Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 87

seeing stars

I have to begin with this beautiful trailer for Navjot Kaur's latest book, Dreams of Hope:

Yes, there's a place for books like Go the F*** to Sleep (though I don't really appreciate a black father—Samuel Jackson—being used to voice the supposedly unspeakable thoughts of parents everywhere), but this lovely book is how you want to send your little one off to dreamland. Please do support this indie press! A while back we discussed the possibility of starting a Birthday Party Project—a campaign to get parents to commit to buying multicultural books as presents for any occasion, but specifically for the endless stream of birthday parties that most kids attend every year. Having books in the home and developing the habit of leisure reading impact a child's academic success—and studies show that black and Latino kids have fewer books at home and read less during leisure time:

One of the things often overlooked in discussions of academic achievement is the importance of leisure reading, not only the quality of it but the volume of it.  There are, in fact, solid correlations between how much reading teens do on their own and how well they perform in school…

When we look at the results broken down by race, more concerns arise.  Table 11 doesn't separate racial groups into age groups, but the racial groups in general show marked differences that likely are reproduced for the teen category alone.  Whites come in at .31 and .37 hours on weekdays and weekend days, respectively.  Blacks come in at half that figure, .17 and .18, even though blacks have more leisure time than whites (5.61 hours to 5.14 hours per day).  Hispanics have less leisure time (4.89 hours) and pile up even less leisure reading (.15 and .11 hours on weekdays and weekend days).

Edi's got a list of new releases if you're putting together a summer reading list for the teen in your life. And there are lots of great books that didn't get their fair share of the spotlight last year—be sure to check out Nerds Heart YA. You can also find author interviews at Reading in Color, The Rejectionist, and The Happy Nappy Bookseller. And while you're there, check out Doret's great list of LGBTQ novels featuring queer teens of color.

I went to the PEN American Center office today and met with Stacey Leigh—she told me all about the Open Book Program:

Initiated in 1991, the PEN Open Book Program encourages racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. Its committee works to increase the literature by, for, and about African, Arab, Asian, Caribbean, Latin, and Native Americans, and to establish access for these groups to the publishing industry. Its goal is to insure that those who are the custodians of language and literature are representative of the American people.

The Open Book Committee includes writers and publishing industry professionals from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. The Committee discusses mutual concerns and strategies for advancing writing and professional activities, and coordinates Open Book events.

We're hoping to host a mixer later this month to give people a chance to meet and have their say about topics related to publishing. I'm excited about the possibilities and will post more in the near future, so stay tuned!

The Bottom of the Pot ~ ChLA

I've got a long post to write about my first Children's Literature Association conference but I got home at 2am last night and need a day of rest (and silence–even in my head). So for now, I've decided to post my conference paper; not sure I'll develop this for publication, but figured it couldn't hurt to make it available on the blog.

"The Bottom of the Pot: Blackness and Be/longing in A Wish After Midnight"

I am an immigrant. I was born in Canada, which means that I grew up "resisting Americanization;" in school I was taught to embrace the "tossed salad" metaphor rather than the "melting pot"—Canada was presented as a multicultural "mosaic," a nation where all kinds of differences were not only celebrated but protected. Canadians often define themselves in opposition to Americans; they pride themselves on being quiet, polite, and progressive—the antithesis of their loud, boorish, bigoted neighbors. I learned at an early age to look down my nose at the United States; it's something of a national pastime and a legacy of Canada's colonial past. Of course, it didn't help that my father used to slip across the border whenever life in "the Great White North" became unbearable. He would eventually return, bearing wondrous gifts (like a black Barbie doll) and for months we'd have to listen to him rhapsodizing about the US. As an adolescent, I disdained the United States yet still elected to study American History in high school, perhaps as a way of connecting with my father. I could not deny that the US had a certain allure—all the pop stars and television shows I admired were American—but I also understood that a fascination with "that country" could and would disrupt my life.

Although he came to Canada from the Caribbean as a teenager, my father spoke without an accent and felt perfectly at ease around whites. I never wondered why. Indeed, I grew up thinking of my father as a "generic" black man with no fixed ethnicity, and I was myself a young adult before I understood how the United States had shaped his identity—and mine. When my father arrived in Toronto at age 15, his stepmother indicated that he was not welcome in her home. Desperate to keep the peace, my grandfather tried to enlist my father in the army, but when that scheme failed, my great-aunt instead enrolled my father in a Christian high school—in Allentown, PA. Her conservative church handled everything; my father was sent to the United States where he finished high school and then entered Eastern Pilgrim Bible College. He was one of only two black male students on campus and in the spirit of Christian fellowship, was strictly forbidden from dating the white co-eds.

My father returned to Canada after graduation and married my mother—the white daughter of a United Church minister. Despite being groomed for the ministry, my father chose to teach rather than preach. He ran for public office—and lost. He tried to add a Black Heritage component to the Toronto public school curriculum—and failed. He had an affair with a black woman he once knew back in Allentown—and my mother divorced him. My father grew out his Afro and became something of a black militant. But there wasn't much tolerance for militancy in Toronto in 1980. Within a few years, my father settled down, started a new family, and learned to accept the status quo. Or so I thought.

The year before I graduated from high school, my father disappeared. We all knew he'd gone to the United States again and we all assumed he'd eventually return. We were wrong. I started college in Quebec and received a letter from my father telling me he was now remarried and living in Brooklyn, NY. Not yet certified to teach there, he drove a gypsy cab along the bus route and would occasionally send me three or four crumpled dollar bills. When I graduated from college, my father invited me to spend the summer with him in Brooklyn and before long I moved all my belongings across the border. His stated goal was to have all four of his children living in the United States. But my father died of cancer in 2004, and I am the only one of my siblings who chose to pursue my own "American Dream."

I begin with this summary of my father's life because I see evidence in his narrative of the many forces that operate upon the immigrant generally and upon the black immigrant to (North) America specifically—forces which shaped my own life story and my young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight. My father used to complain that he "couldn't get anything started" in Canada. The United States, by contrast, stuck in his memory as the land of opportunity where a hard-working black man of humble origin could aspire to almost anything despite the pressure he once felt in the 1960s to lose his Caribbean accent, keep to his side of the color line, and not join the Civil Rights Movement. Though my father cautioned me against a life as a writer (and wished I had chosen a practical profession like law rather than academia), it is as a storyteller and scholar that I have learned to detect, embrace—and mount my own resistance against—the processes of Americanization.

A recent article published in The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults affirms that "…studies have consistently found that minority-race characters are underrepresented in fiction for children and young adults, and that existing portrayals of minority characters are often riddled with stereotypes or otherwise negative images." The author further asserts, however, that "Studies addressing nationality of authors or characters are less common."[i]

This paper will address my competing nationalities and those of my fictional characters. Many immigrants experience a degree of ambivalence when it comes to assimilation; the allure of a new life/identity is tempered by the desire/duty to honor one's heritage.  For black immigrants, that ambivalence can slide into cynicism (and even rage) when it becomes clear that every black person in the US is subject to a pernicious sort of reduction: we all "fit the profile" despite our varying ethnicities, class locations, and/or places of origin. Black immigrants, therefore, experience pressure to become American and additional pressure to suppress ethnic/cultural/political differences in order to conform to a "generic" domestic blackness—a kind of "African Americanization." For the purpose of this paper, I will use "Americanization" to refer to pressure to assimilate certain "representative" US values and to perform the role assigned by the dominant group.

As a child in Canada I vividly remember watching American cartoons on Saturday morning; this meant that, like millions of US children, I learned about American culture, history, and government through the Schoolhouse Rock series. On the issue of immigration, Schoolhouse Rock set to music the widely accepted narrative of "The Great American Melting Pot" (click on image for video) where immigrants from (mostly white European) countries willingly jump into a literal pot filled with others happily frolicking in the red, white, and blue "stew." Not surprisingly, no mention is made of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that supplied the forced labor that built the new nation; the catchy song rightly predicts that "any kid could be the president" but falsely claims that "You simply melt right in, it doesn't matter what your skin."[ii] Scholars in the field of Whiteness Studies have demonstrated how assimilation, over time, diminished ethnic and religious differences that once led to the persecution of groups like the Irish.[iii] Yet descendants of enslaved Africans could not as easily "blend in" to US society. Long after Emancipation, "the problem of the color line" persisted and official and unofficial segregation policies denied equal opportunities to black Americans. In The Souls of Black Folk (1905), WEB DuBois reflected upon the curious position of the African American, introducing the term "double-consciousness" to convey the complicated hybrid status of blacks in the US:

One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Gender bias aside, DuBois makes a sound argument for the hyphenated identity that many African Americans take for granted today. It might surprise many people to learn that up until the end of the Civil War, there was widespread support for physically removing blacks from the US. Believing that the country could not sustain and/or tolerate a free black population, even President Lincoln—"the Great Emancipator"—seriously considered sending freed blacks to Haiti, Belize, Panama, or Guyana. The American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia in the 1820s and drew the ire of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass who insisted that blacks knew no home other than the US, had earned the right to citizenship, and had already demonstrated their ability to assimilate in the North.

The issue of belonging (in the past and present) is central to my writing, and the complicated project/process of identity formation drives the narrative in A Wish After Midnight. As a mixed-race woman of African descent living in NYC, I am often read as Puerto Rican, Dominican, or Cuban; in Brooklyn, where the majority of black is Caribbean, I live and "blend in with" neighbors who speak dozens of languages, practice as many religions, and otherwise embody the multiplicity of blackness in the US. Like many immigrants from the African diaspora, I identify more with the global South than the US South and I wanted to write a novel that would reflect the hybrid identities of the teens I was teaching in Brooklyn. According to the 2010 census, "12.6 percent of the U.S. population…self-identified with the Black or African American category;" more than 90 percent of those blacks were born in the United States, but the number of foreign-born blacks (originating from the Caribbean, Africa, and Central and South America) is on the rise: "The black immigrant population…has grown 47% since 2000 to 3.1 million."[iv] Many of these immigrants live in NYC.

My two teen protagonists, Genna and Judah, have conflicting plans for the future: fifteen-year-old Genna hopes to attend an Ivy League school and become a psychiatrist; Judah, a sixteen-year-old Jamaican immigrant and Rastafarian, sees no future for himself in the US and believes—like his fellow Jamaican, Marcus Garvey—that the destiny of black people is to return to Africa. For Judah, New York City is "Babylon," a place of confusion and corruption; he sees Genna's "American Dream" as a delusional attempt to fit into a society that clearly has no place for blacks besides the bottom rung of the social ladder. But Genna resists his cynicism and his plan to abandon the US:

I ask Judah what's so important about Africa, why he can't wait 'til he's done with school. And Judah says he's already done with school, that he won't learn anything in an American college except lies and misinformation. So then I ask Judah why he doesn't just go back to Jamaica if he doesn't like it here. And Judah says, "Sankofa, Gen. Return to your source."

…"But you're Jamaican," I argue.

Judah…shakes his head solemnly. "African, Gen. All of us—no matter where we're born or where we are now—we come from Africa. We're African."

I don't really like it when Judah talks that way…when Judah starts talking about Africa, his Jamaican accent returns—it's like he becomes somebody else, someone who's not like me…I may not know everything about the continent of Africa, but I'm not ignorant—at least not as ignorant as Judah seems to think I am. Judah acts like there's something wrong with me just 'cause I don't hate the United States. I do hate living in the ghetto, and I definitely want to get out of here someday, but I'm not ashamed of being American. And I'm not ashamed of being African, either. That's why we call ourselves African Americans—'cause we're both, not just one or the other. But Judah doesn't see it that way. (56-57)

But Genna isn't so naïve as to think that reaching her goals will be easy; her African American mother warns her against internalizing the "ghetto mentality" that has already ensnared Genna's older siblings, and she knows that many of the rules of success don't apply when you're "young, gifted, and black"—and female, and poor. Genna befriends an elderly Danish man while visiting the local botanic garden but understands that his vision of the US is outdated at best and quite likely skewed by his own privilege:

Mr. Christiansen's a really sweet man. So I just bite my tongue and listen while he talks about America being "the land of opportunity," or "the great melting pot." I want to ask Mr. Christiansen what happens to the folks who get left at the bottom of the pot. I'm thinking whoever's down there probably gets burned. Not just black people, either. A while back they executed a white man for blowing up a government building in Oklahoma…It takes a whole lot of hate to do something like that. Papi, he didn't like America and that's why he left. But that white man, he made a bomb and killed a hundred and sixty-eight people. And never said he was sorry…

Mr. Christiansen sees things differently…Maybe he just sees what he wants to see. Maybe he can do that 'cause he's old and white. All I know is when I look around me, I only see what's real. (28-29)*

Genna thinks of herself as a realist and so initially believes she must be dreaming when a portal opens in the garden late one night and she is drawn into the past. Though her mother has tried to prepare her to face the ugly reality of racism, Genna struggles to survive in the 19th century; believed to be a fugitive slave, she must resist virulent racism, fend off sexual predators, and escape a mob of Irish immigrants that rampages through the city during the 1863 Draft Riots. In A Wish After Midnight, the history of terrorism in the US doesn't begin with 9/11 and so is an internal rather than an external threat; for Genna, Osama bin Laden isn't Public Enemy #1—that (dis)honor goes to Timothy McVeigh, the white "all-American boy" who helped to perpetrate the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. Genna recognizes that many Americans are discontent—not only her father, a Panamanian immigrant who abandoned the family after being unable to find steady work; Mr. Colon "can't get anything started" in his adopted home and bitterly concludes that "in America, a black man can't even be a man" (6).

When her abuela follows her father back to Panama, Genna finds it difficult to identify with her Afro-Latino heritage and gets no encouragement at home; her mother says, "If you're going to learn another language, you might as well learn how to talk white" because "in America, that's the only language that really counts" (50). Genna explains:

I speak a little Spanish, but not much. Just what I learned at school. Mama always told us we were black, not Hispanic. She says in America, it doesn't matter where you're from or what language you speak. Black is black, and you might as well get used to it. And if you are black, then you better speak English 'cause that's what white folks speak. (5)

Genna's mother rejects cultural or ethnic hybridity and pressures her children to accept the American racial binary of black versus white. Although her three children have different skin tones and Afro-Latino/indigenous heritage, Mrs. Colon tries to reduce them to what Elizabeth Alexander calls "bottom line blackness," a kind of generic identity "which erases other differentiations and highlights race.[v] Alexander contends that all blacks in the US are bound to one another by "sometimes subconscious collective memories" that "reside in the flesh" and are triggered by contemporary spectacles of violence enacted upon black bodies. Admitting her theory is somewhat "romantic," Alexander argues that published images of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (lynched in 1955) became "the basis for a rite of passage that indoctrinated…young people into understanding the vulnerability of their own black bodies…and the way in which their fate was interchangeable with Till's. It was also a step in the consciousness of their understanding themselves as black in America" (92). But do immigrants from across the African diaspora really share this collective consciousness? Can factors like gender, sexual orientation, and nationality be so easily dismissed?

This unifying impulse succeeds at times, but "the bottom" too often relies upon a US-centric construction of blackness that erases both complementary and contradictory histories of persecution and resistance from throughout the African diaspora. Before the 2010 census was taken, a group of black immigrants mobilized members of their communities many of whom were checking the "other" box because they identified as Nigerian or Jamaican rather than African American, Negro, or Black. A USA Today article on the subject concluded that,

In a nation where most blacks trace their origins to slavery, immigrants and refugees from the Caribbean and Africa are redefining what it means to be a black American…Many black immigrants' homelands have a history of slavery, but they don't necessarily equate that with the U.S. legacy of slavery…That's why immigrants cling to national origins rather than racial identities.[vi]

Of course, it isn't either/or—it's a "new stew" called hybridity. In writing A Wish After Midnight, it was important to me to develop narrative strategies that would expose the coercive intraracial dynamics at play in the US, while emphasizing the importance of radical traditions of resistance brought to the US from the Caribbean and other corners of the diaspora. Of the sixty black-authored novels published in the US last year, I found just half a dozen with black protagonists who had at least one immigrant parent. New York is the publishing capital and it is a city of immigrants; my next project is to develop a Diversity in Publishing Network here in the US so that stories which challenge traditional notions of American-ness have a better chance of reaching young readers.

*Last month I read from this chapter of Wish as part of the "Myth and Magic" night at Franklin Park; they've posted the video on their YouTube channel, if you're interested:

[i] Stephanie Kuenn, "Are All Lists Created Equal? Diversity in Award-Winning and Bestselling Young Adult Fiction," June 14, 2011.

[ii] Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.

[iii] See How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev.

[iv] Haya El Nasser, "Black coalition pushes for 'unified' 2010 Census tally," March 3, 2010.

[v] Elizabeth Alexander, "'Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?': Reading the Rodney King Video(s)," in The Black Public Sphere, edited by The Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 84.

[vi] El Nasser: "Somebody from Jamaica may not identify themselves as African-American, black or Negro," says Melanie Campbell, executive director of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation who helped found the Unity Diaspora Coalition. "This is about understanding that the black population is not monolithic but that we're all part of the American experience."

Father's Day

vertical integration

Many thanks to Debbie Reese for posting this important article on Facebook: "."

NEW YORK, June 14, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Nearly eight in ten (78%) U.S. adults believe that it is important for children to be exposed to picture books that feature main characters of various ethnicities or races—but one-third (33%) report that it is difficult to find such books, according to a recent survey that was commissioned by The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the love of reading and learning in all children.

The telephone survey, conducted in April by Harris Interactive on behalf of The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation surveyed 1,001 U.S. adults and found that nearly three-quarters of parents (73%) and half of all adults (49%) have purchased a children's picture book with a protagonist of a different race or ethnicity than the child who will be reading the book. Whereas, only 10% consider it important to match the race or ethnicity of the main character of a picture book to the race or ethnicity of the child who will be receiving the book.

"It's reassuring that so many adults recognize the value in exposing children to books that portray people of all colors and ethnicities," says Deborah Pope, Executive Director of The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.  "What's disheartening though is that, even today, these books are few and far between," adds Pope, who notes that only 9% of 3,400 books published in 2010 for children and teens had significant minority content.

So which comes first? People don't buy multicultural titles because bookstores don't carry them, or bookstores don't carry those titles because people don't come in to buy them? One solution is to launch a new initiative that controls all the stages of book production. My agent told me about this PW article a few days ago and now it's up on Facebook, too. I like this idea but worry that start-ups and outsourcing will give the big publishing houses an excuse to preserve their all-white operations:

Looking to provide a publishing platform for serious literary works, Brooklyn indie publisher Akashic Books is teaming with three notable African-American publishing and bookselling figures to launch Open Lens, a new imprint specializing in quality fiction and nonfiction aimed at the African-American reading audience. The new imprint will be called Open Lens and will debut in September with Makeda, a new novel by Randall Robinson, founder of the human rights and social justice organization TransAfrica.

Open Lens is a co-venture between Akashic Books and literary agents Marie Brown and Regina Brooks along with Hue-Man Bookstore owner Marva Allen and initial guest editor, former Random House executive editor Janet Hill Talbert. Akashic Books has long focused on the African-American market with a list of titles focused on African-American, African, and Caribbean authors.

evidence of things unseen

I just finished an author visit at a fabulous school in Cobble Hill. I concluded by telling them about Ship of Souls, which I'm still hoping will be published early in 2012. When I wrapped up my presentation, a boy shot his hand in the air and asked, "Are there really ghosts living under Prospect Park?" I'm used to kids asking me about Marcus, the older brother in Bird who succumbs to drug addiction. And I don't mind telling them about my own brother and his struggle to make good choices in his life. I'm writing a conference paper now that begins with a summary of my father's life—including the affair that ended his marriage to my mother. I think I'm a pretty open person and I like to model ways of theorizing my own experiences. Today I told the kids about the phoenix dying in flames as a new bird is born from the ashes–hands flew into the air: How did it start the fire? What did it eat? Where did it live? Is that a real bird?"

My answer? The phoenix is an ancient mythological bird that originated in Africa, though there are competing versions of the story in other parts of the world. That usually gets a blank stare. "So…is it real?" Today I tried answering it this way: "A myth is a story that's been told over and over for hundreds–even thousands–of years. And the story still has meaning for people today." Another blank stare. So I finished by saying, "I believe the story." I do. Just like I believe in fairies and mutants with special abilities. If I didn't believe in them, I couldn't write convincing stories about them. And storytelling means a lot to me. But is it right to say that to kids? I'm a bit nervous about an underground scene in SoS that involves subway trains—I don't want kids searching for a way underground, and I certainly don't want them imitating the dangerous moves the characters make in the book. I don't want them trying to pry off the plaque on the boulder in Prospect Park. But once you set a child's imagination on fire, can you control the consequences? Maybe not, though I do think I can manage their expectations somewhat. The goal is to encourage them to keep dreaming, rather than attempting to recreate the world of the book in the here and now. And ultimately, I have to trust kids to draw a line between that dream world and reality. Even though I know that line is riddled with gaps…

fill in the blank

Be sure you stop by Multiculturalism Rocks! because Nathalie's got a great interview with Torrey Maldonado, author of Secret Saturdays. Father's Day is fast approaching, and you won't want to miss this thoughtful piece about absent fathers, substitutes, and the role of comic books in this author's life. Then swing by Crazy Quilts to hear about a brand new comic book—Static—that Edi discovered. I just watched X-Men 3 a few days ago (my favorite in the franchise) and wondered why all the PoC mutants were homeless/punk/bad guys while all the bright-eyed students at Xavier's prep school were white…

meeting stars in bad shoes

Today I was on the train reading The Wonder, Diana Evans' latest novel, when I suddenly had a memory of my father. When I first came to visit him in Brooklyn in 1993, he got a bit salty whenever I wanted him to take me someplace. I found out that Maya Angelou was giving a talk in Manhattan and decided to go; I put on my best dress, which had been a gift from friends, but didn't have any shoes to wear with it. I asked my stepmother to show me how to pin up my hair the way she did hers, and she did it but muttered under her breath the whole time. Finally I slipped on some crappy second hand shoes that my older sister would've thrown away if I hadn't rescued them from the trash. I headed for the front door and told my father I'd be home by midnight. My stepmother glared at him, he started muttering too, but finally got up off the couch and drove me downtown.

I don't actually remember what Maya Angelou said that night; I just remember being embarrassed about my shoes and feeling woefully underdressed. I remember a white mother and her two biracial daughters smiling at me, and how my eyes immediately went to the floor because I just knew they felt sorry for me with my hand-me-downs and hastily done hair. Then all of a sudden my father perked up—"That's Cicely Tyson!" he exclaimed, and next thing I knew he was dragging me down the aisle. "She's from Nevis," he whispered, and I remember thinking, "Yeah, right." But I let myself be led over to Cicely Tyson, who was elegantly dressed in a black dress and oversized hat. And then the crowd around her thinned a bit and my father stepped forward—and bowed. He actually bowed. And he said something about being from Nevis as well, and then he reached back his hand but I was just out of reach, and so he had to turn back and beckon me forward. "May I present my daughter," he said in this ridiculously formal voice, and he probably expected me to curtsy or something, but I just smiled and looked at my bad shoes. Ms. Tyson was very gracious, she called me "lovely," and then my father bowed a couple more times before I managed to pull him away.

I guess I thought about that experience because The Wonder is about a young Jamaican boy who decides he wants to be a kite—then his father takes him to see Katherine Dunham's dance company, and he decides to become a dancer instead. He gets to meet Ms. Dunham and the encounter changes his life. Tonight I went up to Harlem for the Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School's Art and Authors Night. As soon as I arrived, I saw Faith Ringgold seated at a table signing books. There was gorgeous artwork everywhere, and uniformed students would come up and offer to tell you all about the author they had studied. It was like a science fair but for books! And eventually I found the students in Ms. McDowell's 5th grade class who had interviewed me last month, and their display was amazing–two posterboards, a powerpoint slideshow, a list of *all* my publications, letters, stories with alternate endings (Mehkai changes his name to "Eric," becomes an alcoholic, but ultimately goes to rehab and becomes a doctor), innovative book covers, and tissue paper birds they had made to represent the characters in Bird—a penguin for Marcus "because he can't fly." Then the scheduled performance began, the student emcees welcomed the guests, and after Ms. Ringgold got up to say a few words, I was asked to do the same. Suddenly I was aware of my shoes—shabby old suede sandals that I wore because they're comfortable and I didn't want to try to look cute when it's a hundred degrees outside and the event was several blocks from the subway. Ms. Ringgold was glittery and dazzling and very bohemian—a real artiste—and I looked like a school marm b/c I try to dress safe when I know there will be parents around. Anyway, I got up there and made a few remarks that I'd already prepared…and then decided to wing it and share how I came to know about Faith Ringgold's art by studying her daughter's important scholarship in graduate school. I wrapped up, headed back to my place in the crowd, and a woman reached out to grab my hand. "You know Michele Wallace is over there, right?" And she pointed out Michele Wallace, sitting across the room. "Oh crap," I said, "I wouldn't have said that if I'd known she was here." And then the woman pulled me a bit closer and said, "And I'm her sister, Barbara."

The event continued, I signed a few books, and then slipped away in my shabby sandals. I did force myself to say a few words to Faith Ringgold; she told me about finishing her memoir in 1980 and having it rejected by publishers. "They think you'll stop—that's how it works. They say no, and you're supposed to give up. But I wouldn't." She later admitted that the '80s and '90s were better times for picture books, but still—I got the point. Keep writing. Don't let anyone silence you. Then a high-energy kid bopped up and asked for my autograph and Ms. Ringgold moved on. No one will ever remember me for being stylish—maybe a few will remember my ugly shoes. But it's the work you leave behind that matters. This week I've been working on a memory book for my niece, Maya. She just had her first trip to NYC and I've spent hours cutting and pasting and gluing and printing out pictures. But this morning I had to put the book out on the fire escape—it's toxic! It literally gave me a headache. I don't know WHY noxious fumes rise from the pages, but I hope I can solve this problem b/c it's a really cute book!

DIPNET ~ US Edition

Have you become a member of DIPNET yet? It's free and easy to join. You can read my guest post on their blog today and later this week I'll be interviewing Bobby Nayyar, DIPNET Consultant Development Manager, in order to better understand just how the Diversity in Publishing Equalities Charter came about and how he manages to convince publishers in the UK to tackle the issue of equity. I know that Americans generally like to think of themselves as "world leaders," and many aren't fond of the idea of following a European business model. But you know what? A good idea is a good idea, and we can learn from others without mimicking them. Look at all the amazing TV shows we've "borrowed" from the British—American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, The Office…

agony & ecstasy

Roots & Blues, Part 2! It's been a long time coming, but I guarantee you this interview with illustrator R. Gregory Christie is worth the wait! If you missed Part 1 of this series, do take time to read poet Arnold Adoff's thoughtful responses regarding the inspiration for his latest book of poetry.

ZE: It has been argued that "trauma resists representation." How did you approach the illustrations depicting the horrors of the Middle Passage? As a children's book illustrator are you expected to make every subject "beautiful"?

It's all about nuances and the experience a painter has gained in order to shout things softly to his audience. The metaphorical poems in Roots and Blues masterfully intermixed historical names and events into a continuous flow. I feel that the words have a similar sentiment to Blues music, by the way the atrocities and triumphs are a continuous poetic flow.  To paraphrase Tom Feelings, any subject matter can be presented to people of all ages, one has only to hear the blues to know something horrible can be told in a beautiful way.

I also believe that if you present a trauma with a melody, metaphorical words, or with attractively arranged pigments you can at least get the public's attention, but it's the artist's experience and ability to use nuance that will get people to care. If done carefully, I believe that the art will be embraced as something beautiful, at least for some of the people. The poems from Roots and Blues mimicked the essence of the Blues and the history of brown folks' "American" journey. So I, in turn, mimicked Arnold's words in a visual form, which I suppose is the purpose of an illustration.

The visuals are muted grays and blues that I hope are in tandem with the dull pain to those words that were intermixed with pockets of joy. This is the first time I used a glazing technique for an entire book. I chose to knock the colors down a bit, kind of a bluish gray pallor cast over what was once vibrant colors. I was able to wipe away and rebuild certain places in the painting so that the glaze would in fact brighten certain areas within the images. This was done to have pockets of vibrant colors in cool and distant images.

Yes, I'm often expected to make my art beautiful (if not cute) but I tip the balance towards images that will challenge our children. Foremost I paint for myself and do this with the hope that other people will "get it." I keep it fun and interesting but also honor myself as an artist.

ZE: In the blues tradition there's a fine line between ecstasy and agony; talk about your strategies for capturing both emotions in your illustrations.

I am all about balance, in my life and in my art. The artwork for this book was my best attempt to capture Arnold's flow of opposites, colorful moments as a contrast within a long, painful journey.

He has an ability to give historical facts, capture the emotion of the times, and barrage my mind with a stream of visuals. Nothing was sugarcoated in the writing; perhaps that would be a disservice to the people that went through that pain and to the young people that need to be prepared for the world's realities. It seems to me that Arnold danced between these two conflicting emotions all the time (ecstasy and agony) while not being too nostalgic. The poems and the times they comment upon are raw. He put himself out there as an artist and I wanted to keep up with him visually.

But Poetry is one of the most difficult things to illustrate for me, because you have to be decisive when interpreting the meaning of a series of meanings. I always think that such a work can be read so many different ways and too quick of a decision towards the meaning can kill the audience's growth. On the other hand, indecision in the illustrator can often produce a visual incongruity. In illustration I think the major point is to be able to process the mix into an interesting visual summation. Poetry seems to be a mix within a mix, an art form capable of having many tentacles. I think that it takes a delicate heart and advanced mind to embrace something that can be so mercurial, definitively stated and so personal to the reader. I feel as though such a listener wants to create his own relationship to those words, so being told what's definitive as the meaning (visually) can come off as a killjoy.

I respected his art by approaching the series of poems as one steam of ideas. In some cases I focused on the idea of something literal…a piano player or image of a jook joint etc., and other times I attempted to comment on the spiritual side of things. One of the first pieces shows three figures connecting with land and water; eyes are closed and bodies contorted.  On one hand, it would have been easy to define the words near it as a piano player image, but I took the harder road and commented on the metaphorical aspect. I wanted to introduce the reader to the origins of it all: the respect for the land and the process of life, it's circular direction between death and life. We come from the earth only to go back within it, so this first painting is about impossibilities and how something that doesn't make sense sometimes has an order to it. Time must pass in order to sometimes understand that disorder. The land, people and gestures are my way of introducing the readers to what they might expect for the other parts of this book. To expect that the impossible will make sense and to take the subject matter with solemnity and inspiration. I had to pace myself and pace the imagery for the book. At times you will see the agony in the lack of facial expressions—simply eyes closed or the gesture of the hands and body—and other times the figures will be directly looking at you, engaging you as the viewer. It's art that shows itself but invites you to find your own meaning based upon your own life experiences and whatever you can project into the historical and artistic experience.

The Ethical Author

In the summer of 2009 I got an unusual email from Amazon—not an advertisement or order confirmation, but a personal email. This message came from an acquisitions editor who had read my novel, A Wish After Midnight, which I self-published the year before. This editor said he loved the book and wanted to partner with me to help it find a larger audience. After verifying that it wasn't a hoax, I entered into negotiations and ultimately sold the rights to my novel to AmazonEncore, the company's new publishing wing. Wish was given a beautiful new cover and was re-released six months later in early 2010.

As a black feminist, I definitely had reservations about partnering with a behemoth like Amazon. I worried what my friends would say—would they accuse me of selling out? Was I betraying my feminist values? Yet, I reasoned, I had spent nearly a decade dealing with rejection from big and small publishers alike. My work was even turned down by a feminist press that was headed by a black woman! I didn't embrace self-publishing at the outset—I was driven to it by the refusal of traditional publishers to give my writing their official stamp of approval. Self-publishing ensured that my work would exist in the world, but I still encountered a great deal of resistance and a certain measure of disdain, and it was a real challenge to get my books into the hands of readers and reviewers.

In the end, to my relief, most of my feminist friends congratulated me on my decision to work with Amazon and did all they could to spread the word about my "new" novel. I had a fantastic experience collaborating with the AmazonEncore team—I was treated with respect, my expertise and ideas were valued, and no changes were made to my feminist narrative about two black teenagers sent back in time to Civil War-era Brooklyn. Wish wasn't reviewed in any major outlets, but the blogosphere embraced it and my overall experience was so positive that I plan to publish my next YA novel with AmazonEncore in 2012.

I'm still determined, however, to keep all options on the table when it comes to publishing. The industry is in flux right now, and I think authors need to respond by being flexible and open to new possibilities. We also need to be conscious of the ways that certain voices continue to be marginalized within the publishing community. Statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center demonstrate that authors of color constitute only 5% of the five thousand books published annually for young readers. Getting published is an uphill battle for most writers, but the institutional racism that pervades all sectors of US society makes it that much harder for people of color to have their stories published by traditional houses. Self-publishing has been an important option for black writers for centuries, and I suspect that won't change any time soon.

The first time I spoke publicly about self-publishing was at Rutgers University. After reviewing my award-winning picture book, Bird, Dr. Yana Rodgers invited me to speak to her students in the Women and Gender Studies Department. She assigned my self-published play, Mother Load, and I developed a presentation that paid tribute to Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde. I talked about Second Wave black feminist publications and the historical importance of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, founded by Smith following a 1980 phone conversation in which Lorde asserted, "We really need to do something about publishing." Nearly a decade later, Smith reflected on this pivotal moment:

Why were we so strongly motivated to attempt the impossible? An early slogan of the women in print movement was "freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press." This is even truer for multiply disenfranchised women of color, who have minimal access to power, including the power of media, except what we wrest from an unwilling system. On the most basic level, Kitchen Table Press began because of our need for autonomy, our need to determine independently both the content and the conditions of our work and to control the words and images that were produced about us. As feminist and lesbian of color writers, we knew that we had no options for getting published except at the mercy or whim of others—in either commercial or alternative publishing, since both are white dominated.[i]

To the students at Rutgers I explained my decision to start my own imprint, Rosetta Press, with its mission to publish books "that reveal, explore, and foster a black feminist vision of the world." I didn't then see any significant difference between my self-publishing project and the aims of the feminists at Kitchen Table Press. But over time I had to admit that I hadn't formed a collective, and I wasn't planning to publish anyone's work other than my own—not until I caught up on the backlog of unpublished manuscripts on my hard drive. Self-publishing is, as the term suggests, very self-centered; its appeal lies in the autonomy it provides, but that level of self-reliance is only partly in line with my understanding of feminism. I confess, I don't want to tell anyone else how or what to write, and self-publishing frees me of the need to please anyone other than myself with my writing. But do I owe the world something more than my books?

I concluded my presentation that day by reading aloud June Jordan's prophetic words about the "difficult miracle" of being a black writer in the US:

…we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as "political" or "topical" or "sloganeering" and "crude" and 'insignificant" because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees. We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatley, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we "neither sought nor knew," as long as we…remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

But not otherwise. And yet we persist.

I've written quite extensively about racism in the publishing industry and the risks and rewards of self-publishing. When aspiring authors ask me how to deal with rejection, I tell them to persist: Keep writing. Get your work done so that when the moment arrives, you'll be ready. Study the industry and know what you're up against. You may have to adjust your expectations, and you may find yourself forming unexpected alliances. But don't surrender your voice or your vision. Stay in the game and work with others who are trying to change the rules.

Lately I've been puzzling over how to be an "ethical author" in an industry that only seems to value the bottom line. Can I preserve my autonomy and still serve the communities to which I belong? I think so. Last month the publishing industry convened in NYC for the annual BookExpo America; BEA 2012 would be the perfect opportunity to ask members of the publishing industry to sit down and get serious about equity. My goal now—in between job-hunting, self-publishing a new novel, and finishing the sequel to Wish—is to replicate the UK Publishing Equalities Charter proposed by the Diversity in Publishing Network (DIPNET):

The aim of the UK Publishing Equalities Charter is to help promote equality and diversity across UK publishing and bookselling, by driving forward change and increasing access to opportunities within the industry…

For many years the industry has spoken collectively of the need to make publishing more diverse yet has not embarked on an industry wide initiative to resolve this issue. "What is widely suspected about publishing has proven true: the industry remains an overwhelmingly white profession…"

The same can be said of the publishing industry here in the US and it's about time we did something about it. I'm not ready to start a feminist press, but I can still advocate for equity so that marginalized writers can become more visible in the literary landscape, which never has accurately reflected the composition of this country.

[i] Barbara Smith. "A Press of Our Own, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press." FRONTIERS, Vol. X, No. 3, 13-15.