Suniti Namjoshi
The Hindu literary review has a wonderful article by Suniti Namjoshi on writting for children.
I’ve just finished writing my 13th book for children. But for most of my writing life, I haven’t thought of myself as a children’s writer. And it has finally occurred to me to ask why there’s such a discrepancy between the ima ges of children in my books for adults and my idea of the child in my books for children.
I don’t write poems for children, though in my poems for adults children figure considerably. Here’s a recent poem:
Weather Child
Sometimes the air in which roses
grow and trees thrive turns boisterous,
then rough, it tousles their foliage, then knocks
them down so that a child watching all this
out of a window thinks without knowing
what it’s thinking: that’s how it must be,
living with a parent with an uncertain temper.
Sycorax (2006)
What I’m trying to catch here is the vulnerability of children to whatever is going on around them. It is not, however, a poem I would read to a child, particularly not to a child who I knew was living in a violent atmosphere.
But then what sort of poems or stories might I be writing for such a child? Relatively innocuous stories in which dragons are dealt with, protagonists prosper and everything turns out happily in the end? But this escapist norm is a contradiction. According to Auden, the function of poetry is to disenchant. Do different rules apply to children? Are they to be offered escapist fantasies?
Dealing with intensity
I think what I’m admitting to is that I am afraid to deal in intense emotion when my reader is a child. And I think I am assuming that the readers of my children’s books are well balanced, reasonable children, who feel loved and secure, and who are rather like the protagonists in the Aditi books.
Here is another poem from a sequence called “Discourse with the Dead”. My father was killed in a plane crash when I was 12. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year, because I had been away at school; and before I could see him again, I was told he had been killed. And so, for years after that I had recurrent dreams in which he hadn’t been killed, he had just got lost and had now returned.
He died when she was ten in a distant country and therefore the dreams wouldn’t stop.
She made nightly journeys,
climbed out of bed,
walked to the shore.
Who is that sleeping giant?
Not your father — of his bones
are coral made.
She examined his body — his gills
were slits —
then heaved him up quickly
on the palm
of one hand
(like a gigantic balloon,
like a bloated whale)
hurried home with him.
From “Discourse with the Dead” in The Authentic Lie (1982)
People talk of the carefree days of childhood, but how can death be kept far away from children? It’s all around us. And yet, in the Aditi books, nobody gets killed.
I don’t know whether it’s cowardice or incompetence that makes me shy away from death in the children’s books, or whether the atmosphere of the books is such that any serious attempt to deal with death would be incongruent.
In a sequence of poems called “Snapshots of Caliban” I draw on figures from Shakespeare’s “Tempest”. Young Caliban and Miranda are not altogether unlikeable, but they are hardly charming. Miranda actually tries to poison Caliban, and Caliban — I’ve made Caliban female in this sequence — is a greedy, little monster who can’t see why she shouldn’t get her own way. Here’s one of the poems:
There’s something wrong with Caliban.
Is it her shape? Is it her size?
If I could say that Caliban is stupid,
then that might help, but she can read and write
and sometimes her speech is so lucid.
She does not feel? But I’ve heard her howling:
she howls like a dog or some tiresome animal,
and she sobs at night.
Yet she is Caliban. I’ve seen her gaping
at the blue heavens, or at me,
and I fear her dream. For there is something
I dislike so thoroughly about Caliban:
if she had her way, she would rule the island,
and I will not have it.
“Snapshots of Caliban”, From
the Bedside Book of Nightmares (1984)
That is yet another poem I would not offer to the young reader for fear that what it says about the nature of children is not flattering. What’s more, it suggests that it’s possible for guardians to be murderous rather than protective. Clearly, I seem to think that a child would find such knowledge devastating.
But perhaps children are not such delicate creatures. Bad things do happen to children in real life, and in spite of that children do survive, though with the old hurts still within them. Death exists. There are unloving parents and indifferent adults. And there are raging emotions within the child, which can be frightening. Fairy tales acknowledge this, but in such tales the more frightening aspects of human nature are often attributed to non-human creatures.
I’m not sure why these truths about the unpleasant side of human life have to be displaced and put into fairy tale form. Perhaps to make them more bearable for children? Perhaps for the same reason that the fable form makes savage satire more palatable.
However, it’s not just the content of what is being said to children which matters, but the tone as well. What is the point in shouting at a traumatised child or at any child for that matter? I can be savagely satirical with grown ups. But if such satire were directed at a child, she or he might feel like giving up altogether.
Now, when it comes to children, if I have to exclude lyric poetry because the intensity is too great, and if satire and irony won’t do, because the tone is too severe, then what’s left? These qualities are my strengths. For each writer the strategies are different.
In the end I decided to ask the child I once was what I might have wanted and needed all those years ago. After all, it was that child who was informing the poems for adults. Poems aren’t mere self-expression, but experience is the stuff they are made out of, it’s the raw material. It took me a while to go back all those years and to find my nine-year-old self.
I found her in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills. She was reading a book. “Look,” I said, “I’ve come a long way to see if there’s anything I can do for you.” She just looked at me and didn’t say anything, but I could hear her thoughts. If I matter, why am I here? Tell me I’m lovable, well, likeable. That I have a brain worth attending to. Tell me how to make sense out of all sorts of things that don’t make sense. Tell me who or what I can be. Talk to me. Pay attention to me. Answer my questions. Engage with me. Treat me as though I was worthwhile. Be a friend? Say something interesting? Show me, teach me something interesting.
I put my arm around her. “Yes. I can do that,” I said. “No intense emotion in a concentrated poem. All right. No savage satire and complex irony. Okay. I don’t know how to give you those in a children’s story. But there is something else I can do. I can subvert received wisdom so lightly that you won’t even notice what I’ve done. I can give you weapons that will help to protect you. I can make you smile. And I can help you to think for yourself and to write your own stories when you feel like.”
Two-way process
“So then, Lesson No. 1,” I went on still talking to her inside my head, “grown ups are fallible. Even the Marine Sage needs Aditi and Siril to help her to breathe air again. As for the Island Sage, her extreme concentration is all very well, but she nearly lets Aditi and the others get massacred before she wakes up and stops the lionesses.”
And so we talk, but the exchange is not one-sided. I’ve learnt a few things from her as well. Much of what I’ve learnt has gone into the books for grown ups. I think I’ve also learnt what it is I’m trying to do when I write for children. I’m telling them to think. I’m saying, “It’s your best weapon. You don’t necessarily have to be who other people say you are, like the Budapest Changeling; but how other people see you, does affect you, so watch out for that. Or when people talk about ‘side-effects’, consider what it means. (Aditi and the Techno Sage). They’re the effects they don’t particularly want you to look at. Or again, what’s the difference between appearance and reality, and how much does it have to do with what people are willing to believe? (Aditi and the Thames Dragon) And if you’ve been defined as a ‘monster’, you don’t necessarily have to feel bad about yourself. You can take the term and play with it as Grendel and Beautiful (the elephant) do (Aditi and her Friends meet Grendel).” And so I do my best to help her to think without actually lecturing her.
I don’t know whether the nine year old I once was would have enjoyed the encounter between Grendel and Beautiful. What’s clear though is that I stumbled into being a children’s writer because I had to. There has to be a two-way interchange between the adult and the child. The adult can’t just use the child’s experience as raw material for her poems and deal with the pain in that way. As best as I can I have to say something to the child, and allow myself to understand that the child as reader is very like the child in the poems.
I’ve just finished writing my 13th book for children. But for most of my writing life, I haven’t thought of myself as a children’s writer. And it has finally occurred to me to ask why there’s such a discrepancy between the ima ges of children in my books for adults and my idea of the child in my books for children.
I don’t write poems for children, though in my poems for adults children figure considerably. Here’s a recent poem:
Weather Child
Sometimes the air in which roses
grow and trees thrive turns boisterous,
then rough, it tousles their foliage, then knocks
them down so that a child watching all this
out of a window thinks without knowing
what it’s thinking: that’s how it must be,
living with a parent with an uncertain temper.
Sycorax (2006)
What I’m trying to catch here is the vulnerability of children to whatever is going on around them. It is not, however, a poem I would read to a child, particularly not to a child who I knew was living in a violent atmosphere.
But then what sort of poems or stories might I be writing for such a child? Relatively innocuous stories in which dragons are dealt with, protagonists prosper and everything turns out happily in the end? But this escapist norm is a contradiction. According to Auden, the function of poetry is to disenchant. Do different rules apply to children? Are they to be offered escapist fantasies?
Dealing with intensity
I think what I’m admitting to is that I am afraid to deal in intense emotion when my reader is a child. And I think I am assuming that the readers of my children’s books are well balanced, reasonable children, who feel loved and secure, and who are rather like the protagonists in the Aditi books.
Here is another poem from a sequence called “Discourse with the Dead”. My father was killed in a plane crash when I was 12. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year, because I had been away at school; and before I could see him again, I was told he had been killed. And so, for years after that I had recurrent dreams in which he hadn’t been killed, he had just got lost and had now returned.
He died when she was ten in a distant country and therefore the dreams wouldn’t stop.
She made nightly journeys,
climbed out of bed,
walked to the shore.
Who is that sleeping giant?
Not your father — of his bones
are coral made.
She examined his body — his gills
were slits —
then heaved him up quickly
on the palm
of one hand
(like a gigantic balloon,
like a bloated whale)
hurried home with him.
From “Discourse with the Dead” in The Authentic Lie (1982)
People talk of the carefree days of childhood, but how can death be kept far away from children? It’s all around us. And yet, in the Aditi books, nobody gets killed.
I don’t know whether it’s cowardice or incompetence that makes me shy away from death in the children’s books, or whether the atmosphere of the books is such that any serious attempt to deal with death would be incongruent.
In a sequence of poems called “Snapshots of Caliban” I draw on figures from Shakespeare’s “Tempest”. Young Caliban and Miranda are not altogether unlikeable, but they are hardly charming. Miranda actually tries to poison Caliban, and Caliban — I’ve made Caliban female in this sequence — is a greedy, little monster who can’t see why she shouldn’t get her own way. Here’s one of the poems:
There’s something wrong with Caliban.
Is it her shape? Is it her size?
If I could say that Caliban is stupid,
then that might help, but she can read and write
and sometimes her speech is so lucid.
She does not feel? But I’ve heard her howling:
she howls like a dog or some tiresome animal,
and she sobs at night.
Yet she is Caliban. I’ve seen her gaping
at the blue heavens, or at me,
and I fear her dream. For there is something
I dislike so thoroughly about Caliban:
if she had her way, she would rule the island,
and I will not have it.
“Snapshots of Caliban”, From
the Bedside Book of Nightmares (1984)
That is yet another poem I would not offer to the young reader for fear that what it says about the nature of children is not flattering. What’s more, it suggests that it’s possible for guardians to be murderous rather than protective. Clearly, I seem to think that a child would find such knowledge devastating.
But perhaps children are not such delicate creatures. Bad things do happen to children in real life, and in spite of that children do survive, though with the old hurts still within them. Death exists. There are unloving parents and indifferent adults. And there are raging emotions within the child, which can be frightening. Fairy tales acknowledge this, but in such tales the more frightening aspects of human nature are often attributed to non-human creatures.
I’m not sure why these truths about the unpleasant side of human life have to be displaced and put into fairy tale form. Perhaps to make them more bearable for children? Perhaps for the same reason that the fable form makes savage satire more palatable.
However, it’s not just the content of what is being said to children which matters, but the tone as well. What is the point in shouting at a traumatised child or at any child for that matter? I can be savagely satirical with grown ups. But if such satire were directed at a child, she or he might feel like giving up altogether.
Now, when it comes to children, if I have to exclude lyric poetry because the intensity is too great, and if satire and irony won’t do, because the tone is too severe, then what’s left? These qualities are my strengths. For each writer the strategies are different.
In the end I decided to ask the child I once was what I might have wanted and needed all those years ago. After all, it was that child who was informing the poems for adults. Poems aren’t mere self-expression, but experience is the stuff they are made out of, it’s the raw material. It took me a while to go back all those years and to find my nine-year-old self.
I found her in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills. She was reading a book. “Look,” I said, “I’ve come a long way to see if there’s anything I can do for you.” She just looked at me and didn’t say anything, but I could hear her thoughts. If I matter, why am I here? Tell me I’m lovable, well, likeable. That I have a brain worth attending to. Tell me how to make sense out of all sorts of things that don’t make sense. Tell me who or what I can be. Talk to me. Pay attention to me. Answer my questions. Engage with me. Treat me as though I was worthwhile. Be a friend? Say something interesting? Show me, teach me something interesting.
I put my arm around her. “Yes. I can do that,” I said. “No intense emotion in a concentrated poem. All right. No savage satire and complex irony. Okay. I don’t know how to give you those in a children’s story. But there is something else I can do. I can subvert received wisdom so lightly that you won’t even notice what I’ve done. I can give you weapons that will help to protect you. I can make you smile. And I can help you to think for yourself and to write your own stories when you feel like.”
Two-way process
“So then, Lesson No. 1,” I went on still talking to her inside my head, “grown ups are fallible. Even the Marine Sage needs Aditi and Siril to help her to breathe air again. As for the Island Sage, her extreme concentration is all very well, but she nearly lets Aditi and the others get massacred before she wakes up and stops the lionesses.”
And so we talk, but the exchange is not one-sided. I’ve learnt a few things from her as well. Much of what I’ve learnt has gone into the books for grown ups. I think I’ve also learnt what it is I’m trying to do when I write for children. I’m telling them to think. I’m saying, “It’s your best weapon. You don’t necessarily have to be who other people say you are, like the Budapest Changeling; but how other people see you, does affect you, so watch out for that. Or when people talk about ‘side-effects’, consider what it means. (Aditi and the Techno Sage). They’re the effects they don’t particularly want you to look at. Or again, what’s the difference between appearance and reality, and how much does it have to do with what people are willing to believe? (Aditi and the Thames Dragon) And if you’ve been defined as a ‘monster’, you don’t necessarily have to feel bad about yourself. You can take the term and play with it as Grendel and Beautiful (the elephant) do (Aditi and her Friends meet Grendel).” And so I do my best to help her to think without actually lecturing her.
I don’t know whether the nine year old I once was would have enjoyed the encounter between Grendel and Beautiful. What’s clear though is that I stumbled into being a children’s writer because I had to. There has to be a two-way interchange between the adult and the child. The adult can’t just use the child’s experience as raw material for her poems and deal with the pain in that way. As best as I can I have to say something to the child, and allow myself to understand that the child as reader is very like the child in the poems.
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