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  • When we dream

Children have likes and dislikes; they form canons. What they like, they remember and return to again and again. And they are honest in their fierce attachments; one book is boring, another is fantastic. As adults, we are less honest when we exclude books from our attention because they are, we say, inferior. We form canons, but the books we canonize we call touchstones of excellence for they are stronger, superior, of greater and more permanent significance to other books which we are happy to see disappear into the forgotten past. We say that experience and taste and literary competence allow us to evaluate the vast number of books our history has passed and continues to pass on to us. The 'we' I speak of here is an institutional 'we', the 'we' of those who publish books, who promote them, and who teach them. This institutional 'we' is as fierce in its attachments as children are in theirs, only it is less honest in admitting the subjectivity of its preferences. In short, we promote and teach the books which we perceive further in some way our view of things, our cultural values and social vision.

We do this because it is good to do so, we tell ourselves. It is good for children to grow up knowing what to value, and what to value is what their parents and teachers value, what their society values. If their society decides that "Sleeping Beauty" is more valuable than the story by the Brothers Grimm called "Fred and Kate," then "Fred and Kate" will disappear or at least be difficult to find. If their society decides that the poetry of Eleanor Farjeon is more valuable than the poetry of Effie Lee Newsome, then Newsome's poetry will disappear or at least be difficult to find. Effie Lee Newsome does not appear in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (1984), although June Jordan, Sharon Bell Mathis, Mildred Taylor, Virginia Hamilton, Rosa Guy, and John Steptoe do. Apparently these American black writers are valuable. The entries are, however, meagre, and many fine writers for children who happen to be black are evident by their absence: Alice Childress, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin. Perhaps more significant is the entry for South Africa which tells us that most books for children in South Africa are imported, "chiefly from Great Britain." Afrikaans—speaking children have few South African books to choose from, and the "general quality of books is poor," we learn. Why they are poor remains unspoken. In any case, if the majority of South African children's books are imports from Great Britain, then what we have is the situation described by Ariel Dorfman in The Empire's Old Clothes (1983). Dorfman describes, using Babar the Elephant (1937), the situation in which one nation displaces another's history and culture.

The essay by Meena Khorana in this number of the Quarterly goes some way to setting the record straight here. South African children have South African children's books, but these too displace history and culture. The discourse in these books is Afrikaans and all children who read them—black or white—see perpetuated "the exact racist theory with which the colonizer originally arrived: The colored man needs the white. He has a subconscious desire to be crushed and to surrender his personality. In the same way that a woman needs a man and wants to be subjugated and possessed. In the same way the child dreams of becoming a child, not an animal" (Dorfman 47). It is good to know that these books exist; it is better to know how miscreative they are. These are books we would not wish to lose to the silences of history because they remind us so forcefully how ironic the human imagination can be; they are visions of a winter of our intellect which we know will pass, but which we know will return and for whose return we ought to be prepared.

Children's literature, all literature, gives us a golden world, not the world as it necessarily is but as it may be. We need constantly to question our institutionalizing desire to delimit what...

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