'And if you have never loved elephants, you will love them now.Īfter his mother is killed by a hunter, Babar avoids capture by escaping to the city, where he is befriended by the kindly Old Lady. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, in his preface to The Story of Babar. In the meantime, it feels like I’m writing my own Asian-American kids book each time I read any book to my kid, and I hope this community will start creating forward-thinking and narrative-changing work for our kids.'If you love elephants, you will love Babar and Celeste. With perspective comes a willingness to explore complex narratives about each other, and from there comes community. We point out and name skin color in the pictures we see, and we also look at the artist’s placement decisions, syntactical choices, inclusionary and exclusionary language, and how all of these things make us feel. My kid won’t be taught to default to American as her identity, and in knowing the complexity of her roots, she can know the depth of complexity that informs the perspectives of those around her. So instead, I read books to my child that expose them to unexpected and surprising (to us) behaviors from people who live in countries where our neighbors immigrated from or my parents were born in. I’m only shocked and a bit scared when parents buy this story for their kids to consume.Īs a parent to a two-year-old, part of me sometimes wishes in selective censorship, but that doesn’t really mean I’ll have a safe child who has good judgment and knows how to move through and contribute well to the world. I feel sad and angry at Brunhoff that there the adults now who open Babar and don’t just automatically see how harmful a story it is in the way it contributes to xenophobic hysteria in these times.

In reading books by non-white authors in non-European and non-American settings during a time when I was situating myself within my own identity, it only became natural for me to consume art with an eye always on perspective. If it were, every parent with a buck would be raising the mastermind they think they’re raising. Multilingualism in and of itself isn’t the solution to critical literacy. It doesn’t help that some Punjabi people always sound mad when they talk. I hated it back then, of course, because it was Sunday school, extra homework, and it made me the weird Asian kid whose parents could but wouldn’t talk to her in English.

So how did I know at age five to be skeptical of Babar ? Maybe I didn’t right away, but I got there pretty fast, and I think it’s because I was raised to read, write, and speak beyond the White gaze.

Original babar the elephant