This week, I read the books Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed and Malala and Iqbal: Two Stories of Bravery by Jeanette Winter. These stories are all about children who advocate for change for injustice in their lives.
Amal Unbound
This is the story of a girl named Amal who lived with her family and loved going to school. When Amal grows up, she wants to be a teacher and she loves to read books; however, there are not that many available to her in the girl’s classroom, so her friend Oman borrows some from the boy’s class to give to her to read. Amal’s mother was pregnant, and she was having some complications with the baby, so she was put on bed rest, this meant that Amal had to step up and help around the house because she is the oldest child. Soon, the baby came, and it was another girl. The family had been hoping for a boy to be able to look after the farm because girls have to move away from home to be with their husbands and they already had 4 other girls. Amal still had to step up around the house and stop going to school because after the baby, Amal’s mother experienced some postpartum depression, this was never explicitly stated in the book, but it seems reasonable to believe it because of what she was experiencing after birth. Since Amal had to step up, that meant more responsibility and that she was having to do just about all the housework with Parvin who her family employs to help around the house. One day she had to go to the market to get some groceries and she decided to sneak out and go by herself which she is not supposed to do. This was where she got hit by a car of Jawad Sahib which caused her groceries to go everywhere. Jawad got out of the car and started scolding Amal who didn’t know who he was and then tried to take her pomegranate which was the last one they had at the market and she decided that he couldn’t just come to town and take what he wanted so she told him no and ran away. However, the Sahib family is a very powerful family and the frequently abuse the people in the nearby villages where they live. So, Jawad went to her family’s house and demanded that her father pay him a bunch of money or he had to make his daughter, Amal, work for him until the debt is paid off. Amal’s father couldn’t pay, so Amal had to go work for the Sahib family as a personal aid to Jawad’s mother. Living there, she had some bad experiences and was frequently yelled at and even hit once. It wasn’t until Amal started going to a school one day a week and talking with her teacher when she was able to tell him the bad things Jawad and his father had done which finally got him taken away by the police. In the end, she was finally free after being brave and standing up for herself and the other people the Sahib family may be hurting.
Amal in this story in not someone who is a real-life person. The author, Saeed, was inspired by Malala who was a girl going to school in Pakistan who was shot for going to school after standing up for herself and other girls in her community by saying she deserves an education just like everyone else. You will hear more about her and her story in the second book I read this week. But the author of the first book was inspired by her story and the story of many others who are treated unfairly and are told that they cannot do something just because they are a girl, or just because it goes against what is believed to be “standard” or “right” in a community. Aisha Saeed would not be considered an Own Voices author for this book because from my research, she has not had these experiences herself and is writing more from an outsider perspective. However, she is Pakistani American, and it is clear through her writing that she had done research in order to make this piece more accurate and believable. You can also tell that she is very passionate about this and about people standing up for what is write through the ways in which she writes and makes you connect with and empathize with Amal.
For more about Aisha Saeed check out her website here.
Saeed also is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books which is a nonprofit organization that, “advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.”
Here is one video of Saeed talking about her book in the Global Read Aloud and answering questions that students and teachers sent into her to answer.
For more of these videos, got to this link and watch as she answers more videos that had been sent in and asked about Amal Unbound.
In this book, a lot of the characters were fairly passive and just accepted things for the way that they were and were either to afraid or didn’t know how to change things. There were many times when Amal would ask questions or challenge something and was immediately put down by others and frequently, she was told “life is not fair” this frustrated Amal, a lot. She didn’t like the way that things were and she didn’t think that just letting things slide and going with what was expected was not right, so she changed things. She stood up for what she believed in and even when things could have gone bad, she didn’t care. She stood strong and was brave. She was brave for all the characters she met in the story, everyone was fearful of Jawad and too scared to do anything against him because of the power he had. However, Amal was active and stood up for herself and what she believe was right and because of that, she was able to change the outcome of this book, she was able to be the hero of her own story. It shows the power that children can have, even when adults are pushing against her and trying to silence her, she did not care and was not going to stop because they told her to. She saw something wrong and she actively sought out a way to fix it.
This reminded me from a quote from chapter 5 of Reading to Make a Difference when the authors wrote, “Our experience has shown us that children see injustice more easily and more clearly than many adults do. Children are more likely to become incensed by conditions that they deem “not fair” children believe they can make a difference in this big wide world” (Laminack and Kelly, 2019). Not only do we get to see this in the character in the book, but I think that students reading this book will also show this. Children are very quick to point out things that are unfair in books they read, and this is for all ages. When I was student teaching in a kindergarten class whenever we read a book where a character was treated unfairly, the children were very quick to point it out. This book can give students the insight into a new experience that they may have never heard of or thought about and it gives then an outlet to talk and bring up things that are unfair. The conversations that students can have around this book and about this book would be very powerful. Students would really be able to connect with Amal and empathize with her as they read this book and therefor can lead to conversations about things we see on a regular basis that are unfair in our world and we could look into events like this that still happen today.
Another way that the chapter reminded me of this book was when the authors wrote, “Exposure to literature tapped into an existing knowledge based about the civil rights movement in the American South during the 1950s and 1960a. Further conversation and additional texts that Alyssa selected to stretch their knowledge transformed what they may have been a mirror into a window exposing the presence of segregation and racism in the United States” (p. 88, Laminack and Kelly, 2019). This made me think about how this book can reshape the preconceived biases that students have about people from Pakistan. I feel like often they are judged too quickly and are viewed in a negative light. However, this book is showing us a powerful story of a girl who just wants to be treated fairly, get an education, and become a teacher eventually. I think that it will break down some stereotypes that people may have about people who come from Pakistan and allow them to further their knowledge of the people who live there and struggles that they may be facing. I could see this book launching students into a research study about the people of Pakistan and learning their culture, which will lead to greater understanding and more informed students. Below is a link to more books that would also help to break down stereotypes about people from Pakistan.
Advocating for Change
In the chapter that we read for class, I really liked the idea of the Two-Voice Poem. I had not heard of it before and I think that it is a really great way to look at the lives of the different people Rosa Parks and Malala Yousafazi. Through this students are gaining greater understanding and comprehension of what they are reading they are having to use all these mental processes to conduct this very powerful writing. Below you can see the example shown in chapter of what two fifth graders wrote for their Two-Voice Poem. This poem speaks volume and would be a great activity to include in the class to have students try out. Going back to last week, I think it would be really neat to see students write a Two-Voice Poem for Isatou and Emmanuel and see how students compare and contrast those two characters. I also think that it would be interesting to see Yasmin from Book Uncle and Me and Amal from Amal Unbound portrayed in a Two-Voice Poem and I think that would lead to a really powerful poem of the strength those two characters have. Since the two books are on different reading levels, I could see pairing up two different classes for this activity and having younger students read Book Uncle and Me and have some older students read Amal Unbound and together the would have to talk about their characters to see what they had in common and what might be different about them. (Laminack and Kelly, 2019)
Malala, a Brave Girl from Pakistan/Iqbal, a Brave Boy from Pakistan: Two Stories of Bravery
This book is two stories in one. When you open in from one side, you get the story of Malala and then when you turn it around and open it from the other side, you get the story of Iqbal. Both of these children are real people and the author is portraying their stories/lives here in this book.
Iqbal:
Iqbal’s story starts out with his parents borrowing twelve dollars from a carpet factory owner and in return, Iqbal, who was four years old at the time had to work in the carpet factory to help pay back his parents debt. Iqbal was chained to the carpet loom so he could not escape, and he had to work in a dark room with only one window. In the factory, there were rows of children just like him all having to work. He would walk to the factory early in the morning and not get home until late at night, living everyday in the dark. Until one day on his way home, he saw a notice saying that what he was doing was outlawed and he was finally free. He was able to go to school and learn a lot and he started speaking out for other children like him. But he started receiving threats from factory owners. Those threats did not stop him, but one day he was shot and killed while riding his bike and many people mourned for him.
Malala:
Her story starts out with a Taliban fighter asking, “Who is Malala?” while looking into a school van. Then, on the next page, it starts to explain who she is. The author explains that Malala isn’t a girl who is afraid. The Taliban fighters tell girls in Swat Valley that they can’t go to school or read. However, they do it anyway because the girls are brave. Everyday, they broadcast a warning, but Malala starts to speak out saying that she has the right to education along with other important things. The girls start to wear their everyday clothes to school instead of their uniforms to outsmart the Taliban. Every time the Taliban push the people and try to control them, Malala fights back and speaks out. It started to become more and more dangerous for the girls to travel to school, so they start taking a van. One day, a Taliban fighter stopped the van and shot Malala. The van rushed her to the small hospital in the Valley, then a helicopter lifted her to a bigger hospital, and then a plan flew her across the ocean to an even bigger hospital where doctors worked very hard to save her. She survived her injuries and that didn’t stop her from still speaking out and challenging what the Taliban are doing in Pakistan.
In this book, Jeanette Winter is not writing from an Own Voices perspective. She is writing about two other people who she found inspirational. It is clear that Winter did do research into the lives of both of these people and worked to convey them as accurately as she could. Before going into each story, Winter has an Author’s Note at the beginning that explains some more background knowledge about these two people. It is written more so for an adult whereas the actual stories are written more for children and is easier for them to understand.
Additionally, before starting each of these two stories, Winter includes a quote from Rabindranath Tagore which is very powerful. It says, “Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless when facing them.” I thought that quote just fits perfectly with this book and the people who are being portrayed in it because both of them are fearless when making the wrongs of their world’s right. I was also interested to see who Rabindranath Tagore was. He was a poet who won a noble prize in literature in 1913. He was involved with the Indian nationalist movement and was at one point knighted by the British government, but he later resigned from that as a way to protest British control in India. For more information about him, click here.
Another thing that I thought was really interesting about this book was that Winter chose specific lines that were really powerful to change to a different color. These color changes happen when the characters are speaking directly, Winter puts their words in a different color. I think this carries a lot of meaning and shows the importance of the voices that children have. The adults talking in the stories, their words are black like the narration, so the voices of Malala and Iqbal really stand out against their and I think that speaks to the power that children can have. Earlier in this blog I talked about how Amal was a child but was able to create change when no one else was able to and when the adults were too scared to do anything about it. In this story, the children are not scared, then are angry with the way their lives are/were and they want to do something about it for the betterment of the people. Iqbal wanted to help other children like him and end this child labor. Malala just wanted girls to have access to education which is the right that they have as human beings. Here you can see two examples of the powerful words that Malala and Iqbal have which are shown in this book.
Another thing that I thought was really interesting was the kite showing up throughout the book. In Malala’s story, it shows up on just about every page. I think that the kite is supposed to represent freedom and the strength that she has to fight for that freedom. On the spread in the middle of the book before it transitions into Iqbal’s story, we finally see her holding the kite, on all the other pages, it shows it in the background. I think that her now holding the kite shows how she has taken control of things and now she is in control of her own life which she is using to make the world listen. In Iqbal’s story, he is holding the Kite at the beginning of the book when he was free with his family, but it goes away as he is forces into the factory. However, he does bring the kite back into his life into the carpet that he is weaving, and I think that is his way of trying to hold onto hope for better things to come. But then the kite disappears again and does not show back up until he is talking to the people in the crowds in America and they show up in the background as he is talking. This showing the power and bravery he has while speaking to the people to let them know what is happening. It also shows that he is using his freedom to better the lives of others and providing a voice to the voiceless. On the spread in the middle of the book, it looks as though he is letting go of his kite. This makes me think of his kite was with him all this time to provide him with the strength and bravery he needed to speak up, but now that he has passed, he is passing his kite along to let it find someone else to help them find their voice and speak out for the injustices of others much like he did.
For more website’s related to taking action look below:
Sources:
Laminack, L. and Kelly, K. (2019). Reading to make a difference: Using literature to help student speak freely, think deeply, and take action. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Saeed, A. (2018). Amal unbound. New York, NY: Nancy Paulsen Books.
Winter, J. (2014). Malala, a brave girl from pakistan/Iqbal, a brave boy from pakistan: Two stories of bravery. New York, NY: Beach Lane Books.
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