The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney

The Red Pencil is a novel in verse for young readers aged 9 to 12 that explores the Darfur genocide.
Twelve-year-old Amira Bright lives with her Dando, Muma and her little sister Leila on a vegetable farm. Her Dando grows tomatoes and okra, and they have sheep as well. Amira is desperate to go to school but her mother does not feel schooling has any advantage for Amira, who is expected to marry young. Amira's mother is like most in their village - bound by tradition. 

"When it comes to schooling,
my mother is the most tight-minded of anyone."

Amira's mother believes marriage and farm chores are more important. But Amira feels her mother is locked in a "hut of tradition...with no windows for letting in fresh ideas." Unlike Amira's family, her best friend Halima's family has left their village, moving to Darfur's largest town, Nyala. Halima's parents hope to send her to Gad Primary School which accepts girls.

One of Amira's neighbours, Old Anwar often argues with Dando about silly things such as the size of their tomatoes. When Amira admonishes her father for his feud with their neighbour, he tells her that they are in a contest.

Overshadowing Amira's life is the threat of war. Dando tells her the war is about land and that,
"Brothers are killing each other
over the belief
that in the Almighty's eyes
some people are superior."

For her twelfth birthday, Dando gives Amira a sturdy branch with which to make pictures in the goz or sand. Amira loves to draw and spends much time doing this. But Amira's dream is to go to school and whenever she talks about school, her mother scolds her telling her they do not have the means.

One day Amira's mother warns her about the Janjaweed militia and that if they attack she is to run. After this warning, Amira notices that her village neighbours are stalked by the constant fear of attack by these dangerous people. That attack comes to pass one day when helicopters and Janjaweed riding camels attack and burn her village to the ground. Amira manages to escape, but witnesses the murder of her father. Left with nothing, Amira, Leila, Muma, Anwar and Gamal, a boy who is friends with Leila set out to find safety.

After walking many nights, Amira and her family reach a Displaced Persons Camp at Kalma where they live in a structure made out of rice-bag scraps. Food and water are rationed as there are thousands in the camp - a number Amira finds unbelievable. Amira is so traumatized by what has happened to her family that she is unable to speak. It is Miss Sabine with her pencils and notebooks who helps Amira find her way out of her grief. A visitor to Kalma from Sudan Relief, Miss Sabine gives the children paper pads and pencils and for Amira, a beautiful, red pencil. Amira cherishes her red pencil as it re-ignites her desire to learn and to go to school. Locked in the safety of the camp means her dream might never happen but for some unexpected help from an unlikely person.

Discussion

The Red Pencil tells the story of the Darfur conflict through the eyes of a young girl. At the back of the novel, author Andrea Davis Pinkney provides readers with the backstory; a civil war that led to the Sudan government's use of the Janjaweed militia made up of Arab groups to fight rebellion by two groups opposed to the government. The name "Janjaweed" means "devils on horseback".  The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Darfuri civilians began in 2003 and continues to this day and is now widely considered to be genocide. The whys of the conflict are not deeply explored in this novel for younger readers as they are complex and date back to Sudan's independence from Britain in 1956. Instead the story focuses on the trauma the survivors like Amira and her mother experience.

Amira's life is simple and unencumbered. She lives on a farm where their food is grown and the major difficulties are carrying water, birthing lambs and dealing with haboob - sandstorms. The cycle of life passes simply from mother to daughter, from family to family. The attack leaves her afraid and unable to speak.

Pinkney captures Amira's distress in a straightforward manner. Amira is completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of both her personal tragedy and the displacement of thousands of others.

Everywhere bodies:
          We've fled
           peaceful homes.

Beautiful villages,
              Abundant farms.

              Forced to leave
              Prosperous lands
              whose unfortunate luck
              has set us in unsafe places,
              making us prey
              to the Janjaweed.

When she cannot speak her Muma tells her
"Amira, sorrow's fence
has locked you in," she says.
"The only way out is through time."

The conflict and what has happened to her also leaves Amira determined to achieve her goal of becoming educated. The gift of a red pencil helps her regain her voice and her determination.
"Today the red pencil does more
than beg for my hand.

It makes me a promise.
It tells me to try."
Amira eventually discovers that not only does she want to learn to read and write but she wants to teach others too.

Amira is strong, resilient and decides to take her future into her own hands. She sees in the young girl married to a much older man and now pregnant. This might be Amira's future. Leaving the camp is dangerous but, like the flies caught in the Fanta bottle, she must either flee the camp or die inside. It is the flies caught in the Fanta bottle that make Amira realize her situation;
"Maybe they know there's a way out,
but are too frightened by the possibility." 
Just as the flies cannot stay inside the bottle forever, Amira knows she too cannot stay in the camp forever. She must flee the camp to live the life she desperately wants or  stay and see her dreams and hopes die.

Amira represents the hundreds of millions girls and women throughout the world who are unable to read or write and who have little chance of obtaining a basic education because of cultural restrictions and/or poverty and often war.

This novel written in free verse is illustrated by Coretta Scot King Award Winner, Shane W. Evans' grey coloured line drawings. The author has included an very informative Author's Note explaining the Darfurian crisis. The Red Pencil is based on Andrea Davis Pinkney's extensive research and interviews with people who lived through the Darfur conflict. Her novel contains many interesting references to tribal life including calling the moon which young readers will find fascinating.

For those wishing to learn more about the Darfur genocide check out the Darfur page at World Without Genocide (https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/darfur-genocide)

The Red Pencil is a sensitive, well crafted novel. Pinkney's sparse poetry combined with Evans' simple line drawings convey both the beauty of tribal life in Western Sudan as well as the brutality of a conflict that has affected millions.

Book Details:

The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney
Boston: Little, Brown and Company 2014
309 pp.

The Milk of Birds by Sylvia Whitman

"Peace is the milk of birds."

This novel is a truly heartrending fictional account of the terrible situation endured by the people of Darfur, especially its women in 2008.
 
Milk of Birds contains two narratives, that of Nawra bint Ibrahim, a fourteen year old girl in a refugee camp in Darfur and Katherine (K.C.) Cannelli, a young girl struggling academically in her first year of high school. Their stories are told in a series of letters exchanged between the two girls, which highlight their profoundly different life experiences and culture. Each girl also has her own story which informs the reader of the reality of their lives.

K.C. lives in Richmond, Virginia with her mother and older brother, Todd. Her father and mother are divorced and he has remarried. She is still trying to come to terms with what has happened to their family.

K.C is having difficulty in school. Her marks are poor and she has trouble concentrating. Her mother signs her up to be a part of the Save the Girls nonprofit organization working with refugees from Darfur, Sudan. They send a donation each month, part of which goes to the girl in a refugee camp who then sends letters back to her sponsor. Save the Girls matches a girl refugee with a sister in America so they can correspond. 

K.C. is matched with Nawra bint Ibrahim who is living in a refugee camp in Darfur. The two girls are to correspond, but K.C. gets four letters from Nawra which she doesn't respond to. K.C. doesn't respond, mainly because she has difficulty writing but also because of a kind of indifference. ...Life sucks for this Nawra person.  But what am I supposed to do about it? I can't even pass the practice test in world geography."  K.C. reveals to Nawra  that she is the oldest in her class and was held back in school when she was younger. While Nawra isn't able to go to school, K.C. wishes she didn't have to. School is hard for her and it seems to take her a long time to finish assignments. Finally her mother decides to get K.C. tested to see if she has a learning problem.

As K.C. continues to write to Nawra and receives her letters, she begins to understand just how difficult Nawra's life is and she wants to do something. Contact with Nawra expands her world, shows her that people everywhere have problems and helps put her own problems in perspective.

Eventually KC decides that she wants to form a new club at her school, The Darfur Club, to educate people on the situation in Sudan and to raise money to buy fuel-efficient stoves and donkeys. For K.C. it's about making a difference. With Mr. Nguyen as their faculty sponsor, K.C. and her best friend, Emily and her classmate Parker (whom she is crushing on) organize a major project to raise money for the refugees, to buy them things that will make their lives easier and help them get a new start. This project highlights one of K.C.'s strengths - that of thinking outside the box.

In complete contrast to K.C's life of physical ease and comfort, is Nawra's struggle to live with even a bit of dignity in a world torn apart by war, greed and fear. Nawra lives in a camp for displaced refugees (Internally Displaced Persons - IDP) after fleeing from the janjaweeds (outlaws hired by the Sudanese government) who murdered everyone in her village, Umm Jamila. Only Nawra and her mother, who is in such shock she is mute, have escaped. Nawra finds herself pregnant as a result of rape, dishonored and like "spoiled meat". The camp is crowded, dirty and smelly. There is little food and poor sanitation. Still the refugees know that life must go on and a school is formed for the children.  There she meets a young girl, Adeeba  from a well to do family, who is educated, but also now a refugee. Together the two girls help one another.  "When a tree leans, it will rest on its sister." 

When the Save the Girls representatives show up, Nawra is encouraged to join, so she can have some extra money. Nawra who cannot write, dictates her letters to Adeeba, who acts as a scribe.  As we read the two girls' correspondence, it becomes apparent that despite the cultural divide and the geographic distance, both K.C. and Nawra have some similar problems.

Like K.C., Nawra's family is"broken", but not by choice, but by violence and murder. For K.C. she understands how Nawra feels "spoiled" or as K.C. puts it, "defective"  with her inability to do school work. Like K.C., Nawra also has difficulty writing but it is because she is illiterate. Despite the huge cultural differences as evidenced by what each girl writes about, both girls can find something in their letters that resonates with them. Nawra encourages K.C. to persevere and to respect her mother, while K.C. is deeply touched by Nawra's struggle to simply survive and she encourages her to keep going. Both girls stories end with a measure of hope and both begin to find their own way in their world.

Discussion  

The Milk of  Birds  begins slowly but Whitman is simply setting the stage. Readers are encouraged to persevere because there is an important story to be told and it is worth reading. Whitman did a great deal of research in order to create Nawra's voice and make it authentic. She also educates her readers through Nawra's narrative but also by using K.C.'s mom, who gives her daughter some background information on how things came to be in Sudan.

Nawra is from Dafur which is located in southern Sudan. At the time of the events in the novel, Sudan was divided into two regions: the north which is predominantly Muslim and the south with a Christian and animist population. Civil war resulted when the Sudanese government based in Khartoum in northern Sudan, led by General Omar al-Bashir decided to impose a Muslim state on the mainly Christian southern region. 

The predominantly Muslim Darfur region is characterized by two ethnic cultural groups: ethnic Africans who live a pastoral life and Arabs who are nomadic herders. Armed militia groups of ethnic Arabs who came to be known as "Janjaweed" would follow up after government attacks, burning villages and systematically raping women. This genocide resulted in at least four hundred thousand deaths. The purpose of the genocide was to rid Darfur of Black and non-Arab people. The ongoing war has resulted in thousands of people who have been displaced by the war, forced into refugee camps. In 2011, Southern Sudan became a new country.  The Milk of Birds is set against this backdrop of war, genocide and trauma.

There are many issues explored in this novel including rape, female circumcision, AIDS, forced marriage, the concept of honor in Sudanese Muslim families, the role of men and women, identity, education for girls, learning disabilities, environmental destruction, and global social responsibility. While that might seem like far too many, really all these issues at inter-related, especially in the African state of Sudan, and in Nawra's culture. And the this issues are often only obliquely mentioned but yet they are interconnected.

For example, the issue of AIDS and rape are related, not just because a woman can contract AIDS from rape, but also because of the belief by the men in Nawra's culture that sex with a virgin can cure them. Although there is only a mention of this in passing in the novel, this is a prevalent belief that medical field workers must counter. It leads to the violation of very young girls. Rape is also often used as a weapon of war, to destroy a society, weakening family bonds, and demoralizing and marginalizing women.

Although there is quite a bit of violence in the novel it's not done in a graphic way, but told simply using Nawra's understated narrative. The beautiful cover only enhances the prospective reader's desire to open the cover and learn more. 

Book Details:
The Milk of Birds by Sylvia Whitman
Toronto: Atheneum Books for Young Readers    2013
363 pp.

A Long Walk To Water by Linda Sue Park

A Long Walk To Water weaves together the story of two Sudanese children twenty three years apart: Salva during the Sudan civil war in 1985 and Nya during the Dafur conflict in 2008. They are told in alternating narratives.

It is 1985 and eleven-year-old Salva Mawier Dut Ariik belongs to the Dinka tribe and lives in the village of Loun-Ariik. His family includes his mother and his father who owns many cattle and is the village's judge. He has a younger brother Kuol and two older brothers Ariik and ring who have started school before him. They began to attend when they were ten years old.  His sisters, Akit and Agnath do not attend school but are learning how to keep the house from their mother.  Salva and his brothers as well as his father's sons from hhis other wives, were responsible for walking their cattle to the water holes. 

Salva could only attend school during the rainy season when his family remained in the village. In the dry season, the family moved away. On this day in school Salva is thinking about this while the teacher is talking about the Arabic language - the official language of the Sudanese government in the north.  Suddenly Salva's memories are cut off by the sound of gunfire. The war that has been raging in the south for the past two years has come to his village. The northern part of Sudan is mostly Muslim and they wanted all of the country to be Muslim. But the people in the south are of varying religions and did not want to convert to Islam. They began to fight for independence from northern Sudan.

Salva's teacher tells his students not to run home but to run into the bush which is what Salva does. There are many people in the bush but only around a dozen from his village of Loun-Ariik and no one from his family. The next day Salva and the other refugees walk into a rebel camp where they are sorted into groups. Salva is placed into a group of women and children as he is too young to fight. After walkint to a farm and spending the night in the barn, Salva awakens to find himself alone. He stays on the farm for four days helping the elderly woman but when she decides to leave, she tells him he cannot come with her. 

When another group of Dinka arrive at the farm, they reluctantly agree to take Salva with them. For a week Salva walks with this group, who are joined by another Dinka group. They sleep on the ground and are hungry, but find a beehive and eat its honey and honeycomb. A few weeks later, as their group grows, Salva makes a friend in a boy named Marial who speaks Dinka with an accent. He tells Salva that they are walking east to Ethiopia. Salva has now been walking for a month and his group is now in the land of the Atuot people who are known to Salva's people as "people of the lion". This is because the area is noted for the fierce lions who hunt antelope. gnu and wildebeest. 

Unexpectedly, Salva finds his father's younger brother, his Uncle Jewiir. He was in the army and has a rifle. Several days later, Marial is taken by a lion during the night. When Salva's group reach the Nile, he helps with the building of papyrus reed boats so they can cross the wide river. Salva and his uncle make it across the river and prepare to walk across the Akobo desert.  It takes them three days to cross the desert, with his Uncle Jewiir encouraging Salva each day. His uncle tells him that it is unlikely many people from his village survived the attack and informs Salva that he with not stay at the refugee camp in Ethopia but will return to Sudan to fight. Sadly, Salva's uncle is murdered by a gang of men who set upon the group, robbing them at the edge of the desert.

The deaths of Marial and his uncle make Salva determined to survive. In the Itang refugee camp, Salva is separated from the people he journeyed with and placed with other children. This was not to be the end of Slava's journey however. He remained at the refugee camp for six years until 1991 when the Ethiopian government was near collapse. He and the other refugees were forced at gunpoint by soldiers into the treacherous, crocodile-infested waters of the Gilo River.  From there, seventeen-year-old Salva led over a thousand boys south on a walk that took them a year and a half, to another refugee camp in Kenya. After several stays in refugee camps over the next few years, Salva was finally adopted by an American family and taken to live in Rochester, New York. He learned that he was considered one of the "Lost Boys", boys who had wandered through Sudan for months and years after having lost their families, with no one to care for them.

In Rochester, N.Y. Salva learned English, and eventually after six years was in college studying business. He knew that some day he would like to return to Sudan and help his people but he was not sure how. Then one day Salva received an email from a distant cousin whom he did barely know. The email revealed that his father was alive and in a remote clinic in southern Sudan recovering from stomach surgery. This discovery sets in motion a series of events that will impact the people of Sudan years later. 

Salva's narrative alternates with fictional narrative of eleven-year-old Nya who lives in southern Sudan in 2008. Nya is carring an empty container to fill with water from the pond. It is surrounded by women and girls doing the same as well as herds of cattle brought to drink there. Nya drinks a few gourds of the muddy, brown water, fills her container and begins the journey home with it balanced on her head. After eating boiled sorghum with milk, Nya takes her five-year-old sister, Akeer with her on a second trip to the pond for more water. She will make these twice daily trips for seven month. When the pond dries up they move to a camp near a large lake during the five months of the dry season. They do not stay at the lake for the rest of the year because her tribe, the Nuer and the rival Dinka tribe fight over the land near the lake. Nya's mother worried whenever her father and older brother Dep went out to hunt, that they might be hurt or killed in a confrontation with the Dinka. The lake also dried up but Nya was always able to dig into the wet clay around the lake to get water, However, this often took up most of the day.

Nya's sister Akeer becomes very ill and her parents decide to take her to a clinic where she receives medicine. This makes Akeer well but the doctors tell Nya's parents that her illness is from the water. They are told they must boil the water before they drink it but Nya knows this is not possible. They get so little water from the lake that it isn't possible to boil it before drinking.

When they return to their village, several men arrive and ask the village chief where they get their water. Afterwards the men go out and examine two nearby trees and tell the chief that halfway between the two trees is where they will find water. After they leave, the villagers work to clear the area between the two trees of shrubs and brush. Nya and many of the villagers cannot understand why the two men believe they will find water at this location. 

In 2009, the men return, this time with what Nya calle an "iron giraffe". It is a machine for drilling wells. For three days they use this machine to drill a well for the village. For Nya it will not only mean no more long walks to water but a very different way of life with new possibilities.

Discussion

A Long Walk To Water offers young readers two stories of Sudan, that span twenty-four years, from 1985 to 2009. The main narrative is based on the real life of Salva Dut who was born in the village of Luon-Ariik, in Tonj County, in Southern Sudan. It alternates with a second, shorter narrative of a young girl named Nya who represents the people of Sudan at this time. It is a story of war, loss, separation, perseverance and hope.

Sudan, the largest country in Africa, was beset by civil war beginning in 1983. This war was actually a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War that occurred from 1955 to 1972. Sudan had been a British colony that was divided into two regions: the north which was considered similar to Arabic speaking Egypt and the south which had more in common with countries like Kenya and Uganda. Sudan was yet another case where British rule exacerbated ethnic, tribal and linguistic division within the Sudanese. In 1946 the British decided to combine the two regions, making the north responsible for the administration of the colony in both the north and the south. Arabic became the lanugage of the Sudan administration in the south. This caused resentment among the southern Sudanese who spoke English and were largely kept out of the administration of the colony. When independence from Britain was granted in 1953, the southern Sudanese had not been allowed to participate in the process and the administration of both north and south was moved to Khartoum. This set the stage for the first civil war. 

The Second Sudanese Civil War occcurred from 1983 to 2005 and saw the displacement of millions of south Sudanese and these deaths of over two million people. Southern Sudan which is made up of mostly Christians, was granted autonomy in 2005. 

Salva Mawien Dut Ariik is the voice of Sudan's recent past, enduring a breathless, fearful flight from school near his village of Loan-Ariik, in the wake of fighting in 1985. Separated from his family, Salva flees into the bush and endures a journey through miles of wilderness in southern Sudan to a refugee camp in Egypt. He spends the rest of his youth and early adulthood in various refugee camps in Kenya. His journey is shown on a map that is included in the front of the novel. Eventually Salva is selected to emigrate to Rochester, New York where he is taken in by Chris and Louise Moore and their family. He is one of the Lost Boys - boys who had lost their homes and families because of the war and had wandered about for many months or years. With the loving support of the Moore family, Salva gets an education and eventually is able to return to Sudan to help his country.

Salva Dut is a study in perseverance and determination. The death of both his friend Marial and his Uncle Jewiir make him determined to survive. He must persevere. Finding himself utterly alone with the loss of his entire family and witnessing the murder of his uncle, Salva struggles to go on but knows he must. "I am alone now. I am all that is left of my family...How can I go on without them? But how can I not go on? They would want me to survive...to grow up and make something of my life...to honor their memories." Remembering how his uncle helped him to look at one thing at a time in the desert, Salva believes this is what he must do now. "I need only to get through the rest of this day, he told himself. This day and no other."

This determination to survive helps Salva years later when he and the other refugees are forced into the Gilo River. In Sudan, as Salva leads a group of over a thousand boys to safety in Kenya he thinks, "I will get us safely to Kenya...No matter how hard it is."  Salva was to remain in the refugee camp Ifo for years but during that time he pushed himself to learn English. As refugees were being adopted by families in the United States, Salva tried to balance his hope that he too might be allowed to go there. 

After years in America, Salva is reunited with his father, nineteen years after he last saw him. His father, desperately sick from guinea worms he had from years of drinking contaminated water, had needed surgery to repair his damaged digestive system. His father's illness gave Salva the idea of how he could help his mother country of Sudan - and that was to dig water wells. But Salva did not just dig these wells for his Dinka people. He also had wells drilled for the Nuer tribe - considered an enemy of the Dinka people - as well. 

Set against Salva's narrative is that of a young Nya who has to walk every day for miles to get dirty water for her family. Her narrative tells just how difficult life is for the people of southern Sudan who must spend most of their day looking for water - any water just to survive. " Home for just long enough to eat, Nya would not make her second trip to the pong. To the pond and back --to the pond and back --nearly a full day of walking altogether. This was Nya's daily routine seven months of the year.  Daily. Every single day." 

Nya's story also portrays the consequences of life without clean water when her little sister Akeer sickens. "Nya knew many people who suffered from the same illness. First cramps and stomachache, then diarrhea. Sometimes fever, too. Most of the adults and older children who fell ill recovered at least enough to work again, although they might continue to suff on and off for years.
For the elderly and for small children, the illness could be dangerous. Unable to hold anything in their systems, many of them starved to death, even with food right in front of them."

The drilling of a water well by Salva's organization offered new opportunities for Nya's village in ways that she never imagined. Her long walk to water was over. Clean water meant that Nya's days were free for learning at the new school that was being built. With an education, Nya can work to further improve life for her people and her quality of life will improve beyond just subsistence. "Next year there would be a marketplace where the villagers could sell and buy vegetables and chickens and other goods. There was even talk of a clinic someday --- a medical clinic, so they wouldn't have to walk so far to get help, as they had to when Akeer was ill." 

The other thing the well brought was the potential for peace between the Dinka and Nuer tribes who had been at war for centuries. The well meant that disputes over limited resources like water would no longer be an issue. No one was to be denied access to the water. It belonged to everyone.

A Long Walk To Water is a short novel that allows young readers to explore the many issues countries in Africa face: conflicts between various tribes, war, the lingering effects of colonialism, conflicts over resources, and how one person can change the lives of millions.

Linda Sue Park is the duaghter of Korean immigrants and was born in Urbana, Illinois. A Stanford graduate in English, she began writing as a young child and published her first children's book in 1999. 

Book Details:
A Long Walk To Water by Linda Sue Park
New York: Clarion Books 2010
121pp.