When stories take us places
by Irene Caselli
Illustrations by Lutay B. Chitiya
Irene Caselli is the author of the weekly newsletter The First 1,000 Days
which explores the foundational period of our lives that is too often overlooked.
www.thefirst1000days.news
I recently took my son on a trip to a small village in Ghana, near the city of Kumasi. There we met Adjoa, a young girl who told us the story of her older sister: a wooden doll named Akua’ba that her mother carried on her back before Adjoa was born.
We then travelled all the way to New York City and met Julián and his grandmother on the subway. We followed them down the street, all the way back to Nana’s apartment, where Julián transformed himself into a mermaid.
Later we had the chance to visit Yazan’s house in Damascus. It was a dangerous time and the young boy could not leave his house and play with his friends anymore. His school was closed and his parents were constantly watching the news on television.
To confirm, these weren’t actual physical trips. In these times of lockdowns and confined environments, moving anywhere further than our neighbourhood has become difficult to implement, and even imagine. I’ve personally dreamt about travelling to places where I’ve lived before, and to countries I haven’t even seen a picture of. But there’s an even easier way to move around the world, easier than relying on your dreams. And it’s a way that you can bring your child along too, no matter your personal circumstances or the pandemic levels. Yes, I’m talking about reading.
When it comes to children’s literature, there’s a huge potential to the movement that books can generate. This has to do with the possibility to see other places and people via picture books, but also with a more internal, subconscious movement. Research shows that picture books play a great role in shaping who we are, how we come to see ourselves, and who we will become.
Paraphrasing the words of US educator Rudine Sims Bishop, who did pioneering work on the importance of multicultural children’s literature, books can be windows into the world, but also mirrors that reflect human experience back to us. Or as Adrienne Yabouza, an author from the Central African Republic, told me in an email: “I believe children all over the world are entitled to stories from all over the world. Reading is a way of getting closer to others, of understanding them and of loving them.”
Books are especially important in the first years of life, when we create the foundations for our worldview and attitudes towards the external world. “By three months, infants with extensive exposure to same-race faces prefer those faces. The pervasiveness of different forms of prejudice in children under the age of ten years has been well established,” said Dr Krista Aronson, a psychology professor and director of Diverse BookFinder, a collection of children’s picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and People of Colour. She explained that there’s clear evidence in children of favouritism for those who look like them in areas such as ethnicity, race, body size, nationality and language.
It’s perhaps not surprising then that children retain plot better when they read books with characters that look like them. But they also favour realistic and factual stories, and it’s by exposing children to more diversity through books that they can experience worlds that are different to theirs, fostering curiosity, understanding and developing empathy, says Aronson. In this sense, she adds, multicultural picture books can create a starting point to end racism, ableism and sexism and make so that today’s children become more empowered and empathetic.
But the current state of the industry is far from diverse, especially in English- speaking countries. Data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in the US shows that in 2019 83.2% of children’s books published in the country were written by white people, with only 5.7% authored by Black writers and 6.1% by Latinx writers. When it comes to main characters featured in the books, the diversity is also very low: 11.9% are Black, 8.7% are Asian, 9.2% have Brown skin, 41.8% are white, and 29.2% are animals or others. Other indexes also show a lack of diversity among industry staff, with 81% of people in publishing identifying as straight and 89% as able-bodied.
So, what can be done about this? “End of racism starts on the bookshelf,” says Nadine Kaadan, a Syrian book author who was named on the BBC 100 Women in 2020 for her influential work. Inspired by Kadaan’s advocacy work, here are some tips for carers, educators and anyone else with children in their lives to diversify your bookshelf.
1. Take a critical look at your book collection
Start off by looking at the main characters in the books your children have access to. Are they mostly white? How are the people of colour depicted? If there are people of colour, do they have agency, do they play a main role, or are they somewhere in the background? “There is a fine line between pity and empathy,” says Kadaan. Even if there are animals as main characters, do ask yourself how they are depicted. Is black the colour used for scary birds or angry monsters?
What about gender? Does the father prepare dinner as a “special surprise” for the mother, does he “help out” at home only when he feels generous, is he sitting on an armchair reading the paper? Is the daughter cleaning the house for her fun day at home with her mother? What are the main characters wearing? Is it mainly pink for girls and blue for boys? Are there single parents, gay parents, other carers in charge? Are there people with a disability and, if so, how are they depicted?
What about the location: in which country is it set?
And maybe, more importantly: will the children in your life recognise themselves in the characters and the environment depicted? And if they are represented in a majority of the books, do they have any access to books that present other realities in the world?
2. Look into translated books
There is no better way to understand a different reality than to have someone local guide you through it. A lot of diversity can be added to our shelves if only we look beyond our physical borders and translate books that are published in different languages.
Adrienne Yabouza’s The Magic Doll is a perfect example of the power of
a translation. The book, originally written in French, recreates life in an Ashanti village in Ghana, depicting the vegetation, customs and colourful fabrics. It also recreates a genuine link between a woman and a fertility doll, a wooden doll believed to bring good luck to women who try to conceive. The author had a doll like that when she was growing up in the Central African Republic, and remembered that when she became a refugee in
France with her five children after escaping ethnic violence and war in her home country.
Even though English is the international lingua franca, only a tiny amount of children’s books are translated into English. For the US, for example, there is little hard data, but those working in the sector say that only 3% of all books published in the country are translations, and similar numbers are true for the UK and Ireland. These numbers are even more surprising when compared to a market like Spain, for example, where some 30% of the published children’s books are translations.
Out of the US’s 3%, the main languages translated are French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch. “Translated children’s literature can play a big role when it comes to adding diversity, but right now translated children’s books are not particularly diverse,” said Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, a literary translator who writes for the World Kid Lit blog, which offers great tips to adults on international children’s literature. She says that she’s seen a positive trend in the increasing number of children’s literature translated over the years, but diversity is still lacking in terms of what languages get translated.
Kaadan believes there is a deeper problem to deal with: “It’s a form of neocolonialism. We want English books to be translated into every language in the world to spread our culture, but we only have 3% of other books translated into our language.”
3. No topic is too
complex for a child
Children notice race a long time before adults seem to be able to talk about it, different studies have shown. The same is true for questions of gender, ability, language and ethnicity. Children can handle much more complexity than we think.
But when parents don’t tackle complex issues with children, problems arise, says Ruth Banda Chitiya, a Zambian-born, British author and illustrator who writes under the name Lutay B C.
She says she started writing, illustrating and self-publishing books when she realised that her first-born son did not recognise himself in the books around him. “Fairy-tale characters are always white, and an angel could not look like us,” she said in an interview.
Nonetheless, she said books help her have a conversation with her child about diversity and inequality. This means that you don’t have to throw out all the books you currently have on your bookshelf, but instead use them to talk about issues that are problematic. Why is it bad for female characters to be home cooking and for only the father to be out working? Why are there fewer or no Black characters compared to white characters?
4. Get advice from those who know
It’s very hard to find culturally and ethnically diverse children’s literature if you don’t look for it. Most mainstream physical and online bookstores don’t have a particularly diverse catalogue, a result of the lack of diversity among books that are published to begin with.
If you look for independent bookstores in your area, you may be able to
get some local advice. There are also some independent publishers that focus on publishing diverse children’s literature. For example, Lantana in the UK or Lee and Low Books in the US are publishers of diverse children’s literature, Lil’ Libros focuses on Latinx children’s literature in the US, while some mainstream publishers also have divisions dedicated to diversity, such as Penguin Random House’s Kokila. Even Netflix has taken notice and created a show called Bookmarks where celebrity readers share children’s books written by Black authors.
There are also collectives that aim to amplify diversity, such as Inclusive Minds (UK), Las Musas (focused on the Latinx writers in the US), We Need Diverse Books (US) and We are Kid Lit (US), and organisations that have catalogued diverse titles, such as Diverse BookFinder (US) or Outside In World (UK). It’s also worth mentioning there are services such as OurShelves that offer a diverse book box scheme.
If you’re looking in languages other than English, some publishing houses such as ROSE Stories in The Netherlands dedicate most of their work to translating or publishing diverse literature into Dutch, while Associazione Scosse in Italy works to promote diverse literature in Italian.
5. Do the work yourself
A lot of the learning that children do via books happens thanks to the mediation of parents and educators. Having a Black character in a book is not enough if the adults in the room are not willing to recognise and acknowledge the differences. In fact, research shows that a colour-blind reading of books can even support children’s racial bias.
One study that focused on understanding racial attitude development in white children concluded that children were absorbing racial prejudices from their parents as a result of colour-blind ideology. The authors asked white mothers to read two books and discuss the story with their child as they would at home. One book featured a black boy, without mentioning race explicitly, while it used zebras that became black or white as a metaphor for racial prejudice. During the readings, mothers avoided the topic of race. When children made negative comments about racial diversity, mothers “did not respond to their children’s anti-diversity comments, but instead continued reading” and failed to challenge their children’s biases.
“We don’t want to say the wrong things, but we can’t avoid the subject, and we’d rather pass on responsibility elsewhere,” said Banda Chitiya. “But we need to be brave, we need to be open and humble.”
Now that I’ve managed to source books that take us to Ghana, New York City and Damascus, I know that I have a much more difficult task ahead: What are my own implicit biases? And how do I challenge them so that I can help my son challenge his own during the reading?