Guest post written by author Sayantani DasGupta
Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which — The Serpent’s Secret — was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an E. B. White Read Aloud Honor Book. She is also the author of Debating Darcy, a contemporary young adult reimagining of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Sayantani is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University. She is a team member of We Need Diverse Books, and can be found online at sayantanidasgupta.com and on Twitter at @sayantani16. The Chaos Monster is out now.
Saving the world, or better yet, saving the multiverse, is the stuff of an exciting story.
Saving the Earth, on the other hand, is usually a bit of a buzzkill.
Let’s face it, hearing about climate change, rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, deforestation, acid rain, and species loss makes us all anxious. As a parent, the thought of my children living in a rapidly deteriorating world – plagued with forest fires and flooding, food crises and climate refugees – stresses me out to no ends.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t talk about environmental justice and climate change. In fact, we should be talking about the environment All. The. Time. The question is, how do we do it? More specifically, how do we do it in a way that doesn’t make people run away, covering their ears and screaming?
As an academic who teaches Narrative Medicine, I used to say things like, “stories are good medicine.” Meaning, stories are the way we human beings make sense of ourselves, our world, and each other. Stories are necessary and healing, particularly in moments of crisis and loss, illness and trauma, such as the climate crisis we are all living in right now.
As a children’s writer, I’ve stopped using that expression. Because I’ve come to realize that “stories are good medicine” makes stories seem like a bitter pill you have to swallow, something that’s “good for you.” And we all know the last thing children want to do is what an adult deems is “good for them.” (Perhaps it need not be said, but a lot of adults function the same way in their relationships to authority figures.)
As an avid young reader, I remember hating stories that waggled their metaphoric finger at me, scolding me or teaching me a lesson. As a tween I distinctly remember refusing when my mother offered me a copy of Pride and Prejudice – which would eventually become my favorite book of all time – because the title seemed too didactic for twelve year old me. I was sure that in choosing that book, my mother was trying to tell me not to be prideful, or not to be prejudiced.
But stories in general, and children’s stories in particular, have a few tricks up their sleeves. Stories can be an amazing vehicle for dealing with difficult subjects in engaging ways. Like Miss Austen herself, humor is one of my favorite techniques for exploring hard topics, alongside adventure, fantasy, and heart.
As a middle grade author –writing for the approximately 8-12 year old set – I’ve crafted now three series inspired and informed by Bengali folktales. Aside from the fantasy adventures across the galaxies, as well as the flying horses, wisecracking birds, and drooling, rhyming carnivorous monsters who populate my stories – I also tuck in serious topics, from racism, colorism, and colonialism to specific issues like children being put in cages at national borders. I don’t lecture, and I trust in children’s deeply rooted sense of justice – their vibrant ideas of what’s right and fair in the world. I fold the hard issues into multi-layered stories a reader can approach for the fun and for the adventure, or for the deeper meanings.
When I’m writing about environmental and climate justice in my latest series – whether about missing bees, or acid rain, or deforestation – these real life crises are folded into a fantasy landscape. Where the missing bees produce a nectar needed for the flying horses to live, where the acid rain is making the waters uninhabitable for the mer-people, where deforestation is causing increased hauntings (since Bengali ghosts, unlike their Western counterparts, live for unfathomable reasons in the trunks of trees). The squabbling brother-sister twins, Kinjal and Kiya, at the heart of my adventures, discover as much about themselves as about nature during their quests. They ultimately realize that “everything is connected to everything” – by the bonds of the natural world, their chosen communities, and by their familial love.
Stories about climate change and environmental justice can be hard to tell, and can be even harder to listen to. But like my latest protagonists, the science loving girl twin Kiya and story loving boy twin Kinjal, who learn to work together to save the multiverse, good science needs good stories. In other words, to achieve the changes in our world that environmental science is suggesting, we need compelling, welcoming, and yes, delightfully funny stories. We need children, and maybe even some adults, to be enchanted with the idea of saving the planet, if not the multiverse.
Climate justice activists and environmental educators are sounding the alarm about the health of our planet. But the stories we tell about the climate and environment cannot be “good medicine” – told in didactic ways that frighten and alienate. Susan Sontag once said, about the horrors of war photography in faraway places, that pictures meant to galvanize us into action often accomplish the opposite, inuring us into inaction by the enormity of their horror. Environmental narratives can function in the same way. What is it that we can do in the face of such an insurmountable problem, we ask ourselves, and end up doing nothing at all.
But when invited into action through story, saving the planet can become a welcome adventure. Because, as Kiya and Kinjal learn, everything is connected to everything, and it’s up to us to save it all.
