Recovering our history through fiction

With reference to Freedom Come by Jean Goulbourne 

Carlong Publishers (Caribbean) Ltd.

History textbooks usually just give facts and information which many children find boring.  Historical fiction, on the other hand, can make those facts come alive and be quite entertaining.

Hidden behind the scenes in the history texts are events ranging from fascinating and awe inspiring to scary, depressing and sometimes comedic. Wars and conquests, romance, inventions, crusades, slavery and so many other topics provide rich material for the storyteller. It’s people who make history. Authors of historical fiction make those hidden scenes come alive. A single incident or experience could be expanded into a novel by building up the background of events leading to it, and the resulting consequences.

Why haven’t we done more storytelling about our history in the Caribbean? See previous post Historical stories in Caribbean children’s books    for some ideas on this.

Historical fiction can fall into two categories:

1. The setting is historical but people and events are entirely fictional.Time travel stories tend to do this e.g. there was a war, or a natural disaster at a particular time in history, but the story doesn’t dwell on the known historical characters or events. Sometimes an obscure fact in history can be taken out and expanded into a story.

2. Both setting and characters are factual with the author imaginatively expanding on aspects of the events – it could have happened, and this was probably what was happening behind the scenes that history records.

Writers of historical fiction need to remember that:

Plot must be clear and not railroaded by historical details

Historical details must be accurate

Characters must come alive

Illustrations must be relevant to the time period.

Obviously, research is a key for the writer of historical fiction who needs detail to make the story believable. The elements which make for good story are as important as the factual information – especially the use of sensory details. How did things look, taste, feel, smell and sound. These are very important challenges for the writer wanting to make the story come alive.

The author of Freedom Come, Jean Goulbourne, studied and taught history and evidently called upon her scholarship in writing these stories for children.

It isn’t often that we see slave children in stories or even in accounts of slavery. The more striking stories in Freedom Come are about slave children.

The author gives us a glimpse of what it must have been like for children in this era. In the story Cimarron! Cimarron! Goulbourne shows us two young boys taking a break from work (feeding the pigs) to play a little. The bookkeeper on the plantation catches them at play and whips them soundly. We feel the frustration of a way of life which has Alrick, the protagonist, threatening to take his life. Luckily for him, his father, who had escaped to join the free Maroons some years before, returns and rescues him and his mother. They safely escape to a better life in the mountains with the Maroons

Slaves on way to sell produce at market from  Freedom Come

In a gloomier tale, The Whipping, another slave child, this time a girl,  escapes through death. However, the author presents death as preferable to the slave life. In death she is welcomed by her ancestors and we get a feeling that she will be now at peace. This is a gripping first person story with details that make the slave experience come alive in personal ways. The death scene is presented as a celebration.

“There on the sands of a large and wonderful land was a crowd of black people; and the drums were beating and they were dancing; men and women, boys and girls; and the waves washed the shore and the drums beat and the trees waved their branches; and the drums beat and Ole Granpus came out of the crowds and into the sea and his hands were held upwards, welcoming me,and I knew. This was Africa. This was home.”

It is said that many slaves believed that death would carry them back to their home in Africa.The beliefs and superstitions of the slaves are skillfully woven into this story which is mostly about how the slaves themselves interacted with one another in this terrible dehumanizing era.

Slavery was an extremely harsh way of life and it is difficult to use it as a setting for children’s stories since so many of the experiences of the slaves were so painful, physically and emotionally and, no doubt, the kinds of experiences we would like to shield our children from. This collection of stories is meant for the 10 to 12+ age group.

Other stories in this collection deal with the experience of a Taino boy helping his village to celebrate with a feast to which he contributes wild ducks which we watch him catch, Taino style. Another story deals with boys in Port Royal, the famous city of the pirates. The boys learn, first hand from Peter, an old pirate, about one of the more famous raids carried out by the buccaneers -  the raid on  Panama City.  The last story is about the heroic journey of a boy who helped to carry a message to Daddy Sharpe (now a National Hero) on the eve of the Christmas Rebellion in Montego Bay, which helped to hasten the end of slavery.

All the stories bring the history of their era alive. Jean Goulbourne has won many awards and acclaim for her literary skills as a poet and storyteller. The poetic influence can often be seen in the language of her prose. This book is a very useful supplementary reader for students of our past.

Freedom Come was a runner up award winner in the 1999 Vic Reid Award for Children’s Literature, a competition hosted by the National Book Development Council of Jamaica.

New children's book from Jamaica

It's Here!

Carlong Publishers ( Caribbean) Ltd

Everybody said how lucky she was to be going to live with  her mother in the USA, at last . . . but . . . her beloved granny, who is reluctant to see her go, warns: 'Everybody is talking about the American dream. Take care is not a nightmare you going to have'.

 A gorgeous red coat which her mother refuses to buy for her, becomes the symbol of happiness, sophistication and success which Princess hopes to achieve in her new life. But the new life with a mother she barely knows is very challenging. ....."school is different, and everything is different, and sometimes ... sometimes I don't know what to do or how to feel."

Contact Carlong:  email     marketing@carlongpublishers.com
tel  876 9609366 ext 2

Historical stories in Caribbean children’s books

There is not a long list of historical fiction written by Caribbean authors for Caribbean children.

Perhaps it is a psychological problem. Most of our ancestors were uprooted and alienated from their ancestral pasts by slavery, (Africans), indentureship (Indians and Chinese) and indeed it was alienation, too, for many of the Europeans who came. There are few pockets of Carib/Taino descendants- these were the original inhabitants of the Caribbean. Up to fairly recent times even the study of Caribbean history in schools didn’t exist.  Oral history carried some of the stories but modernization has all but wiped out this source. So now, we have to rely on our authors to bring the past alive, as only stories can do, for our children.

Plantation life, on which the Caribbean was built, was no bed of roses; difficult even for the ruling class. Slavery was demeaning and cruel, robbing both masters and slaves of their essential humanity.

A new culture had to be forged out of the disparate elements present in the Caribbean. It has been a painful process for the many, and I think that, as a people, we would rather forget the shame and the pain.

But we can’t change history and as the popular saying goes, we have to know where we are coming from to know where we are going. But,how to deal with it, so that it is not merely sentimental, or damning, or so politically incorrect, in modern terms, that we ‘fraid of it? For example, much as we laud the Maroons for standing up to the British in Jamaica, there are still pockets of people who think that they sold out after they gained their freedom from slavery by helping the planters to catch runaway slaves - so maybe they’re not so heroic after all???

It is also difficult to emerge from the brainwashing which taught us that only European culture was valid. So our heroes couldn’t be heroic. They were ragtag blacks clad in osnaburg, and wicked in their wish for freedom from the masters who enslaved them. Their acts of defiance  - poison, burning the cane fields, rioting - were ‘evil’ acts; by a ‘lawless’ people.That’s how the chroniclers of that past saw the slaves.

Can we, in our stories, give our children a concept of heroism which transcends this? Can we give them stories which equate to the Robin Hoods of the English past, or any of the other European heroes who, in one way or another, changed life for their people. Can osnaburg be made to seem as glamorous as ‘men in tights?’

Of course, in the twentieth century, we got freedom songs and freedom singers and freedom fighters who gained international respect. In Jamaica, our governments have also created national heroes out of past political activists, and have declared a national holiday when we remember them. However, and this is something I usually point out to the aspiring writers for children in my classes, most of what we give the children to read are dry accounts of their dates and the deeds which made them famous. We give them posters of lifeless faces. We expect modern children to automatically understand why (and be enthusiastic about) people who fought for freedom from slavery and for Independence for our country are heroic.. These heroes do not come alive for the modern child, not in the way that fiction could make them.

Writers like Vic Reid (Jamaica) have written compelling historical fiction for children, but we need a lot more of this.

Here are two anecdotes from my own experience.  Draw your own conclusions.

1^st anecdote

When my older grandchildren were about 6 and 7 years old, I was telling them some stories from our past, notably what slavery meant. I told them about the slaves being dissatisfied and wanting their freedom. So, I asked, what do you think they did? The girl was quick to answer. “They went up to JBC to demonstrate.”

(JBC was the former government television station. She was interpreting out of her experience watching television what people did when they were unhappy with their situation.)

2^nd anecdote

Some time ago, I spent one week in Grenada, teaching writing for children, at what was then the Extra-mural Centre. I don’t know if they call them national heroes, but one of their influential political figures was T.A.Marryshow. The Centre was actually in what used to be his house, I was told.  After one class when I had introduced the topic of historical fiction, some students and I were in the car park, below the building. In St. George’s, on every level you have to look up to the next. One of the students remarked that her family used to live in an area below the house. She recalled having seen Marryshow at one of the windows looking out with a ‘trumpet’ at his ear. She also said that the children used to raid the plum tree in his yard, despite being afraid of him. I pointed out that she could use this as basis for a children’s story about the life of Marryshow. Such a story would certainly bring him alive for the children. I don’t think anybody took me up on this.

I like to remind my students that all these important men (and women) would have had children in their lives in some way They would have been fathers, uncles, godfathers etc. How they did or did not interact with the (fictional) children around them would help to give them faces children could understand.

.

Next post I will review Freedom Come by Jean Goulbourne:published by Carlong

 Publishers (Caribbean) Ltd. This book contains five stories about children in Jamaica’s

distant historical  past: Tainos, buccaneers and children in slavery.

And after that I will return to a discussion of Diane Browne’s novels A Tumbling World ... A

Time of Fire and The Ring and the Roaring Water, both time travel stories which take us back to

closer historical times in the twentieth century.

P.S. Since writing this post, I have been delighted to read Gwyneth Harold Davidson's Young Heroes of the Caribbean which marries both the history of the seven Jamaican Heroes with the story of a contemporary 10 year old boy. Title: Young Heroes of the Caribbean. I understand she intends to make it a series. Get a copy here:
www.amazon.com/Young-Heroes-Caribbean-Common-Destiny-ebook/dp/B00B3CUVE4/ 

Hazel Campbell's (me) books available at https://www.lmhpublishing.com/children 
AND
http://www.sangstersbooks.com/products/children-s-books/category/caribbean

Revisiting Caribbean children's book covers and illustrators

LMH publishers

As a writer and editor of children’s books, I find it difficult to understand how illustrators can take on the job of creating illustrations for a story they have not read. Very often, I am told, the artists have no time to read a manuscript, just give them the art brief. I contend that, with the best will in the world, an art brief cannot capture the nuances, the mood, the essence of a story to feed the artists’ creativity, so they are sometimes surprised at the requests for changes as they do not fully understand what is required to complement the story. No wonder some persons complain that the book covers and illustrations for Caribbean children’s books are rarely exciting, and we don’t get anything new by way of technique or vision.

 

My other complaint is the blanket expectation that a children’s book automatically means  whimsy or cartoons; and the lack of appreciation for the requirements of stories for the different age groups within the genre of children’s books. Writers often choose to specialize in writing for specific age groups, perhaps illustrators should do so too. But, since this section of publishing is not well developed in the Caribbean, perhaps there is little incentive to invest time and talent here.

What goes into the design of a book cover? Obviously the intended readership is of extreme importance. If we think of children’s books as covering the age range 0 to 14 years, we need to remember that there are several divisions within this range.

Carlong Publishers

 Easy divisions

0- 3 years –picture books

3-6 years – picture books

6-8 years – picture story books/ early chapter books

8 to 12 years – chapter books/novels

12 to 14 – chapter books/ novels

These age divisions may vary for different publishers. For example, some publishers now use

9 to 13 as a ‘tween age – not quite young adult not completely past chapter books.

These divisions are necessary as guides to writers, illustrators, and readers/purchasers of books. Children's reading readiness, their interests and needs vary from one group to the next, and books should reflect this.

 Can you tell, just by the covers of the books in this post, which age groups are being targeted?

Unfortunately, there is still a tendency to respond to the term children’s books as covering just the picture book ages. Whenever I am asked to read in the children’s section of any function, I point out that although I am an author of children’s books, my stories are for ages 8 and up. I was once asked to read at a morning session at a bookstore where the normal attendance was in the 6 and under age group. I had to abandon my reading plan in favour of something suitable for that age group. Fortunately, the bookstore now has an afternoon session for older children, and both audience and myself were more comfortable when I returned to read for this group.

Carlong publishers

I bring up the importance of the age divisions again, because in the Caribbean, the production of books for children is still, for the most part, in its infancy. The Book Industry of Jamaica (BIAJ) has just recently,for 2011, introduced two sections for children’s book awards- Picture books and Chapter books. Previously there was just one section.They need to consider adding a third, for the YA group (Young Adult).It is not fair to lump together books meant for different age groups in any competition. What standard criteria for judging can be used? A book meant for the YA group will differ from books for adults and should be judged separately. Notwithstanding all this, the fact is that many adults enjoy books for children, and many children

can enjoy books meant for older age groups.

Which brings me back to the problem of book covers. Book designers, of necessity must consider the ages of the intended readership. Illustrations for books in the different age ranges must obviously reflect  the difference in the interests of the readers. What works for one group will not necessarily work for another.

In light of this discussion, I pose this question - who is the best judge of a good book cover?

Jack Mandora

We all know what we want a cover to do – attract readers and buyers. A good cover will also reflect the story’s purpose and appeal specifically to the target age group. In the long run, many of us use very subjective judgements, and your guess may be as good as mine.However, a good story with popular appeal will sell whether the cover has or doesn’t have outstanding artistic appeal. My guess is that many Harry Potter fans, for example, would not really care if the book cover was just plain brown paper with title and author.

Diane Browne

LMH

LMH

Featuring Anansi

Featuring Anansi

 

 

The Anansi festival in Kingston on Saturday afternoon, was a great deal of fun. Many children turned out and thoroughly enjoyed the storytelling. So,too, did the adults in the audience. The storytellers were very good and enlivened their presentations with a lot of interaction with the audience.

Unfortunately the link-up with a similar festival in Miami didn’t come off , so we didn’t get to see Geoffrey Philp launching his new book Marcus and the Amazons.

But back to the storytellers. It struck me again how different storytelling is from reading from one’s book for an audience.

Storytelling demands performance artistry. Constant interaction with the audience is key. The storyteller has to be sharp and utilize the mood of the audience to enhance the story. For example, one story teller, Adzika Simba asked a boy to be the goat in the story. He refused to get up but she wove him and his reaction into the story - to the amusement of the audience.

Another storyteller, Joan Andrea Hutchinson showed how Anansi looks when he is thinking up a plot to outwit persons in the story. “Hand at him jaw. Hand pon him head. Hand pan him jaw”.The children enthusiastically mimicked these actions everytime the story called for Anansi to think.

Amina Blackwood Meeks showed how cockroach did the Dinki Mini ( a traditional Jamaican dance ) and the boy called out to be cockraoch copied the dance to the delight of the audience.

Reading a story or part of a story from one’s book demands a different kind of presentation. Obviously one uses whatever opportunity presents itself for interaction with the audience, but since one is reading from the written word there is not much opportunity to ad lib and change the format, so a reading is rarely dramatic enough to engage all of an audience in the same way storytelling can. And this became obvious as the readers followed the storytellers. Children were listening, but were not as attentive or engrossed as with the storytellers. Many used the opportunity to visit the book tables on the outskirts and get their faces painted or watch a presentation on spiders put on by the Institute of Jamaica.

A good time was had by all. I was only sorry that I had to leave before it all ended. Congratulations to Kelly Magnus and the BIAJ. I hope this becomes an annual treat.

Anything is possible

Anansi Reading by Shannon

Advice to my writing class: If you are going to write for children, successfully, you need to recapture that sense of the newness and wonder of things. The world might be old but a child is new to it and anything is possible.

There’s an ad running on television which tickles me every time I see it. I am not advertising the product, but in essence, the ad shows two young girls watching their mother put cream on her face. They ask her why, and she explains that it makes her look younger. They ask if it really works and she assures them it does.

Cut to the girls plastering the face of their sleeping grandfather with the cream. One says “ He’s going to look so young  when he wakes up." The other agrees “ He’ll look like a baby.”

ANYTHING is possible to the young..

So, release your imagination

Writing for Children

How to Write

For Children

April turned out to be a very busy month. Not much time for blogging. The part I liked best was starting my annual (nowadays) teaching stint of eight weeks  –  four weeks writing for adults and four weeks writing for children. Students register for both, even if they think they are only interested in one segment. Sometimes they find their feet in the segment in which they were not initially interested.

Last week we started the Writing for Children segment. That introductory two hours is always fun. As writers for children know, you have to get in touch with your inner child; be able to see things through the eyes of a child; recapture the wonder of the newness of things.In that first class as we do exercises intended to ‘remember when’, usually the adults begin to grin, sometimes giggle, and generally relax as they share stories of their early youth.

I am looking forward to the results of this week’s homework  –   to lie on the floor in a room in the house and see things from the perspective of a very small child. I have had some real funny responses. One student once said that while on the floor she realized that her household helper had not swept under the bed for some time and got so angry she couldn’t complete the exercise. Obviously she missed the opportunity to recognize those lovely dust bunnies and scary objects from a child’s imagination.

I'm a Winner!

Hectic weekend of activities with the Book Industry Association of Jamaica (BIAJ) - awards ceremony, illustrators workshops, readings etc.
Just briefly announcing that my book Bernie and the Captain's Ghost won the Best Children's Chapter Book Award for 2011. I am very pleased.

http://carlongpublishers.com/book_listing_subject.php?id=32

for all results of this competition see '
http://bookindustryja.com/content/biaj-eleventh-biennial-biaj-national-publishing-and-writing-awards-2011

Writing tips for children's writers

Don't mind the 'foreign' voice on the previous post.  Write4Kids allows their writing tips to be re-posted. As an editor, one of the most frustrating tasks is to have to wade through a poorly presented manuscript. In the Caribbean, a gem can sometimes be discovered from a new writer who hasn't learned all they should about how a book gets published, so I will skim through all the manuscripts which reach me. However, it is a real turn off when it is immediately obvious that a writer has not taken the time to learn at least some of the basics of his/her craft. Maybe this 'foreign' voice will help to convince some to do so.

Your enthusiasm is good, but you want the editor to catch your enthusiasm, so please take some time to learn how to present your work. There are lots of sites on the Internet giving free advice to writers.  Here's one -
Write4Kids blog;  http://www.write4kids.com/blog/2011/03/07/do-you-need-kids-to-write-for-kids/

Submitting to Children's Book Publishers: 3 Steps to Avoiding Rejection...

How not to sell your books

A book marketing newsletter I subscribe to makes this very important point:

All of marketing consists in creating relationships. Real relationships: friends, lovers, partners, warriors, fans.

Another good point is made by a subscriber describing how she sold many copies of her book at airports, restaurants etc, just by carrying copies of the book and telling people face to face about it- Instant sales.
I know I'm going to vex a few persons who might read this post, but I suspect other Caribbean (Maybe it's only in Jamaica???) writers have my experience with this relationship and face to face selling thing.It's another hazard of our small populations.

 Here's how it usually goes: You are at a function, or you meet persons you know well or not-so-well and after the greeting the conversation will go something  like this:
Friend/Foe:   I hear you have a new book out
Me:              Yeah came out earlier this year
F/F               What's the title again?                                                                                                            
Me               Bernie and the Captain's Ghost (Could be another title) It's a children's book
F/F               Where can I get a copy?
Me               It's in the book stores (Duh!)
F/F               You don't have a copy with you?
At this point you'd better say no, because if you say you do and hand it over this is what is likely to happen
F/F              Looks interesting. My son/daughter/nephew/niece/godchild/grandchild would like this.How much is it?
So you give the price gleefully smelling a sale.Then F/F says: "I don't have any cash on me, but call me later at ....... OR  I'll get it to you later" - and walks away with your book.

AND THAT IS TOO OFTEN THE END OF THAT STORY. F/F is never in when you call and if you buck up him/her later you'll get a kind of blank look. He/she can barely remember having taken your book and attitude will suggest you are planning a scam on him/.her.(You're sure I didn't pay you ?)

Then, of course, writer gets shame and drops the issue. Unfortunate!! People who would never think of going into a restaurant and not paying, have no qualms about getting your book for free. It's a mind set we seem to have- books should be borrowed or gifted, but never bought.

At a launch, people (F/Fs) will come expecting to buy a copy of your book,but after that, it's like pulling teeth with your bare hands.
Is it just me with this experience?????

Whose 'tongue'?

Geoffrey Philp posted reference to this article on facebook recently

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/02/decolonizing-my-mind.html

It contains extremely interesting observations on colonization in Africa and India, and how ‘natives’ were  colonized more by language than the gun. 

Here's an extract:          

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.
How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education.

Consequently, the article continues, ex-colonial writers are still rated by their expertise in, and given recognition for use of the ‘mother’ tongue.  Release from this straight -jacket, it seems to suggest, is for writers to return to writing in the native ‘tongue’.

The Caribbean colonial experience is similar, except that the majority of us, coming from Africa, very early lost our languages and our cultures, which were replaced by a (still) confusing mix (adaptations)  –  of what was forced on us, together with our dim memories.  We were thoroughly creolized. So while Indians and Africans never really lost their languages , what do we in the Caribbean have to fall back on?

Our language debate continues  –  local dialects(languages) versus standard ‘Mother tongue’. It is hardly realistic to write a story about children in Jamaica, for example, and use standard English dialogue only, when the majority of our children speak variations  of our creole.

 My Awakening

In my story Good Morning Corner in a collection entitled Ramgoat Dashalong, the protagonist, a wayward street boy, named Ginseng  is taken off the streets of Kingston  by his grandmother to live with her in her rural home high in the hills of Portland. Ginseng is very uncomfortable and regularly ridicules the customs of these rural folk, is disobedient to his grandmother and rude to the older folk.  He is anxious to return to the street life he left behind. The villagers only tolerate him because of their respect for his grandmother.

Then, one night during a storm, he has a magical encounter with his ancestors and begins to understand the importance of family and community.

One of the ancestors, a powerful African woman, gives him the lecture which changes his attitude.

Great –great-great grandmother Addie stood over him. Her voice filled the cave like thunder rolling in from a far distance. Her words echoed  and re-echoed as if to make sure that all who listened, heard and understood.

“Ef you nuh know where you a come from, you cyan know where you a go. The future can ongle come out a the past. One,one smaddy nuh have no strength. Strength come from all the living which everybody roun you do fi you, and wid you.”

In my first draft I had her delivering these words of wisdom in standard English!  although she had previously been using the creole. That’s my colonial heritage – Creole is for entertainment, mostly laughter. To be taken seriously, her wisdom had to be delivered in Standard English.

I was horrified when I realized how my thought processes were working, so  I revised and creolized her speech.  But even then , in writing the words, they came out nearer standard than how she would sound,realistically.

Of course I had in mind the fact that our dialogue is one of the main reasons agents say that our fiction will not be attractive to foreign publishers or to a foreign audience. Since we, as yet, have no standard way of writing the creole each writer is on his own when it comes to how he presents dialogue. It remains an interesting dilemma -  more so in writing for children than for adults. ( Both teachers and parents are uncomfortable with what goes against the Ministry of Education's preferences. After all, the children have to pass standard English exams!!)

 I tell students in my writing classes that I have no answers.  I do what feels right at the moment. The debate will go on for a while yet.