When I started reading to the children in my son’s elementary school classroom, I was a little worried. I could see the little tiles in the zoom classroom when I explained the theme I had planned out for that morning. I had planned Poetry and paired a fiction book by Dr Seuss with a non-fiction memoir by Margarita Engle.
My brain was doing a quick ‘Maybe’ check in the background: Maybe this was too much for them. Maybe I should have gone with a simpler theme. Maybe I should keep it simple and just switch to a sweet little book that everyone would feel comfortable and cosy with. I could’ve switched, but then I remembered the words of wisdom by E.B.White
Never write down to children – E.B. White
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.
More sound advice I have never heard in my life, for the children settled into the themes even if it was a little heavy going before the Thanksgiving holidays for them.
I had chosen a book by Dr Seuss, The Butter Battle Book. The book is a brilliant satire of nuclear weapons during the cold war. Dr Seuss’ brilliance was in full display. The book is about Yooks and Zooks: The Yooks eat their bread with the butter side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter side down. This leads to escalating differences and a long curvy wall is built between the two lands.
Soon, both sides start fighting by using weapons of increasing grandeur and magnitude starting from the Tough Tufted Prickly Snickle Berry Snitch to the Eight Nozzled Elephant Toted Boom Blitz. The book finishes with the Yooks and Zooks sitting on either side of a wall threatening to drop the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo, signifying the nuclear threat.
We discussed the long years of Cold War and how it was a true lesson in diplomacy that the two countries managed to keep from blowing us all up together. From there, we moved on to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then switched to the memoir, Enchanted Air, by Margarita Engle.
The author’s maternal side hails from Cuba, while her paternal side fled from the Ukraine – then a part of the USSR.
Dancing Plants of Cuba
In California, all the trees and shrubs
standstill, but on the island, coconut palms
and angel’s trumpet flowers,
love to move around,
dancing.
..
Maybe I will be a scientist someday
studying the dancing plants of Cuba
Her father’s family escaped from Ukraine, from a communist regime, not knowing whether those left behind survived or not. Her mother immigrated from Cuba.
Two countries
Two families
Two sets of words.
Her paternal grandparents’ recollections are therefore muted, brief and vague. How starkly, concisely, she sums up the human condition for survival? When she asks her Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood, she gets nothing more than ice-skating on a frozen pond.
Her maternal grandmother, on the other hand, regales her with richly detailed family stories, of many island ancestors, living their lives out on tropical farms.
In the poem, Kinship, she sums it up:
Apparently, the length
of a grown-up’s
growing up story
is determined
by the difference
between immigration
and escape.
In the poem October 1962, she writes about the standstill known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Grim news
Chilling news
Terrifying
Horrifying
Deadly.
…
US spy planes have photographed
Soviet Russian nuclear weapons
In Cuba.
…
Hate talk.
War talk.
Sorrow.
Rage.
The children looked sober and serious at the quiet tone of the poem. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. When asked for their opinions, they shared prescient observations, and looked stricken. I moved on quickly to the poem, Hope, that is the last poem in the book.
Hope
An almost war
can’t last forever.
Someday, surely, I’ll be free
To return to the island of all childhood
dreams.
Magical travel, back and forth.
It will happen.
When?
“By Jan 2015, independently announced by both countries, Cuba & USA restored relations . ” I said to the class.
There was a palpable air of relief in the room. The children cheered while their proud teacher beamed at them. The questions that followed left no doubt in my mind about how well the children had perceived the stories. The more I heard them discussing how important it was to patch up between human-beings, the more I felt comfortable in future diplomacy.
If only children could help counsel us, we would be far wiser.
Nourish-n-Cherish 