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International Cornucopia, Spring 2012: Three Books That
Shed Light on Current Events
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2012-03-18 21:04:31
Nearly a year ago, I answered an author friend’s invitation to write for a new children’s book review site called The Pirate
Tree, which focused on social justice and children’s literature. Along with four other authors, we have reviewed about a
hundred books over the past eleven months on topics related to the environment, economic justice and poverty, cultural
diversity, and peace, war, and refugees. Our reviews, published twice a week, are available at www.thepiratetree.com. Many
of the books we review are set in other countries. Some are historical novels and nonfiction books that shed light on events
in the news today. Others portray events that parallel what’s going on in the United States. Still others touch on universal
themes and experiences that cross borders. In this spring’s edition of the International Cornucopia, I offer three exemplary
titles, one for each of the above. Over the past year, we have seen many
images and articles on the Arab Spring, the struggle of ordinary people in the Middle East and North Africa against their
corrupt and despotic governments. The mostly nonviolent toppling of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt has received
perhaps the greatest amount of attention. Anna Perera’s The Glass Collector, recently published by Albert Whitman, gives
readers in middle school and up an important perspective. Aaron is a glass collector in contemporary Egypt, one of
thousands of Coptic Christians who collect Cairo’s garbage, carry it in horse-drawn carts to their squalid village on the city’s
outskirts, and sort and recycle it. The food waste accompanying the recyclable garbage is fed to the pigs in the village. An
aspiring artist, Aaron is obsessed with the beautifully colored glass at Omar’s perfume shop, and he begins to take not only
the damaged bottles that Omar sets aside for him but also the expensive filled bottles of perfume that he hopes to sell to help
his impoverished family. When his temperamental and nosy neighbor, Shareen, catches him and reports him to the priest, his
stepfamily casts him out as a thief, and he is forced to join his friend Jacob in the dangerous job of collecting and recycling
medical waste. Redemption comes in the form of Rachel, who takes care of the village’s ponies and who Aaron tries to visit
in the hospital after his abusive stepbrother runs her over with a motorcycle while showing off, and the sculptor Michael,
who acts as a mentor for the angry, confused youngster. This novel seamlessly weaves in facts about the Zabbaleen, the
Coptic Christians who are shunned but necessary in Egyptian society for their work as recyclers of garbage. Perera does a
good job of showing how the Zabbaleen took on this role (in the rural areas they were the breeders of pigs, a job that the
Muslim majority could not do), the impact of the swine flu hysteria, and the tension between traditional and modern garbage
collection. While immersing readers in the place and culture, she moves the story forward through the conflicts and intrigues
among the characters. Shareen, in particular, is an unfailing source of drama, from the tantrum she throws when her single
father arranges for her to be wed to a much older merchant believed to have a lot of money, to the series of disasters that
accompany the wedding festivities, and finally, to her escape to Cairo, where she is seen getting into the elegant car of a
much older man who really does have money. Above all, Perera immerses readers in a society struggling with extremes of
poverty and wealth, one of the principal causes of the uprising. In the past two years, immigration has become a hot-button
issue in the United States, with several states passing harsh immigration laws and vigilante groups patrolling the border.
Living in a large country with little coverage of the outside world, people in the United States may not know that other
countries have experienced large-scale immigration, and conflicts related to it. Civil strife and violent repression have driven
citizens of several African countries to South Africa, where they, like many immigrants from
Latin America, have been exploited in the workplace and targeted for vigilante violence. South African author Michael
Williams, who has written several sports stories for young readers, portrays a refugee from Zimbabwe in his powerful novel
Now Is the Time for Running (Little, Brown, 2011). When soldiers of dictator Robert Mugabe shoot nearly everyone in 15-
year-old Deo’s village in Zimbabwe because not enough of them voted for the ruling party in a rigged election, Deo flees
south with his developmentally disabled brother, Innocent, who is ten years older. After crossing the Limpopo River into
South Africa, the two evade robbers and hitch a ride with a white farm owner who employs them in conditions hardly better
than slavery. They fall prey to a coworker, a swindler who takes their meager earnings in exchange for a promised job but
dumps them in the middle of a Johannesburg slum, where they find refuge under a highway bridge—at least until a
xenophobic mob massacres dozens of immigrants. Two years later Deo, now totally alone, finds his way to a homeless
shelter and a soccer team that competes in the Homeless World Cup on the eve of the FIFA World Cup in South Africa in
2010. The novel is both bleak and inspiring, as Deo experiences unbelievable cruelty at the hands of fellow human beings
but finds his place through soccer and becomes an agent for peace. Stories of couples brought
together by love but threatened by their families’ enmities existed even before Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliet and
continue to enthrall readers. One of the most compelling that I have read recently is Cathy Ostlere’s Karma (Penguin, 2011),
a novel in verse set in India in 1984, in the days following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her
Sikh guards. Following her mother’s suicide, 15-year-old Jiva travels with her father to India to deliver her mother’s ashes to
their proper resting place. Jiva’s mother was Hindu, and her father is Sikh. Their religious differences forced them into exile
in Canada, cut off from their families; the experience of exile, their neighbors’ prejudice, and the bleakness of their
surroundings contributed to the mother’s depression and death. Jiva and her father return to New Delhi on the eve of the
assassination. In the massacre of thousands of Sikhs afterward, Jiva and her father are separated. Using the name Maya—her
mother’s name for her—Jiva ends up hundreds of miles away, saved by 17-year-old Sandeep who has his own story of
separation from family and adoption into a foreign culture. Ostlere’s characters are multi-dimensional and complex—parents
as well as teens—making this a novel that adult readers will appreciate as well. The unlikely relationship between Jiva’s
mother and father leads to her family’s exile and mother’s despair, but it doesn’t deter her from falling in love with someone
from a different culture. Like many idealistic young people, she seeks to find a way to overcome hatred and suspicion, to
forgive what has been done to her, and to choose love and hope over everything else. As she writes in her diary, “The young
are told to wait for emotions to catch up to the flesh but what if the moment is now? / Our yearnings ready to set us free
from sorrow and fear? / And besides, who will show the world the possibility of love, if it isn’t us?”
