Month: November 2016
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The Big Questions
Contributed by SF Said
I write children’s books because I believe they’re the books that change people’s lives.
My favorite book as a child was Watership Down by Richard Adams. I re-read it as an adult, trying to understand why I’d loved it so much. More than a thrilling adventure story about rabbits, I saw it was a story about the big questions of human life: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? How should we live?
I think that’s why it meant so much to me. My family’s roots are in the Middle East. My ancestors were Iraqi, Egyptian, Kurdish, and Circassian Muslims. I grew up in Britain in the 1970s, where such origins were unusual. Negotiations around identity, difference and belonging were daily facts of my life. Even my name was an issue. Sabah Falah Said is an ordinary Arabic name, but unpronounceable in English! Whenever it came up, people would question it to such an extent that I ended up using initials.
So when I read Watership Down and saw that the hero of the rabbits’ myths was called El-Ahrairah, it struck a very deep chord. The greatest rabbit who ever lived had an Arabic-sounding name? That gave me what Junot Diaz has described as a feeling of seeing myself reflected; realizing my background could be something more than a burden.
A children’s book had given me a way to think about myself and my place in the world. So now I put everything I have into writing children’s books. I put years and years of work into making each book the best it can possibly be, making them as thrilling as I can, but also filling them with those big questions; Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? How should we live?
In my first book, Varjak Paw, these questions are explored through cats and dogs. Varjak is a cat who makes friends with a dog and learns that a dog can be the best friend a cat could ever have.
My new book, Phoenix, is set in a galaxy where humans and aliens are at war. The humans have even built a great spacewall to keep the aliens out. The main characters are a human boy on the run and an alien girl he meets. She’s a refugee from the war who has grown up in camps, hated and feared by humans. But they discover that they have more in common than they thought—and together, they might even save the galaxy.
I didn’t write Phoenix about a specific situation in the real world. I wanted to explore those ideas of identity, difference, and belonging that I’ve been living with all my life, and that I think lie at the roots of so many situations, all over the world.
Things have changed so much since my childhood. People are on the move as never before; hundreds of millions of us now live outside our countries of origin. One response to that is to build walls. But another is to build bridges of understanding— as my characters in Phoenix must do to survive.
Young people everywhere are hungry for stories to help them navigate this world. My highest hope is that a book like Phoenix might help them think about the world, their experiences of it, and other people’s experiences as Watership Down helped me. I love the idea that children’s books can be bridges connecting people, showing them that however different someone else might be, the things which unite us are greater than those which divide us. And that difference can be a source of richness: something to be celebrated, not feared.
SF Said is the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize–winning author of Varjak Paw. He was born in Lebanon in 1967, but has lived in London since he was two years old.
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