Today’s MB excerpt is of one of the
works of Nigeria’s formidable voices, Chinua Achebe. In this 2009 publication,
he relates his journey into writing children’s books and the dangers in
purchasing a poorly written one.
All my life I have had to take
account of the million differences — some little, others quite big — between
the Nigerian culture into which I was born, and the domineering Western style
that infiltrated and then invaded it. Nowhere is the difference more stark and
startling than in the ability to ask a parent: "How many children do you
have?" The right answer should be a rebuke: "Children are not
livestock!" Or better still, silence, and carry on as if the question was
never asked.
But things are changing and changing
fast with us, and we have been making concession after concession even when the
other party shows little sign of reciprocating. And so I have learned to answer
questions that my father would not have touched with a bargepole. And to my
shame let me add that I suspect I may even be enjoying it, to a certain extent!
My wife and I have four children —
two daughters and two sons, a lovely balance further enhanced by the symmetry
of their arrivals: girl, boy, boy, girl. Thus the girls had taken strategic
positions in the family.
We, my wife and I, cut our teeth on
parenthood with the first girl, Chinelo. Naturally, we made many blunders. But
Chinelo was up to it. She taught us. At age four or thereabouts, she began to
reflect back to us her experience of her world. One day she put it in words:
"I am not black; I am brown." We sat up and began to pay attention.
The first place our minds went was
her nursery school, run by a bunch of white expatriate women. But inquiries to
the school board returned only assurances. I continued sniffing around, which
led me in the end to those expensive and colorful children's books imported
from Europe and displayed so seductively in the better supermarkets of Lagos.
Many parents like me, who never read
children's books in their own childhood, saw a chance to give to their children
the blessings of modern civilization which they never had and grabbed it. But
what I saw in many of the books was not civilization but condescension and even
offensiveness.
Here, retold in my own words, is a
mean story hiding behind the glamorous covers of a children's book:
A white boy is playing with his kite
in a beautiful open space on a clear summer's day. In the background are lovely
houses and gardens and tree-lined avenues. The wind is good and the little
boy's kite rises higher and higher and higher. It flies so high in the end that
it gets caught under the tail of an airplane that just happens to be passing
overhead at that very moment. Trailing the kite, the airplane flies on past
cities and oceans and deserts. Finally it is flying over forests and jungles.
We see wild animals in the forests and we see little round huts in the
clearing. An African village.
For some reason, the kite untangles
itself at this point and begins to fall while the airplane goes on its way. The
kite falls and falls and finally comes to rest on top of a coconut tree.
A little black boy climbing the tree
to pick a coconut beholds this strange and terrifying object sitting on top of
the tree. He utters a piercing cry and literally falls off the tree.
His parents and their neighbors rush
to the scene and discuss this apparition with great fear and trembling. In the
end they send for the village witch doctor, who appears in his feathers with an
entourage of drummers. He offers sacrifices and prayers and then sends his
boldest man up the tree to bring down the object, which he does with
appropriate reverence. The witch doctor then leads the village in a procession
from the coconut tree to the village shrine, where the supernatural object is
deposited and where it is worshipped to this day.
That was the most dramatic of the
many imported, beautifully packaged, but demeaning readings available to our
children, perhaps given them as birthday presents by their parents.
So it was that when my friend the
poet Christopher Okigbo, representing Cambridge University Press in Nigeria at
that time, called on me and said I must write him a children's book for his
company, I had no difficulty seeing the need and the urgency. So I wrote Chike
and the River and dedicated it to Chinelo and to all my nephews and nieces.
(I am making everything sound so
simple. Children may be little, but writing a children's book is not simple. I
remember that my first draft was too short for the Cambridge format, and the
editor directed me to look at Cyprian Ekwensi's Passport of Mallam Illia for
the length required. I did.)
With Chinelo, I learned that parents
must not assume that all they had to do for books was to find the smartest
department store and pick up the most attractive-looking book in stock. Our
complacency was well and truly rebuked by the poison we now saw wrapped and
taken home to our little girl. I learned that if I wanted a safe book for my
child I should at least read it through and at best write it myself.
Our second daughter, Nwando, gave us
a variation on Chinelo's theme eight years later. The year was 1972 and the
place Amherst, Massachusetts, where I had retreated with my family after the
catastrophic Biafran civil war. I had been invited to teach at the university,
and my wife had decided to complete her graduate studies. We enrolled our three
older children in various Amherst schools and Nwando, who was two and a half,
in a nursery school. And she thoroughly hated it. At first we thought it was a
passing problem for a child who had never left home before. But it was more
than that. Every morning as I dropped her off she would cry with such intensity
I would keep hearing her in my head all three miles back. And in the afternoon,
when I went back for her, she would seem so desolate. Apparently she would have
said not a single word to anybody all day.
As I had the task of driving her to
this school every morning, I began to dread mornings as much as she did. But in
the end we struck a bargain that solved the problem. I had to tell her a story
all the way to school if she promised not to cry when I dropped her off. Very
soon she added another story all the way back. The agreement, needless to say,
taxed my repertory of known and fudged stories to the utmost. But it worked.
Nwando was no longer crying. By the year's end she had become such a success in
her school that many of her little American schoolmates had begun to call their
school Nwando-haven instead of its proper name, Wonderhaven.
2009
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