Roger Sutton: I’m curious how you see the reception of children’s books with Muslim characters and topics. How has that changed over your career?
Hena Khan: Oh wow, it has changed drastically. When I began, I was one of a few authors writing stories with Muslim protagonists for a mainstream audience. At that time, it very much felt like I was beating down the doors of the publishers, saying Please consider these. When I wrote my first picture book, Night of the Moon, which is about the month of Ramadan, I remember thinking, How do I make this extra appealing to educators and librarians? How do I make this about more than Ramadan alone? I didn’t think that topic had enough weight. I tried to tie it to the lunar cycle, thinking there was more value in that. I thought Julie Paschkis’s illustrations, which are really lush and filled with Islamic art, would appeal to art teachers. I went in thinking of a school and library market, because that’s where I felt it was needed. And I wanted my own children to have access to books about themselves in the library. Each time I wrote a book, starting with that one and then Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns a few years later, I thought, Well, that was fun. I wrote a book. So let’s see if I get to do that again. But I didn’t know if the industry would continue to support books like that or not. It’s been amazing to see the response of publishers to the gradual opening up of the market and the industry. Of course, We Need Diverse Books and other efforts have shown that these books not only are needed, but they do sell.
RS: You alluded in your answer to pulling in other things to make it more attractive to teachers and to non-Muslim children; I wonder about how you strike that balance, because you do that also in this book, right? You don’t want Muslim readers to feel talked down to, but you don’t want non-Muslim readers to be at sea. How do you balance that?
HK: A lot of that is through the perspective of the character I’m writing about. Even something as simple as a concept book about colors is told from a personal point of view, and you learn about things that Muslims care about. It works on a basic picture-book level, but also for novels. You don’t want to overexplain. I very much don’t want readers who share my background to feel like they’re reading a social studies project. I don’t include glossaries in my novels (I do in my picture books), even though I know some writers do. That was a conscious decision; I want Muslim readers to feel like they are the center of the story and that it’s not written for another audience. If you don’t know a particular word, then that’s on you to look it up if you want. It is a delicate balance to strike in terms of making sure everyone gets what they need from the books.
RS: In We Are Big Time, you have the gym teacher, Coach Jess, who is not Muslim. There are a couple of points where she does ask her Muslim students for clarification.
HK: I interviewed the coach and several players from the team that inspired the story. The coach said that as a non-Muslim who didn’t know a lot about Islam and hadn’t been around a lot of Muslims prior to taking the job, she asked a lot of questions and in turn was asked questions by the kids. I love that idea of there being questions on both sides. The kids can ask, “What does your tattoo mean?” And the coach might ask about praying at school or wearing the hijab. Definitely a two-way experience.
RS: The non-Muslim teams that the girls play against also give you an opportunity to provide information in a natural way. How did you find out about this team?
HK: An educator named Aliza Werner in Wisconsin sent me an article about them. Aliza was hosting me for the Wisconsin State Reading Association meeting, and we were talking about logistics. As a footnote in her email, she said, “By the way, this popped up in my inbox and I thought you might find it interesting.” I clicked on the link, and it was about the Salam School girls’ basketball team and their turn-around season. I started searching for other articles and found a Bleacher Report segment on them that was captivating. I thought instantly, This is a special story that I want to tell. After I read as much as I could, I reached out to the school and asked if I could talk to someone, and the coach was very responsive to being interviewed. I talked with her first and then a few of the players. It was great to get that insider perspective, because I wanted to move beyond the stories in the media and how reporters poked and tried to get certain answers.
RS: I love that you do that in the story too. You have people ask the girls questions, and the girls are like Why aren’t you asking me about basketball?
HK: Right? Why are you asking about immigration? I don’t know anything about immigration. Some of the articles talked about the challenges the girls faced when they played other schools, implying that there was a lot of racism or discrimination because of their hijabs. I asked them about that, and they said, “Yeah, there was some, and we didn’t get taken seriously. We would sometimes go to a school and they would laugh when they saw us. We felt like we had to show them who we were, that we could play.” There were a few comments here and there, but it wasn’t as much of an issue as much as you might think. I wanted to highlight that; they got some questions and side-eye, but it was really a lot of just regular trash-talk like all basketball players do. It had nothing to do with who they were or what they looked like. And that’s the way they wanted it; they wanted to be seen as basketball players first. All the other stuff about carrying the weight of representing Muslim women was secondary in their minds. They’re kids, and they’re athletes. They wanted to say, Look at us from our game.
RS: It’s so interesting to me to see this integration of a story of cultural identity with basketball. You wrote a sports novel—were you aware that that’s what you were doing?
HK: I was aware of that. I have written about basketball before in my early middle-grade novel series, Zayd Saleem, Chasing the Dream. I live with a basketball-obsessed family, so that was helpful.
RS: Go Celtics.
HK: No, not in this house. In fact, my poor character in that series is a Wizards fan because I live in the DC area and have suffered for it. So I did have some experience writing about basketball, but this was the next level and it definitely felt more sports reporter-like. I wanted it to be that way because as someone who doesn’t wear the hijab, I always take an outsider perspective. I don’t know what it’s like to go through life navigating that experience. This felt like something I could write about both as a non-basketball playing fan and as a Muslim, but one who doesn’t wear the hijab. It was exciting to write about a girls’ team sport because I feel like we need more female protagonists in sports books.
RS: Sure. And that’s another sort of gap you must bridge. It’s not only Muslim readers and non-Muslim readers—it’s kids who know how basketball works and kids like me who are clueless.
HK: For that reason, I thought the graphic-novel format was helpful because if someone doesn’t know all the technical language around a basketball game--what it means to box someone out or to set a screen-- then I’d have to describe what was happening. In a graphic novel, you get the excitement of the game, and you see the scoreboard and know they’re winning or losing. You know they either made the shot or missed it because you’re just capturing these moments in the game. It was easier to capture that emotion and the ups and downs without getting too technical. I felt like this format might be inviting to people who aren’t basketball players or huge fans for whom describing plays and getting into the specifics might be less appealing. |
RS: Who was my student many years ago.
HK: Oh, wow! Yeah, she’s amazing. So good at what she does. I love her.
RS: It was your illustrator’s first graphic novel as well, right? When you finished the manuscript and said, “Okay, Rotem, here it is.” What did the text look like?
HK: I guess the closest thing would be a screenplay. I wrote it out panel by panel. I think different graphic novelists do it differently, but I described every page of the book in panels, so Panel one: Girls gathered around the coach. Panel two: Coach is talking. I also write the dialogue, so there’s dialogue for each character. That’s a very different way of visualizing and progressing the story than a prose novel. And when it comes to something like the basketball scenes, you’re taking snapshots and thinking, How do I advance an action scene through a series of sequences that add up to mean something. It’s as descriptive as you want it to be, really, and I tend to try to set up a lot of specific details that I think would be helpful to the artist. Safiya Zerrougui did an incredible job rendering it all. I love the expressions and the lines and the movement on the page—it really is magical to see your imaginings come to life in such a beautiful way. I’ve written picture books where I tried to minimize art notes to only essential ones that describe what the characters look like or the setting, but it’s still really cool to see that come to life.
RS: I thought that Safiya did a great job with using almost minimal lines but getting real expression from the faces and adding individuality to them. It was another way to tell the girls apart from one another.
HK: Absolutely. That was something else that made me want to write this as a graphic novel: to represent some of the diversity of the school and the players. People don’t always consider the level of diversity that exists within the Muslim community, and that was nice that she was able to capture different features and different races in a really nice way.
RS: I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never really thought about Muslim schools. I mean, I figured Muslim schools were like what I went to as a young Catholic kid where you go to religious class once a week.
HK: Yep. That’s what I did.
RS: But there can be a whole school with regular old reading, writing, arithmetic curriculum as well as religious instruction. That was a whole new world to me.
HK: There are a lot of Islamic schools around the country. I know several in my area. And sometimes they are affiliated with a large mosque that may open its own school. Oftentimes they’re just regular private schools, charter schools. You see all types.
RS: So that was new to you as well? You didn’t attend one as a child?
HK: No, I did not. I don’t know of too many that were around when I was growing up in the eighties, but there are more and more of them now. I know people who attended, and as an author I’ve visited many and spoken at some. It is a learning experience for me in the sense that their education and their environment is so different than what I experienced as a kid in Maryland public schools, where my fish-out-of-water experience doesn’t necessarily relate to what they’re going through.
RS: It’s very different because there’s so much commonality among the girls. You know that they’re in the school together, they’re all Muslim, and they all like basketball. It’s not a story of an outsider, which so many of our stories about diversity seem to be.
HK: Yes, absolutely. And that’s what I learned as a presenter when I went in and told my story about what it felt like to go to the library and not find a single book that had a character like me. Now their libraries are full of books, and they’re not limited to mainstream published books. They have books from Islamic publishers, too. It was nice to be able to talk to the girls and get a sense of what their concerns were in all areas—not just related to basketball. One girl told me that she had moved from somewhere else and that the basketball team helped her adjust to being new. Another girl told me how as a player she was hard on herself, and the coach had taken her aside and made her aware of all the good things she had done; I built that into the story. It was great to just be able to move beyond, like you said, that whole outsider narrative and focus on the characters’ hopefully relatable experiences even though they are in this very specific environment.
RS: But that’s what’s so quietly revolutionary about your book. The fact that 95% of the characters are Muslim is just a given. But as a non-Muslim reader, I’m not being spoon-fed information in any way. All readers enter this book equally. I felt that you respected that. And that, to me, is the revolutionary part.
HK: Thank you. I hadn’t considered that. I appreciate that.
RS: And the fact that being Muslim is very important to these girls and to the setting of the book obviously, but at the same time you’ve still got the mean girl, you’ve got the new girl, you’ve got struggles with parents, you’ve got homework versus practice. It’s all relatable stuff in a framework that most of us hadn’t considered before.
HK: And that’s where I hope that readers of all backgrounds will be able to connect with Aliya and the other girls and think, Okay, I know what it’s like to be a student athlete and have to juggle practice and exams. Or I know what it feels like to be the new person and walk into a lunchroom and not know where to sit on the first day. Whatever it is. Readers can connect with them on another level, too, and think, So these girls are all Muslims, so what?
RS: I feel like there are a lot of different places where a reader can enter the story.
HK: I hope so. Playing basketball, being new, being curious about the hijab. |
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