We are delighted to welcome author Dashdondog Jamba to PaperTigers. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the amazing Mobile Library he founded in Mongolia some twenty years ago and we also featured a reprint of an article he wrote for IBBY’s journal Bookbird. Dashdondog has published more than seventy books, some of which can be read in English on the ICDL; he also has a blog, which includes translations of some of his poems, as featured in a recent Poetry Friday post. I’m grateful to Ramendra Kumar for putting me in contact with Dashdondog initially, and to Dashdondog himself for taking my inability to communicate in Mongolian in his stride – as well as for sending some great photos.
You have devoted your life to making it possible for children to have access to books. Can you give us some background to what Mongolia was like when you started out as a writer in the 1960s?
In 1958 the agricultural collectivization policy, which entailed handing livestock over to cooperatives, was almost completed in Mongolia. And even though my family didn’t like it, we delivered our livestock to the agricultural cooperative. It was a difficult time for rural herders to part from their beloved livestock. I clearly remember the moment when my grandma was crying about the “pitiable livestock”, and breeding lambs and kids were bleating and trying to run back to their shelters. Yet writers had written that herders had given their livestock to the agricultural cooperatives voluntarily. At that time my first book was published by the State Publishing House. I was 17 years old and in secondary school. From my first book you can only feel the heart of a boy who loves his lambs and calves. So I am always glad that I chose children’s literature as a career far from politics.
What changes have you witnessed, and indeed been instrumental in over the years?
For me who has been witness of two different societies there is opportunity to compare their weaknesses and advantages. I thankfully welcomed democracy, which brought us the freedom to think and have our own opinions. The freedom declared by socialism was limited, like wearing tight clothes. I can bear witness to it because I was considered as anti-communist and punished by losing the right to publish books.
What prompted you to start your now famous travelling library?
In 1990 Mongolia renounced communism and chose democracy with a free-market economy. During the privatization of property former children’s organizations were not taken over by anybody because they were considered as profitless and uneconomic. The formerly state-run children’s book publishing house became a private school, the children’s library became a private bank and the children’s cinema became the stock exchange.
Even though I had fought against it, my efforts didn’t work. Then I asked myself what we should be writing for children in this new society to read. It was unthinkable to present them with books w
Our current focus on Mongolia would be incomplete without a full mention of poet, writer and librarian extraordinaire, Dashdondog Jamba, who set up Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library more than twenty years ago in order to bring books to children even in the remotest parts of the country. We are delighted to be able to bring you a reprint of an article from IBBY’s Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature written by Dashdondog, “With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons“. Do head over to the main PaperTigers website and read it for some fascinating insight into the Mobile Library service, through this detailed description of one of its journeys. Originally the library was transported by oxcart or camel; now there is a van which clocks up thousands of kilometers every year. The library won the 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and features in Margriet Ruurs‘ book My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World.
As well as ensuring that Mongolian children have access to books from all over the world, Dashdondog Jamba (sometimes also written as Jambyn) is himself the author of more than seventy children’s books. Not many are available in English but you can get a tantalising glimpse of some of them here, at the ICDL. A collection of his retellings of Mongolian Folktales was published recently and is currently our Book of the Month. Dashdondog was instrumental in setting up the Mongolian sections of both SCBWI and IBBY.
You can read an article by Dashdondog, “Children’s Literature in Mongolia Needs Renovation” written for ACCU in 2001, and his speech to IBBY’s 30th Congress in Macau in 2006. Indian author Ramendra Kumar recounts his meeting with Dashdondog here, including an unexpected prelude – and some great photos.
Indian writer Ramendra Kumar‘s latest children’s books focus on stories of Indian children in a contemporary setting – an area of writing for middle-grade readers and young adults that has been greatly ignored in India: indeed, he would suggest, actively avoided. Though that may be changing: his most recent book, Now or Never (Ponytale Books 2010) has just been selected as a supplementary reader for Classes 7 and 8 by the Central Board of Secondary Education in India. Other novels include Terror in Fun City (Navneet Publications, 2008) and Not a Mere Game (Navneet Publications, 2006), and his book J J Act is endorsed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Butterflies, a non-profit “programme with street and working children”. Ramendra is also the editor of BoloKids.com, a “complete portal for the young and the young at heart”. We are delighted to welcome Ramendra to the PaperTigers blog.
During the Asian Conference of Story Telling in New Delhi a few years ago, a key-note speaker with very impressive credentials in the field of Library Science (and an equally impressive personality) was giving tips to children’s writers on how to write for children.
“All writers attempting to write for children should keep in mind that they have to go down to the level of children,” she concluded with a flourish, waiting for the applause which naturally followed.
During the interaction session I raised my hand to ask a question. She transferred her imperious gaze to me and lifted her eyebrows.
“Ma’am, I think you got the direction wrong. We children’s writers don’t have to go down to the level of children, rather we have to rise up to the level of the young and vibrant minds. For, ma’am, children are the closest that you can get to God, and God lives up there, not down below.” There was a stunned silence for some time and suddenly the entire Hall No. 5 of the India Habitat Centre exploded with claps and cheers.
As an MBA in marketing the primary lesson I was taught was to respect the customer. For us writers the customer is the child. However, instead of respecting the child, we patronize her and take her for granted. The books being churned out by writers and publishers in India are a testimony to this fact. Most of the books written for children are rehashes of earlier classics. As far as the publishers are concerned, they consider the fairytale/folk tale/fantasy segment safe.
I would like to put forth a strong case for a different genre of writing; and I would like to take the liberty of naming this segment of writing the Here and Now genre.
What do I mean by Here and Now writing?
This is the writing which is set in today, not in the once upon a time. It is concerned not with the past perfect but the present (tense or otherwise). Kids of today face problems, find opportunities and counter predicaments which didn’t exist for earlier generations. This scenario throws up greater challenges as well as higher levels of responsibility fo
