Jamila Gavin
About Author
Jamila Gavin was born in India in the foothills of the Himalayas, and came to England for secondary school. She has vivid childhood memories and looks back on her early years with fondness.
Jamila was nearly 12 years old when she came to settle in England and was very aware of the cultural differences between the two countries. "My Father was passionately Indian and my mother was passionately English," she said.
"As a child, I didn't think about whether I liked England or not, I was a naturally happy person and made friends easily but looking back now, I realised that I found it cold and restrictive in comparison with India."
As a child Jamila was an aivd reader; in her own words "a word addict". Later, she pursued her love of music, studying at the Trinity College of Music, London, and then moved to Gloucestershire to have her family.
Jamila's earlier books have been short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Award ('The Wheel of Surya' and 'The Eye of the Horse'), and for many other awards including the Smarties Prize and the Federation of Children's Book Groups Award. Grandpa Chatterji was televised for Channel 4.
'Coram Boy', won the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award 2000 and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal and the Blue Peter Book Award. It was staged at the National Theatre from November 2005 to February 2006.
Coram Boy is set in London and Gloucester in the 18th century, and could be said to be about the beginning of Empire as well as about the transforming power of music, divisions between fathers and sons and the brutal treatment of children in this period.
"I first heard the name 'Coram' over ten years ago," explained Jamila. "A friend said, 'The highways and byways of England are littered with the bones of small children', and then went on to talk about a 'Coram Man'. I wanted to know more - but he only knew it was to do with unwanted babies and children who were picked up by a travelling man, a Coram Man, who was a tinker or trader. He charged money for taking the children to the institution for abandoned children in London, founded by Sir Thomas Coram, and known as the Coram Hospital. Such a man was never employed by the Coram Hospital, and it seems there could have been a racket going on in which young women with unwanted babies were being horribly cheated. Most children he took away were probably murdered or died from neglect, and never reached this haven.'
"I was very interested and I knew immediately there was a story to be told. I let it brew for the next ten years and then began to research it. Living in the Cotswolds, aware of the drover's roads and the ancient highways of England criss-crossing the country, I found myself setting Coram Boy around a Gloucester family and their trauma when a baby was born and disappeared. Was it murdered by the Coram Man? Or did it reach the Coram hospital in London?"
Other recent titles include; The Robber Baron's Daughter; 'The Blood Stone', an epic adventure story following one boy's search for the father he has never seen; 'Danger by Moonlight', a shorter novel for younger children that follows on from the 1991 title, 'Three Indian Goddesses and Three Indian Princesses'.
Interview
BLACKBERRY BLUE AND OTHER FAIRY TALES
PUBLISHED BY TAMARIND
NOVEMBER 2013
In Blackberry Blue, award-winning author Jamila Gavin creates her own collection of fairy tales, inspired by the stories of The Brothers Grimm and the enchantments and dangers of European fairy tales, yet peopled by characters from many corners of the world.
In these stories we meet Blackberry Blue, found in the forest as a baby with skin 'as black as midnight' who grows up and falls in love with a prince at a ball; in The Purple Lady, Abu confronts the Purple Lady who steals children; Chi hopes his carved, jade gifts will help him to marry a beautiful princess in The Golden Carp; and Emeka the Pathfinder has to confront bears and wolves as he seeks his destiny. Other stories in the collection include Oddboy and The Night Princess.
Here, Jamila Gavin explains what inspired her to write her own collection of fairy tales.
"Fairy tales have always been a great favourite of mine from my early childhood, then growing up and becoming a writer. It's clear that fairy tales have always had a wide influence on writers. Look at the opening of King Lear when he asks his daughters to prove how much they love him; fairy tales are threaded through so much of our writing and cultures.
Yet although fairy tales come from many lands and cultures, the effect of Disney films has been to create the blond and blue eyed Western European archetypes although today in Europe we have children who are born and brought up as Europeans with many different ethnic heritages; my children and grandchildren are also mixed race. It's so important for children to identify with different heroes and heroines but they are saying, 'that can't be me because I'm not European enough' in the old sense of Europe.
So I wanted to write fairy stories with all the elements of European fairy stories, the dark forests and castles, the enchantments and that frisson of danger, but to give the characters different identities. Fairy tales come from so many different cultures - the first Cinderella story was, I believe, Chinese - so I felt I had a license to explore the different characters and identities. I also bring in some Greek myths and legends.
What I want my stories to do for the contemporary child living in Europe and growing up here, who may have parents and grandparents from Africa, India, China or Russia, is for them to read these stories as Europeans but with an acknowledgement that they have another heritage behind them, whether that's through their name or language, etc.
I wrote these stories because I wanted children to feel at home with European stories, to approach stories like Snow White as Europeans and to not feel alienated from them. I wanted them to know that while they may have a Russian background, they live here in Europe and they can also experience these European stories on their terms.
This idea is reflected in the book's illustrations which were created by Richard Collingridge. While the stories may have a Chinese or Indian or African in it, they are still rooted in Europe so the characters couldn't look too ethnic in how they were dressed; the details had to be right. I thought he managed that beautifully and I love the way the stories are laid out in the book, too.
What I didn't want to do in this collection was to 'rewrite' our known fairy stories or folk stories. The most derivative story I have in the collection, Blackberry Blue, references Snow White and Cinderella. The name and title dropped into my head but she fitted very neatly into the Cinderella fairy tale, the notion of the poor child emerging into a rich environment, and I drew on the Cloak of Rushes and other stories that fit into the British culture. It has all the elements of stories I adore, like the ball in Cinderella. In my old versions of Cinderella there are three balls and I liked that so I gave Blackberry Blue three different balls and three gorgeous dresses to wear.
There is also a story in my collection called The Purple Lady, who enchants children and takes them away, so it feels a little like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. But the idea came from me sitting on a bus in Moscow one winter and seeing a lady in purple on the bus and that found its way into a story.
I think Blackberry Blue is probably my favourite from the collection because it feels very complete; the others have some things left over for the characters to deal with, a sadness or something not left whole. Some people who have read The Purple Lady have asked if Abu really had to lose an eye after saving his sister but for me, that's important; you're not always left whole at the end of an experience and you have to keep your bargains. At the end of Emeka the Pathfinder, we find that the sorceress is the one who is sad because she really did love Joy and wanted a daughter. In The Night Princess, they all struggled to find happiness but the ending reminds us that you don't always find it.
We are used to happy endings but that isn't what fairy tales are all about. We call them 'fairy tales' not because they are about fairies, it means they are 'fantastic', and those ancient stories were to do with exploring the light and dark in human nature and the struggle to overcome one or the other. This thread runs through all the cultural stories from the Greeks all the way through.
Writing fairy tales, like fantasy writing, gives you a freedom to explore the darkest human actions and thoughts. The old folk tales explore all the aspects of the human condition, things like jealousy and being lost and found, not in a preachy way ('if you're bad this will happen to you...') but saying, 'these are things which you may face in your future life'. They explore the idea that if you're jealous, it could lead to other bad behaviours, but if you're generous it may lead to good things.
If you look at the early folk tales, you will have people getting chopped into pieces and so on but it's told in that mystical, fairy tale language so that a child reading it knows that it's not really true, but that there is a truth in it.
Writers continue to be fascinated by the old fairy tales and to find their own ways to re-write them. I think there's a great revival of the fairy story tradition, look at Philip Pullman's retellings of the Brothers Grimm tales and his own collections of stories. So while there is the 'Disney' world of fairytales, these days there is a lot we can draw on to countermand that."
Blackberry Blue
