They all saw a cat... but what did the cat see? Seeing and Being Seen. Recommended for ages 3 and up

'The cat walked through the world, with its whiskers, ears and paws...
and the child saw A CAT,
and the dog saw A CAT,
and the fox saw A CAT, Yes, they all saw the cat
The cat walked through the world with its whiskers, ears and paws...

.... A CHILD and A DOG and A FOX...
....
The cat knew them all, and they all knew the cat.
And the cat walked through the world, with its whiskers, ears, and paws, then it came to the water...
and imagine what it saw?'

Author and Illustrator Brendan Wenzel does a fantastic job illustrating the cat in the eyes of each animal observing it as it walks through the world - it is monster-like for the tiny mouse; all hair for the flea, a strange shadow for the worm and all pixels for the bee. And of course, there is the cat's reflection, barely recognisable as the cat we know.



A cat is a cat is a cat. THE CAT remains the same but we all see the cat differently, based on our own perspective, position and the 'glasses' we are wearing. And the cat walks through the world being observed by all the animals - predator and prey- from up in the sky to down in the earth..until it comes to the water and the reader is asked to imagine what the cat sees there.

We see A REFUGEE, but what does the refugee see?
We see A MUSLIM, but what does the Muslim see?
We see A BLOND GIRL, but what does the blond girl see?
We see an  OLD MAN WITH A STICK,  but what does the old man see?

What's lovely about this book is that it indirectly also focuses its gaze on all those who see THE CAT - and lists their names in capital letters.
YOU and ME - we see and are seen. But what we see is not necessarily how we are seen!

But I do believe the way others see us influences our self-image. There is a risk in simplifying, the author wants to say. Each person is a complex being with many layers. There is a human need to simplify, categorise and understand. Hence, the popularity of stereotypes. But generalisations - good and bad - are never defining and humans (and animals) defy them every day.

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.