| From
the November/December 2006 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
One by One
 ord
knows we weren’t trying to publish a multicultural
issue. When Barbara Bader proposed writing about Verna Aardema,
all I could think of was how any of Aardema’s books were a
gift of pure genius to a children’s librarian needing to pull
together a foolproof story hour. I loved Janet Wong’s submission
for its humor and bristling opinions, and Lelac Almagor intrigued
me with an e-mail about her “Mary Sue” project. And
(except for Michael Heyman) who knew that Anushka Ravishankar, the
author of Tiger on a Tree, had so much else to say?
I didn’t notice until we were mocking up
the table of contents page that when you put all these distinct
articles together, they spell out the much-bandied, frequently abused
(and periodically declared dead) m-word. It’s a word for which
I’ve never had much patience, primarily because its use in
the children’s literature field is too often euphemistic or
bullying. Is a book really “multicultural” just because
its characters are Latino? (That’s the euphemizing.) Is a
book not “multicultural” if the author is white? (That’s
the bullying.) The word has been overused and under-thought.
But the articles in this issue give me hope. They
each implicitly recognize that questions about “who can write
about whom” and “cultural authenticity” are the
easy ones, too readily answered by platitudes and dogmatism. The
harder and more rewarding questions are those that spring from experience
lived, not labeled. When a midwestern white storyteller connects
with children of all colors through African folklore, or an Asian
American poet finds inspiration in the junk food “culture
of salt and oil,” or an African American fifth-grader looks
for herself in an all-white fantasy novel, lives and literature
are creating each other word by word and person by person. And,
reader by reader, these accretions offer an authentic multiculturalism
that is worthy of its name.
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