- Recent Books about Black America, Africa, and the Carribean
Most children's books are not very good books for essentially two reasons: (1) they too often sentimentalize the facts of life; (2) (a not wholly separate resson) they are often condescending toward their intended audience. Having the former fault, they make the truly ugly beautiful, challenging not the imagination so much as the reader's sense of reality. Having the latter fault, they oversimplify to such an extent as to insult the intelligence. They are commonplace in conception and execution and they give the impression that their authors neither know nor respect the intelligence and imaginative capacities of children.
Two books which seem to me to fail for the reasons suggested above are Lonzo Anderson's Izzard and Arnold Dobrin's Josephine's 'magination, whose scenes are respectively the Virgin Islands and Haiti. Izzard tells a very unreal tale about a lizard, unreal, because it attributes human characteristics to an inhuman creature in a context so realistic otherwise as to call into question the [End Page 215] imaginative reality of the tale. That is to say that there is no distinction between the real and the imagined in the lizard's mind, the chief human character's mind, the minds of the other characters in the story, nor the author's mind. The reader is asked to grant too much. He is asked to believe that the apparently sane people around the chief character, Jamie, in actuality participate in Jamie's fantasy. The reader is intended to participate too, but nothing, other than his goodwill, encourages him to suspend disbelief. The characters are black with the exception of the green lizard—but that fact is not relevant to the tale.
Josephine's 'magination is a brightly illustrated book whose author reflects in his tale something of his sense of its exotic setting. It is clearly a book written from a perspective outside of the events and scenes it describes. It colors Haitian peasant life in such a way as to make it charming and beautiful. Some facts are there—the implication of hardship in peasant life, the poverty and difficulty of general living conditions—yet the whole is so treated as to distort. I would be most unhappy if any child's sense of the life of peasants in Haiti were inferred from this book or books like it. The intention of the book is to indicate the commonality of childhood experience, but the implication that happiness stems from the exercise of the imagination despite socio-economic conditions seems at best a distortion.
Three novels about Africa, Bisha of Birundi by Mary Louise Clifford, Sunrise Tomorrow by Naomi Mitchison, and Mukasa by John Nagenda all deal essentially with the same problem, the conflict between traditional and more modern values. The focus in each of these novels is on the younger generation and describes their conflict, especially with parents and grandparents, about tradition and modernity. In each case the younger characters decide that though modern ways are most desirable, one's preference must be tempered by reverence for the past. These novels are interesting to a reader who knows little or nothing about Africa. Once one has read one, however, he has the essentials of many...