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You and Yours - Transcript 大象传媒 Radio 4 |
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TX: 21.03.08 - Portrayal of Disability in Books PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 大象传媒 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON If you buy children's books or if you see your children or grandchildren's school reading materials then you'll know that ethnic minorities feature in the illustrations and the story lines. When it comes to characters with disabilities though they can still be pretty hard to find in the pages of most children's books. Two big research and awareness campaigns, funded by among others the Roald Dahl Foundation and the National Lottery are working on it. Alexandra Strick is involved in both projects, the first aimed to give children a voice in the way that disability is portrayed in their books. Well earlier I asked her what this research involved. STRICK Well this was a project which I ran for the national independent charity Booktrust and it was really aiming to ask children what they thought about disability in books, so we sent information to every school across the country and we also arranged a series of workshops and consultation sessions. ROBINSON Was that across England or across the United Kingdom? STRICK Across most of the UK. And we were talking to over 200 individual children in the end but also collecting information and comments and letters and views from children and schools right across the country. ROBINSON And what did the children think? STRICK Well not surprisingly, I suppose, they felt there were nowhere enough images of disabled people in children's books at the moment. The number of books that children could name which included disabled characters could normally be counted on one hand. So there was really a very powerful message coming to us from these children that there's something not quite right here, there's quite a serious imbalance in the way disabled people are pictured or not in books. ROBINSON But why did the children think that there should be people with disabilities included in books? STRICK I think they felt, first and foremost, that books just don't actually reflect society as it is. So at the moment there's a very large number of disabled children in the country and it's a growing number. So what they're really asking for is just that that true reflection of society can be seen in books. ROBINSON How many - what proportion would it be then if you were to do the portrayal fairly? STRICK Well I think something like 1 in 20 children is disabled. ROBINSON I read the report that you prepared at the end of this project and some of the things that the children said they were quite revelatory weren't they and some were very moving? STRICK Yeah very much so. I think the overriding feeling was that books really exacerbate the impression that somebody who's disabled is different, I know that's not really a ground breaking observation but I think it's a very, very important one. A lot of children talk emotively about the feelings they already had, of feeling isolated, feeling left out. One of the boys I spoke to who has cerebral palsy said I don't like people feeling sorry for me or being sympathetic and trying to give me special treatment, it's like you have to wear a different costume from everyone else, sometimes I just want to fade into the crowd more. And I thought that's very powerful and it's just wanting to be the same as everyone else. So I think there's a slight risk in books, and certainly traditionally, to equate disability with extremes. So you're either a villain or a martyr and there's not much ground in between. ROBINSON Well I want to come on to your current research project in a few moments but first I want to go to Diane Whitley, who is a writer for children's television, and she's just published her first novel, it's about a boy of nine whose grandmother is disabled, first by a lung disease and then by a stroke. And the little boy's initially so horrified by the change in her that he thinks his real nana has been taken away and replaced by an alien. Diane Whitley read for us an extract if you would. WHITLEY Okay, this is the bit where he goes to visit his nana in the hospital for the first time: Clip As we walked into the ward the noise got louder and louder, it was coming from a little side room. The door was open and that's when I saw her - the woman, the creature. She looked a bit like my nana I suppose but I knew deep down that it wasn't her. Her hair was all over the place, she wasn't wearing her glasses, she didn't have her false teeth in and she was just wailing and thrashing around on the bed. A nurse was trying to get her to put an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth but she didn't want to wear it. Dad looked as shocked as me. "Hilda?" he said. Hilda is my nana's name. The nurse looked up then. She smiled sadly and said: "Hilda's having a bad day today, I'm afraid". And then the nurse came out of the room, leaving the wailing crying person lying on the bed. ROBINSON Diane Whitley, tell us how this book came to be written. WHITLEY It's actually a deeply personal book, it's actually based on my own mum who was a nana and a great nana to many and basically she had a rare lung and heart condition called pulmonary hypertension, which not many people have heard of. Often people die not of the pulmonary hypertension itself but of added complications such as heart attack or, as in my mother's case, she had a stroke which was a complication of the original illness. And it was when we were visiting my mum in hospital and it was quite a shock for me seeing how changed she was, how the stroke had changed her, I mean we'd watched her suffer with the pulmonary hypertension, she was using a wheelchair towards the end, but then the physical changes of the stroke were just quite shocking to us as adults. And I suddenly realised just how little we were telling the younger members of the family. And it was after she died and you sit going through the grieving process, I was lying in bed one night and thinking about it, and I just thought did we tell them anything, did we explain what was going on properly? And the whole point really of the book is how we don't talk enough to children and explain what's going on. ROBINSON I want to bring another writer into the discussion now - Lois Keith, she's written for children, one book A Different Life is about a teenager who has to adapt to life in a wheelchair; for younger children she's created a picture book Being in a Wheelchair; she's written about disability in children's literature and is also, as it happens, disabled herself. When disability features in the plot of a book for children how is it best done in your view? KEITH Well it's a very complex and interesting question and of course what you want is a whole load of books which all deal with it in different ways. And I suppose I have some key things. First and foremost are the kind of criteria that you'd apply to any sort of children's books - they're engaging, they're funny and serious, they have things in them that make you want to look at the world in a different way or they have things which you do know about but want to understand better and I suppose you want it to avoid all the clichés that are very much a part of how we see disabled children in stories. And I particularly like books that don't use the cliché of having the disabled child who gets out their wheelchair to fly. ROBINSON Well perhaps this would be a good moment to hear what some young readers think. We sent our report Brian James to a children's bookshop, Simply Books, in Bramhall in Cheshire. He spoke to the bookshop owner, Sue Steel, who was overseeing a regular meeting of her book review group. STEEL My name's Sue Steel and I'm co-owner of Simply Books in Bramhall in Cheshire. We're an independent bookshop, about 10 miles south of Manchester and we're currently Independent Bookshop of the Year for the North of England. JAMES How do you say, from your experience, how discerning are the children that come into your bookshop? STEEL I think the children are very discerning actually, I think they do look at what they're choosing, there are authors that they really enjoy but I do think they take a lot of time when they're choosing their books and they know what they do and don't like. I actually have several groups of children who are book reviewers here and I write a monthly column in the Bookseller reviewing children's books. Well here we are at Book Reviewers' Club and this time we've done something different from what we usually do, haven't we. So normally we'd be looking at books before they were published and reviewing them and I know that this time I asked you all to take away a book to look at yourselves, something that I'd chosen for you to look at, which has a theme within in it which is to do with disability or illness and I know that you've all been busy reading them and it's going to be really interesting to see what you thought about them. So Gaby, I gave you Hurricane Wills by Sally Grindley to look at didn't I, what did you think? GABY Well I thought it was a very good book but with a very slow beginning and sometimes it was quite difficult because you're reading it from somebody else's point of view who's got a brother who's got ADD, so it was quite difficult hearing his point of view. It made me feel quite sad at some bits because if you had that disability you wouldn't really want to have somebody writing about it. STEEL Now Sophie, I picked out a picture book for you, what were your first impressions of that book? SOPHIE Well it didn't really look very interesting and it looked a bit sad and boring and a bit dull. STEEL Which book is it that you were reviewing? SOPHIE I read Private and Confidential by Mason [sic] [Marion] Ripley and Colin Backhouse. STEEL So when you did read it how did you find it? SOPHIE I thought it was really good. It was about someone being blind and they're having to read by Braille and it had some Braille in it so it really involved the reader when we could like find out what it said. STEEL And Charlie, now you had a novel as well and quite a famous book actually Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon. Now when I asked you to read this book you said you'd seen it on the shelf before, didn't you, but you'd never picked it up, why was that? CHARLIE I thought it looked quite babyish and not really the sort of book I like because I usually like action books and so once I had read it though it's been definitely worth reading and I'd like to read more books like this. STEEL So what particularly did you like about it? CHARLIE Just the point of view he's got and the different view on the world he has, it's completely different to ours. SOPHIE My name's Sophie and I'm 10 years old. I like quite girly sort of real life books. I don't really like books about death much because I don't really like the sort of action books but I don't really mind reading about disabilities. JAMES Do you find you can relate to the characters that have these disabilities? SOPHIE Sometimes, it depends what disability it is. But people that are blind, like I've read the book about blindness, I can't really relate to it very much. JAMES Do you think it's a good idea to bring in those issues into books, children's books? SOPHIE I think it's a really good idea because I can understand more about the disabilities. CHARLIE I'm Charlie and I'm 12 years old. JAMES What do you think about the idea of bringing in characters with disabilities, illness or characters who die? CHARLIE I think it's a good idea because a death in a story can change the plot greatly or disabilities can sort of make them seem more realistic because quite a lot of people have disabilities and if they're not in there then it doesn't seem right. ROBINSON The views of some children at the Simply Books bookshop in Cheshire, part of a regular reading group. Diane Whitley, is your book, as you see it, a straightforward children's read or is it more as a resource, something that a parent might introduce to a child if that child was in the situation of the child in the narrative? WHITLEY I hope it works on both levels. I mean I really do hope that any child could pick up the book and read it and enjoy it. But yes I think - I think when I was writing it I did have in mind that it could be a resource, that it could be used. It deals - it also deals with death and dying, I mean the nana in the book is actually dying and the little boy has to come to terms with that. ROBINSON Lois Keith, do you think that books exploring painful subjects like this are suitable for all children? KEITH Yes I do, I don't think it's the painfulness that's the difficult thing, I think it's how it's handled. I think - you know a writer writing for children has a responsibility to have some kind of resolution or some kind of hope at the end and I think a really gloomy book which ends in an unresolved way is scary and it doesn't really fulfil the purpose that a good children's book should do. ROBINSON Alex Strick, how do publishers regard books that feature disability, did they see them as a niche interest or is the search on to find the next Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time? STRICK I mean I think there is a slight tendency for people who work in books, who edit or publish books, to question why you're including a wheelchair or a hearing aid if it's not for a key reason, it's not part of the plot and I think well what I'd like to do is just more books which do that naturally, which just happen to have a character who is disabled in it. And I think publishers are still trying to get used to that idea a little bit and I also think there's a slight worry about getting it wrong, that I think people in the book world would be very cautious about including something that they weren't an expert in themselves. ROBINSON Lois Keith? KEITH Yes I think that's right, I think there is a slight tendency to think we've done it once, you know we've had - we've got a book about disability so we don't need another, we need a different kind of book. ROBINSON Alex Strick, I said at the beginning of this discussion that I'd come on to your latest piece of work later and this is a project called In the Picture. It's organised by the charity Scope but the money's come from lots of different sources, including the National Lottery. Tell us what it is you're doing this time. STRICK Well yes this is really a three year campaign to raise awareness of the need for these positive images, particularly in early years books, so we're looking very much at picture books. And I think there can be a tendency just to either avoid the subject altogether, as we've earlier, or to address it as an issue but not just to simply include disabled people throughout all the images that we see all the time in children's books and it's actually not that difficult to do and there are the resources there thankfully, we're starting to find resources like Scope's brilliant website in the picture website ... ROBINSON Yes I wanted you to talk about that website because it's a website you can visit and you can see illustrations by some leading children's illustrators showing disabled characters, tell me about that. STRICK That's right. I mean there's been some interest, thankfully, from writers and illustrators who are very, very keen to rectify the situation, help us make sure these images are out there. And they're trying things out, they're wanting advice on how to get it right and they're then trying it themselves and putting it on to the website. And the website also includes children's own illustrations and stories, to really help people understand better and try and get these images into books. ROBINSON There are also some amusing illustrations, aren't there, where children have created illustrations in the style of their favourite illustrators and sometimes they're very accurate. The one that made me laugh is the one - is it Debbie - how do you say her name Debbie [name], yes, she does the thing about the foxes, the big fox and the little fox, and there's a little fox with a hearing aid but it's so like her drawings. STRICK It's fantastic, I mean we were overwhelmed by some of these images and great to see children actually helping us, as adults, understand these things and helping us know how to get it right. ROBINSON Since we've come to the end of the discussion I thought this might be a good point to ask you to suggest a children's book where disability features that you regard as being very good. Lois Keith? KEITH Well one that I really, really love is - there are two books really, two parts but they're both very short, admirably short and funny and moving - are Morris Gleitzman, who's an Australian writer and they're called Sticky Beak and Blabber Mouth, I think Blabber Mouth comes first. And they're wonderful, funny books and they have a central character who can hear but she can't speak and he takes all kinds of conventions in these sort of stories, like the school project, which is usually a terribly worthy and often rather dull convention by which a non-disabled child learns so much about the disabled child and becomes a better person and he understands all of those things and he turns them on their head. And her voice is so strong, Rowena her name is, and her dad is so completely embarrassing and it's just a lovely, funny book. It gets right to the heart of what it would be like to be her. ROBINSON Diane Whitley? WHITLEY I'm a big fan of Morris Gleitzman as well and also enjoyed Benjamin Zephania's Face. And I suppose my own book written in the first person was very much inspired by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. ROBINSON What did you like about that? WHITLEY I loved the fact that it was written in the first person and just that you really - I suppose because I'm a dramatist you see I very much - I get into the heads of characters and write from the character's point of view. And I just really got inside that boy's head. ROBINSON Alex Strick? STRICK Ooh I really love the London Eye Mystery Siobhan Dowd, I don't know if you've read that one, but fantastic... ROBINSON I haven't but it's on the shelf. STRICK Oh lovely, lovely mystery, full of sort of brilliant humorous relationships and just happens to have a lead character who has Asperger's Syndrome. I'm also reading at the moment a book called Me and Marilyn by Shanta Everington, which is about a learning disabled young woman. And for younger ones I think I'd really recommend things like Pippa Goodhart's Maxine and Minnie books which are - I mean we talked earlier about books which just happen to include wheelchair users and Maxine just happens to use a wheelchair, which is fantastic. ROBINSON Alexandra Strick, Lois Keith and Diane Whitley speaking to me a little bit earlier. And we'd love to have your nomination of a good book for children where disability features and there'll be links on our website to Alex Strick's research and information on all the books that we mentioned in that discussion later on today. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external websites |
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