact, his suitability is extolled so much that it begs the question – was Lamb trying to explain something that, he feared, might be inconceivable to his audience? Othello’s advanced age is not hinted at in the beginning, and only his skin colour appears to set him apart in the opening paragraphs of the tale. And yet, an inherent prejudice against Desdemona’s choice, and a struggle to accept it, is evident – …this noble lady, who regarded the mind more than the features of men, with a singularity more to be admired than to be 95

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imitated, had chosen for the object of her affections a moor, a Black, whom her father loved and often invited to his house.

Neither is Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected as her lover.

(211, emphasis added) Ironically enough, Iago’s grudge against Othello in the story does not have a foundation in the latter’s colour - it is more centered on the lack of a promotion and jealousy regarding Othello’s familiarity with Iago’s own wife Emilia. Though he plays on Othello’s inferiority complexes concerning his colour and age, Iago’s hatred is not a racial resentment but personal. The backbone of Othello is altered by Lamb.

Garfield belongs to a different world, and his interpretation is more fearless. He is a shrewd observer of the class conflict present in Shakespeare. His irony is couched in subtle sentences, so much so that the barbs may almost be missed by inexperienced readers. In The Merchant of Venice, he brings out an interesting difference between the merchant class and the aristocratic class, as exemplified

by Antonio and Bassanio respectively. Bassanio’s background is made clear by lines like “[Bassanio] had spent all his rich inheritance and was drowning in a sea of debts” (50), and “Maybe it was not an enterprise that a sober merchant would have embarked upon, but it seemed proper for a youth like Bassanio, who was made, not for trade, but for love.” (51). It becomes immediately clear that Bassanio belongs to the careless aristocratic class while Antonio is a hardworking businessman. Antonio’s sorrow for Bassanio’s lack of capital is portrayed ironically thus: It grieved the good merchant to see the carefree young man grow grey and pinched for the want of so mean a thing as money.

(50, emphasis added) 96

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Their lives are shown to be completely different, and hence their attitudes are also different. But they are essentially from the same strata of society, a strata determined by ethnicity rather than class; a strata from which the Jew, Shylock, is barred despite his wealth. The difference is visible in the territories inhabited by Antonio and Shylock – the former stands in “the bright air…full of the winks and chinks of smiling money” (49) as opposed to Shylock’s place of business, which is: In a narrow street, where the water ran dark and crooked between high weeping walls, and little barred windows, like imprisoned eyes, stared dully down...

(54, emphasis added) This gloomy description is that of a Jewish ghetto, and its sordid state is used both to create an atmosphere of evil around Shylock and to show the desperate conditions of Jews in Europe. Garfield, himself hailing from a Jewish family, knew and sympathized with the ostracism the community had faced for centuries in Europe; and his version of The Merchant of Venice handles Shylock’s character with sensitivity.

Shylock hated Antonio because The merchant lent money without interest and so brought down the cost of borrowing in Venice. Money was the Jew’s only commodity, and the Christian undermined him. The Christian could make money out of trade; the Jew, by Venetian law, could only make money out of money. Take away his money and you take away his life.

(55, emphasis added) Garfield brings a twentieth-century understanding to Shylock’s immense hatred for Antonio. He explains the practical reasons behind the Jew’s hard bargains as arising from the meanness of the Christians rather than entirely his own nature. His suffering after Jessica’s elopement is that of a grieving father rather than that of a miser: 97

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The Jew, his eyes all red from weeping, glared at the Christian gentlemen, in whose contemptuous smiles he read, all too easily, mockery for his loss. His daughter was gone, and they laughed at him. Such a daughter, they jeered, was too good for such a father to keep…The money-lender glared around him with such ferocious distress and such ancient anguish, that the brightly hovering world of Venice seemed to shrink and tremble. Shylock went on, his voice as raw as the shrieking of sea birds: “Hath not a Jew eyes? ...” Shylock stopped, panting from his exertions. To the relief of Antonio’s friends, a messenger came…The lookers-on shrugged their shoulders and strolled away.

(65 - 66, emphasis added) Garfield thus transforms an individual’s anguish into the reaction to the repression of an entire community that was often treated contemptuously by Europeans; Shylock becomes the prototype of a battered and ‘ancient’ race, maltreated by uncaring Christians. His future actions are justified, or at least made understandable, by his present distress.

Garfield’s authorial interpretation is also found in the meticulous cataloguing of the different kindnesses demonstrated by Gloucester and Cornwall’s servants in the scene after Gloucester’s blinding in King Lear. He contrasts the gentleness of the servants with the cruelty of the masters, calling into question the issue of ‘natural’ behavior of the classes.

“Hold your hand, my Lord!” cried out a servant, scarce able to believe what his master had done. The duke turned on him. They fought. The servant wounded his master; then paid for his brave humanity by losing it. Regan stabbed him from 98

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behind... [Gloucester] was led away, and servants, out of sight of their mistress and master, soothed his bleeding face with whites of eggs, and gently bandaged over his horrible lack of eyes […]

An ancient countryman, a tenant of the earl’s, saw him fumbling the air, and was at once filled with pity. He took him by the hand and led him away from the castle. Gloucester begged him to go away, for he feared that any who helped him would suffer for it, even as he had suffered for helping the King.

‘You cannot see your way,’ answered the ancient one, as if that was reason enough for setting pity above common sense. So they wandered on, the tenant carefully keeping his blind lord out of the ditches…

(14 – 15, emphasis added) The humanity of the servants is set in contrast to the ruthless ‘common sense’ of their masters. Though the Duke’s servants are too frightened to help Gloucester before getting ‘out of sight of their mistress and master’, they are more compassionate than Gloucester’s own son was towards him; and the old tenant and the first servant never heeded the repercussions before assisting a helpless man. The royal couple bloodthirstily and cowardly blinds an old man while he is tied up, and a stranger from the servant class lays down his life for him. The contrast is obvious.

Another of his intriguing inclusions is the ‘Induction’ scene in The Taming of the Shrew, which few adaptors keep on, let alone describe so extensively. He remains faithful to the framework and personalities bestowed upon the characters by Shakespeare himself, but adds his special wit in order to present a transformation which 99

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showed to the Elizabethan world (and to countless theatre-goers and readers since then) the impracticability of swapping one’s social standing.

Garfield explains how Christopher Sly “…was offered all manner of delicate things, quite unsuited to a tinker’s tastes” (166, emphasis added), and was given a talk on “Apollos and Daphnes and suchlike, which were all Greek to Sly.” (166) Interestingly, the converse situation is also included in the very same play, and the social swap of Tranio and Lucentio is carried out without anyone noticing the exchange; thus proving the common humanity of man, irrespective of class.

He writes in detail about Prospero’s threat to Ariel in The Tempest to trap the latter in the oak, though he justifies it slightly by mentioning beforehand that when Prospero had freed the spirit from his imprisonment in the cleft pine, he had demanded twelve years of absolute obedience in return. “Ariel’s service still had two days more to run” (27), and therefore, his attempt to be released before the agreed time was unjustified and deserved reprimand. Similarly, he describes Adam’s role in every detail in As You Like It (74, 77), and contrasts his loyalty against the false sycophancy of courtiers with their “mask of smiles” (72). Garfield is one of the rare adaptors who give the sub-plots of the Touchstone-Audrey and Silvius–Phebe romances with detailed descriptions. They all belong to the lower classes except for Touchstone, whose ‘courtier’ mentality is amused at the idea of marriage with someone as unsuitable as Audrey.

Both he and the ‘Lord’ in The Taming of the Shrew attempt to elevate someone beyond their class, and both see the futility of this action. One of the best portions of the story is the scene where the three wanderers meet Corin for the first time: “Holla, you clown!” called out Touchstone, with a courtier’s contempt for simple countrymen who were little better than the beasts they tended.

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“Who calls?” asked Corin; and he stared in wonderment as the trees disgorged themselves of strange fruit indeed: a haughty jester, a lady dressed as a shepherdess who, he would have taken his oath, had never tended sheep save with a knife and spoon, as mutton, and a swaggering young huntsman with villainous sword and fearsome spear, whose complexion was as soft as a flower.

(77, emphasis added) The ways in which people from different classes view each other are shown here as laughably similar. Both view the other’s world with incredulity, and some degree of ‘contempt’. In spite of such varying outlooks on each other and life in general, they come together out of necessity, and waive their personal views regarding the other section of society. Corin settles to work for a master and mistress, who know nothing of shepherding, for a better salary; the others also embrace the country life as being essential for their escape; and all except Touchstone appear to revel in the idea of their new calling in life. The switching of class for personal benefit is seen as painless in the cases of almost all comers to Arden like Rosalind and Celia, Orlando and Oliver, the Duke Senior, and his band of courtiers.

Conclusion Adaptors add their personal touch and ideas to an established entity like the Shakespearean plays through the contemporaneous sociohistorical contexts seen in the tales themselves, to mould Shakespeare’s works for the consumption of the young. Scrutinizing these adaptors’ works shows how their writing styles and selection of materials for dissemination are influenced by the social concerns and points-of-view prevalent in their times. Such adaptations help a literary tradition to continue into the next generation, while helping the readers to see beyond 101

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the plot and canon to the matter contained within the plays according to the expectations of their respective societies. Hence, the books are often rooted in their particular period of history while gaining new meanings through the eyes of different generations of readers.

Works Cited Garfield, Leon. Six Shakespeare Stories. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1988. Print.

Garfield, Leon. Six More Shakespeare Stories. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1994. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 (2005). Print.

Lamb, Charles and Mary. Tales from Shakespeare. New Delhi: Rupa, 1807 (1980). Print.

Myers, D.G. “The New Historicism in Literary Study.” Academic Questions 2 (1988–89): 27-36. Print.

- “Race”. The Chambers Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 1998. Print.

- “Race”. The Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 14. UK: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-war Britain.

New York: Athlone Press, 1997 (2004). Print.

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‘Nonsense’ as sense: Comic vision in two plays of Sukumar Ray Saurav Dasthakur

I shall begin by raising a simple question that might serve as a point of self-criticism, and then trying to partly answer the question by way of self-justification. In other words, the question is intended to serve as a critique of the kind of exercise exemplified by this paper, an exercise which is then defended. The question is: Why am I at all considering the literary works discussed in this paper as “children’s literature”? Neither the writer nor the reader in this particular case being a child, and nor the kind of reading of the works proposed here, I hope, being quite childlike, how do I justify the inclusion of this paper in an edited collection on children’s literature?

The question of authorial intention is long in the grave along with the dead author. Are not we, then, left with essentially two options of approaching a work of so called “children’s literature”? Either one approaches the work with the presupposition that she is dealing with a work of children’s literature, and reads the text accordingly, or one reads them with an open mind, so as to keep oneself prepared for the possibility of ending up questioning any essentialistic generic labelling/ pigeonholing. Taking the second approach–that is, acting as a resisting reader who refuses to submit to any a priori generic/cultural 103

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expectations-would actually imply reading all texts as open texts capable of endlessly re-locating or re-positioning themselves in terms of generic nomenclature or any other kind of categorisation. Indeed, that is precisely the rationale I can provide to partly justify my ascription of ‘adult’ meaning to works of art widely considered to be works of children’s literature.

Not only, thus, is the text born in the process of reading, but also the reader is embedded in the kind of reading ascribed from outside to the text. The reader thus is as much a discursive construct as reading, and the child in the genre of “children’s literature” is an equally elusive, or at any rate, an unstable entity. As Jacqueline Rose argues in The Case of Peter Pan, ‘there is no child behind the category of “children’s fiction”, other than the one the category itself sets in place’ (Rose: 10).

It is only through this kind of an apologia that I can pave the way for myself to be able to question the dominant Bengali critical tendency of associating the term ‘nonsense’ with the creative works of Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), a Kolkata-based poet, writer and playwright in the first two decades of the last century, widely considered the greatest writer of ‘nonsense’ literature–and arguably of children’s literature at large–in Bangla.1 Meetings of the Nonsense Club–an intimate and informal cultural organisation Ray founded with family members and close friends–were the occasion for reading out and performing several of his poems and plays. This is one of the reasons that readers across generations have been misled to unproblematically associate his poems and plays with the category of nonsense.

That most of such works–especially poems–would later be published in the children’s magazine Sandesh, founded by Ray’s father Upendrakishore Ray Choudhury and subsequently edited for a considerable period of time by Ray himself, only strengthened the logic 104

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behind such an association. Now, interestingly, the two plays I would discuss in this paper–Chalachitta–Chanchari (an untranslatable nonsense title), and Shabdakalpadrum (The great ancient philological tree)–were neither written to be staged by the Nonsense Club, nor published subsequently in Sandesh.2 And yet, curiously, to date, even after some scholarly interventions challenging the tradition of (mis)interpretation of Ray’s works over the last two decades or so, they are usually approached and invariably published under the rubric of “children’s literature.”3 And, thus, in a culturally symptomatic fashion, far less critical attention has been devoted to Ray’s works than they really deserve.

It is beyond the scope of this paper, of course, to engage in any discussion of the politics of such convenient categorisation and resultant domestication of the possible subversive potentials of Ray’s works. I shall only observe by way of a passing remark that such eloquent cultural strategies of foregrounding and silencing only betray the power of the site of children’s literature to act as a ‘medium’ for adult people’s dialogue with the self, or the various modes of self-fashioning they ceaselessly engage in–individual, communal and cultural. The fringe status of a discourse is often reflective of its power of political intervention. Surely one of the reasons behind the broad Bengali tell-tale critical amnesia regarding Ray’s creative corpus is his famed inexhaustible playfulness, passion for mirth and joviality, incredibly rich resourcefulness in inventing games, funny ‘nonsensical’ situations and apparently meaningless linguistic disorders, and above all refusal to submit to undesirable or authoritative seriousness, in real life as well as in textual practice. That such energetic and indefatigable indulgence in the non-serious has a strong misleading capacity, at least so far as the reception of his literary works is concerned, is evident today. One important way in which Ray’s works, including those I am concerned with in this paper, reflect his 105

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actual passion for the playful. The aim of this paper is to show how the comic elements in the two plays mentioned are used for some serious purposes, to interrogate certain dominant ideologies of his time and thus are part of Ray’s ideological vision. It seeks to explain how Ray employs humour as a strategy of critique of certain discursive practices prevalent in the Bengali urban middle class life in the late colonial period.

For this purpose I shall draw on Northrop Frye’s theory of the comic as expounded in his Anatomy of Criticism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘folk laughter’or what he alternatively describes as ‘carnival laughter’, elaborated in his Rabelais and His World.

The late nineteenth early twentieth century India witnessed the production and circulation of a flurry of discourses in its socio-politicalcultural life. Two of the dominant ideologies of the time, imperialism and nationalism, fought to take control over the Indian psyche through a politics of foregrounding and silencing on the one hand and modes of subversion of that politics on the other. The imperial project of establishing all-round hegemony over the indigenous subjects by effecting a combination of coercion and consent manufactured through production of discourses, behind the facade of reformation and ‘redemption’ of the ‘barbaric’ masses was often countered by the dominant nationalist discourse of ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ Indian subjecthood. The negotiation of such immensely problematic questions as those of ‘modernity’ and ‘nationhood,’ ‘identity,’ the desire to preserve and reconstruct the ‘ideal’ Indian self in an age of inevitable hybridisation and colonial cultural onslaught took place within a complex discursive field fraught with several contradictions. Pseudo-intellectualism and production of hollow rhetoric was one of the means to elide such contradictions in a section of the urban educated middle class of the time.

Such rhetorical practices revolved around two dominant discourses of the time among others the discourse of science on the 106

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one hand and that of ancient Indian scriptural and philosophical wisdom on the other-which often came to be associated, in a crudely reductive fashion, with two value-systems, worldviews and even civilisational ideals competing for supremacy in the colonial world. If the discourse of science assumed symbolic significance to represent the West, colonial modernity, English education, material progress in a world of increasing opportunities and also cultural displacement in the Indian context, ancient Indian (Hindu) scriptures, treatises and philosophy were made to represent the East, Indian identity, native tradition and heritage, a Sanskrit-based pedagogy, and cultural rootedness often at the cost of material sacrifice.

The binary oppositions were not absolutely free of moral implications, with a strongly scientific bent of mind suggesting to the orthodox Indians a passion for rampant ‘amoral’ westernisation. Not only did these discourses assume great political significance in the conflict of the imperial and nationalist ideologies, they also accrued around themselves an aura of discursive power, a stamp of authority for the indigenous middle class mind. Employment of pseudo-scientific or pseudo-philosophical language and rhetoric devoid of any substance often lent positions, persons, perspectives and discourses an air of power and authority.

Such a practice of valorising the form without content, ‘shape without form, shade without colour’ was profoundly reflective of the colonial culture that reduced many an indigenous persons and positions into a ‘paralysed force, gesture without motion’ (Eliot: 77). My contention in this paper is that Ray critiques such hollow discourses of high-seriousness and positions of power and authority, some peculiar products of colonialism in the indigenous culture, through an extensive use of various modes of ‘folk-laughter.’ Folk laughter in its different 107

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forms, according to Bakhtin, challenges the idea of the permanence of prevailing systems and hierarchies and in the process it also foregrounds the transience of all accepted ‘truths’ and authorities.

Bakhtin describes medieval folk laughter as ‘the social consciousness of all the people’ (Bakhtin: 92). The paper would seek to trace how this ‘social consciousness of all the people’ operates through certain marginal voices in two plays of Ray and what aesthetic and ideological significance it had in and outside the textual universe, at a critical phase of Indian history.

Northrop Frye’s idea of the ‘comic’ mode in Anatomy of Criticism includes an obvious ideological dimension. The textual employment of the ‘comic’ for Frye has extra-textual, sociological significance. Not only does he understand ‘the theme of the comic’ as ‘the integration of society’ (Frye: 43); further he goes on to emphasise the radical potential of the comic text, which, he argues, depicts ‘the movement from one kind of society to another,’ the ‘new society . . . frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual’ (163). Such an understanding of the comic mode as charged with almost a revolutionary possibility echoes Bakhtin’s conception of ‘folk-laughter.’ For Frye, the source of much of the comedy in the comic mode is ‘usually someone with a good deal of social prestige and power, who is able to force much of the play’s society into line with his obsession. Thus the humor is intimately connected with the theme of the absurd or irrational law that the action of the comedy moves toward breaking’ (169). In Ray’s ChalachittaChanchari hybrid English-educated urban middle class intellectuals like Janardan, Nikunja, Ishan, Satyabahan,Srikhanda and so on, who indulge in a ceaseless production of hollow, nonsensical pseudo-scientific and pseudo-scriptural serious rhetoric, pretending to effect a constructive synthesis of the East and the West, indigenous antiquity 108

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and alien modernity, enjoy such ‘social prestige and power.’ The sombre gravity and grandiloquence of their ostensibly meaningless utterances create an air of absurdity and irrationality that serves as an important source of laughter in the play. In Shabdakalpadrum the source of absurdity and irrationality is the pompous Guruji who embodies the powerful indigenous middle class impulse of uncritical valorisation of the ‘glorious’ ancient Indian philosophical tradition as a means of ‘preserving’ and reconstructing Indianness in the face of cultural colonisation of the native mind.

An equally interesting transportation of Frye’s idea into the present context could be done through the invocation of what Frye calls ‘the contest of eiron and alazon’ (172). Frye describes the alazons, or ‘the humorous blocking characters of comedy,’ as ‘nearly always impostors, though it is more frequently a lack of self-knowledge than simple hypocrisy that characters them’ (172). Hardly can one think of a more apt description for the powerful characters in both the plays.

The secret of their power is their ability to dabble in, however superficially and insubstantially, several hegemonic discourses of the time–the English language, Anglocentric discourse of Science and the ‘authentic’ Indian Sanskrit-based tradition of philosophy and spiritualism. They are certainly no less than intellectual impostors, but then so far as their words and activities are less exclusively individual than symptomatic of a broad collective tendency at a particular critical phase of Indian history, it seems it is more ‘a lack of self-knowledge than simple hypocrisy that characters’ these impostors. And the social critique of the two plays revolve around two of the most remarkable eirons-self-deprecators-in the history of Bengali “children’s literature,” Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar. Indeed, it is these two humble, self-deprecating characters, by way of acting as the authorial spokespersons, who deflate from the margin all serious discourses and pompous high rhetoric of the alazons.

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And it is their humble marginal character as well as location within the dramatic design, their crisp use of a mundane language and idiom of profanity, their unselfconscious ability to insert banality into discourses of verbosity that act on the one hand as source of the ‘comic’ in the plays and as powerful means of social critique on the other.

Bakhtin’s idea of ‘folk-laughter’ can here supplement Frye’s idea of the eiron for us to understand the nature of humour and its ideological significance in the two plays. On the occasion of his discussion of folk humour in a specific tempo-spatial context, namely, Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Bakhtin comments on the general nature and sociological significance of laughter: The serious aspects of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with violence, prohibitions, limitations and always contain an element of fear and of intimidation... Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used for violence and authority.

(Bakhtin: 90) Folk laughter has a distinctive communal character in which everybody laughs and is reduced to an object of others’ laughter. The aim of such laughter is pure fun and not sneering at or ridiculing other individuals, except in case of satires directed at institutions, with authorial consent. ‘Carnival laughter,’ as Bakhtin defines it, is, first of all, a festive laughter. . . Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay creativity. (11) 110

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Folk-laughter destroys the seriousness of atmosphere created by authoritarian discourses to sustain a hierarchical social structure. It challenges the ‘aura’ of all pompous high rhetoric, and thereby brings things down to a ‘profane’ level and draws attention to their transient and mutable nature. As Bakhtin suggests, folk-laughter is marked by an ambivalence by which it creates as well as destroys, glorifies and degrades at the same time. This is precisely how it subverts the existing power structures: This experience, opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretence at immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, undefined forms. All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of the prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (a l’envers), of the ‘turnabout’, of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. (10-11) Folk-laughter in its different forms thus challenges the idea of the permanence of prevailing systems and hierarchies and in the process it also foregrounds the transience of all accepted ‘truths’ and authorities.

The democratic atmosphere created by carnival laughter is similar in spirit to Bakhtin’s idea of ‘dialogism’ or ‘polyphony’ that challenges any hierarchy between different languages, voices, perspectives and the narrator and characters in a work of art. ‘Polyphony’ creates an atmosphere of play of equally empowered voices and discourses. The challenge and ridicule inherent in the carnival spirit of folk-laughter aimed at the serious ‘monologic’ discourses of powerful institutions 111

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that strive to perpetuate the existing power-dynamics, therefore, voice the destabilizing desire of the marginal space.

The comic in the two texts apparently lacks the communal character and the carnival spirit that are essential features of folklaughter. Indeed, the characters within the dramatic world do not laugh at all; they either keep on erecting the edifice of inflated high rhetoric with utmost seriousness, or demolishing such constructions with an absolutely straight face. And yet the carnivalesque atmosphere is created in them through the deflating and ‘uncrowning’ presence of the two marginal figures-Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar-who unwittingly expose the hollowness and the authoritarian desire of the high discourses in the plays. They are simple, honest, unpretentious fellows who are conscious of their foolishness and even idiocy. All they do is to unintentionally misinterpret the nonsensical high rhetorical discourses and give them, again unintentionally, some simple but unmistakable twists, thereby liquidating the authority of certain dominant discourses and causing laughter in the audience. The audience is almost invited to participate in the narrative of the plays. And this is precisely when the carnivalesque moment is born: laughter without malice or any interpersonal misgivings is created with a clearly iconoclastic social intent. Humble and selfdeprecating eirons challenge and dismantle the authoritarian impulse not in alazon individuals but of discourses. If Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar are sneered at within the narrative, they reduce those sneering at them to objects of the audience’s laughter at the level of the metanarrative. They parody, travesty the others’ pomposity without any avenging spirit, and do so in a constructive fashion, albeit unknowingly.

Hierarchies, thus, are subverted, without being followed by new hierarchies.

The serious discourses of prestige and power in contemporary Bengali and Indian urban middle class life, the discourses of ‘Western’ 112

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science and ancient Indian wisdom, are couched in the plays in an appropriately grand language and pompous idiom. An almost inscrutable, deliberately jargon-oriented English is used as the language of science–probably in mimicry of the western use of the classical Latin in this sphere–and a sophisticated, Sanskritised vernacular is the medium of representation of the ‘authentic’ Indian discourses of ancient wisdom. Names of western scientists and philosophers of authority and meaningless terms like ‘ayaskandha-paddhati,’ ‘lokashta-prakaran,’ ‘sinnex cosmopodia,’ ‘pulse extracyclic equilibrium and the negative zero’ (Ray: 87), ‘graduated psychothesis of phonetic forms’ (88) and so forth are dropped at the drop of a hat in Chalachitta-Chanchari. In contrast to such grand and elevated uses of language, Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar speak an ordinary colloquial language in an everyday folk idiom. Not only does the unpretentious and unheroic ‘realism’ of such language of the soil, by acting as a foil, magnify the artificiality and absurdity of the high rhetoric; it also mimics, negatively parodies, deconstructs and profanises the languages and discourses of power and thereby bring them down from their high pedestal. For example, Bishvambhar engages in a dialogue with Guruji in Shabdakalpadrum thus: Guruji: Be it the Vedas, the Puranas, Smriti, or Shastra, what are they? Only a series of sentences, nothing but a few words [shabda/ sound], aren’t they?... In the dawn of creation, when life, cause and sky were together on the verge of being, would creation come into existence without the great deafening primal sound ‘Om’? Sound is creation, sound preservation, sound is destruction. Why so many words? Why does Lord Vishnu carry the conchshell? Why does Lord Shiva play the vishan? Why does He sport the damaru? Why does Narad play the lyre on his way to heaven?... Think it this way, 113

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whatever you can conceive of is sound - the Shastras dictate that sound is the Great Being, Brahma Bishvambhar: The crackers our Matilal made the other day, oh-what great sound! Let me read out the poem I have written about it, shall I. (91) As in the example much of the folk-laughter in the two plays emerge from the congruent coexistence of two kinds of language–one being that of power and the other, more closely attached with the popular sphere, completely irreverent to such power.

Commenting on the ‘language problem’ of Europe in the Middle Ages, Bakhtin writes that ‘the line of demarcation between two cultures– the official and the popular–was drawn along the line dividing Latin from the vernacular’ (Bakhtin: 465). Gradually of course “the vernacular invaded all the spheres of ideology and expelled Latin. It brought new forms of thought (ambivalence) and new evaluations; this was the language of life, of material work and mores, of the ‘lowly,’ mostly humorous genres (fabliaux, cris de Paris, farces), the free speech of the marketplace” (465-66). In the colonial Indian context the problem of distribution and circulation of power along linguistic lines was even more complex. English was not merely the language of official and administrative life; it was the language of power for the hybrid, ambivalent, ambitious, upwardly mobile middle class. And the language of ‘official’ dissent, of ur-India, of the puranas and the shastras, embraced by another section of the same middle class, was Sanskrit, in circulation through a specific variety of the vernacular itself. Against these two ‘official,’ high languages were the languages of people, the ordinary folk vernaculars. Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar incorporate the folk vernacular in the two plays, and thereby successfully subvert the ideological dominance of the two ‘official’ languages.

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Bakhtin talks about the extensive use by Rabelais of various irreverent, ‘lowly,’ unofficial popular linguistic registers, like abuses, oaths, swearing, curses and so on, which together constitute what he calls the language ‘of the marketplace,’ the ‘peculiar argot’ (188) of the people. Bhabadulal and Bishvambhar do not use oaths, swearing and curses as such. But they do use abusive language about authority; Bhabadulal several times in the last scene of the play and Bishvambhar once, when he creates uproar among the disciples of Guruji by speaking of Guruji’s tail with a metaphorical intention (Ray: 89, 91). They challenge positions and languages of hegemony through disruption, distortion, being irreverent and prodigal about decorum of language usage, being supremely careless about hierarchies, order of things and discourses, and finally by creating disorder and chaos out of apparently immutable and ordered systems. One of the disciples in Shabdakalpadrum, Harekananda, expresses his displeasure at such attitude of Bishvambhar in the very first scene of the play: “Look, I don’t like this frivolity and ‘don’t care’ attitude. If you are not willing to revere anybody, please don’t bother to come here” (91). Carnival laughter thus challenges hierarchy of languages and voices and becomes instrumental in the introduction of a ‘dialogic’ practice at the level of narrative.

To conclude, Ray in the two plays rather cursorily discussed here, critiques a particular aspect of Bengali urban middle class intellectual and political life in the age of late colonialism, that might have validity also for other Indian cultures. His use of the comic mode, seen from a politically informed perspective, is geared towards playfully exposing the functioning of power in the world of discourses that assumed more than regional significance at this time. He was critical neither of the discourse of science nor of the discourse of ancient Indian philosophical-spiritual heritage. Indeed, as is well known, and as many of his works suggest, his was a robustly scientific 115

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and rational temperament, and being one of the most enthusiastic young leaders of the Brahma Samaj he internalised in his own way a deeply spiritual sensibility.

All he is critical of in these plays is the impostor culture of high seriousness that relegates both science and spiritualism to the level of hollow rhetoric divorcing them from their practical content. From a marginal, popular perspective that relies strongly on a destructive yet regenerative comic principle he lashes out at a cultural condition in which form, facade and words wield more power than content, substance, ideas and action. It takes a naive reading that segregates the texts from the context of their production, and refuses to question the dominant critical discourse of Ray being a writer of children’s literature alone, to misread the playful and so called ‘nonsensical’ nature of these works. Alternatively, the plays raise questions about any anesthetic perception or even validity of the generic nomenclature of “children’s literature.” They remind us all over again that after all ‘there is no child behind the category of “children’s fiction [or literature]”, other than the one the category itself sets in place’ (Rose 10) Notes 1. The translation of quotations from the Bangla originals is mine.

2. According to the bibliographical information provided in probably the most reliable and popular edition of Ray’s complete works till date, edited by Satyajit Ray, Ray’s son, and Partha Basu, Shabdakalpadrum, written in 1915, was published ‘much later’ in Alaka and Chalachitta-Chanchari, ‘written around the same time as the earlier play,’ was published after the author’s death in Bichitra in Ashvin, 1334 (Ray: 168). I have used this edition in this paper.

3. The most notable of such against the grain works is Shibaji Bandyopadhyay’s Gopal-Rakhal Dwandwasamas: Upanibeshbad o Bangla shishusahitya (Kolkata: Papyrus, 1991).

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WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965 (1968). Print.

Eliot, T. S. ‘The Hollow Men,’ Selected Poems. New Delhi: Rupa & Co. and Faber & Faber, 1992. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print.

Ray, Sukumar. Samagra Shishusahitya. Eds. Satyajit Ray & Partha Basu. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, Bangla 1383, ninth rpt. Bangla 1392. Print.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Revised edition. London: Macmillan, 1984 (1994). Print.

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Is Big Brother Watching? – State-Sanctioned Voyeurism Visualized in a Booker Contender: A Semiotic Analysis Anjali Pandey

“I ran past the CCTV camera. I let it snap me for luck.”

(Kelman, 2011: 261)

Neoliberalism and Construing Consensual State-Sanctioned Surveillance Very rarely does the world of young-adult fiction overtly venture into the arena of politics as it does in Pigeon English, a novel on the 2011’s Booker shortlist. Pigeon English is a young-adult, novel by British author Stephen Kelman whose critique of 21st century Big Brotherism while localized to British society has global implications for a technologically connected world increasingly premised on the state’s persistent encroachment into civilian domains. In a pithy comment, Klein (2007) wryly observes that “Surveillance is the new democracy” (11)an observation made in response to the increasing utilization of technology-toys of “mass surveillance” (Sumpter, 20011: 225) such as “virtual fences” (11) and “unmanned drones” (11) which in the name of so-called ‘border security’ continue to give free rein to what Klein (2007) calls an “invisible web of continental surveillance” (11). The 118

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eyes of Pigeon English are positioned precisely on this type of voyeurism- the state’s increasingly roving and presciently present cameras of surveillance. While the novel focuses on a number of other themes that are contemporary, the focus of this paper is on the theme and trope of state surveillance. Indeed, the state’s ever-increasing paternalistic, and often, patriotically framed (albeit, seemingly consensually-driven), yet nonetheless, surreptitious obsession with citizen-surveillance forms the main thrust of literary focus in Pigeon English. This trope of the visual-of seeing and being seen forms the thesis of the novel and is the subject of semiotic scrutiny in the current essay.

It is also not often that a young-adult novel uses pictures to evoke its meaning–a strategy of writing usually reserved for children’s fiction (Sipe, 2008). Consequently, the visuals in Pigeon English, have to be evaluated using a different semiotic eye. These picture-image conflations have to be subjected to discoursal scrutiny both for what they say, as well as for what they encode in terms of authorial intent.

After all, the first question for discussion in the appendix of this literary contender for Booker Prize prods readers in explicit ways to reflect on this unique literary feature. Visuality seems to serve a deliberative authorial outcome evident in the prompt below: 1. Pigeon English is written from an eleven-year-old boy’s point of view but is not a children’s novel. How do ‘adult’ issues appear? Discuss particular scenes and characters.

(Kelman, Reading Guide: 267) Pigeon English is indeed a sign of the times a literary foray employing hypervisuality and hypertextuality as both strategy and intent.

The end product is a literary semiotext (Baudrillard, 1983) of real ‘seeing’ subsumed in the service of ‘wasted’ state-sanctioned visuality–a 119

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metropolitan voyeurism of constantly watching without really seeing, the specific workings of which are outlined below.

In his astute analysis of the role of reality TV’s, “televised surveillance” (4) in naturalizing and legitimizing modern, Orwellianinspired, Oceania-like “submissions to surveillance,” (3), Couldry (2008), proffers astute exemplars of the manner in which state voyeurism forms a commonsensical feature of the agenda of western neoliberalism. As an example, he cites the convincing case of so-called “workplace surveillance used to monitor every aspect of performance” (6)-scenarios in which citizens ‘willingly’ permit the legitimization and “permanent possibility of surveillance” (6). Such active, micro-oriented corporate voyeurism used to “monitor every aspect of performance including the length of toilet breaks” (6) has become so “entrenched a practice” (Couldry, 2008: 6), as to instigate more pervasive deployments of macrooriented, state-spying. After all, more research is increasingly spotlighting other arenas of mass, government-sanctioned voyeurism. Take for example, the ever-pervasive reach of “electronic voyeurism” (Kemper, 2000: 9)-a novel, invention of workplace-oriented surveillance in which under the pretext of preventing “cyberloafing” (Kemper, 2000: 10), which employers increasingly insist accounts for “30 percent to 40 percent of lost worker productivity” (Kemper, 2000: 10), more corporations continue to use as legitimate pretext to sanction increasingly invasive acts of voyeuristic watchfulness.

In Pigeon English, the eventual utility of state-sanctioned surveillance even becomes the subject of a protracted debate between Harri, the immigrant-protagonist of the novel and his mother-a dyad which juxtapositions the innocence of a child’s ‘seeing’ against the jaded complacency of adult ‘blindness’.

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Mamma says the CCTV cameras is just another way for God to watch you. If God’s busy in another part of the world, like if he’s making an earthquake or a tide, his cameras can still see you. That way he can never miss anything.

Me: ‘But I thought God could see everything at the same time.’

Mama: ‘He can. The cameras are just for extra help.

For the places where the devil is very strong. It’s just to make you safer. (116) Allusions to ‘safety’ are not accidental in the dyad excerpted from the novel above. After all, it is such “protectionist discourse” (McDougall and Peim, 2007: 306) which continues to underpin the increasing argument for the encroachment of state-sanctioned voyeurism into everyday lives, particularly in neoliberal societies eager to utilize the alibi of ‘safety’ to further sanction increased “voyeuristic participation” (McDougall and Peim, 2007: 308) and camera penetration into everyday lives. That the London bombings, and the so-called ‘global war on terror’ (Pandey, 2012) constitute a key literary backdrop in the chronoscope of events which unfold in Pigeon English is immediately apparent.

Consider the following excerpt from the novel, in which Kelman in line with his overarching thesis of ‘exposed’ visuality, employs the vividness of synaesthesia as a literary allusion to the bombings. These visual tokenizations, however, are not cited as literary devices to break the monotony of text in the novel, but rather, serve to bear the burden of semiotic message–further tokenizations of the trope of constant, statesanctioned surveillance–of being “watched”, being controlled, and being contained. In a sense then, these visio-literary devices encode the duality 121

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of both ‘seeing and ‘being watched’, particularly in a post-bombing London of ‘imminent’ terrorist threats. After all, there is a protracted scene in the novel of an illegally ‘found’ Pakistani couple – no accident, about the nationality chosen for these ‘culprits’– (the local butcher, named Nish and his wife)- who are roughly carted off by the police (182) to the jeers of a by-standing fruit-seller’s taunts of: “Send him Home!” (182). We are told: “They locked up Nish’s van so nobody could get inside. Then they took Nish and his wife away. They put chains on their arms” (182-183). There are hints that it is their ‘illegal’ status which triggers this treatment. In a visually-rich scene textualized by the bystander witness–the eleven-year-old Harri–readers are given other vivid details: It was too late to do anything, they were already taking Nish away. He was shouting and screaming like an alien. He sounded mad. He didn’t want to go. The policemen were pulling him and pulling him but he was hanging on to his van.

He wouldn’t let go of it. They had to pull his fingers off. I could hear them breaking. […] Nish’s wife fell over. The policeman pushed her, I saw it with my own two eyes. Her shoe fell off. I picked it up for her. She was crying. Her toenails were painted red. They looked crazy and lovely. Her lips were red as well. There was meat everywhere. […] (182) Again, Kelman’s use of “multisensory” (Slattery, 2005: 122) descriptions is strategic rather than accidental. Allusions to the “red” of painted toe-nails and raw meat is not lost on readers. Eventually then, the act of looking exposes the duality of state-sanctioned acts of being watched. Here, then, we see the manner in which the so-called global war on terror, as construed by the Bush-Blair, transatlantic alliance (Pandey, 2012) of coalitionary politics (reminiscent of the generation 122

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prior-pairing of Reagan-Thatcher) creates a “form of socialism based on terror” (Cowley, 2010: 24) in which state-sanctioned surveillance under the guise of ‘security’ abolishes all “rights of civil liberty” (Dalvai, 2010: 394) eventually subjecting the populace to a surrender to the state’s “vague notions of regulation and citizenship” (MacDougall, and Peim, 2007: 310). After all, when the novel first opens, the young protagonist of the novel is quick to note of a policeman he sees at a crime scene: “We weren’t allowed to talk to the policeman […] I could see the chains hanging from his belt but I couldn’t see the gun” (3).

The relentless and numerous injunctions banning modes of behavior are encountered by the young Harri everywhere. Their visuality is carefully appropriated by Kelman in potent literary terms via a strategy of multimodal rendition. Soon, we witness Harri’s own slow ideological “buy-in”-the evolution of his own “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1984) into this bounded, sanctioned, visually-contained, and rule-bound world with its overt visualizations of embargo, prohibition and consequence. Harri gallantly refuses to buy pirated films because in his words: “If you buy a pirate DVD the money goes to Osama Bin Laden. We learned it at school” (251), yet another exemplar of how self-regulation, indeed, consent is manufactured when the state is not directly ‘looking’.

One could further argue that it is through such seemingly consensual acts of participant acquiescence that citizen surveillance continues to be legitimized in modern western societies. What is particularly fascinating is that even ironically subversive,” “voyeur drama” (Thomas, 2000: 56), or reality-TV-based shows such as Big Brother, authenticate western-sociopolitical values and dispositions of the need for example for: absolute control, team conformity, inauthentic authenticity, manufactured positivity, and most importantly, the primacy of individualization (Couldry, 2008: 10-11) in 123

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participatory democracies-all sociopoliticized values of socialistdemocracies that Stephen Kelman in this Booker contender puts under literary scrutiny.

In Pigeon English, a dystopian novel with its own Orwellianinspired “fusion of realism and satire” (Dalvai, 2010:388) then, the action unfolds in a post-London bombings metropolis consensually given up to such invisible totalitarianism-or what has recently been called a “paternalistic authoritarianism” (Cowley, 2010: 24) of an “overweening state” (Cowley, 2010: 23) which Kelman subjects to a literary selfreflexivity. It is no accident that Kelman’s own writing is itself a byproduct of such state-induced control. Proffering biographical details, Danford (2011) reports that “Stephen Kelman…discovered an upside to unemployment. After being “made redundant” at a job in local government administration, the 34-year-old inhabitant of Luton took six months to write a first draft of his debut novel” (124). So successful was the ensuing manuscript, that it launched a bidding war among 12 different publishing houses eager to secure rights to its publication (Aspden, 2011), some details to which we now turn.

The Booker Prize and Reception of the Novel Critics of the 2011 Booker Finalist List voiced their disappointment in vociferous terms at both the 13-authored longlist culled from 138 submissions (Flood, 2011: 10) as well as at the much anticipated, 6-authored shortlist in the literary race to what Bosman (2011) describes as “the most prestigious award for fiction in the English-speaking world” (3). The debate seemed to pivot around a single explosive word: “readability” (Flood, 2011: 10), a criterion which “so enraged pretentious folks” (Zipp, 2011: 1) as to prompt venerated Booker judge, Andrew Motion to go on record with the defense that this was “patently not 124

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true” (Flood, 2011: 10). It is not “readability” however, that really seemed to be the deal breaker, but narrative innovation. If literary prizes are meant for “novel undertakings” (Danford, 2011: 124) in the Booker world, the judges were indeed right to put Pigeon English on the shortlist. Far from being a “simplistic portrait of a kid’s life in the housing projects of London” (Adams, 2011: 34), this 21st century literary creation will likely go down as one of the more subtly complex exemplars of 21st century narrative invention-indeed confirming that in our current, hypermedia and hypervisual world, an innovative use of pictographic strategies, rather than mere textual writing, can serve to dually ‘draw’ reader-attention to the machinery of containment and control in the modern police-state-even in a novel seemingly targeted at the very young. The hypervisual world of both being watched and of watchfulness is inscribed via a duality of pictographic and textual means

by Kelman details of which are outlined below.

Pigeon English complete with its own discussion questions, chronicles the tragic tale of a young African immigrant (culled from a real life-story) of a pre-teen’s assimilation into a metropolitan London of socialized housing. As Jones (2011) reports, the seemingly fictitious plot which unfolds in Pigeon English is in fact adapted from nonfiction, from real London life.

It is transparently based on the story of Damilola Taylor, a bright-eyed, grinning 10-year-old in a school uniform, recently arrived from Nigeria, who bled to death in a Peckham stairwell in November 2000, after being attacked by a pair of 12-yearolds. (1) The eleven-year old protagonist, Harri, in Pigeon English, by the unfortunate circumstance of poverty is forced to both witness and experience the reality of metropolitan violence which surrounds him at 125

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every spatial turn, a ferocity which eventually claims his own life, and a tragic outcome occurring in spite of the plethora of CCTV cameras encircling the public housing complex where he lives in, and in whose dank stairwell he is ruthlessly murdered and left to bleed. This theme of pointless “watching” with no real “seeing” forms the main action of the novel–a trope further inscribed into the novel’s literary percale via salient pictographization strategies to which we now turn. Perhaps this is what explains the seemingly amorphous dedication: “For the traveler,” in a novel heralded by the potent and equally enigmatic epigraph by E.E. Cummings in the opening couplet which reads: I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

The Reality in Pictographization: Stating the Argument This paper contends that Kelman’s creative genius lies in his careful synergization of 21st century multimodality with textual variegation, indeed, a brilliant exegesis of blending and bleeding hypervisuality with hypertextuality. Kelman thus utilizes two levels of “projection resources” (Chen, 2010: 487) to construct his trope of ‘seeing’ versus ‘being watched’– a heteroglossic synthesis of literary strategies which exist both at the “level of lexciogrammar” (Chen, 2010: 487) as well as the level of lexico-semiotics–meticulous conflations of visual and textographic imagery. In the interests of space, the focus here is solely on hypervisuality. If Pigeon English convinces readers of anything, it is that Kelman is a masterful user of visuality as a narrative trope in and of itself. Via the use of ‘seeing’ strategies (pictographization) rather than just ‘telling’ strategies (textualization) Stephen Kelman, in Pigeon English, successfully inscribes at the very same time as he exploits multimodality to create a dual trope of active and passive visuality, of both ‘seeing’ and of being ‘watched’.

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Kelman’s intertextual strategies of narrative construction, while obviously simple and overt in their taxonomic variety, also function in subtly complex ways– inevitably entailing a covert, hybridized, tripartite synchronization of text-image conflations or “intertwinglings” (Slattery, 2005: 123) of picturized meaning including but not limited: “anchorage” (where the text elucidates the image); illustration (where the image elucidates the text) and relay (where the text and image stand in complementary relationship to each other) (Chen, 2010:497)–a revival of Roland Barthes’ rhetorical triumvirate of text-image workings. These three semiotextual strategies result in a literary product which visually, as it textually renders a scathing indictment of a post-empire city of emigrated colonized subjects in the ‘flat-world’ [pun intended] of an oppressively policed, and CCTV-wired 21st century London as visualized through the eyes of a ‘watched’ protagonist child-one, who like most in this century ‘sees’ his world, near and far in pictures, either viewed through his eyes, or through a pair of camouflage-colored binoculars, whilst simultaneously recording of its visual details in and through textimage conflations.

Surveillance and Seeing: A Child’s View The “prohibitive” nature of a society under the constant surveillance of ubiquitously occurring CCTV cameras is surreptitiously, albeit relentlessly detailed by Kelman throughout Pigeon English. In a chilling foreshadowing of the novel’s focal intent, Harri’s friend, Dean, offhandedly comments: “Surveillance and evidence, it’s the only way” (61). The carefully pointed, and ultimately ‘pointless’ positioning of CCTV camera-lens which crowd Harri’s world, are indeed ‘noticed’ by him. Harri tells readers: 127

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[…] there’s cameras all over the place! There’s one at both ends of the shops and outside the newsagent’s. There’s even three just inside the supermarket just to stop Terry Takeaway stealing the beer.[…] If I go fast enough the camera can’t follow me…[…] We had to keep our backs to the camera until X-fire found a target. (116-117) That all these cameras are in fact blind to the real threats of safety forms a persistent semantic motif in the novel. When a neighborhood elder is attacked by gangsters and asks: “Will they be on CCTV?” (111), the response he gets from a neighborhood-child-already savvy to such wasted watchfulness is: “They’ll have covered their faces” (111)-caustically adding: “They’re ignorant but they’re not stupid” (111).

Even, a mere child like Harri, unlike the ‘watchful’ police is able to eventually spot the killer of the murdered-child found outside his flat, a chilling episode which both opens and foreshadows the action to come.

Simulating the visuality of an opening scene in a slowly unfolding film, readers are first introduced to the novel’s protagonists in dialogic form, an illustrative effect enhanced via screenplay scripting, an innovative literary strategy used with consistency throughout the novel: You could see the blood. It was darker than you thought. It was all on the ground outside Chicken Joe’s. It just felt crazy.

Jordon: “I’ll give you a million quid if you touch it.

Me: ‘You don’t have a million.’

Jordon: ‘One quid then.’ (3) It is not just mounted cameras, but even higher-positioned helicopters which keep up the act of constant surveillance. Harri sees and hears their relentless whirring constantly. At one point, he tells readers: “The helicopters were out looking for robbers again, I could hear them far away” (24). Early in the novel, he confesses: “Some 128

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people use their balconies for hanging washing or growing plants. I use mine for watching the helicopters” (6).

Harri’s view is also at times aerial. He sees his world first through his bare eyes from the balcony of his 9th floor flat where he watches “the car park” (24), and at one point, actually ‘sees’ the killer hide the murder weapon. Harri thus becomes the ultimate visual witness in the novel. He tells readers: “He pulled something from under the bin. […] I only saw it for one second but it had to be a knife.” (25). He is quick to add: “The helicopters didn’t even see him. They didn’t follow him or anything, they were too high up” (25). Later, Harri gets technical help for his close-up shots at ‘seeing’. He wins a pair of binoculars with a carnival-bought raffle ticket. “I looked at the whole world through them. They made everything close” (108-109), he excitedly tells readers.

The trope (Hebron, 2004) of ‘looking’ is both literally and figuratively forgrounded in the novel. In Harri’s race to search for clues to the murdered boy’s death, he zooms in on his own world realizing that through these powerful binoculars-like CCTV cameras, “Nobody knows we are watching them” (154). He continues with: “Especially with the binoculars you can see things you don’t normally get to see” (154)-a foreshadowing of the novel’s ultimate message-the close-up, accurate, zoomed-in world of a child’s sightedness as contrasted against the missed, blurry and ultimately, downright blindness, of aeriallymounted, CCTV-lens of adulthood. When a neighborhood thug smashes Harris’ binoculars to pieces, he declares with weighty words: “Without the binoculars I’m just a civilian again” (180)-a poignant claim alluding to the increasing powerlessness experienced by a citizenry subjected to the mass voyeurism of the modern socialist state. After all, the gestaltlike, bookcover of the British-edition of the novel, potently draws readers’ attention to the overall trope of sightedness and aerial voyeurism encoded 129

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in the novel (see, Figure 1 below). While some critics have argued that the weakest passages in the novel include: “the protective pigeon’s portentous prose” –a literary “misstep which falls flat” (Aspden, 2011: 39), the current paper urges for a reading in which it is the ‘watchfulness’ of a higher power–symbolized in the form of a presciently- present pigeon whose aerial positionality really ‘sees’ everything– a type of vision which Kelman seems to insinuate, we as a society can ultimately only truly rely on.

Visual Anchorage One of Kelman’s most creative of intertextual strategies is of anchorage (where the text illuminates the image (Chen, 2010). Consider for example, Kelman’s astute use of capitalizations to visually render an obvious ‘boundary line’ when the novel first opens. Once again, simulating the visuality of a slowly unfolding opening scene in a watched film, readers confound the gruesome imagery of a murdered boy lying in his own congealed pool of blood. Harri tells readers: You wanted to touch it but you couldn’t get close enough.

There was a line in the way: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS If you cross the line you’ll turn to dust. (3) The textographic use of both capitalizations and spatial centering to create visual “salience” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006: p. 201-203) in a bid to both construct, as well as draw readers’ attention to the presence of a visual boundary as ‘sighted’ and understood by a child is particularly effective on the part of Kelman in the opening pages of Pigeon English. This textographic device simultaneously serves to foreshadow Kelman’s semantic focus on ‘seeing’ vs. ‘watchfulness’ 130

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as well as draws reader-attention to the dichotomy between watchfulness and its enforcement particularly as this pertains to visually recognizable ‘lines’ of state control. The literary trope of being ‘watched’ is further culled in and through an equally potent appropriation of multiple ‘sightings’ of restriction-a textual use of capitalizations meticulously centered on the page to simulate the visuality of prohibitive interruption, at the very same time as it serves as an obvious reminder of the modern, neoliberal state’s persistently injunctive “notion of regulation and citizenship” (McDougall and Peim, 2007: 310).

Consider another example: Kelman’s use of this strategy to encode the oppressively rule-bound society which Harri inhabits, a world in which visual prohibitions constantly bar, ban, forbid, and ultimately contain his actions. Harri recounts his first encounter with this visually proscribed world, and his peers’ meager attempts at defiance: The shopping center doors open by magic. You don’t even have to touch them. There’s a big sign with all the rules written on it: NO ALCOHOL NO BICYCLES NO DOGS NO SKATEBOARDS NO SMOKING NO BALL GAMES Underneath the real rules somebody has written a new rule in pen: NO FUGLIES A fugly is a girl who always wants a baby from you. Dean Griffin told me about them. (29) 131

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If Stephen Kelman uses the visuality of capital letters to encode state-sanctioned prohibitions, he manages to use the strategy of listing, evoked via lower-case lettering, to encode the role that other statesanctioned instruments of socialization (Bourdieu, 1984) such as schools, play in re-coding such obedience. Harri, in his role as “protagonist witness” (Clark, 2011: 10) is careful to list the visuality of these ubiquitously sighted prohibitive injunctions designed to instigate “selfregulation” (McDougall and Peim, 2007: 310) which surround him at every spatial turn. It is no accident that the school rules are stated not via capital letters, but in lower-case format, a hyponym of sorts in the grand scheme of institutional control, spanning those seen at the mall to those glimpsed in those underscored in the school environs.

Some rules I have learned from my new school No running on the stairs.

No singing in class.

Always put up your hand up before you ask a question. (63) The list continues for another page, a litany of “Don’ts”, which while encoding all the preoccupations of a mere child also serve as a textualized commentary on the potent socializing force of schooling into the “habitus and dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1984) of mainstream society. The list ends with two outrageous ‘internalizations’ of a heterosexual society eager to marginalize the ‘other’ and to ‘out’ nonconformists. Harri’s two-page list of prohibitives soon moves from the realm of encoded injunction to school-induced, and child-internalized, conformism. Harri tells his readers: If he wears a pinky ring he’s gay If she wears a bracelet on her ankle she’s a lesbian. (64) Again, in a world in which all are constantly under surveillance, “viewer voyeurism” (McDougall & Peim, 2007: 308)–constantly being 132

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watched if you will–creates the necessary self-censorship in citizencontrol. Eventually then, what you “see” translates into what you are.

This simulation of a child’s world also serves as a commentary on the potent, socializing force of schooling (Bourdieu, 1984) into adultoriented values and beliefs. Harri is quick to describe a classmate in the following terms: “Altaf is very quiet. Nobody really knows him.

You’re not supposed to talk to Somalis because they’re pirates.

Everybody agrees” (52), yet another instance of a gradual buy-in of status-quo beliefs, and citizen self-regulation at work when the state is not ‘looking’.

Visual Illustration Perhaps the most unique of literary strategies is the manner in which Kelman uses seemingly child-like images or visual illustration to scaffold his textual thesis concerning the reach of state control even in the lives of its youngest of citizens. Harri tells readers: “There are warnings everywhere. They’re only there to help you. They’re very funny” (46). Readers are then treated to a meticulous pictographization of three of such signs which only add to “the interpretive possibilities” (Turk, 2011: 298) embedded in the text. The first ‘sighting’ appropriates a child-generated lexical item, “hutious,” to describe a sign: The big fence around the front of school has hutious spikes on top to stop the robbers climbing over. There’s a sign on the fence: (46) Readers soon “see” what Harris sees: (see, Figure 2)

Figure 2 (46)

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Like Harri, we ‘see’ the irony embedded in these prohibitions.

Harri describes yet other signs he sees around him: Asweh, its very funny. There are signs all over school telling you to turn off your mobile phone: (46)

Figure 3 (46)

With the material pressure to acquire such tech-tools, the irony embedded in a school’s meager prohibitive attempts is not lost on readers.

The novel is replete with countless clues to the larger metaphor of sightings, of seeing, and eventually of looking. We “see” how Harri and his child friends “look” for clues to “the murder weapon” (98) in a bid to eventually solve the crime that the adult, and ultimately, inept London police are unable to solve [perhaps in their hasty bid to round up illegals]?

“Come on, man, keep looking” (98), urges Jordon, Harris’ crime-solving partner, a literary maxim which soon acquires double-entendre.

Parody via glyphization The visual signs, guiding and constraining Harri’s behavior soon take on an ironic twist, a parody of intertextuality in which “imitation characterized by ironic inversion” (Hutcheon, 2006: 6) forms the main thrust of the narrative sequence. We see “an integrated structural modeling of the process of revising, replaying and transcontextualizing” (Hutcheon, 2006: 11) the visuality of a child’s ‘sightings’ as contrasted against the incompetent apparatus of state surveillance. The first parodying occurs via visualization. Harri remains perplexed by another sign which he describes in the following terms: 134

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There’s a sign next to the playground: (98)

Figure 4 (98)

Harri is quick to comment: It doesn’t even tell you what the question is. You just have to say no to whatever they ask you. (98) We see a further parodying of this injunction-oriented, and rulebound metropolitan world inhabited by Harri which contains a river filled with pollutants. Harri tells readers: The river is behind the trees. It’s only dark. It’s too small for swimming and the water is acid…. You can just sit there and watch all the things in the river go past.

It’s usually just sticks or cans or paper. (47) Once again, we see how the machinery of citizen self-regulation is constructed, how in fact, the manufacturing of consent works. It is within such a context that readers are given the following visual ‘warning’ whose irony is not lost on readers. Harri tells readers: “We found another crazy sign by the river. We love that sign. It’s our new alltime favorite.” (47).

Figure 5 (47)

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There is a similar use of inter-referentiality-”a discursive process through which intertextual chains are produced” (Parkison, 2009: 136) in which the visuality of seeing is contrasted against watchfulness via a re-referencing of a previously ‘sighted’ sign in the form of -a hypermedia-culled “glyphization” (Hyman, 2006: 231; Lacefield 2009) of semiotic signs already ‘sighted’ by readers. We therefore ‘see’ once again, the visual which fences in Harri from real safety, in a scene when he is being chased down by neighborhood thugs. He tells readers: “I stopped at the sign” (148), just as readers ‘see’ the sign. Again, the use of the visual permits for an immediacy, the possibility of reader presence in the unfolding scene. We feel as though we are right there ‘watching’ his entrapment.

Figure 6 (148)

Harri continues with the narrative: “I waited for Dizzy to catch up to me. I held the fence like I was a prisoner” (148-149). This recoding of an already ‘sighted’ pictographic image simulates the “personal branding” (Delo, 2011: 68) so rampant in the “thoughtcasting” (Croal, 2008: 56) of current hypermedia-culled discourse.

Visual Relay-Pictographization via Peritextualization The third of the semiotic strategies Kelman employs with literary efficacy is of relay where text- image conflations complement each other. Immediately apparent in the novel is the use of the strategy of peritextual signification (Pandey, 2011) - a multimodal strategy in which

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Kelman augments both his narrotological, as well as his thematic signification of ticking time, in a novel ultimately structured as a simple ‘whodunit-type’ of suspense story, and encompassing what one critic describes as a “pacy plot” (Jones, 2011: 1), and yet another, “a murdermystery of sorts” (Aspden, 2011:39). Kelman adopts a narrative style that is episodic, what Turk (2011) defines as a “reportorial style which creates the illusion that events are being narrated in an unselective way” (304) when in reality they are being chronologically rendered.

How does Kelman achieve this one might ask? He does it via visual means, through peritextual pictographizations which carefully create what Lambert (2009) calls a “cliffhanger continuity” (4) in the text. Via the use of visual ‘meme-like’ picturizations (Hyman, 2006) complete with their own hypertextualized labeling, readers soon realize that the school- term which forms the time tapestry on which the action unfolds in the novel, is ultimately drawing to an end. Kelman achieves narrative suspense via a visual forefronting of month-long installments of time carefully coded and visualized in the narrative, albeit as innocuous peritextual (Sipe, 2008) ‘sightings’ by the reader.

These visual “markers” of time in the novel (see, Figure 7), then become a way to chronologically connect Harri’s ‘disconnected’ musings. For readers, it is clear that the novel encompasses a chronological time-frame, the flow of a spring term into the impending summer. Immediately apparent, are the multimodal signpostings of time rendered through child-like pictographizations (see, Figure 7 below), and labeled via “textual teasers” (Lambert, 2009: 10) of chronoscopic time, the passing of the months of: March, April, May, June and finally, July. Again, these visual signs, far from being child-like details included to break up the monotony of text, serve to augment Kelman’s ultimate thesis regarding the wasteful watchfulness of surreptitious, state-

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sanctioned surveillance, and its visual discovery or ‘seeing’ on the part of its youngest.

March

April

June

May

July

Figure 7 (2; 49; 106; 151 & 218)

Also apparent is the careful labeling of each of these images on Kelman’s part. The role of such “labeling” confirms an “interpolation of the authorial presence so as to assert or insist upon the value or warrantability of the proposition” (Martin and White, 2005: 128)—an assertion both of a literal meaning (the passage of time) as well as a symbolic meaning (a reassertion of the trope of aerial watchfulness) on Kelman’s part. This innovative use of “hybrid spaces” (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 434) in which to engage in “creative improvisation” (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 434) on Kelman’s part, confirms yet another manner in which his use of text-image conflations renders a unique “semiotic mode” (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 434) of meaning potential in the realm of young-adult fiction.

Like everything in the text however, these drawings while reminiscent of childhood, are not intended to portray child-like content.

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An analysis of the significations soon reveals that the image of the finger print, or even the silhouette of a CCTV camera, are adult in semantic import. Eventually then, all five of the images: the plane, the finger-print, the camera, the view of the sea, and finally the pigeon (the moniker of the novel) conjure at the very same time as they corroborate a trope of aerial watchfulness, a ‘seeing’ from above constructed via an innovative use of “text and genre chains which induce thematic intertextuality” (Shegar and Weninger, 2010: 437). Inevitably then, Kelman’s “intertextings are co-thematic” (Torr, 2007: 87). These “peritextualizations” (Sipe, 2008: 134) impel in readers a renewed attention on the “focal text” (Torr, 2007: 78) which both precedes and succeeds each of these visual significations, and only adds to the suspenseful import of the unfolding plot. The semiotic effect is potent.

As one critic notes: “As this charming boy gets closer to a solution, readers will feel their adrenaline start pumping hoping Harri will succeed and remain safe” (Kempf, 2011: 85). He does not however remain safe. The novel ends on the last day of school-right before the summer holidays, with the repeat of another killing of a child, this time, the protagonist–a bookending of violence which serves to signpost Kelman’s ultimate thesis.

Narrative Timely-ness: Why is Kelman’s Multimodality Important?

The last words out of the dying Harri’s mouth in Pigeon English are visual. He ‘sees’ an image as he lies bleeding to death. While a seemingly simplistic overgeneralization- “All babies look the same” (263), this candid, textually-rendered claim is predictably Kelman’s ultimate indictment as to the cruelty of a cosmopolitan London unwilling to recognize such sameness, that all babies are indeed the same.

Kelman’s pictographizations in Pigeon English are intentionally stylistic, 139

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a means to add “new resonance” (Sârghie, 2010:106) to his writing, and form a new “third space” (Levy 2008) in which to invent. The analysis thus far points to an interpretation in which pictographization, like other forms of intertextuality, is “not merely decorative addition to a text, but sometimes a crucial factor in its conception and composition” (Lodge, 1992:102) and one might add, in its reception.

After all, the novel has been marketed astutely all over the world, and already comes “packaged with reading group discussion points” (Aspden, 2001: 39). Why such an unusual marketing strategy, particularly for a novel bound for the Booker List? Pigeon English in its debut weeks alone saw “sales in seven countries world-wide” (Danford, 2011: 124). While it is hard to speculate as to the actual literary intent behind Kelman’s choices, what is significant is the novel’s portended shelf life, (it has already been adapted into filmic form on British TV). Part of the reason for this portended literary longevity rests in Kelman’s use of literary intertextuality, a device which only heightens the realm of interpretive possibility embedded in the novel for a 21st century audience already reared on such multimodality. Pigeon English is in effect likely to impel a new kind of “readerly activity” (Turk, 2011: 296) in a generation of readers already weaned on hypervisuality. The current generation of readers already expects to encounter ‘dialogic’ engagements with the texts they ‘read’. As a “transformative text” (Turk, 2010: 296) then, Pigeon English, affords particularly younger readers unique interpretive possibilities, even prodding them as to the “necessity of reading differently” (Turk, 2010: 296) especially in a ‘Kindle-oriented’ world of literary discovery in which “reflexivity and intertextuality create a self-referential cycle” (Sharma and Philip, 2010: 114) of literary potential and where “these readerly activities make for an especially high level of audience participation amounting to a coconstruction of the text.” (Turk 2011: 296).

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Kelman’s pictographizations, indeed his visuality, is likely to trigger literacy encounters in young readers, which induce novelty in the reading encounter, and prompt a new kind of readerly interpretation in young readers, which is not surprising since as Torr (2007) rightly notes, making “semiotic intertextual connections requires considerable experience with written and visual texts” (90). That the novel overtly prods its readers into a self-reflexivity about its own intertextuality is most apparent when we examine the discussion questions which the novel already comes prepackaged with. Question 7, for example, asks readers: “Harri makes lists and diagrams to explain what he has learnt about his new life in the UK. What effect do his explanations have on you as a reader?” (Kelman, 2011). The novel urges its readers towards a ‘new’ kind of reading, and ultimately towards a new kind of ‘seeing’. Is it any wonder then, that some critics predict that Kelman’s debut novel “will be read by millions who have never read a book review and in a year or so will be a fixture on the school English syllabus” (Jones, 2011: 1).

Conclusion The current paper has examined the manner in which the sociopolitical machinery of “the apparently consensual regime of neoliberalism” (Couldry, 2008: 12), as played out in modern Britain, is both experienced and critiqued by the young protagonist hero of immigrant roots in Pigeon English. In the novel, the invisible totalitarianism of state-voyeurism in 21st century London forms the backdrop of literary critique on the part of Kelman, as does the verisimilitude of its unforgivable failing and eventual inability at keeping the youngest of its citizens really safe. Pigeon English is a timely, 21st century young-adult novel both on a thematic and stylistic level. So, far from being a platitudinous, even idiosyncratic synthesis of visual and 141

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verbal detailing, Stephen Kelman delivers a novel worthy of plaudits, an intentional, stylistic ‘picto-texting’ of meaning-what Torr (2010) describes as “semiotic intertexting” (86), to render a literary-scape in which textuality and visuality both incarnate and synchronize the twin acts of ‘seeing’ and being watched. The recent resolution of the reallife, racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence by a British gang, and the subsequent inability of the British police to convict the obvious murderers (even exculpating the real criminals at one point), in an ‘investigation’ taking over 18 years to solve (Muir, 2011: 1), makes Pigeon English a relevant novel for the times.

The novel’s focal emphasis on individuated ‘seeing’ and its concomitant ‘watchfulness’ or sightedness, when contrasted against the institutionalized voyeurism of wasted, state-sanctioned surveillanceblindness, is forefronted by Kelman, via a plethora of innovative, intertextual and pictographic means, semiotextual strategies whose textimage conflations are co-thematically recoded as anchorage, illustration and relay (Chen, 2010) with consistency in the novel.

Kelman’s creative delineation of the duality of active watchfulness with its passive, more sinister state-sanctioned equivalent: “watchedness” in effect, impels in readers a co-construction of textographic rendering of ‘seeing’ versus being ‘watched’ in a hyper-CCTV-wired cosmopolitan metropolis of 21st century migration. Eventually then, the novel employs a modern, hypermediated, texto-visual narrative lens to both film and photograph a cosmopolitan city’s blind spots in a bid to deliver its own scathing indictment of a 21st century, multicultural metropolis of postempire emigration, in which ‘looking at’ citizens trumps ‘looking out’ for its young—a society in which ubiquitously occurring, aeriallymounted, CCTV cameras fail to spot what even ground-level placed children can so clearly ‘see’.

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That such pervasive control is not just a feature of Britain, but elsewhere, is noted by Klein (2007) who chronicles the increasing trend towards so-called “integrated security” (11) such as for example, plans even in the US “to link thousands of CCTV cameras on streets , subways, apartment buildings and businesses into networks capable of tracking suspects in real time” (11)—a plan of action also ushering in a new trend of what Sumpter (2011) labels an Oceania-like use of “warrantless spying” (207) in which “discreet GPS mobile tracking devices” (208), are increasingly being employed for the explicit purposes of remote monitoring and “persistence surveillance” ( 222) of citizens on the part of the police. It is this type of increased voyeurism pervasively becoming entrenched in the modern, policestate which constitutes the focus of Stephen Kelman’s literary lens— a strategy in which visuality is used to ‘draw’ reader-attention to the inherent blindness on the part of citizens to the visibly-invisible wastefully-watchful cameras of state-surveillance already positioned at every spatial and electronic turn.

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McDougall, J. N. Peim. "A Lacanian Reading of the Study of Big Brother in the English Curriculum." Changing English 14.3 (2007): 299-312. Print.

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Contributors KAREN LEGGETT ABOURAYA Karen Leggett Abouraya is an award-winning radio and print journalist, currently writing for Voice of America, International Educator and other publications. Broadcasting on ABC Radio in Washington, D.C., for many years, she frequently focused on education and children’s literature. A past president of the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C., her reviews of children’s books have appeared in the New York Times, Baltimore Sun and online. She graduated from Brown University and has worked, traveled or studied in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East – especially Alexandria, Egypt, her husband’s hometown. Abouraya is the coauthor of Hands Around the Library: Protecting Egypt’s Treasured Books. She has two adult children, lives with her husband in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, where they are actively following and participating in the historic Egyptian elections.

DEEPA AGRAWAL Deepa Agrawal is the author of over fifty stories, novels and picturebooks for the young as well as fiction and poetry for the adult audiences. She is known for her strong female characters and for a concern for gender equality. Her books include Anita and the Game of Shadows, A Capital Adventure, Three Days to Disaster, and Not Just Girls! Agrawal’s series books are among the most widely circulated children’s books published in India. Five of her books have been listed 148

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in the White Raven Catalogue. Ashok’s New Friends received the N.C.E.R.T National Award for Children’s Literature in 1992-93, and Caravan to Tibet was chosen as the best book from India for the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Honour List in 2008.

ERNEST BOND Ernest Bond served as the guest editor for this volume of the Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies. Bond is the Chair of the Teacher Education Department and Professor at Salisbury University (Maryland, USA). His publications include Literature and the Young Adult Reader, Interactive Assessment (with Tierney et al), and a chapter in Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter. He has been honored with the Regent’s Award for Teaching Excellence (University Systems of Maryland) and US Professor of the Year - Maryland (Carnegie/CASE). Bond has also served as a jurist for the Green Earth Book Awards, Outstanding International Books for Children, and the Hans Christian Andersen Awards.

SAURAV DASTHAKUR Saurav Dasthakur teaches English literature and culture in the Department of English and Other Modern European Languages at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. His areas of interest include Postcolonial Literatures, 20th Century English Literatures, Translation Studies and Literary Theory.

SUSANNE GERVAY Susanne Gervay is an Australian author who is widely published in literary journals and anthologies. She has written for a variety of ages. I Am Jack, a rite-of-passage book on school bullying and the first 149

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book in a series, has also been adapted into a play. Gervay’s literature for young adults includes Butterflies, The Cave, and That’s Why I Wrote This Song (coauthored with her daughter Tory). Her work appears in the anthologies, Peace Story and Fear Factor Terror Incognito. Ships in the Field, her first picturebook, was published in 2012. Gervay is a leader in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Australia, and Chair of the Sydney Children’s Writers and Illustrators Network.

MARY GOVE Mary Gove is an associate professor at Cleveland State University, Ohio USA. She is the author of Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, which has been used in university classrooms for twenty years. Her present research interests include teachers’ perceptions of the effects of No Child Left Behind legislation on classroom teaching in the USA and ecological critical literacy. Gove teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses on Literature Based Reading Instruction and on Literacy Research.

JEN CULLERTON JOHNSON Jen Cullerton Johnson is the author of fiction and creative nonfiction for literary journals and magazines. Johnson holds a MFA in Non-Fiction from the University of New Orleans, a MEd in Curriculum and Development from Loyola University of Chicago, and is an Illinois certified teacher. Her non-fiction children’s book Seeds of Change about the life and work of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Wangari Maathai, received the Green Earth Book Award for children’s nonfiction. Johnson often speaks about Green Literacy and the role of environmental books for children and adults at diverse venues from the Environmental Protection Agency to the International Reading Association. Jen is also 150

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a founding member of MuseWrite a literary arts organization based in Chicago. She lives and teaches in Chicago, Illinois.

ANITA MISRA Anita Misra did her M.A. and M.Phil courses from the University of Hyderabad. Her thesis dealt with Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Works for Children (2011). She currently serves as a Junior Lecturer in English in Dhenkanal Government Women’s (Jr.) College in Odisha, India.

RAJA MOHANTY Raja Mohanty has written and illustrated ten books, many of them made by his own hand. His works are diverse, including adaptations of Chekhov’s stories, collaborative work with traditional visual artists, and “silly tales” for children. He teaches courses in design and visual arts at IDC, IIT Bombay and is involved in several projects on Indian art and cultural traditions. Mohanty is also a film-maker and Art Director for ZED TV with fifteen years experience in the field of visual communications. He is a PhD Research Scholar, MSU Baroda (- Master in Design, IDC,) ANJALI PANDEY Anjali Pandey is a Professor in Applied Linguistics at Salisbury University (Maryland, USA). She holds a PhD. in Applied Linguistics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, M.A. in TESOL from University of Illinois at Chicago, and B.A. in Linguistics from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Her current research encompasses issues related to linguistic disempowerment in film, transnational literature and popular culture using a critical discourse analysis framework. Her latest book: Manufacturing Linguistic Insecurity on the Silver Screen is due to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press. Anjali’s background straddles three continents: Africa, Asia and North America.

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SUSAN L. ROTH Susan Roth is the author and illustrator of many books for children, including the best-selling Listen to the Wind and My Love for You. Her most recent book -- The Mangrove Tree:Planting Trees to Feed Families (with Cindy Trumbore) received the Green Earth Book Award in children’s nonfiction, the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction, and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; it has also been named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book and a Best Children’s Book of the Year by Bank Street College of Education. Roth’s books, with their lyrical writing and trademark collage art, frequently introduce children to unheralded heroes whose accomplishments have improved the lives of others. Her “Let’s Hold Hands” paper dolls have been made in Pakistan, Ghana, Bolivia, Russia, Dominican Republic, Italy, Kenya, Japan, Australia – even in the great library in Alexandria, featured in Hands Around the Library, which she co-authored with Karen Leggett Abouraya. Other honors include New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year, American Booksellers Association Pick of the Lists, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.

She has three grown children and lives with her husband in New York City.

ELLEN HANDLER SPITZ Ellen Handler Spitz is a writer, lecturer, and scholar. She currently holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She attended Barnard College (A.B.), Harvard University (M.A.T.), and Columbia University (Ph.D.) She is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as books including Art and Psyche (Yale University Press, 1985), and Inside Picture Books (Yale University Press, 1999). She has taught and/or lectured in England, France, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain,

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Russia, Canada, India, and the Peoples Republic of China. Her areas of research explore the cultural lives of young people, the relations between aesthetics and psychology, and interconnections among various art forms.

PAUL ZACHARIA Paul Zacharia is a groundbreaking Malayalam short story writer, novelist and essayist. Born in Urulikkunnam in Kottayam district in Kerala, India in 1945, Zacharia lives in Trivandrum. His first collection of short stories was published while he was still at college. Since then, five volumes of his short stories, a novella and a collection of essays have been published. He is considered to be one of the most important Indian writers living today and his writings have been translated into numerous languages. Zacharia’s narratives are considered unconventional in style and theme, and marked by a deep sense of humor. His novella, Bhaskara Patelum Ellarum (1992), has been made into a movie by the renowned film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan.

Zacharia received the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for his short stories in 1978, the Katha Award for Creative Fiction in 1993, and the Katha Award for Translation in 1995. As a socially and politically committed and engaged writer, his opposition to political forces have often involved him in controversy and pushed him into the media spotlight.

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Call For Papers The editors invite submission of manuscripts for the third issue of Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies. Manuscripts should not exceed 5000 words. This is a peer reviwed journal with an ISSN number, MLA indexing and it has an international board of editors. The journal does not pay the contributors. Authors will receive a complimentary one year subscription to the journal.

Preparation of copy: 1. Type all copies double spaced, allowing two-inch margins at the top and bottom of page with generous margins on sides. Type in Ariel font 14. Please be sure to number your pages.

2. Use the MLA style sheet (7th edition) for documentation. Please give endnotes (not footnotes); the superscripts for endnotes should be in Roman numerals.

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Send images as separate files.

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