Our Common Earth - International Board on Books for Young ...

Feature Articles: Our Common Earth: The Local and Global Flow of Narrative in A River of Stories • Heal the World, Make It a Better Place • The Child-Poet Gwen Cope in the Land of “Australian Faery” • The Mountain and the Devil: Fake Lore or Folklore? • Paranoid Prizing Children and Their Books: The Power of Caribbean Poetry • Flying to Pick Blueberries

Vol . 51, No.1 J A N UA RY 2 013

Editor: Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta—Augustana Faculty (Canada)

Address for submissions and other editorial correspondence: rharde@ualberta.ca

Bookbird’s editorial office is supported by the Augustana Faculty at the University of Alberta, Camrose, Alberta, Canada.

Editorial Review Board: Peter E. Cumming, York University (Canada); Debra Dudek, University of Wollongong (Australia); Libby Gruner, University of Richmond (USA); Helene Høyrup, Royal School of Library & Information Science (Denmark); Judith Inggs, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa); Ingrid Johnston, University of Albert, Faculty of Education (Canada); Shelley King, Queen’s University (Canada); Helen Luu, Royal Military College (Canada); Michelle Martin, University of South Carolina (USA); Beatriz Alcubierre Moya, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico); Lissa Paul, Brock University (Canada); Laura Robinson, Royal Military College (Canada); Bjorn Sundmark, Malmö University (Sweden); Margaret Zeegers, University of Ballarat (Australia);

Board of Bookbird, Inc. (an Indiana not-for-profit corporation): Valerie Coghlan (Ireland), President; Ellis Vance (USA), Treasurer; Junko Yokota (USA), Secretary; Hasmig Chahinian (France), Angela Lebedeva (Russia)

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Production: Design and layout by Bill Benson, Texas, USA Printed by The Sheridan Press, Hanover, Pennsylvania, USA

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature (ISSN 0006-7377) is a refereed journal published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, and distributed by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4363 USA. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland, and at additional mailing offices.

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IBBY Executive Committee 2012-2014: Ahmad Redza Ahmad Khairuddin (Malaysia), President; Linda Pavonetti Vice President (USA); Hasmig Chahinian (France), Vice President; Marilar Aleixandre (Spain); Gülçin Alpöge (Turkey); Nadia El Kholy (Egypt); Kiyoko Matsuoka (Japan), Azucena Galindo (Mexico); Angela Lebedeva (Russia); Akoss Ofori-mensah (Ghana); Timotea Vrablova (Slovakia), Voting Members; María Jesús Gil (Spain), Andersen Jury President; Elizabeth Page (Switzerland), Executive Director; Ellis Vance (USA), Treasurer; Roxanne Harde (Canada), Bookbird Editor.

IBBY may be contacted at Nonnenweg 12 Postfach, CH-4003 Basel, Switzerland, tel: +4161 272 29 17 fax: +4161 272 27 57 email: ibby@ibby.org <www.ibby.org>.

Bookbird is indexed in Library Literature, Library and Information Abstracts (LISA), Children’s Book Review Index, and the MLA International Bibliography.

Cover image: Cover image of A River of Stories courtesy of Jan Pieńkowski. Jan Pieńkowski, born in Warsaw in 1936, went to the UK in 1946. He was educated at Cardinal Vaughan School, London, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and English. He has written and illustrated over a hundred children’s books and won the Library Association Kate Greenaway Medal twice. He is currently working on theatre design.

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The Power of Caribbean Poetry: Word and Sound Morag Styles | 51

Flying to Pick Blueberries: Two Preschoolers’ Literary Encounters with other Cultures Virginia Lowe | 60

Reading Camp: Children from the Bahamas Develop a New Appreciation of Children’s Literature Joyce Armstrong | 67

Editorial

Introduction

A River of Stories Alice Curry and Lydia Kokkola | iv

Our Common Earth: The Local and Global Flow of Narrative in A River of Stories Alice Curry | 1

Heal the World; Make It a Better Place: Social and Individual Hope in Indian Children's Cinema Jayashree Rajagopalan | 10

“She flings her elfin dreams of mystery”: The Child-Poet Gwen Cope in the Land of “Australian Faery,” 1931–1939 Nicole Anae | 20

The Mountain and the Devil: Fake Lore or Folklore? A Wonder of the World in South African Children’s Literature Tanya Barben | 31

Paranoid Prizing: Mapping Australia’s Eve Pownall Award for Information Books, 2001-2010 Erica Hateley | 41

Belonging and Differentiating: Aspects of New Zealand National Identity Reflected in the New Zealand Picture Book Collection (NZPBC) Nicola Daly | 73

The Triumphant Return of the Dodo: Emergent Children’s Literature in Mauritius Sandra Williams | 80

The Growth towards a Truly African Quality in South African Children’s Literature Jean Williams and Jay Heale | 87

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Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature by Mary Shine Thompson Anthony Pavlik | 94

A Made-Up Place by Anna Jackson, Geoffrey Miles, Harry Ricketts, Tatjana Schaefer, and Kathryn Walls B.J. Epstein | 95

Seedlings: English Children’s Reading and Writers in South Africa by Elwyn Jenkins B.J. Epstein | 97

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights by Robin Bernstein Samantha Christensen | 99

Dogodogo: Tanzanian Street Children Tell Their Stories by Kasia Parham Lilian Vikiru | 9

To chamogelo tis Semelis [Semeli’s smile] by Marina Michaelidou–Kadi, illus. by Constanze von Kitzing Christina Christodoulou | 19

The People from the Sea by J.O. de Graft Hanson Rose Austin | 40

Adventure at Brimstone Hill by Carol Ottley-Mitchell Nahdjla Carasco Bailey | 59

That Boy Red by Rachna Gilmore Karyn Huennemann | 66

Yellow Mini by Lori Weber Sylvia Vardell | 72

Focus IBBY | 103

Editorial

I am pleased to present Bookbird 51.1, the first of 2013’s two guest-edited, themed issues of IBBY’s journal. This year, IBBY celebrates its 60th Anniversary. This organization of more than

70 national sections all over the world has come a long way since its remarkable founder, Jella Lepman (1891–1970), invited delegates to Munich to attend International Understanding through Children’s Books, the meeting that eventually led to IBBY’s foundation in October 1953. This issue of Bookbird has been prepared in collabo-ration with another well-established organization: the common-wealth Educational Trust (cET), which shares many of the same goals as IBBY. Like IBBY, the cET is an international organiza-tion of people who are committed to increasing the opportunities for children to develop the critical thinking, empathy, and cultural literacy essential for a child to thrive in today’s societies. By bringing books and children together, both organizations aim to promote international understanding and responsible citizenship.

The expertise and energy guest editors Alice curry and Lydia kokkola have brought to this issue, and Bettina kuemmerling-Meibauer is bringing to the Multicultural issue (Summer 2013), ensure these issues will resonate with the journal’s international audience. And their collective and individual work on and for chil-dren’s literature has had me thinking about all the members of our global community who work with children and their books. Like A River of Stories collected by Alice for the cET, Bookbird brings together people with diverse backgrounds, from disparate cultures, and a variety of disciplines. I hope you enjoy this issue which, thanks to Alice and Lydia, brings together work from across the commonwealth, from people who dedicate their effort and talent to this discipline and its audience.

Bookbird Editor

Roxanne Harde is an Associate Professor of English and a McCalla University

Professor at the University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty. She studies and

teaches American literature and culture. She has recently published Reading the

Boss: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Works of Bruce Springsteen, and her essays have appeared in several

journals, including International Research in Children’s Literature, The Lion and

the Unicorn, Christianity and Literature, Legacy, Jeunesse, Critique, Feminist

Theology, and Mosaic, and several edited collections, including Enterprising Youth

and To See the Wizard.

Dear Bookbird Readers,© Jan Pieńkowski

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EdITORIAL

Bookbird Guest Editors

Lydia Kokkola is Professor of English and Didactics at Luleå University of

Technology, Sweden. Her main areas of research are English as a Foreign

Language, Second Language Acquisition, Holocaust Fiction, Trauma Fiction,

Adolescent Sexuality, Advanced Literacy Skills, and Ekphraxis.

Alice Curry is an Honorary Associate of Macquarie University and the Children’s Literature Advisor to the Commonwealth Education Trust, for whom she compiled

and edited A River of Stories. She is currently working closely with educators to produce a blended media education

package to support learning about global issues of sustainability and culture.

The commonwealth—a voluntary organization of fifty-four countries with a shared set of values and an equal standing in the commonwealth, irrespective of size or GdP—is remarkable for the diversity of the countries it encompasses. From the tiny island of nauru in the Pacific, with an estimated population of around 10,000 people, to the sprawling Indian subcontinent with a population exceeding 1,186 million, the commonwealth includes a spectacular range of religions, geographies, climates, and languages. Each country has retained a unique storytelling tradition despite the colonial history these nations share, and this issue of Bookbird celebrates this mix of indigenous, colonial, and commonwealth values.

The commonwealth Education Trust (cET) began in 1886 as part of the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee that were to take place the following year. Her son, Edward, Prince of Wales, was personally involved in raising funds to establish an Imperial Institute that would unite the peoples of the Empire through education, research, and related activities. The majority of the £426,000 raised came from ordinary people living in towns and villages across the Empire. In the 125 years since then—from the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria to the diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II—the Empire has given way to a

Introduction: A River of Storiescommonwealth of nations, and the Institute is now the commonwealth Education Trust.

Over half of the commonwealth population is under twenty-five, which is why the cET is committed to funding research in education and the benefits that such an education can bring to communities worldwide. The Trust’s change of name has signaled a significant policy shift. Over the years, the original Institute had become decid-edly inward facing, with a large physical presence in the Uk. The cET is more outward facing in its promotion of education throughout the coun-tries of the commonwealth. Two of the papers in this issue of Bookbird showcase recent activi-ties in which the cET has been engaged, both of which call upon the dynamic story traditions of the commonwealth.

The cover illustration by the award winning illustrator Jan Piénkowski is taken from A River of Stories, an anthology of poems and stories from across the commonwealth compiled and edited by Alice as part of the cET’s 125th anniversary. Last year, Judith Hanratty OBE, the chairman of the cET, Jan, and Alice were delighted to be invited to Buckingham Palace to present this collection to Her Majesty the Queen for inclusion in the Royal Windsor Library. The anthology’s theme of water draws on the idea that the world’s waters connect nations yet, as Alice also explains

Introduction

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in her article, water is a precious resource, and the anthology has a strong ecocritical focus. The cET is now working with experts in new Zealand to develop accompanying teachers’ materials to address these global issues, with the aim that A River of Stories can become a useful learning resource for children in schools throughout the commonwealth.

The other cET project we showcase in this issue is from Morag Styles, Professor of chil-dren’s Poetry at the University of cambridge where the cET has established a centre for commonwealth Education. In our children and their Books section, Morag introduces us to the caribbean Poetry Project, which is a collabora-tion between poets, teachers, and scholars, as well as publishers and arts administrators in both the caribbean and the Uk. The project’s main goal is to bring children and the vibrant, dynamic poetry of the caribbean together, and it has already had some remarkable successes.

These two papers are specifically related to the cET, but reflect the same values and concerns as IBBY. Both organizations strive to promote inter-national understanding through children’s books and to ensure that children have access to books with high literary and artistic standards. To these ends, both organizations are also involved in the publication and distribution of quality children’s books, especially in developing countries. IBBY members are often teachers, teacher-trainers and/or academics concerned with the interface between children and their books, and the cET aims to stimulate such activities by providing support and training for those involved in educa-tion and encouraging the production of scholarly works in the field of children’s literature. With so many shared interests, a collaborative issue of Bookbird was a logical extension of the two organ-izations’ shared concerns. We were delighted by the response to our call for papers and believe that the result is a celebration of the diverse range of literatures and readers to be found throughout the commonwealth of nations.

As one of the ways in which IBBY dissemi-nates the collective interests of this diverse group of people, Bookbird provides a space where those who are passionate about bringing children and

literature together can meet. Except for congress Issues, which celebrate the host country’s litera-ture, the journal editors endeavor to include information about children’s books from at least three continents in every issue. This is not always easy, mainly because many of those who do exciting work with children and their litera-ture are either too busy to write up their daily activities or are somewhat daunted by the task of writing in English, or both. With the aid of the cET, we were able to contact people who would not otherwise have thought to write for Bookbird. And we are more than a little pleased that this issue contains texts from or about Africa, Asia, the caribbean, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, north America, and Oceania. not all the articles that were submitted and passed peer review could fit into this issue, so they will appear in future issues of the journal.

We have letters from Mauritius by Sandra Williams, from new Zealand by nicola daly and from South Africa by Jean Williams and Jay Heale, introducing us to the varied literatures of these nations. The complex history of these nations as they shifted away from their colonial past to form independent nations is reflected in their literature for children. Williams and Heale’s general overview of South African literature is complemented by an article from Tanya Barben in which she examines a variety of stories depicting one of South Africa’s most iconic landmarks: Table Mountain. Her article traces stories from as far back as the sixteenth century, and in doing so reveals a landscape and stories that bring people together.

This connection between landscape, nation-hood, and children’s literature constitutes a domi-nant theme throughout the issue. There have recently been several book-length publications on this topic and reviews of those from South Africa, Ireland—with a part-commonwealth and part non-commonwealth identity—and new Zealand are included in our reviews section along with a study of race-nation tensions in American children’s literature and toys. With the overviews of national literatures found in the letters, these critical works share an interest in how children’s literature constructs a sense of nationhood. In our

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children and their Books section, Virginia Lowe addresses this same issue from a different angle: as a parent. Lowe is a mother from Australia who kept a daily journal of her two children’s engage-ments with literature for over five years. In the next issue of Bookbird, she describes this process of documentation in greater detail. In this issue, she explains how literature contributed to her children’s comprehension of nationhood.

Lowe’s parental insight into her children’s indi-vidual relationships with the books they read is an invaluable reminder of how idiosyncratic chil-dren’s responses can be. She also offers concrete evidence of how children’s literature can inform young people’s ability to think about the world they inhabit. This focus on education through literature is taken up by Joyce Armstrong as she describes a project combining literature and literacy in the Bahamas. The summer Reading camps Armstrong describes introduce Baha-mian children to picture books that engage with national characteristics and familiar themes, providing much-needed support for children who otherwise have little access to books. nation-hood, in this sense, becomes more than simply an acknowledgement of shared characteristics; it becomes a tool for improving reading comprehen-sion and enhancing literacy.

nationhood is further explored in the non-fiction Australian books examined by Erica Hately, the Indian children’s films examined by Jayashree Rajagopalan and the poetry, also from Australia, analyzed by nicole Anae. Just as Alice’s article on the local and global imagination in the commonwealth tales and poems of A River of Stories connects identity to landscape, these articles situate their exploration of nationhood within the geographies of Australia and India. Erica Hately’s study of prize-winning non-fiction pays particular attention to the Anzac figure (a soldier) and Aborginal culture in the presentation of Australian national identity. Jayashree Raja-gopalan’s article explores the ways in which the emerging genre of Indian children’s film constructs notions of national identity through child char-acters’ struggles against war, terrorism, religious intolerance, and alcoholism. These child charac-ters lead lives closely tied to their local landscapes,

and their struggles for freedom from violence and other social evils are undertaken quite literally “on the ground.” nicole Anae’s discussion of Gwen cope, an Australian poet from the 1930s, reveals a different view of children’s engagement with landscape. Gwen cope began publishing her fairy poems when she was just eight years old. Although not widely read today, cope’s poetry offers a child’s perspective on her landscape, and Anae’s discus-sion reveals how cope’s perspective was influ-enced by changing constructions of Australian identity in the poems of her adult contempo-raries. With postcards from five countries and four continents—St. kitts (caribbean), Tanzania and Ghana (Africa), cyprus (Europe), and canada (north America)—this issue is intended to take readers on a literary journey around the common-wealth. These snapshots of established and emerging literary traditions, brought together in one volume, provide an elegant metaphor for the commonwealth itself: a group of nations bound together by history yet flourishing in their indi-vidual children’s literatures.

We hope you enjoy this special issue and feel inspired to explore some of the national literatures we did not have space to include. The common-wealth Secretary-General, kamalesh Sharma, has labelled the commonwealth “a very diverse community” which—in its wholeness—can promote “great global wisdom” (Commonwealth). It is in this spirit that we bring you this common-wealth issue of Bookbird so that collectively we can rise to the challenge of increasing literacy, enhancing children’s enjoyment of reading and bringing more children and books together.

Works CitedTheCommonwealth.org. 5 Oct. 2012.

Websites for Further Reference:International Board for Books for Young People:

http://IBBY.org/The commonwealth Educational Trust: http://www.cet1886.org/A River of Stories: http://www.ariverofstories.com/The caribbean Poetry Project: http://caribbeanpoetry.educ.cam.ac.uk/about/

Literary studies are moving away from nationhood and towards the global. This move prompts Wai chee dimock to suggest that reading is a “global process” that turns literature

into “the collective life of the planet” (178). Globalization is rapidly changing the ways in which communities engage with their local landscapes; it is also changing the ways in which these landscapes are represented in literature for children. If dimock is correct in arguing that literature “holds out a different map, a different time scale, predating and outlasting the birth and death of any nation,” it is important to analyze how children’s texts represent such globality

Globalization is rapidly changing the ways in which communities engage with their local land-scapes; it is also changing the ways in which such landscapes are represented in literature for chil-dren. This article explores the tension exhibited by the Commonwealth Education Trust’s recent publication, A River of Stories (2011), between local and global understandings of human iden-tity. The collection’s focus on environmental crises invites an ecocritical reading. This article ques-tions whether the collection’s “common earth” motif masks social and environmental inequali-ties, or whether this motif prompts a collective understanding of environmental crises and a commonality of human response.

Our Comm

on Earth: The Local and Global Flow

arrative in A River of Stories

Alice Curry read English at Oxford University before moving to Macquarie

University in Sydney to complete a Masters and Doctorate in Children’s Literature, the latter of which is to be published in the “Critical Approaches to Children’s

Literature” series by Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interests lie in postcolonial and Commonwealth children’s literatures

and ecocritical theory.

by ALiCE CURRy

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OUR cOMMOn EARTH

(175). Ursula Heise (2008) uses the term “eco-cosmopolitanism” to describe the effects of globalization on humanity’s evolving relationship with place. As Greta Gaard (2010) and others have pointed out, however, an eco-cosmopolitan perspective can mask the social inequalities—centering on race, gender, class, sexuality and species—that jeopardize certain communities’ interactions with their local environment. The “contour lines” employed by cindi katz are more helpful in producing a “topography” of the land-scapes of children’s fiction (1229, 1228). Such a topography—or mapping of spatial features—

addresses the ways in which social practices relating to globalization underpin environmental representation. The question becomes: how can a text mediate between a sense of earth on a local level and the much larger and more encompassing “collective life of the planet”?

The commonwealth Education Trust’s collec-tion, A River of Stories: Tales and Poems from Across the Commonwealth, illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski (2011), takes the notion of a “collective life of the planet” as its starting point and embeds that point in its central motif: a river of stories flowing between commonwealth nations. Such fluidity is set against the abiding presence of a common earth, an earth that is not simply the only earth to which humanity has access but also an earth shared by all nations. In its focus on the natural world, and particularly the world’s waters, the collection reveals a preoccupation with story’s capacity to retain a localized sense of place while crossing national borders to reach a global child readership. The collection thus offers an alterna-tive reading of global expansion by envisaging it, not as a force driven by a free-market economy, or what Luke and Tuathail term the “friction-free

flows of commodities, capital, corporations, communication, and consumers all over the world,” but as a river of stories flowing freely across the globe (76). The collection’s “Foreward,” by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, makes clear that this local and global flow of narrative is offered as a response to the increasing pressures afforded by environmental crises, “from climate change to the depletion of natural resources and eco-systems, and from food security to unsus-tainable population growth.” The collection rests on the understanding that stories can affect “how we see our relationship with nature” and thus encourage us “to think about the kind of future” we wish ourselves and our descendants to inherit (“Foreword”).

The collection’s focus on environmental crisis invites an ecocritical reading, addressing the ways in which global concerns are mapped onto the local landscape. The tension between local and global exhibited by the collection raises an important series of questions. In a world in which

climate change disproportionately affects certain peoples and ecologies, does a common earth motif mask social and environmental inequalities under the banner of commonality? does such a motif free individual organizations, governments, or nations from responsibility for the earth’s care? A more pertinent question for this collec-tion, perhaps, is whether such commonality is a product of the same imperial ideologies that have resulted in a shared colonial history for a set of disparate countries ranged geographically across the globe? Such questions feed into katz’s delin-eation of “doing” a topography, which she defines as carrying “out a detailed examination of some part of the material world, defined at any scale

…how can a text mediate between a sense of earth on a local level and the much larger and more

encompassing “collective life of the planet”?

In a world in which climate change disproportionately affects

certain peoples and ecologies, does a common earth motif mask social

and environmental inequalities under the banner of commonality?

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from the body to the global, in order to under-stand its salient features and their mutual and broader relationships” (1228). To “do a topog-raphy” of A River of Stories is to map such “salient features” and to reveal the collection’s underlying preoccupation with the consumption, depletion and disposal of natural resources. The answers to the questions posed above—if answers are to be found—arise through contemplating the ways in which such an ecoconscious preoccupation can prompt a collective understanding of envi-ronmental crisis and a commonality of human response.

Fiji and Barbados: Consuming the Common Earth The fifty-four tales and poems of the collection are caught in tension between a local and global understanding of human identity. A bioregional focus on the local valorizes connections to partic-ular landscapes—the frangipani trees of Samoa, for instance, or the veld of southern Africa—and appears particularly attuned to the experiences of women and children. This local earth is one that encourages a felt and lived connection with the environment, circumscribing the human race within daily earth-centered rituals such as cooking (Malawi), cleaning (Tonga), bathing (Vanuatu), and collecting water (Botswana). It is an earth that retains voice and agency through the water gods (nigeria), ice kings (canada), river fairies (Uganda), and sea devils (Grenada) who manage

the world’s meteorological cycles and who advo-cate respect and reverence for the natural world. The traditional myths incorporated in the collec-tion embody unique and collective understand-ings of commonwealth landscapes and of the capricious workings of natural phenomena. These tales render the earth capable of performing as backdrop to the “collective life of the planet”

whilst still retaining its integrity. This attention to the local and particular is a response to the fragmentation or homogenization of identity often noted as an effect of global expansion.

The global earth, by contrast, is one that calls attention to the imbalanced distribution of wealth and privilege that results in non-western peoples and fragile ecologies bearing the effects of climate crises (Mies & Shiva). Friends of the Earth International defines “climate debt” as “a special case of environmental injustice” whereby industrialized countries accrue “ecological debts” as a result of over-consumption. These “debts” are brought to the readers’ attention in the tales that employ interlocking discourses of consump-tion and depletion to reveal the vulnerability of the poorest nations to environmental disaster. Awareness of the increasing fragility of much of

the developing world provides the darker antith-esis to the “collective life” understanding of a common earth. These tales are underpinned by an awareness of weakening relationships between humans and the earth and a fear that the natural world will demand retribution.

The tales in the collection from Fiji and Barbados—small island states suffering from rising sea levels—draw attention to the environ-mental consequences of resource depletion and human greed. Pleasant deSpain’s retelling of the traditional tale “cooking with Salt Water” from Fiji is set in a fictional time “long, long ago” when the Pacific islands were under the gover-nance of “the great chiefs Sun and Sea” (18). An old woman, Amara, learns that her village has run out of salt and leaves her mountain home to

The fifty-four tales and poems of the collection are caught in tension between a local and global understanding of human identity.

OUR cOMMOn EARTH

journey down to the sea to collect salt water in the hope that her cooking will be “the envy of everyone in the village” (18). Having collected a gourd-full of water on the high tide, Amara looks back at the sea from midway up the mountain and sees the water at its low tide level. Shocked

that her actions have caused the sea to shrink, Amara returns the “stolen” water and travels back to her village empty-handed (21). Exploitation of the natural environment—however trivial—is here envisaged as theft underpinned by human ignorance. Since Amara’s father died when chief Sea “swallowed him up” in anger, the capacity of the sea to consume or be consumed is central to this ideological portrayal of island existence (18). In Fiji, where the very real threat of rising sea levels is a daily reality for the island’s inhabitants, such a focus on consumption argues for a direct

correlation between practices of consumerism and the safety and secu-rity of low-lying coastal regions.

Amara’s decision to steal from chief Sea—motivated by a desire to be the “envy” of the village rather than to provide sustenance for the wider community—feeds into current discourses of capitalist self-actu-alization that reward the self-advancing individual rather than those who demonstrate selflessness, community spirit, or a drive for collective empowerment. That Amara must learn to “cook without salt…just like the other villagers” suggests that this leveling of humanity in the face of

nature’s retributive “anger” is not only deserved but also a necessary step to ensure a more respectful and sustainable relationship with the planet (21).

An adapted extract from Timothy callender’s “The Legend of the Golden Apple Tree,” told in Barbadian creole, is similarly preoccupied with consumerist discourses that invest the earth with monetary value. On the tropical island of Barbados where an enormous fruit tree bears apples the color of gold, an islander named John Ibo heads out to sea and is captured by pirates. The pirate captain hears John Ibo murmuring in his sleep about golden apples and forces the islander to take him to the tree on which they grow. Having arrived in Barbados, the captain is devas-tated to find that the golden apples are a type of fruit and, worse still, that the remaining pirates have stolen his ship and are disappearing over the horizon. The captain ends his life at the end of the hangman’s noose with “neither gold nor golden apples now” (68). Pieńkowski’s accompa-nying illustration shows the captain lying on the ground,

golden apples raining down around him. The image is enigmatic—is the captain kicking apples into the air or are they pummeling him from above?—and serves to position the reader at an angle closer to the absent

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tree than to the pirate and his failed commodification of the apples. Like the tempting fruit of the Garden of Eden, the golden apples

of this Barbadian tree are the environmental symbols of human greed. This focus on gold is a poignant reminder of the centrality of economic factors in determining the extent to which a particular ecology bears the effects of crisis. The tree with golden apples—through the captain’s eyes—takes on a quasi-mythical status that renders it “better than the goose that laid the golden egg” (67). Both the tree and the goose are defined through their economic use-value to humans rather than their intrinsic natural worth. Maternal language is used to gender the egg-laying goose and the tree that “bear[s] once a year” female (67). The captain’s desire to “settle down, and farm golden apples” is thus a form of systematized exploitation of female reproduction (68). The captain’s lack of respect for humans and nonhumans alike thus gives his aware-ness that he is living “on borrowed time” an ecological emphasis: “He know night does run till daylight catch it. He know that the longest day got an ending, that time longer than rope but shorter than elastic, and that the sand in the hour-glass going soon run out” (67). Viewed in light of an ecology threatened by over-consumption, this intimation of impending doom is re-inscribed as the plight of Mother Earth itself.

The Bahamas and Malta: Disposing of the Common EarthIn its wider drive to promote sustainable relationships between humans and the planet, the collection offers representations of the common earth as a space shared not only between nations but also between species. The wider ecological web in which humans are enmeshed is evoked in traditional anthropomorphic tales that explore human values through the lens of animal behavior and that personify the elements in explication of nature’s meteorological patterns. The common earth of the collection harbors nosy elephants (Swaziland), clever tortoises (Tanzania), brave monkeys (Malaysia), and cunning chameleons (nigeria); it is an earth in which rain and fire (namibia), sand and stars (Papua new Guinea), and wind and river (Guyana) struggle to maintain ecological balance. Since mythical renditions of the historical landscape are often closely tied to particular spatialities, they can reflect what Richa nagar terms the “uneven geographies” of global politics (32). These uneven geographies are especially visible in the ecologies that are most frequently and most damagingly subject to environmental pollution. Through a visible concern over waste and disposability, the collection renders the common earth motif an ambig-uous referent for shared responsibility in light of the “toxic discourses” of globalization (di chiro 200).

OUR cOMMOn EARTH

Ashley Saunders’s poem from the Bahamas, “The March of the Hermit crabs in the Rain,” undertakes an uncomfortable integration of human and natural habitats. In stanzas arranged diagonally across the page, hermit crabs leave their hiding places at the approach of rain and march across the beach under cover of shells “found washed upon the shore” (41). These shells range from a perfume bottle cap to an old clay pipe under the witty proviso that “finding a shell that fits isn’t / always that easy in life” (41). This humorous rendition of the creatures’ use of objects thrown into the sea as waste is underpinned by a more unsettling awareness that the over-produc-tion of goods in industrialized countries often has damaging consequences for the environment. Human waste in the form of non-biodegradable garbage results in the crabs quite literally bearing the burden as they “settle for” a bottle cap or pipe.

“But what does it matter?” the reader is asked in the final stanza, under the assurance that “To hermit crabs it’s all the same” (41). We might question whether this dismissal of the crabs’ polluted habitats is as comical as Pieńkowski’s accompanying illustration in which crabs wander across the bottom of the page bearing tea cups, old boots, beer jugs and a cowboy hat. If same-ness is taken as an indication of collective expe-rience, one might further question whether this representation of commonality is successful in engendering a sense of shared responsibility or whether it encourages a collective apathy towards continuing abuse of the local landscape.

Saviour Pirotta’s Maltese story “do You Believe in Magic?”—a tale about a shell that is similarly found washed up on the shore—is

underpinned by the awareness that western chil-dren living in urban areas often have only limited access to the natural world. When a young boy, Sumed, passes the seashell he has found on the beach while visiting his grandmother around his multicultural school classroom, each child listens to the shell and recounts the sounds they hear inside it. These sounds—including dolphins jumping, fishermen with oars splashing, birds singing, the wind in the trees, dogs barking and children playing—prompt Sumed to conclude that “[t]here must be a bit of my granny’s village caught in the shell” (25). The class’s collective interest in Sumed’s shell and their combined efforts to interpret the sounds inside it suggest that such an imaginative investment in the natural world unites children of differing back-grounds. not only does the natural scene remind Sumed of his “granny’s village” but also recalls for dith Tu trees “like the ones back home”; the natural world has the capacity to inspire feel-ings of familiarity that surmount cultural and geographic borders (25). “[G]rown-ups”—noted in child’s register—are “calling to the children to be careful,” watching over them fondly as they play and swim; the earth gains an associa-tion with the protective role of older generations and the wisdom and knowledge passed from one generation to the next (25). The children’s use of sensory perception to call forth this alternative image of environmental harmony adds a sense of “magic” to their otherwise formal interaction with the world (25).

Yet while the natural world is given continuity and dependency by its association with “my gran-ny’s village,” it also reveals a failure of “grown-ups” to nourish childish visions of a common earth (25). The teacher dismisses the natural sounds in the seashell as a product of the children’s over-active imaginations and drops the shell into the classroom fish tank before rushing the children out to play. Her refusal to accept the children’s creativity functions as an effective dismissal of their imaginative engagement with the environ-ment. Such a conclusion relegates the natural world to a traveler’s trinket or transient curiosity, easily thrown away by its human collectors. That

The class’s collective interest in Sumed’s shell and their combined

efforts to interpret the sounds inside it suggest that such an imaginative

investment in the natural world unites children of differing

backgrounds.

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OUR cOMMOn EARTH

the teacher later takes the class “out to play” is ironic in the context of her earlier dismissal since the reader might question what kind of “outside” world will be left for the children to inherit (25). The tale warns of the dangers of segregating the natural world from human conceptions of iden-tity and selfhood; if the natural world—in the form of the seashell—can remain beautiful and isolated within the confines of the classroom fish tank, it can attract the children’s gaze but not their interaction. Such an image calls atten-tion to the sense of ecological dislocation often experienced by urban communities. The tale inti-mates an underlying anxiety that, in the context of increasing globalization, a sense of belonging to the local landscape is no longer an attainable goal; it is already a nostalgic construct.

Conclusion: A Turn Towards the “world as a whole”The two common perspectives in the critical literature on globalization that Anthony d. king identified two decades ago—“the rejection of the nationally-constituted society as the appro-priate object of discourse” and “a commitment to conceptualizing ‘the world as a whole’”—still underpin contemporary conceptions of human community (ix). cartographic historian denis cosgrove (1994), however, has pointed out that the concept of the “world as a whole” can provoke two competing representations of the planet: the “whole earth” and the “one world.” The former—associated with fragility and vulnerability—high-lights human responsibility for care of the earth; the latter—associated with “the expansion of a specific socio-political order across space”—erases political boundaries and establishes financial, media and communications networks in their place (290). neither of these planetary images is free from a sense of human ownership: “[b]oth interpretations insist on the globality of the image, both are inattentive to the specificity of their cultural and historical assumptions; and, in prac-tice, both obscure local perspectives on the world in their claim to speak for a common humanity” (288). The “common humanity” of the “world as a whole” shares an uncomfortable resemblance to

the “common earth” of a globalized world. Such commonality is more uncomfortable still when viewed through the lens of Britain’s imperial history and the postcolonial heritage that most commonwealth countries share.

However, while commonality can function as a tool for promoting imperial ideologies and for dislocating humans from the local landscape, the ecoconscious narrative trajectory of A River of Stories renders this interpretation redundant. The collection rests on the understanding that children are capable of making ethical choices in relation to their interaction with the environ-ment. A reading of this collection in the context of worsening environmental crisis points not only to the tales’ increasing relevance to a modern child readership but also to the capacity of the common earth motif to provoke a sense of shared responsibility in the struggle for planetary health.

To “do a topography” of the landscapes of A River of Stories is to uncover the ways in which countries across the commonwealth conceptu-alize their relationship with the natural world. As katz contends: “[r]evealing the embeddedness of [social] practices in place and space in turn invites the vivid revelation of social and polit-ical difference and inequality” (1228). Through a focus on local and global understandings of human identity, the collection foregrounds the discourses of disposability and consumerism that often underpin our interactions with the earth.

The collection’s turn towards “the world as a whole” thus functions as an attempt to achieve the encompassing vision of stories wrapped protectively around a fragile globe. Such an image is elegantly relayed in Abena P.A. Busia’s poem “Mawu of the Waters” from Ghana, about

Through a focus on local and global understandings of human identity, the collection foregrounds the discourses of disposability and consumerism that often underpin our interactions with the earth.

OUR cOMMOn EARTH

a creator goddess “[w]ith mountains as my footstool / And stars in my curls” (137). The goddess’s transformation into the world’s waters—capable of nourishing a parched and thirsty earth—can be read as indicative of the need to nourish the “collective life of the planet.”

Through use of a discourse of shared responsibility that transcends cultural and geographic borders, the poem calls attention to the importance of valo-rizing human connection to the natural environ-ment not as a pursuit defined by nations but as a universal human endeavor. In a world of increasing dislocation from local community, this is an idea not without hope. In Pieńkowski’s accompanying illustration, the silhouetted goddess tiptoes, as if dancing, across the rounded globe. With a river curving away towards the horizon through a bank of blue, purple and yellow flowers nestled in green grass, the image inspires hope in human-ity’s capacity to tread lightly upon the earth. The common earth of this commonwealth collection thus engenders a sense of collective responsibility rather than disengagement from our planetary home.

Works Cited

Children’s Bookcurry, Alice, ed. A River of Stories: Tales and Poems from Across the

Commonwealth. Illus. Jan Pieńkowski. London: commonwealth Education Trust, 2011. Print.

Secondary Sourcescosgrove, denis. “contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth,

and the Apollo Space Photographs.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84.2 (1994): 270-294. Print.

di chiro, Giovanna. “Polluted Politics? confronting Toxic discourse, Sex Panic, and Eco-normativity.” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Eds. c. Mortimer-Sandilands and B. Erickson. Indiana: Indiana UP, 2010. 199-230. Print.

dimock, Wai chee. “Literature for the Planet.” Globalising Literary Studies. Ed. Giles Gunn. Spec. issue of PMLA 116.1 (2001): 173-88. Print.

Friends of the Earth International. “climate debt: Making Historical Responsibility Part of the Solution.” Web. 19 September 2012.

Gaard, Greta. “new directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism.” ISLE 17.4 (2010): 643-665. Print.

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. new York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

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king, Anthony d, ed. Culture, Globalisation, and the World-System. Binghamton: department of Art and Art History, State U of new York and Binghamton P, 1991. Print.

katz, cindi. “On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement.” Signs 26.4 (2001): 1213-1234. Print.

Luke, T., and Tuathail, G. “Global Flowmations, Local Fundamental-isms, and Fast Geopolitics.” Unruly world: Globalization, Governance and Geography. Eds. A. Herod, G. Tuathail and S. Roberts. London: Routledge, 1998. 72-94. Print.

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Halifax, nS: Fernwood, 1993. Print.

nagar, Richa. “Mapping Feminisms and difference.” Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography. Eds. L.A. Staeheli, E. kofman & L.J. Peake. new York: Routledge, 2004. 31-48. Print.

Images from A River of Stories © Jan Pieńkowski.

Dogodogo is a collection of personal stories told by Isaac, Moses, Edward,

Amos, Aloys, Rajabu, Dickson, and Emmanuel. What began as a

strategy to practice the past tense in the f irst person by telling stories led

to the production of this emotional collection: the individual and collective

experiences of street children in Tanzania. Although the stories are different,

they share common themes of pain, loss, and rejection. The book is written

by Kasia Parham, a volunteer teacher of English at the Dogodogo center,

compiled from the children’s oral accounts. Dogodogo means “little” and is

a common K iswahili term used in Tanzania to refer to a child. Parham

allows the children to tell their own stories of how they endured poverty,

hunger, domestic violence, child labor, and deprivation of basic necessities.

The children recount how they ran away to Dar es Salaam to escape their

harsh lives, but when they got to the city, realized that, to most of the

adults, they were invisible. Although the children tell their heart-rending

stories of hardship, they also exhibit a resolve and determination to f ind

a better future: as they put it: “[w]e survived the streets, we can survive,

we can manage”. The children have not only told the stories, but also

illustrated parts of the book, showcasing some of the talents that have been

harnessed by the Dogodogo center.

Lilia n Vikiru

kasia Parham

Dogodogo: Tanzanian Street

Children Tell Their Stories

dar es Salaam: Macmillan

Aidan, 200949pp. ISBn 978-0-230-72212-5

(non-fiction, 12+)

blic of

T a n z

India is known to be the world’s largest annual producer of films. Given this fact, it might be easy to assume that children’s films occupy a sizeable share in this annual production. However,

the Indian children’s film industry does not receive the attention enjoyed by commercial or mainstream cinema such as Bollywood, which produces films in Hindi, Tollywood, in Telugu, Mollywood, in Malayalam, or Pollywood, in Bhojpuri. The bulk of Indian films are concerned with stock themes that appeal to an adult

The Indian children’s film industry lacks the attention enjoyed by its adult counterpart, commercial cinema, yet several Indian films for and about children have created a distinct space for themselves. This article examines four Indian children’s films that delve into contemporary socio-political issues, contrast individual hope with social despair, and end with the onset of social hope through children. In the process, they highlight the romantic ideologies of redemption and reform in Indian children’s literature and cinema.

An aspiring PhD scholar and children’s-fiction writer, Jayashree Rajagopalan is an ESL-certified academic editor and works with a pioneering editing firm in

india. During her second master’s degree in Children’s Literature from Macquarie

University, Sydney, she developed a keen interest in different forms of indian

children’s literature, particularly films.

by JayaShREE RaJagopaLan

ren’

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HEAL THE WORLd, MAkE IT A BETTER PLAcE

audience—romantic love, lust, fantasy, adultery, violence, vengeance, morality, devotion, humor, relationships, friendship, or betrayal—often combining all into one masala film (masala, in Hindi, is the mixture of spices and condiments that lend Indian cuisine its distinctive flavor). In these films, children mostly feature as an element of comic relief or as stock characters who symbolize innocence, or they are used to reveal the softer side of an aggressive hero’s personality. In Mr. India (1988), which is very popular among children, the protagonist Arun is a poor but phil-anthropic adult who adopts abandoned orphans and, with their help, tackles an anti-social villain. In the love story Raja Hindustani [Indian king] (1996), the boisterous Rajnikanth functions as the passionate hero’s cute sidekick. In the blockbuster Kuch Kuch Hota Hai [Something Happens] (1998), eight-year old Anjali fulfills the wishes of her dead mother and plays cupid between her widowed father and his estranged best friend from college; as the narrative progresses, the entire focus shifts to her father’s romantic escapades. Although non-mainstream cinema in India experiments with a broader range of themes and film-making techniques, not many films include children. children’s films are rarely discussed in the media, except when they involve popular actors (e.g., Aamir khan’s Taare Zameen Par [Stars on Earth], 2007), are showcased at international film festivals (e.g., Rajan khosa’s 2011 release Gattu), or win acco-lades (e.g., Vishal Bharadwaj’s 2002 release Makdee [Spider]).

Indian cinema is largely for and about adults. Where, then, is the child in Indian cinema? do filmmakers who treat themes and aspects related to childhood stand a chance? For as grim as this reality sounds, there seems to be a ray of hope. In spite of receiving little commercial backing or success, several Indian films for and about chil-dren stand out from the crowd by adopting an idealistic, and occasion-ally postcolonial, standpoint: they present children as primary focalizers and radical action-takers. They delve into themes inspired by socio-political realities, revealing ideologies that are essentially hopeful and that herald the onset of social reform through children. In what follows, I extend Roberta Trites’s outline of American novels of social hope—“that admit the possibility of reform” and convey the message that “with self-improvement, you can improve the world” (3)—to Indian children’s cinema to look at four such films in three Indian languages. Santosh Sivan’s Hindi film Tahaan (2008), set in a war-ravaged valley, portrays how Tahaan, the child protagonist, chooses a path of non-violence. Jayashree kanal and A. S. kanal’s Chota Sipahi [Little Soldier] (2005, in Hindi) portrays a child’s perspective on, and struggle against, colo-nialism. In his Gujarati production Harun-Arun [the two names of the child protagonist] (2009), Vinod Ganatra explores Hindu-Muslim

In spite of receiving little commercial backing or success, several Indian films for and about children stand out from the crowd by adopting an idealistic, and occasionally postcolonial, standpoint: they present children as primary focalizers and radical action-takers.

communal conflicts and places his protagonist at the center of religious intolerance and fanati-cism. Ramchandra P. n.’s kannada film Putaani Party [The children’s Party] (2009) is about a unique partially-empowered children’s faction that thwarts the vested financial and political interests of adults to solve various rural prob-lems, including alcoholism. These films place the child at the center of their cinematic narra-tives of growth. They chart the progress of the protagonists in particular and society in general from individual and social despair to hope and reform. Thus, these films support the expecta-tion that children’s cinema tends to be optimistic and conveys the possibility of positive change through affirmative action.

Many Lives at Stake: Tahaan and Chota SipahiThe storylines of Tahaan and Chota Sipahi are situated in life-threatening circumstances where violence is a part of daily life. The soci-eties to which the child protagonists belong have witnessed military and communal strife for many years. There is no escape from the tyranny of terrorism in Tahaan or from colonial domi-nation in Chota Sipahi. Both films engage their child protagonists in life-threatening military action and emphasize the consequences of the

choices the children make, particularly those that place their own lives in danger. Tahaan is set in the picturesque northernmost Indian valley of Jammu & kashmir, which has been a hotbed of militant activity. The film traces eight-year-old Tahaan’s struggles to retrieve his favorite donkey, Birbal, who has been sold by his poor family after the disappearance of his father and sudden death of his grandfather. In a powerful opening, Sivan’s self-reflexive statement sets the mood: “This film is a fable with fictitious char-acters and non-fictitious incidents.” The initial credits are displayed against a series of animated brushstroke images of nature: a donkey, and a young boy, each distorted by drops of randomly splashed red paint. This coloring symbolizes the bloodshed that has tainted the valley’s pristine beauty and many innocent childhoods. A child (Tahaan) dressed in a rather oversized kashmiri robe shouts “Birbalaaa,” his call echoing through the pale, snowy terrain that spreads out as far as the eye can see. At once, the child’s insignificance and helplessness against the icy surroundings are highlighted. What the eye cannot see the ears can hear and the mind can imagine: Tahaan’s cries, the eerie silence as he enters a deserted zone, and the sudden echoing sounds of shelling convey the dangers with which he is faced.

Sivan establishes Tahaan as a fable by using the donkey as a “dolly” to film point-of-view shots and zoomed-in frames of Birbal’s eyes, ears, and nose that indicate what he sees, hears, feels, and senses. The result is an insider’s view of Birbal’s world. Tahaan’s interactions with the adults around him are shown using high-and low-angle frames, indicating his powerlessness. Tahaan encounters a group of children enacting a militant shootout; the children have imitated the violence in minute detail, from choosing weapon-like branches to drawing fake beards. The fact that Tahaan does not react to any of this, casually addressing them as “militant bhai” [brother militant] while they play dead, exposes the sheer banality of the violence that has perme-ated the lives of Tahaan’s people. Later, Tahaan spots icicles around a tree’s frozen roots, which bear a striking resemblance to weapons. This

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Portuguese colonial domination. The opening sequence of the film portrays a child in fisher-man’s clothing frolicking in the sea, simple fisher folk, and the oppressive manner in which the Portuguese treats them. The use of low-contrast lighting reveals the natural simplicity of the primary characters and their actions. The entire film is shot like a stage play, with most of the characters facing the audience, that is, the camera. Partial close-up frames of characters allow the audience to view the facial expressions and body language of the characters closely, thus bringing out the thematic and emotional elements of the narrative. dialogue and plot also take precedence over complicated cinematographic techniques.

Jozé belongs to the simple but hardworking Goan fishermen’s community and is unaware of the political unrest in Goa. His parents “don’t want to get involved in the freedom struggle. Such jobs are not for poor people.” Although his parents cannot afford his education, Jozé is rewarded with free schooling after rescuing a drowning schoolchild. He zealously guards his secret hideout—a hidden cove—where he encounters Mangesh, a.k.a “clever Fox,” a freedom fighter. This encounter functions as the ideological turning point in the narrative of Chota Sipahi. At once, it becomes clear that Jozé will play a part in Goa’s struggle for independence. He

defining cinematic moment seems to indicate that even nature has started participating in and responding to the bloodshed in the valley.

In a desperate attempt to retrieve Birbal, Tahaan befriends Idrees, a teenage militant, and unwittingly becomes his aide by accepting a suspicious looking parcel and hand grenade for safekeeping. To the viewer, Tahaan’s life seems to be spiraling out of control. The gravity of his situation is conveyed through shallow-focus shots where he struggles to conceal the grenade like a precious object. Tahaan does not realize that his decision to befriend and help Idrees will place his people in great danger; a few days later, Idrees asks him to fling the grenade at the Indian army camp. Just as Tahaan is about to follow Idrees’ instructions, he spots his missing father; Birbal and his friend also walk toward him at the same time. The sight of his loved ones leads to a frantic epiphany that changes Tahaan’s life. He recoils in horror as he realizes the implications of the

horrific act he almost committed and drops the grenade into a river instead. Tahaan’s journey indicates his growth from helplessness and self-concern to empowering awareness and a sense of social responsibility. Tahaan is replete with symbols of war and peace, of degradation and reform. It conveys the possibility of change—in a valley that faces terror every day, a child can choose to reject violence.

Young Jozé of Chota Sipahi does not need an epiphany to realize his mission of fighting for freedom. Inspired by Surekha Panandikar’s novella Bridge at Borim (1999), Jayashree kanal and A. S. kanal’s Chota Sipahi is set in the early 1960s, when the Indian coastal territory of Goa was liberated from a long and oppressive

Tahaan is replete with symbols of war and peace, of degradation and reform. It conveys the possibility of change—in a valley that faces terror every day, a child can choose to reject violence.

devours the book Mangesh gives him, titled The Establishment of Swaraj [self-governance]. Gradually, his ignorance changes to acute aware-ness of the colonial domination of Goa. Throughout the film, medium long-shot frames are used to ensure that Jozé is fully visible to specta-tors within and outside the frame—he is not powerless; he has opinions of his own, and makes his decisions himself. It is significant that Jozé plans Mangesh’s escape following a dance-troupe’s performance during the Hindu festival of Ganesh chaturthi. Ganesh chaturthi was popu-larized by Indian freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak to espouse unity and nationalism during the British rule. The performance, a staged story within the cinematic narrative, abounds in metaphors of colonization, freedom, and disguise. A fisherman’s innocent daughter is captured by a scheming stranger—an outsider—and yearns for freedom; the naïve daughter and her kidnapper symbolize Goa and its capture by the Portu-guese, respectively. Later, Mangesh hands Jozé a small Indian flag and asks him to “keep it close to your heart”: a symbol of the larger country of which Jozé yearns to be a part.

In the climax sequence, Jozé overhears the Portuguese scheme to blow up the Bori Bridge and foil the Indian army’s attempt to take over Portuguese forces. Jozé realizes that this move will thwart Goan libera-tion and he decides to help the Indian army. Extreme long-shots show him swimming across the vast river, narrowly escaping gunfire. Jozé manages to warn the Indian army who change their entry route into Goa. Thus, what begins as a long era of oppressive colonization in Chota Sipahi ends as “Operation Vijay” [victory] due to the fearless determina-tion of Jozé. A concluding deep-focus shot shows Jozé unfurling the Indian flag. The ideology in Chota Sipahi is nationalistic and borders on extreme romanticism: freedom from colonization is essential and chil-dren can play a part in this liberation. Jozé is now the Little Soldier: his life is no longer his own; it belongs to his motherland.

Young Diplomats to the Rescue: Harun-Arun and Putaani PartyHarun-Arun and Putaani Party deal with social inequalities caused by religious communalism and alcoholism, respectively. In both films, adults who choose to ignore their ability to reason consider the chil-dren powerless, and this leads the children to question notions blindly followed by adults. Unlike their counterparts, Jozé and Tahaan, the child protagonists in these two films resolve their dilemmas through peaceful and diplomatic means, using reason to highlight the adults’ idiosyncrasies and to take power into their own hands. Their choice of action literally changes people’s mindsets, thus conveying children’s potential to bring about socio-political reform.

In Harun-Arun and Putaani Party, character development, narration, and interpretation are an important part of the cinematic narrative. Harun-Arun is the story of a boy with two names, one Muslim and one Hindu. An introductory narration sets the historical perspective:

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during the India-Pakistan partition of 1947, thousands of Hindus and Muslims voluntarily migrated between the two countries and others were forcibly moved. The violence and carnage they witnessed in the process created a rift between Hindus and Muslims. Harun-Arun reflects the undercurrents of this horrific communal history. The film is set in the Thar desert region shared by India and Pakistan. Rashid Suleman is a former migrant who illegally returns to India through the desert. Rashid is with his grandson, Harun. The opening sequence of the film portrays Harun and Rashid journeying across an empty, endless desert. Rashid hums the Guajarati translation of nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali composition Ekla Chalo Re [Walk Alone: my translation]: “If no one responds to your call, carry on walking alone.” Harun sings a classic Bollywood song Mera Joota Hai Japani: “My shoes are Japanese, my trousers are English, the red hat I wear is Russian, yet my heart is Indian” [my translation]. Both songs reflect the thematic undertones of the film. Ekla Chalo Re exhorts the listener to deal with the difficulties in life with dogged determination, particularly when there is no support from anyone around. This song is often quoted in the context of major social or political movements. Mera Joota indicates an acceptance of global influences without tarnishing the nationalistic spirit. It gained popularity both in India and internationally, especially for its communist leanings. Later in the film, Harun fights his battle against religious intolerance alone and discards differences associated with religion and nationality to embrace humanity as his faith. While travelling through the desert, Rashid and Harun are separated, and Harun meets and befriends three children who hear his name incorrectly and call him “Arun” (a Hindu name) instead: The Muslim boy from Pakistan becomes Hindu in India. Thus, boundaries and religious labels are dissolved as the children prioritize the humanitarian act of protecting Harun. Harun gradually wins over Valbai, the children’s mother, through his affectionate and resourceful nature.

Valbai’s affection for Harun is put to the test when she discovers him openly offering namaaz (the Islamic prayer ritual) in her house. In a dramatic slow-motion sequence, the audience sees Valbai drop her earthen water pitcher, highlighting her shock and dilemma—a Muslim boy in a Hindu household. A horrified Valbai reacts violently and Harun fails to understand this:

Harun: How am I at fault?…I thought, over here, people refer to “Harun” as “Arun.”

Valbai (enraged): How can you think so? don’t you see the difference between “Harun” and “Arun”?

Harun (desperately pleading): What difference does it make? Whether you call me “Harun” or “Arun,” it will still be me. It is one and the same. [My translation]

deals with substance abuse at the rural household level and covers the larger argument of a child’s ability to reason with adults. Ramchandra P. n. reveals that his child protagonists “have discus-sions and dialogues through which they want to get themselves heard. The subject matter of the film itself is that they are in a conversation.” Shot in realistic documentary style in a rural setting, the film opens with a dedication: “To the chil-dren of keradi and to all the socially organized children of the world.” The rural setting is estab-lished in several panning crane shots, and in

several important sequences dialogue precedes the visual—the viewer hears the children speak or reason before seeing them. “Putaani Party” refers to a self-elected children’s wing in the Gram Panchayat [village governing body] of keradi district in the south Indian state of karnataka. Ramchandra P. n. has based this fictional film on his 2007 documentary Makkala Panchayat [children’s Governing Body]. His illuminating documentary showcases five children’s groups in karnataka that drive reforms in their respective villages. One group actually organized a move-ment to ban the distribution of illicit liquor.

The adolescent members of this party—Anil, Geeta, Gaarya, Hussain, and chandru—take seriously their empowerment to drive social change. They are supported by “neelu teacher”

Valbai realizes her folly and reconciles with Harun. However, the villagers accuse her of being a traitor and Harun, a spy. Throughout the confrontational exchange between Valbai and the villagers Ganatra keeps all the charac-ters within the frame, including Harun; he forms an important part of the change that is to come. The villagers decide to test Valbai’s integrity by forcing her to place her hands in boiling oil—an ancient practice based on the superstition that only the innocent remain unharmed. Harun and Valbai’s children are shocked at the adults’ lack of perspective. A poignant high-contrast frame shows Valbai’s children and Harun anxiously huddled around her on the night before the test. Harun cannot tolerate the injustice and decides

to save Valbai and enlighten the villagers. Following his instructions, Valbai’s children offer hot tea to the villagers without glasses and coax them to drink the tea directly from cupped palms, a recommendation that is rejected immediately. Harun gently reminds them that if hot tea can burn their hands, the boiling oil will certainly scald Valbai. Valbai is spared, the superstitious custom banished, and Harun is reunited with her. Ganatra makes no attempt to mask the hopeful ideology in Harun-Arun. He challenges the mindless physical, emotional, and spiritual violence inflicted by religious intoler-ance by placing Harun, a child, at the center of the conflict.

The reformist ideologies in Tahaan, Harun-Arun, and Chota Sipahi are unmistakably nation-alistic or communal. By involving children in politics, Ramchandra P. n.’s Putaani Party pres-ents a completely different kind of idealism that

Ganatra makes no attempt to mask the hopeful ideology in Harun-

Arun. He challenges the mindless physical, emotional, and spiritual

violence inflicted by religious intolerance by placing Harun, a

child, at the center of the conflict.

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and the Panchayat head “deshpande Sir.” desh-pande’s willingness to help them is driven by his political interests and desire for publicity. From the outset, it is clear that while the adults are corrupt and harbor selfish interests, neelu and the children use organized political power to introduce reform. neelu is perceived as a trouble-maker despite her genuine support of the cause of the Party. “Ideology is always a matter of poli-tics,” and it “consists of the ideas that support and empower particular segments of society” (nodelman and Reimer 80). Ideologically, this film underlines an observation often made in chil-dren’s literature criticism: the sense of power that is characteristic of adulthood is in fact verified and maintained through the control of children. Although children are capable of forming their own views independently, deshpande mocks them—“Within a few days you have learned the language of our village governing body”—and sarcastically lauds neelu: “You’ve trained them well, teacher!” Anil’s father, too, thinks that since the formation of the kids’ committee, “our chil-dren have become uncontrollable.”

The ugly side of adult hypocrisy and moral corruption comes to light when the Party tackles the serious issue of substance abuse. The children see Gaarya’s father in a drunken stupor. Gaarya’s father spends the family’s hard-earned money on alcohol. The children realize that their village is at the mercy of alcoholism as there are many others like Gaarya in their village. When Anil discovers that his father runs an illicit liquor-producing unit to supplement his income as a grocer, he chooses to support his committee. His sense of responsibility highlights the hope that each child ideally should harbor to prog-ress toward an ethical, peaceful, and optimistic future. In another political move to discontinue the children’s anti-alcohol movement, neelu is transferred to another village. To the adults, it seems as though the storm has subsided and they have regained control. However, the chil-dren are persistent, albeit passively. Under the pretext of a cleanliness drive, they collect liquor bottles and sachets, calculate the cost of each, and discover that their village spends 2,800,000

rupees annually on alcohol alone. The children know that they will not be heard by the adults and decide to voice their opinions at a public forum. Instead of showing the staggering figure to the fickle deshpande, Geeta shares their find-ings while giving a speech in honor of a visiting Health Minister. She makes her point when she says, “Some of us don’t have school uniforms. Some of us don’t have textbooks. Streetlights don’t have bulbs in them. We have taps, but no water comes out of them. Our roads are unsur-faced, yet we spend 28 lakh rupees on liquor.” This definitive move leaves the adults speechless; they have no choice but to take the matter seri-ously. In a final frame breaking moment, Geeta’s gaze shifts to the audience outside the frame. She looks into the camera lens and demands, “can you do something about this?” This powerful question undeniably addresses Indian households that deal with the grim reality of alcohol abuse. By subversively challenging the ideologies of the adults, this Putaani Party shows faith that it is possible to change, and that the children are here to drive this change.

Fighting the Odds: Children Lead the WayThe four award-winning films I have analyzed are bound thematically rather than temporally and each betrays the “sincere humanist convic-tion that children’s literature can contribute to the conceptualization of a better society” (Joosen and Vloeberghs ix). The cinematic narratives in these films operate at two distinct ideological levels. At one level, by situating children within specific social and political issues, the four films explore how children can develop an under-standing of their agency in society and in relation to the adults around them. At another, thematic level, these films contrast individual hope with social despair and end with the promise of social hope, thereby highlighting romantic ideologies of redemption and reform (Joosen and Vloe-berghs ix). Indian children’s cinema upholds this romantic ideology by presenting the possibility of transformation through and by a child. This reform can be brought about despite authoritarian

attempts by adults to overshadow the brilliance and redeeming qualities of childhood. Adults need not always control children, because children are capable of seeing beyond everyday assumptions; they can visualize a world without social inequalities and moral corruption; they can make

their own choices. This optimistic and transforma-tive approach adopted by some Indian children’s film makers can in fact be viewed as an indica-tion of the impact that reforming Indian cinema for and about children can have, compared to its adult masala-garnished counterpart. Indian chil-dren’s cinema is not unlike the child—frequently marginalized, surviving against all odds, calling attention to itself as a powerful area of expression in its own right, and with immense potential to bring about positive change at the individual and social levels—as illustrated by the films studied in this article.

Works Cited

Children’s Films Chota Sipahi [Little Soldier]. dir. Jayashree kanal and A. S. kanal.

cFSI. 2005. YouTube. Web. 25 Aug. 2012. Gattu. dir. Rajan khosa. cFSI. 2011. dVd.Harun-Arun. dir. Vinod Ganatra. cFSI. 2007. YouTube. Web. 25 Aug.

2012. Makdee [Spider]. dir. Vishal Bharadwaj. Percept Picture company.

2002. dVd.Putaani Party [The children’s Party]. dir. Ramchandra P. n. cFSI.

2009. YouTube. Web. 25 Aug. 2012. Taare Zameen Par [Stars on Earth]. dir. Aamir khan. UTV Home

Entertainment. 2007. dVd.Tahaan. dir. Santosh Sivan. idream Production. 2008. YouTube. Web.

25 Aug. 2012.

Bollywood FilmsKuch Kuch Hota Hai [Something Happens]. dir. karan Johar.Yash Raj

Films. 1998. dVd.Mr. India. dir. Shekhar kapoor. narsimha Enterprises. 1988. dVd.Raja Hindustani [Indian king]. dir. dharmesh darshan. Fame Motion

Pictures Limited. 1996. dVd.

Secondary SourcesJoosen, Vanessa, and katrien Vloeberghs, eds. Changing Concepts of

Childhood and Children’s Literature. newcastle: cambridge Scholars Press. 2006. Print.

Indian children’s cinema upholds this romantic ideology by presenting the possibility of

transformation through and by a child. This reform can be brought

about despite authoritarian attempts by adults to overshadow

the brilliance and redeeming qualities of childhood.

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nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 2003. Print.

Ramchandra, P. n. “director’s Statement.” Putaani Party. Web. 28 October 2012.

Trites, Roberta S. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. Iowa city: University of Iowa Press. 2000. Print.

“Welcome: director’s Statement.” Putaani Party [The children’s Party]. Mar. 2003. Web. 10 Sep. 2012.

The title of this picturebook by the Cypriot author Marina Michaelidou-

Kadi and the award-winning German illustrator Constanze von K itzing

is as enigmatic as the smile of the little girl on the front cover. What is it

that makes Semeli smile? Semeli seeks the source of genuine happiness

by asking her mother and friends, searching in books, and questioning her

grandfather. What makes people smile? He wisely does not give her a clear

answer; trusting her critical abilities, he simply tells her that “something

different makes each person smile,” leaving her space and time to rethink

and investigate. A conf lict over a coveted red bicycle and a wounded puppy

helps her decide. In this high-quality edition, published by the Bank of

Cyprus Cultural Foundation, the reader is taken on a journey through a

young girl’s changing understanding of the world. The book’s colorfu l

illustrations initiate a symbolic play with hidden red hearts, keeping the

reader searching for them throughout the book, and implying an answer to

Semeli’s question. Semeli’s Smile is a story about valu ing love and affection

over the superf icia l pleasures of materia lism. In our consumer–driven

societies, it gently reminds the child reader that true happiness cannot be

bought, and instead can be found by caring for others.

Christina Christodoulou

Marina Michaelidou–kadi

To chamogelo tis Semelis

[Semeli’s Smile]

Illustrator: constanze von kitzing

cyprus: Bank of cyprus cultural

Foundation, 2011

40 pp, ISBn: 9789963429196

(picturebook, 5+)

blic of

y p R u

Professor J. J. Stable speculated in his preface to The High Road of Australian Verse (1924) that, while there were few giants among the people of Australia, her contemporary poets were

paving the way for the literary giants soon to appear (Brisbane Courier 5 Oct. 1929: 27).1 Indeed, the literary world in which ten-year-old Gwen cope published her poetry collections for children a decade later was a landscape dominated by literary giants contributing to the genre. Mary Gilmore, Zora cross, Annie Rentoul, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Mary durack, May kidson, Mabel Forrest, and Pixie O’Harris were just a few of the many female poets to realize a sense of national identity through fairy-lore verse. The iconic Australian poet, dorothea Mackellar, in her address on “Faery Poetry” in 1927, proposed that “Faery” designated “the collective name for all those

Gwen Cope enjoyed a significant reputation as a gifted Australian child-poet throughout the 1930s. Nevertheless, her two collections remain unacknowledged in the history of Australian literature despite their popularity. This article situates Cope’s fairy-poetry against the ideological backdrop defined by adult fairy-poets of the 1930s to reveal fundamental discords between the child-poet writing her vision of fairy-folklore and the canonical writers who aimed to re-conceptualize “ faery-lore” in the interests of Australian national literature.

“She

ry”:

f “A

” 19

31–1

by nicoLE anaE

Dr. nicole anae lectures in Secondary English and Arts Education at the

University of South Australia, Adelaide. Her research interests include children’s literatures, Shakespeare, theatre history,

and the interplay between the Arts, literature, and cultural literacies. Her work

appears in Australasian Drama Studies and Australian Humanities Review, among

other journals.

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“SHE FLInGS HER ELFIn dREAMS OF MYSTERY”

beings that are mentioned in literature, under the guise of different names, such as elves, goblins, brownies, trolls, sprites, and leprechauns” (4).

Female poets of the first three decades of the twentieth-century recog-nized and popularized what Zora cross coined “the land of Australian faery” in highly admired poems imagining uniquely Australian settings. A critic reviewing Joan and George Mackaness’s new anthology of Australian poetry, The Wide Brown Land (1935), described the poetry by women comprising thirty-percent of the collection as “dainty ditties about laughing elves and russet goblins with magic red caps and silver buckles—the fairy poetry—of romance that delights imaginative childhood everywhere” (Brisbane Courier 19 Jan. 1935: 12). Particularly well-known exponents of the 1900s to the 1930s included Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, acclaimed as “Official artist to Her Majesty the Queen of Fairyland” (Adelaide Mail 6 Oct. 1934: 3). Other collec-tions of fairy poetry include Mabel Forrest’s collection of narrative fairy-verse Green Harper (1915), Zora cross’s The City of Riddle-Me-Eee (1918), Pixie O’Harris’s Fairy Book: Stories and Verse (1925), Ruth Bedford’s Fairies and Fancies (1929), Mary Gilmore’s “The Fairy Man” (which appeared in The School Magazine 1 Mar. 1928), and May kidson’s various fairy-poems such as “Fayre Layde of the Lake (South-West caves, Margaret River)” (1923), “Rhyme of Miss Seven Years Old” (1926), “My Ladye Orchid” (1926), “Fairyland Today (Lake cave, Margaret River)” (1927), and “If ” (1939), among many others.

It was within this literary landscape that Gwendolyn Marie Jean cope created her fairy-poems for children:

Laughter and magic, joy of flightBurn in the radiant birth oflight …Oh World of Magic—the heart of meThrobs with the gladness ofLife to be. (“Youth”)

The Sydney Morning Herald published her first poem in 1931 and over the next eight years published over 34 of her poems and one short story. cope’s two collections published by Angus and Robertson—Under the Joy of the Sky (1936 & 1939) and Fairy Verse for Little Folk (1937)—were both illustrated by one of Australia’s most recognizable author/illus-trators, Pixie O’Harris (1903–1991). A reviewer commenting on the latter collection suggested that O’Harris’s illustrations for cope’s poems showed “almost as much imaginative power as their creator,” thereby raising cope to the same footing as her well-established adult counter-parts (Advertiser 20 Feb. 1937: 10, emphasis mine).2

It was within this literary landscape that Gwendolyn Marie Jean Cope created her fairy-poems for children

Fairy Verse for Little Folk attracted critical claims that cope’s poetic voice was as distinctive as her authorial vision. While one named her “Australia’s youngest authoress,” another proclaimed that the book “teems with elves, pixies, gnomes, and fairies brought to life from the mind of a child as no adult could picture them” (Adelaide Advertiser

20 Feb. 1937: 10). “This very charming book of verse about fairies” noted another, “would not shame an adult, much less the lass of 13 years who is its author” (Courier-Mail 15 nov. 1938: 1S). critics praising her poetic abili-ties suggested, “she is a natural versifier, and sufficiently near the nursery herself to appreciate its demands,” while another concluded, “A lyrical sweetness is understandable in a young mind, but a power of poetic organisation such as hers is almost unbelievable. She has the true modern poet’s eye for unexpected juxtaposition of imagery and laconism of technique” (Sydney Morning Herald 24 dec. 1938: 6; 31 Oct. 1936: 12). Another critic asserted, “To have a collection of poems published at the age of 13 is sufficiently remarkable in itself, but when those poems are of an extraordinary degree of technical excellence and emotional integrity, it becomes astounding” (Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 1936: 12).

Importantly, one literary commentator staked a claim for cope’s voice and her subjectivity in the state-ment, “These poems are written by a child for children” (Adelaide Advertiser 20 Feb. 1937: 10). Indeed, another made twin associations between Australian identity and

the project of literary renewal through fairy-verse: “[cope’s] poems have a real touch of lilting pleasure and through them runs that magic of fairyland… I am glad to know that Australia has a girl so youthful able to produce such a delightful book of children’s fairy verse” (Mercury [Hobart] 6 Mar. 1937: 8). Another critic claimed her poems “show amazing skill in construction and a wonderful lyrical sense for so young a poet” (Mercury 3 Jun. 1939: 9). Gwen cope’s later obscurity is worthy

of further examination given that her work was so patently well received by the critics of her day.

This article re-reads cope’s collections against highly canonized items of fairy-verse written by adults for children. I argue that cope countered the broader aims of literary authenticity under-taken by adult poets by realizing tropes of the fairyland-theme “as no adult could picture them.” Additionally, cope’s fairy-poems were by their

very nature literal works of the symbolic voice that adults conceivably sought to replicate. Therefore, the authority of cope’s voice as a child fairy-poet similarly complicated the larger agenda attempted by adult poets of the genre. These writers sought to articulate and define the

…Cope countered the broader aims of literary authenticity undertaken

by adult poets by realizing tropes of the fairyland-theme “as no adult

could picture them.”

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aesthetic and literary qualities of fairy poetry in Australia in response to renewed efforts to realize and revitalize a distinctively Australian literary tradition.

The Canon: “The authority to speak in the name of a nation”For david carter, “Australian literature” is a term that attracts various meanings, definitions and social forms “for establishing cultural and intellectual authority…not least the authority to speak in the name of a nation” (20). The fairyland theme took on greater significance in the 1930s for two central reasons: as a genre open to envisioning “Austra-lian-ness” in poetry that afforded Australians “insight into the under-lying motives of our national aspirations” (Stable vii), and as a means to rewrite the place of Australian literature within a literary landscape where British Arthur reigned “in his unquestioned place as the supreme king of Fairyland” (Ward & Waller 44). commonwealth writers such as Ola cohn, for instance, expressly promoted her literary character “Stout Heart” as much a rival to the ubiquity of Peter Pan as an Austra-lian fairy equivalent to the prototype: “‘Writers in Australia,’ she said, ‘have been in the habit of calling too much upon English fairies, such as Peter Pan’” (Burnie Advocate 19 Jan. 1934: 2).

A specific literary agenda displacing imported conceptualizations of the fairy-image had its roots in the 1830s. This concern emerged in response to what Brenda niall acknowledges was a particular charac-teristic of the period—that “for the greater part of the 19th century the literary perspective from which Australian scenes were created was predominantly that of the outsider” (1). Adult faery-poets a century later sought to emphasize the centrality of the faery-genre in the corpus of Australian national literatures from within: “to-day both pictures and books are being produced that have a truly Australian perspective, atmo-sphere, and colouring. In no branch of literature is this more manifest than in the dainty fairy stories” (Brisbane Queenslander 27 Oct. 1923: 3).

dorothea Mackellar asserted that “Faery” represented a key term defining a particular tradition of Australian national literature in the period. “It would be difficult to contemplate a national poetic litera-ture even in future years” she said, “that had in it no place for faery poetry” (4). critics called for creating “a type of [fairy] folklore indig-enous to Australia, and essentially suited to Australian surroundings” (Villette 15). Other editorials claimed the significance of this genre and the aesthetic importance of its imagery as an issue of canonicity in claims that “In these days, fortunately, the young Australian can have a fairly wide choice of the delightful stories that are essentially Australian in colouring and atmosphere, as truly national in fact as are the art of [Arthur] Streeton and the poetry of [Henry] kendall” (Queenslander 18 nov. 1922: 3).

So important was the fairyland trope in qualifying Australian commonwealth literature that examples of the genre were sent to Queens, duchesses, and celebrities in America and elsewhere as testimonies of

Australian nationalism in literature and poetry. copies of Hume-cook’s collection Australian Fairy Tales (1925) were sent to the Queen, and Outhwaite’s Fairyland (1926) with an inscrip-tion by A. McLaren was gifted to the duchess of York for her infant daughter, the Princess Eliza-beth, in 1927 (Brisbane Courier 12 Apr. 1927: 24). A wedding gift of a desk of Australian woods decorated with gum-nuts was made to the duke and duchess of Gloucester from the people of the Australian commonwealth in 1936. The gift was presented by the then Australian Minister of commerce dr. Earle Page who explained to the duchess the place of gum-nuts within the literary tradition of Australian fairy-lore thanks to works such as May Gibbs’ Australian fairy-lore story of 1918 Wattle Babies (Australian Women’s Weekly 9 May 1936: 39). Indeed, Gwen cope’s two collections also contributed to the exporta-tion of a distinctly Australian literary aesthetic of nationalism. copies were similarly sent to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and the great American baritone with the new York Metropol-itan Opera company, Lawrence Tibbett, report-edly purchased copies of cope’s collections during his Australian tour in 1938 to send to his children (Courier-Mail 15 nov. 1938: 1S).

Gwen Cope’s Australian Fairyland: “Gnomes and fairies brought to life from the mind of a child”cope’s canonical obscurity illustrates that achieving recognition in the history of Australian national literature extends beyond the owner-ship of one’s collections by princesses or celeb-rities. Exploring her absence thus necessitates identifying the key features of her fairy-poems that set her works apart. I begin with the unique literary and aesthetic qualities specific to cope’s re-writing of the land of Australian fairy-lore.

cope’s fairy-verse was certainly influenced by adult traditions. Many of her poems borrow the conventional repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional christian hymns with lines that rarely depart from a four-beat meter. Yet the fact that she wrote mostly lyric poems, characterized by the voice of a single speaker, usually herself as

a child-poet, was one notably unique quality that set her apart. By extension, cope’s poems develop a voice of oratory that traces a shifting trajectory of life perspectives from childhood to girlhood as a unique chronological collection. cope’s works track the increasingly “real-life” demands and obligations of life from a child’s own perspec-tive. Thus, hers was a voice that adult poets could only yearn to replicate. This abstract from cope’s poem “The Haven” (1934) presents a snapshot of an eleven-year-old’s concerns:

When the strain of school is over—and nogrind of homework loomsI travel down to Athol where dreams evolve—and bloomsWhere the quiet peace of dawning, broodingo’er the myriad treesBrings contentment, sweet and tranquil—totroubled hearts brings ease.3

“The Haven” also accentuates cope’s accord with the prevailing literary trend to attach profound emotional ties to a mythologized and idealized Australian landscape. cope replicates this char-acteristic as demonstrated in adult fairy-poetry but makes it truly her own. Many poems empha-size the atmosphere of a bush-land setting while simultaneously constructing an enchanted world imbued with immense potential for personal autonomy and subjective freedom. This abstract from her poem “kurrajong” (1935) is an example:

Mystic gorges where the rolling vapoursup silent, ’cross the craggy, goblin graels—Soft murm’ring winds that play among the Branches,—Or swell like thunder in the roaring gales…Oh ’witching place of lovely mountain beauty,The magic of thy song has caught my heart,—And like a leaf upon an ebbing river,I drift—and dream myself of thee, a part.4

“The Haven” and then “kurrajong” a year later show a growing intellectual maturity as well as an authorial coming-of-age. Where the first invests nature with solitude and quiet escape, the

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second situates the child-poet-as-observer within a dream-like sphere of shadows, “mystic gorges” and “goblin graels.” The latter is typical in that cope never quite abandons the tropes of her faerie-poems even as she grows older and begins adopting alternate world-views. Her poetic realm imagines a geographically-enchanted land in which elves, fairies, pixies, and gnomes seem to personify the land itself:

Softly o’er sand and spire and towering hill Pouring a shimmering radiance on the seaSilent she glides, and o’er the moon-drenched worldShe flings her elfin dreams of mystery. (“Enchantment” 1936)

cope’s positioning of the child-subject within her realm epitomizes another key literary and aesthetic quality specific to her unique re-writing of the land of Australian fairy-lore. cope’s poetic fairy-lore displaces adults entirely as outsiders. Adult figures in fact rarely appear at all. The literary perspective from which cope realizes her vision of Australian fairy-lore predominantly positions the adult as a kind of absent inter-loper. We simply do not see this kind of creation of Australian fairy-lore emerging in the verse forms by adult poets who positioned themselves within—“inside”—the poetic visions they created for an imagined, idealized child. “Here lives in rhyme a teasing little elf,” wrote cross, “And here the girl I was at just her age” (4). kidson’s “My Fadye Orchid” similarly positions herself in her faery-world: “I was just where I liked best to be, in the bush-shadows trying to forget I was a mortal child…no one to say ‘do’ or ‘don’t’ and ‘if ’ or ‘but,’ and all those nasty little words which make life not—not Fairyland!” (West Australian 7 Jul. 1916: 41). O’Harris too positions herself as orator in her fairy-world poems: “One day I met a Fairy Man, / And he sang songs to me—” (Sydney Morning Herald 14 Jul. 1937: 13); “Magic little fairy bells / In my heart the memory dwells” (Sydney Morning Herald 14 Jan. 1933: 9).

The appropriation of the fairyland theme was one way that adults could legitimately “participate

in a fantasy world in which they can ‘master’ the drama of trauma and survival” (Odden 132). It was a desire which cross claimed for herself. “The bush world,” she wrote, “was far lovelier than the garden of my babyhood. It was, indeed, fairy-land—now, purgatory” (1). This passage exemplifies what Richard Flynn has termed a kind of “cross-writing”—one in which “For the cross-writer, poetry involved a complex fusion of the child and the adult in which the mature artist, in making the poem, renders the child’s ‘capacity for wonder’ articulate” (62). This kind of “dialogic” writing makes possible the conversation between the poet’s “adult-self ” and the poet’s “remembered child-self.” The writing of Gwen cope needs to be read within this context.

cope arguably renders the voice of the adult redundant in articulating a world in which the child-poet’s self was in direct dialogue with a self not remembered but one temporally present. cope’s “I” was a unique speaking-subject quite distinct in voice and authority to the “I” of adult poets. It is by design that the fairy-verse form of the 1930s envi-sioned a particular form of Australian folklore in which the primacy of the adult voice underscored the legitimacy of its utterance. Many accounts of canonical fairy-poets emphasize their capacity to “read the child” while seemingly displacing the agency of the child herself as both voiceless and somehow passive. Mackellar was claimed to have “the freedom of faery; she can read the heart of a child” (Sydney Morning Herald 8 Jan. 1927: 10). Bedford wrote “almost exclusively from the view-point of the child-mind she loves to study” (Asterisk 11). And one critic claimed of Mary Rattenbury’s fairy-poem “The city of Lost Souls” that “Here is something of the unspoiled imagination of child-hood which is yet close to essential things” (Central Queensland Herald 24 Sept. 1936: 14).

Her poetic realm imagines a geographically-enchanted land in which elves, fairies, pixies, and gnomes seem to personify the land itself

The Child-Poet in the Land of Literary GiantsThe primacy of the adult voice in faery-poetry reveals how cope crafted her visions of Australian fairy-lore within a specific cultural and literary moment in the history of Australian national literature. Re-reading cope as a child-poet who had strayed into a restricted literary terrain peculiar to the 1930s assists in theorizing the reasons behind her canon-ical anonymity.

When Agnes Rose-Soley wrote that the “Australian child has no fairy lore of its very own” (9), she could well have been referring to the fact that no Australian child-poet had been formerly recognized as writing the tradition from the child-poet’s viewpoint. Yet Rose-Soley was one critic who espoused the potential of child-poets to contribute to redefining Australian literature with its own unique “lore.” Appre-ciating the child’s capacity for imagination, suggested Rose-Soley, was the key to realizing the conception of this literary recovery: “knit her children unto her with poetry evoked from the ghosts of a silent past. Only then will her literature enthrall them. They will cherish it, cleave unto it, glory in it, spread it abroad, perchance add to it” (9).

Various critical commentaries of the day acknowledged cope’s contribution to this country’s fairy-verse tradition. Her fairy-poems remained characteristic of the favored application as deployed by adult poets—that is, as “the poetry of escape”—but cope tailored this motif in very specific ways to accord with the cultural climate of the 1930s. It is no coincidence that her fairies often figure as rescuers who moti-vate “escape” and transport the child to another realm beyond the harsh realities of real life (Courier-Mail 19 Jan. 1935: 12). Magical beings typi-cally appear before the child-poet during the night or in times of solemn reflection and offer the child access to avenues of imaginative escape peopled with beings of iridescent brilliance and ethereal kindness. A nocturnal fairy appears at her window sill in “The Fairy’s Visit” (1934) and invites the child to visit “A far-off wondrous valley, which no one had ever seen” to meet the Fairy Queen and Bluebell:

When dressed, I hurried down the stairs intothe garden darkGuided by the fairy’s lantern, gleaming redlike a radiant sparkWe started on our pilgrimage to reach themystic vale.

This heroic casting of the fairy was perhaps a response to grappling with the confronting intensity of a nation facing WWII. A reviewer in Australian Town and Country Journal claimed that “children people their fairyland, weaving romance round their toys, and building up an ideal world in which everybody is interesting and everybody is happy” (26).

An editorial entitled “Re-Enter the Fairies” in Lady’s Pictorial was as timely in 1910 as it was in the 1930s with the claim that “nurtured

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on fairy-tales, and, consequently living apart in a wonderland of its very own, what little lad or tiny maiden would think of aeroplanes, the possible invasion of England by the Germans, and so on” (Queenslander 5 nov. 1910: 4). Indeed, cope’s poem of 1939, “Outward Bound,” paints a vivid image of a floating magical ship commanded by an unseen magical crew that augurs escape with “The song of the anchor” and a cry of “Ship Ahoy”:

And our hearts are freed from their narrowing bandsTo dream of the glories of hidden lands!Till the harbour’s cleared…on her shingly strandsThe sea shouts—“Outward Bound”!

That cope’s fairy-verse appeared to distill real-life cultural anxieties about war from a child’s perspective transforms the significance of her collection and the authority of her voice as truly unique. critics applauded her voice and aligned the collection itself with the broader literary aims earmarked for the Australian fairy-lore genre: “We may feel in this utilitarian age that fairies and all the reli-gions of magic belong to an old and useless past, but so long as children exist so long will fairies remain a potent force and an impelling instinct” (Mercury 6 Mar. 1937: 8). claims such as this only emphasize the peculiarity of cope’s current absence from the history of Austra-lian literature. Re-reading cope as a child-poet of the fairy tradition who had strayed into a restricted literary territory reconciles the obvious disparities between the supportive critical reception she enjoyed throughout the 1930s and her present-day canonical obscurity.

The canonizing of “local fairylore” by adult poets (Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1936: 12) concerned the revival of the faery-verse form to instill “Australian-ness” into a folkloric tradition and “forms part of the contem-porary glorification of the land as the basis of a national tradition” (Inglis Moore 69). For Rose-Soley, the strengthening of a distinctly Australian faery-lore tradition held the key for cultural recovery: “The story the wind soughs through the trees, the legend drop-ping from eucalypt branch, the torch of the aboriginal burning in the flame tree, the wall of the maiden falling down the waterfall. dream, heroes, goblins, gods—give Australia her past” (9). cross idealized this project of giving Australia “her past” as occurring within a figurative terrain—“the land of Australian faery”—in which adults themselves could re-envision a specific context of literary authenticity: “In every bush home the mother is tempering the old tales just as in every city school every good teacher is counteracting the bad old tales by tales of her own intentions. A very real world of faery is growing up in spite of

the old tales, many of which were never intended for children” (1).

This canonical terrain thus left no room for the voices of actual child-writers and cross’s quotation represents a fitting cautionary tale of the dangers faced by the child fairy-poet entering this fairyland populated by literary giants of the Australian fairy-folkloric tradition. cope’s collections sit uneasily within the landscape as writing—and indeed re-writing—the “land of Australian faery” within a literary terrain which cross herself believed had already passed out of infancy and was moving into maturity.

Silencing the Giants: A Child-Poet Rewrites the “land of Australian faery”cope’s dismissal of adults from her magical faery realm proves significant in pinpointing the literary points of her departure from the canon-ical map set by adult poets. cope’s alternative tale of the land of Australian fairy-lore centralizes

the voice of the child and silences the voice of the figurative adult intruder. This silencing perhaps stands as a metaphor for a figurative shutting-out of the turbulent world of adults and their gestures of violence and the stark reality of impending war then defining the mid-to-late 1930s. It was in cope’s utterances of exclusion and seclusion that her fairy-poetry envisioned a realm exclusively for children. The prohibition against grown-ups entering her faery-land dominion was perhaps aptly captured in Rose-Soley’s claim to adults that “The child’s mind is a little kingdom, the door whereof is barred to your maturity” (3).

cope’s world of “the fairy and the doll” (Sydney Morning Herald 24 dec. 1936: 6) is one where only a child can truly imagine and identify with “Elves and Pixies dancing / In the bright moon-light” (“A Happy Sight” 1931), where “Butterflies

flutter through the air / Of a kind you will not find elsewhere” (“Beautiful Fairy” 1933), where the “scarlet flame” of a new day dawning is “fash-ioned in a fairy mould” (“dawning 1934), and where youth itself embodies “Laughter and magic, the joy of / flight” (“Youth” 1939). Her realm also represented a legitimate authorial world peopled with real-life characters of her own creation: cope appeared at the Australian Author’s coro-nation Ball of 1937 “in a spangled blue frock, and carrying an immense red rose above her head portray[ing] a fairy character from her own book of verse, ‘Fairy Verse for Little Folk’” (Sydney Morning Herald 12 May 1937: 4).

Gwen cope envisioned for children a child’s fairy-lore realm as no adult poet ever could. She “exercised her juvenile imagery when she was from five to nine years old; at an age when fairy folk are their friendly best” (Elliston i). The authority of her voice as a speaking subject by and for children articulated both literary and cultural tropes beyond the authorial possibilities of adult poets. Meaning in cope’s fairy-verse relied on its power to “speak” as a child to other children.

Cope’s alternative tale of the land of Australian fairy-lore centralizes

the voice of the child and silences the voice of the figurative adult

intruder.

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Thus, her “fairies remain a potent and impel-ling instinct in the creation of happy images” (Mercury 6 Mar. 1937: 8) as much as her magical books—Fairy Verse for Little Folk and Under the Joy of the Sky—privilege, affirm, and immortalize a path to discovering a child’s conceptualization of the Australian fairy-lore realm that may yet merit greater recognition in the annuals of this country’s canonical literatures.

Notes1. Unsigned and untitled newspaper reviews

and commentaries are cited in full in-text and not in the Works cited.

2. The color illustration by Pixie O’Harris comprised the front page of the Australian Women’s Weekly’s 1937 special section entitled “Home Maker” (25 dec. 1937: 41): “This clever Australian…specialises in illustrating fairies and goblins to delight the hearts of little folk”. O’Harris was one of the best-known and most loved exponents of fairylore in Australian literature. She was a staunch advocate of the form’s intellectual and creative merits for young readers and voiced her opinions publically on radio and in print media, including writing her personal view in response to the backlash against fairytales in the Australian Women’s Weekly claiming, among other things, “my heart goes out to the poor little mites whose parents are so mundane that they do not know the way to ‘make believe’” (Australian Women’s Weekly 23 dec. 1933: 17).

3. “Athol” is a reference to Athol Bay, Sydney (Sydney Morning Herald 30 Jun. 1934: 11). cope’s poem, “The Picture” paints a picture of “Sydney, seen from Athol” (cope Under 28).

4. The version of this poem in Sydney Morning Herald (25 July 1935: 23) is different from cope’s other poem of the same name in her book Under the Joy of the Sky (cope Under 56).

Works Cited

Children’s BooksBedford, Ruth. Fairies and Fancies. London: A.

& c. Black, 1929. Print.cope, Gwen. Fairy Verse for Little Folk. Sydney:

Angus & Robertson, 1936. Print.—. Under the Joy of the Sky. Sydney: Angus &

Robertson, 1937. Print.—. “Youth.” Australian Women’s Weekly 27 Aug.

1938: 18.cross, Zora. The City of Riddle-Me-Eee. Sydney:

Angus & Robertson, 1918. Print.Forrest, Mabel. Green Harper. Brisbane: Gordon

and Gotch, 1915. Print.Hume-cook, James. Australian Fairy Tales.

Melbourne: J. Howlett-Ross, 1925. Print.Mackaness, Joan S. and George. The Wide Brown

Land. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1949. Print.

O’Harris, Pixie. The Pixie O’Harris Fairy Book: Stories and Verse. Adelaide: Rigby, 1925. Print.

Outhwaite, Ida Rentoul. Fairyland. Melbourne: Ramsay, 1926. Print.

Stable, Jeremiah, Joseph. The High Road of Austra-lian Verse: An Anthology for Australian Schools. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1924. Print.

Secondary SourcesAsterisk. “child Verse in Australia.” Sydney

Morning Herald 15 Jun. 1935: 11.Baldick, chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary

Terms. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.Bellis, natalie, Graham Parr and Brenton doecke.

“The Making of Literature: A continuing conversation.” Changing English 16.2 (2009): 165–179. Print.

carter, david. “Literary canons and Literary Institutions.” Southerly 57. 3 (1997):16-37.

cross, Zora. “Australian child-Literature.” Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser 10 Feb. 1922: 1. Print.

—. “Modern Books.” Maoriland Worker 11.180 (26 May 1920): 4. Print.

Elliston, norman. “Foreword.” Fairy Verse for Little Folk, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936. Print.

Gilmore, Mary. “The Fairy Man.” The School Magazine. Education department 1 Mar. 1928. Print.

Hendrick, Philippa. “Fairy Lore: does It Make The child ‘Slack’?” Bris-bane Queenslander 1 May 1926: 4. Print.

Flynn, Richard. “Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet: Poets, children, and Readers in an Age of Prose.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Ed. Julia L. Mickenberg. new York: Oxford UP, 2011. 53-70. Print.

Hughes, W. H. “Forward.” Australian Fairy Tales. Ed. James Hume-cook. Melbourne: J. Howlett-Ross, 1925. i-ii. Print.

Inglis Moore, Thomas. Social Patterns in Australian Literature. Berkeley: U of california P, 1971. Print.

Jones Lewis, W. “The Arthurian Legend.” The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Vol. 1. Eds. A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller. new York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907. Print.

kidson, May. “Fairies.” Perth Sunday Times 20 Jan. 1927: 38. Print. —. “Fairyland Today (Lake cave, Margaret River).” Perth Sunday Times

27 Mar. 1927: 40. Print. —. “Fayre Layde of the Lake (South-West caves, Margaret River).”

Perth Western Mail 22 Feb. 1923: 30. Print. —. “If.” Perth Sunday Times 2 Jul. 1939: 22. Print.—. “My Ladye Orchid.” Perth Western Mail 7 Jul. 1916: 41. Print. —. “Rhyme of Miss Seven Years Old.” Perth Sunday Times Oct. 1926:

38. Print.Mackellar, dorothea. “Faery Poetry.” Sydney Morning Herald 1 Mar.

1927: 4. Print.niall, B. Australia Through the Looking-Glass: Children’s Fiction, 1830–

1980. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1984. Print.Odden, karen. “Retrieving childhood Fantasies: A Psychoanalytic

Look at Why We (Re)read Popular Literature.” Second Thoughts: a Focus on Rereading. Ed. david Galef. detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. 126-151. Print.

O’Harris, Pixie. “Fairy Bells.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Jan. 1933: 9. Print.

—. “Fairy Man.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Jul. 1937: 13. Print.Reid, Ian. The Making of Literature: Texts, Contexts and Classroom Prac-

tices. norwood: Australian Association for the Teaching of English, 1985. Print.

Rose-Soley, Agnes R. “no Fairy Lore. Australia’s Literary need.” Sydney Morning Herald 31 dec. 1927: 9. Print.

—. “From the child’s Point of View.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Oct. 1925: 3. Print.

Villette. “What Are Little Girls Made For?” Mercury [Hobart] 19 dec. 1936: 15. Print.

cape Town, known by some as South Africa’s “Mother city,” has been in international news recently. It has been recog-nized by cnn as one of the world’s ten best-loved cities, as

one of the five “best cities in the world” by the condé nast maga-zine, and has been designated the world’s design capital for 2014. It is also known for its high crime rate and the rampant inequality that divides its populace on an economic and racial basis. The city nestles between the iconic Table Mountain, recently voted among

Table Mountain, beneath which nestles South Africa’s “Mother City,” Cape Town, whose history is given briefly, has not featured much in South African children’s literature, although it is mentioned in the epic poem by Portugal’s national poet, Camões, and the adventures of Baron Munchausen. A much-loved exception has been the story of how Table Mountain got its cloud and why its companion, Devil’s Peak, was so named. This article discusses two older versions of this tale alongside more recent books written for children, in which Table Mountain and/or Devil’s Peak play a role.

The Mountain and the Devil:

Fake Lore or Folklore? A W

of the World in South A

frican Children’s Literature

by Tanya BaRBEn

Tanya Barben is the University of cape Town’s Libraries' Rare Books Librarian. her duties include the care of the South African Children’s Literature Collection. One of her pleasures is walking her dogs on the lower

slopes of Table Mountain, even during a howling South-Easter.

THE MOUnTAIn And THE dEVIL: FAkE LORE OR FOLkLORE?

the seven natural wonders of the world, and Table Bay. The mountain boasts a floral kingdom of over 600 species while the number of species growing on the cape Peninsula rivals that of the whole of Great Britain. It is the recreational park of thousands and is venerated by all.

The mountain and the area round it, the cape of Good Hope, have been part of the European imagination ever since the Portuguese explorer, Bartholomeu dias, rounded what he called the “cape of Storms” in 1488. It was renamed the cape of Good Hope after dias’s successor, Vasco da Gama, opened the way for Europeans to the riches of the Indies. The national poet of Portugal, Luis de camões, in celebrating these achievements, wrote in The Lusiads how the Titan, Adamastor, is banished from Olympus to be imprisoned forever at the cape in the form of the mountain that straddles it. This punishment is not only for his part in the Titans’ rebellion against Zeus, but also because he dared to court the nymph, Thetis, who had also caught the eye of the sexually avaricious Olympian. Adamastor is the guardian of the cape and, as such, wreaks revenge on any human being who dares to invade his territory. The Titan, despite his classical connotations, is a sixteenth-century Rabelai-sian invention about whom the first example of “fake lore” around the famed promontory sprang up. Adamastor appears once again in Rudolf Erich Raspe’s Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in which this remarkable traveler explains how Table Mountain became flat-topped and how Adamastor disappears into the deepest reaches of the mountain, never to be seen again.

The cape of Good Hope’s human history goes back many thousands of years, to when the region’s First People, the hunter-gatherers known as San or “Bushmen,” inhabited it. Later settlers were the pastoralist khoekhoe, referred to as “Hottentots” by the dutch, who moved around the area with their cattle in search of good pasturage. The Portuguese lost interest in the cape after an incident when one of their own was killed during an attempt to abduct a khoe child and steal some cattle. It was, however, a

Portuguese, Antonio de Saldanha, who referred to the mountain that guards the bay as Taboa da Cabo, the Table of the cape. English and dutch ships, among others, visited Table Bay to take on fresh water and gather wood sorrel (oxalis), which grew in profusion and served as an antidote to the dreaded scurvy causing so much havoc amongst their crews. These visitors adopted “The Table” as the name of the familiar flat-topped mountain, for this is how it presents its northern aspect to onlookers from the sea.

Overall, the range is made up of several more rocky projections. The one on its eastern flank the dutch first named Windberg or Windy Hill, although earlier English visitors had called it king charles’s Mount or Herbert’s Mount (named by Sir Thomas Herbert). Flanking the Table on the west are Lion’s Head and Lion’s Tale (now Signal Hill, once named the Sugar Loaf). The mountain is also known as the “Old Grey Father of colo-nialism and the Silent Witness of apartheid” and the “Watcher of the South” (nicolaas Vergunst 16). Of course, these names totally ignore the fact that the indigenes had their own name for Table Mountain: Hoerikwaggo, or Sea Mountain, appropriate for a grey protuberance of granite and sandstone that seems to rise straight out of the sea.

The dutch East India company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische compagnie or VOc), under commander Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, estab-lished a refreshment station at the mouth of a perennial river, the camissa or “Sweet Water,” which rose on Table Mountain and emptied itself into the waters of the bay. The settlement became known as the KaapscheVlek or cape Hamlet, but by the end of the eighteenth century visitors writing home were referring to it as cape Town (Kaapstad in dutch).

One might well ask what the above has to do with South African children’s literature. Very little, regrettably, for very little fictional has been written about the mountain for young readers. One notable exception is the tale of why the name the dutch settlers gave to the Windberg was soon replaced by its current appellation, devil’s Peak, and how the cloud that so often covers the Table

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(known appropriately as “the Tablecloth”) was formed. The presence of the Tablecloth is indica-tive of the Southeasterly wind that is considered a curse to visitors whether on land or at sea. The residents of the city are a little more equitable, for to them the wind is also known affection-ately as “the cape doctor” as it cleans the streets (through which it blows with a vengeance) and provides welcome relief from the summer heat. Jan Pietersz cortemünde, who visited the cape

in december 1672 (the height of the South-Easter season), wrote that the mountain was also called “devil’s Mountain” for “when the clouds strike it, they call forth a horrible roaring and growling, which is often heard three hours before the wind is felt” (16). Another visitor, Willem ten Rhyne, remarked the following year that the “wind generally comes in great gusts and that it is always blowing, as if this were the kingdom of Aeolus”; he added that “the mountain which is continuous with Table Mountain is always vomiting forth a gale, and is hence called devil’s Peak” (97).

A tale, or legend “peculiar to the cape” (Varley 45), explains the origin of the Table-cloth. It tells of how the pirate, Jan van Hunks, engaged in a smoking contest with the devil on that part of the mountain known then as the Windberg. The smoke that billowed from their

pipes formed a thick white cloud (the Tablecloth) and henceforth the Windberg became known as devil’s Peak. The tale Varley refers to was the work of Ian duncan colvin, an ultra right-wing journalist who worked in cape Town from 1903 to 1907. “How Table Mountain Got Its cloud” appeared in his South Africa (1909), one title in the “Romance of Empire” series, and no doubt as part of the nation-building project that culmi-nated in the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. In colvin’s version, the pirate Van Hunks wins the contest, but exposes his opponent as the devil who whisks him away in a crash of thunder and a flash of lightning. All that remains are the empty peg and pipes and “a spot scorched bare of herbage” (163).

Although not written for children, this Faustian tale, in which the stakes, according to Van Hunks’s smoking companion, are his “soul against the kingdoms of the world” (colvin, 159), has become part of the canon of South African children’s literature. It has been retold and embellished many times for both adult and child readers. colvin asserted that his account had its origin in the Malay Quarter of cape Town where men who had been to Mecca could explain how Table Mountain got its cloud, an assertion that has been accepted by many. There is, however, no evidence to support this contention. In fact, it would appear that the tale was colvin’s inven-tion, one that fits the definition of “fakelore” and is probably not entirely original.

“Fake lore” (later “fakelore”) was a neologism coined in 1950 by American folklorist, Richard M. dorson, to describe the “presentation of spurious and synthetic writings under the claim that they are genuine folklore” (7). Richard A. Reuss clarifies this by adding that “in more casual conversation the term is apt to be used to mean any folk or folksy tradition that is popularized or becomes a commercial (financial) success” (305 n. 5), while Alan dundes articulated dorson’s objection to cases “in which an individual first fabricated material and then had the audacity to claim that it was pure, unadulterated oral folk-lore” (6). For dorson, there was an undeniable dichotomy between folklore (which was good)

…the cloud that so often covers the Table (known appropriately as “the Tablecloth”)… is indicative of the Southeasterly wind that is considered a curse to visitors whether on land or at sea. The residents of the city are a little more equitable, for to them the wind is also known affectionately as “the Cape Doctor” as it cleans the streets and provides welcome relief from the summer heat.

and fakelore (which was evil) (6). colvin’s claim that his Van Hunks story was based on a Malay tale is exactly what dorson was protesting about. It is acknowledged, of course, that a definition of folklore is elusive (see dan Ben-Amos), yet dorson and his successors clearly exclude colvin’s story from the category of folklore.

Versions like Van Hunks and the Dark Stranger (1990) and Van Hunks and His Pipe (1966) were published with children in mind and translated from English into Afri-kaans and vice-versa. The latter was retold in Afrikaans by a well-known writer, Leon Rousseau, and translated into English by nancy Baines. Here the story is expanded, and all the idiosyncrasies and inequalities of early cape society described. Other versions have been published in collections of South African stories, such as Jay Heale and dianne Stewart’s African Myths and Legends (2001) where it appears as “Van Hunks and the devil,” as it does in Madiba Magic: Nelson Mandela’s Favourite Stories for Children (2004) and in Traditional Stories of the Afrikaner People (2007). Madiba Magic has also been translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, two of democratic South Africa’s nine official languages. The Van Hunks version in this collection, originally written in Afrikaans by Annari van der Merwe, is described as dating “from the early years when the cape of Storms was still circumnavigated by sailing ships and the settlement at the cape was dutch colony” (79). In Van der Merwe’s version, neither of the two contestants is willing to admit defeat and so the

competition continues still, except in winter “when it was too cold to stay sitting up there” (82). In summer, however, when the Tablecloth covers the mountain, “people still look up to the mountain and say to each other, ‘yes, today Van Hunks and the devil are really smoking up a storm’” (82). This conclusion is also used in Van Hunks and the Dark Stranger, in which kathleen Milne ends her tale thus:

Every time the South Easter whips through the streets of cape Town and you look up at Table Mountain to see its cloth of cloud billowing over the edge, you can be sure that the devil and Van Hunks are competing against each other yet again. For, as you know, the devil hates to lose and hell will freeze over before Van Hunks ever lets him win. (34)

Perhaps it is inconceivable that the devil could get the better of a man?

Interestingly enough, dante Gabriel Rossetti had on his deathbed in 1882 completed something he had begun writing when he was eighteen. The Ballad of Jan van Hunks was not published until some decades after Rossetti’s death (in The New Review in January

Perhaps it is inconceivable that the Devil could get the better of a man?

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1909). It describes a fatal smoking contest between a dutchman (no pirate in this version, but a heartless miser), Jan van Hunks, and the devil, who carries his opponent off to Hell. The action is set in Europe and has no linkage at all with the cape. The inspiration for this work was a story, “Henkerwyssel’s challenge” that appeared in a “periodical named Tales of Chivalry” which Rossetti enjoyed reading as a boy. Sarah dickson, in the “Forward” to John Robert Wahl’s edition of Rossetti’s ballad, adds that “the author of a book on South Africa printed a prose version, as if it were a folk tale of the cape” (Rossetti x). Wahl’s edition is based on a manuscript of the ballad acquired, appropriately, for the Arents Tobacco collection. “Henkerwyssel’s challenge” was published in other journals, including Winter’s Wreath and the 1824 volume of Friendship’s Offering. In this story, the name of one of the smokers is given as Peter van Funk. colvin’s editor has doffed his hat to Rossetti’s poem by stating in an editorial note that colvin’s story was made available to him several months before the publication of Rossetti’s ballad. Whether this is so we will never know. It does, however, seem somewhat coin-cidental that one of the protagonists in colvin’s story not only has the same name as Rossetti’s character but also has a wager with the devil over the smoking of a pipe.

Unknown to most South Africans is the existence of another account about how devil’s Peak was named, one that preceded colvin’s by sixty-one years and is abso-lutely grounded in the history of the cape. charles Aken Fairbridge, cape attorney, book collector, and benefactor of the South African Public Library (now the national Library of South Africa), writing under the pseudonym of H. van Plaaks, published in the 1848 issue of The Cape of Good Hope Literary Magazine, “dirk van Splinter: A Legend of the devil’s Peak.” The author claims that this account of a meeting between dirk van Splinter, a former pirate but now in the employ of the company, and a stranger, is detailed in the journal of Barendz Weiland, chaplain to the commander of the cape, Jan van Riebeeck. The journal, he claims, is housed in the dessinian collection of the Library, and, despite the fact that it is virtually indecipherable, can be perused by anyone with the permission of the Librarian.

This delightfully wry account explains that dirk, having wasted all his piratical gains among his friends in the taverns of Rotterdam, seeks employment in the company and is appointed bombardier, his role being to protect the newly-built fort from the depredations of the local population and lions. Bored, and eager to regain his wealth, he decides to search for gold in the interior of the country, this being the mountain closest to him, namely, the Windberg. He obtains a day’s leave on the strict understanding that he will be back an hour after dark, and labors up the mountain carrying his pipe and tobacco, his rations, a stout stick and a goodly quantity of his favorite alcohol.

needless to say, no gold is found, he consumes his rations, drinks heartily from his cask, and falls asleep, waking up long after sunset. The wind has begun to howl round the mountain, but dirk’s fear of being attacked by wild beasts quite overtakes his fear of being keelhauled because he is AWOL. A small, dark, grizzly-bearded man who seems to know his most intimate secrets approaches him. After some chatter, they decide to share a pipe and the keg that dirk has brought with him. dirk is intrigued by the fact that his companion draws a glowing object from behind his back, which he uses to light his pipe. The smoke that issues from the bowl of his pipe does not dissolve into thin air but gathers round the head of the stranger in a thick white cloud that eventually spreads itself over the gap between the Windberg and Table Mountain until it eventu-ally covers the Table as well. dirk’s curiosity as to the nature of the glowing object gets the better of him, and he thumps it with his staff. It is then revealed to be a tail, and dirk realizes that his companion is the devil himself. dirk summons up all the courage of a dutchman and smashes his fist into the devil’s face. The devil disap-pears, and a clap of thunder and a blow from an unknown hand knocks out dirk. He is found the following day by a party sent out to search for him. He shows them proof and the location of his surprising adventure: an empty keg, his pipe, and a “patch of burnt herbage.” He is hauled before the commander and his council to whom he recounts his experience. After the council care-fully considers his story, he is called before them again, promised a seat on the council and threat-ened with being cashiered and keelhauled if he tells of his encounter with the devil to anyone. The credulous Weiland believes all that he is told. Fairbridge ends his light-hearted tale with the following:

for though government from the days of…van Riebeeck, to our time, perversely persists in calling the mountain in all official documents “the Windberg,” the good citizens of cape Town devoutly believe the marvellous adventures of

dirk van Splinter, and, fortified by the authority of the first colonial chaplain, never speak of the hill where dirk met the strange smoker by any other name than the devil’s Peak (79).

Barendz Weiland certainly existed. He is mentioned in Van Riebeeck’s Journal as Willem Barentssen Wijlant, not as a chaplain, but a sick-comforter, someone who comforts and attends to the needs of the sick and in the absence of a minister offers up prayers and reads sermons on Sundays. He did not keep a diary detailing the affairs of the cape until 1659, as Van Plaaks/Fairbridge suggests, and there is nothing like it in the dessinian collection. In fact, he left the cape for Batavia (now Indonesia) in 1656. That no diary exists is not unexpected, but it is evident that the writer has given his readers a delight-fully whimsical tale that is so compelling that one would like it to be true.

Is there a connection between the two Van Hunks tales and that of dirk van Splinter? It seems more than likely that colvin (despite his editor’s disclaimer) knew of both Rossetti’s recently published work and Fairbridge’s narra-

tion of the bombardier’s experience. In fact Wahl (a capetonian who made a study of Rossetti’s works) asserts that even if colvin’s story had been written before the publication of Rossetti’s Ballad, as a well-read man colvin would probably have seen a reference to it in Rossetti’s published diaries and letters which had been edited by his brother, William, and then “borrowed both the name and the theme for his own purposes” (Rossetti 18). certainly it was not an old Malay folktale, but one that would fit into the defini-tion of fakelore. As for the dirk van Splinter story, A.M. Lewin Robinson, South African Librarian, suggests that it is hard to believe that

…it is evident that the writer has given his readers a delightfully

whimsical tale that is so compelling that one would like it to be true.

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colvin was ignorant of it. Fairbridge could not have known of Rossetti’s work, and his story’s connection with it is rather tenuous.

despite colvin’s apparent plagiarism, it is his story that has captured the imagination of thousands, and it even appeared in an episode of Albert coates’s opera, The Table Cloth, performed as part of the celebrations for cape Town’s 1952 Tercentenary. cape Town sports a Van Hunks restaurant, and Van Hunks Pumpkin Ale is available for sale, the bottle’s label bearing an account of the old pirate’s wager with the devil. In a recent book written for nine-to-fourteen-

year-olds, Glenda Jager’s Danger on Devil’s Peak (2010), Ben visits his aunt during the school holidays. She tells him the story of Van Hunks and the devil and introduces him to a playmate, Jaftha. The boys find Van Hunks’s old tobacco box and this sets them off on a number of adven-tures, including a search for the spot at which Van Hunks and the devil met. In fact, the tale of Van Hunks and the devil is intertwined with the boys’ escapades on devil’s Peak, enabling both the old pirate and the mountain to come alive.

Other than in the retelling of the Van Hunks

story, Table Mountain features relatively infre-quently in South African children’s literature, although there are many stories featuring the streets and suburbs of cape Town. In the past fifteen years, only a few books set on the slopes of the mountain have been published for children, Danger on Devil’s Peak being one of them. noted writer of children’s books, Lesley Beake, has written a work of speculative fiction for young adults in which the mountain features. Remem-bering Green (2009) is set in 2200. It envisages a world in which the ice has melted and sea levels have risen. Table Mountain stands above the waters as an isolated island, inhabited by Tekkies who cling to a lifestyle that has long since vanished. Their resources are running out and the land that was once Africa—known as Out—is burdened with a massive drought. The River People who live in Out have shunned twenty-third century technology and follow a simple way of life based on an ancient knowledge that enables them to survive. This is what the Tekkies want, and will use any means to acquire it, even if it requires human sacrifice.

The Giants’ Picnic (1997), written and illus-trated by Sue Woodward, is aimed at the much younger child and gives an entirely new take on the mountain and its cloudy covering. When the world was young and unformed two giants from “Somewhere Elsewhere” landed on the earth to have a picnic. They found a perfect picnic spot on a table with a pure white cloth. They laid out their food and drink on the cloth, but their lunch disappeared into that tablecloth which was, of course, a cloud. They soon found themselves enveloped in mist, roared out their disapproval like thunder, and jumped off the earth, “leaving their picnic fossilised now in the rocks of the table with the pure white cloth” (20).

Alex d’Angelo’s Asmodeus: A Forkful of Tales from Devil’s Peak (1997) is a delightful collection of stories about a junior demon who is sent by the devil himself to set up a new branch of Hell at the cape, as it was well-known that that region of the world had enough sinners in it to warrant the establishment of a regional office. d’Angelo weaves into his story tidbits of early

cape social history, told tongue in cheek. Asmodeus, unfortunately, is not entirely up to the task and finds that those very same sinners whom he is expected to control often outwit him. He learned to his cost that “some of them were tougher than him and quite a few were cleverer. In fact the cape is full of tales about folk who out-ran or out-thought or simply out-smoked him, like the old pirate Van Hunks, for example, who smoked with Asmodeus on devil’s Peak until Asmodeus had a mouth like a tar-barrel and had to run away to be sick” (3). Here, as in the dirk van Splinter tale, a visitor to the world from Hell is no match for a man.

There could, of course, be another explanation to the name given to the former Windberg, which has nothing to do with the wind that howls over it. Peter kolb (kolben) was a German visitor to the cape in the early eighteenth century who wrote a detailed and surprisingly sympathetic account of the social life and customs of the khoekhoe. He mentions that at night a large glowing red carbuncle could be seen on the mountain, resembling a crowned serpent in the imagination of many (13). Perhaps this is what the native inhabitants took to be the devil and passed that on to their dutch usurpers, with ordinary folk, rather than officialdom, taking it up in the name of the mountain. This we will never know for sure, unfortunately, as no khoekhoe remain in cape Town except as their very much-integrated descendants. These people of the cape were either destroyed by a series of smallpox epidemics or fled northwards, away from the whip of their dutch masters and colonialism. The mountain that kolb refers to, however, is Table Mountain. kolb does say that the names given to Windberg or devil’s Peak, however, are because of “the terrible South-East wind, caus’d by a white cloud. … From this cloud, the South-East Winds issue as from the Mouth of a Sack, with inexpressible Fury, shattering

the Houses” (19). Whatever the case, it is colvin’s story that, regardless of its origin, has been retold and adapted and become a much-loved tale in a part of the world Sir Frances drake described as “the fairest cape in the whole circumference of the globe.”

Works Cited

Children’s Books Beake, Lesley. Remembering Green. London: Frances Lincoln, 2009.

Print.d’Angelo, Alexander. Asmodeus: A Forkful of Tales from Devil’s Peak.

cape Town: Tafelberg, 1997. Print.

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Jager, Glenda. Danger on Devil’s Peak. South Africa: Eazi Study Publishers, 2010. Print.

Milne, kathleen. Van Hunks and the Dark Stranger. cape Town: Anansi, 1990. Print.

Rousseau, Leon. Van Hunks and His Pipe: Traditional Tale of the Cape. cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1966. Print.

Van der Merwe, Annari. “Van Hunks and the devil.” Madiba Magic: Nelson Mandela’s Favourite Tales for Children. cape Town: Tafelberg, 2002. 79-82. Print.

Woodward, Sue. The Giants’ Picnic. cape Town: discobbolos, 1997. Print.

Secondary SourcesBen-Amos, dan. “Towards a definition of Folklore in context.” The

Journal of American Folkore 84.331 (1971): 3-15. Print.colvin, Ian duncan. “How Table Mountain Got Its cloud.” South

Africa. London: Jack, [1909]. 155-164. Print.cortemünde, Jan Pietersz. Adventure at the Cape of Good Hope in December

1672. Transcribed and ed. by Henning Henningsen. Trans. and annotated by douglas and Vera Varley. cape Town: Friends of the South African Public Library, 1962. Print.

dorson, Richard M. “Fakelore.” American Folklore and the Historian. chicago: U of chicago P, 1971. Print.

dundes, Alan. “nationalistic Inferiority complexes and the Fabrica-tion of Fakelore: A Reconsideration of Ossian, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan.” Journal of Folklore Research 22.1 (1985): 5-18. Print.

Fairbridge, charles Aken (H. van Plaaks). “dirk van Splinter: A Legend of the devil’s Peak.” The Cape of Good Hope Literary Magazine 2 (1848): 65-79. Print.

kolb, Peter. The present state of the Cape of Good Hope: Volume 2. 1731. new York: Johnson Reprint company, 1968. Print.

Reuss, Richard A. “‘That can’t Be Alan dundes! Alan dundes is Taller than That!’: The Folklore of Folklorists.” The Journal of American Folklore 87.346: 301-307. Print.

Robinson, A.M. Lewin. “charles Aken Fairbridge and his Library: II. Literary and Bibliographical Work.” Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 9 (1954-1955): 32-49. Print.

Rossetti, dante Gabriel. Jan van Hunks. Edited from the original manuscripts by John Robert Wahl. new York: nY Public Library, 1952. Print.

Ten Rhyne, Willem. “A Short Account of the cape of Good Hope and of the Hottentots Who Inhabit that Region.” The Early Cape Hottentots Described in the Writings of Olfert Dapper(1668), Willem Ten Rhyne (1686) and Johannes Gulielmus de Grevenbroek (1695). The original texts with translations into English by I. Schapera and B. Farrington. 1933. cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2012. Print.

Varley, douglas Harold. “Adventures in Africana.” Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 4 (1949): [39]-84. Print.

Vergunst, nicolaas. Hoerikawaggo: Images of Table Mountain. cape Town: South African national Gallery, 2001. Print.

Did the earth really move? J.O de Graft Hanson introduces the reader to two curious siblings, Kof i Taatna and Esi Nworaba, and their cousin Ebow Kobena. Through these brave young children the writer throws light on the legends of Ghana, the beliefs of the people of Moree in particular and Ghanaians in general in the ancestors’ and the peoples’ reverence for the gods and the elders. The People from the Sea is a novel for 9-12 year olds that combines a f ictional narrative with legendary stories of how the people of Asebu, a village near Cape Coast in the Central Region of Ghana, and Akatakyiwa, a village also in the central Region, came into being. Originally published in 1988, it has recently been re-released for a modern child readership. J.O de Graft Hanson fuses his narrative with traditional stories and myths as well as legendary songs to paint a vivid picture of Ghanaian belief systems centering on some of the historic events of the Central Region. The novel ends with the earthquake that shook Ghana in 1939, demonstrating the power of natural events to shape a culture’s traditional beliefs. In this well-written novel for children, the child characters are active participants in the events, suggesting children’s capacity to play a signif icant role in creating a better society for all.Rose Blankson Austin

J.O. de Graft HansonThe People from the SeaTema: Ghana Publishing corporation [1988], 2009 89 pp. ISBn 9964-1-0469-3(novel, 9+)

ubli c ofG

ha n a

History is always selective—you never hear the whole story—and there are many myths about Gallipoli.

(davidson Scarecrow 2)

Ghassan Hage asserts that the “core element of Austra-lia’s colonial paranoia is a fear of loss of Europeanness or Whiteness and the lifestyle and privileges that are seen to

emanate directly from them. This is a combination of the fragility of White European colonial identity in general and the specificity

Paranoid Prizing: Mapping

Australia’s Eve Pow

nall Award for

Information B

ooks, 2001-2010

by ERiCA HATELEy

Each year, the Children’s Book Council of Aus-tralia (CBCA) administers a number of Book of the Year Awards, including the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The books chosen by the CBCA constitute a contemporary canon of Australian children’s literature, and serve to both shape and reflect current educational policies and practices as well as young Australians’ sense of themselves and their nation. This paper reads a selection of award-winning Australian non-fic-tion children’s literature in the context of colonial-ism, curriculum, military myths, and Aboriginal perspectives on national history and identity.

Erica Hateley is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and a member of the Children

and youth Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. She is the recipient of an Australian Research

Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and is currently researching Australian children’s book awards.

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of the Australian situation” (419). This colonial paranoia can be traced through a range of popular cultural formations, including contemporary Australian children’s literature. Each year, the children’s Book council of Australia (cBcA) confers awards and honors-listings to fifteen books for young people across five categories: Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early child-hood, Picture Book, and the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. First awarded in 1946, the cBcA Awards are clearly connected with the conscious forging of a national culture immedi-ately following WWII; and “the symbolism of a new cultural beginning being made with books for children, rather than for adults” (Macleod 3). They do so by identifying the best or most desir-able forms of Australia’s past, present, and future, and linking such visions with modes of national subjectivity. Using Hage’s concept of colonial paranoia, this paper considers the relationship between prize-winning books and educational agendas in the ongoing revision and renewal of national myths for Australia in the early twenty-first century.

The Eve Pownall Award for Information BooksAlthough not often included in critical debates, non-fictional texts overtly seek to shape young readers’ understandings of their national context and their own location as national subjects. Thus, the books named as winners or recipients of honors of the Eve Pownall Award provide a snap-shot of which facts and whose fictions are salient in shaping the contemporary Australian nation. Since 1993, the Eve Pownall Award for Informa-tion Books has been an annual category within the cBcA Awards:1

1.2.5 The Eve Pownall Award for Infor-mation Books will be made to outstanding books which have the prime intention of documenting factual material with consid-eration given to imaginative presentation, interpretation and variation of style. As general guidelines, the Judges may consider the relative success of the book in balancing and harmonising the following elements:

• Style of language and presentation;• Graphic excellence;• clarity, appropriateness and aesthetic

appeal of illustration;• Integration of text, graphics and

illustrations to engage interest and enhance understanding;

• Overall design of book to facilitate the presentation of information;

• Accuracy with regard to the current state of knowledge. (“Awards” 1-2)

As is often the case with literary prizes, the criteria for the Eve Pownall Award for Informa-tion Books are at once comprehensive and amor-phous—the telling qualification “may” suggests that they are compulsory and optional for the judges. The criteria emphasize form and content to the degree that they might be measured objec-tively, and it is apparently not the remit of the cBcA to select texts on the basis of curricular policy, ideological content, nor discourses of nation. nonetheless, the cBcA are conscious of the widespread reliance on the Awards lists for curriculum resourcing. Indeed, the 2002 cBcA Judges’ Report explicitly referred to “[r]ecog-nising that the Notables [the cBcA’s longlist] often acts as a buying guide for primary schools” and admit that this effect informed the judges’ reactions to the books submitted for their consid-eration (“children’s” 3).National Myths

Rather than focusing on the (somewhat arbi-trary) criteria for the Award, I am interested in how sanctioned non-fiction children’s texts may function as a national children’s literature. Such books provide young readers with an historical understanding of their nation, balancing histor-ical accuracy with opportunities for reader iden-tification: “they aim through subjective retellings

…I am interested in how sanctioned non-fiction children’s texts may function as a national

children’s literature.

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of the national myths, to be sources of national pride and identity, to provide the underpin-nings for children’s sense of belonging” (Shavit 124). The Eve Pownall Award books serve as an example of national myth-making, achieving what Bourdieu calls the “truly ideological effect [which] consists precisely in the imposition of political systems of classification beneath the legitimate appearance of philosophical, religious, legal (etc.) taxonomies” (170). As “Australian national identity narratives [tend to] privilege elements of non-Indigeneity, whiteness, mascu-linity and heterosexuality,” it is pressing to consider the ideological effects imposed within and by children’s literature as a cultural land-scape that both reflects and shapes anxieties of national identity (Elder 6).

Curricular ConcernsIn Australia, the cBcA notables, shortlists, honors and awards not only attract attention but also convey “legitimacy.” While it would be inac-curate to suggest that educators rely exclusively on the cBcA lists, it makes sense that Austra-lian educators and librarians turn to the Eve Pownall lists for resourcing quality non-fiction children’s literature into the curriculum. This is perhaps especially true in the current Australian educational context which has seen the expendi-ture of federal funding under the title “Building the Education Revolution” (BER) as part of an economic stimulus package commencing in 2009, frequently made manifest in the building of new school libraries (department of Educa-tion, Employment and Workplace Relations [dEEWR]); the 2011 tabling of a report resulting from a Senate enquiry into “school libraries and teacher librarians in Australian schools” (commonwealth of Australia); and, the current development and roll-out of a national curriculum (Australian curriculum, Assess-ment and Reporting Authority [AcARA]). Such governmental actions are examples of the kinds of forces brought to bear on educators that require the inclusion of quality children’s litera-ture in educational practice, but do not neces-sarily define what quality children’s literature is.

The need for high-quality, accurate non-fictional texts for young readers in Australian schools is particularly strongly indicated by the inclusion of three cross-curricular priorities in the national curriculum: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures; Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia; and, Sustain-ability (AcARA). Imaginative engagement with these priorities can aid in the development of young Australians as capable of recognizing and valuing multiple ways of being, being not just Australian, but human. These priorities may even contribute to a widespread privileging of ethical citizenship within Australian and global contexts.

Although the cross-curricular priorities aim to achieve a widespread discursive shift in the meaning of Australian culture, it is difficult not to discern the resonance between these cross-curricular priorities and the three elements of colonial paranoia that Ghassan Hage argues as specific to Australian colonialism:

First, it should be noted that what-ever traces of colonial confidence exist, built as they are on genocidal practices, they remain haunted by these constitutive deeds. […]

Another factor that has bred colonial uncertainty is an Australian-specific sensi-tivity to and awareness of the impossibility of fully colonizing the natural environment. […] Finally, as is well known, because of its distance from the mother country and because of its geographic location, Austra-lia’s early settlers, or at least those who had the power to shape the identity and culture of the settlements, constructed Australia as an isolated White British colony in the heart of a non-European (read also uncivi-lized) Asia-Pacific region. (421)

In line with Hage’s critique, AcARA’s cross-curricular priorities seem to reinscribe fears of Aboriginal “revolution,” Asian “invasion,” and the capacity of the Australian natural environ-ment to obliterate humans.

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Mapping as MetaphorWriting about Australian children’s non-fiction books produced by Eve Pownall and others in the mid-twentieth century, clare Bradford notes that “drawings, maps, charts and photographs which purport to work as conceptual pictures, explaining history in a realist or scien-tific mode” predominate (101). She explains further that “[n]arra-tives of exploration loom large in Australian children’s histories of the 1940s and 1950s, generally in conjunction with maps, which plot not only the journeys of explorers but also epistemologies of space and distance” (103).2 Mapping, then, may be understood as a metaphor for the cultural work of children’s literature in the past and present. Maps make visible and attempt to manage anxieties about time and space. They seek to fix both in order to render the subject (who makes or who

uses the map) as agentially mobile within time and space, rather than subordinate to ever-changing moments and places. Epistemologies of space and time can be traced in twenty-first century Eve Pownall Award titles’ engage-ment with Aboriginal Australian history and Australia’s military history.

Explicit manifestations of colonial/white paranoia are unlikely to be published by mainstream children’s book publishers, and even if they were, they would be unlikely to find themselves the recipient of the cBcA’s seal of approval. What does seem to have taken place in recent years, however, is an encoding or displacement of this paranoia into the “supreme national story” of Anzac (Seal 7). In its first usage, AnZAc is an acronym for Australian and new Zealand Army corps, but has been adapted through consistent linguistic use as a noun—Anzac—to refer to “a member of the Australian and new Zealand Army corps during World War I” and, more generally, “a soldier from Australia or new Zealand” (“Anzac”).

Australia’s Anzac MythA tradition of military history, popular and political discourses, and active mythologizing has established a

powerful web of narrative and symbolic associations that can be called the “Anzac myth.” The Anzac myth structures, and is structured by, the annual observance of Anzac day (April 25) in Australia: a national day of mourning for, and commemoration of, all Anzacs who have served, and especially of those killed in service. This date marks the historical cornerstone of the Anzac myth: the Allied landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. This myth describes a privileged mode of subjectivity, and a set of behaviors or characteristics that shape the subject’s engage-ment with the world (especially, but not exclusively, in international military engagements):

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toughness, steadfastness, egalitarianism, a tendency towards theft, looting and light fingers, a distinct lack of respect for army hier-archy and the officers who represented it, and a resulting lack of indiscipline […] counterbalanced by a profound respect for the Empire, the monarch and the “old country.” (Seal 11)

A persistent aspect of the Anzac myth that indexes particular modes of social agency is the inscription of normative gender and a privileging of homosociality:

While the digger would come to be presented in the Anzac tradition as possessing the virtues of courage, resourcefulness, egalitarianism and independence that contribute to his soldierly prowess, it is the notion of undying loyalty to one’s mates that both distin-guishes the digger’s Australian-ness and his ability as a warrior. Thus it is in the concept of mateship that the national-military myth most powerfully incorporates both the imperatives of the warrior and of the nation. (Seal 78)

Tellingly, the perpetuation of these mythologies of masculinity, homosocial bonding, and nationalism efface a range of structural inequalities—especially along lines of gender, sexuality, and race—which continue to shape Australian culture and society today.

Twenty-percent of the Eve Pownall books under consideration here are Anzac texts: Anthony Hill’s Soldier Boy: The True Story of Jim Martin, the Youngest Anzac (2001), Patrick carlyon’s The Gallipoli Story (2003), Leon davidson’s Red Haze: Australians & New Zealanders in Vietnam (2006), Peter Macinnis’s Kokoda Track: 101 Days (2007), and Mark Greenwood’s Simpson and his Donkey (2008). In these books, “Australian” is a relatively uncomplicated subject position, defined as much by its difference from foreign enemies and from the colonial authority of the British, as a discrete subject position. Anzac narratives can, without controversy, encode the ideal Austra-lian body (and subject) as white and male. This is not to say that these works are homogenous, totally positive, nor univocal, but the category of “Australian” remains relatively stable across them.

The Anzac myth provides a template for identity which makes “Austra-lian-ness” a positive and definite set of characteristics, disembeds it from the threats of colonial guilt and the Australian physical environment,

Anzac narratives can, without controversy, encode the ideal Aus-tralian body (and subject) as white and male. This is not to say that these works are homogenous, to-tally positive, nor univocal, but the category of “Australian” remains relatively stable across them.

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and plots relations with other nations as martial victory. What has been identified as “a profound hollowness at the centre of the Australian experi-ence [because] all of Australia’s military under-takings have been conducted in faraway places” becomes positive in contemporary ideological discourse (Seal 171). Anzacs will not be over-whelmed by outsiders: they will travel beyond Australia’s shores to defend the nation (as land, state, and idea). Once there, neither the Austra-lian environment nor its original inhabitants can defeat them.

Even more specifically, in the Gallipoli texts by Hill, carlyon, and davidson, there are clear efforts to convey historical information (implying an unknowing readership), supported visually by maps and, often, photographs from the Austra-lian War Memorial. Although the implied reader is assumed not to know about historical specifics, they are usually assumed to have prior knowledge of the Gallipoli myth. For example, carlyon writes:

The Gallipoli legend is so ingrained that separating facts from myths can be diffi-cult. We all learn about the Anzacs when growing up. We are taught that Simpson was brave and that the British got it wrong. Both statements are true enough, but the most powerful tales of Gallipoli are about men you don’t often hear about any more. (carlyon 168)

The construction of an always-already “Austra-lian” reader here signals as strongly as any concrete historical data in The Gallipoli Story the under-lying attempt to extend and develop a particular vision of Australian culture and subjectivity.

All of these Gallipoli texts encourage direct identification with one or more Anzac soldiers. This personalizes history and myth, and also gives the appearance of de-politicizing the war. Hill follows the experiences of Jim Martin, the youngest known Anzac to die at Galli-poli. carlyon peppers his narrative with “in the trenches” detail, quoting from a wide array of Anzac letters and diaries, and including the

names of the soldiers who wrote them. david-son’s Scarecrow Army (2005) is predominantly a third-person narrative, but each chapter opens with a “What if you were there …” first-person vignette. For example, chapter Three opens with:

Aegean Sea, 25 April 1915What am I doing here? No way I wanna be in this boat crammed with 40 tobacco stinking soldiers and the sun not even up. For weeks I’ve been waiting for this day to arrive. Now I don’t know why I was so impatient. (37, emphasis in original)

“Anzac” becomes a subject position at once histor-ically specific and generally available through imaginative empathy. Seal notes, “the concern for the inculcation of appropriate knowledge and values in the young is a continual theme of the Anzac mythologizing process” (126). Simi-larly, Elder argues that “the emotional weight of the [Gallipoli] narrative also makes it effective in terms of pedagogy and as a site for instilling disciplinary practices of good citizenship” (246). Given AcARA’s educational agenda and Hage’s critique, I am especially interested in the possible

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relationships between this mode of mytholo-gizing and “Australia’s engagement with Asia.”

The historical and political facts of World War II and the Vietnam War locate Anzacs at war in and with Asia. Two photographic images in particular serve as metonyms for these texts’ engagement with Asia. In Macinnis’s Kokoda Track (2007), a photograph shows two infor-mally dressed Anzacs physically handling an Australian flag. The caption reads “Australian soldiers raise the Australian flag after forcing the Japanese nankai Shitai out of kokoda Village” (Macinnis 158). This image is explicitly coded as symbolizing military triumph, and can further be read as a neocolonial “victory” over Japan in Asian territory. In turn, such triumphalism may be juxtaposed with representations of Anzac experiences in the Vietnam War to index more recent anxieties about Australia’s ambivalent location (literal and symbolic) within Asia. Leon davidson’s Red Haze (2006) offers a sustained and self-reflexive narrative of Anzac participa-tion in Vietnam. Serving as a visual metonym for the far less confidently colonial logic of this historical narrative is a photograph showing two shirtless Anzacs jumping “into their weapon pit after an enemy alert was sounded” (davidson Red 97). Read individually or as components of a culture-text, such works reveal a range of ongoing tensions about Anzac myths, Australian subjectivity and agency, and Australia’s relation-ship with Asia.

When read against such conflicting ideas and images, it is unsurprising that the majority of military history texts prized recently by the cBcA is focused on Gallipoli, which offers a coherent and self-contained narrative of Anzac mythology. However, even beyond military history, it should be noted that Kokoda Track and Red Haze are the only two books (out of thirty Eve Pownall winners and honors in the first decade of the twenty-first century) to comment on Asia at all.

Aboriginal Australian PerspectivesIf an uncanny return to national origins is being staged in the repetition of the Gallipoli myth

(in part, I argue, as a way of avoiding engage-ment with Asia, and as an example of Hage’s colonial paranoia), then a simultaneous return of the repressed (or, in Hage’s terms, haunting) narratives of Aboriginal Australian histories and cultures can be seen in the Eve Pownall awards of the twenty-first century. Richly illus-trated works such as Elaine Russell’s A is for Aunty (2000), Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001), christine nicholls’s Art, History, Place (2003), and Maralinga: The Anangu Story (2009) disrupt too-neat mythologies of Austra-lian history and subjectivity.

Elaine Russell’s autobiographical alphabet book, A is for Aunty, uses a colonial construct of “order” (the alphabet), but does so in order to disrupt any orderly colonial narratives of indige-nous experience. As the book proceeds from A to Z, readers are offered visual and verbal texts that juxtapose Aboriginal ways of seeing with colonial strategies of subjugation. So, for example, “M is for Mission” faces “L is for Lagoon,” where the lagoon shows both a perspective on the natural environment and modes of understanding it (without dominating it), the Mission is a mapped and a mapping space wherein residents are subordinate to institutional power (for a fuller reading of this book, see Lunt). Similarly, “T is for Teacher” demonstrates the ways in which the colonial schooling system offers physical restraint and constraint. The school depicted on this page is overseen by a figure of white authority and, readers are told, is valued primarily for the literal

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nourishment it provides: “The best things about school were the small bottles of milk we drank every day and the vegetable garden” (np). There is no sense that any pedagogical or curricular experiences are valued by the speaker, presumably because they are disconnected from the valued culture and experience of the community that the school is supposed to serve.

Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001) is the result of a curriculum project at Papunya School to give students a meaningful education. Towards the end of the book, readers realize that they are reading one of the outcomes of an explicit educational agenda: “At Papunya we now know about schools and now we will make decisions about how and what we want the children to learn. Tjulkura will sit outside and behind Anangu to assist and work with Anangu teachers,

students and administrators” (40). Beyond this initial, important goal, Papunya School Book of Country and History is now widely available to non-Papunya readers, and reading this book offers a perspective on Australian colonial history that makes the erasure or effacement of Aborig-inal experiences impossible.

Papunya School Book explicitly addresses colonial policies and practices that have shaped Australian history, but which have not always been addressed by Australian schools. Such practices include the appropriation of land being described as exploration and the forced removal of Aboriginal people to Missions where orig-inal languages and cultures were intended to be erased in favor of Anglo-Australian language and culture. Many Australians now know about the history of the Stolen Generations—a term used to describe the forced removal of Aboriginal

children from their families to be assimilated into dominant, White Australian culture (Australian Government). Papunya School Book not only addresses such issues from an Aboriginal perspective, but makes clear the effects of educational colonization:

At this time [1960], children were not allowed to speak their own language at school. They were meant to learn only the whitefeller way of doing things. Teachers were very strict, and the Tjulkura did not talk to the community about how it wanted the children to learn. The education system did not recognise that Anangu elders and families had been teaching children since the Tjukurrpa. Teachers did not recognise the learning that the children brought from the community. They did not value learning about country. (Papunya School 30)

Papunya School Book explicitly addresses colonial policies and prac-

tices that have shaped Australian history, but which have not al-

ways been addressed by Austra-lian schools. Such practices include

the appropriation of land being described as exploration and the

forced removal of Aboriginal people to Missions where original lan-

guages and cultures were intended to be erased in favor of Anglo-Aus-

tralian language and culture.

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Papunya School Book of Country and History enacts a productive opposi-tion to such policies, and offers an antidote to some of the educational fictions which accompany, enact and transmit colonial paranoia. If “the very act of naming geographical entities implies a power over them” (Harvey 419), then Papunya opens by taking back power, as a full-bleed map incorporates colonial place-names such as Alice Springs and Hermannsburg, but privileges language groups such as Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara as markers of location and identity (Papunya School 2-3). The hybridity of this map indexes a much deeper sense of hybrid nation-ality and subjectivity. Regardless of their cultural location, Papunya invites readers to consider the role of curricular materials in coming to know the self and the other. It offers a palimpsestuous approach to mapping that represents and enacts its wider approach to education.

It may not be a coincidence that where the Anzac texts are openly and straightforwardly didactic, the Indigenous texts combine their social-izing and acculturating elements with a critique of normative educa-tion. That is, the Anzac books are “for” education where the Aboriginal books are “about” education. Indeed, the very existence of books such as Papunya speaks to the necessity of open, thoughtful curricular enter-prises. Readers are told, “At school we learn two ways—Anangu way and Western way” (45). It seems to me that the AcARA cross-curric-ular priorities are reaching out for such multiple educational perspec-tives, and I can only hope that colonial paranoia does not undermine the potential benefit to the current and future citizens of Australia. I also hope that the cBcA continues to prize the multiplicities of works such as Papunya, which teaches (among many lessons) that curricular goals need relevant and appropriate resources, and that Australian history, culture, and subjectivity need reconsideration rather than recapitulation.

Notes1. The first Eve Pownall Award was presented to nadia Wheatley

and donna Rawlins’s My Place (1987) in the year of Australia’s bicentenary, 1988. This first award was administered by the family of Eve Pownall, who was a highly regarded creator of children’s non-fiction literature in the twentieth century and an active member of the cBcA throughout her adult life. The award has since been absorbed within the cBcA Awards roster (“Winners”).

2. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider issues of sustainability, but at least thirty-percent of the Eve Pownall books of the twenty-first century seek to negotiate anxious relationships with the Australian environment via stories of exploration, mapping, and empirical, scientific knowledge of flora and fauna.

Works CitedChildren’s Bookscarlyon, Patrick. The Gallipoli Story. camberwell, VIc: Penguin, 2003.

Print.

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davidson, Leon. Red Haze: Australians & New Zealanders in Vietnam. Fitzroy, VIc: Black dog Books, 2006. Print.

—. Scarecrow Army: The Anzacs at Gallipoli. Fitzroy, VIc: Black dog Books, 2005. Print.

Greenwood, Mark. Simpson and His Donkey. 2008. Illus. Frané Lessac. newtown, nSW: Walker, 2011. Print.

Hill, Anthony. Soldier Boy: The True Story of Jim Martin, the Youngest Anzac. camberwell, VIc: Penguin, 2001. Print.

Macinnis, Peter. Kokoda Track: 101 Days. 2007. newtown, nSW: Black dog Books, 2012. Print.

Maralinga Tjarutja Inc, with christobel Mattingley. Maralinga: The Anangu Story. crows nest, nSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Print.

nicholls, christine. Art, History, Place. 2003. kingswood SA: Working Title Press, 2009. Print.

Papunya School, with nadia Wheatley and ken Searle. Papunya School Book of Country and History. crows nest, nSW: Allen & Unwin, 2001. Print.

Russell, Elaine. A Is for Aunty. Sydney: ABc Books, 2000. Print.

Wheatley, nadia. My Place. 1987. Illus. donna Rawlins. Melbourne: Pearson, 2005. Print.

Secondary Sources“Anzac.” The Macquarie Dictionary Online. 2012.

Web. 15 May 2012. Australian curriculum, Assessment and

Reporting Authority (AcARA). “cross-curriculum Priorities.” 2011. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.

Australian Government. “Sorry day and the Stolen Generations.” 22 Oct. 2009. Web. 20 Sep. 2012.

“Awards Titles and criteria [for 2011 Awards].” Children’s Book Council of Australia. 2010. Web. 30 Aug. 2010.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. cambridge: Polity, 1991. Print.

Bradford, clare. “Picturing Australian History: Visual Texts in nonfiction for children.” The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature. Ed. Ann Lawson Lucas. Westport, cT: Praeger, 2003. 99-105. Print.

“The children’s Book council of Australia Annual Awards 2002 [Unsigned Judges’ Report].” Reading Time 46.3 (2002): 2-13. Print.

commonwealth of Australia. “School Libraries and Teacher Librarians in 21st century Australia.” 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.

department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (dEEWR). “Building the Education Revolution.” 2011. Web. 15 Mar. 2012.

Elder, catriona. Being Australian: Narratives of National Identity. crows nest, nSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Print.

Hage, Ghassan. “Multiculturalism and White Paranoia in Australia.” Journal of Interna-tional Migration and Integration 3.3-4 (2002): 417-37. Print.

Harvey, david. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagina-tion.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80.3 (1990): 418-434. Print.

Lunt, Trish. “Situating childhood: A Reading of Spatiality in Aboriginal Picture Books.” Papers: Explorations Into Children’s Literature 15.1 (2005): 59-67. Print.

Macleod, Mark. “The Book of the Year Awards: The Early Years.” Reading Time 50.2 (2006): 2-5. Print.

Seal, Graham. Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2004. Print.

Shavit, Zohar. “On the Use of Books for children in creating the German national Myth.” The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature. Ed. Ann Lawson Lucas. Westport, cT: Praeger, 2003. 123-132. Print.

“Winners and commended Books 1980 – 1989 – cBcA.” Children’s Book Council of Australia. 2011. Web. 12 Jul. 2012.

The caribbean Poetry Project (cPP) is a unique collabo-ration between the Universities of cambridge and West Indies (UWI), developed under the auspices of the

cambridge centre for commonwealth Education and funded by the commonwealth Education Trust. It is made up of scholars with educational backgrounds from Barbados, cambridge, Jamaica and Trinidad. Our project team soon discovered that although we may live an ocean apart, we have like minds when it comes to teaching poetry. Indeed, one of the main points of the project is to reach as many children and teachers on both sides of the Atlantic as we can, encouraging them to appreciate and enjoy caribbean poetry.

key caribbean poets are advisors on the project, including kamau Brathwaite, Mervyn Morris and Olive Senior, and our partners include organizations such as the online Poetry Archive, an open access resource which enables people to hear poetry read aloud or performed, as well as to find out more about the poets and their back-grounds. (The cPP has raised funds to add a number of significant caribbean poets, such as Edward Baugh and Linton kwesi Johnson, to this resource). This column reflects on some of the staging-posts from the journey we have embarked on together as we sought ways to share caribbean poetry with teachers and young people.

Stuart Brown and Mark McWatt talk about caribbean poetry as a life-affirming and spiritually uplifting body of poetry. We agree entirely with that assessment. Poetry can be written in elegant

If anything can be said to define West Indian poetry it is that sense of an engagement with the diverse and often hidden sources of Caribbean history and culture and the determination to refashion those materials into poetry which speaks of and into the present in voices that the peoples of the region would recognise as their own. (Brown 155)

The Power of

Caribbean Poetry: W

ord and Sound

Morag Styles is Professor of Children’s Poetry at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, and a Fellow of

Homerton College. She divides her time between teaching and research. Her

publications include From the Garden to the Street: 300 Years of Poetry for Children; Children Reading Pictures:

Interpreting Visual Texts; Reading Lessons From the Eighteenth Century:

Mothers, Children and Texts; and Poetry and Childhood. She is currently directing

a Caribbean Poetry Project with the University of the West indies.

by MoRag STyLES

THE POWER OF cARIBBEAn POETRY

standard English, or exuberant Jamaican creole or, like much of the work of derek Walcott which weaves caribbean inflection into classical European forms, can also take account of “the popular music rhythms of the region” (Pollard forthcoming). This poetry comes to life in spoken form and performance. As kei Miller and others have suggested, poetry is a kind of music. Indeed, kamau Brathwaite in his classic manifesto for nation Language, The History of the Voice, insists that caribbean poetry is based on sound and that written versions of poems inevitably lose part of their meaning. By “nation Language,” Brath-waite refers to the creoles spoken by the people of the caribbean derived from colonial and vernacular forms of the language. Beverley Bryan points out that nation Language is a political and cultural term “illustrated by a variety of voices with different accents, registers and dialects” (forthcoming). We have, therefore, put orality at the heart of our project and all our workshops include performances by caribbean poets.

“Riddim” Poetics: Where Politics and Poetry Meetdieffenthaller describes caribbean poetry as a young literature with an “aesthetic that runs counter to the dominant Western tradition” (2). caribbean poetry needs to be read as part of a larger project of responding to the history of slavery and oppression, but also of resistance and liberation. Some caribbean poetry enacts resis-tance through mockery, as in the calypso tradi-tion and the work of the acclaimed poet Louise Bennett, recording the vagaries of Jamaican life in Jamaican creole. Others, such as dabydeen’s Turner (1995), mourn the loss of those who died during the era of slavery and expose the callous-ness of all those who benefitted from the slave trade. The content of much caribbean poetry

is so political that you cannot introduce it to teachers or pupils without also engaging with its background.

The history of slavery in the region is inti-mately connected to the language and rhythm of the poetry we hear today. When Bryan observes that “rhythm and sound has helped to define the poetry” of the caribbean and that this poetry includes “a medley of forms and registers in a heritage of song, speech and performance,” she is referring to the ways in which caribbean poetry draws on its African heritage (Bryan forth-coming). The rhythms resemble those found in the music of West Africa from whence most of the slaves were taken, and the language retains residues of the slaves’ grammar when they learned to speak the European languages of their masters. This is “riddim poetics”: a politicized poetry full of beauty and entrancing rhythms, but which never allows the listener to forget the brutal history of the region.

kwame dawes refers specifically to reggae as the aesthetic “which has come to shape the creative context for much of the writing that has emerged out of the caribbean in the last two decades” (2008:8). Through the performances of reggae artists such as Bob Marley (1945-81), reggae has enabled the world to engage with riddim poetics. One of Marley’s many remarkable achievements was that he managed to achieve world renown without leaving Jamaica for long periods. By way of contrast, many of the best known caribbean poets (including several who are involved with the cPP) have left their native home for extended periods, if not permanently.

Exile and IdentityAs a result of the poverty of the region, and richer publishing and performance opportunities outside the caribbean, many caribbean poets find themselves pulled in two opposing direc-tions. Those who move away from their roots sometimes have an uneasy relationship with their host society that includes uncomfortable accom-modation to a colonial past and the need to deal with the realities of contemporary racism. Most caribbean poets living overseas also continue to

The history of slavery in the region is intimately connected to the

language and rhythm of the poetry we hear today.

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have a strong relationship with their own places of origin, often leading to ambiguous feelings of guilt, longing and loss and, for some, a sense of exile. Some of the central tropes in caribbean poetry relate to this troubled history of exploita-tion, migration, separation and confused identity. “To tell you de truth / I don’t know really where I belaang” cries Grace nichols (2010) in her poem “Wherever I Hang.”

For those who stay in the islands, the history of oppression continues in a subtler form as those colonisers of old make their presence felt as “the more benign interlopers we call tourists” (Styles & Bryan forthcoming). Olive Senior’s “Medita-tion on Yellow” (2005) is a powerful exploration of this idea expressed in the voice of a worker at a beach hotel:

I want to feelthough you ownthe silver tea servicethe communion plateyou don’t ownthe tropics anymore

Mark McWatt’s “Variations on the Theme of Independence II” (2009) is even more blunt:

Independence is that annual visitoror quasi-diplomat who explores your islandin his cd jeep or rented car, who knows its lore and history better than you…“Independence” is the name of the househe will build, after retirement, on your prime beach land...And the question is: if he hires youto cook his meals or cut his grasswill his independence and your independence become the same thing at last?

McWatt refuses to answer this question; he passes it over to the reader or listener to consider the complexities involved in untangling the nations of the caribbean from their colonial pasts.

But even the most terrible of histories can end on a note of hope:

I have crossed the ocean

I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung

writes nichols in the voice of a former slave in “I is a Long-memoried Woman” (1999). despite the vicissitudes of history, most caribbean people are keen to make the most of the migration experi-ence; although nichols talks of feeling “divided to de ocean / divided to de bone” in “Wherever I Hang,” she ends on a triumphant note, declaring that “Anywhere I hang me knickers—that’s my home.” Indeed, there is another side to carib-bean poetry which employs winning strategies of humor, musicality and sound to engage and disarm the audience.

One of the most popular exponents of humorous poetry is John Agard who is famous for his biting wit and mischievous use of irony. Agard has become one of the Uk’s best-loved poets. His sense of fun and the warmth of his personality make him a great favorite with pupils and teachers alike. Some of Agard’s poems have already gained canonical status, finding their way out of adult collections and into exam syllabi. “Poetry Jump-up” (1996) has become a perfor-mance standard:

words shakin dey waistwords shakin dey bumwords wid black skinwords wid white skinwords wid brown skinwords wid no skin at allwords huggin up wordsam sayin I want to be a poem todayrhyme or no rhyme

On a more serious note, though still full of fun, Agard is widely admired for poems such as “Half-caste,” “checking Out Me History” (1996) and “Palm Tree king” (1982), quoted respectively:

yu mean when Picassomix red an green is a half-caste canvas

§dem tell me bout 1066 and all datdem tell me bout dick Whittington and he catBut Toussaint L’Ouvertureno dem never tell me bout dat §If 6 straw hatand half a dozen bikinimultiply by the same number of coconut treeequal one postcardhow many square miles of straw hatyou need to make a tourist industry?

Although the language and ideas of these poems appear initially very accessible, they invite deep engagement with ideas of identity and place, history and voice. They offer ideal material for children, both those in the caribbean and those elsewhere, to engage with the varied nations, their histories, their languages and their cultures in a less “touristic” manner.

Teaching Caribbean Poetry The cPP team has worked together to try to help teachers and pupils in the caribbean and Uk to understand the histories, contexts, sound, music, language and landscape of caribbean poetry in order to explore its richness and variety. We have constructed a core course that can be adapted into workshops, events and poetry readings for any audience.

The poetry extracts quoted above give some sense of the material we employ although there isn’t space for some of the more challenging examples we use. So far, we have designed the course for practicing secondary teachers or trainees, but it could be easily modified to Masters’ level and we plan to develop it for primary teachers. The course will form the basis of Teaching Caribbean Poetry which will be published by Routledge next year.

during 2012, versions of the course have been taught in Antigua, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, St Lucia, St Vincent and Trinidad, as well as in London and cambridge in the Uk, by members of our team, working hand-in-hand with poets and sometimes Ministries of Educa-

tion and exam boards. Members of the project team have taken part in arts events such as the Poetry Parnassus in London and Bim Festival in Bridgetown, Barbados, both in 2012. Our aim is to provide a highly

…these poems offer ideal material for children, both those in the

Caribbean and those elsewhere, to engage with the varied nations, their

histories, their languages and their cultures in a less “touristic” manner.

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supportive and interactive experience for teachers, modeling ways of probing the poetry, making practical suggestions for the classroom and showing how to bring it alive in readings and performance.

“Sea Timeless Song”So what happens in a typical workshop? Here’s one example of a short, apparently simple poem that can be used with almost any age group as a starting–point. drawing on non-stereotypical caribbean images to make it more concrete, discussion can range around social, histor-ical, environmental and geographical as well as literary issues. A choral reading of Grace nichols’s “Sea Timeless Song” might be preceded by reading a memoir extract:

My imagination is stirred by my childhood. I was awakened by tropical things. Whenever I remember the country village along the Guyana coast, where I spent my small-girl days, I can’t help seeing water water everywhere. Brown silky water when it rained heavily. Fish swim-ming into people’s yards and children catching them in old baskets… A lot of my poems are about…back-home happenings. (nichols, qtd. in Styles & cook).

Hurricane come and hurricane go but sea sea timeless sea timeless sea timeless sea timeless sea timeless

Hibiscus bloom and dry wither sobut sea sea timeless sea timeless etc

Tourist come and tourist gobut sea sea timeless sea timeless etc

Many of the distinctive features mentioned above about caribbean poetry can be found in this poem. We encourage starting with a geographical approach which means locating the Guyanese coast on a map and noting the position of the islands of the caribbean looking out to the Atlantic, the Americas and Africa—and all that this config-ures about its history. Sun, sand, sea, sport, leisure and luxury may be what tourists experience, but the delights of tropical life come at a heavy price for those who live there year-round, including extremes of weather bringing devastating consequences. A literary examination of the poem and its sound shows how the rhythm of the tide coming out and coming in timelessly is reflected in the rhythm. Like a lot of caribbean poetry, its

dominant rhythm is “dactylic” (a pattern of one strongly stressed syllable tending to be followed by two less stressed ones) with emphatic use of repetition and alliteration. While it is neither pure standard English, nor nation Language, it includes some distinctively caribbean phrasing.

Two other features of caribbean poetry we emphasize throughout the course are a sense of place and a concern for the environment. “Sea Timeless Song” offers scope for discussing what it means to depend on the sea as a source of food and employment alongside the present danger of rising sea levels. nichols also makes reference to the life cycle of the hibiscus, drawing attention to the beauty of caribbean flora and fauna. We often select poems that are rooted in the phys-ical environment, reflecting the “landscapes and seascapes and the writer’s connection to them” (Styles & Bryan forthcoming). These are matters with which the children of the region can easily engage, but they also make the caribbean imagi-natively accessible to those living far away.

Teaching Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Poetry in the British Classroom

wid mi riddimwid mi rimewid mi ruff base line

In British classrooms, caribbean poetry tends to be either absent or included in a tokenistic fashion. White British teachers tend not to be knowledgeable about the history of the carib-bean and, even if persuaded to include nation

Language poetry within their classes, may lack confidence, being unsure what it means and how it should be read aloud. They may also be afraid of being politically incorrect and would rather be politically incorrect by omission than by teaching it wrongly.

While some of the work of Agard and nichols might be readily accessible, the powerful confrontational dub poetry of Linton kwesi Johnson is likely to challenge most teachers in terms of theme and language. Johnson pioneered a new kind of poetry in the 1970s using modified Jamaican English with a reggae rhythm, quickly gaining a wide audience through his electrifying performances, musical brilliance and radical political message. He expressed some of “the anger and the frustrations and the hopes and the aspirations of my generation growing up in this country under the shadow of racism” (in caesar 64). These are important ideas for today’s British children and Johnson’s poetry can make them more widely accessible.

Tessa Ware of Alexandra Park School, Haringey (whose work I quote with her permis-sion) took our Teaching caribbean Poetry course in cambridge with her colleague, crispin Bonham carter. He went on to develop a scheme of work based on caribbean poetry which they both taught to classes of 12-13 year old students. Tessa was interested to see whether young people would be able to access the complex messages in poems by Johnson and get beyond the defamilia-rising nature of the language used. In her course assignment, Tessa talked bravely about being aware of her position in relation to these texts as a “cultural tourist,” exploring the poetry of a region of which she had no direct experience. She identified some of the key issues that Uk teachers grapple with in accommodating difference.

After reading Johnson’s “If I Woz a Tap-natch Poet” (2002) (available on the Poetry Archive), the pupils were given this task for homework: “Imagine a newspaper has criticized modern schools for teaching Linton kwesi John-son’s poetry. Write a letter to the editor of the newspaper explaining why you think it is impor-tant to study poetry in different dialects.”

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Here are some of the pupils’ responses:

if we no longer teach caribbean poetry in our school then pupils will not under-stand the different ways of caribbean culture and caribbean pupils will find it as an offence that their poems are not good enough to read - when they are.

So what’s a little difference in language, in the end we will understand the message of the poem.

The caribbean dialect is very different to ours and to me it’s unique because everyone has their own way of speaking…

These comments suggested that studying poetry in non-standard English had intensified the pupils’ collective view that nation Language poetry was important. There was something about Johnson’s assertion of his non-standard voice that persuaded the whole class that this was an important aspect of poetry. One comment took a sophisticated view on how the poem defa-miliarized the reader to the extent that they had to “think more carefully” about the poem. The pupils showed a basic understanding that the language used encoded culture in some way. They were also critical of implied value judg-ments about non-standard English, and aware of code-switching involved in the poets’ deliberate adoption of creole and their reasons for doing so. Similar understanding was seen when exploring the same issues with an older class looking at Agard’s “checking Out Me History”: “Since he was brought up with a British education, he would have learnt how to pronounce ‘them’ correctly (sic), however he is deliberately saying ‘dem,’ almost saying ‘this is how it’s pronounced in my country, so I will say it like this’.” The pupils were then asked to perform a caribbean poem in groups where they enjoyed the oppor-tunity to “speak like a caribbean person.” Actu-ally performing it helped them to understand the emotions in the poem by considering how to read certain lines and how to engage with an audi-ence, so that they could “bring the poem to life” and “feel the proper sense and rhythm.”

This experience reminded Tessa of John Gordon’s (2004) comment that poetry is often studied in school as a purely written medium to take into account the forms of assessment that focus on poetry on the page, read silently rather than shared orally. dealing with the sound element of poetry involves bringing poetry into the public sphere which is, of course, very similar to Brathwaite’s seminal view. Tessa pointed out that the activity the students enjoyed best was the one that got them closest to the performa-tive elements of caribbean poetry: “certainly, the responses of these students showed their understanding of ‘marginalised political views,’ their engagement with ‘language variety’ and their enjoyment of the ‘community feeling in live performance.’” As such, they moved closer to understanding the crossing-places of oral and literary modes, and thus closer to the heart of what many of the poets are trying to achieve in their use of form, rhythm and language. Tessa’s pupils may still be “cultural tourists,” but hopefully tourists with a stronger grasp of the poetic forms they have encountered and on the way to developing some appreciation of riddim aesthetics.

Last WordsI have drawn in some detail on the workshops of which I have personal experience in the Uk with colleagues, Georgie Horrell and david Whitley, and on Tessa Ware’s teaching experience. I do not, however, want to give the misleading impression that the cPP is Britain-focused. Far from it, one of our most exciting achievements to date has been this summer’s series of workshops in the Eastern caribbean run by our colleagues in Barbados and attended by a pair of teachers from every secondary school in every territory in the region. Another is the setting up of a 40-hour course for B.Ed students accredited across UWI campuses which had its inaugural run in Jamaica 2012.

As I write this paper, the cPP is preparing for an international conference on caribbean poetry, featuring an impressive line-up of carib-bean poets, lectures from distinguished scholars,

a range of papers on varied aspects of caribbean poetry from many parts of the world, and contributions from our entire project team. We will disseminate what we have learned together and continue the conversa-tions further afield. There are other research and publishing initiatives in the pipeline with a wide assortment of partners, including the ambi-tion to contribute to a caribbean-wide electronic open campus. We are looking forward to continuing this journey together. Perhaps some of the readers of this article would like to join us in promoting caribbean poetry and supporting teachers in bringing it alive in classrooms all over the world.

Photographs are used with permission.

Works Cited

PoetryAgard, John. Get Back, Pimple! London: Viking, 1996. Print.—. Man to Pan. Havana: casa de las Américas, 1982. Print.dabydeen, david. Turner: New and Selected Poems. Leeds: Peepal Tree

Press Ltd, Jonathan cape, 1995. Print.kwesi Johnson, Linton. Mi Revalueshanary Fren. London: Penguin,

2002. Print.nicols, Grace. I Have Crossed an Ocean: Selected Poems. Tarset: Bloodaxe,

2010. Print.—. I Is A Long-Memoried Woman. London: karnak House, 1999.

Print.—. Come on into my Tropical Garden. London: A & c Black, 1993. Print.Senior, Olive. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2005.

Print.Styles, Morag & Helen cook. There’s a Poet Behind Me. London: A & c

Black, 1988. Print.

Secondary SourcesBrathwaite, kamau. The History of the Voice: The Development of Nation

Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: new Beacon Books, 1984. Print.

Brown, Stuart. Tourist, Traveller, Troublemaker: Essays on Poetry. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2007. Print.

Brown, Stuart, and Mark McWatt. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. new York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Bryan, Beverley. “The role of context in defining adolescent responses to caribbean poetry.” English in Education 29.1 (1995):42-49. Print.

Bryan, Beverley, and Morag Styles. “The diaspora consciousness: notions of Identity and Exile in British caribbean Poetry.” Teaching Caribbean Poetry. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2013. Print.

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caesar, Burt. “Interview: Linton kwesi Johnson talks to Burt caesar at Sparkside Studios, Brixton, London.” Critical Quarterly 38.4 (1996): 64-77. Print.

dawes, kwame. Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2008. Print.

dieffenthaller, Ian. Snow on Sugarcane: The Evolution of West Indian Poetry in Britain. newcastle: cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Print.

Gordon, John. “Verbal energy: attending to poetry.” English in Educa-tion 38 (2004): 92-103. Print.

McWatt, Mark. “Variations on the Theme of Independence.” The Journey to Le Repentir. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2009. Print.

Pollard, Velma. “Understanding, Approaching and Teaching derek Walcott.” Teaching Caribbean Poetry. Eds. Beverley Bryan & Morag Styles. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2013.

Ware, Tessa. Assignment for TcP course. 2012.

Set in St K itts in the Caribbean, this book centers around an

unsuspecting trio of boy, girl, and monkey on what should have

been an innocuous f ield trip with teacher and classmates to the

famous Brimstone Hill Fort on that island. The three f ind themselves

transported to the 18th century, captured as spies, and thrown into a

f ierce battle between the British and French for the Fort, built by the

English to defend the island. Fact meets f iction comfortably in this

adventure story, and the author is careful to tell us in her notes that

her story is written “with a sprinkling of the truth.” Y oung readers will

f ind a graphic, colorfu l, albeit not totally accurate, history lesson from

the 18th century dished up in this adventure of the 21st century, and

will be able to easily digest the revised episode of war between Britain

and France, namely the Battle for Brimstone Hill. The tale is well-

plotted and, once the young pair and pet monkey get involved and

become part of the battle, the action picks up and the adventure really

takes off. The narrative is a lively retelling of the sights, sounds and

f lavors of a signif icant moment in K ittitian history.

Nadhjla Carasco Bailey

carol Ottley-Mitchell

Adventure at Brimstone Hill

caribbean Adventure Series Book 1

Illus. Ann-catherine Loo

carol Mitchell, 2008

93pp; ISBn 1-4392-1923-0

(fiction, 9+)

sT. KiTT

i b b e a

Robert Mccloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948) can be read as an idealized fable on the subject of ethnicity. In this classic American picture book, Little Bear’s mother is “old enough

to be shy of people, even a very small person like Little Sal,” and similarly Little Sal’s mother is “old enough to be shy of bears, even very small bears like Little Bear,” when they are mixed up together on Blueberry Hill. Little Sal and Little Bear, unlike their elders, are not shy at all, and happily accept the different versions of mother-hood they encounter. Like Little Sal with Mother Bear, very young children are either unaware of, or uninterested in, the differences in ethnicity and culture which they encounter every day. In their expe-rience, each family has its own culture. differences in food and in childrearing for instance, are accepted by young children as just that family’s difference, regardless of their cultural background. My chil-dren, Rebecca and Ralph, played with Johnny, Andrew and Minos across the road, but were scarcely aware of, and certainly uninter-ested in, the fact that their mother spoke Greek. The cultural differ-ences that they discovered in books, both fantasy and the simple domestic tale, were far more significant to them.

Between the years 1972 and 1988, I kept a record of my two children’s responses to books, from the birth of the elder until the younger reached adolescence (Lowe 2007). In the largely mono-cultural society of Australia almost forty years ago, books were one way, perhaps the major way, for young children to discover different ways of life to compare with their own: different countries, different customs, different languages. However, very few books were sources of information about their own national identity. despite the flow-ering of Australian children’s literature which was taking place in the 1970s, only 6% of Rebecca’s books had Australian authors (7% of Ralph’s). The approximately 2000 books they met were mainly

’ Lite

by ViRginia LowE

Dr Virginia Lowe kept a record of her two children’s book-responses for over

twelve years, on which she has published extensively including a book by Routledge.

A children’s librarian then university lecturer, she is now an Adjunct Research

Associate at Monash University, Australia. Since 1997 she has run Create a Kids’ Book manuscript assessment agency.

www.createakidsbook.com.au.

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FLYInG TO PIck BLUEBERRIES

American (46% for Rebecca and 41% for Ralph) and English (32% and 33%). These hardly count as other cultures in our minds, but their very differences from their own lives were significant to the children. Of the remainder, 7% were German or dutch, 4% (6%) French, 3% Swedish and 3% authors from other countries (Japanese, chinese, danish, Finnish, Russian, Italian, new Zealand). Their view of other cultures, other lives, other peoples, was received from their extensive contact with the books we introduced them to, some of which foregrounded these differences; some showed everyday lives in other cultures, and some were set in the universal world of fantasy. I have detailed here some of the ways in which Rebecca and Ralph came to understand their national identity through the books they encountered.

Encounters with Other CulturesIt was America which became for Rebecca at 2-10 (two years and ten months) the symbol for the exotic, for all that was wonderful and out of reach, and it happened through Blueberries for Sal. Sal is a little girl in many ways similar to Rebecca herself: she has a cat; she “helps” her mother in the kitchen; they go for trips in the car. Best of all, as Rebecca discovered with the onset of winter, her own overalls had straps “like Sal’s!” as she exclaimed, straining around at the mirror to admire them crossing on her back. Apart from her adventure with the bear, Sal leads a similar life to Rebecca’s. One of Rebecca’s regular games became “picking blueberries to bottle”: picking clover leaves into a yogurt carton in the yard. She asked “When can we pick blueberries?” The only reply possible to this was that blueberries grow in America (we had never eaten them) and that America is such a long way that you have to go by plane. next time we saw a plane flying overhead: “Perhaps it’s going to America, to pick blueberries.” Interestingly, despite her fascination with animals, it was never the encounter with the bear that she talked about in relation to this book.

Simple domestic tales, wherever they were set, inspired this interest in cultural specificities. Rebecca knew that “in England” the mail is deliv-ered right to the door and the milkman comes into the kitchen (Hughes’ Lucy and Tom’s Day 1960), that potato chips are “crisps” and are bought in “snack bars” rather than milk bars (Vipont/Briggs’ The Elephant and the Bad Baby 1969). She knew that Stockholm celebrates children’s day (Lindgren/Wikland’s A Day at Bullerby 1967), and that “there’s snow at christmas in books” (4-1). These were worlds that she recognized as having an actual existence somewhere. Like Sal’s America, one could talk about visiting them, even if it would involve a plane trip.

Her response to fantasy was quite different; she tended to see this as placeless. Beatrix Potter’s world is one where rabbits and kittens talk and wear clothes (her understanding of the anthropomorphized animal characters is discussed in Lowe 1996), and Max lives in a world with Wild Things—the countries where these books originate is irrelevant. They exist in places outside the “real” world, and at some level she

understood this. When she was 6-4, enjoying being read the Moomin books, she entered a “favorite author” competition with a letter to Tove Jansson in which she wrote: “I wish I could go to Finland for a holiday because I want to see it because it is in the books, to see if the forest really looks like it is.” She asked to visit Finland, where Jansson lived, but not to visit the Moomins themselves; she understood that Finland was Jansson’s world, not Moomintroll’s (Lowe 1994).

Rebecca spent five months in Europe from the age of four years three months, and the trip had a lasting impact on her understanding of national identity. krasilovsky and Spier’s The Cow Who Fell in the Canal (1958) had been a favorite since she was twelve months old. Unusu-ally, this book foregrounds a country and even emphasizes its different culture and appearance. “Hendrieka was an unhappy cow” it begins.

“She lived on a farm in Holland, where it is very flat.” Hendrieka falls in a canal and floats down to see the city and the cheese market. These locations are described and pictured in ways that make their difference from the familiar (familiar to the Australian child just as to the American for whom it was written) quite explicit: “The streets are made of cobblestones and the houses have staircases on their roofs.” Then Hendrieka arrives at the excitement of the cheese market which Rebecca later saw at Alkmaar. As we flew into Athens on our trip, her father waxed lyrical about Mount Olympus and the Greeks. We talked about Italy and France as we flew over them. But when we reached Holland the sun was up, and

making a shining crisscross pattern of the canals. We pointed them out to Rebecca, and her face lit up. “We’re somewhere at last!” she exclaimed with delight. Holland existed for her through Hendrieka.

This trip made her very aware of other cultures, and other languages particularly. We had read her quite a few non-fiction books on other countries in preparation, and some stories, like Fromm’s Muffel and Plums (1972) were so obviously European that she recognized their envi-ronment everywhere (shops and fountains in Germany for instance). So much of her literature was English that there was delighted recognition throughout “dover” from the nursery rhyme; “Peter Rabbit lettuces” as she named the cos variety (different from our familiar icebergs); “Barba-papa’s house” in the hexagonal gazebos seen in yards; climaxing in a visit to Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm, which was so like her beloved Tom Kitten (1907) that she complained that there were three pots of geraniums on the kitchen windowsill, where the book had two (Lowe 1977). Inspired by Bettina’s Dolls (1962), which illustrated and described the places where various dolls originated, we promised to buy her a doll from each country we visited. As an adult she has remarked that it was these doll souvenirs which kept the countries real and distinct for her.

At home she had had several books featuring languages other than English, and her father would read words to her in French. At three,

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“French” became her term for anything unintelligible: when singing nonsense words to a familiar tune for instance, she would say “that’s how you sing it in French,” and she once told me that “‘Stolen and strayed’ is French for ‘lost’” (from Milne’s “disobedience” 1924). She enjoyed trying them out: “Bonjour happy Ralph” she said to her baby brother, quoting Fatio/duvoisin’s The Happy Lion (1955) at 3-6, and “‘Bonhomie’ said Brownie in a slow voice” she said of her pretend mouse-companion, after reading Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). In Germany she gabbled to a little girl she was playing with, then explained to me: “That’s German.”

Ralph, three years Rebecca’s junior, displayed a quite different pattern. For one thing, because of his position in the family, he encoun-tered a much broader range of stories at an earlier age than Rebecca had. His concentration had to be better, his range of interests more diverse, to cope with the challenges. Sometimes he queried unfamiliar vocabulary. American books were full of foreign expressions. As well as nickels and dimes, there was “ jelly” for jam, “crayons” for colored pencils. One of Ralph’s American encounters was with Burton’s Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (1938). It must be confessed that contrary to our usual practice of reading the text as it stood, we occasionally did change Americanisms to more familiar vocabulary, and he had heard the text numerous times over two years with “motor cars” being substituted for “motors.” However his grandfather read it as written, and Ralph earnestly explained that “‘motor’ is a car’s engine—is a bit of a car’s working bit,” to contrast it with its use in the text (age 4-1).

Ralph’s interest was with the exotic. At three and four he was fasci-nated by the Amerindian and African tales (especially those illustrated by Gerald Mcdermott), by Trezise and Roughsey’s Aboriginal stories, and by similar legends of other countries. These led to quite different types of discussions, with adult explanations of who had first told the stories, and how they had been believed. Where Rebecca’s view of other cultures was shaped by minor domestic differences, Ralph’s centered on supernatural characters and their adventures in books. Ralph’s view of ethnicity was based on these stories. Here I must digress to point out again that this is almost forty years ago: in his world, dark or Asian faces were rare. Ralph used the terms “African,” “chinese,” and “Aborigine” interchangeably to describe those characters whom he obviously gener-alized as people who look different from us and tell supernatural legends.

The stories of these people were clearly imaginary (from our Western point of view). At 4-5, for instance, Ralph described Roughsey/Trezise’s The Quinkins (1978) from the pictures, before he had heard it: “This one’s chinese, isn’t it? This one’s exotic! And it’s not real, too. All those things are painted and they come real in the book,” referring to the spirit Quinkins themselves, who are first shown as rock paintings. After

the second reading he continued “The chinese are strange. And so are they. What are they called?” (Quinkins?) “no, those!” (Aborigines.) “Yes. They’re strange and so are Japanese. There’s three people that do strange paintings. How do they do the paintings? Are they alive Mummy? Are Quinkins alive?” (no, it’s a pretend story. But there are real Aborigines.) Ten months later (5-3), he was again struggling to understand. We had borrowed The Quinkins and another of Trezise’s from the library. In comparing them he noted, of the less familiar The Rainbow Serpent (1975), “Are they written by the same people?” (Yes). “They’re Australian people too.” (Yes, by an Aborigine. Look [photo on blurb]). “Aborigines are quite beautiful, aren’t they? Though they’re sort of cruel.” (Why?) “Because they kill things.”

(kangaroos and things?) “Yes.” So I explained, certainly not for the first time, about the tradi-tional way of life and killing for food. With my children, if the culture was similar, skin color was irrelevant, so that Peter’s dark skin was ignored in The Snowy Day (keats 1966), where the snow itself was envied. On the other hand, Papas’ No Mules (1967), set in South Africa, foregrounds the prejudice the little boy encounters, so here skin color was recognized as an issue and discussed.

kindergarten at 4-0 had brought him new awareness of cultural differences and particu-larly new languages. Frederick could speak

only Spanish. “I’m going to learn to say things in Spanish so I can talk to him,” Ralph volun-teered. We located Joslin’s Señor Baby Elephant, the Pirate (1962), which has a Spanish/English text and a short glossary, and practiced “Buenos dias amigo” and “Adios amigo.” At 4-1, Ralph explained that the mother duck in Tyson and Taylor’s Barbapapa’s Ark (1974) was telling her ducklings to get out of the polluted water “in duck language.” A few weeks later his awareness of other languages increased as he watched and listened while I worked with Johnny’s mother translating the texts of several Greek picture books for the kindergarten library. It was books which foregrounded other cultures and other languages for the children, much more than did their own immediate environment.

Literary Encounters with Australian Culture While books published in other countries were staple reading material, very few books were sources of information about my children’s own national identity. Of those that were written or published here, few featured Australia “as such” anyway. Rebecca’s first encounter was with the dandenong Ranges, situated just behind her home, Melbourne. They feature in de Fossard’s Puffing Billy (1967, heard at 3-10). Ralph’s first encounter with Australia in a story (that he remembered) was very exciting: “I can’t believe this! At last! Australia! You know how it’s always America? Well, this time it’s Australia!” This was in Hughes’ The Iron Man (1968) at 5-8, and it was an Australia that the space-bat-angel-monster almost covers in coming to land, ironi-cally because this would have seemed remote and unthreatening to the (British) readers.

Several of the authors in Children’s Litera-ture and National Identity (carol Fox, Judith Graham, Margaret Meek) remark on the way children’s literature presents an idealized view of the country of origin and presents the national characteristics at their best, so that children have a positive view of their own country. This idealized view was not available to Australian children at a time when there were very few

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books published in this country. Even today in Australia, the aspects of the society to celebrate are tolerance and diversity, which are difficult concepts to get across to the young. Our children knew, from conversations with their parents, that the Aborigines were here before the white people came, that it was their land, their country, and that we pushed them out. They were also aware that the Europeans brought harmful exotic plants and animals with them—blackberries and rabbits for example. The child growing up in a post-colo-nial world has, of necessity, to cope with an unsa-vory history. This is rarely presented to them in books, however, as the metanarrative of picture books is of a child solving a problem alone, with a happy ending. John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s The Rabbits (1998) tells the sad story of coloniza-tion, but was twenty years too late to be of value to my children.

children accept the version of reality that stories and pictures offer them, compare it with their own experience, and assimilate it as just another version. So they accept that different people live different lives, believe different things, tell different stories, look different. And from these literary experiences they build a basis for approaching and understanding other cultures and individuals when they encounter them in the real world. Jerome Bruner has specu-lated that “our sensitivity to narrative provides the major link between our own sense of self and our sense of others in the social world around us” (94). Metaphorically at least children can “go to America to pick blueberries”.

Works Cited

Children’s BooksBettina. Dolls. London: Oxford UP, 1962. Print.Burton, Virginia Lee. Mike Mulligan and his

Steam Shovel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. Print.

de Fossard, Esta. Puffing Billy. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1967. Print.

Fatio, Louise. The Happy Lion. London: Bodley Head, 1955. Print.

Fromm, Lilo. Muffel and Plums. new York: Macmillan, 1972. Print.

Joslin, Sesyle. Señor Baby Elephant the Pirate. new York: Harcourt Brace, 1962. Print.

Hughes, Shirley. Lucy and Tom’s Day. London: Gollancz, 1960. Print.

Hughes, Ted. The Iron Man. London: Faber, 1968. Print.

Jansson, Tove. Moomintroll Series. Trans. Eliz-abeth Portch. new York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Print.

keats, Ezra Jack. The Snowy Day. new York: The Viking Press, 1962. Print.

krasilovsky, Phyllis, and Peter Spier. The Cow Who Fell in the Canal. kingswood, Surrey: World’s Work, 1958. Print.

Lindgren, Astrid. A Day at Bullerby. London: Methuen, 1967. Print.

Marsden, John, and Shaun Tan. The Rabbits. Melbourne: Lothian, 1998. Print.

Mccloskey, Robert. Blueberries for Sal. new York: The Viking Press, 1948. Print.

Mcdermott, Gerald. Anansi the Spider. new York: Henry Holt, 1972. Print.

—. Arrow to the Sun. new York: The Viking Press, 1974. Print.

Milne, A.A. “disobedience.” When we were Very Young. London: Methuen, 1924. Print.

—. Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Methuen, 1926. Print.

Papas, William. No Mules. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Print.

Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Tom Kitten. London: Warne, 1907. Print.

Roughsey, dick, and Percy Tresize. The Quinkins. Sydney: collins, 1978. Print.

—. The Rainbow Serpent. Sydney: collins, 1975. Print.

Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. new York: Harper & Rowe, 1963. Print.

Tison, Annette, and Talus Taylor. Barbapapa’s Ark. London: Warne, 1974. Print.

Vipont, Elfrida. The Elephant and the Bad Baby. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969. Print.

Secondary SourcesBruner, Jerome. “The Transactional Self.” Making Sense: The Child’s

Construction of the World. Ed. Jerome Bruner and Helen Haste. London: Methuen, 1987. 81-96. Print.

Lowe, Virginia. Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two Children Tell. London: Routledge, 2007.

—. “‘Little Fur coats of Their Own’: clothed Animals as Metafictional Markers and children as Their Audience.” Writing the Australian Child: Texts and Contexts in Fictions for Children. Ed. clare Bradford. nedlands: U of Western Australia P, 1996. 37-54. Print.

—. “Snufkin, Sniff and Little My: The ‘Reality’ of Fictional characters for the Young child.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 2.2 (1991): 87-96. Print.

—. “Peter Rabbit Lettuces, or Around Europe with a Four-year-old Bookworm.” Orana 13.1 (1977): 21-24. Print.

Meek, Margaret, ed. Children’s Literature and National Identity. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2001. Print.

“Anne of Green Gables for boys” is how many people would describe That Boy Red, which is an engaging, nostalgic depiction of rural life in 1930s Prince Edward Island, with a red-headed protagonist: but there the similarities end. “Red” is not an orphan in search of a “kindred spirit” but a mischievous boy, one of f ive siblings. The solidarity between siblings—even amidst rivalries and conf lict—resonates in That Boy Red and renders it a marvelous portrayal of family dynamics at a time when families had to pull together in order to survive. The episodic nature of That Boy Red works very well with its target audience of 8-12 year olds. Red revels in childish pranks: he tricks his younger sister, who ends up getting lost; he interferes in his older sister’s romance; and he ends up taking refuge from a storm in the local bully’s outhouse. But when his father’s hand is seriously inju red, Red demonstrates a level of maturity previously unseen by taking charge and f inishing a carpentry contract in order to maintain his father’s reputation. In the f inal scene, Red helps a grounded airplane pilot repair his plane, earning himself a ride. The reader will glory in what Red realizes, f lying high, as he sees how all the parts of his world connect: having strong roots gives him the freedom to grow. Karyn Huenemann

Rachna Gilmore That Boy Red

Toronto: Harper Trophy, 2011 211 pp. ISBn 978-1-55468-459-5(novel, 8 +)

ToRonT

an a d a

Reading Camp: Children

from the Baham

as Develop a New

ppreciation of Children’s Literature

nine-year-old kenisha, a participant of the July 2010 Reading camp, summed up her new understanding of the connection between reading and the world around her with

the words, “It was fun to read stories about animals, and then take pictures [with a camera] about the same animals we read about.” Before this, kenisha’s reading instruction in her Bahamian primary school had not taught her that a book could represent her reality. Her school, located in a low socio-economic inner-city neighbor-hood, was attended by children whose families’ mean yearly income was less that $500 a year. For these children, reading was some-thing that they did in school, but never in the real world. After the summer reading program, when the American teachers heard kenisha’s comments, they knew that they had spent their summer wisely, and that they had helped children like kenisha realize the importance of reading, both in their daily lives and for their future education.

during the summer breaks of 2010, 2011, and 2012, Reading camps were organized for children from a primary school in the inner city of nassau, The Bahamas. Each summer, the school prin-cipal and teachers selected 45 students to attend the camp; low reading scores on a test designed by the Bahamian national Educa-tional department assisted in identifying which students would benefit most from participation in the Reading camp. Activi-ties were held in various classrooms in the school building and included a field trip to the beach each week. The Reading camp teachers were graduate students from a college in Pennsylvania who were completing Master’s degrees in Education and who had at least eight years’ worth of teaching experience. These teachers had chosen to work for the summer in The Bahamas because their

Joyce armstrong, phD, has taught 18 semesters of Children’s Literature courses to graduate and undergraduate students.

She has planned and managed six Children’s Literature Conferences, as well as publishing five articles about children’s

Literature. Dr. Armstrong is currently Assistant Director, Center for Learning and

Teaching at Old Dominion University in norfolk, Virginia.

by JoycE aRMSTRong

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graduate studies centered on helping children to develop a love of reading. They were sponsored by a non-profit making organization—The Harvest Foundation—which covered the costs of their travel, accommodation, and meals. The Harvest Foundation also donated and arranged a ship-ment of more than 1,000 children’s books to the Bahamian school’s library. The Bahamas was a particularly important place for the graduate students to expand their own learning since the schools in Pennsylvania have a large immigrant population.

The graduate students (the summer teachers) and the school’s administration agreed upon the curriculum. The summer teachers then directed the day to day activities. The two major goals of the Reading camp were to immerse the chil-dren in literacy and to increase their enjoyment of reading. All of the Reading camp’s activi-ties were focused toward the development of a community of readers and the establishment of a safe environment where all children, regardless of their familiarity with reading, could improve their literacy abilities. children’s literature enables children to develop their literacy skills, so that they can come to appreciate how reading can provide insights into their own and into others’ environments, broadening their world. In Baha-mian schools, teachers’ focus on reading skills and comprehension is limited to the informa-tion contained in the prescribed reading mate-rial. Quality children’s literature, particularly if it is relevant to the child’s experience, deepens a child’s understanding and appreciation of reading and competency in language use (Heisey & kucan 668). Through well-crafted children’s literature about topics which catch children’s particular interest, children improve in reading comprehension, and a desire to read in greater quantity is often instilled (Mullis, campbell, & Farstrup 12).

At the beginning of the 2011 Reading camp, the summer teachers decided to select books for the children on the theme of the ocean, following Anderson and Pearson’s claim that existing background knowledge aids children’s understanding of new information (7). The ocean

and its animals served as stimulating topics for the students to explore, thus ensuring that the students’ interest and motivation levels would be high. The summer teachers gathered both fiction and non-fiction books which would bring strong content vocabulary to the theme and would allow the students to better understand the readings. children at the Reading camp particularly enjoyed diane Allette & Alan Baker’s Caribbean Animals, Lesley Sutty’s Fauna of the Caribbean: The Last Survivors, and Miranda MacQuitty’s The Ocean.

Reading is an active process that engages the reader. Accordingly, reading comprehension is improved when the content of the passage relates to the reader’s prior knowledge. Multiple-strategy instruction that is flexible in relation to the strategies used and to their implementation over the course of a reading session provides an opportunity for teachers and readers to interact over texts (Thompson 30). Thus, research indicates that an interactive, multiple-strategy approach can have a positive effect on the development of reading comprehension and a child’s appreciation of literature.

comprehension and vocabulary retention can be strengthened when a teacher reads a book aloud to students, especially if the reading is interactive and if the teacher models a variety of reading strategies, such as anticipation, using contextual clues to work out what unfamiliar words might mean, and breaking down words into smaller phonetic or syntactic units. compre-hension occurs when readers/listeners actively participate in intentional interaction between the reader and the text. The use of reading aloud has assisted the comprehension of students in the primary grades (coyne, et al 148). Through thoughtful lesson planning, teachers create ques-tions and statements which can scaffold their students’ reading processes by offering examples of what good readers do in order to comprehend a text. This planning enables the students in the read-aloud experience to hear and see good examples of ways to use their own literacy skills.

The first day of the first week was devoted to the establishment of small groups (8 to 10 students), each working with one summer teacher. Most of

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the first day centered on the Bahamian students’ and the summer teachers’ attempts to learn more about each other. Students were encouraged to share information about themselves and to express that information in drawings, writing, and short plays. Many students were hesitant at first to do short plays; “I don’t do these, we can’t learn that way,” Alex told one of the summer teachers. But by the end of the day there were many smiles. The remainder of the week centered on the development of a daily routine of reading and writing. This instructional plan continued each week, until the students had completed a total of six books.

A typical day included a group meeting first thing in the morning in the multi-purpose room; students would then go to their classrooms to begin instruction. Lunchtime was a very impor-tant segment of every day. For many of the students, this lunch was their only meal of the day. during lunchtime, chapter books from the school library were read aloud to the students while they ate. Then, at the beginning of each afternoon session, each student group’s teacher led a short discussion of the chapter. After the discussion time, students would design art proj-ects or short plays to display their comprehension of the vocabulary and the concepts within the book they were reading.

The basic activities for each book included 1) its introduction by conducting a “picture walk”; 2) the summer teacher’s reading, interactively, the book aloud to the students; 3) comprehen-sion activities; 4) paired reading of the book with another student; 5) reading a non-fiction book

about the topic of the book; 6) literacy circles; and 7) writing about the book. For each book, this routine lasted for two to three days, with the reading aloud of the book at least twice a day. These are the activities undertaken by the students:

• Picture Walk: Picture walks were conducted by leafing through a picture book, page by page, discussing only the pictures. All components of each picture were discussed with the students and predictions were made about what the book might tell us.

• Interactive Read-Aloud: The teacher read the book aloud to the students, stopping frequently to discuss vocabulary, plot, and sequence, and to ask comprehension questions.

• comprehension activities: comprehen-sion activities were designed for each book. Questions were developed to ensure that the students’ thinking included knowl-edge of the subject matter, application of the ideas within the book, and analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating the content of each book.

• Paired reading: Students were paired with another child and the two of them read the book aloud to each other. One student read the right-hand side of the book while the other student read the left-hand side of the book.

• Reading a non-fiction book: Each fiction book was paired with a non-fiction book, in order to expand the knowledge base of the students. The book was read to the students and a discussion followed.

• Literacy circles: The students formed groups of three or four to discuss the book. Each child had a role to play as they discussed questions proposed by the teacher. The roles included Artful Artist, Wacky Word Finder, discussion director, and cool connector. The duties of each role added to the discussion and comprehension of the book. Students

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discussed all of the questions and one student reported on the group’s discussion to the rest of the class.

• Writing: Every day, each child wrote for fifteen minutes about something from the book that had piqued his or her interest. After their writing, the children participated in an Author’s chair activity in which the children could read their writing to the class if they wished.

On Friday of each week, a field trip to the ocean was planned. At least 30% of the enrolled students had never visited the ocean before participating in the Reading camp. Abigail, a student, enjoyed the reading aloud of Brenda Guiberson’s Mud City: A Flamingo Story (2005), a picture book about the adventures of a flamingo. After one trip to the ocean, Abigail wanted to learn additional information about the activi-ties of flamingos and decided to make her own book about these birds. Shyann, another student, asked: “Why are all the animals in Caribbean Animals A to Z also on the beach and in our ocean?”

The three-week experience concluded with a closing ceremony designed by the school administrators. Each of the students was awarded a t-shirt, a pencil, and a certificate of attendance. The children sang their national Anthem, said the Pledge of Allegiance to the Baha-mian flag, and were led in a prayer of thankfulness. The vice-principal also engaged the children in a poem and a thank-you song. Everyone

(both teachers and students) put on their new t-shirts and walked to the pavilion for a group picture. Local televi-sion and newspaper reporters were present to interview the children, the summer teachers, and the local school personnel. Jauvante, a student, commented to a reporter as she was leaving: “This is the first t-shirt that I ever owned that nobody wore before me. I will wear it every day to read in.”

The two major goals of the Reading camp were to immerse the children in literacy and to increase their enjoyment of reading. The children who attended the camps were immersed in children’s literature for 15 days.

They would not have experienced any literacy activity during this time period without the Reading camp. Yashug summed up his experience with this comment: “This can’t be real! I never liked to read before, now I do.” Standardized tests were administered following the three weeks of the Reading camps. There was improvement in reading compre-hension indicated by all but one student during years one and two. In year three, four students showed no increase and three students’ scores decreased. But to measure the effect of the Reading camp, one needs to look at qualitative results.

In general, several factors indicate that the Reading camps were a positive experience for all. In each year, 95% of the children boasted perfect attendance for all fifteen days. The students laughed frequently

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and (most important of all) expressed a positive change in their feelings about books after participating in the Reading camp. “Today you gave me the reason why we read, thank you,” Justin told one of the summer teachers. “You are different from our regular teachers,” observed Julia, before thanking the graduates for coming. The children actively partici-pated in class discussions and when the day was over, they did not want to leave the school to walk home. After the first year, when the announce-ment was made that the Reading camp would return for a second year, over 100 children wanted to be included. The summer teachers, upon their return home, also expressed an interest in returning each summer to help the students. The Reading camps were very successful for both the summer teachers and the children. Both groups benefited from their collective experiences.

Photographs are used with permission.

Works Cited

Children’s BooksAllette, diane and Alan Baker. Caribbean Animals. London: Tamarind,

2008. Print.Burnie, david. Bird. dk Eyewitness Books. London: dk children,

2008. PrintGibbons, Gail. Sea Turtles. new York: Holiday House, 1998. Print.Guiberson, Brenda. Mud City: A Flamingo Story. new York: Henry

Holt, 2005. Print.James, Sylvia. Dolphins. new York: Mondo, 2002. Print.MacQuitty, Miranda. Ocean. dk Eyewitness Books. London: dk

children, 2008. PrintMccarthy, colin. Reptile. dk Eyewitness Books. London: dk

children, 2000. PrintMorpurgo, Michael and Michael Foreman. Dolphin Boy. London:

Andersen Press, 2005. Print.Pirotta, Saviour and nilesh Mistry. Turtle Watch. London: Frances

Lincoln children’s Books, 2009. Print.Sattler, Jennifer. Sylvie. new York: Random House, 2009. Print.Silva Lee, Alfonso and Alexis Lago. My Island and I: The Nature of the

Caribbean. Saint Paul, Mn: Pangaea, 2002. Print.Stewart, Melissa. National Geographic Readers: Dolphins. Washington,

dc: national Geographic children’s Books, 2010. Print.Sutty, Lesley. Fauna of the Caribbean: The Last Survivors. Oxford, Uk:

Between Towns Road Publishers, 1998. Print.Watson, T. I Wanna Iguana. Paradise, cA: Paw Print Press, 2001. Print.

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Secondary SourcesAnderson, Richard c. and P. david Pearson. “A Schema-theoretic view

of Basic Processes in Reading comprehension.” Handbook of Reading Research 1 (1984): 225-92. Print.

coyne, Michael d. et al. “Teaching Vocabulary during Shared Story-book Readings: An Examination of differential Effects.” Exception-ality: A Special Education Journal 12.3 (2004): 145-62. Print.

The Harvest Foundation. 2009. Bahamas chapter. Web. 1 Oct. 2012.Heisey, natalie and Linda kucan. “Introducing Science concepts to

Primary Students through Read-Alouds: Interactions and Multiple Texts Make the difference.” The Reading Teacher 63.8 (2011): 666-76. Print.

Mullis, Ina, J. R. campbell, and A. Farstrup. National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1992 - Reading Report Card for the Nation and States. Washington, dc: U.S. department of Education, 1993. Print.

Thompson, R. A. “Balancing Vocabulary Instruction with Teacher-directed and Student-centered Activities.” The Balanced Reading Program. Ed. Susan Blair-Larson and kathryn Williams. newark dE: International Reading Association, 1999. 24-36. Print.

In this novel in verse, author Lori Weber weaves together the perspectives of multiple characters with a particular focus on teens struggling to f ind their places in the world. The protagonist, Mark, owner of a new yellow mini car (which provides the title for the book) is popular, but angry and grieving the recent death of his father. His girlfriend Stacey is attracted to Mark, but confused by his need for distance and isolation. Secondary characters Mary, a shy and quiet musician, Annabelle, a socia lly conscious activist, and Christopher, an awkward, but supportive friend tell their stories too as their various paths cross and intersect. Refreshingly, even parent characters are heard in this novel and play pivotal and realistic roles as the conf licts emerge and resolve. As we learn about the death of Mark’s cabdriver father who had f led the war in Lebanon, we come to understand the web of family and friendship that support his journey and our own. Graphic elements add interest to the book with different fonts cuing the reader to different character voices and periodic black and white images (airplane, moon, musical notes) adding symbolic impact. The use of multiple viewpoints and powerful free verse lends itself to readers' theater performance too.Sylvia Vardell

Lori Weber

Yellow Mini

Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2011ISBn: 1554551994243 p.(YA poetry, 13+)

c a n a da

Although we all use the term “national identity” confidently, defining what constitutes an individual’s or group’s sense of how they belong to a place and a citizenship is not easy.

Jeffries defines national identity as “a shared sense of belonging of a group of people that depends on a common area of named place, a common set of beliefs and values, and positive feelings for a specific named geographical area” (4). Fox defines it as the “characteristics a society (or nation) feels its members share that distinguish it from others” (44). Meeks describes national identity as a way of differ-entiating between “us” and “others,” and explains “the role that children’s literature plays in the development of children’s under-standings of both belonging…and differentiation” (x). What all these definitions share is a rejection of a static, essentialist view of identity (not only of national identity, but also of gender and ethnic identity) and an acceptance that national identity is forged through interactions between individuals and their environment. “People are seen as being involved in continuous negotiation of different aspects of their identity…based on the new norms, practices and situations which they encounter in their everyday interactions” (Jamarani 2). This letter examines a collection of picture books from new Zealand in terms of how they reflect and thus contribute to the negotiation of the national identity of children.

To date, several researchers have indicated a strong link between new Zealand national identity and its children’s literature (Hebley et al). The recent A Made Up Place explores the reflection of new Zealand identity in young adult fiction through a series of topics including sport, money, religion, history and Maori Gothic (see the Reviews section of this issue of Bookbird for a fuller discussion). Hebley’s doctoral dissertation draws attention to the frequency with which two landscapes feature in new Zealand children’s fiction published between 1970 and 1989: seascapes (no new Zealander

Belonging and Differentiating: A

spects of New

Zealand National

Identity Reflected in the New

Zealand Picture B

ook Collection (NZPB

by nicoLa DaLy

nicola Daly is a senior lecturer in arts and Language Education at the University

of waikato, new Zealand. her research interests lie in language teaching and the

use of picture books in education. She has collected picture books since she was a teenager, and loves reading them to her

daughter.

BELOnGInG And dIFFEREnTIATInG

lives more that 130km from the sea), and volca-noes (tectonic activity is a part of the national conscious as new Zealand lies on a fault line).

Moore explores national identity through the visual imagery used in The New Zealand School Journal, a magazine produced for use in new Zealand schools. She argues that, while the role of art in new Zealand has been discussed with relation to national identity, illustrations have not been included in such analyses. Yet as a long-standing publication for use in new Zealand schools, The School Journal “has offered us many ways to imagine ourselves as a kind of commu-nity of possibilities—always becoming” (23). Moore shows how this idea of a community that is “always becoming” is revealed through images of new Zealand’s flora and fauna, and through references to Maori visual culture.

Thus, to date, research has indicated a strong link between new Zealand national identity and new Zealand children’s literature in a number of ways including landscape (sea and volcanic), visual and textual references to flora and fauna, and visual and linguistic references to Maori culture. Jeffries’s examination of national iden-tity in new Zealand children’s picture books has indicated that this is a poor category of litera-ture for dealing with new Zealand identity. However, given my previous work with parents who reported on the importance of the picture book for developing the national identity of their children after a month reading a set of 13 new Zealand picture books to their children, I believe this warrants further investigation.

new Zealand has been inhabited by the Maori for approximately the last 1,000 years, and was “discovered” by a dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, in 1642. Whalers and sealers began traveling to new Zealand; a great deal of British activity then followed which led, in 1840, to the signing of a treaty between the chiefs of many (but not all) new Zealand Maori tribes and the British crown. The ethnic diversity of present-day new Zealand society grows with each census. The most recent census in 2006 showed that while the majority of new Zealanders identify their ethnicity as “European” (68%), people of

Maori ethnicity constitute 15% of the popula-tion. People of Asian descent have increased 50% since the previous census in 2001, and those of Pasifika descent have increased 15% (Statistics new Zealand). “Pasifika” is a term used to denote people living in new Zealand from a range of Pacific nations including Samoa, Fiji, cook Islands, Tonga, niue and Tokelau.

Spoken by 95.9% of the new Zealand popu-lation (QuickStats about Culture and Identity), English is the most widely used language in new Zealand. In 1987, the Maori Language Act gave te reo Maori (the Maori language) official language status in new Zealand, and in 2006 new Zealand Sign Language was also given official status. The use of Maori loanwords is one of new Zealand English’s most defining characteristics (deverson), and Macalister has shown that between 1850 and 2000 the inci-dence of Maori loanwords increased in a range of contexts. Macalister has also recently estimated that new Zealanders generally know between 70 and 80 Maori loanwords. Several studies of new Zealand picture books have shown that these books use a much higher rate of Maori loanwords in their English texts than do other domains such as newspapers and school journals

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(kükupa et al). One study in which parents were interviewed after reading new Zealand picture books using high frequencies of Maori loan-words to their children for a month revealed that parents believed these books were important in the development of their children’s national iden-tity (daly 2010).

New Zealand Picture Book CollectionThe new Zealand Picture Book collection (He Kohinga Pukapuka Pikitia of Aotearoa) is a collec-tion of 22 English language picture books chosen to reflect new Zealand identity. The collection is not available as a commercial unit, but is anno-tated and accompanied by curriculum-related classroom activities on a website (www.picture-books.co.nz). In the process of nominating books for the collection, a series of valuable discussions took place concerning the ways in which new Zealand identity is reflected in new Zealand picture books. This paper is, in part, a report on those discussions.

Over a period of five months, a group of chil-dren’s literature experts (an academic, an author, a classroom teacher, and three librarians) sat down to discuss picture books from and about new Zealand. Their goal was not to discuss new Zealand national identity per se, but rather to identify books that reflected new Zealand iden-tity and to explain why each should be included in the collection. drawing on field notes and reflections from these meetings, I was able to identify four major themes relating to national identity: The new Zealand environment, Maori language and culture, new Zealand’s History, and diversity—which I have used to arrange the discussion below. I have used pseudonyms for those who contributed to the discussions (Anne, Alice, George, Jo, Saskia, and Timmy).

The New Zealand EnvironmentThe prominence of the new Zealand environ-ment has been noted in the other literature about new Zealand national identity in children’s liter-ature (Hebley, Moore). In our discussion group, the new Zealand character of the rural environ-ment was mentioned in conversations about the

vivid watercolor illustrations of Nobody’s Dog by Jennifer Beck (2005), in which a grandfather shares with his grandson his childhood memories of a pet dog who saved his life. Jo commented on the new Zealand character of the environment illustrated, including the landscapes, barbed-wire fences, and beach scenes. The importance of seeing the urban places of new Zealand in the illustrations of books was also commented upon during our discussions. The depiction of state housing and telephone poles was noted several times during the nomination of the Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street by Patricia Grace. For Saskia, the inclusion of such details resulted in a book which reflected realistic urban landscapes: they look like “our place.” This story is about a tuna with a magic throat who travels to an inner city new Zealand street with state housing and power lines. There the tuna presents gifts relating to dance to the children who live there. The gifts all link to the children’s cultural heritages: Tokelauan, new Zealand Maori, cook Island Maori, English, Irish, and Samoan, and in the end the children dance together. The importance of the new Zealand urban landscape in picture book illustrations does not appear to have been commented upon in previous examinations of new Zealand national identity and picture books.

Maori Language and CultureSeveral previous studies have noted the impor-tance of references to Maori culture, both visu-ally and textually, within a broader sense of new Zealand identity (Jackson et al; Moore). Within the research group, Jo and Ann noted the univer-sality of themes relating to Maori culture, such as intergenerational relationships, evident in several of the books nominated for the nZPBc including Haere: Farewell Jack, Farewell by Tim Tipene. In this book, a young girl narrates the loss of her grandfather, koro Jack, and then the birth of her sister’s new baby, describing Maori practices around birth and death in her family. Jo commented on the importance of Maori knowl-edge for all new Zealanders. The importance of the use of Maori words and phrases was also

made evident in the discussions of this book (as well as several others). The text includes many loan words from Maori used in new Zealand English. For example “I saw whanau [family] I hadn’t seen for ages, even my sister who was hapu [pregnant]” (unp.).

Stiven has examined the use of new Zealand idiom as part of new Zealand culture and identity in books. In several previous studies, I have examined the use of Maori loanwords in new Zealand English children’s picture books published between 1995 and 2005 and have noted the link made by readers of these books between the use of such loanwords and new Zealand national identity (daly, Macdonald & daly). At a rate of 45 borrowed words per thousand words of text, the use of Maori borrowings in the nZPBc was at a much higher level

than that found in many other contexts (Macalister, Macdonald and daly). In addition to the language used and topics covered in this book, the illustrations in Haere were also commented on by participants who noted the representation of spirits and the often-unseen world in the illustrations by Huhanna Smith.

New Zealand HistoryThe importance of new Zealand’s history in the construc-tion of national identity has been discussed by Harry Ricketts in relation to young adult new Zealand fiction, but has not been mentioned in previous work examining how national identity is reflected in new Zealand chil-dren’s picture books (Jackson et al). However, partici-pants nominating books for this collection specifically mentioned it. Jo noted that The House that Jack Built by Gavin Bishop offers readers the opportunity to discuss new Zealand’s colonial history. This book is based on the well-known rhyme of the same name: an English settler to new Zealand in the late 18th century arrives in new

Zealand and builds a business. At the same time, the effects of coloni-zation on the indigenous Maori population and the land are revealed through clever details in the borders of the pictures.

DiversityThe theme of diversity arose in the context of discussions about ethnicity, family type, and differing perspectives. diversity is a theme that ties in with the observation that national identity is not “inherently monocul-tural”; being “tolerant, egalitarian and pluralist … may be a defining feature” (Fox, 44). In nominating The Terrible Taniwha of Timberditch by Joy cowley, participants noted the range of cultures represented among the characters in the book. In this story, a little girl’s father warns her against playing at a local lake by telling her that there is a taniwha there (pronounced tah-ni-fah). The little girl decides to make a trap so she can see what a taniwha looks like. As she collects the materials to make

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the trap, people in the neighborhood tell her about mythical monsters from their home countries. For example, Mrs. Johnson tells her about a troll, Mr. chen describes a chinese dragon, and Mrs. Papadoupolos, a gorgon. In the end, Josephine creates an amazing personal image of a taniwha that blends all of the ideas she has heard about.

diversity in family types was evident in discussions of the illustra-tions of many of the picture books nominated. Timmy noted the repre-sentation of a split family in her nomination of Every Second Friday by kiri Lightfoot in which two children go and stay with their father every second Friday. In using this setting, the text makes visible a family arrangement that is common for many children in new Zealand class-rooms. The diversity of family types represented in the books being chosen, and the participants’ awareness of this, contrasts with unpub-lished findings about the domination of nuclear family groups in new Zealand picture books. However, it must be noted that no books repre-senting same-sex relationships and same-sex parented families are included in the collec-tion, and to my knowledge none have been published in new Zealand.

In field notes and reflections, cultural diversity was the theme that was frequently raised. For example, Old Hu-Hu by kyle Mewburn was nominated because the main character (Hu-Hu-Tu) searches for an explanation for the death of his dear friend Hu-Hu and in doing so the reader hears many different perspectives on death. For example, when Hu-Hu-Tu asks Spider where Hu-Hu is, she replies, “There’s some of him here. There’s more of him there. His blood is in the oil. His breath is in the air. I can see him in the flowers. I can see him in your hair. Old Hu-Hu’s not gone! He’s everywhere!” (unp.), while Butterfly replies: “Soon he’ll awake, born once again! He might be an elephant, a snake or a hen” (unp.).

One aspect of diversity not present in the books nominated for the collection was representation of new new Zealanders, recent migrants and refugees. despite a specific request for books representing these communities, it appears that there is also a gap in this area. Two books were suggested, but the ensuing group discussion based on the partici-pants’ considerable experience of reading books to, and buying books for, children concluded that they were either unappealing to children or used stereotyped images in their illustrations which made them unsuit-able for inclusion in the collection.

Conclusion This paper has identified the themes evident in discussions about the books nominated to be included in the new Zealand Picture Book

collection (He Kohinga Pukapuka Pikitia of Aote-aroa). In doing so, this study provides a robust example of the ways in which picture books can and do reflect national identity. These themes show many similarities with themes evident in other studies that have examined the representa-tion of new Zealand national identity in children’s literature. In particular, new Zealand’s environ-ment and the importance of Maori language and culture were evident as they are in the studies by Hebley, Jeffries, and Stiven.

Themes evident in the discussions not previ-ously noted in studies of new Zealand national identity and children’s picture books include the importance of diversity in family units, new Zealand history, and the representation of urban landscapes. The reason that these themes were not evident in previous studies may be due to the fact that the present study is based on the intersecting recorded perceptions of six people who were discussing why particular picture books should be included in a collection reflecting new Zealand identity, rather than an explicit examination of what constitutes new Zealand. It is also possible that concepts associated with new Zealand national identity are developing and changing as the years pass; that is, just as individuals are constantly negotiating their identity (Jamarani) it is likely that communities and national groups are also modifying their group identities based on new perspectives, influences and interactions. For example, as colonized new Zealand increases in age, a desire to review the past in relation to colo-nial history, such as in The House that Jack Built, becomes more possible. And as the new Zealand population increases in the proportion of its popu-lation based in urban areas, urban landscapes are more frequently a part of the everyday lived expe-riences of new Zealanders.

Why is it important for national identity to be reflected in children’s picture books? Jobe notes in his discussion of the representation of cultural identity in canadian picture books that “all chil-dren should have the right to see themselves reflected in the books they read, such imaging is crucial for developing a positive self-concept and a sense of who we are” (80). Thus the invisibility

of some communities within new Zealand society (e.g., new new Zealanders and same-sex parented families) in the picture books discussed has potential implications for the new Zealand children from these communities in terms of their feeling of belonging to the society in which they are growing up (Meeks). It also means that other children will have fewer opportunities to learn more about some of their classmates’ stories and lives. Both of these are missed opportunities for new Zealand children’s picture books to reflect authentically the changing nature of what it means to be a new Zealander.

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was funded by the Faculty of Education Research committee. I would like to thank the six participants for their enthusiastic participation and contributions, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to acknowledge Marion Mckoy for her calculation of the rate of use of loanwords in the collection.

Works Cited

Children’s BooksBeck, Jennifer. Nobody’s Dog. Illus. L. Fisher.

Auckland: Scholastic, 2005. Print.Bishop, Gavin. The House that Jack Built. Illus. G.

Bishop. Auckland: Scholastic, 1999. Print.Brown, Ben. A Booming in the Night. Illus. H.

Taylor. Auckland: Reed, 2005. Print.cowley, Joy. The Terrible Taniwha of Timber-

ditch. 1982. Illus. Rodney McRae. Auckland: Puffin, 2009. Print.

Grace, Patricia. Watercress Tuna and the Children of Champion Street. Illus. Robyn kahukiwa. Auckland: Puffin, 1984. Print.

Lightfoot, kiri. Every Second Friday. Illus. B. Galbraith. London: Hodder, 2008. Print.

Mewburn, kyle. Old Hu-Hu. Illus. R. driscoll. Manukau: Scholastic, 2009. Print.

Tipene, Tim. Haere: Farewell, Jack, Farewell. Illus. Huhana Smith. Wellington: Huia, 2006. Print.

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Secondary SourcesBainbridge, Joyce, M. “The Role of canadian

children’s Literature in national Identity Formation.” English Quarterly 34.3-4 (2002): 166-74. Print.

Bainbridge, Joyce M. and Brenda Wodolko. “canadian Picture Books: Shaping and Reflecting national Identity.” Bookbird 40.2 (2002): 21-27. Print.

daly, nicola. “kükupa, koro and kai: The use of Mäori vocabulary items in new Zealand English picture books.” New Zealand English Journal 21 (2007): 20-33. Print.

—. “‘Right here, right now’: Embracing new Zealand national identity through the Maori loanwords used in new Zealand English children’s picture books.” Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 7.2 (2010): 22-37. Print.

deverson, Tony. “new Zealand Lexis: The Maori dimension.” English Today 26 (1991): 18-25. Print.

Fox, carol. “conflicting fictions: national iden-tity in English children’s literature about war.” Children’s Literature and National Identity. Ed. Margaret Meeks. London: Trentham Books, 2001:43-52. Print.

Hebley, diane. The Power of Place: Landscape in New Zealand Children’s Fiction, 1970-1989. dunedin, n.Z.: Otago UP, 1998. Print.

Jamarani, Maryam. Identity, Langauge amd Identity. A Study of Iranian Female Migrants in Australia. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012. Print.

Jackson, Anna, et al. A Made up Place. New Zealand in Young Adult Fiction. Wellington, nZ: Victoria UP. 2011. Print.

Jeffries, Maria “national Identity in Australian and new Zealand children’s Literature.” Talespinner 18 (2004): 4-12. Print.

Jobe, Ronald. “Establishing cultural Identity through Picture Books.” Art, Narrative and Childhood. Ed. Morag Styles and Eve Bearne. Stoke on Trent, Uk: Trentham Books, 2003. 79-85. Print.

Johnston, Ingrid, et al. “national Identity and the Ideology of canadian Multicultural Picture Books: Pre-service Teachers Ecoun-tering Representations of difference.” Cana-dian Children’s Literature/Literature canadienne pour la jeunesse 32.2 (2006): 76-96. Print.

Macalister, John. “The Maori Presence in the new Zealand English Lexicon, 1850-2000.” English World-Wide 27 (2006): 1-24. Print.

—. “Revisiting Weka and Waiata: Familiarity with Maori Words among Older Speakers of new Zealand English.” New Zealand English Journal 21 (2007): 1-19. Print.

—. “Tracking changes in Familiarity with Borrowings from Te Reo Maori.” Te Reo 51 (2008): 65-98. Print.

Macdonald, daryl and nicola daly. “kiwi, kapai, and kuia: Maori Loanwords in new Zealand English children’s Picture Books Published between 1995 and 2005.” Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, forthcoming.

Meeks, Margaret. Children’s Literature and National Identity, London: Trentham Books, 2001. Print.

Moore, Helen. “Imagining the nation: Illustra-tion and Identity in the new Zealand School Journal.” Set. Research Information for Teachers 3 (2007): 18-25. Print.

Moorfield, John, c. “Taniwha.” Maori Dictionary. Web. 11 September 2012.

Statistics new Zealand and Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs. Demographics of New Zealand’s Pacific population. Wellington: Author, 2010. Print.

Statistics new Zealand. “QuickStats about culture and Identity.” Web. 11 September 2012.

Stiven, Judith. “Bridging Faultiness and Standing Upright.” Talespinner 20 (2005): 45-50. Print.

Williams, Sandra. “The czech Republic: The creation of national Identity: Significance of Jan karafiat’s Broucci to czech children’s Literature.” Bookbird 39.1 (2001): 46-51. Print.

Mauritius is a small tropical island east of Madagascar with a population of 1.2 million. Significantly, before coloni-zation it had no indigenous population and, apart from

the occasional visits by Arab traders, was largely left alone until 1510. The first settlers were Portuguese, followed by the dutch, the French and finally the British, who took control in 1810. The people of contemporary Mauritius are mostly the descendents of those who arrived as slaves from Africa, indentured laborers from India, or small traders from china. Independence from Britain was attained in 1968. The lingua franca is French creole, which is largely oral, and a number of Indian languages are also spoken. French is widely used due to an agreement to protect French culture, made between the French and the British during the handover. English is the offi-cial language for education, government, and business, but for many children, English is virtually a foreign language. consequently, children who do not speak English outside of school are severely disadvantaged. There are current plans to use creole in school as the language of instruction for younger children.

Mauritius’s literacy rate is 85%, and teachers mainly rely on English textbooks. If Mauritian children are to enjoy literature and become literate in English, local books which reflect their lives are necessary. Unfortunately, while books from France and the Uk can be found in bookshops, there are few that are local. Botelho and Rudman use metaphors of mirrors and doors to explore the influ-ence of literature on identity formation:

by SanDRa wiLLiaMS

Sandra Williams lectures in English in Education at the University of Brighton,

UK. Her research interest concerns cultural indicators of national identity

embedded in children’s literature. She tutors on the M.A. in Education

for Mauritian teachers at MiE which is validated by University of Brighton.

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THE TRIUMPHAnT RETURn OF THE dOdO

These are powerful metaphors because they presuppose that literature can authentically mirror or reflect one’s life; look through a window to view someone else’s world; and open doors offering access both into and out of one’s everyday condition. The mirror invites self-contemplation and affirmation of identity. The window permits a view of other people’s lives. The door invites interaction. (xiii)

children must be able to read about themselves and their lives in order to develop their own cultural identity, and this development is not easy for Mauritian children.

For this review, texts were identified from three key sources: those held in the library at the Mauritius Institute of Education, titles published by the Federation of Playgroups, and those found in book shops in Mauritius. They have been written by a variety of authors and illustrators, some self-published, and produced by a range of local publishers with a few titles from large international groups. The Feder-ation of Playgroups has produced an excellent series of books for young readers. Originally developed co-operatively, they have been edited by Pushpa Lallah and published as dual language texts in English and creole. International publishers have been involved with secondary school readers, the most successful being Macmillan’s two volumes of short stories by Ramdoyal, and a few ex-pat writers have also made contributions.

There are a number of challenges when considering writing stories that bind the multicultural population together, offering a cultural landscape that is universally recognizable. First of all, there is the question of which language to select. Although children are educated in English, the mother tongue for most is creole, with French as the other ambient language. currently, the majority of texts are either in French or English with some dual creole/English publications. There is also a question of how to create texts that will encompass each Mauri-tian culture. There are no common indigenous oral traditions of myth, legend, or folk tale, which often form the bedrock of emergent chil-dren’s literature. Those who came as slaves lost much of their culture on arrival as language groups were deliberately separated, and all were converted to christianity, making it difficult to preserve cultural tradi-tion. Indentured laborers were able to retain their language, religion, and oral tradition, but they operated in a different geographical and cultural setting. The question also arises as to how the history of slavery and colonization can be dealt with in local children’s books. Lastly, as children’s literature currently does not play an important role in developing literacy in Mauritian schools, there is not a strong demand for multicultural children’s literature. despite these many challenges, there are books that reflect the cultures of Mauritius and solve some of these challenges.

Animal StoriesThe animal story provides the child reader with a character with which they can identify, what-ever their own cultural group, and regardless of whether they come from an Indian, African, or chinese background. All Mauritian children can empathize with the lizard from the rainy high-lands seeking sun on the beach. One creature that is distinctively Mauritian is the dodo, rendered extinct by the arrival of the colonizers. Thus the dodo functions as a metaphor for the destruc-tion of the island’s wildlife within a distinct local setting.

Perhaps the two strongest texts featuring the dodo are christian Bossu-Picat’s I the Dodo, which narrates the experiences of a dodo from a first person perspective, and Jane Lagesse’s The Oldest Dodo in the World, which is based on histor-ical events documented in Mauritius Illustrated by Allister Macmillan. In I the Dodo, the dodo explains the formation of the island of Mauri-tius, the development of its flora and fauna, and the sad extinction of the dodo after the arrival of Europeans. Lagesse’s text retells the experiences of Emmanuel Altham, who visited Mauritius in 1628 and sent a live dodo to his brother in Essex. The dodo, named Joseph, became a beloved family pet, and the author assures her young readers that the dodo is still living in a secret place in England.

Other dodo stories take different approaches, and although each tale reflects the sadness and loss of this bird that represents a sort of pre-colonial innocence, some authors focus more heavily on moral responsibility and relationships. Alladin’s The Dodo includes another extinct bird, the soli-taire, which inhabited Mauritius’s sister island of Rodrigues. The tale has strong moral undertones, for in this version the two birds quarrel and ignore each other instead of cooperating with one another to prevent their own extinction. koombes’s series of picture books contains In Dodoland, where a boy senses that there are dodos on an islet off the coast but cannot get to them. The picture book Dinododo offers a conversation between adult and child with a focus on the extinction of both the dinosaur and the dodo. Another text, In Dodoland by Appasawmy, does not concern the dodo itself,

but offers Mauritian reflections on the island and its culture.

The series of dual language texts in English and creole produced by the Federation of Play-groups also features a number of distinctively Mauritian flora and fauna. In Lallah’s Pekoy Goes Fishing / Pekoy al Lapes, a bird called Pekoy takes

advice from a paw-paw, a jackfruit, and bamboo, as well as a prawn and a monkey to build his boat. Finally, a fisherman helps Pekoy identify reef fish. This story offers lessons in fishing, plus the iden-tification of local flora and marine fauna. Marine animals also feature in Lallah’s Small Creatures Go On a journey / Vwayaz ti Zanimo, where Mr Eel, Mrs Octopus, young shrimp, and Mr Squid

travel from sister-island Rodrigues to Mauritius. They are met by a tortoise who takes them to the well-known beach resort of Flic-en-Flac. More animals also appear in the Search for the Sun / Al Rod Soley by the same author, which features a mouse, a beetle and a gecko who live on a hill in the rainy part of the country.

Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales in a Mauritian LandscapeThe myths and legends brought to Mauritius by

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slaves and indentured laborers have been trans-formed by reference to local geographical features. The resulting texts retain their connection to the oral tradition by foregrounding the local. Stories from the ancestral lands are incorporated into the local cultural landscape; a landscape only recently populated by humans. Each tale tells of homesickness while strategically incorporating local geographic features into a cultural/spiritual landscape.

A number of myths and legends concern the large volcanic lake known as “Grand Bassin,” and many tales concern both African slaves and Indian indentured laborers. In Land of the Fairies, by Ramoydal, the reader is transported to a time before human beings colonized the island. Living around the lake are fairies. When humans arrive, they are told not to interfere with the fairy community. Saddened by the slavery among the human population, the fairies flee into the moun-tains. In another version of the tale, Angel Lake by Ramsurrun, it is angels who watch over the lake, and are also disturbed by the treatment of slaves. After a violent beating by his owner, a slave is healed by the lake angels, but after failing to keep the angels’ existence a secret, he is turned to stone.

The legend of Pari Taleo, a tale of Indian indentured laborers, is recounted by Ramdoyal. It focuses on the laborers’ inability to make a pilgrimage to the Ganges. In 1897, Jhummun-geer, a mystic, dreamed that he was bathing in the Ganges and was transported to a beautiful lake, Grand Bassin. Grand Bassin is a sacred site of pilgrimage, and its significance in Hindu tradi-tion emphasizes its influential role in Mauritian children’s literature. There are also a number of stories featuring the mountain of Pieter Both. These include a story by Alladin in which an angry father turns a boy to stone after he falls in love with his daughter.

While much of Mauritian literature based on historical myth features distinctive and recog-nizable geographical Mauritian landscapes, it is also clearly linked to Mauritius’s colonial history. These stories undoubtedly reflect a colonial past and highlight the power relationships between colonizers and colonized.

ColonialismThe French and the English are viewed both posi-tively and negatively in Ramdoyal’s short-stories. In Marline, a French couple supports a local girl who is unloved and isolated. The Tribulations of Mr. James Merryweather is a cautionary tale that sati-rizes a ham-fisted colonial as he fails to connect with local fishermen. In Fishing for Deer, local fisherman catch deer without poaching until the French land owner, Missie Phillip, builds a fence to prevent deer from running into the sea. In Le Grand Solitaire, a French landowner nearly dies in his attempts to land a giant Marlin. Operation Pink Pigeon features an interfering Westerner who is responsible for the extinction of wildlife, and in this story a sorcerer saves the rare pigeons.

A most moving story is the legend of Le Morne, which is based on historical events and tells the tale of slaves who escaped from the sugar planta-tions and lived in fear of recapture. After emanci-pation, the police are sent to inform the runaways of their freedom, but fearing re-capture, they jump to their deaths. Ramdoyal tells the story from the perspective of an escaped slave’s family member. Mauritian history involves a great deal of difficulty and hardship, but by revisiting the colonial era in children’s literature, young readers have access to significant aspects of Mauritian cultural memory.

Domestic Realism While animal stories, myths and legends, and the colonial past resurface throughout Mauritian children’s texts, the everyday, recognizable charac-teristics of children’s lives form another branch of Mauritian children’s literature in works of domestic realism. By locating these stories within Mauritian geography, wildlife, and culture, young readers are able to relate to characters’ experiences and develop a sense of cultural identity.

The protagonist in Gopaul’s Bebbo is a dog whose adventures are told by kumar, a twelve-year-old boy. Through the tales of Bebbo, readers get a sense of middle class Mauritian life: their yard, the neighbors, and trips to the seaside. Less bucolic events include an attack by neighboring dogs, a burglary, and a violent death in a village. Beppo creates a sense of superiority in this urban

Indian family over the “superstitious” villagers, and reflects some of the tensions between ethnic groups on the island.

The Tamarind Boy, by Ramesh Bucktawar, mirrors aspects of the educa-tion system. Tefano, who has failed his exams, can no longer attend school but is not yet old enough to work. He is nagged and scolded by his parents, but although he lacks confidence, he has the courage to rescue a man in danger along the Black River. He is rewarded for his good deed, and gains self-esteem and familial acceptance.

The Federation of Playgroups’ stories also commonly focus on aspects of domestic life. Lallah’s Marde’s Garden / Marde so Zardin concerns the importance of growing vegetables. Marde explains to a group of children

how he grows his own produce, but unfortunately, his fence is weak and so stray dogs trample his crops. In the same series, The Shop Story / Zistwar Labutik features the daily routine of a small local grocery store, but the familiar atmo-sphere changes at night when rats and mice cavort amongst the goods. Abu in the Woods / Abu dan Bwa features Mauri-tian deer who have evolved slightly differently since they were introduced by colonists. The focalizer is Abu, who joins his game-keeper father and sees the deer for the first time.

In two collections of short stories for secondary age readers—Tales from Mauritius and More Tales from Mauri-tius—Ramesh Ramdoyal presents the largest number of Mauritian domestic realist stories to date. Both books are supplementary English readers published by Macmillan for educational use. Many stories are set in the Black River area and collectively create “a series of original short stories firmly rooted in Mauritian soil, or, as is more often the case, set in Mauritian waters” (Tales iv). The tales concern such topics as the relationship between old and young in

The Trap, and the effects of tourism on Mauritian values in The Uninvited Guest, both told in a familiar setting.

Another recognizable aspect of Mauritius is its tropical climate, and as Mauritius is highly prone to cyclones and extreme weather, many chil-dren’s stories incorporate environmental messages. In koombes’s picture book, A Cyclone over Black River, a group of children on a camping trip survive a powerful cyclone, and experience violent Mauritian weather.

ConclusionLocal Mauritian texts are, unfortunately, few and far between. Local chil-dren’s literature is not widely recognized or valued, as the hegemony of colonialism gives higher status to publications from the West. difficulties in developing a distinct national literature are not confined to Mauritius but are common in all post-colonial countries with a small multilingual population (Williams). Small print runs make publishing uneconomical, and state subsidy is not always available.

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There is also the question of which is the most appropriate language for publication. carole Boch, in her discussion on biliteracy in Southern Africa, quotes Thiong’o on the negative impact school systems can have on literacy when the mother tongue is not the medium of education:

So the written language of a child’s upbringing in the school… became divorced from his spoken language at home. There was often not the slightest relationship between the child’s written world, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his imme-diate environment in the family and the community. (17)

Mauritian children continue to be educated in a language that is not their mother tongue, and Mauritian literature allows them to read about a world they recognize. The publication of the annotated bibliography I have compiled may be a small step in publicizing emerging Mauri-tian literature, and hopefully will encourage local writers, illustrators, teachers and the Ministry of Education to develop Mauritian children’s literature further.

With thanks to Anita curpen and nita Rughoonundun chellepermal at MIE and Pushpa Lallah at the Federation of Playgroups.

Works Cited

Children’s Books Alladin, Abu. Short Stories from Mauritius. Illus. Salim Alladin, Ysz Yun

So, and Winners of Art competition open to Form III students of secondary schools. Mauritius: Editions Le Printemps, 2000. Print.

Appasawmy, n. In Dodoland. Mauritius: Edition Le Printemps, 1998. Print.

Bossu-Picat, c. I the Dodo. Mauritius: Pregraph, Les Pailles, 1994. Print.

Bucktawar, Ramesh. The Tamarind Boy. Mauritius: Little Hill, 2000. Print.

Dinododo. Mauritius: Federation of Pre-School Playgroups, 1991. Print.Gopaul, B. Bebbo. Mauritius: Editions capucines, 1997.koombes, H. In Dodoland. Text Pascale Siew. Trans. Lindsley collen.

Mauritius: Vizali, 2003. Print.Lagesse, J. The Oldest Dodo in the World. Illus. Spangenberg Becherel.

Mauritius: Pierre Largesse, 2004. Print.Lallah, P. Abu in the Woods / Abu dan Bwa, Marde’s Garden / Marde so

Zardin, Pekoy Goes Fishing / Pekoy al Lapes, Small Creatures Go on a Journey / Vwayaz ti Zanimo, The Search for the Sun / Al rod Soley, The Shop Story / Zistwar Labutik. Illus. Bernadette Mok Tsze chung. Mauritius: Federation of Playgroups, 1998. Print.

Ramdoyal, R. More Tales from Mauritius. Illus. nazal Rosunally. Oxford: Macmillan Education, 1981. Print.

—. Tales from Mauritius. Illus. nazal Rosunally. Oxford: Macmillan Education, 1977. Print.

Ramsurren, P. Golden Legends. Illus. Geeta Sawhney. Singapore: Heineman Southeast Asia, 1996. Print.

Wong, T. Some Short Stories According to the Times. Mauritius: The President’s Fund for creative Writing in English, 2004. Print.

Secondary SourcesBloch, c. “Enabling Biliteracy Among Young children in Southern

Africa: Realities, Visions, and Strategies.” Global Perspectives on Multilingualism. Ed. M. E. Torres-Guzman and Joel Gomez. new York: Teachers college P, 2009. Print. 225-241.

Botelho, M.J. and M.k. Rudman. Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Hollindale, P. Signs of Childness in Children’s Books. Stroud: Thimble, 1997. Print.

Williams, S. J. “The Struggle to develop a distinctive children’s Literature in Singapore.” New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 12.1 (2006): 103-15. Print.

Our Forthcoming Issues:

51.2 (Spring 2013) Open Themed51.3 (Summer 2013) Multilingual Literature51.4 (Fall 2013) Open Themed52.1 (Winter 2014) GLBTQ52.2 (Spring 2014) HCA Award Nominees52.3 (Summer 2014) Mexico City Congress52.4 (Fall 2014) HCA Awards and Open Themed

In the mid-nineteenth century, Africans were depicted as innately greedy, bloodthirsty, brutal, despotic, lustful, and lazy; as naked, pagan, fetish worshippers and cannibals who performed grotesque and frenzied dances to hideous carved idols at the instigation of wizards and witch doctors; and as bizarre, barbaric, crude, queer, disgusting, wild, and indecent. (Schmidt 14)

European readers were thrilled to read about colonial Africa as it offered mystery and that powerful ingredient, adventure. Titles such as R. M. Ballantyne’s The Settler and the Savage

are indicative both of a fictionalized picture of Africa and of the assumed superiority of the European over the native. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard swiftly sold over a hundred thousand copies. The whole continent, it seemed, was full of jungles, wild animals, and even wilder inhabitants.

For many years, the writers and readers of children’s books in South Africa were White, so the stories were about White children. In Corah’s School Chums by May Baldwin, a girl explains, “They do

The Growth tow

ards a Truly A

frican Quality in South

African Children’s Literature

by Jay hEaLE and JEan wiLLiaMS

This article was written by Jean williams (director of Biblionef Sa) and Jay heale

(an independent consultant). The aim of Biblionef is to supply books to schools

which have few or none, and to redress the present poor supply of children’s books in

the “minor” languages of South africa. Both authors are long-standing members of the

South african national section of iBBy.

THE GROWTH TOWARdS A TRULY AFRIcAn QUALITY In SOUTH AFRIcAn cHILdREn’S LITERATURE

not allow coloured girls at our schools, even if they are only a little coloured.”1 Kit in Kafirland by E. M. Green explains how kit, who remains “awfully decent” throughout, lives in a land where “kafirs are like children: they work well enough as long as there is someone in authority over them. As soon as they are left to themselves they relapse into idleness.” The paternal, conde-scending assumption was that Africans were unintelligent and only fit to appear in books as domestic servants, rogues, or vagabonds!

Another common theme in these early books was that of a brave White boy accompanied by a small Black companion, and indeed, White chil-dren growing up on South African farms were often allocated a Black child of the same age as a companion. As recently as 1976, a book such as Tongelo by catherine Annandale describes such a “veldt friendship” between a White and a Black boy, severed when the White boy goes off to an education never envisaged for his Black friend. Martin leaves Tongelo, promising that “no school is going to make any difference to us! It will always be the same.” And the author (whether wisely or sadly we are left to guess) adds: “But, of course, it never was quite the same again.”

The adult African in European children’s fiction was either portrayed as a “noble savage” or else a “stupid servant.” Any concept of “noble” disappeared swiftly after South Africa came under national Party rule. One stereotyped character to survive too long in literature was the witch-doctor, who was usually portrayed as wicked and malicious. African magic remains very real even today. The sangoma (diviner) and the inyanga (herbalist) are both still strong forces within African culture.

Separate Developments: English, Afri-kaans, “Indian,” and “Bantu” Educationdifferent living conditions for Blacks and Whites within South Africa were set in place by the British administration under Lord Milner. However, it was the national government led by d.F. Malan which enforced racial segregation (called apartheid) between 1948 and 1994. The

legislation allowed for significantly different levels of support for education. Each province had its own White, colored and Indian educa-tion departments, while the areas reserved for Blacks had their own “Bantu” education which aimed at achieving lower standards. At one time, there were 19 separate education depart-ments. Afrikaans became an official language of South Africa in 1925. The country was declared bilingual and equal status was therefore allo-cated to Afrikaans and English. The books of fiction approved for school use were those portraying good, polite, obedient White chil-dren who showed respect for authority.

As equal money was allocated for books in both the main languages, there was an upsurge in books written and published in Afrikaans, and a strong South African children’s litera-ture began to emerge. children of differing skin color and cultural backgrounds hardly ever met each other except in the pages of books. Although good money could be made if a book was “prescribed” for school use, an increasing number of subversive books were published that refused to toe the line. Only a few youth novels were actually banned, though many more were not accepted for school use, which had much the same effect. Amongst the offenders were The Sound of the Gora by Ann Harries, which provided a sympathetic account of the 1976 children’s riots in cape Town, and Journey to Jo’burg by Beverley naidoo, which described police brutality (both novels were published in the Uk).

The First Books with a Non-White ProtagonistThe publication of Not So Fast, Songololo!, written and illustrated by niki daly (1985) was a milestone in South African literature for children. This full color picture book was the first to feature a Black urban South African child as the happy hero of his own story. What a simple story too: skipping ahead of his bulky Gogo (grandma) a boy helps with the shopping and comes home wearing bright red tackies (sneakers).

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At last our literature was not restricted to White heroes. Quickly, we saw titles such as Sidwell ’s Seeds about a boy living in an “informal settlement” (squatter camp), Day of the Giants about a boy and girl caring for an elephant injured by a landmine in war-torn Mozambique, and Love, David another tale of the cape Flats where parents travel away to work as domestic servants. These were reality tales of underprivi-leged children living, as they did live, in squalor, in danger, in poverty.

In 1987, the first international conference on children’s literature in South Africa, “Towards Understanding,” attracted 550 delegates to the University of the Western cape. One of the honored guests was dr. Lorenz Graham, a pioneer in African-American literature. Suddenly, local publishing came alive. In English alone, 134 children’s books were published in that year, compared with 59 in 1986 and 30 in 1985 (Heale 99). These included The Strollers by Lesley Beake, set among the street children of cape Town with the challenge of daily survival; it has been reprinted over twenty times.

Themes never mentioned before began to appear in children’s books. A White boy in a small town school falls for a “colored” girl in Down Street by Lawrence Bransby, producing a story of love across the color barrier; a deaf and dumb Black boy becomes visible in A Cageful of Butterflies by Lesley Beake; a boy who stut-ters and has difficulty communicating is given a voice in My Cat Turns Autumn by Barrie Hough; and, a modern Bushman girl living on the farm of an impoverished White farmer is celebrated in Song of Be by Lesley Beake. Here, in our liter-ature at last, was the world we lived in with its poverty and social divisions as well as the harsh physical environment.

Transition Time: The Early 1990sFor a while, South African society and its youth literature were not sure how to handle the situa-tion of White and Black (and Indian and others) being together. There were stories about a gang of White boys admitting a Black member and finding that he was “all right.” There were no

stories of Black youngsters admitting a White child into their group of friends—probably because there were very few Black authors who could handle such a theme. Lawrence Bransby did write of a lone Black boy in a White school (in Homeward Bound), which Tafelberg bravely published as early as 1990. Independent schools had been allowed to admit “non-white” pupils only since 1985. The book was named as the Bookchat Southern African Book of the Year in 1991, but the concept was not easy for many White readers to swallow.

All White males who served their compulsory “basic training” with the South African defense Force were heavily indoctrinated against the swart gevaar (the black danger). Jimmy Goes to the Border by Andrew Mccallaghan is an inno-cent story of a boy day-dreaming about his father, fighting “on the border,” and making a plane and a jeep and a gun out of plasticene. It provoked a storm of protest: children’s books were not supposed to meddle in such topics! We were not ready for reality.

Tentatively, we tried stories of one White and one Black child together – such as the Craig and Cardo stories by debora Savage and Bronwen Jones’s Tristan and Thobe stories (1994-95). While parents and educators considered the implications, junior stories portrayed African children longing to go to school or learning to read. Although it was not South African, we rejoiced when we read The Day of Ahmed’s Secret, set in cairo, where little Ahmed’s great secret is that he can write his own name!

The first ever IBBY congress in Africa was held in cape Town 2004. One of the keynote speakers was Professor Elwyn Jenkins who, in his paper “Sharing Our Stories: South African children’s Literature in English,” emphasized:

children’s literature has been produced in every period of South African history. Perhaps visitors here today will find at least something that resonates with your own countries’ experiences: the oral literature of pre-colonial Africa followed by the literature of colonialism;

colonial wars; and neo-colonialism; civil wars; the repressions of a harsh regime; revolution, emergence from colonialism, and the building of a new democracy for the twenty-first century. (Jenkins 5)

DemocracyThe amazingly peaceful election of 1994 brought democracy to South Africa and nelson Mandela to the presidency. (Two years earlier, in 1992, South Africa had been admitted as a national section of IBBY.) The Day Gogo Went to Vote by Elinor Sisulu describes the emotive scene of the election, and its sweeping pictures by Sharon Wilson show the endless, snaking queues of people. The Group Areas Act and many other hurtful pieces of legislation were repealed. We were allowed to meet each other, even to live beside each other. But the divisive element which would take so long to solve (and has not been properly dealt with yet) was that of language. All eleven languages of South Africa were declared “official languages.” Hurray! But children whose mother tongue was a minor African language, such as SiSwati or Tshivenda or Xitsonga, had virtually no hope of encountering a picture book in their own language.

There were two streams of thought: the academics who argued that little children should initially be taught in their mother tongue and so demanded children’s books in all eleven languages, and the parents who argued that they wanted their children to be able to get jobs in the “new” South Africa. For that they needed fluent English, and so their educa-tion should be largely in English.

The gap in funding between White (Afrikaans and English) schools and Black (African language) schools was still horribly unequal. So one can hardly blame our publishers for failing to produce books in African languages when there was no money available to buy them! Garamond Publishers gallantly produced full color picture books, printing 1,000 copies in each of four languages: Afrikaans, English, isiZulu, and isiX-hosa. The first two languages sold; the second two did not. Many fine titles (such as The Red Dress by dux van der Walt) initially failed to cover the cost of production.

In recent years, many more books have appeared for Zulu and Xhosa readers, and some in the other African languages. One applauds the efforts of such publishers as Pan Macmillan for issuing picture books (the Giraffe series) in all South African languages as well as Portu-guese (for Mozambique and Angola) and Sesotho for Lesotho. Maskew Miller Longman’s Literature Awards for original, unpublished and untranslated fiction in all eleven languages is another major initiative to increase the number of published books.

HIV and AIDSThere is no more violent reality to hit Africa than the trauma and suffering caused by AIdS-related diseases. It is estimated that, of the

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present 50 million population of South Africa, over 10% are living with HIV (South African Partners). The SAcBIP data base (South African children’s Books in Print) maintained on www.book-chat.co.za lists eighty titles that include AIdS as a main theme. despite President Thabo Mbeki’s claim that he has never known anyone with AIdS, our children are not in denial: they now know all about it. There are too many parentless families for it to be ignored. At least two books need to be mentioned. Praise Song by Jenny Robson describes, in a Botswana setting, a murder connected with the utter refusal of many Africans to name or mention the disease. To admit that someone in your family has AIdS is considered shameful. To some extent, this problem has still to be overcome. In children’s literature, it is being tackled by such publications as Brenda Has a Dragon in Her Blood (2005), which originated in the netherlands but was republished in South Africa with the support of Biblionef. Its bright text and pictures tell of a cheerful little girl who is quite ordinary except that she has a dragon called HIV and it has to remain sleeping. As indi-cated, there are now many other children’s books which present sensible facts and attempt to take the stigma out of the situation. Here youth literature is being used positively.

Proof of QualityThe IBBY Honour Books displayed every second year on behalf of South Africa since 1994 show the high quality of book production. We have had, so far, four candidates submitted for the Hans Christian Andersen Award: Lesley Beake, niki daly, Piet Grobler, and Beverley naidoo. The nearly 600 delegates who attended the first ever IBBY congress in Africa (hosted in cape Town in 2004) saw for themselves the vibrant children’s book scene in South Africa, as well as evidence of the still appalling lack of books in our schools. As noted by the Libraries for South African Schools, “The vast majority of schools in South Africa have no functional library. In the Province of the Eastern cape, for example, 93% of schools do not have a library. Overall, 85% of the population of South Africa lives beyond the reach of a public library.” (South African Partners website). Of course South African publishers make sure that schools and libraries are aware of their publications, but the general public has hardly any way of knowing that new children’s books exist unless the few bookshops promote them or when they occasionally attract publicity. Teachers in underprivileged schools still have very little knowledge of the books that are available. For this reason, we are justly proud that

such international figures, including Former President nelson Mandela and Archbishop Emeritus desmond Tutu, have turned their attention to South African children’s literature. Madiba Magic (published in the United States as Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales, where it has also been issued as an audiobook) carries a Foreword by Mandela and thirty-two stories sourced from all over Africa. God’s Dream, written by Tutu and douglas carlton Abrams is a picture book about children all over the world sharing God’s dream “that every one of us will see that we are all brothers and sisters.” Both books have been made widely available in African languages. In his Foreword, nelson Mandela states, “It is my wish that the voice of the storyteller will never die in Africa, that all the children in Africa may experience the wonder of books and that they will never lose the capacity to enlarge their earthly dwelling place with the magic of stories” (8). now at last we can claim that we publish books about South Africa for South African children, indeed, for all the children of Africa.

1. The early publications cited in this paper are held in the vaults of the South African Library in cape Town. Access to this archive is limited and it has not been possible to check all the page numbers.

Works Cited

Children’s BooksAnnandale, catherine. Tongelo. Johannesburg: Perskor, 1976. Print.Baldwin, May. Corah’s School Chums. London: W & R chambers, 1912.

Print.Ballantyne, R.M. The Settler and the Savage. London: James nisbet,

1877. Print.Beake, Lesley. Song of Be. cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1991.

Print.—. A Cageful of Butterflies. cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman,

1989. Print.—. The Strollers. cape Town: Maskew Miller Longan, 1987. Print.Bransby, Lawrence. Homeward Bound. cape Town: Tafelberg, 1990.

Print.—. Down Street. cape Town: Tafelberg, 1989. Print.case, dianne. Love, David. cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman,

1986. Print.daly, niki. Not So Fast, Songololo! cape Town: Human & Rousseau,

1985. Print.Green, E.M. Kit in Kafirland. London: Society for Promoting christian

knowledge, 1914. Print.Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. London: cassell, 1885. Print.

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Harris, Ann. The Sound of the Gora. London: Heinemann, 1980. Print.Heide, Florence Parry & Gillilan, Judith Heide. The Day of Ahmed’s

Secret. new York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1990. Print.Hough, Barrie. My Cat Turns Autumn. London: Viking, 1990. Print.Jones, Bronwen. Tristan and Thobe Go to School. Johannesburg: Ithemba!

Publishing, 1995. Print.Martens, Maretha. Sidwell’s Seeds. cape Town: Tafelberg, 1985. Print.Mccallaghan, Andrew. Jimmy Goes to the Border. Pretoria: daan Retief,

1983. Print.naidoo, Beverley. Journey to Jo’burg. London: Longman, 1985. Print.Pieterse, Pieter. Day of the Giants. Pretoria: de Jager-HAUM, 1986.

Print.Robson, Jenny. Praise Song. cape Town: Tafelberg, 2006. Print.Rode, Linda, ed. Madiba Magic. Foreword by nelson Mandela. cape

Town: Tafelberg, 2002. Print.Savage, debora. Flight from Hout Bay. Johannesburg: Varia Books,

1991. Print.Sisulu, Elinor Batezat. The Day Gogo went to Vote. cape Town: Tafelberg,

1996. Print.Tutu, desmond and Abrams, douglas carlton. God’s Dream.

Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010. Print.Van der Walt, dux. The Red Dress. durbanville, cape Town: Garamond,

1996. Print.Vink, Hijltje. Brenda has a dragon in her blood. Pinelands, cape Town:

Biblionef SA & Garamond. 2005. Print.

Secondary SourcesBookchat. SACBIP. Web. 1 July 2011.Heale, Jay. From the Bushveld to Biko. Grabouw, SA: Bookchat Booklets,

1996. Print.Jenkins, Elwyn. “Sharing our Stories: South African children’s

Literature in English.” Seedlings: English Children’s Reading and Writers in South Africa. 2004. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2012. 5-13. Print.

Schmidt, nancy J. Children’s Fiction about Africa in English. new York: conch Magazine, 1981. Print.

South Africa Partners. Web. 1 July 2011.

Young Irelands: Studies in Children’s Literature. Mary Shine Thompson, editor. dublin: Four courts Press, 2011. 186 pp.The fourth book in the Studies in Children’s Literature series looks exclusively at Irish children’s literature. covering a range of texts from a time period that stretches from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to more modern texts, the essays examine how various Irish texts for children from the eighteenth to twentieth century work either within or outside concepts of Irish nationalism and British imperial identity, and also how Irish children’s books have been received in other countries. Thus, following Shine Thompson’s long introduc-tion, which provides a potted history of Irish nationalism’s resis-tance to British imperialism and its influence on texts for children, the essays are divided into three groups based on their focus. The first group covers texts that can broadly be seen to support and/or inculcate the societal and behavioral norms of empire and nation, and thus, more generally, how children’s literature and other texts

aimed at a young audience can be utilized as part of efforts to promote social stability (in this case, British imperialism). The essays in the second group consider texts that offer resis-tance to notions of nation-alism and imperialism or that choose not to engage with such ideologies at all. The third group of essays focuses on the reception of Irish texts by non-Irish audiences, either in terms of the figuring of Irishness itself, or with regard to aspects of translation.

In the opening group of essays, Sharon Murphy writes on Maria Edgeworth’s belief

in appropriate education for future imperialists and how this belief operates in her work, and Joy Alexander considers the importance of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. Both of these essays see impe-rialist ideas being transmitted through the process of education. In contrast, Marnie Hay discusses the counter-imperialist propaganda of “na Fianna,” whilst Michael Flanagan discusses the periodical, Our Boys, and its use of the past to offer a sense of nationhood in the present. Finally ciara ní Bhroin examines retellings of the Táin and how they can also be seen to appropriate certain traditional notions of Irishness for a particular social and political purpose.

In the second group of essays, Anne Marie Herron looks at the way Irishness is presented through iconography in the children’s

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REVIEWS

fiction of kate Thompson, and Anne Markey examines how elements of both Irish and European folk and fairy tales inform Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales for children in ways that both bolster and undermine nationalist and imperial discourse. Jane O’Hanlon considers the problematic use of tropes and themes in the narnia books of c.S. Lewis and how they can be seen to subvert the “Britishness” of the books, and Valerie coghlan examines how three illustrators have visualized James Joyce’s “The cat and the devil” differently, arguing for the text’s lack of fixed interpreta-tion and nationalist purpose.

The final three essays consider how Irish texts have been consid-ered from outside Ireland. coralline dupuy’s consideration of a French translation of Morgan Llywelyn’s Cold Places, focusing on how trans-lation affects reader’s sense of place and access to themes, pairs well with Emer O’Sullivan’s essay on the problems Irish children’s litera-ture poses for German translators, especially in terms of how vernacular speech is dealt with. Aedin clements offers a fascinating account of the importance of Padraic colum in helping to forge a new and respect-able Irish-American identity for children. concluding the collection is Shine Thompson’s journey through the historical reception and impact of Gulliver’s Travels, itself a well-considered text in translation studies.

despite a footnote style that is rather difficult to follow (combining the notes themselves and bibliographic information), the essays in this collection offer some very interesting insights into Irish children’s literature and, just as importantly, suggest a number of possible direc-tions for further studies in Irish children’s literature and its production and dissemination. In that respect, the essays also contribute to wider discussions about the figure of the child and nationhood in general.

Anthony PavlikBogazici University, Turkey

A Made-Up Place. Anna Jackson, Geoffrey Miles, Harry Ricketts, Tatjana Schaefer, and kathryn Walls. Wellington, nZ: Victoria UP, 2011. 224 pp. despite a strange cover that seemingly shows two girls in their under-wear, this fascinating book by new Zealand-based scholars who teach children’s literature discusses what is likely to be new ground for many of us: young adult literature from new Zealand. It analyses a number of topics (ranging from race to sport, the Gothic to money) and refers to many authors, including Margaret Mahy, Maurice Gee, and Witi Ihimaera. The main topic is national identity, which is connected to other issues, so Jackson, Miles, Rickets, Schaefer, and Walls analyze young adult literature from new Zealand with the apparent aim of under-standing what such works say about new Zealand and about the new Zealander identity (or identities).

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This work helps new Zealand to escape from being known as “just” another commonwealth country; the authors focus on the country’s literature and identity in its own right, rather than as an offshoot of Britain. And yet, there is a distinct sense of confusion about where new Zealand identity lies. Is it with the English, in a sense of Englishness, whatever that might be? Is it more generally European white (which is referred to as Pākehā)? Is it with the indigenous Māori? Is it some combination thereof? Is there such a thing as new Zealandness? Or something else altogether? The authors—and new Zealanders in general, it seems—are not sure. If it is true that “[w]here new Zealand YA authors represent the kind of institutionalized management of national identity or invention of tradition proposed by [Ernest] Gellner or [Eric] Hobsbawn, then, this is almost invariably in a critical spirit” (12), then this comment suggests an ambiguous feeling towards national identity. An implicit question in this book seems to be: is there a coherent new Zealand identity? Or are there multiple new Zealand identities? The authors respond: “Pākehā new Zealanders are defined at one and the same by their difference from the English, and by their English heritage” (45). But then, in “other new Zealand books for YA readers, we find similar representations of Englishness as a respectability against which new Zealanders define themselves by their difference; as a heritage which defines the Pākehā new Zealander in contrast to the Māori; as connected both to memory and to forgetting” (45).

Memory and forgetting seem to be key themes in YA literature from new Zealand, and they

recur frequently here, though the chapters them-selves seem somewhat randomly ordered. In the chapter on historical fiction, Ricketts points out how historical novels for young adult readers are popular because“[t]he past, particularly the YA fictional past, is a potentially safe space to escape to, to fantasize about, even (through imagina-tive games) to pretend we live in” (68). And yet, “[one] of the oddities of new Zealand YA histor-ical fiction is that until now it has almost exclu-

sively been the preserve of Pākehā writers” (69). These Pākehā writers have been inspired by British historical fiction whose national ist /imperia l ist attitudes have often found their way into nZ histor-ical novels (73). As a result, nZ historical fiction tends to focus on settler expe-riences at the expense of Maori history. Rick-etts offers an alternative explanation for this. Since the Māori view time and history differently from Europeans, the past is not necessarily past but rather a place you can return to easily, so historical fiction is perhaps a contradiction.

Another popular genre in new Zealand young adult fiction seems to be utopian and dystopian novels. Miles suggests, “[in] a sense, the real country of new Zealand emerges out of this tradition of utopian fantasy and speculation” (88). Miles makes the case that futurist fiction is in some ways about identity and can be descriptive even if it is not realistic. He writes: “new Zealand’s YA dystopian fiction, then, is not simply following an international fashion for such fictions; it also springs from specifically new Zealand anxieties…about race, about religion, about unfulfilled ideals of social justice and equality. Perhaps, in a strange way, the predominance of dystopias shows how much

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we as a nation are still possessed by the dream of utopia” (110).

A Made-Up Place is strongest where it looks at Māori writing and Māori identity within YA literature. As the book mentions, the Māori started to protest about the way they had been treated in the 1970s, and this has affected bicul-turalism in new Zealand. Three novels published since the advent, but before the height of, bicultur-alism are analyzed with this in mind: the novels are by Maurice Gee (1989), Patricia Grace (1988), and Jack Lasenby (1992). Walls analyzes how racist these books are and which characters show racist attitudes. It would have been interesting to compare this to more recent books (although of course contemporary works are discussed in other chapters in reference to other issues).

The book also explores the genre of the “Māori Gothic,” which is quite different from what we generally understand the Gothic to be in Europe, and questions whether it is actually a separate genre (194). Jackson suggests that for some nZ authors, it could be “the English heritage that haunts new Zealand,” creating a Gothic that is unique to new Zealand (50). Miles explores this in much more depth, first arguing that “[t]here is a strong strain of ‘kiwi Gothic’ in new Zealand literature, film, and visual art, appropriate for a country whose unofficial national colour is black,” before going on to say that ghosts are part of the Māori tradition, whereas in Gothic works, the ghosts do not belong and are used to help create the Gothic atmosphere (194). Ultimately, Miles suggests that although these books “include Gothic motifs and Gothic moments, none really fit the definition” (217). Still, he argues, it “is perhaps in these novels that we currently find YA writers grappling most explicitly with the defini-tion of new Zealand’s national identity and the ways in which that identity is being shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves” (217).

In sum, this fairly slim volume manages to cover a lot of ground. The book offers a glimpse into a literature that few of us are aware of. Through it, we can learn about what new Zealanders find important and how they approach young adult literature, and perhaps we can also find some new

ideas about texts we can use in our own children’s literature courses.

B.J. Epstein, University of East Anglia, UK

Seedlings: English Children’s Reading and Writers in South Africa. Elwyn Jenkins. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2012. 235 pp. Paperback.In this new collection, all the essays relate in some way to South Africa and to children, but they do not pretend to offer a comprehensive introduc-tion to South African children’s literature. One should thus not view Jenkins’ text as a history or analysis of South African children’s litera-ture as a whole, but rather allow the loose links between chapters to open up an initial route into this complex national literature. Jenkins explores a wide range of topics and, more specifically, what he calls South Africa’s “three great contributions” to world literature: “the folktales of its peoples; books about its magnificent animals, plant king-doms and landscapes; and stories which docu-ment, grieve over, and celebrate our history” (5). For example, he analyses tales by and about the San people. Jenkins discusses the fact that Euro-pean fairy tales are actually more easily available than South African children’s literature and more widely read, even though the San stories are in many ways more relevant. He suggests that a way forward for South African books would be to include “retellings of stories and creative integra-tion of San words and lore” (32); in other words, if South African writers would allow themselves to learn about, and be inspired by, their native culture, this could benefit children’s literature (and, presumably, literature for adults as well).

Another topic Jenkins tackles is peritexts/para-texts in South African children’s books, and here he offers an interesting analysis of how the covers of South African books are sometimes changed when they are published abroad, which thereby affects how South Africans and their culture are viewed. The issue here, he says, is that the continent of Africa in general and South Africa in particular are portrayed in ways that reflect

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what foreign readers want to believe. Thus paratextual changes end up strengthening readers’ stereotypical views of South Africa rather than challenging them. A third subject of this book is on repeated themes/characters, such as the honey-guide bird which has been cheated by humans and so takes out his revenge on them. Here Jenkins writes about how the honey-guide bird is depicted in children’s books and how this is relevant to South African culture and literature. He suggests that “[t]he lesson to be drawn from this is that humans should not be greedy, but should live in harmony with nature” (36).

In other chapters, Jenkins discusses specific authors. In one, for example, he looks at various English-language authors who lived in and/or were inspired by South Africa, such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Rudyard kipling. Many readers may not know that Tolkien was born in South

Africa and that some of his early memories from that country seem to have shaped his Lord of the Rings series, so this chapter provides insight into some classic works. Further chapters introduce South African writers whose names are likely be completely unfamiliar to readers outside the country, such as nellie Finder, Pauline Smith, cecil Shirley, and kagiso Lesego Molope, who describes herself as an African feminist and whose books reflect this. cecil Shirley, for example, was the author and illus-trator of Little Veld Folk which “was one of the last in a tradition of illustrated books in English about little South African animals” (102). What is remarkable about Shirley is that he produced this work despite having no arms.

The strongest and most interesting parts of this book are those in which Jenkins explores South African chil-dren’s literature more generally and gives overviews of particular topics, rather than those sections in which he analyses a particular text or author. Race is an ever-present subject here, and, of course, is a major subject in South African history and literature. Much of what Jenkins discusses seems to return to the idea that white writers and white topics have taken precedence in literature for chil-dren in South Africa. For instance, he notes that English

language South African children’s literature was reluctant to address the rights of children exported to the colonies as child labor from the 1830s onwards, despite protests from their families until the 1960s. He draws attention to the absence of black writers for children, and notes that the white writers wrote works that were about their own privileged lives. This sense of privilege comes across clearly throughout Jenkins’ work, such as when he discusses the absence of San folk tales in English trans-lation, as previously mentioned, as well as the inaccurate portrayal of the San by non-San writers. Jenkins is also aware of the privilege evident in the writing of kingsley Fairbridge (1885-1924) who, Jenkins explains, conveniently forgot or deliberately ignored all non-white residents of

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the country and instead portrayed South Africa as an “empty land”: the perfect spot for Empire-building. Fairbridge was so popular that a statue was erected in his honor, which was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Jenkins calls Fairbridge a “visionary” due to some of his political ideas, but his literary work does seem to have been revaluated of late (95).

As Jenkins further notes, the absence of non-white authors and subjects in South African children’s literature is only recently and partially being rectified. He argues that from the 1970s forward, “young adult fiction showed white teenagers coming to understand the evils of apartheid, while books for younger children that were about black people portrayed the harshness of the conditions under which they lived” (152). Jenkins’s book provides a fascinating glimpse into this country, whose preoccupations and interests are made visible through children’s litera-ture. While the style can be inconsistent—there is some sloppy editing and a few of the sections seem out of place (such as the chapter on ciga-rette cards)—on the whole this motley grouping of essays starts to make South African children’s literature more accessible to readers living in the rest of the world.

B.J. Epstein, University of East Anglia, UK.

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Robin Bernstein. new York: new York UP, 2011. 307 pp.In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein engages in a discursive commen-tary on race, childhood, and innocence in American texts emerging from the antebellum period (the period prior to the civil War). Bringing slave narratives and theatrical adaptations into discussion with Stowe’s seminal text Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bernstein explores the racism and Euro-centric values implicit in nineteenth-century American understandings of childhood innocence. She recognizes that Stowe’s influential work, often linked to the spark that ignited the American civil War, was more than a work of literature: it carried with it a material culture that cut through class, gender, and racial boundaries. Bernstein refers to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a repertoire, as it existed as prose, parlor performance, visual art, and in other cultural forms. Throughout Racial Innocence, she offers close readings of texts and other material, particularly white and black dolls, and unpacks the implications of white supremacy implicit in the romanticized notion of the African American as childlike.

Bernstein introduces the first chapter with a comprehensive anal-ysis of the book’s cover image, a nineteenth-century advertisement for cottolene (a brand of cooking fat), by comparing the image of the African American child to a similar advertisement for the same product depicting a young white girl. Bernstein recognizes that understandings of

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childhood shifted in the nineteenth-century, and (white) children were no longer viewed as small adults, but rather as fragile and innocent beings. The author argues, however, that nineteenth-century cultural material portrayed black children as “pickaninnies”: wild, gluttonous, and immoral creatures who were unable to feel pain or respond emotionally to actions or events. The ability to feel pain was a key component of childhood inno-cence, and because the pickaninny was thought to be immune to pain, the notion of childhood inno-cence did not transmit to the black child. Bern-stein supports this argument with contrasting analyses of the violence which was encouraged toward black rubber dolls and the nurturing atti-tudes promoted through white porcelain dolls. She also reads the recurring touches shared between Eva, the pure and innocent white child in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Topsy, the wild and misbehaving black slave-child. The touch is a key factor in the adoption of childhood innocence on Topsy’s part, and Bern-stein offers an insightful discourse on the transfer of innocence in shared touches between white slaveholders and black slaves. She also begins to explore the discourse of racial innocence at work in the popular Topsy-Turvy doll of the nineteenth century, which she carries into the following chapter.

In the second chapter, Bernstein looks more closely at the Topsy-Turvy doll—a popular double-ended children’s toy depicting Eva and Topsy fused at the waist and separated by a shared skirt. Highly popular all over antebellum America, the Topsy-Turvy doll helped the repertoire of Uncle Tom’s Cabin come to life, and Bernstein explores the problematic relationship between the widely loved doll and the racial consciousnesses of white

and black children alike. She suggests that the black and white characters convey images of the mixed-race child and subtly comment on issues of rape and miscegeny in slave-holding America. Bernstein notes that these dolls were often sewn by slave women in the domestic sphere, and the social commentary attached to these bi-racial, “crotchless” dolls “was not only intellectually brilliant but also angry and bitterly witty” (89). Bernstein offers a deeply insightful and innovative analysis of the well-known Topsy-Turvy doll, and foregrounds an exploration of issues of miscegeny, rape, and slave women’s experiences sewn into this popularly well-loved toy.

In the third chapter, entitled “Everyone is Impressed: Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom’s to Uncle Remus’s cabin,” Bernstein suggests that nineteenth-century social under-standings of childhood and its inextricable link to innocence masks a sexual relationship between Eva and Uncle Tom. She contends that, had Eva been an adult character in the novel, her relation-ship with Uncle Tom would have been viewed as a romantic one. Both because Eva is a child and because of the way inno-

cence and race are connected, she is able to build a close friendship with Uncle Tom without raising the issue of an interracial sexual relation-ship. Bernstein also takes note of the touches and embraces shared between Eva and Tom, espe-cially in performances and live-action adaptations of the novel. She argues that these shared touches played a role in both abolition and endorsement of the slave trade, and continues her analysis to include Joel chandler Harris’s apology for slavery, Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Planta-tion (1905).

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Bernstein shifts her focus from Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the fourth chapter, and explores issues of blackness and whiteness in Raggedy Ann. She argues that Raggedy Ann, a popularized doll-turned-book-character-turned-theatrical per-formance, reinstated slavery in the early twen-tieth century as “innocent fun” by popularizing the image of the black-faced pickaninny (193). Through a Topsy-esque representation of the Af-rican-American child, Raggedy Ann encouraged violence toward black dolls by propagating and re-popularizing black-face minstrelsy. Her soft mate-riality prompted “both cuddling and abuse,” and her ever-smiling, racially ambiguous body “enjoys being thrown, boiled, wrung out, skinned, and hanged. It’s racially innocent fun” (193).

The fifth and final chapter, “The Scripts of Black dolls,” eloquently concludes Bernstein’s re-surfacing argument throughout the text. She reas-serts the notion that black children in nineteenth-century America were associated with the inability to feel pain, and uses behaviors toward black and white dolls to reveal the violence encouraged to-ward black children. Black dolls, often made from rubber or other resilient materials, invited acts of violence from the white children who owned them, while white dolls, often made of cotton, silk, and other soft materials, solicited acts of love and nur-turance. Bernstein explores young black women’s

rejection of these violent acts toward black dolls throughout the early twentieth century, suggest-ing that kindness toward black dolls helped de-construct internalized racism and desegregate un-derstandings of childhood innocence.

Racial Innocence deconstructs issues of child-hood racial innocence using the most basic and universal object of domestic girlhood: the doll. Bernstein’s clear, concise, and approachable writ-ing style makes the text a suitable resource for researchers of all educational and disciplinary backgrounds, and her lack of exclusive language and jargon make the book a truly enjoyable read. Though she does rely heavily on Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she recognizes the text’s enormous influence in antebellum and post-bellum Ameri-ca, and is able to construct compelling contrasts and comparisons using other popularized texts and cultural material from the era. The navigable notes section and thorough index are both useful and reader-friendly. Bernstein’s Racial Innocence is a valuable contribution to the study of children and race in the slavery and civil rights periods of America, and her passionate and energetic writing style compels the reader to become absorbed in the captivating and influential content.

Samantha ChristensenUniversity of Alberta, Canada

Response to “Review of Historical Dictionary of Children’s Literature” Bookbird 50.1 (January 2012) by Bridget Carrington1. The review states that in the case of the Marsh award “the Appendix (283) names merely

names (sic) the books that have won it, and not the original author or the translator”. This is factually inaccurate: on p. 283-4 of the dictionary, the list of Marsh Awards first gives the name of the translator, then the title of the book, then the name of the author.

2. It also states, when writing about the carnegie Medal, “It must also be noted that neither are all the recipients of that and the other awards noted in the Appendix”—which is also innacurate—all the recipients of all the major awards are listed in the Appendix (275-289).

3. The reviewer finishes with a comment on “the latest (2008) information”—but the appendix and bibliography include material published in 2010.

Emer O’SullivanLeuphana Universität Lüneburg

Bridget carrington chose not to rebut.

Response to “Review of Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl” Bookbird 50.3 (July 2012) by Fawzia Gilani-Williams.

I appreciate this opportunity to clarify the misunderstandings that have skewed Fawzia Gilani-Williams’s interpretation of my book and prompted her misguided conclusion that I deliberately excluded particular writers and texts, thus calling into question my findings.

Readers should be aware that I explicitly state the parameters of the study and my methodology in the Introduction (pages 2-6) and that throughout the discussion, I never generalize any find-ings beyond the 101 books in the sample group, thus ensuring the validity of the analysis.

It is also important to note that I provide both a clear description of the difficulty I encountered in sourcing and accessing the primary texts comprising the sample (due to limited print runs and poor distribution) (page 2) and an explanation for the focus on novels instead of other genres (page 3): the texts I studied were limited to those I was able to access, while I chose to focus on novels due to their potential to illuminate issues related to nationhood and national aspirations. I am saddened by the base-less accusation that I deliberately excluded Muslim writers; Gilani-Williams would have done better to join me in my repeated, emphatic questioning of the narrow, hege-monic, and often Hinducentric, portrayals of nation, culture, and gender within the body of texts that I examine—which is

precisely the position I take in framing and supporting my argument throughout the entire book (see especially pages 4 and 178).

With this clarification of the parameters and focus of my discus-sion, I should also stress that I would welcome input from any readers, including Gilani-Williams, recommending novels “written by Indian authors living in India, the United kingdom, and north America, and published for readers aged eight through eighteen, between 1988 and 2008” (Superle 2) that include the writers and content/themes she suggests I have excluded so that I can become familiar with these unknown and previously inaccessible texts.

Michelle SuperleUniversity of the Fraser Valley

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Michelle Superle’s response to my review indicates it has apparently become another example of that age-old problem of symbolic interactionism. In the spirit of sociological inquiry, I had raised the methodological issue of bias in sample representation, which was apparently and unfortunately misinterpreted by Superle as a “baseless accusation that [she] deliberately excluded Muslim writers.” Issues of bias in the sociology of literature are not personal attacks but merely its conventions. For the rest we nearly have a marriage of minds, but the question remains—how representative of India were these texts in their notion of a “new Indian Girl”?

Fawzia Gilani-Williams

International Children’s Book Day 2013The IBBY section of the United States of America—USBBY—

is the sponsor of IcBd in 2013. The motto this year is Bookjoy! Around the World with poster art by Ashley Bryan and is accom-panied by a poem written for the children of the world by author Pat Mora. copies of the poster (on this issue’s back cover) and message are available from USBBY and are posted on the IBBY website under IcBd: www.ibby.org.

Bookjoy! Around the World

We can read, you and I. See letters become words, and words become books we hold in our hands.

We hear whispers and roaring rivers in the pages, bears singing funny tunes to the moon.

We enter spooky gray castles, And in our hands flowering trees climb to the clouds. Bold girls fly; boys fish for sparkling stars.

You and I read, round and round, Bookjoy around the world.

By Pat Mora

Focus IBBY

Compiled and edited byELiZaBETh pagE

Elizabeth Page is iBBy's Executive Director

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IBBY World Congress London 2012: Crossing Boundaries: Translations and MigrationsThe 33rd IBBY World congress took place in London, 23-26 August 2012. The venue was Imperial college London in the heart of the museum district. The IcL was founded in 1907 and became an inde-pendent university one hundred years later in 2007. The theme of the congress was very appropriate for the college since the student body is drawn from 126 different countries.

The congress opened on Thursday afternoon with a performance by the children from the Theatre Peckham. The children gave a spirited performance of scenes from kate di camillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. After the welcome by the organizers and IBBY Uk, the IBBY President Ahmad Redza Ahmad khairuddin welcomed the participants:

I would like to take this opportunity of thanking you all for making a huge effort to come here to participate in this congress. I know that for many of you it has not been easy at all. Apart from the universal financial constraints, the system of getting visas continues to be an issue. I congratulate you all on your deter-mination to be here.

The increasing difficulties presented by visa regulations was very evident this year, something that IBBY constantly lobbies against. chieko Suemori then gave a moving résumé about the situation in Japan following the 2011 Tsunami and about IBBY’s support of the Iwate

project. Though the project continues to take books and stories to the children in the devastated area, there is still much to do. The opening ceremony ended with Redza, who had the special task of bestowing IBBY Honorary Membership on Ana Maria Machado, Urs Breitenstein and Peter Schneck in recognition of their services to IBBY International. He thanked them for giving their “time and energy selflessly to IBBY and its cause and today IBBY is where it is, partly thanks to their untiring efforts.”

The participants then were treated to a giant birthday cake to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Where’s Wally? books. True to British tradition, there was plenty of tea available! After tea the Uk children’s laureates Anthony Browne, Michael Morpurgo and the current laureate Julia donaldson took the stage and gave us an entertaining

glimpse into their work. Julia donaldson brought her busking past into play with music and giant fluffy ears!

The presentation of the 2012 IBBY Asahi Reading Promotion Awards took place in the evening in the main hall. The Jury President Mingzhou Zhang gave the laudation praising the two winning projects:

Peter Schneck, Ana Maria Machado, Urs Breitenstein and Ahmad Redza Ahmad

Khairuddin (photo: Phil Polglaze)

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Abuelas Cuentacuentos, The Grandmother Storytelling Programme from Argentina, and SIPAR from cambodia. The Grandmothers’ storytelling project, Zhang noted, “impressed the jury by its simple and original approach to reading promotion, it is easy to replicate and is sustain-able over a long period. The promotion of intergeneration interaction is another aspect that gives it effective and emotional dimensions that are beneficial to both the chil-dren and the grandmothers.” From cambodia, “SIPAR began as a Franco/cambodian association in 1982 to help cambodian refugees living on the cambodian/Thai border during the khmer Rouge regime. He said that the award was given in recognition of the work done over the last twenty years, as well as by the long-term training aspect of SIPAR that will build a book culture and thus answer a very big need for literacy in cambodia.” Wararu Sawamura the head of the European bureau of the Asahi Shimbun presented the two winners with the award. In his speech, he said,

Both of these outstanding projects nurture sensitivity and build self-esteem in young people through reading. The projects serve major roles in helping children carve out bright futures for themselves. He went on to thank IBBY: I would like to express our heartfelt admiration and congratulate IBBY and its supporters for their continued dedication in promoting books and bringing the joy of reading to children throughout the world. It is our sincere hope that IBBY will continue with its good work, and we look forward to seeing the activi-ties bear ample fruit in the years to come. The Asahi Shimbun is committed to providing our support to the best of our ability towards promoting books among young readers.

He also extended thanks to IBBY members around the world for the support that poured in following the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011.

The professional programme began on Friday morning with an Earlybird session talking about the new media under the title Atlas to App: A Multimedia Migration. The programme continued with a two-part plenary session that covered the importance of translation for chil-dren. Emer O’Sullivan asked Why Translate Children’s Books? and gave excellent reasons why it is so important. Aidan chambers and Bart Moeyaert continued with a conversation about translation. Parallel sessions took up

Julia Donaldson in character (photo: Phil Polglaze)

Tea time (Photo: Phil Polglaze)

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the rest of the morning covering topics related to the main theme by speakers from Germany, Japan, South Africa, Egypt, Greece, Russia, Romania, Brazil, the USA, the netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, canada, Slovenia, Australia, and the Uk: a truly international programme!

Throughout the congress, the lunch breaks offered not only eating opportunities, but also poster sessions and sponsored sessions by authors and illustrators. Friday afternoon comprised more parallel sessions, once

more with a broad international flavour. The now traditional IBBY Open Forum gives IBBY members the opportunity to meet to discuss matters of common interest and get together in regional groups. The 2012 Forum included an introduction to the advantages of twinning between sections. Toin duijx talked about the experiences of IBBY netherlands, while Barbara Lehman gave a summary of USBBY’s twinning activities. kathy Short from the USA and Redza khairuddin talked about the building of inclusive policies within the sections and how important is the governance of the sections to their stability and success. Ellis Vance led the meeting and then invited all the participants to disperse into their regional groups. The final act of the Open Forum was to put

forward six recommendations to the General Assembly that would encourage the national Sections to become stronger and more inclusive. These recommendations included: transparency and democracy within the sections’ governing bodies; the sections should have constitutions wherever possible; they should do more to be inclusive, with possibili-

ties of the introduction of regional or state commit-tees; twinning with other sections; improvement of internal communications; and, recognising the importance of regional meetings as well as the bien-nial world congress. These recommendations were seen to enhance the sections and help to strengthen them.

Parallel to the Open Forum were two important sessions: one was about translation and comprised two well-known translators translating live a passage from a novel by the Spanish writer Eliacer cansino. The other was to celebrate 20 years of Bookstart with speakers who had successfully developed the programme in their countries. The last event on Friday was a performance by Galtzagorri Elkartea,

the Basque Branch of Spanish IBBY. Flying Over Paper is a performance about Basque Literature for children.

Saturday morning began with reports from Japan about prog-ress made after the 2011 earthquake and destructive Tsunami. Takao

Natalia Porta López and Mempo Giardinelli representing Abuelas Cuentacuentos receive their diploma and award from

Wataru Sawamura (Photo: Phil Polglaze)

Socheata Huot and Sothik Hot representing SIPAR receive their diploma and award from

Wataru Sawamura (Photo: Phil Polglaze)

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Murayama, current president of JBBY spoke of the disaster and the subsequent projects set up to help the children and families of the devas-tated eastern seaboard of Japan. He drew lessons from the work of Jella Lepman after World War II:

I think there are three main points we should learn from her [Lepman]. The first is that she resolved to provide books as ‘spiritual nourishment,’ as well as food, to children through her inspirational observation of children in chaos. The second is that she maintained her will without discouragement under terrible circumstances. The third is that she discussed her ideal with her colleagues or friends over the border and established a broad base of support for children’s books.

chieko Suemori spoke about the project that she inaugurated and which was supported by IBBY worldwide: 3.11 Ehon Project Iwate, and Hisako kakuage drew attention to the children of Fukishima and chil-dren who have special needs.

The morning continued with a fascinating talk by Shaun Tan, during which he talked about his life and his work: both cross many bound-aries. He showed how his work not only crosses geographical bound-aries, but also straddles reading cultures crossing genres, age groups and cultures. He grew up in Perth in Western Australia and has a feeling of being always on the periphery, a feeling that was very important to him as it lead into crossing many more boundaries. The afternoon saw the traditional presentation of the IBBY Honour List. However, the 2012 presentation was anything but traditional! Thanks to the help of Pam dix from Uk IBBY and journalist candy Gourlay, a film of school chil-dren talking about their favourite books nominated for the excellence of their illustrations from the 2012 list entertained the audience. We are grateful to the librarians and students at St Aloysius’ college and Mount carmel School in Islington and Stoke newington School in Hackney for sharing their enthusiasm and enjoyment of the books with us. Thirty-two of the 169 nominees attended the presentation and received their diplomas from IBBY President Ahmad Redza Ahmad khairuddin.

The highlight of the day was the evening celebra-tory presentation of the 2012 Hans christian Andersen Awards. The venue was the Science Museum; founded in 1857 as part of the South kensington Museum, it gained independence in 1909 and is now world-renowned. The 2012 Andersen Jury President María Jesús Gil opened the evening and welcomed the winners, the sponsors, the jury members and the audience. Two of the 2012 finalists were also present; Roger Mello (Brazil) and Bart Moey-aert (Belgium) received their diplomas from the IBBY President.

When giving her laudatio María Jesús noted, Jury President María Jesús Gil (Photo: Doris Breitmoser)

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It is very easy to say: “briefly introduce.” But, in fact, it is a hard, almost impossible challenge. How to reduce to five or six minutes the enormous work of our talented winners, two artists of the stature of María Teresa Andruetto and Peter Sís? However, let me make the attempt, relying on the indulgence of the winners. Both of them have in common an ability that is very deep, sincere, and intelligent. Both of them have lived through great difficulties during their lives. María Teresa Andruetto experienced the consequences of the military dicta-torship in Argentina. Peter Sís was born in the former Czechoslo-vakia—on the Red side, the Communist side—of the Iron Curtain. However, they have overcome all the difficulties in their paths and, through their work have, by making an ever-lasting contribution to children’s literature, given children and adults the message that we must aim for a better world.

When giving a brief summary of the jury’s deliberations, she spoke of its recognition of the talent of María Teresa Andruetto and by awarding her the medal, IBBY was “honouring her mastery in creating unique and sensitive books, which are deep and poetic, and for being an outstanding artist with words.” When talking about the Jury’s assess-ment of Peter Sís, she spoke of his “extraordinary originality and versa-tility as he engages his powerful imagination to create a complex and intricate visual language through the different layouts, artistic tech-

niques and designs that he has especially created for each book, where marvellous surprises delight the reader!” The Jury President then invited author winner María Teresa Andruetto from Argentina and illustrator winner Peter Sís from the czech Republic to come up to the stage and accept their medals and diplomas. Both winners gave moving speeches that were warmly received by the participants. Woo-Hyon kang spoke briefly on behalf of the sponsor: the very generous nami Island Inc, from the Republic of korea. The evening was accompanied by a finger buffet served amongst the exhibits of old cars, steam engines and early planes.

The final day of the congress included storytellers from Mongolia, Wales, Ireland and Palestine; an enlight-ening speech by Patsy Aldana about how to give everyone a voice; and an entertaining talk by Michael Rosen under

the title, “Migration: Towards a new normal.” In the afternoon the IBBY General Assembly took place in the great hall. While at the same time, librarians, teachers, translators, reviewers, authors, illustrators, reading promoters, publishers, editors, storytellers and academics took part in professional meetings. Parallel sessions of speakers continued throughout the congress giving a broad range of experiences, but all the while reflecting the main theme. Altogether 107 papers were presented in 38 parallel sessions and a further 41 poster sessions were exhibited.

María Teresa Andruetto and Peter Sís showing their diplomas (Photo: Doris Breitmoser)

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Eighteen plenary speakers, eight panellists, the numerous seminar speakers and five publisher-sponsored speakers all made for an inter-esting and thought-provoking congress.

The congress closed on Sunday afternoon with a performance by Lemn Sissay, poet and playwright (www.lemnsissay.com). The re-elected IBBY President introduced the new IBBY Executive committee for the period 2012 to 2014. Ahmad Redza Ahmad khairuddin went on to warmly thank the congress organizers and presented the co-directors kathy Lemaire and Ann Lazim with a token of IBBY’s appreciation. IBBY Mexico closed the congress with a colourful and exciting glimpse of what we can expect at the 2014 IBBY World congress in Mexico city! See you all there!

IBBY Elects Executive Committee 2012-2014Ahmad Redza Ahmad khairuddin (Malaysia) was elected for a second term as IBBY President. He is active in publishing in Malaysia, espe-cially in the national, production of children’s books. In his first term as IBBY President he continued the policy of supporting grass root proj-ects that bring children and books together. during the past two years he visited many national Sections around the world, encouraging them and urging them to become more inclusive and thus strengthen their position in the world of children’s books. In 2005 he was appointed as Vice President of the Majlis Buku Kanak-Kanak & Remaja Malaysia – the Malaysian Section of IBBY (MBBY). He is an advisor for the Students in Free Enterprise Team (SIFE) at local universities and panel judge for SIFE competitions at national level and for the World cup final competitions. He was chairman of the SIFE Malaysia Business Advisory Board until 2011.

Linda Pavonetti (USA) and Hasmig chahinen (France) were elected by the Execu-tive committee as IBBY Vice Presidents for the next term. Linda is a professor and chair of the department of Reading and Language Arts at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan. She teaches children’s literature, young adult litera-ture, and qualitative research methodology to undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students. Altogether, she has taught for over 25 years. Linda has published and presented papers at conferences in the US, IBBY World congresses and other international meetings. She spent three months at the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, researching the artistic styles in award-winning international picture books. She served as a board member of the United States national Section of IBBY (USBBY), as president-elect, presi-dent, and past president. during her term as USBBY president, she

IBBY Executive Committee 2012-14. From left to right: Ellis Vance, Angela Lebedeva, María Jesús

Gil, Marilar Aleixandre, Gülçin Alpöge, Ahmad Redza Ahmad Khairuddin, Azucena Galindo

Ortega, Hasmig Chahinian, Nadia El Kholy, Kiyoko Matsuoka, Linda Pavonetti, Akoss Ofori-Mensah and Timotea Vrablova (photo: Jack Dix Davies)

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travelled to nami Island, korea and Santiago, chile to address the need for books for all children. Linda served as IBBY Vice President 2010-12.

Born in Lebanon, Hasmig holds a Phd in children’s literature from the University Paris 13 and is currently in charge of the Arab World at the International division of the French national centre for chil-dren’s literature – Centre national de la literature pour la jeunesse - La Joie par les livres, a service of the French national library, which is also the seat of IBBY France. She organizes and holds training sessions for professionals in various parts of the world. She is one of the editors of the European IBBY newsletter and is one of the administrators of the IBBY Europe Facebook page. Hasmig served on the IBBY Executive committee 2010-12.

María Jesús Gil (Spain) was re-elected as the Hans christian Andersen Award Jury President for the 2014 awards. After her Bache-lor’s degree in Arts in the University of Valladolid in 1981, she travelled to United kingdom to study Language and Literature in the Universi-ties of Exeter, Manchester and dundee. She worked at Ediciones SM for twenty years, starting as Foreign Rights Manager, and then as the Editorial Manager of the department of children and Young Adults for fifteen years. She also was Editorial Manager of Alfaguara Infantil y Juvenil and Altea (Santillana). She is currently the coordinator of Reading Programmes for Spain and Latinamerica in the Foundation SM. She was an elected member of the IBBY Executive committee (1996-2000); served as President of the Spanish Section of IBBY (2009-11) and was the chair of the 32nd IBBY congress in Santiago de compostela in 2010. She was a member of the Jury for the Hans chris-tian Andersen Award for the 2008 and 2010 awards.

Marliar Aleixandre (Spain) is currently working as a science educa-tion professor at the University of Santiago de compostela, as well as an author of papers and books on argumentation and critical thinking. Marilar has received a variety of awards, in particular for her poetry and novels for young readers. She was a member of the IBBY 2010 congress committee and was elected to serve on the IBBY Executive committee 2010-12.

Gülçin Alpöge (Turkey) gained her Phd in Psycholinguistics from the University of Istanbul in 1983 and became Professor in 2002. She is currently working part-time at the Bogaziçi University, where she teaches “Brain and Education”. Gülçin has written many articles, academic books, and designed curriculum programmes. She also writes for children. She is currently the President of IBBY Turkey. Gülçin was elected to serve on the IBBY Executive committee 2010-12.

nadia El kholy (Egypt) is chair of the department of English Language and Literature at cairo University. She serves as director of the national council for children’s culture, and is President of the Egyptian Book council for Young Readers. She has published a number of articles on the modern Arabic and English novel. nadia was a member of the 2008 and 2010 juries for the Hans christian Andersen

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Award and was elected to serve on the IBBY Executive committee 2010-12.

Azucena Galindo Ortega (Mexico) combines ongoing studies of chil-dren’s literature with reading promotion in order to expand the impact of IBBY Mexico’s programmes and projects. An important aspect of her work as Managing director of IBBY Mexico/A Leer is to make Mexico a stronger presence among IBBY’s international sections; hosting the 34th IBBY congress in Mexico city in 2014 is very important in this aim.

Angela Lebedeva (Russia) worked as Senior Lecturer at MSUcA, at the department of children’s Literature and Library work for chil-dren and youth and then at the Moscow State Open Pedagogical Insti-tute named after M. Sholohov (MGOPU) at the Faculty of Journalism between 1997 and 2009. She was a member of Hans christian Andersen Jury for the 2004 and 2006 awards, and has been Executive director of IBBY Russia since 2002. Since 1998 she has organized the annual project Days of Russian Children’s Books Abroad. She has more than 50 professional publications in Russia and abroad.

kiyoko Matsuoka (Japan) has been a curator at the Itabashi Art Museum since 1986. In 1989 she became responsible for the Bologna Illustrators’ Exhibition in Japan and since then has collaborated with the Bologna Book Fair in organizing the world tour of the exhibition. She has organized several series of exhibitions of picture-book artists, and workshops on the creation of books for children for young artists She is also a university lecturer on the Art of Picture Books. kiyoko was elected to serve on the IBBY Executive committee 2010-12.

Akoss Ofori-Mensah (Ghana) received an internship at the Un Fund For Population Activities in new York for six months in 1974 and went on to study for a Master’s degree in Population Education at the University of chicago, IL. She returned to Ghana in 1976 and in 1993 started her own publishing house—Sub-Saharan Publishers for chil-dren’s books. Akoss has served on the Ghana Book Publishers Asso-ciation as Honorary Secretary, Vice President, and as President from 2003-2005.

Timotea Vrablova (Slovakia) has been a research worker at the Insti-tute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, working on the literary culture of the 17th and 18th centuries and children’s litera-ture since 1991. Since 2008 she has been working for Slovak Radio, and currently has a programme aimed at creative reading for children called Little School Year. Since May 2010 she has been the President of the Slovak Section of IBBY.

Ellis Vance (USA) was confirmed as IBBY Treasurer. Ellis is an active member of USBBY and is currently its Executive director. He served as IBBY Vice President between 2006 and 2008, and has been treasurer since 2008.

Urs Fröhlicher (Switzerland) was elected IBBY auditor. Urs has been helping the Secretariat since 2008 with the closing of the yearly accounts

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in preparation for the annual audit. He is a licensed bookkeeper and tax advisor, who together with his wife set up the firm Fröchlicher Treuhand in 1994.

Fritz Rothacher and Peter Gyr were warmly thanked for the many years they served as IBBY auditors since being first elected in 1998.

Roxanne Harde (canada) was reconfirmed as Bookbird Editor. Liz Page and Luzmaria Stauffenegger were reconfirmed as IBBY Executive director and Administrative Assistant, respectively.

Margaret Mahy (1936-2012)Margaret Mahy was the founding patron and huge supporter of Stor-ylines, the national section of IBBY for new Zealand. She was an unflagging supporter of Storylines’ work to fostering young people's love of story and recognition of the power of language. new Zealand’s most renowned author for children, she was a prolific writer of over 300 books for the young, loved and admired world-wide for the richness of her imagination and unique creativity with language. Through her many educational readers, novels, picture books, poetry, short stories and screen-writing, she created an unequalled body of award-winning work which touched the hearts and minds of literally millions of chil-dren world-wide. Since the mid-1970s she was a star turn, often wearing her signature wig, in schools and at literary festivals. no one hearing her reciting her performance pieces Down the Back of the Chair and Bubble Trouble will ever forget her sheer joy in the magic, comedy and power of language.

Margaret’s contribution to new Zealand and world literature has been immeasurable, on a par with katherine Mansfield and Janet

Frame. She was a key figure in the explosion of an indigenous children’s literature from about 1970 onwards, tirelessly carrying the torch for the growing number of fine authors who chose to write for children and create arguably the strongest genre of writing within new Zealand literature. Her honours included new Zealand’s highest, the Order of Merit, and in 2006 the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s writers, the Hans christian Andersen Medal, as well as several honorary doctorates. By teachers and fellow librarians, by parents and grandpar-ents, but most of all by several generations of children throughout the world, her unique voice will be much missed.

By Dr Libby LimbrickChairperson, Storylines Children’s Literature

Charitable Trust of New Zealand

Margaret Mahy receiving the Hans Christian Andersen Medal from IBBY President Peter Schneck and Jury President Jeffrey Garrett,

IBBY Congress 2006 in Macau, China

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MARGARET MAHY, A Memorychildren loved her; the weird and wonderful attire, the rainbow-hued wigs, and, above all the magic of the stories she told them. The stories of lions in meadows, of piratical mothers, a whole gamut of “shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings” and much more besides. She engaged the imaginations of a good two generations of our young, and not only here in our nation but all over the globe. Parents and grandparents read her tales aloud to wide-eyed and eager small listeners, and, in the way things are read, the same tales again and again as the same small listeners demanded a repeat.

When she died recently she was mourned and remembered in play-ground and in parliament, in libraries and lecture rooms and countless other places. Our country had lost someone very special indeed and her passing touched many hearts. A published career as a writer span-ning over half a century is noteworthy in itself. That the prodigious output of Margaret Mahy was of such high literary quality makes that career even more remarkable. Work that gave pause for thought and contemplation by young adult and adult, minds, as well as that more than liberal sprinkling of wild and woolly, rambunctious tales for the very young is truly an incredible achievement. Mahy was honoured for her efforts; an abundance of national and international literary awards, doctorates from universities, and, of course, the Order of new Zealand; this nation’s greatest honour, restricted in number and reserved for the great and the good.

She deserved them all.Margaret was a long-serving and loyal member of the new Zealand

Society of Authors. She served as chair of the canterbury branch of the society on more than one occasion and was made President of Honour of the society in 2002. She gave a speech on this latter occa-sion; sparkling wit, but, as always, something to think about.

The children’s writing community will particularly miss Margaret. She encouraged and supported other writers for the young, she bought our books and, invariably, had us sign them; and not only that, she read them, too! She was a regular presence whenever we gathered and, it must be said, she certainly enjoyed the social aspects of such get-togethers. not only did we admire her; we loved her and revelled in her company.

It was a very small new Zealand children’s writing community when Margaret started out; little more than herself, Anne de Roo, Elsie Locke, Joy cowley, and a very few more of us just slightly later. The numbers of us grew. Margaret was always there when we gathered at hui, festivals, Storylines events. She lent her name to the Story-lines, the children’s Book Foundation of new Zealand, Margaret Mahy Lecture Award and medal. Margaret’s ‘lion’ adorns the medal presented to winners of the award, given for significant contribution to new Zealand children’s literature. Margaret herself was the inaugural recipient!

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Where did this woman find the energy, much less the time, to produce this incredible output of stories and books? Over and above the obvious output of a writer were the speeches; dozens if not hundreds, well-crafted and delivered over the years in her inimitable and highly entertaining style here and abroad to a wide variety of audiences. Writer, and a working librarian until 1980, solo parent of two daughters, building and making a home; strength of purpose, physical stamina, in addition to self belief can be the only answer.

I first met Margaret around the time she ceased being children’s librarian at the canterbury Public Library in order to write fulltime, and a couple of years before I gave up teaching to do the same. The old department of Education had assembled a group of writers in christchurch in the hope of encouraging us to produce material for the Ready to Read series. Margaret, Joy cowley and I ended up as a small sub-group within the larger entity and we wrote stuff and tried it out on each other. I wrote a splendid poem about a spider and read it out to Margaret and Joy and, naturally, expected a rapturous response. Margaret, generous soul that she always was, smiled and murmured, “Very interesting, Bill.” Joy, more perceptive and accurately honest, said, “Stick to writing books, Bill.”

Over the years we corresponded via cards, letters, phone calls and, of course, regularly meeting up at all those places where writers were gathered together. I have kept many of her cards, slipping them inside one of her books. Every one of them is similarly signed; “Margaret (Mahy, that is!).” Given her inimitable and unmistakable handwriting, I always found the bracketed bit delightfully superfluous.

I took her to task on one occasion in regard to her wondrous poem, Down the Back of the Chair. My small grandaughter, Isla, was at that moment probably Margaret’s greatest fan. I wrote; “She tramps around the house, Margaret, reciting large chunks of your immortal verse. I am sick to death of reading it to her because she corrects me on the spot if I get a line wrong or try to add an individual touch of my own. But, above all, Margaret Mahy, Isla is MY grandaughter. Until ‘down the Back of the chair’ I had always been Grandpa Bill to her. nine times out of ten these days she addresses me as Uncle Bill, and yes, she has checked various chairs to see what treasure trove may be hidden. I have told her my will is in the hands of my solicitors and she’ll bloody well have to wait!”

Over the years, Margaret’s advice to me as writer was, if not crucial, at least invaluable at a

fundamental level. On the matter of speaking engagements: “Accept them all, Bill - but check beforehand that you will be paid.”

On reviews: “You never remember the good ones. The bad ones? They remain engraved on your mind for a long time.” When I suggested to her that she had never had a bad review she just laughed. Years

afterwards she wrote to me; “Got a poor review in the nY Times. Got a copy of the review last night. By tomorrow I will have stopped thinking about it, but, mind you—this is still today.”

On translation and foreign rights: “You’ll get one cheque and generally not a very big one. After that you’ll be lucky to get any more.”

On the practicalities of daily life at a time when I was experiencing difficulties in regard to plumbing and water supply: “I’m an expert in plumbing, Bill. What a pity we don’t live closer; I could come and advise and give you a hand.”

William Taylor is a much-acclaimed new Zealand writer for children, and the recipient of many awards including the Storylines Margaret Mahy Medal and Lecture Award, the Esther Glen Award, and the new Zealand Senior Fiction Award. Amongst his best-known titles are Agnes the Sheep, Knitwits, The Blue Lawn, and Spider. He has recently published his memoirs: Telling Tales: A Life in Writing.

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP,MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION, 10/1/12

Title: Diacritics. Pub. No. 0300-7162. Frequency: Quarterly. Four issues published annually. Subscription price: $120.00 institutions, $30.00 individuals. Location of office of publication: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Headquarters of publishers: Same. Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Editor: Laurent Dubreuil, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. Owner: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal Income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months.

Extent and nature of circulation Av. no. copies Actual no. copies each issue single issue pub. preceding 12 months nearest to filing date

A. Total no. copies printed 493 471B. Paid circulation, mail subscriptions 156 150C. Total paid distribution 262 255D. Free distribution 36 35F. Total distribution 367 381G. Copies not distributed 126 90H. Total 493 471I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. William M. Breichner,Journals Publisher.

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This reader of much erudite literature and studies in the arena of science and metaphysics did have a more mundane side when it came to tastes in television viewing. On one occasion she extolled to me the joys of professional wrestling programmes. I’m unsure whether or not she wrote a story about it. Quite likely she had one in mind.

A living treasure in her time on earth, now she has gone. Margaret Mahy; you have left us a legacy that means you will live on in our minds

Title: Bookbird Pub. No. 019-026. Frequency: Quarterly. Four issues published annually.Subscription price: $100.00 institutions, $50.00 individuals. Location of office of publication:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Headquarters of publishers: Same. Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Editor: Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty, 4901-46 Avenue, Camrose, Alberta, T4V 2R3 Canada. Owner: Bookbird, Inc., 5503 N. El Adobe Drive, Fresno, CA 93711-2363 The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal Income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months.

and our hearts into the foreseeable future … and probably well beyond. Thank you, Margaret, and thanks also to your daughters and their families for sharing you with us.

By William Taylor

Storylines (IBBY new Zealand) acknowledges the permission of the Society of Authors to forward this article, first published in the new Zealand Author in September 2012, for publication in Bookbird.

Call for Papers: Queerness and Children’s Literature

Bookbird invites submissions for a Special Issue on queerness and children’s literature. Over the past two decades in particular, interest in the intersection between the representation of children and queerness has been steadily growing. In the past several years, several volumes have stimulated this growth: Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children edited by Steven Bruhm and natasha Hurley (2004), The Queer Child by kathryn Bond Stockton (2009), Over the Rainbow edited by Michelle Ann Abate and kenneth kidd (2011), and Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature by Tison Pugh (2011). The editor and guest editor invite proposals for articles of 4000 words which explore queerness and children’s literature.

In addition, short reviews of recently published children’s literature (c.a. 300 words) or of research on children’s literature (c.a. 750 words) are warmly welcomed.

Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.

Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):• Nation,empire,queerness • Queernessandculturaldifference• Nationalchildren’sliteratureandqueerness • Translationandqueerness• Homophobia,violence,and/orbullying • “Innocence”andqueerness• Gender,nation,queerness • Censorshipandsexuality

Titles and abstracts of 250 words should be sent to both editors by 15 JANUARY 2013: Roxanne Harde (rharde@ualberta.ca) and guest editor, Laura Robinson (Laura.Robinson@rmc.ca). Final articles will be expected by 15 MAY 2013. Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.

Call for Papers: “Que todos signifique todos”: Inclusivity and Mexican Children’s Literature

We invite submissions for a Special Issue of Bookbird to coincide with the 34th IBBY International congress to be held in Mexico city in 2014. We invite papers that examine texts for children from Mexico or the Latin American world as they relate to or intersect with the conference theme: “Que todos signifique todos / May Everyone Really Mean Everyone.”

Proposed papers of 4000 words are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:• Inclusivity/exclusivity • Stereotyping• Diversity • Normalcy• Participation • Belonging• Alternatives • Developmentsandtrends• Multiculturalism • Genre, form and themes (including, but not restricted to, fantasy, realism, young adult fiction,

visual texts, poetry, controversies and taboos)

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to both editor and guest editor by 1 May 2013Editor: Roxanne Harde (rharde@ualberta.ca) Guest Editor: Beatriz Alcubierre Moya (balcubie@gmail.com)

The full articles will be expected by 1 September 2013. Please see Bookbird’s website at www.ibby.org/bookbird for full submission details. In addition, short reviews of relevant recently published children’s literature (250 words) or research on children’s literature (1000 words) are warmly welcomed. Papers which are not accepted for this issue will be considered for later issues of Bookbird.

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Would you like to write for IBBY’s journal?

Academic Articles ca. 4000 wordsBookbird publishes articles on children’s literature with an international perspective four times a year (in January, April, July and October). Articles that compare literatures of different countries are of interest, as are papers on translation studies and articles that discuss the reception of work from one country in another. Articles concerned with a particular national literature or a particular book or writer may also be suitable, but it is important that the article should be of interest to an international audience. Some issues are devoted to special topics. details and deadlines of these issues are available from Bookbird’s web pages.

Children and Their Books ca. 2500 wordsBookbird also provides a forum where those working with children and their literature can write about their experiences. Teachers, librarians, publishers, authors and parents, short articles discussing the ways in which you have worked with children and their literatures, or have watched children respond to literature are welcomed. Articles concerned with a particular national issue are of interest, but should be written in a manner that appeals to an international audience.

Postcards and Letters ca. 300 or 1000 wordsBookbird publishes reviews of both primary and secondary sources. Brief ‘postcards’ (ca. 300 words) on individual works of children’s literature, or extended ‘letters’ (ca. 1000 words) introducing the work of a particular author or illustrator are welcomed. In addition to the full publication details, please comment on whether the works are available in translation.

For further information, please contact: Roxanne Harde, Email: rharde@ualberta.ca

Call for Papers: Anthology on Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature

How do different cultures present the concept of death to children? How is death represented pictori-ally? How is death suggested metaphorically? How do the images and metaphors in children’s books reflect contemporaneous beliefs, hopes, and fears? Are there taboos in the verbal and visual presenta-tion of death? How is the transition made from death being something that happens to someone else to death being something that will inevitably happen to oneself? How is the inevitability of death made less fearful than it was in the past (or is it)? How are fear and fascination or appeal balanced? Often it is the elderly or animals that die: is this distancing conducive to empathy? What are the means of achieving empathy with those confronting death?

This call-for-papers is for a collection of essays that would address these and other related questions. The editors are particularly interested in proposals that focus on the topic of death as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and a social construct. Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives and on literature representing different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, picture books, graphic novels, translations, adaptations) and different cultural perspectives and periods are welcomed.

If you would like to contribute to this publication, please submit a 450-550 word abstract of your proposed paper and a curriculum vitae (no more than two pages) by Friday, 1 February 2013, to dr. Lesley clement (lclement@lakeheadu.ca) and dr. Leyli Jamali (leylijamali@gmail.com).We will contact you about the status of your proposal by the end of April, 2013, at which stage we will be approaching publishers that have a special interest in children’s literature and global issues. If the editors invite you to submit a paper, it should be 18-22 double-spaced pages (including endnotes and bibliography) and would be due the end of August, 2013. Please address any queries to above editors.

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Editor: Roxanne Harde, University of Alberta—Augustana Faculty (Canada)

Address for submissions and other editorial correspondence: rharde@ualberta.ca

Bookbird’s editorial office is supported by the Augustana Faculty at the University of Alberta, Camrose, Alberta, Canada.

Editorial Review Board: Peter E. Cumming, York University (Canada); Debra Dudek, University of Wollongong (Australia); Libby Gruner, University of Richmond (USA); Helene Høyrup, Royal School of Library & Information Science (Denmark); Judith Inggs, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa); Ingrid Johnston, University of Albert, Faculty of Education (Canada); Shelley King, Queen’s University (Canada); Helen Luu, Royal Military College (Canada); Michelle Martin, University of South Carolina (USA); Beatriz Alcubierre Moya, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico); Lissa Paul, Brock University (Canada); Laura Robinson, Royal Military College (Canada); Bjorn Sundmark, Malmö University (Sweden); Margaret Zeegers, University of Ballarat (Australia);

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Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature (ISSN 0006-7377) is a refereed journal published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People, and distributed by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4363 USA. Periodicals postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland, and at additional mailing offices.

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IBBY Executive Committee 2012-2014: Ahmad Redza Ahmad Khairuddin (Malaysia), President; Linda Pavonetti Vice President (USA); Hasmig Chahinian (France), Vice President; Marilar Aleixandre (Spain); Gülçin Alpöge (Turkey); Nadia El Kholy (Egypt); Kiyoko Matsuoka (Japan), Azucena Galindo (Mexico); Angela Lebedeva (Russia); Akoss Ofori-mensah (Ghana); Timotea Vrablova (Slovakia), Voting Members; María Jesús Gil (Spain), Andersen Jury President; Elizabeth Page (Switzerland), Executive Director; Ellis Vance (USA), Treasurer; Roxanne Harde (Canada), Bookbird Editor.

IBBY may be contacted at Nonnenweg 12 Postfach, CH-4003 Basel, Switzerland, tel: +4161 272 29 17 fax: +4161 272 27 57 email: ibby@ibby.org <www.ibby.org>.

Bookbird is indexed in Library Literature, Library and Information Abstracts (LISA), Children’s Book Review Index, and the MLA International Bibliography.

Cover image: Cover image of A River of Stories courtesy of Jan Pieńkowski. Jan Pieńkowski, born in Warsaw in 1936, went to the UK in 1946. He was educated at Cardinal Vaughan School, London, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Classics and English. He has written and illustrated over a hundred children’s books and won the Library Association Kate Greenaway Medal twice. He is currently working on theatre design.

Feature Articles: Our Common Earth: The Local and Global Flow of Narrative in A River of Stories • Heal the World, Make It a Better Place • The Child-Poet Gwen Cope in the Land of “Australian Faery” • The Mountain and the Devil: Fake Lore or Folklore? • Paranoid Prizing Children and Their Books: The Power of Caribbean Poetry • Flying to Pick Blueberries

Vol . 51, No.1 J A N UA RY 2 013

Our Common Earth - International Board on Books for Young ...

Documents

Transcript of Our Common Earth - International Board on Books for Young ...

Our People, Our Resources - IUCN Portals

Earth Sciences 1100 Planet Earth: How It Works

Our History - Our Ontario

Our brands, our products and our people who work with ...

Our processes

What if Gliese 581d had Life? Young Earth Creationism and the Politics of Astrobiology

Our Children's Earth Foundation v. CA Air Resources Board

Pengertian Modulus Young. Modulus Young

Earth Sunday

Our Impact. Our Future. - AXA XL

DR.EDWARD YOUNG.

DDAMD EARTH

Discussing Earth - cloudfront.net

Evaluating geoscience information systems in the classroom: A case study of Discover Our Earth

Our Home, Our World - Kingfisher plc

OUR HEROES

Earth system sciences

OUR SOLUTIONS HELP OUR CUSTOMERS BUILD A ...

Our past is our future - Interreg Europe

our village, our city