The Cat and the Dark, a children's book by Mia Couto, here interviewed by Rogério Manjate in October 2001. My usual apologies for the translation from the Portuguese. (For Mia Couto's biography, go here).
---
The Cat and the Dark - Mia for Children
An interview by Rogério Manjate, October 2001
RM - Your next book is a children's book. How did that happen?
MC - In 1995 or 1996 a magazine issued by the Education Ministry of Portugal asked me to write a short story for children. I resisted because I don't write for children. I believe that children's literature has its own rules, another wisdom, a different kind of writing. Even so, they asked me to give it a try. And I wrote a small story called The Cat and the Dark and sent it. I don't even know if it was published in the magazine or not. I had no feedback at all and I don't know what happened next. One day I went to Lisbon and unexpectedly, at Caminho Publishing house, they showed me some illustrations. I didn't know what they were about, but they were very beautiful. They told me: Look carefully at the text inside the illustrations. I was surprised to see that it was that story I had writen 5 years before. I was a little apprehensive and reacted defensively but they ended up encouraging me to go forward with it. I revisited the text, made a few small changes and that was the book.
The book talks about the relationship children have with the dark; how darkness is an absence of place, or the non-place, where children put their ghosts and where fear is born. The story has to do with the animation of that darkness as a cat, this is, darkness becomes the cat and gains an existence of cumplicity and friendship with the narrator, a small cat, as if it were a child. Like all children's stories, it's a simple story, not simplist, but writen in simple lines, a small short story with an obvious moral connotation. This complicated process ended up giving me pleasure, to see how a text can be lived through images mainly because it is a pictorial book, an illustrated book.
RM - What was the main challenge of writing this story for children?
MC - I think that writing for children has a soul of its own, its own technique and it means a relationship of truth with the text that doesn't allow for under the table moves. It's like having a child in front of you and children pay a lot of attention to those elaborations that we sometimes create to go around difficulties. All our escape routes must be faced with truth and the story has to have its own spell, you can't attract using a literary "trick". The challenge has to do with the way you work with orality, that has it's own technique. I'm not saying that short stories or novels for adults are a lie... they are obviously an assumed lie and that literary trick I'm talking about has no negative connotations.
RM - So you had to escape the way you are as a writer, your work on language?
MC - But I keep it, you understand, I keep the poetic recreation of language and I think that has been for me the biggest challenge, how was I going to keep that which is my personal mark of working the language and the challenge of knowing that poetic elaboration can be taken by the child and not be treated as someone who doesn't understand and that is the challenge for me, not knowing if that works or not. The children will be the ones to say if the story reached them the way I expected.
RM - How is it to be the father of children who can't still read your work? Does it bring any conflicts?
MC - I certainly have them. I have created stories, mainly for the youngest one. She doesn't read, I read the stories for her and in this relationship I feel that what is most essential goes through and that was what authorized me. Some stories that I have created for Rita were born because I tell her bedside stories and then suddenly I see that the story is there and I ask myself: Can I transform it into written text? In that transformation from oral to writing, how much was lost, how much became the universe of adults only. I write the text and read it out loud and I understand that some things do not go through but the essential does and that gave me a certain courage to start this adventure. I don't know if I will do it again.
RM - In Mozambique there is the need for a children's literature. Is this book an attempt at answering that need?
MC - No, it was an accident. I honestly didn't want to do it. And I feel like an intruder in a domain that I know has its own rules, a method. For which I was not born. To me and because it implies an effort and that effort I don't want to make. When I write literature I want something that flows because it's what I have to say.
RM - Then we have to invent people to write children's literature...
MC - There are some. Mozambique had people who wrote children's literature. Do you remember Colecção Periquito (in the photo)? It worked very well. I believe the collection ended because children's and young people's literature weren't encouraged for many reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the texts because they worked very well.
---
A book summary by the WhiteRavens catalogue:
The fur of Pintalgato, a young, tigered tomcat, changes over night into a black coat darker than the gloomiest night. His curiosity is responsible for this transformation; why had he ignored his mother's warning to get nowhere near the »light that leads to the other side« on his nightly roams? The encounter with the darkness has made him dark, too. In the end, it becomes clear that darkness - the realm to which we attribute our fears - needs the same amount of loving attention as Pintalgato receives from his mother. With the poetic, symbolic text of this colourfully illustrated book, the well-known author from Mozambique enters the stage of children's literature. (8+)
---
The book has been illustrated by Danuta Wojciechowska, and has been nominated for the "2004 Hans Christian Andersen Award".
About Danuta Wojciechowska:
b. 1960, Quebec, Canada
Other awards include: Special Mention - National Prize for Children's Book Illustration (1999, 2000, 2001, 2002), Selected for the "White Ravens" Catalogue (2001)
Danuta Wojciechowska has quite a varied life. Born in Canada to Swiss and Polish parents, she moved to Switzerland at 17 to study art, then on to England to study education at 23. Since 1984, she has lived in Lisbon, Portugal, and appears to be sticking there. She has illustrated for a wide variety of different media, including schoolbooks, magazines, museum documents, and even games. She has also worked for many years in musical and theatrical production, designing stage sets and costumes. In fact, she began her career as a children's book illustrator relatively late — only four years ago — but that has become her central pursuit ever since. Regarding her style, and specifically her style in Mouschi, o gato de Anne Frank ("Mouschi, Anne Frank's Cat"), University of Lisbon Fine Arts Professor Barbara Videira says, "Danuta's illustrations are in themselves challenges to more conventional perspectives and portrayals of reality. Each illustration presents various dimensions, in a dream atmosphere, telling a story, in which we are detective spectators who have to put together the pieces, with suspended objects, distorted doors and walls."
(Barbara Videira, "A New Form of Writing: The Illustrations of Danuta Wojciechowska," in Ms. Wojciechowska's HCA dossier, 2004)
And a couple more book covers by Danuta:
No comments:
Post a Comment