Waiting for Refugee Aid To Grow Up
By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) | November 14, 2022 |
Supporters of Ukraine at Warschauer Strasse station in Berlin, September 20. Image – Getty iStockphoto: Fotofantastika
A Heartfelt Imbalance
Since late February, when Vladimir Putin began his barbaric invasion of Ukraine, international publishing industry news has frequently featured stories about terrific programs providing books for Ukrainian refugee children.
Generally, 5,000 copies or more of these titles are printed in a given European book market, often thanks to generous donations from book-business professionals and others. The books then are provided to humanitarian-aid organizations to be handed out at border crossings and other points at which Ukrainian refugees are gathered either to live or to move forward to settlement elsewhere.
These efforts are highly commendable, of course. They can help to further the kids’ war-upended educational programs, to keep the children distracted with stories during nerve-wracking experiences, and to connect these youngsters to their own language, putting the comforts of their mother tongue within reach at a time when that language–which is not the same as Russian–is a natural, defining element of an assaulted nation’s character.
What the campaigns and efforts to mount these programs for Ukrainian children seem to reveal, however, is that the big heart of the world publishing industry is warmed far more easily by the idea of children’s books and their readers than by the need for books for adults in such a nightmarish situation.
It’s the adults, after all, usually mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, who have had to flee with the kids, leaving behind their husbands, lovers, uncles, brothers who are required to stay and fight. And while putting a book into the hands of one of those kids might help keep her or him occupied for awhile (a big help to Mom, of course), there has seemed to be little interest in the emotional and intellectual needs of the women who are caring for these youngsters.
And what about those soldiers left behind, struggling to turn the tide, trying to save their homes so their families can return, often unable to communicate with wives and children, parents and grandparents who are in diaspora? Where are the book drops for them? – new and valuable literature resonant with the culture these boys and men are fighting for? Even adventure and science-fiction as well as literary prose and incisive political analysis could be a comfort, a distraction, a reminder: this is what you’re there for. These guys surely deserve something to dream on before falling asleep, to reconnect them with the very reason, the pulsing intellect of their beleaguered nation.
Somehow, books for Ukrainian adults just haven’t caught on as a humanitarian gesture, even as these valiant adult refugees are the ones who really know what’s going on back at home – or they’re the ones who are attacking the Russian tanks, beating back the invaders: the grown sons and daughters of Ukraine who genuinely understand what they’re up against.
At Frankfurter Buchmesse last month, there wasn’t only an address from Volodymyr Zelensky, but the Ukrainian first lady, Olena Zelenska, actually made a visit to the trade show – in person. It was an honor to see this woman, clearly complex and conflicted, do an evening on-stage interview for adults.
But her first event was to appear with Elke Büdenbender, wife of Germany’s federal president. The two first ladies’ focus was a fundraising campaign for refugee children, Better Time Stories. That program is backed not only by Zelenska and Büdenbender but also by Doris Schmidauer, first lady of Austria, and by Princess Laurentien van Oranje of the Netherlands. All, again, for children.
Independent of the Ukraine crisis, this past weekend’s programming in Indonesia at the 33rd International Publishers Association (IPA) from the International Publishers Association (IPA) included a discussion of reading promotion in many cultures. The focus immediately went to children, despite my efforts as moderator, to bring adults’ needs into the picture. In developing the discussion across weeks of exchanges, we tried to widen the perspective to include the fact that so many adults have left reading behind in a flight to Netflix and other streamers. But there was little interest in talking about how to help adults find their way back from HBO Max to decades of reading, despite obvious attrition among adults who were formerly readers.
So What About the Adults?
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
There’s of course little to say here by way of analysis or revelatory rationale. Sympathy and empathy run for many of us more easily to the plights of children in trouble than adults, even when it’s clear that adults have done nothing to create or deserve a catastrophe, and even when they’re the ones trying to face down an enormous struggle while trying to care for those kids.
You might think that the imaginative skills and expressive grace of people in book publishing would make them better able than others to recognize that an over-emphasis on children and overlooking the needs of adults is illogical and unnecessary. But it appears we’re not there yet. The projects for children keep rolling along.
Do not misinterpret what I’m saying: I’m saying that these projects for young readers are good. They are right. They are generous. And they are to be supported.
I’m asking only this: What about the adults? Why do we leave them out when looking for ways to offer the support and comfort of literature?
Have you seen other instances in which children are emphasized in cases of need and adults’ struggles are left unanswered? What do you think drives this? And why are book people seemingly so fixated on children’s aid in times of such obvious culture-wide stress as is happening in Ukraine and in refugee centers?
@Porter_Anderson is a fellow of the National Critics Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and independent authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller‘s The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations’ WFP in Rome. is a recipient of London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. PorterAndersonMedia.com
Hi Porter, my answer might be ordinary and repetitive, but the future lives in our children. And the world, whether kind or war-torn, affects the very breathing of children and how they respond to every stimulus they are exposed to. Love and hugs, kindness and story-telling would help a child deal with being taken from all that is familiar to them, or help them through a period when their village is being bombed. I have never encountered anything remotely like the panic and fear that kind of a life, even for a few days, might do to harm a child. SIMPLE FACT: I can escape sorrow and difficulty through reading, and that is asking a lot of a child. But early reading can become a necessary habit. And though this might sound maudlin, it is a basic fact: they are the future. Help them enter it with ideas, empathy and maybe even the courage that reading can provide. Good to see you here.
But the thing is…is that if children are the future, then adults are the present and without a present, we won’t ever get to the future. Your words answer beautifully why so many people are focusing on the children. But that wasn’t actually the question. Please, PLEASE, continue to help the children. But often, the best way to help the children is to help their adults. Nothing has the potential to help a child as much as their parents or the parental-figures in their lives can. At the same time, nothing has the ability to hurt and to damage a child as much as their parents and their parental figures. A thousand books will never make up for having a parent who is so over-burdened, so stressed, so crushed by the weight of their world that they cannot take care of you. A book will never provide as much hope or comfort as the arms of a parent wrapped around you in absolute love. And when you’re talking about pre-reading children, what good are books in their native language going to do if they don’t have anyone who can read to them?
Books for children are really good, but especially for young children, those books can never replace what they really need. It’s like that experiment with the rhesus monkeys–a warm lap will help a small child much more than a cold book ever will. (https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/harlows-classic-studies-revealed-the-importance-of-maternal-contact.html)
But for an adult, those books can really make a difference. Adults can connect with books in a way that helps them find hope and strength and helps them feel not alone. From personal experience I know that no matter how much you love your children, when you are struggling emotionally and mentally, sometimes you are just not capable of providing that warm comfort that children need. (And thank goodness in those times for other loving adults who are willing to step in with love when they are so desperately needed) But I also know from personal experience that books can be surprisingly effective at helping adults deal with mental and emotional challenges.
And I do believe that for older children, books can do the same thing.
But for the youngest of children, when you send the books to the children, you are giving them a bunch of pretty, but also very inanimate objects. But when you send the books to their adults, you are giving the young children warm laps and warm hugs, (because books really can make that much of a difference in the life of an adult. The right book absolutely can be the thing that gives you just enough strength so that you have the energy to care for your children) and THAT is what the smallest of children need to not just survive, but thrive.
One thing I have noticed about people in general (myself included), is that we are incredibly sensitive to being told that we are wrong and that many of us (myself included) have a tendency to not be able to hear what is actually being said if we even think that there might be a possibility that someone is telling us that we are wrong. Humans tend to be very, very insecure and we build up thick, thick walls to protect ourselves from that, and if you engage those walls–good luck getting past them.
When our insecurity feels attacked, instead of hearing what the other person is saying, we’ll glitch, and instead, we’ll just more firmly entrench ourselves in our own ideas. And often, we don’t even realize that we’re not even hearing what the other person is saying…Because it just hurts something fierce to be wrong. I suspect that you are right about why so many people are doing so very much for children and so very little for the adults. Children are easier to empathize with than adults and our modern world has conditioned us to choose easy over hard.
It sounds like you (or someone else) tried to introduce the idea of helping adults as well and it wasn’t well received. I don’t know what happened, but from my experience, what could have actually happened is that subconsciously the people felt attacked (even though I suspect no one was actually attacking them. I suspect the idea was presented there much as it was here. That you commended them for sending books to children, because that’s a good thing! That you didn’t want to stop those efforts, but just expand them. But the thing is, is that humans as a whole tend to be so insecure, that often we feel attacked even when we aren’t actually being attacked. And sending books to children is something that people are doing to help them feel good about themselves, and then for someone to say it isn’t good enough…which again, I doubt you actually said. But sometimes we are so sensitive that if extreme care isn’t taken in first shoring up our fragile egos, anything that even gets close to approaching the idea that our efforts fell a little short might be too much for us) and I suspect that if the people felt attacked, they couldn’t really hear your idea.
It’s fascinating to watch, actually. My husband and I have started calling it glitching, because that’s what it reminds us of. And even knowing that it’s a thing, my husband and I still catch each other doing it. Basically, what happens is that you will say something, and the listener just doesn’t hear the words that you are saying. Sometimes their minds just flat-out do not register the words: it’s like they glitched out of reality for a few moments and did not hear what you said. Sometimes, they will misunderstand what you said so that it fits in better with their world-view. But the thing is, is that the listener absolutely does not realize that they are doing it. Knowing about it, my husband and I can call each other on it, and we’ll realize what we’ve just done after the fact, and then we’re able to prepare ourselves to hear what it was that the other person is trying to say. But we can only do that because that’s something we’ve worked into our relationship and because we truly do want to understand where the other person is coming from–even when we don’t agree with it.
For other people, the best I can recommend is preparing for it in advanced. Like I said, many of us humans are very, very insecure, and that can make us very, very tricky to work with because most of us build up thick, thick walls to protect our very fragile selves. And if you do something that hurts our insecurity, you trigger those walls and up they go and good luck getting through.
So if you have something to say that might be hard for people, but you really want them to be able to hear it, you have to engage very carefully. And hearing that something you are doing to help others is maybe not as effective as you thought–that you’re not being as helpful as you thought–is a hard thing. Even if you’re telling them they’re doing good, you’re still telling them they’re doing less good than they had originally thought and less always hurts.
I’m still learning how to navigate this myself, so I don’t have any great advice to give, but sometimes, just realizing what is happening can be helpful (if this is indeed what is happening.) Sometimes you can build people up to begin with, so that it doesn’t hurt their sense of worth to the point that their defensive walls come up. If you really want your idea to go forward–and you don’t care about getting credit for it–the way of least resistance to make that happen is if you can get people to think that it was their idea in the first place. If you can steer the conversation so that you don’t tell people that adults need books too, but can lead them to that conclusion on their own, then they are going to be much more likely to get really excited about that idea, because now it was their idea, and instead of being wrong, they get to be very, very right. You won’t get any credit for the idea, but if the idea is more important than the credit, it’s much more likely that it will get done.
Anyway, it is a very worthy endeavor and I hope you are able to bring it about.
My guess is that Ukrainian adults don’t have much time for reading, and this goes for those who’ve been turned into refugees. But it must be a blessing for such a person to see her child or grandchild absorbed in a book.
As for the emphasis on children and children’s lit in the U.S., that I think has to do with what Elizabeth says above: adults are turning to alternatives to reading, so making children into readers is crucial. As for audiobooks, listening is IMO more imaginative than sitting and watching. That said, though, there is something touching about the idea of so many adults listening to books rather than reading them. They may also be gardening or commuting, but it still reminds me of children being read to at bedtime, or sitting on the floor and listening to a librarian. Somehow, this fits with half the readers of YA books being fully fledged adults.
I certainly agree with you that adults are in need of safety, diversion, normalcy, and basic needs, I also know one thing for certain as a parent. If a child is well taken care of, happy, then parents’ needs are lowered.
Adults are certainly shouldering too much in wartime. The question is when is enough enough to trigger outpouring of aid? To me the issues are separate. To solve this for adults, we have to answer a big question about what we believe socially (talking about services) and legally in other arenas for others affected by poverty, ill circumstance, lack of opportunity, racism, disability, discrimination, a lack of having had a stable home or anyone lovingly teach them as a parent or caregiver how to be or believe they can so they can be the adults unkind society unreasonably demands they suddenly be even though they never had remotely the same chance as many privileged others.
Some days I resolve this by saying it’s good that everyone has a different cause to support—that that hopefully means everyone and everything gets some help. On others I really wonder why the judgment? Why the buck up buttercup? I believe most people will fix things if they know how and have the resources and a welcoming place to go. Most people are whole and capable … AND we can all be a lot less cruel in our voting, legal, and other decisions.
You’ve highlighted an oversight. It’s commendable books are being placed in the hands of refugee children, but I’m sure after the lights are out, many parents would like some escape as well, and books provide that. Especially if there is no access to any other entertainment.
Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine, Mariia Shuvalova, a PhD student at Kviv university, told me she felt like a character in my novel. My novel, Sunflowers Under Fire, is based on my Ukrainian grandmother’s life in Russia during the Great War and the wars that followed. It’s an inspirational story and I had the sense, that for Mariia, my true life story gave her some hope that she, too, and her fellow Ukrainians would get through this war.
We need books to give us perspective and to take us away from our immediate troubles. Books are a godsend for so many in strife. Thank you for bringing this need to the forefront.
In an Ethiopian orphanage, I saw a room full of young children looking at picture books donated by Americans. It was book time and they dutifully turned the pages.
The texts were in English, though, which hardly mattered since the kids were holding the books upside down.
It’s nice that we care about kids but our efforts to help don’t always have the desired result. Adults in wartime may have needs more urgent than books. Visas to travel come to mind. Medicine too.
Porter, another example comes to mind: welfare. For the U.S. to summon the will to provide a safety net for people in poverty, it had to be through a program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (now drastically trimmed down and called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). There was and is a miserly willingness to help needy children, but not adults.