A return to childhood - Kampung Boy

It amazes me at times that while we share a cultural and social history with several nations in Asia, one would never guess it going by the popular culture and social media that form a large part of our lives. Our bookstores, for instance, display tons of European, American as well as African books, but almost nothing from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam or China.

On a recent trip to Malaysia, therefore, I was on the lookout for children's books by local authors. It wasn't easy, for most bookstores (like the ones in India) displayed American and British children's titles or some Malaysian titles in Bahasa. After some questioning and prodding of the staff at the stores, I was delighted to find children's books by Malaysian and Chinese authors. I bought six and began reading them on returning home.

Lat published his first book for children, Kampung Boy, in 1979. It's an autobiographical narrative in which he attempts to recreate the days of his childhood living in a traditional Malay house called a kampung while growing up on a rubber plantation. 

Two years later, he followed it up with Town Boy, which describes the years he spent in Ipoh where he went to live when he was eleven. A decade later, he published Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today juxtaposing contemporary and earlier Malay childhood using the same format of brilliantly illustrated pages, largely in black and white, and accompanying text.

  

Kampung Boy: Yesterday and Today by Lat - whose real name is Mohammed Nor - is an absolute delight to read. Lat takes us down memory lane, through homes that were full of love and inventiveness, and playgrounds where every toy had to be created by the children and their parents. The games they played included equal participation by ants, pangolins, cows, angry honeybees and sleepy pythons. Rural life is presented as exciting rather than bucolic, full of adventure and, at times, danger.

Of course, there's a lot of nostalgia and a lot of idealisation of childhood. But there's also a subtle plea to parents to cease being over-protective, helicoptering, competitive mums and dads. 






The artwork of Kampung Boy - a mixture of caricature and evocative detailing - is wonderfully expressive, enabling the author-illustrator to say a lot without using too many words. Lat doesn't follow the graphic novel format favoured by a number of contemporary writers, or the manga style that originated in Japan. Instead, moving as he does from being a newspaper cartoonist-columnist to one attempting an autobiographical narrative,  he uses the page as a canvas and fills it up with a single scene that captures the essence of the tale he wants to tell.   

I introduced the book to a group of students who have learning differences and built a reading and writing activity around it. It was heartening to see that they liked the book a great deal, and would either stay back and try and read a few more pages or come in early the next day to continue with the story. The illustrations helped them make sense of the story and the minimal text and unusual fonts used by the author made it easier for them to read the narration. 

The one thing I did not like about Lat's work was that I detected a certain internalisation of colonial attitudes, though. As the children - depicted with 'non-human' expressions - leave their 'nature-phase' behind them and enter the world of schools and academia, their faces take on more human orientations. I shall probably have to examine the whole of the Kampung series before making very definitive statements.

All in all, a great addition to your library!

Oliver Jeffers and his marvellous books

I encountered Oliver Jeffers’ books recently when I was in Goa a fortnight ago for a Library educators’ course. It was love at first sight – the moment I started reading his books, I knew that this was what I had always wanted picture books to be – a meaningful coming together of words and images to create  a tale that floods your senses, and stimulates your grey cells – all at once.

Jeffers has produced several pictures books, both singly and in collaboration. One that I have particularly liked, is The Heart and the Bottle. It’s about a little girl who loved exploring and discovering and learning new things, until she experiences a terrible loss. Not prepared to deal with it, she locks away her heart in a bottle. What happens next? Does she ever take it out again? As you read on to find out, you learn about the devastating effects of grief, about recovery, healing and happiness. That’s the Jeffers magic for you.

Another of his books that moved me is a book about books, about the magic of stories. Jeffers wrote A Child of Books in collaboration with Sam Winston. The narration begins with a little girl (I am a child of books, I come from a world of stories, And upon my imagination, I float) who sets sail on a sea of words …

And arrives at the house of a little boy and invites him to join her on her journey into the power of imagination. It’s a highly intertextual book and refers to almost forty famous works of literature. The reader thus simultaneously goes on her own journey, as she spots the references and revisits those stories. 

A Child of Books is a homage to all the amazing children’s classics that have been a part of the authors’ growing up years (and mine!). Since Jeffers and Winston both feel that reading is a visceral and sensual experience, the text from the classics form a part of this book. For instance, when the girl sets sail, the sea is made up of words taken from famous sea-faring stories.

Winston with his exceptionally fine typographic art and Jeffers with his hauntingly lyrical illustrations have created a modern children’s classic in this book. 

The Children of Kashmir

 

Sometimes, the shrillness and the ‘in-your-faceness’ of news reporters dull one’s senses to the actual events, and the horrors documented and broadcast to our living rooms lose their edge and ability to shock us, simply because that is what we have come to expect from prime-time television news.  But a work of fiction which although purports to be of the imagination/a fabrication can, in the unfolding of the narrative, shock us into realising that the story (an invention of the author) is startlingly close to the truth, maybe even more honest and real than ‘the truth’.

   Reading Paro Anand’s books set in Kashmir brought home to me the uncomfortable truth that the children in Kashmir are living lives that violate the fundamental rights of a child – the right to education, to good health, to nutrition, the right to play, the right to have loving parents or caretakers, the right to peace … Her book, No Guns at My Son’s Funeral (2005) is set against the problem of militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s and features a teenager, Aftab who is lured by charisma of the older Akram, a leader of a group of teenaged freedom fighters. Aftab is exhilarated to become a part of this forbidden group, and enters a web of intrigue, spies, manipulation and betrayal.

Another book by Paro Anand, Weed (2008),  is set in the first decade of the 21st century and raises questions about the inheritance of violence that the children of Kashmir are weighed down with. Specifically, it is about 13-year-old Umer, his little brother Umed, their mother Amina and their father who is seen by the authorities as an atankvadi or a militant while he calls himself a jehadi or a freedom fighter.

        On the one hand, Umer is the adolescent son who feels abandoned by his father and torn between the father and the mother. Should he stay with his mother and be a support to her like a good son? Or should he, as a son who loves his father, follow his father’s footsteps, “even if those footsteps are blighted”?

        Amina exercises tight control over Umer, especially after her younger son, Umed, leaves to join the mujahideen. Her fears and insecurities for his and her safety cause her to tighten her hold so much that Umer feels stifled in this claustrophobic atmosphere where he is watched all the time. Taken out of school, cut off from all human interaction, not allowed to meet anyone other than his mother and the owner of the shop where he works, Umer feels as if he has “become invisible, ceased to exist” – much like the ordinary citizens of Kashmir have ceased to exist for the rest of us in India.