“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it
hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni Morrison
As an
engaged reader and a literature scholar, I’ve long been concerned with
representation and with its role in empowering some people and disempowering
others. When I became a mother, addressing and redressing representation became
even more urgent, especially due to the omission or distortion of Blackness in
the realm of entertainment and educational tools for young children. Trying to
counter this particular form of white normativity in my children’s life has
translated into a daily practice of what I like calling “domestic
micro-activism”, for example by purchasing Black dolls, finding books and films
featuring Black characters, forging an appropriate vocabulary to discuss
representation with my children, and, last but not least, writing our own
story. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s famous exhortation, I resolved to write the
books I wanted my children to read.
This is my first children’s book, part of a larger
project still in progress. My writing builds on the shortcomings of diversity
in contemporary literature for young children and is based on the belief that
self-identification is paramount to empowerment. I try to address three basic
needs: the inclusion of figures with whom Black children can identify, the need
of stories mirroring the experience of Black children growing up in Europe and
of children with a history of adoption, and the need of both fictional and
historical role models and heroes. It goes without saying that the effort of
endorsing diversity in literature does not only serve the interests of
minorities (white kids, too, need non-white heroes), and such writing aims to
be a child-oriented exercise in Critical Whiteness. In fact, the absence of
non-white superheroes in the imaginary and historical landscape offered to our
children pairs with a vision of the world based on white supremacy. This alone
should be enough to persuade ourselves of the need to put diversity on the
agenda.
“Hey, that’s me!”
My five-year-old twins respond with enthusiasm when we
look at picture books featuring children who look like them. The main markers
of resemblance are gender, skin colour and hair type. Age does not seem to be
particularly important: they can identify with a younger or older child, as
long as they are Black and of the same sex. Time is only marginally relevant
(that me can live at the time of dinosaurs), while setting becomes increasingly
meaningful as they start making sense of geographies and diasporas.
Contrary to what I experienced in my childhood,
empowerment features very clearly on the agenda of contemporary literature for
children. The implicit message in the majority of stories I read to my
five-year-olds seems to be: You can!
Anyone who has ever read to children will know that a
child experiences a sense of empowerment and even grows in self-confidence any
time the protagonist of a story successfully overcomes obstacles, defeats the
bad guys or simply accomplishes an achievement. However, for this to happen,
for the sense of empowerment experienced during the reading to be transposed
into an actual growth in self-confidence, that is, for the story to go beyond
itself and become productive in the life of a child, the child has to be able
to identify with the main character. However, with the exception of stories
featuring non-racialized imaginary creatures or anthropomorphic animals, for
many young recipients this kind of identification is hindered by the fact that
over and over again they cannot find any indication of resemblance with the
protagonist. For non-white children growing up in predominantly white
societies, the pervasive whiteness of the narratives they are offered can lead
to a sense of disempowerment. That also goes to the detriment of white
children, who are being empowered in a racialized way, conveyed white
normativity and emboldened in a sense of white righteousness. In a nutshell:
without inclusion, empowerment is not achievable.
Inclusion, by which I mean a host of really diverse
characters and roles, has advanced a great deal with regard to gender, but has advanced
very little indeed with regard to race: whiteness is the norm, while non-white characters,
if present at all, are secondary (read: subordinate), stereotypical, exotic, or
even grotesque.
All children need to find in books positive models of
diversity reflecting the reality of the global world rather than transposing
old colonial stereotypes into new forms of othering (such as the exotic Disney
characters or the popular misrepresentation of Native Americans and other First
Peoples). The diversity conveyed in this collection of rhymes and poems is
primarily inspired by my own children. Some rhymes use their names and tell their
personal stories, while others are more general in scope and approach. However,
all have been written with them in mind, to fill up the gap that leaves them
and families like ours no place in poetry.
The title poem, Sono
nero e sono fiero, opens the collection by celebrating Black people’s
history of resistance to oppression. It is purposefully marked by gender in
that it is a twin poem told in first person by a boy and a girl, each one
evoking their same-sex heroes (if gender normativity is maintained in the
traditional pairing of male and female –
superheroes and princesses – both sides are depicted in their heroic
role). Another poem in the same section, Bottoni
magici, challenges physical normativity by inscribing bellies with
protruding navels within an ethno-historical frame where such bodies are seen
as the norm. Nenè of the Maroons
builds on a personal connection with the legendary figure of Queen Nanny. When
my husband and I brought our daughter home from Haiti three years ago, she came
fighting, and she fought with such a determination that did not allow us to
forget that hers was a story of deprivation and uprooting embedded in a larger
picture of old power relationships between Blacks and whites, something that
also called into question our legitimacy as her parents. That is how I started
seeing her as a baby warrior and nicknamed her Nenè of the Maroons. I started
telling her about this ancestor of hers, who also lived in the Caribbean and
fought against being uprooted and sold and subjugated and who finally succeeded
in taking her destiny in her own hands and founding a free Black community on
the mountains of Jamaica. Believe it or not, this did help her in her way to forging
a sense of identity and self-worth.
The ones mentioned are only a few examples of the
motivations and thoughts behind the poems. Many people (mostly whites) are
uncomfortable with thematising skin colour, not to mention race issues. I am,
on the contrary, strongly against colour-blindness and I believe that children
have the right to a taboo-free and non-edulcorated approach to race as an
aspect of socialization that affects our life and our place in the world. Sociologist
Colette Guillaomin expressed it bluntly: “Race does not exist. But it does kill
people.” This polemical statement goes back a couple of decades, but it is
sadly still true to the bone. If we want for our children a different and
bright future, we cannot allow ourselves to remain silent on the topic. If one
day my children tell me I have made too much of those issues, I will be happy.
It will mean that something has eventually changed.
