Literary Safari

Next week, the holy month of Ramadan will come to its conclusion and millions of Muslims around the world will be celebrating Eid-ul-Fitr. “Eid” is an Arabic word meaning festival and “Fitr” means to break the fast. So, yes, Eid-ul-Fitr is literally the festive breaking of a month long fast.

Earlier this week, I was surprised and pleased to see the window of my favorite children’s bookstore in NYC, the Bank Street Bookstore, filled with books and novelty items about Eid. Included in their window display are the following three picture books which, I think, beautifully bring the Eid celebration to life for young children here in the U.S. Here you go: three picture book picks, one for each day of Eid.

The Best Eid Ever, by Asma Mobin-Uddin
Boyds Mill Press, 2007

On Eid morning, despite all the gifts she receives, Aneesa is sad because her parents are away on Hajj. Her outlook changes, however, when she meets two sisters—refugees from a war torn country—at the mosque. While her grandmother Nonni prepares a delicious Eid feast, Aneesa cooks up a plan to share the festival’s delights with her new friends and give them the best Eid ever. Laura Jacobsen’s pastel pencil illustrations sensitively bring to life Asma Mobin-Uddin’s poignant holiday story about sadaqua, the Islamic tenet of voluntary giving within one’s means.

The White Nights of Ramadan, by Maha Addasi
Boyds Mill Press 2008

Noor lives in a country in the Persian Gulf and is preparing for Girgian, a special three-day celebration that takes place in the middle of Ramadan when the moon is almost full. Girgian means “candy” and is an occasion where children wear their best traditional clothes and go from house to house collecting treats from their neighbors (not so different from our Halloween tradition of trick or treating). Ned Gannon’s warm paintings carry the reflection of glimmering moonlight and bring a different culture to life for readers. Underlying the narrative of the festivities is a reminder of the significance of Ramadan. “Ramadan can be fun, but remember that the true meaning of Ramadan is spending time with family and sharing with those less fortunate,” Noor’s grandmother tells her.

The Night of the Moon: A Muslim Holiday Story, by Hena Khan
Chronicle Books, 2008

A wonderful primer about the A-Z’s of Ramadan as its celebrated in a Pakistani household in America, complete with presents, backyard barbeques, and trampolines. As seven-year old Yasmeen follows and watches the phases of the moon, we are led through the unfolding festivities in her household and community. In her multicultural classroom, she and her classmates engage in a discussion about Ramadan where she explains the significance of the holy month. The story beautifully portrays a holiday celebrated by many different cultures, a holiday not so different from other holidays marked on the American calendar. This is wonderful contribution to the literature of tolerance and a window into contemporary Muslim culture. I am a huge fan of illustrator Julie Paschkis’s work. Her gorgeous, detailed style is complemented by her ability to take traditional art forms (in this case Islamic tiles) and render them in a contemporary context.

More books about Ramadan at Just One More Book.

I’m re-reading Natalie Goldberg’s “Writing Down the Bones” and am going to start doing more freewrites, in addition to my morning journals. Along the way, I’ll share writing exercises and books that I especially felt strengthened my writing muscles.

In my writing group a few months ago, we did a timed writing exercise (10 minutes) that I really enjoyed: Write a story where each sentence begins with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. So, that means the first sentence starts with “A,” the second with “B,” and so on … I thought it would be impossible, but turned out that wee bit of the structure was tremendously freeing. Here’s the piece of flash fiction that I came up with. (I’ve since edited it a bit and added a few sentences so a couple of letters might be off, but you’ll get the gist of the exercise.)

“All I ever wanted was a house with a yard,” she said. “But your father bought me this monstrous mansion. Ceilings 12 feet high, eight bedrooms, and a forest in the back. Do you really think two people should be living like this? Every day is a trial–so much work, so much space, nobody here. Far, far away from everyone I know. Give me a break. Help me convince him to sell this place, no? If anyone can, it would have to be you.”

I listened to my mother pour her wishes out to me over the phone, jasmine tea in a cup next to me, a wet cloth on my forehead.

“Kumarasami Raghavan is not an easy man to talk to,” I said. “Lest you have forgotten, let me remind you of the time he bought you a Mercedes convertible just after you had given birth to me.” My lips curved into a smile as I imagined my mother, a first-time mom, trying to bundle me into a car seat in a breezy car, her sari flying.  Now here I was, a grown woman swallowing the words I didn’t have the courage to say: “Ma, he has to give you a big house to live in. There’s someone else in the chinnaveedu.” (Of course, Ma would understand what I meant right away if I used the words “small house.” The other woman.)

“Please don’t remind me of that impractical car,” Ma interrupted. “Quietly, in your own way, can’t you do something? Really, you don’t know the weight of your words, you, his only pet daughter.”

Silence streamed through the receiver. I was not going to say anything, I had sworn myself to secrecy.

“Tarini, are you there? Can you hear me?” Ma said. “Signal lost?”

True, I was his daughter. But only daughter? That was a lie. Until last year, I had believed this to be true, but I cannot pretend anymore. Vidya, my father’s other daughter, will not allow me to. Whenever I look in the mirror nowadays, I see her—my height, the same eyes—spread apart, the identical liking for evening ragas and oreo cookies.

“X marks the spot,” Dad used to say when he taught me how to play miniature golf the summer of my ninth birthday. Years later, Vidya sat next to me on an airplane and asked me to exchange seats with her. “That’s my seat,” she said, showing me her boarding card. “X marks the spot.”

Zebras do not have identical stripes. A mother zebra knows her child, a sister zebra recognizes her sibling, just as I knew then that Vidya was my little sister.

So … now, it’s your turn. Feel free to post your Alphabet Flash Fiction here or link back to it at your blog.

This post was originally published at Sepia Mutiny. I’m passing on my copy of “Schooled” to any interested reader. Just let me know you want if you want it in the comments section and, if there is more than one person, I’ll pick a name at random next Friday, the 26th. 

I used to work at a tutoring center on a small private college campus in Westchester, NY several years ago. Our offices were a safe space that students visited for help with writing papers, coursework, math, ESL. We hired several peer and professional tutors every semester to provide such services to our student body, and very often, I also took on a small student load. It was tremendously fulfilling work, helping students navigate challenging course material or a tricky writing assignment, watching them come into their own, grasp the content, and produce assignments that met curriculum standards.

That’s my experience with tutoring. Then, there’s the experience of Anisha Lakhani, a former teacher whose novel “Schooled” was just published by Hyperion this summer. She taught (and was even the Middle School English Chair) at the high-profile NYC private school Dalton for a decade, but quit last year following her disillusionment with the culture of cheating in which she found herself.

Lakhani was raking in the dough (over 200 bucks an hour) for private tutoring sessions with the children of wealth clients on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her closet was filled with the latest designer fashions and she was hanging with all the right folks. As the Jersey-born Columbia graduate sank deeper and deeper into this world, she discovered a vicious inner circle in which educators, parents, and students were enmeshed: Parents, eager to see their kids excel, hired tutors like Lakhani to help student swith school assignments. Students, accustomed to being treated with kid gloves and occupied with AIM, Juicy Couture, and their active social lives, expected Lakhani to essentially do their homework for them. And, teachers, intimidated by parents, knew not to give in-class writing assignments or to even raise the question of whether a paper was written by the student or a tutor, kept silent.

Based on her experiences as a tutor as well as those of her colleagues and parents, Anisha Lakhani’s “Schooled” takes us into the crazy world of Anna Taggert, a recent Columbia graduate who goes against the wishes of her parents (they could have been desi!) and takes up a job at a private school. Despite her initial idealism and desire to imbue her students with the spirit of literary greats, she is very quickly beset with a host of problems: pushy moms, low pay, a rundown apartment, and a school administration which warns her not to make her lesson plans too complicated (she’ll make the other teachers look bad). As the months pass, Anna decides to take up a tutoring gig on the side to supplement her measly income. That’s when things spiral out of control. Her values go whoosh and she falls head over heels with the all things Juicy and Chanel; with shopping sprees; with blonde highlights; and with the experience of being the “cool teacher” who gets invited to Kanye West bar mitzvahs. (Sidenote: The novel also features a desi character – a fellow math teacher – who also gets equally corrupted by the lure of tutoring.)

Eventually, things settle down and Anna looks in the mirror and realizes who and what she has become — and unlike Lakhani, who has quit teaching and turned into a full-time novelist and socialite — returns to the classroom ready to reform her students and herself. But until that happens, readers will get an unnerving look at the Upper East Side annals of overambitious, competitive, and heartbreaking private education. The novel follows in the footsteps of books like “The Nanny Diaries” which provide the insider/outsider point of view. In fact, by the end of this week, movie rights will be sold. And though it’s not literary fiction by any means, it is an intriguing sociological study into a culture of cheating with a dash of pedagogy and activism thrown in.

“I thought it was time someone spoke out. Yes, certainly there were many hardworking students and decent families, but so, so much cheating is occurring and it needed to be exposed.” Lakhani told me in our e-mail Q&A which follows below the fold. Maybe parents and teachers alike will cull some advice from this morality tale from someone who knows what it’s like to walk in their shoes. I certainly hope some conversations about reform emerge from this book, or else it will be just a fictionalized navel-gazing venture. (more…)

Though comics and graphic novels have been in the publishing spotlight in recent years, educational publishers and teachers still approach them with cold hands and tentative minds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, when presented with a worthy and quite literary comic book, “Oh, but it’s just a comic. We can’t give kids such watered down stuff to read.”

The summer 2008 issue of Teachers & Writers magazine speaks directly to these concerns, serving up a selection of articles which effectively make the case that yes, “writing and reading comics can strengthen writing skills, spur the imagination, and boost literacy in classrooms from kindergarten to college and beyond.”

As a former editor in the educational publishing industry, the “fearful editorial culture” that Sari Wilson describes in “The Comics Revolution in the Language Arts Classroom” was all too real to me. I too have encountered the same challenges and obstacles of which she speaks. Many of the graphic novel excerpts I pitched for inclusion in our product were rejected not because they were deemed not engaging enough, but because of concerns about them “looking too much like a comic book” or not appearing “meaty enough” in terms of sentence length.

At the end of the day, much of the industry seems to feel caught between wanting to provide students with “traditional” or “award-winning” literature (read: a high-enough lexile text) and “high-interest” content (read: cool illustrations and graphics). Somehow, the notion that the two can coexist in a single text (read: graphic novel or story) that tastefully blends the elements of storytelling with sophisticated visuals is still not an accepted one. This is unfortunate because as a result students may very well miss out on being able to dissect, critique, analyze, respond to, and enjoy many worthy works that are categorized in the comics section of a bookstore.

In my opinion, this “either-or”attitude results in somewhat of a vicious cycle: On one hand, publishers are nervous about featuring excerpts from works such as “American Born Chinese” by Gene Yang in their textbooks because they worry about the teachers‘ response -“Will he or she be able to handle student responses?” On the other hand, teachers are worried about introducing similar works to their students in the classroom as part of the curriculum because they don’t see them in textbooks, and therefore, don’t want to seem to be loosening curriculum standards.

As I was going through the T&W comics issue, I was struck by the many examples provided of how comics can open for readers and non-readers alike, writers and non-writers alike. There are some amazing people doing some incredible work out there in this field. [more below the fold] (more…)

We stopped by at Walden Pond on the way to Maine this past weekend. Though I’ve read Walden; or, Life in the Woods many more times than I can remember, I’ve actually never visited Henry David Thoreau’s home in the woods, the place where he spent two years and two months living alone, in a house he had built himself, earning his living by the “labor of [his] hands only” engaged in an experiment to experience a “life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” (After roughing it for those 26 months, Thoreau then spent nine years composing and revising his groundbreaking narrative about his experience.)

On the drive over, I sat in the passenger seat slowly flipping through and reading Thoreau at Walden, John Porcellino’s graphic novel interpretation of Thoreau’s story. Published by the Center for Cartoon Studies and Hyperion (2008), this brown and black ink illustrated edition brings Thoreau’s journey alive using carefully selected original text from Walden. The line drawings are spare and stark, allowing space for the crux of the philosopher’s words and ideas to come alive.

Porcellino is an astute editor who has culled and woven original language from Thoreau’s original, and organized it by the seasons into four sections: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Just before we pulled into the driveway of Walden Pond, I re-read the “Summer” section, where Thoreau breathes in and relishes the season that, for most of us, is nearly over: “Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day, for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days … and I spend them lavishly.” (That is exactly what I plan on doing for the remains of these warm summer days.)

If you’re wary of this book just because it’s a graphic novel, don’t be. There’s a terrific introduction by D. B. Johnson, author of the picture book Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, a key to quotation sources (linking readers back to the original text), and an annotated “panel discussion” section which provides further background about Thoreau along with anecdotal details about objects in the illustrations (for example, Thoreau’s three-legged table pictured on page 13 gives Porcellino the opportunity to tell us more about the furniture in his cabin in the woods). [plus a teachers guide] After all this, readers will no doubt be tempted to return to the original edition of Walden, as I was.

But beyond all this, what I love most about the book was its nimble execution of Thoreau’s credo of “Simplify! Simplify!” Porcellino really gets it. He has taken the essence of Thoreau’s philosophy and poured it into an 88 page “comic” where wordless panels convey the silence of Thoreau’s journey, where nature is a key organizational device (as it was for Thoreau’s daily living), and where one man’s personal epiphanies urge us to take pause and figure out a way to render them our own.

Check out this interview with John Porcellino at School Library Journal for more on his work process.