Remembering the Island you are

Islandborn by Junot Diaz, recommended for ages 5 and up

We are taught how to think, and we are taught matrices of evaluation by the larger culture. When the larger culture basically argues all day long that there is whiteness and it’s incredibly important and then there’s blackness which helps us define whiteness, it’s going to be hard for most people to develop a sense of a world which is more sophisticated (Junot Diaz in an interview with Bianca Betancourt).

A wonderfully creative picture book that invites the reader to imagine the protagonist Lola’s birth country (simply the Island) with her as she tries to re-create a place she has no memories of (she left the Island when she was a baby) for a school assignment inviting all the children to draw a picture of their first country. Witty, light and meaningful at the same time, the author and his protagonist combine the neighborhood’s memories of a place they left behind to produce a collage of fantasy, nostalgia, terror and beauty.

'Every kid in Lola’s school was from somewhere else. Hers was the school of faraway places…And Lola was from the Island' – that’s the start of this story that encourages every kid to dig into their past (and be proud of it) in order to understand themselves and their present.

Lola feels bewildered and displaced when her teacher asks the class to draw a memory of their birth country. She knows she is from the Island, she feels she is from the Island.. but her memory stubbornly remains blank. The Island community she is surrounded by will all give her a piece of their memory for her project – ‘bat blankets, more music than air, fruit that makes you cry, beach poems and a hurricane like a wolf’. It is Mr Mir, the superintendent of her house where she lives, however, who will complete the picture for her and indirectly explain why so many of her compatriots had to leave their country for ‘the North’ – the arrival of the Monster who stayed on the Island for thirty long years. Imbued with a child’s language and fantastical, detailed illustrations, the author invites the reader to share in the diversity we are part of. Asked why he didn’t put a name to the Island (Dominican Republic) in his story, he underlines; “I’m inviting the readers to embark on that same journey, to undergo that same process with all of those possibilities, to imagine a place that they cannot remember. A place called “the island” that has no corollary in the real world’. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/03/23/junot-diaz-pushes-diversity-in-childrens-books-beyond-black-and-white-with-islandborn/?noredirect=on). 

And this Island is indeed as diverse as the people who make it up, with their individual memories preserved, contorted, hidden or tucked away, inflated and magical…all that is necessary to anchor their floating lives in an adopted country.

At the school of faraway places, the teacher hangs the drawings of her students on the walls – ‘now our classroom has windows’, she tells them… ‘anytime you want to look at one another’s first homes all you have to do is look out the windows’.

This debut picture book by the Pulitzer prize winner author does not single out the trending topics of immigration, skin colour, being from another culture, integrating in the adopted country etc. but is imbued with all of this, which it uses as its starting point. With all the pictures as windows, there is suddenly so much more room to breathe; each person has something to anchor them and to share with the others and each story is a part of our collective identity.

Lola may not know the Island she was born on, we may not know Lola’s island, but we are all Islands surrounded by the flowing images and memories that shape how we define others and ourselves. As Diaz's quotation emphasises at the beginning, it is extremely relevant and necessary to provide complex images of minorities, for they have been misrepresented, ignored or silenced for far too long.