Bronx Masquerade not so Bronx??

Several interesting topics were discussed this week during our class on African American Children’s Literature and the book Bronx Masquerade. One topic I found particularly interesting dealt with the language of the book. The question was brought up of whether or not the language portrayed in the book gave an accurate representation of how high school students in the Bronx talk?! In my opinion the language is far too clean and is in no way truly authentic to the high school environment. Now there might be an innocent intention in this depiction. Would this book have been published or win any diversity awards if it contained curse words? Probably not! However, I wonder which is more important: accurate language depiction or curse word free literature? Now I am in no way advocating the obnoxious use of offensive curse words around young children. Yet, curse words are a very realistic aspect of young culture, especially in high schools. Just walk down the halls of any high school in-between classes and you will know what I mean. I believe this book gives readers a false sense of what goes on in an inner city high school by leaving out any dirty language usage. Therefore, I believe it fails to accurately represent the life and struggles of African American students in the Bronx. I believe adding some instances of curse filled language would make the book more realistic and passionate. The language is definitely not extreme enough!

Habibi

Hello All! There was definitely a lot of good thought provoking discussions during out class meeting this week! For instance, during my group’s discussion on Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye, we discussed how two people from one culture can have differing views and opinions on a given topic. This occurrence was evident between Poppy and his mother Sitti. By placing this idea within the novel, Nye can begin to show readers how not everyone from the Arab culture thinks the same way. I also thought this could be helpful when dealing with stereotypes about other cultures. When we understand that people belonging to the same culture can and do encompass differing beliefs and ideas, we hopefully can also see how inaccurate that makes hurtful stereotypes.

We also related our discussion back to the insider vs. outsider issue discussed last Wednesday in class. The question was brought up as to whether Liyana was an insider or an outsider to the Arab culture. It would seem Liyana should be considered an outsider based on the idea that most of the Arab world was completely foreign to her. However, Liyana’s heritage is half Arab, which might lead some to conclude Liyana as an Arab culture insider. For me, this is a question I am still unsure about, although I am leaning towards the outsider perspective. This is mainly based on Liyana spending all of her youth in America and her resistance to many customs of the Arab culture.

Lastly, I am beginning to see the overall purpose of Children’s Literature 448. I did not really know what to expect coming into this class. Maybe, I was hoping for all the answers to many complicated questions about diverse Children’s Literature. Or a list of “good” and “bad” books for the classroom. But I discovered it is more about learning strategies to accurately identify positive Children’s Diversity Literature. It reminds me of the common saying “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever!” This class is not about finding all the answers right now. It is about searching out better ways for us as educators to recognize and bring accurate and respectful diversity literature to our future classrooms.