Ronia, the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgren

Many readers associate Astrid Lindgren with her character Pippi Longstocking and rightly so - Pippi's fame has long surpassed her fictitious creation and the colossally strong girl has carved a world for herself, much like Collodi's Pinocchio who ceases to be a wooden puppet and becomes a 'real' boy of flesh and blood.

Published in Swedish in 1981 

But Lindgren has created other longlasting characters, also worthy of mention and praise. There's Lisa from the Bullerbü world, there's Mio, the orphan child who goes on a magical journey of love, friendship and courage and then there is Ronia, the robber's daughter who defies her father and befriends the rival robber's son, Birk. The robber's world may at one time have been fun and adventurous but Ronia and Birk want nothing of it and their quest to create a path for themselves and to find themselves in the closed robber circle is one of adventures, love, hope, danger and friendship. This is a book set in the forested world inhabited by fearsome harpies, gray dwarves, rumphobs and murktrolls. The seasons and the mysterious forest with its warmth and hidden dangers are as much characters as the robbers and the two children who become one with nature.

It's a story about bonds and conflicting relationships, about a love between a father and a daughter and about holding on while letting go at the same time. Ronia's fearless and fearsome father Matt has disowned his daughter when she betrays him by crossing over to the enemy's side in order to save the captured Birk's life. Ronia struggles between love for her father and the resentment she harbors because of his generations-long enmity with the Borka clan and his theiving ways. But Matt also knows that to keep his daughter he has to give in and make peace.

It is a story about survival, about living in a lawless marginalised world and about acceptance. Ronia's escape into the forest and her coming of age will capture young readers who will share in her passions, fears and narrow escapes. The timeless character Ronia will always be remembered for her humour, fearlessness and strength. A book well worth reading!

The Everyone Book

'If you can make people laugh, you can tell them anything...comedy cuts deeper', says Rushdie.

Here is Salman Rushdie talking with Mitchell Kaplan about his new book Quichotte. Towards the end of his fascinating, meandering chat where he reveals some of his inspiration for his novel and the multiple threads that intertwine in it, he comes up with the term an 'everything book'. Sounds like a just blog title! I like the wittiness and all the depth it encompasses. He confesses that that's the book he has been trying to write all his life.
In fact, an everything book, in my mind, reflects and tries to showcase or speak to as much of reality as possible. Maybe instead of diversity books, we can have the 'everyone book' ;)!

Sycamore Wings

Shake me empty
the bowels overflow
 a river of tears,
rage pushed in a vortex.
I long to be free.
Shake me still,
then let me be,
blinding words infested wounds,
navigate my head
piercing blue light
inhale exhale a smile
rage swimming forth
breathing hard
out of breath
echoing void


Jekyll hydes waiting for the kill
looking through the glass pane
nobody knows he is there
just an angel with a spear
open arms smiling clear

but the see-through rage cannot cover up
the smears
of the authorities
the ondulating fence
of barbed wire,
of splintered wood,
of mossy insignificance
longing for respite
pierce the fear,
 it's empty, you see

Perch on that perfect sycamore seed,
grip the fragile blades,
ignore the greed
tumble dizzily
safe landing mission completed

wait for new buds to sprout,
bring out the talking cricket
and the rhino
the roots hold down and push
OUT
this magical being
levitating
and the air still stinks

'All of us look alike to white people', Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

'I think we need to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable', says Adichie

An extract from the novel Americanah, which offers a pointed analysis of race and being Black in America:

'At the checkout, the blonde cashier asked- 'Did anybody help you?'
Yes, Ginika said
Chelcy or Jennifer?
'I'm sorry. I don't remember her name'-
'Was it the one with long hair?', the cashier asked
'Well, both of them had long hair'
'the one with dark hair?'
Both of them had dark hair.
... Ifemelu said, 'I was waiting for her to ask, 'Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?'
'Why didn't she just ask - was it the Black girl or the White girl?'
...'Because this is America. You're supposed to pretend that you don't notice certain things' (Extract from pg. 126-7, Americanah by Chimamanda N. Adichie)


We are caught up and preoccupied and tied up with words. Words hurt or twist or veil reality, descriptions define and encase, reinforce or subvert; words bring people closer or create a chasm between them. This is the danger of being politically correct - our mentalities do not change, prejudices aren't adequately addressed, discriminations are swept under the carpet and we try to hide the obvious because we don't want to or are not ready or cannot face lived and living history.

'Identity is something one always negotiates, but it's also often something external', notes Adichie.
'To read literature is to become alive in a body that is not your own', she adds in her chat with The Economist's Sacha Nauta.
'In talking about diversity, we have to make room for discomfort', she underlines in the same chat.


Americanah caught my attention for several reasons:

Its refreshing insight into slices of Nigeria, USA and to a lesser degree, England; the young, educated mobile characters trying to pave a path for themselves in the midst of uncertainty, capitalist wrecklessness and oscillating fortunes

The desolating hypocrisies of race in the US and all the nuances of being Black there; the identity crisis of non-American Blacks and how they fare in their adopted society.

The humorous yet revealing layers of changing accents and situating oneself - the fluid, flowing, fragile identities and the awakening of a grounded, confident self after much self contemplation

The trials of an immigrant, both legal and undocumented; the slow dehumanising process, the steady ascent, the travails of everyday life, the small pleasures and the lucky/unlucky outcomes.

All the different female profiles it provides - of women both defeated and triumphant, subservient and empowered, fighting to stay human, to stay beautiful, to become independent.

                                                                    ***

And in the spirit of this blog, which focuses so much on (the lack of) positive figures for non-White children in (mostly) German picture books, it is worth quoting Adichie's non-fiction book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. It's a response to how you can make your daughter a feminist, asked by one of her friends. Some of her answers extend beyond creating a 'feminist' child. They are 'suggestions' for creating a whole individual, confident in her skin, unafraid to stand out because she may have a different opinion, taste and yes, skin colour - 

Be a full person; motherhood should not define you as a person, as important and precious as it is; Rejecting likability, your job is not to make yourself liked but to be your FULL SELF, 'a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people'; 

Teaching difference and making it ordinary and normal, teaching without attaching value to difference.

These 'suggestions' are not only for our kids of course. If we keep them in mind, the glasses we wear and through which we see the world, will suddenly make us see, not only ourselves, but others with a different clarity and light.

The Paper Dolls - Creativity at its Best!

Julia Donaldson's imaginative story in The Paper Dolls (illustration Rebecca Cobb) reaches out to the young and old.



You Tube Reading by Little Loves Library

'They were Ticky and Tacky and Jackie the Backie and Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow'.

'You can't catch us. Oh no no no!
We're holding hands and we won't let go.'

A beautiful tale of a little girl who makes five paper dolls with her mum and takes them on many adventures until they are snipped by a little boy. The paper dolls do not disappear, however, and the girl turns into a woman and a mother, who passes on the gift of play and creativity to her own daughter,

The illustrations are immediate, fantastical and flow wonderfully with the simplicity and magic of the text.

Why I like this story:

The repetitive, catchy 'chorus' is musical and melodic
The story is an opener for creative, simple games with kids
The book pays hommage to a child's imagination
There is strength in togetherness, there is power in a child's imagination!
The story can also be used to accompany a child suffering from loss or trauma (nothing is lost forever; using your memory to store and keep precious things long after they have gone).

Afrocentric Nursery School in Brooklyn - Counteracting White Education and Fostering Self Representation

Afrocentric Nursery School - Starting with a Positive Self Representation

'It's because we are a suffering people', says Founder Fela Barclift

We are not afraid of using the word race, says Barclift
Her curriculum's focus is on empowering ethnic minorities
Children of all races can attend the school
The school has been criticised for creating separation over integration.
How does the founder respond? - If people agree that such schools are okay, she says, 'that means there has to be a conversation about why it is okay, why is it needed?, why do we have something like this..instead of being able to all be together?''

A bold initiative to give tools to young children to build their self esteem and look in the mirror and be able to see and love themselves. Here in Cologne, nursery school girls who are dark-skinned are already wishing they had blond hair and blue eyes and are being told they are ugly. Blond hair and pink skin are more beautiful, my 4 year old daughter tells me. Another dark-skinned mother was told her skin was the colour of shit by a preschooler. These are real examples to drive home the point - there is a problem with the education system when children are allowed to play games like 'who is afraid of the Black Man?`, and when children in nursery schools cannot find positive representations of themselves.
If we are to begin the debate on integration, then this is a good place to start - introducing interculturality at the youngest levels, having trained, mixed staff who are conscious of discrimination and having libraries and professionals who can guide the staff and children about living and loving their diversity. There are many manuals and single initiatives in the different states and they are all laudable but there has to be a collective effort that trickles down to the nursery and primary schools and reaches the children most in need of it.

Do we also need ethnic-empowering schools in Germany? I believe everyone stands to benefit from such initiatives until the standard curriculum changes to include real diversity.

Being Bullied because you are dark-skinned

Aminah gehört zu uns (Aminah is part of us). Petra Mönter und Susanne Maier

published in 2017

The problem I see in this book is that the prejudice against dark-skinned children isn’t properly tackled; the girl Aminah is left with no tools to speak out or defend herself – instead, all the ‘white, normal’ kids from her class decide to protect her from the older kids, without letting her stand on her own. Indeed, she belongs to them and they have appropriated her voice. 
As I read somewhere in a racism in children's books manual (Reference: Sprache-Macht-Rassismus. Dokumentation der Fachtagung vom 22. Oktober 2014; Diakonie, Düsseldorf), this book should come with the subtitle - 'for whites only', since it is indeed a book by 'Whites' for 'whites'. It has nothing to do with giving non-Whites more representation or humanising them, but simply instilling in the supposedly all-White readership the need to be tolerant to difference, even though that difference may be shocking, pitiable or simply, unpleasant. Let’s take a closer look at the plot:

Henri and the blond, blue-eyed protagonist, Ida enter their classroom after the summer break and is speechless (‘verblüfft’) when they see a new child there – ‘die Neue sah einfach anders aus, als wir es gewöhnt waren. Sie hatte sehr dunkle Haut’ (the newcomer looked quite different from what we were used to. Her skin was very dark). She is asked very slowly what her name is, to which she replies -  ‘I am not stupid, you can speak normal to me!’ Aminah was born in Syria (never mind most people in Syria are fair-skinned!) and moved to Germany with her parents. The other kids enter the class and they are all illustrated in a state of shock, whispering or simply startled. 

Later at the playground, a group of older kids start heckling Aminah – we learn that this gang of three were accustomed to harassing the foreigners (read dark-skinned children) (die ausländischen Kinder) at school: ‘Wie siehst du denn aus?..bist du in einem Farbtopf gefallen?’ Aminah is furious when they make fun of her skin colour but a lot of the kids snigger. Henri and Ida take Aminah back to class. Later at the playground, the bullying trio are back and this time, their actions are more aggressive – ‘Ausländer haben hier nichts zu suchen’ and they run away with Aminah’s jacket. Aminah starts crying while her ‘friends’ stand helplessly by.

The following day Aminah is absent. Henri thinks Aminah is afraid to come to school alone. They gather everyone from their class together and try to find a way to help. The class prefect says they need to stick together and so, they devise a plan. The next morning, they pick Aminah up from her house. ‘We are going to pick you up every morning from now on’, says Henri. Aminah is never given the chance to face the older kids and defend herself. Later in the city, it’s Henri and Ida, the protagonists who meet the older girl from the gang and confront her with her racism – Lea is planning to go to Kenia and Henri mockingly notes that there, all the people are dark-skinned, hopefully they won’t be so mean to her as she was to Aminah. Does this change Lea’s thinking and behaviour? Does she apologise to Aminah? Is Aminah still a victim of their bullying?

Lea and her gang return the next day and are waiting to taunt Aminah. But they are in for a surprise - all the kids from Aminah’s class circle the three – Henri and Ida have their hands around a scared Aminah. Now the class speaks up for a silent, helpless Aminah – ‘Lasst unsere Freundin in Ruhe…sonst kriegt ihr es mit uns zu tun’. More and more kids join in to walk Aminah home and pick Aminah up on mornings -  ‘Aminah gehört zu uns. Wer sie wegen ihrer Hautfarbe ärgert, kriegt es mit uns zu tun.`‘ (Aminah is a part of us. Whoever annoys her because of her skin colour has to go through us). Aminah’s voice is effectively usurped, her body and colour absorbed by all the whiteness surrounding her. The daunting question is – what happens when the trio finds her alone?

This is no triumphant book against xenophobia. In fact, I would argue it reinforces xenophobic feelings through the following:

Aminah is singled out and deemed strange and undesirable simply because of her skin colour

What is the norm in the classroom in Germany? – white kids, full stop.

The white normal kids take up Aminah’s conflict and make it their own without dealing with the real problem – racism.
Aminah’s voice is nonexistent. There is no interaction or confrontation with her and the kids. She remains an ostracised secondary character who has to depend on the normal, white kids to be and feel safe.

As already mentioned in previous posts, it’s also disturbing to see how many books point to the child’s skin colour as an automatic sign of strangeness, not belonging, not being able to speak the German language etc. That darker-skinned persons continue to create such a stir and scandal in children’s books is not only very distressing but very worrying about the (self)representation that ‘Germany’ chooses for itself. It’s impossible to begin to open up the discussion about integration and what constitutes the national culture when everything that is non-white gets branded as foreign, strange and undesirable.