Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods [1st ed.] 9783030353919, 9783030353926

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi
Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods (Rachel Conrad, L. Brown Kennedy)....Pages 1-10
Front Matter ....Pages 11-11
Spectacle and Parody: Burlesque Subjectivity in the American Picturebook (William Moebius)....Pages 13-30
The Self in Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas (Karen Coats)....Pages 31-49
A Subjunctive Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency (Kevin Quashie, Amy Fish)....Pages 51-71
Front Matter ....Pages 73-73
Seeing Red: The Inside Nature of the Queer Outsider in Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness (Holly Blackford)....Pages 75-91
New Spaces and New Childhoods: Challenging Assumptions of Normative Childhood in Modernist Children’s Literature (Aneesh Barai)....Pages 93-111
Modern Family, Modern Colonial Childhoods: Representations of Childhood and the US Military in Colonial School Literature (Solsiree del Moral)....Pages 113-128
Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books (Karen Chandler)....Pages 129-145
Front Matter ....Pages 147-147
“I remember. Oh, I remember”: Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers (Adrienne Kertzer)....Pages 149-166
Yoshiko Uchida: Loss, Displacement, and Identity (Amanda C. Seaman)....Pages 167-181
“I Would Not Be a Pilgrim”: Examining the Construction of the Muslim Child as an Authentic Witness and a Dynamic Subject in Anita Desai’s The Peacock Garden (Nithya Sivashankar)....Pages 183-200
Front Matter ....Pages 201-201
Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the “Ransome Style” (Victoria Ford Smith)....Pages 203-218
Kali Grosvenor, Aurelia Davidson, and the Agency of Young Black Poets (Rachel Conrad, Cai Rodrigues-Sherley)....Pages 219-236
“Send it to ZOOM!”: American Children’s Television and Intergenerational Cultural Creation in the 1970s (Leslie Paris)....Pages 237-254
Tupac Shakur: Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists (Awad Ibrahim)....Pages 255-272
Back Matter ....Pages 273-285

Citation preview

LITERARY CULTURES AND CHILDHOODS

Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods Edited by Rachel Conrad · L. Brown Kennedy

Literary Cultures and Childhoods

Series Editor Lynne Vallone Department of Childhood Studies Rutgers University Camden, NJ, USA

Scholarly interest in the literary figure of the child has grown exponentially over the last thirty years or so due, in part, to the increased attention given to children’s literature within the academy and the development of the multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies. Given the crucial importance of children to biological, social, cultural and national reproduction, it is not surprising that child and adolescent characters may be found everywhere in Anglo-American literary expressions. Across time and in every literary genre written for adults as well as in the vast and complex array of children’s literature, ‘the child’ has functioned as a polysemous and potent figure. From Harry Potter to Huck Finn, some of the most beloved, intriguing and enduring characters in literature are children. The aim of this finite five-book series of edited volumes is to chart representations of the figure of the child in Anglo-American literary cultures throughout the ages, mapping how they have changed over time in different contexts and historical moments. Volumes move chronologically from medieval/early modern to contemporary, with each volume addressing a particular period (eg ‘The Early Modern Child’, ‘The Nineteenth Century Child’ etc). Through the aggregate of the essays, the series will advance new understandings of the constructions of the child and the child within different systems (familial, cultural, national), as communicated through literature. Volumes will also serve, collectively, as an examination of the way in which the figure of the child has evolved over the years and how this has been reflected/anticipated by literature of the time. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15353

Rachel Conrad  •  L. Brown Kennedy Editors

Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods

Editors Rachel Conrad Hampshire College Amherst, MA, USA

L. Brown Kennedy Hampshire College Amherst, MA, USA

Chapter 13 draws on material from the book Time for Childhoods (2019) by one of the authors (Conrad), which is used here with permission from the University of Massachusetts Press. Chapter 14 draws on material from an earlier article published by the author on openvault.wgbh.org, which is used here with permission from WGBH Educational Foundation. Literary Cultures and Childhoods ISBN 978-3-030-35391-9    ISBN 978-3-030-35392-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Peter Stone / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lynne Vallone, editor of the Literary Cultures and Childhoods series, for extending to us the invitation to edit this volume. We are grateful to all of our contributors for their unique approaches to twentieth-century literary cultures and childhoods and for their commitment to the volume, as well as to our expert team at Palgrave and Springer Nature, including Shaun Vigil, Rebecca Hinsley, Ben Doyle, Camille Davies and V. Vinodh Kumar. We wish to acknowledge our institutional home, Hampshire College, for its fostering of cross-disciplinary teaching and institutional support of childhood studies. We have also greatly appreciated the fellowship and collegiality of the Five College Childhood Studies group. Lastly, the editorial pair for this volume owes its existence and sustenance to over twenty years of friendship and intellectual collaboration in teaching the literature of childhoods.

v

Contents

1 Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods  1 Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy Part I Framing the Twentieth Century: Spectacle, Self, and Specularity  11 2 Spectacle and Parody: Burlesque Subjectivity in the American Picturebook 13 William Moebius 3 The Self in Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas 31 Karen Coats 4 A Subjunctive Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency 51 Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish

vii

viii 

Contents

Part II Representations of Childhoods: Questioning or Re-Imposing Received Tropes  73 5 Seeing Red: The Inside Nature of the Queer Outsider in Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness 75 Holly Blackford 6 New Spaces and New Childhoods: Challenging Assumptions of Normative Childhood in Modernist Children’s Literature 93 Aneesh Barai 7 Modern Family, Modern Colonial Childhoods: Representations of Childhood and the US Military in Colonial School Literature113 Solsiree del Moral 8 Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books129 Karen Chandler Part III Identity and Displacement: Narrating History and Culture 147 9 “I remember. Oh, I remember”: Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers149 Adrienne Kertzer 10 Yoshiko Uchida: Loss, Displacement, and Identity167 Amanda C. Seaman 11 “I Would Not Be a Pilgrim”: Examining the Construction of the Muslim Child as an Authentic Witness and a Dynamic Subject in Anita Desai’s The Peacock Garden183 Nithya Sivashankar

 Contents 

ix

Part IV Children as Culture-Makers: Young People, Agency, and Literary Cultures 201 12 Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the “Ransome Style”203 Victoria Ford Smith 13 Kali Grosvenor, Aurelia Davidson, and the Agency of Young Black Poets219 Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley 14 “Send it to ZOOM!”: American Children’s Television and Intergenerational Cultural Creation in the 1970s237 Leslie Paris 15 Tupac Shakur: Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists255 Awad Ibrahim Index273

Notes on Contributors

Aneesh Barai  is a University Teacher in Education at the University of Sheffield, and a Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include intersections of modernism and children’s literature, cultural representations of education, fantasy literature and film, as well as ecocritical approaches to children’s literature and television. He has written on the children’s writing of Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, and films by the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. He is working on a monograph about ideas of place and space in modernist children’s literature. Holly Blackford  holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches and publishes literary criticism on American and children’s literature. Her books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (2004), Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (2011), The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (2011), Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel (2018), and edited volumes 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e’: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (2009) and Something Great and Complete: The Centennial Study of My Antonia (2018). Her next project is The Animation Mystique: Sentient Toys, Puppets, and Automata in Literature and Film. Karen  Chandler  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she teaches courses on children’s literature, African xi

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

American and American literature and culture, and composition. She has also taught in Hollins University’s Graduate Program in Children’s Literature. She is currently completing a book exploring historical narratives for children about slavery and freedom. Her essays have appeared in journals such as The Arizona Quarterly, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and African American Review, and in edited collections such as Who Writes for Black Children? Karen  Coats  is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her essays on the intersections between youth literature and cultural and literary theory, with a special emphasis on psychoanalytic theory and cognitive criticism, have appeared in many publications. She has co-edited several collections, including The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders (with Anna Jackson and Roderick McGillis), Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature (with Shelby A Wolf, Patricia Enciso, and Christine A.  Jenkins) and Mothers in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to Postfeminism (with Lisa Rowe Fraustino). She is also the author of Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature and The Bloomsbury Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Rachel Conrad  is Professor of Childhood Studies at Hampshire College, where she teaches courses on critical youth studies and twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry of childhood. Her research focuses on poetry written by young people from the perspectives of literary criticism and critical social studies of childhood, and her essays have appeared in journals including Childhood, Jeunesse, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Callaloo, and The Lion and the Unicorn. Her monograph Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency has been published recently in the new series “Childhoods: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children and Youth.” Amy  Fish  researches young people’s role in United States literature and culture. Her current project shows how child writers of color generated influential literary responses to US society at the decline of the civil rights movement and dawn of the War on Crime. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University and is a postdoctoral associate in the Kilachand Honors College at Boston University. She

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

serves on the editorial team of Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, for which she guest-edited a 2016 special issue on childhood. Her essay on June Jordan’s His Own Where recently appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn. Awad Ibrahim  is an award-winning author and a professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a Curriculum Theorist with special interest in cultural studies, applied linguistics, Hip-Hop, youth and Black popular culture, philosophy and sociology of education, social justice, diasporic and continental African identities, and ethnography. His research and essays in these areas have appeared widely, and his books include In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Hip-­Hop (with Hudson & Recollet); Provoking Curriculum Studies: Strong Poetry and the Arts of the Possible in Education (with Ng-A-Fook & Reis); The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity and the Politics of Becoming; Critical Youth Studies: A Reader (with Steinberg); Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (with Alim & Pennycook). L.  Brown  Kennedy  is Professor of Literature, Emerita, at Hampshire College. Joining the founding faculty at Hampshire in the third year of the college, she has had the privilege over the past forty-five years of helping to develop its uniquely collaborative pedagogy and interdisciplinary curriculum. In addition to work on the representation of childhood, her research areas are British seventeenth-century literature and intellectual history, the literature and history of the US South, and twentieth-century literature, particularly the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, and Morrison. Adrienne  Kertzer is a professor emerita, Department of English, University of Calgary. Author of numerous essays on Holocaust representation, she received the Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Scholarship on a Jewish Subject for My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Forthcoming publications include “‘One Jew, One Half-Jew, a WASP, and an Indian’: Diversity in The View from Saturday” in Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial, edited by Sara L.  Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl; “Holocaust” in Cambridge History of Children’s Literature in English vol. 3, 1914-Present, edited by Katharine Capshaw, Zoe Jaques, and Kenneth Kidd; and

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

“Trauma Studies” in Blackwell Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by Karen Coats and Deborah Stevenson. William Moebius  is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures for eight years and Comparative Literature for sixteen. His interventions in the field of word and image, with focus on picturebooks, have appeared since 1985 in American, British, Belgian, French, Spanish, and Chinese collections and anthologies, with public lectures in French or English at the Universities of Leipzig, Stockholm, Winnipeg, Louvain-la-Neuve, and at the prestigious Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle in France. Born and raised in Wisconsin, Moebius has authored a book of poetry Elegies and Odes (1969), a translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1972), and critically acclaimed translations of the poetry of Philodemos (1974). Solsiree del Moral  is Professor of American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. A historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean, her research and publications focus on Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and US Caribbean diasporas. She is the author of Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952 (2013). Del Moral’s articles have also appeared in Caribbean Studies, CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Journal of Caribbean History, New West Indian Guide, and Radical History Review. Her current book project is a history of street children and incarcerated youth in mid twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Leslie Paris  is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches modern American history. She is the author of Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (2008) and has co-edited A Paradise for Boys and Girls: Adirondack Summer Camps (2006); Lost and Found: Vulnerable Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (2009); and The Girls’ History and Culture Reader, vols. 1 and 2 (2011). She is currently completing a history of American childhood in the 1960s and 1970s. Kevin Quashie  teaches Black cultural and literary studies in the English Department at Brown University. He is the co-editor of New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America (with R. Joyce Laush and Keith D.  Miller, 1999) and author of Black Women, Identity, and Cultural

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject (2005) and The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012). He is completing a book on Black aliveness. Cai  Rodrigues-Sherley holds a BA in Africana Studies from Smith College. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, their work focused on the relationships among Black childhood, womanhood, and mourning, for which they were awarded the 2019 Ida B. Wells Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Africana Studies. Rodrigues-Sherley intends to continue exploring these poetic, political, and personal intersections in their graduate studies. Rodrigues-Sherley is a poet, songwriter, and youth educator. Amanda C. Seaman  teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is Professor of Modern Japanese Language and Literature. A scholar of modern women’s literature, genre fiction, and gender studies, she is the author of Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan (2004) and Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan (2016). Her other publications include translations of Japanese women’s literature, and writings on Japanese popular culture and Japanese food culture. Her current research explores the representation of illness and the afflicted in postwar Japanese literature, film, and popular media. Nithya  Sivashankar  is a PhD candidate in the Literature for Children and Young Adults Program at The Ohio State University with a Minor in English and a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in South Asian Studies. She holds an MA in Writing for Children from University of Central Lancashire, UK, and has worked as an editor at a children’s publishing house in India. She was awarded the 2017–2018 Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop Scholarship for Research in Children’s Literature. Her work on multicultural conflict narratives, dramatic inquiry, illustrated books, and narrative theory has appeared in the journals English Teaching: Practice & Critique and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and in edited collections including Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom (2019) and Immigrant Experiences: Expanding the School-Home-Community Dialogue (2019). Victoria Ford Smith  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches children’s, young adult, and British literature and culture. Her research focuses primarily on child agency and child-produced texts, children’s art and visual culture, and literature and

xvi 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

culture of the fin-de-siècle. Her work has appeared in Dickens Studies Annual, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and Children’s Literature. Her book Between Generations: Intergenerational Collaboration in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature was published in 2017 and is a winner of the Children’s Literature Association Book Award.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods Rachel Conrad and L. Brown Kennedy

The history of the twentieth century, if not airbrushed, is brutal. What stories should be told, and how should they be written for child readers who will approach them from various points of identification, as “insiders” or “outsiders” to diverse histories? How do literary texts built for or through children (or adult ideas about children) enter into these histories? How have literary cultures more broadly intersected with children and childhood across the twentieth century? How have children themselves been involved in the construction of twentieth-century literary cultures? In 1900 the Swedish feminist reformer Ellen Key called for the twentieth century to be The Century of the Child through her book of that title, which became a surprising bestseller. Key’s concerns included child labor, schools that commit “soul murder” (203), and patriarchal families in the context of industrial capitalism. In the United States, those invested in matters concerning children, as Michael Zuckerman argues, “took up the title of her book and, with obtuse optimism, changed it from a summons to a slogan” (228). One could argue that calls to place the child at the R. Conrad (*) • L. B. Kennedy Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_1

1

2 

R. CONRAD AND L. B. KENNEDY

center of adults’ thinking in the twentieth century resulted only in adults’ ideas about children taking center stage. And in this regard, the twentieth century ended as it began, with an opportunity to rethink how to center children in cultural and political actions, projects, and texts. A major issue in recent scholarship rethinking twentieth-century treatments of childhood across the disciplines has been the recognition that “the child” is not a unitary category, that childhoods are plural, and that the experience of being a child is culturally and historically specific, as Allison James, Adrian James, and others discuss.1 In her “call for our scholarship … to grow” (238) through “resituating diversity within children’s literature and the academy” (251), Katharine Capshaw eloquently argues for centering race and ethnicity when considering writers, readers, and representations. The scholars writing in this volume—working in and across disciplines including literary studies, history, psychology and psychoanalysis,  education, cultural studies, and the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies— foreground diverse representations of childhoods and focus on texts that have not necessarily been part of the standard English-language repertory for child audiences, including texts from former US and British colonies. Beyond the unquestionable need to add writers and texts to the “canon,” contributors to this collection also ask us to shift the questions and frameworks we use in reading literary and cultural texts. They engage major intellectual movements and political crises so as to reconfigure our conception of how childhoods were understood and represented during a twentieth century marked by war, by political struggle over civil and political rights, and by the cultural clash of postcolonial, racial, class-based, gender, and sexual identities. They ask us not just to “include” the “peripheral,” but rather to take up stances that reposition us as readers and critics and re-center our view of the whole. As they work from different methodologies and theoretical bases, their chapters come together here to insist that literary and visual representation are not neutral processes but are historically and culturally shaped, no less than are child subjects who themselves act—as readers and as creators—to reshape culture. This volume engages with two crucial acts of re-centering: not only focusing on the multiplicity of childhoods, but also centering the agency— or in certain cases critical and parodic lack of agency—of children, as subjects of representations, as readers, even as writers themselves. Richard Flynn’s recent essay in Jeunesse, included in a panel on “Divergent Perspectives on Children’s Agency,” hones in on “children’s competence and capability as social actors” (262) in contrast to the developmental

1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY CULTURES AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 

3

discourse of children’s incapability, ignorance, and incompetence. Flynn draws in part on Allison James’ delineation of what is meant by children as “social actors” in her 2007 essay problematizing adults’ interest in and mediation of children’s voices: “Childhood is a social space that is structurally determined by a range of social institutions, but, precisely because of this, children as subjects are also structurally and culturally determined as social actors with specific social roles to play, as children” (270). Children’s agency doesn’t merely emerge within social institutions but helps to construct them, as the anthropologist Myra Bluebond-Langner writes in her prescient 1978 book, The Private Worlds of Dying Children, in which she articulates a view of children “as willful, purposeful individuals capable of creating their own world, as well as acting in the world others create for them” (7). Centering children’s agency, then, involves not only the idea that children are capable and competent, but also the recognition that children’s experiences as and views of children and childhood enable them to shape their social worlds and to redefine our understanding of childhoods and, in the case of child writers, of aspects of literary culture. Adults writing literary childhoods can foreground the idea of agency in imagining their young characters and/or young readers. Yet another theme of this volume is to see literary culture not simply as a body of materials produced by adults for consumption by children, but also as co-created by young people in their actions as speakers, artists, readers, and writers. The chapters in this collection pursue multiple avenues to constructing literary cultures of childhoods, with emphasis on the plural of both “literary cultures” and “childhoods.” Without pretending to be exhaustive, we have been particularly interested in scholars and writers who are grappling with received notions of childhood, depicting active children engaging with their worlds, and representing diverse childhoods. Contributors approach writers who worked to rewrite scripts of the “natural” child (Holly Blackford, Aneesh Barai), writers who positioned child protagonists so as to offer young readers multiple points of entry and identification (Adrienne Kertzer, Nithya Sivashankar), or writers who crafted child subjects so as to do justice to complex aspirations and identities (Karen Chandler, Amanda Seaman). Other contributors undertake critiques of hegemonic perspectives (Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish, Solsiree del Moral), explore projects that directly involved young people as participants in or makers of literary culture (Victoria Ford Smith, Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley, Leslie Paris, Awad Ibrahim), and write about the role of child-­oriented texts in larger cultural projects (William Moebius, Karen Coats).

4 

R. CONRAD AND L. B. KENNEDY

In the context of this volume, the term “literary cultures” implies, in part, the exchange and circulation of texts and ideas among those who read and write. These texts include here the written genres of poetry, biography, fiction, and historical fiction. Increasingly through the twentieth century, though, this general notion of “literary cultures” was augmented by other cultural forms used to circulate the ideas and the imaginary of those who are literate. Chapters within this volume consider such other cultural forms as visual art and illustration, the picturebook, spoken word poetry, and television, as well as the institutions that support and “authorize” cultural circulation: schools, libraries, museums and archives, and the publishing and production industries. Texts that feature child protagonists and appear to seek child readers draw on an immense range of intertextual reference. Hughes and Bontemps’ Popo and Fifina bears useful comparison to Rousseau, so Aneesh Barai argues, while William Moebius notes that Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are echoes Wagner’s Parsifal. Child readers and writers, no less than adult writers, participate in this circulation of literary cultures and are both enabled and at times constrained by its assumptions and practices. Young writers Hall and Whitlock draw not only on Ransome, but on Keats and Matthew Arnold. And Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley speak to the engagement of Kali Grosvenor with Langston Hughes’ poetry, and to the role of Gwendolyn Brooks in promoting, from her position as poet laureate of Illinois, the work of young poets such as Aurelia Davidson. Across the twentieth century, the enlarging circulation of what people imagine, write, reference, and sample regarding children and childhood encompasses recent narratives and images as well as time-worn myths, tropes, and, yes, stereotypes. Part of what circulates in and through literary cultures are figures and plotlines that can alienate or delimit as well as attract or delight their readers, sometimes by means of a complex symbiosis. This is especially the case when the school curriculum or books with an explicit educational mission become the agent of transmission. Fictions and their writers can also, however, serve to rewrite old narratives, expose or mock cultural constraints and bigotries, and open new possibilities for their young readers. The “reading” young person—whether present through representation or as the “implied reader” of the text—is the direct concern of many of the contributors to this volume. Part I, “Framing the Twentieth Century: Spectacle, Self, and Specularity,” begins with two chapters that take up the cultural context and value of a range of texts across a broad span of the century, offering

1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY CULTURES AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 

5

very different but usefully complementary perspectives on intersections between “literary cultures” and “childhoods.” In “Spectacle and Parody: Burlesque Subjectivity in the American Picturebook,” William Moebius looks at the rise of the picturebook as a cultural institution in the United States of the 1930s through the 1970s, fueled paradoxically by immigrant artists leaving World War II Europe—even as cultural institutions like the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal promoted picturebooks as an “American” form. Child figures may feature in these large-scale and visually spectacular cultural projects, Moebius argues, but they are not necessarily their focus and may finally be heavily ironized. The grandiose and ultimately grotesquely spectacular masculine self that Moebius sees at the heart of the emergent picturebook form stands in useful tension with the vision of the child-self as it is constructed in Karen Coats’ account of the same 50-year arc in US and British culture in her chapter “The Self in Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas.” Examining intersections between the emerging field of psychoanalysis and a range of books and cultural artifacts designed for child consumption, Coats undertakes a broad survey of issues of self and identity as they emerge in twentieth-century views of childhood. Contrasting a “neoliberal, individualistic self” with a more interpersonal view of the self—one that intersects with the psychological models of, respectively, Melanie Klein and Harry Stack Sullivan—Coats argues that while the individual self dominates in many mid-century texts for child readers, another group of texts creates an important alternative view that is more communitarian, less isolated and narcissistic, and less preoccupied with economic success. If books and other cultural representations help to construct the child-­ self, as Coats argues, or bedazzle and restrict the subject (child or adult), as Moebius suggests, reading and looking can also be an instrument of critique and a source of perspective. In “A Subjunctive Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency,” Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish remind us that to author is also to “authorize” a reader, in the sense of conveying power and critical authority. The authorization of young black readers was a focus of efforts in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s as well as during the 1960s and 1970s. Quashie and Fish discuss Jordan’s Who Look at Me (1969)—a long poem accompanied by paintings by black and white American artists—which begins by invoking “blackness as spectacle” to a white audience and then proceeds by inviting young readers “to interrogate (through) looking”

6 

R. CONRAD AND L. B. KENNEDY

and to “shape a subjunctive ethic of human connectedness.” In examining not only Jordan’s authorization of black child readers, but also archival evidence of “failures of understanding” with her editor in a mainstream (white-dominant) publishing house, Quashie and Fish present Jordan’s work as an innovative “meta-text, a book about black looking and making—and being.” Part II, “Representations of Childhoods: Questioning or Re-Imposing Received Tropes,” begins with two chapters on early-century texts that implicitly or explicitly criticize cultural restrictions and sympathetically represent child “natures” that offer what Aneesh Barai calls “new childhoods” beyond the majority cultures of those eras and locations. In “Seeing Red: The Inside Nature of the Queer Outsider in Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness,” Holly Blackford rereads Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel retrospectively in the light of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 controversial adult-audience text. She explores the two texts as “coming-in stories” in which girl characters who are outsiders to their conservative communities find the fulfillment of their emergent selves in intellectual activity and female companionship. At stake, Blackford suggests, is the definition of “the natural,” as the two texts claim for their “odd” girl protagonists a connection both to an internal spontaneity and to the physical landscapes of the novel that serve to naturalize their “queerness.” Analogously, in “New Spaces and New Childhoods: Challenging Assumptions of Normative Childhood in Modernist Children’s Literature,” Aneesh Barai argues that the Modernists in Britain and the United States very provocatively write for child audiences, creating texts which echo earlier Romantic tropes of childhood “innocence” and the natural—in order to parody them in the case of Gertrude Stein (The World Is Round, 1939), or to appropriate and reassign them to black child figures in the case of Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps (Popo and Fifina, 1932). Whereas a repressive pedagogy figures centrally in Barai’s analysis of Stein’s child protagonist (for whom education and personal perception do not cohere), Hughes and Bontemps’ child character finds in rural Haiti compelling adult mentors and a nurturing cultural education. The impact of cultural stereotyping and the trope of education also dominate chapters by Solsiree del Moral and Karen Chandler, who ask us to consider the role of literary culture in education, and of reading as an instrument of acculturation, particularly in pedagogical contexts. In “Modern Family, Modern Colonial Childhoods: Representations of Childhood and the US Military in Colonial School Literature,” del Moral

1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY CULTURES AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 

7

explores themes of aspiration, education, and the complex problems of identification and loyalty presented to child readers in pedagogical stories written for Puerto Rican schoolchildren during the 1920s by the young American teacher Elizabeth Kneipple. Part of the official project of the “Americanization” of Puerto Rico, Kneipple’s texts use the guise of language instruction to rewrite the history of the island and position the American military not as occupiers, but as modernizing saviors and, effectively, a new “family.” Just as del Moral exposes a rhetoric which presented, under the guise of inclusion, racially “othered” children as subordinate and dependent on North American and dominatingly white perspectives, so too Karen Chandler in “Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books” analyzes the rhetoric and contrasting illustrational strategies in paired biographies of Booker T. Washington, and critiques textual biases which inscribe a middle-class and often white female perspective on scenes of education and aspiration. Looking critically at the ideology of literacy in 1980s children’s biographies of Booker T.  Washington that were published for instructional use, Chandler argues that Marie Bradby’s More Than Anything Else locates the young Washington’s introduction to literacy within the African American family and community, thus “insisting on the compatibility of blackness and print culture.” Chapters in Part III, “Identity and Displacement: Narrating History and Culture,” explore the effort, emergent in the last quarter of the twentieth century, not just to enlarge representation but to give young people critical tools for thinking about their own relation to history and culture. In her important 1990 framework, Rudine Sims Bishop discusses how books can provide “windows,” “mirrors,” and “sliding glass doors” that permit variously positioned child readers to understand more about lives different from their own and imagine for themselves new possibilities, or else see themselves reflected in new contexts. Adrienne Kertzer, Amanda Seaman, and Nithya Sivashankar share an interest in the writer’s task of engaging twentieth-century child readers with their child protagonists’ points of view during cataclysmic times in history. In “‘I remember. Oh, I remember’: Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers,” Adrienne Kertzer takes up the debate over the effects on child readers of encountering traumatic histories through consideration of late t­wentieth-­ century novels and films concerning the Holocaust. Comparing Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988) to Han Nolan’s If I Should Die before I Wake (1994) and Cherie Bennett and Jeff

8 

R. CONRAD AND L. B. KENNEDY

Gottesfeld’s Anne Frank and Me (2001), Kertzer asks who are the intended readers of these texts and considers why Holocaust memory matters. Reflecting on the time-travel plot as a figure of access to the past, Kertzer asks what kind of engagement with the past may be necessary in order to “know” it. As Kertzer suggests, the standpoints of these texts’ protagonists may prefigure those possible for the young readers of the novels who must themselves venture out imaginatively and return to make ethical choices. Amanda Seaman’s chapter “Yoshiko Uchida: Loss, Displacement, and Identity” considers the career of Uchida (1921–1992) as a writer for young audiences whose works provide a complex view of children’s negotiation of Japanese American identity, pressures from family and religious community, and rampant discrimination. Seaman focuses on Uchida’s set of “Rinko” novels, written amid the anti-Asian, anti-immigrant political tumult of the early 1980s, which extend and complicate her earlier novels for young readers representing Japanese Internment during World War II. As Seaman suggests, in response to the dearth of realistic and sympathetic representations of Asian American young people, Uchida depicted both for Japanese American children and for a general audience of young readers the culture of a vibrant Japanese American community in the pre-­ war period, even as she clearly showed the painful impact of racism and prejudice. Similar themes of conflict over family loyalty, religious and national identity, and response to identity-based violence frame Nithya Sivashankar’s chapter, “‘I Would Not Be a Pilgrim’: Examining the Construction of the Muslim Child as an Authentic Witness and a Dynamic Subject in Anita Desai’s The Peacock Garden.” Noting the paucity of Anglophone texts for young audiences about the Partition of India and Pakistan that present the point of view of a Muslim child figure, Sivashankar analyzes Anita Desai’s narrative strategies in The Peacock Garden (1974) to argue that Desai’s narrative ethics requires the child protagonist and the child reader to actively form their own judgments. The chapters in Part IV, “Children as Culture-Makers: Young People, Agency, and Literary Cultures,” explore young people’s active roles in literary cultures and their direct engagements as participants, collaborators, and writers. The scholars included in this section make visible some of the varied roles young people have taken in Anglo-American literary cultures in the twentieth century: responding to and engaging with adult-­produced texts, crafting literary texts themselves, and collaborating with other youth or adults. The young culture-makers discussed in these chapters help

1  INTRODUCTION: LITERARY CULTURES AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY… 

9

expand views of agency beyond a focus on autonomous action toward models that engage with interdependence and collaboration. In “Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the ‘Ransome Style,’” Victoria Ford Smith explores models of the child writer in considering the novel The Far-Distant Oxus, which was co-written by British teens Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock in the 1930s in the style of Arthur Ransome. While Hull’s and Whitlock’s work has typically been seen as imitative of Ransome, Smith reveals how Hull and Whitlock imaginatively and critically engage with Ransome through their own writing practices and by representation of their child characters’ literary knowledge. Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley, in “Kali Grosvenor, Aurelia Davidson, and the Agency of Young Black Poets,” also rethink child writers’ agency in relation to their literary engagements and relationships with adult mentors through discussing poems by Kali Grosvenor (1970) and Aurelia Davidson (1980) as complex texts that engage with themes of Blackness, youth, and “the role of the past for futurity.” Exploring the enabling but constraining roles that adults played in relation to the public presentation and reception of these young poets’ work, Conrad and RodriguesSherley’s analysis highlights a key dimension of youth agency—“that it must be on young people’s own terms and serve their own purposes.” In “‘Send it to ZOOM!’: American Children’s Television and Intergenerational Cultural Creation in the 1970s,” Leslie Paris writes about “intergenerational cultural creation” in the public television show ZOOM, which emerged from the emphasis on children’s participation associated with 1970s liberal culture in the United States. Paris uses archival research to consider the complications of adults’ and children’s roles in relation to the show, and to underscore the innovative ways in which ZOOM produced a participatory children’s culture through collaboration with adults. Finally, in “Tupac Shakur: Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists,” Awad Ibrahim discusses young people’s involvement with spoken word poetry in the late twentieth century and offers a “genealogy of the spoken word culture” and its literary cultural possibilities. The heart of Ibrahim’s chapter focuses on Tupac Shakur and his movement “from consumption to authorship” of spoken word poetry, as well as the “social critique and social theorizing” evident in his work. Ibrahim interweaves critical examination of ideas of childhood and youth, particularly in relation to the lives of black and brown children, and argues for the value of nonlinear “rhizomatic” frameworks that consider youth and childhood “as complex processes that are always to become and always in progress.” Ibrahim’s chapter

10 

R. CONRAD AND L. B. KENNEDY

thus demonstrates the value of critically engaging with models of childhood and youth while considering the active roles of young people in literary cultural production, and attending to the changing landscape of literary cultural genres in which young people participate. Although the loosely chronological structure of each section of this collection allows for useful juxtapositions and comparisons, a chronological narrative of the twentieth century—either of decline or of progress—is not our point. The volume does end with an element of hopefulness, noting a century that, despite its violent and repressive histories, its manipulations and excesses, still has at times made space for the concerns and voices of young persons.

Note 1. Sarada Balagopalan offers an important critique of current discourse on plural childhoods, arguing that the “distancing” of the lives of children outside European American contexts serves to, problematically, “continually reinforce … the higher truth of an universal, linear, and singular narrative of childhood” (24).

Works Cited Balagopalan, Sarada. “Childhood, Culture, History: Redeploying ‘Multiple Childhoods.’” Reimagining Childhood Studies, edited by Spyros Spyrou et al., Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 23–39. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 1990, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. ix–xi. Bluebond-Langner, Myra. The Private Worlds of Dying Children. Princeton UP, 1978. Capshaw, Katharine. “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation between Fields.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 237–257. Flynn, Richard. “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Agency?” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 254–265. James, Allison. “Giving Voice to Children’s Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials.” American Anthropologist, vol. 109, no. 2, 2007, pp. 261–272. James, Allison and Adrian L. James. “Childhood: Toward a Theory of Continuity and Change.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 575, 2001, pp. 25–37. Key, Ellen. The Century of the Child. G. P. Putnam, 1909. Zuckerman, Michael. “Epilogue: The Millennium of Childhood that Stretches Before Us.” Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, edited by Willem Koops and Michael Zuckerman. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003, pp. 225–242.

PART I

Framing the Twentieth Century: Spectacle, Self, and Specularity

CHAPTER 2

Spectacle and Parody: Burlesque Subjectivity in the American Picturebook William Moebius

There shall be sung another golden Age, The rise of Empire and of Arts, The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage, The wisest Heads and noblest Hearts. Not such as Europe breeds in her decay; Such as she bred when fresh and young, When heavenly Flame did animate her Clay, By future Poets shall be sung. Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last. —George Berkeley, A Miscellany1

W. Moebius (*) University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_2

13

14 

W. MOEBIUS

Bishop Berkeley’s vision of the course that empire would take on American soil, the “rise of empire and of arts,” heralds both a final act and the “noblest” of offspring. He pays homage to the youthful stage of European history as a “golden age.” In Berkeley’s imaginary, the childhood of Europe, its Renaissance, was, in effect, its golden age. America’s childhood itself would be the last, the final act of empire. In this chapter I examine instances in which picturebook artists in post-­depression America and their adult readers seized the land of childhood as their playground and turned the wonderland of British or continental childhood into an American extravaganza. To make an extravaganza is to make something big and impressive, feature animals as well as humans, include acrobats or dancers, and draw a huge crowd of spectators of all ages. Whether housed in a burlesque theater or a huge tent, under the shadow of large skyscrapers or on the grounds of a zoo, these often urban habitats themselves would breed spectacle, inviting insiders and outsiders, children and adults, to take part, but once there to be treated to caricature and parody, strong medicine for those seeking the “good and great inspiring epic rage” which can also be the “great inspiring epic page.”2 For American picturebook makers and their publishers, “grabbing and sustaining” the attention of the child reader would play an important role3; the publisher also would need a bold new concept to prompt an adult consumer’s choice of the book as a keeper, with its “epic page,” “big bang,” or “read-all-aboutit” quality. To some readers, the picturebook would evoke a scaled-down readership or listening experience, suitable for the small, vulnerable, and even gullible; if we think of childhood as small and vulnerable, such picturebooks as James Thurber’s The Last Flower: A Parable in Pictures (1939) or Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (1941) or Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon (1947) may come to mind. But the gullible aspects of childhood might also play into scenarios of what was, in the late nineteenth century, called “brutehood” or the “brute-inheritance.”4 Brutehood would have plenty of room for theriomorphic caricature, that is, in the shape of a beast, and in the first half of the twentieth century could still be read as linking childhood to Haeckel’s discredited notion “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and therefore to earlier stages of

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

15

human development. The once presumed science of Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy had already validated such distortions. Such caricatures could include Edgar Degas’ young ballerinas, labeled “les rats.”5 If we, as adults, were to think of childhood as a drama of the disqualified, as a caricature of ineptitudes, as a mobilization of freaks, clowns, and mischief-­makers, then the scope of the picturebook itself expands, competing with the greatest shows on earth. It cannot go without notice that both authorship and readership of the picturebook were not and have never been limited to the small and the vulnerable; but for American authorities in charge of measuring the worthiness of picturebooks, they had better be American. Scenes of nudity or alcoholism found in picturebooks from abroad might be deemed “risqué” and “frowned upon.” The sanctimony of the picturebook was closely guarded by the American Library Association (ALA), which counted some 14,626 members back in 1938, the year Animals of the Bible, A Picture Book was awarded the first Caldecott Prize for best American picturebook. Based in Chicago, the ALA represented both the book industry and its constituent readers, large and small. Librarians were specialists in books for children as well as for adults, and picturebooks had to be reviewed and checked for quality and content with greater scrutiny than any detective novel for adults. Immigrant picturebook artists like Ludwig Bemelmans or H.A. Rey and his wife Margret could settle in the big cities of the East Coast, but the destination of their work would just as well be a school library in the “heartland.” Eventually, the “place” of the picturebook could be in a lieu de mémoire such as the De Grummond collection at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where, each year since 1969, a small medal, bearing the likeness of the author or illustrator on one side and of a favorite character on the other, would be awarded by a group of adults, not children, for best children’s book of the year. A medal of modest size would stand for honor and respect; more than 15 of those awards would go to picturebook makers, not all of them of American nationality. Yet cherished picturebooks could also be viewed as ephemera, as what Winnicott called “transitional objects”; smaller than the tabloid New York Daily News (once known as the Illustrated Daily News) or Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, their size was by no means a new concept in journalism in the 1920s.6 Until 1911, there had been no room at the New  York Public Library, “the largest marble structure ever attempted in the United States,”7 for picturebooks, any more than there would be room for comics

16 

W. MOEBIUS

for years to come, although books of caricatures would no doubt find their place.8 Picturebook makers had to learn from the newspapers how to make the big splash, catchy headlines, how to make a big deal of what was no larger than a pamphlet that little hands could lift and hold on to. Not a few picturebook makers would make their living as artists creating advertisements, hyping such commodities as bug spray or shaving cream. No wonder that a bug for the spectacular was so contagious. Love of the spectacular motivated both the choice of an Art Deco designer of skyscraper inscriptions to design a national award for best picturebook for the members of the ALA and, 40 years later, Barbara Bader’s landmark study American Picturebooks: from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (1976). Bader’s title would frame a trajectory of the American picturebook from its origins to its destiny in the early 1970s as if this ark of the covenant had reached a culmination, from its roots in ancient Biblical stories to the leafy foliage of Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Maurice Sendak’s classic was a modern testament to psychoanalytic insight, but is at its core, a show, destined to become, among other things, an opera, kicked off by a boy-child in a wolf-suit threatening to eat his mother, a sly caricature of that brute inheritance. Unlike many of the picturebooks it names and describes, Bader’s volume itself has a certain gravitas, grander and more inclusive than its scholarly counterparts in the field of children’s literature, because it was saturated with images. Bader’s compendium was at the time a marker of the respect the picturebook had earned in the adult world beyond the membership of the American Library Association. The time to recognize the greatness of the American picturebook had arrived; the “epic page” had reached its prime. The big city’s chronic megalomania could also find a home in spectacularity in the picturebook, crowd scenes with a figure of an “amazing” child commanding attention. Such circumstances, on second thought, could be somewhat problematic, as suggested in Gertrude Crampton’s Scuffy the Tugboat (1946) when the little toy tugboat, “meant for bigger things” from a tiny stream in the country finds himself alone on a vast river. Thinking big might be conveyed in the figure of Noah’s ark, but the child of the city, like an immigrant, could also land under a tower of Babel, famous for its promotion of misunderstanding; what many found to be the “promised land” might begin at Ellis Island, where Scuffy’s illustrator, Tibor Gergely, arrived from Hungary in 1939. Thus, the American picturebook artist’s particular strategy as a conjurer of “spectacle” would by no means be unfamiliar, but the spectacle itself might betray a certain homelessness and haplessness.

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

17

It is no wonder that New York City would welcome so many of those artist-refugees who would become, in America, leading American picturebook makers, and lend its strengths to their vision and success. George Macy’s grand parade with larger-than-life creatures, some of them later based on figures from picturebooks (e.g. a Wild Thing hovering over thousands of spectators led by marching bands); a (PT) Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Bros. circus, with elephants “promenading down boulevards, marching into the city by bridge or tunnel”; a Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster on the screen; a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Met: these big shows could make Americans feel great about themselves. Even a Wagnerian opera could, in the hands of a Willi Pogány, another immigrant set designer and illustrator from Hungary, become a picturebook scenario.9 America’s greatness, after all, lay at the heart of the national harmonies of “oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber fields of grain, for purple mountain majesties …” (as evoked in Katherine Lee Bates’ 1895 lyrics to the patriotic song “America the Beautiful”). New York’s greatness could be recognized on the street and on the stage, under tall buildings marking the wealth and fame of a Rockefeller, Chrysler, Helmsley, or Woolworth. A version of a Roman triumphal arch in Greenwich Village could evoke either the glory or the insidious grandiosity of the American spirit. To call the tallest and most “spectacular” building the “Empire State” was to pay homage to a fantasy of empire and the dominant view. The Morgan Library and Museum, on the other hand, with its wealth of books and painted ceilings, might suggest a different vision of America, one that valued interior spaces, meditation and reflection, spaces where the fireworks could be found on the pages of books, not a few of which would be lavishly illustrated, and in the impressions of readers of all ages. It may not then be an exaggeration to address a certain kinship between the spectacular in the imaginary of New York City, and the spectacular in openings in certain American picturebooks, as two different ways of thinking big.10 Although, by 1938, there existed a canon of distinguished American picturebook creators,11 the ALA had elected to crown the glory of the annual picturebook by borrowing the name of a successful British book illustrator who had died just 52 years earlier in St. Augustine, Florida: The Caldecott Medal shall be awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen or resident of the United States, whether or not he [sic] be the author of the text.12

18 

W. MOEBIUS

Needless to say, Caldecott would not have been eligible for this national award himself, but the British Empire in which he had thrived could not but add weight to his glory and to that bestowed on winners of an American medal in his name. World-class illustrators at that time would have included Edy Legrand (1892–1970), a French illustrator highly praised in department store mogul George Macy’s Heritage Club newsletter Sandglass for his illustrated editions of the tragedies of Shakespeare, the Divine Comedy of Dante, and after World War II, an edition of the Bible with more than 1000 illustrations, one that found itself reported in Time magazine. Edy Legrand was also the creator of a large format picturebook, Macao et Cosmage, originally published in France in 1919 and reissued in 2000. To this reader, it is one of the most spectacular of the twentieth century. In this post–World War I picturebook, a small, tropical island populated only by a naked, mixed-race indigenous couple is “discovered” by a foreign navy and soon built up to resemble Manhattan. The book is both a tribute to and a parody of the colonizer. Given the nudity of the principal characters, Macao et Cosmage would not be eligible for the American picturebook market. Nonetheless, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had included LeGrand’s work in an exhibition in 1936 (two years before the establishment of the Caldecott Award) devoted to “Modern painters and sculptors as illustrators.” In the New York exhibition’s press release, its curator, Monroe Wheeler, an American associated with a publishing firm in Paris, offers a vision of author/illustrator collaboration that might fit the emerging genre of the picturebook: The highest type of illustrated book is the joint work of author and artist who are contemporaries, working as in equal collaboration; inspired by similar feeling; approaching the same subject matter from opposite directions; dealing with it twice within the covers of the one volume, neither should seem to take precedence. Of course, one does precede the other, in practice; but our impression in the ideal instance is of simultaneity, as if in free enthusiasm author and painter had each created alone, and the results had just happened to coincide: an impression of spiritual unity.13

While this exhibition gave a lift to the genre of illustrated book that closely resembled, in many respects, the goals and methods of its cousin the picturebook, it did not recognize the cousin, which suffered no doubt from its association with children even if its inspiration shared the same roots.

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

19

It is thus noteworthy that the American Library Association chose one of the foremost creators of bronze wall inscriptions for New York’s high-­ rises, René Paul Chambellan, to design the Caldecott Medal. Son of French immigrants, raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Chambellan had been a sergeant in the American army in France during World War I and, like Pogány, a student at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, before launching his career in the US as a successful sculptor of wall plaques in stone or bronze for large office buildings that would borrow their look from the French Art Deco movement. If the “tallest building in the world,” the Empire State, completed in 1931, had that look, so could the Caldecott Medal. Chambellan’s experience in monumentality would give the best picturebook award a high cultural status otherwise unknown in the world of childhood. Like her fellow admirers of the picturebook in the ALA, Barbara Bader would pay homage to the size and transatlantic dimensions of the American picturebook as she evoked Noah’s ark in a 615-page volume history of the newly defined genre weighing more than four pounds. That narrative is a spectacular voyage itself, if one considers the number of talented European illustrators who had found their place in the history of the American picturebook over the first half of the twentieth century, learning like many of their child readers, to read and write in a new language as they embraced the “new world.” Both the story of Noah’s ark and the experience of Max in Where the Wild Things Are dwell on a period of excess which seems almost cosmic: a boatload of human and animal survivors on the one hand or a music hall stage cast enacting a rumpus; both involve the mingling of human and animal, a convergence marked in the layout of Sendak’s rendering by three openings without words, full page bleeds of what could be seen as an off-Broadway variety show in which the dancers are speechless but smiling, a burlesque, perhaps, of cross-dressing Rockettes. Leading the rumpus is a boy with a crown, king of all the wild things, in charge of his subject animals, reaching new heights in a kind of gloire, yet still in need of “someone who loved him best of all.” Bader’s title American Picturebooks: from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within registers a compound of American childhood as beast within and master of revels, both with the promise of land after the deluge and that of being the wildest thing of all in a land of opportunity. Like most such illusions, the promise fails to answer the needs of the subject. The limited space of the picturebook itself remains negligible compared to that of the big stage or screen, but offers tactility, presence and availability for frequent turnings of the page,

20 

W. MOEBIUS

rehearsals of a show somehow always blessed by its absurdity. The child figure, named Max (linked to “Maurice” from the German picturebook of boy monsters Max und Moritz), makes a spectacle of himself in his wolf-­ suit until he retires to his bedroom. Whether or not this is the American way—childhood is about naughtiness, its narrative corrosive—will remain a question in the four picturebooks to be examined in this chapter, each created by a single “author-illustrator,” with a singular vision that balances the trajectories of the image with patterns in the words, and not subject to divergent points of view that find their way into joint endeavors of a writer “illustrated” by a second party. Such divergencies as those in the Curious George series, where text may be undermined by image (as Margret Rey’s text is offset or challenged by her husband’s illustration), involve a power dialectic as old as the European Renaissance and require separate treatment.14 One of the most widely read picturebooks before Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was the first one composed by Ted Geisel, under the name Dr. Seuss, published in 1937, the year after the exhibit of illustrated books at the Museum of Modern Art. The gestation of the book took place while Geisel was living in New York City, writing ads for Standard Oil, but the book got his sustained attention aboard an ocean liner returning from Europe. The finished product found its publisher (after 27 or 28 rejections) in a chance encounter on Madison Avenue. To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street featured a boy named Marco who had to come up with an impressive account of his day for his father. Although western New England readers point to evidence of Geisel’s intentions to treat the book as a token of his memory of Mulberry Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, Geisel’s birthplace, it is not implausible to imagine its roots in Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan, in the heart of an Italian neighborhood.15 If Geisel spent any time in Italy on his European vacations in the 1930s, he would have been impressed with the spectacle on the streets of Rome, but Mulberry Street in New York City could also supply some of the imagery in Marco’s grandiose parade of exotic animals which started with a simple horse and wagon. Marco’s obligation to impress his father with his own experience reflects to some extent the need to think big.16 That he adds to his spectacle a Chinese character also complements the context of New York City’s Mulberry Street, which opens out at its southern end onto a Chinese neighborhood.17 With a name like Marco, in a place that might have been named “Little Italy,” the need for the little guy to show off, to self-aggrandize in order

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

21

to impress the unnamed father may echo developments in Italy, especially in 1937, a year that Geisel and his first wife toured Europe. Without his imaginary parade, Marco is a nobody, a son who daydreams. However, this little guy is also one of a series of male figures to follow in American picturebook history who turn to the big show for relief, lending their own Mulberry Streets a kind of Fifth Avenue grandiosity. Yet no figure in a picturebook can be life-size, wow a huge audience with a show of muscle or verve, or deliver a show that brings the house down. The scale of picturebook spectacle at its largest is that of the humblest finger puppet. “To make it big” is not enough; make it a big crowd and the spectacle will impress. The picturebook must rely on cinematic “reaction shots” to persuade the reader that the show warrants attention and respect, whether the leading character in the show happens to be a wolf, a bear, a pig, or a steam shovel. The crowd scene plays an important role in the defining of the Aristotelean “megethos” effect, the grandness that spectacle needs. Whether in a sports dome, in a three-ring circus, or in a demonstration or political rally, numbers establish the credibility of the event as a spectacle. Just two years after the publication of Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Virginia Lee Burton’s well-loved and celebrated Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) delivered a spectacle validated by wide public attention. As in a Greek tragedy, all of the action in this modest offering takes place between sunrise and sunset; at the end of the day the heroine is put to rest, and her consort will join her in the underground of a new public edifice, a monument to the day’s spectacle. Before the actual spectacle can begin, the picturebook offers a digest of other similar transformative activities in the USA that have changed the landscape under the spacious skies and mountains’ majesty, even in the making of big cities with tall buildings. All of these activities can be credited in part to Mary Anne the steam shovel and her manager Mike Mulligan and “some others,” who, once accredited as contributors to the American dream, have suffered the woes of obsolescence. Their services are no longer needed, until they find employment in the little town of Popperville, where they promise to finish the excavation of the town hall foundation in a single day. The deeper and faster they work, the more the two earn both public attention (from the citizens not only of Popperville, but also of Bangerville, Bopperville, Kipperville, and Kopperville as well), and the blessing of the smiling sun herself. Like a sports duo, Mike and Mary Anne push themselves to their limits in the race to the finish line underground. Key to their efforts is Mike’s

22 

W. MOEBIUS

answer to a little boy who seems, with blonde hair, to be a match for the sun, and who helps deliver the two to their final fate. To the boy’s question “Do you think you will finish by sundown?” Mike replies, “Sure, if you stay and watch us. We always work faster and better when someone is watching us.” While Mike’s answer hints at a secret of the entertainment industry, it also captures a perhaps unintended reading of a doctrine proposed by Bishop Berkeley: “Esse est percipi” (“To be is to be seen”). Mike’s “us” includes Mary Anne, presented in the first opening of the picturebook in both an illustration and a verbal accolade, but unlike her partner Mike Mulligan, without a surname. The illustration has the two of them within a halo of sunlight, Mary Anne in the center left, and Mike gesturing from the right side. In this first opening, the first lines of the narrative speak of ownership and speech: Mike Mulligan had a steam shovel,    a beautiful red steam shovel.    Her name was Mary Anne.       Mike Mulligan was very proud of Mary Anne.       He always said that she could dig as much in a day        as a hundred men could dig in a week,         but he had never been quite sure           that this was true.

Speech, in these lines, solely practiced by Mike Mulligan, lacks a certain reliability, but the slanted margin “shovels” the text for the eye in a way that we might call the “style” of Mary Anne. Mike lives on bravado. Mary Anne, the star of his show, weighs in as more productive than 100 men and functions best while being observed. She has no lines to utter, but what we might call the Mary Anne effect is present in the shifting margin of the text itself. In the final effort to make good on Mike’s promise, her effect is unmistakable:     Never had Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne    had so many people to watch them;   never had they dug so fast and so well; and never had the sun seemed to go down so fast.     ‘Hurry, Mike Mulligan!     Hurry! Hurry!’     shouted the little boy.

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

23

     ‘There’s not much more time!’      …………………           But listen!              Bing! Bang! Crash! Slam!                Louder and Louder,                    Faster and                      Faster!

The reader follows the excavating armature down and in, a movement on the page much more effective for the reader than Mike Mulligan’s bravado. Many thousand readers, young and old, would love this picturebook, as it evokes a kind of heroism. What makes it a spectacle may also be related to the status of the steam shovel as a cultural icon of strength and endurance, despite her fatal obsolescence. Spectacle needs a dominant presence, a soloist with epic standing: Mary Anne’s experience making highways, excavating sites for skyscrapers, and digging canals has earned her that standing; she has made America great. But she is not the first mechanical picturebook character in America to be proposed as a savior. In 1926, Mary Liddell’s The Little Machinery would celebrate new technologies at the dawn of modernity in America, just as picturebooks in Russia featuring hydroelectric dams would make similar news for children in the 1930s.18 The Little Machinery’s robotics could not register as spectacular, although for some they too might possess impressive sound effects: But his hammer that goes by compressed air makes the biggest noise of all—because he bangs and bangs with it very hard, and sends the sticks and stones all flying. / He isn’t making anything but noise in this picture. (18)

The actions of Little Machinery never achieve the epic dimensions of Mary Anne the steam shovel, largely because Little Machinery is equipped to solve any problem with ease, almost routinely; he is the obedient elf who never stops smiling. Mary Anne’s fate is linked to town politics and acts of sacrifice in the name of community; she cannot continue to serve as a steam shovel once she has completed the excavation. Like the show-­ stopping Brunhilde of the Wagnerian Ring riding into the flames, Mary Anne becomes the giver of fire for the survival of the polis, far exceeding the short-sighted real estate wheeling and dealing of a selectman named Henry B. Swap.

24 

W. MOEBIUS

The towering world of New York City is far from rural, low-profile “Popperville”; Burton spent most of her life in New England. Her portrayal of the last day of a steam shovel was published one year after Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a spectacle of family life in a New England town, first performed in New York City in 1938. Both Burton and Wilder shared a respect for New England rural culture, and both spectacles resonate with themes of unity, simplicity, and humility, themes upheld by E.B.White in his 1952 children’s novel Charlotte’s Web. Like E.B. White, cartoonist and picturebook artist Syd Hoff grew up in New York, and also like White, contributed to The New Yorker magazine. Hoff’s third picturebook Grizzwold (1963) turns our attention away from utopian New England to the spectacle of the disenfranchised on both rural and urban fronts. Hoff was not the first to make a picturebook about an alienated bear. Hollywood movie cartoonist Frank Tashlin’s once notorious picturebook The Bear That Wasn’t (1946) drew a sharp contrast between the “innocent” bear who goes to hibernate in a forest cave, waking up to find himself inside the grounds of an industrial plant, and his misidentification as a shaggy employee charged with dereliction. Hoff’s unassuming bear, Grizzwold, whose name, in effect, joins “grizzly” with the Anglo-Saxon “wold” or “wooded upland,” is seen over and over as someone, like “the bear that wasn’t,” coming out or down where he shouldn’t, because he has no place in the world. He cannot remain in the woods because the wood is needed to make paper (like the paper in the reader’s hands); once on urban terrain he finds no place to stay until he finds himself in a wooded park, where his statuesque figure suits the needs of amateur paparazzi. Thus, Grizzwold must be seen in order to have his place; he is what we might call a public “attraction” whose purpose is to entertain, in this case, by “posing for us” (63). As a figure of entertainment, he may find himself on the floor as a rug, at a masked ball as a bear, or in a zoo-like situation in a well-managed park. Two of these roles advance an interpretation of “humiliation,” and yet the final role, which features Grizzwold in a standing pose, approaches the realm of exaltation, a kind of bucolic “ecce homo,” “the biggest bear they had ever seen” (62). But this same figure may apply to Grizzwold at an earlier moment in a masked ball when the partygoers must take off their masks. Told that he looks “just like a real bear” (38), Grizzwold thanks the partygoers, and joins the dance as an iconic “dancing bear.” When asked to take off his mask, he pleads “‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘This is my real face’” (43). Here lies the spectacle of pathos, an ultimate rejection of his

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

25

being, from a persona to simply an “it,” an “other.” Such unmasking has a long history in Western drama. Its reenactment in a picturebook of the 1960s leaves open questions of race, origin, or gender, but puts forward an “entertainment” solution by turning the bear into a spectacle of nature—and the show doesn’t end there. Grizzwold is as green as a child in his inexperience of the world. He has to find his place in a human environment, a kind of misfit or outcast in American society, only cute when captured on film. For a final example, we turn to a picturebook whose creator had ties to Hollywood and the Disney empire. A number of twentieth-century American picturebook artists found opportunities in the film industry. If their career trajectories can be used as a measure of their artistic propensities, then a “will to spectacle” from picturebook to storyboard will seem quite like the gold rush it proved to be. Bill Peet’s Chester the Worldly Pig, first published in 1978, brings together a pig that wants to make it big as an entertainer and a late twentieth-century version of the circus that once captured audiences from New York to LA, a circus always looking for a new gimmick to help market its show. Chester will do anything to get attention: ‘Of all things,’ grumbled Chester, ‘why on earth did I have to be a pig? A pig is no better off than a cabbage or a carrot, just something to eat. But before I end up as so much sausage and ham, I intend to try and amount to something.’ But what could a pig ever be? That was Chester’s main problem, and he turned this around and around in his head until one day it suddenly came to him: ‘I’ll be a star in the circus.’

The question Chester raises, “of all things … why on earth did I have to be a pig?”, suggests trajectories beyond becoming someone else’s meal. “To eat like a pig” and “to behave like a pig” are epithets sometimes hurled at diners or drinkers, but questions like “What will come of me?” or “What will I become?” are more germane to the Greek word hys, the root of hysterectomy and hysteria.19 The pig “psychosis” has thrived in narratives for children, starting with the Mother Goose “action” game “This little piggy …,” a finger game that gives agency and options to the players, especially in the final “this little piggy ran all the way home,” home often being a soft ticklish place on the body of a child. The more practical British tale of the “Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” would

26 

W. MOEBIUS

determine what would become of three adult male pigs according to their choices of construction material, promoting the smart choice of bricks and mortar over the fatal choice of more flexible and less durable building materials. Wilbur the pig in Charlotte’s Web, stigmatized as a runt, would find protection in Charlotte the spider’s “radiant” interpretation, which would draw crowds to witness the spectacle of a little pig so exceptional as to be blessed with a spider’s message. Porky Pig and Petunia Pig, created by Bob Clampett and Friz Freleng in 1935, loomed large in Frank Tashlin’s Looney Tunes as a famous stutterer who had trouble finishing a sentence. Peet’s Chester is thus not alone in posing the existential question of what can come of a pig or what a pig can become. Banned in some food cultures, exploited in others, the pig offers an enigmatic and somewhat pathetic array of possibilities for a featured role in visual media such as the picturebook, children’s book, or Hollywood “picture.” What does it take to get in that picture? Chester chooses a modest circus, not known for its hog show, as a site of public assembly where he can earn the widest attention. Chester thinks he has shown value because he can stand on his nose, but this circus is indifferent to such a limited array of stunts. It needs something more for star-power. Chester joins a giant circus but finds the circus environment toxic— performing with five tigers as figures of brutehood does seem more spectacular, but it may also be fatal. He heads back to the country. Once the map of the world imprinted in Chester’s hide is recognized, his career as the main attraction of a carnival is guaranteed. As a mappa mundi, Chester earns a kind of cosmic value similar to that of Mary Anne the steam shovel. He will not be a reference tool, and national boundaries may change as he grows older, but his hide will always be someone else’s show. Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Chester need only be on display and beheld to be a source of entertainment. Representing the world in his case is not a matter of global diplomacy but rather of what we might call seamless globality, from shore to shining shore, the art of seeming global. To be a “worldly” pig does not require any experience or training in global cultures or diversity; the benefits of showing here outshine the benefits of knowing. The American picturebook, whether in the invention of the Caldecott Award for best American picturebook, the launching of Max to his appointment as ‘king of all wild things,’ an imagined fantasy parade in New York City, a town hall excavation project in New England, a big bear’s photo shoot in a city park, or an American pig’s outing as “the One and Only

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

27

Pig!!” can deliver the spectacular. Yet in each instance, parody and caricature make the ambitious figure a dubious, if not pathetic model for a new age. A larger survey of the spectacular and the burlesque in the American picturebook would need to include more recent works by Caldecott Medal– winning picturebook artists such as David Wiesner, Jerry Pinckney, Javaka Steptoe, and William Steig. Patricia Polacco for her Pink and Say and Emily McCully for her Mirette on the High Wire would also be among those whose work merits consideration in further inquiry into the American picturebook spectacular. We might do well to consider just what spectacle may stand for in twenty-first-century America and in its proud tradition of picturebooks.

Notes 1. Epigraph excerpted from: George Berkeley. “Verses by the Author, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” in A miscellany, containing several tracts on various subjects. London: Printed for J. & R. Tonson and S.Draper, 1752. pp. 186–187. Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Text Creation Partnership. University of Michigan Library, name. umdl.umich.edu/004805982.0001.000. Accessed 10 July 2019. 2. Berkeley’s verse “on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” used here as an epigraph, may have been written as early as 1726 in Newport, Rhode Island, and existed in multiple early American editions. There is variation in the word that ends the key line, “The Good and Great inspiring epic Rage.” In 1847, in William Bacon Stevens, A History of Georgia, “rage” is replaced by “page,” but in John Nicolas Norton’s Life of Bishop Berkeley (1861), “rage” presides, under the heading of “Ode on Arts and Learning,” as Berkeley is linked to the colonial trustee of Georgia, James Oglethorpe. 3. The phrase “grabbing and sustaining” is borrowed from the title of a self-­ published book for entrepreneurs: see Kingsley Chisanga, Grabbing and Sustaining Golden Opportunities, 2013. 4. For “brutehood,” see John Fiske, Studies in Religion, pp. 70–71. Fiske was a prominent American philosopher and historian whose work seeks to reconcile Darwinian theory with Christianity. 5. For Degas’ view of girl dancers, see Anthea Callen’s The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas (Yale UP, 1995). Callen calls attention to Degas’ dancer statuettes enclosed in display cases that mimic display cases in a natural history museum. 6. See Tony Rogers. “The Differences Between Broadsheet and Tabloid Newspapers.” ThoughtCo, January 30, 2018, thoughtco.com/broadsheet-­ and-­tabloid-newspapers-2074248. Accessed 12 Feb. 2018.

28 

W. MOEBIUS

7. www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/history. Accessed 18 Oct. 2017. 8. Thomas Wright’s monumental A History of Caricature and Grotesque, illustrations and engraving by F.W. Fairholt. London: Chatto and Windus, 1875, would have been on their shelves. Comenius’ Orbis Pictus (1658) might also have stood in a place of honor. 9. For reference to circus elephants entering New York see Andy Newman. “Circus Elephants of New York Vanishing”. In London for ten years, Pogány had produced his own proto-picturebooks for children as “complete illustrated works” on Wagner’s Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, and Parsifal before landing in NYC in 1914 as an illustrator and Metropolitan opera set designer. His career eventually took him to Hollywood. 10. For discussion about book openings see William Moebius, “Introduction to Picturebook codes” in Maybin, Janet, and Nicola J.  Watson. Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories. Palgrave Macmillan in association with The Open University, 2009. 11. For a vivid portrayal of the pressures of canonization faced by one picturebook artist in New York in the late 1930s, see Leonard S. Marcus’ Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, especially the chapter “Bank Street and Beyond,” pp. 67–106. 12. www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmedal/aboutcaldecott/aboutcaldecott. 13. Monroe Wheeler, Press release, The Museum of Modern Art, ca. April 1936, pp. 3–4. www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325052. pdf. 14. See William Moebius, “Making the Front Page: Views of Women, Women’s Views in the Picturebook,” in Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Feminist Theory and Children’s Culture, edited by Margaret R.  Higonnet and Beverly Lyon Clark, Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 15. Geisel’s general reluctance to disclose the sources of his work raises doubts about the reliability of his answers. To one admirer’s question about his sources and influences, he alleged that he found them in an annual trek to “Über Gletsch” or “beyond the glacier”), a Swiss village he would visit once a year for service on his cuckoo clock. See Philip Nel, Doctor Seuss: An American Icon. Continuum, 2004, or Horn Book Magazine, Vol. 41–42, p. 12. 16. “Random House wanted a blockbuster ‘big book’ for the fall of 1962 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ted’s first book, Mulberry Street,” write historians Judith and Neil Morgan (176). 17. As a marker of the street’s Italian heritage, an 11-day-long San Gennaro Feast and street parade, begun in 1926, takes place at 268 Mulberry Street each September to this date.

2  SPECTACLE AND PARODY: BURLESQUE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE AMERICAN… 

29

18. See Anika Burgess, “The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.” 19. As Peet begins his autobiography, a picturebook in its own right, he recalls the family pigs back in Indiana: “In that compartment of the brain where visual memories are stored mine has been cluttered with an endless assortment of things starting with the two pigs we raised in my birthplace of Grandview, Indiana.” Peet takes several openings before allowing a revelation to take place in the career prospects of his Chester the pig. For Peet, Chester the Worldly Pig, which followed the end of his long career with Walt Disney, stood as the “one book of mine that reflects my past more than any others” (185). Joining the circus was “my trip out west to Walt Disney’s big top” (186). In Peet’s interpretation, the clown of the big circus Chester eventually leaves is Walt Disney (188).

Works Cited Picturebooks Burton, Virginia Lee. Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. Houghton Mifflin, 1939. Crampton, Gertrude. Scuffy the Tugboat. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely, Vanguard, 1937. Hoff, Syd. Grizzwold. Harper and Row, 1963. Legrand, Edy. Macao et Cosmage. Paris. Circonflexe, 2002. Orig. Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1919. Liddell, Mary. The Little Machinery, A Critical Facsimile Edition, Nathalie op de Beeck, Wayne State UP, 2009. Orig. Garden City: Doubleday, 1926. Pogány, Willy. Parsifal or the Legend of the Holy Grail. New  York and London: Harrap, 1912. Peet, Bill. Chester the Worldly Pig. Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Harper and Row, 1963. Tashlin, Frank. The Bear that Wasn’t. E.P. Dutton & Co, 1946.

Criticism

and

Contexts

Bader, Barbara. American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast within. Macmillan, 1976. Berkeley, George, “Verses by the Author, on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” in A miscellany,…. London 1752, pp. 186–187. Burgess, Anika. “The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature.” 15 June 2017. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-childrens-books-propaganda. Accessed 22 Sept. 2017.

30 

W. MOEBIUS

Busch, Wilhelm. Max Und Moritz: Eine Bubengeschichte in Sieben Streichen. München: Verlag Braun und Schneider, [between 1900 and 1940], 1900. Callen, Anthea. The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas. Yale UP, 1995. Chisanga, Kingsley. Grabbing and Sustaining Golden Opportunities. Wilshire Funds Management, 2013. Fiske, John. Studies in Religion. Houghton Mifflin, 1902. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomy. First published in English in London, 1826. Morgan, Judith and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel: a Biography. Da Capo Press, 1996. Newman, Andy. “Circus Elephants in New York, Vanishing,” New York Times, 4 March 2016. Peet, Bill. Bill Peet: An Autobiography. Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Ross, Alex. “A Walking Tour of Wagner’s New York.” The New Yorker, 13 May 2013. www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-walking-tour-of-wagnersnew-york. Accessed 15 July 2017. Wheeler, Monroe. Press release for 1936 MOMA exhibition of illustrated books. The Museum of Modern Art, ca. April, 1936. www.moma.org/documents/ moma_press-release_325052.pdf. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. Basic Books, 1971.

CHAPTER 3

The Self in Twentieth-Century American Children’s Literature: A Tale of Two Schemas Karen Coats

In his sweeping cultural history of psychotherapy, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, Philip Cushman walks readers through thick descriptions of what humans have believed about the self over time, arguing that “[t]he masterful, bounded self of today, with few allegiances and many subjective ‘inner’ feelings, is a relatively new player on the historical stage” (357). Cushman’s “today” is the late twentieth century in the United States, a time and place wherein selfhood and personal identity had become “the single-most important concern of the era” (277). As Cushman and many other philosophers and social scientists have noted,1 this growing concern with the self coincides with the epochal development of modernity. Originating in the philosophy of Rene Descartes, developing through the European Enlightenment and the expressive Romantics, the self came of age as a reified construct in the secular scien-

K. Coats (*) Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_3

31

32 

K. COATS

tific culture of the twentieth century. The dominant self-schema that developed in America over the course of the century was, for the most part, individualistic, autonomous, competitive, anxious, psychosomatic, creative, and acquisitive. This self-schema, which many today call neoliberal, has increasingly come under postmodern critique for its investment in perpetuating the values of white masculinity and serving the ends of a consumer-based culture predicated on the fostering of insatiable, conformity-driven desire while paradoxically insisting on responsible and autonomous self-mastery. Cushman notes, however, that there was another schema available at the beginning of the twentieth century, one that had more interpersonal origins and ends. The radical work of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan presaged the critique of autonomous individuality by positing that the self was not free-standing at all, but instead emerged in social, political, and economic contexts that should themselves be examined and reformed for the psychological damage they inflict on the individual. For Sullivan, psychological problems were the result of social and economic ills that required political interventions. His calls for political interventions met with resistance and ultimate rejection by a psychological establishment and a culture at large that required a neoliberal self-schema in order to promote ideas of American exceptionalism and economic growth. Cushman thus explains that Sullivan’s perspective was “the road not taken” (159), and I would argue that it may indeed have made all the difference in the construction of the twentieth-century self in America, leading it away from a consuming isolate whose problems are intrapsychic to a communal, intersubjective self that develops in a context of interpersonal response. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how children’s texts of the twentieth century represented and actively participated in the construction and ultimate dominance of the neoliberal self-schema in American culture, and then to suggest how other child-oriented texts showcased both its critique and an alternative. In fact, I would argue that the twentieth century is bookended by a self-schema more in line with what Sullivan proposed, one that presents the self as deeply interpersonal rather than individualistic and isolated. Most children’s literature critics agree with Steven Mintz that “[s]ince the early twentieth century, children have constructed their identities and culture out of symbols, images, and stories from the raw material of popular culture” (49). Cushman argues that the entrepreneurial economy of early twentieth-century America necessitated such a belief in self-creation through the consumption of cultural ­products.

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

33

The child self was seen as especially vulnerable to texts that offer scripts for how to achieve status and stand out among one’s peers, and such scripts were crassly promoted to youth through Vaudeville and Wild West shows; advertisements in children’s magazines; radio, film, and TV shows; and sensational comics aimed at young audiences. However, Mintz also points out that children are not merely passive recipients of the raw materials their culture provides. Instead, their interactions with stories are more often than not playful revisions of or resistance to didactic adult-authored scripts. This independence of mind results in a persistent friction point in the way the conception of the self developed and was represented in twentieth-century American children’s literature. On the one hand, the work of social scientists and literary scholars alike has been dominated by a social constructionist model, wherein children’s minds are conceived as blank slates, vulnerable to the images presented to them in books, media, and social contexts as they construct a sense of their own value and identity, for better or worse. This is consistent with Sullivan’s interpersonal self-schema. On the other hand, the fact that children regularly and energetically talk back to their media suggests that they do have some autonomy to resist social indoctrination and the transmission of communal values that might efface the individual achievement and innovation needed to grow the American economy and promote exceptionalism. What was thus needed in terms of a self-schema in the twentieth century was one that acknowledged the influence of cultural texts and interpersonal relationships on children and yet satisfied the myth of the self-made individual. Cushman argues that such a rapprochement came from the theories of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who in mid-­ century posited the notion that relationships were in fact integral to the development of the self, but that those relationships were intrapersonal and imaginary, rather than interpersonal and reality based. In what follows, I will explain Sullivan’s and Klein’s models of the self and how they are reflected in and perpetuated through children’s texts.2 In terms of the dates of the creative and the critical work, it is important to note that psychologists’ theories are retrospectively constructed; that is, they map psychic territory that already seems to exist. Thus, if their theories about the self have validity, the reflection of those theories in texts will both precede and follow their analytical expression. In addition, I would note that I make no claim that Sullivan or Klein ever read the children’s texts I ­examine here; instead, I suggest that their work gives us language to examine the self-schemas at work in the texts.

34 

K. COATS

The Interpersonal Self in Children’s Texts Born in 1892, Harry Stack Sullivan is a lesser-known figure in the annals of American psychology, mostly because his ideas were out of step with his time. Sullivan had a lonely, impoverished childhood in Norwich, New York, where he was discriminated against because of his Irish Catholic faith. More importantly, his mother suffered a psychotic episode when he was young, leaving him in the care of his authoritarian grandmother. These experiences influenced his understanding of the self as deeply affected by real interpersonal relationships and social contexts. As a result, he advocated for a move away from “the psychiatry of private living” to “a psychiatry of politics” (Sullivan, “Security” 420). This stance went against the grain of the professional goals that other prominent psychiatrists had been actively cultivating since the turn of the twentieth century for a politically neutral psychotherapy grounded in scientific (or at least purportedly scientific) principles. The gloss of science enabled a rejection of any sociohistorical contexts for psychological problems in favor of an atomistic, essentialist, autonomous self whose problems were located within one’s own mind; simply stated, it wasn’t society’s fault if you were having problems coping or achieving success. The aim of the available therapies and treatments was greater adaptation to the social world as it existed, with the ultimate goal of achieving personal well-being. In other words, American culture was just fine, thank you very much, and the proper focus of parenting and psychotherapy was to create optimistic, well-adapted, boot-­ strapping consumers who were invested in their own personal gain rather than creating more just and equitable societies for all. For Sullivan, by contrast, the idea of individualism was an illusion: [I]t makes no sense to think of ourselves as “individual,” “separate,” capable of anything like definitive description in isolation … No great progress in [psychiatry] can be made until it is realized that the field of observation is what people do with each other, what they can communicate to each other about what they do with each other. When that is done, no such thing as the durable, unique, individual personality is ever clearly justified. (“Illusion” 317)

Sullivan believed that the self develops in dynamic response to others, and that it constantly monitors and adapts to its environment. Perhaps more importantly as his work developed, though, he believed that “[p]sychiatry has a basic role in making sense of human affairs, individual and collective” (“Security” 420), and he tried to push his colleagues toward ­understanding

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

35

that sociopolitical problems such as racism and economic injustice required psychological study and intervention. By displacing the sources of conflict and its resolution away from the individual and onto the collective, he not only threatened the status of psychotherapy as an apolitical, scientific, and profitable endeavor, but also, at a deeper level, his ideas threatened to expose the cracks and exclusions in America’s boot-­strapping idealism and independent spirit. Fundamentally, Sullivan believed that emotional illnesses were not caused by intrapsychic conflicts, but by interpersonal, contagious anxieties that prompt children to develop patterns of “selective inattention” in order to avoid their parents’ and their own insecurities and fragmentation (Sullivan, Interpersonal 233–34). Such illnesses are cured when, through the attentions of a therapist working as a participant-­ observer, the patient can more accurately see herself as others see her (374). Bearing Sullivan’s ideas in mind, we can see how some of the most well-­ known children’s books of the early twentieth century focus on white, female protagonists who demonstrate a process of interpersonal development. Though their stories begin with displacement from their families, characters in these books seek to maintain interpersonal connections to their absent families as they embark on self-definition. For instance, Rebecca Rowena Randall, of Kate Douglas Wiggins’ Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), proudly bears the name given her by her derelict but artistically inclined father. Anne Shirley, of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), wants to be a teacher because her deceased parents were teachers. Pollyanna, Eleanor H.  Porter’s eponymous character (1913), strives to carry on her father’s legacy of relentless optimism despite enduring the deaths of her parents and an accident that results in paralysis. Given their orphaned state, each of these girls is motivated by what Sullivan refers to as a need for “interpersonal security”—that is, it is evident to these girls that their situations are precarious, so they attempt to interact in ways that won’t result in rejection (Interpersonal 42–43). However, they have been deposited into the care of adults who suffer from various degrees of brokenness themselves. In Pollyanna, Aunt Polly is unable to place her heartfelt desires before her social standing, and is therefore cold and difficult for Pollyanna to reach. In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), the orphaned Mary’s uncle and new guardian, Archibald Craven, has not recovered from his depression following the death of his wife and his fear that his son, Colin, will either die or inherit his kyphosis (excessive outward curvature of the spine). The adult caregivers in Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and

36 

K. COATS

Burnett’s A Little Princess are all older and single, and either see their charges as duties or commodities, or are insecure about their ability to care for their charges. While in Sullivan’s theory, these damaged adults risk passing on their contagious anxiety to their new charges, the novels provide the child characters with defenses and good participant-observer therapists who help them see how their behavior is perceived. Mary of The Secret Garden, for instance, has learned patterns of “selective inattention” as a defense against earlier rejection by her socialite mother and has retreated into patterns of solipsistic avoidance. The first evidence of this comes when a boy named Basil attempts to join her as she plays at creating a garden by herself. She curtly rejects his intervention and ignores his teasing by dismissing it as irrelevant to her need for security. When she arrives at Misselthwaite Manor, however, she is confronted with observations by employees of the estate that draw her out of such defensive responses and into successful interpersonal relationships. Mary’s first interaction with the servant Martha is instructive under a Sullivanian dynamic: After insinuating that Mary should be able to dress herself, Martha innocently misidentifies her as Indian rather than English, and Mary flies into a racist rage. Sullivan identifies rage as a significant key to understanding the interpersonal self. In this instance, Mary is confronted with the fact that she is powerless in her new environment; that is, her security is threatened. She is used to servants who did her bidding without question and a mother who ignored her; this new type of servant, who questions her abilities and her sense of who she is, ignites her deepest insecurities. But in Sullivan’s terms, it is in fact Martha’s anxiety that precipitates Mary’s rage response. Martha is unsure about being an upstairs maid, as her Yorkshire dialect is too common for such a position. Her insecurity over her performance is thus contagious, and their shared anxiety is only resolved when Martha remembers that Mary is a child in need of fresh air, exercise, and friendship. When Martha indicates that Mary would enjoy meeting her nature-loving brother, Dickon, the narrator opines that Mary’s interest is “the dawning of a healthy sentiment” (36). Such a characterization is distinctly Sullivanian, as he believed that the self is innately inclined toward health once obstacles to honest perceptions of the self and others have been removed. In removing such obstacles, the gardener Ben Weatherstaff is perhaps most instrumental in Mary’s development of an awareness of how she is perceived:

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

37

“Tha’ an’ me are a good bit alike,” he said. “We was wove out of th’ same cloth. We’re neither of us good lookin’ an’ we’re both as sour as we look. We’ve got the same nasty tempers, I’ll warrant.” This was plain speaking, and Mary Lennox has never heard the truth about herself in her life … . She actually began to wonder also if she was “nasty tempered.” She felt uncomfortable. (47–8, emphasis added)

Here, Ben offers Mary her first truly honest glimpse of how she appears to others. By casting his assessment of her in interpersonal terms—that is, by comparing Mary to himself—Ben inadvertently offers himself as an ally in her development. His observation clears the way for Mary to perceive the truth about herself and prompts her to think about why she might have missed it before; the servants she knew prior to coming to Misselthwaite Manor had performed functions rather than interacting with her in genuinely interpersonal ways. Because Ben responds to her with “plain speaking” rather than his own anxiety over proper servant behavior, Mary is able to accept his judgment calmly, and use it to her benefit; it merely makes her “uncomfortable” rather than enraged. Mary’s anxiety is further lessened, and her sense of security enhanced, by her interactions with Martha’s nature-loving brother Dickon, who radiates calm self-assurance. Instead of treating him with the selective inattention she practiced with Basil, Mary recognizes Dickon as someone who is key to her interpersonal security in the secret garden. Thus she engages in a process Sullivan calls “consensual validation” with Dickon, accepting his authority as she learns to regulate her speech and behavior so as not to disturb the quiet of the garden or the wild animals he has taken into his care. Sullivan refers to this stage of interpersonal development as the acquisition of the “syntaxic mode of experience,” wherein “the child gradually learns the ‘consensually validated’ meaning of language—in the widest sense of language. These meanings have been acquired from group activities, interpersonal activities, social experience” (Interpersonal 28–9n). From her interactions with Dickon, Mary learns to control the volume and tone of her language, thus demonstrating Sullivan’s point that the self continually monitors and adjusts its behaviors and responses to ensure interpersonal security. In fact, Mary’s level of interpersonal security blooms to the point where she seeks out the source of the crying she hears in the night until she finds her invalid cousin, Colin. Surrounded by people who obsequiously defer to him because they fear losing their jobs, Colin has never overcome his

38 

K. COATS

rage behavior, which Sullivan notes is an infantile response to the anxiety of one’s caregivers (Interpersonal 54). As Mary becomes more secure through her various interpersonal relationships, her “nasty temper” subsides into strategic anger that can be used “very facilely … when [she] would otherwise be anxious” (54). Entering into the role of participant-­ observer rather than servant, she reflects to Colin his behavior and temperament in the same way Ben reflected hers to her. Colin is thus enabled to view her as the first authority figure he can trust. He consults with her about how he should use language in consensually validated ways to assert his own authority as future lord of the manor; when he does so, everyone’s anxiety is lessened, and the community itself becomes happier and more functional. This portrait of the interpersonal self as Sullivan theorized it can be traced through other texts of the early twentieth century; in fact, the interpersonal self dominates in texts that feature white girl protagonists. In L.  M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Anne Shirley and her new caregivers, Matthew and Marilla, work to achieve consensual validation and greater interpersonal security as they learn to read each other’s words, silences, gestures, and facial expressions. Sara Crewe, from Burnett’s A Little Princess, changes the culture of her school as she helps shy and lonely girls find community. In Porter’s novel, Pollyanna’s interactions with several older people in her community heal long-standing emotional and psychosomatic wounds. Each of these girl characters thus performs the affective labor necessary to heal their communities and, in turn, themselves. Although these characters seem memorable for their individuality, their development depends on their interaction with others with whom they act, often reciprocally, as correctives to distorted and limited self-­ images. The authors firmly reject the perpetuation of the values of individualism in favor of connectedness and community. Characters do find personal fulfillment, but always in the service of goals larger than themselves, in a move away from solitary imaginings toward communal presence and activity. Despite the enduring popularity of these works, the interpersonal self lost traction in the American psyche as the century progressed, largely because it whiffed of communism and in other ways didn’t fit the entrepreneurial, competitive spirit required of robust capitalist endeavor. The United States had been invested in the ideal of “independence” since its inception, so the tales of interpersonal dependence and indebtedness at the most intimate level of the self did not sit well, nor did the idea that emotional problems could be located and solved through better local

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

39

socialization and widespread political change rather than universal, scientific, and above all marketable interventions. As Sullivan became more vocal in his calls for political activism rather than individual therapy, his ideas got pushed to the periphery of acceptable ideology and practice by his peers. This is not to say that the idea of the interpersonal self disappeared altogether, of course, or that it did not continue to find expression and promotion in children’s texts. Similar characters who find validation of the self only through communal life can be found throughout the twentieth century, for instance in the work of William Steig, Leo Lionni, Arnold Lobel, Cynthia Rylant, and Kate DiCamillo.3 We might even read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) as a cautionary tale since Harriet suffers rejection and retaliation when she asserts her individualism. However, alongside these stories grew others, especially stories about white boys, that promoted the notion of the individual self, depicting society as a hindrance and vaulting autonomy and risk over the pleasures of community. Huck Finn (1884) rejects integration into polite society and “light[s] out for the Territory” (Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884, 295); Twain’s Tom Sawyer (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876) exploits and endangers his friends in the service of avarice and risk; E. B. White’s Stuart Little (Stuart Little, 1945) abandons his human family to set off on the open road. The boot-strapping individual was rising to prominence in both psychological theory and children’s literature.

The Triumph of the Isolated Self In contrast to a fully dynamic, interpersonal self at the constant mercy of environmental forces, a more palatable version of the self for the American context took hold—that of an autonomous ego that could successfully negotiate with social demands and master its own drives and desires. If things went wrong, therapies aimed at adaptation to social rules and self-­ mastery could be effectively monetized. And if legitimate psychologists and opportunistic con artists could convince consumers that their problems were internal and personal, solvable through the treatments, remedies, and products they offered, or by more effective methods of child rearing, no broader social change (such as Sullivan called for) was necessary. As a result, psychological practices based on the primacy of an autonomous ego, largely impervious to the sociopolitical world in which it developed, came into vogue in America during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

40 

K. COATS

Despite these hopeful claims, however, the symptoms and disorders that presented in the early to mid-twentieth century, such as a loss of reality and debilitating anxiety, malaise, and paranoia, necessitated a more complex understanding of the self. It became clear that the self was not completely autonomous, and that its problems couldn’t be solved by asserting its social and emotional independence from others. A model was needed that did in fact attend to social relations, which were perceived as imperiled due to an overemphasis on economic competition, upward mobility, and the loss of binding traditions. While the sociopolitical changes Sullivan called for were rejected by the American psychological establishment, the pioneering work of Melanie Klein offered a new understanding of the self that aligned more closely with the values of individualism. Although they had major philosophical disagreements, Klein and Freud’s daughter Anna Freud are considered the founders of child psychoanalysis. Their ideas inspired changes in psychoanalytic theory and practice in the United States, though Klein considered herself to be the true inheritor of Freud’s legacy, as she developed with greater specificity his ideas about introjection, projection, and object relations. For our purposes here, the most important aspect of Kleinian theory is the way she conceived of early social interactions in the development of the self. Specifically, she offered a view of psychological conflict as primarily intrapsychic rather than interpersonal. Like Sullivan, Klein emphasized the importance of social dynamics, but she located these dynamics as fantasized interactions within the psyche rather than encounters and relations with real others. In this way, she was able to ignore the sociohistorical and situational aspects that prevented Sullivan’s work from having uptake, and instead satisfy the demands for an apolitical psychology that was nevertheless complex enough to address new maladies. In Klein’s theory of object relations, children are born with a set of moral and perceptual psychic structures, which she refers to as “inborn elements determining the strength of the ego and of instinctual drives” (230). From birth, the child introjects, or imaginatively takes in, objects and part-objects that fill in these psychic structures with meaningful content. The analysis of very young children has taught me that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences are also operative from the beginning. (53, emphasis added)

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

41

In other words, unlike Sullivan, Klein believed that the self’s negotiation of desires and fears is largely determined by inborn temperamental traits, rather than by responding to externally derived interpersonal contexts and relationships. In the process, real external objects such as the mother’s breast take on an imaginary significance that trumps their actual function, and real external dynamics, such as the emotional distance of a depressed mother, might transform into fantasies of unmet needs even if the child is well cared for physically. Through a process of projecting or spitting out negative instincts such as hostility and aggression onto others as bad objects, and introjecting or consuming ideal images as good objects, the child develops a full cast of fantasized part-objects that interact within the self-contained psyche. Of course, children also introject bad objects that cause internal conflict, but Klein posited that children will be predisposed to both love and hate any of their objects prior to and in excess of any actual experience of them. Klein’s model is obviously more complicated than this brief explanation indicates, but its instructive potential for understanding how the autonomous self of the twentieth century flourished in children’s literature is found in her ideas about the nature of social relations as intrapsychic rather than interpersonal. In fact, we might argue that, like Sullivan, Klein was unwittingly mapping territory already under investigation in children’s texts. For instance, Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929), and Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll (1957) offer more or less unfiltered responses to the anxiety engendered by a loss of emphasis on interpersonal relationships as the century progressed. Through their doll protagonists, writers could express the psychological distress of loneliness, alienation, and a loss of reality that Klein and others were seeing with greater frequency in their patients. But these “objects” also reinforced a solipsistic autonomy in their owners, becoming what play historian Howard Chudacoff called “psychological crutches” for some girls (139). As Lois Greene-Stone, a participant in the Doll Oral History Collection, puts it, “What a doll did for me is give me definition. Part of what I am is also because of my dolls which may have to do with the definition of a young girl … the doll becomes a companion and an extension of oneself” (qtd. in Chudacoff, 140). As companions and extensions of the self, however, these playthings can’t offer the external views on how that self is perceived that Sullivan felt were necessary for healthy development; they merely reinforce perspectives that, while they may be complex and conflictual, are nevertheless contained within the child’s imagination.

42 

K. COATS

In his study of how children’s play in America evolved from the 1600s to the twenty-first century, Chudacoff suggests that this mid-twentieth-­ century understanding of dolls may well have been fundamentally different from the way children related to their dolls in earlier times. It is clear, for instance, that the expressionless, sawdust-filled dolls of the late nineteenth century played a significant and sometimes unsavory role in establishing the individualistic, acquisitive self-schema. Robin Bernstein cites the memoirs of Frances Hodgson Burnett and other nineteenth-century white southern children who used dolls to enact racist fantasies of aggression against the unchanging, because inanimate, black “other.” What Bernstein doesn’t note, however, is the mortified tone with which Burnett relates and processes, through her account of her mother’s reaction, the incident wherein she is caught playacting the role of Simon Legree, viciously whipping her black doll. When her very real mother interrupts her fantasy play to ask her what she is doing, Burnett writes, “[t]he Small Person hung her head and answered, with downcast countenance, greatly abashed” (One 56). In Kleinian fashion, Burnett used her dolls as objects upon which to enact inner fantasies of aggression and sovereignty. However, because her mother acted as a Sullivanian participant-observer who offered a real, disapproving, external perspective on her fantasy play, Burnett related her pretense to the social realities of her day, and came away emotionally and morally chastised by those realities instead of enclosed in her fantasies. In other words, her mother’s active role in the incident indicates the importance of an actual interpersonal relationship that acts as a corrective to a solitary playscape. But as ideologies of autonomy in the twentieth century took hold, the child’s private imagination began to be valued over such interpersonal dynamics. As a result, in the early decades of the twentieth century, in addition to being props for ­fantasy play, dolls took on the more integral role of filling in the contours of an increasingly isolated, autonomously constructed self. As the century progressed then, actual social interaction in popular texts for young children4 seems to have been downplayed in favor of psychological interiority and the masterful ego engaged in private fantasies with its internal objects. For instance, two of the most iconic texts of the twentieth century feature protagonists engaged in what are obviously intrapsychic fantasies: Max, in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), and the children in Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957). By mid-century, the self in America was fully invested in notions of individuality, freedom, and personal autonomy, such that challenges to those val-

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

43

ues result in the types of Kleinian intrapsychic conflict we can clearly see in these well-known stories. Because of Max’s unacceptable social aggression, he is deprived of his physical freedom and forced into increasingly sequestered spaces—from the interior of his home to his room to the inner world of his own mind. There, he is free to imagine a more expansive world, but he is also left to resolve his intrapsychic conflict between himself and his “wild things”—in Kleinian terms, his internalized objects— without outside help. It is entirely within his own imagination that he first plays with but then asserts mastery over his wild things, negotiating the conflict between social acceptability, aggression, and love. The two children in The Cat in the Hat are likewise confined to an interior space, which is then invaded by a stranger bent on realizing anarchic desires. The outsized, unrealistic figure of the talking cat and the fact that no actual damage is done to the house alert readers to the fact that this is an intrapsychic fantasy even though it is shared by the brother and sister. The fish provides an ineffective oppositional voice who warns the children not to let the cat have his way, and the children’s shifting facial expressions show that they are in fact experiencing an inner, unvoiced conflict between delight and fear. If we take Thing 1 and Thing 2 to be the children’s inner wild things come out to play, we can posit that, as with Max, self-control and mastery ultimately win without the intervention of any other humans. In these stories, the problems the child characters experience, which include aggression, anger, and boredom, are represented as being confined to their own minds, and the healing solutions must be worked out there as well. To use Freudian terminology, we could say that these autonomous child selves experience conflict between id-based desires for exuberant, anarchic activity and an internalized superegoic mandate for self-control, representing for child readers that imaginary play, or ­reading about imaginary play, allows for the vicarious experience and exorcism of antisocial desires. Other protagonists of children’s literature of the twentieth century are similarly confined to fantasy spaces that metaphorize their isolation and autonomy. A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood is perhaps the prototypical example of an enclosed space wherein a young boy’s imaginary objects interact with each other, and occasionally with him, until he leaves them behind to enter the world of “Skool.” While Kenneth Kidd argues that this space was co-constructed by the adult narrator and Christopher Robin, for most child readers or viewers of the animated featurettes released by Disney in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the frame story falls

44 

K. COATS

away and the Hundred Acre Wood seems to have always already been there, in keeping with Klein’s aforementioned belief in the innate structures of a child’s mind. A similar interpretation could be given for the central portion of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952). When Fern, an eight-year-old white girl, is forced to sell her runt piglet Wilbur, the piglet enters a world where the animals talk to each other, but Fern is the only human who can hear their conversations in the barn, much as Christopher Robin is the only human who talks to the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood. As Charlotte the spider’s web-words are witnessed by other humans, we might posit that Charlotte is a part-object Fern has created to represent herself, since it was Fern’s words to her father that saved Wilbur in the first place. Such an interpretation renders Charlotte’s Web something of a rapprochement between Klein and Sullivan, in that both Fern’s interand intrapersonal relations have effects on Wilbur’s fate. However, it remains that conversations between the children, animals, and inanimate objects in these tales suggest that important social relations exist only within individual minds, unverified by anyone other than the child who experiences them. Each of these texts, and countless others, present their main characters in relationships with what could be seen as imaginary introjections of good and bad objects in spaces that allegorize the enclosed mind of a child. Children are invited to go along with Shirley on her imaginary adventures while her parents snooze on the beach (Burningham 1977), to walk home from school with Marco on Mulberry Street (Geisel 1937), to embark on a voyage created by a small boy with a purple crayon (Johnson 1955). With characters as real as those in the Hundred Acre Wood, as real as benevolent spiders and vulnerable pigs, as real as wild things with terrible eyes and terrible claws, as real as cats who wear hats and burst out of boxes, these interiors don’t afford or validate any perspectives or desires other than those that could credibly or consistently reside in the character’s own mind. Instead, they catalog anxieties and offer solutions to conflict from within their own frames, thus supporting the schema of an interiorized, autonomous self.

Conclusion: A Swinging Pendulum? Cushman argues that in the twentieth century, psychology, under the guise of scientific neutrality, slyly introduced a secular moral vision as a replacement for a religious one, arguing that “[t]o justify the professional

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

45

practice of psychotherapy as a science, enculturation (previously a social, religious and moral activity) became reconceptualized as the psychological development of the child” (209). Such development happened in collusion with sociohistorical contexts that found support and reinforcement, and occasional challenge, in children’s texts. In a sense, we can say that children’s literature has never really completed the project of veering away from instruction to delight; no matter how delightful, all children’s texts contain implicit instruction about what a culture believes about the self. The texts of the twentieth century reflect a tension endemic to the era itself—a drawing away from Sullivan’s social, interpersonal, mutually responsive self in favor of an autonomous, essentialist, atomistic self for whom, as Klein notes, all relations are internal and thus ultimately informed by imaginary projections and introjections of good and bad objects. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, the notion of an interpersonal self reasserted itself, largely through the good offices of feminism, the civil rights movement, and greater inclusion of voices that espoused a communitarian, interpersonal ethic. Many of these books came from black authors, such as Mildred D. Taylor’s Logan Family Saga and Virginia Hamilton’s novels and folktales. In Christopher Paul Curtis’s 1995 The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963: A Novel, black teenager Byron begins the story isolated from his family, chafing under his parents’ rules, rebelliously craving independence, and enacting violent fantasies behind the closed door of the bathroom; in other words, he has adopted the neoliberal self-schema as his own. Rather than leaving him to his own devices as Max’s mother does, however, his parents act the way a Sullivanian therapist might, taking him to Birmingham, Alabama, to expand his view of the way his identity and behavior may be perceived by both his ­grandmother and an unjust social world. While there, Byron becomes a hero when he saves his younger brother Kenny from drowning in a whirlpool hidden beneath the placid surface of a lake. As he is drowning, Kenny personifies the whirlpool as a monster dragging him down; its hidden danger functions as a metaphor for the racial violence that Kenny had not yet experienced firsthand. This offers an especially apt example of Sullivan’s convictions, as one of the reasons Sullivan’s ideas were rejected by the mid-century psychological establishment was his insistence that the self was not indifferent to politics and social injustice. Instead, Sullivan believed that racial and economic injustice had psychological effects that required broader social and political change for

46 

K. COATS

healing to occur. When Kenny introjects the whirlpool into his fantasies as a monstrous bad object, he demonstrates the truth of Kleinian object relations as intrapsychic. But when the monster erupts into the real world through the bombing of the African American 16th Street Baptist Church by white supremacists, the text allegorizes Sullivan’s insight that social injustice inflicts psychological damage; that the self is profoundly, inescapably interpersonal; and that healing must come through interpersonal means as well. After the bombing, Kenny experiences symptoms of PTSD; he has a psychic break with reality, stops talking, and hides behind the couch when he and his family return home. No one suggests that his problem is all in his head or is his alone to solve, however. Instead, the entire family offers support for Kenny, and it is finally Byron who draws Kenny out of his paralyzing isolation and expresses the ultimately ambivalent insights our culture holds as to why the white men bombed the church: “I don’t know, Kenny. Momma and Dad say they can’t help themselves, they did it because they’re sick, but I don’t know. I ain’t never heard of no sickness that makes you kill little girls just because you don’t want them in your school. I don’t think they’re sick at all, I think they just let hate eat them up and turn them into monsters.” (Curtis 134)

Their parents’ perspective and Byron’s doubt sum up the tensions that persist between a Kleinian view of an autonomous self that operates out of internal fantasies and a Sullivanian one that suggests that a socially unjust world sickens the self. Whereas today Sullivan might be considered cannily prescient in his recognition that psychological and emotional difficulties have their source in social structures rather than individual minds, in mid-twentieth-century America his work was viewed as an unpleasant reminder of all the bubbling anxiety about race, gender, and social class that lay beneath the surface, threatening to drag us down like the whirlpool in Curtis’s novel. By contrast, well-regarded children’s texts such as those examined here under the Kleinian model promoted the idea of a self-contained, isolated ego that could and should ultimately gain control over its anarchic, aggressive tendencies. The legacy of that self-schema certainly persists and even dominates in American culture, but fortunately, children’s texts of the twentieth century have kept alive Sullivan’s interpersonal schema through books that highlight the reciprocal effects of social contexts on the self. From the white girl books of the early twentieth century to books like Watsons at its

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

47

close, challenges to the individualistic self-schema remind us that self-­ schemas are neither essential nor inevitable, but instead are made visible, reinforced, and may perhaps even be open to change through the models offered by children’s texts.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity; Anthony Gidden’s Modernity and Self-Identity; Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century; and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. 2. I am limiting my discussion to the models proposed by Klein and Sullivan for heuristic purposes. For a much more comprehensive treatment of the relationship between psychoanalytic models and children’s literature, see Kenneth Kidd’s Freud in Oz; for more on the representation of children’s minds in literature, see Holly Blackford’s From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel. 3. See, for instance, William Steig’s Amos and Boris (1971), Leo Lionni’s Swimmy (1963), Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970), Cynthia Rylant’s Missing May (1992), and Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie (2000). 4. This is not necessarily true in texts for older children and adolescents. As Kenneth Kidd notes, “[t]he American literature of adolescence that emerged in the early to middle twentieth century reflects the struggle between psychological and anthropological/sociological understanding of adolescence, and even seeks to reconcile them” (153).

Works Cited Bernstein, Robin. “Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race: or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 160–169. Blackford, Holly Virginia. From Alice to Algernon: The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel. U of Tennessee P, 2018. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child. Scribner’s, 1893. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. Frederick A. Stokes, 1911. Burningham, John. Come Away from the Water, Shirley. Cape, 1977. Chudacoff, Howard P. Children at Play: An American History. New York UP, 2008. Curtis, Christopher Paul. The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963: A Novel. Random House, 1995.

48 

K. COATS

Cushman, Philip. Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. Da Capo Press, 1995. DiCamillo, Kate. Because of Winn Dixie. Candlewick, 2000. Field, Rachel. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years. Macmillan, 1929. Fitzhugh, Lois. Harriet the Spy. Harper, 1964. Geisel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss). And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street. Random House, 1967. Geisel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss). The Cat in the Hat. Random House, 1957. Gidden, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford UP, 1991. Hamilton, Virginia. The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. Random House, 1985. Johnson, Crockett. Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harper and Row, 1955. Kidd, Kenneth. Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Words 1946–1963. Hogarth Press, 1975. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton, 1979. Lionni, Leo. Swimmy. Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Lobel, Arnold. Frog and Toad Are Friends. Harper and Row, 1970. Milne, A. A. Winnie-the-Pooh. Methuen & Co., 1926. Mintz, Steven. “The Changing Face of Children’s Culture.” Reinventing Childhood After World War II, edited by Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, U of Pennsylvania P, 2012, pp. 38–50. Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. L. C. Page, 1908. Porter, Eleanor H. Pollyanna. L. C. Page, 1913. Rylant, Cynthia. Missing May. Orchard, 1992. Seigel, Jerrold. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge UP, 2005. Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. Harper and Row, 1963. Steig, William. Amos and Boris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. Sullivan, Harry Stack. “The Illusion of Personal Individuality.” Psychiatry, vol. 13, 1950, pp. 317–332. Sullivan, Harry Stack. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. W. W. Norton, 1953. Sullivan, Harry Stack. “Security of the American Commonwealth—An Editorial.” Psychiatry, vol. 1, 1938, p. 420. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Harvard UP, 1989. Taylor, Mildred D. Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. Dial, 1976. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Chatto and Windus, 1884. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. American Publishing Company, 1876.

3  THE SELF IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S… 

49

White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. Harper and Row, 1952. White, E. B. Stuart Little. Harper and Row, 1947. Wiggins, Kate Douglas. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Williams, Margery. The Velveteen Rabbit. George H. Doran Company, 1922. Wright, Dare. The Lonely Doll. Doubleday, 1957.

CHAPTER 4

A Subjunctive Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish

One could say that June Jordan’s writing is all ars poetica, an instruction in what writing should do—its function and purpose and utility, as seen in the exquisite example of “These Poems,” from her 1977 collection Things That I Do in the Dark: These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?

K. Quashie (*) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Fish Kilachand Honors College, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_4

51

52 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

These words they are stones in the water running away These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love. I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are whoever I may become. (ix)

Central to the poem’s ethos is an aesthetic of the subjunctive, the idea of the possible-impossible, that is, though the subjunctive grammatically is a conditional mood and tense, the term can also describe the power of imagination and futurity, an indication of what hasn’t occurred (yet). Jordan’s poem conceptualizes “whoever” as a dual subjectivity for the speaker and for the stranger, and sets up a consciousness of encounter that is both wondrous and cautious: “whoever you are / whoever I may become.” In this way, the poem ends in a register that resembles a child on the cusp of entering another level of knowing. Indeed the subjunctive, as a syntax of the not-yet-achieved capacity of being human, is an apt idiom for representing childhood. The evidence of Jordan’s literary interest in children is abundant: she wrote seven books in various genres for and about young people; worked on the 1963 film about Harlem boyhood, The Cool World; founded and directed Poetry for the People, an arts activism writing workshop; and authored an iconic 1977 manifesto about love titled “The Creative Spirit: Children’s Literature.” Though Jordan might be best known as a poet, essayist and black feminist activist, she could be remembered also as a chronicler of childhood; as scholar Richard Flynn argues, “From her first book … Jordan has insisted on a poetics that interrogates private notions of childhood through activist, public positions” (159).1 That first book is Who Look at Me (1969), a long poem in irregular and differentiated ­stanzas accompanied by 27 reproductions of paintings featuring black people by both black and white artists, though this description doesn’t quite capture what is a quintessential artist’s book. That is, the very shape and materiality of Who Look at Me celebrates the made-ness of the book, first in the way that the poem’s stanzas sit at the top or bottom of the page, aligned left or

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

53

right so as to leave much of the space open. Moreover, the book begins with a blank page and then three stanzas spread over successive pages with no image to break the white space. Later stanzas speak to the images, though the address is not quite descriptive but more an oblique engagement, as if image and verse are distant kin. Neither is the pattern of verse and image consistent, since there are pages that are bereft of image, verse or both. In this regard, Who Look at Me is a work built on an irregular pattern of absence, of open spaces where something else (an interpretation?) might go; it makes the book seem graphically spare even as its images and verse are full of density. What makes Who Look at Me striking, then, is the child—and the child reader—imagined by its complicated materiality. Early on, the book seems to establish—even license—a young black male subject, which would be in keeping with many Civil Rights-era photobooks2: The dust jacket features Symeon Shimin’s Boy, a torso-sketch of a young black male figure whose face is stoic and stares directly; and then, in the front matter, there is an unattributed portrait of a black gentleman and Jordan’s dedication, “FOR CHRISTOPHER MY SON.” These initial textual aspects singularize young black maleness in a way that matches the unpunctuated capitalization of the dedication (notice there is no comma between the two phrases); and in collusion with the book’s title, that vernacular interrogative, the book instantiates a subject full of voice and readiness. But this authorization is not a simplistic equivalence between speaker and subject. Indeed, to locate the subject invoked by Who Look at Me’s materiality, a reader has to figure through the dynamic praxis that is looking: through the speaker’s shifting voice of address, through the irregular coherence between verse and image, through the density of the poem’s syntax about visibility. The subject—the process of subjectification—here is not simple, and what crystallizes is an aesthetic of (im)possibility, a subjunctive where the idealized black child reader is called into relation by the complicated terrain of this unusual book. This unusual book projects (to) a young subject who is being authorized through the peril and power of looking as a racialized praxis of encounter. The invitation to look—and to interrogate (through) looking—becomes the ethos of agency and animates the young subject, the one for and to whom the book speaks. Consider how the poem begins: with two interrogative stanzas on separate and successive pages—recto then verso—neither one accompanied by an image:

54 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

Who would paint a people black or white? For my own I have held where nothing showed me how where finally I left alone to trace another destination (1–2)

These six lines offer a sophisticated meditation by the speaker, as the alliterative “paint a people” alludes to the book’s illustrations and also signifies a child’s imaginative conceptualization of racial representation. The spark of the question is carried forth by the quatrain’s odd and exceptionally philosophical syntax, such that “For my own I have held” inverts the idiomatic “I have held my own,” producing a kind of vulnerability. This opening, then, moves between determination and tenderness, especially in the third line where the word “left” seems to be in place of its sonic anagram, felt. And though the actual phrase is not “I felt alone,” the stanza’s lyricism and syntax swerve enough so that the speaker’s emotional subjectivity toggles between what is stated and what is echoed: “I left [felt] alone / to trace another destination.” This emotional magnitude quickens the speaker’s voice, cultivating a sense of intensity that is reinforced by the wide-open (as in unadorned) pages on which these lines appear. The poetic density builds on the next page: A white stare splits the air by blindness on the subway in department stores The Elevator         (that unswerving ride where man ignores the brother by his side) A white stare splits obliterates the nerve-wrung wrist from work the breaking ankle or the turning glory of a spine (3)

As before, this examination of blackness as spectacle unfolds without illustration and so one surrenders to the series of alliterative, consonant and assonant sounds: s’s and t’s and w’s and k’s and a’s and i’s. The sharp sonic

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

55

cascade here registers not as clear argument but as affect and impact, the sensory pings of racialization, and the echoes create a music that alights something terrible and harsh (especially the heavy stop of the many plosive t’s, b’s and k’s). Indeed, this assault of sounds and imagery illustrates the limits of racialized looking, a chastisement that becomes explicit with the next stanza: Is that how we look to you a partial nothing clearly real? (4)

The directness of the question resides in the second-person address, the first time that the poem declares an audience—a spectral white subject— and also the first moment where the verse is accompanied by an illustration, in this case, Charles Alston’s Manchild. This entire opening sequence establishes a vibrant perceiving speaker, an attentive and complex subject who is navigating the book’s complicated poetry but also the expanse of white space. The layout here is particularly compelling as the first six pages move from a blank page to a page with a cornered couplet, then two more pages each with a stanza, then a page with the above couplet followed by one with Alston’s geometric abstraction. In each pair of pages, text and image peel away from the spine of the book, as every textual thing is flushed to the outer margins (e.g. the blotchy block primitivism of Manchild is aligned right on recto page and opposes the interrogating couplet that is tucked in the upper left corner of the verso one). The flushing of text and image away from the book’s fold creates expansiveness but also a gap, a stretch of space that can be filled. In these opening pages, the book unfolds incrementally as in a classic picture book, though this pattern is not reliable throughout and, more importantly, the content surpasses what might ordinarily be found in a work for the very young. And though it is not clear whether the speaker is a black child—or instead narrates on behalf of one—the book’s unusual material aesthetics surely summons the child reader into dynamic being, as one who is capable of parsing through/within these wild logics. This assessment of the black child’s instantiation as a dynamic subject informs how we read the book’s politics. That is, even in moments of racial confrontation where the speaker uses second person, the book’s political work is not centrally in confronting whiteness but more in displaying black engagedness, in its showcasing a speaker who is alert and alive. In that way, Who Look at Me exhibits for the child an example of

56 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

black being for the sake of and on behalf of black being, of blackness as alert aliveness. One might even say that as the book displays this praxis of being, it also invokes its child reader into and as this luminous aliveness. Because Who Look at Me exploits the racial politics of looking, we might be inclined to read it through differentiation and antagonism. And yet the book’s textual and visual materiality invites us to focus on the speaker’s becoming through this wondrous wide-open book where the world imagined of and for a black child is one of unromantic possibility. We are arguing for a reorientation in how one reads the book’s antagonism and therefore how one beholds the black child who is constituted—imagined—in the book’s dynamism. Consider, for example, an early stanza where the book’s confrontational title is revised in a capitalized couplet: WHO LOOK AT ME WHO SEE (7)

These lines speak against the violence of racial misrecognition, especially in the way that the syntax of the second line does not include an object referent, as if to distinguish the superficiality of looking from the more penetrating practice of seeing. But beyond the confrontation of an inept watcher is the fact that the speaker is negotiating being and that this couplet is exemplary of black consciousness. In this regard, one appreciates the moment not only as an indictment of the racist world, but also as a reflection of the speaker’s becoming—the glide of discernment that happens as the voice falls from (the failure of) looking into (the openness of) seeing. Said another way, the couplet highlights that the politics of looking includes agency for the one who is being looked at, that looking is a site of encounter with (inter)subjectivity. One notices, again, this investment in becoming through the speaker’s assertive discerning, especially in one of the poem’s central declarations: I am impossible to explain remote from old and new interpretations and yet not exactly (17)

This is a statement of audaciousness and immanence, signaled by the subject and verb standing grand and alone as a full stanzaic thought: “I am.” What follows this excellence is the argument that no idea, no matter how

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

57

traditional or modern, can encompass being.3 The speaker’s declaration troubles the politics of looking, such that later, when the poem calls us to look at “black sailors on the light / green sea” (20) or “lines of men no work to do” (23), we are forced to remember that it is not possible, ever, to see blackness rightly. Blackness is “impossible to explain” and this conundrum itself is luminosity. The claim to a black sublime is advanced by another first-person declaration, this one centered as a single line on the right side of two otherwise blank pages: “I am black alive and looking back at you” (31). What might be read as threat here could also be an articulation of being where the idiom “looking back” is an acknowledgment of the aliveness of intersubjectivity. (In this way, it anticipates the end of Jordan’s “These Poems”— “whoever you are / whoever I may become.”) That is, Who Look at Me displays the wild beauty and terrible trembling of black being with all its questions and struggles and rages and delight and wonder—the broad vibration of the speaker’s voice. As Jordan would later put it, “Who really matter are these young people: these new lives: original, furious, gentle, broken, lyrical, strong, and summoning” (98).4 Jordan’s investment, then, is on the first-person potency of the child speaker. Even when the book closes with two directed questions, Who see the roof and corners of my pride to be (as you are) free? WHO LOOK AT ME? (91)

even in the face of the parenthetical address to a differentiated (white) audience, it is possible—essential, even—to notice the speaker’s experience of consciousness, the speaker as the one who feels pride and yearns to be (more) free, the one who launches the question and who is formed by its unanswered unfolding. Who Look at Me houses a staunch first-person speaker who is not marked explicitly as a child, and yet the speaker clearly speaks as a proxy for the black child reader. Of course what complicates this claim is the speaker’s direct address to a white audience in the book’s title and in moments throughout the poem. Flynn notes that Who Look at Me “uses multiple address (black and white children; black and white adults; north and south), so that there is no subject position from which one can evade the speaker’s command” (165).5 And yet there is a distinction to be made between the ideological audience named in the poem’s politics—the generalized white world—and the black child reader whom we believe to be

58 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

invoked through the book’s aesthetics. If the book is truly to be for Jordan’s son Christopher—and by extension, for any black child—then we have to read the speaker’s materiality as being of that child. In this regard, the dynamism of the speaker’s voice embraces and engages the black child reader much more than it registers an argument with the white audience. We make this distinction to focus our reading on the speaker’s inhabiting of being, a practice that becomes a model for the child reader. This inhabiting necessarily includes confrontations with racism but not to the exclusion of attention to the child’s process. Said another way, the speaker’s voice is evidence of being and becoming, of the speaker’s relationality, rather than the establishment of an argument intended to rehabilitate the white reader. Our argument is that the book imagines and instantiates an idealized reader—its black child—through its complicated logics, the way it unfolds and encases, the way it leaves spaces open for interpretation, the way it at once presents the harsh and also envelopes the young one in possibility. Moreover, Jordan creates a speaker whose voice is so ferocious and animated, that the speaker is singular, a specific non-homogeneous black child. This creation sidesteps the inclination to characterize black children via a collective and superficial idiom of vulnerability (or worst, pathology). In all of these ways, the book doesn’t infantilize the child and instead assumes that the young reader can navigate through this resonant verse speaker. The speaker’s vibrancy is of one with the black child, and Who Look at Me is a book of magic where the black child is called into being. It is this praxis that represents the book’s subjunctive act, the subjunctive being not only a literal tense but also the syntax of possibility. The terms of the subjunctive—if, could, would, if and when, what if—express yearning but also characterize language as that which enacts yearning. In these ways, the subjunctive has become important to thinking about the condition of black lives in an antiblack modernity. It is for this reason that Saidiya Hartman, in theorizing records of slavery, calls on the performative quality of the subjunctive: Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities) … I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of “what could have been” … (11)

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

59

“What could have been,” what was (not) and what might be—Hartman’s notice of black possibility in the ideological subjunctive resonates with Who Look at Me: Think of the book’s nonlinear and nonhistorical materiality, the way its open (blank) spaces and synaptic gaps between verse and image characterize a speculative aesthetic; think, again, of the statement of immanence from earlier I am impossible to explain remote from old and new interpretations and yet not exactly (17)

where the speaker cites being as impossibility, as an inhabitance too full of awe to behold. The speaker here figures self through abstraction, particularly the diction of negation and imprecision (“impossible,” “remote,” “yet,” “not exactly”), which is akin to the subjunctive acts Hartman notes above.6 All of this makes the book ripe for a child’s imaginative play and, as such, Who Look at Me manifests as an exceptional coloring book: one where a black child can navigate the agency of racial looking, where the child is conjured up—by the speaker—into the subjunctive work of self-­ imaging and of becoming.7 Jordan’s work is avant-garde in the way that Evie Shockley argues of the renegade poetics of the black arts movement; and its ethos dares to imagine that a black child might want a book, might be the subject in and of a book, might find meaning in interacting with a book. It also dares to extend the world of the black child beyond the limits of realism, representation and resistance. Like Amiri Baraka’s In Our Terribleness (1970), Who Look at Me bypasses the idiom of innocence that is impossible for black children, and instead exhibits faith that a young person can find meaning in something dense, incomplete, sublime—in the possibility of reaching into/across the void.8 We’ve focused so far on Who Look at Me’s subjunctive poetics, its syntax of possibility that resonates with the ethos of Jordan’s work. And yet, as Katharine Capshaw notes in Civil Rights Childhood, most illustrated works for children are collaborative projects, which is the case with this one. Indeed, the idiom of the subjunctive is relevant to the collaborative process of the book’s production, which raised the very issues of racialized looking that Jordan’s verse engages. Because Jordan wrote the poem and

60 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

assembled the paintings for Who Look at Me simultaneously, during the first half of 1968, the text and art took shape in response to each other as well as in response to Jordan’s often difficult conversations with her publisher. Her carefully preserved correspondence regarding the book documents the process of imagining young black selfhood within the dominant whiteness of the children’s literature industry. Resonating with the question of the title, Who Look at Me, Jordan’s letters reveal how the book comes to comment on its own making. The story of Jordan’s involvement with the book’s production is extensive. Who Look at Me began as a collaboration between Langston Hughes and the white historian and author Milton Meltzer, who had partnered with Hughes on previous illustrated books for adults.9 When Hughes died, in May 1967, before beginning work on the project, Meltzer asked Jordan, an up-and-coming poet in her early 30s, to take Hughes’s place. Meltzer first contacted Jordan in November of that year; by December, she had already met with Meltzer and begun to sift through his collection of hundreds of reproductions of paintings. Although Meltzer initially acted as a liaison with the publisher, Thomas Y. Crowell, Jordan quickly established her own communications with the company. She soon surpassed the role of contributing poet to take on both the textual and visual aspects of the book, a task in line with her studies of architecture and design. In January 1968, she sent Meltzer “A First Proposal” listing images in sequence for “Who Looks at Me: American Paintings of Afro-­ American Life.” She wrote to him that month, “I have ‘roughed’ the layout, and am quite excited. It seems to me that the book ought to be like powerful and printed jewelry.”10 Jordan’s “powerful and printed” work extended to her collaborations with young people. From 1967 to 1971, she founded and co-directed The Voice of the Children, a Brooklyn-based collective of black and Puerto Rican adolescent poets, who published a weekly newspaper as well as a 1970 self-titled anthology. Several members of The Voice of the Children were attending a poetry reading by Jordan on 4 April 1968, the evening of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and both young and adult writers responded to that moment in poetry. Jordan would later say that she wrote the poetic text of Who Look at Me while in Atlanta for King’s funeral (Greene and Brown 92–93), and one can imagine that the text likewise resonates with the voices of her young poetic collaborators.11 Jordan’s bookmaking, then, should be understood as in conversation with particular children, both Christopher and others, as well as with the cultural meanings of black childhood in the 1960s. Construed in white cul-

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

61

ture simultaneously as promising agents of change and as criminal threats, the children of color with whom Jordan was writing knew well the double-­ edged nature of American attention. In Who Look at Me, the voice of these children roots the late-60s moment in the foundational separations of the African diasporic past. Consider an example from the heart of Jordan’s text: we come from otherwhere victim to a rabid cruel cargo crime to separate and rip apart the trusting members of one heart my family I looked for you I looked for you (50)

The position of these short lines on a vacant ocean of unillustrated pages approximates the speaker’s enduring loss, yet also a space of possibility. Notably, the poetic speaker not only is looked at but also narrates a firstperson looking for, a phrase that implies both searching for you and looking on behalf of you, both trying to see you and seeing if you will see me. Looking for is the subjunctive act, ongoing and as yet incomplete, of healing separations and reconstituting relations in the wake of captivity, enslavement and descendant forms of racial oppression. Repetition and lack of punctuation extend the past tense into the present of the page, so that this searching, desiring gaze establishes the speaker’s transtemporal consciousness. The subjunctive, then, locates not only the quintessential newness of childhood but also its historical weight, the long tradition of the continual becoming of black aliveness. The multiply connotative work of looking for you shapes Who Look at Me as a visual and textual poetry of black childhood. This dynamic, risky process of interpersonal looking finds articulation in a letter from Jordan, written in September 1968 to Andrew Wyeth, a white artist best known for his 1948 work Christina’s World, and the contributor of two paintings to the final version of Jordan’s book. Requesting permission to reproduce his work in the book, she writes: One sadness I have learned, over the past year, is the appalling lack of beautiful art expressing black American life. This terrible scarcity of powerful, perfected work may bespeak the black and white American blindness all of us suffer, black or white. I have written a poem hoping to challenge that

62 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

­ lindness. In the development of this poem entitled “Who Look at Me,” the b extreme care and the deep wonder of your paintings literally delivered me from a sorrow near to bitterness.12

One can read this passage for its meaningfulness to Jordan’s own experience of subjunctive looking during the making of Who Look at Me. Jordan’s insistence on “deep wonder” and “extreme care” registers the unfathomability of human life and near-impossibility of its representation. Steeped in the language of Christian grace, Jordan’s letter suggests that Wyeth paints from an experience of “scarcity” and an awareness of his imperfect understanding of others. In line with this ethic, an interviewer recounts Jordan’s characterization of the image selection in Who Look at Me as “not entirely successful in achieving the vital recognition, but it ‘represents the possibility’ of person to person acknowledgment and commitment” (Bottstein 19). In the book, then, looking (for) remains a conditional and incomplete act, a representation of possibility. This sense of imperfect effect characterizes Jordan’s correspondence over the summer of 1968 with her editor at Crowell, Matilda Welter. Though their working relationship would become a strong one, continuing with His Own Where (1971)—a work partly stemming from Welter’s suggestion that Jordan write a young adult novel—their exchanges nevertheless included tensions and failures of understanding.13 Jordan and Welter’s disagreements over seemingly small details of the book point to an unsurfaced conflict over the nature of the project. This friction appears in Welter’s first extant letter to Jordan: One always hesitates to question a poet’s choice of words, but several of us have been bothered by the conjunction of obscene and obfuscating on page 125. Could you find another word for obfuscating? There seems to us a danger that it might sound comical to some readers as it stands, and it would be a pity to weaken the dignity of your text.14

Welter couches her objection in a compliment that hints at threat. Leveraging the collective “several of us,” she conjures a picture of readers laughing at Jordan’s “comical” work. The insinuation of poor reception may have been especially sharp given that Who Look at Me would be Jordan’s first book and that Meltzer, not Jordan, had secured the contract with Crowell. The word “danger” rightly evokes the pain expressed in the book—it is a dangerous book—but Welter’s appeal to “dignity,” repeated

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

63

through her letter, aligns the project with respectability politics. Perhaps following the publisher’s plans to market the book as a model of civil rights liberalism, Welter’s assessment seems to miss the radical possibility of the work. In her reply to Welter’s comment, Jordan agrees to an alteration—the words obscene and obfuscating disappear from the text—but maintains that “the original does not strike me as conceivably comical.”15 Refusing to ignore the gap in perception between her and Welter, Jordan marks their collaboration and the resulting book with the incompleteness of human-to-human understanding. The stakes of such disagreement become clear by attending to a painting that would not appear in Who Look at Me, Wyeth’s painting Grape Wine (1966). In her ultimately losing disagreement with Welter over the inclusion of the work, Jordan locates the centrality of failure and loss to the book and particularly to her conception of a child reader. In Wyeth’s portrait, a black man sits quietly in profile, his outline almost dissolving into the dim background, his shoulders slightly sagging under his sweater, his eyes lowered in thought or pain. One collarbone and the shell of an ear catch the light that lands more softly on the man’s inscrutable face. In a letter to Jordan objecting to the painting, Welter declares, “in view of the title of the picture some readers may be embarrassed and distressed that this particular unhappy man has been chosen.”16 The “particular” man to whom Welter refers derives from the title of the painting, rather than the more mysterious portrait itself, which shows no alcohol or obvious drunkenness. Her picture of “some readers … distressed” focuses emotional response to the book on concerns about propriety, a logic of looking at odds with Jordan’s approach to the child reader. Jordan’s reply replaces Welter’s appeal to respectability with a defense of unmitigated confrontation with “human life.” I feel very strongly about Wyeth’s Grape Wine …. As for its “depressing implications”: they were surely intended by Wyeth, and I, for one, do not find the painting anymore depressing than most superlative renderings of a single human life having matured through the diminution of hope and desire …. But what about depressing implications? Isn’t the very title of my poem depressing by implications?17

Pointedly ignoring Welter’s potentially superficial language of distress, Jordan instead insists upon the depressing. Her letter demonstrates a kind of looking through which the downward push of the depressing can be

64 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

paradoxically superlative, a term suggesting a capacious definition of uplift. Not only making a claim about the kind of affective content appropriate for a child reader, Jordan is implicitly arguing for children’s central role as practitioners of the kind of interpersonal ethic that Grape Wine requires. Yet the following letters establish only a rhetorical gridlock, with Welter continuing to cite the distressing while Jordan acknowledges only the depressing, so that each correspondent stubbornly rewrites her own position over the other’s words.18 This impasse calls up the grieving, yearning cries of the book’s poetic speaker: “Is that how we look to you / a partial nothing clearly real?” (4) Jordan eventually yielded to Welter on the omission of Grape Wine, leaving the bookmaking marked by this additional moment of racial confrontation. Whether or not she anticipated this failure, by continually recasting Welter’s language, Jordan turns the dispute into a poetic invocation of the “impossible to explain.” The limits and impasses of editorial negotiations resonate with the spaces of incompleteness and possibility in the book, the history of “looking for” into which the black child steps. The sometimes tense back-and-forth between Jordan and Welter, through which the book took shape, parallels the push-and-pull conversation between poetic text and images in Who Look At Me. Jordan’s use of text-image juxtaposition to develop the child’s capacity for subjunctive looking is particularly evident in the case of Anglo-American painter Colleen Browning’s Door Street (1953). In the 1950s, Browning moved from her native England to East Harlem, where “she began her studies of Negro life” (95).19 This doubly intimate and alien position as a white

Fig. 4.1  Colleen Browning (American, b. Ireland, 1925–2003), Door Street, ca. 1953. Oil on Masonite, 11 1/2 × 36 1/2 in. (29.21 × 92.71 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, M1966.150. (Photographer credit: P. Richard Eells)

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

65

observer of black life is the unseen point of reference in Door Street, a context mobilized by Jordan to exemplify the book’s ethos (Fig. 4.1). In Browning’s small-scale, originally candy-colored panorama, reproduced here in black and white, a collage-like line of overlapping doors, some crumbling or boarded up and all closed, both evokes and negates hope for entry. Against this background, to the left, a boy is frozen in the motion of chasing a hoop that is clearly beyond his reach. On the right, a second boy pauses his game of ball on the pavement to look back at the viewer. The central figure is a girl standing utterly still in the middle foreground, seeming less to be frozen in time than to stand outside it, as if to mark the action behind her as a perpetual state: the boy will always be dashing after the hoop, always performing the act of yearning across an irreducible distance. By pairing Browning’s work with her own poetry, Jordan shifts the subjectivity of the image, making room for the consciousness of a black child speaker and reader. Jordan unsettles the given gaze by creating dissonance between the image of Browning’s painting and the accompanying verse on the facing page. “WHO LOOK AT ME / WHO SEE,” the poet appeals on the bottom of previous page, before the turning hand reveals: the tempering sweetness of a little girl who wears her first pair of earrings and a red dress the grace of a boy removing a white mask he makes beautiful Iron grill across the glass and frames of motion closed or charred or closed (8)

While calling attention to the red dress of the girl, the central figure of the work, Jordan has reproduced the originally color painting in black and white. The poetry thus prompts the reader to imagine a red that the illustration itself does not provide. The red/gray dress opens a gap between the original and reproduced versions of the artwork, bringing the reader up against the limits of access, those doors into the selves of others that remain “closed or / charred or closed.” The withholding of color enacts an incompleteness resonant with the boy’s evasive hoop, leaving a negative

66 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

space of possibility for all that cannot be shown in the book, including Grape Wine.20 This curbing of vision carves out room for the imaginative work of the reader. Jordan’s poetic re-coloring of the girl’s dress models the creative work of seeing oneself and others beyond the images dictated by white supremacist culture—literally beyond black and white. Who Look at Me thus creates a dynamic resembling that identified by Capshaw in African American photobooks of the era, in which image-text juxtapositions prompt black child readers to exercise their own critical and imaginative capacities. These books, Capshaw argues, cultivate “the possibility of child political agency” (xi) by positioning young readers as “active interpreters of images and ideas” (xxiv). Similarly, Jordan’s poetic presentation of her text alongside a black-and-white Door Street recruits the child reader into the creative act of looking. For late-1960s children in particular, to replace the hegemonic white childhood imaginary of Dick-and-Jane readers, as well as the accompanying pathologizing and criminalizing iconography projected onto young people of color, with the look and looking of black aliveness demanded nothing less than art. The red/gray dress models the process by which black children must leap across the borders of the images given to them in order to shape their human selves. Within Jordan’s poetic presentation, then, the uncrossed distances and closed doors that are central to Door Street protect space for the irreducibility of young black subjectivity. In Jordan’s verse reading of Door Street, the three children themselves enact the space for their own self-making. At the center of this practice, the red-dress girl announces the limits of the very looking she invites. Radically foregrounded from the rest of the landscape, she captivates the scene, which seems to exist in relation to her. The nuanced play of light on the skin of her face, whose perfect symmetry emphasizes its precisely full­on angle to the viewer, embodies the luminosity of blackness “impossible to explain” (17). Her arms loosely wrap around her torso, which turns slightly away, in a gesture that is both fearless and protective. She seems simultaneously to invite others in and stand guard at the border of her world. She rewrites gendered and raced concepts of strength, as evoked by the boxing match poster pasted to the wall of doors behind her. The girl’s self-possession both draws the viewer’s gaze and holds it at bay, claiming the right, in later words of Jordan’s poem, to “say yes / AND NO” (84). Even as she gazes straight at the viewer, she seems to be focusing inward, fully absorbed in her own being. She captures the way in which that oft-­

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

67

quoted line of Jordan’s poem, “I am black alive and looking back at you” (31), also describes the act of looking back at oneself. The girl’s attitude echoes in the boy to the right. Shirtless and sprawled on the concrete, the boy twists his gaze toward the viewer, so that although his face is fully visible and the skin of his back is bared, his body points away. Like the girl with her folded arms, he hides the part of his chest where his heart would be. In an incongruous detail, the boy wears a white eye mask, the type used in costumes, pushed up on his forehead. Jordan’s choice to narrate the scene as “the grace of a boy removing / a white mask he makes beautiful,” even though Browning depicts it as already removed, imaginatively animates the image beyond its frozen temporal frame. The mask both evokes and misaligns with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1896 poem of disclosing and hiding, “We Wear the Mask.” Whereas Dunbar’s collective speakers “with torn and bleeding hearts … smile,” the children in Door Street choose not to grin at all. They need not smile to generate their “tempering sweetness,” the enchanting serenity of their gazes. To temper is not only to soften or moderate, but also to strengthen by mixing, as in alloying metal: the sweetness is in the mingling, in the imperfect, conditional human encounter. The red-dress girl and the white-mask boy embody “black quiet”: “a black expressiveness without publicness as its forbearer, a black subject in the undisputed dignity of its humanity” (Quashie 26). With an interior expressiveness that is “not essentially resistant … not consumed with intentionality” (Quashie 22), the girl neither welcomes nor refuses the viewer’s gaze. The unforced wrap of her arms suggests the effortlessness of her privacy, unthreatened by those looking. Utterly still, she could be listening to something deep within herself. By attending within, she gestures outside of the limited frames of American vision. Thus, to glimpse the borders of another person’s private self is to witness “grace”—a holy thing that evades explanation and is paradoxically “watcherless” even in its witness (Quashie 22). Jordan’s verse cultivates a way of looking at and for the children of Door Street as practitioners of black quiet. The book models a reimagining of the interpersonal as a practice of the deepest interior, a practice of cultivating grace. Who Look at Me invites the reader to shape a subjunctive ethic of human connectedness based in the very incompleteness of self-making. Jordan positions the black child as the teacher and guardian of the possible-­ impossible, the space of “whoever you are / whoever I may become.” The young poetic voice, moving in and out of alignment with the images as

68 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

humans do with each other, urges the reader to gain by letting go: “To begin is no more agony / than opening your hand” (37). Who Look at Me, then, is a meta-text, a book about black looking and making—and being: a book that manifests June Jordan’s subjunctive everywhere, her big-­ hearted gift to the (black child) reader.

Notes 1. Beyond Who Look at Me, Jordan’s works that focus on childhood include The Voice of the Children (1970), His Own Where (1971), Dry Victories (1972), Fannie Lou Hamer (1972), New Life: New Room (1975), Kimako’s Story (1981) and her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2001), the latter of which Flynn’s essay studies beautifully. Flynn also counts Jordan’s poetry anthology Soulscript (1970) as another work in the catalog. Also see Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s argument about Jordan, children and mothering. 2. See Katharine Capshaw, Civil Rights Childhood (55). 3. These five lines follow a black-and-white reprint of an unattributed nineteenth-­century painting that was later named “Enigmatic Foursome” because it represents four figures—one black and three white—in a classic family portrait stance. 4. From her afterword to The Voice of the Children, a work discussed later in the essay. 5. Flynn’s comment is part of his argument about cross-writing, how “Jordan’s writing, for children, for adults, and across what are ultimately artificial adult-child boundaries…delineates a poetics that combats the regressive tropes of childhood embedded deep within our culture and proposes new tropes that may well be revolutionary” (181). For more on point-of-view in children’s literature, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott’s How Picture Books Work (especially the chapter “Narrative Perspective”) and various essays in Charlotte F.  Otten and Gary D.  Schmidt’s (eds.) The Voice of the Narrator in Children’s Literature, including Milton Meltzer’s “The Designing Narrator.” 6. This thinking about abstraction is inspired, in part, by Robin Bernstein’s enduring arguments in Racial Innocence about abstraction as a feature of the ideology of childhood. 7. For other considerations of the black dreaming that align with our use of subjunctivity, see Ashon Crawley’s “I Dream Feeling, Otherwise” and Blackpentecostal Breath. Also see Kimberley Reynolds’s discussion of dreams and future orientation in Radical Children’s Literature and Dianne Johnson’s exploration of the tension between realism, representation and dreaming in Telling Tales.

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

69

8. In addition to Shockley’s Renegade Poetics also see Nathalie op de Beeck’s Suspended Animation which connects the avant-garde to picture books; Lawrence R. Sipe and Sylvia Pantaleo’s exploration of textual dynamism in Postmodern Picturebooks; and the consideration of textual complexity via audience in various essays in Peter Hunt’s Understanding Children’s Literature. 9. Hughes’s correspondence with Meltzer documents their collaborations on A Pictorial History of the Negro in America (1966) and Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the African-American in the Performing Arts (1967) but only briefly refers to the project that would become Who Look at Me. At the time of Hughes’s death, Meltzer seems to have been waiting for Hughes to provide poetry for the project. Langston Hughes Papers, Box 111a. 10. Meltzer, Letter to June Meyer [Jordan], 14 November 1967; Meyer, “A First Proposal: Who Looks at Me: American Paintings of African American Life,” January 1968; Meyer, letter to Meltzer, 30 January 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. Jordan, who divorced Michael Meyer in 1965, was at this point still working under the name June Meyer. She would return to her birth name midway through 1969, before the publication of Who Look at Me. 11. Jordan also attended Hughes’s funeral and was reported to have said at the funeral that “she considered herself a ‘daughter’ of Mr. Hughes because she had drawn a book from work he was doing when he died” (Vidal, quoted in Kinloch 38). 12. Meyer, letter to Wyeth, 7 September 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. 13. For Welter’s later suggestion of the book that would become His Own Where upon completing Who Look at Me, see Welter, letter to Meyer, 27 February 1969. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. Jordan’s papers include affectionate notes from Welter as well as a letter of recommendation that Welter wrote praising Jordan’s design skills. 14. Welter, letter to Meyer, 18 June 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. At the time of this letter, Welter and Meyer had not yet met and it seems that Meltzer had only recently withdrawn as the mediator between Jordan and Crowell. 15. Although Jordan does not specify exactly where in the text and how she altered the disputed language of obscene/obfuscating, we speculate that the piece may have been replaced by the section of the completed poem that centers around the word obliterates: “A white stare splits obliterates / the nerve-wrung wrist from work / the breaking ankle or / the turning glory / of a spine” (3). 16. Welter, letter to Meyer, 18 June 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. 17. Meyer, letter to Welter, 27 June 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54.

70 

K. QUASHIE AND A. FISH

18. Welter, letter to Meyer, 14 July 1968; Meyer, letter to Welter, 31 July 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. 19. Although Browning, like Jordan, taught at City College, the two professors seem not to have known each other. Meltzer, letter to Meyer, 12 September 1968. June Jordan Papers, Box 54. 20. Although several images in Who Look at Me do appear in color, the choices of where color images would appear were limited by the mechanics of the printing layout. The doubling of red and gray thus calls attention to the pattern of color versus black-and-white throughout the pages of the book, as a mark of the negotiation with the constraints of the publishing process.

Works Cited Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York UP, 2011. Bottstein, Andrea Balchan. “Profile: June Jordan ‘58.” Barnard Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1970, p. 19. Capshaw, Katharine. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. U of Minnesota P, 2014. Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. Fordham UP, 2016a. Crawley, Ashon T. “I Dream Feeling, Otherwise.” Arts Everywhere. Nov. 18, 2016b. artseverywhere.ca/2016/11/18/i-dream-feeling-otherwise/ Accessed 19 Aug. 2017. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “We Wear the Mask.” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dodd, Mead and Co., 1922, p. 71. Flynn, Richard. “‘Affirmative Acts”: Language, Childhood, and Power in June Jordan’s Cross-Writing.” Children’s Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 159–185. Greene, Cheryll Y., and Marie D.  Brown. “Woman Talk: Interview with June Jordan and Angela Davis.” Essence, May 1990, pp. 92–94+. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering.” Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, edited by Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. PM Press, 2016, pp. 19–31. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14. Hunt, Peter, editor. Understanding Children’s Literature. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005. Johnson, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth. Greenwood, 1990. Jordan, June. “The Creative Spirit: Children’s Literature.” Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, et al., PM Press, 2016, pp. 11–18.

4  A SUBJUNCTIVE IMAGINING: JUNE JORDAN’S WHO LOOK AT ME… 

71

Jordan, June. “These Poems.” Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. Random House, 1977, p. ix. Jordan, June. Who Look at Me. Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1969. Jordan, June and Terri Bush, editors. The Voice of the Children. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. June Jordan Papers, MC 513, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Kinloch, Valerie. June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. Praeger, 2006. Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ MSS 26, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott, editors. How Picture Books Work. Routledge, 2006. Op de Beeck, Natalie. Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity. U of Minnesota P, 2010. Otten, Charlotte F., and Gary D. Schmidt, editors. The Voice of the Narrator in Children’s Literature: Insights from Writers and Critics. Praeger, 1989. Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. Rutgers UP, 2012. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Shockley, Evie. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. U of Iowa P, 2011. Sipe, Lawrence R., and Sylvia Pantaleo, editors. Postmodern Picturebooks: Play, Parody, and Self-Referentiality. Routledge, 2008. Vidal, David. “What Happens to a Dream? This One Lives.” New York Times, 24 Mar. 1977, p. B1.

PART II

Representations of Childhoods: Questioning or Re-Imposing Received Tropes

CHAPTER 5

Seeing Red: The Inside Nature of the Queer Outsider in Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness Holly Blackford

From her hair and temperament to her consciousness of being queer, sensitive in nature and easily unnerved, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables affords a precedent for identifying the eccentricities of a later red-­ head: Stephen Gordon of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Not only does the intellectually gifted and imaginative Anne present an odd consciousness and consciousness of oddity, but as Marah Gubar argues, Montgomery’s novel defers socialization and heterosexual romance to give primary intimacy to passionate attachments between female characters. Laura Robinson discusses the complex erotic structure throughout the Anne series, concluding that critics’ growing interest in Anne’s unconscious display of lesbian desire is not unwarranted. The 20 years between the publication dates of these red-headed characters, 1908 for Anne of Green Gables and 1928 for The Well of Loneliness, were marked not only by increasing awareness of romantic friendship and schoolgirl crushes as both natural and potentially a problem if left unchecked, but also by concerns

H. Blackford (*) Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_5

75

76 

H. BLACKFORD

about female independence and higher education, as growing numbers of unmarried women entered colleges and professions. Anne and Well provide bookends to a period shifting from embrace of female romantic friendship to heightened awareness of lesbianism.1 Anxieties about lesbianism and female independence from reproductive patriarchy align in this period, after sexologists proffered science-based arguments that female “friendships” were alarmingly driven by innate “depravity.” However, the shift of sexology discourse to investigating the bisexual or “inverted” child as a naturally occurring phenomenon enabled Well to rewrite Anne’s story rather than succumb to compulsory heterosexuality: both Montgomery and Hall use the story of queer girls who come of age to suggest that such girls bring intellectual, literary gifts which define their communal value outside traditional reproductive lines. In her 1908 debut, Anne’s passion for female friends is presented as an appropriate part of her overflowing nature. Yet Anne is generally marked as an odd girl who unsettles others because her unfolding nature comes into conflict with a narrow civilization that has lost touch with anything natural and unrepressed. She is paradoxically both an outsider and a deeply configured insider to the community, equated with the color of its soil, its lost fertility, and its intellectual potential. Published 20  years later, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness recasts its red-haired odd girl as a retrospective foundation for the argument that academic ambition and desire for women are inevitable outgrowths of a girl’s inborn oddities and sensitivity to the natural world. A third of Well is devoted to the burgeoning consciousness of Stephen Gordon as a child and adolescent, an emphasis which in many ways offsets the reasons the novel “makes us cringe” (Doan and Prosser 25). Contemporary critics object to the novel’s dependence on sexology (Doan), the myth of the “mannish lesbian” (Newton, De Lauretis), the invariable tragedy of lesbian isolation and shame (Munt), and what many see as clunky, didactic prose. However, when viewed from the perspective of childhood studies and development, which puts the child at the center of inquiry, more empowering readings come to the forefront; for example, Jay Prosser situates Stephen Gordon as a sketch of a transsexual, using child development to underscore his reading. Stephen’s high-strung, keenly self-conscious temperament; relation to her body and hair; acute nerves and heightened passions; status as a social outcast; love of heroic and tragic fiction; and scholarly brilliance: all are qualities of Anne Shirley as well.

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

77

Anne and Stephen are studies of early emotional deprivation and loneliness, and both characters passionately identify with places and even trees, strong symbols of primitive natures rooted in a primordial past. Although they are hardly the same social class and solve their problems in radically different ways, both conflict with civilization because of their essential natures. Most importantly, their exceptional intellectual abilities, their heightened emotional sensitivity, and their distaste for narrow convention come to define something that is interior to other women as well. Anne’s guardian Marilla Cuthbert finds her own repressed memories and feelings expressed in Anne, and expression of the inverted community becomes Stephen’s very purpose, her fecundity in the final pages of the novel. As odd girls ready for serious educational training, they deconstruct unnaturalness in girls and women who bring to the community nontraditional gifts. Reading Anne through the lens of Stephen captures the queer profile Anne presents and what it might have meant for other women, in the novel and beyond it, to see this profile naturalized. Hall did not keep journals and she wrote few letters (Cline 4), so while we have a record of books Una Troubridge read aloud to her, we cannot determine when, if ever, she sat down and read Anne of Green Gables. Anne was an immediate sensation upon publication, in England as elsewhere. Early book covers, including that of the 1925 Harrap edition published in England, demonstrate that the book was marketed not only as children’s literature but to a wide, general audience; many show a woman with turned-up hair on the cover (“Picturing”). The well of loneliness in Anne’s early life would certainly have resonated with Hall’s real experience of an emotionally if not economically deprived childhood (Cline 34), but Stephen was more a child of research than reality (Cline 227). Stephen was based on a hermaphrodite case in Krafft-Ebing (Armstrong 47–48) and in the novel she and her father read various sexologists; but her rich interior childhood bears more resemblance to the queer consciousness that was defined by Havelock Ellis in his 1897 Sexual Inversion, in which he explored the childhood temperament and early consciousness of congenitally predisposed “inverts” (his term for persons of homosexual identity). This developmental character, he noted, was often related to a nervous and artistic temperament, distaste for conventional gender roles, feelings of difference and social ostracism, sensitivity to beauty and precocious passions that symbolize sexual excitements regardless of intent. In women, he added, homosexuality is more commonly associated with high intelligence (Ellis

78 

H. BLACKFORD

178). Resonant details overlapping in the characters’ childhoods suggest that Hall might have read Anne as a queer nature deeply reminiscent of her own, explicating through the character of Stephen the full childhood (birth to age 18) missing in Anne, who is adopted as a teen, and evoking for an audience who grew up with Anne a queer “condition” newly defined as inversion and equated with exceptional intellect.

Inside Out: Nature and Nerve Both Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness set the stage for their child characters by dwelling on the fact that their parent figures are anticipating boys. The girls are therefore mismatched with their environments, deficient from the beginning. They are a “queer mistake,” as Marilla says of Anne’s arrival (94), the wrong nature entirely. Just as Marilla and her brother Matthew await the orphan boy for whom they have applied, Stephen’s parents, Anna and Philip, await the birth of their son, Anna seeing in the Malvern Hills “pregnant women, full-bosomed, courageous, great green-girdled mothers of splendid sons!” (13). These expectations for sons set the stage for the debuts of new women as taking the place of sons, of course, but it also establishes the girls’ later intellectual value as compensation for being odd and unwanted—freaks of nature, if you will. Both girls feel guilt for not fulfilling expectations, a guilt never assuaged. Anne’s early exclamation, “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy!” (74), echoed by Marilla’s question to Matthew, “What good would she be to us?” (80), resurfaces in Well with Anna’s response to Stephen. While Philip and Matthew immediately adjust to these “queer mistakes,” Anna feels a “great sadness” that Stephen is not her boy (32), and “grieved” (13) at the birth of an unexpected daughter. Anne always feels a debt to Marilla for keeping her, and her feelings of guilt upon Matthew’s death reveal unresolved questions about her value. Guilt is lifelong because it is the girls’ very nature, in conflict with familial expectations, that is all wrong. Both novels begin similarly, introducing their properties (Green Gables, Morton) with the idea that these “aloof” or “retreated” homes are well ordered but embed thin bodies of water (a brook in Anne, a stream in Well) that divide and connect boundaries between nature and culture. These bodies of water are, in both cases, symbols for the odd girls arriving on the scene. Though they are innately nontraditional, both girls find in their retreated estates a modest level of support for their queerness, especially from father figures. Both novels are romantic studies of nerves that

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

79

keenly respond to physical nature and that are too sensitive and emotional for smooth functioning in the social world. Anne cries and laughs too easily (103), her sensitivity makes Marilla nervous, and she cannot bear criticism or the scorn of neighbors, something true also of Stephen. This sketch of Anne’s temperament becomes in Well the “nerves of the invert,” a phrase often used to describe (155, 184) the hyper-sensitive Stephen. Anne’s capacity for a broad range of emotions and bipolar relationship with her environment creates conflict with the calm, logical, matter-of-­ fact Marilla: For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature… the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity… [A] tranquil uniformity of disposition [would be] as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows… The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into “deeps of affliction.” The fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. (216)

Stephen is equally tempestuous, catching breath at something particularly beautiful and experiencing an “orgy of grief” (53) when something goes wrong. Both experience streams of imaginative consciousness, and both unsettle others because their spirits and minds do not stay grounded in their bodies. Marilla ponders of Anne, “There’s something I don’t understand about her” (81). Anne makes Marilla “nervous, as if in the presence of something not exactly natural” (84). From Anne, Marilla gets the “uncomfortable feeling that while this odd child’s body might be there at the table her spirit was far away in some remote airy cloudland … Who would want such a child about the place?” (84). Both novels depict a child who is physically present but mentally reveling in nature, enacting romantic literature, or fantasizing about female friends. Both Anne and Stephen have major instances of rage because they are self-conscious and easily insulted; both love and hate deeply and with sustained emotion and a distinct wildness. Tellingly, their major instances of violent rage occur in response to heterosexual pressure; Anne strikes out at her schoolmate (and future suitor) Gilbert’s teasing, and Stephen strikes out at the man she finds kissing her maid, Collins, her first crush at age seven. If Anne is as alien to Marilla as a “dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows,” this is because the novel encourages us to view Anne as something primitive. In her break at school, Anne “was wandering happily in the far end of the grove, waist deep among the bracken, singing softly to

80 

H. BLACKFORD

herself, with a wreath of rice lilies on her hair as if she were some wild divinity of the shadowy places” (158). The passions and rages of Anne seem connected to her primitivity, native-born and red “as carrots,” rawness and emotional instability linked to the natural cycles of seasons and trees that fall and blossom in rhythm. As the critic Mary Armstrong argues, Stephen’s emotive nature is similarly theorized as primitivity (47–48). As Stephen experiences rage at an insult to her mother, for example, she becomes disheveled and “heavy,” lacking beauty, but simultaneously “grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition” (52). Likewise the trope of primitivity underscores Stephen’s connection to the forests, to her horse Raftery, to “Negro spirituals,” and to Orotava, where she and her first lover Mary Llewellyn finally consummate their love in the context of rich vegetative and procreative forces. Stephen’s appreciation for her mother’s Celtic beauty and the Welsh Mary are related, Armstrong demonstrates. The red hair of both girls is a sign of raw “Celtic” primitivity, unsettling to others because it signifies a range of emotion and “unevolved” warlike anger. Anne’s and Stephen’s physicality receives an inordinate amount of focus because their odd, thin, homely bodies bear their unfeminine natures and sense of deprivation. Both are acutely aware of beauty and feel a lack of beauty in themselves. Both girls obsess over their bodies as oddities and burdens of nature—natures all wrong. In an initial description, the narrator emphasizes Anne’s gangly figure when she describes her ugly, outgrown dress, “decidedly red hair,” “small, white, and thin, also much freckled” face, large mouth and eyes, and pointed, pronounced chin (also pronounced for Stephen, who repeatedly rubs hers). Extraordinary observers might see features that reveal “no commonplace soul” (64), but Anne herself matter-of-factly expresses disgust for her thinness, red hair, and lanky appearance. Anne explains what an ugly baby she was, and we see how being ugly and unloved become interdependent. Anne creates fantasies of beautiful friends and looks forward to meeting the pretty Diana Barry because “[n]ext to being beautiful myself—and that’s impossible in my case—it would be best to have a beautiful bosom friend” (107). The comment of her neighbor, Mrs. Rachel Lynde, that Anne is “terrible skinny and homely … did you ever see such freckles? And hair as red as carrots!” (112) are par for the course for Stephen as well. Stephen feels her long, wavy hair spoils her appearance, and she spends a lot of her childhood fighting to contain it, finally cutting it upon adulthood into a short style, which suits her masculine figure. Anne’s hair is also cut after her

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

81

revulsion causes her to die it accidentally green; at school her friends actually like the new cut, suggesting that she has, like Stephen, a figure more suited to a modern cut. From their innate deficiencies, Anne and Stephen develop different idealizations: Anne a taste for extreme, hyperbolized femininity and Stephen for extreme, artificial masculinity. Both seek excesses promoted by fashion, overdetermined drag performances that never quite match their lean, awkward bodies. Matthew’s recognition that Anne is different from the other girls, when he sees them together, is ambiguous about whether the difference might be Anne’s body or clothing: “Matthew suddenly became conscious that there was something about her different from her mates. And what worried Matthew was that the difference impressed him as being something that should not exist” (231). He rules out eyes, features, and animation, and after two hours of smoking decides the difference is her dress. Given the emphasis on Anne’s odd body throughout the novel, this might not be the only conclusion. Anne’s obsession with Diana’s more traditional beauty is similar to Stephen’s “worship” (15) of her mother’s beauty: “one of those queerly unbearable things, like the fragrance of meadowsweet under the hedges” (36). Sensitivity to nature and appreciation of female beauty become in these novels the same thing, sensitivities intertwined with “longing” in Stephen and in Anne “the ache” (a word repeated many times) for personal lack of these qualities. Stephen’s sensitivity to nature is embedded in the setting of Morton, her family’s estate, as strongly as Anne’s is to Green Gables. Her raptures over nature and Morton occupy numerous passages. Stephen’s projections of her deficiencies and loneliness onto nature are very similar to Anne’s. Anne’s identification with Green Gables and Stephen’s identification with Morton are compensation for feelings of not belonging. Addressing the birches and the cherry tree, her dear Snow Queen, Anne prays to them and thinks of herself as “Anne of Green Gables” and finds comfort in her placed identity. Deeply identified with Anne’s perspective, the narrator makes a point of commenting on the flora and fauna of every pathway and every seasonal change registered in nature’s beauty, to which Anne is tremendously sensitive. Likewise, Stephen’s early awareness “of spring,” of being “conscious of its fragrance” and longing “for the meadows” because “[h]er active body was forever on the fidget” (25), theorizes precocity in relation to nature, but it also advances the spiritual purpose of the novel: “the spirit of Morton would be part of her … would always remain somewhere deep down within her, aloof and untouched by the years that must

82 

H. BLACKFORD

follow…. In those after-years certain scents would evoke it” (35). Perceived as the inner core of Stephen, whose abrupt exile is basically then the annihilation of her soul, Morton is “her blood,” the soil to which she “belonged” (108): “Morton and I are one” (144), she tells Angela. Stephen’s identification with the blood of the estate is similar to Anne’s embodiment of the natural redness of the soil and Green Gables homestead. The authors carefully craft the properties to suggest that the homesteads await the mythic arrival of the girls and embody their isolated, anomalous nature. At the same time, passages linking the queer girls to estates insinuate the girls’ rights to property, space, and communion with others. When Anne and Diana set up housekeeping in their brook side playhouse Idlewild, and when Stephen establishes housekeeping with Mary, they are naturally coordinating new love relationships with their rooted identities in being “of” Green Gables or belonging to “the fruitfulness of Morton … Yes, she was of them [makers of Morton] … they might spurn her… But for all that they could not drain her of blood, and her blood was theirs also” (108). Children of the very soil of the properties, they are reproducing with women, as it were, the core meaning of the estates—the deeply rooted instinct of settlement. The most important symbols of rootedness and settlement in both novels are trees, which become metaphors for the girls. Whereas Marilla finds them simply messy, Maple branches give Anne a “thrill”; (163) and throughout the novel, the narrator affirms Anne’s thrills by introducing chapters with the beauty of nature, registered by changing trees. In October, for example, the “royal crimson” maples and wild cherry-trees “put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green” (163). But Anne’s anthropomorphism of trees goes much further. For her, maples are sociable trees because “they’re always rustling and whispering to you” (149), whereas the more conventional Rachel Lynde believes “‘[t]rees aren’t much company’” (55). In fact, they are Anne’s preferred company, explained by the critic Joy Alexander as entities with the rootedness in place that Anne lacks before she christens herself Anne of Green Gables. Even before seeing Green Gables, Anne idealizes the farm for the report that “‘there were trees all around it,’” and her discourse on orphan trees reveals the things she cannot say about herself: I was gladder than ever. I just love trees…. [Trees at the asylum] looked like orphans themselves, those trees did. It used to make me want to cry to look at them. I used to say to them, “Oh, you poor little things! If you were out

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

83

in the great big woods with other trees all around you and little mosses and Junebells growing over your roots and a brook not far away and birds singing in your branches, you could grow, couldn’t you? But you can’t where you are, I know just exactly how you feel, little trees.” (68)

The orphan trees, pale and cagey like her body, are unable to thrive without love and community. Isolated and desiring a place in nature with other creatures, they express Anne’s early trauma and abuse which, as Hilary Emmett has argued, is unspeakable in Anne but present in the silences of the text when Marilla asks about Anne’s early life. In both texts, trees stand for hardiness, valor, and courage; in spite of beatings of weather, isolation, and lack of power or choice, they withstand the elements and stand tall. After Marilla learns about Anne’s past and begins to think about keeping her, the narrator comments that one side of the road features “scrub firs, their spirits quite unbroken by long years of tussle with the gulf winds” (92). This resilience also preoccupies Well. Stephen’s friend Martin attracts her with descriptions of his Canadian trees; and Martin’s discourse on trees is strongly reminiscent of Anne’s discourse on orphan trees and Montgomery’s narrator’s sense of trees as naturally resilient. The Well of Loneliness dwells on how trees embody the courage to follow their nature: Martin would pause to examine the thorn trees, ancient thorns that had weathered many a hard winter. He would touch them with gentle, pitying fingers: Look, Stephen—the courage of these old fellows! They’re all twisted and crippled; it hurts me to see them, yet they go on patiently doing their bit— have you ever thought about the enormous courage of trees? I have, and it seems to me amazing. The Lord dumps them down and they’ve just got to stick it, no matter what happens—that must need some courage! (95)

The trees function here and later in the text as symbols of Stephen and all other “true” inverts whom God has created and should therefore stand with courage. Martin believes in God because of his trees; and over the course of the novel, Stephen learns to view an intimate connection between God and the creation of inverts. The sheer variety of trees that Martin describes as occupying his beloved forest (96) stands for the novel’s thesis: all God’s created varieties have similar access to heaven.

84 

H. BLACKFORD

In both novels, imagery and narrative patterns suggest that passionate desires for beautiful women are extensions of the girls’ appreciations for the bounty of nature. Rather than perverse unnaturalness, love for women is utterly natural and romantic. Anne loves Diana with fervor, she welcomes sympathetic adult women like the minister’s wife Mrs. Allen and the teacher Miss Stacy with open arms, and she relinquishes college to help Marilla keep Green Gables. The language used to describe her feelings for bosom friends and kindred spirits distinctly echoes her language of trees as sociable, whispering confidants. Participating in the cult of romantic friendship, Anne has “dreamed of meeting [an intimate female friend] all my life” (106). She makes Diana take an oath to be her bosom friend, even while Diana finds Anne a queer girl whose passion is a bit over the top (133–34); and Anne cries bitterly over the fact that “when we grow up Diana will get married and go away and leave … I hate her husband—I just hate him furiously” (162). Anne’s passion for Diana is linked to the intensity of her nature: “As much as she hated Gilbert however, did she love Diana, with all the love of her passionate little heart, equally intense in its likes and dislikes” (162). While in the popular mindset of the time intimacy between girls and women may not have been a problem, Anne’s passionate “intensity” is. The narrator gently mocks her insatiability; the only proper outlet for her inherent adolescent jouissance is to send her away to school at Queens College. Hall similarly situates shameless, natural female love as an inevitable outgrowth of a deeply passionate nature: “[Stephen] loved deeply, far more deeply than many a one who would fearlessly proclaim himself a lover…. those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends … are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also” (146). The love is richer because it stems from a deeper source— nature, trees, Morton, and primitive splendor are recapitulated in Stephen’s urge to love. This urge to love is equated with fertile imagery in physical nature even as it is separated from reproductive roles. Hall expressly equates Stephen’s fertile energies with God’s incomprehensible purpose in that she and Mary are in the grip of “Creation’s terrible urge to create; the urge that will sometimes sweep forward blindly alike into fruitful and sterile channels”: Something primitive and age-old as Nature herself, did their love appear to Mary and Stephen … they who might never create a new life, were yet one of such moments with the fountain of living…. Oh, great and incomprehensible unreason! (313)

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

85

In fact, both Stephen and Anne embody the energies of natural fertility without being “productive”; for example, the full thrust of spring in its “bridal flush” comes to life as young Anne first travels with Matthew to Avonlea through “The White Way of Delight,” the blossoming fruit trees. Yet this flushing is contingent upon Anne’s sense that she herself is too homely ever to be a bride, while Matthew, as Rachel Lynde observes, should be planting his spring seed on his farm but is not. Anne disrupts productivity and planting, but nevertheless stands for the fertile project of bringing nature’s energies to life. Not only does Stephen, like Anne, embody transcendentalist principles in her embodiment of and reaction to nature throughout the novel, but the sort of love she offers Mary transcends social roles: “Stephen, as she held the girl in her arms, would feel that indeed she was all things to Mary; father, mother, friend and lover, all things; and Mary all things to her—the child, the friend, the beloved, all things” (314). An Emersonian transcendentalism is consciously articulated in both texts; and Hall echoes Anne’s revaluation of nature as a thing of beauty to be valued in itself—not for what it produces—in order to transform the reader’s appreciation of congenital inversion as a value of nature in—and for—itself. Early on, Anne praises the Snow Queen while Marilla complains about its wormy fruit; the project of Anne is the transformation of appreciation for nature from the utilitarian view to the “priceless” view, much as it transforms appreciation for the child as laborer to the child as emotionally priceless (see Zelizer) and restorative to adults (see Steedman). Such a transformation paved the way for contemplating the unforeseen value of God’s anomalies in Hall’s novel as well.

Outside In: Representative Women Montgomery and Hall’s familiarity with Emersonian transcendentalism shines through their texts in many ways, not only through theories of “oneness” in nature (articulated directly in Well and indirectly in Anne when Anne says she would worship God outside), but also through theories of service to community. In his theory of “Representative Men” as well as in his essay “American Scholar,” Emerson stressed the idea that people are not unique individuals but embodiments of “whole man” and natural history, and that scholars or poets are delegated intellects, or representatives of the communal whole. Both Anne and Stephen are presented as “Representative Women.” Just as Stephen, by writing, gives

86 

H. BLACKFORD

voice to the many inverts who need representation, Anne gives voice to the deepest repressed memories in Marilla, representing other women through her role as the female unconscious and representing the potential of Avonlea and “native” Canada through becoming its delegate intellect. Marilla’s increasing inner sense that Anne expresses her own buried thoughts, and our knowledge that Marilla is slowly lessening her habit of repressing affection, demonstrates that the wombs of these highly intelligent young characters, Anne and Stephen, are fruitful with the burden of releasing other repressed women, a service to society and to the advancement of women generally. Marilla initially seeks a Canadian-born orphan from a neighboring province because she imagines one cannot be “much different from ourselves” (60), but she is quickly unsettled by the child’s difference from her. Yet the experiences of Anne—her anger at being called ugly, her sentiments about the minister’s boring sermons, her feud with Gilbert—are all experiences Marilla has had but not dwelled upon, until Anne re-invokes them. Marilla’s increasing joy at Anne’s presence, not to mention her rebellion against other matrons of the community, suggests on a modest scale what Hall expands in Well—that the unconventional girl has a new purpose of embodying the communal voice of many women: “It had almost seemed to [Marilla] that [her own] secret, unuttered, critical thoughts had suddenly taken visible and accusing shape and form in the person of this outspoken morsel of neglected humanity” (130). Anne’s gift at recitation and her debut as “Anne of Avonlea” at a concert further the thesis that she represents a community, serving as delegated intellect. Anne’s embodiment of an inner, unfulfilled Marilla serves as training for her communal role. In a direct mirroring of the way Anne brings out painful memories in Marilla, Stephen rouses memories in Puddle, her tutor who is similarly inverted. Just as Anne brings out Marilla’s memory of being called ugly, Puddle “must be tormented by memories dug out of their graves by Stephen—Stephen, whose pain had called up a dead sorrow that for long had lain quietly and decently buried. Her youth would come back and stare into her eyes reproachfully … She would sigh, remembering the bitter sweetness, the valiant hopelessness of her youth” (156). Puddle provides a model of the suffering lesbian who encourages Stephen multiple times to put her energies into her work and prove to the world her genius. In many ways, Puddle is tantamount to the gentler Miss Stacy: highly educated, single women who enter the texts and rectify the neglect of the girls’ education prior to their arrival. Before the arrival of the two “true”

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

87

teachers, both Anne and Stephen have false teachers: Mr. Phillips and Mademoiselle Duphot, whose chaotic schoolrooms and ineffective pedagogies embody the mismatched educational aspirations and environments of these intelligent girls. The girls showcase a potential for the education of women in traditionally male subjects, such as the classics, that is immediately recognized by others. Matthew recognizes Anne’s brightness after their first carriage ride; and Philip intends an Oxford education for Stephen from her early childhood, especially after he reads sexology works. Therefore, although the girls embody the pain of women before them, they stand for a brighter future of “representative women” as higher education opens its doors to them and pioneering female teachers take charge of them, channeling their mentally rich landscapes in productive if relentless ways. This faith in serving community tempers, somewhat, our intolerance for the intense martyrdom governing both novels. What disturbs the modern reader is the sense that the girls’ intense studying is represented as compensation for flawed natures and incompetence elsewhere. Being homely, unwanted, sensitive, unusual, and unfeminine, these girls need education to prove themselves, the novels suggest. The blight of “not being boys” hangs over both texts; for if these protagonists were boys, education and scholastic achievement would not be compensatory but merely expected.2 Although she transforms her value fairly quickly, Anne has incredible guilt about being unhelpful on the farm; even at the end of the novel when she wins the Avery scholarship, she still apologizes to Matthew for not being a boy. Although Matthew answers with assurance that it was his girl and not a boy that won the scholarship, the feeling of the need to earn one’s place in the family is always vexed in Anne. Marilla withholds information and sentiment from Anne, ensuring that Anne never fully understands her contribution. She continually ruminates on what a trial she is for Marilla and on her wicked nature: “Some people are naturally good, you know, and others are not. I’m one of the others.” (218). Anne is particularly distressed at always involving those she loves in scrapes (195); and this, of course, is the major dilemma for Stephen. Her nature alone is acceptable, but involving women like Mary in her lifestyle has consequences that she ultimately cannot accept. Stephen’s obsession with feeling sinful even though her love is selfless and noble is reminiscent of Anne’s general feelings about herself as inherently sinful. This sense of sinfulness finds expression in imaginative lives centered on pain and martyrdom. The common love of tragic literature and fantasies

88 

H. BLACKFORD

of martyrdom are perhaps the strongest concurrences between Anne and Stephen. The sensitivities of Anne and Stephen make them prone to a love for the imaginative literature of chivalry, and such literature infiltrates their consciousness by defining nobility and grandeur. Both love to recite and play tragic characters from fiction. Their sense of sacrifice, heroism, and tragedy mirrors their reading in romantic history and poetry. Both have an autoerotic reaction to literature; Anne gets a “crinkly feeling up and down [her] back” (91) from poetry. Anne is so stimulated by sensational plots that Miss Stacy eventually has to guide her reading into more appropriate channels. Likewise, “such stories [about heroes] so stirred [Stephen’s] ambition, that she longed intensely to live them. She, Stephen, now longed to be William Tell, Nelson, or the whole Charge of Balaclava” (19); Stephen uses heroic play to express her feelings for Collins. Young Nelson from the Battle of Trafalgar influences both her sense of self and her relationship to the attractive maid. The literary imaginations of Stephen and Anne are represented as both chivalric and sacrificial, tied as they grow to their respective missions of service to others. Stephen’s young courtship of Collins could be defined as a theater of martyrdom. When Stephen discovers that Collins has water on her knee, which pains her, Stephen begins her relationship with Christ. This martyrdom defines her throughout the novel, as Valerie, a different lesbian model, scornfully points out. Stephen begins a “veritable orgy of prayer” asking to “bear all Collins’ pain the way You did…. I would like to wash Collins in my blood, Lord Jesus—I would like very much to be a Saviour to Collins—I love her, and I want to be hurt like You were…. Please give me a knee that’s all full of water, so that I can have Collins’ operation” (22). After this, she fantasizes that she can cure Collins by cutting off her own knee. The identification of an early crush with severe pain and sacrifice defines Stephen’s masochism throughout the novel. Toward the end, when she decides to give up Mary by pretending an affair with Valerie, so that Mary can lead a socially acceptable life with Martin, the narrator figures her sacrifice as a consecration of her intellectual gifts to God on behalf of inverts. She has the obligation to render their voices through her writing. Anne similarly ends with sacrifice of Anne’s ambitions in order to protect Marilla and Green Gables, but the fantasy of martyrdom preoccupies her play far earlier. For example, she tells Diana a fantasy that suggests she links her passion with novel-reading and takes the chivalrous role:

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

89

I was thinking the loveliest story about you and me, Diana. I thought you were desperately ill with smallpox and everybody deserted you, but I went boldly to your bedside and nursed you back to life; and then I took the smallpox and died and I was buried under those poplar trees in the graveyard and you planted a rosebush by my grave and watered it with your tears; and you never, never forgot the friend of your youth who sacrificed her life for you. (167)

The fantasy is similar to Stephen’s dream that “Collins was kneeling and kissing her hand” (22) in return for the sacrificed knee. When Anne returns from the church picnic, she wishes that she rather than Jane had “nearly drowned” because it would be “such a romantic experience” and “thrilling tale” (148). When Diana is ripped away from her by Mrs. Barry, Anne obtains a token of Diana’s hair and tells Marilla to bury it with her since “I don’t believe I’ll live very long” (175). Anne’s fantasy that she “was a Catholic—taking the veil to bury a broken heart in cloistered seclusion” (168) could easily describe Stephen’s actual sacrifice of her happiness at the end, when she gives up Mary to Martin. Stephen’s sacrifice ends Well as she takes up her plea for the outcast: “God,’ [Stephen] gasped, ‘we believe; we have told You we believe … We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” (437) Both girls in some sense serve as “representative women” pleading for the rights of odd outsiders who deserve the same opportunities—homes, marriage, education— as others. Perceptions of female love for women dramatically altered tone between 1908 and 1928, but in style and ideology, both Anne of Green Gables and The Well of Loneliness have a certain conservatism; both represent young women who are at the cusp of modernity but look back at the nineteenth-­ century countryside with longing. Both Anne and Stephen use and exaggerate literary identities to embrace their status as communal intellects with the duty and burden to represent others, and they reconfigure their personal value to a communal one informed by their imaginative relation with chivalric literature. Anne’s sacrifice for Marilla, fellow morsel of neglected humanity, at the end of the novel is Stephen’s sacrifice of Mary for the cause of other inverts. Anne provides a scaffolding for what in Hall would become architecture. Stephen’s developmental consciousness makes the novel far more than a message about the shamefully tragic existence of the lesbian. Stephen’s passionate nature, sensitive nerves, and

90 

H. BLACKFORD

intellectual gifts—studied in relation to families and peers—enable an illuminating reevaluation of adolescent Anne “as she is,” as a disturbance both natural and misunderstood.

Notes 1. Lillian Faderman feels society turned on its head from seeing female friendships and even households as the height of noble love to suspecting their perversity, whereas critics like Terry Castle and Lisa Moore feel that awareness of the fine line between proper female friendship and the lesbian lurks in literature and culture from a much earlier period. Cameron Duder’s study of lesbians in Canada follows the tradition of Faderman in seeing transformations. 2. In the same way, argues Michael Bronski, gay men have offered themselves as guardians of high culture (opera, theater, taste, etc.) to compensate for cultural illegitimacy. See Culture Clash, 12.

Works Cited Alexander, Joy. “Anne with Two ‘G’s: Green Gables and Geographical Identity.” Anne with an “e”: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables, edited by Holly Blackford, U of Calgary P, 2009, pp. 49–50. Armstrong, Mary. “Stable Identity: Horses, Inversion Theory, and The Well of Loneliness.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 19, no. 1, 2008, pp. 47–78. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. Columbia UP, 1995. Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. Overlook, 1997. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Perverse Desire: The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp. 109–27. Doan, Laura. “‘The Outcast of One Age is the Hero of Another’: Radclyffe Hall, Edward Carpenter and the Intermediate Sex.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp.162–78. Doan, Laura, and Jay Prosser. “Introduction: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp.1–31. Duder, Cameron. Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900–1965. U of British Columbia P, 2010. Ellis, Havelock and John Addington Symonds. Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition. Edited by Ivan Crozier, Palgrave, 2008.

5  SEEING RED: THE INSIDE NATURE OF THE QUEER OUTSIDER IN ANNE… 

91

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Nature: Addresses and Lectures. Ralph Waldo Emerson—Texts. Edited by Jone Johnson Lewis, 12 Jan. 2009, www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Representative Men. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, Heart’s International Library, 1914. Emmett, Hilary. “‘Mute Misery’: Speaking the Unspeakable in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Books.” Anne with an “e”: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables, edited by Holly Blackford, U of Calgary P, 2009, pp. 81–104. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. William Morrow, 1981. Gammel, Irene. “Safe Pleasures for Girls: L. M. Montgomery’s Erotic Landscapes.” Making Avonlea: L.  M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Irene Gammel, U of Toronto P, 2002, pp. 116–18. Gubar, Marah. “‘Where is the Boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne of Green Gables Series.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 25, no. 1, 2001, pp. 47–69. Hall, Radclyffe. The Well of Loneliness. Anchor, 1990. LeBlanc, Elizabeth. “The Metaphorical Lesbian: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 15., no. 2, 1996, pp. 289–307. Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. Broadview, 2004. Moore, Lisa. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Duke UP, 1997. Munt, Sally R. “The Well of Shame.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp. 199–215. Newton, Esther. “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp. 89–108. Olson, Marilynn Strasser. Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890–1915. Routledge, 2012. “Picturing a Canadian Life: L. M. Montgomery’s Personal Scrapbooks and Book Covers.” Virtual Exhibition by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, 2002. lmm.confederationcentre.com/english/welcome.html. Prosser, Jay. “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transition’: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well.” Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay Prosser, Columbia UP, 2002, pp. 129–44. Robinson, Laura. “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne Books.” Canadian Literature, vol. 180, Spring 2004, pp. 12–14. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930. Harvard UP, 1995. Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton UP, 1985.

CHAPTER 6

New Spaces and New Childhoods: Challenging Assumptions of Normative Childhood in Modernist Children’s Literature Aneesh Barai

‘Modernist children’s literature’ may at first appear a paradoxical term. The modernists are often associated with abstract complexity and their works typified by radical experimentation in style, genre, structure and language itself, producing such notoriously difficult works as The Waste Land, The Waves and Finnegans Wake. Further, it is the modernists who rigidified the distinction between serious ‘Literature’ and popular forms, working alongside the newly formed academic discipline of English Literature to seek to establish a canon that largely excluded women, the working class and, of course, children’s literature. In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Andreas Huyssen sees no points of connection between

A. Barai (*) School of Education, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_6

93

94 

A. BARAI

­ odernism and mass culture (including such supposedly populist modes m as children’s literature), only antagonism: “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (vii). One of the figures Huyssen points to in particular is T.  S. Eliot, as an example of a modernist author attempting to “salvage the purity of high art from the encroachments of urbanization, massification, technological modernization” (163). A view, such as Huyssen’s, of modernism as exclusionary and intentionally difficult neglects the multifaceted nature of most modernist writers and the immense variety within modernist expression. Moreover, Huyssen takes no account of the brief but significant interest that several modernist authors showed in child audiences. Indeed, while Huyssen picks out Eliot as an example of the ‘High’ modernism he is discussing, Eliot produced two books for children: the internationally popular Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (which went on to become the musical Cats) and, in response to a letter from a young fan of his work, a long poem published as A Practical Possum. Figures as varied as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Mina Loy, Graham Greene and Langston Hughes all wrote children’s stories and/or children’s poetry collections. Their children’s texts all reveal not a division or distance between modernism and children’s literature, but possibilities for common grounds between them, including a potential playfulness, exploring new perspectives and the (in)significance of authority figures. In discussing some of these modernist texts for children, Kim Reynolds notes a ‘rehabilitation’ of the notion of modernism in children’s literature studies, and broad intersections between modernism and children’s literature, including the “tendency to play with language and meaning; its combination of visual and textual elements in illustrated and picture books; and the willingness of children’s writers and illustrators to bypass or subvert conventions” (153). As well as these stylistic features, I will argue here that these texts bring modernism and children’s literature together through their content, by focusing on marginalized and new child identities. This chapter will focus on two texts in particular that express the great diversity within the corpus of modernist children’s literature: Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’ Popo and Fifina (1932; hereafter Popo) and Gertrude Stein’s The World is Round (1939; hereafter World). As we will see below, these texts bridge two seemingly incompatible categories, by being modernist in style, technique and content, and being for children.

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

95

In the introduction to this chapter, I will reflect on the questions of whether these texts qualify as ‘children’s literature,’ or as ‘modernist’ and set up the prevailing notion of childhood ‘innocence.’ I will then consider how Popo and World engage with ideas of childhood in the early twentieth century, critically rejecting these earlier models of ‘innocence’ for what they exclude. Modernist children’s texts challenge earlier models of childhood and natural innocence in multiple ways, in light of the developments in mass urbanization, and critical reconceptions of race, psychology and sexology in the early twentieth century.

Resituating Childhood ‘Innocence’ One key way in which modernist children’s texts stand out from other children’s texts of their period is through the challenges they frequently pose to normative understandings of, or assumptions about, childhood. Modernist works, for children and adults, often explore childhood from cultural, social and psychological perspectives and, in doing so, break down the concept of ‘childhood’ as a protected, special category, characterized by a Romantic or Rousseauvian ‘innocence’ that is beyond scrutiny. The prevailing attitude to childhood, even today, is to view it as a condition of ‘natural’ happiness and innocence, unless ‘corrupted’ from this innocence by negative adult or social influences. This ideology, which has a grip on all discourses surrounding childhood, was not always assumed as the norm, but came to force in the eighteenth century with the works of philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau argued for childhood as its own complete and ideal stage in a person’s life, to be valued and cherished as being purer and freer than adult life: Love childhood; give favor to its games, its pleasures, its delightful instinct. Who of you does not sometimes miss that age where a smile was always on your lips, and where your soul was always at peace? Why would you rob these little innocents the pleasure of a time so short that flees them[?] (302)

Imagining children as ‘always’ smiling, ‘at peace’ and naming them as ‘innocents,’ Rousseau demarcates a separate space for childhood, distinct from adulthood. This innocence is, for Rousseau, evidenced in children’s interactions with uncorrupted nature, in their happiness and, as I will discuss further below, in the implicit assumption that the child fits a specific model of race, social class and sexuality.

96 

A. BARAI

For Rousseau, these ideas of childhood innocence and innate worth are specifically nurtured in giving children a rural upbringing, in order for them to learn not from society or academic education, but from nature itself: “Let the senses be the only guide for the first workings of reason. No book but the world, no teaching but of fact. […] Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature” (495). Rousseau’s goal is for his imagined student, Émile, to trust his own senses and perception of the natural world first, rather than the ideas, arguments or perspectives of others, and thus for Émile to be in tune with his own ‘natural’ self. In contrast, the city as a social scene stands for Rousseau against nature: he pours vective on urban life, rejecting what he felt were “the black customs of cities whose varnished surfaces make them seductive and contagious for children” (326). In stark contrast to Rousseau’s ideas, modernism as a movement prioritizes city life as a topic. Texts like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Nella Larsen’s Passing introduce readers to complex sexual and racial identities in city settings (Paris and New York, respectively), pointing to the ways that metropolitan life contains multiplicities, and often enabled more daring expressions of identity. These modernist children’s texts, too, in a move that is still uncommon in mainstream children’s literature, depict urban settings in a positive way for young readers. In particular, the London setting for most of the poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats portrays the city as a site of exciting encounters and lively characters, bringing a type of feline playfulness to London’s many districts, with Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer in Victoria Grove, Bustopher Jones eating his way around St James Square and Cat Morgan keeping the door in Bloomsbury Square.1 Langston Hughes frequently praises cities and towns in his stories for children, such as his First Book of Negroes, which is set in New York. Toward the end of the book, after a day of sightseeing, the protagonist Terry exclaims: “This is the prettiest city in the most wonderful country in the world” (65). In Popo, there is no large cityscape; but nevertheless, Hughes gives a positive comment about cities when Popo first sees the town they are moving to: “Oh, I think the city is grand” (15). These texts mark themselves as products of modernity in embracing the urban and, as we will see in more detail below, in expressing new, previously marginalized, identities.

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

97

Children’s Literature and/or Modernism? Issues of Classification In the minimal discussion that exists on modernist texts for children, there is often a suggestion or assertion that these texts are not ‘really’ for children. Hope Howell Hodgkins, without reading the texts with any children, makes the claim that: “The high modernists saw the boundaries between children and adults as impassible, just as the road from childhood to maturity is a one-way street. We also might see their elitism as a one-­ way street, leading to a powerful but narrow art that raids but does not reinvest in childhood” (365). Wendy Lesser, reviewing Woolf’s story Nurse Lugton’s Curtain, does read the story to a child and, despite finding that he likes the book—he responds “It has nice pictures, I like the words, and it’s a good story”—finds herself “[irritated] at Woolf’s prissiness,” and concerned that young readers “may be a bit taken aback by the number of semicolons” (n.p.). While there is no consensus on how to codify ‘children’s literature’ as distinct from other kinds of literature, there are many unarticulated assumptions, such as simplicity of punctuation, about what makes a book for children. Marah Gubar’s “On Not Defining Children’s Literature” provides a useful antidote to rigid efforts to delimit children’s literature as a category. Contending that to seek to define children’s literature is to misrepresent the heterogeneity of literature produced for and consumed by children, Gubar argues that the category cannot be constructed solely from authorial intention, publication history, reception history and certainly not by any particular themes or styles. As she concludes: “we simply have to accept that the concept under consideration is complex and capacious; it may also be unstable (its meaning shifts over time and across different cultures) and fuzzy at the edges (its boundaries are not fixed or exact). Childhood is one such concept; children’s literature is another” (212). The mathematical concept of the ‘fuzzy set,’ which Gubar alludes to in this quotation, is indeed appropriate for both childhood and children’s literature. Fuzzy sets are not mutually exclusive and instead have degrees of membership. For the fuzzy set of ‘childhood,’ one could, for example, be partially, mostly, or more often, in the set, allowing for both a broader grouping (essential for the recognizability of the set) and a range of possible relations to the set ‘adulthood.’ ‘Adult’ and ‘child’ can in no way be binary or mutually exclusive categories, given the lack of a clear dividing

98 

A. BARAI

line; they can, thus, instead be seen as fuzzy sets, and also dependent on relative positionalities (e.g. infant and teenager, short adult and tall child). Given this, the dividing line between literature for adults and literature for children is equally fraught. This is not to say that there is no distinction, or that they cannot be distinguished, only that there are no absolute criteria by which to separate the two categories. I draw my category of modernist children’s literature both from the intended audiences of the authors themselves (specific children in the case of Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Loy and Stein) and from the publications of these texts, often by children’s publishers, and in child-orientated forms (such as picturebooks and illustrated texts), rather than from clear stylistic or thematic boundaries. These modernist authors compromise little of their trademark styles in these works and very much push against the notion that works for children should be ‘simple.’ Eliot, for example, uses such high register vocabulary as ‘terpsichorean’ (16), an allusion to the muse of dance that few adults would be likely to know; as mentioned above, Woolf strings together long and complex sentences with semicolons; Stein’s The World is Round in no way differs in style from her prose for adults, such as Three Lives (1909), entirely breaking from conventional grammar and playing with sonorous repetition and continuous tenses. I argue for the inclusion of these modernist texts in the category of children’s literature, which can help to expand the outer limits of the category and push against some of the perceived norms of children’s literature. The idea of the fuzzy set is also appropriate for considering the definition of ‘modernism,’ which borders with, and blurs into, other cultural productions from the early twentieth century. In the past twenty years, a reappraisal of modernism has broached the idea of modernisms, and of peripheral modernisms. Katherine Mullin notes, for example, that “Just as there are many feminisms, so there are many modernisms. A range of diverse, even incompatible aesthetic practices are commonly labeled modernist” (136). In recent years, work has been done that seeks to expand beyond Euro-American boundaries, to consider modernisms globally, such as in the collection of essays The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (edited by Wollaeger and Eatough). This development in modernist studies considers racial identities that cross national borders, as does the edited collection Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-­ garde (edited by Sweeney and Marsh), and recognizes that modernism as a movement brought new identities into literary form, often centralizing those who were marginalized by society, in order to introduce new

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

99

­ erspectives on the world. In Hughes and Bontemps’ depiction of postcop lonial black childhood in Popo, and Stein’s presentation of queer girlhood in World we will see this same emphasis brought to the heterogeneity within ‘childhood’ as a category.

“They had freed themselves, fighting”: Postcolonial Childhood in Popo and Fifina Langston Hughes is best known for his poetry about black experiences of the US, specifically New York City and, within that, Harlem. For reasons of space and focus, this chapter will not explore Arna Bontemps’ life, works and input to Popo and Fifina, but it is important to note that he was of Haitian origin and, after writing the book with Hughes, went on to write several more children’s stories on black lives.2 Like Bontemps and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes’ style often emphasizes the beauty of black bodies, lives and cultural forms, drawing on the blues and jazz, to express pride in black culture. As Hughes’ biographer Arnold Rampersad notes: “From the start of his poetic career, Hughes had placed an identification with the masses of blacks [sic] at the center of his consciousness as an artist. He had made the blues, the music of the black American masses, pivotal to the evolution of his art as a poet” (104). Hughes centralizes black culture and racial identity in his writing for children as much as for adults, drawing on black cultural forms, as he does in in his children’s poem “The Blues”: when “you’ve lost the dime you had—[/ … /] That’s the blues, too, and bad!” (Collected 107, italics in original). This is a charming redirection of the lament of the blues toward a child’s concerns, such as needing money to buy ‘candy,’ which respects children’s feelings and pains, counting them as being ‘the blues.’ The use of ‘and bad’ at the end may appear to be a tautology (we understand that the blues are ‘bad’), but may help to clarify this for a child reader; and the rhyme of ‘had’ and ‘bad’ lays emphasis on the frustration a child might feel in these circumstances. A number of Hughes’ poems for children also emphasize racial issues and celebrate diversity. In places, he appears to offer a direct rebuke to R. L. Stevenson’s short poem in the famous Victorian collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, “Foreign Children.” In this poem, Stevenson smugly asserts a white child’s racial superiority: “Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, / Little frosty Eskimo, / Little Turk or Japanee [sic] / O! don’t you wish

100 

A. BARAI

that you were me?” (33). Giving the poem a child speaker (the ‘me’ at the end of the poem) encourages child readers or listeners to identify with this voice, to see themselves aligned with the confident, white child, in excluding children of other races. Analyzing nineteenth-century Western culture, Robin Bernstein persuasively argues that the ‘innocence’ ascribed to children was limited to white children in particular: she provides evidence that, throughout American history, “innocence was raced white” (4). Hughes’ work challenges the overwhelming social norm that Bernstein is condemning: as Michelle Phillips has noted, “African-American modernism disavowed the venerable child-innocent as a representation of childhood that most assuredly did not represent the experiences of black children” (28). However, Hughes’ writing does not undermine the idea of childhood innocence in itself; rather, Hughes emphasizes the innate goodness of all children, regardless of national or racial background. For example, his poem “The Kids in School with Me” takes the perspective of a schoolchild who, at public school, learns “What makes America tick”: The colored kid And the Spanish kid And the Russian kid my size, The Jewish kid And the girl with the Chinese eyes— We were a regular Noah’s ark (Collected 100)

In emphasizing and valuing diversity among children, Hughes’ work implicitly rejects the dominant racism and nationalism of his time, which saw institutional and social marginalization of people of color, as well as of diverse groups of immigrants in the early twentieth-century US.3 The mention of ‘Noah’s ark’ in this poem stakes a claim for the spiritual innocence and purity of these children in Christian terms, identifying them as all worthy of salvation in God’s eyes, regardless of racial or national background. The final line of the poem, “One for All and All for One!” derives from a Latin phrase, but is best known from the children’s classic The Three Musketeers (1844) by Alexandre Dumas: in this story, the phrase suggests chivalry, unity and mutual support between the four musketeers. Hughes expands on these implications, resignifying a phrase that children might be familiar with, to encourage unity among “Every race beneath the sun” (100).

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

101

This idea of unity and alliance among all people is also implicit in Popo, which is a realist story of two Haitian children’s move from the countryside to an unnamed town, and descriptions of their daily pleasures, chores and, as they mature, work. There is no racial diversity within the story, which remains firmly focused on native Haitian life, but the narrative voice of the story is targeted toward teaching those unfamiliar with this country and its people, thus encouraging an emotional engagement with Haiti and Haitians. To do this, the narrator at times draws direct contrasts between life in North America and Haiti, such as describing different habits and norms for mealtimes in both countries: “If Mamma Anna had lived in the US, she probably would have cooked her entire meal before she allowed her children to begin eating. But her stove was very small, and so she cooked one thing at a time—in no particular order. And her children ate what she cooked as soon as it was ready” (13).4 In other instances, the narrative drive to educate young readers about Haiti comes in the form of Popo himself learning about Haitian history, in an extended passage describing a walk Popo and his family take: [Popo] could see the ruins of the Citadel from the door of the workshop, and it made him sad to think how hard people had worked to build it. […] But as Uncle Jacques went on with his story, Popo began to understand. The Haitians had once been slaves to the French. They had freed themselves, fighting. Then they had built that fort, the Citadel, as a protection, so that the French might not come and make them slaves again. (78)

These are evidently complex issues, explicitly dealing with the history of not only colonialism and slavery, but rebellion against it, and the self-­ sacrifice involved in that process. It is interesting that the passage filters this narrative through Popo’s consciousness, not telling the story directly as Uncle Jacques tells it, but relating it as Popo begins to understand it, encouraging its child readers to also begin to understand this history of colonialism. While this passage stands out in the text for its historical and political focus, for the majority of the text, the pleasures of everyday life are emphasized; and what is interesting about Popo is how ordinary, or familiar, he may seem to an Anglo-American reader, child or adult. In fact, one could argue that Popo in many ways fits in with the standard model of the ‘innocent’ child as established in earlier centuries. Just as Rousseau’s Émile delights in the natural world, Popo too finds happiness in observation of,

102 

A. BARAI

and play with, the nature around him: “Popo […] noticed the great bright-winged butterflies fluttering above the bushes along the way. His heart was light and happy, but he was beginning to feel sleepy” (37). Some passages suggest an indirect influence from Rousseau’s ideas of education, which begin with the boy learning the capacities and limits of his own body through play in nature: Once he crossed a gurgling brook that seemed to be in a great hurry to get somewhere. Popo knelt in the very middle and took a drink. How cool the water was on his knees and chin! He liked water so much that he would have lain down in it, if he had had time. (43)

Popo’s education into human activity also echoes Émile’s. Rousseau expects Émile not only to observe the natural world, but also the work of laborers and farmers, and to imitate their work for himself: “In every age, and especially in childhood, we want to create, to copy, to produce, to give all the signs of power and activity. He will hardly have seen the gardener at work twice, sowing, planting, and growing vegetables, before he will want to garden himself” (444). Similarly, Hughes and Bontemps have Popo learn a trade by observation of a master craftsman and find pleasure in working with his hands: “Popo stood beside his workbench smoothing a board that was to become the top piece of a little table. Uncle Jacques had shown him how to put his sheet of sandpaper around a block of wood and then use the block as if it were a plane. The thing worked like magic” (66). Crafting here gives Popo a sense of wonder, suggested in the word ‘magic.’ Popo’s work, however, is fundamentally different in purpose from observations of craftsmen we might see in the education of Émile or in other, earlier representations of aristocratic or elite children: these aristocratic children would learn about such labors in their childhoods before moving on to more cerebral education. What is critical is that Popo is learning this craft not for his own benefit, but to provide an income for his family. Moreover, he feels the wider value of his work, and takes pride in making something that will be used, and will make other people happy: “Popo was happy. He was helping to make a table—little Popo helping to make a table for the front room of some well-to-do family of the town. And what he was doing to the table was important too. Why, what would a table look like without a fine smooth top?” (67)5 As he learns to make more complex objects, such as engraved trays, he simultaneously learns from Uncle Jacques and Old Man Durand to see this craft as an artistic

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

103

expression of his emotions and the world he sees around him, to create something of both aesthetic and functional value: Popo began to think about his tray again […] He thought of what old man Durand had said about a design being a picture of how you feel inside. And Popo wondered if his tray would show that he felt sad as a result of Uncle Jacques’s story about the men of old. […] He wanted everybody to know how glad he was to make something with his own hands. (78)6

In Popo’s story, Hughes and Bontemps bring together the history of Haiti and the artistic and functional craftsmanship found even in children in the island, showing black childhood with agency, artistry, joy and dignity. They draw on many elements of the traditional, happy and ‘innocent’ child playing in nature and learning from observation of the world around them, but move beyond these models that have aristocratic underpinnings to new social and political messages about poverty, race and the history of slavery. Through this blended process, affirming certain stereotypical ideas of childhood while introducing colonial history and cultural difference, Hughes and Bontemps bring a modernist edge to the Rousseauvian child, and show that innocence does not have to be “raced white” (Bernstein 4).

The World is Round: A Queer Phenomenology of Girlhood While Hughes does not seek to overthrow the concept of childhood innocence altogether in his story, Stein’s work thoroughly challenges the conceptual grounding of ‘innocence’ in a number of ways: the child’s relation to nature, to sexuality and to adulthood. We can read in World a queer phenomenology of girlhood, as the heroine Rose cannot fit comfortably into normative systems and laments the way the world does not align with her own view. Stein’s story focuses on its heroine Rose’s traumatic experience of learning at school that the world is round, an absolute refutation of her perception of the world. Rose sings and cries frequently, with the text erratically changing between prose and lineated poetry, and splitting into irregular, subtitled sections. To overcome her horror of roundness, Rose seeks a taller perspective, and so decides to climb a mountain and see what she can see. On reaching the top, she is bathed in light from above. The potential symbolic implications of this light as revelation or epiphany are undermined, as the text suggests that the light comes from a flashlight

104 

A. BARAI

belonging to a boy called Willy. Moreover, where the beginning of the text leads us to believe that Willy is Rose’s cousin, he turns out not to be, as the story ends with an abrupt leap forward in time from the top of the mountain to a point a few lines on where we find Rose and Willy married with children. I will return to discuss their marriage in more detail below. Gertrude Stein is most famous for her controversial biography of her partner, framed as an “autobiography”–The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas–and she is known as a queer writer for this work and others, such as her long poems Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly. She most explicitly and directly wrote of her sexuality in her earlier prose works, such as QED, but did not try to find a publisher for them, for fear of revealing so much about her life. Later works often coded sexuality in ambiguous terms. While the OED accredits Stein with the first printed use of ‘gay’ to refer to a homosexual relationship, in her short story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (1922), the term was then current only among queer people and probably neither this story nor A Long Gay Book (1933) would have been received as queer texts by the majority of their audience. Stein attempted to publish four books for children, but, after the first was released, struggled to find a willing publisher for the remaining works. This first children’s book, The World is Round, had the draft title “The Autobiography of Rose” (How Writing, 39–41), putting it in parallel with Stein’s work about her partner Alice Toklas; indeed, we can read in the story a coded queerness akin to that in Stein’s works for adults, as the heroine Rose cannot fit comfortably into normative systems. There are no sexual acts in World, but what is more important for understanding Stein’s writing for young readers is not its eroticism per se; rather, it is the broader distinction that Stein often puts forward between a masculine or patriarchal world order and a distinctly lesbian one. In Patriarchal Poetry (1927), Stein describes the kind of literature that she is writing against: “Patriarchal poetry makes no mistake. […] Patriarchal poetry in regular places placed regularly as if it were placed regularly regularly placed regularly as it were” (Yale 115, 123). The sense of rightness and sanctioned place are evidently key elements of patriarchal poetry, as Stein defines it. The patriarchy is recognizable as ‘regular’—both the norm, and that which is regulated, governed by standards and rules of acceptability. In direct contrast, Stein’s most explicitly lesbian poem, Lifting Belly, sets out a lesbian erotic poetics which sits outside of such patriarchally authorized logic: “Lifting belly is so erroneous” (Yale 7). This poem is often spoken in a collective feminine ‘we,’ includes a lesbian

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

105

kiss, and uses the image of ‘lifting belly’ as a euphemism for lesbian sex. Stein’s use of the word erroneous here is not a condemnation of lesbian sexuality as ‘wrong,’ but a celebration of its deviancy from a heterosexual norm. As we will see, a specifically lesbian or queer perception, which challenges both heteronormativity and any universalizing, authoritative world view, also plays a key role in Stein’s children’s literature. In World, Rose is traumatized by the disjunction between her perception and the world. Stein presents a queer perspective that denies authoritative forms of knowledge, in her phenomenology of girlhood, as Rose refuses to see ‘in line’ with the norm. World provides a fundamental challenge to Rousseau’s argument that one learns best through experience: while Émile gains in confidence and understanding through his observations of nature, Rose in World deviates from such a narrative of normative progression. The story pits personal experience against school knowledge, as Rose’s understanding of the world is specifically contrary to that of the institution: There at the school were other girls and Rose did not have quite as much time to sing and cry. The teachers taught her That the world was round That the sun was round That the moon was round (14)

The mention of the ‘other girls’ highlights school as a social and socializing experience, teaching Rose to be less emotionally expressive, singing and crying less often. The syntax here is a merry-go-round of null rhymes, ending five lines in a row with ‘round,’ if indeed this lineated passage is poetry, as it breaks up rhyming and repetitive prose. Stein’s syntax and her plot reject linear progress and, like the rhymes here, we see Rose growing ‘round’ and ‘round,’ rather than up, never reaching a stable point. Kathryn Bond Stockton’s monograph, The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, sets up ‘growing sideways’ as a queer alternative model to ‘growing up’ (11). Stockton privileges modernist texts—by Henry James, Djuna Barnes and Woolf—in her discussion of the constructions of non-normative childhoods, and explores the relationship between such childhoods and non-linear temporalities. Rose endeavors to make a linear narrative, to literalize the metaphor of growing ‘up,’ by climbing a mountain. Rose’s journey up the mountain can be seen as a failed or

106 

A. BARAI

s­ ubverted quest narrative (as Cleveland discusses it), but can also be read as Rose’s effort to attain a taller perspective, to mimic growing up, in a manner that also fails or is subverted. When Rose learns that her very perception of the world is wrong, it shatters her belief in her own perception, causing her to associate roundness with a traumatic loss of selfhood. Her subsequent self-doubting leads her to singing and crying. We see from this that Rose’s response is not a logical one, nor an interpersonal one, but one that pours out of her body, a response entirely grounded in her physicality. However, her senses do not help her. It is because she takes her senses to be central (as Rousseau advocates in Émile’s education) that she encounters a phenomenological despair upon learning that the world is round. As Jeanette Winterson notes: “The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe” (81). The narrator of World follows Rose’s thoughts in asserting our experience of the world as flat: “Rose oh Rose look down at the ground / And what do you see / You see that the world is not round” (27). Rose cannot reconcile the map and the globe. She believes in her own perception over abstract knowledge and suffers ontological panic when her perception is proven to be wrong. For example, having seen mountains from a distance, she believes they are blue: “When mountains are really true they are blue. / Rose knew they were blue and blue was her favorite color” (31–32). As she comes close to them, she is horrified to learn that they are actually green: “and it was not blue there no dear no it was green there, grass and trees and rocks are green not blue there no blue was there but blue was her favorite color all through” (33). Rose struggles to accept that the world is not as she perceives it. Forced to question her perception, she begins to doubt even those things that she had seen before, suspecting that they were merely hallucinations: “Once when five apples were red. / They never were it was my head” (57). Red apples are an extremely common example in discussions of the philosophy of perception. Even dating back to the eighteenth century, the British Empiricist George Berkeley writes of the perception of apples (and mountains) in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710); and (after Stein) Wittgenstein opens his Philosophical Investigations (1953) with the example of “five red apples” (2). Through such allusion, Stein brings Rose’s despair into the realm of philosophical debate.

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

107

The problem that Rose faces in the story, what the title suggests is the crux of the story, remains an unresolved issue. By the story’s end, we do not learn if Rose has come to accept the roundness of the world, or if it is still the cause of her tears. The final paragraph of the text abruptly takes us from a mountaintop to an indeterminate moment in the future: Willy and Rose turned out not to be cousins, just how nobody knows, and so they married and had children and sang with them and sometimes singing made Rose cry and sometimes it made Willy get more and more excited and they lived happily ever after and the world just went on being round. (62)

While entering the historically conventional roles of wife and mother, Rose maintains her approach to life, singing and crying her way through the world. It is, thus, that we do not in truth see Rose growing up, but remaining the same as adult or child, growing round and round and queerly refusing to progress along the line from childhood to adulthood. For Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology, a ‘queer perception’ is one that is out of line with others, and does not ‘right’ itself. Ahmed shows “how ordinary perception corrects that which does not ‘line up,’” while for Ahmed queer orientations might be those that continue to see ‘slantwise,’ and do not “overcome what is ‘off line’” (106–107). Rose’s perception, seeing mountains as blue and the earth as flat, is something that the world, and education, seek to painfully ‘correct,’ but even by the end of the story, do not seem to succeed in doing. Rose’s perception does not bend to match the norm, from childhood to adulthood. A particularly telling moment in the story comes when Rose etches her name into a tree and inscribes a famous line of Stein’s poetry (from ‘Sacred Emily’): “So she took out her pen-knife, […] she would carve on the tree Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose until it went all the way round” (50). This sense of circulating identities, rather than a narrative progression of identities, has much in common with the merry-go-round of null rhymes discussed above, showing that neither age nor size can mark out maturity. Where Ahmed talks of queer perception as ‘out of line,’ we see that for Rose, to her horror, the line is a curve, and even the line of poetry that she writes circles back on itself, to endlessly reconnect to its own beginning. Linear progression and direct perception both bend for Rose, and so we can say that although her ending may appear heteronormative in its marriage, both its normativity and sense of ‘ending’ anything are strained. In these ways, Stein breaks out of the mold of the ‘innocent’

108 

A. BARAI

child, as she neither delights in nature, nor learns from her senses, and in the hypothetical consanguinity of her relationship with Willy appears to deviate from the heteronormative narrative of sexuality. World thus puts forward new possibilities for childhood identities that challenge and resist the norms of childhood, learning through the senses, and heterosexism.

Conclusion As is evident from these two examples, Bontemps and Hughes’ Popo and Fifina and Stein’s The World is Round, modernist children’s literature stretched the idea of what a child could be. Modernist children’s texts speak out against the norms of childhood inherited from Locke and Rousseau through the Romantics and Victorians, in terms of children’s relation to nature, racial identity and models of sexuality, maturity and perception. In bringing attention to these stories as being parts of the tradition of both children’s literature and modernism, the corpus of modernist children’s texts can help us now to expand our own understanding of what constitutes both modernism and children’s literature. Eliot’s and Hughes’ works value urban settings for children, in the light of social changes in the early twentieth century. Bontemps and Hughes present children who connect closely with traditional models of childhood ‘innocence,’ but resignify it through being black, embodying difference from the implicit norms of innocence. Bontemps and Hughes introduce their hero, and child readers, to a country that resisted colonial rule, expanding the world of childhood to new frontiers through their story. Stein’s queer heroine Rose refuses to align with normative and authoritative knowledge, centering her identity from her embodied perception and embracing circularity over the shape of growing ‘up.’ Modernist children’s literature interrogates the norms of ‘innocence’ to uncover those it excludes, and explores the lives of those marginalized by earlier ideologies of childhood.

Notes 1. For recent work on Practical Cats as urban children’s poetry, see Barai. 2. For excellent discussion of Bontemps’ involvement in Popo and his other writing for children, see Katharine Capshaw (Smith)’s Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Capshaw’s monograph as a whole provides context for the representations of race in Hughes and Bontemps’ work for ­children, and her chapter on them discusses Popo, their other collaboration The Pasteboard Bandit, and Bontemps’ other children’s texts.

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

109

3. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge Hughes’ problematic language in representing some social groups, particularly in the mention of ‘Chinese eyes’ here. 4. Capshaw asserts that Hughes and Bontemps “compel the reader’s identification rather than a sympathy that could become patronizing,” but argues from passages such as this that “a subtle critique of economic conditions […] at points threatens to undercut the reader’s attachment to Haiti” (239). I contend that this story most likely does not produce a sense of exact sameness between reader and character, but rather provides a ‘hook’ for the reader to identify with some elements of Popo’s character through the representation of his traditional ‘innocence,’ while also educating its readers about Haitian life at the time, as in this passage. 5. The mention of ‘well-to-do’ families here hints at the variety and stratification within Haitian society; that is, that not all families in Haiti are like Popo’s. Elsewhere, Hughes is openly polemical about the deep disparities of social class in Haiti, seeing aggressive, capitalist power relations between the classes (see ‘People’ 48). 6. The allusion to the ‘men of old’ links Popo’s creation to the building of the Citadel and thus, as Capshaw has argued, the Citadel draws together ideas of art and labor into one political construct, bringing about “social and economic transformations” (242), pointing to the revolutionary potential of creative work.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. Barai, Aneesh. “‘They Were Incurably Given to Rove’: T. S. Eliot’s Practical Cats, London and the Petit Flâneur.” The Literary London Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, 2017, pp. 3–17. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (America and the Long 19th Century). New York UP, 2011. Capshaw, Katharine (Smith). Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Indiana UP, 2004. Cleveland, Janne. “Circle Games: Inscriptions of the Child Self in Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round.” Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, vol. 24, no. 1, 1999, pp. 118–121. Eliot, T.  S. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. 1939. Illustrated by Nicolas Bentley, Faber, 1998. Gubar, Marah. “On Not Defining Children’s Literature.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 1, 2011, pp. 209–215.

110 

A. BARAI

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indiana UP, 1986. Hodgkins, Hope Howell. “High Modernism for the Lowest: Children’s Books by Woolf, Joyce, and Greene.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, 2007, pp. 354–367. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 11: Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing. Edited by Dianne Johnson, U of Missouri P, 2003. Hughes, Langston. The First Book of the Negroes. Illustrated by Ursula Koering, Franklin Watts, 1952. Hughes, Langston. “People without Shoes.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs, edited by Christopher C. De Santis, U of Missouri P, 2002, pp. 46–49. Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps. Popo and Fifina. 1932. Oxford UP, 1993. Lesser, Wendy. “A Drape of One’s Own.” The New  York Times, 19 May 1991, nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/woolf-lugton91.html. Accessed 11 Dec. 2011. Mullin, Katherine. “Modernisms and Feminisms.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 136–152. Phillips, Michelle H. Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave, 2016. Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction and Afterword. Popo and Fifina, by Hughes and Bontemps, Oxford UP, 1993, pp. vii–ix, 101–110. Reynolds, Kim. “Modernism.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, New York UP, 2011, pp. 151–154. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Emile ou de l’éducation.” Œuvres complètes de Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau IV: Émile: Éducation, morale, botanique, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Gallimard, 1969, pp. 241–869. Schachter, Allison. Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature in the Twentieth Century. Oxford UP, 2012. Stein, Gertrude. “The Autobiography of Rose.” How Writing is Written: Previous Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein, Black Sparrow, 1974, pp. 39–41. Stein, Gertrude. The World is Round. Batsford, 1939. Stein, Gertrude. The Yale Gertrude Stein. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Yale UP, 1980. Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child’s Garden of Verses. 1885. Illustrated by Eve Garnett, Puffin, 2008. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009.

6  NEW SPACES AND NEW CHILDHOODS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS… 

111

Sweeney, Fionnghuala, and Kate Marsh, editors. Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-garde. Edinburgh UP, 2013. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. 1989. Vintage, 2001. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Translated by G. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, 1986. Wollaeger, Mark, and Matt Eatough, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford UP, 2012.

CHAPTER 7

Modern Family, Modern Colonial Childhoods: Representations of Childhood and the US Military in Colonial School Literature Solsiree del Moral

Puerto Rico became part of the US empire as early as 1898. The US military invaded the island during its war against Spain in neighboring Cuba. At the conclusion of the war, the United States acquired sovereignty over the island and the US military occupied it for two years. In the 1920s, when Elizabeth Kneipple was publishing her four volumes of English-­ language short stories for use in local classrooms, Puerto Rico had been a US colony for a generation and all Puerto Ricans born on the island, as of 1917, were US citizens. Kneipple’s short stories and the English-­ language curriculum in Puerto Rico’s public schools were designed to revise this history of US war, occupation, and colonialism. School children in English-language classrooms read stories about young Puerto Rican child protagonists who aspired to be modern and progressive and

S. del Moral (*) Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_7

113

114 

S. DEL MORAL

who idealized Kneipple’s mythic version of a benevolent and humanitarian US military presence. The colonial department of education, headed by both Puerto Rican and US administrators, was tasked with teaching local school children love and loyalty for the United States, the island’s new colonial ruler. This vision of Americanization dominated the English-language curriculum in public schools.1 Schools became a critical venue through which state officials could transmit this political and ideological vision to the generation coming of age under US rule. Like other non-Anglo-Saxon communities in the US mainland and its overseas territories, Puerto Ricans would be taught what it meant to be an “American.” In the 1920s, for non-white and colonial members of the US empire, that meant learning the limitations of second-class citizenship. In Puerto Rico, the officer in charge of Americanization through public schools, the commissioner of education, was directly appointed by the US president. The commissioner approved or denied curricular changes and teacher appointments in the highly centralized school system. In 1925, commissioner Juan B.  Huyke collaborated with Elizabeth Kneipple, a young American teacher of English at Central High School in San Juan, in the mission to Americanize the new US citizens through the vehicle of English-language instruction. Kneipple had arrived in Puerto Rico from the University of Chicago in 1923; two years later, Commissioner Huyke promoted her to the position of Special Supervisor of English in the Department of Education. Between 1926 and 1929, Kneipple wrote four collections of short stories, for a total of 71 individual stories. Stories from the four collections were assigned to the English-language classrooms in middle school and high school grades (Del Moral, “Language”). In this essay, I explore how Kneipple’s short stories presented a particular vision of Americanization, one approved by the Puerto Rican commissioner of education. A rich scholarship on the history of education in Puerto Rico has explored the controversial role of English-language instruction in the project of Americanization, as well as the ways in which the new school curricula promoted the creation of new “tropical Yankees” or local supporters of US colonialism (Navarro, Creating). Building on this scholarship, I examine how English-language colonial school texts promoted modern representations of colonial childhoods. In Kneipple’s program of stories, the modern child embodies the transition from a generation of Puerto Ricans raised under Spanish colonialism to the new generation raised under US tutelage. The three stories I

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

115

explore—“The Good Will Story,” “Luisa’s Gift,” and “Tomansín’s Company”—highlight the relationship between the modern child and the US military. The US Army, Navy, and National Guard emerge as central characters who promote the best qualities of US colonial rule. Kneipple develops the character of the US military man as the best role model for Puerto Rican boys and girls, supplanting the Puerto Rican father and all other adult males. Kneipple’s Puerto Rican adult characters are traditional, conservative, and fearful of change. They exemplify characteristics, beliefs, and practices that colonial children are encouraged to leave in the past as they evolve into modern, US citizens. The young child protagonists, by contrast, are ambitious and aspire to be both modern and American. They admire and try to emulate the behaviors and actions of responsible American adults and leaders. US military men thus offer the young protagonists an alternate paternal figure and version of masculinity, disrupting family authority, structure, and even gender roles. Kneipple’s colonial version of the modern girl and boy breaks some gender boundaries while reproducing others. In the “Good Will Story,” Kneipple introduces a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued by a US military man, while in “Luisa’s Gift,” the protagonist is a 1920s school girl who defies traditional, conservative, gendered standards of girlhood. The modern girl diverges from turn-of-the-century representations of helpless colonial women reflecting instead the version of femininity colonial educators in the 1920s Puerto Rico hoped to produce through the Americanization curriculum (Del Moral, Negotiating). She is literate, bilingual, adventurous, aware of modern technology, and fearless in the face of change. The boys in Kneipple’s stories, meanwhile, are independent, creative, and ambitious youth who have hitherto lacked appropriate adult direction and guidance. In “Tomansín’s Company,” the US military man becomes the ideal model of masculinity, honor, and modernity. Young Puerto Rican boys, in the Americanization literature, grow up to be military men.

“Good Will”: Revising History To create this new narrative and teach it to a young school-boy auditor is the central task in “Good Will.” The story opens as the boy Manolín asks his father don Angel (a former Captain in the Spanish army now returned from the exile in Spain imposed at the end of the 1898 War) to retell the well-loved story of the meeting, courtship and marriage of his father’s

116 

S. DEL MORAL

sister, Aunt Rosalinda and the US soldier Captain Tom, who had arrived on the island in 1899, following a “disastrous hurricane,” just in time to rescue the orphaned Rosalinda and eventually marry her with her brother’s consent. In this thinly veiled romantic allegory of the union of the hapless (and feminized) Puerto Rico and the virile, powerful United States, Kneipple not only provides Manolín with a more effective father-­ figure, she also provides school children with a new version of history. Under what conditions did the US military arrive in Puerto Rico? On July 25, 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico. Six months later, at the end of the War of 1898, the United States emerged as an empire with overseas territories in the Caribbean and Pacific. The Treaty of Paris, the agreement between Spain and the United States that ended the war, granted the United States sovereignty over Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.2 The two-year US military occupation of Puerto Rico concluded when the US Congress approved the 1900 Foraker Act, establishing a civil government for the island. In 1917, the US Congress approved the Jones Act and Puerto Ricans born on the island became US citizens.3 Together with these congressional acts, the US Supreme court opinions about US territories, known as the Insular Cases, determined Puerto Rico’s political path. It would not become an independent nation like Cuba and the Philippines but rather a non-incorporated territory of the United States.4 The island’s colonial Department of Education published Kneipple’s short stories in the late 1920s. Through them, just a generation after the US invasion, Puerto Rican school children, like Manolín in the story, were taught a quite different version of this history. Rather than telling his son about war and military occupation, don Angel shares with Manolín a history of the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane and the “benevolent” and “humanitarian” US response. Don Angel explains that once “the SpanishAmerican war came to an end … the flag of the United States was raised in Porto Rico.” San Ciriaco was a disastrous hurricane that “swept the island… with its ravaging winds and torrential rains” (52). As Manolín wipes away tears at hearing this horror, don Angel comforts him reminding him of the noble work done by the US “rescuers” (58). The story don Angel then recounts about Captain Thomas Steele, one of the young Americans deployed by the colonial governor on the rescue mission to the highland town of Aibonito, personalizes this tale of benevolence. In Aibonito, Captain Tom meets a “devastated Rosalinda,” whose parents have perished in the storm (54). “She is now an orphan, with no one left

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

117

in the world except her brother, who is in Spain, a captain in the Spanish army (57).” Don Angel describes how Captain Tom—a gallant, compassionate, military man—embodies the United States’ humanitarian mission in Puerto Rico when he rescues the charming and gracious Rosalinda. In don Angel’s account of the 1898 War, as Kneipple relates it, the US military invasion and two-year occupation are insignificant and uneventful, worth mentioning only in passing and in the passive tense: “The Spanish American war came to an end” (51). Indeed, all references to US acquisition of Puerto Rico are in the passive tense: “The armistice was ordered”; “The flag of the United States was raised in Porto Rico” (51). The significant moment, and the one that Kneipple suggests will shape the future relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, becomes the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane. The US military arrives just as Spain abandons Puerto Rico to suffer the ravages of a deadly hurricane. Thankfully, American aid supplants Spanish betrayal. Manolín learns that the US occupation was not a militarized precursor to colonialism, but rather a “peaceful” and “tranquil” time when Puerto Ricans suffered “no harm” (52). Manolín’s character, as well as school children in English-­ language colonial classrooms, thus learned a new origin story that revised recent Puerto Rican history. Kneipple continues to develop the allegorical romance between a feminized Puerto Rico and a gallant America: After a long, complicated courtship, Rosalinda and Captain Tom fall deeply in love. However, once the hurricane reconstruction work is completed, Captain Tom receives word that he has to leave the island, a plot turn illustrating Kneipple’s point that Americans never intended to occupy, but rather to help and then leave. Neither lover can endure the end of the relationship. Rosalinda realizes that “if Captain Tom was out of her life there would be no more happiness for her” (59). Captain Tom, who feels similarly bereft, “declared that he loved her and wished to marry her!” (59). Thus Kneipple’s account of the 1899 humanitarian work highlights how interconnected Puerto Rico and the United States already had become. The United States does not want to leave; Puerto Rico could not survive if it did. A permanent relationship has been established that cannot be severed. The marriage proposal raises another concern. What about the legacy of military and political conflict between Spaniards and Americans? As it is explained to Manolín, while Captain Tom has been busy commanding reconstruction work in Puerto Rico, Rosalinda’s absent brother, don Angel, has been “frantic with suspense” (58). However, he contributes

118 

S. DEL MORAL

nothing to the 1899 reconstruction effort. What could he, representing Spanish rule, contribute to Puerto Rico’s future? Torn between her past and her future, Rosalinda wants to accept Captain Tom’s proposal, but she fears that don Angel will not consider her consorting with the “enemy … patriotic or honorable” (59). At this point Kneipple creates another dramatic, allegorical vignette in which don Angel, having resigned from the Spanish army and returned home, meets Rosalinda at the grave of their parents and learns of her desire to marry Captain Tom. When don Angel resists, Rosalinda declares: “He is the man I love … I would accompany him anywhere! Without him I can never be happy” (61). At this critical moment a man “intrudes upon [their] sorrow” (61). As he tells Manolín, don Angel is at first deeply suspicious of Captain Tom’s presence. However, he begins to overcome some of his apprehension after Captain Tom introduces himself with generosity and benevolence: “Great catastrophes of nature, such as this one, unite all men for common protection, and of erstwhile enemies make brothers! … Surely you will extend me the hand of fellowship at the grave of your beloved parents, in the presence of your dear sister… ” (62). When don Angel hesitates to offer his hand, Captain Tom adds: “I entreat you to let there be no bitterness between us!” (62). Don Angel concludes the story by emphasizing for Manolín that “solemn moment” in which they “pledged brotherhood … over the grave of your grandparents” (63). Spanish colonial rule is now in the past. The future would be shaped by a new relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. The question, however, remains: Where does this story leave Manolín, who now, in effect, has two father-figures and two potential role models? After providing this alternative reading of Puerto Rican history, Kneipple’s military themed stories continue exploring its new colonial version of modern girlhood and boyhood.

“Luisa’s Gift”: A Colonial Version of Modern Girlhood In a second short story, Kneipple develops the character of the modern Puerto Rican girl. Luisa, the main protagonist, represents the new generation of children born under US rule, who have had the privilege of attending US colonial schools. The modern girl is prepared—literate, bilingual, ambitious, and scientific—to take advantage of the new

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

119

­ pportunities offered by the US military. As Kneipple frames the story, o Luisa is a middle-class school girl from Caguas, a town located in the central mountain range of Puerto Rico. She travels with her parents in a private automobile to visit family in the northeastern coastal town of Fajardo. The weekend visit to Fajardo is a special gift for Luisa. She is now thirteen, a “bright girl in school … soon to be promoted to the eighth grade.” Luisa is also curious and ambitious. Bored and restless in the town of Caguas and anxious for some adventure, she laments, “boys are the only ones who have any real adventures in this world. How tiresome it is to be a girl!” (83). Kneipple explores Luisa’s modern behaviors and expectations through encounters with the US Navy. In the first encounter, Luisa’s tío Adolfo, in attempt to satisfy her taste for adventure, takes Luisa to visit the Fajardo pier. Uncle Adolfo “owned a fine boat which had two sails and even boasted a small cabin” (85). He is a fisherman, but not one of the typical “fisher-folk.” Rather, he employs several other men in his fishing business. For the holiday weekend, as the colorful small boats of the fishermen line the shore, the local people gather on the seafront to “admire” two US Navy battleships “anchored at the middle of the bay” (85). While Adolfo proudly presents Luisa with his “fine boat,” he finds that her attention is on the US Navy. She has learned about the US military in her colonial school and, therefore, unlike her uncle and the others, can identify the battleships as destroyers. Luisa also knows that the Navy is meeting that weekend to practice maneuvers at the neighboring island of Culebra. Not satisfied with simply looking at them from the dock, she gazes “eagerly” at the ships and longs to go on board and “speak to the men in English” (86). Uncle Adolfo, representing adult Puerto Rican men, must curtail the child’s excitement. He reminds Luisa that no one is allowed to go on board the ships. In the second encounter with the US Navy, Kneipple further stresses the generational differences between young Luisa and Puerto Rican adults. As a modern girl, Luisa proves to be more intellectually curious and technologically informed than the adults around her. In a second attempt to offer Luisa an adventure, uncle Adolfo takes her out to sea on his fishing boat with his three-man crew. To his surprise, again, this is not enough. As he prepares to return after a day at sea, Luisa implores him: “Please, please let us go to Culebra! Oh, I do so want to see the United States warships” (89). Less ambitious and more conservative than Luisa, as Kneipple is careful to show, Adolfo “had never thought of doing such a

120 

S. DEL MORAL

thing” (89). Luisa convinces him by proposing it as “an opportunity” for “an adventure” (89). Uncle Adolfo also is caught off guard by Luisa’s suggestion that he need only inform her parents about their change in plans through the radio. “I did not know girls could be so interested in such things… This new education is certainly remarkable! My niece is indeed a very modern young lady” (89). Uncle Adolfo has traditional expectations of girls, expectations that Luisa challenges with her knowledge about the military and modern technology. Once they arrived at Culebra, Kneipple emphasizes the great awe they all experience at the spectacular power and magnitude of the US Navy: “spreading far into the sea, to the south of [Culebra], lay the enormous fleet (91).” Kneipple describes the US military ships around Culebra as a “monstrous, gray industrial city” in the water, a city whose water ways “were busier than the streets of San Juan,” Puerto Rico’s capital (92). Uncle Adolfo, the fishermen of Fajardo, and their colorful small boats cannot compete with the technology and battleships of the US Navy. In fact, the navy’s display of power paralyzes uncle Adolfo. He finally breaks the silence, when he declares in hushed tones: “What mighty wealth and power is represented here… What a wonderful country is the great United States of America! And think, Luisa, that splendid fleet is only half of our Navy!” (91). Although uncle Adolfo is presented as a reserved, cautious, and traditional man ill-prepared to engage the changes and opportunities the US military has brought to the island, he nevertheless timidly embraces his role as a colonial citizen of the United States when he acknowledges the battleships as part of “our Navy” (91). Luisa, by contrast is presented as having the will, imagination, and education required to make the most out of this encounter. She catches sight of a motor launch “full of white-clad officers” that slowly approaches her uncle’s boat (92). Luisa is entranced by “how beautiful they look… in their clean and white uniforms and … magnificent gold-braid and buttons” (92). She especially admires the “dignified and handsome… gray-­ haired gentleman in the center.” (92). That officer is also curious about the “beautiful child” (92) who charms them all with her “quaint” English and “lovely manners” (93). Luisa, who has “never been so happy in her life… [does] not wish the launch to go away” (93). Impulsively, she offers the officers a gift of six lobsters, and, in exchange, their leader grants Luisa’s wish to board a battleship. Her uncle stands by “utterly astounded” as he silently observes the symbolic exchange—in which he (representing the past) willingly relinquishes his “ownership” of the girl to the United

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

121

States (the future) (94). Luisa spends the next thirty minutes on board the battleship where the “gallant officer” shows the “charming little visitor” a photograph of his own grand-daughter who looks “a great deal like” Luisa (94). On returning to Fajardo, Luisa is “exuberant with joy” for she has been “the guest of no less than an Admiral of the United States Navy!” (95). Kneipple’s representation of the American military man—powerful, authoritative, and paternal—stands in sharp contrast to the Puerto Rican males depicted in her story. The US  Navy Admiral represents the best aspects of the US military and its men. He is handsome, gallant, and kind. His uniform attests to his “bravery and long distinguished service to his country” (93). Significantly, he also evinces a paternal attraction to Luisa, who reminds him of his own family on the mainland. While in Kneipple’s first story Captain Tom was romantically attracted to Rosalinda, in this example the US Admiral is enchanted by the amiable and gracious Luisa. Like an indulgent grandfather, the Admiral takes the time to teach her and support her interests. In contrast, uncle Adolfo, although guided by the best of intentions to support and entertain his niece, is unable to meet her needs. The best he can do is to deliver her to those who can satisfy her ambitions—the US military men. Luisa’s character provided Puerto Rican schoolchildren in the classroom with an aspirational version of modern girlhood. Student readers were encouraged to challenge the behaviors of traditional girls. Brazen Luisa demands adventure, pushes her uncle to go farther than he had imagined possible, and proves herself knowledgeable about modern technologies. Her ambition and preparation meet with opportunity when she crosses paths with the US  Navy Admiral. Here, as in the “Good Will” story, Kneipple lays out the Department of Education’s colonial vision for the island and its people. Young, intelligent, eager, and ambitious, they are in the process of becoming. Kneipple’s stories teach the reader how important it is for school children to break with the limitations of their ancestors’ traditional past. Their future is tied to the power and might of the US military. English-language instruction and modern education will prepare them for the opportunity to assume leadership and experience new forms of colonial governance.

122 

S. DEL MORAL

“Tomansín’s Company”: A Colonial Version of Modern Boyhood In “Tomansín’s Company,” Kneipple explores modern boyhood. The story focuses on the hopes and wishes of the children of the working-class and rural poor. The US military model of manhood provided Puerto Rican boys with a preferred example of discipline, hierarchies, leadership, and governance. Kneipple’s stories portray US colonialism as benevolent and humanitarian. In this example, readers learn it was also supposed to be temporary. Published in the late 1920s, “Tomansín’s Company” proposes that the current generation of boys, those who would form the next generation of leaders on the island, had a responsibility to prepare themselves for governance.5 Following the example of the US military, Tomansín and his company of “make-believe soldiers” could evolve into organized, disciplined, young men, or modern boys (157). The story takes place in a field on the outskirts of the town of Yauco, in the southwestern region of the island, where the US National Guard holds a three-week long training camp. “Naturally this was an exciting interval for everyone in town, especially the boys” (151). Kneipple portrays the local boys’ deep longing and desire to become soldiers. Young Tomansín, the main protagonist, is described as “a little barefoot boy … [who] had great ambitions, one of which was that someday he would be the captain of a company in the National Guard!” (151). Early in the story, Kneipple describes how Tomansín and the young boys “hovered all day long on the outskirts” of the camp. From a distance, they find themselves “thrilling to the bugle class, following the various maneuvers of the drilling companies with admiring eyes, and even themselves marching whenever they heard the martial music of the band” (152). The time spent observing the soldiers from afar ignites inside each of the boys the aspiration to become a National Guardsman in the future. “There was scarcely one of them, after witnessing the orderly drills, the large camp with its rows and rows of new khaki tents, [and] the impressive officers who did not resolve that some day [sic] he, too, would wear the uniform of the Guard” (151). Readers learn that “every boy is a potential soldier, who may someday be called to the defense of his country” (155). Kneipple’s short story naturalizes racial segregation. The boys are watching segregated units of white US officers lead and train Puerto Rican men in military methods. Nevertheless, they long to be like the Puerto Rican men. They accept the leadership and authority of white

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

123

American officers in the same way they are taught not to question US colonial rule. In this example, Puerto Rican soldiers are portrayed as incrementally moving toward full citizenship and manhood. Kneipple highlights how the boys admired “the general enthusiasm of the public towards these possible defenders of the nation.” Young readers, too, are in the process of formation. In the colonial classroom, they learn that racial subservience and colonial rule are interconnected and natural. The boys in the story do not question this either. Rather, Kneipple describes their “longing” to take the place of the Puerto Rican men dutifully learning from white, US military officers. They long to display this form of masculinity which is characterized as everything Puerto Rican masculinity is not; disciplined, orderly and moral. Thinking of his future and feeling that he “could no longer wait,” Tomansín “set[s] about to organize a company among his friends in order that he might at least play at being a soldier” (152). Once the boys decide to organize their own company, their first debate is over leadership and hierarchy. While “they all wanted to be officers,” it is Tomansín’s company and he is designated captain. When Tomansín announces that they need uniforms, one of the boys begins to cry. “I have no money with which to buy a uniform and neither have any of the others” (153). Tomansín, as the leader, reassures them they have all they need. He orders them to bring with them the next day a straw hat, an old shirt, and a pair of trousers. They then gather firewood and dye their uniforms red and black in a boiling kettle. Next, they carve themselves guns out of wood. These are not middle-class children, with opportunities to visit family in the United States, like Manolín, or whose parents own automobiles for weekend trips to the coast, like Luisa. Rather, they are the children of working parents. Working-class children, unlike middle-class ones, Kneipple suggests, spend their days unsupervised. Like “noble savages,” they are independent and creative. They entertain and educate themselves, while their parents labor in fields, workshops, and domestic service. Kneipple carefully describes competing models of masculinity. Tomansín, like Manolín and Luisa, understands the distinction between the Puerto Rican version of manhood and the American one. Inspired by the guardsmen’s military drills, Tomansín’s company of make-believe soldiers decided to organize a parade. However, as the boys parade into the town of Yauco, a fire breaks out in one of the small wooden homes of the working poor. “A general cry of dismay went up, and there was a wild rush towards the scene of the fire by these poor people who knew only too well

124 

S. DEL MORAL

what that smoke meant—that if there was not quick action, all of their frail homes would be destroyed” (164). Faced with this challenge, Tomansín stops, assesses, and reacts. He orders his men to get buckets and anything that could hold water. “Remember, all of you, that this is our great chance to do something for our country! Do it well!” (164). Tomansín’s “men” follow his orders. “So while every grown-up was running around wildly, the boys carried out the Captain’s orders.” In this example, the boys who mimic US military behavior are not only more organized and effective than local adults; they also serve as an example for how adults should behave. “The astonished grown-ups, witnessing the concerted actions of the boys, followed their example. … All in all, no fire had been so well taken care of in recent years” (165). The stupefied and hysterical Puerto Rican adults are outdone by children. Without military training and direction, according to Kneipple’s representation, Puerto Rican adults are useless and ineffective in a crisis. The modern boys, however, demonstrate the skills they have acquired through simple observation. The military methods demonstrated by National Guardsmen at a distance are enough to train young children to act responsibly in a crisis. Tomansín faces one final challenge: “Just as everything seemed to be going well, a young woman ran up screaming and tried to enter one of the burning houses” to save her child. (165). Initially shocked and frightened, Tomansín is “almost instantly … strengthened by the thought, ‘What would a real guard do?’” (165). He rushes into the burning building, grabs the child, and turns to leave. Halfway out he feels himself begin to lose consciousness. The turn Kneipple gives this narrative is predictably melodramatic: Probably he would never have emerged with the child he had so bravely tried to save, had not at that instant a heartening sound reached his ears. It was the bugle in the nearby campamento. The bugle! To duty it called him. An officer in the National Guard must not fail. Somehow he staggered forward and plunged through the door just as the fragile walls of the little house caved inwards; just as a detachment of the real National Guard under a real captain arrived on the scene. (165)

Once the National Guard arrives, they take over and put out the fire. The next day the town and the guardsmen hold a ceremony, where they celebrate the bravery of the make-believe soldiers. The boys are rewarded with

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

125

an invitation to dine with the guardsmen, having earned the privilege to enter the military camp instead of longingly observe from a distance. “Tomansín’s Company” exposes school children to alternative visions of modern boyhood, manhood, military service, citizenship, and leadership. Kneipple offers the children of the poor the option of pursuing ­military careers as soldiers or as officers in the National Guard. The boys witness how differently Puerto Rican men behave inside and outside of the military zone. They admire and chose to emulate an alternative model of manhood and masculinity, one shaped by colonial paternalism as well as by the racial segregation they observe among the training troops. Unlike the irrational, disorganized, and ineffectual civilians, military men make important interventions into traditional boyhood practices. Kneipple also suggests that if local leadership was not sufficient to the task at hand, the promise—and threat—of US intervention loomed. US military leadership would step in when the house was on fire.

Conclusion Kneipple’s short stories center the US military as the institution that could teach schoolchildren a new version of Puerto Rican history, provide an alternative example of manhood, and suggest aspirational versions of modern girlhood and boyhood. Kneipple’s colonial school literature erases the history of Puerto Rico before the arrival of the Americans in 1898 and creates a sharp break between the island’s Spanish colonial past and its future under US rule. Kneipple rewrites the history of war and colonial occupation. Americans were not invaders and occupiers, but rather benevolent, humanitarian, tutelary, and selfless actors who responded to local pleas for support and help following the 1899 San Ciriaco hurricane. If there had been a military intervention (an event never explicitly acknowledged in the short stories), it was by invitation (Pérez, The War). The stories define and promote Puerto Rico’s new colonial status. The only version of the relationship they acknowledge is one in which the island is permanently connected to the United States. The relationship between island and metropole might be hierarchical and unequal, but it is nonetheless interdependent. None of the three stories I examine acknowledge the basic facts of US empire and Puerto Rican history. Rather, they promote a new US-sponsored version of the island’s recent past and of the current and future relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.

126 

S. DEL MORAL

Kneipple’s child protagonists represent a particular combination of Puerto Rican heritage and US colonial education. School children learned that they were members of a new “imagined community,” a new colonial family now composed of a modern Puerto Rican boy and girl who chose the leadership and example of the US military man (Anderson, Imagined). Colonial education in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico emphasized English-language instruction and Americanization and prepared children like Manolín, Luisa, and Tomansín, unlike most adult Puerto Rican characters in Kneipple’s stories, to take advantage of the opportunities and transformations that came with US colonial rule. Kneipple’s stories suggested that modern colonial children grow up to assume leadership roles in the new Puerto Rico under American direction. If school children took heed of the lessons and examples provided by US military men, if they shed some of the traditional ideas of the older Puerto Rican generation, like Luisa and Tomansín, they too might emerge as future leaders. This colonial lesson, unfortunately, also asked school children to embrace an ideology that denigrated their parents and family traditions. Kneipple’s short stories were assigned to colonial classrooms as instructional material in English-language lessons. US colonial educators in Puerto Rico understood that English-language children’s literature was a foundational tool for Americanization. In service to the guiding ideology of the US colonial state, Kneipple’s school literature provided textbooks to help teachers inculcate school children with an alternative version of Puerto Rican history, a redefinition of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, and a modern version of colonial childhood and the new family. Acknowledgments  The author would like to thank the editors (L.  Brown Kennedy and Rachel Conrad), Rhonda Cobham-Sander, and Russell Lohse for their comments on early drafts of this chapter.

Notes 1. On the history of education, Americanization, and English-language instruction in Puerto Rico, see Cebollero, A School Language Policy; Muñiz Souffront, El problema del idioma; Negrón de Montilla, La americanización; and Osuna, A History of Education.

7  MODERN FAMILY, MODERN COLONIAL CHILDHOODS… 

127

2. On the history of US occupations in the Caribbean and Pacific at the turn of the century and into the 1930s, see Kramer, The Blood; LaFeber, The New Empire; McCoy and Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible; Pérez, The War; Renda, Taking Haiti; and Silva, Aloha Betrayed. 3. On the history of US citizenship for Puerto Ricans, see Trías Monge, Puerto Rico; Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity; and Venator-­ Santiago, Puerto Rico. 4. On the history of US empire and Puerto Rico, see Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People; Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construction of Identity; Sotomayor, The Sovereign Colony; and Trías Monge, Puerto Rico. 5. The glorification of the National Guard and acknowledgment that local leadership trained in US military methods would soon be tested might have represented Kneipple’s understanding of US military organization and training of “National Police” forces throughout the Caribbean in the late 1920s as the United States prepared to end US military occupations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books, 2006. Cabán, Pedro A. Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898–1932. Westview Press, 1999. Cebollero, Pedro A. A School Language Policy for Puerto Rico. Impr. Baldrich, 1945. Del Moral, Solsiree. Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952. U of Wisconsin P, 2013. Del Moral, Solsiree. “Language and Empire: Elizabeth Kneipple’s Colonial History of Puerto Rico.” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2019, pp. 56–86. Kneipple Van Deusen, Elizabeth. “Luisa’s Gift.” Stories of Porto Rico, Silver, Burdett and Company, 1926, pp. 83–96. Kneipple Van Deusen, Elizabeth. “Good Will.” Tales of Borinquen: Puerto Rico, Silver, Burdett and Company, 1928, pp. 51–85. Kneipple Van Deusen, Elizabeth. “Tomansín’s Company.” Tropical Tales (Porto Rico), Silver, Burdett and Company, 1929, pp. 151–168. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. U of North Carolina P, 2006. LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Cornell UP, 1963. McCoy, Alfred W., and Francisco A. Scarano, editors. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. U of Wisconsin P, 2009.

128 

S. DEL MORAL

Muñiz Souffront, Luis. El problema del idioma en Puerto Rico: Esfuerzos de la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico para alcanzar la solución del problema. Biblioteca de Autores Puertorriqueños, 1950. Navarro, José Manuel. Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908. Routledge, 2002. Negrón de Montilla, Aida. La americanización de Puerto Rico y el sistema de instrucción pública, 1900–1930. 2nd ed., Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1990. Osuna, Juan José. A History of Education in Puerto Rico. 2nd. ed., Editorial Universitaria, 1949. Pérez, Louis A. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography. U of North Carolina P, 1998. Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. U of North Carolina P, 2001. Rivera Ramos, Efrén. The Legal Construction of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico. American Psychological Association, 2001. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Duke UP, 2004. Sotomayor, Antonio. The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico. U of Nebraska P, 2016. Trías Monge, José. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. Yale UP, 1997. Venator Santiago, Charles R. Puerto Rico and the Origins of U.S. Global Empire: The Disembodied Shade. Routledge, 2015.

CHAPTER 8

Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books Karen Chandler

Twentieth-century children’s books about the controversial educator and political leader Booker T. Washington understandably have focused on his legacy as an advocate for education. As the founder and director of Tuskegee Institute, he implemented policies that became models for other institutions’ practice and won the support of white American power-­ brokers to secure his vision at a time of widespread anti-black discrimination. Although Washington was popular in his own day, he alienated many of his African American contemporaries, who were disturbed by his calculated refusals to denounce Jim Crow legislation and racist violence, dismissal of liberal arts education for African Americans, compromises with white supporters, and creation of a media machine that suppressed opinion differing from his own (Moses 66; Norrell 3, 6). Even now, many persons associate Washington with accommodations and compromises that favored white Americans and left African Americans disempowered.

K. Chandler (*) University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_8

129

130 

K. CHANDLER

Since the mid-twentieth century, historians such as W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Wilson J. Moses, and Robert J. Norrell have offered balanced assessments of Washington’s career. They have explained the rationale for his controversial decisions, shed light on neglected aspects of his leadership, such as his veiled attempts to challenge Jim Crow, and traced continuities between Washington’s economic and educational theories and those of his critics. Still, given this complicated legacy, it is surprising that Washington has been a frequent focus of youth biography.1 His leadership challenges the conventions of the genre, which usually foregrounds positive aspects of a biographical subject’s character or shows the process by which he or she exorcises problematic behaviors and attitudes and acts in more responsible ways. Many twentieth-century children’s books about Washington circumvent his contradictions by settling on aspects of his youth that apparently lack controversy, encourage easy identification with him, and anticipate his adult role as an educator. In this essay I show how two children’s illustrated biographies of Washington, Thomas Amper and Jeni Reeves’ Booker T. Washington (1998) and Marie Bradby and Chris Soentpiet’s More Than Anything Else (1995), exemplify these patterns. Both books focus on young Washington overcoming social obstacles to gaining an education. And both reinforce the common assumption that formal education brings opportunity and social success, shaping Washington’s experience to fit a myth of American achievement. Yet the two books serve different ideological ends, presenting opposing conceptions of the substance of, and supports for, Washington’s education. In doing so, they speak to their readers in quite different ways about black achievement and cultural belonging. Through close attention to the tension and interplay between Bradby’s words and Soentpiet’s pictures, I argue that More Than Anything Else offers a complex portrait of Washington’s achievement as a poor African American boy that affirms both his individual initiative and his culture’s resources. Where the illustrations emphasize the stark limitation of his poor working-class background, the words call attention to his black community’s epistemological contributions to his education. Booker T. Washington is a more unified book, with its pictures reflecting the word text’s message that literacy is important but secondary to the moral influence of white female mentors in Washington’s development. In offering competing visions of Washington’s affiliation to the African American community and to Euro-American institutions and traditions, the books provide opposing ideas about African American success. As they confront issues of aspiration and belonging, they speak not only to Washington’s

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

131

struggles but also to questions of inclusion and diversity affecting late twentieth-century American children. Booker T. Washington and More Than Anything Else deserve attention because they offer divergent responses to calls in the second half of the twentieth century for multicultural books and curricular diversification that would reflect the pluralism of US society and history. Multicultural literature was seen as a necessary counter to media that excluded or stereotyped indigenous persons, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ persons, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. Reformers called for culturally diverse literature and inclusive pedagogies that would benefit all students’ cognitive development and help address educational disparities that can result in minority students’ alienation from school. According to children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, “The desired effect was … ultimately to fulfill the promise of a truly democratic egalitarian society by making possible full meaningful participation of all its citizens, without regard to race” (“Selecting” 1). This involved recognizing alternatives to, as well as the limitations of, dominant cultural myths. Although Booker T. Washington seems to be Amper’s only book, Reeves, Bradby and Soentpiet have all contributed several books to the multicultural movement. Reeves has illustrated biographies of Frederick Douglass, Pocahontas, Enrique Esparza, and Babe Didrikson Zaharias (Reeves). Bradby’s books about twentieth-century black experience include a middle-­school novel and several picture books, including Momma, Where Are You From?, a collaboration with Soentpiet. He has illustrated books about Chinese migrant workers in nineteenth-century California, Christina King Farris’s picture-book memoir, My Brother Martin, Sharon Dennis Wyeth’s Something Beautiful, and multicultural poetry collections. Bradby and Soentpiet have received awards, citations, and positive critical attention for their representations of persons of color and for presenting historical perspectives and experiences long neglected in children’s literature (Bradby, “Marie Bradby”; Soentpiet). The two Washington biographies also deserve our attention because they represent two common, even ubiquitous, categories of children’s books that cater to early readers. A volume in Lerner Books’ “On My Own Biography” series, Booker T.  Washington is marketed as an educational resource for early readers, providing information about an historical figure’s achievements and presenting pictures that support the word text’s message. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lerner Books published volumes on Squanto, Abbie Burgess, the Wright brothers, and many other figures for

132 

K. CHANDLER

independent readers. Such volumes support primary-school curricular goals for social studies, particularly history.2 More Than Anything Else, published by industry-leader Scholastic, has the same audience and learning specifications, but it represents the category of more costly prestige publications whose high production values are manifest in heavy paper and lush illustrations.3 Such books can generate more buzz for their authors and illustrators, receive fuller reviews in journals such as School Library Journal, and earn endorsements from literacy and library associations. Yet both kinds of books are widely circulated and can play important roles in young readers’ and their adult sponsors’ understanding of historical figures’ struggle and achievement. Booker T.  Washington and More Than Anything Else contribute to a cultural narrative that endorses and even normalizes education as a foundation for gaining power and influence in society. At least as far back as the 1920s, books such as Elizabeth Ross Haynes’ Unsung Heroes (1921) and Walter Clinton Jackson’s A Boy’s Life of Booker T. Washington (1922) present Washington’s youthful educational pursuits as exemplary. Washington himself is a principal source for this approach, emphasizing in both of his autobiographies, An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work and Up from Slavery, the importance of personal qualities like diligence and defining learning as a central goal of his life. The popularity of Washington’s education story may result, at least in part, from the ways it reinforces certain American values and myths. These include the beliefs that hard work and determination lead to success and that an individual can transcend poverty. A related belief associates formal education with personal transformation and socioeconomic success, an association that cultural historian Harvey Graff has called “the literacy myth.” This myth is composed of assumptions, often unfounded, about the privilege and opportunity that knowing how to read and write brings an individual and the limitation inscribed by illiteracy (Graff and Duffy 36). Books that focus on Washington’s progression from illiteracy to literacy reinforce the importance of education as a springboard for success, often ignoring other important aspects of his experience. They can also interpret this arc in different ways. Although both biographies replay scenes from Washington’s narratives that illustrate his passion for learning and his surmounting of social obstacles, More Than Anything Else presents his pursuit of literacy as a personal journey infused with black cultural knowledge. This emphasis recalls the African American variant of the literacy myth that Robert Stepto, an

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

133

i­nfluential scholar on African American narrative, has theorized. Stepto has identified the association of literacy and freedom as a central paradigm in African American literature (18).4 In More Than Anything Else, this association propels a specifically black working-class trajectory of educational striving and achievement that is not reduced to a simple formula of assimilation but instead foregrounds black self-determination. Focusing on Washington’s youth in post-bellum Malden, West Virginia, More Than Anything Else reconstructs his struggles to learn to read and write within an African American world. The book portrays the arrival in Malden of a black teacher and the founding of a school for black children. It retells Washington’s account of not being able to take advantage of this school because of his family’s dependence on his wages as a laborer in salt and coal mines. The book also draws on both autobiographies’ characterization of his mother Jane Ferguson’s support for his efforts to learn and dramatizes Washington’s mention in An Autobiography of the great impact of his seeing a black man reading a newspaper before a group of laborers. More Than Anything Else ends with a fictionalized scene that consolidates and dramatizes the autobiographies’ record of Washington’s personal triumph in learning to read (An Autobiography 23–24, Up from Slavery 27–28). The title of Bradby and Soentpiet’s book signals the importance of education to Washington: as a boy he longed “more than anything else” to read (n.p.). The book focuses on the conflict between Washington’s will to learn and his position as a child laborer. Although many African Americans were gaining access to education in the years after the Civil War, Washington, instead, toiled along with his brother and stepfather at the numbing labor of shoveling and packing salt. Bradby’s prose indicates that in spite of his hardship, he sees education as a food that can sustain him: “My arms ache from lifting the shovel, but I do not think about the pain there. I think about the hunger still in my head—reading” (n.p.). More profound than hunger for food, Washington’s desire for literacy skills suggests that he understands education not only as a personal escape from physical hunger and material lack but also as a salve for his spirit. He sees learning as a way to help others learn, vowing to “work until I am the best reader in the country. Children will crowd around me, and I will teach them to read” (n.p.). Although Bradby foregoes Washington’s comparison in Up from Slavery of school to “paradise,” she presents education as a process and achievement that can transform other black persons’ lives and bring about a better society (7).5

134 

K. CHANDLER

More Than Anything Else champions literacy by relating it to freedom and opportunity and by opposing it to a life of menial labor, which several of Soentpiet’s illustrations define as stultifying. They suggest the poverty that dampened many African Americans’ passion for life and sharply contrast the aspiring Washington with surrounding representations of the rest of his community, who are largely faceless and downcast, apparently marked by a determinism that Washington transcends. In this way, the pictures convey the literacy myth’s association of illiteracy with social failure (Graff and Duffy 36, 39). In one illustration after another members of Washington’s community seem hopeless, with their shoulders bent and heads down, whether relaxing, working, or strolling. Their gaunt brown bodies, encased in patched brown and grey clothing, convey their enervation. Soentpiet’s palette of browns is heavy and restricting, with the colors anchoring his figures to the ground and opposing the light of knowledge and flights of imagination and desire. Washington is one of only a few characters who does not look at the ground—who is not bound to it and to soul-suppressing labor. Instead, he looks up at salt mounds, looks over at a man reading, and looks down at his book and his own writing. In one scene, he even stops to commune with a frog in a way that shows his sense of fun and his interest in acting beyond the utilitarian functions associated with other males in the family. Individuating Washington as searcher and seer, Soentpiet’s illustrations encourage young readers to identify with him and sense the possibility and hope that he embodies. These illustrations contribute to the idea that Washington’s emergence from poverty and acquisition of literacy were remarkable, heroic feats, because the odds were stacked against him. It is significant that in one of the final illustrations showing his moment of triumph, when he is able to read his name, Washington jumps for joy, leaving the ground and overcoming, at least symbolically, the post-bellum slavery stunting others in his community. Soentpiet keeps most of the human faces in the book in shadow, thereby de-emphasizing their individuality and power. Washington, by contrast, is a lamp-bearer in three illustrations and is near lamps, a candle or the family hearth in others. The illustrations imply that Washington is rare in his intellectual curiosity and ambition, and that other African Americans are defined by social stasis. Soentpiet’s pictures vividly portray the oppressive power of whiteness and define Washington as a hero who faces and challenges this power. Metonymically, through images of massive heaps of salt, Soentpiet figures the imbalance of white and black (or brown) power. According to his

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

135

­ ictures, African Americans bend to the demands of salt mining. And p though one illustration presents the young Washington in such a pose, in the two others showing the salt works, Washington stands or sits before the mounds of salt, looking at them as if he knew their secret, their hold on him and others. He challenges this hold, looking directly at this embodiment of the black community’s defeat. The salt, according to Bradby’s text, “is heavy and rough. The shiny white crystals leave cuts on your hands, your arms, your legs, the soles of your feet” (n.p.). It dwarfs the workers, and its whiteness blocks, for the most part, the blue of the sky and the greenery of undeveloped land in the distance. More Than Anything Else insists that Washington stands apart both from this white oppression and from the resulting enervation that black persons embody. Yet if Soentpiet’s images cast a deterministic pall on other members of the black community as they figure Washington’s distinction, Bradby’s prose complicates this view of black working-class subjection. She presents Booker as the first-person narrator, and his words depart from the negating pictures in ways that counter stereotypes of black intellectual deficiency and that underscore the resourcefulness of African American culture as a whole. The resulting combination of words and pictures complicates the book’s message about African American poverty and its effects on community members. In an ironic juxtaposition of picture and words, Booker notes the freedom African Americans are embracing in a post-­ bellum industrial economy: All people are free to go where they want and do what they can. Book learning swims freely around in my head and I hold it long as I want. Back in town, coal miners, river men, loggers, and coopers gather on the corner. They are worn-out as me, but full of tales. (n.p.)

Here Bradby emphasizes a sense of possibility through her short action verbs: “live,” “go,” “can,” “swims,” and “hold.” The persons she is referring to are “worn-out,” but they are also imaginative and generous, given to sharing their visions through storytelling. Although Soentpiet’s accompanying illustration presents the workers as mostly passive and faceless, they are seated around a fire that recalls the light associated with Washington. Words and pictures combine to suggest that black working-­ class culture is also a source of knowledge. Bradby’s characterization in this instance prepares for her fuller portrait of how Washington’s embrace

136 

K. CHANDLER

of learning is not merely assimilative but instead reflective of African American values and tradition. More Than Anything Else thus demonstrates how a largely oral culture does not conflict with, but rather complements, a culture of books and reading by featuring African American “sponsors of literacy,” composition and rhetoric researcher Deborah Brandt’s term for persons and institutions that effect the acquisition of literacy (19). First, Bradby presents Washington’s mother Jane Ferguson as a key support. In one scene, Washington goes to her specifically to voice his desire to learn to read; in another scene, she hands him a book she has procured for him. Ferguson also offers her son a framework for understanding how he should relate to the book’s foreign codes, conflating the marks with the musicality of the black vernacular: “She can’t read it herself. But she knows this is something called the alphabet. She thinks it is a sing-y kind of thing. A song on paper” (n.p.). In presenting Ferguson as a support for his learning, Bradby draws upon Washington’s characterization in Up from Slavery, which emphasizes her ingenuity in providing for her children’s needs: In all my efforts to learn to read my mother shared full my ambition, and sympathized with me and aided me in every way that she could. Though she was totally ignorant, so far as mere book knowledge was concerned, she had high ambitions for her children, and a large fund of good hard, common sense which seemed to enable her to meet and master every situation. (28)

This statement, like Bradby’s interpretation of Ferguson’s influence, shows an unlettered working-class individual’s transformative power. Yet Bradby emphasizes not only Ferguson’s individual drive, but also her cultural inheritance, which she shares with Booker and which supports his learning. Here again, Bradby suggests that Washington’s triumph is not idiosyncratic but rather an outgrowth of an African American cultural experience that conceives of communication and sharing knowledge as important. Books are singers, and readers are potentially listeners, even accompanists; thus Bradby emphasizes the interrelation, rather than the difference, between print and oral cultures. As Washington struggles to wrest meaning from his book after his hard work at the mine, he explains, “I stare at the marks and try to imagine their song.” In desperation, he ponders, “sometimes I feel I am trying to jump without legs. And my thoughts get slippery…. I can’t catch the tune of what I see. I get a salt-­ shoveling pain and feel my dreams are slipping away” (n.p.). Finally, an

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

137

African American man visiting the community helps Washington decipher the marks on the pages of his book. Washington sees him as a “brown face of hope,” as a model of social leadership, who embodies the idea of reading as a gift to oneself and to others (n.p.). In presenting reading as an experience that grows out of Washington’s desire to know the world and benefit others, More Than Anything Else roots this experience in an oppressed working-class black community. In claiming reading as working class and relating it to black vernacular culture, the book colors the literacy myth black, acknowledging the historical importance of literacy in black communities during the nineteenth century (Williams 1–3). It recalls Arna Bontemps’ portrait of Washington in Young Booker (1972) as a person embedded in his black community rather than someone who fits better outside it because of his intellectual aspirations. This emphasis on Washington’s continuity with his social environment makes his literacy and his cognitive and moral development seem home-grown, rather than manifesting white mainstream influence. In ending her narrative with the protagonist Booker’s reading of his name, Bradby keeps the focus on his achievement within a black world that does not call on him to compromise his ideals: the word he reads, “Booker,” affirms his identity. Bradby emphasizes both the power of the written word, specifically, his name, and young Washington’s ability to “hold” onto this visual sign. And Soentpiet’s accompanying illustration complements this affirmation, placing a lantern next to Booker’s glowing, smiling face, and the large letters of his name written in dirt. Although his socioeconomic status has not changed, the final pages of More Than Anything Else suggest that he is transformed, risen up from the oppression that still gripped many African Americans in the decades after the Civil War. This Booker’s joy in learning not only reflects the historical Washington’s enthusiasm for gathering knowledge but also serves to inspire Bradby and Soentpiet’s young readers. Although Amper and Reeves’ Booker T.  Washington provides similar assurances about Washington’s youthful aspirations and achievement, it does not insist on the power and resourcefulness of black working-class culture. Instead it provides a simpler, more unified message about Washington’s early personal success. More problematically, the book also provides a racialized message about the power, even dominance, of white culture. Booker T.  Washington tells a more extensive story than Bradby and Soentpiet’s book, covering Washington’s years in Hale’s Ford, Virginia

138 

K. CHANDLER

before the Civil War’s end; his life as a child laborer in Malden, West Virginia; and his journey to Hampton Institute, where he will be able to focus on his formal education. The book ends with Washington being admitted after passing a character and skills test. Booker T.  Washington establishes the importance of literacy with eight of Reeves’ pictures showing the child Washington with books. This number includes a cover illustration of him in a mine with a head light illumining a book. A slightly different version of this image appears within the narrative, across from a picture of Washington seated at a table with an open book while a black male teacher stands behind him. In other illustrations, Washington holds books or stands near them. Supplementing these images is a picture of a soldier reading a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation as Washington, his family, other enslaved black people and upper-class white persons respond. Collectively, these images support Amper’s word text, which presents literacy as an object of Washington’s desire, as a metonymy for freedom, and as an endeavor divorced from the grueling menial work that Reeves’ illustrations associate with his black male companions. Like More Than Anything Else, Booker T.  Washington emphasizes Washington’s distinctiveness by first foregrounding his desire to learn to read and write. Reeves’ image of Washington with his brother working at a mill offers one example of this pattern. While the brother pays attention to the work of shoveling salt, Washington looks into the distance at other children meeting to attend school, thus paralleling the Bradby book’s characterization of his uniqueness. Amper’s text explains that Washington and his brother labor from before dawn to after dusk, but it is silent about the unnamed brother’s vision and interiority, noting, “The worst part was what Booker could see. From where he worked, he saw boys and girls walking to school. Booker wished he were with them” (13). Amper’s words and Reeves’ pictures suggest that Washington has aspirations that his brother does not share. For their Booker, the school-going children are objects of desire, paralleling the white schoolchildren who appear earlier in the book and registering the benefits of freedom that are closed off to the very poor. As in the Bradby book, Booker envisions his education as a way of demonstrating his proficiency and sharing what he has learned: “He wanted to find the answer to a question and tell the whole class. He wanted to look at a sign or a newspaper and tell people what the black letters said” (9). For the excluded Washington, learning is not a perfunctory matter, but a means of enriching himself and others. As in More Than Anything Else, the emphasis on his desire to be generous to and lead ­others

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

139

foreshadows his career as a public servant—both teacher and advocate for southern African Americans. Yet Amper and Reeves’ book differs from More Than Anything Else by associating print culture with whiteness, specifically white femininity, and presenting white women as gatekeepers who can facilitate his access to education. Both through its words and pictures, Booker T.  Washington makes white culture, manifested as white girlhood or womanhood, the standard that young Washington longs, and ultimately, gets, to follow. In the first section of the book set in Hale’s Ford, Amper and Reeves contrast Washington to a white girl, Miss Ellen, the daughter of his master. Both children are walking to school, and though he is carrying a book, it belongs to her. Washington does not enter the school: according to Amper, only “Miss Ellen went in. Booker went home” (7). This declarative statement is followed by the explanation, “He was a slave. It was against the law for slaves to go to school” (7). Washington’s lowly social condition is underscored in the accompanying picture that shows the gowned Ellen walking in front of Washington, who wears a long shirt with no pants visible. Ellen is dressed as a young lady, whereas Washington is dressed as a deprived child—lacking the dignity of pants and full shoes. Similarly, a subsequent illustration shows him looking through a window at white children within the school, emphasizing that slavery limits his mobility and opportunity. For Amper and Reeves’ young readers, these images of a black boy excluded from a place of learning may pointedly convey the injustice of the racism and segregation of Washington’s time. Booker T. Washington goes on to associate white culture-bearers with Booker’s salvation and minimizes the influence of his black community. The book does include the image of the black male teacher standing with Booker and pointing to an open book. Yet Amper does not identify the teacher by name, as he does Booker’s white mentors. The text also does not name Jane Ferguson, who seems to be present in at least three illustrations, though it is hard to be certain, because the woman pictured does not have a consistent, identifying appearance. By contrast, Reeves highlights the white Viola Ruffner, Booker’s employer in Malden, and Mary F. Mackie, the headmistress at Hampton. Ruffner and Mackie are associated with learning, both formal and moral education. They represent white benevolence and middle-class standards of decorum, industry, and self-constraint, which are indispensable, the text and illustrations suggest, for Washington’s progress. Whereas the unnamed black teacher appears in a single, half-page image, the book presents Ruffner in three illustrations,

140 

K. CHANDLER

including two full-page pictures. Only one of these illustrations includes books or alludes to academic study, but Ruffner teaches Booker to set high standards for himself and to work to exceed other people’s expectations. Reeves’ positioning of Booker and Ruffner with respect to each other underscores his submission to her. In one illustration, the pair stands on Ruffner’s porch, she on the step above him, while each grips a part of a broom. Booker looks up at Ruffner, and she looks down at him. Donning a discreet dress and apron, she seems kind and assured, and he, holding a bucket and with bare feet, is respectful. Although their relationship is hierarchical, Amper emphasizes that by accepting the role of servant, Washington is able to escape labor that does not feed him intellectually and socially. Washington’s work for Ruffner includes mostly house and yard work, but the text and illustration associate her and her upper-­middle-­ class dwelling with opportunity: behind the pair is a door which is partly opened, one of several portals presented in the book. Unlike the closed school door in Virginia, this open door may suggest that Booker’s relationship with Ruffner will allow him access to experiences unattainable through his working-class position. In putting such weight on Washington’s connections with white mentors, Amper and Reeves circumscribe his agency, even though the book’s final image of Washington and Ruffner acknowledges that her role as mentor includes supporting Washington’s own intellectual endeavors. It is another full-page illustration with them on the porch, but the composition is tighter: Ruffner clutches an apple and small lunch pail, presumably for Booker, who is carrying two books and a hat. Again, she looks down on him, but he looks past her, suggesting that he is positioning himself for great things, possibly a role as a social visionary. Yet Amper’s text suggests that their relationship depends on Booker’s ability to learn how to conform to Ruffner’s standards and to use his understanding of her standards and beliefs to get what he wants. According to Amper’s text, to perform a task well, “he pretended he was Mrs. Ruffner,” which entails anticipating her criticism (seeing “everything that was wrong”) and looking for things he would usually overlook (22). One outcome of his capacity to perform to Ruffner’s expectations is that he gains her approval to attend school occasionally. His obedience and conformity are central to their relationship, and Amper suggests that the path to success for Washington depends less on learning to read and write than on taking advantage of opportunities with powerful white associates. Booker T. Washington affirms this message in its concluding episode, in which Washington passes the cleaning

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

141

test Mackie gives him to determine his fitness for study at Hampton. Reeves’ last picture juxtaposes Booker and his broom with a set of books on a desk, suggesting that access to books depends on his effective performance of menial labor. With its focus on character development and mentoring, Booker T. Washington displaces literacy from the center of the plot to the status of performance reward. Although the goal and practice of reading and writing remain important to Booker, Amper foregrounds the Ruffner work ethic as his means of advancement. Although this acknowledgment that it takes more than book learning to secure success is a corrective to the literacy myth, the narrative still simplifies matters. Amper and Reeves suggest that it is white women’s mentoring that orients his hard work and determination. Amper’s portrait of Washington offers little indication that his black family and communal culture held much direct bearing on his cognitive growth. Indeed they seem to be forces that must be left behind in his assimilation to white middle-class standards. Family, community, and ethnic heritage, in Amper and Reeves’ book, serve as foils to Washington’s achievement and future advancement. As opposed to Soentpiet’s final picture in More Than Anything Else of Booker at home celebrating his ability to read his name, at the close of Booker T. Washington he stands in a classroom, looking past his broom and from behind a row of books. Amper refers to his “pride” and realization that “his dream had finally come true” (46). The smiling Booker, having been assured a place in the school, is partly framed by the broom handle and books. Although these objects symbolize his future commitment to practical education and basic literacy, they also suggest containment and support the text’s message of conformity and subservience to the dominant culture. Amper’s focus on Washington’s assimilation has some important implications for young readers. In identifying Miss Mackie’s and Mrs. Ruffner’s values as foundations of Washington’s philosophy and practice, the book lays out an approach to education that foregrounds Euro-American values. In this respect Amper’s Booker T. Washington seems to confirm the concern of African American youth described by educational theorist Patrick Finn that in the United States school is steeped in Euro-American values to the exclusion of minority cultures’ perspectives (Finn 42). This certainly reflects the message in Booker T. Washington that for a black student to succeed he must bend to fit white standards, and abandon or suppress those aspects of identity that are not aligned with a white-dominated society’s values. Booker T. Washington suggests that Washington represents

142 

K. CHANDLER

an educational process that runs on conformity rather than cultural inclusion and innovation. Where More Than Anything Else suggests that Booker learns to read and write by building on what he already knows and on what his black culture has afforded him, in Booker T. Washington the white world underpins Booker’s vision. Booker T.  Washington and More Than Anything Else, then, represent opposing positions in late twentieth-century debates about American multiculturalism. Booker T.  Washington fits the criteria upheld by Diane Ravitch, an education policy analyst and former Assistant Secretary of Education. In supporting the push for diversifying school curricula, Ravitch praised efforts that she labeled “pluralistic multiculturalism,” in which ethnic and racial groups’ struggles and achievements were incorporated into a more inclusive version of traditional narratives about American achievement that acknowledged values that all Americans shared (339, 341). Booker’s poverty and his subsequent passing of Ruffner’s and Mackie’s tests identify him in Amper and Reeves’ portrayal, as a black version of a quintessentially American success story. Yet this approach to characterizing African Americans is one that Bishop and many other advocates for diverse books for children criticize because of its insufficient attention to the way black identity is influenced by the particularities of black culture (“Reflections” 7). By contrast, More Than Anything Else epitomizes the kind of culturally sensitive literature that Bishop sees as indispensable for correcting the biases and omissions in mainstream narratives and official histories (Bishop, “Reflections” 7; Johnson 2, 73–74). The book offers an interpretation of Washington’s youth that demonstrates an African American child can be successful by relying on his particular talents and the supports of his home and communal culture and that he does not have to fit into a model of white success. In promoting a black boy’s successful struggle to gain access to education, Booker T. Washington and More Than Anything Else both center on young Washington’s subjectivity. Yet the latter presents the possibility that Washington’s acquisition of literacy is distinctly African American and thus an alternative to the kind of conformity to white practices that Amper and Reeves’ Washington enacts. In associating Washington’s literacy with the sounds and rhythms of black working-class life and culture, Bradby encourages us to rethink the dominance of white literacy and to consider the implications of Stepto’s concept of an African American literacy myth that reflects distinctly black creative and intellectual energies. This message resonates with many children’s books authored by African American

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

143

authors, such as Walter Dean Myers, Patricia McKissack, and Joyce Hansen, who have been concerned with placing African American characters within a black cultural context. The message is especially highlighted when it is compared to Amper and Reeves with their stress on the whiteness of culture. Reading these two biographies together serves as a reminder of the important cultural work that children’s literature can do. In reconstructing Booker T.  Washington’s early passion for learning, the books offer narratives of black achievement that convey distinct ideas about black culture and individuality and about African Americans’ relationship to the dominant culture. More Than Anything Else and Booker T.  Washington open up questions not only about Washington’s early life but also about his relevance for later generations of young readers. Among these are African American boys who suffer a disproportionate rate of disciplinary interventions that take them out of elementary- and secondary-school classrooms, and thus make school an alien space (Monroe 102). Drawing on research from the 1970s through the early 2000s, education professor Carla Monroe finds that the student behavior and teachers’ and school administrators’ perceptions that lead to black boys’ office visits, suspensions, and expulsions manifest incongruities between African American boys’ home and communal cultures and the expectations of school. Booker T. Washington and More Than Anything Else speak to this problem. If the former confirms that black boys can find a place for themselves in educational systems by learning to subordinate their energies to the system, the latter suggests the possibility that black boys, like Bradby’s Booker, can synthesize the cultures of home and school and succeed in being and expressing themselves in a larger world.

Notes 1. See Connolly, 198, for a discussion of publishers’ focus on a limited number of African American biographical subjects. 2. Scholastic also has a page devoted to Amper and Reeves’ book. One difference between the listings is that Lerner recommends the book for children in grades 2 through 4, but Scholastic recommends it for children in pre-­ kindergarten through second grades. I first purchased the book at a Scholastic Book Fair when my son was a kindergartner. 3. More Than Anything Else first appeared in hardcover with a suggested US retail price of $15.95, and after winning the International Reading

144 

K. CHANDLER

Association Award and many other honors, a paperback edition followed in 1997, the same year actor Malcolm Jamal-Warner read the book on PBS’s Storytime. 4. Stepto has maintained that “the pursuit of freedom and literacy” is a “pregeneric myth” in African American culture (18). This myth, according to Stepto, determines the structure and content of much African American literature, including antebellum slave narratives and twentieth-century fiction and autobiography. 5. For a discussion of the historical tendency within black communities for individuals to teach what they had learned, see Brandt 127–129.

Works Cited Amper, Thomas. Booker T. Washington. Illustrated by Jeni Reeves. Lerner, 1998. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Reflections on the Development of African American Children’s Literature.” Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 38, no. 2, 2012, pp. 5–13. Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Selecting Literature for a Multicultural Classroom.” Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom, edited by Violet J.  Harris, Christopher-Gordon, 1997, pp. 1–19. Bontemps, Arna. Young Booker: Booker T.  Washington’s Early Days. Dodd, Mead, 1972. Bradby, Marie. Marie Bradby: Children’s Author, Writer. www.mariebradby.com/. Accessed 1 April 2018. Bradby, Marie. More than Anything Else. Illustrated by Chris K.  Soentpiet. Scholastic, 1995. Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge UP, 2001. Connolly, Paula T. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010. U of Iowa P, 2013. Finn, Patrick. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest. SUNY P, 1999. Graff, Harvey. The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-­ Century City. Academic P, 1979. Graff, Harvey, and John Duffy. “The Literacy Myth.” Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons: New Studies in Literacy. Edited by Graff. Transaction, 2011. pp. 35–47. Johnson, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Promise and Pedagogy of African American Literature for Youth. Greenwood, 1990. Monroe, Carla. “African American Boys and the Discipline Gap: Balancing Educators’ Uneven Hand.” Educational Horizons, vol. 84, no. 2, 2006, pp. 102–111. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. “Of Mr. Robert J. Norrell and Others.” Review Essay. Alabama Review, vol. 63, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 62–71.

8  READING FOR SUCCESS: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON’S PURSUIT… 

145

Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T.  Washington. Harvard UP, 2009. Ravitch, Diane. “Multiculturalism: E pluribus plures.” American Scholar, vol. 59, no. 3, 1990, pp. 337–354. Reeves, Jeni. Jeni Reeves. www.jenireeves.com/default.htm. Accessed 1 April 2018. Soentpiet, Chris. Chris Soentpiet. www.soentpiet.com/book_index.html. Accessed 1 April 2018. Stepto, Robert. “Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition; The Reconstruction of Instruction.” Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by Dexter Fisher and Stepto. MLA, 1979. pp. 8–24. Washington, Booker T. An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work. J. Nichols, 1901. Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ washstory/washin.html. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Doubleday, 1900, 1901. Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/washington/washing.html. Williams, Heather Andrea. Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. U of North Carolina P, 2007.

PART III

Identity and Displacement: Narrating History and Culture

CHAPTER 9

“I remember. Oh, I remember”: Traumatic Memory, Agency, and the American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers Adrienne Kertzer

Published shortly before and after the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988), Han Nolan’s If I Should Die Before I Wake (1994), and Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld’s Anne Frank and Me (2001) utilize time travel to teach American youth about the Holocaust. In so doing, they offer different perspectives on what are the lessons Americans should take from the Holocaust and who are the Americans who need to learn these lessons. They also offer radically different portrayals of the elderly survivors the young protagonists meet before and after their travels. Undoubtedly contributing to the difference between Yolen’s traumatized survivors and those we find in the 1999 television film adaptation of The Devil’s Arithmetic, as well as If I Should Die and Anne Frank and Me was Steven Spielberg’s creation in 1994 of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Dedicated to recording testimonies by Holocaust survivors and witnesses, the foundation helped to establish a model of the

A. Kertzer (*) Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_9

149

150 

A. KERTZER

survivor as a heroic witness whose testimony would educate others. This model dominates not just the portrayal of the survivor in post-1994 time-­ travel texts; it also informs their depictions of the time traveler and the actions she takes. Although these texts resemble time-slip narrative in that there is no rational explanation for how the protagonists move from the American present to the Holocaust past, they deviate from other time-slip fiction in striking ways. Unlike many time-slip novels that offer “the excitement of discovering and entering someone else’s history” (Cosslett 247), the protagonists in Holocaust time travel are horrified to discover themselves in Nazi-occupied Europe. They most definitely do not want to be there. While this might seem to support Jerome de Groot’s observation that time-slip fiction “undermines the subject’s agency … because it is involuntary, unsought” (52), all of these texts insist, albeit ambiguously at times, on the protagonist’s agency, either in the Holocaust past (The Devil’s Arithmetic), the post-Holocaust present (If I Should Die), or in the case of Anne Frank and Me, in both. The insistence upon agency also accounts for the novels’ treatment of traumatic memories. With the exception of Yolen’s novel, no elderly Holocaust survivors in these texts suffer traumatic memories that impede their ability to speak to the young. Similarly, any traumatic memories the time travelers possess are carefully situated so that they do not interfere with their witness, nor their ability to take action. In both If I Should Die and Anne Frank and Me, the adolescent time travelers return to their present as survivors who take up the burden of testifying by rescuing vulnerable children: Hilary Burke in If I Should Die reveals where a Jewish boy has been imprisoned; Nicole Burns in Anne Frank and Me rescues her younger sister from the internet sites that question the legitimacy of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. Only The Devil’s Arithmetic does not end with the rescue of a contemporary child. Instead it gestures toward a different understanding of the purpose of Holocaust time travel, one in which the attainment of memory is enough. As Hannah Stern, Yolen’s protagonist declares at the end of the novel: “I remember. Oh, I remember” (164). But what does it mean to remember when one is a time traveler and in what sense might we call the memories Hannah achieves traumatic? According to Lisa Woolfork, time travel in African American texts permits the time traveler “to experience the [traumatic] event as it occurred and to recognize it as trauma while it is happening” (27). In this, she contests Cathy Caruth’s influential view that trauma is an unclaimed experience:

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

151

“that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (Caruth 91–92). Caruth’s view of traumatic memory appears to have little to do with a form of writing that seems by definition to prioritize experiencing traumatic events over belatedly and imperfectly remembering them. In “An Experiential Act,” an essay based on a lecture Yolen gave just prior to the publication of The Devil’s Arithmetic, she insists that time travel helps readers “remember as if they had been there, without having to come back …. with the long numbers scorched into their arms” (249). Such vicarious memory hardly seems traumatic given that readers “remember as if they had been there” but are not permanently marked. I begin therefore by addressing the difficulty of locating traumatic memory in The Devil’s Arithmetic. I then analyze how the novel’s willingness to engage with the traumatic memories of Holocaust survivors is erased in the film adaptation. In my third section, I turn to Nolan’s If I Should Die which, unlike Yolen’s text, locates traumatic memory in the protagonist’s pre-Holocaust life. The relationship between different concepts of heroism and the American identity of Holocaust time travelers is the focus of my final section. In all of the texts I analyze, time travel enables the young protagonist to rescue another child. The location of traumatic memory not only affects whether the rescues take place in the Holocaust past or the post-Holocaust present but also foregrounds opposing rationales for teaching the Holocaust to American young people, rationales which draw on significantly different conceptions of what constitutes the time traveler’s American identity.

Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic: Three Ways of Looking at Traumatic Memory The Devil’s Arithmetic is a much-debated text in American scholarship on Holocaust children’s literature. Scholars disagree regarding its pedagogical value, the function of its reliance on time travel, and the degree to which its heroine, twelve-year-old Jewish American protagonist Hannah Stern, retains her present-day memories after she mysteriously shifts from a Passover Seder in her grandparents’ Bronx apartment to a different identity (that of the orphan Chaya Abramowicz) in 1942 Poland. Quickly deported from a shtetl to an unnamed concentration camp, she ultimately chooses to die so that her friend Rivka might live, a choice that time travel

152 

A. KERTZER

permits Hannah (but not Chaya) to survive. The novel ends soon after Hannah’s return to the present and her recognition that her great-aunt Eva bears a tattooed number that is identical to Rivka’s. Yolen’s novel does not quite fit Woolfork’s approach to time-travel narratives. Although Yolen relies on Woolfork’s bodily epistemology—for example, when Hannah sings Yiddish songs in Poland, Yolen writes that the words emerge “as if her mouth remembered what her mind did not” (54)—she also works within a Freudian model of trauma in which trauma is prompted by an extreme single event, a model which Woolfork critiques. Nor does Yolen’s approach fit Travis L.  Martin and Owen R. Horton’s premise that a Caruthian lens provides insight into the temporal paradoxes they find in contemporary time-travel films. Martin and Horton conclude that in these films “trauma is a prerequisite to time travel” (198). However, in “An Experiential Act,” Yolen provides different reasons for Hannah’s time travel: “the great neediness in her family of Holocaust survivors, the open seder door, and the familiar childhood chant ‘Ready or not, here I come’” (246). Yolen’s language does not suggest that Hannah is driven by a compulsion to return to an unclaimed experience of her own. On the contrary, she is compelled to time travel because she has no desire to learn more about the past. Despite Yolen’s rationale, The Devil’s Arithmetic engages with three different conceptions of traumatic memory: traumatic memory as the intense memory that follows the experience of a traumatic event, traumatic memory as temporally disordered memory characterized by fragments and flashbacks, and traumatic memory as located in narrative absences. While the first definition suits a narrative that ends with Hannah’s passionate declaration of memory, it is hard to know in what sense the memory produced by Hannah’s time travel is traumatic, given that Yolen’s ending is so abrupt. Interested in how the time-travel genre can function as a “dialogic narrative” that moves readers beyond the call to memory to engage with questions of action, Michael J. Martin has observed that the novel fails to show what Hannah does with the memory she gains. Only four pages recount what happens after Hannah returns to the present and rejoins the Seder. Most scholarship on The Devil’s Arithmetic scrupulously avoids the words “traumatic memory.” Daniel Feldman, in an astute essay examining how “role-play allows Hannah to experience traumatic reality without suffering real consequences” (100), uses “traumatic” as an adjective to modify many nouns, but never to modify “memory.” Although Feldman does

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

153

not hesitate to refer to the Holocaust as “traumatic history” (103), he does not clarify whether the “Holocaust memory” (103) produced by the novel is in any way traumatic memory, which surely might be regarded as one of the “real consequences” of “traumatic reality” (100). Most scholars also avoid the words “traumatic memory” when assessing what happens to Hannah’s memory of her present-day life once she is deported. However, references by some to Hannah’s “fragmented” memory (Tribunella 119) and “fragmentation of the self” (Stewart 235) suggest a second conception of traumatic memory, in which the survivor of traumatic events is subject to flashbacks and inexplicable memory fragments. Hannah clearly experiences such memory fragments, but because time travel disrupts the relationship between time and memory, they are fragments from her contemporary world, not the Holocaust world she witnesses. Time travel thus permits Hannah to possess two kinds of memory, in that the witnessing of the Holocaust (the past) is not impeded by the fragmented memories of life in New Rochelle, New York that she also experiences. This temporal paradox is strikingly unlike the paradox that concerns Caruth; in The Devil’s Arithmetic, Hannah’s fragmented memories are of the life she had before she entered the past. A Caruthian interpretation would require that Hannah’s fragmented memories enable her to experience what she could not experience during the traumatic event but this hardly fits the content of her dreams. In keeping with the distinction Freud draws between traumatic nightmares and “the wish-fulfilling tendency of dreams in general” (“Beyond” 139), Hannah does not need to work through her fragmented dream memories; all that is necessary is that she return safely to the present. While one advantage of Hannah’s ability to witness so coherently is that child readers are not confused by what she witnesses, the fragmentation of her contemporary memories also enables Yolen to explore a question implicit in her construction of a time traveler who can still remember “bits and pieces of her classroom discussions about the Holocaust” (72). Would knowing what the Nazis intended have made any difference? Early in her time travel, Hannah is tormented by the deported Jews’ refusal to pay attention to her warnings. But as she observes them “naked and weaponless” (91), she comes to question whether her foreknowledge benefits anyone and chooses to say nothing about what she knows. However, her silence is no longer a matter of choice when her head is shaved and her foreknowledge is shattered. For following the shock of the loss of her hair, Hannah suffers a radical loss of memory: “she realized with a sudden awful

154 

A. KERTZER

panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past” (94). “Shorn of memory” (94), she does not regain her confidence that what she recalls of her pre-time-travel life is true until the last few pages of the penultimate chapter. Hamida Bosmajian (144), Susan Stewart (234), and Michael J. Martin (320) assert that Hannah retains her present-day memories throughout her time travel possibly because the narrator continues to refer to her as Hannah even when her memories become “camp memories only” (135). Although Martin also observes that “Hannah rarely forgets who she truly is” (320), his argument that the novel fails to fulfill its potential is heavily dependent on his conclusion that Hannah does not forget who she is. In this context, Hannah experiences inexplicable memory fragments often conveyed in italics which signal their temporal distance from the girl who can make no sense of them: words such as “clock radio” (105) and “February,” and the name of her teacher “Mr. Unsward” (109). Such slips of memory cannot compete with the “much more vivid memory” (109) that Hannah is accumulating in the camp. The third conception of traumatic memory, as one located in narrative absences, is one that scholarship has overlooked, which is not surprising given how the novel’s focalization on Hannah deflects attention from the traumatic memories her great-aunt Eva may well have. Eva is highly reluctant to speak about her memories, and Yolen’s narrative deflects attention further from Eva to her Holocaust survivor brother. When Hannah enters her grandparents’ apartment, her grandfather Will (Eva’s brother) is “waving his fist and screaming” (8) at Holocaust images on the television. Yolen emphasizes that such behavior is typical of Will, and a continuing source of embarrassment to Hannah who fears his “crazy” (10) behavior. In contrast, Eva apologizes for Will, and readers are thus encouraged to regard her as the sane survivor. However, if we accept that Hannah’s time travel reveals the truth about the sacrifice leading to Rivka’s survival, then we might consider whether Eva too has traumatic memories. Whether or not Yolen intended this reading, her representation of Eva foregrounds significant narrative absences that are often regarded as symptomatic of traumatic memory. The novel’s abrupt conclusion, its focus on Hannah’s memory, and its minimal depiction of Eva hint by omission at the possibility that Eva is unable or unwilling to talk about her own traumatic memories. Prior to her time travel, Hannah barely notices her great-aunt; no one satisfactorily explains why Eva lives with her brother; and Hannah knows nothing about

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

155

what happened to Eva during the war. Instead, during the Seder after Will starts to refer to Eva’s thirst in the camp, the narrator comments “he never had to finish the sentence, for no one could withstand the promise of guilt” (16). The comment simultaneously draws attention to Will’s traumatic memories and to how the family’s concern about him reduces their attention to Eva. Since Rivka is ten years old when Hannah encounters her in the camp, readers can only speculate what Eva would “have given for a little glass of watered wine” (16) when she was thirteen. Survivors of traumatic events may be silent for a variety of reasons: they may be ashamed, they may feel guilty, or they may believe that no one around them is interested. Whatever accounts for Eva’s reticence, the elderly survivors in other time-travel texts are far more willing to speak about their memories.

Erasing Holocaust Survivors’ Traumatic Memories in the Film Adaptation of The Devil’s Arithmetic The possibility that Holocaust survivors may be unable or unwilling to speak to their memories disappears in the television film adaptation of The Devil’s Arithmetic. Emphasizing traumatic memory as the intense memory that follows the experience of a traumatic event, the film supports Yolen’s statement that time travel offers “a straight road into memory, an experiential act for an understanding of the past” (“An Experiential” 247).1 The differences between the novel and film that produce this turn away from the novel’s multifaceted representation of traumatic memory include alterations of character relationships, a depiction of Hannah’s haircut that displays its brutality but not its shattering impact upon her memory, and an expansion of the ending that leaves no doubt that the intense memory Hannah has gained has salutary results. Some of the alterations from the novel to the film are obviously intended to help viewers; in the film, when Hannah Stern time travels, she becomes Chana Stern—a name that more readily links her to her present-day identity than the name (Chaya Abramowicz) given in the novel. Others revise character relationships to encourage attention to the familial losses produced by the Holocaust: thus Rivkah [sic] is Hannah’s relative, not just a girl she meets in the camp. Many of the changes help viewers connect past and present by focusing on the close relationship between present-day Hannah and Eva who in the film is Hannah’s aunt, not her great-aunt as in the novel. Because the film omits Hannah’s grandfather, instead of his

156 

A. KERTZER

initiating Hannah’s time travel as in the novel, it is Eva who invites Hannah to open the door to Elijah—an invitation that Rivkah repeats later in the film when the girls hold a Seder in the camp. Rivkah not only repeats other sentences first spoken by Eva prior to the time travel; she even announces that if she survives, she will change her name to Eva. The two most significant changes in the film—the treatment of traumatic memory and the depiction of Holocaust survivors—are linked. In the film, Hannah’s grandfather is replaced by two uncles, a change that also diminishes the possibility that elderly survivors suffer ongoing traumatic memories. In contrast to how in the novel Hannah dreams repeatedly of her grandfather’s “distorted face and … guttural screams” (9), in the film Hannah is simply bored by her uncles’ stories about life before and during the war. Uncle Abe serves less as a figure of traumatic memory than as the relative who tells Hannah about the young boys who tried to escape but were betrayed, a memory she will recall in the camp but that will prove futile when the boys persist in their escape attempt. This memory is characteristic of a protagonist who remembers her American life to a far greater degree than the heroine of the novel. In contrast to the novel’s representation of how having her hair shaved off disrupts Hannah’s memory, the film stresses the scene’s brutality and the pain that the girls experience. The scene juxtaposes a rapid succession of events that include Hannah being tattooed, standing exhausted in an Appel (a roll call) at night, trying to find a place to sleep, lining up for food the next morning, and then working at hard labor, a scene in which she keeps reminding herself that she is from New Rochelle. Thus even when the film includes an event that in the novel damages Hannah’s memory, it does not explore the impact of the event on her memory. Because the film is more interested in Hannah’s remorse for how prior to her time travel she rarely listened to those who spoke about the Holocaust, it devotes surprisingly little space to Hannah’s uncertainty about her own identity. And because the film really values Hannah’s relationship with her aunt Eva, Hannah keeps thinking of her, something she never does in the novel. Unlike the film in which Hannah is confident that she and Rivkah “will be together again,” the novel defers the revelation that Rivkah and Eva are the same person until Hannah returns to the present and stares at the number on Eva’s arm. After stating “You’ve never let me explain it to you and your mother hates me to talk of it” (162), Eva offers to explain it: “Still, if you want me to …” (162), but the ellipses that trail her words suggest her hesitancy. Acknowledging that she was once called Rivka, Eva

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

157

admits that she and her brother changed their names after the war. Just like her offer to explain the numbers on her arm, Eva’s admission of her original name is marked by ellipses. Silencing Hannah by touching her lips “as if to stop her mouth from saying what had to be said” (164), she forces herself to admit to her original name. She directly says nothing else. Given that whatever information Eva reveals to Hannah is summarized in the epilogue, which focuses on what happened at the “end of the story” (165) that is, after she and only two survivors from Chaya’s original transport were liberated, it is not clear that Eva is ready to dwell on the painful memories of what happened earlier. In the film, in keeping with the 1990s’ commitment to the pedagogical value of survivors’ testimony, Eva is far more willing to speak. When Hannah arrives at the Seder, Eva answers her question about the girl she is named after with the response that she would like to explain, but she fears that the story is so far from Hannah’s experience that she wouldn’t understand. Eva is also willing to speak in the film’s conclusion, confirming tearfully that Chana was killed in her place, an admission that is not actually provided in the novel. Readers may believe that Chaya sacrificed herself; Eva never admits this in the novel. The narrative omission does not mean that Chaya’s sacrifice did not happen, but it does leave open the possibility that if Chaya did sacrifice herself, that might well be precisely the kind of memory that Eva would have difficulty talking about. The film’s final scene deviates strikingly from the novel’s contrast between Eva’s hesitant voice and Hannah’s affirmation of memory so loud “that the entire table hushed at its sound” (Yolen, Devil’s 164). Instead, the camera focuses on Hannah enthusiastically joining her relatives in singing a Passover song. As the film pans onto Hannah’s thoughtful and joyful face, it gives one answer to Martin’s query about what Hannah does with her memory: rather than traumatize her, Hannah’s journey into Holocaust memory has made her part of her Jewish American family. The growing expectation that Holocaust pedagogy must do more than this may explain why the endings of both the novel and its film adaptation have frustrated so many critics.

158 

A. KERTZER

The Location of Traumatic Memory in If I Should Die Before I Wake Daniel Feldman characterizes what Hannah says in The Devil’s Arithmetic while she walks with the girls as they are about to be gassed as “the cloyingly optimistic lesson delivered at the gas chamber” (103), and Michael J. Martin finds the ending of that novel inferior to “the dual narrative of hope and new lessons” (325) that he finds in Han Nolan’s If I Should Die Before I Wake. Informing the different endings of the two novels are the identities of the two young time travelers, identities in which the location of traumatic memory plays an important role. If I Should Die locates traumatic memory neither in the fragmented memories the sixteen-year-old protagonist Hilary Burke experiences during her time travel, nor in the narrative gaps in the Holocaust survivor’s speech. Yolen’s Jewish American protagonist must time travel in order to appreciate what her relatives experienced, and to recognize the difference between the knowledge she has gained from books and experiential knowledge. In contrast, Nolan utilizes a non-Jewish protagonist who must time travel to save herself before it is too late—the novel begins with her near death following a motorcycle accident—and then to act on that self-transformation in order to rescue Simon, the Jewish boy her fellow neo-Nazis have imprisoned. In contrast to The Devil’s Arithmetic, there is no evidence that Hilary has studied the Holocaust in school. Instead, Nolan strongly suggests that Hilary is drawn to the neo-Nazis as a way of dealing with her own unresolved childhood trauma and feelings of abandonment. Prior to her time travel, Hannah is tired of remembering; prior to her time travel, Hilary is traumatized by two betrayals: the accidental death of her father and the three-day disappearance of her mother following her father’s death. The traumatic memories that precede and prompt Hilary’s time travel to 1939 Poland, where she takes on the identity of a Jewish adolescent Chana Shayevitsch, also determine which aspects of her extensive Holocaust witnessing she find most disturbing, and which memory fragments continue to torment her following her travels. Abandoned at age five by her mother following her father’s death, Hilary repeatedly recalls that she was staring enviously at a Jewish father playing with his baby son Simon when her mother returned. Enraged that Simon could have a happy family when she did not, and already convinced that a “greedy Jew boss” (92) was responsible for her father’s death, she never forgets this memory. Eleven years later, an eager convert to the Aryan Warriors, she proposes

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

159

that the Warriors kidnap Simon. Immediately after they do so, Hilary suffers the motorcycle accident that triggers the coma during which she time travels. The coma lasts three days, exactly the number of days Hilary was abandoned by her mother, which not only reinforces the link between Hilary’s traumatic memories and her subsequent time travel, but also makes her a Christ-figure resurrected to a new life. As with Hannah’s witnessing in The Devil’s Arithmetic, the narrative structure of If I Should Die ensures that traumatic memories do not interfere with Hilary’s ability to witness when she becomes Chana. With the exception of two early chapters titled “Hilary/Chana,” all of the other titles clearly distinguish between “Chana” chapters and “Hilary” chapters. Although the “Hilary” chapters increasingly show how her time travel makes Hilary question her contemporary self, there is no parallel to the way Yolen’s Chaya experiences flashbacks containing memory fragments of Hannah’s present. Instead she meticulously witnesses a near-­ encyclopedic list of Holocaust events, including the forced move from her home to the Łódź ghetto; a thwarted attempt to pass as a Polish worker that leads to torture, imprisonment, and a life sentence as political prisoner; slave labor in Auschwitz; and finally coming close to death just as the Russians liberate the camp in January 1945. On occasion she says that she is confused, but such confusion never impedes her role as a witness, as is strikingly evident when she chastises herself in the ghetto for her earlier refusal to acknowledge the excremental labor of the fecal workers, or meticulously reports excerpts from historical documents. Even when the brutal conditions in Auschwitz overwhelm her, the clarity of her internal monologue persists. Logically debating the implication of action upon identity—“If I killed the guard, all of who I was would be a murderer…. If I showed love, all of me would be a lover. Who then did I want to be?” (195)—she hardly sounds traumatized. She is an adolescent witness modeling for young readers how the actions we take determine our identity. Only two events significantly interrupt the linear progression and clarity of her witnessing: the first is the hanging of Chana’s father in the very first chapter of Hilary’s time travel; the second is her discovery that the attic she had regarded as a possible hiding place for her family during the mass deportations from the ghetto was the location of a massacre. Initially resisting imagining herself as one of the family being murdered, she runs away, shouting “They were not my family” (152). It is this moment of denial that contributes to Hilary’s post time-travel decision to help save Simon, whom the Warriors first trapped in a school locker and then

160 

A. KERTZER

s­uspended—as was Chana’s father—in a tree. Furthermore, in her post time-­travel memories Hilary incessantly returns to the painful details of these two events and as she does so, she blurs the relationship between Simon and herself. Confusing Simon’s location with that of a boy trapped “in a hole at the ghetto” (286) and dreaming of him “playing patty-cake with [her] father” (287), she has nightmares in which she is “trapped in the room above the ceiling with Simon” (285) and no one hears their screams. Such empathy did not exist prior to the time travel. While Hannah in The Devil’s Arithmetic also learns empathy, her empathy is directed toward the great-aunt she has ignored, one of the many ways in which Yolen links the time traveler’s American identity to her familial relationship to elderly Holocaust survivors.

The American Identity of Holocaust Time Travelers The knowledge/memory that Hilary gains in If I Should Die Before I Wake is inseparable from her characterization as a young American whose experience, it is assumed, will be relevant to other young Americans. According to Martin, “the action of the adolescent reader is to not only remember [the Holocaust], but to understand and work to make others understand … and how one might work against the return of such a darkened historical moment” (326). Certainly the question of what American youth are to do with their Holocaust knowledge dominates the ending of If I Should Die. In contrast, The Devil’s Arithmetic does not address this question; instead if offers different answers to the nature of heroism in the camps. According to the epilogue of The Devil’s Arithmetic, Chaya “died a hero in the camps” (166), a comment that sharply deviates from Rivka’s perspective that given the conditions of the camps “We are all heroes here” (142). In her concluding note “What is True about this Book,” Yolen supports Rivka’s point of view: “To witness. To remember. These were the only victories in the camps” (“What” 169). This statement implies that the person who remembers—whether she is the survivor or the protagonist who becomes a survivor by virtue of her time travel—is heroic. In contrast, the epilogue declares that the hero is the person who may have saved her friend’s life by resisting the devil’s arithmetic, which the novel explains as the implication of the process of selection: “everyone knew that as long as others were processed, they would not be. A simple bit of mathematics, like subtraction, where one taken away from the top

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

161

line becomes one added to the bottom” (146). Unfortunately, the child who resists the devil’s arithmetic by sacrificing herself for another is still doing the same math. The heroism of Chaya’s substituting herself so that Rivka is not killed is far more ambiguous than I once recognized when I categorized the novel as characteristic of the “usual heroic lessons that accompany many children’s books on the Holocaust” (56). In praising how If I Should Die “flies in the face of the Western Holocaust text of hope, heroism, and completion” (326), Martin sets aside how the survivor who enables Hilary’s time travel might be viewed as heroic. When Hilary finally emerges from her coma, she identifies the woman in the hospital as the aged version of the Chana she became in her time travel. Having transferred her memories, the dying Chana now instructs Hilary to “[u]se what you know to change things. You can change the world” (281). The dying woman bears no resemblance to the survivor relatives in The Devil’s Arithmetic. How could she convey her memories to Hilary if they were so fragmented and painful that she was, like Hannah’s great-aunt Eva, reluctant to share them? How could she ensure Hilary’s witnessing of the Holocaust if she raged like Grandpa Will? Because Hilary’s time travel concludes precisely at the moment Chana is liberated from Auschwitz and because the elderly Chana disappears immediately after she instructs Hilary on her duty as a witness, Nolan need not address whether Chana suffered traumatic memories after the war. This omission is apparent in the novel’s conclusion when just prior to Hilary’s leaving the hospital, Chana’s surviving sister fulfills her now dead sister’s request that she bring Hilary a photo album. Rather than reveal anything about Chana’s post-war life, the album serves to confirm the truth of Hilary’s time travel. There is thus a strange contrast between Hilary who appears to have traumatic memories following her time travel, and the elderly survivor who initiates her time travel. In depicting a Holocaust survivor who is not rendered speechless by her memories, If I Should Die offers an alternative to the model of heroism Yolen’s Chaya enacts. This is not the heroism of sacrifice, of dying so that another might live; instead it resides in Chana’s acceptance of what her grandmother Bubbe told her in Auschwitz. In that conversation, Bubbe told Chana that one day she would use her special gifts to “save someone’s life” (276). Just as Bubbe once instructed the adolescent Chana to remember everything she witnessed, the elderly Chana instructs Hilary that time travel has made her a witness: “It is your turn to remember and to tell, and to keep on telling until you are sure others have heard” (282). Hilary has

162 

A. KERTZER

become part of a testimonial chain, one in which her prior life makes her a powerful witness. The photo album she inherits from Chana reinforces this testimonial connection, for in the album Hilary finds a final inscription of Chana’s message in a passage from Jeremiah instructing a reluctant youth to become a “prophet to the nations” (292). It is also significant that Chana insists that Hilary’s past as a neo-Nazi adolescent makes her more credible than those—such as Yolen’s Hannah—who might speak against Holocaust denial because of their family relationship to the victims. According to the rationale Chana gives Hilary, Jewish Americans directly related to Holocaust survivors may be less effective in combatting Holocaust denial than non-Jewish Americans who once fervently believed in that denial. Martin writes that If I Should Die teaches that “the philosophy that lead [sic] to the Holocaust did not end with World War II … but the enemy is no longer the crazed Nazi, but the average American adolescent” (326). This assertion that a neo-Nazi represents the average American adolescent puts a different spin on what is often called the Americanization of the Holocaust. Critics have objected to how The Devil’s Arithmetic exemplifies the worst aspects of this Americanization: Hannah entertains the Jewish girls she encounters in Poland with stories about Barbra Streisand, The Wizard of Oz, and Star Wars. As she and the other girls approach the gas chamber, she predicts that “one day … a Jewish girl will be president if she wants to be” (160). However skeptical we might be that girls who are about to die would take consolation in her prediction, we might consider that these comments speak to Yolen’s determination to depict an American child protagonist whose familial relationship to Jewish Holocaust survivors does not obviate her love of Easter candy and television movies about zombies. Hannah is an “ordinary sort of girl” (159), simultaneously Jewish and American. The identity of the child time traveler obviously shapes the questions that arise when contemporary American youth study the Holocaust. One issue that time-travel fiction with non-Jewish protagonists often foregrounds concerns the religious implications of the Holocaust. Just before Nolan’s Chana is liberated and her time travel ends, she has an epiphany in which she realizes that the way that the Jewish prisoners care for each other proves that God has not abandoned them. Bennett and Gottesfeld’s Anne Frank and Me provides another example of how a non-Jewish protagonist struggles with the religious implications of the Holocaust. Prior to her time travel, Nicole Burns is more interested in dancing and romance

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

163

than listening to the elderly survivor who visits her classroom. During a school trip to an Anne Frank exhibit, she is knocked unconscious and wakes up in 1942 in Nazi-occupied France. As the Jewish Nicole Bernhardt, she witnesses a range of Holocaust events which will return as traumatic flashbacks once her time travel is over. During one of those events, she meets Anne Frank in a cattle car destined for Auschwitz and seeks reassurance, which Anne provides, that God is “right beside” them (227). Shortly thereafter, facing death in a gas chamber, Nicole blesses her younger sister Elizabeth and tells her that “God is watching [them]” (238). In contrast, in The Devil’s Arithmetic, Hannah’s Judaism appears more familial and cultural than religious. Despite the novel’s intermittent references to God and the prayers that Hannah witnesses, when she sacrifices herself so that Rivka may live, she does not pray. Introducing Nicole in Anne Frank and Me through a website in which she refers to herself as Girl X and predicts that she will never be remembered at her “twentieth class reunion” (1), Bennett and Gottesfeld define Nicole by her ordinariness. What also makes her ordinary—her pre-time-­ travel susceptibility to Holocaust revisionist websites—differs from what makes Yolen’s Hannah “an ordinary sort of girl” (Yolen, The Devil’s 159). These differences provide different perspectives on why contemporary American youth should study the Holocaust. If I Should Die justifies such study by presenting Holocaust denial as a contemporary American issue. Although Hilary’s motives for becoming a neo-Nazi are rooted in her childhood trauma, ultimately the novel links denial to being a bystander, like the people Chana observes watching her board a train for Auschwitz: “They were the reason this war against us, the Jews, could be so successful. They knew, they saw, and they did nothing but watch” (179). The theme of the complicit bystander is equally strong in Anne Frank and Me. However, while Nicole’s parents in Bennett and Gottesfeld’s 1997 Anne Frank and Me: A New Play for Multigenerational Audiences are clearly Holocaust deniers, denial is less extreme in the subsequent novelization. Unlike the play, in the novel Nicole’s father does not challenge the historical reality of the Holocaust. Instead, he objects to an American educational system that places learning about the Holocaust above learning about “the literary legacy of [their] own country” (29). Rather than only focus on the dangers of Holocaust denial, Bennett and Gottesfeld justify studying the Holocaust as a way to teach American values. This is evident when Nicole’s teacher, frustrated by her students’ indifference to reading Frank’s Diary, watching the television film of The Devil’s

164 

A. KERTZER

Arithmetic, and listening to Paulette Litzger-Gold, the elderly survivor who visits their class, assigns an essay on “the importance of speaking out in the face of tyranny” (13). As a time traveler, Nicole exemplifies this value through the anonymous “Notes from Girl X” that she writes and distributes. Only after her return to the present and her attendance at Paulette’s funeral does she learn the impact of her exhortations that Parisians not be indifferent to what the Nazis and their supporters were doing. Finding one of the notes on a Paris park bench in 1943, the adolescent Paulette not only found the “strength to go on” (10); as a survivor and proud American she also imitated what Girl X had taught her about the value of speaking out by recording her video testimony for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. As in If I Should Die, a testimonial chain links the elderly survivor and the young time traveler. Inspired by the hope her notes gave Paulette, Nicole leaves the funeral determined to rescue her younger sister from her misguided faith in revisionist websites. In contrast to how The Devil’s Arithmetic concludes with Hannah’s insistence that she remembers, the ending of Anne Frank and Me stresses that memory without action is not adequate. Insomuch as Americans were neither perpetrators nor victims during the Holocaust, the danger of being a bystander readily lends itself to American Holocaust pedagogy. Perhaps what really makes Hilary Burke more of an average American than Hannah Stern is not her being non-­ Jewish or a neo-Nazi but rather her lack of family connection to the Holocaust. Precisely because of her family relationship to the Holocaust, it is much harder for Yolen’s Hannah to be a bystander. Traumatic memories do not prompt her journey; nor does she deny the Holocaust. Yet the desire not to be an American bystander may haunt The Devil’s Arithmetic. Although all of these novels center on the rescue of young people—Rivka in The Devil’s Arithmetic; Simon in If I Should Die; and Nicole’s sister Elizabeth in Anne Frank and Me—only one focuses on the rescue of a child during the Holocaust. Insisting that “We cannot change the past” (“An Experiential” 250), Yolen ambiguously does so by imagining a world in which an American child rescued a child targeted by the Nazis. Holocaust pedagogy in If I Should Die Before I Wake and Anne Frank and Me is driven by the question of what American children should do now. In The Devil’s Arithmetic, it is driven by the desire for Americans to have acted differently then.

9  “I REMEMBER. OH, I REMEMBER”: TRAUMATIC MEMORY, AGENCY… 

165

Note 1. In Holding on to the Past, Yolen is far more nuanced regarding the complex relationship between memory and historical truth, stating “We are all, when the matter is memory, unreliable narrators…. We make up history, believe it, and then call it truth” (22).

Works Cited Bennett, Cherie, and Jeff Gottesfeld. Anne Frank and Me. 2001. Puffin-Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2002. Bennett, Cherie, and Jeff Gottesfeld. Anne Frank and Me: A New Play for Multigenerational Audiences. Dramatic Publishing, 1997. Bosmajian, Hamida. Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust. Children’s Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2002. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Cosslett, Tess. “‘History from Below’: Time-Slip Narratives and National Identity.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 26, no. 2, April 2002, pp. 243–53. Project Muse, doi.org/10.1353/uni.2002.0017. De Groot, Jerome. “Time, Death and Science in Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. 91, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 45–66. doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.91.1.4. The Devil’s Arithmetic. Directed by Donna Deitch, Showtime Entertainment, 28 Mar. 1999. Television. 2002. DVD. Feldman, Daniel. “Playing with the Past in Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic.” Children’s Literature, vol. 43, 2015, pp. 84–107. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” 1920. The Penguin Freud Reader, edited by Adam Phillips, Penguin Books, 2006, pp. 132–95. Kertzer, Adrienne. My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust. Broadview Press, 2002. Martin, Michael J. “Experience and Expectations: The Dialogic Narrative of Adolescent Holocaust Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 29, no.4, 2004, pp. 315–28. Martin, Travis L., and Owen R.  Horton. “Temporal Prosthetics and Beautiful Pain: Loss, Memory and Nostalgia in Somewhere in Time, The Butterfly Effect and Safety Not Guaranteed.” Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature and Video Games, edited by Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod. McFarland, 2015, pp. 144–205. Nolan, Han. If I Should Die Before I Wake. 1994. Harcourt Brace, 1996.

166 

A. KERTZER

Stewart, Susan. “Shifting Worlds: Constructing the Subject, Narrative, and History in Historical Time Shifts.” Telling Children Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature, edited by Mike Cadden. Frontiers of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2010, pp. 231–50. Tribunella, Eric L. Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature. U of Tennessee P, 2010. Woolfork, Lisa. Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. U of Illinois P, 2009. Ebrary. 9 Aug. 2015. Yolen, Jane. The Devil’s Arithmetic. 1988. Puffin, 2004. Yolen, Jane. “An Experiential Act.” Language Arts, vol. 66, no.3, March 1989, pp. 246–51. JSTOR. www.jstor.org/stable/41411736. Accessed 27 Oct. 2015. Yolen, Jane. Holding on to the Past. Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lectures, No. 17. Toronto Public Library, 2005. Toronto Public Library, 2005. Yolen, Jane. “What Is True about This Book.” Yolen. The Devil’s Arithmetic, pp. 167–70.

CHAPTER 10

Yoshiko Uchida: Loss, Displacement, and Identity Amanda C. Seaman

While I was familiar with the work of any number of Japanese American writers, my first encounter with Yoshiko Uchida was in a book belonging to my young daughter, Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World, where Uchida (described as a children’s author) is the entry for the letter U.  When I investigated further, I learned that in addition to being a prolific author of children’s literature and a savvy adaptor of Japanese folktales, Uchida (1921–1992) also was a journalist, as well as a pioneering chronicler of pre- and postwar Japanese American life. Contemporary readers familiar at all with Uchida likely think of her as a writer of stories about the incarceration of Japanese Americans, because these are her only works that remain in print. This appraisal, however, is a limited as well as limiting one. When we broaden our scope to include Uchida’s less-familiar, but no less important, children’s literature from the 1980s addressing the Depression-era history of Japanese Americans, it becomes clear that Yoshiko Uchida deserves greater attention as a witness to, and interpreter of, Asian American life before and after World War II, A. C. Seaman (*) University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_10

167

168 

A. C. SEAMAN

particularly the life of young people defining themselves through and against prevailing norms of “Japanese” and “American” identity.1 Over the course of her career, Uchida chronicled the complicated relationship between Japan and the United States in her writing. She frequently used her own rich biography as source material for her literary fiction for young people, rewriting and recasting her experience growing up as a Japanese American as well as the experience of the families in her church and her community in California before World War II. Born in Alameda, California in 1921, Uchida was the second child of Dwight Takashi and Iku (née Umeda) Uchida. As she recounts in her autobiography, Yoshiko’s father came to the United States in 1906, and her mother eleven years later. Their marriage was an arranged one, a fairly common practice at the time; due to the restrictive immigration laws, single Japanese women could not enter the United States unless they were already engaged to a US resident.2 Unlike many other Asian immigrants at the time, however, both were well educated, holding degrees from the prestigious Doshisha University in Kyoto. Exploiting his family’s connections in the Japanese American community, Dwight found employment with the Mitsui Corporation. As a result, Yoshiko and her older sister Keiko had a privileged upbringing. Growing up in a large home in an otherwise “whites-only” Berkeley neighborhood, they did not experience the Japanese language schooling of their second-generation Nisei peers, although they spoke Japanese at home (Uchida, Desert Exile 20). In 1937, Uchida entered the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in English, history, and philosophy; her sister Keiko attended Mills College in Oakland, where she studied early childhood education. Before Uchida could graduate, however, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the family was swept up in the evacuation orders issued by the US government against residents of Japanese descent. Although her father was sent to Montana along with other leaders of the Japanese American community, the rest of the Uchida family was interned at the Tanforan racetrack in California for five months before finally being sent to the Topaz (Utah) camp—experiences that would later become the ­subject of her first series of fictions for young readers (Uchida, Desert Exile 20). By 1943, young people with job prospects or offers of college admission began to be allowed into non-restricted areas in the Midwest or the East Coast, and Uchida was able to accept a graduate scholarship at Smith College, where she received her master’s degree in education and then

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

169

started a teaching career. Soon, however, she would leave the profession behind, convinced that her future lay in writing, a choice that initially appeared to be quixotic, as short story after short story was submitted and rejected. However, encouraged by a professor in a course which she took at Columbia University on writing children’s literature Uchida pursued a retelling of Japanese folk tales that became her first book, The Dancing Kettle and Other Japanese Folktales (1949). Over the course of her life, Uchida published over thirty books for children as well as writing for adults—most notably, her novel Picture Bride, which was later made into a movie. Despite her substantial literary output, only a small number of these works have remained in print since Uchida’s death over twenty-five years ago, most of them dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans during the World War II.3 Uchida’s first story for young adults in this vein, Journey to Topaz: A Story of Japanese-American Evacuation (1971), is told from the point of view of Yuki, an eleven-year-old girl; its 1978 sequel, Journey Home, describes the difficulties of readjusting to life after internment. Notably, Journey to Topaz was published two years before Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s autobiography Farewell to Manazar; these two texts were the touchstone of internment literature in the American mind and both feature female protagonists.4 Although the latter was meant for an older (high-school aged and above) audience, while Uchida’s novel addressed a middle school readership, both worked in tandem to bring the dark history of Japanese American internment to a broader American reading public, narrating it through the voices of young, intelligent female protagonists. The positive attention generated by these novels, and the greater scrutiny paid to internment in general in the 1980s, led to the 1982 publication of Uchida’s autobiography Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family, over a decade after it was first written (Niiya). While powerful and important, however, Uchida’s fictional and autobiographical accounts of life in the internment camps have led readers and critics to pigeonhole her as an “internment writer.” This narrow reading represents a broader tendency to flatten the historical and cultural narrative of Japanese in America, offering a simple plot-line in which life was good before the war, became difficult and discriminatory during it, and returned to “normal” at the war’s conclusion. More to the point, this categorization has blinded readers to the fact that during her long career, Uchida explored much more than the internment experience, including

170 

A. C. SEAMAN

sensitive retellings of Japanese folklore and engaging works of fiction featuring Nisei Japanese American heroines. Many of the protagonists in Uchida’s fiction, like Uchida herself, are young Nisei girls, struggling to find their place in and between Japanese and white communities, pushing back against their parents’ expectations (including attendance at Japanese School), struggling with the intricacies of a Japanese language that they are gradually forgetting, and striving (and often failing) to behave “appropriately.” Uchida takes up these themes most fully in the young adult trilogy—A Jar of Dreams (1981), The Best Bad Thing (1983), and The Happiest Ending (1985)—that she wrote in the 1980s, alongside her own autobiography Desert Exile (1982) with its unflinching account of racial difference and the difficulties of growing up both “American” and “Japanese.” It is to the former trilogy, set in Berkeley during the Great Depression and featuring Uchida’s best-known heroine, Rinko, that I will turn in the following pages. The arc of the Rinko trilogy makes it clear that internment literature is the culmination of a longer story about identity, racism, immigrant displacement from Japanese culture, and the struggle to make a new home in one’s adopted country. Each of the books in the series reveals the racism that Japanese Americans faced before the war, and the tight-knit sense of community that bound Japanese Americans to one another. In this respect, they offer a necessary prolegomenon to, and context for, the crises and challenges recounted in internment literature itself. As many critics have noted, accounts of Japanese American internment (fictional as well as non-­ fictional) are shaped not only by their authors’ anger at the racism and bigotry that motivated US policy, but also by their profound disbelief that their own country could question their loyalty and devalue their citizenship (Uchida, Desert Exile 136). Uchida’s trilogy makes it clear that none of this occurred in a vacuum: rather, the social, cultural, and political beliefs that enabled internment were so visible in the decades preceding World War II that even a child could see them. At the same time, Uchida masterfully captures the ambivalences and complications of an immigrant community in flux, as the American-born Nisei protagonist Rinko finds herself pushing against the values and expectations of her Japanese-born (Issei) parents and desiring to be someone else. Rinko Tsuchiyama is eleven years old when A Jar of Dreams begins in 1935, living in Berkeley California with her father and mother. When her father’s barbershop is forced to close, Rinko’s mother starts a laundry business, only to be confronted by a local rival, Wilbur Starr, who steals

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

171

their deliveries and shoots their dog in a brute show of force. Ultimately, Rinko’s father faces down Starr and restores the family’s fortunes by starting a successful machine repair shop. In the trilogy’s second volume, The Best Bad Thing (1983), Rinko is sent to live with Mrs. Hata, a neighbor struggling to raise two boys after her husband dies of tuberculosis. During her stay with the Hatas, Rinko befriends their boarder—a young Japanese man living in fear of deportation and ashamed of his failure to make something of himself in America—and proves to be a valuable member of the family in a number of trying circumstances. In The Happiest Ending (1985), the final volume set in 1936, Rinko helps her Japanese language teacher run a boarding house, and attempts to plays matchmaker for Mrs. Hata’s daughter Teru, who has returned from Japan for an arranged marriage with an older man. In a broad sense, these three novels fit squarely within the genre conventions of the “immigrant story,” exploring how families are part of the United States and yet culturally distinct, and how different generations confront these divisions.5 In part, Uchida focuses on the challenges faced by her characters in terms that young people from all immigrant backgrounds would understand, including Rinko’s struggle to master her parents’ language and to “fit in” in terms of dress, hobbies, and activities. Rinko is separated from her Caucasian classmates by family obligations that keep her from living the life of a “normal” teenager (including going to the movies on weekends), thus she pushes back, for example, against pressure from family and neighbors to eat traditional Japanese food all the time, rather than the toast and cocoa that she loves. Unlike the individuals in many other immigrant narratives, however, Rinko and the other Japanese American characters are starkly set apart from their surrounding society not just by language or mores, but by physical appearance. This difference is rendered even more significant when pictorial illustration is joined to literary narrative, work done here by cover illustrations created by Japanese American artist Kinuko Craft, featuring a montage of images relating to stories from the texts.6 Each of Uchida’s novels, moreover, highlights the close links that still exist in 1930s California between the local Japanese American community and Japan itself—ties encouraged and even necessitated by the government’s history of restricting access to citizenship for Japanese immigrants and forbidding Asian non-citizens from owning property. Cut off from many of America’s political and economic rights and institutions, Uchida’s characters are forced to find support in one another and in their native

172 

A. C. SEAMAN

land. In A Jar of Dreams, for example, Rinko urges her father to save his failing business by seeking financial support from the local Tanomoshi (Finance Association), a mutual aid society into which each member pays and from which each can take money in times of need. This association, which had its roots in the villages in Japan, provided the capital to launch many Japanese American businesses (Minamikawa, 124). Yet being “Japanese American” is not a simple matter of grafting a culturally homogenous stalk onto a heterogenous, Californian trunk. The main characters in Uchida’s trilogy (like Uchida herself) are Christian and deeply involved in their church community in the United States, which serves as a source of social, religious, and cultural identity and activity for Rinko and her family (Harada 27). As Fumitaka Matsuoka notes, the church and the reading of the Bible both embody and enact a “web of relationships that goes beyond the realm of the living to include their communion with the deceased family members, friends and ancestors” (180). For many Japanese Americans, the church was a key site for community in the United States, a place not only for spiritual release and sustenance but also one in which the needs of the community were identified and then taken care of. It is through the church that Rinko’s mother provides food and assistance to other members of the Japanese American community who are in need; and every Sunday is spent with the congregation. While the Bible and church provided solace for parents, children found them “a reminder of the ‘drab’ religious rituals [they] were forced to endure,” not least because services continued to be celebrated in Japanese (although Sunday School, in Uchida’s novels, is conducted in English) (Matsuoka, 180). Rinko cannot escape her obligations to the church community; in The Best Bad Thing, she is sent to live with the Hata family to help out after Mrs. Hata’s husband dies, a decision couched as a matter of Christian duty. Yet while Rinko grudgingly agrees, wryly noting the dangers of crossing “God, who was Mama’s Personal Friend” (15), she nonetheless finds herself resenting church more and more, seeing religious obligations as a barrier to enjoying social opportunities like going to the movies with her friends. “Going to see a movie on a Sunday,” she observes, “isn’t exactly Mama’s idea of a treat. To her it’s more like committing a major sin. For a long time, Mama had us all believing that Sundays were meant only for going to church and being solemn” (3). Underlying such frictions, however, there are larger issues which define the position of Rinko and her friends. In particular, as Uchida

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

173

makes clear in The Happiest Ending, it is language that most separates the younger generation of Japanese Americans from their parents and grandparents. While Rinko’s family speaks a mixture of Japanese and English at home, her own Japanese is halting and far from fluent, and she revels in her growing English vocabulary (5). In an attempt to overcome this linguistic gap, many of Rinko’s peers are required to attend the local Japanese school after regular public school classes end. Rinko does not want to attend Japanese school; “it makes me feel like a foreigner,” she tells her mother, “and I am not” (4). Due to her fragile health, Rinko is able to avoid attending regular Japanese classes, leaving her language instruction in the hands of an occasional tutor, Mrs. Sugita. Despite her insistence that she “just wants to be like any other American,” however, she continues working with her tutor after her health improves, in part due to her mother’s argument that being Japanese requires understanding Japanese. This difference in Japanese language ability between young and old has important consequences for the community as a whole. On the one hand, the children’s relationship with their parent’s homeland (and with family members remaining in Japan) depends upon their ability to master the older generation’s native tongue, reflected in a number of uncomfortable encounters between Rinko and her peers with relatives and family friends rendered “foreign” by their exclusive use of Japanese. Conversely, however, because many older people grew up in Japan, and thus have learned English later in life (if at all), they rely on their children’s generation to serve as interlocutors and interpreters with the non-Japanese world. In The Best Bad Thing, for example, Mrs. Hata cannot speak to a woman from the welfare office and relies on Rinko to interpret for her. This seemingly “in-between” space, one that Rocío G. Davis describes as a part of the world that younger Japanese Americans occupy vis-à-vis their families and the language that they speak with them, also manifests itself in their relationship to other cultural objects and practices. Living with Mrs. Hata means that Rinko has to eat the traditional Japanese breakfast of rice and miso soup, rather than the toast and hot cocoa to which she has become accustomed—a situation that she clearly dislikes. Often, Uchida’s descriptions of Rinko’s mother making Japanese food are punctuated by Rinko’s negative comments. She disparagingly notes that the sesame seed-covered rice balls “[look] as if the ants already got to them,” and laments that umeboshi (pickled plums) “cover me with goose bumps and make my tongue curl” (Uchida, Best Bad Thing 2). Elsewhere,

174 

A. C. SEAMAN

Uchida humorously but also perceptively illustrates what happens when culinary traditions collide, most memorably in her description (in The Happiest Ending) of a shared Thanksgiving meal featuring turkey, stuffing, and sticky rice. Clothing is another source of conflicted attitudes and identity for Rinko, highlighted when her Japanese aunt comes to visit. In 1930s California, most Japanese Americans wore Western-style clothing in their daily lives, with kimono and other “traditional” garb reserved for special occasions or ceremonies. Rinko herself, in A Jar of Dreams, only gets her first kimono at the age of eleven, a gift from her aunt Waka to be worn for a formal photographic portrait. “I held out my arms to look at the white peonies on the long blue silky sleeves,” recalls Rinko. “I turned around and twisted my head to look at the knot of the obi in back. I knew then how Aunt Waka felt when we made her get into western clothes.” “That’s not me,” exclaims Rinko, to which her aunt replies, “I know how you feel, but it’s you all right.” As Waka acknowledges, Rinko “certainly [is] a child of America.” All the same, she implores her, “don’t ever forget, a part of you will always be Japanese too, even if you never wear a kimono again” (121). It is her very body, however—and especially her face—that serves as the clearest and most indelible marker of Rinko’s alienation from American identity. While clothing can be changed, styles taken on and off, Rinko ruefully notes that her looks cannot be changed, despite her longing to have bigger eyes or curly hair. She moans, “it’s bad enough that I have this Japanese face, with stick-straight black hair and eyes that aren’t even as pretty as my big brother Cal’s. And having a name like Rinko Tsujimura, which my teachers cannot pronounce” (Uchida, Happiest Ending 4). “Looking Japanese” immediately marks her as being Japanese, making her a target for people who disparage her and subject her to racist treatment throughout the course of the three novels. The topic of racism is addressed most directly and persistently in the trilogy’s first novel, which chronicles Rinko’s family’s attempts to start a laundry business competing with one owned by a white man. When Rinko and her siblings walk past his business, he yells “Get outta here, you damn Jap kids,” a comment that cuts her to the quick. “I hated the way that I felt when Wilbur Starr called me a Jap,” Rinko recalls. “It made me really mad, but it also made me feel as though I was no good. I felt ashamed of who I was and wished I could sink right down and disappear into the sidewalk” (Uchida, Jar of Dreams 5). This is not an isolated incident; at school,

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

175

white children belittle Rinko through name calling and more subtle forms of discrimination: “they talk to each other,” she observes, “but they talk over and around and right through me like I was a pane of glass. And that makes me feel like a I was a big nothing” (6). Rinko and her Japanese American friends take such treatment as a fact of life, as occurs in other cases of systematic social prejudice; similarly, she is not shocked by the white girls in her school who look through her, or by the fact that she cannot swim in the local water park. As she observes in A Jar of Dreams, “The nurse didn’t pay the slightest attention to me. But I was used to that. Sometimes in Judson’s Department Store, the clerks wait on everybody else before they’ll come wait on Mama and me. And if I ever go by myself, sometimes they ignore me completely” (116). Nevertheless, the young person’s perspective— simple, direct, and free from the rationalizations and hedges that come with age—emphasizes the personal and emotional consequences of racism, and the lasting damage it causes to its victims. As Rinko’s admits in The Happiest Ending, she cannot even now look a white person in the eye, “especially a grownup” (22). Perhaps the most pernicious effect of racism, perceptively depicted by Uchida, is its ability to trump all other individual talents and virtues, and all other efforts to move forward. Rinko and her brother Cal know that the discrimination that they face as Japanese Americans is real, and that it will make it much harder for either of them to achieve their ambitions and dreams, despite the hard-won progress they have made. Cal, who is older and attends the University of California at Berkeley, often is absent from the family, picking fruit on farms to pay his tuition; driven to distraction by the thought that his college degree likely will not be enough to gain him admission to the engineering career he desires, he drops out of college before eventually being persuaded to return by a family friend. Yet despite these challenges, neither young person throws in the towel. Unlike their Japanese aunt Waka, who exclaims, “I just don’t think I could live in a land where I was always looked upon as a foreigner, unwanted and thought not to be as good as everyone else” (Uchida, Jar of Dreams 107), Rinko and Cal insist on making a life for themselves in America and as Americans, committing themselves to school, friends, and careers in a place that, for all of its shortcomings, is their home. Uchida’s special focus on Rinko and her life also serves to demonstrate how important Japanese American women were for developing a new sense of American community and identity while at the same time maintaining ties to their Japanese heritage and to Japan itself. Rinko’s mother

176 

A. C. SEAMAN

works in the home laundry that helps support the family, while also raising the children and supporting the Japanese American community of which she is a crucial part. In turn, in The Happiest Ending, while Rinko initially criticizes her friend Teru for choosing to marry an older man rather than the local heartthrob Johnny Ouchi, she belatedly comes to realize that the latter’s good looks and selfish ambition are no match for the former’s understated goodness and willingness to sacrifice for the neighborhood. Teru’s choice was the right one, prompted by good sense and steadfastness rather than a lack of imagination. “Teru wasn’t just a pretty Japanese doll,” concludes Rinko. “She was a real woman, and she was strong too, just like Mrs. Sugino and Auntie Hata and Mama” (109). Discovering who and what makes her community function gives Rinko an insight into who she is and where her place is—an awareness that helps her figure out how to navigate her Japanese and her American world and, as her brother Cal observes, “finally grow up” (111). In some ways, Uchida’s Rinko stories are works of fiction that chronicle experiences of growing up shared by most children: a parent’s stress at starting a new job, resentment at having to help an adult when one would much rather play and having one’s childish views of the world change in light of new sensitivities and sensibilities. At the same time, however, Uchida’s particular subject position permits, and even demands, that her trilogy explore issues and problems shared by her own minority community. Much like the Asian American autobiographies studied by Rocío G.  Davis, Uchida’s novels explore how her female characters deal with their own awareness of themselves as Japanese Americans and how they “negotiate historical specificities, and form communities” (Davis 90). Uchida’s project differs from more recent ethnic autobiographies because she fictionalizes her own upbringing in order to write about families living at different points of the economic spectrum from those she experienced. Despite the differences, Uchida’s work, like these biographies, “has tended toward historical realism and toward intercultural narratives that emphasize the varied cultural influences a child growing up in the United States experiences, rather than on depicting that child acquiring a pure heritage identity” (Davis 90). Uchida thus depicts a world whose inhabitants carve out a living, one where members of the younger generation try to figure out how to negotiate the complex interplay of rules and expectations imported from and imposed by Japan as well as the United States, and in the process undergo “highly individual itineraries of cultural denial and affiliation, represented

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

177

by a pivotal ‘in-between’ space” (Davis 91). In Uchida’s work this space is both physical (like that of Rinko’s school) and relational (with her family and other members of her community). In these works, as elsewhere in her extensive oeuvre, Uchida consistently strives to create a literary space in which Japanese American voices can speak and be heard. At a time when geopolitical struggles overseas shaped the attitudes and self-perceptions of Americans of all ethnicities back home, Uchida’s early contributions to the body of children’s literature in the 1950s and 1960s—focused in particular upon the creative retelling of Japanese folk tales—were signally important both for Japanese American children who needed to see positive representations of their culture and for other American children whose families were affected by the War and its aftermath. As Cindy I-Fen Cheng has observed, however, Asian Americans during the Cold War were “perpetual foreigners-within,” an identity forged by the Korean War, the rise of the Communist regime in China, and the seemingly intractable struggle in Vietnam (Cheng 10). In the years following their internment, Japanese Americans also strove to redefine themselves amidst rising fears of communism in Asia. Addressing Japanese American author Hanama Tasaki’s novel Long the Imperial Way, Edward Tang notes that the nation’s anxieties about communist expansion and infiltration … also affected Japanese Americans after their mass imprisonment. Addressing doubts about their loyalty, Nisei community spokesman and others assured those in white mainstream society about the former’s ‘Americanism’ and ability to assimilate. (Tang 37)

What Tang does not stress, but Uchida clearly shows in these novels for young readers, is that even while the Japanese American community was assimilating as quickly as possible, it still retained a connection to Japanese language, culture, and history. Uchida’s own such connections, nurtured with the help of a Ford Foundation fellowship, allowed her to rediscover and re-interpret Japan’s rich folktale tradition, a tradition that represented Japan as a place of humor, wonder, and peasant common sense rather than the militaristic warrior empire familiar from wartime propaganda. Additionally, Uchida’s work gained a wider and more receptive audience in the 1960s, as scholars and activists argued for a more ethnically diverse, culturally broad, and racially inclusive definition of “America” and the “American Experience” itself.

178 

A. C. SEAMAN

It is ironic yet also appropriate that the first volume in Uchida’s Rinko trilogy, with its quietly forceful critique of racism and discrimination, appeared in print just as a new wave of anti-Asian (and particularly anti-­ Japanese) sentiment broke over the United States. Japan’s economic success in the early to mid 1980s, particularly in the realm of personal electronics and automobiles, was met with fear and hostility among American workers and consumers, who saw themselves as victims of a new “Japanese invasion.” This hostility reached a boiling point in June of 1982, when a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit by two men angry about the loss of auto jobs. When the killers finally were allowed to plead to a lesser charge years later, resulting in no jail time for either, many Asian Americans began to question not only the fairness of the judicial system, but whether America would ever accept them as full citizens (Zia 57–81). Seen in this light, the lesson of Uchida’s novels became even more clear: racism and prejudice are evils with deep roots, but also long shadows. In the decades that followed, tales of Japanese American childhood became something of a fallow literary field. Instead, a new generation of Japanese American writers turned their attention to telling (or more accurately, reconstructing) the traumatic wartime experiences of their parents and grandparents—experiences which the latter often preferred to forget or ignore— in works of bio-fiction such as Julie Shigekuni’s A Bridge Between Us (1995) or Holly Uyemoto’s Go (1995). It was not until the twenty-first century that literature about Japanese Americans, meant for a young readership, began to reappear. Leading the way in this regard was Alan Say, who after a long career as a children’s illustrator began to write about his own Asian American identity and the history behind it, most famously in his powerfully illustrated and leanly narrated indictment of Japanese American internment, Home of the Brave (2002). An internment camp also serves as the setting for Cynthia Kadohata’s celebrated coming-­ of-­age novel Weedflower (2006), as well as Eric Fein’s recent graphic novel Mystery at Manzanar, the engaging tale of a misunderstanding between a gang of Japanese American boys and the guards confining them at the infamous Manzanar camp in California. At the same time, writers of youth fiction have realized that “Japanese American” is not simply synonymous with internment and World War II. An early example of this shift in approach was Jacqueline Turner Banks’ 2001 novel A Day for Vincent Chin and Me, in which a sixth-grade Japanese American boy worries that his mother’s activism in the wake of

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

179

the Vincent Chin murder will draw unwanted attention to his own Asian identity. More recently, Debbi Michiko Florence has launched her charming Jasmine Toguchi chapter book series, which features (in the words of blogger Mia Wenjen) “a regular girl who just happens to be Japanese American” (Wenjen 2011). Likewise, the very category of “Japanese American writer” is one in flux, encompassing Japanese-born Americans, American-born Japanese, children of Japanese and non-Japanese parents, and many more besides, reflecting a more capacious approach broadened by cultural hybridity and blending, multiculturalism, and diverse families and communities, and allowing for the creation of new stories that enrich what it means to be “American” today.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Brown Kennedy and Rachel Conrad for the privilege of exploring the works of Yoshiko Uchida. This is dedicated to the memory of long afternoons in Chicago learning first-hand about the life experiences of Kathryn Yamamoto and Monica Mori, as well as discussing Japanese literature with them and Betty Siffert and Jeanne Cohen. I am grateful for their patience and their stories. 2. The 1875 Page Act forbade immigration by Chinese women, ostensibly to curtail the spread of prostitution. This law was extended to Japanese and other Asians, leading to a profound gender imbalance in Asian communities. The phenomenon of “picture brides”—women brought from Japan or China and married to men who knew them only by their photographs—is perhaps the best-known response to such legal restrictions. 3. The use of the word internment is itself a matter of debate. The Japanese American Citizens League uses concentration camp in its publications, while scholars like Alice Yang Murray prefer to use “internment camp” because of the conflation of the former term with the Nazi death camps in the popular imagination. After much debate I have decided to use internment, because that is the term Uchida herself uses. 4. The majority of internment narratives were written by women, in part because it was considered more culturally appropriate within the Japanese American community for women to talk about their feelings than men. A notable exception is John Okada’s No No Boy (1957), which focuses upon the consequences of answering “no” to the loyalty oath demanded of internees. See Ann Rayson, “Beneath the Mask: Autobiographies of Japanese American Women. 5. For more on the multiculturalism of Uchida’s work and on the work of Asian American children’s authors more generally, see Junko Yokota, “Asian

180 

A. C. SEAMAN

Americans in Literature for Children and Young Adults,” and Rocío G. Davis, “Ethnic Autobiography as Children’s Literature: Laurence Yep’s The Lost Garden and Yoshiko Uchida’s The Invisible Thread.” 6. Uchida frequently collaborated with Japanese and Japanese American artists throughout her career, in one instance (The Magic Listening Cap: More Folk Tales From Japan. Harcourt Brace, 1955) providing her own illustrations.

Works Cited Banks, Jacqueline Turner. A Day for Vincent Chin and Me. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Cheng, Cindy I-Fen. Citizens of Asia America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War. New York UP, 2013. Chin-Lee, Cynthia and Megan Halsey. Amelia to Zora: Twenty-Six Women Who Changed the World. Charlesbridge Publishing, 2008. Davis, Rocío G. “Ethnic Autobiography as Children’s Literature: Laurence Yep’s The Lost Garden and Yoshiko Uchida’s The Invisible Thread.” Children’s Literature Quarterly, vol.28, no. 2, 2003, pp. 90–97. Fein, Eric. Mystery at Manzanar. Stone Arch Books, 2009. Florence, Debbi Michiko. Jasmine Toguchi, Mochi Queen. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017. Harada, Violet. “Caught between Two Worlds: Themes of Family, Community, and Ethnic Identity in Yoshiko Uchida’s Works for Children.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 29 no.1, 1998, pp. 19–30. Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D.  Houston. Farewell to Manzanar. Bantam Books, 1973. Kadohata, Cynthia. Weedflower. Atheneum, 2006. Matsuoka, Fumitaka. “America Seen Through a Different Lens: The Bible in the Works of Yoshiko Uchida.” Semeia, vols. 90/91, 2002, pp. 181–193. Minamikawa, Fuminori. “Vernacular Representations of Race and the Making of a Japanese Ethnoracial Community in Los Angeles.” TRANS-PACIFIC Japanese American Studies: Conversation on Race and Racialization. Eds. Yasuko Takezawa and Gary Y. Okihiro. U of Hawaii P, 2016, pp. 107–132. Murray, Alice Yang. Ed. What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? Bedford/St. Martins, 2000. Niiya, Brian. “Yoshiko Uchida.” Densho Encyclopedia. 2017. www.encyclopedia. densho.org/Yoshiko_Uchida/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2017. Rayson, Ann. “Beneath the Mask: Autobiographies of Japanese American Women,” MELUS, vol. 14, no. 1, 1987, pp. 43–57. Say, Alan. Home of the Brave. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2002. Shigekuni, Julie. The Bridge Between Us. Anchor Books, 1995.

10   YOSHIKO UCHIDA: LOSS, DISPLACEMENT, AND IDENTITY 

181

Tang, Edward. “Reorienting Empires: Hanama Tasaki’s Long the Imperial Way and Postwar American Culture.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 17, no. 1 (2014), pp. 31–59. Uchida, Yoshiko. The Best Bad Thing. Cover Art by Kinko Craft, Atheneum, 1983. Uchida, Yoshiko. Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family. U of Washington P, 1982. Uchida, Yoshiko. The Happiest Ending. Cover art by Kinko Craft, Atheneum, 1985. Uchida, Yoshiko. A Jar of Dreams. Cover Art by Kinko Craft, Atheneum, 1981. Uyemoto, Holly. Go. Anchor Books, 1995. Wenjen, Mia. 2011. www.pragmaticmom.com/2011/05/top-10-japanese-american-childrens-books-ages-2-16/. Accessed 7 April 2017. Yokota, Junko. “Asian Americans in Literature for Children and Young Adults,” Teacher Librarian, vol. 36, no. 3, February 2009, pp. 15–19. Zia, Helen. Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

CHAPTER 11

“I Would Not Be a Pilgrim”: Examining the Construction of the Muslim Child as an Authentic Witness and a Dynamic Subject in Anita Desai’s The Peacock Garden Nithya Sivashankar

In 2001, during a special symposium celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Nobel Prize, the then relatively new concept of Witness Literature came to the fore. Deep and personal accounts of war and other conflict, migration and natural disasters, these texts feature either the author or the protagonist as a witness. As Horace Engdahl defined the genre in the proceedings of the symposium: “One does not become a witness only by observing an event with one’s own eyes. A witness is a person who speaks out and says, ‘I was there, I saw it, I can tell people!’” (3). According to Engdahl, “the witness” does not clarify but “talks of something that is incomprehensible in the hope that someone else will make it possible to understand and with the certainty that any explanation must be rejected as inadequate” (Engdahl 10). Although the term “Witness

N. Sivashankar (*) The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_11

183

184 

N. SIVASHANKAR

Literature” has been used by only a handful of scholars of literature for children, narrative fictions centered on child characters who are witnesses to violence, forced displacement, and other forms of conflict are widely available for young audiences. These texts help cultivate empathy in readers by acting as windows to the realities of children across the globe who are victims of disaster. Equally important for our purposes here, these narratives also perform the function of “mirrors” as they echo back the voices of children who have been witnesses to these events, conveying to their young readers the potential power of their own voices (Bishop ix). Referring to such conflict narratives in which child characters perform the roles of witnesses as “Witness Literature” confers a sense of ethical responsibility to, and acknowledges the agency of, the young characters who offer testimony and attempt to comprehend the violent situations in which they are embroiled. The field of children’s literature has always concerned itself with the ways in which issues of morality and ethics are communicated to a young audience. Use of the term “Witness Literature” provides the opportunity for scholars of youth literature to inquire into the ethics of not only the event to which the child character bears witness, but also the very act of storytelling itself. This chapter deals with one such witness narrative, The Peacock Garden by Anita Desai, which features a Muslim girl, named Zuni, who is caught in the throes of the violent aftermath of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. I inquire into the rhetorical strategies employed by Desai1 in order not only to analyze how she constructs her young Muslim protagonist and discusses this complicated historical event with her young audience, but also to examine the ethics of Desai’s storytelling. Engdahl’s idea of an “authentic witness” lets us examine how the author constructs the subjectivity of Zuni in the illustrated novella, portraying through the character a form of Muslim childhood in a newly independent India. The framework of “Witness Literature” is particularly useful in this regard since it enables the reader to look beyond the superficiality of treating a child character as a mere bystander, and instead consider her as a person who occupies an active and agentic role in the narrative. Set against the backdrop of the Partition riots in India in 1947, The Peacock Garden (1974) relates the story of a family of Muslims who have been forced to evacuate their home by the rioting Hindus in their village. The first published work for children by Anita Desai—an Indian novelist who taught for many years in the USA—this illustrated novella is one of

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

185

the handful of English-language, Indian books on the Partition of India and Pakistan for young children. Desai has since authored books for both adult and juvenile audiences, including her better-known Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize-winning novel for young audiences, The Village by the Sea (1982). Even though The Peacock Garden supports the ideology of nation-building in the manner of other historical narratives published for children in post-independent India, it does so in an accessible and non-­didactic manner. This novella was first brought out by India Book House Education Trust in 1974 and was subsequently reprinted and distributed in England in 1979 by Heinemann. Although The Peacock Garden has been translated into Indian languages (Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi), the 1991 English-­ language version, illustrated by Mei-Yim Low, received more attention from readers than any of the other editions of the book. I argue in this chapter that through her use of specific narrative strategies in The Peacock Garden, Desai establishes Zuni as a thoughtful Muslim subject, and produces a story that is ideal to foster children’s awareness of the aftermath of the Partition of the subcontinent—an event that saw one of the largest mass-displacements in world history. I also suggest that Desai uses rhetorical strategies to give Zuni a dynamic subject position, and that this construction allows the author to offer her target audience of children a view of complex, thematic issues revolving around the Partition and forced displacement. In unpacking some of the communicative devices employed by Desai in this conflict narrative, I claim that the author does not characterize the child character’s subjectivity as fixed. Rather, she allows the protagonist to occupy multiple positionalities—that of a child who is vulnerable, helpless, curious, questioning, thoughtful as well as that of someone who evaluates contradictory opinions about the Partition and its aftermath, even while she is struggling to handle the trauma inflicted upon her by the conflict. In doing so, Desai provides opportunities for the audience of child readers both to empathize with the protagonist and her family, and to question or evaluate the events surrounding the Partition. Beyond the history of the Partition itself, The Peacock Garden’s underlying thematic concern is sectarian violence—a form of communal violence caused by divisions and factional rivalries, in this case between the Hindus and the Muslims. Of the few Partition narratives written by Indian authors for young audiences, most of them (including Nina Sabnani’s picturebooks, Mukand and Riaz and Stitching Stories, and Uma Krishnaswami’s Chachaji’s Cup) foreground the geographical division of

186 

N. SIVASHANKAR

the subcontinent and relegate to the background the religious divide that fueled it (Sivashankar 19–20). By contrast, The Peacock Garden offers a counter-story by highlighting the sectarian tension that pervaded the Indian subcontinent prior to, and immediately after it gained independence from the British. Moreover, stories about the Partition for children, including those mentioned above, primarily feature Hindu protagonists, whereas Desai’s novella centers around a Muslim family. As a teller of this counter-story, Desai is vested with the responsibility of illuminating and exploring the experience of an otherwise marginalized character in Indian and Anglo-Indian children’s literature—a Muslim child in a subcontinent battling for a Hindu majority. In order to examine how Desai employs rhetorical resources to communicate with her audiences as she constructs this narrative about sectarian division, I turn to the framework of Rhetorical Narratology, a method of understanding narrative “as a rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Phelan, Experiencing Fiction 3). This approach, which identifies narrative as a multilayered tool of communicative action, focuses on the relationships among tellers of the story (authors/narrators), audiences, the occasion of the storytelling, and the events, together with the tools employed in the act of intercommunication between author and audience. In their classic study of narrative theory, Scholes, Phelan, and Kellogg state that one of the primary objectives of authors of narratives is “to engage and influence their audiences’ cognition, emotion, and values” (The Nature of Narrative 297). This idea is particularly valuable in the case of literature aimed at children, wherein the authors are purposively communicating with their young audience through the use of varied narrative resources.

Zuni as an Authentic Witness In this section, I argue that Zuni, the central character, has been constructed by Desai as an authentic witness by virtue of how she performs her roles as both an eyewitness and what I will call here a histor, a term that I adapt from the theoretical work of Scholes et al. In addition to actively witnessing the Partition riots, Zuni also functions as someone who critically examines and evaluates conflicting opinions about the event. While Engdahl suggests that “the effect of [witness literature] depends on the reader’s conviction that the author is an authentic witness” (7), I extend his argument to propose that the effect also relies on the reader’s belief in

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

187

the character as an authentic witness, an authenticity that depends, I argue, on the way that character combines the two functions of seeing and questioning or evaluating. Before proceeding to deem Zuni an “authentic witness,” I consider the terms eyewitness and histor and examine how she plays out these parts. One of the primary subject positions that Desai constructs for Zuni in this historical narrative is that of a child who is witnessing communal conflict unfold in front of her eyes. The novella opens with a short excerpt from the main text prior to the title page, in which an omniscient, third-­ person narrator2 declares that the protagonist, Zuni, “saw so many bonfires there now [in her village] … immense ones with hungry blue and orange and scarlet flames reaching out into the hot, parched air” (Desai 1). This paratextual element—one that does not appear as part of the primary narrative—signals to the reader the role of Zuni during the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan. She is a witness who “could see bonfires;” “could hear voices in the village … some screaming high, thin screams like kites battling in the sky…” (Desai 1). This short excerpt is followed by the title and the copyright pages, which lead to the main body of the text. In the main narrative, Desai then constructs a somewhat different third-­ person narrator, who tells the story of Zuni and her family’s displacement from their home due to the fire, and of their subsequent seeking a haven in a local mosque. This narrator reports primarily on what Zuni is thinking and experiencing, privileging her knowledge as reliable, and using Zuni’s understanding to communicate information to her audience, thus highlighting her role as a witness. For instance, as Zuni’s family escapes covertly from the village, the narrator reports that “[i]t was as if the whole village was on fire. Zuni could see that it was too big a fire to put out—there was so little water in the well these days” (Desai 11). The narrator also shows us Zuni’s confused and conflicted thought process during this time: “That must be the reason why they were running away—but why in silence? Why in hiding? …. Zuni hid her face in her father’s beard to keep from bursting with the questions in her that she had to keep still” (Desai 11). For the remainder of The Peacock Garden, the third-person narrator focalizes the story through the character of Zuni by positioning her as an eyewitness whose thoughts are being made accessible to the reader—a mode of focalization that divulges Zuni’s thoughts, as she is processing them, and also reveals to the reader the limits of her comprehension. While the term “eyewitness” suggests that Zuni is merely a spectator of the events occurring around her, using the expression histor connotes

188 

N. SIVASHANKAR

Zuni’s more active participation in the act of witnessing. She not only observes; she also interprets and evaluates what she sees and experiences during the aftermath of the Partition. Scholes et  al. define a histor as a “narrator [who] is not a recorder or recounter but an investigator. He examines the past with an eye toward separating out actuality from myth. …Where the traditional poet must confine himself to one version of his story, the histor can present conflicting versions in his search for the fact” (242–243). As the text continues, we see Desai periodically positioning Zuni to perform this role of a histor. In these instances, Desai employs the discursive technique of restricted narration. She does not allow the narrator to perform the functions of interpreting and evaluating the characters or the events; instead, she lets dialogues between characters highlight the conflicting viewpoints that Zuni tries to navigate. In other words, Desai removes the narrator from the frame and allows the child character, and by extension the child reader, to do the work of interpretation and evaluation. The child reader shares Zuni’s initial doubts and questions (“why the silence, why the hiding”) and hears what she hears; but often neither Zuni nor the narrator articulates an answer. As a result, the child reader is left to comprehend the message conveyed directly by dialogue between characters and, along with Zuni, to perform the act of interpreting and evaluating the opposing views of the conflict that are put forth by other characters in the narrative. These rhetorical devices of restricted narration and character-character dialogue are evident in the exchange between Amma (Zuni’s mother) and Abba (Zuni’s father) that occurs when the family learns that they have been offered refuge in a house in the local mosque. The priest permits them to stay within the premises of the mosque, while the other refugees leave for Pakistan. Abba is shown to be dismissive of the idea of moving to Pakistan, and Amma persists with the idea of crossing the border in the trucks that are likely to arrive the following day. ‘Most of them will be going by truck to Pakistan,’ Abba said. ‘They are waiting for the trucks to come.’ Amma shifted suddenly and said, ‘Why can’t we? Why should we not try, like them? It might be better…’ ‘How can it be better,’ Abba said with some anger, ‘when our land is here, not there? What is the good of going to a new country with empty hands? How will we eat? How will we live there?’

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

189

‘But there may be nothing left here,’ Amma cried. ‘It may all be burnt!’ (Desai 24)

Here, Desai’s use of restricted narration and character-character dialogue illustrates the multiplicity of voices that could exist at the time of crisis within a family. The restricted narrator only reports the dialogue between Amma and Abba, adding notes about tone and emotion (“with some anger”), but does not evaluate Zuni’s parents’ views on migration, and neither do any of the other characters in the story. Desai instead complicates the subjectivity of Zuni by positioning the character as a histor in these conversations between her parents. While Zuni is not participating in the conversation above, she is shown to be listening to her parents; she is the one who initiates this exchange between her parents by “nodding at the humming crowds out in the courtyard,” and asking her Abba about what “all the others” in the mosque were likely to do—stay or leave (Desai 24). She is not only a spectator, but also one who carefully considers the events around her and raises questions about them. She is the one who asks, “When can we go back to the house, Amma? …[W]ill they let us stay? Will the priest let us stay?”—questions that have no simple answers (Desai 23). Mei-Yim Low’s illustrations for The Peacock Garden help facilitate the positioning of Zuni as both an eyewitness and a histor; they also enhance the role of the child reader/viewer. The first edition of The Peacock Garden, which was published in India in 1974, featured illustrations by Punco and the 1979 Heinemann edition used illustrations by Jeeroo Roy. It was only later, when the British publishing house Mammoth reprinted the novella in 1991, that Low’s images were published with Desai’s story. Low employs the third-person perspective in all her images to show the events not through Zuni’s eyes, but as if a neutral observer was seeing them. This perspective also allows for readers to take on the role of an eyewitness, as they see the illustrations of Zuni and her family on the pages. In the very first illustration, Zuni and her family are shown to be walking away from their village, which is burning. While the rest of the family members bear belongings in their hand, Abba is carrying Zuni, who is curled up in a fetal position in his arms, and whose gaze is directed toward his chest, and away from the houses, the fire, and the smoke (Desai 8). This image conveys Zuni as showing a spontaneous emotion in response to the riots that she has just witnessed, situating her as an eyewitness. She is uneasy, uncertain and insecure, and seeks comfort in her father’s arms.

190 

N. SIVASHANKAR

In a subsequent illustration, Zuni is depicted as she evaluates something while in her mother’s company (Desai 19). Zuni’s eyes are wide open and directed toward the ground, while her mother is pointing her finger at a family who is leaving the mosque to board the truck to Pakistan. This suggests that rather than passively listening to her mother, Zuni is engaged in the act of careful consideration, as if assessing something. Low’s illustration of the young girl in active thought serves to reaffirm Desai’s construction of Zuni as a histor. Further, Low also positions the readers as witnesses and perhaps evaluators themselves. The third-person observer perspective of the illustrations leaves the young viewer to perform the work of interpreting and evaluating the characters and events, while the juxtaposition of narrative and illustration also permits the audience to compare multiple perspectives.

Desai’s Narrator and the Creation of Zuni as a Dynamic Subject One of the key issues in The Peacock Garden is the relationship between the establishment of Zuni as an “authentic witness,” who performs the roles of both the relatively passive eyewitness and the inquisitive histor, and the role of the narrator. Blending rhetorical approaches, Desai strategically uses the narrator to distinguish these two subject positions for Zuni, and subsequently for the reader as well. A rhetorical reading of a narrative, such as the one as we have begun above, involves considering the text as part of communication pathway between the author and the audience. As we have already seen, Desai relies on what James Phelan and others term two “channels of communication” to perform the primary functions of narration: to report about the characters and the events, to interpret, and to evaluate them (Phelan, Living to Tell 12). Through one of these communication channels or “tracks,” the author disseminates messages to the audience through the narrator. Through the second, she conveys information to the audience through dialogue that occurs between the characters in the storyworld (Phelan, Living to Tell 12). What is notable from the opening of the novella onward are the distinctly different impressions of Zuni conveyed through each of these two channels. The “eyewitness” whom we have observed in the opening scenes of the texts is often confused and frightened and largely ignorant of what

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

191

is happening. The “histor” whom we have tracked in sections of dialogue between Zuni and her parents is alert and questioning and, as the novel continues, an astute analyst of the essential concerns in the story. Through the alternation of these two perspectives, Zuni is constructed as a dynamic subject who is able to shift between various stances and, in the process, evoke from the reader differing responses. However, there is another aspect of Desai’s technique to be considered here. The stance of her narrator toward her protagonist also shifts, sometimes within one passage, as the narrator observes the child Zuni more from the exterior or conveys more of her feelings and thoughts. For example, in the opening section of the novel, the narrator oscillates between the past and the present in order to convey not only the passing of time and the worsening heat, but also to illustrate the restlessness of the families— an anxiety that is specified when the narrator shares the thoughts of the child protagonist, Zuni: Others paced the rooftops—white figures in the dark, slowly walking up and down, up and down, waiting for a breeze or a cloud—so Zuni thought. She knew they were waiting, but she did not really know what they were waiting for, nor did she know why they were so worried. (Desai 6)

Desai’s narrator focalizes here through Zuni’s consciousness to make the interpretive judgment that Zuni knew her neighbors were anxious, but that she was still ignorant about the cause of their worries. For the rest of the first chapter, the narrator continues to report on Zuni, focusing on the events of a hot night in August, when the child awakened and “cried out in fear,”…“feeling the heat burn her body, and then saw flames leaping up to the sky in the neighbor’s courtyard like a huge bonfire” (Desai 7,6). However, having first characterized Zuni as dependent and frightened, the object of the child reader’s empathetic concern, the narrator immediately adds another layer to her subjectivity—she is also thoughtful and curious, someone whose thoughts the reader can follow. In the scene where Abba responds to Zuni’s question about the mysterious figure who is leading their family out of the village, Desai allows her narrator to do most of the reporting, while still privileging Zuni’s thought process. ‘It is Gopal,’ Abba whispered. ‘He is taking us to a safe place. Now Zuni, no more talking. We must be silent’ … . Gopal was the man who watched over Abba’s mango grove down by the canal and helped to look after the cattle

192 

N. SIVASHANKAR

and take them to cattle fairs to trade. Gopal was not Muslim, like Abba’s family, but a Hindu. That was why he could walk out in safety. (Desai 10)

In this passage, the narrative perspective gives the reader access to Zuni’s thoughts about Gopal and his identity. It illustrates how this young Muslim girl is trying to rationalize the act of a man walking about in the village with a sense of security at the time of the Partition riots while none of the members from her own family could. Zuni evaluates Gopal as being a Hindu and not a Muslim; and she infers that his religious affiliation offered him safety. As readers, we understand that these are Zuni’s conclusions since we are embedded in her perspective while reading the narrative. Importantly, the character also comprehends the relevance of these religious differences in the context of the incident that forces her family to leave their home behind and migrate to a new place. This method of toying with the rhetorical device of the narrator— allowing the narrator to perform the functions of reporting, interpreting, and evaluating on Zuni’s behalf at times, and restricting the narrator at other times—is used by Desai through the entire course of the book in order to show the conflicting and coexisting subjectivities of Zuni as the more passive eyewitness as well as the more analytical histor. Using a third-­ person narrator gives Desai more room to mediate her own views, whereas restricting the narrator to [or from] reporting gives her the opportunity to either establish multiple viewpoints through dialogic interaction or speak directly to the audience through conversational disclosure. These different narrative methods become particularly critical as Zuni continues to wrestle with the divisions between Hindus and Muslims in her community and witnesses the effects of the clashes in the aftermath of the Partition of the subcontinent. Here Desai restricts the interpretive voice of the narrator and gives a complex view of Zuni as intelligently curious, as well as merely non-comprehending, as she listens to information that Desai narrates through the character of her mother. Once Zuni, her Amma, Abba, and sister, Razia, reach the mosque—a temporary place of refuge for the family—the following exchange occurs between the mother and daughter. ‘Look out again, my dear,’ [Amma] said, very slowly, ‘and you will see that they are our neighbours from the village, and some from nearby villages. Our Muslim neighbours. We are the lucky ones who escaped from the fire

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

193

and from the killers last night and are being sheltered here by the priests. No one will dare to kill us here in the mosque.’ ‘Kill us?’ Zuni cried out. ‘Who wants to kill us?’ ‘The Hindus, my dear. Kill us, or at least drive us away to Pakistan.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘The new country for the Muslims across the border. The Hindus want us to leave India and go to Pakistan, to this new country.’ (Desai 16–18)

The excerpt above is an important one in the narrative. In it, Desai restricts the narrator’s functions and allows the character-character dialogue itself to carry out the work of narration. The dialogic exchange positions the mother as a superior, all-knowing figure, and Zuni as naïve and unknowing, so much so that the mother has had to explain the situation to her daughter “very slowly” (Desai 16). We are able to infer that while Zuni is frightened (“Kill us?”), she is also interested in understanding what is going on around her (“What is [Pakistan]?”). This exchange also serves to illustrate how Desai restricts the role of the narrator and allows the dialogue between Amma and Zuni to perform the functions of narration, thus communicating her intended message to the audience. While Amma is informing Zuni about the war between the Hindus and the Muslims, and the reason for the establishment of a new country for the Muslims, Desai is simultaneously communicating with her young audience to educate them about the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan. In The Peacock Garden, Desai portrays the idea of “Indianness” not as monolithic but as dynamic, complicated and unessentialized, by inserting bite-sized commentaries on the religious divide between Hindus and Muslims and thus undermining the idea of national unity or of a singular, secular nation. She characterizes Amma and Abba as contradictory, in terms of their beliefs, and locates Zuni as an interpreter and an evaluator— thus a histor—in a liminal space, oscillating between, and evaluating, the ideologies embraced by her mother and father. During the vital scenes in which Abba and Amma debate whether or not to migrate to Pakistan, Desai again uses both direct narration and character-character dialogue to convey her central themes to the reader: Abba always knew so well how to calm everyone, Zuni thought. Amma began to sound quite excited as she said, ‘Then we must go too. Let us escape as well….

194 

N. SIVASHANKAR

But Abba… said very clearly and firmly, ‘No. There will be no running away for me. My land is here, my mango grove and my cattle. I have been talking to the priest here who says the Hindus will never attack a mosque. It is a place of worship and the Government of India has promised to protect it. It will be best to stay here till everything is quiet again and people become sensible once more and we can go back to our house.’ (Desai 20)

At the outset of this passage, Desai has the narrator report Zuni’s thoughts by focalizing on her, using the phrase, “Zuni thought.” Subsequently, she restricts the function of the narrator to merely reporting the events and the characters, while placing emphasis on the dialogue between Amma and Abba to convey to her audience that even within the same family of refugees there are likely to be conflicting views about issues such as migration, safety, the trustworthiness of neighbors and the government. Zuni, who is in the frame of reference, is privy throughout to the conversation between her parents; however, Desai then provides voice to Zuni to divulge to the reader that the young girl is not merely watching her parents argue but is actively thinking about her family’s future. When “Amma’s mouth opened to let out a wail… , Abba gave her such a look, so strong and dark, that she said nothing at all … . Only Zuni still chattered” (Desai 20). She raises several questions: “Will we stay here, Abba? In the mosque? When will we go home? Do you think the cattle will be all right? Will Gopal look after them?” (Desai 20). Desai, thus, once again reaffirms her child protagonist’s position as a histor, who is dynamically investigating and inquiring into the events happening around her, and once again asks the reader to consider the answers to the child histor’s unanswered questions. In creating the position of a histor for Zuni, Desai situates her protagonist as a child who is developing a strong sense of national identity (by equating it to the idea of a “home”) during the Partition riots in her village in India. While Zuni’s Abba embodies the secular nation and believes that his family can leave the mosque and go back home, her Amma does not entertain such thoughts. Unlike Abba, she does not trust her erstwhile home in their village to be a safe space. She does not buy into Abba’s belief that Hindus and Muslims are equally responsible for her family’s present situation. Zuni, on the other hand, travels back and forth between her nostalgia for her old home and her excitement for inhabiting a new home, be it in Pakistan or in a make-shift house within the premises of the mosque. In a later scene where Zuni meets her old friends, who have also

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

195

taken refuge in the mosque with their families, they flaunt their dolls, reminding her of Mumtaz, her ragdoll. She thinks “of Mumtaz lying alone in a corner [of their old house], the big, brown-eyed cattle in her father’s shed … . and then she kn[ows] Abba had decided right and they should stay” (Desai 23). Although Desai, in this instance, first uses her narrator, who in turn focalizes on Zuni, to report on the character and the events concerning her, she then deploys Zuni to do the work of interpreting and evaluating the judgment of her parents. As the excerpt indicates, Zuni finally decides to take her Abba’s side, while thinking about her doll in her old home. It is important to note that this scene occurs in between the two important arguments that her parents have in the novella, regarding the move to Pakistan. In employing a narrator who reports that Zuni “knew Abba had decided right,” and consistently focalizes around the consciousness of the young protagonist, Desai communicates to her audience her own project of constructing a patriotic Muslim girl whose allegiances lie with India at the time of the Partition (Desai 23). Through the length of the novella, it can be observed that the author highlights multiple aspects of Zuni’s identity, and while some of them have been underscored in this chapter, there are others such as the protagonist’s gender that have not been dealt with deeply here. Desai includes scenes like those involving the ragdoll in order to situate Zuni as a naïve young child, pining for her doll—a construction of the character that perhaps offers the child reader respite from the weighty, complex issues of displacement with which the adults in the novel wrestle. I would argue that Desai creates this subject position for Zuni, drawing on the trope of childhood innocence, to remind her young audience that they can only be onlookers while adults around them engage in crucial conversations, while she cautions her older readers that they need to protect their children and their naïvete. This subject position is short-lived, however, as Zuni is reminded that her family “[has] left many things behind” and that her doll was just one among those (Desai 23). In later scenes featuring Zuni in the courtyards of the mosque, Desai paints the picture of a child who is distracted and fascinated by the presence of peacocks; but here again, as in the segment about the doll, Zuni’s child-like wonder is soon replaced by her realization of the distress surrounding her. When Zuni wanders into a lemon orchard in the pursuit of peacock feathers, she notices her father working at the cattle-shed in the corner. Here Zuni’s naïvete makes a re-appearance as “swinging her legs

196 

N. SIVASHANKAR

and watching the bullocks snuffle into buckets of fodder,” she asks her father why they cannot go out to the fields (Desai 37). Abba replies that “‘[t]hese are bad times—Hindus and Muslims, all have gone mad, they are killing each other and burning down houses and cities…. We are quite safe here, inside the walls of the mosque’” (Desai 37). At this point, however, Desai once again shows the shift in Zuni’s subjectivity from that of an unknowing child to that of a more self-assertive, mature girl who realizes that she has to “assure” her father that she “know[s]” about the Hindus and Muslims fighting outside the walls of the mosque (37). Desai has her narrator report at this stage that Zuni “did not want [Abba] to think she was in the least bit afraid” (37). In having her child protagonist become aware of her role as the daughter of a Muslim father during troublesome times, Desai shows Zuni as a child who is at the cusp of maturity. However once more, at the end of the same chapter, Desai employs another dialogue with Abba to reestablish Zuni’s position as a child associated with purity and a literal, spiritual “innocence.” While her Abba goes to pray with the caretaker of the mosque, Zuni wanders around a graveyard and peers into “a hole in the ground into what seemed to be an underground cell” (Desai 42). Abba explains to her that the cell was the place where religious pilgrims would take shelter and pray for days on end. Zuni shudders at the thought of this, holds her father’s hand for comfort and declares, “‘I would not be a pilgrim… . I hate dark rooms’” (Desai 42). In recalling and reconstituting his daughter’s position as a virtuous child, Abba says, “‘You are not a sinner’” and takes her home (Desai 42). Through the inclusion of this particular dialogue uttered by Abba, the author, in turn, gives the reader room to question whether Zuni is merely being cast as “innocent,” in theological terms, or as more “secular,” in not wanting to be associated with a religious trait. Desai, through the use of both tracks of communication (the voice of the narrator and the recorded dialogue), thus insists that Zuni, though she remains cheerful, struggles with the loss of her old home and with adapting to life as a refugee. Despite Abba’s assurance that she is “not a sinner,” she also struggles with guilt and responsibility, with the aftermath of traumatic violence, and with the realization that her parents, despite their assurances, cannot know who is at risk of death and who is not. When the family flees from their home at the beginning of the story, Gopal, the caretaker of Abba’s mango grove, guides the family to a safe place. Later in the story, when Abba and Zuni step outside of the mosque and take a trip to

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

197

the village, they learn of Gopal’s death. Gopal is a Hindu; and as has been emphasized in several passages early in the novella, not only Zuni, but also the adults of the family have presumed that his religious affiliation would ensure his safety. Now Zuni has to confront the irony that he died protecting their property. Here once again Zuni’s coexisting subjectivities of the passive bystander and an evaluating histor come to the fore, as Desai establishes these subject positions for Zuni by both restricting and allowing the narrator’s reporting: [Amma] cried, ‘Oh, you are safe! Is it all peaceful now?’ ‘Quite peaceful,’ Abba said, handing over the parcels one by one, ‘and very friendly.’ ‘And our house?’ she cried. ‘And our cattle—did you see them?’ He looked at her and said softly, ‘The house is burnt, Khalida, and no one knows who ran away with the cattle. Gopal did his best, but the thieves had knives with them. They killed him and got away.’ For a while they all stood shocked and silent to think the good Gopal had been killed while guarding their house and cattle. Zuni stopped eating nuts and blinked with tears. She did not bother now to ask what had happened to her doll Mumtaz. (Desai 59–60)

Here again, as in her representation of the family’s dilemma about whether or not to migrate to Pakistan, Desai positions Zuni as not just a passive bystander, but also a young histor struggling to deal with the hardship and trauma that go hand in hand with a conflict.

The Ethics of Storytelling in The Peacock Garden As was posited at the outset of the essay, the concept of “Witness Literature” is useful both in discussing the ethical issues that surround conflicts and in considering the ethics of the discourse of storytelling. Having examined how Desai uses narrators, characters, and voice in The Peacock Garden, it is important to address her project at large—the construction of a Muslim girl-child in newly independent India. As I have argued here, it can be seen that Zuni makes the explicit choice to side with her patriotic Abba and makes peace with the idea of staying in India, even though her friends have migrated to Pakistan. This stance adopted by Zuni is in keeping with that of the Indian child characters in historical narratives that were published in post-independent India. These novels—

198 

N. SIVASHANKAR

including Kamla’s Story: The Saga of our Freedom, The Chandipur Jewels, and The Blind Witness—highlighted the role of children in the process of nation-building and thereby roused their young readers to participate more actively in constructing a national identity. Desai uses the two dialogues between Amma and Abba (mentioned previously) to highlight these ethical tensions. She also uses, as we have seen, dialogues between Zuni and her parents to emphasize the ethical dilemma of being a Muslim in independent India on the brink of Partition, based on communal segregation. However, the ethics of storytelling includes also Desai’s choices in mediating the channels of communication, and her decisions to either permit the third-person, adult narrator to take control of the narration, or to restrict her role by giving preference to the character-character interaction through dialogue. When she is restricting the narrator from performing the reporting of characters and events, Desai directly addresses her implied audience of child readers. When discussing religion and conflict, however, Desai recruits the narrator to focalize around Zuni’s consciousness and positions the young child as a curious and thoughtful histor in order to invite the audience to engage with the character’s subjectivity and themselves make judgments about the Partition and situation of Muslims in India during that historical period. Her use of the two channels of communication to establish multiple subjectivities for a young, female, Muslim child also provides the audience the opportunity to think more deeply about the ethics of communalism and evaluate them alongside the character. Anita Desai offers a unique narrative about the Partition of India and Pakistan in The Peacock Garden, centralizing the feelings and experiences of a young Muslim girl-child. By constructing her protagonist as an authentic witness, she successfully manages to describe the religious climate during August 1947, while also effectively describing the atmosphere of atrocity which formed the fabric of the Partition riots. Moreover, Desai sets up multiple subjectivities for the child in order to reify her role as a patriotic young girl, who, in addition to being helpless, vulnerable, and occasionally passive is also vivacious, idealistic, reflective, and outspoken. In Zuni, Desai presents to young readers a strong role model—a complex child character who plays an active part in discerning and making sense of the conflict around her.

11  “I WOULD NOT BE A PILGRIM”: EXAMINING THE CONSTRUCTION… 

199

Notes 1. Rhetorical narratologist, Wayne Booth, puts forth the term “implied author” to refer to “author-image evoked by a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text” (Schmid). In this chapter, when I use the word “Desai,” I am referring to the implied Desai, considering that I too am constructing the author based on her work and assigning my interpretation of her work to the “implied Desai’s” intent. 2. Gerard Genette, in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, uses the term “heterodiegetic” narration to describe the kind of narration in which the narrator is “absent from the story [she] tells”; “homodiegetic” to characterize that in which the narrator is “present as a character in the story [she] tells” (245); and “autodiegetic” to illustrate the idea of a protagonist [herself] being a narrator (247). When I use the term third-person narrator in this context, I am drawing on Genette’s idea of the “heterodiegetic” narrator.

Works Cited Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives, vol. 6, no. 3, 1990, pp. ix–xi. Desai, Anita. The Peacock Garden. Illustrated by Mei-Yim Low, London, Mammoth, 1991. Desai, Anita. The Peacock Garden. Illustrated by Jeroo Roy, London, Heinemann, 1979. Desai, Anita. The Peacock Garden. Illustrated by Punco, Bombay, India Book House Education Trust, 1974. Engdahl, Horace. “Philomela’s Tongue: Introductory Remarks on Witness Literature”. Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium, edited by Horace Engdahl, World Scientific Publishing Co., 2002, pp. 1–14. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane Lewin. Cornell UP, 1981. Phelan, James. Experiencing Fiction: Judgements, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2007. Phelan, James. Living to Tell About It. Cornell UP, 2005. Phelan, James. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2017. Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin. “‘The Lessons of Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day” Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman, Ohio State UP, 1999, pp. 88–109.

200 

N. SIVASHANKAR

Schmid, Wolf. “Implied Author.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, 16 May 2014, www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/implied-author-revised-versionuploaded-26-january-2013. Accessed 28 May 2019. Scholes, Robert, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative: Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Oxford UP, 2006. Sivashankar, Nithya. “Religion, Riots and Rift: Representations of the Partition of 1947  in English-Language Picture Books.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, vol. 1, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1–30.

PART IV

Children as Culture-Makers: Young People, Agency, and Literary Cultures

CHAPTER 12

Katharine Hull, Pamela Whitlock, and the “Ransome Style” Victoria Ford Smith

When Pamela Whitlock wrote “From Swallow to Sea Bear” (1967)—an essay memorializing her mentor and friend, Arthur Ransome, published in The Junior Bookshelf—she might have been preoccupied with her own reputation as a writer for young readers. While Ransome is remembered as a writer who, through his Swallows and Amazons series, revitalized children’s literature with tales of outdoor adventure, Whitlock, along with her collaborator Katharine Hull, is often remembered as a copycat. When Whitlock was 16 and Hull was 15, they began publishing a trilogy of children’s novels inspired by Ransome. All three books—The Far-Distant Oxus (1937), Escape to Persia (1938), and Oxus in Summer (1939)—were relatively successful but today are largely ignored in children’s literature scholarship. When contemporary scholars mention the series, they usually refer to it in light of the authors’ imitation of Ransome. Hugh Brogan calls The Far-Distant Oxus by Whitlock and Hull “a successful piece of flattery” (351), and Anna Bogen describes it as Ransome fanfiction (61).

V. F. Smith (*) University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_12

203

204 

V. F. SMITH

Whitlock likely viewed her own work quite differently. While she does not mention her own writing in “From Swallow to Sea Bear,” she does note that Ransome’s books “have been imitated by those who only found in them children intent on practical occupations” (223). These imitators are like the reviewers who criticized the Swallows and Amazons series “for being ‘middle class’” or those who praise them for being “moral” (223). They do not truly understand Ransome’s books, according to Whitlock. While many, she concedes, recognize how Ransome changed the landscape of children’s literature, few comprehend “the tremendous impact [his books] made on the first generation to enjoy them” (224). Implicit in Whitlock’s discussion is that she does understand Ransome’s impact. She was ten years old when Swallows and Amazons (1930) was published, and, in her words, she learned—alongside “thousands of children”—“a new way of looking and seeing” through Ransome’s books (224). That fresh perspective, for Whitlock, extended beyond reading to shape her own authorship. She quotes, at the end of her essay, a passage from Ransome’s “Art for Life’s Sake” (1913) that describes how one author can reproduce the creative spirit in another: “We ask from an artist opportunities of conscious living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their recurrence, turn us into artists, and help us to contract the habit of being alive” (224). This suggestion of imaginative contagion is a proper final note. Separating true inspiration from those mimics who produce merely stories of practical children, Whitlock emphasizes the sterility of mimicry and the fecundity of engaging fully with the work of a fellow artist by adopting their way of seeing the world. Without even addressing her relationship with Ransome, Whitlock quietly insists that reading his books made her an author, not a copycat. In what follows, I adopt Whitlock’s position, which requires departing from common critical approaches to child writers and, in particular, the assumption that their imitation is uncritical and aspirational. After a review of current theorizations of children as contributors to culture, I examine the reception and publication history of The Far-Distant Oxus, considering the paradigms of childhood and authorship that shaped that history.1 I then trace these paradigms in The Far-Distant Oxus itself, a text that does not merely reproduce but interrogates and critiques Swallows and Amazons. I argue that reading the young authors’ fiction alongside public and private accounts of their relationship to Ransome—as readers, mentees, and writers—unsettles and complicates the status of mimicry as a childlike or derivative literary practice. Ransome, Whitlock, and Hull understood the Oxus books as imitation of a particular sort, its reproductions

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

205

self-conscious and inextricably linked to the authors’ professional practices. Reassessing mimicry makes clear how our assumptions about childhood and authorship often obscure more complex, and more agentic, models of childhood.

Theorizing Child Authorship Current scholarship has parsed the powerful preconceptions that inform and even warp our approach to child authors. For example, Cathryn Halverson argues that readers evaluate a child-produced text based on “how well [it] corresponds to their already formed notions of ‘the child,’” with the consequence that “the child’s text often does not work to reconfigure the reader’s understanding of ‘child’ but rather only to confirm it” (243). For example, one of the earliest approaches to child texts was through juvenilia, a genre that defines the child as an unfolding subject, a germ of later genius. Juvenilia, writes Rachel Conrad, “replicates adult views that children’s activities are valuable only toward an adulthood that they will eventually inhabit” (197). Studies of juvenilia often see child writers’ tendency to mimic published texts as puerile attempts on the path to accomplishment. Rachel M. Brownstein, for example, compares Jane Austen’s and Lord Byron’s earliest writing to the sounds of “an infant who becomes an independent, distinctive, socialized adult in the process of imitating others,” language that suggests that both young authors were much younger and unpracticed than they were—and this despite Brownstein’s respect for child authorship and her acknowledgment that both authors’ adult works continued to be “self-conscious about echoing literary and social forms” (135). Other accounts of child writing eschew the developmental narrative, adopting instead the assumption that young authors are inspired Romantic geniuses. Writers in popular and scholarly sources alike often dub children “natural” poets or artists, and many have parsed readers’ attachment to these idealized notions of child authorship. Halverson, for instance, argues that girl authors of the 1920s were valued because their writing was “highly feminine, emotional, naïve, in possession of an intense physicality, and close or even part of the natural world” (237). Anna Redcay complicates this assumed innocence of child authors, arguing that reviewers of child writing from the mid-nineteenth and twentieth century in particular expressed both adoration for Romantic childhood and praise for young authors’ ability to navigate literary culture. Innocence and professionalism, Redcay concludes, were not opposed but dependent upon one

206 

V. F. SMITH

another: “the child’s acuity—her ability both to write within and improve upon literary conventions—is directly dependent upon her naiveté” (9). While Redcay recognizes the real child holding the pen negotiating powerful constructions of Romantic or innocent childhood, many studies do not approach that real child at all, assuming that accessing that child is too problematic a project to pursue. A particularly robust vein of scholarship on child writers focuses on this impossibility, importantly countering the assumption that readers can access an unmediated child voice via young people’s writing. Such studies are concerned with adults’ influence on children’s writing and, in particular, children’s imitation of adult forms. Peter L. Cumming, for example, wonders what scholars can do with children’s writing that “seems thoroughly co-opted (either as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ writing) by conventions of ‘adult’ writing” (110). He does not dismiss what he calls “‘contaminated’ children’s writing” that is transformed by “substantial adult mediation” but suggests that such texts are valuable primarily as evidence that children’s writing will never lead us to an “authentic” child voice (111). Cumming concedes that “some children’s writing may be progressive and innovative” but warns that “we need to be prepared for the possibility that much children’s writing will be formulaic, derivative, banal, conservative, or reactionary, in both content and form” (113).2 Some recent scholarship re-theorizes child authorship, suggesting that the influence of existing texts and the sway of discourses of childhood do not foreclose the possibility of a professional, agentic child author. For example, Laurie Langbauer recuperates young people’s writing as a self-­ conscious tradition in the Romantic period, when “youth … wrote as youth” (2). Her exploration of Robert Southey’s support of young poet Henry Kirke White opens up the possibility that adult and child writers forged relationships that rejected the hierarchy of genius and neophyte. Conrad, invested in re-imagining the relationship between adults’ and children’s poetry in particular, notes that to recognize child-produced culture we must unseat existing models of agency. She uses a children’s rights framework to argue that “Western ideas of autonomy likely interfere with adults’ recognition of young people’s literary artistry, which can involve adult mediation through prompting, transcribing, teaching, editing, or other scaffolding.” This redefines adults’ influence on children’s texts as “part of the background against which children’s literary productions take shape” (200).

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

207

In this context, imitation is not a sign of young authors’ immaturity or powerlessness but instead evidences their adeptness at navigating literary culture. Marah Gubar has explored this possibility as it appears in the practices of fictional children; she notes that E. Nesbit’s novels, for example, feature children and adults alike who “tweak, transform, and renew” existing stories, “suggesting that both [adult writer and child reader] can improvise on other people’s stories to produce their own narratives” (132). In a similar vein, Mitzi Myers contends that “the mimicry of child readers and writers” is “wily and inventive,” a truth obscured by the “metanarrative” of Romantic childhood, which focuses on the child’s isolation from adult culture rather than their use of it (67). Myers’s work is akin to that of Robin Bernstein, who argues that children are both “scripted” by adult discourses and “scripting” in their responses to those discourses (29). Together, this scholarship suggests that we should consider children’s resourcefulness when they are confronted with adult narratives and that mimicry, a practice often read as childish, might in fact indicate artistry.

Young Hands It is understandable that scholars read The Far-Distant Oxus as mimicry. Its plot chronicles the adventures of the Hunterly siblings (Bridget, Frances, and Anthony) alongside brother and sister Jennifer and Peter Cleverton and mysterious moorland boy Maurice as the group rides ponies across the moors of southwest England—a narrative that would be at home in a Swallows and Amazons novel. Reviews of The Far-Distant Oxus published upon the novel’s release framed the novel as a recapitulation of Ransome. A reviewer writing in 1937 in the London Times, for example, insisted that The Far-Distant Oxus “will attract first by its picturesque wrapper, then by its title, then by Mr. Arthur Ransome’s introduction, which tells how it was made” (“Children’s” 10). That wrapper had been designed to resemble the covers of the Swallows and Amazons books and reinforced the idea that The Far-Distant Oxus was imitative, perhaps indistinguishable, from Ransome’s series, and the introduction assured readers that Ransome authorized the text as worthwhile. Even those invested in the novel’s originality could not seem to escape referring to Ransome as father of the form. While May Becker, writing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1940, admired inventive elements of the Oxus books, she called the stories “derivative” and described Whitlock and Hull as “two

208 

V. F. SMITH

schoolgirls who wanted to write like [Ransome]” and who “used his ‘formula’” (7). This critical tradition—which framed Ransome as the original genius and Whitlock and Hull as amateur echoes—continues to the present day. In 1984, Humphrey Carpenter compared The Far-Distant Oxus to Ransome’s series three times in one paragraph: it is “written in imitation of the Swallows and Amazons stories”; “Whitlock illustrated it in the Ransome style”; and the book “has all the features of a typical Swallows and Amazons adventure” (182). Nearly two decades later, Victor Watson wrote that the Oxus novels “are as absorbing as Ransome at his best” (57) but without the adult writer’s “greater psychological depth” (58), and Brogan, in his biography of Ransome, argued that the young authors’ talent “might have taken years to express itself, if it had ever done so, without its discovery of the literary form invented by Arthur Ransome” (351). Kate Teltscher put it succinctly: The Far-Distant Oxus “was modeled closely on Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons but substituted ponies for boats” (149). When reviews contemporary to Whitlock and Hull recognized The Far-­ Distant Oxus as original, they did so by arguing that the authors escaped mimicry by virtue of their embodiment of a particular mode of Romantic childhood. Such reviews praised The Far-Distant Oxus as vivid and immediate, communicating childhood’s experiences without the artificialities that trouble adult-authored books for or about children. For example, a 1937 review titled “By and For Children” published in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) dubbed The Far-Distant Oxus “the real thing, genuine children’s play recorded by those who played it while it was still quite fresh in their minds” (“By” 832). Whitlock and Hull likely understood the force of this rhetoric. The title of the TLS review referenced but revised their own motto, proclaimed in a letter to Ransome: “‘by children, about children, and for children’ … In fact, ‘Do without the grown-up author altogether’” (Ransome, Introduction x). Their celebration of child-genius and their dismissal of the “grown-up author” might seem to grant themselves agency as young authors, but in fact it erases their labor; characterizing their authorial practice as steeped in unspoiled childhood implies that they are, to use Redcay’s phrase, “professionally adept at being young” (159). As this reception history suggests, accounts of The Far-Distant Oxus at times gravitate toward extremes, reading the novel either as a rote imitation of Ransome’s work or as a text arising, fully formed, from childhood

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

209

play. But it is possible to work between extremes, answering Conrad’s call for “a view of autonomy that encompasses individuals’ embeddedness in social and cultural worlds” (200)—in this case accepting Whitlock and Hull as proper authors despite the reality that they are influenced by existing texts and subject to cultural constructs of childhood. Ransome’s impact on the young women is well documented, and the pull of Romantic childhood on interpretations of their work is evident. However, a fuller account of their authorship emerges if we consider accounts of the novel’s composition created by Ransome, Whitlock, and Hull—an archive that ensures we understand the young authors’ imitation within the context of their professional practices. The document most scholars turn to for a description of The Far-­ Distant Oxus’s origins is Ransome’s introduction. He recounts the arrival by mail of Whitlock and Hull’s manuscript and accompanying letter by comparing the young women to other children who send him mail: those naïve fans whose letters are “addressed to the characters” (viii); those who are playful mimics, “who have adopted the … make-believe of my stories” to “play them for themselves” (viii); and those who attempt to imitate Ransome but, due to youth and lack of skill, fail, like the girl who “produced a note-book in which were the beginnings of half a dozen different tales” (ix). Ransome introduces these children as counterpoints to Whitlock and Hull, who sent him a “colossal, orderly bulk” of “four hundred closely written pages” (ix). Ransome indulges in some of the tropes of inspired child authorship that preoccupied reviewers of The Far-Distant Oxus—he contends that the authors “seem to have had instinctive knowledge of how a book should be written” (x) and assumes that for “young geniuses” the “actual writing … presented no difficulty at all” (xi)—but he also characterizes them as authors whose reliance on his plots is a studied practice. For example, Ransome dedicates much of his introduction to outlining the authors’ process, which is anything but effortless. While many reviewers characterized The Far-Distant Oxus as a blithe record of childhood play, Ransome focuses on the time Whitlock and Hull invested in crafting their manuscript. “They did not begin to write until they had agreed on the contents of every chapter and had drawn up a detailed plan of the whole,” he explains (x). Once Jonathan Cape agreed under Ransome’s advice to publish the book, Whitlock and Hull developed editing guidelines and marked the manuscript with what they called “an excessive amount of red ink,” using copyediting marks of their own devising, as they

210 

V. F. SMITH

found the standard printer’s “squiggles and curlicues … unnecessary” (xii). Their edits were primarily deletions—the consequences of a strident plan to excise unnecessary language and “any words [they] disliked,” a list that included the word “children” (xii). Deeming “children” off limits might signal their understanding that many see childhood as a disempowered or idealized state—associations that, in their motto, they seemed to exploit; rooting out references to “children” in the text itself, then, might suggest their intention to depict their protagonists’ adventures with seriousness or even their own understanding of childhood as a state they can claim or abandon. Taken together, Whitlock and Hull’s editorial practices imply that while they aimed to “do without the grown-up author altogether,” they did not reject the publishing world but instead the idea that authorship requires “grown-ups.” They mimicked, and at times transcended, professional norms, inspiring Ransome to write that they “might serve as a model to be followed by much more experienced writers” (xii). Reviewer Wilfrid Gibson similarly wrote that “these young hands … have little to learn from older hands” (18). Two years after the publication of The Far-Distant Oxus, Whitlock and Hull provided their own account of its composition in a short essay in The Horn Book titled “People, Plots and Ponies” (1939). That essay, like Ransome’s introduction, makes clear that the novel arose not from childlike inspiration but instead from concerted labor. They write of “the work it took, the loss of free time, [and] the tricky evasion of school studies” (353) as well as the “months of concentration” a book requires (356). This process is not without joy, but it is situated in the business of the book trade: “we both want to be mixed up with paper and ink and critics and authors and book catalogues and publishers for the rest of our lives,” they write. “We have loved signing agreements, getting press cuttings, buying things we’ve always wanted with our royalties, and looking to see if shops stock our books. Most of all we have liked the letters we get from odd people about them, such as the one scrawled in letters an inch high, ‘Dear Madams, I like your book very much’” (356). Whitlock and Hull’s account of the labor and rewards of authorship both reinforces and challenges Ransome’s introduction. Like Ransome, the authors emphasize their labor, but unlike Ransome, they also reveal their ambition for fame and recognition. Like their mentor, they reap the rewards of the marketplace and even receive fan mail—addressed respectfully to “Madams”— and this is precisely the success they had hoped for. “[T]o write a book” seemed “the one thing worth doing,” they write, and they “scribbled

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

211

drawings of the spines of books with our own names carefully lettered on them” (353). While Ransome, Whitlock, and Hull all work to debunk the trope of the inspired child author, Ransome in particular anticipates the argument that the young authors are, on the other hand, copycats. The Far-Distant Oxus “is in no sense of the word an imitation of my books or of anybody else’s,” he asserts, insisting that the West Country moors where Whitlock and Hull’s novel takes place are their “private territory” (xiii–xiv). Ransome uses this conceit of land to distinguish between facile mimicry and more inventive authorial practices. He has encountered “trespassers”: “the dull grown-ups who, after reading no more than a few chapters by someone else, find themselves willy-nilly adopting a method or a formula, echoing characters, dialogue and even titles, and, in spite of inventing new incidents and settings, in spite of trying to be original, producing something that is at best ‘a colourable imitation’” (xiv). Instead, Whitlock and Hull are “using the grown-up author as a spring-board, and then … doing without him altogether” (xiii). For Ransome, imitation is primarily an adult practice: greedy, opportunistic, and executed “willy-nilly.” Later, he would describe the trespassing author as a “second-rate, cheap purveyor of echoes” who “reads a book, sees that certain readers enjoy it, says, ‘I could write something just like that’” (“Bookshop” 1552). In contrast, “using the grown-up author as a spring-board” demands paying attention to existing material and managing its influence with intention and craft. This practice resembles the type of inspiration that Ransome wrote of in “Art for Life’s Sake”—that theory of authorship Whitlock quoted in “From Swallow to Sea Bear” that blends repetition and invention to produce generations of artists. Ransome wrote that “[w]e ask from an artist opportunities of conscious living, which, taken as they come, multiply the possibilities of their recurrence” and “turn us into artists” (qtd. Whitlock 224). For Whitlock and Hull, reading Ransome’s work taught them “a new way of looking and seeing,” and they reproduced that new perspective in their book. Ransome argues that the authors’ youth was instrumental to this more respectful creative practice, not because it grants the authors uninhibited access to childhood but because, as young readers, they know the market. “They have read your books, my books, and the books of everybody else who manages to find his way into school libraries,” he writes, “and, young themselves, dissatisfied with our elderly efforts, have struck out on their own to show us what our books should be” (xiv). They are not mimics; they are nimble readers.

212 

V. F. SMITH

Young Authors Owning Texts The characters of The Far-Distant Oxus are nimble readers, too. While, in his published reflections on child audiences, Ransome describes children as “omnivorous,” noting that “[e]ven the shoddiest of stuff is made marvellous by the miracle of being able to read it” (“Bookshop” 1550), Whitlock and Hull’s protagonists consume texts selectively. For example, when, in an attempt to read their adventures through familiar plots, Peter asks Anthony “[w]hat are we?”, Peter asserts he “will not be Robinson Crusoe.” Anthony agrees: “I can’t bear the way he gets in an awful fix, then an enormous bit of good luck turns up.” Anthony declares “[t]he Swiss Family Robinson makes [him] vomit” for the same reason—and anyway, “they’re such prigs” (196). The characters’ keen critiques extend beyond literature. When the Hunterlys first arrive at the Fradds’ farm, where they will be lodging during their holiday, Frances pauses to examine an illuminated text featuring a Madonna lily and a bunch of holly. She “gazed at it and wondered how anyone could ever have thought it beautiful,” and Anthony “was surprised that anyone could be such an ass as to mix summer and winter in one picture” (10). Later, they show no mercy in their review of a village stage show, calling the play “rotten” (98), the piano performance “unbearable” (99), and the singing “dull and weak” (102). “We could have done better ourselves,” they conclude (98). While the children are quick to pan art they find subpar, they are dedicated fans of artists they admire. They stock their treehouse with adventure tales, including Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Marjorie Mary Oliver and Eva Ducat’s Ponies and Bunts (a book that, like The Far-Distant Oxus itself, is coauthored by women), and travel literature for adults (65). The protagonists’ chatter and play reveal which stories they deem worthy of imitation and which are considered contemptible. Whitlock and Hull, who imitate but transform Ransome’s series in their own, create characters who do the same—children who acknowledge but adapt pre-existing stories. These child characters delight in stepping back from their story and contemplating the roles they play, both as adventurers and as children. For example, Bridget, before leaving with their brother to meet the mysterious Maurice for the first time, casts herself and sister Frances as actors in a “proper adventure,” comparing their play to theatrics. Recalling “that play we saw last holidays” (29), Bridget reminds Frances of “the very beginning, when everything was black” before “a

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

213

spotlight was switched on [and] lit up the prologue.” “Well, don’t you think the moon is like the spotlight?” she asks. “The farmyard is the prologue, where our adventure starts, and the blackness around it the curtain” (30). The girls’ turn to the stage as an equivalent for their adventure is notable; to use Bernstein’s formulation, Whitlock and Hull’s characters are both scripted, as they are part of a familiar plot, and scripting, as they recognize their embeddedness and make decisions within its framework. “What will the play be?” Frances asks. “Comedy or Tragedy?” Bridget wonders (30). That same self-consciousness is key to the way the imitative elements in the novel itself function. Whitlock and Hull transform as they imitate. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, they engage in particular Ransome’s intertextual practice—its own sort of repetition—to imagine a relationship between child and text that differs from their mentor’s. Peter Hunt notes that some of the most interesting moments in the Swallows and Amazons series are those “when Ransome doesn’t feel that he has to name the texts that his characters reference,” such as when, in Swallowdale (1931), “he assumes his readers will know (Felicia Hemans’s) Casabianca, which [characters] Nancy and Peggy have to recite” (24). Ransome’s child characters indeed quote or reference a range of texts for both children and adults; however, those references are at times couched in a representation of child literacy that teeters between mastery and naïveté. For example, Hunt points out that when Titty quotes Macaulay’s “The Armada,” Peggy chimes in that she and her sister Nancy “know that one, too” but “not all of it” (Ransome, Swallowdale 332). Peggy’s unreliable memory implies that Ransome’s characters are not always in control of the texts that surround them. Whitlock and Hull respond to that characterization through imitation and critique; they use intertextuality to insist upon children’s mastery and, in particular, their ability to transform the texts they appropriate. To demonstrate the contrasting ways Ransome, Whitlock, and Hull deploy intertexts, I will compare the ways Swallows and Amazons and The Far-Distant Oxus interpolate poetry: in Ransome’s text, John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), and, in Whitlock and Hull’s, Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (1853). Ransome uses Keats’s poem in an epigraph for Chapter One of Swallows and Amazons, when the Walker siblings, perched on a high outcropping they’ve named Darien, look out toward the island where they will stage their adventures:

214 

V. F. SMITH

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (13)

Titty named their promontory; she “had heard the sonnet read aloud at school, and forgotten everything in it except the picture of the explorers looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time” (15). This moment stages a complex dialogue between Titty as a child navigating texts, the adults and institutions that shape and sometimes dictate what she reads, and the author depicting her. On the one hand, Titty is a lackluster student, recalling the illustration but not the text her teacher recited. By including a passage from the sonnet as an epigraph, Ransome underscores Titty’s forgetfulness, rehearses his superior knowledge, and—by including the epigraph without title or attribution—assumes the reader’s superiority over Titty, as well. However, the erasure of Keats’s name could be read differently. Adult authorities are absent here, as they often are throughout Swallows and Amazons. The teacher who introduced Titty to Keats is erased by the passage’s passive voice: Titty “had heard the sonnet read aloud.” Moreover, the narrator’s claim she had “forgotten everything” of the poem cannot be true; Titty remembers the name Darien, at the least. More important than the erasure of adult authority, however, is the establishment of Titty’s. She is akin to Cortez, claiming land by assigning its name. A few pages later, Darien becomes “Titty’s Peak” and affords the perfect view of “the island, waiting for them. It was their island” (17). Titty borrows Darien’s name, and her authority, from another author’s text, but that maneuver is not limited to children. In fact, such mediated authority is precisely what Keats describes in the poem Titty cannot remember. Keats’s sonnet recounts, through the metaphors of land and ownership, a young man’s breathless discovery of Homer through poet George Chapman’s translation. While the beginning of Keats’s sonnet outlines his familiarity with “deep-brow’d Homer,” who ruled the Aegean, upon encountering Chapman’s translation, Keats rediscovers and, in fact, claims that land as his own; this is when the speaker, like Titty, becomes “like stout Cortez.” Keats’s speaker uses Chapman’s words to master Homer’s landscapes, just as Titty uses Keats to master the island she conquers through play. Swallows and Amazons, then, both celebrates children’s literary savviness and undermines it. In a series of intertextual moments that involve both child character and child reader, Ransome ges-

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

215

tures toward children’s mastery and naïveté. Ransome foregrounds Titty’s imperfect memory of Keats but gives a sly wink to the more sophisticated reader. Titty’s forgetfulness is subsequently overshadowed by her similarity to Keats himself. In The Far-Distant Oxus, on the other hand, Whitlock and Hull ensure that the child characters’ literary knowledge is apparent. They rarely trivialize their characters’ mastery, as Ransome does Titty’s, and their characters display familiarity with Arnold’s poem and its landscapes. When the Hunterly children first meet Maurice, he explains that his dog’s name, Ellita, is “Persian for dragon. The Clevertons and I call all the places round here Persian names, mostly out of that poem, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’” (39). Bridget replies that she has “read it in school” (39). (Note Bridget reads Arnold while Titty has Keats read to her.) The child protagonists begin their adventure with a shared knowledge of their source text and, as the narrative unfolds, share that expertise with the book’s readers in a manner that allows those readers to appropriate the poem, too. “That was Orgunjè,” Maurice notes to Frances as they pass a local village. “Is that from ‘Sohrab and Rustum?’” Frances asks. “Yes,” responds Maurice (205–6). The child protagonists of The Far-Distant Oxus do not merely mention Arnold’s poem in passing; they use its narrative to jumpstart—but not limit—their adventure. The poem narrates the story of legendary warrior Sohrab, who unknowingly kills his long-lost son, Rustum, in a challenge of strength. It is apt material for two teenaged authors writing in the shadow of an older mentor, as it focuses on the inevitable conflict between young upstarts and established elders. However, Whitlock and Hull do not focus on the plot of the poem but instead use intertextuality to rehearse a mode of imitation and textual borrowing that is not mimetic but originary and creative—an authorial practice that they, as authors borrowing but launching from Ransome’s work, also practice. For the children in The Far-Distant Oxus, as for Whitlock and Hull, existing texts are memorable but malleable. They remap Exmoor according to the Persian names of Arnold’s epic—Cloud Farm, where the Hunterlys lodge, becomes Ader-baijan, while the Cleverton’s home becomes Seistan, and a nearby town is rechristened Cabool (40)—but the context of Sohrab and Rustum often recedes as the children’s narrative displaces it. Before half of the narrative is over, the source of the Persian landscape they’ve created has become less vital than the sense of ownership it affords. “Why, exactly … do we pretend that this is Persia?” Frances asks. Maurice answers that Persia is “marvellous country,” and Jennifer concludes that “no one else

216 

V. F. SMITH

knows about it.” “‘It’s really ours,’ said Maurice” (139). Frances’s question indicates that the children’s landscape has detached from Arnold’s poem and transformed into a terrain of their own imagining: while Arnold’s landmarks inspired their story, this “marvellous country” is theirs. This dialogue is one of a number of moments in The Far-Distant Oxus when the children, leaving Arnold behind, declare proprietorship over a landscape inspired by his work. For example, when Bridget and Jennifer reach the coast, Jennifer confidently proclaims, “The Aral Sea, and it belongs to us because we’ve discovered it” (227). This shift from mimicry to ownership indexes Whitlock and Hull’s larger philosophy of imitation and authorship. For these young authors, Ransome, like Arnold, is a model to abandon—a foundation that transforms into an addendum or afterthought. When Whitlock and Hull recounted the composition of their novel in “People, Plots and Ponies,” they begin by noting, generically, that “[o]ther people’s books which we had loved and admired goaded us on to make one ourselves,” but that “[w]e were inspired by visions of whole shelves of our own work” (353). Arnold doesn’t appear at all in the essay, and they mention Ransome only in the final paragraph—and not as an author whose stories inspired them but instead as a mentor who assisted them in finding a publisher. It makes sense, then, that while Ransome’s seemingly bold child characters in Swallows and Amazons are often, in truth, supported by adults—the Walkers’ mother is a short boat ride away, and a local family provides the children with supplies and reports on their status to Mrs. Walker— Whitlock and Hull imagined quite a different relationship between old and young. The Far-Distant Oxus insists upon its protagonists’ independence from adults: “They were alone with their mounts. The moor stretched all about them. The three children were exultant” (16).

Conclusion In 1937, L. A. G. Strong, tasked with reviewing “books for the young” for the Spectator, found himself demoralized. “In no branch of letters is the simian imitativeness of publishers more obvious,” he writes. “If a book about woodlice succeeds one Christmas, it is followed next year by forty. Most of the throw-outs have been imitations of this kind, and repetitions of the old, old stuff by the old, old hands. The remainder offer good grounds for hope” (1023). That “remainder” includes both Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea—his titles consistently earned raves, and

12  KATHARINE HULL, PAMELA WHITLOCK, AND THE “RANSOME STYLE” 

217

Strong’s review is no exception—as well as Whitlock and Hull’s The Far-­ Distant Oxus. Strong notes the latter is “a fit companion for Mr. Ransome’s own” (1023). This chapter has demonstrated the value of imagining Whitlock and Hull not as Ransome’s mimics but as his companions in craft and, in so doing, to reframe imitation as a professional practice that might be executed poorly by adults—those “old, old hands” Strong disparages— or adeptly by children. Imitation is a tool available to young and old that can be “simian” or generative, that might—in Ransome’s words—make us “second-rate, cheap purveyor[s] of echoes” or “turn us into artists.”

Notes 1. Due to this essay’s scope, I focus on The Far-Distant Oxus and Swallows and Amazons and not the subsequent novels in either series. 2. See also Schwebel; Goodenough, Heberle, and Sokoloff, p. 4.

Works Cited Becker, May. “Books for Young People.” New York Herald Tribune, 30 April 1939, p. 10. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York UP, 2011. Bogen, Anna. “‘The island come true’: Peter Pan, Wild Cat Island, and the lure of the real.” Treasure Islands: Studies in Children’s Literature, edited by Mary Shine Thompson and Celia Keenan, Four Courts Press, 2006, pp. 53–61. Brogan, Hugh. The Life of Arthur Ransome. Jonathan Cape, 1984. Brownstein, Rachel M. “Endless Imitation: Austen’s and Byron’s Juvenilia.” The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 122–37. “By and For Children.” Times Literary Supplement, 6 Nov. 1937, p. 832. Carpenter, Humphrey, and Mari Prichard. “The Far-Distant Oxus (1937).” The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, Oxford UP, 1984, p. 182. “Children’s Tales.” Times [London], 10 Dec. 1937, p. 10. Conrad, Rachel. “‘My sole desire is to move someone through poetry, and allow for my voice to be heard’: Young Poets and Children’s Rights.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 40, no. 2, 2016, pp. 196–214. Cumming, Peter L. “What Children’s Writing? Read by Whom, How, and to What Ends?” Canadian Children’s Literature, vol. 34, no. 1, 2008, pp. 106–115. Gibson, Wilfrid. “Lucky Thirteen.” Observer, 28 Nov. 1937, p. 18.

218 

V. F. SMITH

Goodenough, Elizabeth, Mark A. Heberle, and Naomi Sokoloff, editors. Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature. Wayne State UP, 1994. Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford UP, 2009. Halverson, Cathryn. “Reading Little Girls’ Texts in the 1920s: Searching for the ‘Spirit of Childhood.’” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 30, no. 4, 1999, pp. 235–48. Hull, Katharine, and Pamela Whitlock. The Far-Distant Oxus. Macmillan, 1938. Hull, Katharine, and Pamela Whitlock. “People, Plots and Ponies.” Horn Book, 15 Nov. 1939, pp. 353–56. Hunt, Peter. “Taken as Read: Readers in Books and the Importance of Reading, 1744–2003.” Children as Readers in Children’s Literature: The Power of Texts and the Importance of Reading, edited by Evelyn Arzipe and Vivienne Smith, Routledge, 2016, pp. 16–27. Langbauer, Laurie. The Juvenile Tradition: Young Writers and Prolepsis, 1750–1835. Oxford UP, 2016. Myers, Mitzi. “Of Mimicry and (Wo)Man: Infans or Forked Tongue?” Children’s Literature, vol. 23, 1995, pp. 66–70. Ransome, Arthur. “A Bookshop for Children.” The Bookseller, 14 Nov. 1953, pp. 1550–54. Ransome, Arthur. Introduction. The Far-Distant Oxus, by Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, Macmillan, 1938, pp. vii–xvi. Ransome, Arthur. Swallowdale. Godine, 1985. Ransome, Arthur. Swallows and Amazons. Godine, 1985. Redcay, Anna. “The Long-Defended Gate”: Juvenilia, the Real Child, and the Aesthetics of Innocence, 1858–1939. Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001. Schwebel, Sara L. “The Limits of Agency for Children’s Literature Scholars.” Jeunesse, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 278–90. Strong, L. A. G. “The Pick of the Bunch.” Spectator, 3 Dec. 1937, pp. 1023–24. Teltscher, Kate. “‘The Rubicon between the Empires’: The River Oxus in the Nineteenth-Century British Geographical Imaginary.” Writing Travel in Central Asian History, edited by Nile Green, Indiana UP, 2013, pp. 135–51. Watson, Victor. “The Far-Distant Oxus.” Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Victor Watson, Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 255. Whitlock, Pamela. “From Swallow to Sea Bear.” The Junior Bookshelf, vol. 31, no. 4, 1967, pp. 221–24.

CHAPTER 13

Kali Grosvenor, Aurelia Davidson, and the Agency of Young Black Poets Rachel Conrad and Cai Rodrigues-Sherley

Poems written by children—defined as people younger than 18  years according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child— are chronically undertheorized and underrecognized for their contribution to cultural discourses about children and childhood.1 In this chapter, we think about two young poets—Kali Grosvenor and Aurelia Davidson— whose poetry participated in literary-cultural discourses about childhood and Black futurity, and we set this work in conversation with Black poets and poetics of the 1970s and 1980s. More specifically, we consider how adults (poets, editors, critics, parents) positioned themselves in relation to the work of Grosvenor and Davidson, and how adults’ intervention influenced the presentation, performance, and cultural life of their poems. Young poets arrive at public audiences in different ways, but typically through the mediation of adults. This is true for both young poets we consider in this chapter: Kali Grosvenor, who published a book of her R. Conrad (*) Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Rodrigues-Sherley Independent Scholar, Brooklyn, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_13

219

220 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

poetry in 1970 with the assistance of her mother Vertamae Grosvenor; and Aurelia Davidson, who in 1980 won an Illinois Poet Laureate Award, a poetry contest sponsored by Gwendolyn Brooks for young poets. While in our discussion we center poems written by these young poets and read them for their artistry and poetic purpose, we also attend to how the poems were taken up by adults and used for adult purposes and interests. Although writing by young people may depend for its visibility on the action of adults, such action at the same time can deflect or obscure young poets’ own intentions. Central to our discussion of Kali Grosvenor’s and Aurelia Davidson’s poetics is the question of youth agency as a location of possibility. Both Grosvenor and Davidson experienced elevated visibility and social acclaim for their work, while also being limited by that same attention. Kali Grosvenor and her writing became symbolic of childhood potential and resurrection for the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and adults often defined the social meaning of her work for and to her, in the process muting her own creative voice. Following the Illinois Poet Laureate Awards celebration2 during which her work was initially presented, Aurelia Davidson’s embodied voice was absent in the circulation of her art, which was carried in the pocket and communicated through the voice of a formidable adult poet when, years later, Brooks recited Davidson’s poem at a public event. Thinking about Grosvenor and Davidson as Black youth in 1970 and 1980 locates them in the context of that era of rupture, which brackets a period of adult literary-cultural interest in youth voice in the United States, and particularly in the voice of Black youth. While Grosvenor was one of a number of young Black poets whose work received attention and public recognition (e.g., see Vanessa Howard’s A Screaming Whisper, as well as other young poets in June Jordan and Terri Bush’s edited anthology THE VOICE of the Children), by 1980 Aurelia Davidson’s poem survives only through the hand and voice of the adult poet, Brooks. In addition to the problems faced by young writers more generally, the cases of Grosvenor and Davidson reflect both the possibilities and tensions surrounding youth-produced poetry during the 1970s and 1980s in literary-­ cultural communities that centered Black poets and poetics, and these concerns still have resonance today. In analyzing poetry by Grosvenor and Davidson, we grapple with the unique sociopolitical contexts of Blackness and Black childhood in relation to time and history. Daylanne English has focused attention on the current “temporal turn in American and African American literary ­studies”

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

221

(225). In this chapter, we take up recent ideas about agency, time, and theorizing Blackness in the work of critics Christina Sharpe and Michelle M. Wright in order to retheorize the poems by the two young Black poets at the center of our reading. We use Sharpe and Wright to help deepen our exploration of these two cases in terms of questions about Blackness and childhood, and about reading poetry by young Black writers in, through, and beyond time. In doing the work of discovery and recovery which we undertake, we use Sharpe to explain Grosvenor as a poet who transcends time and the boundaries between life and death, and we use Wright to make Davidson more visible as a poet who remakes time in her evocation of Blackness. In our discussion of the agency of Kali Grosvenor and Aurelia Davidson, we focus particularly on how their poems were positioned after they were written. This focus helps us consider how young poets’ own purposes might be obscured and their control over their art compromised or rendered incomplete as their work enters the public sphere. We argue that youth agency—in order for the concept to be sound—must be on young people’s terms. Given that adults so often help create the setting conditions for youth agency, how can Grosvenor and Davidson be understood to establish their own times and terms for agency?

“I would like to tell you about your / poems”: Mourning, Tokenism, and Theories of Blackness in the Poetry and Perception of Kali Grosvenor Langston, I would like to tell you about your poems …3

So begins Kali Grosvenor’s poem “LETTER TO LANGSTON HUGHES” (49), featured in the book Poems by Kali, published in 1970, when she was eight years old. The speaker’s postmortem correspondence with Hughes, who died in 1967, is both friendly and familiar. It may seem bold for a seven-year-old to feel comfortable telling Hughes something of his own poetics. However, the poet’s use of the conditional “would” and the vulnerability imbued in the ellipses following “poems …” reassure the reader that the speaker is less arrogant than earnest. She is requesting an audience, as both an admirer and a peer. Grosvenor’s letter to Hughes is

222 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

preceded in her book by a trilogy of poems that reimage “My People,” one of his most famous works. Throughout Poems by Kali, Grosvenor’s poetics are intentional about speaking with the dead, and her creative constructions of Blackness and liberation often go through and beyond the writings of her predecessors. Christina Sharpe’s book In The Wake provides a valuable tool for considering how Grosvenor’s poetics operate in a space beyond time and between (or among) life and death. Understanding the wake as the disturbed water left behind a ship, or the aftermath of an event, Sharpe articulates wake work (17) as living in the presence of a past which is Black death, loss, and trauma, both individual and systemic. In 1963, Grosvenor was born into a particular aftermath—the ongoing impact of chattel slavery on Black people across the diaspora—and in the specific wake of the political, ideological, and personal losses of the Civil Rights Movement. Mothered by cultural culinary anthropologist Vertamae Grosvenor, who was a cook for the Black Panther breakfast programs in New York City, Grosvenor was raised surrounded by the politics of Black mourning, and within the murky and feminized labor of not forgetting. In her correspondence with Hughes, Grosvenor’s speaker recalls (49): Well, I remember the time when I was in a play about the Birmingham children— bombed—and I read two of your poems

Engaging with the dead literary hero of the Harlem Renaissance, the speaker alludes to an encounter with another historic site of Black death. The Birmingham four “— / bombed—” splinter out of time, releasing a shock wave throughout the poem; just so in 1963, a bomb exploded during Sunday morning services in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls in an attack perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for a federal order to integrate the Alabama school system.4 It is unknown which of Hughes’ works Grosvenor read during this performance; however, what matters is the author’s preexisting practice of placing Hughes’ poetics in conversation with Black childhood and Black death. The play that Grosvenor remembers alludes to a community of adults training Black children in recognizing and remembering those who have died. This acculturation into Black mourning is part of what Sharpe terms “wake work” (17), wherein “wakes are processes;

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

223

through them we think about the dead and about our relation to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory” (21). Plays and poems are rituals in their own right, allowing the barriers between living and dead to fracture through invoking, reimagining, and even remedying the past. Furthermore, “wake work” pays acute attention, Sharpe argues, to “‘living the afterlife of property’ … in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother” (15). In the afterlife of “slave” as a hereditary, matrilineal, and binding bodily condition, children are always inheritors of potential Black death. This makes them hyper-­symbolic of the fragility of life and the importance of remembering. Grosvenor, a Black child being raised within the political mourning and “wake work” of the Long Black Seventies,5 is the inheritor of the lives and spirits of those who have died before her. She must speak to the dead, and for them as well, hence her book’s dedication to The Birmingham Four: Addie Mae Collins,6 Denise McNair, Carol Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. But this responsibility is a double-edged sword. As conduit, Grosvenor also became a symbol, and as “the child artist of the BAM” (as stated by Rita Williams-Garcia in an interview with Katharine Capshaw 170), her unique seat at the table of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) did not mean equal participation or agency in table talk. The lack of public or scholarly engagement with “LETTER TO LANGSTON HUGHES” or recognition of the scope of Hughes’ influence on Grosvenor’s poetics is one mark of the central dissonance in her career: that critical engagement with her work was and is undermined by the adults whose visions of her as a portal leading to the dead children they mourned diminished their ability to engage with her as a mourner and wake worker in her own right. She became the token example of what a conscious, liberated, and living Black child could be(come). As a result, those works of hers which were iconized explicitly reflected the relationship between adult nostalgias of Black childhood and the radical racial politics of the Black Power Movement. Shepherded by her mother, Grosvenor’s work became the talk of the town, selling more than 7000 copies between June and September of 1970 (Bowers “7000 Volumes”). With reviews in the New York Times (Campbell) and Boston Globe (Bowers “7000 Volumes”), as well as Black publications like Jet Magazine (Bowers “Young Poet”), Grosvenor’s poetics became popular and fashionable with both child and adult readers. With poems organized into sections titled “I AM BLACK” (13), “WHAT HAPPING TO THE HEROS” (31), “PEOPLE” (41), and “ITS A NEW KIND OF DAY” (51), Grosvenor invited her audience to know her as “BLACK,” mourn

224 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

the lost “HEROS” of the Civil Rights Movement, converse with Black “PEOPLE,” and then turn their eyes toward a “NEW” Black future. In Civil Rights Childhood, Katharine Capshaw analyzes the photographs featured in Poems by Kali as part of a larger conversation about the meanings of childhood during and for the BAM. In doing so, Capshaw outlines the ways in which “childhood took on representational weight as both a source of Black possibility and its incomplete fruition during the BAM” (167) at the same time as “[t]he child questioning social authority becomes a means to mourn … child victims of the civil rights campaign” (182). In 1970, Poems by Kali and its author became representative of Black childhood lost for adults at the forefront of Black Arts in the age of Black Power. This hyper focus on Grosvenor’s status as a Black child, as a symbol rather than as an agentic poetic medium, became the primary lens through which her work was viewed during her short time in the spotlight. Grosvenor’s poems, or “musings” as they were referred to in Ebony Magazine (Garland), were adored for their explicit merging of the child-­ like with the ethos of Black Power. Raised in community with her “Auntie Nina” Simone, “Auntie Maya” Angelou, and the ideas of Stokely Carmichael, Grosvenor’s work reflected the aesthetic and political urges of the times (Garland). Her poetics were shaped not only by Langston Hughes, but also by the other Black people called on throughout her book, including Simone, her sister, her mother, the late Otis Redding, and Carmichael. Conversing with Black people across age, influence, and mortal condition, Grosvenor’s reformation and understanding of Black culture and politics have both literary and social import. At the same time that her politics could be traced back to the central tenets of the Black Power Movement, like urbanism and militancy, her poems also flowered forth unique visions of Black futurity and essence. However, these new visions were largely ignored by the public. Grosvenor’s most popular poems were those that played off nursery rhymes, children’s songs, and other cultural forms that adults identified with her child status. Poems like “What Happing To The Heros,” “Lady Bird,” and “THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE” were performed on television, reprinted in newspapers, and featured in live performances. Chaperoned by her mother Vertamae, Grosvenor was a guest on both the David Frost and Dick Cavett programs, and performed both “THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE” and “Lady Bird” as part of “The Black Woman,” a 1970 special episode of The Black Journal that featured her mother and highlighted Kali Grosvenor’s poetics as part of a performance

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

225

roster including Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.7 She was also the youngest person to appear on the 1972 recording of Black Spirits: Festival of New Black Poets in America, a BAM event at The Apollo Theater where she performed her greatest hits.8 Alongside this public interest in only certain of Grosvenor’s poems, the publishers of Poems by Kali denied her requests to correct spelling errors. An older Grosvenor explained, in an interview with Capshaw, that this “was so disappointing to little me … I saw they were going to do what they wanted to do. To get through that I calmed myself and imagined the poems were sort of ‘dialect’ poems of a kid” (Capshaw 172). Grosvenor’s child “dialect” was seen as integral to the meaning of her work for adults, at a time when the BAM was deeply invested in reviving the nobility of Black vernacular and undoing the indoctrination of Black children out of Black speech at school. Adult oversight defined Poems by Kali as a restorative book meant to soothe the agony of Black linguistic and childhood losses by essentializing her youth. Her own intertextuality, which brought the Black past into the present through both direct conversation with the dead and allusions to their poetics, was overshadowed. Grosvenor may have been the golden child of the Black Arts Movement, but she was still a child and treated as such. There are no available one-on-­ one interviews with young Grosvenor about her writing process or personal politics. As conduit, Grosvenor’s personal creative voice was backgrounded in service to a greater cause, with more interest shown in how her poems mirrored the politics of Black radical adults than in how they expressed her own visions of Blackness through time. Only decades after her book’s publication could an older Grosvenor confirm in an interview with Capshaw that her favorite poet at the time she wrote Poems by Kali had been Langston Hughes (Capshaw 182). It is beyond these contexts of adult mourning and misrecognition of Grosvenor’s work that we must read and reread the poems “My People,” “Our Black People,” and “My People Are Black.” In the same way that the title of the section of Poems by Kali in which these poems appear tells us “I AM BLACK,” her trilogy’s speaker tells us “and so are my people.” In “My People,” the speaker’s people are “Black yellow Bash / and Brown red,” encompassing a range of colors associated with human complexion. As the poem progresses, we are given contextual confirmation that these people, in all their shades, are Black. The speaker lists cities which during the Long Black Seventies were hubs of racial tension and grassroots ­organizing, including Washington (presumably DC), “Chagio,” and New York. Most

226 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

notable is the assertion that these people exist primarily in the South. The Black American freedom struggle found its momentum in the deep South, where Blackness is ingrained in the economic and social history of the human and natural landscape; and the tragic event whose victims Grosvenor’s book is dedicated to took place in Alabama. The poem ends with a joke about the speaker being “e / largick to White” (20), a stance of opposition to Whiteness which suggests not only that Whiteness is bad, but also that it has the potential to negatively impact the speaker’s (Black) body. “Our Black People,” the second poem in the series, shifts and complicates the ideas of the first. Now, the “People” belong to both the speaker and the reader, and the poem seeks a common understanding of what defines these shared beings. These people are “your and my / People” and “We know / they can love” (21). This statement pulls the reader into the ideological outlook of the speaker, asserting that something which may be discursive is a known fact: that Black people have knowledge of love. However, this mutual recognition must be actualized in prayer or spoken manifestation: “let this be true,” not only for “All / of you” (us) but also for “Me” (the speaker). Let what be true? That Black people know how to love, or that we know that they can do so? This trilogy’s final poem is an arrival, and also an origin story, leading us back to Langston Hughes. One of Hughes’ most famous poems, “My People,” bears a stark resemblance in phrasing and ethos to Grosvenor’s trilogy, especially its finale, as shown in each poem’s starting lines. Whereas Hughes’ “My People” begins “The night is beautiful, / So the faces of my people” and repeats “beautiful” throughout the poem, Grosvenor in her poem “My People are Black” repeats, alters, and emphasizes “lovely” (23). My People are Black and Lovely and lovely Very very very lovely I love My Black loveys My People you are One too I am Serious too

Hughes’ poem is a total of six lines, but I (Rodrigues-Sherley) would argue that these three poems in Poems By Kali work together to elaborate on this original work of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’ “My People” and Grosvenor’s “My People are Black” both characterize the essential

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

227

essence of Black people, through a loving speaker. In “Letter to Langston Hughes,” Grosvenor writes to the dead poet about her sadness at his passing, the personal impact of his work, and her desire to “tell you about your / poems ….” So when she tells us in “My People Are Black” that “I love My Black loveys” and in the final line “you are / One too,” perhaps the “you” is not only the reader, but Hughes himself. Hughes, in his location beyond the mortal plane, is still present in the now, as friend and Black kin. This is the “wake work” of Grosvenor: not representing the dead, or having them speak through her, but rather speaking with and through them. By remaking and re-envisioning Hughes, she does tell him about his poems, and she tells us too that to be Black is to be not just beautiful, but love defined. Grosvenor’s status as a Black child is relevant to the nature and meaning of her poetry, but only on her own poetic terms. The handful of children’s anthologies that include Grosvenor’s work (Arnold Adoff, My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry9; Teacher’s Guide to Celebrate Reading10; Slier, Make a Joyful Sound: Poems for Children by African-­ American Poets11) mainly feature the few poems in her book that articulate a more universalist message about Black love and acceptance, further sanding down the urgency and radicalism of even her most famous poems. Grosvenor’s work was overshadowed by the wake work of adults, who saw her as a conduit through which they could mourn Black childhood lost. The liminal space of the wake allowed Black practitioners of the BAM to experience “a past which is not past” (Sharpe 13) through a resolve “[t]o tend to the Black dead and dying” (10). In this context, Grosvenor’s poetics represented not only her voice, but the voices of those children who died before her, like the Birmingham Four, whom Black radicals of the 1970s desired to care for. This desire erased the ways in which Grosvenor was herself tending to the dead, speaking to Hughes in the ecstatic now, and allowing herself to transgress the boundaries between past and present. Furthermore, her trilogy’s evolution away from the individual in “My People” toward a construction of the “we” in “Our Black People,” and her final welcoming of the reader and possibly Hughes into the folds of Blackness, reflect her own relationship to the Black collective in the age of Black Power. Grosvenor’s work grapples not only with who and where Black is, but also with the essence of what Blackness is, and to whom it belongs.

228 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

“I am a little Black girl TRAPPED”: Aurelia Davidson’s Remaking of the Present of Black Youth Agency In the context of this chapter’s focus on youth poetic agency, discussion of Aurelia Davidson’s poetry must begin with the irony that her work is preserved only by the hand and voice of Gwendolyn Brooks.12 The only means of recovering both the artistry and agency of Aurelia Davidson as a poet is to reach through and beyond the adult Brooks’s championing of her work. Davidson was a prize winner in Brooks’s 1980 Illinois Poet Laureate contest for elementary- and high-school-aged poets, and her poem “Trapped”—her only poetic work in the public record—is preserved in the Brooks archive at the University of California at Berkeley. Written in Brooks’s hand on a page of notepaper printed with the Amtrak train logo, the poem has notations—capitalizations and underscoring—that may have been features of the original poem, or may have been added by Brooks in preparing to read the poem in public. Davidson’s “Trapped” offers layered engagement with youth, Blackness, and time through its speaker, a young Black girl who acts and re-acts, questions and declaims, until she breaks “from the past” of racial oppression. Davidson’s agency as a poet in crafting the agency of her poetic speaker in “Trapped” is evident through analysis of her delineation of racial entrapment, and her rewriting of the present toward emergence. I am trapped Because I am Black. Let me out, I say, But the white man say NO. I turn, I turn, But who am I? I walk, I walk, But who am I? I am a little Black girl TRAPPED. But will I get out? Yes, I say. I look, I learn And I sing, And I dance. And OUT I COME — from the past.13

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

229

The speaker’s initial formulation is a causal one (“I am trapped / Because I am Black”) in which she is trapped as a result of racial oppression at the hands of “the white man.” Although the first half of the poem is in present tense, it is a present conditioned and constrained by “the past”; this adherence to a cause-and-effect model limits the Black speaker to a linear logic reactive to white anti-Black racism. In her theorizing of Blackness and temporality, Michelle M.  Wright posits “epiphenomenal time” (17) as transcending the limitations of linear time in the post-slavery context of US anti-Black racism which, in its reactive stance, does not enable a Black subject to fully own agency. Within the constraints of linear time, in Wright’s formulation, “whiteness always retains the originary agency” (116). Wright argues that when a Black subject locates herself not only in linear time but also in the “now” of “epiphenomenal time” (17), she can discern “the full multidimensionality of Blackness” (146) that might involve recognizing contradictory dimensions and remaking the present in the moment of “now.” Davidson’s remaking of the time in which her speaker operates is entwined with her delineation of a more “multidimensional” Blackness. Davidson’s poetic strategy in “Trapped” involves reformulating the present in the poem’s second half. This reformulation of the present is occasioned by the speaker’s intersectional statement of identity (“I am a little Black girl”) which, in pushing the word “TRAPPED” to the end of the poem’s longest—and central—line, traps it to use as a hinge to open a door to a more agentic position. The circular, repetitive acts of the poem’s first half (“I turn, I turn,” “I walk, I walk”) are contained within a series of sentence couplets that act as binding constraints. Following the speaker’s direct questioning of her future (“But will I get out?”), this couplet structure is broken by the speaker’s statement of confident assertion— “Yes, I say”—that enables a repositioning of the past, present, and future of linear time. In questioning the future, Davidson’s speaker finds an answer in the present, and by the end of the poem, the present becomes the future, enabling an emergence from “the past.” As the poem continues, new actions each appear on a separate line (“I look, / I learn / And I sing, / And I dance”) instead of the repetitive motion of the poem’s first half. Rather than power remaining with “the white man” in the linear timeframe of racial oppression, Davidson’s speaker emerges “from the past” through the phrase “OUT I COME,” which conveys (and emphasizes through capitalization) the speaker’s remaking of time in the service of agency.

230 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

Davidson, having located her speaker as “a little Black girl” who has had to find her own way to “get out” of being “trapped,” uses particular ways of making time. She gives to her young speaker a string of present-tense acts that answers her forward-looking question “But will I get out?” with her own determination and searching action. The poem’s final two lines have interesting resonance with James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with its collective “we” that carries the past as it moves “[o]ut from” it—“We have come … / Out from the gloomy past”—and Davidson’s omission of the “gloomy” past seems not a denial of gloominess but an acknowledgment that her speaker actively transforms the past in moving “OUT … / from” it. By the end of “Trapped,” Davidson’s speaker has already transformed “the past” into a future that is now her present. In Wright’s view of Black agency, Davidson’s second formulation of the present tense involves rewriting the present as “epiphenomenal time,” where “the ‘now’ is foregrounded by agency because Blackness begins as its own interpellation in the moment” (116, emphasis in original). Thus, control over time or youth temporal agency (Conrad Time for Childhoods 162) is a leading edge of Davidson’s poetic ability to remake the historical trajectory of Black struggles against entrapment in a way that asserts the agency of her young poetic speaker as well as her own agency as a poet. In addition to its print appearance on the Amtrak notepaper in Brooks’s archive, Davidson’s poem is preserved in audio recordings of a public event held a half dozen years after Davidson won her Illinois Poet Laureate Award. In 1986, Seton Hall University hosted a celebration of the centenary of Emily Dickinson’s death with a roster of prominent women poets including Brooks, Adrienne Rich, and Toi Derricotte. While most of the poets began by reading a poem or two by Emily Dickinson, Brooks recited Davidson’s poem before reading her own poems. Brooks’s decision to substitute young Davidson for Dickinson is striking also for the way she introduced the poem: Well, the first woman-oriented poem I want to read, or at least it was written by a woman, although a woman of twelve, not myself, Aurelia Davidson, entered this poem in my … Illinois poet laureate competition in Chicago … And I had to give this poem a prize because I felt it was such a clear note of warmth-oriented and honesty-oriented poetry. She called her poem ‘Trapped’ (“Emily & I Are Absolutely Different”).14

Brooks’s introduction to Davidson’s poem intertwines reference to womanhood (“woman-oriented poem”), a fusion of child/woman status (“a

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

231

woman of 12”), and self (“not myself”). That last element is clarified by her pronouncement after she recited the poem—“I would like to think that all of our little black women [would] subscribe to that and I told Aurelia, ‘Aurelia, I wish I had written that poem’”—which articulated not only her wish to have written the poem but also an invocation of Black womanhood (and another paradoxical youth/adult fusion) and racial solidarity (“our little black women”). Gwendolyn Brooks’s multiply determined investment in Aurelia Davidson’s poem—through the acts of recopying and carrying it with her on the train (to a public reading),15 reciting it at a public event, and announcing that she wished she had written it—all served to preserve the poem. However, given limitations in young poets’ access to direct public engagement, these acts also superimposed Brooks’s agency on Davidson’s. Yet “superimposition” is not quite the right image for the relation between Brooks’s and Davidson’s agency. Instead, it is more nuanced: perhaps a fade-out/fade-in of adult Brooks to child Davidson, like one of those flickering images that shift as you tilt them, or perhaps an intertwined structure like a tree grafted from adult and child stocks. This difficulty in arriving at an image and concept of the agency of young poets in relation to facilitative adults is instructive, as it exposes some of the limits of current theorizations of youth agency. We have as yet no clear term for youth agency that stands through (not despite) its compromises with necessary adults. In calling attention in this chapter to complex cross-age poetic engagements—between Kali Grosvenor and Langston Hughes, Aurelia Davidson and Gwendolyn Brooks—it’s worth tracing out a bit further how Davidson’s poem may have influenced or at least contributed to an important element in Brooks’s later poetics. In 1986—the same year as the Seton Hall event where Brooks recited Davidson’s poem—the immediacy of young people’s actual voices inspired Brooks to craft her powerful first-­ person poem “The Near-Johannesburg Boy” (Blacks 507–09). This poem’s epigraph reads: “In South Africa the Black children ask each other: ‘Have you been detained yet? How many times have you been detained?’” (507). Brooks related in a 1986 interview with Kevin Bezner that she had been watching television coverage of South Africa, and “what specifically inspired the poem is what I heard the children were saying to each other: ‘Have you been detained yet?’” (Bezner 123). The actual voices and tone of children’s questions to one another in the midst of the unfolding crisis in South Africa, and their talk about detention as what Brooks described as “an experience that you just went through” (Bezner 123) moved

232 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

Brooks to write “The Near-Johannesburg Boy.” This powerful extended poem presents, significantly, the first-person voice of a child who, by the poem’s conclusion, joins with other young people (as “we”) to “forge with the Fist-and-the-Fury” (Blacks 509) in an era when thousands of children were being detained.16 From early in her career, Brooks engaged seriously with constructing voices of young poetic characters (e.g., the first-person “a song in the front yard” from her first book A Street in Bronzeville, Blacks 28), and her varied projects over the years include the well-known plural youth voice in “We Real Cool” (Blacks 331), direct address to “the Young” in “Speech to the Young. Speech to the Progress Toward” (Blacks 497), and the third-person “The Life of Lincoln West” (Blacks 482–89). Yet it is compelling to consider the influence of young people’s actual voices or actual poetic speakers on Brooks’s late poetics. In Brooks’s late work, she entered more deeply into poetic construction of time and experience from her child characters’ own points of view. In her 1991 volume Children Coming Home, a tightly organized collection of 20 poems written in first-person voices of child characters, each poem uses the distinctive voice of a named young character to command the finely drawn situations. Brooks’s poems in Children Coming Home are written by an adult (for an adult audience), yet still her interest in young people’s making and remaking of time is reflected in the varied ways she depicts her young speakers moving in the children’s time of “[c]oming [h]ome” from school as well as shaping their own time.17 While young people were always central to Brooks’s work, her interest in real children’s voices—as evident in the epigraph to “The Near-Johannesburg Boy” and in her advocacy for young poets such as Davidson—indicates the key role of young people’s voices for Brooks’s late poetics. Finally, Brooks’s articulated wish that she herself had written Aurelia Davidson’s poem “Trapped” reveals some of the complexity of the position of young poets in late twentieth-­century literary culture—since the agency of young poets could (and largely can still) only be potentially recognized if adults encourage it to take center stage while deftly stepping aside.

Conclusion Both Kali Grosvenor and Aurelia Davidson acknowledge, own, and make poetic use of the past of Black history and community, although they do so in different ways. Grosvenor’s poetics vision a collective Blackness in the present that pulls those who have died out of the past and into her

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

233

Black now, which looks toward the Black future. Davidson’s acknowledgment of a communal Black past is implicit through her conceptualization of racial entrapment and through her speaker’s racial identification and holding fast to her Blackness as she engineers a path beyond and “out” of entrapment by “the white man.” Grosvenor and Davidson thus each delineate a poetic voice (whether singular or plural) that makes use of the past toward futurity, and establish this voice on their own terms, through their own poetic goals and agency. Poems by Kali Grosvenor and Aurelia Davidson are examined here as layered texts that participate in literary culture and sociopolitical discourse concerning youth, Blackness, and the role of the past for futurity. This restorative analysis enables us to highlight a key dimension of youth agency: that it must be on young people’s own terms and serve their own purposes. Entry of young writers into the public sphere has often been through the energy, reputation, and priorities, not to mention the hand and voice, of adults. Grosvenor was influenced by Hughes and built her poetics through and beyond that influence, and Davidson benefited from the advocacy of Brooks, who in turn was inspired by Davidson. Viewing these two cases through the lens of intergenerational participation bolsters the agency of each young poet and contributes to our thinking about the value of the inclusion and participation of young poets not just in literary culture but specifically in relationships of literary influence. Young people are already participating in culture-making and text-making. The question is: (how) can adults acknowledge the power and influence of young writers’ work, and facilitate and retain a place for this work in the public record?

Notes 1. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (“Convention”) defines a “child” as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier” (Article 1). In this chapter, we use the terms “children,” “young people,” and “youth” interchangeably. See my (Conrad) book Time for Childhoods for a more extended argument about recognizing poetry written by young poets as literary texts, and for an earlier discussion of Davidson and Brooks, some of which is included in this chapter by permission of the University of Massachusetts Press. 2. The awards ceremony was held on June 4, 1980 (WBEZ). 3. Quotations from poems written by Kali Grosvenor appear by permission of Kali Grosvenor.

234 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

4. In response to Gov. George Wallace’s attempts to halt integration of Tuskegee High School at the start of September, US District Judge Frank M. Johnson and four other federal trial judges in Alabama jointly issued a restraining order instructing the governor to stop interfering with the court-­ordered desegregation of public schools in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee. 5. The Long Seventies is a term coined by Bruce Schulman to describe the 16-year period between the 1968 Nixon campaign and the 1984 reelection of Ronald Reagan, when he argues America saw a monumental shift in politics, culture, race relations, family life, and religion. I (RodriguesSherley) am inserting Black into his terminology to specify my interest in Black life. My timeline spans from the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., through the height and decline of the Black Power Movement into the second Reagan administration. 6. In Grosvenor’s dedication her name appears as Addie Mae Collin; however, Addie Mae’s last name was actually spelled Collins. 7. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o1kR9GjkeM&t=1340s. Accessed 14 Jan. 2019. 8. Black Spirits was recorded live at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, with an introductory speech by Amiri Baraka, produced and recorded by Black Forum in 1972. Grosvenor performed the poems “Circles,” “Black Is,” “Nigger, Do You,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Ladybird,” and “What’s Happening to the Heros.” It is interesting to note that in both the Apollo performance and “The Black Woman,” Grosvenor was solely referred to by her first name. The full recording can be found here: www.discogs.com/VariousBlack-Spirits-Festival-Of-New-Black-Poets-In-America/release/ 2981293. Accessed 20 Jan. 2019. 9. Adoff’s collection features Grosvenor’s poems “Our Black People,” “It’s a New Kind of Day,” and “Were Is My Head Going.” 10. Teacher’s Guide to Celebrate Reading features Grosvenor’s poem “Who I Am.” 11. Slier’s anthology features Grosvenor’s poem “Who I Am.” 12. Relevant are other sites where children’s voices or viewpoints enter only indirectly, such as US courts, where children’s opinions enter into court proceedings only obliquely through the voices of adult advocates (Melissa L. Breger). 13. The spacing in Brooks’s handwritten transcription of this 17-line poem could be read as indicating a stanzaic structure of couplets with a central single-line stanza. However, given that this stanzaic structure is not certain, and I (Conrad) have not located an original typescript of Davidson’s poem, I do not reprint such stanza breaks here. It is also not clear whether the full capitalizations in lines 4, 9, and 16 and underscoring in line 11 were present in Davidson’s original poem or were added by Brooks as prompts for her public recitation of the poem.

13  GROSVENOR, DAVIDSON, AND THE AGENCY OF YOUNG BLACK POETS 

235

14. This transcription is from the audio-recording and is slightly different from the transcription on the website (“Emily & I Are Absolutely Different”). 15. Brooks most likely recited Davidson’s poem at multiple public events. The Amtrak train notepaper on which Brooks copied Davidson’s poem had a poem by another young prize-winning poet, Ebony Tillman, written in Brooks’s hand on its reverse side (see Conrad, Time for Childhoods, for further discussion). 16. See www.saha.org.za/youth/children_in_detention.htm. Accessed 22 Feb. 2019. 17. See Conrad, “Children Coming Home,” for a more extended discussion of Brooks’s construction of these complex time frames.

Works Cited Adoff, Arnold. My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry. Dutton, 1974. Bezner, Kevin. “A Life Distilled: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Gloria Wade Gayles, UP of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 117–124. Bowers, Carolyn A. “7000 volumes sold of 9-year-old’s poetry.” Boston Globe, 14 Sept. 1970. Bowers, Carolyn A. “Young Poet.” Jet Magazine, 23 July 1970, p. 36. Breger, Melissa L. “Against the Dilution of a Child’s Voice in Court,” Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 20, no. 2, 2010, pp. 175–194. journals.iupui.edu/index.php/iiclr/article/download/17625/17789/0. Accessed 8 Dec. 2018. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Third World Press, 1987. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Children Coming Home. The David Company, 1991. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Emily & I Are Absolutely Different in the Details of Our Lives.” www.emilydickinson.org/titanic-operas/folio-one/gwendolynbrooks. Accessed 20 July 2016. Campbell, Barbara. “‘Poems by Kali’: A Little Black Girl Speaks Her Mind.” The New York Times, 7 July 1970. Capshaw, Katharine. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. U of Minneapolis P, 2014. Conrad, Rachel. “Children Coming Home: The Anticipatory Present in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poems of Childhood.” Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 369–388. Conrad, Rachel. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. U of Massachusetts P, 2020. “Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations Human Rights, 20 Nov. 1989. www.ohchr. org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. Accessed 13 April 2015.

236 

R. CONRAD AND C. RODRIGUES-SHERLEY

Davidson, Aurelia. “Trapped.” Gwendolyn Brooks Papers, BANC MSS 2001/83 z, The Bancroft Library, U of California, Berkeley, box 11, folder 32. English, Daylanne K. “Race, Writing, and Time.” Time and Literature, edited by Thomas M. Allen, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 225–241. Garland, Phyl. “The Gifted Child Kali.” Ebony Magazine, 20 Aug. 1974, p. 97. Grosvenor, Kali. Poems by Kali. Doubleday, 1970. Howard, Vanessa. A Screaming Whisper. Holt, Rinehart, 1972. Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems. 1926. Knopf, 1954. Johnson, James Weldon. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Complete Poems, edited by Sondra Kathryn Wilson, 1927/1935, Penguin, 2000, pp. 109–110. Jordan, June and Terri Bush, collectors. THE VOICE of the Children. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Da Capo Press, 2002. Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016. Slier, Debby, editor. Make a Joyful Sound: Poems for Children by African-American Poets. Scholastic, 1991. Teacher’s Guide to Celebrate Reading. Scott Foresman, 1993. WBEZ. “WBEZ Presents Award-Winning Poetry.” Press release. 30 June 1980. Gwendolyn Brooks Papers, BANC MSS 2001/83 z, The Bancroft Library, U of California, Berkeley, box 4, folder 17. Wright, Michelle M. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

CHAPTER 14

“Send it to ZOOM!”: American Children’s Television and Intergenerational Cultural Creation in the 1970s1 Leslie Paris

“We’re gonna ZOOM, ZOOM, ZOOM-A-ZOOM.” So sang the ZOOMers, a diverse group of Boston-area children nine to thirteen years of age, in the opening segment of the weekly television show ZOOM. From its premiere in January 1972 to its finale in February 1978, each episode began with scenes of the youthful cast dancing energetically, while encouraging viewers to “Come on give it a try / We’re gonna show you just why / We’re gonna teach you to fly high / Come on and zoom! Come on and zoom zoom!” (Episode 101). Over the course of the next half hour, the ZOOMers performed in short ZOOMplays; tried activities proposed by viewers in letters drawn from a large ZOOMbarrel; explained ZOOMdo craft projects; offered ZOOMgoody recipes; spoke ZOOM’s “secret” language, Ubbi Dubbi; and discussed serious issues such as pollution and parental divorce during ZOOMraps. Adults appeared only incidentally, in ZOOMguest documentaries, which were short films produced by adults

L. Paris (*) University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_14

237

238 

L. PARIS

but narrated by young people from around the country who were doing interesting or unusual things. ZOOM’s focus was on children making and sharing their own fun, and its distinctive claim was that young viewers sent in the ideas for the jokes, plays, games, and other activities, and thus helped to dictate the show’s content. As the theme song continued: “Who are you? / What do you do? / How are you? / Let’s hear from you! / We need you!” Millions of children tuned in to ZOOM, produced by public television station WGBH in Boston and distributed to about 125 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations across the United States, and they responded to its exhortation in significant numbers. At the show’s peak, ZOOM received 20,000 letters every week, many from children seeking information about past ZOOM activities, suggesting new projects, or sharing their own original plays, stories, and artwork (ZOOM newsletter). In this chapter, I consider ZOOM’s enlistment of its child performers and its young viewers as creative partners in the creation and dissemination of children’s culture. ZOOM drew upon the talents and ideas of two groups of children: ZOOMers, who performed in cohorts of seven to ten children per season and took part in the creation and editing of some ZOOM content, and youthful fans, who mailed their suggestions, original content, and feedback to ZOOM. These two groups were always in dialogue with one another. Even as ZOOMers offered to teach viewers to “fly high,” their young audience provided most of the show’s content; even as viewers learned from ZOOMers, they were inspired to send in their own materials. ZOOM’s adult producers represented this collaboration as authentically child-led. At the same time, ZOOM was choreographed, organized, and edited by adults, who served as silent but powerful partners behind the scenes. With adult producers as overseers and intermediaries, ZOOM was in effect a form of intergenerational cultural production; children generated most of its ideas, but the demands of producing a successful weekly television show set important limits on their ability to determine its content, form, and style. To consider ZOOM’s process of intergenerational collaboration is not to diminish the role of children as cultural creators. Ultimately, the roles of children and adults in creating ZOOM were complementary. ZOOM’s adult leadership acknowledged children’s capabilities and ideas, encouraging viewer participation and deliberately involving the young cast members in some degree of decision-making. Young viewers’ enthusiastic participation in the ZOOM community attested to their own sense that

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

239

they were important partners in the enterprise. Outside of the commercial realm of children’s media, ZOOM taught young viewers new ways of connecting with others, while offering them a space where they could envisage themselves as full and equal participants in the creative process. What young people saw on their television screens affirmed their own sense of their capabilities, interests, and membership in a larger community of children.

“Send it to ZOOM!”: A Community of Children Dear ZOOM, Me, my brother, and my sister would like to be members of youre club. My brother is 5, my sister is 3, I am 7. We watch youre show all the time. We injoy it. You are very talented. Please send us ZOOM cards as soon as posibiel. —M. M., seven-year-old girl from Michigan2

ZOOM’s project of audience engagement took place through the American postal system. Each week, the cast recited WGBH’s postal address as a poem, ending in song, such that the repeated call to “Send it to ZOOM” likely made “02134” the best-known zip code among American children of the 1970s. Cast members also explained how to place a SASE, or self-addressed stamped envelope, inside one’s letter in order to receive some kind of reply. This exhortation was a resounding success. By 1976, ZOOM had received over 2 million letters (“ZOOM’s Fifth Season”). To deal with the deluge of mail, ZOOM staff and adult volunteers sorted incoming letters into categories before the production staff considered them: plays, stories, poems, requests to appear on ZOOM, games, ZOOMdos, jokes and riddles, and other ideas. In one five-day period in January 1975, volunteers processed over 11,000 letters (Kahn). About one-third of these letters included SASEs, many with requests for photos of cast members or for ZOOMcards explaining more complex ZOOMdos, such as tie-dyeing cloth or making a raft out of sticks and branches. Many children sent in story and game ideas or made suggestions for ZOOMraps based on their own problems or concerns. One child from Arkansas, for example, asked that ZOOMers do a rap about “how would you feel if you had a gerbil, and your dad didn’t like him. I have to move away in July and I don’t want to leave him” (S. W.). Some viewers sent contributions such as ZOOM-themed art, and general suggestions or requests for personal

240 

L. PARIS

advice. A third of the 1975 sample were simply affirmations, on the order of “I like ZOOM” (Note dated 1-10-75). These letter writers represented a wider age cohort than the seven-to-­ twelve-year-olds who were ZOOM’s target audience. Some children were so young that they needed help in writing. Even parents of toddlers wrote in to say that their children enjoyed the show. And teenagers, especially those who had grown up with ZOOM, also continued to watch the show and to write in, though a few of them wrote specifically to ask whether they might now be too old to keep watching. One seventeen-year-old high school junior from Iowa enthused that “I really enjoy ZOOM! A lot of my friends watch ZOOM also!” (L. W.). Some of the show’s most fervent fans wrote repeatedly to ZOOM. In the late 1970s, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nebraska who had been watching the show for five years estimated that “This is about the 10 letter I’ve written to you and I must say I am impressed. Every time I write you always send an answer and it usually comes in about a week” (J. B.). Other young fans sent letters decorated with handmade stamps in lieu of actual postage; WGBH regularly paid the postage due (Zeitlin). For viewers who sent in SASEs, ZOOMcards invited them to write again, thereby reinforcing this connection. Part of what inspired so many children to write to ZOOM was the possibility that their own ideas or art contributions might appear on air, introduced by ZOOMers and publicly credited to them by name and hometown. For those who did achieve this recognition, success was encouraging; one ten-year-old girl from upstate New York whose stunt appeared on ZOOM was then inspired to begin to write a play (MacGregor 20). Children were so eager both to participate in ZOOM culture and to be celebrated as creators of ZOOM content that some tried to put pressure on ZOOM to use their material: “I have sent in a lot of things to do. But I have never seen them on your show. I have waited and waited and waited for a long long time,” wrote one Californian (J. L.). Another complained bitterly that “I wroght before and you fuckers didn’t have a rap about it” (M. G.). A third noted that despite his having written over one hundred letters over the course of four years (some directly to ZOOM, and others to politicians on ZOOM’s behalf), none of his letters to ZOOM had ever appeared on the air. Even so, he reflected, he had benefitted from the show: “I feel that all forty-two Zoomers and I have become personal friends … ZOOM has made my life so different, by learning about new people, places, and things and participating in them” (J. G.).

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

241

Viewers knew little about the cast members’ lives off camera, but letters to the show suggest that children experienced ZOOMers, in the words of one eight-year-old girl, as “just like my best friend!” nonetheless (M. H.). ZOOM tried to preserve the notion that the cast members were ordinary kids, plucked from obscurity, who returned to it once their time on television (a season or two at most) was at an end. ZOOMers were known to viewers only by their first names, didn’t travel outside of the Boston region on ZOOM business, and were specifically prohibited from parlaying their fame on ZOOM into appearances in advertisements or other television shows for several years afterward. ZOOMers were not meant to be professional entertainers. When they were shown laughing while performing a play about a princess locked in a tower (Episode 220) or making a sloppy banana-orange sherbet shake (Episode 308), they were represented as accessible, ordinary, and unpolished. These qualities were central to their charm, allowing viewers to identify with (rather than merely to idolize) them. This sense of intimacy encouraged many viewers to see themselves as part of a collective ZOOM community, and to pick up their pens and pencils and respond. The diversity of ZOOMers also inspired viewers to respond. While ZOOM gave equal attention to all its cast members, individual viewers identified more with some ZOOMers than with others, and many children wrote specifically to particular ZOOMers, or asked for specific cast members’ ZOOMcards. A number of young viewers wrote about having crushes on specific ZOOMers. Children who watched the show regularly often felt connected to several seasons’ worth of ZOOMers at once, because many local PBS affiliates continued to broadcast reruns from multiple seasons on weekday afternoons. This repetition of episodes allowed viewers to compare the cast members from various seasons, and to choose favorites. And at a time when racial minorities were significantly underrepresented in American children’s popular culture, many minority children wrote expressly to ZOOMers of their own race, sometimes adding their own photographs to their letters. By emphasizing racial and gender diversity within each season’s cast, ZOOM allowed children both to identify with children who appeared to share similarities with them and to consider themselves part of a children’s community built across lines of difference. ZOOM modeled equality through scenes of inclusiveness and equitable power-sharing. Its opening montage included a handshake between a white child and a black child, photographs of children of varied racial backgrounds, and a dance number

242 

L. PARIS

­ erformed by the diverse cast. ZOOM trod lightly around the issue of race p on the show, however; its ZOOMrap about the Boston busing crisis of the 1970s, for example, which barely explained the issue of school segregation that had precipitated it, would likely have been confusing to anyone who was not already well-versed on the topic (Episode 402). In a similar vein, ZOOM only infrequently tackled gender politics directly, as when a ZOOMguest segment focused on a girls’ hockey team playing against boys (Episode 309). In the era of second-wave feminism, ZOOM modeled equality through scenes of boys and girls leading and following one another’s lead without regard to gender. ZOOMguests (whose stories were told through short documentary films, but who almost never appeared in person on the ZOOM set) offered glimpses of the lives of an even more diverse range of children, including many whose stories were rarely told on television: a young Chicano migrant worker picking crops with his parents in Colorado (Episode 209); a white boy living on a California commune (Episode 216); a Chinese American girl working at her parents’ restaurant in New Jersey (Episode 311); an Italian American immigrant in Massachusetts living with older siblings instead of with his parents (Episode 501). From the first season onward, ZOOMguests included children with visual and auditory disabilities; in ZOOM’s final season in 1977–1978, a time when many children with disabilities were being newly mainstreamed into regular public schools as a result of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the US Office of Education provided funding for ZOOM to create eight ZOOMguest segments that touched on the experiences of children with disabilities. A number of children with disabilities wrote to ZOOM, praising the program for showcasing the lives of children like themselves (A. P.). From ZOOM’s premiere onward, children from around the nation pleaded to join the cast. The pilot episode, broadcast on WGBH several times in early September 1971 to test ZOOM’s appeal, sparked the first of many such requests. As one early viewer wrote, “I am twelve years old. I wondered if by chance you would like or need another person for your cast” (Christopher Sarson). Because ZOOM represented the cast members as ordinary Americans doing activities that any child could emulate, being on ZOOM seemed relatively attainable. One boy from the New York suburbs wrote in 1977 that he was spurred to ask about becoming a ZOOMer because he “realized that the kids on ZOOM weren’t any kind of fancy child actors but just regular kids” (D. K.). Many fans didn’t realize that

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

243

ZOOMers all lived in the greater Boston area, and that most viewers were thus ineligible to be cast members. A ZOOM fact sheet created to address many of the most common letter writers’ queries explained that “[b]ecause ZOOM doesn’t want to disrupt a ZOOMer’s private life any more than is absolutely necessary, it is not possible to make special arrangements to live with a friend, commute to Boston or move to Boston just to be on ZOOM” (“Dear ZOOMviewer”). To address its viewers’ curiosity about life as a ZOOMer, the first season included a rap about “What’s it like to be on TV” (Episode 108). ZOOMers knew that their experiences of appearing on television were unusual and set them apart. But the message they received from staff was, as first season ZOOMer Ann recalled, “that we were chosen because we were ordinary—they went to great lengths to make sure that we didn’t get our egos all pumped up—but there’s no way on earth you actually believe that” (Benson 21). ZOOM emphasized ordinariness in the service of its larger claim: that all children were capable of cultural creation. As ZOOM’s first executive producer Christopher Sarson told the press in 1972, “Never underestimate the potential of that kid down the block” (Joyce). As a means of protecting the “ordinary”-ness of its casts, the ZOOM staff did what they could to insulate ZOOMers from viewer attention. ZOOMers were not allowed to read their own fan mail, let alone respond to it. In one exception to this rule, when Sarson wanted second season ZOOMer Bernadette to explain on camera how she did her signature arm wave, he showed her some of the fan mail asking about this special skill (Benson 36). However, ZOOMers did have access to some of the creative submissions ZOOM received, including riddles, stories, songs, and games (Joyce), and they had a role in shaping the show’s content. At least some of the time, the staff offered ZOOMers a choice of plays and poems submitted by viewers, and asked which materials the ZOOMers preferred to use (Kramer). ZOOMers also wrote some material themselves. In season one, Nina sang a song she had written about a short-lived relationship, while in season four, ZOOMers collectively scripted and helped to build the sets for the first episode of their parodic soap opera, “As the World ZOOMs” (McLean). The fairly improvisational rehearsals reflected this collaborative process between adults and children in determining content. As Jon, one of the first season ZOOMers, later recalled, “initially we had a script to follow. I was supposed to go in to interview this kid who had invented something. I remember not understanding how I was supposed to behave. And they finally figured out that the more they let us play and improv, the

244 

L. PARIS

better off they were” (Benson 20). Especially in season one, much of what became classic ZOOM material was based on improvisation; one day, after ZOOMer Tracy was injured on set, Sarson gathered the other children to discuss their feelings about going to the hospital; this filmed conversation became the first ZOOMrap, a signature of the show (Benson 48). Numerous former ZOOMers later recalled that their auditions seemed designed to assess their creative spirit and their ability to improvise. For example, when Cate auditioned for season four, the members of her group were asked to read an imaginary letter plucked from an imaginary treasure chest; she later reflected that she had done well to add a detail—a padlock on the chest—to her performance (Benson 16). Such skills served ZOOMers well on set. During the first season, one newspaper reporter who watched ZOOM rehearsals saw ZOOMers Jay and Kenny rolling the ZOOM barrel from one end of the television studio to the other, with ZOOMer David scrunched up inside. “Watch this, Billy!” David called out to Billy Wilson, the show’s first choreographer. Wilson replied, “We’ll use it!” (Joyce). Another visiting reporter that same season described the scene at the WGBH studio as “utter chaos.” The ZOOMers had gathered to discuss “Where’s the Report Card?,” a play submitted by a fifteen-year-­ old boy from Maryland. Sarson led the children through the script, allowing them to digress and to suggest their own riddles and jokes, all the while guiding them until they had refined the dialogue and action to their collective satisfaction (Fripp). Although ZOOMers were paid for their twice-weekly labor ($110 per week in 1977) (Zeitlin), most experienced life on the set more as play than as work. Former second season ZOOMers Bernadette and Nancy both later characterized the WGBH set as akin to an “after-school program”; Timmy, from season three, recalled that “you got to run around and do plays and you know all this fun stuff … I made some really good friends” (Benson 52–53). When they were on set at WGBH but not filming, ZOOMers also had a fair degree of autonomy. “We spent a lot of time sitting in Julia Child’s cooking studio,” first season ZOOMer Ann later recalled (Benson 26). ZOOM had a broad reach in children’s culture, even though the majority of children who watched ZOOM never wrote in, only a small number of viewers saw their own ideas on television, and even fewer served as ZOOMers. Viewers frequently parlayed elements of ZOOM episodes into their own peer communities. One parent noted that after an episode of ZOOM in which the cast members played a game of jacks, her daughter

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

245

insisted on getting jacks; everywhere they looked the stores were sold out of jacks because, the mother contended, other ZOOM fans had already bought them (“Raising Children”). In letters to ZOOM, children frequently explained that they tried to speak Ubbi Dubbi; puzzled over why Fannee Doolee (the subject of a number of early puzzles) liked certain things and hated others; and described making craft projects based on ZOOMdos. One set of friends living in the Boston suburbs “would reenact the shows,” as a viewer later recalled, “and we each got to be our favorite character. Of the girls, we all fought over being Ann” (Buskey). Here were some of the most visible effects of ZOOM’s interactive children’s realm. As one Massachusetts girl explained, “When I watch your show I get a lot of ideas” (M. C.). Whether as fans of the show, serving as creative advisors, or imagining themselves as ZOOMers, viewers immersed themselves in an inclusive space of cultural creation that offered multiple conduits for participation.

The Role of Adults in Participatory Children’s Television Culture Although the degree to which ZOOM emphasized children’s centrality as cultural producers was novel in 1970s children’s television, children’s direct engagement with popular culture has a far longer history. By the early twentieth century, commercial American radio broadcasters were working to cement their young fans’ allegiances through consumerism; for example, numerous children’s radio shows of the 1930s encouraged children to write in for special “club” offers, some of which required proofs of purchase from corporate sponsors (Jacobson). In the postwar years, sponsors followed the rapidly expanding television market. Advertisements for breakfast cereals and toys appeared during, and embedded within, television programs marketed to children, such as NBC’s Howdy Doody Show (1947–1960). The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1959), one of the most famous postwar television programs designed for children, exemplified this melding of commerce and culture; it included more advertisements than any other show then on television, some of which were filmed with its young cast members (Mouseketeers), and it featured a range of Disney-themed promotional content (Coleman 301; May 50). Mickey Mouse Club fandom required immersion in consumer culture, while it entitled children to some degree of (generally one-sided) dialogue

246 

L. PARIS

with Mouseketeers. Producers of the show tracked incoming fan mail, accounting for over 350,000 fan letters between 1955 and 1958, and rewarded the most popular cast members with more on-screen time and attention (May 53). Early educational television shows for children also solicited responses from children as fans and, to a much smaller degree, as contributors of content. At the critically acclaimed show The Children’s Corner, hosted by Pittsburgh public television station WQED from 1954 to 1961, Fred Rogers developed many of the puppet characters that would later appear in the fantasy sequences of the nationally syndicated Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001). Producers of The Children’s Corner encouraged children to send in letters, poems, and riddles; in 1954, the section of the WQED program guide devoted to children promised that some letters might be read on air, and suggested that “[t]his poor old mailbox is so unhappy when he doesn’t get a ton of mail that he pouts and won’t talk to anyone.” ZOOM went further than these earlier efforts in engaging with children as the central creators of television content. Television producer Christopher Sarson, while working as the first executive producer of the new WGBH series Masterpiece Theatre (1971 onward), came up with the idea of a program that would, in the idiom of cinematography, “zoom in” on children’s interests through an eclectic variety format, child hosts, and viewer-created content. As a father, Sarson noted that there were few good television options for children who had outgrown Mr. Rogers. He was also intrigued by the potential of the new children’s magazine KIDS (1970–1975), founded in the Boston suburb of Cambridge, whose stories and articles were written and edited by children aged fifteen or younger, although its founding editors were adults (“Biography”; “Kidnews”). Indeed, Sarson initially hoped to set up a television show called Kids as a joint venture with KIDS’ first publisher, Jim Robinson (Seligsohn 5). ZOOM’s magazine format and casual style were also indebted to other television programs, for adults as well as for children, whose off-the-cuff sensibilities ZOOM would emulate. One 1971 draft of a WGBH promotional letter for ZOOM (“What is ZOOM?”) compares it to the sketch comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1967–1973), the satirical political variety show Great American Dream Machine (PBS, 1971–1972), a humorous documentary series for children about how things are made called Hot Dog (NBC, 1970–1971), and Sesame Street

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

247

(1969 onward), a popular public television program designed to entertain while teaching preschoolers the basics of letters and numbers. Sarson’s interest in children’s programming was undoubtedly further influenced by his wife Evelyn Kaye Sarson’s media activism. She was one of the founders and, from 1968 to 1972, the first president of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), a lobbying group based in the Boston suburb of Newton that challenged the quality and content of American television networks’ children’s programming (Clark 67; E. Sarson; Hendershot 61–94). Amid rising concerns that children were being harmed through their exposure to televised violence, relentless advertisements, and the inherent passivity of the viewing experience (Spigel; Kline; Public Health Service 52, 60), ZOOM reflected the era’s broader call for new, more creative alternatives to commercial children’s media culture. Tapping into values that emanated from the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s—community, simplicity, authenticity, anti-­ materialism, environmental awareness, and do-it-yourself creative fun— ZOOM offered such an alternative. Most seasons, the ZOOMers dressed in identical striped shirts and jeans, and for the first few seasons they often went barefoot, further signaling their informality. A number of ZOOMdos suggested recycling used materials to make interesting toys, rather than acquiring new playthings: joining elastic bands to create “Chinese jump ropes” (Episode 209) or making kites out of grocery bags (Episode 508). Pointedly, when ZOOMers made recipes, the ingredients were always displayed in plain, unbranded packaging. This is not to say that ZOOM was entirely removed from commercial culture. Two ZOOM-themed books (The ZOOM Catalog in 1972, and Do a Zoom Do in 1975) and two record albums (Playgrounds in 1973, featuring former ZOOMers; and Come on and ZOOM, an official ZOOM album, in 1974) were released over the course of its run. The program also relied in part on outside funding, both from the Ford Foundation and from corporate sponsors McDonalds and General Foods. ZOOM recognized these sponsors briefly in each episode without any specific mention of their commercial products. ZOOM also sought to advance children’s sense of themselves as empowered agents. Here, the goal of creating a participatory television show for children was at least partly in tension with making the program appealing to its audience. Adults, not children, had the professional connections to build these new visions of children’s community, and the vision to keep the flow lively. All ZOOMers attended regular schools full-time, and none were professional performing artists prior to appearing on the show. Their

248 

L. PARIS

“ordinariness” made them attractive on-screen; at the same time, relatively few preteens had the skill to carry more of the production load, let alone to do so in an entertaining way. Consider the fate of a similar show, Take a Giant Step (NBC, 1971–1972), that debuted when ZOOM was first in production. The conceit of Take a Giant Step was very similar to that of ZOOM: a mix of entertainment and information in a magazine format, with young teenage hosts on live television discussing issues of interest to a preadolescent audience. Like ZOOM, Take a Giant Step encouraged viewers to interact with the show by mail and floated the idea that some viewers could make their own films for the show. Unfortunately, contemporary reviewers found the rotating hosts on Take a Giant Step to be unpolished and awkward; while critics called the show’s concept innovative, they found the overall effect uncomfortable and boring (Pierce; Smith 120). ZOOM, on the other hand, appeared to have just the right amount of polish: enough to be well-paced, but not so much as to appear inauthentic. A hit among adults as well as children, ZOOM won Emmy awards for children’s programming in 1973, 1974, and 1977, and media critics were unequivocally positive. As Life magazine reported after the show’s 1972 premiere, “Zoom is graduate school after Mister Roger’s Neighborhood” (Cyclops 1972). Reporter Cecil Smith, writing for the Los Angeles Times, reported that same winter that “my children would rather see Zoom than eat.” Toward the goal of an entertaining and thoughtful final product, ZOOM’s adult staff served as gatekeepers, determining which of the ideas submitted by children would appear on each episode (or be discussed for inclusion) and deciding in general terms how to present the material. Staff rewrote some letters for clarity and edited most for brevity before ZOOMers read them on the air. For example, a girl from Texas sent ZOOM a play she had written that featured a “hippie” character; ZOOM staff substituted a “panhandler,” and converted her slangy line, “Ain’t no place to go,” into standard English (Episode 206). Where producers could not find examples of the kinds of material they wanted, they sought out other ways to get it. For example, the production values of movies created by children tended not to be of high enough visual and sound quality to use on air, so in order to find useable material the producers turned to a Boston-area art studio where children were taking courses in film animation (“Other elements”). While thousands of eager children wrote to ZOOM listing their talents and asking to be ZOOMguests, the producers appear to have found most ZOOMguests through their own contacts.

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

249

The staff also deliberately selected material to showcase the diversity and range of their audience, whether by choosing letters representative of different regions or by filming ZOOMguest documentaries across the country. Every episode ended with an upbeat song-and-dance number; these too were chosen, choreographed, and filmed by adults. ZOOM staff deliberately removed and elided these signs of adult influence from the finished episodes. ZOOMguest documentaries, for example, appeared to be narrated by the children whose voice-overs they featured, but these voice-overs were spliced from children’s responses to taped interviews led by adult interviewers; the adult voices were then edited out. Similarly, ZOOMraps appeared to be self-directed conversations among children. In point of fact, adults asked cast members questions off camera, and in the subsequent editing process these adult voices were removed. One significant exception to this rule stands out; in the last episode of the final season, ZOOM producers interspersed scenes of the adult production crew with more traditional shots of the cast members performing the weekly song-and-dance sequence. As the credits rolled, the final shot offered a broader view of the studio in which cast and crew were visible only in silhouette, beyond the cranes of another camera operator and a boom operator (Episode 615). As this last episode made clear, many adults were in fact just out of camera range. But over the course of its run, most young fans of ZOOM likely didn’t know or care about the show’s degree of adult mediation; they found it satisfyingly child-focused, entertaining, and well-paced.

Participatory Democracy and the ZOOM Viewer Experience In the 1960s and 1970s, new voices in television insisted that the medium could be more thoughtful, creative, and educational for children: teaching viewers useful skills, inculcating good values, and better preparing them for the world beyond their living rooms. ZOOM exemplified this kind of project. Functioning as a kind of national cultural clearinghouse for interesting information and activities, it sought to represent a wide spectrum of American children’s experiences outside the parameters of the commercial media marketplace. While ZOOM was widely praised for achieving these goals, its funding was always precarious, a reflection of the politics of public television in the

250 

L. PARIS

1970s. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), founded in 1968, distributed funding to public television stations around the country, which in turn became part of the new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1970. Because the CPB’s budget was dependent on annual Congressional appropriations, and its board was entirely staffed by presidential appointees, the funding stream for public television was politically unpredictable, and in the lean economic times of the 1970s, it was regularly beset by funding crises. In 1972, for instance, President Richard Nixon vetoed the CPB’s funding bill because he found some PBS programs overly critical and controversial (Carnegie Commission; Morris 67–71; Carmody 1972; Croteau, Hoynes, and Carragee; Craig). In this political climate, ZOOM, which received funding from the US Office of Education, the CPB, and PBS, was at risk. In February 1973, ZOOM was threatened with cancellation when the CPB failed to renew its grant in its second season. ZOOM staff immediately organized what they called a ZOOMalarm for the following week’s episode. ZOOMer Maura looked directly at the camera and told the audience at home that “ZOOM may be taken off the air. The people who decide are in Washington. If you love ZOOM and want ZOOM to stay on, send us your picture. We will send it to Washington to show you care.” By one (perhaps overstated) account, over 500,000 children responded to this plea (“PBS conducting”; Carmody 1974). Just as ZOOM was a product of its era, so too its ZOOMalarm was a savvy use of media campaigning. In the style of ACT and similar liberal lobbying groups, ZOOM was effectively training children to become activist citizens who could advocate for their own interests. “I want to save ZOOM!!!” wrote one girl. “I like ZOOM. Please keep it on the air,” wrote a six-year-old boy (WGBH photographs collection). The media described the ZOOMalarm as a sign of the democratic process; as Newsweek noted, “Could anything be more participatory than a children’s program relying on its audience for ideas, on children for its performers, and on public opinion for its very survival?” (Cyclops 1973). The ensuing press coverage (“PBS Conducting”; Mark; “Kiddie TV”), and the letters generated by children, prompted the CPB to reconsider its decision. In a difficult environment for public television, this lobbying was only provisionally effective. In 1975–1976, ZOOM production was temporarily halted (and new programming replaced with ZOOM reruns) due to funding difficulties, and the show was finally cancelled in 1978 after its sixth season. Yet the ZOOMalarm remained a touchstone for many viewers,

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

251

having taught them about their own collective power as an activist community. Some fans, when they heard that ZOOM was being cancelled, wrote in with advice. “Why don’t you have another ZOOM ALARM?,” asked one (D. S.); “Why didn’t you tell viewers to write to [sic] company that would give ZOOM a grant?,” suggested another (G. G.). In the deliberately less polished space of ZOOM, children exerted cultural power while learning to advocate for themselves as young citizens. No wonder that for many American children of the 1970s, ZOOM became an important cultural benchmark of their youth, having inspired them to see themselves as creative collaborators and sometimes as political actors. The show would later inspire a second-generation PBS remake (1999–2005), whose audience included some of the sons and daughters of its original fans; now, instead of sending letters through the mail, children could connect with the show via electronic “zmail.” At once playful and earnest, ZOOM took seriously the notion that children had interesting talents and ideas; it represented the experiences of a diverse range of American children; and it taught children the power of reaching out to others. As such, ZOOM freed children to imagine their own lives in more creative, inclusive, and far-reaching ways.

Note 1. This chapter draws on material from an earlier article I published on openvault.wgbh.org, which is used here with permission from WGBH Educational Foundation. 2. All letters in the WGBH archive are cited by initials only.

Works Cited A. P. to ZOOM. 31 Aug. 1978. Envelope 10. Documentation D02649. WGBH. Benson, Pam. ZOOMers Revisited: Where Are They Now? WGBH Educational Foundation, 1998. “Biography  – Christopher Sarson.” “ZOOM facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH. Buskey, Teri. “Thoughts on ZOOM’s 40th Reunion.” 9 Mar. 2015. WGBH Alumni, wgbhalumni.org/2012/08/17/zooms-40th-reunion/. Accessed 30 April 2017. Carmody, John. “A Money Message for the Media: PBS Tightens its Belt.” Washington Post, 17 Jul. 1972, p. B1. Carmody, John. “WETA Decides Not to ‘Zoom.’” Washington Post, 23 Jul. 1974, p. B1. Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. Public Television: A Program for Action. Bantam, 1967.

252 

L. PARIS

Cast of ZOOM. Playgrounds. Good Fortune Enterprises, 1972. Cast of ZOOM. Come on and ZOOM. A&M Records, 1974. Chesler, Bernice. Do a Zoom Do. Little Brown & Co., 1975. Coleman, Barbara. “Through the Years We’ll All Be Friends: The “Mickey Mouse Club,” Consumerism, and the Cultural Consensus.” Visual Resources, vol. 14, no. 3, 1999, pp. 297–306. Cooney, Joan. “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education” Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1966. Clark, Naeemah. “The Birth of an Advocacy Group: The First Six Years of Action for Children’s Television” Journalism History, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 66–75. Cooney, Joan and Linda Gottlieb. “Television for Preschool Children: A Proposal” Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1968. Craig, R. Stephen. “Noncommercial Television.” History of the Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia, edited by Margaret A. Blanchard. Routledge, 1998, pp. 473–6. Croteau, David, William Hoynes, and Kevin M. Carragee, “The Political Diversity of Public Television: Polysemy, the Public Sphere, and the Conservative Critique of PBS.” Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs, 1996. Cyclops. “Use at last for 12-year-old minds.” Life, vol. 72, no. 3, 28 Jan. 1972, p. 18. Cyclops. “Children’s Hour.” Newsweek, vol. 81, no. 9, 26 Feb. 1973, p. 57. “Dear ZOOMviewer.” “Mail 1975” folder. Documentation 281035. WGBH. D. K. to ZOOM. 1977. “Feedback” folder. Documentation D02649. WGBH. D. S. to ZOOM. Second box. WGBH. Fore, William F. “FCC Cops Out on Children’s TV.” Christian Century, vol. 91, 20 Nov. 1974, pp. 1084–1085. Fripp, Bill. “The TV show for kids by kids.” Boston Globe 15 Jan. 1972, p. 10. G. G. to ZOOM. Second box, WGBH. Hendershot, Heather. “Action for (and against) Children’s Television: ‘Militant Mothers’ and the Tactics of Television Reform.” Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, edited by Heather Hendershot. Duke UP, 1998, pp. 61–94. Jacobson, Lisa. Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. Columbia UP, 2004. J.  B. to ZOOM. “Complimentary letters.” Envelope 19. Documentation D02649. WGBH. J. G. to ZOOM. “Feedback” folder. Documentation D02649. WGBH. J. L. to ZOOM. “Giggles” folder. Documentation D02649. WGBH. Joyce, Kristin. “ZOOM  – youthful imagination makes popular TV show.” Christian Science Monitor, 20 Dec. 1972, p. 10. Kahn, Tony. “Welcome to the mail.” 10 Jan. 1975. “ZOOM facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH.

14  “SEND IT TO ZOOM!”: AMERICAN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION… 

253

“Kiddie TV Show Tries to Keep Itself on Air.” Austin American Statesman, 23 Feb. 1973, p. 48. “Kidnews.” Newsweek 83, no. 17, January 1974, p. 51. Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing. Verso, 1993. Kramer, Carol. “ZOOM is for Sharing.” Chicago Tribune, 19 Aug. 1973, p. O7. Letter to parents. 5 August 1974. “Parents” folder. Documentation 281036. WGBH. L.  W. to ZOOM. “Parents letters” folder, Envelope 18. Documentation D02649. WGBH. MacGregor, James. “When is Moon Broke? Want an Apple Split? The Kids Love ‘Zoom.’” Wall Street Journal, 21 May 1973, pp. 1, 20. Mark, Norman. “ZOOM Doomed  – Unless Letters Mushroom.” Detroit Free Press, 3 Mar. 1973, p. 7A. McLean, Robert. “New ZOOM starts with a boom.” Boston Globe, 9 Nov. 1974, p. 15. May, Kirse Granat. Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955–1966. U of North Carolina P, 2010. M.  C. to ZOOM. 1978. “Complimentary letters” folder, Envelope 19. Documentation D02649. WGBH. M. G. to ZOOM. “Giggles” folder. Documentation D02649. WGBH. M.  H. to ZOOM. 1978. “Complimentary letters” folder, Envelope 19. Documentation D02649. WGBH. Morris, Norman S. Television’s Child. Little, Brown and Co., 1971. “News.” Library Journal 99, 15 May 1974, p. 1426. Note dated 1-10-75. “Mail 1975” folder. Documentation 281035. WGBH. “Other elements not in that description,” “ZOOM Facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH. “PBS conducting ‘children’s crusade’ to save kids’ own Zoom show.” Baltimore Sun, 20 Feb. 1973, p. A3. Pierce, Ponchitta. “A Child’s Guide to Television” McCalls, vol. XCVII, no. 12, 1971, p. 48. Public Health Service. Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence. Report to the Surgeon General, United States Public Health Service. US Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1971. “Raising Children in Modern America.” 1975 publicity kit, 1976–77 season. WGBH. Sarson, Christopher. “Audience Reactions to ZOOM Pilot, September 16, 1971.” “ZOOM Facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH. Sarson, Evelyn, ed. Action for Children’s Television: The First National Symposium on the Effect on Children of Television Programming and Advertising. Avon Books, 1971.

254 

L. PARIS

Seligsohn, Leo. “A TV Hit That’s Child’s Play.” Newsday, 3 Dec. 1972, pp. 4–5. Smith, Cecil. “Zooming In on Zoom Watchers.” Los Angeles Times, 10 Feb. 1972, p. 20. Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Duke UP, 2001. S. W. “Kim.” “7/11” folder. Documentation D02649, WGBH. WGBH archive, ZOOM archival collection, Brighton, MA. WGBH Educational Foundation. The ZOOM Catalog: Riddles, Jokes, Stories, Songs, Games, Plays, Puzzles, Poems, Crafts, Art, Guest Interviews. Random House, 1972. “What is ZOOM?” 2 Sept. 1971. “ZOOM Facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH. “WQED program guide.” The Neighborhood Archive, 10 Sep. 1954, www.neighborhoodarchive.com/images/cc/memorabilia/program_guides/0001.jpg. Accessed 7 Nov. 2018. Zeitlin, Arnold. “Children of ‘Zoom’ lead protected television lives.” Austin American Statesman, 25 Dec. 1977, p. 19. “ZOOM newsletter 3, no. 6.” Mar. 1974. “ZOOM Facts” folder. Documentation 139820. WGBH. ZOOM photographs collection, WGBH. “ZOOM’s Fifth Season.” 1976–77 press kit. WGBH.

CHAPTER 15

Tupac Shakur: Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists Awad Ibrahim

In The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Tupac Shakur invokes the metaphor of a rose that is planted in the concrete as an allegory of his life. If that rose has “[s]cratches and marks,” he contends, the emphasis should not be on the scratches and marks but more on the fact that “[a] rose grew from the concrete.” “Same thing with me,” Tupac concludes, “I grew out of all of this” (n.p.). For Tupac, “this” is a brilliant encapsulation, a meta-analysis, an auto-ethnographic theorizing of one’s own life. It speaks to the poetic as well as the social, the two poles that I intend to work with and oscillate between in this chapter. Given the nature and the emphasis of this volume, however, it is significant to note that “this” also radically disrupts a privileged notion of childhood that is not afforded to Black and Brown children in North America (Beverly Tatum; Michelle Alexander). With Tupac, as with many Black and Brown children, childhood develops rhizomatically rather than linearly. With a linear development, one moves from childhood to pre-teen to teen to young adult to adult; with a rhizomatic development (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), one does not move from A. Ibrahim (*) Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_15

255

256 

A. IBRAHIM

A to B to C, but from A to C to B and then back to A. A rhizome is a crabgrass-like figuration, a tree whose surface is seen but whose roots remain invisible; it receives the sun, the rain, and everything that comes its way, but its final shape is unknown and unpredictable. A rhizomatic development therefore is arduous, non-systemic, non-linear, fluid, flowing, unpredictable, with multiple entry points, and in a constant state of deterritorialization and forever becoming (Ibrahim Rhizome). Black and Brown childhoods are better understood within such a framework since most Black and Brown children are still looked at suspiciously as criminals or potential criminals (Tatum), especially in the United States, a scrutiny and categorization which makes their childhood overlap in complex ways with their teenhood and their adulthood. Tupac had a deep understanding of this complicated rhizomatic framework when it came to Black and Brown bodies. He may not have used the term “rhizome,” but he certainly spoke about the idea. Surrounded by Black Panther politics from birth (Robert Anson), Tupac knew the nature of a social system that worked over-time (and still does) to brutalize and dehumanize Black and Brown people, from birth to childhood to adulthood. In the midst of the rubble, however, emerges hope. Spoken word is a poetic space where young people are full of grounded hope, and they thus become our new social critics and our new cultural theorists (Ibrahim “Youth”). In this chapter, I argue, first, that one of our foremost social and cultural critics and theorists is Tupac Shakur, also known as Pac or 2Pac, and, second, I reintroduce Tupac not as a performer but as a spoken word poet. Contrary to popular perceptions of spoken word poetry as a 1990s phenomenon, spoken word is not new, but has taken on a new look and a fresh tone precisely because it is increasingly affiliated with Black and Brown social issues, and has become an urgent and unapologetic voice for those who are historically silenced and rendered voiceless. In her Foucauldian genealogizing of the term, Susan B.  A. Somers-Willett explains that the use of the term spoken word “came about in the early twentieth century as a way to refer to the recorded, performed text of broadcast radio as opposed to written journalism and radio plays” (100). Today, however, the use of the term “spoken word” is altogether different, as Somers-Willett explains: “Spoken word poetry is positioned at the nexus of hip-hop music and performance poetry” (100). Spoken word poetry is certainly performed poetry, but it is also so much more than that. Spoken word poetry is an index, a term that contains other terms such as

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

257

slam, cipher, identity, witnessing, testifying, and that does more than ­conventional text put into performance. For Somers-Willett, the native venue for spoken word poetry is “live performance” (13) where race, gender, sexuality, and politics intersect. What has been missing from criticism of spoken word poetry, however, “is serious consideration of the issues of identity and cultural politics that infuse its everyday aspect from the page to the stage, from composition to performance” (Somers-Willett, 13–14), in the first place, and taking spoken word poets not only as poets but also as cultural critics and cultural theorists, in the second place. This chapter is a modest attempt to redress this gap. To fully grapple with what I am putting forth in this chapter, however, two notions have to be kept at the forefront: childhood/youth and African American presence in the spoken word scene; and to make my arguments, I will mention two events that are affiliated with spoken word: Brave New Voices and Youth Speaks. Since spoken word is an auditory, oratory, and affective experience, the reader is invited to go through this experience by hitting YouTube for examples of spoken word from Brave New Voices and Youth Speaks. For Brave New Voices, I suggest Hiwot Adilow’s poem talking about what it means to be Black and an immigrant in the United States, and for Youth Speaks, I suggest Obasi Davis doing a meta-analysis of Black nihilism, the reasons why Black people feel hopeless with the current system. From these and other examples, spoken word emerges as a form of testimony which, first, includes exceptional social theorizing, criticizing, and historicizing of the poet’s life experience, hope, and struggle; and, second, serves as a social witnessing to the lives of others around the poet. Brave New Voices and Youth Speaks are populated primarily by middle and high school students who reflect on and historicize their childhoods. As I stated earlier, the notions of “youth” and “childhood” are better understood rhizomatically, that is, not as categories we reach, but as complex processes that are always to become and always in progress (see also Ibrahim and Steinberg). This notion of rhizomatic process—the outcome of which is rhizomatic development where, in the case of 2Pac, for example, we move from childhood to adulthood by the age of 10—is particularly true for youth and children of color, especially African Americans, who have boldly and innovatively taken up and populated the spoken word scene because it opens up a poetic space that allows them to speak what some would prefer to keep silent. It suffices to say that over two-­ thirds of the US spoken word poetry and slam competitions were won by

258 

A. IBRAHIM

African Americans in 2008–2009 (Somers-Willett) and beyond; their ­visibility, the urgency of the social justice issues they talk about (e.g., structural poverty, police brutality and killing of African Americans, and systemic discrimination), and their age (primarily pre-teen, teenage, and college age) create an equation between African American youth and spoken word. Youth of color have helped in populating the spoken word scene and rewriting the relevance of poetry to people’s lives and identities, but they cannot take full credit as we shall see next.

The Birth of Spoken Word Poetry In the hot summer of 1988, poetry as we knew it (be it by Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, etc.) was so radically changed that it was no longer known to its insiders. The culprit was a White Chicago construction worker, Marc Smith, who not only had the audacity of declaring himself a poet but literally transformed poetry (into spoken word poetry, also known as slam),1 the relationship between poets and their audience (with the audience now becoming theatrically active and immediate judge as to the quality and the political and social effects of the poem on them), and the delivery of the poem (no longer in sterile and mostly academic venues, but in “popular” and more democratic venues). It is worth remembering that a serious discussion was taking place around 1988 about what some saw as the steep decline of poetry readers and the steeper decline of audience in poetry reading events (Joseph Epstein). Closer to being a lament, many were wondering: who was reading poetry, and for whom was it written? Instead of participating in this “lifeless monotone that droned on and on with no consideration of the structure or the pacing” or even the audience, Marc Smith turned to bars and cabaret, and primarily targeted youth, who came in droves (Smith 117). Those nights were as a combination of poetry, cabaret, performance art, and musical experimentation. Without being called such, those nights were Hip-Hop nights, as they included significant elements of Hip-Hop: speaking over music (or rapping with boom boxes), poetry (or MC-ing), graffiti, and improvisation, the most significant element of Hip-Hop.2 Since those days, spoken word has become a global phenomenon, and the recent conflict between the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) and Marc Smith—who on April 16, 2017, was not only criticized but booed for questioning what he called “black [sic] anger” (where Black people are “milking the repression of our easy existence”) and for

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

259

not questioning his White privilege3—declared a rupture between the past and the present in the spoken word scene. In the intervening years of spoken word poetry since Smith’s early days, youth of color brought the real to the poetic in speaking their lives and speaking about the urgency of the moment. In this moment, even as spoken word poets hold on to a notion of entertainment, social justice is the issue. This idea has become one of the following five pillars around which spoken word is built (see also Tyler Hoffman; Somers-Willett). First, spoken word poetry first and foremost is meant to tell a story in and through engaging and entertaining language. To do so, it invents and reinvents itself dependent on the venue and the audience. Second, spoken word poetry is characterized by and designed to display oratorical and rhetorical skills. As such, it is used as a means to invoke and push what the audience knows in a direction that is not already determined or known. Third, the subject and the use of the “I” is not only permitted but expected, hence centralizing the originality of the speaker, who is expected to be the author of the poem. In spoken word poetry, the performer is the author of what is being performed. Fourth, tolerance, justice, equality, democracy, and politics—and this list is far from being exhaustive—are what spoken word poetry is about. Spoken word poetry asks its audience to be open, to fight for social justice, to fight against racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on, and to speak about and for a better future. Fifth and finally, as a result, the performers of spoken word poetry become social critics and cultural theorists. As we see later on, we witness all five pillars of spoken word poetry in and with Tupac. His poetry is a testimony to his life, his elegance seeps through his texts where he speaks his mind, and his whole poetry is a fight for social justice and a better future: thus, making him one of our most admired social critics and cultural theorists, both in the eyes of youth and adults. With Tupac, the extent of his advocacy for social justice calls upon us to expand what constitutes childhood and youth, on the one hand, and his elegance and prophetic poetry is, on the other hand, at the level and in areas that are conventionally claimed by adults.

From Consumption to Authorship “All the arts are capable of duende” or inspiration, writes Federico Lorca, “but where it finds its greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being

260 

A. IBRAHIM

forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present” (Lorca 12). Of course, no one is born a poet, and spoken word poets are no different. To become a spoken word poet is to become a “living body” (in the true sense of becoming wide-aware) who is propelled to move from consuming to authoring spoken word poetry and who is required, I am arguing, to go through stages, three stages to be exact. Finding and discovering spoken word poetry is the first stage, where one gets to know what spoken word poetry is along with its different styles. The second stage requires a move from consumption to authorship. This might be described as “conscientization” (Paulo Freire) or being changed as a result of becoming wide-aware of the social and political situation that surrounds the poet and then bringing that awareness to one’s compositions. Finally, when conscientization reaches a particular level of both political and stylistic maturity, where youth become conscious not only of social and historical oppression and injustice but also realize over time their endowed gift of voice and spoken word, spoken word poets become cultural theorists (Ibrahim “Youth”). In psychoanalytic terms (Shoshana Felman), I am contending, the first level is recognition, where for content or stylistic reasons, spoken word poetry becomes a site of enjoyment that hails us or calls us in; the second level is witnessing, where one becomes conscious of the political and the social situation around them, and becomes conscious of spoken word poetry as a venue for talking about it, deconstructing it, and imagining a different world; and the third level is testifying, when one reaches a high pitch of consciousness and moves from being a consumer and bystander witness of spoken word poetry to a producer, author, and performer of spoken word poetry. The movement from consumption to authorship thus is a movement from Recognition to Witnessing to Testifying. Recognition → Witnessing → Testifying

To testify, Shoshana Felman contends in a different context, is “to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement” (5). In the case of young spoken word poets, this testifying and its expressive ability mature over time because the more writers write, the better they get at it. To testify in the context of spoken word is to produce testimonial speech acts of the everyday experiential practice and history of mostly marginalized, subaltern, Brown and Black people (see

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

261

especially Tyler Hoffman; Michael Eric Dyson). Qua testimony, however, spoken word poetry is not “a completed statement, a totalizable account” of that practice, since no language is eloquent, full, or capable enough to speak the unspeakable or bear the unbearable (Felman 5). In testifying, Felman explains further, “language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-­ transparency of knowledge” (5). Adapting Felman’s notion of testifying to this context, spoken word poetry is a compositional narrative of bits and pieces of the social reality of the groups that it is speaking about (be it Blackness, Brownness, or subalternness; and mostly from the perspective of young people); not a “completed statement” or “a totalizable account,” but a langage-en-procès—a language-in-process, a discursive practice, an unapologetic testimonial speech act that borders on hope and absolute hopelessness. Spoken word poetry is an informal historical record, a third term, that explicates and draws on keen observation and autodidactic rumination to critique racism, sexism, homophobia, and their effects; the force and function of crack cocaine, crack economy and crack crime; conspiracy theory; defensive suspicion; underground economy; economic restructuring; social dislocation; urban regentrification; drug pushing and drug dealing; gangs; police brutality and ghetto life; and, ultimately, death. The spoken word poet Crystal Valentine speaks elegantly about almost all of these issues in one poem, ironically called “Black Privilege,” where she is, among other things, asked to memorize her brother’s and father’s eulogies, expected and supposed to know Trayvon Martin on a first name basis, “always having to be the strong one,” and where she once overheard a teacher “asking a [Black] boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said alive!” Both youth and adults, it must be noted, talk about these issues in their spoken word poetry, but young people seem to be more forceful, pushy, unapologetic, in-your-face, speaking with a flare, and projecting a radically different future. No one is so iconic, so iconoclastic and so poetic in addressing these social and political issues with this unapologetic style as Tupac Shakur. In Tupac’s case, Hip-Hop and spoken word are one and the same. Tupac, writes Michael Eric Dyson, “is perhaps the representative figure of his generation. In his haunting voice,” continues Dyson, “can be heard the buoyant hopefulness and the desperate hopelessness that mark the outer perimeters of the hip-hop culture he eagerly embraced, as well as the lives of the millions of youth who admired and adored him” (13). By reintroducing 2Pac as a spoken word poet and a representative of the youth of

262 

A. IBRAHIM

the late twentieth century, I am contending that his life and his poetry are the ultimate example of the three levels of progression one makes in spoken word poetry from recognition to witnessing to testifying.

Microphone Check: Tupac and the Ethics of the Appointment4 Tupac Shakur—born on June 16, 1971, to Alice Faye Williams, who revoked her “slave name” and was reborn as Afeni Shakur, and Billy Garland, who abandoned him at a very young age—is what might be described as an organic intellectual who turned poet and performer or, as we shall see, a morally, politically, and socially literate poet who recognized the organic ethics of witnessing and testifying. A principal player in forming and informing this ethics was his mother, Afeni Shakur, who was a member of the radical Black Panthers New York 21. She grew up under the vicious Jim Crow laws in North Carolina, enduring racial epithets and observing the hateful manifestations of Southern apartheid. With street-­ consciousness, she moved to New  York City where she joined the civil rights movement, first as a schoolteacher and then as a militant social activist. As a jailed revolutionary turned mother, Afeni nursed Tupac while in jail; hence, he once said, “my embryo was in prison.” She named him Tupac Amaru—“Shining serpent”—after an eighteenth-century Incan Peruvian revolutionary chief whose body was torn apart with horses by the Spanish conquistadors. Afeni settled in the Bronx with Tupac and his sister, both of whom practically lived in New York public libraries, where Tupac was introduced to van Gogh and to reading the New York Times every day. Before being a talented poet and performer, Tupac was a voracious reader, a fact rarely talked about, if at all, when conversing about spoken word and Hip-Hop in general. At the age of 10, Tupac was once asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” His answer was instantaneous: “A revolutionary” (Anson). At 13 years old, Tupac played Travis in A Raisin in the Sun at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. When life got tough in New York, Afeni moved the family to Baltimore. By now, Tupac has seen enough to be endowed with an acute and profound consciousness that can only be described as a consciousness of a mature and highly intellectual “adult,” yet Tupac was only 14 years old; this is a fact that can only be understood rhizomatically. “Here we was, kickin’ all this shit about the revolution,” he told Kevin Powell, “and we starvin’.” After door knocking by Afeni, Tupac was able

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

263

to attend the prestigious Baltimore School for Performing Arts, where he was attracted to acting classes, which resulted in his appearance in such films as Juice and Above the Rim in his early 20s. All through his early life, Tupac was not sheltered from the 1970s upheaval and 1980s Reaganism, which devastated the Black and Brown ghettos through the laws of predatory capitalism, establishing crack cocaine as a necessary economy. Tupac wrote poetry as early as primary school and performed some of it in his teen years, and is thus known for his lyricism as a Hip-Hop artist and performer. His writing style as well as performance matured over time (Dyson), but that maturity was embedded in a deep organic intellectualism, an insatiable desire for reading, and an incredibly perceptive mind, eye, and ear. No one can say for certain the exact age when Tupac wrote his lyrics because he avidly wrote mature poetry from the age of 10 (The Rose). This is why, with Tupac, childhood and adulthood are so intersectional that it is safe to read all of Tupac’s work as a langage-en-procès, an expressive performance of a life experience that matured so quickly and was cut short at the age of 25. In fact, Tupac’s life shows the need for a rhizomatic analysis of childhood and youth when it comes to children of color. At the age of 13, Tupac was already writing about very mature and “adult” topics such as violence, poverty, teen pregnancies, and even death; thus creating a perfect illustration of what I discussed above as rhizomatic development. We see his poetic and social maturity in “Cradle to the Grave,” where he testifies to how his life, from its inception, was a “warzone” as he called it: “From the cradle to the grave, life ain’t never been easy / Living in the ghetto / June 16, 1971 / … a rainy day my mama gave birth / To a baby boy trapped in hell on Earth” (Thug Life, 1994). “Cradle to the Grave” is a social commentary on what it means to be “a baby boy trapped in hell on Earth,” a boy whose childhood was not only robbed from him but who is “now a young ni∗∗as being raised by the streets.” His mother knew what it meant to be “raised by the streets,” where death was an everyday reality. “I measured his life in five-year periods,” Afeni told Anson. “When he was five, I was so grateful. When he was 10, I thanked God he was 10. Fifteen, 20, 25, I was always amazed he’d survived. He was a gift.” “I’m glad to say / I made it this far,” writes Tupac in “Cradle to the Grave” a year before his death. “Many G’s died hard / And all they got was their name here up on a wall / …Life goes on, I’m steady lost in this land / as the warzone I got no home.” But homeless he was not! In fact, despite the poverty, Tupac grew up and died dignified and with grace. Bold as she was, Afeni did not hide behind language in

264 

A. IBRAHIM

discussing presque tout with Tupac, even her drug addiction, and he in turn embodied her frank domestic pedagogy. As a high school student, for example, Tupac noted that, “The way my mother brought me is no lies. You know the total truth. Everything is real in this society. If something is going on wrong, then I know everything” (Dyson, 37). With knowledge, however, comes the ethics of the appointment. In this ethics, Levinas argues, I am demanded, claimed, assigned, designated, and appointed to tell, especially when I am so close to death that it stares me in the eye. It is doubly burdensome, as Tupac came to realize, when one becomes cognizant of this ethics at a young age. “It was like I was given the responsibility before I wanted it,” Tupac explains, “and so now I can’t really differentiate what great responsibility is because I’ve had it for so long” (Dyson, 38). For Tupac, this responsibility included being a witness and a testifying voice for those around him, which was paralleled with an exceptional gift for language and an insatiable intellectual appetite. Throughout his short life of 25  years, Tupac blurred the boundaries between childhood and adulthood and Hip-Hop and spoken word. The Rose that Grew from Concrete is a case in point. Published posthumously, The Rose is a collection of unpublished poems that reflected (on) Tupac’s early life—pre-teen and teen and to some extent his 20s. The collection shows a level of maturity that can only be understood rhizomatically. From “Tears of a Teenage Mother,” to “Wake Me When I am Free,” to “In the Event of My Demise,” to “Lady Liberty Needs Glasses,” The Rose is a bricolage and assemblage whose main intent was to prove “nature’s laws wrong” because out of nihilism, “concrete,” and utter hopelessness, the wretched of the earth miraculously “learned how to walk” with dignity even “without having feet” (17); they learned how to speak when they were expected to remain silent and voiceless. Taken together, the collective work of Tupac demonstrates, first, that he went through the three stages of spoken word poetry (recognition, witnessing, and testifying) and, second, that Hip-Hop and spoken word are one and the same and can be used interchangeably. Especially in the United States, Somers-Willett writes, “audiences… use the term [spoken word poetry]… to indicate a hip-hop-infused lyric, and, although not all spoken word poetry reflects these aesthetics, in [most] cases spoken word poetry is indistinguishable from hip-hop” (99). We see the interchangeability between spoken word and Hip-Hop clearly demonstrated while Tupac is attending the Baltimore School for Performing Arts where he, organically and slowly, emerges as a spoken

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

265

word poet and a Hip-Hop performer, thus moving from recognition to witnessing. This move is clearly expressed in “Me Against the World” (Me Against the World, 1995), where Tupac takes on the role of a consciousness raiser in addressing his fellow high school students with the rhyme, “tha message I stress / to make it [oppression] stop / study your lessons / don’t settle for less.” One has to teach oneself, in other words, and find ways to articulate one’s suffering because, as Tupac discovers, “tha powers in tha people” and “polititions and hipocrites… don’t wanna listen.” For Tupac, this consciousness emerges in two separate but interrelated ways. First, at a very early age, Tupac discovers the power of the word, what he can do with it. Qua witness, the word is a container that carries the burden, speaks and bears our intellectual life as much as it does our everyday lived experience. Second, as part of his conscientization, Tupac realizes that his life story and his struggle are not unique to him, but too common among Black and Brown youth around him, especially their struggle with marginalization, silence, police brutality, and ultimately death. Indeed, one of the most prominent themes in Tupac’s work is death. Seeing death all around him, at some point, Tupac becomes a being-toward-death, to use Emmanuel Levinas’ language. This is usually the case when one declares one’s own death, when death becomes inevitable or as Tupac put it in “God Bless the Dead,” “In my mind I can see it [death] coming.” What a peculiar state of mind to see, literally and metaphorically, your own death coming towards you! “Lookin' back in my year book all the years took,” Tupac writes in “God Bless the Dead,” which was written when Tupac was 20 years old, “Half my peers, they're stretched for years” (Greatest Hits, 1998). Half the yearbook, it seems, are or have been dead for a while. The titles of his lyrics are significant in evoking or speaking to themes of death: “16 on Death Row”; “Only Fear of Death”; “Hail Mary”; “Life Goes On”; “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto”; “God Bless the Dead”; “Me Against the World”; “Still I Rise”; “2Pacalypse Now”; “How Long Will They Mourn Me?”; “R U Still Down?”; “If I Die 2Nite”; “Death Around the Corner.” What makes these lyrics even more disheartening is the fact that some of them were written when Tupac was a teen. In “Death Around the Corner” (Me Against the World, 1995), Tupac writes about seeing death all around him, which makes him, in turn, a dead man walking. Struggling to stay alive, he writes: “I see death around the—corner, anyday… Trying to keep it together… Strugglin and strivin, my destiny’s to die.”

266 

A. IBRAHIM

Not only were these lines prophetic since they were released a year before Tupac died in 1996, but they raise a challenging existential question: how do we go on living when in our mind’s eye we are already seeing death coming our way and so our destiny is to die? By his death at age 25, Tupac had seen enough so that his life can only be understood rhizomatically, where his experience and sensibility are complex, multiplicitous, with multiple entry points, thus giving birth to an ever-complicated notion of childhood/youth. Lyrically, he was more retrospective and reflective in “Death Around the Corner” while he was more didactic in “God Bless the Dead”; these reflective and didactic styles dominate most of Tupac’s lyrics. Not only does Tupac embrace his being-toward-death, but in doing so, Dyson writes, he becomes “at once plague and prophet” (218). As Dyson explains, “Tupac believed he spoke for the desperately demobilized and degraded lumpen who were, as he said on one of his songs, “young [and] strapped,” those who “don’t give a fuck”” (218). In “The Good Die Young,” Tupac asks: “Does anybody have an answer why / It seems the good die young?” (Still I Rise, 1999). This is a brilliantly summative social, historical, and political question, especially when it comes to Black and Brown bodies in the contemporary “Trumpistan” (Salman Rushdie, 2018). In the case of Tupac and the spoken word world in general, spoken word poetry is where silence and the silenced are able to speak: it is the voice of voicelessness and the possession of the dispossessed. In the final analysis, spoken word poetry is a way to describe, understand, and deconstruct social, cultural, and political reality, on the one hand, and a language of freedom and hope, on the other. Tupac’s lyrics in “Trapped” (2Pacalypse Now, 1991) are another moment of social critique and social theorizing of what was happening in his life and the lives around him. We get a complete picture of police brutality, poverty, political indifference, and ultimately death. “Trapped” tells the story of a young “ni∗∗a” who is trapped by the social condition in which he finds himself. The “ghetto” where he grew up is a large prison, both in terms of an imaginary prison (by closing the possibilities for people to imagine themselves and their lives to be otherwise) and actual and physical prison (by incarcerating people). In the face of horror, death, and destitution, Tupac declares in “Trapped”: “Naw, they can’t keep tha black man down.” Despite it all, it seems, being trapped is neither a consummated event nor a horizon void of the possibility of resistance. “They” may trap him, but “they” won’t keep him down. In fact, Tupac argues, there is another way, another path: “Cuffed up, I said I had e­ nough /

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

267

There must be another route, way out / To money and fame, I changed my name / And played a different game / Tired of being trapped in this vicious cycle.” To consciously change one’s own name, Freire would have argued, is “to speak the true word,” which ultimately “is to transform the world” (87). The name, the word we use to describe ourselves and the world, Freire argues, directly influences our possibilities for action, if not our imagination. So, changing one’s own name is changing and transforming one’s own life into a better and more hopeful one. Tupac was fully aware that the world could be (imagined) otherwise. So, with this particularly acute social consciousness, Tupac continued his rising. This is the ultimate consummation of consciousness and the beginning of the journey of testifying. As such, testifying is not an event, but a continuous, ever-evolving, and ever-growing journey. No one ever reaches its mountaintop, as spoken word poetry is an ongoing form of cultural critique and social theorizing. In “Words of Wisdom” (2Pacalypse Now, 1991), Tupac sums up his social critique and his social theorizing by offering a poem that speaks directly to the cherished values in spoken word poetry of democracy, equality, diversity, social and political critique, and historical perspective. He speaks directly to “Amerika,” which is spelled as pronounced. “Amerika” is now put on trial and being accused of rape, murder, and robbery. It has nowhere to go but jail because, through physical and psychological violence, it is creating its own nightmare. “And the jury find you guilty on all accounts,” Tupac declares, “And you are to serve the consequences of your evil schemes.” In “Words of Wisdom” (2Pacalypse Now, 1991), Tupac speaks truth to power by arguing that he is not violent, but is consciously resisting the system that traps him and the people who surround him, his communities, and allies. Tupac names and condemns the system as violent, and if the system does not recognize or is incapable of recognizing its violent nature, then “Amerika” should get ready for its “nightmare.” “NIGHTMARE thats what I am / America’s nightmare / I am what you made me / The hate and evil that you gave me,” Tupac writes in “Words of Wisdom.” So, he continues, my role as a social critic and social theorist is to “shine” and highlight and poetically write “a reminder of what you have done to my people / for Four hundred plus years / You should be scared / You should be running.” For Tupac, always in “Words of Wisdom,” it is not surprising that “Amerika” “should be trying to silence me… But you can not escape fate.” “Amerika,” he writes, “You reap what you sow / 2pacalypse America’s Nightmare.” In almost all of Tupac’s lyrics, two things are clear: the spoken word poet seeps through

268 

A. IBRAHIM

every line and the rhizomatic childhood and youth are clearly performed. Here, one can see a sensibility and wide-awakeness that can only be understood rhizomatically, where life did not go from A to B to C but from A to C to B and back to A again, and where all developmental stages and cycles seem to pass so quickly.

And Still They Rise: A Conclusion on Spoken Word Poets as Cultural Theorists Clearly, to reach the point of social critique and social theorizing that Tupac reached, one has to muster one’s own recognition, one’s own witnessing, and one’s own testifying. For Tupac, as a spoken word poet, bearing witness is not a solemn but a collective act. To testify is to recognize, to witness, to relate to, to become conscious, and to narrate oneself and the other within an ethics of relationality. This is where the other becomes my sister and my brother, and where my story is both individualized and collectivized. However, this is no small task. This level of consciousness requires spoken word poets to pass through the arduous task of recognition and witnessing. Clearly, generalizations are there to be broken, so tautologically stated: not all spoken word poets are deserving of the label of cultural theorists. The latter requires not only an acute consciousness but also requires that one goes through the transformative process of recognition, witnessing and testifying. To explain, when reaching the level of cultural theorist (as did Tupac), there is no testifying that is transformative and will appeal to its audience if it is not grounded in the audience’s lives or speaks to a social, cultural, and political issue that the audience can identify with. It is this “being-in-the-world” (Levinas) that enabled Tupac to recognize, witness, and ultimately testify, hence making him a spoken word poet deserving of the designation of cultural theorist. Tupac recognized early in his life that he was called upon and appointed to testify. That is an awesome responsibility, especially knowing full well that there is no language that is elegant enough to fully capture a social reality. In my view, this is why Tupac produced as much as he did by the age of 25; certainly he felt the urgency of the issues he was talking about and the imminence of his death. For Tupac, silence was not an option, yet he actually felt that he managed to say and testify very little about the contextual experience of his life, especially envisioning a better future (Dyson). Unfortunately, a hopeful future will never be his, since he was a

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

269

victim of the violence he so much talked about. As a spoken word poet, a social critic, and a social theorist, Tupac always referred to a futuristic place of mental freedom, a decolonization of the mind, where hard and critical questions are asked about why things are the way they are. For Tupac, one way out of the physical imprisonment (of Black people particularly) and mental colonization is education to illuminate and light a path for a rendezvous of victory and shedding ourselves of injustice, discrimination, marginalization, and oppression. Tupac would have certainly said it loudly: Black Lives Matter! Being a spoken word poet, and a social critic and a cultural theorist, Tupac’s poetry presents an exceptional narrative of a man who told his story so many times that he became the story itself, a producer, and a product of it. Hence, the story continues to live on, since Tupac was among the top earning artists in 2017, topping Bob Dylan and Def Leppard (Sanchez). Tupac is a representative of spoken word poets who are endowed with the gift of language accompanied by a clear vision and social consciousness. As our new cultural theorists, these poets tend to tell us something new or invent the known in an unknown language. Their rhizomatic development is exceptional in that they are able to conceive so much (especially harm) at such a young age. They have the courage and audacity to engage, look for, and think through what Rorty calls the “blind impresses” (43). These are the difficult knowledges—problems, if you like—that society prefers not to face, be it racism or violence. In the face of formidable pressure, these cultural theorists, through their spoken word poetry, will choose to walk through these “problems,” so to speak, and deal with them at the individual, national, and global level. Look around you, check out YouTube and search (College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational; National Poetry Slam; Button Poetry; Brave New Voices, Youth Speaks; and the list goes on)! Listen carefully! I think you will join me in arguing that youth are our new social and cultural theorists. So maybe the time has come for us to shut up and listen and carefully learn from them. Just listen to Obasi Davis at the age of 16 deconstructing, like Tupac, our social, educational, and political ills: www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=myhuAaVwzZ8. SNAP!

270 

A. IBRAHIM

Notes 1. Somers-Willett makes an unconvincing distinction between spoken word poetry and poetry slam. She sees the latter as not commercial and more about poetry for its own sake, and the former as more trapped into commercialism. However, she also writes, “Since today a poem’s life as ‘spoken word poetry’ is highly dependent on context, slam poetry can easily slide between the slam and spoken word camps, and many performers bill themselves as slam poets in the competitive arena and spoken word poets in commercial arenas” (99). Precisely because of these arguments where the distinction is not only not helpful but unnecessary, I use the terms “spoken word poetry” and “slam poetry” interchangeably. 2. Spoken word poetry has a rich genealogy that Imani Perry (2004) calls the “poetics of Hip-Hop.” 3. chicagodefender.com/2017/05/04/college-poets-protest-marcsmith-on-the-cupsi-finals-stage/. 4. Throughout this chapter, Tupac’s lyrics were accessed lyrically on his CD’s and  orthographically on  web.archive.org/web/20100208034545/www. tupacnet.org/lyrics/lyrics.htm. Current websites with  Tupac’s lyrics are genius.com/2pac and  www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/2pac. The  reader will notice that some spellings are different and in those cases I relied on my own ear and listening (phonetically) as an avid Tupac listener but also triangulated the  phrasing and  spelling the  best I  could. “Microphone check” is an  expression indicating that a  performer is about to  begin his/her performance.

Works Cited Adilow, Hiwot. Brave New Voices, 2012. www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=6a2LSvJMd38. Accessed 15 Oct. 2017. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2012. Anson, Robert. “To Die Like a Gangsta.” Vanity Fair, March 1997, www.vanityfair.com/culture/1997/03/tupac-shakur-rap-death. Davis, Obasi. Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam, 2012. www.YouTube.com/ watch?v=myhuAaVwzZ8. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, 1987. Dyson, Eric. Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. Basic Civitas Books, 2001.

15  TUPAC SHAKUR: SPOKEN WORD POETS AS CULTURAL THEORISTS 

271

Epstein, Joseph. “Who Killed Poetry?” Commentary Magazine, Aug. 1988, www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/who-killed-poetry/. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Routledge, 1992, pp. 1–56. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Harvester, 1980. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1993. Hoffman, Tyler. American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop. U of Michigan P, 2011. Howard, Jean. “Performing Art, Performance Poetry: The Two Sisters.” Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip-Hop, and The Poetry of a New Generation, edited by Mark Eleveld, Soucrebooks MediaFusion, 2003, pp. 64–67. Ibrahim, Awad, and Shirley Steinberg, eds. Critical Youth Studies: A Reader. Peter Lang, 2014. Ibrahim, Awad. “Youth: Our New Cultural Theorists.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 2, 2015, pp. 129–133. Ibrahim, Awad. The Rhizome of Blackness: A Critical Ethnography of Hip-Hop Culture, Language, Identity, and the Politics of Becoming. Peter Lang, 2014. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Columbia UP, 1998. Lorca, Garcia. Theory and Play of the Duende. A. S. Kline, 2007. McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface. North Point Press, 1982. Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Duke UP, 2004. Powell, Kevin. “Tupac Interview.” Jan. 1995, 2paclegacy.net/tupac-interviewkevin-powell-for-vibe-magazine/. Accessed 21 Sept. 2017. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge UP, 1989. Rushdie, Salman. “Truth, Lies, and Literature.” The New Yorker, May 2018, www. newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/truth-lies-and-literature. Accessed 2 June 2018. Sanchez, Daniel. “Who Are the Best-selling Artists of all Time?” Digital Music News, Oct. 2017, www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/10/17/riaa-best-sellingartists-of-all-time/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017. Shakur, Tupac. “The Rose That Grew from Concrete.” genius.com/2pac-the-rosethat-grew-from-concrete-lyrics. Accessed 17 Aug. 2017. Shakur, Tupac. The Rose That Grew from Concrete. Pocket Books, 1999. Smith, Marc. “About Slam Poetry.” Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip-Hop, and The Poetry of a New Generation, edited by Mark Eleveld, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2003, pp. 116–120.

272 

A. IBRAHIM

Somers-Willett, Susan. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. U of Michigan P, 2009. Tatum, Beverly. “Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations about Race. Basic Books, 1997. Valentine, Crystal. “Black Privilege.” College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI) Finals, 2015. www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7rYL83kHQ8Y. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017.

Index1

A Action for Children’s Television (ACT), 247 Adilow, Hiwot, 257 Adolescence, literary representation of, 45–46, 47n4, 78–89, 149–167 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 39 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), 39 Affective labor, 38 African American, 7, 46, 66, 100, 129, 132–137, 139, 141–143, 144n4, 150, 220, 257, 258 African American childhood, 142 See also Black and Brown children; Blackness, and childhood; Black child African American literacy, 133, 144n4 African American literature, 45–46, 51–68, 99–100, 133, 142–143, 144n4, 219–233, 255–269

See also Black poets Agency children’s political agency, 66 in literary representations of children, 2, 56, 59, 103, 150, 184, 228–230 of young poets, 9, 231 youth poetic agency, 228 See also Black agency; Youth agency; “Youth temporal agency” Alexander, Joy, 82 Allegorical romance, 117 Allegory, 116, 255 American culture and identity, 5–10, 14–17, 19–25, 31–47, 61, 67, 100, 114–117, 130–132, 141–143, 149–151, 160–164, 168, 170, 174–179, 220, 241–242, 249, 251 See also African American; Euro-­ American; Japanese American; Jewish American

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 R. Conrad, L. B. Kennedy (eds.), Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Literary Cultures and Childhoods, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6

273

274 

INDEX

American Dream, 21 Americanization, 7, 114, 115, 126, 162 American Library Association (ALA), 5, 15–17, 19 American military, representations of, 117–125 American picturebook, representation of American childhood and culture in, 14–26 “American Scholar, The” (Emerson), 85 Amper, Thomas, 130, 131, 137–143, 143n2 Anderson, Benedict, 126 Anne Frank and Me: A New Play for Multigenerational Audiences (Bennett and Gottesfeld), 149, 150, 162–164 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), 6, 35, 38, 75–90 Armstrong, Mary, 77, 80 Arnold, Matthew, 4, 213, 215, 216 Asian American, 8, 167, 176–178, 179n5 Assimilation, 133, 141 “Authentic witness” (term used by Horace Engdahl), 8, 183–198 Author-illustrator, 20 Autobiographical fiction, 169 Autobiography, 29n19, 104, 132, 133, 144n4, 168–170, 176 Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work, An (Washington), 132, 133 B Bader, Barbara, 16, 19 Banks, Jacqueline Turner, 178 Bemelmans, Ludwig, 15 Bennett, Cherie and Jeff Gottesfeld, 149, 162, 163

Berkeley, George (Bishop of Cloyne), 14, 22, 27n2, 106, 168, 170, 175, 228 Bernstein, Robin, 42, 68n6, 100, 103, 207, 213 Best Bad Thing, The (Uchida), 170, 171, 173 Biography, 4, 7, 104, 130–132, 143, 168, 176, 208 Birmingham Four, 222, 223, 227 Bishop, Rudine Sims, 7, 131 Black agency as theorized by Michelle M. Wright, 230 in work by Aurelia Davidson, 230 in work by June Jordan, 5, 51–68 in work by Thomas Amper, 140 Black and Brown children, 9, 255, 256 Black Arts Movement (BAM), 59, 220, 223–225, 227 Black child, 5–6, 53, 55–61, 64–68, 99, 100, 103, 133, 143, 220, 222–225, 227, 241 Blackness and childhood, 9, 220, 221, 224 and futurity, 9, 52, 219, 224, 233 and print culture, 7, 52–68, 129–149 theorizing Blackness, 54–57, 221–227, 229 Black Panthers, 222, 256 Black poets, 51–68, 99–100, 219–233, 255–269 Black Power, 224, 227 “Black quiet” (term used by Kevin Quashie), 67 Black womanhood, 230–231 Body, 3, 25, 67, 76, 78–81, 83, 99, 102, 106, 134, 174, 177, 187, 191, 226, 256, 259, 262, 266 Body, perceptions of, 76, 80–81, 106, 134

 INDEX 

Bontemps, Arna, 4, 6, 94, 99, 103, 108, 108n2, 109n4, 137 Booker T. Washington (Amper, Reeves), 130–132, 137–143 Bosmajian, Hamida, 154 Boys (boyhood), 39, 78, 87, 115, 118, 119, 122–125, 138, 143, 156, 171, 178, 242 A Boy’s Life of Booker T. Washington (Jackson), 132 Bradby, Marie, 7, 130, 131, 133, 135–138, 142, 143 Brandt, Deborah, 136 Brave New Voices, 257, 269 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 4, 220, 228, 230–233 Browning, Colleen, 64, 65, 67, 70n19 Brutehood, 14, 26, 27n4 Burlesque, 5, 14–27 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 35, 36, 38, 42 Burningham, John, 44 Burton, Virginia Lee, 21, 24 Bystander, 163, 164, 184, 197, 260 C Caldecott, Randolph, 5, 18, 19 Callen, Anthea, 27n5 Capshaw, Katharine (Smith), 2, 59, 66, 108n2, 109n4, 109n6, 223–225 Caribbean, 116, 127n2, 127n5 Caruth, Cathy, 150, 151, 153 Cat in the Hat, The (Dr. Seuss), 42, 43 Chambellan, René Paul, 19 Charlotte’s Web (White), 24, 26, 44 Cheng, Cindy I-Fen, 177 Chester the Worldly Pig (Peet), 25, 29n19

275

Child, see Children Childhood, 205, 207–209, 255–257 and authorship, 204–207, 219–233 as diverse, 2, 3, 99–100 literary cultures of, 1–10, 205 in literature, 52, 93–108, 113–126 models of, 10, 95, 108, 205 as “new childhoods” (Barai), 6 representations of, 2, 7, 52, 100, 113–126 Romantic childhood, trope of, 95, 96, 102, 205, 207–209 studies, 2, 76 tropes of, 4, 6, 68n5, 195 Child labor, 1, 138 Children as citizens, 250 as collaborators, 203, 251 as consumers, 245 as cultural creators, 203–217, 219–233, 238, 263–264 with disabilities, 242 as fans, 246 in intergenerational collaboration with adults, 60–61, 219–233, 237–251 as poets, 60–61, 205, 219–233, 237–251, 263–264 as political activists, 39 as readers, 1–8, 14, 19, 43, 53, 55–58, 63–66, 68, 99–101, 108, 153, 185, 188, 189, 191, 195, 198, 207, 214, 215, 223 as television actors, 242 as television producers, 246 as workers, 131, 135, 138, 159, 223, 242, 258 as writers, 2–4, 9, 60–61, 94, 203–217, 219–233, 263–264

276 

INDEX

Children’s agency, see Agency; Youth agency; “Youth temporal agency” Children’s Corner, The, 246 Children’s literature, 2, 16, 31–47, 60, 68n5, 77, 93–108, 126, 131, 143, 167, 169, 177, 184, 186, 203, 204 Chudacoff, Howard, 41, 42 Church, 46, 89, 168, 172 Citizens, 17, 21, 113–116, 120, 131, 178, 250, 251 Citizenship, 114, 123, 125, 170, 171 City, 15–17, 21, 26, 96, 120, 196, 225 Class aristocratic, 102, 103 middle-class, 7, 119, 123, 139, 141, 204 poverty, 103, 132, 134, 135, 142, 258, 263, 266 working-class, 93, 122, 123, 130, 133, 135–137, 140, 142 Cline, Sally, 77 Clothing, 81, 134, 174 Colonial children, 115, 126 Department of Education, Puerto Rico, 114, 116, 121 education, 126 English-language curriculum, 113 family, 113–126 rule, US, 114, 115, 118, 123, 125, 126 school, 113–126 school literature, 7, 113–126 Colonialism, 101, 113, 114, 117, 122 Commissioner of education, 114 Communalism, 198 Community, 6–8, 23, 37–39, 76–77, 85–87, 114, 126, 130, 134–139, 141, 144n5, 168, 170–173,

175–179, 192, 222–226, 232, 238–245, 247 Conrad, Rachel, 4, 9, 179n1, 205, 206, 209, 230 Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), 250 Cosslett, Tess, 150 Craft, Kinuko, 171 Crampton, Gertrude, 16 Cushman, Philip, 31–33, 44 D Davidson, Aurelia, 4, 9, 219–233 Davis, Obasi, 257, 269 Davis, Rocío G., 173, 176, 177 A Day for Vincent Chin and Me (Banks), 178 De Groot, Jerome, 150 De Grummond Collection, 15 Degas, Edgar, 15, 27n5 Deleuze, Gilles, 255 DeMille, Cecil B., 17 Desai, Anita, 8, 183–198 Desert Exile, 168–170 Development, 2–3, 15, 33, 35–38, 40, 41, 45, 76–77, 89, 130, 131, 137, 141, 205, 255–257, 263, 268, 269 Devil’s Arithmetic, The (film) (Yolen), 155–157, 164 Devil’s Arithmetic, The (novel) (Yolen), 7, 149–155, 158–164 Dialect, 36, 225 Diary of a Young Girl (Frank), 150 DiCamillo, Kate, 39 Discrimination, 8, 129, 175, 178, 258, 269 Diversity in children’s literature, 2, 94 Doan, Laura, 76 Doll, 41, 42, 195, 197

 INDEX 

Doll Oral History Collection, 41 Door Street (Browning), 64–67 Dr. Seuss, 20, 21, 42 See also Geisel, Ted Duffy, John, 132, 134 E Economic injustice, 35, 45 Education, 2, 6, 7, 76, 86, 87, 89, 96, 102, 106, 107, 114, 120, 121, 126, 126n1, 129–143, 168, 269 Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, 242 Eliot, T. S., 94, 98, 108, 258 Ellis, Havelock, 77, 78 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 85 Émile (Rousseau), 96, 101, 102, 105, 106 Emmett, Hilary, 83 Empire, 14, 17, 18, 25, 113, 114, 116, 125, 127n4, 177 Engdahl, Horace, 183, 184, 186 Escape to Persia (Whitlock and Hull), 203 Euro-American, 98, 130, 141 “An Experiential Act" (Yolen), 151, 152 Eyewitness, 186, 187, 189 F Fairholt, F.W., 28n8 Family and adolescent, 90 and father, 158, 171 and grandfather, 121, 154–156 and identity, 8 and mother, 158, 175, 190, 192, 216 and religion, 197 Fannee Doolee, 245

277

Farewell to Manzanar (Uchida), 169 Far-Distant Oxus, The (Whitlock and Hull), 9, 203, 204, 207–213, 215–217, 217n1 Feldman, Daniel, 152, 158 Felman, Shoshana, 260, 261 Female development, in literature, 104, 130–132, 169, 176, 35 Fertility, 76 See also Reproductive roles Fiction, 4, 88, 144n4, 150, 162, 168, 170, 176, 178, 184 See also Literacy Finn, Patrick, 141 First Book of the Negroes (Hughes), 96 Fiske, John, 27n4 Food, 26, 133, 156, 171–173 Frank, Anne, 163 Freire, Paulo, 260, 267 Freud, Anna, 40 Friendship, female, 76, 90n1 Futurity, see Blackness, and futurity G Geisel, Ted, 20, 21, 44 See also Dr. Seuss Gender, 21, 32, 79–85, 103–108, 114–115, 123, 139, 198 Gender identity, 79–85, 103–108 Genette, Gerard, 199n2 Gergely, Tibor, 16 Girls/girlhood, 27n4, 35–38, 41, 65–67, 76–82, 84–89, 103–108, 115, 118–121, 125–126, 138–139, 154–158, 162, 169, 170, 175, 179, 184, 192–198, 205, 209, 228, 239 “Good Will Story, The” (Kneipple), 115, 121 Graff, Harvey, 132, 134 Grape Wine (Wyeth), 63, 64, 66

278 

INDEX

Great American Dream Machine, 246 Greene-Stone, Lois, 41 Grizzwold (Hoff), 24, 25 Grosvenor, Kali, 4, 9, 219–233 Guattari, Félix, 255 Gubar, Marah, 75, 97, 207 H Haeckel, Ernst, 14 Haiti, 6, 101, 103, 109n4, 109n5, 127n5 Hall, Radclyffe, 6, 75–78, 84–86, 89 See also Well of Loneliness, The (Hall) Hamilton, Virginia, 45 Hansen, Joyce, 143 Happiest Ending, The (Uchida), 170, 171, 173–176 Harlem Renaissance, 99, 222, 226 Harriet the Spy (Fitzhugh), 39 Hartman, Saidiya, 58, 59 Haynes, Elizabeth Ross, 132 Heterosexuality, 76 History of Puerto Rico 1898, Spanish-American War of, 125 Foraker Act, 1900, 116 Jones Act, 1917, 116 San Ciriaco hurricane, 1899, 116, 117, 125 Treaty of Paris, 1898, 116 Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (Field), 41 Hoff, Syd, 24 Holding on to the Past (Yolen), 165n1 Holocaust American Holocaust pedagogy, 164 Americanization of the, 162 bystander, 164 children’s literature of, 151 denial, 162, 163 familial relationship to, 160, 162

and heroism, 151 lessons, 149, 161 religious implications of, 162 survivors, 150–152, 154–158, 160–162 and time travel, 149–164 witness, 149, 153, 158, 159, 161 Home of the Brave (Say), 178 Homosexuality, 77 See also Lesbianism; Queer Horton, Owen R., 152 Hot Dog, 246 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, 169 Howdy Doody Show, 245 Hughes, Langston, 4, 6, 60, 69n9, 69n11, 94, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103, 108, 108n2, 109n3, 109n4, 109n5, 221–227, 233 Hull, Katharine, 9, 203–217 Huyke, Juan B., 114 I Ibrahim, Awad, 3, 9, 256, 257, 260 Identity, 2, 3, 5, 8, 31–33, 45, 77, 81, 82, 89, 94, 96, 98, 99, 107, 108, 137, 141, 142, 149–164, 167–179, 192, 194, 195, 198, 229, 257, 258 If I Should Die before I Wake (Nolan), 7, 149, 158–160, 164 Illinois poet laureate award, 220, 230 Illustration, 4, 18, 20, 22, 28n8, 54, 55, 65, 130, 132, 134, 135, 137–140, 171, 180n6, 189, 190, 214, 263 See also Paintings Imagination, 41–43, 52, 88, 120, 134, 176, 179n3, 267 “Imagined community”, 126 “Immigrant story”, 171 Immigration, 168, 179n2

 INDEX 

India, 8, 184, 185, 189, 193–195, 197, 198 Indian Children’s Literature, 184 Individualism, 34, 38–40 Innocence, 6, 59, 95, 100, 103, 108, 109n4, 195, 196, 205 tropes of childhood innocence, 6, 95–96, 100 Intellect, intellectual development, 78, 86 Intergenerational collaboration in cultural production and Aurelia Davidson, 219–233 and Hull and Whitlock, 209 and Kali Grosvenor, 219–233 and ZOOM, 9, 237–251 Intergenerational relations in textual representations of African Americans, 129 of early twentieth-century Haiti, 109n4 of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico, 126 of post-Partition India, 184–186 of twentieth-century Japanese American communities, 8, 168, 171 of women and girls, 240–242, 245, 248, 250 Internment, Japanese American, 8, 169, 170, 177, 178 Intertextuality, 213, 215, 225 J Jackson, Walter Clinton, 132 Jamal-Warner, Malcolm, 144n3 Japanese, 168–177, 179, 179n1, 179n2, 180n6 Japanese American, 8, 167–178, 179n4, 180n6

279

Jar of Dreams, A (Uchida), 170, 172, 174, 175 Jewish American, 151, 157, 158, 162 Jim Crow, 129, 130, 262 Johnson, Crockett, 44 Johnson, Dianne, 68n7 Jordan, June, 5, 6, 51–68, 220 Journey to Topaz: A Story of Japanese-­ American Evacuation (1971) (Uchida), 169 Juvenilia, 205 K Kadohata, Cynthia, 178 Keats, John, 4, 213–215 Kidd, Kenneth, 43, 47n4 “Kids in School with Me, The” (Hughes), 100 KIDS magazine, 246 Klein, Melanie, 5, 33, 40, 41, 44, 45 Kneipple, Elizabeth, 7, 113–126, 127n5 Kneipple, stories of modern boyhood, 122, 125 modern education (in Puerto Rico), 121 modern girlhood, 118, 125 modern technology (radio), 115, 121 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 77 L Language, 37, 38, 58, 62–64, 93, 94, 113, 114, 117, 126, 168, 170–173, 259, 261, 263–266 See also Dialect; Vernacular Lavater, Johann Caspar, 15 Legrand, Edy, 18

280 

INDEX

Lerner Books, 131 Lesbianism history of, 75, 76 in literature, 76, 86, 88, 89, 104–105 Liddell, Mary, 23 Lionni, Leo, 39 Literacy, 7, 130, 132–134, 136–138, 141, 142, 144n4, 213 See also Reading Literacy myth, 132, 134, 137, 141, 142 Literary cultures and childhoods, 1–10 and twentieth-century childhoods, 1–10 The Little Machinery (Liddell), 23 A Little Princess (Burnett), 36, 38 Lobel, Arnold, 39 Lonely Doll, The (Wright), 41 Looking and racialization, 55 Low, Mei-Yim, 185, 189, 190 “Luisa’s Gift” (Kneipple), 115, 118–121 M Macao et Cosmage (Legrand), 18 Macy, George, 17, 18 Manhood/masculinity, 32, 81, 115, 122, 123, 125 Marginalization, in literature, 96, 98, 106, 108, 186, 94 Martin, Michael J., 152, 154, 157, 158, 160–162 Martin, Travis L., 152 Martyrdom, in literature, 88 Masterpiece Theatre, 246 Max und Moritz, 20 McCloskey, Robert, 14 McKissack, Patricia, 143 Megalomania, 16 Meltzer, Milton, 60, 62, 68n5, 69n9, 69n10, 69n14, 70n19

Memory conceptions of traumatic memory, 152 flashbacks, 152, 153 testimonial chain, 162, 164 traumatic memory/ memories, 149–164 Mickey Mouse Club, The, 245 Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (Burton), 21 Milne, A. A., 43 Mimicry/imitation, 203–209, 211–213, 215–217 Mintz, Steven, 32, 33 Modernism Afromodernism, 98 and children’s literature, 94, 108 and gender, 118–125 and race, 122, 123, 125 and the city, 96 Modernism in literature, 94 Momma, Where Are You From? (Bradby), 131 Monroe, Carla, 18, 143 Montgomery, L. M., 6, 35, 38, 75, 76, 83, 85 More Than Anything Else (Bradby, Soentpiet), 7, 130–139, 141–143, 143n3 Moses, Wilson J., 129, 130 Mourning, 221–227 Multiculturalism, 142, 179, 179n5 Munt, Sally R., 76 Muslim child, 8, 183–198 Myers, Walter Dean, 143 N Narrative, theory of dynamic subject, 185 ethics of storytelling, 198 “heterodiegetic narrator” (term used by Gerard Genette), 199n2

 INDEX 

histor, 190 restricted narration, 188, 189 Rhetorical Narratology, 186 Nation, 116, 123, 193, 194, 242 Nature, as “innate” character, 76 Nature, natural world, 78–85, 95, 102, 103, 105, 108, 96 Navarro, José, 114 Newton, Esther, 76, 247 New York City, 17, 20, 24, 26, 99, 222 Nisei, 168, 170, 177 Nixon, Richard, 250 Nolan, Han, 7, 149, 151, 158, 161 Norrell, Robert J., 129, 130 O Object-relations, 40 Odd girl, 6, 76–78 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Eliot), 94, 96 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats), 213 Orphans, 78, 82, 83, 86, 116, 151 Our Town (Wilder), 24 Outsider, 1, 6, 14, 75–90 Oxus in Summer (Whitlock and Hull), 203 P Paintings, 4, 5, 52, 60–63, 65, 68n3 Pakistan, 188, 190, 193–195, 197 Parent, parenting, 35, 45, 78, 116–120, 126, 163, 170, 179, 194–198, 219, 262–264 Parody, 6, 14, 18, 27 Participatory children’s culture, 9 Participatory democracy, 249–251 Partition of India and Pakistan, 8, 184, 185, 187, 198 Partition riots 1947, 184, 186, 192, 194, 198

281

Paternalism, 125 Patriarchal, 1, 104 Peacock Garden, The (Desai, Low), 8, 183–198 Pedagogy, 6, 87, 131, 157, 164, 264 Peet, Bill, 25, 26, 29n19 Perception, 6, 36, 63, 89, 96, 103, 105–108, 143, 256 Phelan, James, 186, 190 Phenomenology, 103–108 See also Perception Philippines, 116 Picturebook/picture books, 4, 5, 14–27, 55, 69n8, 94, 98, 131, 185 Play, 41–43, 59, 88, 94, 102, 123, 152, 158, 208, 209, 243, 244 “Pluralistic multiculturalism” (term used by Diane Ravitch), 142 Poetry, 4, 9, 51–68, 88, 94, 99–105, 108n1, 131, 206, 213, 219–233, 256, 269, 270n1, 270n2 Pogány, Willi, 17, 19, 28n9 Pollyanna (Porter), 35, 38 Popo and Fifina (Hughes and Bontemps) class in, 109n5 education in, 102 representation of Haitian culture in, 101–103 work in, 99–102 Post-colonialism, 2, 99–103 See also Colonialism Poverty, 103, 132, 134, 135, 142, 258, 263, 266 “Pregeneric myth” (term used by Robert Stepto), 144n4 Prosser, Jay, 76 Psychoanalytic theory, 40 Psychology, 34, 40, 44, 95 Psychotherapy, 31, 34, 35, 45 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 144n3, 238, 241, 246, 250, 251

282 

INDEX

Public schools, 100, 113, 114, 173, 242 Publishing industry, 4, 6, 63 Puerto Rico/Puerto Ricans, 7, 60, 113–126, 126n1 Q Queer, 75–78, 82, 84, 89, 99, 103–108 See also Homosexuality; Lesbianism R Race, 2, 18, 21, 46, 95, 100, 103, 108n2, 131, 241, 242, 257 See also Racism; White supremacy Racial segregation, 122, 125 Racism, 8, 35, 58, 99–100, 139, 170, 174, 175, 178, 229, 259, 261, 269 Ransome, Arthur, 4, 9, 203, 204, 207–217 Ravitch, Diane, 142 Reading black child as reading subject, 53–58, 64–66, 262 reading and authorship, 211–217, 222–227 reading and indoctrination, 122–123, 126 reading and racial contexts of literacy, 129–143 See also Literacy Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Wiggins), 35 Reconstruction, 117, 118 Redcay, Anna, 205, 206, 208 Reeves, Jeni, 130, 131, 137–143, 143n2 Religion and identity, 82–83, 88, 162–163, 172, 194–198

“Representative Men” (Emerson), 85 Reproductive roles, 76, 84 See also Fertility Rey, H.A., 15 Rey, Margret, 20 Rhizomatic development, 255–257, 263, 269 Rhizome, 256 Robinson, Laura, 75 Romantic childhood, see Childhood Romantic friendship, 75, 76, 84, s Romanticism, 79, 84–88, 95, 101–102, 108, 205–207 The Rose That Grew From Concrete (Shakur), 255, 264 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 95, 96, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, 246 Rural, 6, 24, 96, 122 Rylant, Cynthia, 39 S San Juan, Puerto Rico, 114, 120 Sarson, Christopher, 242–244, 246, 247 Sarson, Evelyn Kaye, 247 Say, Allen, 178 Scholastic, 87, 132, 143n2 Scholes, Robert, 186, 188 School Library Journal, 132 Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 35, 36 Sectarian violence, 185 Self as autonomous, 34, 40, 44–46 as consumer, 32 characteristics of, 133 -expression, 33, 39 as interpersonal, 5, 32–39, 45, 46 neoliberal, 5 -schema, 32, 33, 42, 45–47

 INDEX 

Sendak, Maurice, 4, 16, 19, 20, 42 Sesame Street, 246 Sexology, 76, 87, 95 Sexual Inversion (Ellis), 77 Sexuality, female, 104, 105 Shakur, Tupac, see Tupac Sharpe, Christina, 221–223, 227 Shigekuni, Julie, 178 Slavery, 58, 101, 103, 134, 139, 222 Smith, Katharine Capshaw, see Capshaw, Katharine (Smith) Smith, Marc, 258, 259 Social construction, 33 Soentpiet, Chris, 130, 131, 133–135, 137, 141 Sohrab and Rustum (Arnold), 213, 215 Somers-Willett, Susan, 256–259, 264, 270n1 Southern US, 262 Spain, 113, 115–117 Spectacle/spectacularity, 14–27, 54 Spielberg, Steven, 149 Spoken word poets, 9, 255–269 “Sponsors of literacy” (term used by Deborah Brandt), 136 Steedman, Carolyn, 85 Steig, William, 27, 39 Stein, Gertrude, 6, 94, 98, 99, 103–108 Stepto, Robert, 132, 133, 142, 144n4 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 99 Child’s Garden of Verses, 99 and white superiority/supremacy, 99 Stewart, Susan, 153, 154 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 105 Storytime, 144n3 Stuart Little (White), 39

283

Subjectivity, 5, 14–27, 52, 54, 56, 65, 66, 142, 184, 185, 189, 191, 192, 196–198 Subjunctive, as idiom for representing childhood, 6, 52–53, 58–59, 61, 64, 67–68 Sullivan, Harry Stack, 5, 32–41, 44–46, 47n2 Swallows and Amazons (Ransome), 203, 204, 207, 208, 212–214, 216, 217n1 T Take a Giant Step, 248 Tang, Edward, 177 Tasaki, Hanama, 177 Tashlin, Frank, 24, 26 Taylor, Mildred D., 45 Television, for children, 9, 237–251 “These Poems” (Jordan), 51, 57 Thurber, James, 14 Time, 7, 104–106, 149–164, 191, 209–210, 220–222, 228–230, 232, 263 Time Travel American identity, 7, 149–164 American values, 163 identity of child time traveler, 162 “Tomansín’s Company” (Kneipple), 115, 122–125 To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street (Geisel Seuss), 20, 21 Transcendentalism, 85 Traumatic event, 150–153, 155 Tribunella, Eric L, 153 “Tropical Yankees” (José Navarro), 114 Troubridge, Una, 77

284 

INDEX

Tupac (2Pac, Pac, Tupac Shakur), 9, 255–269 Tuskegee Institute, 129 U Ubbi Dubbi, 237, 245 Uchida, Yoshiko, 8, 167–179, 179n1 United States (US) Army, 19, 115 citizenship, 114, 123, 170 colonialism/colonial rule/colony, 2, 113–115, 117, 122, 123, 126 empire, 14, 113, 114, 116, 125 intervention – military occupation of Puerto Rico, 116 Navy, 115, 119, 120 territories, 114, 116 Unsung Heroes (Haynes), 132 Up from Slavery (Washington), 132, 133, 136 Urban, 14, 24, 96, 108, 108n1, 261 Uyemoto, Holly, 178 V Velveteen Rabbit, The (Williams), 41 Vernacular, 53, 136, 137, 225 Visual art, see Illustration; Paintings W Wagner, Richard, 4, 17, 28n9 “Wake work” (term used by Christina Sharpe), 222, 223, 227 Washington, Booker T., 7, 129–143, 225 Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963: A Novel, The (Curtis), 45

Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 6, 75–90 Welter, Matilda, 62–64, 69n13, 69n14 WGBH, 238–240, 242, 244, 246, 250, 251n2 “What is True about this Book” (Yolen), 160 Wheeler, Monroe, 18 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 4, 16, 19, 20, 42 White, E.B., 24, 39, 44 White child, trope or “imaginary” of, 66, 99, 100 Whiteness, 6, 7, 32, 54–55, 60–61, 123, 129, 134–135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 174, 175, 226, 228–229 and agency, 229 and children’s literature industry, 60 White privilege, 259 White supremacy, 46, 66 Whitlock, Pamela, 4, 9, 203–217 Who Look At Me (Jordan), 5, 51–68 Wilder, Thornton, 24 Williams, Heather, 137 Wilson, Billy, 244 Wise Brown, Margaret, 14 Witnessing, 122, 124, 153, 158, 159, 161, 186–188, 257, 260, 262, 264, 265, 268 Witness literature, 183–184, 186, 197 See also Authentic witness; Witnessing Woolfork, Lisa, 150, 152 The World is Round (Stein), 6, 94, 98, 103–108 World War II, 8, 18, 162, 167–170, 178 WQED, 246

 INDEX 

Wright, Michelle M., 221, 229 Writing, in literature, 104, 169 Wyeth, Andrew, 61–63 Y Yolen, Jane, 7, 149–155, 157–164 Young Booker (Bontemps), 137 Young poets, 4, 9, 60–61, 206, 219–221, 223, 231–233, 255–269

285

Youth agency, 3, 9, 208, 220, 221, 228–233 Youth Speaks, 257, 269 “Youth temporal agency” (term used by Rachel Conrad), 230 Z Zelizer, Viviana, 85 Zia, Helen, 178 ZOOM, 9, 237–251