Keynote Speeches

The unabridged speeches follow at the end of this page, alphabetically by the surname of the speakers.

Monday

09.00 - 10.30   Plenary Session 1

Fernando Savater, Spain

The Narrative Thinking

The history of philosophy consists of not only abstract discussions and syllogisms, but also – and maybe in particular – of stories, fables and myths. The fiction and the story has played a decisive role in the development of the Western way of thinking and in the creation of classic systems like those by Platon, Kant or Nietzsche. What is the connection between the narrative and the philosophical way of thinking?

Spanish author and professor in philosophy, born in 1947, began his career as an assistant lecturer. After a brief spell in Franco's jails, Savater was expelled from the teaching profession in 1971 for political reasons. In 1975, he earned his doctorate, and he has since been a teacher of ethics and philosophy, presently in Madrid.

Savater, who describes himself as “more a philosophy teacher than a philosopher,” has written more than 45 works – essays, novels and children's books. His philosophical ideas, detailed in a personal philosophical dictionary, are based on thoughtful rebellion against the establishment, with a touch of humour and irony.

His speciality is ethics, which he defines as “the belief that not everything is equally valuable and that there are reasons for choosing one course of action over another.” He has written several books on the subject, including The Task of the Hero (1982), The Questions of Life: Invitation to Philosophy (1982), Ethics as Self-Respect (1988) and Ethics for Amador (1991), which has been translated into numerous languages.

In 1997, he published The Value of Education, an essay dedicated to his mother, who was his first teacher, in which he professes that education is the cure for most of society's ills. “Intolerance, fundamentalism and extreme nationalism must be tackled from schooldays on,” he says.

Savater has been given several prizes for his contribution to the defence and promotion of freedom, tolerance and human rights.

Torben Weinreich, Denmark

How children's literature has reflected actual history

– and how historical experiences have influenced stories for children

Children's literature has its own history, but is also a part of history itself. From the beginning, religious and political ideas and conceptions have influenced on children's literature. Children's literature is art, but it is also pedagogy. When we write, publish and present literature for children, we always do it with regards to upbringing and education. Therefore kindergartens, schools and libraries play an enormous role in the history of children's literature. And therefore children's literature can be seen as a reflected mirror of society.

Torben Weinreich, born 1946, grew up in a suburb near Copenhagen. He studied biology, but changed direction and became a teacher. In the middle of the 1970's, he worked as a researcher on the dissemination of children's literature. Later he took a degree in pedagogy, writing his thesis on comics.

In 1975, a publisher asked him to write a book about unemployment from a socialistic point of view. Accepting the challenge, he wrote his first novel Arbejdsløs (”Unemployed”) which is a mix of fiction and nonfiction. A couple of years later, Weinreich wrote De sorte skygger (”The Black Shadows”), about a workplace and problems because of a strike. With his trilogy Manden i vinduet (”The Man in the Window”), Drengen i skoven (”The Boy in the Forest”) and Pigen i sneen (”The Girl in the Snow”), he created a kind of opposite image to the slight idealization of the 1950's which was dominating in books from the 1980's. In 1981, Weinreich received the annual of the Ministry of Culture for Manden i vinduet.

In 1992, Torben Weinreich took a Ph.D., his dissertation ”Askepots sko” (”Cinderella's Shoes”) presenting an analysis of the past 25 years of children's literature and pedagogy of literature. In 1998, he was appointed professor of children's literature and director of the newly established Centre for Children's Literature, where he remained until his retirement in 2005.

Torben Weinreich has written several important books about children's literature. He characterizes

himself as a generalist regarding his views on literature, and takes a special interest in contexts.

In 2007, he was awarded the IRSCL Award, the most prestigious award for research in children's literature, for his book Historien om børnelitteratur (”The Story of Children's Literature”). In addition to this he was awarded the Klods Hans Prize (Simple Simon Prize) also in 2007 by IBBY Denmark for his work promoting children's literature in Denmark.

Tuesday

09.00 - 10.30   Plenary Session 3

Michèle Petit, France

Children's Reading in Times of Crisis

Programs in which reading has an essential role are presently developed in different places throughout the world, in spaces in crisis – in war situations or repeated violence, of populations' forced moves or abrupt economic degradation, etc. Numerous professionals (librarians, teachers, social or humanitarian workers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, writers) refer to reading, frequently connected to other cultural activities, in order to help children, adolescents and adults to construct or re-construct themselves. Setting out from a research that was conducted mainly in Latin-American countries, some hints will be raised in an attempt to explain the proceses that are triggered, and to specify the benefits that might be expected from these programs.

Michèle Petit is an anthropologist in the National Center for Scientific Research (Paris). Since 1992, she has been conducting research on reading and relationship with books, with a qualitative methodology. She coordinated research on reading in rural areas, and on the role of libraries in the fight against exclusion and relegation, based on interviews with young people in low-income neighborhoods of French cities. As a prolongation, she analysed the contribution of reading in the elaboration of subjectivity, especially in times of crisis.  

Grete Haagenrud, Norway

Children in Times of War: a story from Norway

I was nearly fifty years old when I wrote five books about Sofie who is 5-6 years old and Kathrine who is 7-8 years old. Their story is built on my own childhood in Finnmark in northern Norway during World War II. I wrote about everyday life during the war, bomb raids, German soldiers and Russian prisoners. In autumn 1944, Finnmark was burnt by the German soldiers and the population was forced to evacuate. In my lecture, I'll tell how it is for a child to see her home burning, to loose almost everything and be a refugee in her own country - and how difficult it is to come back after the war and see that the town from the days of her childhood is gone. But she discovers the churchyard and her grandmother's grave where wild flowers are blooming, and the flowers bring her hope for the future.

Grethe Haagenrud was born in 1938, in Vardø in the eastern part of Norway. She soon moved to another village, Vadsø. This village was bombed during the Second World War. The inhabitants were evacuated, and they did not return until after the war. Grethe Haagenrud's family then settled in Kirkenes. Thus, her writing is distinctly influenced by growing up in the arctic Finnmarken, where the war was part of everyday life.

Already as a child, Grethe Haagenrud wanted to become a writer. But the passion for writing faded away as she was reproached for misspelling. She had been working as a teacher for many years before she felt the passion for writing again. Her first writings were texts of memories based on her own and her sister's childhood. These memories were first broadcasted by the Norwegian radio as episodes in a children's program, and later (1991) published as a book for which Haagenrud received the Norwegian Ministry of Culture's first novel-award. The five books about Sofie og Kathrine (“Sofie and Kathrine”) , who grew up in Finnmarken in wartime and had to live as refugees in their own country, describe, as Haagenrud herself expresses, just how she felt as a little girl.

Despite her late start as a writer, Haagenrud has left distinguished marks . Thus, Det gror i brent jord (”It grows in burned earth”) , which is the last volume in the series Sofie og Katrine , was nominated to the Norwegian literary prize, Brageprisen, and in 1998 it was included in IBBY's Honour List. In the museum Grenslandsmuseet in Kirkenes, the main characters of the novels, Sofie and Katrine, have their own section, with six central themes about children and war.

Haagenrud has also written three books about Johanne og Lyder ( ”Johanne and Lyder”), set in the present days in Finnmarken. These books describe the conditions of life for children and adults in the outskirts, with active children playing the lead. She has written some short stories as well.

In 2006, Grete Haagenrud was awarded the Teskjekerringa-prize (The teaspoon-woman-award) - the award named after the popular Norwegian author Alf Prøysen. Since 2005, she receives the Norwegian lifelong scholarship called ”statsstipendiet”.

www.skrift.no/haagenrud/

Josefine Ottesen, Denmark

Recreating the Story of Your Life: How to overcome cruelty

"Leave hate and bitterness to those who are not strong enough to love" is an old gypsy saying. But how do you do that if you have been a victim of hate, threats and humiliations, even though you have done nothing to warrant it other than having been born into a particular family, culture or race? Choose your stories with care! Because through the way you tell others about yourself, your lineage and your tribe, you are taking part in a decision of whether the spiral of hate and evil can be broken or whether it will escalate. It is the story that forms our minds, our very selves and our expectations of the world that surrounds us. Therefore, it is important to tell stories that will bring the world towards friendship and love. But remember: we cannot talk about the light without relating it to the darkness.

Josefine Ottesen was born in 1956 in Copenhagen. Her mother, Thea Bank Jensen, was a writer, storyteller and educator of German-Jewish-Hungarian origin, and already as a child Josefine wrote poems and fables herself. But she was more interested in theatre and became a trained actor, and she has spent many years performing and creating theatre with and for children and teens.

In 1983, she made her debut as an author, and so far has had nearly 60 books published. Her preferred genres are folktales and fantasy. In 1987, her first fantasy novel, Eventyret om fjeren og rosen ( ”The Tale of t he Feather and the Rose”), which differed from the trends in Danish children's literature, was published; it received the Ministry of Culture's Children's Book Award. Her own children play an important role for her writing; for example, her son's interest already as a small kid in male values, made her take an interest in the Icelandic Sagas and martial arts, as reflected in the Drageherre-series (”Dragon Master”), which is based upon classical heroic virtues and follows the structure of mythological storytelling. A unique contribution to young people with reading problems, it has been awarded the Children's Libraries' Cultural Award in 2004.

However, it's mainly thanks to the fantasy trilogy Historien om Mira (”The Story of Mira”), she has been invited as a plenary speaker. It takes its outset in a wish to examine the concept of suffering, partly inspired by her own family background, partly influenced by parents' efforts to provide their children with a smooth life, devoid of any adversities. Mira has to fight the demons who have possessed her people, and undertake responsibilities she may not be ready for.

Josefine Ottesen has become increasingly significant as one of Denmark's most widely read and appreciated authors of books for children and the young. She has received several national awards and has been nominated to several international. She was the Danish candidate for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2006.

Some of her books have been translated, e.g. into Dutch, French, German, Norwegian and Swedish.

www.josefineottesen.dk

11.00 - 12.30   Plenary Session 4

Ana Maria Machado, Brazil

Cultural heritage reflected in literature for children

The author examines her personal experiences and thoughts about some aspects of how cultural and ethnic heritages are described in children's literature. She writes from different viewpoints. She begins the paper by digging up from her memories of a Latin American child reading and listening to stories from different sources and then she continues from an intellectual adult analysis, both as a scholar and a fiction writer. By doing so, she discusses how the consciousness of the past, as shown in books, may influence young generations. On the other hand, Machado also discusses the role played by local and foreign backgrounds, characters and historical references in books for children and their role in building up or relieving cultural tensions.

One of the most complete and versatile Brazilian authors, Ana Maria Machado is a member of Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2003. In 2001, she had been awarded the Machado de Assis prize -- Brazil's most prestigious National Award in Literature, given every year to an author for the whole body of work. It focused mainly on her books for adults. In 2000, she had won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the most important international award given to a living children's books author for the body of her work.

Ana Maria Machado was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1941. Formerly a painter, she studied at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and at the MOMA in New York and had several exhibitions. After graduating in Roman Languages, she studied with Roland Barthes and took her Ph.D. at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, when in exile. She lectured on the Theory of Literature and Brazilian Literature at the University of Rio. As a jornalist, she worked for ELLE magazine in Paris and for the BBC in London, as well as for several newspapers in Brazil, where she had for five years a weekly column on children's books and for 18 years she run the country's first children's bookstore.

She began writing books in 1969 and has published over 100 titles, both for children and adults. They have sold over 18,5 million copies and have been adapted to the stage and the screen.

Her work for adults is considered by the critics one of the most important in Brazilian contemporary literature. Her work for children has been published in 18 countries and has received all the main awards in Brazil, as well as some prizes abroad. She is a Fellow of the Cambridge Literature Seminar, in England, and in 1997 was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was Adjoint Professor of Brazilian Literature in the 1999 Spring Term.

Machado lives in Rio, has three children and two grandchildren.

Wednesday

09.00 - 10.30   Plenary Session 5

Ngarmpun (Jane) Vejjajiva , Thailand

The Relevance of Myths and Legends in Contemporary Thai Children's Literature

A look at Thai children's books confirms the theory that a nation's cultural heritage is very much alive in contemporary children's literature. A number of Thai writers find sources of inspiration from classical literature and use them to renarrate new versions either by basing the stories on traditional literary masterpieces while adding new imaginative ingredients, or by borrowing certain characters to create new stories. An example of the mix of old and new is found in comic books. From traditional Thai style comics with realistic cartoons telling ghost and drama stories, we find today a new breed of comics with Japanese style cartoons depicting classical literatures and folktales. Thus, traditional Thai literature is still dynamic and continues to be ‘reborn' in contemporary children's works with new interesting elements.

Like most Thais, she has adopted a short nickname, so most people know her as "Jane".

Jane Vejjajiva was born in 1963 in London where her parents completed their medical studies. She returned to Thailand at the age of 3 and grew up in Bangkok . Having cerebral palsy from birth which limits her movements, she finds comfort from books which open to her an imaginary world. Her skills in languages led her to graduate with first honours Bachelor Arts (French literature) from Thammasat University . She then furthered her studies at Translators and Interpreters School (French, English and Italian) in Brussels . She started her career as a translator in a magazine publisher in 1988 before setting up her own company publishing and editing a magazine for children until 1995. She is now running a copyright agency, Silkroad Publishers Agency.
She also works as freelance translator. Her translations include Seta by Alessandro Baricco, Le moine et le philosophe by Jean-Fran ç ois Revel & Mathieu Ricard, The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White. In 1999, she was decorated Ch evalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Culture of France.

The Happiness of Kati (2003), her first novel, is about a young Thai girl mourning the death of her mother, yet also enjoying life in a small Thai village on the banks of the Chao Phraya River , living with her grandmother and cousins. It won the SEA Write Award in 2006 and is now in its 43rd print-run with 6 languages already licensed. A major film will also be made from the book and is scheduled to be released in April 2008.

Sharif Kanaana, Palestina

Stories Told by & for Children in Today's Society: The Palestinian experience

This paper looks at stories told by Palestinian children, discerns their similarities to traditional folktales and draws from this analysis rules for writing, editing and publishing stories for today's children and comments on the principles of freedom of speech versus morality involved in the banning of some children's literature. The paper starts with the reasons for collecting stories told by Palestinian children during the first Intifada and elicits the main themes of these stories and the main characteristics of the heroes in these stories. These are then compared and contrasted with their counterparts in traditional Palestinian folktales and in aspects of children's cognitive make-up, and points of agreement among the three are made explicit and illustrated by specific examples. These points help draw conclusions on why some children's books -- including one written by this speaker – are being banned and, more importantly, what principles should be observed in writing, editing and publishing children's books, if the interests of the children, not the adults, are to be served.

Sharif Kanaana, born in 1935, is a Palestinian ethnologist at the Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. His specialty is Palestinian oral history, narrated history as it appears in the mouth of the people and vanishes.

Kanaana was educated in the U.S., with a BA in psychology and economics, a MA and a PhD in anthropology,

For fifteen years Kanaana has observed how much Palestinians communicate through jokes and anecdotes. He has compiled thousands of them in boxes and on file cards. Until recently the most popular were Palestinian Arafat jokes. Kanaana can tell hundreds of them. "I want a Palestinian state," Arafat says to God, who wishes to fulfill a wish for him. God hummed and hawed. "It will not happen in your lifetime, Arafat." "I want Jerusalem ." "Nor will this happen in your lifetime, Arafat." "Then at least I want to be as good-looking as George Clooney." "Arafat!" says God, "that won't even happen in my lifetime." Book Review.

In March 2007, the Hamas-supervised Education Ministry removed from school libraries “Speak, Bird, Speak Again,” a 400-page anthology of tales narrated by Palestinian women, reportedly because of mild sexual innuendo. The book was assembled by Sharif Kanaana and Ibrahim Muhawi, and first published in English in 1989 by the University of California, Berkeley. 

Ondjaki (Ndalu de Almeida), Angola

Let's Share the Dream: Stories for children in Angola

After 33 years of independence and 6 years of peace, Angola is a country of many writers and many stories. But more stories should have been written for children. Is the war a cause for this? And what's the place of the elders in this process? Through historical data, facts, and examples, Ondjaki analyses the present situation of the Angolan literature for children.

Ondjaki was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1977. A novelist and poet, he writes also for cinema and theatre, plays as an actor, and paints. He has studied sociology in Portugal, concluding with a study of the great Angolan writer Luandino Vieira.

Ondjaki has published two books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and three novels, e.g. Bom dia camaradas, published in English and German translation, as well as two children's books: “Ynari: the girl with five braids”, and “The Lion and the smart Rabbit” (published in Brazil). Some of his books are translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, some short stories even into Chinese.

Among 382 works in Portuguese language, Bom dia camaradas was one out of ten shortlisted for the important Telecom de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa 2007 Prize. It's a boy's lighthearted account of his daily life at home and in school, but underneath lies a satirical view of life right after the independence, influenced by the ongoing civil war. “Childhood is a previous period that keeps coming back,” has Ondjaki said.

According to himself, Ondjaki likes to write, to travel and to dream.  

11.00 - 12.30   Plenary Session 6

Rukhsana Khan, Canada

Freedom of Speech vs. Cultural Sensitivity:

Balancing the right to create freely vs. the need of people to be respected

Freedom of speech as a fundamental right in Western cultures was a hard won victory for the enlightened masses. It meant that government could not censor opposition points of view and art could flourish and challenge petty bigotries and corrupt establishments. It is a cornerstone of Western civilisation, and yet this freedom is not necessarily one that is universally or even consistently upheld. Even in the West, there are times when the majority of people feel that freedom of expression goes too far, when nefarious individuals hide behind it to subtly and not so subtly attack cultural identities. It is always the most difficult to judge between two rights: the right of people to create what they wish vs the right of people from other cultures to be respected. Where do we draw the line? The world has become a smaller arena. No longer can a cartoon in Denmark go unnoticed on the other side the world. Images and stories are powerful. They can evoke passionate emotions, no less so when they are meant for children. The beauty of children's literature is that it often leads the way in promoting tolerance and justice. With increased globalization it is time to find a new balance, where both these rights, the one to create freely, and the right to be respected, can find a compromise.

Rukhsana Khan is an award winning author and storyteller. She was born in Lahore, Pakistan and immigrated to Canada, with her family, at the age of three. She grew up in the small town of Dundas, Ontario.

Rukhsana has a down-to-earth, humourous style of presentation. Some of her presentations tackle serious subject matter such as child refugees, but she does so with a light touch that engages listeners without trivializing the situation. With her years of storytelling experience and wide repertoire of stories, her presentations work well for various age groups and audience types. 

She has presented at schools and communities all across Canada and in many parts of the U.S. She has also presented at the 2006 American Library Association conference in New Orleans, and the 2004 IBBY congress in Cape Town. She was a featured artist at the 2007 Universal Forum of Cultures in Monterrey, Mexico.

Rukhsana began by writing for community magazines and went on to write songs and stories for the Adam's World children's videos. She currently has seven books published and others under contract. 

Rukhsana is a member of SCBWI, The Writers Union of Canada, CANSCAIP, and the Storytelling School of Toronto. She tells tales of India, Persia, the Middle East, as well as her own stories. She has four children, and lives in Toronto with her husband and family.

www.rukhsanakhan.com

Mats Wahl, Sweden

Do You Remember Diogenes?

On the memory of distant days and imagined nights.

On the tales often told.

On the mystery of truth within a lie.

On getting in and out of the barrel.

Mats Wahl was born 1945 in Malmö, in the south of Sweden. When he was two, he moved with his mother to the island of Gotland to live with his grand parents, and here he grew up. His grandfather was a good interlocutor, who would often read aloud to the boy, and his grandmother had a gift for storytelling. When he was 12, Mats moved with his mother and her husband to Stockholm. His beautiful school-friend Katarina remained in Gotland, and with her the experience that your beloved can disappear, a theme which often appears in Wahl's books, e.g. Maj Darlin.

When Mats was 16 years, the dramatic suicide of the author Ernest Hemingway made headlines.

Mats went to the library to borrow Farewell to arms. After reading this story, he knew he should be a writer.

Mats Wahl studied literature and psychology. He worked almost for 20 years as a teacher for young misfits, and his first book is based on his experiences with this work: ”På spaning efter växandets punkt” (1978). His first novel was Honungsdrömmen (”The Honey dream”, 1980), about childhood in the 1950's. The biographical novel Maj Darlin (1988) takes place in the 1950's on the author's childhood island. The novel tells with warmth and humour about the relationship between two friends who fall in love with the same girl, and the shock and sorrow they feel after her death.

Mats Wahl has published several novels, plays and television series. The latest is the powerful social novel Återkomst (”The Return”), which is also the last volume in a quartet of detective stories.

The author has received numerous awards, e.g. “Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis”, the Swedish

“Kungliga Dramatiska Teaterns Pris för bästa pjäs för barn & unga” (The Royal Dramatical

Theatre's prize for the best play for children & young people), the Nordic ”Nordiska Skolbibliotekariernas Pris” (The Nordic School Librarians' Award), the Swedish ”Nils Holgerson-plaketten”.

Peter Sís, USA

Orbis Pictus: Drawn into the World

Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) from Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic, is the author of Orbis Pictus (Pictures of the World), which has been acclaimed as the first ever picture book for children and is a point of connection for my discussion. In my lecture I will talk about my inspirations and aspirations as an author-illustrator for bringing historical and personal stories to life in picture books. I want to embrace the world, as Comenius did, and having been born in the middle of a century, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of political conflict, as he was, I feel I am in a unique position to do this. In my books I celebrate independent thinkers, seekers, and explorers, be they children or historical icons in hopes of promoting a world where people can live together in harmony.

Peter Sís is an internationally acclaimed illustrator, author, and filmmaker. He was born in Brno , Czechoslovakia , in 1949, and attended the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and the Royal College of Art in London. He began his career as a filmmaker and won the Golden Bear Award at the 1980 West Berlin Film Festival for an animated short. He has also won the Grand Prix Toronto and the Cine Golden Eagle Award, and in 1983 collaborated with Bob Dylan on You Got to Serve Somebody. His film work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1982, Sís was granted asylum in the United States. A correspondence with Maurice Sendak led to a meeting and Peter's introduction to children's book editors, and he moved to New York City in 1984 to begin a new career.

Sís quickly became one of the leading artists in the field with the publication of the 1986 Newbery Medal Winner, The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleishman. He has more than twenty books to his credit and almost as many honors, e.g. six The New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, and a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei was a 1997 Caldecott Honor Book and has been published in English, French, German, Czech, Portuguese, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Spanish.
In addition to his prolific career as an author, Peter Sís has contributed more than a thousand drawings to The New York Times Book Review, and his illustrations have appeared in Time magazine, The Atlantic Monthly , Newsweek , Esquire and many other magazines in the United States and abroad. He has designed many book jackets and posters, including, in 1984, the famous poster for Milos Forman's Academy Award-winning motion picture Amadeus . He lends his art to many mediums and will sometimes paint on any surface he can find - chairs, walls, eggs, boxes, seashells, even hats.

In 2007, Peter Sís has published The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic , says of the book, “Peter Sís book is most of all about the will to live one's life in freedom and should be required reading for all those who take their freedom for granted.”

Peter Sís lives in the New York City area with his wife and children.

For more information on Peter Sís and his artwork, please visit the author's website www.petersis.com

PLENARY SPEECHES

Grete Haagenrud

Children in Times of War – a Story from Norway

I've written five books about Sofie and Kathrine, two girls living in northern Norway during the last world war, from 1940-45. Sofie is the storyteller. She is five-six years old and her sister Kathrine is two years older. Kathrine always knows how to behave when they are visiting people. She never eats too much and she never speaks about dead people or makes a mess of herself. Sofie is more careless, and Kathrine always makes sure her chair is near Sofie's chair so she can pinch her thigh when she doesn't behave correctly.

Sofie was two years old and Kathrine was four when the war started. Therefore, normal everyday life for them was German soldiers, Russian prisoners of war, rationing and air raid alarms. The books are based on my own childhood. When you're an author, you can of course invent situations, which I have done. But all of the events related to the war are based on historical facts.

Germany attacked Norway the 9th of April 1940. After Norway was forced to surrender, a sort of normal life began under the leadership of the German Reichskommisar Josef Therboven. Of course there was continued Norwegian resistance against the German soldiers, but after a while the daily bombing attacks and battles came to an end.

The war in northern Norway developed in a somewhat different way than in the south.

The German military built bunkers and forts along Finnmark's eastern coast, to protect the German ships transporting nickel and iron-ore to Germany. Germany was dependent on nickel for production of armoured steel, and Russian submarines and bombers attacked the German fortifications. For this reason, Russia, which was allied with Norway, was constantly bombing in the north. Air raids and bombing were therefore part of normal life for people living in northeast Norway during the war.

As a child I did not understand why Russian bombers attacked us. We were friends, and we used to give Russian prisoners of war bread when the German soldiers weren't looking.

We got gifts from the prisoners. They carved little wooden birds and other figures for us.

My family lived close to the prisoners' camp, and in the evening, when our bedroom window was open, we could hear the Russian prisoners sing. They sang about the Volga and “Stenka Rasin”, a Russian Cossak rebel. It was a sad, very dramatic song. I loved to sing when I was a child and I knew all the verses in Norwegian and sometimes I used to sing the Norwegian translation of “Stenka Rasin” for the prisoners. And I sang “Lilli Marlene”, just like Zarah Leander on the phonograph record we had at home. I played the record again and again until I knew it by heart. Sometimes I even sang it for the German soldiers. I knew they were our enemies, but the German soldiers had candy. I sang for them even though my sister had told me that God the Father in heaven could see and hear everything and God the Father in heaven had very big ears and he could especially hear small girls singing to the enemies.

I felt a little better when I managed to persuade my sister to eat some of the candy, but afterwards we had to fold our hands and ask God the Father in heaven to forgive us.

When our parents and their friends talked about how it was before the war started, when there were all sort of things in the shops, no bombing, no German soldiers and no Russian prisoners, I could not quite comprehend. I remember that one of my aunts laughed when I asked her who used to repair bomb-holes in the streets when there were no Russian prisoners of war who could do that.

Everyday life during the war also meant grandparents talking about trade between Russian and Norwegian people living in the northern area, the so-called Pomor trade.

This was before the Russian revolution in 1917. We heard about the Finnish immigration to Norway in the 18 th century. A lot of Finnish immigrants established small communities along the Varanger Fjord. This was a part of our own background, and we loved to hear about it.

But during the war, air-raid alarms, bombing, German soldiers and Russian prisoners were the normal situation for my generation. When the air-raid alarm started, we knew we were supposed to run home. If we were far from home, we were to run into the nearest house and into the cellar. But I didn't like to go into the cellar of people I didn't know, so I always ran home. But once I did something I never did again.

I loved going to the graveyard to look at the gravestones and the flowers. One summer day when the sun was shining, the flowers blooming and everything was very nice, I was in the graveyard, and suddenly the air-raid alarm started. I was so tired of the alarm and I didn't want to leave the graveyard where everything was so nice. I crept under a tree and I told myself that the Russian bombers would not be so stupid as to drop bombs on the graveyard, where everyone was already dead. No bombs fell in the graveyard, but they did fall in the neighbourhood. I became very, very scared and started to run home. After that experience, when I heard the air-raid alarm, I ran like an arrow into the nearest cellar.

My five books about Sofie and Kathrine begin in 1943 and end in 1947. The two first books are about everyday life during the war. Book two ends on the 23rd of August 1944, a day no one who lived in Vadsø then will ever forget. Within half an hour the town was completely demolished and Sofie and Kathrine's family had to move, along with all the other citizens. Sofie and Kathrine's family moved to Tana, a fjord northwest of Vadsø, and they lived there for some weeks until the Germans forced everyone to evacuate the area.

In 1941 Germany attacked Russia on the northern front. The German army met the Russian army at the river Litza and fought there until 1944. The Germans were forced to retreat and decided to burn all the houses in northern Norway and evacuate the population by force. Then, when the Russian army crossed the Norwegian border, they would meet an almost totally destroyed countryside at the brink of the polar winter. Eighty percent of all buildings were burned and around 50,000 to 60,000 people had been evacuated. Sofie and Kathrine's family and their neighbours were transported westward in lorries, and after some days they boarded a German freighter. 1,900 people were forced to go down into the ship's hold where they were to “camp” on wooden pallets covered with straw.

Because Russia forced the German army to withdraw from the north, the German army took with them as much of their war equipment as possible. The deck was full of cannons. What the children didn't know was that under the pallets in the hold were cases of ammunition. I only remember a man shouting that it was forbidden to smoke in the hold. This part is later on referred to as the worst part of the evacuation. A lot of people got dysentery, lice flourished, and some people died. When the ship arrived at Narvik, the Red Cross had to use gas masks when they went into the hold to help the weakest people out.

To make a long story short, my family finally got to Lillesand in southern Norway, and lived there until the end of the war. Book three ends here. For various reasons, we could not go home to Vadsø and we became refugees in our own country. Life in the south is all right, but Sofie doesn't feel quite at home. And she is afraid that people up north will forget her if she stays away too long. She starts school and when she has learned to write, she writes a letter to Mrs Jentoft up north. She writes three words aslant – Forget me not – at the bottom of the letter. And Mrs. Jentoft understands Sofie's situation. She writes back, “I've told everyone who knows you that you wrote me a letter, and we are all looking forward to seeing you again”, and Sofie becomes very happy when she receives Mrs. Jentoft's letter.

New Growth in Burnt Earth is the fifth and final book in the series. We follow Sofie and her family on their way back home. On their way, they stay in Harstad for one year, and then they return to Vadsø. But Sofie becomes confused. She has lost her past and she is afraid to go back and her feelings are mixed. She knows that rebuilding has begun and she knows that the new town will be different from the old one. Will she be able to find her grandfather's house? Her best friend Klara's house? And what about the bakery? Will she be a stranger in her own hometown? However, when Sofie finally does get home, things fall into place. She realizes that she will never get her little red teddy bear back. It was destroyed during the bombing. But that's the way it is.

After having written five books about Sofie and Kathrine, and telling my own story more than forty years after the war, I asked myself: “What did the war do to my generation? What did the war do to me as a child?” I have no answers to these questions, but I do have some reflections to contribute.

Rebuilding had begun when we returned home to the north. Everyone lived in barracks during the first years, but eventually moved into new houses. It was a very optimistic time.

In my last year at high school, we moved into new school buildings. Nobody talked about the past. We were focused on the future.

The first book about Sofie and Kathrine was published in 1991, and since then I've toured all over Norway, mostly in the north. And it is in the north I have had the most emotional meetings with readers. After my presentation of the books, people begin to ask questions, and then to tell of their own war experiences.

I often ask them, “Have you ever talked about the war with your friends and your children?” or “Have you ever had a chance to process your traumatic experiences?” The answer is often, ”Told others about them? Talked about it? Had a chance to process traumatic experiences? No. When the war ended, we didn't talk about it any more. The thoughts came now when you told us about Sofie and Kathrine. That's how it is”.

And that's how it was for me too. No one forbade us to talk about the war when we came back, but we didn't do it. If we did, we talked about funny things that had happened, safe memories.

As I have said, more than forty years afterwards, while working as a teacher, I suddenly started to write. I didn't intend to write a book, I just wanted to write. I wanted to tell about my own childhood and give it to my children, Kari and Pål, who were about thirty years old at that time. But I could not tell the story from my own point of view. And I could not tell it as their mother, a grown up woman. However, Sofie, the little girl inside of me, could tell it. That was safe. My middle name is Sofie, but I have never used it. But when Sofie took over the story, it was ok to write about the things we hadn't talked about.

The great bombing attack on Vadsø the 23rd of August 1944, when Sofie found her little red teddy bear completely destroyed, and the fact that they all forgot about her birthday three days later, are the tragedies Sofie connects to the bombing attacks. She thought she would have to wait another whole year before she could be six years, and that is a tragedy, a very great tragedy for a little girl looking forward to becoming six years old. It is impossible for a little girl to relate to a town that has become a pile of smoking rubble.

When I, as an adult author, allowed Sofie to tell the story, I understood that I myself never noticed all the ruins we passed when we left home after the great bombing attack. I have no visual memory of this. I know that as a young girl, when I saw photographs of Vadsø after the bombing, I asked myself why I didn't remember all the ruins. I must have seen them when we left home after the bombing. But I didn't ask my sister if she remembered anything about it. I didn't ask anybody.

The graveyard was not bombed, and when I now visit my hometown in the north, I usually take a walk there. I no longer curtsy to my grandmother in her grave like I did as a child, but I have the same good feeling inside of me and I smile as I walk around. The grave­yard is one of the very few places from my childhood that still exist. I remember that I once hid under a tree and thought that Russian bombers would not be so stupid as to drop their bombs on people who were dead already, but the panic is gone. I've put the panic into my books.

No one talked about processing trauma during the war or after the war. Nobody spoke about traumatic experiences connected to the war. I don't know how my generation, and those who were adults during the war, would have been and behaved if there had been no war. And I don't know either if it has been possible for them to process their traumatic experiences.

Most people in northern Norway live very close to nature. We have midnight sun, we have darkness in the winter, we have a direct way of speaking, words are not wrapped in wool.

But we did not talk about the war. Many years had to pass before it was possible to do that.

But I don't intend to say that war has no influence on a child. Of course it has. When I wrote about the great bombing attack on Vadsø, I was suddenly back in the cellar. The cellar windows exploded with a huge bang and I felt Sofie's panic inside of me. But I found words and I could describe the feelings and wrote them down. Afterwards I stood in the shower for half an hour. More than forty years had passed. We had never talked about the event since it had happened. I never knew I had this sort of panic deep inside of me. I know I couldn't have told my children or anybody else about it, but Sofie, the little girl, she could tell the story.

And I don't know how I would have reacted if I, as a child, had known more about the realistic situation of the war. I've asked myself how much parents ought to tell their children. Someone, not our parents – I think it was children older than me and my sister – had told us that the German soldiers planned to burn all the houses and force people to leave, but I did not understand it, I could not believe it. And someone had told us that Russian soldiers would cross the border and force the German soldiers to leave our country. The Russian soldiers did cross the border and did force the German soldiers to withdraw from the east of Finnmark, but that happened afterwards, when we had been evacuated by force. Children will always hear rumours, and if they ask their parents I think the best answer is that – when it's war, you will never know. That's in any case the truth.

Now I've told you about how it was for me to be a child during the Second World War. As a grown up woman I have no conclusion for this lecture, but I can give you Sofie's conclusion after coming home. Sofie and Kathrine are on the quay with their father. They see a ship out in the fjord. The ship's name is “Tanahorn”. Their father was captain on the “Tanahorn” during the war. The ship was bombed just before they were forced to evacuate. But now the ship is restored and is on its way back home.

“Tanahorn!” Kathrine's voice was very quiet, as though she were talking to herself. “It's Tanahorn, Sofie. Look, it's “Tanahorn!” Suddenly her voice was bright and happy.

Daddy was captain on the “Tanahorn” during the war, but it got bombed. After the war, it was brought up and towed into Langesund and then to Breivik. And now, “Tanahorn” was as good as new. She was almost like a queen sailing in the fjord.

It was then I felt a special feeling inside. I knew that just like the boat, both Vadsø and Finnmark would become like new again. All the grey barracks would be pulled down. People would plant flowers at the graves and “forget-me-nots” in their gardens.

When you stand on the quay in the rain and just think about graveyard flowers and forget-me-nots and look at the “Tanahorn”, that had never before looked as beautiful, then you know, that even if it would be a long time before Vadsø and Finnmark were rebuilt, some day everything would be in order again.

I wouldn't ever get my red teddy bear back again, but that's the way it is.

As an author it was important for me to describe the war as realistically as possible. The historical facts were important to me. But I was very conscious of not describing dreadful situations. Let me give you an example from the ”Karl Arp”, the German freighter that brought us from Finnmark to Narvik.

I have described the situation on board in the way I remember it as a child. I didn't tell what I read later on: the story of the lady who lost her little baby into the sea from the gangplank when she left the boat. I didn't write about the two small boys who sat beside their dead mother in the loading room. I know the boys were taken care of, but it was so difficult for me as a grown up person to read about this and other dreadful stories from the “Karl Arp”, that even if I had seen these situations as a child, I could not have written about them.

When I came to the end of book two, I was forced mentally to go into the cellar together with Sofie, and stay there while the town was completely demolished. I had to do that because I knew then that I had to continue the story about the two girls and to explain why they had to leave town. I had to write about Sofie's panic, but I didn't make it stronger than necessary.

It is important for me as an author to tell the truth, but when you know that the readers are children, dreadful details of the full and whole truth are not necessary. It is possible to write about war and historical facts, without mentioning horrific situations, or if it's necessary to mention them, I think you can do it in a roundabout way.

The real problem I have met as an author was to tell the young readers that once upon a time, Germany was our enemy. They beat the Russian prisoners, they forced us to evacuate, they burned our houses, etc. I meet a lot of young people in libraries and schools, and I have met pupils who have a close relationship to Germany, even a mother or a father from Germany, and I have met pupils who have told me that they know someone who were friends with German soldiers during the war. They have even told their names before I could stop them.

In these situations I have told the pupils that it is important that we know our history and are able to learn from the experiences of others. I think realistic books concerning war are important books for children, but as an author I feel I have to find the balance between the full and whole truth – and what, from a literary point of view, is necessary to tell.

Sharif Kanaana

Stories Told by and for Palestinian Children

The main topic of this presentation is the writing of stories for children. The children I am concerned with here are those between the ages of three or four up to the age of nine or 10, that is, before the age where they start to show any physical, emotional or cognitive signs of puberty.

However, I would like to start by talking about the road or experiences which led me to what I consider the insights or – you may consider – viewpoints.

These experiences consisted of three different research interests I have been involved in for the last 30 years or so, when I came to work at a Palestinian university after studying and teaching at American universities for about 15 years.

•  The first of these three lines of research began in 1978 with the collection of traditional oral Palestinian folktales. This research still continues today and has recently expanded and become quite intensive due to the recognition granted by the UNESCO in 2005 to the Palestinian folktale as one of the World Masterpieces of Intangible Heritage, which must be preserved. This came as a result of a proposal I presented to the UNESCO. The UNESCO has initiated a three-year project for the collection of the folktale, of which I am still the Academic Director.

Out of this work came a book entitled Speak Bird, Speak Again published by the University of California Press, the Arabic version of which Qul ya Tair was banned last year by the PA ministry of culture and to which I may return later.

•  The second line of research started in late 1987 shortly after the beginning of the 1 st Intifada, or uprising, which later became known among Palestinians as “The children's Intifada”, or “The Stone Intifada”. This uprising was started and maintained – at least for the first two years – primarily by children between the ages of 7 and 13 or 14.

The stone-throwing children used to engage the Israeli soldiers in a confrontation which lasted usually for a few minutes, during which some children were killed, some injured, and the rest ran away. Like many adults, I usually stood on the sidewalk at a safe distance from the confrontations and watched. After a while, I realized that the children who ran away regrouped at some distance from the soldiers and seemed to be carrying out lively discussions accompanied by a lot of laughter. Later I found out that in these sessions they were actually bragging about their or their friends' heroism and exploits against the soldiers during the confrontations, and that they accepted each other's stories as factual and found them highly amusing. These narratives can be formally classified by those in the field of folklore as ‘humorous contemporary legends'.

I started collecting and studying these legends a few weeks after the beginning of the Intifada. This again turned into a larger project on “Palestinian political humor” in general, which has produced two books and several articles, and is still going strong.

Going back to our main topic – children's narratives – what I found most fascinating about Palestinian children's intifada narratives was the similarities between the hero in these narratives and the hero in many of the folktales I had collected among Palestinians and folktales in general.

Time does not allow me here to present the two types of tales side by side in order to show the similarities. Suffice it here to mention that like the hero of the traditional oral folktale, the hero as portrayed in the children's narratives is very young, often the youngest in the family, physically small, deformed, or handicapped and overcomes much more powerful opponents, often with assistance from a human or a supernatural agent. Another noticeable similarity is the presence of the child-hero and mother in these narratives.

Here are a few illustrations:

•  One time when the town [Gaza] was under curfew, a pregnant woman started to have labor pains. The soldiers took her to a military hospital to give birth there. It turned out that she was pregnant with twin boys. The head of one of the babies came out, he looked around and saw all these [Israeli] military uniforms, turned back to his brother and shouted, “Ahmed! Ahmed! We are surrounded, get some rocks!”

•  A child keeps coming out of the door of a house, throwing rocks at the soldiers and running back in, and the soldiers cannot find him. Finally, a foreign news correspondent goes into the house and begs the mother to tell him how the child manages to avoid the soldiers. At first, the woman refuses to tell him. Finally, he assures her that he will not tell anybody about it, and she lifts up the edge of her long flowing dress and says, “Mahmoud, come out, habeebi [my love],” and the boy comes out from under her dress.

•  One day the Israeli soldiers arrested a child in the Ramallah market. A woman who was doing her shopping close by saw what happened. She threw herself at the soldiers, crying and screaming that her son had not done anything; he was simply walking with her while she did her shopping. She kept screaming, tugging and pulling at the boy, and a big crowd gathered around, until she succeeded in pulling the child away from the soldiers. As she was walking away holding the child's hand, a person passing by heard her asking the child, “Whose son are you, Darling?

•  Khaled el-Iraqi, a boy from Jenin was nicknamed “El-qujjeh”, “The Piggy Bank”. He gave the Israeli authorities a lot of trouble, and the soldiers were always looking for him, and he was injured several times, but they were not able to catch him. One time he was injured and the other boys took him to the hospital, and his liver had to be taken out, but when they removed the liver they found a small liver underneath the first liver. He survived the operation, healed and went home, and within few days he was back throwing stones at the soldiers.

•  In the Alamaari refugee camp everybody is talking about a young boy 13 years of age. No one knows his real name, but his nickname is “Hoboob er-reeh”, “The Wind Storm”, and whom­ever you may ask about him in the refugee camp would know him because he has done many heroic deeds and he is driving the soldiers crazy. People of the camp say that Shamir [Israeli prime minister at the time] once said that he was ready to release all detainees from Amaari Refugee camp and to remove the Israeli observation tower from the camp in return for capturing “The Wind Storm”, because he does things no other person could do – for example he has already injured over one hundred soldiers, all by himself.

•  The Israeli soldiers put barbed wire around an area, as they usually do, to prevent people from going into this area. One kid named Yusif, who does gymnastic exercises, can jump high in the air, and people call him “the one who flies” (elli biteer). One day Yusif jumped over the barbed wire. The soldiers were surprised. How could he do that? They got into the jeep and followed him. Finally, they found Yusif in front of his house. When they saw him, they ran after him to catch him, but he jumped up in the air, flew away and disappeared. The soldiers started pounding at people's doors and asking, “Where is the boy who flew into your place?” But they could not find him. In the afternoon one of the soldiers saw Yusif and recognized him. The soldiers gathered up the neighborhood boys and took away their I.D. cards and told them, “You cannot have your I.D. cards unless you capture Yusif for us.” Among the boys was one of Yusif's brothers. Yusif's brother ran towards him pretending that he wanted to capture him, but at the same time he was shouting, “Run, Yusif, run. The soldiers sent those kids to capture you!” After a while everyone was looking at him, but he flew away and disappeared. The kids, together with Yusif's brother, went back to the soldiers and said, “He flew away. You saw that yourselves!” The soldiers threw their I.D. cards back to them and let them go.

•  A young man one time found himself surrounded by soldiers who were trying to capture him. He looked at them and selected the smallest one of them although very small and short himself. He picked up the small-sized soldier and threw him at another soldier and escaped fast like lightning. They tried to catch him but couldn't, and he managed to escape.

•  There was a young boy from Khan Yunis. His name was Khalil. The soldiers were looking for him because he used to burn down the hothouses of the settlers. He had burned about 20 of them and used to raise Palestinian flags on army jeeps and on the civil administration building. He caused them a lot of trouble. One time the military governor came to their neighborhood looking for him. By chance, he saw Khalil all by himself, but he did not recognize him. He asked him, “Where is Khalil's house?” Khalil answered, “Come with me and I'll show you Khalil's house.” They walked a little ways, and then Khalil told him, “Here, this is Khalil's house.” He opened the door for him, pushed him inside the courtyard and locked the door behind him. Then he went up on the roof and started to throw stones at him. The military governor started shooting at him, but he escaped safely.

•  A young man from the village of Ithna in the Hebron district was arrested and cha r [V1] ged with possessing firearms. During the investigation he decided to carry out a plan. He admitted to the secret servicemen that he actually had some firearms and volunteered to take them to the place where he had hidden them. He took the men to a cave in the Hebron area and entered the cave to get the weapons. They waited all day long for him to come out, but he did not come out. The soldiers blew up the cave, but there was no sign of the young man. Later they realized that the cave had another entrance at quite a distance from the first one. And they never caught the young man.

•  One time the soldiers came and occupied the school building. They raised an Israeli flag on top of the school. Then a young man climbed up to the roof, took the Israeli flag down, and placed a Palestinian flag in its place although the soldiers were all over the place. The young man said that when he came down he threw dirt in the eyes of the soldiers and God must have blinded their eyes. They did not see him, and he was able to carry out his mission and left as if nothing had happened.

•  The third line of research is recent. It came after the mid-nineties, as a result of the signifi­cant role played by children during the intifada. Starting with the last years of the intifada, more and more Palestinian writers, poets and intellectuals started to pay more and more attention to children and to write for and about them. What attracted my attention most was a number of “literary folktales”, where the authors took some of the best-known Palestinian traditional oral folktales, and modified them in such a way, supposedly, to improve them, refine them and “update” them. Such efforts are not actually new or invented by Palestinian story writers. They are best known from the second edition of the Grimm Brothers collection in 1819, and at least a couple of centuries earlier among the French and the Italians.

Comparing and contrasting all three types of stories: the traditional oral folktales, the literary fairytales, and the intifada narratives, it became clear to me that the first and the third were much more similar to each other than either of them to the second. The similarity came due to the fact that intifada narratives were invented by children and the traditional folktales have been told to children, preserved, and transmitted orally for several thousands of years. Both of them are well suited to the existential needs, worries, and mental abilities of children. Literary stories on the other hand are written by adults and seem to represent what adults want children to become, and how they want them to think and behave in order to fit properly into the modern, literate upper and middle classes of their societies. They actually seem to be written to children rather than for children, i.e., these are messages from adults to children to tell them what they want them to be in order to better serve the needs and interests of adults, rather than being written for the children to serve the children's needs, hopes, and interests and address their existential worries, fears, and anxieties. They live in much less than perfect societies but prepare children to expect to live in a perfect society – perfect by the standards of the literate, well-to-do upper classes of the society. In other words, these messages are hypocritical and self-centered on the part of the adults.

Had our societies continued to be illiterate, tradition-oriented village societies, where tales are transmitted and told to children orally, then I would have advocated that traditional folktales should not be modified intentionally and consciously, because oral stories would evolve automatically to suit new circumstances. But since now we read to our children from books rather than tell the stories from memory, which prevents tales from evolving, then I agree that they should be modified and updated. And here is where the problem lies. The way the nervous system of our human species (Homo sapiens) is wired has not changed for over a hundred thousand years, and the traditional tales have been transmitted orally and told to children from memory for several thousand years. Thus, they have evolved in ways suitable for different cultures across time and space. But they have also evolved to suit the unchange­able mind of the human child; they have become quite adept at catering to the universal needs of the human child everywhere. Points of coincidence with the nature of the mind of the human child have become an inherent part of the traditional oral folktale. It is these points of coincidence between the mental, emotional and developmental needs of the human child, on the one hand, and some aspects of the folktale, on the other, which should not be omitted from literary tales written for children, whether such tales are based on existing folktales or composed from scratch. The following are ten points which, I believe, qualify under this category, although I will not be able to elaborate and justify the claim I make about each point adequately in this paper. These ten points are just a start and do not necessarily exhaust all the lessons a writer of children's stories could learn from the traditional oral folktale:

•  A child, unlike a literary critic or any other adult, does not analyze a story logically and try to find the message behind it. A child rather lives out the story by identifying with one of its characters, usually the hero, assuming the child finds in it a character with similar existential problems and needs as him/her self.

•  As far as the child is concerned, what matters is not the moral lesson at the end; not who wins and who loses, nor fear of punishment, shame, or guilt. The child wants to feel adequate, important, loved, to have hope, to find meaning in his/her life. The issue is not a specific lesson; it is rather a general orientation to life – to humans, to the world.

•  Do not send a message to the child, rather give him/her a form, a structure which he/she can adopt or assume, which could get him/her from where he/she feels he/she is to where he/she wants to be.

•  The child perceives and understands the world in analogic rather than digital mode. Give the child images and metaphors of life and the world rather than abstract quantifications: “very, very, very big” is more understandable than “three times as big as …”

•  A child perceives and understands the world in black and white and not shades of gray. The world should be desorbed in binary divisions and polarized images. Characters have to be either very bad or very good, not a mixture of good and bad.

•  Humor and what is funny for the child consists of breaking the rules and the taboos of the adult society. A good example of such terms can be found in the banning of my book, Qul Ya Tair, in Palestine in the spring of 2007. I have a copy of the directive sent to the school administrators telling them to destroy all copies of the book found in the school libraries. The minister tries to justify his action by quoting some of the offending words and phrases which occur in the book. Among these he gives the following: “You son of a whore,” “Damn your father,” “Your cousin is a whore,” “The camel bit off his penis and testicles,” and “I will shit in this pot.” Some of the audience may be familiar with another big “contro­versy” which broke out in the United States at about the same time as the banning of my book in Palestine over the use of the word “scrotum” in an award winning book entitled The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. Mentioning sexual parts of the body, or body products, which is prohibited by prudish adults, is very funny to the child, simply because it is prohibited by adults, not because they understand other implications which adults do. Thus, using such “crude” terms, as story tellers from illiterate, traditional, oral societies do, to entertain and amuse children, should be deemed quite legitimate.

•  The hero of children's stories should not start out tall, big, strong and handsome. That is not how the child feels, therefore the child cannot identify from the beginning with such a hero. A child feels powerless, overwhelmed, and oppressed by adults and older children. The child should have similar characteristics and then conquer and overpower his oppressors and take the child with him/her in a process of mastering the people and world around him/her.

•  The existential problems of the child spring from conflicts with his own parents and siblings, i.e. within his own family and not from the outside society. Many authors of literary tales try to improve and beautify folktales by moving the conflict and struggle to other members of the community outside the immediate family. That, of course, takes all the fun out of the tale for the child who cannot identify with the hero's adventures and exploits because the child does not have any accounts to settle with people outside her own immediate family.

•  Another point related to the previous one is that it is clear to scholars of the traditional folktale that a stepmother is the bad side of the real mother. Killing the real mother and bringing in the stepmother simply hinders the child from coming to terms with the facts of life, namely, that a mother is not always kind and loving, but can get angry, even cruel and nasty. Ultimately, the child has to come to terms with that and accept the mother as is.

•  Finally, we come to illustrations. Illustrations clearly came in with literary fairytales, and like writing it is ideological and intended to brain-wash or socialize the child into the social system. Illustrations can be helpful in guiding the child's imagination and giving him/her forms in which to project and give shape to his/her feelings and hopes and aspirations. Illustrators, however, should be careful not to restrict and inhibit the child's imagination and impose on the child images with which the child does not feel comfortable. One way to avoid that is to make illustrations as vague and undefined as possible. Illustrations should come as close as possible to being Rorschach ink blots.

To conclude, my main point in this presentation is that the traditional folktales of the illiterate societies and stories told by children are similar to each other and that they are more suitable to the mind of a child than are literary fairytales. The work of many of those who try to modify the traditional folktales remind me of the Arabic saying, “He came to put kohl on her eyes but in the process blinded her.” So we don't want to, instead of improving things, ruin them.

Rukhsana Khan

Freedom of Speech Versus Cultural Sensitivity:

Balancing the Right to Create Freely vs. the Need of People to be Respected

In the Quran (49:13) God says, “Oh mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and female, and made you into nations and tribes that you may know each other (not that you may despise each other)…”

Imagine how dull the world would be if we all looked the same, ate the same food and dressed the same way!

I believe that just as biodiversity allows species to take advantage of evolutionary niches, diversity of cultures explores all the societal permutations possible and helps mankind to progress.

Societies are in a constant state of flux. Members move between communities and with this comes the cross pollination of ideas. Over time cultural norms must change and adapt as a result of this.

All this cultural exchange is very healthy. It prevents stagnation. It challenges a culture's status quo and allows for the vetting of long held assumptions. Ultimately only the best and fittest concepts will survive to further contribute toward the progress of mankind.

Each culture represents an evolutionary pathway of human society and contains both positives and negatives. I believe this variety of cultures exists so that we can learn from each other. No single culture has all the answers.

But judging from the state of the world today, many cultures seem to think they're perfect and need no vetting.

At this time in history we're in a big mess. Xenophobia is on the rise, cultural clashes are rampant and sometimes members of one community hide behind the principles of freedom of speech not to challenge other cultures in a legitimate exchange of ideas but simply to launch culturally insensitive attacks.

Instead of having a positive vetting effect, these culturally insensitive attacks instigate conflict which can often result in violence and death. These attacks must be exposed for what they are, but they should not necessarily be stifled. Instead the instigators should be encouraged to express their opinions in a less combative way, a way that can constructively challenge the other culture instead of just causing strife and unnecessary conflict.

Issues of freedom of speech and cultural sensitivity are really symptomatic of a larger problem, and that is the issue of integration and assimilation.

When I first arrived in Canada, it was 1965 and it was automatically assumed that immigrants would assimilate. There was no choice in the matter. The message was, “Shut up and be grateful for being allowed into this western country club and the way you show that gratitude is by adopting our values. It'll take a generation or two, but if you behave yourself and keep your nose clean, maybe your kids will grow up to be prosperous. And if you don't like it,

go back to where you came from.”

Of course this was never stated out right, but everywhere it was implied.

We immigrants were grateful and we worked hard to capture as much of the dream as we could.

My father was a tool and die maker. At one point he took a job for $2.35 per hour because he refused to go on welfare. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had $5 a week with which to buy food. Most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

At his workplace they wouldn't call my father by name, they called him black bastard. And he put up with it because he had a wife and four kids to feed.

My father was not alone. In many countries, immigrants make tremendous sacrifices and tolerate all kinds of insults for the sake of dependent family members.

By the late ‘60's the civil rights movement began in America. We saw people of colour demanding full equality, no longer settling for the back of the bus, no longer apologizing for being dark in skin tone.

Liberal ideologies were popular. Hippy songs with themes of peace and justice played on the radio. And like Martin Luther King Junior, immigrants too had a dream.

The Canadian government adopted many of the principles of the civil rights move­ment wholeheartedly and even went a step further. Canada wouldn't be a melting pot, we'd be a salad, where everyone maintains their individual characteristics and flavours but still is part of the whole.

In Canada we would be multi-cultural. We would celebrate everyone's culture. Nobody had to assimilate if they didn't want to, and as long as they followed the laws and paid their taxes they were free to live as they pleased.

In large cities in Canada diversity is the norm and the government has funded many arts and cultural initiatives. Afrofest celebrates African culture; Caribana celebrates Caribbean culture; Taste of Italy celebrates things Italian; Aboriginal Day celebrates first nations' and of course Muslimfest celebrates Muslim culture, to name a few. You'll find all kinds of people at these public events. Many come for the food – after all, food can be the best ambassador between cultures.

In the schools the official policy is multiculturalism. Teachers stock books that validate the cultural heritage of all students and often expand their knowledge to include cultures that are not necessarily present in the classroom.

Canada has even taken the unusual step of encouraging the children of immigrants to retain their mother tongues. Towards that goal the Canadian government funds heritage language programs. These are classes where children of immigrants go to study their ‘heritage' language.

Through these kinds of initiatives the Canadian government has created cross-cultural education, awareness and appreciation and encouraged immigrants to be secure in their culture.

It sounds idealistic doesn't it?

But actually I do think it works quite well.

It's not perfect. There are still two tiers of society. There's mainstream society and then there are pockets of ethnic communities. Many immigrants develop a split personality complete with dual identities. They dress and talk one way when they're in the public, and another way when they're among their own people.

When I was growing up, one of my teachers once told me that no matter how hard any immigrant community tries, in three generations they lose all semblance of their cultures and are completely assimilated.

It made me angry when he said that. As if it was inevitable and only logical that I, just like everyone else, would eventually succumb and abandon my faith and culture in light of the far more progressive Western culture.

This was the popular wisdom then, but it hasn't exactly played out that way.

Some immigrants do abandon their faith and culture, but others cling all the tighter to it.

Of course this is not just a Muslim phenomenon.

Almost every major city in Europe and North America has a Chinatown.

In some areas of America the Hispanic population has created a sort of parallel society complete with store signs in Spanish, entirely independent of the patronage of the dominant culture.

How alarming it must be for people in the dominant culture, who have been living in the country for umpteen generations, to see these cultural enclaves emerging and the character of their country changing.

And because of this there are campaigns in parts of America to enforce English as the official language so no one can conduct business in any other language.

In Switzerland there is a movement to ban the building of minarets. Minarets are such an outward symbol of Islam. People are concerned that having minarets pop up all over the alpine slopes will ruin the look of the country.

In France they have prohibited the wearing of head scarves and other religious insignia in public schools.

These attitudes are a reaction to the immigrants who don't assimilate. Immigrants who manage to get by in their adopted countries while still dressing, worshipping and acting like they did ‘back home'.

It would be easy to label these actions as simple bigotry and racism. But I think there's more to it than that.

If a country is like a house, immigrants would be like house guests. When the immi-grants first arrive, the local population tends to be neutral and continue their own lives as usual, but eventually the house guests wear out their welcome. The differences become blatant. These immigrants are backwards and will never be like us. They're still cooking their smelly foods, speaking their loud languages, and don't clean up after themselves. The tran-quility of the home land has been destroyed.

And these immigrants are breeding, a lot, and inviting more of their family members to join them in this land of plenty.

But unlike house guests, immigrants contribute taxes and revenue to their new country. It doesn't matter though because many of the local population start to feel nostalgic. It's not like it was before.

It's quite understandable that these feelings of resentment would arise.

But what emotion is really at the root of this resentment. Could it be fear?

Not just fear of the unknown, but fear of being overwhelmed?

And it's not like the local population can express this in a blunt way because then they'd appear racist and bigoted, so instead these fears manifest themselves in other ways, especially as a determination to dominate the immigrants and establish their cultural rules as the norm.

Ultimately this is a power struggle.

But you have to ask yourself who really has the power here?

Most immigrants come to Western countries because they live in despotic regimes where there is little opportunity to advance oneself. They come for the sake of their children, to give them the opportunities that are not available in their own countries. These are pressure-cooker societies ruled by iron-fisted dictators who are often, ironically, propped up by the West.

When Muslims come to the West, they often feel powerless and marginalized, but at least, they are free of tyranny. In most western countries no one is following them around after Friday prayers and monitoring them just because they wear a beard or pray five times a day – although after 9/11 that's not as true as it once was.

When Muslims see the permissiveness of Western societies, it makes many of them cling all the harder to their faith. And they cling to their communities, because they too are afraid. Afraid of being overwhelmed.

Freedom of speech is one of the most brilliant institutions in the West. It has been singularly responsible for shaking off the yoke of oppressive religious dogma and opening up thought and discovery. Freedom of speech is absolutely essential to the cross-pollination of cultural ideas.

But some in the West use freedom of speech to make their immigrant populations feel less welcome by insulting what they value most.

One of the most famous examples of this is of course the Danish cartoon incident which began in 2005 when Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

If Muhammad (peace be upon him) were alive today, there would be no question that the cartoons would be considered libelous and not protected by freedom of speech. But since he is dead they are allowed. This seems like an arbitrary limitation to me. Why can't libel extend to protect the reputation of all people? Even those who are dead? Isn't that the time a person's reputation is the most vulnerable because they aren't here to defend themselves?

Others might argue that the cartoons are a legitimate form of Juvenalian satire. But I think it is hard to effectively satirize an unknown entity. How can the audience judge what is exaggeration if they are largely ignorant of the subject matter of the satire?

Without any kind of balanced information on Muhammad (peace be upon him), the audience the cartoons are intended for, really can't get any kind of point the cartoons are trying to convey. And rather than being Juvenalian the cartoons come across as juvenile.

The kind of sketch a kid would draw of a hated teacher.

Jyllands-Posten successfully hid behind the concept of freedom of speech to launch these culturally insensitive attacks.

The creators of the cartoons stumbled, by trial and error, on the one thing that all Muslims, irregardless of their ethnicity or degree of religious observance, can be offended by.

When people are marginalized, when they don't have the means to express their frustration and their pain, when they already live under enormous pressure doing menial jobs that barely pay their expenses and when they endure insult and injury while doing so – perhaps seeing their beloved Prophet (peace be upon him) attacked through fiction is enough to make them snap. They wonder, what did he ever do to deserve such things said about him?

They think, isn't it enough that Muslims put up with being vilified as a community? Isn't it enough that they endure attacks from the news media, the movies, from Bugs Bunny and Popeye cartoons, and are the target of the most hideous insults from the lips of Evange-lical preachers?

All these they can tolerate, but fictionalized attacks on their Prophet (peace be upon him) – the one whose name can't be uttered without invoking the blessings of God upon him, the one who is dearer to them than their own selves – it is too much.

Perhaps they feel they have nothing to lose.

They already have the reputation of being violent lunatics so they might as well live up to it. And so they go nuts. They don't just gnash their teeth. They don't just boycott Danish products. They don't even just burn Danish flags. They riot in the streets, they kill, and torch Danish embassies, and in doing so they violate the very precepts of the faith they claim to hold so dear.

And of course, in the entire process Muslims are accused of being culturally sensitive and insecure.

And there is truth to that charge.

When it comes to our Prophet (peace be upon him), we Muslims are extremely sensitive. We can't help it. It's a visceral reaction. That will never change.

From the very beginning early Muslims were forbidden to make pictures of the Prophet (peace be upon him) for two reasons. Firstly it was feared that some Muslims, out of ignorance, would start worshipping him instead of God, and secondly these likenesses could be used by his enemies to ridicule him. This is why there are no pictures of Muhammad (peace be upon him).

This is also why even if the depictions in the cartoons were more respectful, they would still grieve and offend Muslims. But of course, just because they're offended, doesn't mean Muslims should riot and kill and burn down Danish embassies.

Unfortunately Muslim outrage is further undermined by the fact that when it comes to being culturally insensitive, Muslim societies really are no better. Soon after the Danish cartoon incident, Ahmadinajad sponsored a holocaust cartoon contest. And in many newspapers across the Arab world, cartoons, that are every bit as culturally insensitive, are published routinely.

In both cases, Jyllands-Posten and Arab newspapers would argue they have the right to publish culturally insensitive cartoons.

And it's true, they do have the right to do this, but does that make it right?

So what's the solution to this clash of cultures? How do we solve this confrontation of values? How do we reconcile freedom of speech with cultural sensitivity?

One option is that we could extend the definition of libel. Not just for the sake of Muhammad (peace be upon him) but to protect the reputation of any one living or dead. That would mean no more ad hominem attacks on Moses or Jesus (peace be upon them) either. Think of it, no more pictures of Jesus (peace be upon him) dipped in urine. Would that be such a loss?

Another option is that we could use existing censorship committees to assess satirical art to see if it is indeed a culturally insensitive attack. The committee would examine if there is any sort of balance within the public domain or even general knowledge of what is being lampooned so it could qualify as genuine satire. But that sounds rather cumbersome.

Another option that seems to be the current status quo is to ignore the seething resent-ment of the disenfranchised and marginalized, clamp down on immigrant communities, racially profile and monitor society more closely for any reprisal attacks. In doing so, we would basically adopt the pressure-cooker style policies of the countries these people ran away from. More and more that seems to be happening in the West.

Too bad we can't use the classroom model.

If this were a classroom, the teacher would simply say, “Jyllands-Posten and Mustafa! Both of you stop it right now. Jyllands-Posten, stop drawing those silly pictures and, you, Mustafa! Stop saying you'll blow yourself up, or so help me I'll put you both in time out and you'll miss your snack of milk and cookies.”

Then when both boys had settled down, the teacher would take them on her lap, kiss their foreheads, tell them to look each other in the eye and say they were sorry. And when they had done so she'd leave them with this advice, “Now boys, it's not only what you say, it's how you say it. Jyllands, you can find a better way to express yourself without resorting to insults, and Mustafa, you can find a better way to tell Jyllands how you feel without blowing yourself up.”

Sigh.

If only it were that easy.

Since getting libel laws changed and satirical standards raised seems unlikely, there is one other thing we can do to effect change in this matter. And that is for each and every one of us to raise awareness when we return to our respective communities. I have talked about the past and the present, but that doesn't have to be the future.

Everyone in this congress is incredibly important and has a role to play either towards creating a more tolerant society or encouraging the opposite. Our very presence here shows how seriously committed we are to excellence in children's literature. We are in effect its gatekeepers.

What I'd really like to do is explore the tendency of children's books to preach and try to convert.

We need to get away from this way of dealing with each other's culture.

This is a problem common to the most popular books about other cultures. They search for the mote in the other cultures' eyes instead of examining the beam in their own.

If it's a book about communist China, you can bet it's an oppressive tome whose basic allure to Western readers seems to lie in the ability of Westerners to feel smug and satisfied within themselves that their cultures are so much better.

Unfortunately, these are the books that attain international acclaim. These are books that in subtle and not so subtle ways denigrate another culture and focus on their weaknesses. Such novels are basically propaganda.

If you read a novel about Columbia you can bet the subject matter will be the drug trade. If it's a novel about Africa, it will often tackle AIDS or poverty. If it's about the Middle East it will be about violent conflicts like the Palestinian situation. Westerners do not want to read about the middle class and functioning people from ethnic minorities. It's almost as if these people do not exist.

The first instinct I, and other ethnic minority writers have, in dealing with these stereotypes is to counter this propaganda with our own. We want to write about ‘normal' people from our cultures. We avoid all stereotypes, and instead focus on the positives that the West tends to ignore. And in doing so we are committing the very same ‘crime'. We are also writing propaganda, using literature to dispel stereotypes and further our own particular agendas.

No wonder so many kids are turned off by children's books. We treat children like ping pong balls, batting them this way and that with our political agendas.

Children are very astute. They can sniff propaganda a mile away. They're exposed to it on a daily basis. You'd think we would show them more respect and we would move beyond this!

And yet the intentions behind this kind of propaganda are good. Shouldn't the children be exposed to different cultures and all the problems in the world? Absolutely! But let's do it through legitimate story!

I have a confession to make. When I was a kid, and even now, I never read fiction to learn anything. I read a book to hear a story. Learning things is just a happy by-product.

There has to be a legitimate story you're trying to tell. The book has to be entertaining on some level. Behind the story, by all means, you can dispel stereotypes and enlighten, but such issues have to arise organically and not be superimposed as an author's agenda, no matter how well intentioned.

On a personal note, it grieves me that there are so many children's international bestsellers written by mainstream authors, about young Muslim heroines where the only solution the mainstream author could come up with is to have her dress up as a boy and run away.

What message do you think that sends to Muslim girls? In these novels, the fact they're Muslim is perceived to be the problem. Basically Islam is the conflict.

Dressing up as a boy and running away doesn't reflect Muslim reality. Frankly it's insulting.

Like I said, the first instinct for most ethnic authors is to ignore the stereotype and write about positive cultural situations.

To all the ethnic authors who are trying to get your work known internationally, I say this is not necessarily the right approach. Call me cynical but you will probably limit your audience. That's not what they want to read.

Instead you could take up such stereotypes as a challenge.

Elizabeth Laird did this quite effectively when she paired up with Sonya Nimr and wrote A Little Piece of Ground . The way Ms. Laird took Israeli punishments that many of us have heard about in the news, and made them hit home was remarkable. You could feel the children's claustrophobia while being confined to their homes. You could feel the frustration and rage of the refugees when they're confronting the Israeli tanks. And underneath it all, you could understand how these boys just wanted a pitch, a little piece of ground, to play soccer.

Walter Dean Myers also took on the challenge when he wrote his amazing book Monster. He tackled the black-teen-hoodlum-in-trouble-with-the-law stereotype and turned it on its head! After reading Monster I had hope that perhaps I could do this too.

For years I wanted to tackle the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim heroine but I couldn't find a legitimate story with which to do so.

And then one day I read a report on Children in Crisis focusing on some orphanages in Afghanistan that I help to sponsor through the royalties of one of my books. This girl's story broke my heart. It was just a small paragraph buried in the report. Her mother had died during the war, her father had remarried. The stepmother didn't want her, so the father took her to the marketplace and left her there. She ended up in the orphanage I sponsor.

At first I didn't want to write this story. It was too stereotypical. And yet stereotypes exist because they are common. In fact the same scenario was playing out within my own extended family in Canada. One of my relatives died of breast cancer. A year before she was diagnosed her husband ran off with another woman. Her kids are left with a dead-beat dad.

What would it feel like to be abandoned like that?

And so I decided to write the story. I resisted the urge to find out too much about the girl in the orphanage. I wanted to write this on my own terms.

The first thing I asked myself was where does this Afghan girl come from?

All the stories out of Afghanistan are from the perspective of the people of Kabul and yet the people from Kabul are not like the rest of the country. They are very westernized. The world is getting a skewed vision of Afghan culture. I know this because my sister in law's family is from Kabul and my son in law's family is from Kandahar.

So I decided that the girl in my story would be from Kandahar. And because all three of my daughters, despite being born and raised in Canada, decided to not only wear the head scarf but to also cover their faces like they do in Kandahar, I wanted to understand their decision better. So this girl would be from Kandahar and she would wear the burqa, and she wanted to keep on wearing it. I had to know why.

I began this novel for all the best reasons. Not to further any political agenda, but to find out what would happen to this poor girl.

What surprised me the most was that the burqa actually worked its way into the plot! That novel is coming out next spring and will be called Wanting Mor – M-O-R, that's the name of her mother.

When I began my book called Muslim Child I was determined to focus on story. Each story would illustrate a major aspect of Islam but all the stories would be populated by characters any child could relate to. And because I was dealing with Muslim culture, conflicts would arise from the application of the culture. Islam was not the problem. Applying it was.

I hate boring stories, I was determined to make sure there were none in this collection. The first story would have to be about prayer. Muslims have to pray five times a day, and before we pray we have to wash – a lot. Without this ablution our prayer is invalid. And if you fart or go to the bathroom, then you have to go back and wash again. So I wrote a story about a kid who wakes up before sunrise, for the first prayer of the day, and in the middle of the prayer, he's got a big problem. He's got to fart. But he doesn't want to wash up again so he just squeezes and hopes nothing slips out.

It's actually a story about spiritual awakening.

I knew the collection would be enlightening the reader about aspects of Muslim faith and culture but I would do so in an entertaining manner. I really do believe it doesn't hurt to poke a little fun at ourselves.

In my first novel, Dahling if You Luv Me Would You Please Please Smile, I wanted to tackle themes of manipulation: the manipulation of society through fashion; the sexual manipulation of girls by boys and the way religion can be used to manipulate others.

When it comes to their cultures, there are some authors who feel very proprietorial. They feel that no one should write about another culture because of issues of voice appropriation. I think voice appropriation becomes a problem due to this superficial culturally insensitive treatment I have been referring to.

When I first started out writing I felt that way about mainstream writers dealing with Muslim stories too. I thought that mainstream writers couldn't get past their differences to really understand Muslim culture.

Then I read Frances Temple's The Bedouin's Gazelle.

It can be done.

The Bedouin's Gazelle is a meticulously researched book set several centuries ago in a Bedouin society in North Africa. Ms. Temple was able to penetrate the social construct and even portray the antagonist in a humane way. A remarkable achievement! It really can be done.

Ms. Temple was able to internalize the values of the society she was writing about in a completely convincing way, and more importantly, she was able to tell a good story while remaining true to the culture. I suspect that Ms. Temple was able to accomplish this through a kind of temporary suspension of her own identity in the process of writing the book.

Some might argue that all authors suspend their identities while writing a book, but when it comes to dealing with other cultures, it seems they do so with varying degrees of success.

A little advice for mainstream authors who feel compelled to write about other cultures, I would say, go right ahead, but remember this caveat. Do your research, and no matter how much you disagree with the customs and mores you encounter, accept them as part of their norm and try to understand. Then write your story within the parameters of that reality keeping in mind that no society constitutes a homogenous entity and there will always be individuals who buck the trend.

The best analogy I can think of is some advice I've heard given to science fiction and fantasy authors. If you were writing a science fiction or fantasy novel, once you'd established the logic of your magical world, you have to remain within the logic of that realm. Similarly, treat this culture you want to write about as you would a magical realm where the rules are fairly static.

But it should be noted, that in the case of Muslim stereotypes a lot of the worst behavior is not condoned in any way by the religion itself. It doesn't take much to refute the misogyny and oppression that are rampant in Muslim cultures. I know this because I'm reasonably familiar with the religious scriptures.

I suspect the same is true for many other cultures – that most of the worst customs are cultural aberrations and not necessarily condoned as a whole.

Reading Ms. Temple's book gave me the courage to write outside my cultural experience as well.

When my friend Elisa Carbone first approached me to collaborate on a story collection with another friend of ours, a Hindu author named Uma Krishnaswami, I thought the project had a lot of merit. We'd write a collection of five short stories about kids who, despite their religious differences were all friends, just like the three of us.

So we wrote three of the five stories, the ones about our respective religious celebrations, and shopped the project around to all our publishers but received no interest.

I think it's because although the stories were legitimate and good, the project stunk of propaganda.

Finally, I suggested we go to one of my smaller Canadian publishers who relied on government grants. To make a long story short, the project was accepted under the condition that I write eighty percent, so I had to write the other two stories and the corresponding non-fiction pieces about the celebrations as well.

I wrote the Hanukkah story in the middle of Ramadan, while I was fasting. It was much easier than I thought it would be. I had done my research, it was not hard to put myself into the shoes of this boy going to visit his great-grandmother in a nursing home. For the Buddha's Birthday story I wanted to focus on the Buddhist concept of right livelihood and the way we, as a community, are economically intertwined. The Buddhist girl helps her father run a jewelry shop and sells what becomes a new family heirloom to the Jewish boy for his mother's birthday. And the one thing that connects them all is their love of basketball!

I write by instinct. And one of the things that alarmed Elisa and Uma was that the stories were showing different levels of maturity among this group of friends. I convinced them it was a good thing. Children in any group naturally have different maturity levels and that was part of being tolerant too.

In the end, I was able to link all seven stories into a story arc and I'm really proud of the way it is both a project that enlightens children while also entertaining them. This collection is called Many Windows and is a testament to that verse of the Quran that I quoted at the beginning of this speech, that we exist as nations and tribes that we might know one another, not that we might despise one another.

These are some of the steps I have taken towards creating a more culturally aware and tolerant society. I'm particularly pleased that I wrote the Hanukkah story and the Buddha's birthday story in that collection. I wanted to remind Muslims that we are supposed to respect other religious traditions as well.

Finally, as professionals in the children's literature field, we must remember that we wield tremendous influence over the direction of our respective societies. We must not underestimate our capability for we can help set the tone of the future.

It is up to us to take up the challenge.

I have outlined what I am doing, but it is also up to you to help cultivate a vision of a global society where people are free to explore the diversity of cultural expression, where we can conduct dialogues that respectfully and intelligently challenge each other's cultural concepts, where we share the common goal of improving society as a whole and where warmongers cannot ply their agenda.

I have hope.

Together we can work towards creating a global atmosphere where people from each culture can feel secure in their own identity, as ingredients of a global salad.

Where people from each culture can learn from one another.

Where no one fears being overwhelmed.

And in the process, let's tell some darn good stories!

Ana Maria Machado

History and Stories

We may begin our talk by acknowledging that there is no way out. If we agree that the human species may be defined by our use of articulate language and if one of the most important functions of that language consists of transmitting lived experiences from one generation to the others, as well as the sharing of acquired knowledge and experience among different individuals, it follows that narrative is essential to mankind. Telling the others what has happened is crucial to our survival as a whole. What is told may be a fact – and be part of business or management reports, of History, of journalism. It may also be fiction – and be part of literature. In other words, what is told may be History or stories. But on this first level, both of them play the same role for mankind: they allow experience to be shared with the others, instead of being kept inside one individual only.

By doing so, we also begin sharing a collective knowledge about survival strategies, a common search for the meaning of being alive, a set of similar questions about the mysteries of existence, a whole series of possible answers to those questions or the need to play together and to have fun with many kinds of different materials – including words.

So, the logical consequence of this reasoning shows us that we need to tell and to be told stories. The more, the better. They help us in our search and, at the same time, they refine and improve our understanding of everything we come across during our lifetime.

As I was born and raised in Brazil, I was very lucky to be part of a culture that is made of so many different contributions that we do not reject nor distrust what comes from other people. Personally, I was also lucky enough to go to school and to be raised in a reading environment, because my family considered books to be very valuable. Although we didn't have the means to buy many things, we used to borrow a lot of books. And as a child I had a very wide stock of stories within my reach.

To begin with, we had a very rich tradition of non-written stories. Through the practice of listening to oral storytelling, since my first childhood, I was familiar with the folktales that come from European, African or Indigenous roots and constitute our common national heritage. Through the reading of books (not only those I read but also what my parents and grandparents had read), I was acquainted with the classics for children and young readers. Many of them came from other cultures, such as those which had been written by Andersen, Perrault, Grimm, Wilhelm Busch, Carlo Collodi, James Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Hoffman, Stevenson, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Eleanor Potter, Karl May, Selma Lagerloff, the Countess of Segur, Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Edmondo De Amicis, Rafael Sabattini, Michel Zevaco, Emilio Salgari as well as adaptations of Swift, Defoe, Cervantes, the Arabian Nights, Victor Hugo, Greek mythology, Medieval legends with heroes such as the king Arthur and his knights, Robin Hood, the emperor Charlemagne and the 12 peers of France, and so many others… I just mention some of them now, in the order they come to my mind, to recall how wide was the book world a Brazilian child had in translations at our disposal in the 40s and 50s. And there was Tarzan, and Beau Geste and the Sheik, and King Solomon's Mines , and Heidi, and collections of fairy tales from Russia, from Poland, from China, from everywhere. And there were our Brazilian authors, fewer but as attractive as the others. Poets like Olavo Bilac and Bastos Tigre or prose writers such as Monteiro Lobato, who was very popular, sold amazing quantities of excellent books, at the same time humorous and intelligent, transgressive and enticing. Lobato left a high quality example for all of us, being very influential on the way we took books seriously in the country. But above all,

it was wonderful reading his books. Like the vast majority of literate people in my generation in Brazil, I am sure that the person I became owes a very significant debt to the joy of having had the chance of reading him at an early age – as my children did and so do my grand­children now.

So, nowadays, when I see that very often the market or the reading policies tend to avoid translated children's books or works that were written in other times, aiming to give children only stories that have some kind of nearness to their immediate reality (or that were written by people from cultures which are very much similar to their own), I can't help but pity those young readers. They don't know what they are missing. But adults who take those decisions should know. They may even seem to be well-intentioned, by trying to match children and books that fit them perfectly, but they are impoverishing the children in the next generation, by depriving them of a part of their common cultural heritage and also by limiting their access to different voices and blocking their contact with other realities to which they are entitled – no matter how different they may be from their own country, time, culture or way of life.

My personal experience, in my generation and my country, was different. As I grew up, I was so used to different kinds of narrative that I couldn't imagine life without them.

The natural consequence was that I tried to enlarge their supply. I looked for them every­where: in stories and in History. And also, as every curious child does, in the conversations grown-up people exchanged around me, while I pretended to be just playing nearby, but was also paying attention to everything that was said. Thanks to overhearing all that, little by little I was also building up a stock of family stories, very mixed up and not very clear, but certainly important in the development of my imagination and my sense of belonging.

In them, there were European, Indian and African characters, many of them my ancestors or relatives.There was a 10-year old Portuguese boy who emigrated alone to Brazil in the belly of a ship. There was a great-great-grandmother who lived in the lands of a coffee plantation and made business with the general store in the nearby town, selling products like manioc flour which had been made by runaway slaves hidden somewhere in the forest – because she was their only known representative and the merchants knew that fact and respected it. There was a small red-Indian orphan boy who had been found ill in the jungle, cast out by his group, and had been brought home to be raised by the family of the man who found him and to become one more of his children. There were forbidden loves and arrow wounds. There was a peasant who furnished fruit and vegetables to the emperor's palace. There was a woman who challenged her father and wrote articles in the local paper, fighting for women's right to vote. There was a Portuguese woman ancestor known as The Lady Sailor, who went to the sea with a male crew. From the same European village, there were also strong hints of Jewish and Arab interbreeding in faraway Iberic intercrossings.

True or partly false through imagination and exaggeration in family lore, all those stories were woven into each other. They assured me that I was just a drop in a human ocean, made of stories as mixed as the different ethnical features in my family, where the fact that two of my brothers and three of my sisters had blue eyes didn't prevent a funny mistake that happened again and again, every summer holidays. As we played on the beach, we matched perfectly the village fishermen children, who were direct descendants from Africans or native indigenous people. Each of us could be taken for the other. Many, many times, one parent would address one of us from a distance, maybe to call us home for a meal or shower time or to scold for some mischief, only to soon find out that it was not his/her child, among our bursts of laughter. We were all identical from a distance, interchangeable – to our delight.

Our hair looked the same, our skins had very similar colours, we were nearly the same size. This repeated experience always confirmed what we already knew: the whole History belonged to us, for we belonged to everything around us, to those differences that poured

in every direction in those lands and that sea, as much as we belonged to whatever reached us from the night of times.

But of course I was curious to know more about different lands and times. So no wonder that, when the time came for me to go to university, I first thought of studying Geography and History. Both of them seemed to be able to show the most of possible expansion – in place or time. But I soon changed my mind, dropped that course and decided to study Roman Languages, where literature could bring me different answers to the same questions, but always with something in common: they were narratives and they widened my horizons.

Guimarães Rosa, one of the most important Brazilian novelists, once said something very puzzling, that left me wondering: he stated that stories don't want to be History and sometimes they are against History. What did he mean with that? Rosa himself explained it partially. First of all, he stressed that stories, especially short stories, are stronger when they are new and unexpected, when their plot tells something unheard of and original. In a sense, they are like jokes and must surprise the listener. He compares them to a match that is struck and gives some light but soon is useless. But that is not all. Their effect may remain. In the practice of art, stories grow. They widen the territory of logics and they invite the reader to another level of reality, opening to new and more magical systems of thought. They dive deep in search of personal meanings, individual experiences that reflect the light from different angles and multiply what is seen. By doing so, they transform those single meanings into collective meanings, because they are placed in the field of our similarities, no matter the singularities of each people, time or culture. In other words: according to that viewpoint, stories deal with emotions, conflicts or psychological realities that are essential part of the human condition.

On the other hand, History (being a science) is not focused on originality of things that happen just once. Even when it examines a fact that seems to be unique, it tends to analyse its circumstances in search of something that could almost be called historical laws – certain political, economical, social or cultural constants. It tries to understand causes and conse­quences which are at play in society, collective meanings of human experience. It searches trends, patterns, recurrent features, underground structures, under-surface variables.

There is another difference: History deals with facts from reality, that happened indeed. This limits the scope of what it may tell or describe. Literature, on the contrary, is free to invent whatever anyone wishes in the stories that are told. This gives them different dimensions. Literature is not compelled to a factual and direct veracity – only with the meaning and coherence of what it tells. One of them is a science, the other is an art, although many historical texts may also have literary qualities.

In spite of that, History and stories share a fundamental aspect: both of them are narratives. As such, they play a fundamental role in human development. They are part of an essential feature of mankind: the ability to use articulate language in a linear chain of words and clauses, in order to tell something. When they do so, they help in a quest for the meaning of this experience of being in the world, that we all share.

Some anthropologists define human species, essentially, as an animal that tells stories, as McIntyre reminds us [1] . Hannah Arendt completes that notion, stating that we are storytellers that aspire to truth, because only truth bestows depth and density to the meaning of narration. The important thing for us now, when we quote her, is not to get her remark wrong, for when she speaks of truth she is not referring to reality, as if truth and reality were synonyms.

Her opinion doesn't mean that only what seems to be real is true. Often deep truths are hidden under the mask of unreal situations, of magical, fantastical or dreamlike appearances. Such cases are generally told by stories, not by History. But in both cases – facts or delirious visions – what matters is that they can be told.

According to Arendt, narrative is the appropriate way of approaching facts realistically because it reflects temporality, the time quality in which we inhabit. That is the reason why, in her opinion, no philosophy, no analysis, no interpretation, no matter how deep, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning to a well-told story [2] . And there is an extra soundness in that process: although stories are the inevitable consequence of actions, there is in that process an almost paradoxical aspect. The ones who fully understand and reveal the meaning of those actions are not the agents or actors who perform them or receive their direct consequences, but the narrators, those who grasp and tell those deeds [3] . Furthermore: the whole process is not finished as long as it is not submitted and completed by those who read or listen to that narration, or watch its dramatical transposition to the stage or the screen.

Only then may it achieve its whole meaning. One of the main reasons for that is because the reader, listener or spectator has an advantage over those who take part in the action: he/she sees the work in its totality, while each actor or participant sees only a part of it, and only from his/her own angle and so, by definition, is always partial.

In other words, when a narrative is ordered to become a story, it develops toward an end or a goal. This gives sense to what is being told, and works by means of a retrospective understanding, in which memory helps to build meaning. That is why it is so important to have narratives that keep alive what happened in the past. It is a powerful way of avoiding that horrors and crimes be forgotten and evil becomes a common feature. Telling what happened is a way of preventing the collective loss of memory, always the first step to ensuring that ethics survive and that being good may be kept as an ideal and desirable pattern. Narratives help in the task of cutting down the chances of being morally anesthetized, a possibility that springs from forgetting. At least this is Hannah Arendt's strong suggestion.

Many philosophers agree with that opinion and stress that narration is the human way to give meaning to what happened, because of the plot that the narrator has to weave in order to tell a story. The act of telling itself, being linked to the culture of the teller, gives shape to the senses and signification of the things that are being told, towards an aim. Things that only get their full meaning when the whole is taken into consideration.

Even when we observe very small children, we can notice that the growing complexity of their narrative abilities (or understanding of what is told them) follows step by step the development of their consciousness and intelligence and is shown in their language skills. From small expressions side by side, the child goes to clauses that are simple but complete, one following the other or connected by additive words (such as and, so, then , etc). Later, little by little, the existence of different circumstances that may interfere with the action is perceived, and language reflects them. Children begin using terms that acknowledge adverse forces at play (like but), recognize alternatives (whether, either ... or), conditions to be fulfilled (if), times that are not present (when), consequences of actions ( so much ... that ), causes (because), simultaneity (meanwhile), concessions that are made but don't avoid the action (although, in spite of ... ), etc. Little by little, more and more circumstances can be dealt with, including this very notion of graduality. All those ways of ordering one's thoughts are part of narrative language. The more a reader is acquainted with those categories, the more he/she will be able to organize and give meaning to what is experienced, and the more chances he/she will have to develop intellectually.

George Steiner, one of the most important contemporary thinkers, remarks that grammar is “the articulate organization of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve­structure of conciousness when it communicates with itself and with others” [4] . In that view, some aspects of language only develop because they are connected to essential aspects of humankind, which distinguish us from other species. Among them, memory, the consciousness of death and the awareness that life, the species and the world go on after our individual death. Facing this fact that Steiner calls “the scandal and incomprehensibility of individual death”, language in a certain way tries to deny that mortality – even if it is only in a very limited way. It then creates and develops certain mechanisms that have a tremendous semantic strength around hidden cores of potentiality – such as the future tense (the ability to discuss possible events on the day after one's death) or the use of subjunctive and if-clauses (ways of trying to alter the world and refuse the brutal inevitability of facts). Steiner calls those linguistic turns “passwords to hope” and reminds us that “hope and fear are supreme fictions, empowered by syntax.”

If we recognize this, it logically follows another important difference between History and stories. Stories deal with verbs that may be in the future tense, and they may also use subjunctive and if-clauses. History narratives cover only the past. The latter tell what happened, the former tell what might happen. But our thirst for the future demands to be also fed by means of relations with the past and with the moment in between (the present).

This must be done by two different ways: by the knowledge of what has indeed happened and by the logical ordering of plots that gives it some sense. We have a need to exorcise the threatening role of chance, which leaves us in anguish and defenseless. We try to reason along a line that tells us that if facts are not due only to chance but are consequences of previous causes, then some of them may and should be avoided. We are not always at the mercy of unpredictable fatality, every moment on the verge of being victims of the unknown. Our consciousness needs to be fed with enough nourishment to be able to play its role of making sense and synthesis. The ordering action of what happens in a logical narrative process, which we call plot, articulates the meanings of those happenings and gives them a purifying effect. Fiction then goes ahead and lends History the linguistic elements it uses, so that historical narratives can also be coherent, selective, organized, as if they were also plots. Meanwhile, literature keeps its freedom, to tell its stories as wanted, open to endless possibilities, expanding frontiers and boundaries, exploring new fields that thrive in logical and linguistical experiments, breaking known patterns, building new models, facing the challenge of a continuous dialogue with the established canon. A canon that is always reinvented in that process, in a movement of constant creation.

In my work – both for children and for adults – I never wrote anything that could be classified exactly as historical fiction. But I have often built narratives where there is a kind of counterpoint between history and fiction. I take the inspiration from some historical facts that happened but I change them into fictional matter. They become a kind of plausible back­ground, where I can give life to my invented characters, although once in a while those characters may interact with some men and women who had a historical existence. But almost always they are disguised in my stories, with a few exceptions – like Christopher Columbus in Mysteries of the Ocean Sea .

But in general, I just take historical models as models, to create other characters, fully mine. What interests me always, in such cases, is a counterpoint movement between yesterday and today. I like to examine how the past has formed us, how we became its heirs, how we can break with it or in what way we may continue it. In short, I like to explore questions around the issue of how History may help us to understand what we are today and where we may be heading.

It will be easier if I give some examples, examining one of my recent books – From Another World , published in English by Groundwood and being launched now in Danish and Swedish by Hjulet (as Slavepigen / Slavflickan).

It is a contemporary story. The characters are teenagers that spend some holidays in a country hotel built on the premises of what had once been the siege of a coffee plantation in Brazil, both the masters' big house and the slaves' quarters. Little by little they find out it is a haunted house. Not haunted by an ordinary ghost, one of those we all read about in ghost stories, that live in an English castle. It is the ghost of a girl their age, who had lived as a slave in that place, in the 19th century. No contemporary terror movie can compare to the horrible realities of slavery – that's what they realize along their meeting with the girl ghost, and are challenged to face the consequences of that historical reality we all have to live with in our days, as descendants of people who once tolerated slavery or were submitted to it. No matter when it was abolished, the fact is that the effects of that historical nightmare left their imprints in the current divisions of the contemporary world. The characters in the plot live in our days. Their experience, as told in the novel, may seem to be just a teenager adventure mixed with fantastic aspects. But the whole plot develops in a dialogue with a real historical element –

the existence of African slavery in Brazil's past, where it was introduced by Europeans to replace a frustrated attempt in using native slavery, in order to produce goods for the European market, according to European ways of living and thinking. We are all together in that.

This does not mean that I think that every plot in every book should have clear historical references. Several of my books, probably the majority of them, don't show this aspect. But I am sure that time and place are important for me, as I live and as I write.

The place aspect often develops as a dialogue between where the story happens and the rest of the world, because I firmly believe that we are not islands. Although I consider that it is very important to stress and reinforce the specific cultural features that distinguish every human group and to show how worthy they all are, I am also convinced that it is even more significant to show how much we have in common that makes us all brothers and sisters.

The emphasis of how much we are alike allows us to recognize ourselves in the others, to exchange ideas and to live in peace, in spite of all the cultural differences. Those different features, then, may just become very attractive in that perspective, as complementary aspects to what we are.

As for the time aspect, I know it is always important in my work, although I seldom think about this before beginning to write a book nor decide beforehand that I'll focus on a certain historical period. Just as what happens with place, landscape or scenery, I realize I tend to work with different times side by side and make them respond to each other, in a kind of dialogue or counterpoint. In that way, I try not to be completely cut off from the present, while not forgetting the references of past experiences. I'll give some examples.

Bisa Bia, Bisa Bel (in English Me in the Middle , published by Groundwood; in Swedish Isabel , published by Opal) tells the story of a girl who finds a portrait of her great­grandmother at her own age. Magically, when she tries to keep it inside her blouse, near her skin, the image becomes a transparent tattoo that begins living within her, while invisible to the others. Along with that girl that lived many decades ago, Isabel goes through amusing and moving situations in her everyday contemporary life, in a society where roles are changing. Then they receive a visit: from the girl's future great-granddaughter, from another century,

a yet unborn girl to whom some day she will be the invisible companion no one will see or know.

D e Olho nas Penas (in Danish Øjne på verden, published by Hjulet, and in Swedish Sorgens Ögon , published by Gidlunds) deals with the story of a culturally mixed Brazilian boy who was born in exile and tries to understand why he is not totally European nor African but also Latin-American. The plot takes him in a mythical journey in the company of a magical bird with whom he flies in the night, through different continents and times, visiting myths, legends and a History that helped to form his identity.

O Canto da Praça (The Song of the Plaza) follows two boys, a girl and an old man in times where war threatens mankind and new weapons are developed, in the Middle Ages,

in future intergalactic space and in our day. Stories and History are mixed while delving into a long human tradition of looking for peace while war is raging.

In my novels for adults, the critics have already remarked the constant presence of this kind of dialogue between different times and counterpoints between different visions of the world. It is not the case of going into that here, this is a congress about children's books. I just mention the fact to stress that at this point in my life, after 40 years writing fiction, I realize that those remarks are true: those aspects are often present in my work. Many times I was not even aware that I was doing that, those dialogues just came naturally. My only conclusion is that they keep on popping up in what I write because they correspond to something that is deeply true in the way I am. I do this as a writer because I do this as a human being – including as a reader.

When I read, I am always establishing some kind of relationship between different times and cultures. I read Homer, Cervantes or Shakespeare with delight and admiration and I bring that reading to become part of my life as a Brazilian woman in the 20th and 21st centuries. The strangeness I feel when Melville's pages take me along, chasing Moby Dick in cold seas, or the familiarity I experience when sailing with Stevenson in tropical waters in search of a treasure island are part of my life and follow me along the South Atlantic ocean shore in Rio de Janeiro where I walk every morning. The thrill of the medieval Japanese boy helping to fight tyranny in Katherine Patherson's The Master Puppeteer or the suffering experienced by the boy forced to play so that the African slaves could exercise in their trip to America, in a book like Paula Fox's The Slave Dancer , or the risks Alki Zei's character runs to challenge dictatorship in Greece in The Tiger in the Window , or the terrible everyday situation little Parvana has to face in her Afghanistan devastated by war and fundamentalism in Deborah Ellis's The Breadwinner , they are all deeply connected to Anne Frank's suffering or to the fights for freedom everywhere, including my country under the military dictatorship. As much as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit show Tolkien's worries with the spread of evil during World War II, they are a testimony to the presence of History transformed into stories. The nightmare imagined by George Orwell in Animal Farm or the consciousness of responsibility left open by Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince may find their echo when young South American, African or Asian readers of today open other books and face their future. Stories bring new possibilities for History. Everywhere.

Everything is linked. That is what I would like to remind us all here today. Stories and History. Old tales and modern narratives. Books written no matter where. Our own reading of one of them is an act that gives them life and may assure the survival of humanism in a world where technology cannot erase the sense of community that exists among all men and women, from every society, from every period of History.

Of course the role played by local and foreign backgrounds, characters and historical references in books for children is very important. To stress what the young reader sees at home and around his/her everyday routine is a way of helping to understand where he/she comes from. The references to one's culture stress the sense of belonging and accentuate the differents aspects of national and local heritage. Books for children can be a mirror to show how beautiful are one's surroundings and cultural inheritances, how one should be proud of them, how unique they are and where they stand, facing the rest of the world.

The unique beauty of each language, especially, is an aspect that children's literature is equipped to introduce since a very early age, by underlining word plays, allusions, suggesting the richness of a common field in oral and written tradition. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once said “My country is my language”. We all know what he meant by that. There are even historical cases of people who have been deprived of a territory but kept their identity through the permanence of a language, where culture was preserved.

In a global world, where mass media tend to go over individual differences, and where those who are economically stronger try to crush the weaker ones who dissent from the imposed patterns and models, it is impossible not to worry about the threats to the survival of different voices and viewpoints. Human diversity is as important as natural diversity, as everyone who is concerned with the environment is aware of. And they stand on a sense of local cultural belonging.

Children are entitled to develop this feeling through stories and good books that spring from their own cultural heritage. They play an important role in building up a sense of identity or in relieving cultural tensions and should be an essential part in a young reader's emotional and intellectual development. But we should also be concerned with the risks of falling into the trap of stressing the differences too much and transforming culture in a way of building barriers between people and cultures. When a child reads a book which strongly expresses her cultural background, she may feel something like “how wonderful we are...”, yes, and that is good. But not something like “we are better than the others...”

Cultural background should come naturally in a story and help one to feel at ease with oneself and one's culture. But sometimes, nowadays, it seems to be so intentional that it risks to express some kind of resentment or hurt feelings – often justified, no doubt, but out of place in children's literature. For this misuse may contribute more to set fire to a boiling anger than to develop human understanding. Risks of becoming a kind of propaganda are always a danger when political or ideological intentions begin playing a part in the genesis itself of what should be a work of art. Children's books walk always on a tight rope, because of the common assumption that they are akin to education. All of us who deal in the area should keep our eyes wide open, to avoid those hidden ghosts of manipulation. We have no right to pretend to be innocent, it is morally unforgivable.

Setting stories in History or in the cultural diversity of the planet cannot be used as a pretext to enhance isolation or intolerance. Books are not written to be only mirrors, but windows. Peace, justice, equality and mutual respect are built on the basis of acknowledging what we have in common, in spite of of the variety of our wonderful and rich differences.

The meanings of stories are more important than disagreements of historical authorities. History as a whole is made by human beings that communicate and trade, by cultures that borrow and lend to each other – not only by instant reactions, political slogans, ready-made labels and ideas, campaigns and sharp orders from those who are in power.

In the 18th century, Goethe already was conscious of this when he came with the notion that there is an universal literature, Weltliteratur , that would be a kind of symphony made by the art of words as a whole. A language art that could unite in harmony all the different individual voices and sounds and never miss the beauty of the whole. More recently, Erich Auerbach reminded us of how important it is to be able to avoid literary homogeneity and standardization – for they threaten the development of humanism. In order to be able to prevent that danger, an essential step lies in our ability to to develop sympathetically and subjectively the practice of entering into the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time and its author – as Edward Said reminds us [1] . We must know each other, pay attention to foreign voices, believe that we gain something when we understand those who are not identical to us. Be it for children, young people or adults, stories and History should go along and walk together to reinforce humanism and resist against all forms of injustice and violence.

[1] In the introduction to the reedition of Orientalism , by Penguin, London, 2003, reprinted in The Guardian 2/8/03.

[1] MacIntyre, Alastair, After Virtue, Notre Dame Press University, 1981, quoted in Vial, Jorge Peña, La Poética del Tiempo , Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 2002.

[2] Arendt, Hannah, Men in Dark Times , Harcourt, Brace Jovanovitch, San Diego, New York, n/d, quoted in Vial.

[3] Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition , The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958.

[4] Ateiner, George, Grammars of Creation, Faber and Faber, London, 2001.

[5] In the introduction to the reedition of Orientalism , by Penguin, London, 2003, reprinted in The Guardian 2/8/03.

Ondjaki

Let's Share the Dream: Stories for Children in Angola

“(…) children's literature was born and put about in Angola in the Journal de Angola supplement and by Rádio-Piô – at that time, and for many more years, the most lauded informational and educational channel for children. (…) An interesting phenomenon was that a part of our listeners, a great part of those who wrote to us and who wanted to collaborate sending us stories, traditional tales and riddles, were actually youngsters serving time in the army (...)”

Dario de Melo, Angolan writer

1. Introduction

Angola was a country colonized for 500 years. The Portuguese arrived in Congo in 1482 in an expedition led by Diogo Cão.

The political, religious and cultural impositions resulted in successive inhibitions and even prohibitions of local forms of expression. Centuries later, and even after the abolition of slavery, Angolans, blacks and mulattos alike, suffered from continuous social discrimination. Even some white people born in Angola were called “second class whites”.

The resistance made an impact on me from very early on in my life. Isolated to the southern and eastern parts of the country the revolt – created and nurtured by the very people that had already been victims of revolt themselves – was militarily controlled by the Portuguese colonial regime. Yet, an Angolan nation came into being, with the continuous presence of people that had come from across the ocean, the people they had met and the people that were to be born out of this cultural mix. The near shore areas were inhabited by the most powerful people, politically or financially. Thus, along the years, the Angolan interior was “conquered”.

Eventually, these organized resistances also reached the urban centres. Cities like Benguela, Lubango, Huambo and Luanda all became centres for ideological organizations fighting colonial occupation. At the beginning of the 20 th century, some journalists and intellectuals even ventured to publish texts expressing favourability towards Angolan independence and autonomy.

  However, being constantly more satisfied with the great riches obtained in Angola and other African colonies, the Portuguese regime insisted that these territories were only “provinces of Portugal”. The awareness among some intellectuals and individuals from the political and cultural circles gave birth to several independence movements.

2. The writers and the war(s)

One of the most well-known Angolan writers, Pepetela, besides being guerrilla and a commander at the northern front, began discovering his vocation during the guerrilla years. “Ngungas adventures”, one of the most widely read books in Angola both before and after independence, was written for Angolan children meant as a manual to the Portuguese language and cultural references.

Originally, Ngunga wasn't meant to be a novel. I was in the East making a census of MPLA bases. For the first time, the number of bases, the number of men and the number of guns were going to be known. I went from base camp to base camp – and at the same time I attended the school classes, helping the teachers (…). I started to realize that the kids had only the school's books when learning Portuguese and I concluded that it was necessary to work out auxiliary texts, and thus Ngunga started to take shape. [1]

  Written and published in 1973, in stencil, by the MPLA's cultural services, As adventuras de Ngunga is an educational story about a young boy with a very determined and honest nature, who chooses the same path as other “pioneers” joining the MPLA guerrillas, consequently growing into a man and learning to think independently. MPLA stands for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

  Another big name in Angolan literature is Luandino Vieira [2] . He joined MPLA very early on, having been imprisoned for conspiring against the Portuguese colonial regime. But even in prison, sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, he continued writing.

  Even a guerrilla fighter like Agostinho Neto, a medical doctor and poet who in 1975 became the first president of the Republic of Angola, divided his time between political and literary activities for a long time. It was as if the foundation and the destiny of the country were always tightly connected to books.

  During the colonial war, until 1975, and even during the times of the subsequent civil wars, literary production never ceased despite these somewhat difficult circumstances.

  At the beginning of the 20 th century, prose and chronicles were the two great arts of the nation's writers. After the 50s, and until today, Angola has been the birthplace of a great number of poets coming from all corners of the country.

  However, like in all other struggles around the world, the civil war generated other urgencies and priorities, just as the Angolan cultural sector also suffered many privations.

3. The 80s

During the 80s, Angolan literature went through a very fertile period within the poetry genre.

  With the social and economic strains becoming ever more accentuated, particularly in the interior of the country where the war was the most intense, the cities became the destination for thousands of people arriving mainly from the southern and eastern parts of Angola. The capital city of Luanda, residence of the political and financial elite and the main urban and cultural centre of the country, received and accumulated the ethnical, cultural and social tendencies from almost any part of what is the territory of Angola.

  This reality is clearly echoed in the national literature. Luanda and its urban characte-ristics became the predominant literary matter.

  The poetry allowed itself to travel beyond Luanda. Names like Ruy Duarte de Carvalho and, later on, Ana Paula Tavares or João Maimona, emerged on the poetic scene with more modern and abstract voices, though still dealing with aspects of Angolan traditions. In their poetry, the city and the countryside were either in conflict or living in harmony.

  So what about children's literature? Was there any place for this genre in the hardship days of the 80s?

Actually, in the 80s, children's literature saw its most prolific years. Works by Dario de Melo, Gabriela Antunes and Cremilda Lima were published. [3]

  Tightly connected to aesthetic issues, however, a preoccupation with putting about a literature that evolved around aspects firmly establishing Angolan culture also manifested itself. At the same time, though, honouring and respecting children's literature as a literary genre.

  “ Children's literature is, first and foremost, literature. It presupposes art, beauty and delight, and does not reject the word children's.” [4]

  In the specific case of Angola that had adopted Portuguese as its official language, another question arose, namely the role of the so-called national languages (umbundu, kimbundu, kikongo, tchokwe etc.):

   The book A caixa, by Manuel Rui, can be considered the first post-independence children's book. In 1977, Maria Eugénia Neto, wife of the first Angolan president, published E nas florestas os bichos falaram that was awarded the Honorary Prize by UNESCO's Cultural Committee.

During these years, the Angolan Writers Association also contributed to the publication of various works.

4. The 90s

Luanda remained the cultural and political centre for a long time. The concentration of cultural powers, of actors and of the very artistic dynamics was in Luanda – save the rare exceptions, organized by the government, in other cities that the war inhabited.

After the 1992 elections, and even the subsequent fresh outbreak of war, the change of the political system made an immediate impact at all levels. Despite the war, financial life changed substantially. Editors re-emerged and new ones saw the light of the day. And they all gave room for prose, poetry and children's literature. However, few were the ones who were writing.

Even though Dário de Melo was still publishing books at the end of the 90s, the most prolific writers were Celestina Fernandes and Cremilda Lima. In 1992, Maria João, coming from Lubango, published “The school and Miss Milk-Can”, an interesting reflection on the milk cans used in schools due to the lack of desks. Over many years, especially right after our independence, kids used to bring empty milk cans from their homes, as a substitute for desks or chairs. In this way children were able to sit and teaching was not interrupted due to the lack of material. When I was in the fifth grade, even in my classroom in Luanda, there were only a few desks every morning. They used to be moved to other classrooms during the afternoon or night shifts. So we used this huge bookshelf laid horizontally, to replace the desks. Others would use part of the window sill to write down their notes.

From 2000 and onwards, new writers enter the scene of children's literature: Yola Castro, John Bela, and myself with “Ynari: the girl with the five braids”.

5. A personal note: the books and experiences of Ondjaki

Geographically Angola is divided into 18 provinces, but the capital city of Luanda has almost always manifested itself as a country apart from the rest of the nation. Due to social and political matters already touched upon here, and also parallel to what happens in all other countries in the world, the capital city becomes the principal centre of all kinds of power and influences.

  I grew up in this city, during the 80s, reading some of the books mentioned above. Socialism, both the political and even civilian system back then, constituted the essence of my educational system. Angola underwent the political transition to democracy in 1991.

  The children that I could read about in Angolan literature, or even Mozambican literature, handed out in school, were real children accompanying me in my everyday life. With the exception of stories that depicted the time prior to independence, many of the stories, for example the ones by Manuel Rui, and above all his book Quem me dera ser onda, depicted concrete aspects of the reality I lived in, thus making them very tangible. Furthermore, it was my generation who lived through what the literature about the 80s was to describe later on.

  The linguistic aspects (references to music, and the estigas [5] ) and the social aspects (demeanour associated with the 80s, political speeches and the reproduction, by children, of the socialist system, ways of dressing, social rules, etc.) that appeared in literary works were immediately indentified by us as being very real. This was the beauty of literature: what was written, even though a result of the artist's fantasy, was at the same time the reality of our daily lives.

The “street” and the “school” always made up the sacred spaces of our childhood.

The famous phrase that we read in our school books and reference books, “the pen is the pioneer's weapon”, became our rule of conduct in life. The truth was that revolution was carried out through books, through the pen, through reading materials and through texts. Some among us, and I include myself in this group, believed in the power of the pen and the power of the book.   

  The story “We killed the mangy dog” by the Mozambican writer Luis Bernardo Honwana that we read in school influenced a whole generation. The same for the incredible tale “Wish I was a wave”.

  In the first case, this “mangy dog” was an old and sick dog, in the surrounding areas of Maputo, that is supposed to be killed by one boy, with an air-pressure gun. A group of boys is authorized by a Portuguese white man to kill the dog, because it was disturbing the neighborhood. Only one girl, Isaura, tries to defend the animal until the end. One of the boys, a black boy among the others who are white, does not want to kill the mangy dog anymore. But the circumstances and the group pressure lead him to the easiest choice. In “Wish I Was a Wave”, Manuel Rui tells another story with children: To their eight-floor building, their father brings home a pig, to be killed a few months later. But the kids love the pig right away, so they will do everything to save him.

  In both stories, the political contents was not explicit for us, as kids, but the rhythm and the language used were very powerful. Some of that African way of writing, that really has to do with our way of being with the world and with the languages, has remained in me.

  In 2000, one week before the end of the Angolan civil war, I felt a very strong urge to write a story for children. I only knew that I wanted to write about a girl, with five braids, who made immense sacrifices trying to bring an end to the war that was all around her. This girl, and this is the story of my book “Ynari: a menina das cinco tranças”, loses her braids one by one in the five villages at war. The war between these five villages breaks out because the people in each village have lost one sense or the other: the ability to hear, to taste, to see, etc. At the end of the story, Ynari, after having resolved all the wars, goes looking for “a very old elderly person who destroys words” and asks her to destroy the word “war”. I believe that any person of my generation, living through those interminable years of war, would have liked to meet that elderly woman.

  The main reference point in Ynari: a menina das cinco tranças is the open space of the countryside, my own diligent search for something I did not know all that well. Being born and raised in Luanda, the interior of Angola, due to the successive wars, was for the people of Luanda a mystical and inaccessible space. The book Ynari, then, serves as a search for a lesson of my own. For the powers of the land and the magic of what cannot be explained:

it must be lived.

  What I had indeed lived and knew well were the streets and the schools of Luanda.

In my most recent children's book, once again the children, with their magic powers and their serious decisions, appear. When the houses in a certain neighbourhood are all threatened by the presence of a big construction (the famous construction of the Mausoleum that was to become the resting place for the embalmed body of comrade President Agostinho Neto), the children react and make secret decisions: they will have to knock down the enormous concrete construction before “the adults” decide to knock down their neighbourhood. Wrongly interpreted as an attack on the first Angolan president, in my opinion, the intention of the book is merely to draw attention to the powerful effects of children's universe: they defend the parts that make up the roots of their hearts and of their world. And a house, or a neighbourhood, can make up that world. To a child, under the power of purity, everything, including magic and fears, gains a bigger meaning.

  Another one of my children's books, unpublished, is called A bicicleta que tinha bigodes. It is a simple homage to the Angolan writer Manuel Rui. In the story, presumably taking place in the street where the writer lives, a group of kids are trying to create a written story so they can win the bicycle that Rádio Nacional is offering as a prize for the best children's story of Luanda. Knowing that “uncle Rui” is a writer, a rumour spreads in the street that his beard contains letters, accents and magical phrases that are put in a box, every Thursday, when his wife “sweeps” his beard with a miniature broom. The group of friends hatches up a plan to steel the box, but eventually, because of his friendship with the writer, the protagonist does not commit the crime. They send only a sincere letter to Rádio Nacional, clumsy, written in Portuguese, but full of grammatical errors, and addressed to the comrade president stating that he should offer a bicycle to all Angolan children.

  I have given you these last two examples wanting to tell you that Angolan children's literature is being reborn. And this is especially due to the economic boom experienced in the country, as well as the way the peace process has facilitated creativity and, finally, the rise of the phenomenon that I believe will be the so-called “urban orality”. This will be, if it isn't already here, the outcome of these social mixtures of a generation born in Luanda, with origins in other parts of the country. But also by the well-to-do generations of Luanda who had the opportunity to travel and study abroad, and who are now returning influenced by other stories and echoes of other realities.

  From a personal point of view, I am content with the “literary signs” that point towards new productions of national literature, and new tendencies that embrace urban orality phenomena like “estigas”, anecdotes and the theatrical style of Luanda life, and the incorporation, in music, in theatre and in literature, of the most prominent social questions of our everyday life.

  It is thus that you enrich literature, regenerating life. Because life – with all its civilian agents, nurturing creativity and tenderness – is what we call “culture”.

[1] Pepetela, in an interview given to the website “Portal da literatura”.

[2] Although born in Portugal, Luandino Vieira always considered himself Angolan. He was sent to prison by the Salazar regime´s secret police in 1959, accused of having connections to the independence movement, but released shortly after. In 1961, the Portuguese Writers Association (PWA) decided to award him the Castelo Branco Prize for his book Luuanda. That decision made PIDE/DGS force the disintegration of PWA. That same year, Luandino Vieira was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. He served the sentence at the Tarrafal prison in Cap Verde. He returned to Portugal in 1972, but on restricted liberty terms and with fixed residence in Lisbon. In 1975, following Independence, he returned to Angola where he stayed until 1992.

[3] Works by Cremilda Lima include: O tambarino dourado, Missanga e o sapupo, O nguiko e as mandiocas, A kianda e o barquinho de fuxi, A múcua que bailocava ao vento, O maboque mágico, A velha sanga partida, Mussulo uma ilha uma encantada and O balão vermelho.

[4] Maria Celestina Fernandes in “The Emergence and Formation of Angolan Post-Independence Children's Literature”, a lecture given in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, July 2008.

[5] Estigas is a game, an oral dispute, principally among children, with the purpose of (scornfully or maliciously) offending the counterpart (author's definition).

Josefine Ottesen

Recreating the Story of Your Life: How to Overcome Cruelty

There was a low, pale winter sun that day. I was sitting in the sunrays in front of the terrace door, playing with some plastic animals. I was around eight years old. At the other end of the room, my mother was sitting with a friend. Their voices were low but intense. Something important was being said. Stories not meant for my ears.

  Slowly and very discreetly, my animals moved closer and closer to the table where my mom and her friend were sitting, and I ended underneath it without anyone noticing. Here, I overheard the story of my mother's life from her childhood in Budapest, Hungary in the beginning of the 20th century. How her playmates tied her to the fence with her arms spread out saying : “The Jews crucified Jesus; now we'll crucify you!” I also heard about the time when her uncle, shaking with fear, showed up at their flat in central Budapest shortly after World War I, telling how he'd just been on a tram, where a group of Red or White revolutionaries – I don't remember which – had pulled out everybody who looked Jewish and hanged them from the nearest lamp post. For some reason they had overlooked him – although he looked very Jewish.

She moved to Germany in the 1920s and then had to flee from the Nazis in 1934. First she went to Denmark, and then had to continue on to Sweden in 1943 with two small children.

She was upset, very upset. I could not see her face from my position under the table, but I could hear her voice shaking.

  When she got to the part where she had to tell about the loss of almost her entire family in the concentration camps, I wished I had stayed in the sunrays by the door. It was horrible to hear of the death of her beloved relatives, and it was terrifying to cope with the knowledge of human brutality and cruelty and especially the total lack of reason.

  When she had finished, I remember the silence that followed and the sound of the clock ticking – and in those few seconds a great part of my identity was formed. I realized that I was one of THEM; someone who could be persecuted for no reason at all – even killed for having done nothing, except for being who I was.

It was too big a revelation, and for several years I tried to ignore it until one day, a teacher decided to show us, a group of 15-year-olds, Nacht und Nebe l – a documentary of what the Allied and Russian troops saw when they reached the concentration camps in Germany at the end of the war.

  Then I clearly remembered my mother's stories, and now I was too old to just push the thoughts aside. I was a Jew, I had to accept it, like it or not.

It was not because I was brought up in Judaism, especially since my father was a Danish vicar and I was baptized, like the rest of my Danish family. And it was not because I was an integrated part of the relatively strong Jewish Danish community – my mother herself, having been brought up in a very secular culture, never had much to do with other Jewish people. The reason that I was Jewish was solely because someone else had decided so!

I could not do much about it, so I tried to pay as little attention to it as possible. Not until I gave birth to my own children, and as they grew older, did I realise that even though I tried to keep that part of my story really low-key, it still had an enormous impact on how I brought them up. The fear of being persecuted, deprived of one's dignity and even killed, kept me in a constant state of stress, and I passed that on, unwittingly, to my own children.

This story of history, which was not even my own, but my mother's, filled and controlled a great part of my life and my way of observing the world. I would always buy lots of dried food, such as beans and rice, so we would have supplies if we needed to escape.

I would have nightmares of having to live on the road, and always worry if we all had good boots to wear, just in case … I would be very concerned with how my family was regarded by others – they should do well in school, be polite and well-behaved.

  It was certainly time, I discovered, to confront myself, if I did not want my kids to inherit the story I had inherited from my mother! And so I did.

I started reading a lot of literature about concentration camps, which I had, up to this point, avoided. Immediately essential questions started to pop up:

Why is it that some people can go through horrible experiences and come out stronger on the other side, whereas others fall apart?

How is it possible to make one group of people hate another group, when they have lived peacefully side by side with each other before?

And here my journey began into the creative proces, that would end up being my trilogy, “The Story of Mira”.

My work as an artist has always been very inspired by folk-tales, myths and legends. For me the fantastic non-realistic universe offers the best metaphors for what I call “mapping the inner landscape” – finding our way through the emotional, subconscious world I would imagine that we all share, no matter where or who we are.

The challenge is always how to find the right symbols and images that represent the essential elements of the story I am working with – symbols and images which hopefully will strike a chord with my readers.

The first question “Why do some people come out stronger on the other side of severe traumas, and others fall apart?” led me to books by Otto Frankl, Jean Amery, Primo Levy and others who had actually survived the concentration camps. The main message from the survivors seems to be: You have to keep looking out through the fence and hang on so that your suffering on some level has a meaning.

  Imre Kertez's story of how he, having survived the Holocaust, came back to Budapest, made a great impression on me. When he told his few remaining relatives what had happened to him, they felt deeply sorry for him, but he insisted that his living through the horrible years of concentration camp was meant to be. He was chosen to be a witness and was given the mission to tell others what had happened. In that way he took on his history and made the cruelty and inhumanity part of his own story. So he transformed himself from being a pitiful victim to somebody with a mission: to tell the story of the cruelty he had been through.

At the same time I was introduced to a book by French psychiatrist Boris Curulnik, “Den Grimme Ælling” in Danish. In English this translates into “The Ugly Duckling”, using the Hans Christian Andersen tale as a hint to the story of becoming a beautiful swan although nobody helps you and you go through severe suffering in your life.

  Curulnik very clearly states that to survive as a human being through traumatic events, you need to be able to re-tell the story of yourself, so what has happened transforms into something meaningful to you.

  Curulnik presents the case of a small African boy, who sees his whole family being massacred. For some reason the attackers overlook him. Paralysed with fear he stays in the empty village. A few days later the militia comes back, and this time he reacts by hiding himself under a blanket. Although they search the whole place, they don't find him. When they are gone, he hurries to the next village to seek shelter. When he tells his story to two grown-ups, they are, of course, terrified and clasp their hands in fear while one of them says: ”Imagine if you had sneezed!”

Curulnik meets this boy in a refugee camp, where he keeps on tickling himself in the nose with a blade of grass, until he starts to bleed. When Curulnik reveals his story it becomes evident that this boy is trying to recapture his own story. He wants to be able to control a sneeze at any time. You might say that this boy has been traumatized twice: first through the horrible experience and afterwards in being deprived of his story: he actually made it, he survived!

  To me, Curulnik's book became a turning point in my writing process. This was a story I would really like to tell: How do we re-tell the story of our lives so that it becomes meaningful and establishes ourselves as powerful and active persons in our own lives, instead of being passive victims of someone else's aggression and will?

The next question was more difficult: What makes one group accept, all of a sudden, that their fellow citizens are no longer humans but less than animals, not worthy of living and so dangerous that they need to be annihilated?

  For one thing, Nazism, and all that it brought with it of horrible deeds, was due to a very specific historical situation. But genocides have happened, both before Nazism and after, so I had to find a way of explaining how an idea like this could establish itself more or less overnight in a larger group of people.

  It was a difficult task – mainly because most of the writing on a subject like this is very political and closely related to specific historical periods and what I needed was more of an archetypical explanation.

One could say that trying to bring in a kind of a meta-layer on political and sociological issues in a fantasy novel is a bit ambitious, but then on the other hand that was what I set out to do, and I was rather determined to fulfil it – just ask my editor, Nanna Gyldenkærne!

By coincidence I talked with a woman who works as a nurse with newcomers to Denmark. She told me about “Memes” – a different way of describing cultural thought patterns, that are – or become – so strong that you don't question them.

I went on the internet and found out that “memes” had 35,800,000 hits!

On one site I found this definition:

“Memes are contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection. As memes evolve, they become better and better at distracting and diverting us from whatever we'd really like to be doing with our lives. They are a kind of Drug of the Mind.”

Apparent ly, effective memes find their way into more primitive part of the brain, outside the control of the conscious mind, and they especially seem to spread easily if they relate to sex, food or fear – the more effectively they activate our evolutionary buttons, the faster they spread.

You can say that it is a kind of “mind-epidemic”.

  This made sense for me. Memes as a term became a good image for me to understand how ideas and thought patterns can spread like a virus, and why it seems so difficult to fight against it.

But how to use this pseudo-scientific term “memes” in a fantasy-novel? I really needed some strong metaphors to show how dangerous these “mental viruses” are – I needed something fast-running and uncontrollable!

  For me, demons had the right qualities. Almost every culture in the world knows demons under one name or another. Their common quality is the fear of something powerful that from one minute to the next can change your friend into your enemy – into something inhuman and cruel, some strange magic that possesses someone's mind and turns them into monsters without empathy.

  And the most interesting thing for me at this point was the fact that the primary channel for new memes and how they become “ a demons tool” was through story-telling. Stories told from one generation to the next, stories spread worldwide through the media and internet. It happens SO fast!

If you need proof just look at where totalitarian regimes strike first – controlling the stories!

Little by little, the theme of my new book formed around two main topics: How do you re-tell your own story, so your life becomes meaningful and which stories do you accept and pass on?

  Setting the universe in “fantasy-time” gave me exactly the freedom I needed to write this story. Mira – my main-character – is a well-off girl with a happy life in first class. But times change and all of a sudden she becomes the victim of the story of her tribe. To save herself and her loved ones she has to get in charge of her own story, she has to learn to control the demons, that spread the evil and keep them on a leash. And no – you can't rid the world of evil and cruelty, but you can consider how you want to deal with it!

  Working with this novel became a real eye-opener – not only on how much the story of my life – told by my mother – became the story of my life without me questioning it before very late in life, but also about how important my job as a storyteller is.

I am on a mission! I want to give to my readers a message: Be the author of your own lifestory!

And to do that, the children need stories. Lots of them! The more stories they hear and read, the more tools they will have to re-create their own stories so they can form their own lives.

In the “Story of Mira” story-telling is used as a way of teaching the youngsters about life. Mira, like all the other young children has to have the tribal mark branded behind the ear. It hurts and to help her deal with the pain she is told this story:

Once upon a time a king and a queen had a child. A little princess. They gave her everything she could possibly wish to keep her happy, but then one day when she was fifteen she started crying. Nobody understood why. But finally she told them that she could not bear the thought that winter was coming and all the flowers would die. They tried to comfort her. The flowers would come back the following spring, they said, but she could not stop crying. She wanted summer to last forever. Her parents had to send for the Wizard. But even though he was very skilled, he could not stop the change of the seasons. Then the princess cried even harder. Her parents fell on their knees and begged him. “Do something! Solve this problem! Our daughter has to be happy!”

“I can help you,” he said, “but you might regret it later.”

“Just do it. We can't bear to see our daughter in such pain.”

Then the wizard took the young girl's bleeding heart and exchanged it with a new heart of shining crystal.

“Now she will feel no more sorrow and pain,” he said.

And so it happens. The princess was again happy – smiling and giggling. After some years her parents thought it was time to find her a husband. Lots of princes passed by, but she never really cared for any of them.

Finally the Wizard was brought back again.

“Please, make her love somebody,” they asked him.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Once you have chosen the crystal heart to avoid the pain and sorrow of life, then you will never be able to love.”

And to all you wonderful people who sit here and work on bringing stories to children and young people: Tell them stories that open their minds and hearts and teach them how to overcome struggles, give them the tools to become in charge of their own lives instead of the victim of others. Give them hope by telling stories, that can help them map their own “Inner Landscape”.

A Danish author, Vagn Lundbye, once said: “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” He is right: You cannot change whatever terrible experiences you have been through, but you can be conscious of how you will incorporate what happens in your own story – will you give more anger and revenge to the world, or will you pass on stories of empathy and forgiveness?

Michèle Petit [1]

Reading in Crisis Areas

God morgen, good morning, buenos dias, ka??µ??a sa?  ! I would like to thank Vagn Plenge and the organizers of this meeting for inviting me to be with you today. I am also grateful to Nathalie Beau and Jacqueline Kergueno, from IBBY-France, and to Mireille Vachaumard who translated the text of this talk. For a long time, I wondered whether I should give it in English or in Spanish as a tribute to the people in Latin America whose stories enabled me to study the topic which I will speak about. But English being our lingua franca, I decided to use it even though I don't feel as comfortable with it as with Latin languages. Please excuse me if I happen to stumble along the way…

Looking back through history, we notice that reading has helped resist adversity, even in the most horrible circumstances. Let's think of the part that reading or literary memories played for so many deportees. However, most of these people had already been immersed in written culture from an early age.

Today, programs in which reading plays a key role are implemented in various parts of the world that have to face up to countless adversities, and some of them were initiated or supported by IBBY. It was in Latin America that I discovered amazing literary experiments shared and developed in areas struck by armed conflicts or violence, economic crises, more or less forced population displacements or great poverty. These experiments are conducted by teachers, librarians, people promoting reading or psychologists, and are proposed to young

ex-guerilla and paramilitary fighters, refugees, drug addicts who live on the streets, detained teenagers, abused children etc. In brief, to children, teenagers or adults coming from poor, marginalized backgrounds with dominated cultures and who grew up far away from books.

Most of the time, such experiments remain ignored or unknown in Europe. But they are likewise unknown even a few kilometers away from where they are conducted. This is why I tried to study about fifteen of them in Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico: ”best practices”, as they say today, and those who initiate these programs are very talented.

I listened to them, visited some of the places they run, read texts they wrote, and examined documents in which they had recorded their observations. As a counterpoint, I gathered data on a number of other experiments and accounts within different cultural environments.

Most of the people I met claim they do not use ”bibliotherapy”, a concept that is rarely used in Latin countries. Although they know that their activity has healing effects, they seek to achieve something that goes beyond care, something related to culture, education and,

in some respects, politics. For them, access to written culture, knowledge, information too often turns out to be a spurned right. So does the appropriation of literature. In many respects, they consider it desirable to have access to literature as it would enable people to use a language in a more skillful way, develop a more subtle, critical intelligence and permit them to explore human experience and give it a meaning and a poetic value.

The art of mediation …

The mechanism lying at the heart of the mediators' action is apparently very simple: written material is proposed to those who are usually deprived of it, and someone reads aloud to them. Then stories, discussions or silence crop up among the participants. Obviously, there are countless variations. Some of the mediators dedicate the whole length of their meetings to reading and oral exchanges deriving from them, while others mix reading with writing. Others alternate or combine reading, writing and other practices such as visiting museums, theatre, music, dance, making graphic or audiovisual works, etc.

However, apart from their distinctive features, several common characteristics are to be found in a number of these experiments that reveal the real art of reading, but first and foremost the art of welcome and hospitality. Indeed, mediators are highly accessible and confident in everyone's capabilities and creativity. In these meeting places, each person's rhythm, culture or background is respected and everyone is considered as a person worthy of being listened to in a specific way. Children's and teenagers' statements are received as something valuable in contrast to many ordinary schools, where teachers often tend to identify what is wrong in the pupils' oral or written production. These young people are often asked to become book facilitators themselves, and are trained as such.

The art of mediation is also the quality of being present, the ability to be there with one's body and energy. Mediators prefer to resort to oral expression, to the voice which enlivens the texts, and to the look which goes from one participant to the other. They combine literary knowledge with intuition, flexibility, particularly when they have to select the proposed works. But I shall come back to that later on.

The art of mediation is also the ability to question oneself: people involved in these programs thought out their own routes and their relationship with books. During the sessions, they watch what is going on in a subtle way and elaborate their reflection through writing or by comparing their work with others who practice the same art.

Lastly, the art of mediation is the ability to move heaven and earth in order to obtain grants to pursue the programs and fight endlessly, without losing heart, despite the hazards due to political changes, possible whims of regulatory authorities, etc.

When mechanisms similar to those I mentioned earlier occur on an ongoing basis, children, teenagers – and adults too – manage to seize some fragments of the works that have been read to help them construct or reconstruct themselves, even though they grew up far away from books.

... and the art of reading

Reading involves a specific appropriation, otherwise books go unheeded, even though we learn how to decipher them. Now, such a talent is characteristic of readers: texts do not construct readers, but readers construct something by appropriating stories and words that they read or heard and by transforming them.

If children are lucky enough to have access to books at an early age, they try to question them and steal what they consider to be secretly related to their own questions and what will provide them with a personal version of their intimate dramas. And the way they achieve this is often disconcerting.

For instance, I remember this little boy who, after hearing an extract of ”The Odyssey” when Ulysses spends years with the nymph Calypso, noticed that his father, like Ulysses, had abandoned his mother to go and live with another woman. At this point, the children started a spontaneous discussion and went through the different family forms in which they could grow up: recomposed, polygamous, one-parent, homoparental etc. What about this adopted little girl who, day after day, was asking to be read about Tarzan. Especially when baby Tarzan finds himself in the arms of Kala, the female gorilla. The characters and sceneries described in Tarzan's adventures, mixed with those she had borrowed from other albums, could be found in the games she invented and in which she staged her own story in an active, creative way.

Children write their stories between the lines they have read, just like us. By filling their games and thoughts with stories, pictures and sentences, they build a shelter where they will not depend on anyone. Hence, reading boils down to constructing a space for oneself, provided this can be done without too much fear or too many constraints. Take Christine, whose life was punctuated by exile periods from an early age: ”Reading is my country.

I do not miss anything when I read. Time disappears. And I do not depend on anyone.”

Or Martin: ”My family was torn away from their homeland and moved to many different places. At least, books and serials made me feel at home.”

Books are so many borrowed homes and a means to re-create one's lost land. This is why they are so precious during exile periods and for those whose living environment was destroyed or altered, as in Colombia. In Medellin's suburbs, librarians developed a program entitled ”Shelter of tales” when part of the population was chased away following fighting by armed groups. Consuelo Marín recalls one morning as she was reading aloud in a high school in which the population had taken refuge and young listeners had insisted on hearing the end of the story while shots were coming closer: ”Those children who spent their nights crying in the high school hallways, fearing the dark, did not want to miss the end of the tale, like a second skin, the skin of the soul that cannot be removed [2] .”

A book is a kind of shelter that we can take with us, in which we can hear the distant echo of the voice that soothed us and the body in which we stayed. Such a space, though intimate and secret, has many links leading to many others: the author, those who read or will read the book, those who produced or submitted it and the characters that are to be found through the pages. At this point, we are very close to what psychoanalysts have been calling, since Winnicott, the ”transitional space” [3] , a playing area which opens up between the infant and the mother – provided the child feels confident – in which he can start to liberate himself and construct himself as a subject. From the very first years through to advanced age, such a space is crucial as it helps live in a somewhat creative way and in relatively good psychic health. Especially in crisis situations, when life has been punctuated by break-ups, abandon­ments, separations or exile periods.

Books are a means to make room for a new or renewed margin of freedom and suggest another possible future. As Rosalie says, “Books made me happy and allowed me to discover another distant world where I could live. If it were not for the library, I would have gone mad, what with my father who kept shouting and making my mother suffer. The library allowed me to breathe. It saved my life.”

The space to which reading introduces us is regulated by a specific time-period when daily activities are interrupted and daydreaming is given free rein. For thinking and creativity cannot exist without daydreaming.

When reading or listening to a story, a child discovers another language that differs from that used for designating living beings and things; i.e. the story language where contingent events take a meaning inside a narrative with a beginning, a development and an end. It is as if the chaos of the inner world could take shape through the book's secret order. Let's remember that what human beings fear the most is to be nothing but chaos, a divided body, a discontinued series of fragments; to lose the feeling of continuity, of unity, which is not given at birth but has to be achieved through a very complicated process that consists in linking together different life events as and when they arise. Each encountered book comes to the rescue of children or teenagers who endeavour to establish a link between their life events held together not only by a story, but also by the page format and the book as an object, made of bound pages.

Whilst the need for stories may be at the heart of our human specificity, it becomes particularly intense in times of crisis, when the feeling of continuity is given a rough time. Vladimir Propp said that stories represented an attempt to face up to unexpected or unfor­tunate events. As for Pascal Quignard: “Our species is enslaved by stories. […] The need for stories is particularly intense at certain times during individual or collective lives, e.g. during a depression or a crisis. This is when stories provide an almost unique remedy [4] .”

However old we are, the stories that we listened to, read in the secret of our loneliness, or even glanced through, help put some unspoken parts of ourselves into words, shape them in a symbolic way that can be shared, and transform them. They revive each person's narrative, sustain the development of stories about their own lives which always need to be recon­structed. The people I met in Colombia, Argentina and Brazil make the same comment: reading prompts children, teenagers, or the elderly to talk. There may be moments of silence, but this is when everybody is deeply absorbed in their thoughts and inner stories.

Thus, reading is useful also for developing links between the people who – as they feel emotions when being read a text together and exchanging words and stories – become closer to each other. Women who were entirely taken up by their struggle for survival and who were no longer capable of telling their babies nursery rhymes, nor singing songs to them, rediscover how to use words in a free, poetic way. Sometimes, they remember legends or forgotten songs from their childhood, and the emotional and symbolic exchanges with their babies get more intense. In a broader sense, shared reading turns out to be a useful structure for facilitating the free circulation of ideas inside a group. Beyond friendship, those who take part in readers' circles say they learn tolerance and democracy. They find new ways of living together, where everyone has a say in the matter while being respected.

What to read?

These are some of the ways reading can help individuals reconstruct themselves, whatever their social or cultural background. There are other ways that I won't be able to mention as Vagn would like me to focus on the following question: what sort of texts can give people strength, help them get on with their lives, think of a way to position themselves in the world? The answer is obviously complex. Readers are so different and the unexpected so present that what makes someone happy might be boring or worrying for someone else. What readers choose to read is often very surprising, whether they are trying to find words that will reveal themselves, give a meaning to their life or recharge their heart.

What's even more amazing is that human beings use all means available to find words, stories and metaphors. So much so that we could wonder, in the first place, whether all kinds of material could not be suitable to this purpose.

Here are a few examples. As a child, Edward Said kept reading three ill-printed pages about a fakir girl doing feats of strength in a circus… For him, this was a way to “come out of the many cages” in which he felt like a prisoner and to create a space to face up to the environment [5] . One of my colleagues who was assigned domestic chores from her childhood managed to find such a space as she looked greedily at the newspaper pages receiving the vegetable peelings. When he was ten years old, Volodia Tchistokletov found peace between two bombings through animal pictures: “It's a big book with beautiful pictures... I spent the night reading it and I couldn't stop... I remember that I didn't borrow war stories: I didn't want to read them anymore. Animals and birds were something different [6] .” Sacha Kavrous says that the first book he found after the war was a collection of arithmetic problems: “I was reading those problems the way I would have read poems...” [7]

Every single genre has been of help to someone one day, from dictionaries to detective novels, from the One Thousand and One Nights to Dostoyevsky and Mickey Mouse. If we draw up a list of books that caused a rescue shock, the greatest texts of world literature go hand in hand with ordinary adventure novels whose authors can't be remembered by readers. The materials I have gathered do not allow me to ascertain whether the impact of a work and its healing capacity depend on its literary quality. It is particularly difficult to make this analysis because the essentials of the process take place unconsciously ... and what readers see in a text often differs from its contents (or so it seems). It is wonderful to see how our spirit seems to be ready to connect any symbolic material that comes its way, with the substance of our experiences; how it seeks any form of echo, any structure that could represent our unspoken core – particularly if it is painful, give some continuity to our life, make the world more habitable, and add a few sentences or pictures to form the bridge between ourselves and reality.

Obviously, I would readily assume that works with an emphasis on aesthetics are more likely to bring about a psychic activity, provided that their form is no definite obstacle for deciphering them and that they involve some mystery, opacity and secrecy, without which desire cannot possibly exist. But this cannot be proved because powerful encounters with cheap novels do also occur.

However, most mediators whose work I have been following choose to give the best, and in my view, they are right. Everyone has the right to have access to the most beautiful things and many people say they are happy and proud to have been given the keys to something universally recognized. Like this teenager of a stigmatized neighbourhood who told a lady who had proposed a medieval legend to him: “So, this is a real book? Not just a book for us?”

The book facilitators I met aim rather high while trying not to depreciate the initial tastes of their audience. Books are often selected according to the way the participants have been listening and by using associations that come to the mediator's mind. Intuition plays a part, although it is based on a sound knowledge of literature.

But it is not easy to “pass on” demanding texts to people unfamiliar with written culture, who have difficulties in deciphering them and whose attention is sometimes difficult to hold for a long period. This is why short texts that can be read in one go are often used.

In this respect, there are various favoured genres.

The reading of myths and tales is already widely practiced with children, teenagers and adults. They are partly taken from every place's heritage, thus opening up a link to oral tradition and reviving memories of stories heard during childhood. Through them, hot issues are recalled, but nonetheless it is possible to retain a certain distance. However, those using such genres insist that they can only have a healing value if they are read within an environ­ment where intersubjectivity plays a prime role, so much so as they can be a source of anxiety. Besides, the way they are appropriated differs according to the context and the people. This is when the book facilitators' art – made of observation, curiosity, intuition and culture – takes its full meaning.

Poetry is also a favourite genre among participants, and there again whatever their age. It is used by mediators to uncover a hinterland of sensations, a movement, a rhythm that lie hidden under the text. Texts produce multi-level effects through their contents, the asso­ciations they suggest and the discussions they induce, but also through their melody and their tempo. The rhythm supports us and breathes life into us the way hands hold a young child.

High-quality contemporary literature for young people, particularly picture books and sometimes comic strips are mentioned on a regular basis as, there again, they are not only popular with children, but also with teenagers and adults.

Whatever genre they choose, many mediators spontaneously propose texts which do not refer directly or explicitly to the situation of the people they work with. Although some of them had first gone for “mirror” texts, they often had to alter their choices. In Argentina, Gloria Fernández mentions a workshop in which mediators had first tried to stick to the experience of detained teenagers and their alleged tastes [8] . Facilitators were surprised when,

at the second meeting, the participants asked if they could leave or else be read something different. Were the characters not close enough to them? Didn't they live the same kind of life? The fact is that the mediators' subsequent attempts to propose this corpus again failed. Listeners felt too close to the protagonists as the books chosen mainly dealt with poverty, misfortune, bad luck and used the same crude words as these young people. They couldn't cope with so much distress and either walked out or interrupted the reading and asked:

“Do you have that of the fairy who transformed a pumpkin into a carriage?” or “Read The Black Cat to me! And the story of the cockroach who was a man”.

The mediators whose work I followed closely never said they used texts that were explicitly “intentional” or tailor-made to help listeners face such and such crisis. Just like therapists who also use reading, they don't trust books written with a specific purpose.

Day after day, they notice that surprise and the unexpected are perfect ingredients for breathing life into a reader's story. By using metaphors, in remote lands or times, tragedies are given a meaning without being mentioned directly, painful events go through a transformation that allows the sufferers to work through their loss, while creating relationships with others, instead of keeping to themselves.

In praise of detours

Looking into these experiments leads to praise the use of detours. Most of the experiments

I examined regularly take place in liberty, with no marking systems or assessments involved, and for which productivity or quantifiable results are of no concern.

The people who launched them did not seek to achieve one single goal only. They would rather focus on something undetermined and many-sided. Although this could be considered a weak point, it seems to me that these programs are efficient because they are not definitive and are not limited to just one function or one field such as education, civic training, health, transmission of a specific cultural good, even though each of these also plays a part in the programs. There is a bit of ”play” – in all connotations of the word – fluidity and room for the unexpected to appear. Being many-sided, flexible (even though there is a rule-governed ”framework”), these programs are particularly suited to enriching the participants' psychic activities and exchanges.

People attending these programs don't only enjoy a warm and respectful welcome, but also cultural assets which radically open up time and space and allow them to make a detour. Such a detour is vital as it leads toward the unknown by enabling people to break away from their daily lives and rediscover desire, find secret emotions and feelings beneath the words they read or hear, remember the first years of their life. It stimulates thinking, makes them forget about pain, fear or humiliation, even for a short period of time. A sort of magic spell.

A refuge that offers protection and enables them to dream about other futures. Under certain circumstances, people who went through painful life experiences can work symbolically through them.

All forms of literature provide an outstanding basis for awakening one's inner life, breathing life into one's thoughts, stimulating one's narrative activity, creating new meanings while people are encouraged to share unexpected things. Literature is not only an educational tool. It is a resource that can be drawn on for creating or maintaining interludes for breathing, for giving a meaning to our life, for dreaming and thinking.

Writers take whatever time is necessary to give a meaning to individual or collective events, to singular or universal experiences. They have a talent for observation and use the subconscious to shape the language and remove its clichés – good writers at least. Many of their works were created out of deprivation, loss and transfigured pain. The act of creation freed the author and even allowed him or her to find joy in the transformation of pain to a work of art. Such words, then, when read, echo through listeners' and readers' minds to soothe them, to render their own tragedies intelligible and sometimes to give them a certain feeling of happiness. This process is especially calming when offered with transpositions and metaphors: again the detours.

These days, everything needs to be quantified and everyone is obsessed with getting immediate returns, and we easily tend to forget that making detours is crucial from an anthropological and psychic point of view, particularly in critical times. According to Bernard Chouvier, “it is necessary for our psychic life to find indirect ways and give something a meaning that otherwise could only exist against our own existence. [9] ” Making a detour is vital when we need to be clever to get around pain or fear rather than face them. It is also essential for thinking and creativity. For those who spent their early youth far from written culture, taking shortcuts might be indispensable for truly learning new things, and similarly for reconciling with written materials those who consider books as a hostile, colonizing authority and a means of exclusion. They won't necessarily become great readers, but books will no longer put them off or frighten them. Sometimes, they will even find it worthwhile and easier to appropriate written culture.

This just shows how precious and difficult the art of mediating is, how this activity would deserve to get some support, be encouraged, taken over from others so that everyone could get a chance to discover new worlds. A woman living in the French countryside used to say: “With books, there is not only us as we watch our life pass by”. Young people and teenagers from Brazil who had been able to appropriate books and hand them over to others thanks to skilled mediators told me the same thing with different words: “Perhaps the most important thing is that I felt part of something larger, something that went beyond myself”.

Thank you for your attention.

Topics of this talk are developed in L'Art de lire, ou comment résister à l'adversité , Paris, Belin, to be published in October 2008 (and simutaneously in Spanish by Océano, Mexico).

[2] Cf. Consuelo Marín, “Biblioteca pública, bitácora de vida”, www.anabad.org/archivo/docdow.php?id=39 y « Los programas bibliotecarios para jóvenes en el contexto de la guerra urbana », Bogotá, Nuevas hojas de lectura, Fundalectura. http://www.nuevashojasdelectura.com/p_06_losprogramasbibliotecarios.htm

[3] Donald W. Winnicott , Jeu et réalité. L'espace potentiel , Gallimard, 1975

[4] « La déprogrammation de la littérature », Entretien avec Pascal Quignard, Le Débat , 54, March/April 1989, p. 78-79.

[5] Edward Said, À contre-voie , Paris, Le Serpent à plumes, 2002, p. 63

[6] Quoted by S. Alexievitch in : Derniers témoins, Paris, Presses de la Renaissance, 2005 , p. 53

[7] Id., p. 106

[8] Gloria Fernandez, ¿Dónde está el niño que yo fui ?, Buenos Aires, Ed. Biblos, 2006, p. 57-58

[9] Bernard Chouvier (dir.), Les Processus psychiques de la médiation, Paris, Dunod, 2004, p. 33

Fernando Savater

Narrative thinking: Stories, fiction and philosophy

Unless Borges is mistaken, the impressive collection of Western thinking is no more than the history of a few metaphors: Plato's cave, Descartes' malignant genius, Kant's pigeon (that wanted to fly in a vacuum because it thought that the air was holding it back, while in reality it sustains it), Nietzsche's superman (Übermensch)... That is: a handful of audacious stories is holding the roof of our ideas and providing the fuel for our most active ideologies. These stories (or myths if you like) do not only illustrate the scope of our thoughts, but they also constitute their influence and true impact. After all it is a question of intensity. Theoretic reasoning is subtle and complex, but you never forget a good story: and it is a fact that we often forget what we have enjoyed step by step in order to understand it well, while on the other hand we never forget a narrative image which we may understand only partly. It is not only the case in philosophy, it also happens in significant literary works: Cervantes' famous novel contains many dialogues between Don Quixote and Sancho which inspire scholars,

but most of the readers – and many others who have not read the book – epitomize the story in the indelible battle of the knight against the windmills that he believes are giants. The novel covers a thousand pages, the incident with the windmills is told in only one ... but it's unforgettable. It is all a question of intensity.

When considering the matter in a superficial manner, the characteristic abstract thinking of philosophy seems opposite to the task of the story-teller who seeks the concrete and circumstantial. He who proposes and discusses ideas cares about what is most general;

he who tells stories concentrates on what is individual. Philosophy is about understanding the permanent structure of things, meaning that it does not change under the constant, apparent changes of all that we see and feel: it tries to discover what all human beings have in common beyond their superficial differences, and it calls what has no date, what is equally real today as a thousand centuries ago or in another thousand centuries to come, the true “reality”. Contrary to this, story-telling always talks about what is unique, what is incomparable, what happened at a certain point in time and place for the first and only time. The story is what has happened, not what remains: nobody tells what is always happening, but the news of the world and the transience of what happens in it. The philosopher generalizes, the story-teller personalizes:

the studious anthropologist is interested in Man while the poet is only carried away by Ulysses, in the same manner as some scholars study botany and others sing to the rose of the day that has just been in bloom and will wither in a few hours.

Nevertheless, from its very origins philosophy has been inseparably mixed with stories and tales. Often in its own form of expression: The first great thinker of the most abstract and general, Parmenides, who invented the theory of the immutable Being, demonstrated his thinking through a narrative poem in which a wise goddess enlightens and educates the shy mortal who has come to her in search of knowledge. And of course Plato who, in addition to establishing philosophy as such, created one of the most unforgettable characters in Western narrative memory: the perspicacious, cunning and in his own way heroic Socrates. It is not always easy to understand the platonic lectures on ideas or the organization of justice among men, but no reader of his dialogues can avoid the undoubted seduction of the figure of Socrates and his personal destiny as agitator of conscience, which made him fall out with his fellow citizens, led him to prison and finally to his death. There is no doubt that we are very interested in the more abstract thoughts of Plato, but to a large degree we are excited by them because they reach us through the leading part of this unequalled individual that was Socrates, whose personal adventure is not less moving than what we are told of Achilles and Hector, of Hamlet or of Don Quixote. In a single word: What would be of Plato's philosophy without the story about Socrates?

The narrative stories in which the philosophic thinking is based are not always as explicit as in the platonic dialogues, but if you search a little for them you will find them no less evident. Some times they are autobiographical like Descartes' story at the beginning of his “Discourse on the Method” of how he had the revelation – if we can call it that – of his methodological skepticism, sitting by a stove in a military camp. It's an anecdote just as illustrative and memorable as Combray's evocative Madeleine at the beginning of “In search of lost time” (actually “Discourse on the Method” might as well have had the Proustian title “In search of Future Time”). And it is also Descartes who, by the hypothetic invention of his “malignant genius”, dedicated at deceiving our senses and making us live in a false reality of mere appearances, introduces the first figure of terror in the habitually placid environment of philosophy, a remote precedent of those extra-terrestrials who at the beginning of sci-fi in the 20th century seized the human minds and submitted them to their delusional dictatorship.

We can also find stories of fiction at the basis of fundamental works of modern political philosophy. Hobbes for example invented the kind of existence – poor, miserable, rude and short-lived – that mankind endured before experiencing another imaginary moment, the social pact, after which society organized as State began, according to him. They are all legends,

but without their narrative support he would not have been able to convey his brilliant ruminations about the political institutions and their meaning. And the description of the “state of nature” that Rousseau opens his “Discourse on inequality” with also belongs to the same kind of stories invented ad hoc . At least Rousseau has the honesty to inform his reader that such a mythical situation, without hierarchy nor competition, has probably never existed nor is likely to exist, and that it is only a mental device that he imagines, enabling him to theorize about the problems that consequently brought mankind social and cultural institutions.

In the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the remainder of the enlightened also resorted generously to narrative effects in order to transmit their ideas more intelligibly to an audience of non-specialists, consisting of curious people rather than students or academics. Voltaire and Diderot preferred always to express their thinking using tales, allegories and dialogues. Just remember the novelette “Candide” of the former, intended to dismantle the Leibnizian illusion of optimism, and “Rameau's Nephew” of the latter, a dramatized reflection of the difficulties in establishing what is moral and distinguish it from the immoral in a world that has renounced the traditional foundation and which is ruled by the precarious social convention. Both French writers were undoubtedly in debt to other stories with a philosophical meaning: those of the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Concerning the great Scottish scholar, David Hume, his most mature and subversive work is “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, a subtle and implacable demolition of any rational basis for religious beliefs, written in the form of a dialogue between characters who not only expose but also represent the world's different perceptions being the matter of dispute.

Nor did the unsentimental Kant shy away from the option of occasionally telling anecdotes or short stories to support and illustrate his theories. We have already mentioned the little story about the pigeon that flies supported by the air, and when feeling its resistance under its wings imagines that it would fly better in a vacuum: Kant uses it to denounce the error of assuming that our conceptual capacity would work more smoothly if it did not have to subject itself to what our senses actually experience. But Kant also resorts to a small, ironic narrative to justify the title of his short and justifiably famous essay “Perpetual Peace”: it is about an inn, real or imaginary, that has a sign with the picture of a cemetery, and is called exactly “Perpetual Peace”. Schopenhauer, the most unruly of Kant's disciples, constantly uses allegories and short stories to stimulate his system and usually does so with particular literary success, because contrary to most of his fellow philosophers he was undoubtedly an excellent writer. Schelling, on the other hand, explicitly contributed to the “narrative philosophy” and as an example wrote a philosophy of mythology in which he resumes the classic myths in a metaphysical manner – a method that only rarely makes them more suggestive to say the truth. Even Hegel, the most speculative and abstract thinker of all, sometimes tells stories and some of them as unforgettable as the master and the servant in his “Phenomenology of Spirit” which later inspired Marx and, I even dare say, was much later taken to the screen by Joseph Losey with the title “The servant”.

It's hardly necessary to recall the indebtedness of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche's thinking to the narrative. Every one of Kierkegaard's synonyms (Johannes de Silentio, Victor Eremita, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus, Frater Taciturnus, etc.) does not only create a disguise for the author, but also an intellectual character with its own peculiar nature and its own obsessions. And the subjects developed in this manner also appear wrapped in a clearly narrative style: the diary of the seducer, (the search for) repetition, the adventures of the Knight of faith or of Don Juan, etc... After all, Kierkegaard's entire thinking is directly or indirectly autobiographical: He does not only display theoretic problems, but relates the difficulty and the angst of existence, taking his own life experience as starting point. Nietzsche for his part continuously applies explicit or covert narrative formulae in all his works. “Thus spoke Zarathustra” is kind of a metaphysic story, didactic and moral, told in a pastiche biblical style, but also the rest of his books are abundantly inlaid with fiction, like the famous travel of the madman, searching for God and asking the mocking crowd about him, who has not yet heard the terrible news of his death. Later, the thinking of the 20th century resorts no less to literary, narrative or dramatic sources, which is proven by the work of Miguel de Unamuno, George Santayana (whose wonderful and little known “Dialogues in Limbo” I would like to point out), Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. Not to mention the stories in the proper sense of the word of writers who created non-academic but first class philosophy through these stories, like Thomas Mann, Musil, Canetti or Thomas Bernhard. You could almost say that in the past century the best philosophy has appeared in the form of novels or plays...

In short, philosophic thinking does not only express itself through abstract categories and speculative arguments, but also uses the narrative form and tells stories. Well then, what kind of stories? In his Poetics, Aristotle makes the famous statement: “The historian tells what has happened, the poet tells what can happen.” Actually, the narratives that the philosophers use to illustrate and represent their thinking do not pertain fully to any of these two genres: That is, they are not precise events that have happened at a certain date and place, nor are they imaginary occurrences that could happen at some point in time. It's rather a question of recounting events that are essentially fictitious – in the same sense as the “state of nature” which Rousseau explained as something that has neither happened, nor is happening or will happen – but are significantly true, meaning that they allow us to understand reality before, now and forever. Meaning that they do not tell stories that happened, nor that could happen, but stories that never happen, that last, that are always there ... and that never the less take place as arguments, with their problems and solutions. Yes, as has been said, time is nothing but a mobile metaphor for eternity, the stories of philosophers are provisionary metaphors for the lasting and immutable. They try not only to tell a story but to help realize something.

Their last meaning is a warning intended to wake us up: Our existence is also composed of fleeting appearances, anecdotes and coincidences like in a novel, but their ultimate substance is to repeat and dedicate the necessary forms of that which stays unalterable. In “The Tempest” Shakespeare declared that we are such illusive stuff as dreams are made on; the philosophers don't deny this, but add that this dream is eternal and always woven and unravelled according to identical norms. Are we talking about pedantic arrogance or deep wisdom? I don't know,

I don't dare answer.

Translated into English by Lisbeth Arne Pedersen

Peter Sis

Orbis Pictus: Drawn Into the World

Dedicated to Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), 1592-1670

It is too ambitious to compare myself to this great thinker and educator, but I cannot help but be proud that he is the author of what is considered to be the first ever illustrated picture book, which was published 350 years ago. Like me, he was born in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) in the middle of a conflict which eventually led him into exile, yet he believed in a better world through learning, education and books….

So forgive me if I am trying to find connections between this great man and my work. There are not that many Moravians in the world of picture books, after all.

As a child you have no control over where you are born. But even though you don't realize it – you are only a baby – you are born into history, into a story. I was born in the middle of the century, in the middle of Europe. I was also born just when the communists took over Czechoslovakia, but I did not know because I was a happy little boy surrounded by a loving family in the dark city of Prague. Then our family history unexpectedly collided with that of a faraway part of the world, changing my life forever. My father, a young filmmaker, was drafted into the army and sent to Communist China to teach documentary filmmaking. He told my mother he would be back for Christmas (which he was, but quite a few years later...) China was building a road through the Himalayas to Tibet. It would be the highest road in the world.

My father and his Chinese students were in the middle of making a film about the building of the road when a huge piece of the mountain broke off, the road was blocked and the crew were stranded and lost. Through his wanderings, my father ended up meeting the then 19 year old Dalai Lama. I wrote a book about his adventures called “Tibet Through the Red Box” to

celebrate the magic and mystery of Tibet which became a part of our family forever. But already as a child I drew the stories I heard from my father. Maybe it was a way of counterbalancing the communist indoctrination I got at school.

I drew and drew. The more repressive the outside world became, the more freedom I found in drawing, in creating a world for myself. I decorated the whole house we were living in from top to bottom, the light switches, the door of the fridge, the chairs. I drew at school, through all my classes, even math and physics (so don't ask me about electricity, or how to count). My art highschool was a wonderful time of my life. Life was relatively freer than it had been, with the advent of the Beatles, the summer of love, and The Prague Spring. What wonderful synergy. Then the soviet tanks rolled in to Prague, and everything crashed down. It is hard to see what is happening as it happens in history. You go with the flow, and only see things clearly many years later.

I was trying to tell my stories. It was hard under the increasingly oppressive regime. Drawing did not work. Painting was censored. Animated film seemed the best way to go. I could tell stories in motion! A seven-minute animated film took me a whole year to make. I made several, and they started garnering prizes in film festivals. This opened the world beyond the Iron curtain for me.

After winning the Golden Bear award in West Berlin I became an exportable article for the National Organization of Czech Film. I was sent to Switzerland, London, Los Angeles. I left for Hollywood, ostensibly for just a few months, to make a film celebrating the brotherhood of man, and the 1984 Olympic Games. I had almost finished the film when the Soviet Union and the East Block countries decided to boycott the Olympics. I was called back home. But I wanted to finish my film. And I did. But by then I was afraid to go back. I had overstayed my travel permit.

Hard to explain to young people today. I decided then and there that I would become extremely successful so that when I did go home I could say that I did it all for my country.

I naively thought that I could spin stories out of my childhood adventures, turn them into books and films. I who didn't grow up with pizza or baseball! It was hard going. Just when I thought

I couldn't make it, I got a push from Maurice Sendak. Thank you, Maurice!

Publishers found my stories awfully exotic. I developed a special pen and ink drawing technique which involved shadings made from hundreds of thousands of little dots. It didn't leave any time for a social life. I was given other people's books to illustrate, and was told by the editors that the faces I drew were too European, that I needed to change all the details. Those were hard years.

I was without a country or a passport. But then more and more I was encouraged to do books of my own. The subjects paralleled my own discoveries of the new world I was in – people exploring streets, elevators, beaches. Then books about explorers – Columbus, Welzl.

Exotic places like the island of Komodo. Places I wanted to go but for now could just draw.

I got married and had two children. As soon as they were born I started to make stories for them. I could not possibly tell stories in a language which was not quite my own, with no references to my own childhood. So I told my stories mainly in pictures. And tried to talk about people who could make us see things in a different way, like Galileo or Darwin.

The books led to new ventures. More film, posters, large scale mosaics in public places.

My children are growing up. What will they remember? I imagine myself as a storyteller traveling on the old silk route, spinning tales by the fire. Tales of different cultures I have seen and imagined. And tales now too of my childhood for my children to tell to others.

Jane Vejjajiva

The Relevance of Myths and Legends in Contemporary Children's Literature

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jane Vejjajiva. I'm a writer from Thailand, a country known as “The Land of Smiles.” We have a long history of over 3,000 years, with myths and legends that have been passed down from generation to generation.

Traditionally in Thailand, we passed down our folklore through storytelling. Our society was an oral society. Monks chanted in temples. Students learned by listening to teachers. We kept historical records by telling.

The question in our modern time is, “Has our society changed?” Have we adopted the habit of reading and writing? If so, what kind of books do children's book authors write today? What do young people read today? Do the stories that are written and read take inspiration from myths and legends that used to be told and not written?

Let's start with the term “children's book”. This term is quite new in reading society in Thailand. Looking as far back as post-World War II, my mother's generation, it cannot be denied that Thai kids shared stories and books with adults. Classical literature and folktales were read by kids even though the content and style may not have been suitable for young readers.

Take “The Story of Phra Aphai Mani” for example. I myself used to read it when I was young. It is one of the most widely read classic stories, written by a poet named Sunthorn Pu. He wrote more than 1,200 pages during the years 1821 to 1841.

At first glance, it is a fantastic adventure story about Prince Aphai Mani and his brother. The story shows a world in which supernatural powers and magic predominate. However, lofty passions are also major themes. Love stories between Prince Aphai and the Sea Giantess, the Mermaid, the Eastern Princess Suvarnamali, and the Western Princess Laweng are told in detail with lots of erotic elements. The book was never intended for children.

Some folktales can be considered suitable for children. They were told before being published in many forms. Here's a popular folktale in central Thailand, “The Golden Goby Fish.” It's a story of a young lady named Eai whose mother died and was reborn as a goby fish to protect her from the stepmother. Motherly love is at the centre of the story, but there's also the jealousy and cruelty from the step-mother and her daughter that raise questions about whether the story is appropriate for kids.

Translations of foreign books for children opened a new horizon for young readers. Tales from foreign authors like Hans Christian Andersen were translated, followed by books for young readers like Cheaper by the Dozen, Little House on the Prairie, and Daddy Long Legs . All became well-loved books among Thai kids and new editions keep appearing for new generations.

The market for children's books was then opened to original works by Thai authors. Some of them took inspiration from foreign works. Some are original.

They are stories that cover all walks of life:

From true stories about ethnic groups, such as “Flowers on the Mountain: Life Stories from Karen Children”, to

Childhood in Northeast Thailand, for example “Child from Isan”, to

Life in the palace, like “When Grandma and Grandpa Were Young” to

A girl's city life, such as “Kaew the Naughty,” by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn.

Other titles published are unique each in their own way.

The student uprising of October 1976 was one historical event that left scars on the nation. Some stories, fiction and non-fiction, revi ved the event and the aftermath.

One example is ‘A Girl with Red Star Hat' by Viriya Srimanta . It is a true story of a six-year-old girl who follows her father into the forest for six years. The author tells her childhood story and writes in the foreword:

‘Once my father asked me whether I had any regrets being in a forest and coming back empty-handed. I told him to be sure that I had no regret, on the contrary, I was glad to have such a vivid childhood that I would not trade it for anything in the world. I am grateful to be born as a daughter to a fighter like him.'

There is my own book: ‘The Happiness of Kati'. The book came out in 2004 when the market was saturated with fantasy books, after the tremendous success of the ‘Harry Potter' series. A story of a little girl who lives with Grandma and Grandpa in a Thai house by a canal in Ayutthaya appeared like fresh air to readers. Many items mentioned in the book bring back nostalgia for the ‘good times' of the past. The main theme of losing a member of the family, a mother, and of the grieving process can be seen as presented in a Buddhist way. After winning the Southeast Asian Write (SEAWrite) Award in 2006, the book sells very well and is now in its 54 th print-run with six languages licensed overseas: US, Japan, Laos, France, Catalonia, Germany and Australia. A Korean edition will come out soon. It will also become a feature film by the end of the year.

Still, I do not think that we are a reading society.

Statistics from UNESCO show that for every 1,000 Thai people, 13,100 kg of paper are used for printing and writing, compared with 98,000 kg per 1,000 people in Hong Kong and Singapore. Other figures also confirm that the newer generations of Thais read less than children in other developing countries.

It has been a long, hard struggle to promote reading in Thailand. Both the public and private sectors have launched campaigns to encourage children to read more. What is the problem? Is it because the books in the market are not interesting enough? Do kids still prefer listening to reading? Do they love to read stories from the past or the current times?

Let us see what books we have for Thai children.

A survey conducted in 2004 by Nuanjan Chanwiwattanan in a Master's degree thesis: “A Study of Contents and Concepts of Fiction for Children Published in 2004”, shows five issues that appeared as main themes in contemporary children's works.

They are

•  rural ways of life – is it interesting?

•  tradition and culture as opposed to modern ways of living

•  child problems in behavior – boring?

•  adventure and fantasy

•  social conditions that affect children's lives

In the study, some works were analyzed. I have some examples.

  For the theme rural ways of life, the researcher chose “Our Village, Our Home” by Sawang Kongyok. It is a story of a boy named Jom. His family migrates to a big city after a harvest season because the villagers have no work. His father gets a job at a construction site. No one is happy with their lives there and they finally move back to the village. They restore the land around the house and create a vegetable plot. Authorities give them more advice and the villagers manage to have income, and no longer need to go into town for work.

  For the theme, “tradition and culture as opposed to modern ways of living,” the researcher chose “Young Boxer” by Chid Chayakorn: Kla is a 15-year-old boy. He has an uncle who was a renowned boxer and teaches boxing in France. He has a passion for Thai boxing, though his friends find it out of fashion, not to be compared with taekwondo, and laugh at him. He proves himself to be a true fighter when he helps one of his friends who gets into trouble with a gangster.

For the theme, “child problems in behavior,” the researcher chose ‘Wang Takien Treasure' by Choti Srisuwan: Yuttana and Somphob are friends from different social strata. Yuttana feels inferior because his father is a poor farmer whereas his friend's father is wealthy. Yuttana develops a gambling habit and gets involved in a plan to rob an old village temple of its treasure.

  For the theme, “adventure and fantasy,” the researcher chose

“The Adventure of Mucha Nu” by Keetakan: Mucha Nu is a mixed creature with the body of a monkey but with a scaley fish tail. He is one of the heroes in the epic tale of Ramayana. He's the son of the great monkey, Hanuman, and a giant's daugther, Suwanna Mucha . In this story, at the age of 5, Mucha Nu was wild and naughty in the underwater land. He was forced to go to find his mother in the legendary Himmapan Forest. He was told to be tolerant, compassionate, and forgiving. The story tells of his adventures and how he finds his mother while attaining these three virtues.

For the theme, “social conditions that affect children's lives,” the researcher chose “Kamsai” by Virasak Suyala: It is a story of a boy who lives with his mother in a village while his father is forced to work as a taxi driver in a big city because the village has been flooded two years in a row. His father returns with money only to find that his son is addicted to on-line computer games, skips school, and gets into trouble with other students.

These themes are mostly connected to the present day, except for “adventure and fantasy.” The sample book, “The Adventures of Macha Nu”, is a story based on Ramayana,

a tale from the past.

If those themes and books do not appeal to young readers, are there other themes that might be more appealing?

How about tales from the past?

As I mentioned earlier, there have been many attempts to promote reading among Thai kids. “100 Best Books for Young Readers,” prepared by the Thai Research Fund, aims to encourage both kids and parents to pick some of the recommended books to start a habit of reading.

In 100 books presented in the list, 18 titles are based on folklore and Buddhist tales.

They are tales from folklore, Thai proverbs, classical Thai literature, historical heroes and events, the Holy Tripitaka, and the Jataka Tales.

The Holy Tripitaka is a Buddhist canon of scriptures.

Jataka Tales is a folklore-like literature telling stories of the previous lives of the Buddha before he was born for the last time to become the Buddha. The most popular stories are the final 10 Jatakas.

Is it possible that books with legends and tales from the past can be attractive to kids nowadays?

An interesting question. The answer can be positive if we judge from the fact that books with legends retold keep appearing in the market.

One phenomenon was “The Story of Mahajanaka” by His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej. The story is based on the Mahajanaka Jataka. The Buddha — incarnate prota­gonist of this tale — was born as King Mahajanaka who had to face challenges and troubles of every kind — from sinking ships to bloody succession conflicts. He survives them all through his remarkable perseverance. The point of Mahajanaka is that perseverance is necessary to gain Buddhahood.

The book first reached the hands of the readers in 1996 in an elaborate edition. His Majesty the King wished to see the book in the hands of a larger group of readers, especially children. A cartoon edition was then published in 1999. It was a tremendous success and was reprinted many times.

Do we have more proof? “The Story of Mahajanaka” might be an exceptional case, given its author, whom the Thai public reveres.

Is there interest among Thai writers to use old tales as sources of inspiration?

A paper presented at the 9 th Thai Studies conference by Dr. Ruenruthai Sujjapun on “The Legacy of the Traditional Thai Literature in Contemporary Children's Thai Literature” confirms the theory that literature as the nation's cultural heritage is very much alive in contem­porary children's literature.

There are four basic methods used by authors to bring the heritage of the classical literature to modern works.

• creating new versions based on an old story with some new elements
• borrowing characters from traditional masterpieces to create new stories
• satirizing literary convention or certain motifs from traditional literature
• transforming old tales into picture books and comics

Let us take a look one by one.

First: Creating new versions based on an old story with some new elements. The example is ‘The Adventures of Macha Nu' by Keetakan: The name “Macha Nu” derives from part of his mother's name , "Suwanna Mucha, " which means “fish,” and "Ha Nu Man", his father's name. The author tells a new version of the adventures of this mythical creature from Ramayana and adds new elements. He reduces the age of the hero to five years old and describes him as a cute pink monkey with silvery scales. He has a green lotus as a weapon. His adventure is to go into the Himmapun Forest to find his mother.

Second: Borrowing characters from traditional masterpieces to create new stories. The example is “Little Garuda” by Koi Nuj: The most important creature of the Himmapan forest is probably the Garuda. Garuda is the king of birds, half-man and half-bird, the vehicle of Vishnu, a Hindu God. In “Little Garuda,” the author puts this mythical creature in a new adventure. She wrote this story after the tremendous success of Harry Potter, with the intention of bringing to kids all the wonders of old tales. The little garuda in the story cannot fly and has small green fins. He is an outcast for his differences. In the end, when he proves himself worthy, he does not wish to be a part of the community.

Third: Satirizing literary convention or certain motifs from traditional literature. The example is “The Non-Magical Prince” by Preeda Akrachantachoti: The prince in this story is not one we would expect to find in fairy tales. He has no magical weapon; he does not meet a princess; he does not fight a giant. Even so, it's still a story of a prince and his adventures as he goes outside the kingdom to gain wisdom and find a princess. The story is written with satirical humour.

Fourth: Transforming old tales into picture books and comics. This is the most common method used in today's market, and I'm afraid it's the most successful method for winning young readers' hearts. It has both advantages and disadvantages.

Let's take a look at books on folktales. The new presentations we found are:

•  Picture books

•  Comic books, Thai style

•  Comic books, Japanese style

Let's start with picture books.

These are stories with beautiful illustrations. High-quality printing. Little text. Stories told in simple words. They can be read by parents and by children ages six and above.

The sample here is “The Horse-Faced Maiden”: a story of an ugly girl who one day meets a prince who promises to marry her if she can help him retrieve a kite. The prince gets his kite but breaks his promise, so she goes to the palace and asks him to marry her.

Next are comic books, Thai style – “The Golden Goby Fish”.

Traditional Thai-style comics are realistic cartoons telling mostly ghost and drama stories from artists' imaginations. The storyline is simple and so is the drawing line. Some artists use folktales like this one: “The Golden Goby Fish”.

As you can see, the cartoons have a realistic look, with no complex storyboard and no action.

This is the most important one: comic books, Japanese style.

This can be considered a new breed of comics. Artists use Japanese-stylized cartoons to depict classical literature and folktales.

This one is “Phra Aphai Manee.” As you can see, there's no resemblance to the drawing by Chakrapun that I showed you earlier.

The idea is to revive classic stories that may not attract newer generations of young readers in their original form by presenting them in a more familiar form, that of the Japanese-style cartoon.

The question is whether it's worthwhile to use an exciting format to lure kids to appreciate Thai heritage, despite the inaccuracies. This is a key concern among educators.

Not only folktales use new presentations. Tales based on the Holy Tripitaka are also presented in new formats which are:

•  Picture books

•  Comic books, Thai style

•  Comic books from animation

•  Comic books, Japanese style

This is a sample of a picture book: “The Adventures of Buddha: Nalagiri, Devadatta's Elephant”.

Elephants are animals that kids love. The story of a naughty elephant in the Buddha's time is told with beautiful illustrations. All details from the Holy Tripitaka are accurate, and I admit I enjoyed reading this book, not to mention that I learned a lot about this elephant.

I chose “Ananda” as a sample of comic Thai style.   Among the disciples of the Buddha, Ananda had the sharpest memory. Ananda joined the Sangha when he was a child. Ananda was Buddha's attendant for 27 years.

A simple Thai style cartoon enhances the peaceful life story of “Ananda.”

But there is a more exciting method to tell a story from Buddha's time, which is comic from animation.

This book is quite unusual. “The Buddha” first appeared as animation and was then adapted to comics while keeping the animated style.

The last method is the Japanese-style comic book.

A sample here is “Tracing the Life of Buddha.”

It is a quite confusing story of a group of boys and girls who can time-travel. I guess the book's aim is to present the life story of Buddha in a fun way, but I don't think there is accurate information to be retained by young readers.

Not only are different forms used to present stories from the past, new elements are added as well.

They are:

•  Elements from science fiction

•  Elements for educational purposes

You cannot tell this is “Ramayana” with Rama trying to capture a golden deer for Sita.

The story is presented as science fiction. Though the story remains as told from the past, the new ingredient put in is questionable.

This is the story of a Thai hero from the past: “Phraya Pichai Broken Sword.” A soldier fights to save his town until he breaks his sword.

The book came in a series, and you can see it's considered as a “knowledge comic”. There's no harm in presenting a heroic story in this format, but the book's aim that it be read for knowledge is doubtful.

In the struggle to promote reading among children, legends and folktales are major resources and very much alive in contemporary children's literature.

Both new presentations and new elements are made, though form tends to get emphasized over content, which is a point of concern.

Without any doubt, classical myths and legends are still dynamic in Thai contemporary literature and continue to be constantly “reborn” in children's works with new, interesting elements. They appear alongside other works that take inspiration from other sources and enrich the reading culture of the country.

Torben Weinreich

History and Children's Literature

In my talk I will deal with the interaction between society and children's literature, the effect society has had on children's literature, both with regard to form and content and the way society has endeavoured to promote children's literature – often a particular type of children's literature – through libraries, schools and other institutions.

  Before I come to this particular interaction, and assuming we all agree that society and its institutions do exert a great influence on children's literature, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this influence has not been only from society to children's literature, but also from children's literature to society. Children's literature has indeed influenced society.

  Let me give you concrete examples right away, starting with the best known of them all in terms of major social issues and decision-making: Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel,

Uncle Tom's Cabin from 1852. This book, with its moving account of the wretched conditions suffered by black slaves on plantations in America, became an enormous success and, after having been published in the magazine The National Era, sold more than 300,000 copies of the book in its first year alone . It was the kind of book that set an agenda. Legend has it that when the US president Abraham Lincoln met the author, he greeted her as "the little lady who made this big war", in other words, the American Civil War.

  Of course, other examples of the direct influence of children's literature on the course of society can be found, but undoubtedly the greatest influence it has had has been on our view of the child. Throughout history there have been various examples of books which have been regarded as controversial because they saw children in a different way from the dominant view at the time. You just have to think of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland , J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking . Not to mention Hans Christian Andersen, who set a completely new agenda as far as children's storytelling was concerned, notably with his idea of using children's own language and re-shaping it in an artistic context. I will come back to this later in my talk. I am sure that all of you here today, from so many parts of the world, can think of examples with corresponding significance from your own literature.

  By focusing at the start of this talk on the influence children's literature has had on society, not the other way round, I would like to emphasise that children's literature is not a frail, little dinghy tossing around out of control on society's stormy waters. No, it is not a case of ‘poor' children's literature; it has had huge significance both for individuals and society as a whole. For our ways of thinking and behaving.

  But let me focus now on society's significance for children's literature and underline my most important point: children's literature has always been situated at the intersection between art and pedagogy. Society, adults, in other words, have always had their own motives with children's literature. Let's start at the beginning.

*

In the beginning was the story. Language was used to communicate information and to retain experiences. In addition, man was able, through language, to explain the immediately unexplainable and to see things in a larger context.

  In principle everyone was productive; everyone was able to tell their story or contribute to existing narratives. And all narratives were constantly changing, not only as they went from mouth to mouth, but also in the narrative situation itself when the listeners could intervene with corrections or new elements. One has to imagine that there were hierarchies of narrators, such that some were listened to with greater interest than others, partly because of their general status and special insight and partly because of their ability to tell a story.

It is also possible, if not probable, that there was a range of narrative sub-cultures: women told stories to women, and children to children. In any case, children acquired the necessary knowledge and skills not only through first-hand experiences but also through listening to stories.

  However, just as everyone was principally a producer, they were also consumers. They were listeners. And, what is more important, in the narrative situation they were in the same room at the same time.

  If we compare this with the situation today, we see that there has indeed been some immense changes. Even if the classic oral narrative and the native communities still physically survive in certain environments, today we encounter most narratives in a completely different environment and they have quite a different purpose. We find them in books, magazines, comic strips and newspapers, in other words in the printed media, and on radio, TV and the computer. And – not to forget – these narratives are available all around us twenty four hours a day.

  And the narratives are no longer tied to the narrative community itself. We are not producers to anywhere the same extent as before, but we have become consumers to an overwhelming degree. There has been, so to speak, a specialisation: some people tell stories, while others listen and watch. At the same time the narrator and those narrated have moved away from each other in time or space in most cases, or – and this is usually the case – in both time and space. In the process the narrative underwent continuous development, but there were some sudden surges along the way. The first forward was the development of written language, at first very simple, but gradually becoming more complex. The next stage was when people began to write on paper, such as the monks of the Middle Ages did. A simple form of mass communication was under way, one which received a great impetus when Gutenberg in the 15 th century made it possible for us to print many copies of the same book,

a technology which has constantly developed through the following centuries. The result was reducing the cost of printing books and what you could call a democratisation of reading. Other factors in this democratisation of reading were the introduction of schools and later on libraries, which also lent books to the public free of charge. The state, the community, paid.

  We have through history moved from a simple to a more complex form of communication, which is often bound up with a loss of something mere genuine and original in return for something superficial. You can say that what we once had, has been a “Paradise Lost”. Throughout this process, there has at the same time been a development in narrating itself. Here I have in mind particularly books as a medium and literature. This is because the development of a written language has enabled us to work with language in a completely new way. We can alter and add; we can change our minds and correct. We can be more precise and refine without the consumer even finding out what has been changed. This is in contrast to oral narration.

  As a result of this, an elaborated written language was developed. To a large extent narratives became literature. They became art. Folk tales were no longer merely pre-existing narratives which were retold to others. Folk tales were now something which was created in this special, elaborated language, either entirely new tales or those based on old tales,

perhaps collected and written down. One only has to consider the way Hans Christian Andersen wrote his fairy tales in the nineteenth century.

  The above is a brief summary of the history of the narrative, literature and book.

The gap between the producer and the consumer has become greater, especially over the last century. New media have emerged and all media have become mass media. In more and more places throughout the world, people, children included, have access to an enormous range of narratives. Where it was once the spoken language which dominated, and later the written language, today it is virtual narratives on TV, for example, which supply us with most of our fiction, especially in the form of films or TV series. The book is still there, but it is only one medium among others.

  In some countries, primarily the so-called welfare states, which consider it important that children have free schooling and free use of libraries, attempts have been made to steer this development which otherwise would be completely controlled by commercial interests. To this end, educationalists, teachers and librarians have been appointed to introduce children and others to literature. This commercial control has been counteracted, sometimes directly via legislation, sometimes by facilitating access to fiction in book form.

   Let's concentrate on the child for a moment. When we choose to think of children as something special, we, of course, attribute instinctive characteristics to them in doing so.

We decide, that 1) the child needs to learn something, in order to develop into a full member of society and a mature and independent individual, and at the same time 2) that this child needs protection, and here we – parents and among others teachers – are responsible.

The general view is that there are some things which children should not be confronted with or learn until they have reached a certain stage of development, a certain age. The child can be harmed if no attention is paid to these considerations.

  Children's literature has always, throughout its history, been required to consider the child's special needs. Here two types of consideration are identified:

  - Firstly, literature (or at least literature designed to be read by children themselves) should be of a kind a child can actually read. This means that it should be suited to the child in both form and content, what we researchers into children's literature usually call “adaptation”. This may mean shorter sentences and fewer difficult words. It also means that the book must include thematic content which is interesting to children and is understood by them.

  - Secondly, literature must be such that it takes account of both the child's needs and society's needs. The child's needs may be, for example, a need for security, which in some people's eyes would rule out description of some aspects of human life. Society's needs may be to inform the child about the world it is living in here and now, and what it means to be an adult in this society. I must emphasise here that what is referred to as “the child's needs” are defined by adults who produce, that is, write, publish or distribute books, and that, therefore, it can be immensely difficult to distinguish whose needs are being taken care of: the society's or the child's.

  We are living in a time when the essential nature of children's literature is the subject of much debate, also in a research context, inspired by, among other things, new currents in modern children's literature. Perhaps we are heading towards an era where we find two types of children's literature:

  - A children's literature which is closer to the original narrative, also in an aesthetic sense, whose intention is still, to varying degrees, to inform and to educate. It is a literature which seeks and frequently finds a broad readership and which is often used in schools, for example.

  - And another children's literature which has a more elaborate language, and which seeks to a greater degree to be recognised as art; at the same time it is a form of children's literature which in some cases consciously tries to appeal to, and does in fact attract, adult readers. Some commentators talk openly of “adulteration” as a tendency in recent children's literature, others talk about its “ambiguity”.

*

Now I would like to return to the more concrete interaction between society and children's literature, that is, the way in which society influences children's literature and the way children's literature reflects the society in which it is created.

Society sets the backdrop for children's literature. In society the technology is developed, that is a pre-requisite for the medium of the book (and children's magazines) to evolve. I can give you an important example. Very early on in the history of children's literature there were books with coloured illustrations. However, there was still not the technology to print books with colour illustrations. That did not happen until the mid-nine-teenth century. Up to that point, every single item was coloured by hand or “illuminated”, as it is known. By the way, it was often children who carried out this work. Hundreds and hundreds of children sat colouring in the black and white drawings, one book after the other, especially in the large factories in Germany where the children were called “Malerbatzen”. When the technology to print books in colour arrived, it was a genuine revolution, as indeed it was later when machines were developed to print books in much greater and far cheaper runs. This led to a democratisation of book-reading, which was later underpinned by the founding of public libraries from which children could borrow books.

It is also society that ensures, via legislation and regulations, that children's literature does reach children and that it has a place in libraries, schools and kindergartens. In many countries, Denmark included, it is laid down that children must engage with good literature and there must be dedicated libraries in schools. At the same time, young people who train to become librarians and teachers must study children's literature. It is stipulated in the syllabus. In other words, society has decided that children's literature is important and that requisite resources should be made available for the purchase and promotion of children's books.

It is obvious that a framework of this kind has even greater significance for the impact and reputation of children's literature. However, it also has significance for the type of literature that is published in the respective country. The situation is such that society not only promotes children's literature in general but also a particular brand of literature. One could say that, in this way, children's literature is in service to society. And that is not necessarily a good thing. One only has to look at how totalitarian regimes have used children's literature for political purposes throughout history.

   At last we come to the significance society has for literature itself, that is, the what and the how of writing. Literary content and form. We see the value of society at its clearest in those historical novels which are used to teach children about historical events and to strengthen national solidarity, for good or ill once again. In general, however, the society – that any literary work is written in – will leave its mark, regardless of whether it is the author's intention or not. I said earlier that society had some significance for literary content and form. And we must not forget form. All the way through history there have been many discussions about how we can and should write for children, not only about what we can tell children. A good example, here, is the work of Hans Christian Andersen.

  When Hans Christian Andersen's first fairy tales came out in Denmark in 1835, he was criticised on a number of accounts. The stories were said to be immoral and potentially harmful for children. Andersen wrote in a style unaccustomed for readers. He used the spoken language, including the spoken language of children. One critic wrote: “One may not put words together in print in the same disorganised way that one does when speaking.”

  In 1842, when Andersen was firmly established as a writer of fairy tales in the public consciousness, another critic wrote: “To write fairy tales for children or common people in some peculiar manner, or to imitate in art the common people's natural but also longwinded and clumsy, incoherent style, or what we recognise as a childlike style and tone is to corrupt children in a tasteless way.”

  Despite this criticism, Andersen continued to write in his own style. He described his style as “natural”. He wrote in his diary: “Let me follow my natural instinct. Why should I follow a fashion or go at a trot? If I amble around, it's because it's my natural pace.”

  It is frequently overlooked that one of Andersen's great virtues as an innovator in children's literature is his issue of the spoken language in the written genre. It was a revolution! Andersen put his feelings into words himself, almost as a kind of poetics:

“You should be able to hear the narrator in any writing; therefore the language should reflect the spoken form. The stories are for children, but adults should be able to listen, too.”

As far back as New Year's Day in 1835, Andersen told a good friend that he was writing some fairy tales: “I am trying to win over the new generations you know!” he said.

  You see: Andersen was very much aware that his fairy tales would be read aloud to children, and that adults would be present. In a letter to another Danish author, he wrote in 1843: “Now I tell stories from my own head, I take an adult idea and then tell it to children while remembering that mother and father are often listening, and you have to consider them.”

  In modern research on children's literature, we would talk about the “ambiguity” of

a children's story or perhaps “double address”, that is, that we can have more than one reader or listener inscribed in a work for children.

*

If we turn our attention to modern children's literature, to the thousands upon thousands of children's books published every year all around the world, is there anything we can learn from H.C. Andersen? Notably, his demand that writers should go their own way, choose their own stories and write them in the way they desire. If we don't have writers who challenge our understanding of what good literature is, both in terms of form and content, children's literature will lose the social significance it, in fact, has had. Remember that the children's literature we still read often has a popular dimension and a more elitist and experimental function, as we see with Hans Christian Andersen. Children's books that were once regarded as odd and perhaps controversial, we see today as literary classics and we still read them.

  Does that mean that we should write and publish all sorts of children's books?

The answer is yes, at least so long as they do not infringe others' copyrights or break the laws of democratic countries. The principle of freedom of speech also applies to children's literature.

  But is that the same as saying that all published children's books should be compul-sory reading for children? No, not necessarily. On a day-to-day basis, it is adults who are responsible for children, that is, parents and, among others, teachers who have to assume responsibility for selecting books, especially when they are read aloud. As important as it is that books can be published freely, it is just as important that adults and children can select from those available. That also means that they can reject titles.

  I do not doubt that different countries or cultures have different concepts of what constitutes good children's literature. And nor do I doubt that it is important to challenge social norms and rules. Let me give you an example – let us imagine a book with a very particular plot: two children, a brother and sister, are alone at home after the father has left for work in the morning. They are bored and start smoking Dad's cigars. Then they play with his chain saw and cut all the furniture to pieces. Unfortunately, the boy also saws off the girl's arm, but they stick it back on with glue and plasters. Then they drink petrol, set light to it and breathe out huge flames from their mouths. In the end, they play with the oil-fired burner and blow the house sky high. When the father comes home, he merely confirms that the house is no more and invites the children to a burger bar. Can you write and publish a book like this? The answer is yes, because it already exists. It was published in Denmark and is entitled “Lars and Lone Alone at Home”. A few years ago, when it was chosen to be part of a European travelling exhibition called “Europe – a dream in pictures”, it caused quite a stir.

  In reality, of course, the book is a parody of the so-called “bad luck stories” of which there were many in the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the kind of book that, similarly, the German writer Heinrich Hoffmann in 1844 made fun of in the world-famous Der Struwwelpeter [ Shock-headed Peter ]. In fact, this is what is done in the Danish book I have just mentioned. Some may fear perhaps that, after listening to this story, children will smoke cigars, drink petrol or blow up the house. Others say that children will be amused by the obvious exaggerations and see them as precisely that: exaggerations, not representations of a potential reality. At any event, this is a book which cannot fail to challenge our concepts of children's writing and its techniques.

  Today I have chosen to set my sights on children's literature in the past and present, especially the interaction between children's literature and its social background, and I have stressed that society in very many areas has great significance for children's literature, both literature as such – its form and content – and its promotion through schools, libraries, etc.

If we look into the future with all its new technological advances, even for children's story telling, there is good reason to pose the question that many occasionally do ask: Will people still write, publish and read children's books ten, twenty or fifty years from now?

  The death of the book has been announced many times since the end of the 19th century; in fact, every time a new medium has appeared. First it was films and comic strips, then radio, then TV, then video, then the computer, and now the internet. Despite all this,

the book has survived, also as a medium. Literature has survived, also as art. And that is the way it will continue in the future.

  Let's look at the world we are living in here and now – the bookworld. There have never been written so many books before. Never been published so many books before. Never been sold so many books before. And never been read so many books before. This also applies to children's books, if we look at both the reading in schools and kindergartens – and in the children's spare time. When the numbers of children-readers constantly increase, one of the explanations is that we have had success in the struggle against illiteracy. Never before – according to Unicef – have there been so few children, who do not go to school and do not learn to read. Let us hope that this struggle against illiteracy will continue. And let us in particular hope that all the girls around the world will come to school and learn to read, too.

It is a human right.

  The simplest explanation for the success of the book is – that it is a superb technology. It is practical in a lot of ways, a great deal more practical than modern media. As an eleven year old girl said to me when I was researching children's reading habits: “Books are good, because they don't make any noise, and you can read them under the duvet and take them with you to the toilet.” That is why the book, even as we know it today, will survive. A factor to this is of course that strong social forces, especially within the school or library systems, and book enthusiasts all over the world, like you, members of The International Board on Books for Young People, will ensure its survival.