museums and mirrors

I have been obsessed with ancient Egypt since I was a child. When the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb toured Canada in 1979, my big sister’s class went to the museum but mine did not. I coveted the replica artifacts she brought home from the gift shop, and devoured all the books in our library that had anything to do with pharaohs and pyramids. In high school I took a course on Ancient History and pulled my first all-nighter putting the finishing touches on my art project about Egyptian burial rituals. But by college, my interest in history had shifted to the medieval period and I traded pyramids in Egypt for castles in England.

It wasn’t until I moved to Brooklyn after graduation that I began to consider the significance of my childhood fascination with ancient Egypt. Despite Hollywood’s attempts to whitewash both rulers and gods, I always knew that ancient Egyptians were people of color—all the artifacts I had ever seen confirmed that they were brown-skinned, full-lipped, wide-hipped, and black-haired. I saw myself in the scenes painted on tomb walls, but I was a young adult before I realized that Egypt was part of Africa. I never learned about Nubia or the Kushites or the Pharaoh Taharqa when I was a child, and only discovered the Senegalese scholar Cheik Anta Diop in graduate school. Diop refuted the claim of generations of European and American historians that the ancient Egyptians were White and more Mediterranean than African. I was at NYU to be trained as a scholar, but those years ultimately confirmed my calling as a storyteller. I began writing for children with a commitment to creating “mirror books” that put kids of color and their cultures at the center of the story.

Twenty years have passed and I now have over twenty titles for young readers. You likely won’t find them in local bookstores, but last weekend I almost sold out of books at the Brooklyn Museum’s Tenth Annual Children’s Book Fair. This was my fifth year participating in the event, and as I sat behind my table in the bustling glass pavilion, I remembered the first time I saw the Brooklyn Museum. The entrance was under construction but the scaffolding was cleverly concealed by a painting of the kohl-lined eyes of an Egyptian sarcophagus. As we drove along Eastern Parkway I marveled at the museum and made a mental note: “That’s for me.”

Children do the same thing when they discover a “mirror book,” and it’s incredibly gratifying to see Black children’s eyes light up when they see themselves represented on the covers of my books. At the book fair I was struck by the number of Black parents who wanted me to take a photo with their child—one mother even handed me her baby! Clearly it means a lot to these parents that their children can see a Black author and know that making books is an option for them, too. I’m proud to be a mirror in that sense—I hope kids do look at me and see what’s possible for themselves.

When editors rejected my latest picture book Milo’s Museum as “too didactic,” I chose to publish it myself. It was inspired by The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia and the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC—two institutions founded by Blacks to tell the many stories that are missing from “the official record.” I wanted kids to understand a curator’s role in deciding what belongs inside a museum, and I included a “how to” guide at the back of the book so that kids can think about the objects that tell their own family’s story.

Bullying and bigotry are the example set by the country’s president-elect, and I’d argue that it’s a good time for White America to take a good long look in the mirror. Though it may seem innocuous, children’s literature has an important role to play in shaping this nation’s youth. “Mirror books” can bolster the self-esteem of our most vulnerable kids and teen, and more “window books” can teach empathy and kindness, which might help to break down the barriers that threaten to divide us.