Back in
February, the wonderful Imagine! Festival for children ran in the Royal
Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. I
was involved in a small way with the part of that festival run by the Inclusive
Minds collective. As the name implies, their
session was all about making books and stories accessible to all sorts of
children, and making sure that books for children include every sort of child
and children from all sorts of backgrounds.
It was a wonderful day of sensory stories, signed poetry, a huge wall on
which all could draw themselves (or anything they fancied), some serious adult debate,
and a lot of story sharing, drawing, chatter and fun. And it set me thinking.
It is, of
course, important to include children of all races, from all sorts of cultural
backgrounds, and those with disabilities, naturally within picture books;
representing all of us without exclusion.
Nick Sharratt has managed to include a number of children with visual
clues to particular conditions in our’ Just Imagine’ book’s busy pictures.
But the What
About Me? event stated that, ‘the organisers believe that ALL
children should be able to see themselves, their lives, their friends and their
families represented in the stories and pictures they are given.’ But I wonder if there isn’t a danger
that that idea might be taken too literally?
Does that mean that a boy with ginger hair who wears a hearing aid won’t
see himself in a picture of a black haired girl wearing a hearing aid? Do we really want to see ourselves exactly in
books? If so, books will have to be
tailor-made for each reader … and I, for one, DON’T want to read about, or see,
a story about a plump middle-aged woman with scruffy hair who writes stories
for children! I want other experiences,
beyond my own real ones, when I read.
But I DO want to find emotional states in stories that I recognise and
want to explore. It’s at that gut
feeling level that I find the point of contact between myself and a story.
I think we’re
in danger of forgetting the power of imagination in all this, and I’d suggest
that picture books with animal characters are a great way to avoid all those
visual mis-match problems whilst getting to the emotional heart of the matter.
For some
reason it’s easier to identify with a fictional character who looks totally
unlike us than it is to identify with a character who is human, but different
from us in age or sex or appearance or background. So
we all sympathise with lovely elephant Elmer’s insecurity in the happy story
about him by David McKee in which patchwork Elmer attempts to blend in with the
grey elephants. A similar story about a child
with, for example, a walking frame, who tried to get rid of the walking frame
so as to look like the other children, would tend to be a very uncomfortable and
unhappy read. Elmer does a better job than
a human character could in making us realise how it might be difficult to be
different, and the need for others to consider and do something about that
difficulty … in this case by having an Elmer Day once a year when all the
elephants paint themselves fancy colours.
There are
picture books with animal characters which more obviously tackle a specific
disability. Jeanne Willis and Sarah
Fox-Davies’ ‘Mole’s Sunrise’ is a very beautiful book in which blind Mole’s
kind friends take him to ‘see’ the sun rise, and describe what they see so as
to share that visual experience with Mole.
Yes, we
certainly do need children of all sorts included in picture books, but please don’t
forget the richness of what is already out there in stories that on the surface
are about animals, but at heart are all about human emotions and experiences.
Have you got
other picture book examples you would recommend, featuring examples of
anthropomorphic characters whose experiences might chime with disabled or
marginalised children?
