Down sizing and clearing shelves of books, one entirely of children’s and YA literature; in a digital world not many people or even libraries want them. What then will happen to our voices for our children? I once did a presentation at an ASCD conference in the USA entitled, Our Authentic Voices Call Out To Us: Do we listen? I presented a local version Authentic Voices: The Case for Caribbean Children’s Literature in Teachers’ Colleges in Jamaica. In both, I referred to writers like Merle Hodge (Crick Crack Monkey), Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, and research papers which highlighted the significance of authentic voices in the material for our children and young people.
Suddenly, it seems, America has identified Own Voices, and the Black Lives Matter movement has led to the ‘discovery of minority (African American) writers and children’s books.’ Then, since the prejudice against Asians has been uncovered, Asians are beginning to be included. We cannot but be pleased. Inclusion is essential, we know.
The term Own Voices has been
around for a few years, from 2015, it seems. If I’m wrong about this please
write me or post a reply on my blog and I’ll acknowledge it. It seems the term ‘own voices’ was brought back into focus because someone had written a
book, to great acclaim, about Hispanics, and then was criticized as not giving
an accurate portrayal of the particular group by a member of that group. I am being deliberately vague
because I do not wish to rake up a discussion, which must have been painful for
the writer and the critic
The quote continues: “Those books that are # Own Voices have an added richness to them precisely because the author shares an identity with the character. The author has the deepest possible understanding of the intricacies, the joys, the difficulties, the pride, the frustration, and every other possible facet of that particular life — because the author has actually lived it.”
I think this must be especially important with books for Native American or First Nation children.
Who else could ever tell their stories? I gather also that an African American
had quite rightly pointed out that he
did not think 'others' should be trying to
write about the African American experience. However having made this point, he
set a story in a country he had never visited and was called out on that.
So that leads us to another point of view: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/228847/...
“Taken to its logical
conclusion, this approach to storytelling will set strict and claustrophobic
limits on imagination, confining authors according to an ever-narrowing concept
of which identities, settings, or narratives are their own."
What has this to do with us here in the
Caribbean? Certainly, we have been telling our own stories from we started to
write children’s literature. We recognized the need for our children to see
themselves in books, to validate their lived experience, especially in our
post colonial territories, socialized by
British stories fist, followed by their
American counterparts. While adult literature blossomed early it took some time
for us to get to this stage where we see increasing awareness and acceptance of
children’s and YA literature of our own, where perhaps we could say that we now
have a third generation of authors and publishers.
Moreover we, as a
multicultural, multiethnic region, seem to have worked out who can tell what
stories. The challenge we face is not lack of representation of all our people
in books; we have built up a trust amongst ourselves; we are sensitive
enough not to write about what we don’t know. I can write about Indian children
( almost half of the population in Trinidad and Tobago and in Guyana) but the
stories I have written are generalized, things that could occur among any group
going to school, for example, Twins in a
Spin. Interesting though, there are twins in my family. This story is true to a
twin experience that we in our family
had wondered about. So it is still ‘write what you know’. However, I would
never write a coming of age book for an ethnicity to which I do not belong, without
consultation/a reader who represents this group. There is a connection, therefore,
to the concept of own voices and our authentic
voices and validation of our lived experience.
This brings me to the
importance of the Burt Caribbean Awards for Young Adult stories, and regretfully its absence
from our young adult coming of age lived experience. That will be for another
blog.
