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The topic
assigned to me is Storytelling to Promote Picture
Books. I would like to qualify the topic further or rather take
it to its logical destination, so that storytelling is seen not merely as
promoting picture books, but also in a general sense promoting reading
through picture books so that it culminates in a love of reading books for
life.
All those who
perceive children's books as something less than literature, all those who
view children's literature with a patronising gaze, will possibly object to
this kind of extension of meaning of the theme. Picture books are for little
ones, beginning readers, they will say. Children need pictures in books when
they are young because they need help to read, and pictures help them to do
that. But once they are set on the path, picture books have played their
part. So what's all this about creating readers for life? That comes later,
with literature with a capital L. That's what many people will say.
We are all familiar
with this tune, so we won't flog it further. However, I would like to ask
why, then, is the Indian film industry the second largest in the world? Why
do adults flock to the flicks, sometimes dragging along their unwilling
children, kicking and screaming into the cinema hall? What is cinema but a
story in pictures? And why do websites feature visuals so prominently, even
the most scholarly and technical ones? What do pictures do to websites that
usually only adults visit?
Having said this, I
must also draw attention to the fact that in many publishing circles,
particularly in the Indian languages, the perception is that pictures are
not necessary. The feeling is, "Oh! This space could have been taken up by
text, because children need to read." The idea of reading pictures
belongs, I suppose, in the realm of high sophistication that goes with
highly developed/progressive societies. Here in India, where questions are
more connected to literacy, it is natural that the word is seen to be of
primal importance. It is important to keep this in mind while speaking of
picture books and books for children.
Stories stand at the
centre of human life, and storytelling is as old as time. The need to make
and share stories is as natural as life itself. The Indian experience
has traditionally acknowledged this sacred space: as sacred as the space
acknowledged for visual representations of stories. Look at Pabuji no phad
from Rajasthan, the chitrakathis of Maharashtra, the leather puppets of
Andhra, the yakshagana of Karnataka, the kathakali of Kerala, the
kathavachaks of north India, the koothu of Tamilnadu, the patachitra and
jatra of Bengal; look at floors, walls, cloth and canopies, filled with
stories drawn in different styles and told through the spoken word, through dance and music.
The
nature of human beings is to look for and respond to the visual. And where
none exists, to create it.
With the introduction
of paper and its use on a regular, commercial basis, of course, the world of
picture storytelling was revolutionised. Picture books found their space in
the world, certainly of children.
What is a picture
book? It is a dialogue between two worlds, the world of images and the world
of words. It is also a space for dialogue between generations: the artists
and writers who create them and the children for whom they are mainly
intended. To connect with that audience, picture book makers pare their
ideas down to their simplest terms, the fundamental essence, to their
clearest possible form.
And these are mighty
standards as anybody who has attempted to do picture books would know. When
these standards are striven for, we know that the best picture books are for
all times, for everyone. As Satoshi Kitamura, the Japanese illustrator says
quite unequivocally, "Because I like pictures, I like stories."
He
believes there ought to be a holistic culture that does not divide adults
from children, and he says that he does picture books for everyone, not
children alone.
Another amazing
Japanese illustrator, Mitsumasa Anno speaks of how, in a counting book for
little ones, he adapted shades of 19th century French illustrator Jean-Francoise
Millet's painting The Gleaner of women working in the fields. He said that
the child would not immediately know this was anything special, but later,
when the child grew up he/she would make the connections.
As Eric Carle has
said, "The effort always is to put something extra into the
picture." Look at Micky Patel's Procession, for instance. And
Pulak Biswas would certainly be able to tell us what he puts into pictures,
and why.
What do the best
pictures do for us? As Margaret Meek says: "We discover in stories ways of
saying and telling that let us know who we are. So, before they even attempt
the first stages of literacy, children have heard and told many
stories." When we know what artists and writers have put into
their picture books, the fact that stories stand at the centre of language
and learning comes as no surprise.
The great advantage,
as far as ordinary mortals (!) are concerned is that picture books make it
possible for everyone to be good storytellers. And you don't even need to
have a good memory! Anyone who has shown a picture book to a small child,
pointing to pictures, pointing to words, so that before long the child sees
language and pictures rising from the pages, anyone who has had this
experience knows what miracles picture books can create.
Trotsky Marudu, the
immensely talented and versatile creator of the images for a innovative
bilingual picture book called Line and Circle said once when we asked him how he
managed to create images that were so sparkling, so spontaneous and so
attractive to children and adults across the board, "Well! I saw the
book as a folk toy. So I tried to bring the dynamism of folk toys to the
pictures." And this isn't even a story book in a conventional sense; it
is a concept book with a highly sophisticated narrative. With his simple
expiation, things fall in place and we begin to understand how picture books
are the natural extension of storytelling, and how they must eventually lead
to creative thinking and expression.
How else can it
possibly work? Imagine, the child in your lap, your arms holding her, the
book propped up in front, and both of you touching and feeling the story on
the page. Your voice softly reading, stopping, interacting, reading again,
finger pointing. This is language learning, and has a great deal to do
with emotion and the development of relationships. Adult and child are
engulfed in a unique experience of intimate and joyful 'connecting' which
sets the pattern of relationship between two people.
As Dorothy Butler,
the author of the timeless Babies Need Books, says in the context of
communication problems that often confront adults and adolescents,
:"All this
can be avoided by the early forging of relationships, by establishing the
habit of give and take. This does not mean that problems won't arise. It
merely means that the human beings concerned will have ways of coping with
difficulties which may lead to the deepening rather than the damaging of
relationships." This forging of relationships can and needs to happen
early in the child's life. Intimacies may vary, but they can be generated in
the lap of a parent, a sibling, as social worker, a teacher, a workshop
facilitator, a volunteer.
Human beings are
capable of abstract thought because they possess language and the quality of
an individual's thought depends upon the quality of that language. And that
is what we are talking about when we say that storytelling not merely
promotes picture books as objective, which indeed it can and does, more
importantly, it promotes a long-term commitment to a life of
thinking/thought.
When stories are told
in the right ambience and with the complete involvement of the teller and
the listener, it opens the listener's ears, eyes and mind to the next story
and the next book. We see this happening time and again at Goodbooks
Bookstore, a very special, exclusive-for-children bookstore and activity
centre in Chennai. When we first embarked on the Reading Trail programme,
the agenda was to promote reading among small children. So we brought all
the books our children had grown up with to the bookstore and told stories
to little ones for a while as they sat, stood, lay surrounded by our
much-thumbed books from home.
The youngest ones
were as little as two and a half years. Most of them had been exposed only
to their mother tongue — Tamil or Telugu or Malayalam and in some cases,
Hindi. For the sake of common ground we told in English, but liberally
mixing Tamil/Hindi/whichever language we were comfortable with, or the
resource person knew. Recognising the multilingual nature of the group, of
respecting the language world of each child, showing pictures from the books
— we always make sure we tell stories from books for the most part. This
helps the children connect with the story, understand and follow
comfortably. It also prompts them to ask questions about colours, shapes,
clothes, whatever, and they often express their own feeling towards the
developments in the story.
Children always ask
of so many things: 'Is it real? Is it real?' Somehow they seem to float in
the eloquent space between dream and reality. The best picture books,
therefore, keep the child's sense of wonder alive, while at the same time
help them negotiate their feelings and responses to the developments in the
story.
Now this is the most
popular workshop at the bookstore. Not simply parents, but children
themselves come asking for Reading Trail!
Once the children
gain confidence in 'reading' the books, in assimilating and understanding
the stories they hear, they are quick to connect with the range of books
available at the bookstore and elsewhere. They will bring books from home to
share. The connection has been made. Anything can trigger off a familiar
feeling and just being able to recognise helps the reader empathise in a
familiar, comfortable, secure way.
A friend who works in
Corporation schools was speaking of how traumatising the environment could
be. She spoke of a school in which local liquor used to be brewed at one end
of the classroom. That's the the quality of life, the environment in which
so many children in India attend school. We are trying to set up book
corners in several such schools where we would do storytelling and
activities. "How will such things work in this environment," the
friend said. "But there's one story the children want all the time, a
story about two girls, one with one hair and the other with two," she
added referring to one of our books. She said how the children would want to
look at the book, delight in the picture and the fantasy of the story.
So, when listeners
are able to anchor with stories, with picture books with a degree of
familiarity and security, there is absence of fear, of fear of the unknown.
That's when picture books start working. And then there's no stopping the
effect.
Anyway, as word of
Reading Trail spread, parents brought more and more children to the
bookstore saying, "My child simply won't read. Do something." Then
when parents, and even teachers, saw how the child slowly began to be
interested in stories, in pictures and in the books themselves, they too
began to look at these books and at others more carefully. Slowly, they too
have started to respond to the stories, to the pictures, to the experience
of reading a picture book with all the senses.
Again, going to the
best for reasons as to why picture books can be compelling. Eric Carle
worked on some books with Bill Martin. Most people would know Brown bear,
Brown Bear, What do you see? Well once when Carle and Martin were working
together, Martin said to Carle, "Eric, what do you think of this? Da da
da da da DAH! Or da da DAH da da DAH?" Carle asked what on earth he was
talking about. "I always do the rhythm first, before the words..."
Martin replied. It is the heartbeat, repetition and rhyme. That is why so
much popular music, film music is so catching, I suppose. It's the same
principle with picture books at one level.
It's just not through
conventional storytelling, though, that connections are made and sustained.
It is also through music and art and writing and puppets. We see this happen
time and time again at Goodbooks. For instance, there is an ongoing workshop
called Kathalaya at Goodbooks that focuses on young children as
storytellers. Here too we see how interactive sharing of picture books
enables children to draw on existing skills of storytelling in both their
own language and their new language as they attempt to retell the story that
they can see in the pictures.
After all, stories do
not offer single meanings. They form interlocking sets of meanings and
children listening to a story search for these meanings and then their
shifts. They now tell their own stories and themselves in the books they
read/the stories they share.
With wordless picture
picture books, children might need just a little push. The reader is the
narrator, and is, in that sense, creating the story as he or she goes along.
Sometimes children might find it difficult to tell or make up a story. But
with an anchor, such as a lead-in, as for example, "Once upon a
time", they are nudged into moving from the visual to the verbal more
easily. When the possibilities for narrative are strong, they really are
able to tell the story of the pictures. Slowly, they see books as toys not
to beat to shreds or break to pieces, but to play with. When they engage in
play is when they are on the road to recognising the 'bookness' of books!
It is a misconception
that picture books are uncomplicated texts. Look at any of the really great
picture books; they are anything but simple stories, simply told. In fact,
picture books often work on levels that are beyond the scope of other books.
For instance, we read the pictures through the words and the words through
the pictures. Very often, the subjects are highly topical, and reflect on
issues such as environment, disability, alienation, loneliness, love,
longing for adventure and so on, all of which are familiar themes of drama,
literature, painting. They evoke emotional and aesthetic responses in
children.
Speaking of the
advantages of the picture book medium, Maurice Sendak says, "The author
can deliver different but simultaneous stories, even purely visual stories.
Authors and illustrators also employ a range of devices including
juxtapositions, irony and humour in the relationship between text and
illustration and that as a result they are being spoken to directly as
experienced readers who know how to 'read' these complexities." It
certainly takes more than an 'inner child' to make a picture book that
lasts, resulting from a range of influences: the traditions, the arts, the
crafts, the popular, the high aestheticism. All these transform the art of
picture book making into a language the children/readers of many cultures
may enjoy.
I cannot
emphasise enough the importance of authentic images (and text) vis-à-vis cultural expression. If this does not happen, these could be seen as stories
of faceless people and places, and leading to stereotyping at several levels
of meaning. Very often, parents impose their own 'attitudes' on to their
children.
Conversely, it's not
unknown for foreign publishers buying the rights of Indian books to change
pictures, colours, and so on because they feel these colours/pictures do not
work in their culture. What is multiculturalism about if not an
equal exchange of images, of ways of life? And do children resist
these 'differences' to such a great extent that they will not even pick up
something that's different? Are these but fancies/preconceived notions in
our adult minds?
In this connection, I
would like to raise a question that was debated at a recent conference on
children's literature organised by Chatterbox magazine in Chennai. Do we
give children what they want? Do we know what they want? Opinion on this was
quite evenly divided.
However, I would like
to sound a note of caution, courtesy Dorothy Butler, while attempting to
answer this question. She says, "How are we to know what will terrify
and amuse? We can't. Each of us must find our own way through this maze and
none of us is likely to emerge without having turned into a wrong alley, and
been obliged to back out hastily. Sometimes we can
use our experiences to avoid later traps, but not always, and we run a risk
in applying any rule too firmly. One of
the greatest of these is that we will transfer our own trepidation to the
child by our careful screening of situations and characters. Another is that
we will become so assiduous in shielding the child from any situation which
we suspect may frighten him, that his literary diet will become more and
more insipid as the months roll by."
I would like to end
with what the American illustrator Tana Hoban has to say on the subject of
wordless picture books. She works with photographs and phonograms. "My
books work well with kids with learning disabilities, " she says.
"There is no threat of the word on the page. If there are captions,
there is a chance the child may get it wrong or take time to focus, to
understand. But when there are no captions, the picture, say of some mode of
transport, could be well be called a car, an auto, transportation, anything.
Having no words liberates a child to a certain
extent. A picture by itself will elicit a personal response that will get
him going. I like to think that my books
promote young children to talk, to express themselves."
That then is the goal
— to help each child express herself/himself.
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