Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
My writing for children is the least known part of my literary activities, yet it remains very important to me. No one thinks of me as a children's writer except those children who at one time or another attended my plays The Escapades of Kuku or Children Entered Parliament., or else those who followed my 33- episode television serial, Children in the United Nations. And this little known interest of mine goes back to the 1940s in London, when my son was born and I began to acquire books and follow radio programmes for his benefit. They infatuated me.
As my son grew up I followed the development of what has since come to be called children's culture. And on arriving in Egypt some 12 years after I first went to England, I was intent on making a contribution to children's literature. An opportunity presented itself in 1967 when former Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha established the Advisory Bureau of Children's Culture and asked me to supervise its office. Immediately I gave up my excellent job as deputy secretary- general of the Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Afro- Asian Writers Movement.
What brought back these memories was an Independent Review review article about the introduction of a Children's Laureate, a lifetime's achievement award for children's writers and illustrators. This position, which originated in 1998 thanks to the late poet Ted Haghes, "carries with it certain public-spirited obligations to promote the gentle art of kid-lit", Joanna Briscoe writes. Yet Michael Morpurgo, who recently acquired the title, "inhabits some murky region of almost-recognition", even though he has produced 94 books, many of which were translated into some 26 languages. He will spend his two years as Children's Laureate, he said in an interview, working hard "to lift children's literature in the eyes of both children and adults. To bang the drum a bit and blow the trumpet when necessary." Confronted by the fact that children's literature is a boom business, garlanded with news headlines and £1 million advances, Morpurgo adds, "I think the children's writers who are known are either the ones who are dead, or they're writers who have done what's called crossover. The point of the children's laureate is to try to focus on all these people who write wonderful stories..."
In the same interview Morpurgo brings up an important point: that it was his mother who instilled in him "a great love for the sound of words", while school, he says, "had made me very frightened of all that, and literature and stories became very desiccated and withered for me." The writer worked as a teacher, and he would tell children stories out loud in class. "And I found they listened," he goes on. He is no big fan of the fantasy genre but he tends "to take things that are factually true and then tell a big lie. The key to writing for children is not to write for them," he insists. "You just write your story, you tell your tale." A children's writer, in other words, must be a good story teller.
Morpurgo believes he is not yet "firmly lodged in the general public -- or at least inadult consciousness" because "most children's books are known by their title, not their author." And his advice to would-be children's writers: "The important thing for an adult is that you don't lose the sense of the child in you. I think the adults who are most interesting to me are the ones who know perfectly well that the child in you is your soul, and you'd better keep it." Writing aside, Morpurgo has founded a charity with his wife, an organisation entitled Farms for City Children. An estimated 50,000 children from 100 inner-city schools have so far undergone "the life changing experience" of spending time in one of their three farms. For that alone Morpurgo deserves to be hailed as a children's hero.
