Radhika Sainath in Literary Hub
/The following piece was published in Literary Hub on December 19, 2017. Click here to view the full article.
Palestinian Children's Book Becomes Target for Boycott and Censorship
By Radhika Sainath
As a new parent, I’m now alert to a substratum of media that passed below the radar of my younger, less narcissistic, self. In the space of mild leftist parenting, this means acquiring board-book samizdat such as Click Clack Moo (cows striking for workplace benefits), and A Rule is to Break (inculcating anarchist principles in pre-literate children.)
Of course, the post-colonial space of this genre (Babar notwithstanding) is pretty unpopulated, so I was excited to spot P is for Palestine by Golbarg Bashi at my local Book Culture.
The book is fantastic on so many different levels: it features a little girl with curly black hair, big eyes and brown skin; the illustrations are gorgeous; and it teaches the alphabet through egalitarian and multi-cultural words from both Arabic and English like “C is for Christmas,” “E is for Eid,” and “M is for Miftah, Key of Return.”
But nothing Palestine-related, no matter how anodyne, can be consumed safely in America, let alone on the Upper West Side.