Voice and Genre in Young Adult Literature: Brown Girl Dreaming (2014)

Trade paperback, 349 pages
Published 2016 (contents: 2014-16)
Acquired November 2016
Read April 2017

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Like a lot of the books I assigned in my young adult literature class without having actually read them, this hovers on the border between middle grade and young adult, and had I known that, I might not have assigned it. By the end of the book, Jackie is in the fourth grade, if I recall correctly. Yet-- and perhaps this is unavoidable if you're an African-American child in the 1960s South-- she has still undergone the processes that Roberta Seelinger Trites identifies as important to the adolescent novel: she has discovered the social forces that have shaped her. Not just the obvious one of race and racism, but also the dynamics of religion. Even from a young age, she's involved in protests and other forms of civil rights activism.

I was especially struck by how the book is an artistic coming of age. Her family are Jehovah's Witnesses, but she's not a very good one by her own admission, loving the stories of the Bible more than the theological answers it is supposed to provide (60). Acquiring a composition notebook even before she can write changes her life: "someone must have known that this / was all I needed" (154). As she gets older, she develops a talent for storytelling. Well, "talent" is understating it, actually; it's a desire or a passion or just a base need:

stories
are like air to me,
I breathe them in and let them out
over and over again. (247)

This need gets her in trouble for lying even though she doesn't see it that way:

It's hard to understand
the way my brain works—so different
from everybody around me.
How each new story
I'm told becomes a thing
that happens,
in some other way
to me...! (176)

Her uncle likes her stories, her mother insists they're lies, but she concludes, "Maybe the truth is somewhere in between / all that I'm told / and memory" (176). Well, of course it is, because this very book occupies such a location; one of the first poems is about how there are a number of contradictory stories about her birth (her mother, father, and grandmother each has a different account), but there's a sense in which they're all true, because each one of those tales is something someone told her about herself, indicating a way they wanted her to be, and so they became a way she was. When her classmates ask her about her stories' authenticity, she always asserts they're true: "Did that really happen? the kids in class ask. // Yeah, I say. If it didn't, how would I know what to write?" (291)

While teaching the book, I had my class read it alongside Walter Dean Myers's "Where Are the People of Color in Children's Books?" and an examination of the We Need Diverse Books website. The book engages with this kind of material, not just by being about a person of color, but the moment where Jackie picks up her first book about a person of color: "the picture book filled with brown people, more / brown people than I’d ever seen / in a book before." She says that if she hadn't seen it,

I'd never have believed
that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me had a story. (228)

So as much as she liked stories, the belief that her story was worth telling wouldn't have existed without a children's book about a person of color to inspire her-- and so she pays it forward, writing one of her own. In a way, the book doesn't end at the fifth grade, because there's an implied older Jackie, the one writing this book and looking backward at her childhood and figuring out who she is and how she came to be.

The book actually ends by explaining how stories construct your identity:

When there are many world
you can choose the one
you walk into each day.

[…]

Each day a new world
opens itself up you you. And all the worlds you are

[…] gather into one world

called You

where You decide

what each world
and each story
and each ending

will finally be. (319-20)

I guess this is the fundamental project of young adult literature, and that's why diverse books are so important. We need as many stories as we can get to decide who to be.