
Tulika Books now offers a fold-out book, Home, inspired by the design of these story boxes. Here's Nina Sabnani, author of Mukand and Riaz, talking about this new title and its origins.
I think as writers we have an obligation to embrace our better angels. We need to support one another, encourage aspiring writers, and give back whatever it is we may have learned that can help others.Makes sense to me. There’s a popular myth of solitude associated with writing, but in fact writing is of and about the world—making sense of it, railing against it, raising the questions that won’t go away. And most writers I know can become social beings for limited periods of time, given the right circumstances. At Vermont College of Fine Arts, when a bunch of passionate and eloquent people regularly spend time in intense 10-day residencies conversing both together and in tandem, it’s sort of like a book that’s more than the sum of its pages. As Jane Kurtz might say, a place to tether my goat--or park my Uggs in January.
I don't pre-sell a book--I write it for the love of writing it, because it's the book I really want to read that hasn't been created yet. I try to be true to the characters and the problems they're faced with.I could live by this. I should mention that Alan's Owen Skye is a wonderfully funny, engaging character, with a mind that runs on impeccable kid logic.
"In your text treat Africa as if it were one country."
"Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat."
"Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her."
If you haven't read the essay, run-don't-walk to the Granta web site to read the rest or to order that back issue.
Yes, I know, it's been four years already since he wrote that. Surely things have changed. Maybe not. Listen to Chimamanda Adichie speak of the danger of hearing only a single story about a place. Any place. Thank you, Julie Larios and Sarah Blake Johnson for sending me this link within days of each other.
All this got me thinking about characters in YA books set in countries other than the US or Europe and published within the last 20 years. A few commonalities struck me.
1. Characters who are a combination of the following (pick two or more): long-ago, faraway, poor, depressed, angry, privy to or oppressed by (or both) some ancient tradition or other.
2. If they're not long ago, they still speak and act as if they were. They often don't use contractions, for one thing, or they adopt a labored kind of dialogue, with phrases in their native languages which they immediately translate into English.
3. They are torn between two worlds, two systems. That might be fine if those systems weren't defined as ancient and modern respectively as if a young person from contemporary Pakistan or Mexico or China were not quite of this century. Find me a teenaged character taking this overly philosophical psychohistorical view and I'll show you a well-intentioned writer driving the story to make a point.
4. They're either suffering from something oppressive in their cultures, or inflicting suffering on someone else for culturally grounded reasons.
Look at any of half a dozen YA novels set in South Asia and you might conclude that all the girls in the region are trying desperately to flee oppressive marriage or widowhood or sexual exploitation. You will feel pity for them and more, you will be grateful that you are not in their place. The thing is, you can't see people as fully human if all you can feel for them is pity. It's even more complicated when you are 8 or 10 or 14 years old and those "other" people instead of staying in their oppressive countries have somehow arrived in your neighborhood and your school.
And more complicated still if they were never in some other place at all, but have somehow, contrary to popular belief, managed to survive and are now suggesting that you share your century with them.
This is why we need more stories that don't define cultures as monolithic, impermeable and unchanging, that don't show the people within those cultures as trapped in unending cycles of victimhood. This is why there is a real danger that if the token single "multicultural" story is taken as representative of an entire place or its inhabitants or emigrants, it will leave no room for others to balance it out. This is why I'm pinning Wainaina's essay to my bulletin board. And drinking a cup of chai because, you know, that's what we South Asian types do when we stress out!