Past pronouns

Another trip to the library and I find myself asking again why so many children's books, especially animal books, have male protagonists and even all-male casts. Not just older books, which might claim some cultural immunity from equality, but new books too. Books that should know better. Why? Why, when the bear or the duck (or at least his friends and offsiders) might so easily be female — when changing the gender wouldn't change the plot one bit —are they so often male? Sometimes I change the pronouns as I'm reading, just to mix it up, but soon Olivia will be alive to this editing — she already pulls me up if I vary even one word ("Not 'the' parrot, 'that' parrot!"). And I think, why didn't the author make these edits? Why wasn't it obvious in the writing that someone — in fact an entire gender — was missing? My best guess is that it's unthinking: an unreflective default to an unaccountable bias towards the male as universal. But that doesn't explain its persistence in our time, some fifty years after the male default was found (at long last) to be deficient. Especially now, but even then, why didn't it occur to anyone that books without girls were an imperfect reflection of the world; a world of eerie erasure and ghostly absence, in which boys roam free and alone inherit the earth?

That women are people, and that roughly half the time people are women, seems the most stubborn and yet the most stubbornly controverted fact in human history. That my two-year-old daughter encounters this controversy in books that contain barely thirty words fills me with despair. I should add that as far as I can tell she doesn't notice or care. Her enjoyment is not dimmed by the fact that the poky little puppy, the saggy baggy elephant, and the tawny scrawny lion are all males. But that's what troubles me: she's imbibing this imbalance unconsciously, learning with every story and each hero that it's boys who take up the world's subjective space. I don't want her to grow up taking in a view that leaves her out. So that's why, where I can, I make the little panda she not he, and make Mr Kangaroo a Ms. 

The Snowy Day

Among other things out from the library at the moment, we have The Snowy Day: Ezra Jack Keats' Caldecott-winning picture book from 1962. It's a simple story. An African American child, Peter, enjoys the snow. He makes snowmen and snow angels, makes tracks and takes a stick to beat a snow-shower down from a tree. He takes a snowball home in his pocket, but it melts in his warm house, where his warm mother pulls off his cold, wet socks. He dreams of more melting snow, an end to the white world he's just discovered, but in the morning, the snow is there still. He takes a friend and sets out again into another snowy day. That's all. 

This book was groundbreaking at the time, which speaks to how desolately white the children's book landscape must then have been. But the sad thing is, it still feels groundbreaking. It still feels unusual to see a black child as the main character (not the offsider) in a story that's just about unalloyed joy. And that is what this story is about. It's about beauty, innocence, wonder, the romance of childhood freedoms and childhood feats. It's not about justice. It's not about diversity or equality.

And yet, it is about those things. It's about the world we'd have if they'd already arrived. In this world, they don't need to be named or won. They're the air a child like Peter breathes, the transfigured landscape on which he sweeps his angel arms, makes his tracks.

Magic words

Olivia loves books. Our tastes don't always coincide but there are several family favourites in her growing collection. We like Charlie and Lola. We're happy to read One Fish, Two Fish many times over, which is just as well. 

My reintroduction to the world of children's books after a thirty-year gap has been instructive. Some books are enduring, like Dr Seuss and other mid-century classics: Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, where the monkeys all have wild 60s sideburns, and the very sweet Are you my mother?, published in 1960, which I remember from my 80s childhood. I remember Each Peach Pear Plum, and still delight in its lovely woodland feel. Some newer books are already classics, like Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo. Not all her books are that good, but this and a few others are cleverly plotted and charmingly rhymed, and Axel Scheffler's illustrations conjure a vivid and inviting world. I also love Sarah Garland's books, with titles like Going Swimming and Doing the Washing. These are rich vignettes of ordinary life, in which the illustrations beautifully embody the quality of life the simple stories evoke: bright, fluid and warm, imperfect but deeply nourishing. The unnamed mother in these books is a role model for me.

I've also seen beautifully illustrated and touching stories that leave the toddler unmoved. They're clearly aimed at sentimental parents, not imaginative two-year-olds. Other failures come from successful authors who turn out sequels that don't measure up. At the library the other day I discovered several sequels to a book I remember fondly: There's a Hippopotamus on my roof eating cake - none of which are really justified. As a plot device, there are only so many things to which a hippopotamus on the roof eating cake can reasonably lend itself.

More troubling to me is that so many books still reflect a world where everybody's white and protagonists, especially animals, are male by default. Almost worse than this, though, are the opposite books, where diversity is the subject, not the fabric. 'Look, brown babies are just as good! Kids with glasses can have almost as much fun!' These books only reinforce the hierarchies they're trying to overturn. They're morals without stories.

Still more disturbing, though, are the children's books - and there are many of them - that are just badly written. Stories that go nowhere, storytelling that's clumsy, prose that's loose and bland, and, unforgiveably, verse that doesn't scan. Why should little children be subjected to bad writing? Why should these tender minds - so receptive, so retentive - be offered anything less than well-conceived stories told in elegant prose or flawless verse?

If the worst books comine bad writing with storyless morality, the best books bring together the magic of the imagination with the magic of words. They show little minds what words, as well as pictures, are capable of, giving them a taste of how delicious language can be. That's why, I think, Dr Seuss has endured the way he has. Even at 60 or 70 years old, his words still dazzle and tickle. They cast an unfailing spell.

Baby lit

Speaking of the matchless Miss Austen, Olivia has a baby version of Pride and Prejudice which tells the story, more or less, in fewer than 30 words. It's in fact a counting primer: “One English village, Two rich gentlemen, Three houses,” all the way up to “Ten thousand pounds a year.” It's clever and rather sweet, and it looks like this:

Olivia's cousin Elinor has a different baby version of the same novel, told in even fewer words, and illustrated with gorgeous photography. This is less educational for the under threes, but certainly a more faithful rendering of the story. It looks like this (note the muddy hem on Elizabeth's dress):

Both are lovely. I don't know if the babies prefer these classics to more contemporary infant literature, but for parents who like Jane Austen they're a delightful variation in a reading diet that otherwise consists almost entirely of bears. And ducks. So many ducks.