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Moving Beyond the Secret Garden
Patrice Lawrence interviews Professor Karen Sands-O’Connor and Dr Darren Chetty about their Books for Keeps series, and now book, Beyond the Secret Garden.
My mother arrived in the UK only a couple of years after Trinidad and Tobago gained independence, so her school education was steeped in British colonial values. She learned about English kings and queens, Shakespeare and Keats, Lords Tennyson and Byron. Woven inextricably within that curriculum was the ideology that whiteness was superior. It was a message built on the sturdy foundations of centuries of racist pseudoscience that placed us wonderful, complex human beings into a hierarchy with European white people at the top and African Black people at the bottom, barely considered human.
The legacy of those destructive stereotypes persists to this day. It is insidious and all-encompassing, seeping into so many areas of our lives including children’s books. There have been decades of conversations about the damage that bias, prejudice and stereotyping inflict on children. For the last seven years, Dr Darren Chetty and Professor Karen Sands-O’Connor have been a vital part of that conversation.
I’ve been an avid reader of their Beyond the Secret Garden columns from the beginning, as the authors challenge writers, readers and publishers to acknowledge the ways that imperialist, white supremacist philosophies creep into children’s books. As many of those columns have been collected into an anthology, I have some questions for them.
Firstly, what changes in children’s publishing have you witnessed in the last seven years?
Karen is cautiously positive. ‘One change for the better (even if it is a slow change) is the increase in genres of writing from racially-minoritised authors. When I started researching, most (published) children’s books with ‘diverse’ main characters were ‘about’ racism or enslavement. In many cases, this is not all that Black and other racially-minoritised authors were writing, but it was all that the children’s book industry would publish! Now there are mysteries, comic novels, fantasies, and fiction set throughout history that brings the story of Britain’s whole population to life, and that’s such a good thing for all readers. Is it embedded? I hope so, but it is too soon to tell.’
Darren agrees, ‘There are definitely more books by racially-minoritised writers. But working with teachers I often find just a handful have come to their awareness. Being published and being publicised, promoted and marketed properly are not the same thing.’
You both care greatly about both children’s books and equality. How does researching and writing these columns affect you?
For Karen, writing the column reminds her of how many underrepresented authors, readers, and communities there are in Britain. ‘I started researching Black British children’s books back in the late 1990s for my family, because I wanted to highlight the ways they were left out of the book world. I was always delighted when I could share a book with my child that represented her in some way. I want everyone who shares a book with a child to have that experience, and every child reader to have that delight.’
Researching and writing the columns gives Darren an opportunity to make sense of his own childhood reading experiences, ‘which were somewhere between reading for pleasure and reading for pain. As the son of a South African I learned pretty quickly that books can get things wrong, can distort reality. At school we were encouraged to learn from the authors we read – but rarely if ever to speak back to them in any sense. I think that part of taking children’s literature seriously involves developing mainstream cultural criticism that goes beyond describing books as ‘magical’. Ok, sometimes they are pretty magical,’ he adds, ‘but children’s authors are fallible humans, not magicians.’
Writers of colour have been targeted with online abuse when they’ve had the audacity to mention a lack of diverse representation in children’s books. Have you experienced any backlash?
Karen recalls being contacted after writing a column calling for more diversity. ‘They were indirectly menacing, telling me children didn’t need to learn about diversity and I’d better reconsider writing such things.’ Though she has found that most people have been quite responsive to their work.
Darren points out that the conversations around children’s fiction and representation are often distorted. ‘There are people who argue that work like ours is part of a ‘social-ill of narcissism’. They wrongly state that we promote the idea that we should only read fiction about people just like us. These opinion pieces pop up every few months in the press but never respond to the actual arguments we make. I work on the philosophy of dialogue also and recognise that it’s not worth engaging with people who aren’t interested in representing your views accurately before they critique them.’
Karen acknowledges the role of social media in encouraging bullying, and is particularly worried about the targeting of young academics and authors from racially-minoritised backgrounds. ‘We all need to find ways to support each other publicly when we see this kind of bullying and abuse.’
Your aim is to provoke discussion rather than to approve some books and dismiss others. Have there ever been times when you really wanted to dismiss certain books?
‘The first part of this question made me laugh,’ Karen says. ‘OF COURSE there are books that we find deeply concerning, and it is often tempting to dissect their problematic aspects. However, when we find a book like this… we try (instead of dissecting it) to indicate books we think avoid the pitfalls of the problematic book. Oftentimes these better books are from authors who do not get the marketing attention that, for example, celebrity authors do; we try to boost them by giving them more column space than the ‘problem’ books and authors.’
Darren adds, ‘I think we try to offer readings of books and our justifications for these readings. I think that any prolonged study of English literature will inevitably include an encounter with ideas relating to racism and colonialism. I’m not on board with the idea that racially minoritised characters always need to be role models; I think that view stifles racially minoritised writers. But the broader question of ‘what is the text doing?’ is a tough one to answer and usually open to multiple persuasive answers.’
For Karen, the most difficult columns to write are those relating to current events. ‘Getting the historical background to that event is important to me. However, my favourite columns have also been the ones that centre on history, especially the way that the British Empire and its values continue to affect children’s books. Understanding this history is the only way that the children’s book industry is going to change permanently and for the better.’
What have you both learned from writing the columns?
Darren’s first publication on children’s literature was in 2014. He feels like a newbie compared to his co-writer. ‘Karen has an encyclopaedic knowledge of children’s literature and has helped me to begin to fill in the gaps in my knowledge!’
Karen has discovered a hunger in schools for children’s books that represent contemporary classrooms and Britain as a whole. ‘I’ve also learned so much from Darren,’ she says. ‘His background in philosophy and education turn my ‘history lesson’ columns into something so much richer.’
Finally, who do you really want to read the book? (I really want commissioning editors to read it, so that they can approach diverse representation knowledgeably and confidently.)
Karen has spent most of her academic career teaching future teachers. ‘There’s so much pressure on teachers to get through a curriculum that focuses far too much on the mechanics of reading and writing. They don’t always have time to think about making that curriculum work for all their students, through books that make kids think, philosophise, empathise. I hope that our book gives these teachers – who want to do the best for their students – a little head start. Yes, we suggest some titles, but we also offer ways of thinking about any new book (or any book stuck in their curriculum whether they like it or not). I want to give these young teachers the confidence to choose more and better books, or have better discussions about books they already have.’
Darren, previously a primary school teacher himself, echoes Karen’s comments, but also agrees with me that the publishing workforce can learn from the columns. ‘Publishing is not as diverse as it could be,’ he says. ‘Class plays a huge part in this. It’s possible to become an English graduate without ever studying any racially minoritised writers and perhaps never thinking about the kind of issues we discuss. We really hope that Beyond the Secret Garden can add to the quality of conversations about children’s literature wherever they take place.’
I agree. I researched and delivered training about racial equity long before I became a children’s writer. However, every Beyond the Secret Garden column challenges me to think anew. They are a precious resource; they can change children’s lives for the better.
Patrice Lawrence won the Waterstone’s Book Prize for Older Readers and the YA Book Prize with her debut novel, Orangeboy, and has written more award-winning books for children and young people since. People Like Stars, her latest book, will be published later this month. She is currently Writer in Residence for BookTrust.
Beyond the Secret Garden: Children’s Literature and Representations of Black and Racially minoritised People by Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor is published by the English and Media Centre, 9781906101749, £24.50 hbk.