From: RUKHSANA KHAN <irrualli>
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 17:07:40 -0800

Omigosh! Thank you, thank you Maia!!!

As a woman from a culture which is oft-misrepresented (more misrepresented than it is ever faithfully rendered) by white authors, particularly white women I applaud your sentiments.

I recently went on book tour to the Northwest Territories. I was up in Inuvik, speaking to the children of the school there. Children whose backgrounds include terrible drug abuse and suffering.

And yet when I went to the town library, there were lots of books about the Arctic, almost all written by white authors. I found it incredibly sad, and yet if the natives couldn't see the beauty and power of the stories they were living, why shouldn't the white authors come in and exploit them? The natives had, in a way, allowed it.

So when I was presenting my picture book, The Roses in My Carpets, about my Afghani refugee foster child, when I was showing them pictures of the refugee camps it was based on and the mud houses the Afghans had lived in, I stopped for a moment and I asked those Inuit and native kids whether they found this interesting. They said, "Oh yes!" And then I told them that just as they found the way these refugees lived, across the world, interesting, others, including myself, found their way of life fascinating!

And then I told them that the refugees whom I'd visited, couldn't see the story they were living. They couldn't see the value of their lives, and how interesting it would be to other people. They couldn't capitalize on it. As a visitor, an outsider, and sometimes it takes an outsider, I could see how fascinating they were. Just as I could see how fascinating the Inuit were. And then I told these kids that they shouldn't be letting others tell their stories. They should be telling them, themselves.

I am so sick of the establishment lauding mediocre stories because of their exotic settings. They do those cultures an injustice.

Just my two cents.

Rukhsana
Received on Tue 30 Jan 2001 07:07:40 PM CST