Process Talk: Samina Mishra on Being an Ally to Children
I first encountered Samina Mishra’s work when I read Hina in the Old City. It’s a picture book about the life of 10-year-old Hina who lives in the old walled city of Delhi and comes from a family of zardosi, traditional embroiderers. I was struck by the warmth of the writing and the careful attention to the small details of a child’s life. Years later, Samina’s still writing into the heart of reality with compassion and warmth. I’m delighted to be talking to her about her latest books from Penguin India.
[Uma] In Jamlo Walks, you’re honoring the lives of real children placed in tragic situations. In Nida Finds a Way, you bring children’s voices into focus in the context of what some might see as grownup issues. Talk about why you wrote each of these books and how each has grown you as a writer.
[Samina] I think children’s literature needs to reflect the world, like all literature. Children are part of the world, and though we place the burden of the future on children, we don’t recognize enough the fact that they experience, absorb and struggle with challenges in the world just as adults do. I am grateful for the work I do because it affects how I am in the world, with children and young people. I strive to be an ally to children – I’m not sure I’m always successful because it is easy to slip into the conventional adult role, driven by stereotypical notions of how children should be brought up. But I try and one way to do this is to consistently interrogate myself in my creative practice. A key aspect of my practice is making room for children’s voices, in my writing and film work as well as in the teaching space. Both Jamlo Walks and Nida Finds a Way are attempts to do that.
The pandemic has been the biggest event of our generation and I don’t know how we are going to emerge from it. Though last year’s lockdown provoked responses from across the world – there were so many short videos about emptied cities and silent streets, songs that spoke of this moment, writing - we are still to make sense of how it has impacted us. Jamlo Walks came from this unprecedented time in our lives. When the migrant labour started walking back because the cities that had used their labour had turned inhospitable to them in a matter of 4 hours, we saw the naked ugliness of humanity which treated them as non-persons. When I read the report of Jamlo walking back but not making it home, it broke my heart and I thought of how children would make sense of such tragedy that they are actually living a time of – they have all suffered in different ways and I thought it was important to create room for those conversations. Literature can help us to see our own experiences differently and help us to make connections with other lives.
Nida too came from a similar space – the need to create representations of Muslim children that were not about their being Muslim, to help make connections and see how different children’s lives intersect in the everyday experiences such as those that emerge from the parent-child relationship. So I set it in the neighbourhood of Okhla that I live in whose residents are mainly Muslim. I had started writing it before the anti-CAA protests and it was about a curious girl wanting to climb trees and ride a bicycle and her over-protective father. But when the neighbourhood transformed with the protests and the presence of children at the protest sites became something that was being used to discredit the protest, it had to become part of the story and so ironically, the Muslim identity became a thread in the story.
I think writing both these books has reinforced my belief in children’s literature drawing from the world - these are both big events that children have lived through and so literature for them must reflect that. Working on Jamlo particularly forced me to ask myself difficult questions about who the reader would be, how to write about her experience when I was locked into my own little space and only had second-hand reports to go by, how to build empathy and not be didactic. I am grateful for how they have sharpened my articulation of the role of children’s literature and hopeful that they help me to be an ally of children. I finished writing Nida during the first lockdown, when the pandemic forced all the anti-CAA protest sites to close. It felt like a loss, certainly the government saw it as a victory. But the book ends with hope because we have to believe that citizens of this country will choose to be inclusive and reject discriminatory policies. We have to do all we can to give our children a better world.
[Uma] More on both titles soon. Thank you, Samina!
