Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 38

come to Cambridge!

 

If you’re in the Boston area, I hope you’ll come out to the Women’s Center at Harvard to hear my public talk on March 22. I’m honored that Prof. Robin Bernstein is teaching A Wish After Midnight in her course, “The Child in African America,” and I look forward to meeting her students while I’m on campus. Robin also arranged this evening talk, and I know there are lots of kid lit people in Boston so I hope to see you there!

MUST.STOP.WRITING.

A novel’s never done. Not for the writer. I finished The Door at the Crossroads in January but I’m tinkering with it still, adding a sentence here and there, inserting a paragraph to extend or clarify a conversation. But it has to stop. At some point every author has to walk away from her book and let it live on its own. I’m like an annoying helicopter parent who won’t let her teenager walk out into the world for fear others will point out her flaws and prey on her weaknesses. I find myself anticipating critiques, and so I go back to the novel and try to answer questions that actually haven’t yet been asked. But it has to stop. Still waiting on the latest updates to the cover but have set a date for the launch party—I hope you can join us on April 14 from 6-8pm at the Weeksville Heritage Center! I’m not good at parties but this book has been a long time coming, so I think it’s important to stop and celebrate.

If you’re in the NYC area, you definitely want to check out the Kweli Writers Conference. I’ll be on two panels but check out all the others—this is your chance to meet and learn from writers, illustrators, editors, and agents:

The Color of Children’s Literature

Program Schedule












Saturday, April 9, 2016

7:30am – 8:45am

Registration and Coffee

8:45am – 9:00am (Volvo Hall)

Welcome and Introduction

9:00am – 9:55am (Volvo Hall)

Keynote by Edwidge Danticat

10:00am – 10:55am (Volvo Hall)

Publishing 101

Panel Discussion moderated by Lynne Polvino (Clarion), featuring:

Regina Brooks, Antonio Gonzalez, Stacy Whitman, Phoebe Yeh

11:00am – 12:00pm (Volvo Hall)

Industry Overview

Panel Discussion moderated by Connie Hsu (Macmillan), featuring:

Victoria Wells Arms, Stacey Barney, Zetta Elliott, Cheryl Hudson

12:00pm – 1:30pm

Lunch Break

1:30pm – 2:25pm

A. Working Through the Editorial Process (Volvo Hall)

Panel Discussion moderated by Natalia Remis (Scholastic), featuring:

Tracey Baptiste, Cheryl Klein, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Eileen Robinson

B. Picture Books Roundtable (Conference Room)

Joanna Cardenas, Zetta Elliott, Cheryl Hudson, Sean Qualls and Eric Velasquez

2:30pm – 3:25pm

A. Building a Platform (Volvo Hall)

Panel Discussion moderated by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, featuring:

Dhonielle Clayton, Antonio Gonzalez, Andrew Harwell, Daniel José Older, Stacy Whitman

B. Writing Middle Grade and Young Adult (Conference Room)

TS Ferguson, Grace Kendall, Alvina Ling, Eileen Robinson

3:30pm – 5:30pm (Volvo Hall)

Manuscript Critiques

3:30pm – 4:25pm

Submissions Panel (Conference Room)

Panel Discussion moderated by Jessica Echeverria (Lee & Low Books), featuring:

Celeste Lim, Beth Phelan, Rachel Stark, Harold Underdown

4:30pm – 5:30pm

Success Stories (Conference Room)

Panel Discussion moderated by Katherine R. Harrison (Knopf Books), featuring:

Joseph Bruchac, Sheela Chari, Nnedi Okorafor, Daniel José Older

6pm – 7:30pm (Volvo Hall)

Wine and Cheese Reception

did you know…?

Did you know that many public libraries won’t acquire a book unless it has been reviewed in a professional journal like Booklist or Publishers Weekly? And did you know that almost all of those review outlets refuse to review self-published books? (Kirkus will if you’ve got $400) So if you’re a writer of color and you’ve been shut out of the publishing industry, deciding to self-publish means facing yet another set of obstacles. UNLESS a radical librarian from Oakland decides she will take on the task of reviewing self-published books in a quarterly column for School Library Journal! Here’s the introduction to Amy Martin’s SLJ column “Indie Voices,” which provides the rationale for adding indie titles to library collections:

Self-publishing platforms like CreateSpace and cheap, accessible printing technology have made it easier than ever for authors to publish independently. This, coupled with the misguided notion that writing books for children is “easy,” can lead to some paltry offerings. After all, what book couldn’t benefit from a talented editorial, design, and marketing team? Yet despite its checkered reputation, a growing number of talented authors and illustrators are producing finely written, beautifully illustrated, and smartly designed works that completely skirt the traditional publishing avenues.

It’s difficult to break into the business of making children’s books. That goes double for people of color, queer authors, the differently abled, and/or those creating stories about people who identify with one or more of those categories. Self-publishing can give voice to marginalized people who may be overlooked by mainstream publishing. In this first column, I recommend a handful of self-published titles whose skillful presentations of diverse stories make them worthy purchase for libraries serving children.

I’m honored to have I Love Snow included in Amy’s list of seven great indie titles. I should note that Amy Cheney also reviews for SLJ and already welcomes indie authors; she even set up an award for books that reflect the realities of urban youth. IndieReader also shines a light on self-published books by marginalized writers. They included The Last Bunny in Brooklyn in their list of “6 Titles to Help #DiversifyYourReads.” Joe Sutton’s remarks echo those made by Amy:

One of the best things about self-publishing is how it empowers diverse authors, who might otherwise need to get “permission” from more short-sighted traditional publishers, to get their works published and read. And with many less expensive options (ebooks, POD) replacing high-price vanity presses, another barrier has been lifted, making self-publishing a more accessible and less costly option.

While the traditional publishing industry still devotes most of its attention to white, male authors, the indie scene has an abundance of diversity and cultures. If you’re resolving to add a little diversity to your library, start with this handful of authors!

I sent out digital review copies of A Hand to Hold yesterday and the response was heartwarming! I feel so blessed to have the support of teachers, and librarians, and other book lovers. Their excitement about my stories means young readers around the country—and the world—will soon have more “mirror books” in their hands! If you’re a librarian, I hope you’ll consider whether the policies at your branch are contributing to the “diversity gap.” Please don’t place yet another barrier in the path of marginalized writers…

Writing While Black/Writing While Indigenous: Two voices speak on excellence

Ambelin: How to begin to speak about excellence? I’m worried that in speaking I’ll contribute to the phenomenon whereby Indigenous writers and writers of colour are held to impossibly high standards, while white writers are often held to no standard at all when it comes to the representation of others. I’m aware that I have no right to tell other Indigenous writers or writers of colour what should constitute excellence for them; we are diverse peoples with diverse cultures, experiences and histories, and all these things influence our individual views on excellence. But I still think there is a place for all diverse writers to personally reflect on what excellence means to each of us, and I believe it’s an important conversation to have. Zetta, you wrote in your first post that you were “tired because the fight seems never-ending, and progress minimal.” I feel the same. On the worst of days, I do what the generations who came before me did – I take the long view, gazing beyond the span of my existence into the undetermined future. And I think about how powerfully it matters to have the voices of so many diverse peoples speaking to these issues in cyberspace. We are creating a record, and if we don’t succeed in changing anything for ourselves, we will at least place our knowledge and insights into the hands of the writers who come after us.

Zetta: Agreed! And I feel the same way about my books. A white woman once remarked that self-published books rarely sell over 100 copies and I thought to myself, “So?” In her mind, that makes the act of self-publishing futile but to me, reaching 100 kids and potentially transforming their lives is not a waste of time. I really want to explore the connection between quantity and quality in the kid lit community. No doubt most writers aspire to see their book on the New York Times Bestseller list, but does that in any way indicate excellence? If 3000 novels for young readers are published annually in the US and only 30 are by Black authors, what does that do to the potential for excellence? Black-authored books in the US are eligible for the Coretta Scott King Award, a prize reserved for African Americans authors and illustrators. But the same people win the award over and over again. Kyra Hicks finds that from 1970-2012,

…authors or illustrators who have received two or more CSK awards or honors account for the majority of all award recipients. For example, 26 African-American authors (33 percent) have been honored with 67 percent of all the author awards given since 1970. And, 17 Black illustrators (40 percent) have 75 percent of all the illustrator awards given.

In 2015 there were only 2 debut Black authors with middle grade or young adult novels. Can we achieve excellence without competition? Are award committees really rewarding excellence when the majority of Black writers can’t even get a foot in the door? In the 19th century, slave narratives had to be authenticated by Whites in order to be deemed legitimate, and formerly enslaved women and men had to self-censor at times in order to avoid offending the “delicate sensibilities” of their genteel White audience. One could argue that this authentication process continues to this day since the publishing industry is dominated by White women.

Perhaps our academic background makes us accustomed and/or indifferent to the limited circulation of significant texts. Perhaps our cultures have taught us that writing is not just for the self but for the community—and every member of the community counts. With this important dialogue we are creating an archive, inserting ourselves into history because these conversations do leave a digital footprint that may guide someone somewhere who feels lost and alone.

Ambelin: And that footprint is so necessary – because diverse writers cannot rely on the people whom writers are supposed to be able to rely upon. Most agents, editors, and reviewers don’t know enough about us to be able to give us meaningful feedback on the ways in which we are representing our worlds – in fact, their advice may well be wrong. I know that I am far from the only Indigenous author to have been told that I am not writing to the ‘Indigenous experience’ (as if there is only one experience shared amongst the vast diversity of the Indigenous peoples of the earth, and as if that experience has been accurately captured by the works produced about us by white people, which is generally the frame of reference against which my writing is being judged). So I must seek other processes to help me achieve excellence. As part of this, I read all I can find written by Indigenous and other diverse peoples on writing and representation. Everything I write is reviewed by other Indigenous people before it is published. If I am in doubt as to whether something should be said, I do not speak. And I am as sensitive as I can be to the contexts in which things will be read, to the many ways in which my words can misread and misinterpreted.

Zetta: I just wrote about this last month when I took issue with a Black-authored book that completely erased young Black women from the Black Lives Matter movement—even though it was founded by young queer Black women. That YA novel went on to win numerous awards and the Black male author ultimately took responsibility for “missing the mark,” which only further impressed his many (white female) fans. People on social media remarked about our exemplary exchange—“so civil!”—but said very little about what it means that this book got published to great acclaim without anyone else noticing (or caring) that it potentially harms young Black women. In a follow-up post I wrote,

…whenever a problematic book comes out, it points to a failure of process. Writing is a solitary activity, but publishing a book is not. It would have been great if the editor of this novel thought about the exclusion of Black girls. It would have meant a lot to me if some reviewers gave the book the praise it deserves but also pointed out this particular limitation. The fact that neither of those things happened confirms for me that a lot of people in the kid lit community aren’t really thinking about Black girls. I don’t generally review books but I published my critique on my blog because I was trying to be strategic. I’ve only met Jason once, but he seemed like an open-minded person and the comment he left on my blog proves that to be true. I also heard he has a ten-book deal, which means he’ll have plenty of opportunities to write (better) Black female characters in the future. Will reviewers and librarians and editors educate themselves about intersectionality and misogynoir? I doubt it. And that puts the onus on the writer—WE have to work harder because we can’t rely on others in the publishing process to get it right. No writer is perfect—I make mistakes all the time. But I care about Black youth and I know Jason does, too. And that’s why we have to help and look out for one another.

Yet as Scholastic’s controversial publication and recall of A Birthday Cake for George Washington makes clear, having a Black editor doesn’t guarantee that a book about an aspect of the Black experience will be properly vetted. Editors don’t always recognize that different cultural groups have particular storytelling conventions, but cultural competence isn’t the only issue. As you pointed out in your first post, storytelling plays a crucial role in the ongoing struggle for liberation but I suspect most people involved in the kid lit community don’t see the publication and promotion of children’s literature as a political act. Many would agree that books can empower young readers, but few seem to recognize that inaccurate and/or insensitive books can be toxic.

Ambelin: I think, too, that its important to many of us to honour the lives (and the struggles) of all marginalised peoples, not only the groups we belong to. But intersectionality is not an easy thing to address within the limits of a narrative – so do we find ways to convey where different experiences connect and diverge? Where are the spaces for diverse writers to have these conversations amongst ourselves in the first place? And how do we remain true to who we are whilst continually negotiating literary spaces that are not our own and reflect nothing of our identities? I don’t think any of these questions have easy answers. One of my picture books has been criticised as being didactic. The criticism is correct in that it is didactic. But in non-Western cultures, including Indigenous cultures, didacticism is not necessarily a negative; and amongst the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, stories often ‘circle back’ to the message of the tale. I am not suggesting that Indigenous cultures are incapable of change such that we must always tell stories within specific fixed and unvarying forms; a view of Indigenous cultures as frozen relics is a myth generated by anthropological texts and other colonial works of epic fantasy. Nor am I suggesting that I, or any Indigenous writer, is a passive victim of Western literary forms; I am as capable of resistance and subversion as my ancestors were in their long battle against colonialism. But for this particular story, I concluded that it needed to be told in this particular way. It drew adverse comment for didacticism from white reviewers. It is also the book which Indigenous people – and other peoples from non-Western backgrounds – regularly tell me is their favourite of my works. My conclusion is this: in order to be true to myself as an Indigenous writer, there will be times when I must contravene Western literary ideals of what it means to be excellent.

Zetta: The novel I’m about to publish (The Door at the Crossroads, sequel to A Wish After Midnight) was also called “didactic” years ago by one of the very few woman of color editors in Canadian children’s publishing. In this case, I think she was reacting to the explicit political content of the book, which I was unwilling to remove or water down. I think most editors—regardless of race—envision the audience for kid lit to be White middle-class kids and teens. And they no doubt realize that the overwhelming majority of educators and librarians purchasing books for schools are also White and middle-class. But since White middle-class readers are definitely NOT my target audience, I resent being asked to alter my story to keep them comfortable. Right now I have a few beta readers looking at Crossroads; one White woman reader said she found the novel hard to read and yet couldn’t put it down, and a Black woman reader said the characters’ harrowing escape from slavery in the book was making it hard for her to be around Whites in real life. That tells me my book is doing exactly what I want it to do. Literature that appeases its readers just upholds the status quo and I want my books to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt! I think Black excellence has a lot to do with risk, and the publishing industry is notoriously risk-averse even as it is also self-congratulatory (same with Hollywood, and the lily-white Oscars are on as I write this). A young Black woman author just got a six-figure advance for a YA novel about the Black Lives Matter movement. Will there be queer Black women in this book? I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath. And even if it does have radical content, one book—and one book deal that enriches one author—is NOT a sign of progress. It costs the industry nothing to make a gesture like that because nothing about the structure of the industry—and the balance of power—has to change.

Ambelin: I am always so happy to hear of the successes of other diverse writers – I know how heavily the odds are stacked against all of us. But as you rightly point out, the success of some isn’t evidence of those odds changing. A world of literature that reflected the make up of the actual world (in regard to both who gets published, and who is working in the industry) would be evidence of change, and we’re a long way from that. The individual voices of the marginalised should be difficult for people to make out not because the structures of privilege prevent us from speaking, but because there are so many of us speaking that we overwhelm with our multitude, with our wealth of stories that shout out the many truths of our existence. Instead, there are so few of our voices to speak to the struggles and triumphs of so many. I feel the weight of that, heavy upon my shoulders. In a YA context I write Indigenous futurisms, a form of storytelling whereby Indigenous peoples use the speculative fiction genre to challenge colonialism and to envision Indigenous futures. In drawing on colonial history, I believe I have a dual responsibility. The first aspect of this responsibility is to speak to the truth of Indigenous resistance and agency, and in so doing, deny the lie that we were unresisting victims who faded away in the face of the so-called ‘superiority’ of Western cultures. The second aspect is to convey the way in which colonialism wounded – and ended – the lives of so many. The triumphs of oppressed peoples is a tribute to the spirit of the oppressed. It does not – ever – make the oppression any less evil that it was. And I think there is a danger that narratives which speak to our triumphs can be interpreted by those whose ancestors did not experience these histories (or the present-day disadvantage, discrimination and multigenerational trauma that resulted) as indicating that things were ‘not that bad’. So I believe excellence in this context means celebrating the incredible spirit of Indigenous peoples, but doing so in a way that always names colonialism and other forms of oppression for the evils that they were (and are).

Zetta: I couldn’t agree more. Speculative fiction operates differently without our cultures, and I worry that decades of Harry Potter mania will make is harder for kids of color to imagine themselves operating within magical worlds. In my 2014 essay “The Trouble With Magic,” I build upon Ramón Saldívar’s concept of “historical fantasy,”

…which “links desire and imagination, utopia and history, but with a more pronounced edge intended to redeem, or perhaps even create, a new moral and social order” (587). Saldívar contends that, “in the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history requires [writers of colour] to invent a new ‘imaginary’ for thinking about the nature of a just society and the role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it” (574). Though Saldívar makes no mention of children’s literature in his discussion, I believe his assessment of contemporary American fiction should be extended to include the needs of young readers, who are more diverse than ever before yet rarely find books that confront the nation’s problematic, ongoing history of social injustice. By linking contemporary racial inequality to the history of enslavement and racial terror in New York City, my novels depart from the work of Ruth Chew by attempting to “reverse the usual course of fantasy, turning it away from latent forms of daydream, delusion, and denial, toward the manifold surface features of history” (Saldívar 595).

That essay can be found in any library database that includes Jeunesse: young people, texts, culture (you can also email me for a PDF). We can—and sometimes must—theorize about our work, but in the end I’m hoping our stories will help young people to theorize their own experience. Magical stories are always about power, and our youth need to know how to wield power and how power has been/is being used by others to oppress our communities.

 

stories heal

My first newsletter of 2016 is ready to go out (read it here), and I’ve got two new picture books to share with readers. I had the illustrations from A Hand to Hold with me in London and shared them with a friend—she got a bit weepy and said her husband probably couldn’t read the book with their daughter because he’d start crying, too! It’s hard to let go of your child and stand back while s/he engages with the world alone. I used to love holding my father’s hand but my dad moved out after the divorce and so I learned at age 8 what it meant to rely on myself. When I moved to NYC at age 21, I was amused when my father would reach for my hand before we crossed the street. In his mind, I was still a little girl and he didn’t believe I could navigate the city on my own. Now that he’s gone, I often wish I could see his “blinking” hand—he never said, “Take my hand.” He’d just “blink” his hand, open/closed, open/closed, until I slipped my hand inside. My father wasn’t really there for me the way the father in the book is there for his daughter, but I consider A Hand to Hold a tribute to my dad just the same…

Troy Johnson at AALBC gave me the opportunity to write a guest post for his blog: “Who Will Write a Story for the Children of Eric Garner?” In my essay I ask whether “white books” are as toxic to Black children as white dolls:

Think of the doll test developed by psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark in the 1940s. Eventually used in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Drs. Clark intended the experiment to prove “the influence of race and color and status on the self-esteem of children.” In 2005, teen filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll test in her short film A Girl Like Me. It’s heartbreaking to watch Black children reaching without hesitation for the white doll when asked, “Which is the nice doll?” and then faltering when asked to point out the doll that looks like them (“the bad doll”). What would happen if we conducted a similar test with books instead of dolls—would the results be the same?

Several YA authors have been discussing this on Facebook so we may take it to Twitter—stay tuned!

decolonize kid lit

The CCBC has posted its findings for 2015, and they are as disappointing as ever. They separate the books into categories—by, about, and by but not about. Keep in mind they review over 3000 books each year:

261 books had significant African or African American content
86 of these were by Black authors and/or illustrators
100 books were by Black book creators
14 of these had no visible African/African-American cultural content



41 books had American Indian / First Nations themes, topics, or characters

17 of these were by American Indian/First Nations book creators


18 books were by American Indian / First Nations authors and/or illustrators

1 of these had no visible American Indian/First Nations content





111 books had significant Asian/Pacific or Asian/Pacific American content

43 of these were by Asian/Pacific or Asian/Pacific American


173 books were by authors and/or illustrators of Asian/Pacific heritage

130 of these had no visible Asian/Pacific or Asian/Pacific American content





82 books had significant Latino content

40 of these were by Latino/a authors and/or illustrators


57 books were by Latino/a authors and/or illustrators

 17 of these had no visible Latino content

So if there were 261 books published ABOUT Black folks but only 86 of those books were BY Black folks, then that means white folks wrote 161 books about Black people. Are you ok with that? I’m not. And once again we see Asian Pacific American authors writing mostly about white people—they wrote 130 books with NO APA content and only 43 books with APA content. Time to DECOLONIZE…

In other news, my new picture book will be out soon. Look for A HAND TO HOLD soon!

Writing while Black/Writing while Indigenous: Part 2

Ambelin,

Just now as I came in, I heard a seagull cry outside my window and I was reminded, once again, that Brooklyn is on an island that faces the sea. I went for a walk this afternoon after mailing a book at the post office; next month I plan to self-publish the sequel to my time-travel novel A Wish After Midnight, and my most trusted reader-friend in Nova Scotia has agreed to provide a critique. There are so many of us separated by stretches of seawater yet when we find words for our experiences, the distance almost seems to disappear. One of the many books I have yet to write is The Hummingbird’s Tongue, an experimental memoir about migration, memory, and mental illness. I’ve tried to develop a structure for the book that reflects the fragmentation of an archipelago, which in turn symbolizes the fractures and ruptures caused by trauma. I’ve only given one talk on this memoir and found myself referencing a 1946 picture book I cherished as a child. In The Little Island by Golden MacDonald (Margaret Wise Brown), a kitten traps a fish but it wins its release by telling the kitten a secret: “All land is one land under the sea.” Weary as I am these days, I draw strength from the knowledge that I have allies like you at the end of so many seas, which makes the isolation of being a Black feminist writer in the US a bit easier to bear.

As I read your initial post I felt a strange blend of affirmation and sadness—too much of what you wrote was familiar to me, and I’m weary these days of the many challenges facing my own beleaguered community. Tired because the fight seems never-ending, and progress minimal. This nation—my adopted home—is on the brink of electing a brazen bigot, and his popularity reveals just how deeply racist the US continues to be. In the past year I’ve found myself actively withdrawing from spaces where I’m likely to encounter groups of whites (harder to do these days in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood). When women of color friends become consumed with the latest outrageous behavior of white women writers, I simply shrug and keep on planning the publication of my novel. I began to self-publish because I had no other way to get my books into kids’ hands, but now being excluded from the publishing industry almost seems like a blessing. As I often like to say when tempests swirl in the kid lit cup, “That’s not my peer group.” I don’t have time to respond to all the ridiculous things oblivious white women say or do, and Toni Morrison’s wise words are never far from the front of my mind: “racism is a distraction.”

But it isn’t right that when a woman of color speaks her truth, countless white women feel entitled to attack her and believe they can do so with impunity—because, in fact, they can. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently warned, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” If that’s true, then that special corner will be very crowded and mighty white. Yet afterlife aside, there never seems to be any penalty for the egregious behavior of those in the dominant group, and those with power and privilege routinely insist upon occupying the victim position even as they deny their role as victimizer. The recent Diversity Baseline Survey conducted by Lee & Low Books makes evident what many of us have known for years: white women dominate the kid lit community. So my separatist impulse is often thwarted by the fact that in order to reach the children of color I write about, I generally have to negotiate with an editor, librarian, reviewer, teacher, or literacy advocate who is likely to be a straight, white, middle-class cis woman. She is not from my community and likely got her job without needing to demonstrate basic competence in my culture. I do have radical white women friends who are actively anti-racist, but I can count them on one hand (and maybe two fingers). Their individual activism doesn’t change the fact that white women as a group are responsible for creating and/or sustaining the disparities we see in the kid lit community today. I very much appreciate true allies’ support and attempts at inclusion, but know that individual subversive acts will not change systems designed to promote and perpetuate dominance.

So how do we decolonize the kid lit community? How do we redistribute power and end the dominance of white women? As the topic of reparations resurfaces here in the US, I can’t help but wonder what reparations would look like within the kid lit community. How could the dominant group ever make amends for the damage done to our children? For decades here in the US they have ignored our pleas for inclusion and perpetrated a form of symbolic annihilation by distorting or altogether erasing the image of Black youth. Can the publishing industry really be trusted to reform itself when those who uphold it haven’t acknowledged the harm they’ve caused? Of course, the first step would be an admission of wrongdoing, but most white Americans prefer reconciliation without its prerequisite: TRUTH.

Author Libba Bray attempted to reason with her white peers and cited a reading by Toni Morrison that she attended here in Brooklyn. Bray recounts that when Morrison was asked what her female characters had taught her, she replied, “Sovereignty.” I imagine that word holds particular resonance for Indigenous people. For me, self-publishing is the only way I will ever retain control over my words and my message to our youth. And I love our youth enough to tell them the unfiltered truth about life in this country. Of course, there are penalties for women of color who dare to create as a radical act of love. As John Henrik Clarke once stated,

Racists will always call you a racist when you identify their racism. To love yourself now – is a form of racism. We are the only people who are criticized for loving ourselves, and white people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I love myself they become irrelevant to me.

Apparently Canadians are preparing an island for those in the US looking to migrate after Trump’s election. But I left Canada once already and know there is no island sanctuary for a Black feminist writer like me. What keeps me afloat is the work and the knowledge that there are allies like you in the world. Thank you for persisting, for claiming space, and loving your youth. The sea between us may seem endless, but under the waves there is land that unites us.

This post is part of a series of essays, letters, and reflections shared by Ambelin Kwaymullina and Zetta Elliott. Read Part 1 here.

Writing while Black/writing while Indigenous: two voices speak on literature, representation and justice

Ambelin Kwaymullina and I met online a couple of years ago and found that we share similar perspectives on issues of representation in children’s and young adult literature. When I told Ambelin I wanted to write something about “Black excellence,” she proposed a series of posts where we could reflect on “the diversity debate” and the ways current responses dismiss or altogether ignore the needs of kids in our communities. Welcome, Ambelin!

***

I am an Aboriginal woman who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. I write YA novels and picture books, and I teach law at a university. I’m often told that being a writer and a law academic is a strange combination, but there is a powerful connection between law and storytelling. The global seizure of Indigenous territories by colonial nation-states has long been justified by legal doctrines based in derogatory stories told about Indigenous peoples. In Australia this was terra nullius, the notion that Indigenous peoples did not own the land we occupied because we were not sufficiently ‘advanced’ (which is to say, our life-ways and law-ways did not resemble those of Western Europe). And in Australia and elsewhere, stories continue to influence the way in which Indigenous and other marginalised peoples are treated by the law.

When I began my law degree I had a deep-seated fear of those in a position of public authority, inherited from my ancestors who survived the ‘protection’ era. From the late 1800s onward in Australia, so-called ‘protection’ legislation authorised the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families. It is estimated that from 1910 to 1970, between one in three and one in ten children were taken. In some families, all the children were taken. In other families the removal and institutionalisation of children occurred over successive generations. My great-grandmother and my grandmother were among them; they belong to what is now called the Stolen Generations. ‘Protection’ legislation was also the basis of a system of intensive surveillance and control under which no aspect of Indigenous existence escaped the attention of government officers.

The last remnants of the ‘protection’ regime were dismantled in the 1970s and Australia enacted national racial discrimination legislation in 1975. My law degree gives me the training to locate and interpret the guarantees of equality that now exist. I once imagined that this would be empowering. Yet it has not made me less afraid. If anything I am more so, because if I know the power of the law then I also understand its limits. Law can regulate behavior; it is often far less successful at changing attitudes. But attitudes can subvert the law and make a mockery of notions of equal treatment and equal opportunity. A recent report on racial discrimination legislation in Australia highlighted the persistence of systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples. Health research has shown that Indigenous Australians are one-third less likely to receive appropriate medical care than non-Indigenous patients with the same need. Beyond Blue’s recent study of Australians aged 25 – 44 found that one in five would move away if an Indigenous person sat near them, one in ten would not hire an Indigenous person, and one in five believe it is hard to treat Indigenous Australians in the same way as everybody else. Statistics in relation to Indigenous peoples elsewhere will differ in their details but the larger trends repeat – as was found by the United Nations State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples report, Indigenous peoples across the globe face systemic discrimination and exclusion from political and economic power.

Behind all these statistics are the stories. There are thousands upon thousands of stories that distort the identities, cultures and histories of the many Indigenous peoples of the earth. These stories influence other tales in a self-perpetuating cycle supported by the structures of privilege that continue to exclude Indigenous voices from speaking to our own truths. Representation – or rather misrepresentation – in narrative is not separate from discrimination; it is part of what enables it. In those crucial moments when others are making choices that will influence our fate, it is the stories they know about us that alter perception and displace empathy. When diverse authors say that diversity in literature is a matter of life and death, I think some people believe we are using hyperbole. But the grim truth is that the marginalised have no need of hyperbole to make our point. We only need reality.

There are those who study the law because they love the law; I studied the law in search of justice. In the legal systems of the many Aboriginal nations of Australia, there is a strong correlation between the concept of justice and that of balance. Far less so, in Western legal systems. Less so too in the world of literature where there are massive imbalances in power between the privileged and the marginalised. But I am not the only one who would name this imbalance unjust, because I am one of many voices across the globe speaking to these issues. Some of us come from the peoples that have been, and are being, excluded; from a history of voices silenced and stories never told. Some are among the privileged who have inherited the benefits of our exclusion. But we are all part of a future that has not yet been fathomed.

None of us know what the world of literature looks like when all voices are heard equally and all voices have an equal opportunity to be heard. Such a world doesn’t exist. But I think I see it sometimes, or rather I feel it. The sound of a thousand peoples speaking to a thousand different realities. A sense of there being air enough for everyone to breathe. Daniel Older has said that “perhaps the word hasn’t been invented yet [for] that thing beyond diversity.”

I call it justice.

Ambelin Kwaymullina is an Aboriginal writer, illustrator and law academic who comes from the Palyku (pronounced ‘Bailgu’) people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She is the author of the Tribe series, a dystopian trilogy for young adults, the first book of which (The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf) is published in the US. She has also written and illustrated a number of picture books. Some of Ambelin’s commentary on diversity issues can be found here.

Electric Avenue

Between jet lag and this never-ending cold, I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep this past week. But my four days in London produced nearly 4000 words so I’ve still managed to be productive, and stepping outside of my Brooklyn life helped me to shift my focus from The Door at the Crossroads to The Ghosts in the Castle. On Monday I arrived with a migraine but checked into my lovely hotel and an hour later went over to Hammersmith to meet another indie author, Tina Olajide. The first book in her Hey Emi series is very popular here in the US, and we talked about ways to expand access to libraries and schools. I learned of Tina through radical Oakland librarian Amy Martin who’s on a mission to add diverse titles to her youth collection by connecting with indie authors. I wish there were more librarians like her! Tina and I swapped stories about the self-publishing process until my energy ran out and I went back to the hotel. There’s something about being in a bubble that helps me write; I can produce here at home but when I’m abroad, there’s a greater sense of urgency. I knew I only had 4 days, and I knew I wanted to see my former editor from Amazon, and I had to tour Windsor Castle once more, and I was invited to tea with a dear friend, her daughter, and granddaughter. I actually might write Brown’s Hotel into my book since I conclude with a tea party between Zaria and her stern Aunt Prudence. In so many of the British books I read as a child, the eccentric aunt takes an interest in—and leaves her fortune to—her most unlikely heir. But instead of passing on her fortune, Aunt Prudence will share her memories of the 1981 Brixton Riots. I spent a couple of hours in Brixton before heading to the airport on Thursday. I found a downloadable walking tour map online and picked out the marketplaces since I needed a shop or vendor where the two children might buy an Ethiopian necklace. After browsing a bit and talking to an Algerian vendor about gentrification in Brixton and Brooklyn, I went to the Black Cultural Archives for lunch. The kitchen was closed but I wrote for a while and chatted with two women there who pointed me in the direction of an Ethiopian shop where I got a necklace and scarf. The Ethiopian woman running the shop and a nearby cafe hadn’t heard of Prince Alemayehu (pictured above), and I wondered if The Ghosts in the Castle would ever circulate in the UK. There are two protagonists, one Black British boy and his African American cousin, but it’s her outsider perspective that drives the narrative. Zaria comes to England as I did for the first time over 20 years ago, with a head full of stories about British castles and wizards and fairies. What she learns at age 8 is what I didn’t learn until my 20s: that British imperialism devastated the countries and cultures of people of color all over the world.

On Monday I’ll have a guest blogger, Ambelin Kwaymullina. We’re doing a series of blog posts starting next week about decolonizing kid lit so stay tuned…

#DearScholastic

Do you remember buying books from the Scholastic Book Fair? I think I do. You got a little catalog at school, and you picked the book you wanted, and then brought in your order slip with your money. Well, Scholastic Book Fair is still going strong but I hear from more and more teachers that they don’t want the fair in their school. The books aren’t diverse and kids often buy licensed products instead of books—so how does that promote literacy? I was at a school last month and a 5th grade teacher surveyed my 20 books and asked, “Will these be available at our Scholastic Book Fair next week?” No—they won’t. Your Black and Latino students will probably be hard-pressed to find a “mirror book” in Scholastic’s offerings.

Last year I met a fantastic 3rd grade teacher, Ruben Brosbe, and his students have started a letter-writing campaign to get Scholastic to diversify their book fair offerings:

Dear Scholastic Books,

In the fall my students learned about the diversity gap in children’s literature. When the December Scholastic Book Club catalog arrived, we decided to count the number of books featuring people of color. Out of more than 100 books we counted about 7 that had people of color.

We decided to write you letters to tell you how we felt about this.

Thanks for reading! We hope you will write back!

Sincerely,

Mr. Ruben and Class 301 

Here’s one excerpt from a letter by Maya:

“When diverse kids have to read books with only white characters it makes them feel left out. It makes them feel like white kids are better. Our class counted and out of over one hundred books less than ten are diverse. I don’t think that’s fair. Also white kids want to read about different types of people. It’s never different types of people.”

All the letters are powerful so please take the time to read, and retweet, and follow their campaign: @diversereaders #DearScholastic