Of course, this is a very happy occasion for me, and I am grateful to all of you here
and not here who have made it possible.
I suspect it took a certain courage for those on the Caldecott Selection Committee to choose
shadow for a third medal.
I am grateful for their courage.
My publisher, Charles Scribner Jr., has trusted me through work on quite a few books by now,
and especially on this one.
Monica Brown-La Montagne, production manager at Scribner's, by her integrity and her
acute eye on proofs and press, assured the book of the look I had hoped for.
Dyneapon of Japan printed it beautifully.
Algaricman, the designer, and David Tovrisky gave it their meticulous care.
Leedy Drick, then my editor, from the beginning of my interest in blaze-sandras prose poem,
believed in the book, and had the grace and kindness to put no impossible pressure on me
while I allowed it to grow.
And I am more grateful than I can ever express to close friends.
They know who they are, who stood by me during a painful hiatus in my work on shadow,
and by their faith in me in the book, enabled me to finish it in strength.
I am especially happy that my being here coincides with your reestablishing this ceremony
as a banquet.
So once again, we break bread together.
I have attended several of these occasions, some up here, some down there.
Wherever one is, one cannot help but feel on this night a sense of celebration and pride
that we are all somehow one in work very much worth doing, despite occasional weary
dismals during the year.
A long time ago I found in Italy a little book of proverbs collected from various peoples
of Black Africa.
Their pithy pertinents can leaven my words.
Proverb.
It's true that I killed an elephant.
However, it's not true that I carried him home on my shoulders.
Have you looked down from a high hill or tower on traffic patterns around a well engineered
intersection?
Drivers trust each other.
They trust their own ability to drive and react quickly.
They trust the reactions of their own machines.
There are remarkably few accidents considering the number of vehicles on the roads.
They all seem held as it were in orbit by invisible threads of trust.
Proverb.
The tongue is a lion.
If you let it run free, it will eat you up.
Others often find themselves in an aronical position.
Much of what they say about their work has to be after the fact, because they think in
images, not words, yet if they can't talk, heaven help them.
Proverb.
When you hear a good talker, don't agree with him all at once.
What is hiding in the corner has not come out yet.
Many years ago, when I was a storyteller in the New York Public Library, I was fascinated
by a little book in the French collection of the Central Children's Room.
Petit Kant nagre pour les enfants des blonds, published in France in 1929, with semi-abstract
and somewhat sophisticated illustrations.
Marjorie Bianco translated that book and published in 1933, little black stories for little white
children, with handsome woodcut illustrations that suggested African wood carvings.
The one piece in the French of Blaise-Sandra that Mrs. Bianco did not translate was La
Fétischeuse or The Sorceress.
I have been haunted for years by the mysterious atmosphere created by Blaise-Sandra as he
evoked shadow, a spirit coming to life in firelight, wandering in and out of memory,
taking part in rituals that gave meaning to life, at times a mirror image of life.
Although the poem had been told more often to adults than to children, hauntingly by
Maria Chimino of the Central Children's Room, I felt that in the 1980s the prose poem might
have meaning for American children.
Because of awareness might be probed that might not have been reached so easily in 1933.
We have grown, and we have also suffered a great deal since 1933.
Perhaps we have learned something about ourselves.
A trip to East Africa in 1975 showed me a land of dazzling light that carved bold shapes
relentlessly against mysterious shadow, colorful rocks still displaying the scars of the
geological upheavals that had formed them, savannas of golden grasses and brilliant sunsets
before the sudden fall of night.
Proud peoples seemed caught between past and present, magnificent animals were both hunters
and prey, the shadow of scavengers hung greedy over the burning land.
One of my strongest impressions was one of timelessness, a kind of innocence in which
man lived with nature, in a way barely imagined by Western man.
My challenge, if I were to make a book of shadow as I had come to call the poem to myself,
would be to incorporate the images that had formed in my head from reading the poem, with
impressions gained from travel in Africa.
With records of anthropologists who had very recently tried to record ways of life that
are constantly changing and absorbing influences from other societies, and in some cases are
disappearing altogether.
I recognized another challenge.
To suggest the element of play with an idea that is implied in the text, I do not think
that Sandrar ever imagined himself to be recording a piece of ethnic literature, even though
shadow is told in a form suggestive of some kinds of storytelling prevalent in Africa.
Any more than Picasso's late Demozel Da Vinion incorporating impressions of African masks
professed to be a record of those masks.
It was a new creation.
Shadow was in no way to be a documentary performance.
Poets, children, and artists often delight in mixing the real and the unreal.
Intuitively aware that each feeds an understanding of the other.
I trusted children to understand many more emotional levels of shadow than the obvious.
Sandrar, and that was not his real name, was in Africa over fifty years ago.
He wrote of people living in pastoral and agricultural societies where nature was beneficent, but
it had to be appeased by ritual for the loss of vital forces taken from the earth.
The explosive energy of dance, of song, of storytelling, of all the components of ritualistic
ceremonies in which the whole community shared, restored these vital forces and equilibrium
was maintained.
Proverb.
No matter how calm the lake, in it there may be crocodiles.
I was quite aware of the possible non-acceptance of the book on an African subject because
I am white.
Also the book as I had conceived it would be very expensive to print and produce properly.
I gave my publisher every chance to be released from our agreement.
Scribner's decided to trust me and gave me possibly the best printing of all my books,
one that united tonalities that had been executed over many months, with a long interruption
in between.
Proverb.
If you've tried and vained a fish with the sea low, try to fish at high tide.
I wanted to make the book as vivid as I could to speak to any child regardless of color.
We all share fear, discovery, loss, and a sense of play.
At one time I toyed with the idea of photography as a medium for shadow.
I would work with images created by a trained dancer.
The book would have been very different.
I decided to work out my own images.
At one time I'd hoped to cut woodblocks for the pictures, arthritic pain in my hands
for bad that.
I think of African wood carvers as sculptors the peers of any in the world, regardless
of the original purpose of their carvings, not as works of art in the sense that we enjoy
them in museums, but as tools of ritual with enormous spiritual and evocative power.
The text was a poem.
A convention of black, stark, cut paper figures for people and animals could unify its many
episodes and avoid the individualization of character that would limit imagination.
I used the convention of the deep violet blue shadows I had seen at dusk in Africa to
suggest actual shadows.
I cut woodblocks and printed them in white on translucent paper to suggest memories,
spirit images, and ghosts.
The round-headed fang masks suggest that one new born may be closest to his ancestors.
A community consists of the ancestors, the living, and those yet unborn.
When I had completed half the illustrations I was forced to stop work for a year because
of illness.
I later worked out the method of blotting to suggest a lens scarred by the history locked
in its rocks.
Fragments of blotted paper were pasted together to build up the landscapes I remembered.
I conceived the book as a kind of day that starts with sunset, moving into night.
Probably because of the huge clouds of dust kicked up by running animals, sunsets in
Africa can be awesomely brilliant before a brief dusk.
The book moves through another day and ends again with the fire that brings shadow to life.
Since the book was not to be a literal record, I did not wish to limit it to any one group,
blotting in temperatures that can easily hover near 125 degrees Fahrenheit is apt to be
minimal.
But I also wish to show gesture, as probably the most vivid mode of communication among
the various members of the human family.
Badlay positions were suggested by my own numerous photographs taken in Africa, by recent
photographs taken by Laney Riefenstahl of the cow and nuba peoples, and those of Michiao
Yue, who spent years recording dance rituals of many ethnic groups in Africa before they
should pass from memory.
Proverb A beautiful neck has no need of a pearl necklace.
Translation is not retelling.
I decry and fear the growing tendency to think that a translator has the right to change
thought, intent, or style.
I made my own translation telling it over and over to myself, keeping in mind the shifting
image of a wonderful dancer storyteller, images darting from her pointed fingers.
When I read Shadow to Lee Diedrich, she immediately thought it could speak to children.
We were a bit optimistic in thinking that French editors would be more careful of old
records than we sometimes are.
It took Lee and her staff almost a year of writing back and forth to France before we
were able to ascertain ownership of rights and go ahead.
Proverb Children sing the song which they hear from their mother and father.
We know from the child deep within ourselves that children rarely speak of all they feel.
We often violate their privacy and urge them to expose inner feelings that are withered
in our scrutiny.
I have often trusted children to accept poetic truth when their elders were worried and
confused by terminology unfamiliar to them or were too literal of mind.
There are levels of response in children we often make no attempt to reach, so anxious
are we to cram their small skins full of practical skills and information.
We push them out of a time of precious reverie and inner growth at the price of stunted and
shallow adult inner life.
Worse, we're sometimes guilty of passing on to them fears, hates, all the baggage of
our own pain when there is often no need.
In generation of twenty years can change mental climate a good deal.
Proverb Today and tomorrow are not the same thing.
The book was to be published as a children's book.
Even though I never thought it for very young children, I felt that children would expect
to find children in the illustrations.
Along with dance, storytelling was often part of a ritual ceremony taking place in an open
space in the village, attended by the inhabitants old and young.
I showed an audience of children for the storyteller, who tells his animal tales and passes
along to his listeners the lore and wisdom of their society.
Shadow is often paradoxical.
Playing with his idea, Sandra moves back and forth from the shadow seen and known to the
child as playmate, a accompaniment to all that lives in light, and shadow unseen, the
ancestral past, the spirit that lives after life, after light, after fires are quenched.
In no way did I wish to make a literal picture of African life, and indeed what picture book
could undertake to show honestly, the incredible diversity of a huge continent.
Thousands of pastoral peoples are not those of the forest, still less those of the cities
that have grown so remarkably in the last half century.
I would have to range as freely as the poet.
On the title page a child steps out of her shadow, giving a backward look to the powerful
ancestral images of the past.
The ritual dance masks are some of the strongest possible means for instilling awe and reverence
for ancestral spirits.
They absorb and control and energy released by the death of living creatures, and make
that energy available as a good, rather than a surrender to chaos.
When making the boi mask from upper Volta, I worked until that mysterious transferral
of spirit could take place, the leap from the spirit of the artist into the thing created.
The evocation of spirit existing in the husk of an artist's creation is unmistakable
when it occurs.
The results of concentration and utter submergence of mind into material.
A child awakens in the night, perhaps for the first time startled at the thought, what
if I am not, and feels the whole of nothingness, the negative of all positive?
In Africa as Joseph Campbell has written, ash is the key to the sacred.
Ash, what is left after fire, after growth, after purification, becomes the eyes of shadow.
A child lifts a stone and uncovers shadow people squirming in the shock of light.
A boy child who adhants so gale at noon is lost.
Joseph sits heavy on the heart in the evening, as a child seeks to comfort the grandfather
who has lost his hunter's son, his warrior son, and the poet sings with his loot to their
joy, sings to their grief.
Proverb, if a village burns all see the smoke, but if the heart is in flames, no one notices.
Years ago I told some of Sandra's stories to children.
I knew their power.
My first chance to use the book shadow with children came last year before the book was
published.
I showed slides of my pictures and read the poem aloud to a second grade class in a public
school in a nearby town.
The children were of many nationalities, many colors, half of them boat people from Laos,
Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Many had recently lost family members.
Some were gifted in art, such as Puvan, MacMarcoth from Laos, whose picture of a blackbird
among little yellow-green orchids hangs on my studio wall.
Eddie Pacific, who wrote, were we excellent when we read our stories?
Ruth Ashby, who wrote, you told us we were casting a shadow on you, you will remember
us, won't you?
And Paul Arbitelli, who wrote, I'd like to be an artist because it's peace.
As I read, shadows flickered over their faces.
Proverb.
Fruits do not shake off by themselves.
Someone is under the tree.
Vituperations tell a great deal more about those who utter them than about the work attacked.
All for-pointed experts are often people who are distinguished, for their ignorance,
as well as their arrogance.
Their eagerness to take up cudgles for causes they appear barely to understand often seems
to be purely careerist in intent.
They need not concern us here, in their words it best be forgotten.
My concern is for the people who do have an emotional stake in conflicts that confront
us, who have suffered real pain, and understandably do not wish the children they teach to suffer
the same pain.
They feel a passionate responsibility to protect children from stigma that is unjust.
I would hope that they might also interpret their responsibility as one of leading children
away from facile, indignant labels of stereotype into a feeling of pride in a distant background
of which we are just beginning to perceive the worth.
Works of art from this background have proudly taken their place all over the world.
Were they fashioned by so-called primitive people, these exquisite and powerful objects
with such subtlety and finesse of surface, with the inner power that only true works of
art possess, I think not.
Regardless of whatever fad in art is having its heyday, art history has sifted out those
works endowed with spirit, not photographic finish, nor the product of art like copying
of nature.
Western men and his arrogance has left a wake of bruised peoples around the world.
The seeking of power demands of putting down to build oneself up.
We're learning that what might have appeared long ago to be a meager, spiritual, and physical
diet was far more sound than the endlessly diluted, manipulated, fair we sometimes put
up with because we think we have no control over it.
In the paradoxical reverse psychology, astrotist, recognize, Western men has envied the wealth
of those he chose to label primitive, feared them because their lives were different, and
eventually hated them because he had mistreated them.
We are now in a position of learning wisdom from people we had been taught to think of
as primitive.
Could children nearer and heritage to those roots be taught pride in them?
Many of the rest of us bear in our heritage the shame of what merits the words bestial,
even satanic, certainly in human.
A drop of water can be the beginning of a deluge.
Why must we cling to the mental fix that an idea presented to a child be law forever
after?
Why is one example immediately frozen into an archetype, or a stereotype?
Do we really understand just what that word means?
Where do our cliches come from, if not from fact?
A lie can produce flowers, but not fruit.
How are we to enable children to explore different modes of thinking and feeling if we exclude
what we in our literalness cannot accept?
There are those with wounds still open from hurt some of us hardly imagine, who are hypersensitive
to any wind that seems harsh to barely healing flesh.
Their expressions of dismay are honest.
I ask them for their trust.
Proverb.
He who keeps asking and asking will not get lost.
This year, Julia McCray published for Watts a beautiful and unaffectedly wise book by
a great artist, the singer Janet Baker.
It is a journal of her last year of singing and opera.
It is late for yourselves her references to listening into those of looking.
The power of art is a person to person communication.
It is meant for one ear, one heart at a time, one's own.
What is revealed is unique and cannot be got vicariously from listening to the remarks
and opinions of others.
One must drink at the life giving fountain for oneself.
What is tasted there depends on the individual.
For the performers, another sort of life and death struggle is going on.
Our concern is how well we have prepared to do the job mentally, physically, spiritually.
Only we can know this and even then partially.
All we can do is try our best at a particular moment, but it must be the best, nothing else.
Proverb.
Tasting the fruit, think with gratitude of who planted the tree.
Politicians and their ambitions notwithstanding, the more we learn of the mythologies of the
world, the more we learn of the one creature, man.
The great themes of his fears, his imaginings, his worship, are legion and universal.
As Joseph Campbell says in the prologue to his first volume in the Masks of God series,
and though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally
scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately
reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motives, variously selected
and ritualized according to local need, but revered by every people on earth.
Come down from the height and watch the cars, cougars, skyhawks, thunderbirds, cobras and
rabbits.
We still keep our totemic distinctions.
We are still tribal in our allegiances, in our exclusions from our own state of blessedness,
and our mistrust of those we exclude.
We are entering a period forecast hundreds of years ago, one that will probably be cerebral,
calculated, terribly competitive for material gain, or material survival, depending upon
who and where you are.
A great deal that is very precious to us may mean next to nothing to this coming generation
and those following, but our joy must be and going forward, trusting each other in the
children we serve, sharing the common purpose of recognizing the spark of life that can ignite
and nourish spirit.
Isn't that why we are here?
Africa is slowly stepping out of its shadows.
At time that we stepped out of our shadows.
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