Programming Spotlight: Dance Africa 2024

image from BAM's website

We were thrilled to have recently hosted the returning teaching artist Jayson P. Smith  from Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Jayson conducted a pre-theater dance workshop with an exceptionally engaged group of students who spent a special hour in the library as it was filled with the joy of movement and dance.  The students were preparing for a trip the following week to BAM’s annual Dance Africa performance.  You can read a bit about the tradition here.--Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Guest Post: The Sounds of My Village by Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah by Sarah Stacke.  Image from www.themoth.org

Best known for his experiences as a child soldier in the memoir A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah’s pre-war childhood in a rural village of Sierra Leone deserves as much attention. This story is an audio recording of Beah’s performance for The Moth, a group which organizes live storytelling events worldwide. In recounting his upbringing, Beah pays homage to his community and its traditions.

When he was nine, Beah’s grandmother told him that “each person’s mind is their own personal library, and as life breathes its moments before you, those moments become memories, and those memories become narratives [...] that you put on a shelf in your own personal library.”  Inspired by her words to create his own rich narrative, Beah inscribes the rhythms of his village in his mind: the morning cry of the birds, the evening communal meal, and the elders’ nightly stories. With tenderness and humor, Beah narrates how his life, once anchored by the warmth of tradition, is torn apart by the unending impact of war. He draws attention to how each victim’s death is the loss of a storyteller and intimates that war does not just destroy the individual but wipes out the collective memory of a culture. War creates a past without storytellers, a tradition without practitioners, and survivors without access to the narratives they need to understand their place in civilization. This story provides an engaging introduction to Beah’s memoir and implants the idea that a young adult’s life is rich enough to compose a personal library.

While this story, suitable for students ages 9 and up, is easily accessible to English speakers, Beah’s dialect may require additional support and scaffolding to aid students in their understanding.

You can access “The Sounds of My Village” here on The Moth’s website. --Esther Kau

Esther Kau currently teaches middle school English in New Jersey. Her current roster of books include Garth Greenwall’s What Belongs to You, her daughter’s favorite, Ben Clanton’s Narwhal: Unicorn of the Sea, and her son’s favorite, Steve Light’s Cars Go.

This is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare by Gabourey Sidibe

The down-to-earth star of Precious strikes a conversational tone and shares her life story so far.  Growing up in Harlem in a family drawn together by necessity instead of romance, Sidibe articulates her maturing perspective, now suffused with humor, regarding the challenges of her unique experience of her parents’ green card marriage, childhood visits to family in West Africa, unstable housing, school struggles, fame, and elective surgery. Older teen readers looking for a new memoir may well enjoy Gabourey Sidibe’s recently published volume.  --Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Sidibe, Gabourey.  This is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Apartheid in South Africa is not a topic students or teachers usually approach with humor, which makes Noah’s book unique in a school library collection.  Using both his lived experience as well as his famous trademark humor, Noah recounts his childhood in South Africa as a multiracial young person through anecdotes.  The book is structured to provide enough context between anecdotes to offer readers the necessary schema to both laugh at Noah’s jokes and begin to comprehend the horrors of the South African system of apartheid.  In doing so, this book is sure to broaden readers’ comparative perspectives on state-sponsored racism and is likely to lead a curious mind to wonder about the history of a nation they may previously only have connected to the name Nelson Mandela.  Teens may enjoy discussing Noah’s perspective on serious matters like, crime, poverty, and domestic violence, all of which are woven throughout the book.  Recommended for older teen readers as well as book clubs. --Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Noah, Trevor.  Born A Crime: Stories of a South African Childhood.  New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016.  Print.

Click here for a short discussion guide published on the blog Book Chatter.

Child Soldier: When Boys and Girls are Used in War by Jessica Dee Humphreys & Michel Chikwanine Illustrated by Claudia Davila

Michel was a fierce-spirited five-year-old when he disobeyed his parents to play soccer with his best friend one day after school in his neighborhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Snatched by rebels, tortured and forced to kill his best friend, Michel recounts his harrowing experiences in a way that younger readers can understand, leaving out the graphic details while showing the story via sequential art.  This moving, true story is followed with excellent backmatter, all of which address the older elementary reader as a future changemaker.  Notably, the authors connect Michel’s unique story to the estimated 250,000 child soldiers serving in armed forces and rebel groups around the world without omitting the fact that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds may join the armed forces in some countries (with parental permission) and the fact that “children in these countries are sometimes recruited into armed gangs and other violent criminal groups.” (43)  Recommended for mature younger readers and those who do not shy away from serious topics.  I would recommend this to a student demanding a read like Yummy, though the first few pages, which outline the cultural and geographical context for the reader, may require a bit of scaffolding for less-experienced readers.--Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Humphreys, Jessica Dee and Michel Chikwanine.  Child Soldiers:  When Boys and Girls are Used in War.  Toronto: Kids Can Press, 2015.  Print.

Click here for the teacher’s guide or discussion guide on the publisher’s website.

Taking Flight by Michaela DePrince with Elaine DePrinc

From eighteen year-old Michaela DePrince comes a memoir which will be of interest to students seeking true stories of survival and triumph.  The DePrince co-authors (mother and daughter) use simple and accessible language to tell Michaela’s tale of her early life in Sierra Leone during the country’s violent conflict.  Orphaned at age three and adopted by the American DePrince family at age four, Michaela relays what she can remember about her experiences as a bright little girl, her biological parents’ only child, born with vitiligo and a precocious ability with languages.  That little girl survived abuse as an orphan, and her memoir spends a fair amount of time narrating her difficult early years and her incredible survival and adjustment to life in the United States.  Readers will be heartened as they follow Michaela’s pursuit of her dream to become a professional ballet dancer and interested to learn about the challenges and obstacles she has overcome and those she still faces dancing in the U.S. (she is currently pursuing her dreams in Europe).  Social Studies teachers may find the initial chapters of the book a useful supplement in its firsthand account of a child’s experience during Sierra Leone’s civil war.  Recommended for independent reading for middle school girls. --Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Discover an interview with the co-authors published in Justine Magazine here.  (Thank you, Regan!)  Read an excerpt published in Teen Vogue here.

DePrince, Michaela and Elaine DePrince.  Taking Flight.  New York: Random House, 2014. Print.

Predator: Life and Death in the African Bush by Mark C. Ross and David Reesor

“Who would win in a fight? A lion or a tiger?” I can’t tell you how many times students have asked me some variant of that question - cheetah and lion, hyena and leopard, anything and a crocodile - the pairings are endless and the discussion endlessly fascinating.  Predator is a natural companion to these conversations - its full color photographs with informative captions invite further investigation.  But Predator is not all style and no substance.  Written by a wildlife biologist, the book is split into five main sections, each covering one large African predator.  The prose covers each animal’s biology, behavior, development, and habitat and is engaging and informative without being overly scientific.  Still, Predator is a text for confident readers.  Backmatter includes a bibliography and index.  Predator is a compelling book for browsing and is well-suited for inquiry, though some pictures are not for the faint of heart. --Regan Schwartz

Ross, Mark and David Reesor. Predator: Life and Death in the African Bush. New York: Abrams, 2007. Print.

Guest Blog Post: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

This is the true story of the life of a boy who suffered the unimaginable and inconceivable horrors of war as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. The story of Ishmael Beah’s transformation from a 12 year old boy who loves to dance to American music with his friends into a thoughtless killer is penetrating and real. Every page is powerful because the terrors of war were forced upon the innocence of children and their families. Ishmael’s ability to succeed is not based on heroic or honorable deeds but rather his sheer determination to simply adapt and survive. This book forces the reader to confront his or her own thoughts and feelings of how he or she would have responded. What if it were you who was there? What would you have done…really? Ishmael has more than the war to battle as the loss of family, friends and his emotional control sends him on a path of drug abuse, killing, revenge, rehabilitation, reconnection, and finally safety within the United States. Ishmael’s story offers the reader hope in the power of rehabilitation and the power of opportunity on our behaviors. Ishmael has incredible talents and gifts that were almost stripped away from him because of his circumstances. This book is guaranteed to capture the reader’s attention and hope as he or she joins Ishmael on his quest for survival and safety. Ishmael’s story helps to make the seemingly impossible possible. -- Stephen Wilder

--Stephen Wilder is the principal of Passages Academy and a literacy leader.

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Unknown Soldier by Joshua Dysart, Illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli

The ComiCon arrives in town Friday (thanks for the heads up, Mr. Lopez!) and we’re hoping to scout out the best new comic books and graphic novels of the season, so before we go, I thought I’d tell you about my favorite discovery from this summer: Unknown Soldier: Haunted House. Following superhero comic book procedure is only half of what the team behind Unknown Soldier has to offer. The other half is worth its weight in gold: factual information about the conflict in Uganda as it plays out (fictionally) before an Americanised refugee who has returned as a competent doctor to administer to those in need. Raising the ethical dilemmas that come with child soldiers and culture clashes when foreigners enter civil war zones, this is a compelling, violent, and informative read which would make for great independent reading in tandem with units on child soldier texts, an examination of contemporary civil wars, or diversity in comic books. Highly recommended as a genre-crossing counterpoint to Beah’s Long Way Gone. Coming soon to a Passages Academy Library near you!

Here's a link to a more in-depth article on this fascinating series published in the New York Times.