This post was originally published on Medium on 20 July 2017.
Sometimes news that seems small in the grand scheme of things is actually indicative of much deeper problems and shifts in society, which is something I had the chance to address in this piece, published at Roar.
I was inspired to pitch this while in a blind rage the day after a friend passed the news on to me that in a sort-of add-insult-to-injury-and-call-it-privitisation way, it would now cost a fee to email UK Immigration for questions regarding the application process. (Prior to this year, phone calls had an associated fee, but emails were free.) I actually never planned on writing it myself, thinking that I would share the news in a few groups of travel writers and fellow international students, and someone else might find a way into the story, take an angle on it. I didn’t want to rock the boat — I’m going to start applying for my own UK visa again soon, and it was bear-enough of a process the first time around before the added NHS costs. But the more I thought about it, and the more it was buried further under the surreal news cycle we all live within, the more I had to say something.
Now for some, as I wrote, this is just a matter of costs, a way to enforce a policy of austerity by reducing government spending in some way. But things that cannot be ignored — which I was only able to touch lightly on in the piece but which motivated it nonetheless — is that there is a distinct implicit bias revealed about how we decide who belongs where, and we can dig into that by considering the following question: Who is an immigrant, and who is an expat.
If we look up the definition in Merriam-Webster, an “expat” is defined as “an expatriate person,” and “expatriate” is defined as “to withdraw (oneself) from residence in or allegiance to one’s native country” or “to leave one’s native country to live elsewhere.” “Immigrant” is defined as “One that immigrates such as a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence,” and “immigrate” is defined as “to enter and usually become established; especially: to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.” But, as discussed here, here, and here, the ways in which we choose when to use which term is a matter of semantics, and also, social constructions tied to colonialism regarding race and ethnicity. The summary: when we say “expat” we are often reserving that term for white westerners, and it is a bias that we don’t question, but we should.
The world continues to globalize. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer in the contemporary world. However, it is not lost upon me as an American student/graduate student that the value of my education is not the education itself, but what the debt subsidizes in turn through both higher fees at home and abroad, and fewer available funding options. When this adds up over ten years of higher education, combined with the perception of academia, the true value society places on education becomes clear. Contrary to what those who determine what school fees should be seem to believe, I am not landed gentry from the Regency period with nothing else to do with my time or wealth. Contrary to popular memes regarding academics, I did not choose to pursue a PhD because I can’t do anything else. I did not choose this path to hide from reality in ivory towers, as some think academics do. And in truth, I think that those academics who choose to do that, especially in this generation, are few and far in between.
I chose this because I am driven to solve problems. I’m not here on a whim, nor because I simply enjoy throwing myself at brick walls, but because the hopefully-to-be-peer-group who evaluated not only the quality of my work to date but my potential to contribute in a meaningful way to a specific field decided that, with a bit more training, I might have something useful to contribute. And then, as high as the bar is, and as much as it keeps shifting ever higher, I still know that my privileges shield me in this endeavor as much as they do in other parts of my life. The idiocy I face comes in the form of unwanted touching and comments because I look “exotic,” or with “striking features,” not because the world has been able to categorize me on sight and determine me threatening. There is surprise that I speak “normally,” confusion about where my name — and therefore my people — might be from. But I’m from a solidly middle class part of Connecticut; socio-economics and the way I am read by others because I tick the boxes of “American,” “from New England,” “educated,” and most importantly, “undefinable” means that I will always be the expat, not the immigrant. In most ways, I am almost always the “right” kind of people; institutionalized racism is not something that affects me, or creates extra barriers for me, as it does for many others.
Yet, it is because I straddle these hurdles, I feel compelled to write about them, and call attention to them. Because I know that if circumstances had been different, if I hadn’t been raised in New England, if I hadn’t been able to be sponsored for grants by a respected international organization, the next step on my way to Cambridge would not be an annoyance and a financial puzzle, but a financial impossibility. The weight of an un-lived other life begins to feel like a responsibility to speak when able. I don’t know how to fix the problems that drive immigration, the problems plaguing global economies, or the unrest that seems to be growing in this world. But I do know that commodifying global movement and education, while piling on cultural biases that continue to promote discrimination isn’t going to solve anything. Hopefully, if we can start naming that which is implied in these kinds of policies, we can better open up conversations about finding real solutions.
“Winter had muted the earth…” I remember reading those five opening words for the first time when I was about eight or nine years old in the Town Campus gymnasium while at a youth program trip during one of the school holidays. The sound of sneakers squeaking across basketball courts faded. I finished more than half of the book that day and then dove into the rest of the series. I was a committed resident of Mossflower Country from that point on.
I don’t remember who gave me that first copy of Brian Jacques’ Mossflower, but it still sits on the downstairs bookshelves, though the pages have to be handled more gingerly now. What I do remember is checking out the rest of the series in bulk from the local library, the excitement of adding to my collection of Jacques’ Redwall series from the local bookstore, wondering what the illustrations would be, if there would be the short introductory poems, and how the narrative would be shaped this time. I remember the heroes, the stories, the depth and richness of language and wordplay in those texts, the whimsical songs, the feasts and food that one could only dream of tasting, and the lessons learned. Mossflower, Redwall Abbey, Salamandastron — these were the places that captured my imagination long before I went to Narnia, travelled to the Lonely Mountain, fought epic battles at the side of an armored bear, or understood that what truly made Death Eaters dangerous was not their complicity, but the complacency they encouraged in others by inspiring fear. Reading the Redwall series was a complete, delightful, sensory experience. But beyond that, Jacques wrote into being a world where everyone was welcome, and where courage, honor, and friendship were not mere bywords but could tip the scales at pivotal moments.
At a certain point between middle school and college I fell behind on the series, but when I was working for my university newspaper in February 2011, I saw a headline come across the AP newswire announcing that Jacques had died a few days prior. During the next school holiday I found myself back in the town library picking up where I left off as best I could, but mostly returning to the titles that had stayed closest to my heart. It was bittersweet to reread these, because the memory of the first time I had read each title colored the experience with a touch of the surreal: someone whose mind I had been offered a glimpse into, a glimpse which expanded my life and world exponentially, was, suddenly, no more. I remember reaching the halfway point of Lord Brocktree and leaving the simple, white and black R.J. Julia’s bookmark tucked within the leaves, shutting the cover, replacing the dust jacket, and crying. Perhaps it is sentimental to grieve or mourn someone whom one has never truly met. But storytellers such as Jacques leave so much of themselves, and their hope and promise for the future, within their tales. It was hard not to take personally the loss of someone who, though a world apart, created the narrative space that helped to form who I became as a person.
I picked up Redwall again as part of my 2016 reading challenge, I think in an attempt to reclaim some of the idealism that the election year had stolen. After reading it I wrote: “Sometimes in transition periods the best way to keep moving forward is to hold on to the stories that always feel like home, and that become a part of you.” The series as a whole had made me not only love reading, but made me fall in love with the flexibility and whimsy of language. But it was in the second book of the series, long one of my favorites, that I realized that I was actually searching for the same things I looked for in books as a child. Comfort. Heroes. Sanctuary. Something to believe in again. My first impression after re-reading Mossflower after such a long hiatus was “sometimes the only way through sleeplessness caused by reading about everything terrible in the world is to nestle down with old favorite stories instead.” Re-reading the books was a lot like going home again, experiencing the same love and wonder of childhood but being able to understand the depths of the lessons I had learned passively.
At first I just found peace, a sense of quiet space in the midst of the excess noise in the world. But the more I read, I realized that the world that Jacques created had been a literary sanctuary for my childhood self. The rhythm of the words, the structure of the narrative, the ability to experience fear and uncertainty and loss but have them shaped as a part of life — these things left an impression on me. Of course, so did the food and the songs. Redwall Abbey might only exist on the page, but the sense of warmth and homecoming reclaimed in each of the texts, especially in times of strife, well, those things were very real to me. The idea that someone had been able to dream of a place where people were kind and took care of each other, where there was the opportunity to challenge one’s self and others to do great things, where friends and family and community were appreciated and celebrated, made it seem even more possible that such a community could exist outside of the covers and dust-jackets. Mossflower, Salamandastron, and Redwall Abbey might be imaginary, but the potential to explore one’s self through the journeys to and through these places in Jacques’ texts are somehow far more real, perhaps because readers can connect with characters organically and make the written experiences of growth their own.
Jacques did not offer a utopia, but a vision of a place where people could strive to be their best selves, to make mistakes, and to grow from those mistakes. That is a powerful thing for a child to internalize; years later I can see how this formed my own perception of the potential of people to become the best version of themselves with the right encouragement. Sanctuary was not just the Abbey, though an abbey in itself represents a kind of sanctuary, a promise of a new world. For me, sanctuary became realized as a dream of a better world, a world achievable through the actions of others and people helping people, ordinary people becoming inspired to act as their own heroes in times of need. I’m not sure when in life we abandon the dreams and truths of adolescence in favor of the skepticism, distrust, and absolutism of adulthood — if there is a definitive moment or if it is a gradual shift as we weather different losses and disappointments — but I realized that maybe even more than heroes, I needed to be reminded about that kind of a dream, and be reminded that if someone could imagine that world, like anything else, it could become possible.
I think it is important to point out that this potential to become a hero, to create a sanctuary, to dream of a better community or world and build it, is not something Jacques offers to children without a price. Death, loss, betrayal, and war are all reoccurring themes, and he takes many characters away after readers get to know them and care about them, even if only in a brief vignette. Children lose parents, parents lose children, friends die in accidents or old age, or in wars. Sometimes there is a reason or a cause, and sometimes there is no good reason, no explanation we can give for why it was someone’s time to leave — much like loss in the real world. In fact, the only unrealistic deaths are those of warriors in the battles Jacques constructs — unreal if only because in the world between the pages, there is a clear sense of right and wrong, of whose side to be on. And it is that sense of right and wrong, that clear moral compass embedded in a code somewhere between Judeo-Christian morality and the chivalric code, with a good, old-fashioned sense of fellowship and service thrown in, that Jacques’ heroes derive strength from. This is their reason for continuing to fight though they watch their comrades die in front of them, to push back against evil hordes, search against all odds for kidnapped children, and scour the earth for cures for friends fallen ill. Time and again, battles are won and miracles achieved because a few characters with strength and courage, expressed in endless ways, give enough of themselves to tip the scales just enough for their allies to rally and take the day.
And, of course, now I can recognize the Christian allegory embedded in parts of the text, much as an adult might when returning to C.S. Lewis or Philip Pullman after the enchantment of talking animals and parallel worlds slightly fades. But Jacques pulled back from the allegory. Though he offers readers an Abbey and a code of peace and fellowship, his continuous spiritual hero figure is a warrior first, one who chose to live peacefully but was always ready to pick up the sword to protect that peace, or ordain one who could carry that mantle. The world can be continually remade into a better version of itself so long as people are ready to find the inner strength to protect it. This was not a message I recognized when I was young, but rather, a sense of hope I found this year, re-reading in the context of Brexit, Trump, post-fact politics, increased attacks on free speech, the rise of fervent anti-intellectualism, the humanitarian disasters in Aleppo and other parts of the world, the exponential death of the Amazon rainforest and other environmental disasters, and the inhumane reactions to peaceful protests in the name of civil rights and protection of resources across the United States…I’m not sure it is possible to provide a full context of what this world has grappled with this year or the extent of the losses that should never have been. But what I saw as well were the small victories, the people who did rise up and stand forward and decide that it was not enough to stay silent any longer, communities built, alliances forged. Even in the darkest moments, there will be people who choose to stand up for the rights of others, to fight when others cannot, to protect those weaker than themselves. And because of those people, the world becomes different. What Jacques gives his readers is the realization that one does not have to wield a sword to become that person; the potential to act with courage and honor, to live in such a way that they demonstrate a commitment to the value of the lives of others, exists in everyone, if only they choose to act on it when it matters most.
Courage, honor, friendship — and loss. These were the four cornerstones of Jacques’ world, even more than the battles between good and evil. Peace is a verb in the Redwall series; it must be practiced actively and defended when need rises. But peace is achievable. Change is possible even when, or especially when, it seems beyond hopeless to think that anything will ever get better. Sadness and joy, life and death, hope and despair, conflict and peace are all a part of existence, all turning on their own cycles, and all must be met head-on. Without challenges, we would never find our courage, know what it means to act with honor, or test the strength and value of our friendships. And without loss, we don’t appreciate our lives. Everything that lives must die, though we don’t get to choose how or when or why. We don’t always get to say goodbye. But we can learn to accept it, celebrate the person we loved and honor who they helped us to grow to be. We can learn to say goodbye, and rather than fear what we do not know. We can live our lives striving to be the best versions of ourselves, so that when our time comes, we can walk into the darkness without regrets, but instead with the hope that we will see those we lost, and wait patiently for the ones we leave behind to join us when it becomes their time. All stories end. They have to. And the storyteller must move on as well. But the beauty of literature is that no story truly ends; we can pick up the book again, and take the journey anew.
Stories have their roots in us, and we, our roots in stories. Sometimes returning to our imaginary, liminal spaces is even more powerful than returning to “real” places, because while our favorite haunts in the real world might evoke memories, our imaginary or literary or musical places evoke the dreams we had for our futures. We can see more clearly why we were inspired, and we can find that sense of hope and promise again, for better or worse tempered with the maturity and cynicism of adulthood. We can trace the moments in the text that became formative parts of our identities, and can understand why certain moments of loss or joy affected us more than others. I found a part of myself when I was young in the woods by the River Moss. To see that world again not only helped me to put reality in perspective — all things considered, the world is not so much tragically worse than it was two decades ago, though it may seem that way — but it helped me to build new connections with people who themselves remembered their journeys to Redwall. And there is something powerful about meeting people who share the same fictional spaces; technology might be isolating us in many ways, but books still have the power to bring us together. Perhaps, in times of turmoil, what we need to do to learn to bridge those seemingly unbridgeable divides in society is to turn inwards and remember our favorite books, remember the kinds of worlds we dreamed of inhabiting, the values we learned within those places we escaped to, revisit them, and share them with the people around us. Millennials turn almost cultishly to Rowling and her oft-quoted words about the doors of Hogwarts always being open to friends; Jacques closed near every one of his twenty-two Redwall novels, and a few of his other books, with that sentiment since 1986. It is always possible to open one’s eyes to the endless wonder of the world and those we share it with; it is never too late to return to the stories of our childhoods where we first set our roots, and truly be home once again.
Michelle Anya Anjirbag studied literature at the University of Connecticut and the University of Edinburgh, and is interested in how books and stories shape the ways people think about each other. She reads voraciously but especially loves children’s and young adult literature, travel writing, and the musings of stodgy old men near the end of their lives. She can be found on Instagram (@michelle_anya) and on Twitter (@anjirbaguette and @bookfeet).
This piece was originally published on 21 September 2018 at the SELCIE blog as part of their #GrowingUpWithBooks project.
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In today’s blogpost, Michelle Anjirbag shares a personal reflection about childhood ‘reading memories’ — the particular stories which have had a formative and longlasting influence, shaping who she was then and now….
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My PhD might be on Disney and fairy tale adaptations now, but the princess I looked up to when I was younger (and still, now) was never found on the shelves of one of their stores, or in their animated films. I was about seven years old when I found the blue and grey and black hardcover books in my elementary school library: Patricia C. Wrede’s The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Inside their pages I met my earliest role models that didn’t walk out of folklore or history books: Princess Cimorene and King Kazul. Most of all I learned the one set of skills that has remained important throughout my life: how to deal with dragons. But more on that later.
The series is comprised of four books: Dealing with Dragons (1990), Searching for Dragons (1991), Calling on Dragons (1993), and Talking to Dragons (1985). Though it is now the last book in the series, Talking to Dragons was originally written as a standalone, and was followed up by the short story “The Improper Princess” in the Jane Yolen edited Spaceships and Spells collection — which then became the first 27 or so pages of Dealing with Dragons.
Cimorene was a princess who fenced, and who didn’t want to do what princesses were somehow meant to do, like learn the appropriate volume to scream when kidnapped by giants. She ran away to avoid an arranged marriage, sure, but at the same time, she found herself through being practical and useful, and using her mind no matter what people thought she ought to do. But, because I started with what is now thought of as the last book, I met Cimorene as a grown woman first. She was, in Wrede’s own words “strong, smart, self-assured, practical, curious, and willing to take on and solve all sorts of problems” (Wrede, iii).
Something about that resonated with me — it could have been the influence of a solidly New England upbringing where we’re taught to just get on with what’s needed, or a bit of the home my mom built, where pursuit of knowledge and skills were celebrated and there was no breakdown of gendered tasks. Likewise, the idea of a dragon kingdom where “King” was merely a job title and had nothing to do with gender, and where the king was practical and not just aloof and wise, or somehow evil or misunderstood, appealed to me. Either way, as a child with no concept of what a twisted fairy tale was, I really enjoyed the way Wrede played with tropes about princess, dragons, and the rules of fairy tales. It was fun to be able to pick through things and recognize them, especially as I read more vastly and returned to the books at different stages of my life.
Beyond Cimorene, though, I loved Kazul. She was the king; she ruled. She became the king of the dragons not because it was handed to her, but because, despite adverse situations, she proved herself. She was incredibly intelligent, she knew a bit of everything and had a library and treasure room too big to bother cataloguing herself. She recognized the value of others, the potential of someone who didn’t quite fit in. She knew her own mind and wasn’t apologetic about it; in short, she, too, reminded me of the kind of women who were in my life — as older generations of teachers, and community service coordinators, swimming instructors, and Girl Scout troop leaders — and who I could see pieces of my future self in. Women who got on with the business of living and leading and didn’t pay any mind to what they should or shouldn’t be able to do. They were doting grandmothers, stern taskmasters when necessary, and could do everything from bake and garden to manage carpentry and roofing and plumbing issues themselves if needed. They were resilient, they thrived both in the cold grey winters and the baking, basking summers of New England. And yes, in many ways, they dealt with dragons — if they weren’t the dragons themselves. I was lucky to find them both on and outside the pages; these women left their mark on a young girl, and I became stronger for it, and had that strength affirmed in both my internal and external life.
Michelle as a reader then, with her younger sister Ashley…… and now.
Looking back on this series now, I’m happy to be able to still enjoy them, if not in the exact same way. Of course, now I know all of the references and all the tropes being played with. I have the knowledge to problematise the ways in which gender dynamics are not completely disrupted across the narrative, but also the knowledge to understand the nuanced space within which this kind of narrative still operates. I know at what point I’d like to see more of the narrative expanded in different ways, or interrogated. I know that we’ve both moved on from and need more of these sorts of stories.
But despite what I know, or think I might know, there still remains the wonder of discovery, the joy of growing up — and continuing to grow up — with books. The covers might have changed, and I might read deeper, but the only thing that has truly changed, is me. But nevertheless, I still see the threads of the woman I hoped I’d one day grow into in these books: self-assured, intelligent, eager to learn, capable, passionate, and fearless, and ready to push back against the wrongs and injustices of the world in a way that is fair and just. And thankfully, I continued to grow up with books — and with people — that never told me that this would be impossible.
Which leads us back to the beginning: learning how to deal with dragons. My positionality in any of the fields that I’ve worked in — be it academia, specialty running, outdoor education, or hyperlocal journalism — means that I hear “no” a lot. I hear “you can’t”, “you’re not supposed to”, and “someone like you shouldn’t” or “someone like you can’t”, or perhaps the most telling: “someone like you should be more careful” about what I think or feel and how and how loudly I say it. I hear about the ceilings I will hit, and how much harder I will have to work — and I see it in the lives and the careers of the women who have gone before me. But importantly, I see women who meet the noes, the cannots, and the nevers, and pressed on. They answer them with “so whats?”, and “I wills”.
Because they do these things — and because writers like Patricia C. Wrede and her generation of female fantasists dared to imagine women who were indomitable, who ruled as kings, who were themselves the wise dragons and witchy women filled with strength and curiosity — I can sit at the University of Cambridge as an ethnic-religious minority woman, eldest child of an immigrant single mother, on the opposite side of the ocean from home. And sitting here, I can not only imagine the ways in which we can be better, but I know I have the will and the strength to be part of the process of getting there.
Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles Book One (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 1990).
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Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Having earned her MSc at the University of Edinburgh and her BA at the University of Connecticut, her research interests include adaptations of fairy tales and cross-period approaches to narrative transmission across cultures and societies, and her current research is on depictions of diversity in Disney’s fairy tale adaptations from 1989 through the present.
