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We live in exciting times. Authors, illustrators, reviewers, publishers and readers all get the chance to correspond and interact with each other thanks in part to book blog networks. As a blogger I especially love working directly with children’s book authors and helping them get the word out about their latest books. I met author/illustrator and blogger Elizabeth O. Dulemba through the Yahoo kidlitosphere group. Each Tuesday on her website she posts amazing coloring pages for children to print out and enjoy. My daughter has worn out her markers coloring Dulemba's awesome pictures. If you spend time around kids, you'll want to print out a few for them to color, especially the holiday or book themed pages.

Next week on September 25th, Dulemba releases her picture book titled Soap, Soap, Soap / Jabón, Jabón, Jabón. I'm the first stop on her Blog Tour. Elizabeth, thanks for introducing me to this book and your blog!

"Now Hugo was muddy and stinky too, but he still had to go to el mercado. To help him remember what he needed to buy, Hugo kept repeating, 'Soap! Soap! Soap! ~ ¡Jabón, jabón, jabón!'" - Soap, Soap, Soap / Jabón, Jabón, Jabón by Elizabeth O. Dulemba

Those familiar with Appalachian folktales will recognize the storyline of "Soap, Soap, Soap." The Jack Tales story has been retold many times and many versions exist. In Dulemba's updated adaption available in a bilingual format, a boy named Hugo walks to the local grocery store to buy soap for his mother. He takes the long route to the store and travels across a playground, down a sidewalk and by a ditch near his schoolyard. He runs into a number of obstacles along the way, gets mud all over his body and forgets the reason for his journey--the soap, soap, soap! The bilingual edition features Spanish expressions like el dinero, huevos, and ¡Ay caramba! effortlessly sprinkled into the English narrative. A vocabulary page at the end of the book provides an overview of all Spanish terms used.

If a muddy romp is your idea of good, clean, picture book fun, you'll enjoy reading Soap, Soap, Soap / Jabón, Jabón, Jabón. The book is available in two different versions: bilingual and all-English. Although we received a galley of the all-English version, I actually prefer the bilingual book mainly because schools and libraries have a need for eye-pleasing bilingual picture books, especially folklore tales. Dulemba's bright illustrations reflect the light, playful tone of the text. My daughter loved the soap graphic underneath each page number and also liked the hilarious picture of grocer pinching his nose to avoid smelling the stinky Hugo. She really liked tracing the dotted path Hugo takes on his journey to the grocery store, though we did notice the illustration is a bit different from the actual story sequence. Part of the fun of telling the original "Soap" tale is that the boy mindlessly repeats phrases over and over, trying to remember his goal. The repetition is somewhat missing in Dulemba's version, though it is implied. It's wonderful that Dulumba has reintroduced a lesser known folktale to the picture book audience.

Because I'd never heard of the "Soap" folktale until reading this version of the story, I asked Elizabeth when she first heard the Appalachian tale. Here's her reply:

Besides the multicultural element of the book there's a lesson to be learned in this time-tested tale of forgetfulness and mud: Even though you may get side-tracked on your journey, don't forget where you are headed or what you started out to accomplish. That's wise advice for everyone to live by -- children, adults, new graduates, and yes, even bloggers.

Soap, Soap, Soap / Jabón, Jabón, Jabón by Elizabeth O. Dulemba. Raven Tree Press; (September 2009); 32 pages; Bilingual Edition: ISBN 9781934960622 hardcover; ISBN 9781934960639 paperback - English Edition: ISBN 9781934960646 hardcover; 9781934960653 paperback
Book Source: Galley provided for free by Raven Tree Press (Preproduction copy - Quotations should be checked against the finished book)

My daughter had a good time coloring the duck from Dulemba's story. Print your own picture at the Soap, Soap, Soap activity page!



Related links:
Elizabeth O. Dulemba - Author Website
Author Blog
Index of Appalachian Folktales - "Soap! Soap! Soap!"

View the Soap, Soap, Soap / Jabón, Jabón, Jabón book trailer on YouTube:

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One Fine Trade retold by Bobbi Miller, illustrated by Will Hillenbrand

A retelling of the classic folktale style of trading for something worse and then reversing the trading to finally get what you set out for.  In this version, Georgy Piney Woods is a peddler.  His daughter asks him to trade her horse so that she can get a silver dollar to buy her wedding dress.  So he trades the horse for a cow, the cow for a dog, the dog for a stick.  Sounds worse and worse, doesn’t it?  But never fear, a solution, unexpected and wonderfully complex, is on its way.  I wouldn’t want to spoil the tale and tell you the ending though!

Miller excels at writing in a traditional way.  Her words evoke a history of folktales without effort.  It is filled with great folksy sayings like “How-do!” And the text is made for reading aloud with its partial sentences that really read like someone is speaking.  Miller has also added lovely descriptive passages about the land Georgy is passing through on his travels.  Daisies are a-dancing, gators are a-splashing, and catbirds are a-mewing.  Hillenbrand takes these passages and brings the entire story to life.  His art is friendly and folksy, with an angular horse, deep darkness of swampland, and one amazingly large stick.  Each character he draws has its own feel and style, which is quite a challenger in a book with such a series of people appearing.

A great read-aloud version of the folktale and well worth trading a horse for!  Appropriate for ages 4-8.

Reviewed from library copy.

Also reviewed by Fuse #8 and Shari Lyle-Soffe.

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Recently, a poet friend who has a blog called Capacious Hold-All, linked to a children’s book related to her post about red purses.  Curious about the book she linked to, I took it out of the library.  The story is called The Magic Purse and is a Japanese folktale.  Retold by Yoshiko Uchida, the story is illustrated in watercolors by Keiko Narahashi.  Similar to the folktale I posted about last time, The Magic Purse features a virtuous man who is faced with a choice.  In this story,  he is given a red purse from a young woman-spirit living in a swamp separated from her parents.  The little red purse is magic.  Bulging with gold coins, it will always replenish itself after the coins have been removed if one coin is left in it.  The young man is charged with a task, however.  He must deliver a letter from the daughter to the girls’ parents who live in a notoriously treacherous swamp called the Red Swamp.  Will the young man undertake this dangerous quest even though he has already received the magic purse?  And how will he use the magic purse?  In a way the purse and its boon, as well as the task he is charged with in receiving it, tests the mettle of the man.

My daughter enjoyed listening to this folktale.  Of course, the swamp part of the story was a little frightening for her.  Folktales often present risks not just to the story’s heroes, but to the parents who must read them to their children!  However, my daughter did realize afterwards that part of experiencing the fear of the hero of the story entering the swamp is what made the story so compelling compared to other books we read that night.

Do you read folktales to your children?  If so, how do you choose them?  Which ones have your children enjoyed?

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Rapunzel by Rachel Isadora.

Hansel and Gretel by Rachel Isadora.

I have to applaud Rachel Isadora’s efforts to recreate well-known European folk tales and set them in Africa filled with African characters. I have recently read her Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel which are clever, simply written and lovely.  Isadora doesn’t try to change the core of the story, leaving that just the same.  But the setting is changed and every element of the illustrations reflect their new setting in all of its colorful glory.

Isadora has done much more than insert people of color into these stories.  She has managed to distill the stories to their essence, offering very simple version of the stories that read aloud very well.  Her illustrations are collages of paper that are brilliantly colored and will project wonderfully to a crowd.  With people of color or not, these stories are some of the most child-friendly versions I have seen.  Isadora also has created two of the most fearsome witches I have seen in a long time.  Truly terrifying with their green eyes or skin and wild hair, these women are fearsome in a wonderful, shivery way.

Highly recommended for reading to classrooms of children who have missed the basic folklore, these books are beautiful, great to read aloud and have a unique cultural story to tell.  Appropriate for ages 4-6.

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The Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree by Anne Shelby and Cor Hazelaar. An Appalachian folk tale is turned into a charming picture book with this title.  Harlan Burch was a man who lived in a hollow sycamore tree.  He was a carpenter and knew immediately when he saw the grand hollow tree that [...]

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The House of Glee had a good time at the Act!vated Storytellers program yesterday. It turned out that this show was seventeen-year-old Zephyr's final public performance with the company. He's got plenty of projects of his own: his band, theme park projects, film projects-- fun stuff like that. Act!vated performed two stories yesterday. The first was Simple Ivan, a folktale from Russia that had a

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I really like the story called "The Sun Sisters" (full text). It's a Chinese story collected in Margaret Read MacDonald's Three-Minute Tales. I haven't yet told it, but I hope it becomes one of my stories. I'm a fan of stories that have to do with the creation and manipulation of textiles. Coincidentally, I read this story right around the time Lucia asked me why she wasn't supposed to stare

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While reading A Girl Named Disaster, I found there were questions that I wanted to discuss with other readers and I hope some of you feel the same way. Your questions will probably be different from mine, and I’m eager to know what they are.

Nhamo is a storyteller and this book is punctuated with the folktales that she has learned and loves. Do these stories strengthen or weaken Nhamo’s own story?

Who is Long Teats and what does she mean to Nhamo?

Is Nhamo’s relationship to the baboons, especially Rumpy, disappointing? Would a different relationship be more appealing?

Nancy Farmer is noted for the length of her novels. Is this particular book well-served by its length or could it be more effective if it were shorter?

A Girl Named Disaster has three distinct segments of Nhamo’s story and some readers are disappointed with the third segment. Is the ending strong enough to provide a satisfying completion to the novel?

Let’s talk!

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Good literature promotes literacy. Reading to children promotes literacy. Promoting a love of books through the example of reading promotes literacy. And sharing a story together, at the end of the day especially, offers a moment of harmony and oasis in family life, which sometimes has to be safe-guarded from the encroachment of action-packed schedules. So all in all, a bedtime story is a win-win scenario, whichever way you look at it!

It can, however, be a daunting prospect for some parents, so today on Books at Bedtime I’d like to focus on two resources which offer parents some tools to help make storytelling a joy for all concerned.

The first is the Storytelling Bibliographies page on The Center for Children’s Books’ website. These booklists encompass stories from all over the world which make great readalouds, arranged by themes such as Phases of the Moon, Tales about Fools, Latino Folktales, Native American Tales… The links to Storytelling Websites offer rich scope and I especially like thie process advocated here for using a book as a springboard for someone to tell a story; and for listeners then to extend that storytelling experience. Such activities will lead children to love books and to love words themselves… the next generation of storytellers and writers?

And the other resource is Australian writer Mem Fox reading extracts from her book Reading Magic – her web-page And Do It Like This offers a step-by-step guide to reading stories aloud to children. She also has her 10 Read Aloud Commandments – here’s number 10 :

Please read aloud every day, mums and dads, because you just love being with your child, not because it’s the right thing to do.

And you can hear her putting all these hints and pieces of advice into action herself, reading three of her stories, including her avowed favorite Koala Lou: and she reads them beautifully.

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Below is my first post to this blog, dated May 8, 2006. In preparing an article about my work as a blogger, I am revisiting--in my memory and with my laptop--the time when I created this blog. I'm reposting that first post today because in it, I reference those from whom I learn and learned, and I want to remind readers that we all learn from someone.

--Debbie

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May 8, 2006

I started this blog in May. This is my second post.

A reader asked (in comments to first post) if I know the work of Ani Rucki. I don't know Rucki's work.

It is the case that there's a boatload of children's books about American Indians out there. Kate Shanley, an enrolled Assiniboine woman from the Fort Peck reservation and professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana-Missoula, has a terrific article in which she talks about "the Indians America loves to love." That love drives a lot of people to write what they think are stories about American Indians. Their stories, however, are based on pop culture and romantic/savage ideas about who we are. (Note: Shanley's article is called "The Indians America Loves to Love and Read," in AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY, 1997, p. 675-702.)

I don't know anything about Rucki, but my experience has taught me that, chances are, any given children's book about American Indians has major flaws.

I've been studying and writing about children's books about American Indians since 1994 when I began work on my PhD. Prior to that, I taught elementary and middle school in New Mexico and Oklahoma. I am tribally enrolled at Nambe Pueblo, in northern New Mexico. I was raised there, and return home for the usual (weddings/funerals), but also for religious and spiritual gatherings.

As a schoolteacher, I taught my students about bias and stereotypes, about how books can be wrong. In graduate school, I honed my research and critical analysis skills. I've learned a great deal from others. Some key books include:

Slapin and Seale's THROUGH INDIAN EYES: THE NATIVE EXPERIENCE IN BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Seale and Slapin's A BROKEN FLUTE: THE NATIVE EXPERIENCE IN BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Kathleen Horning's COVER TO COVER

Betsy Hearne's two articles CITE THE SOURCE and RESPECT THE SOURCE

Below are some of the questions I have in my head whenever I sit down to analyze a Native story that is called a folktale. I invite conversation/discussion with readers of the blog about the questions.

When I consider a folktale, some things I look for are:

1) Is the person listed as the author listed as a "reteller"? That is, on the cover and/or on the title page, is the book "By Ani Rucki" or "Retold by Ani Rucki."

2) In the author's note, or in a source note, does Rucki say where she heard the story, or what source she found it in?

3) If Rucki provides info about her source, does she provide enough detail so that I could find the source if I wanted to?

4) In the author's note, does Rucki tell the reader the ways in which she changed/edited the story and why?

5) In a couple of reviews, there is mention that this is a Navajo folktale. How is that information provided in the book? Is it implied in the story itself or stated on the cover or title page?

I hope readers of the blog are interested in conversation about the questions I've listed above. My first post was a list of books, but my goal is for others to learn how to critically evaluate children's books about American Indians. With such skills, you own that knowledge and can carry and apply it with you wherever you go.

Before you leave this post, take a look at Headlines at National Native News and once there, click on "Today In History."

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Narrative forms have the potential to inspire, sustain and heal us, and traditional folktales have a special healing magic for children. Witch and monster stories like Baba Yaga and Heckedy Peg show how to get through the dark woods of life and suggest that there are helpful beings along the way. The Elves and the Shoemaker illustrates the practice of generosity. Talking Eggs, a traditional Louisiana Creole Cinderella tale, demonstrates the eventual triumph of good over evil. In the Uncle Remus stories, underdogs like tar baby and the rabbit outfox the scary fox himself. Native American coyote tales offer tales of connectedness with the natural world. In our stress-filled lives, these stories provide steadying information and wisdom.

For folktales from Asia, search the wealth of the PaperTigers website, or go directly to interviews with authors like Debjani Chatterjee and Demi, who have written stories based on folktales. For faves of Asian kids, here’s a review of a collection of folktale retellings. And for Hispanic folktales, check out Tales Our Arbuelitas Told.

PaperTigers welcomes your feedback about this important form of literature for the child within each of us.

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Yesterday afternoon, I was driving home with Lucia when we got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic around Husky Stadium. That was nothing new. What was different, however, was the white steam that started to spew from the hood of the car. I called Bede and told him what was going on (because hey, I've overreacted in the past to things that looked scary but were really no big deal). He urged me to get out of there and pull over. There was nothing to do but drive over the median and turn right into the No-Right Turns parking lot across the way. Forty-five minutes later, Triple AAA showed up. In the meantime, I had to calm a frightened child and pray that she didn't have to pee (as she'd already had one accident while we were at the bank). I fed her a few yogurt-covered almonds and then told her the story of Why the Tides Ebb and Flow. Afterward, she drew in her sketchpad for awhile, and then started to fret once more. "We're okay," I told her. "We got off the road, help is coming, and soon we'll be home." I quoted Go to Sleep, Gecko: "Some things [we] just have to put up with."

(Years later, Lucia will probably point out that the story didn't quite happen that way. She'll probably say, "Don't you remember that you yelled at me to stop talking? And that you said rude words?" Yes, I do remember them. But I also apologized.)

So far, all that's wrong with the car is that the radiator is cracked. If that's it, then we're looking at hundreds of dollars instead of thousands of dollars. Some things we just have to put up with. Still, I wish this were a city in which public transportation were truly a viable option all the time.

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I was 6 years old when I first heard Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel read aloud by my school librarian. The whole class loved it, and we practiced saying the main character's name: "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo." The name allegedly meant in Chinese "the most wonderful child in the world." Tikki Tikki Tembo's younger brother, Chang, had a name that meant "little or nothing." The length of Tikki Tikki Tembo's name posed a problem when the character fell into the well. The illustrations by Blair Lent are lovely and the story is top-notch. However, Mosel's story perpetuates a number of Asian stereotypes, mainly the idea that syllables from Asiatic languages are nonsensical and that the elder son is more valued than the younger son. Like Little Black Sambo and The Five Chinese Brothers, the bare-bones of the story itself is compelling but the stereotypes are offensive. (As a side note, some discussion boards point out that Tikki Tikki Tembo is actually based on an old Japanese folktale.)

Before you start to protest,"Oh, stop being so politically correct already!" and "If we get rid of every book that has racism/sexism in it, we'll have nothing left on the bookshelves," be assured that I'm not proposing we get rid of any story. However, we should think really, really hard about the books we read (especially to children) and how the stories affect all of us. At the very least, think about what it would be like to be a Chinese child listening to Tikki Tikki Tembo read aloud in a classroom.

I read about a librarian who used Tikki Tikki Tembo in her storytimes, but instead of the setting taking place in "long ago China," she had the story set on Mars, whereby the Martians all give their children long names. I haven't used Tikki Tikki Tembo in storytimes, but when the time comes where my daughter discovers the story, I'm going to use a similar approach. Still, if the main goal is for children to have a long, amusing name to recite aloud, there are alternatives:

1) Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan Was Her Name, by Tedd Arnold

I don't care for the illustrations, but the song is great! I can post the chords and a link to the song for a future Song of the Week, if you like.

2) The camp song Eddie Cucha Catcha Camma Toesanara Toesanocka Samma Camma Wacky Brown.

Unlike the protagonist of Tikki Tikki Tembo, the subject of the story does come to a bad end.

In the past, I've deliberately avoided controversial topics. I've wanted to entertain you, after all. Still, I do think about these issues frequently, and want to talk about them with people who also want to talk about them. I've long ago stopped trying to please everyone (it's impossible), but I do have an obligation to present stories that provide fair, non-stereotypical depictions of the people they represent. I have no room in which to say, "Oh, it's just a story."

Do I take stories too seriously? You bet I do! And I'm not about to stop.

Thanks to TadMack for starting this discussion in another forum.

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I'm trying to figure out which folktales are okay to tell and which ones I shouldn't bring into my storytimes. Everyone exhorts "multiculturalism" and "world folktales" yet there are so many pitfalls to sharing stories from cultures outside one's own. Then again, just because someone has a particular ethnic background doesn't mean s/he is an expert. My paternal background is Syrian, Eygptian, Russian and Lithuanian. Does that mean I have carte blanche for telling stories from those countries even though I'm not overly knowledgeable of my heritage? (Answer: I think not.)

Some folktales are sacred, and aren't meant to be told outside of those sacred contexts. Many stories have been lifted from other cultures and then tweaked to reflect the values of one's own culture.

As much as I'd love to share some of the stories I've read and learned, I don't want to be a culture vulture looking for story quarry (yeah, I just made up that second part). I want to do the right thing. I wonder: if I find a collection of Iroquois stories published by someone from the Abenaki, does that constitute permission to retell the stories? Or should I just leave alone all stories that come from people who have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed? That's a lot of people and a lot of stories. I'm tired of people being identified by how they've been oppressed... as I am sure are the people who are actually oppressed.

Here's a long article that puts some of the issues in perspective: Swapping Tales and Stealing Stories: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Folklore in Children's Literature, by Betsy Hearne, published in the Winter 1999 edition of Library Trends. Hearn writes,

As more good source notes appear, however, the underlying issue of ownership comes to the fore, sometimes because information makes the question of ownership all too clear. Identifying the source of a story, is only the beginning, it turns out. The next step is considering the broader implications of who tells stories and how they tell them. Indeed, the argument of who owns a story is almost as old and traditional as the stories on which the argument focuses. (page 3 of the article)

And further in the article, Hearn points out that

certainly a culture can simply be omitted because of the complexity of dealing with all these problems, witness Eva Martin and Liszlo Gill's (1987) Tales of the Far North: "The only indigenous folktales of Canada belong to the native Canadian Indian and Inuit peoples. Because these native peoples have such a unique and beautiful tradition of storytelling, no attempt has been made to adapt their stories for this collection. Too often English-speaking storytellers retell native tales only from their own perspective, imposing upon the tales their own vision of life" (p. 123).

True, and conscientiously stated, but now we have a beautiful volume of Canadian tales with no representation of an important cultural group. So how do we deal with folktales crossing cultural and aesthetic borders in the "innocent" fields of children's literature, which on closer examination sometimes resemble battlefields of social values? Is this a no-win situation? (page 12)

If you read through the article, you'll recognize some familiar names: Debbie Reese, Roger Sutton, Jane Yolen, Julius Lester, and Joseph Bruchac, to name a few luminaries.

07/30/07 update: Debbie Reese commented a couple of times on this post and has just published her own post in response: An often posed question: "Who can tell your stories?"

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The First Tortilla: A Bilingual Story
Author: Rudolfo Anaya
Illustrator: Amy Cordova
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN-10: 0826342140

Rudolfo Anaya, author of one of my all-time favorite books, Bless Me Ultima has written a magical and lovely folktale about the origins of that of us Mexicanos/Chicanos, the delicious tortilla. The First Tortilla is the story of Jade, an indigenous girl that lives in a small village near a volcano. Her village has been suffering through a drought and all their squash and bean plants are dying. Jade prays to the Mountain Spirit to bring rain so that the precious plants will live and her village won’t go hungry.

As Jade works in the garden, a blue hummingbird brings a message to go find the Mountain Spirit and ask for rain. Without a question for her safety Jade sets off, braving the volcano and follows the hummingbird to the very top where she meets the Mountain Spirit. She offers the spirit food made by her own hand and he is so pleased with it that he gives her the gift of corn which the ants have in a cave.

Jade tastes the corn and finds it to be sweet and delicious. She takes it back to the village and plants it. As the prayed for rain comes, the corn grows alongside beans, squash and chiles. Jade grinds the harvested dried corn, adds water and makes masa. She puts it on a comal or griddle and the smell soon permeates the village. Her parents taste it and find the corn tortilla to be wonderful. Soon Jade is teaching everyone how to make the tortillas and the people have a new staple.

I loved this story. It has elements of old Aztec legends like the ants in the cave with the corn. It gives a feel to how important water was and is to people. It tells how water was so important that people would move from a village if there was no rain. Children will get a sense of the importance of the tortilla as a staple.

Amy Cordova’s rich and colorful illustrations give a beautiful insight into the village life. Her depictions of those beautiful indigenous faces are just amazing and give children a sense of how they lived and dressed.

I loved how the hummingbird, such an important figure in Aztec mythology was incorporate into the tale. This book is bilingual and the translation by Enrique R. Lamadrid is smooth and almost effortless. The book is recommended for ages 9-12 but I think children of pre-school age will love this book just as much. The bright colors and stunning illustrations are sure to capture their eyes and interest as much as the story read to them will capture their imagination and heart. Highly recommended.


Book Description from the publisher:

The First Tortilla is a moving, bilingual story of courage and discovery. A small Mexican village is near starvation. There is no rain, and the bean and squash plants are dying.

Jade, a young village girl, is told by a blue hummingbird to take a gift to the Mountain Spirit. Then it will send the needed rain.

Burning lava threatens her, but Jade reaches the top of the volcano. The Mountain Spirit is pleased. It allows the ants in a nearby cave to share their corn with Jade. The corn was sweet and delicious and Jade took some back to save the village.

Jade grinds the dry corn, adds water, and makes dough. She pats the masa and places it on hot stones near the fire. She has made the first tortilla. Soon the making of corn tortillas spreads throughout Mexico and beyond.

Reading level: grade 3 and up

The story of a young Mexican girl who saves her village by making the first tortilla with the help of the Mountain Spirit.

About the Author
Rudolfo Anaya, widely acclaimed as one of the founders of modern Chicano literature, is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. Anaya was presented with the National Medal of Arts for literature in 2001 and his novel Alburquerque (the city's original Spanish spelling) won the PEN Center West Award for Fiction. He is best known for the classic Bless Me Ultima. Amy Córdova is an instructor for the Taos Institute of Arts, Taos, New Mexico. She wrote and illustrated Abuelita’s Heart. Enrique R. Lamadrid is professor of Spanish folklore and literature at the University of New Mexico. In 2005, he was awarded the Americo Paredes Prize by the American Folklore Society in recognition of his work as a cultural activist.

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