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Beverley
Naidoo - "Out of Bounds" (2001)
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about "Out of Bounds"
about Beverley Naidoo
quick info author & works
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about "Out of Bounds"
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Out of bounds (Klett 9,90 € ISBN
3-12-573751-6,
142 pages)
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A different
perspective
Kit Spring
Sunday July 22, 2001
The Observer
This is the best
time ever for readers ranging from puberty to young adults. There are
so many talented authors providing children with challenging and
entertaining contemporary fiction. One of the finest is this year's
Carnegie medal winner, Beverley Naidoo, who carried off the prize with
a collection of short stories (Out of Bounds: Stories of
Conflict and Hope, Puffin £4.99, pp142) that astound with their
feeling, their power to move and the straightforwardness with which
she engages with complex issues.
Naidoo, who is white, was brought up in South Africa and served
eight weeks in solitary confinement in the Sixties when she was a
student. Each story is set in a different decade in the past 60 years.
She explains in her introduction: 'My characters... inhabit a most
beautiful land but one that has been full of barriers - real walls and
those in the mind.'
Her protagonists are children - black, white or coloured - aged 10
or 11, each giving a different perspective, which collectively adds up
to a wonderfully human and complex historical text. Nothing is simple.
A white child is shocked to see a small black boy beaten severely and
publicly for stealing an orange. But her reaction is to steal oranges
herself on her way home, because she has realised that the difference
between them is that she can.
In The Noose |  what
we did about "The Noose" |, a young coloured boy, whose main worry is whether he
can have a cap gun and a Lone Ranger outfit, has to deal with the
devastation caused not only by his family being moved out to a
township, but also with his father being classified as African, which
means that he will lose his job. Naidoo writes of white children seeing their activist parents being
taken to prison |what
we did about "One Day, Lily, One Day" | and of a black girl whose grandmother goes to prison
rather than betray her student daughter |
what we did about "The Typewriter"
|. We encounter Rosa, the first
black child in a white school. The atmosphere, though still full of
danger and hostility, becomes more upbeat. Countering the loud
protests and picket lines, Rosa bravely says: 'They will want me when
they know me.' This is a beautifully written, thought-provoking book.
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about Beverley Naidoo
Born in
South Africa in 1943, Beverley grew up as a white child under
apartheid. At that time there were no books that stimulated children
to question the system. She was moved by The Diary of Anne Frank,
knowing that if she and her brother had been born in Europe, they
would very likely have suffered the same fate with their Jewish mother.
Yet she registered none of the terrible reality of racism immediately
around her.
She
was in her last year at school when the Sharpeville massacre took
place. Through a group of committed fellow students at university she
became involved with the growing political resistance against
apartheid.
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Sharpeville
massacre covered in "One Day, Lily, One Day" |
She
became increasingly active which led to her arrest under the notorious
Ninety Days law; she was detained for eight weeks in solitary
confinement, uncharged. She was still a 'small fish' but many other
activists were charged and imprisoned for years, including her
journalist brother. Beverley came to England in 1965 and into exile.
She was awarded a United Nations Bursary and went to York University
to study English and Education and completed her PGCE teaching
qualification.
At
that time her ambition was to teach in Nigeria. While earning the
money for her fare, she met her husband, another South African exile,
and decided instead to teach in England. She began writing when her
own children were young. Censoring Reality, Beverley's analysis
of non-fiction books about South Africa for children, published in
1985, revealed that most books covered the country's 20th century
history with virtually no mention of apartheid.
Beverley
became an Adviser for English and Cultural Diversity in Dorset. For
her Ph.D, she actively researched the responses of 13 year olds to
literature that challenged their perceptions. She wrote about this
year in a literature classroom in Through Whose Eyes? (1992).
Source: Library
Association
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION CARNEGIE MEDAL
WINNER
BACKGROUND ON BEVERLEY NAIDOO AND THE OTHER SIDE OF TRUTH:
Her first two children's novels were set
against the backdrop of apartheid South Africa. Journey to Jo'burg
(1985) won awards in both the UK and USA but was banned in South Africa
until 1991. While researching and writing Chain of Fire (1989),
she was not allowed to return to South Africa and had to rely on
materials smuggled out of the country. By the time she was writing her
third novel, No Turning Back (1995), Mandela had been released
and she was able to return freely to South Africa to conduct first hand
research in the tense lead-up to the country's first democratic
elections. Her stories in Out of Bounds (Foreword by Archbishop
Desmond Tutu) are about young people's choices in a beautiful country
made ugly by injustice, with one story per decade across the apartheid
era and into 'post-apartheid.'
Source: http://www.la-hq.org.uk/directory/press_desk/200109.html
quick info author
& works:
http://www.channel4.com/learning/microsites/B/bookbox/authors/naidoo/textonly.htm
and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/gfi/story/authors/beverley_naidoo.shtml
and
http://books.guardian.co.uk/summerreading2001/story/0,6194,525408,00.html
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zuletzt geändert: 02.02.03 09:51:47
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