From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 07:49:07 +0100

I agree strongly with others that, as Nick Glass reminded us and Cornell West wrote, Race Matters. As do ethnicity, class, gender, and regionality. All of which are implicit or explicit in Make Lemonade and True Believer.

What strikes me over and over when these difficult issues spill into our discussions of children's books is that adults are writing and reading books intended for children. Thus many of us adult readers, not only are reading these books with all our own life experiences, but with a quasi-alert at the back of our minds that these are books for children. I sure I do. I spend my days with children as a teacher and they are a ghostly presence as I read books intended for them. This means I read books for children somewhat differently than I read books for adults. That is, not only do I bring my own experiences to the reading (and, yes, giving myself an image of LaVaughn, based on this personal background), but I also bring to it a wondering as to how a child would respond to it. So there is an awareness of the child reader that is an added piece to my reading. This doesn't happen when I read adult books. I only wonder about other readers' responses when something is especially offputting or offensive.

Adult authors and readers of children's literature, I believe, continually struggle with this paradox. That is, authors are artists who write for themselves (adults even if they write for the children they once were) as well as children. And we readers are adults reading books intended for children. On child_lit recently there has been a thread about the concept of childhood. And what has come out is that how we define children and childhood factors into how we read, write, and think about their books. The comments thus far here on ccbcnet are based on our own adult views and experiences. Robin writes that Jolly reminds her of girls from her childhood, Walter that he used friends to create images of them for himself, and Linda Sue of how unsettled the books made her feel as an Asian who deals with race every day (which was my experience in Sierra Leone; good to have the tables turned for a couple of years.) No doubt child readers do the same, albeit with less life experience than we have had. However, I think we adults do something else as well: think about the child reader's response. How about reading these two books in a community with many young mothers? Or in a community with children in LaVaughn's circumstances? Or in a community where the child readers' images of LaVaughn and Jolly are informed largely from television and movies not personal experience?

Last month I wrote of my disquiet with Sis's ethnic images in Madelenka. While I admired and understood his intentions I still worried about how child readers would take in these images. Without any conversation I suspected that they would go into corners of these children's minds and just sit there unexamined. I feel that Virginia Euwer Wolf has done something different. By allowing us to wonder about her characters' race and ethnicity she forces us to think about them. And I suspect that because the books are for older children that many readers will discuss this issue. I would hope so and hope that adults would encourage and lead/guide these conversations. My concern with Madelenka was that this would not happen.

I'm currently on jury duty (New York City, Manhattan County, criminal court). Can't talk about the case, but one of my fellow jurors is a producer for 48 Hours. At lunch yesterday (best thing about NYC jury duty is lunch in Chinatown!), I spoke about my work and concerns about kids, history, and Africa and she spoke about how shocked she is by the young adults around her at work and family ( and by "young adults" she means 28 year olds) whose knowledge of history comes primarily from movies (e.g. Oliver Stone.) This concerns me. Okay, I'm a teacher, can't help it.

Sorry to go on again. I sure hope that some others will respond (too often my posts on this sort of thing get no responses, at least not online) as I think this topic/issue needs to be examined over and over. The more we think/discuss/consider/grapple with it the more we learn. The more I think about what I do as a teacher it is to teach kids to do exactly this.
 And I think these provocative books are vehicles for doing so as well.

Monica


Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Wed 11 Jul 2001 01:49:07 AM CDT