Joke van Leeuwen wrote with Beginners urgent literary non-fiction about the early years of 24 remarkable people in world history. We often know the outcome of these lives, but how did the story of Sojourner Truth, George Sand or Frida Kahlo actually begin?
In an interview, Van Leeuwen once called childhood the pizza crust of the rest of our lives. That statement immediately indicates urgency Beginners, in which we each time see the first steps of a remarkable life course. Kailash Satyarti, who as an adult founded the South Asian Coalition Against Child Slavery, hosted a dinner party as a child to discuss the difference between the upper and lower classes. Pelé started playing football barefoot. “They didn’t even have a real ball. They played with a stocking stuffed with crumpled paper and rags, and with a rope around it to hold everything together so that it looked somewhat like a ball.’
Nuclear bomb
Van Leeuwen’s characters often step out of their familiar world, and that is also the case in this work. Ruby Bridges, for example, is one of the first black girls to go to a white school. They threw eggs and even rocks when she got there. ‘It was strangely quiet in the school. Many parents kept their children at home. Ruby’s mother wasn’t allowed anymore, that made it scarier.’ Van Leeuwen tells the stories from the point of view of the child and weaves her research through them seemingly effortlessly. They don’t all end well, Sadako Sasaki, the girl who witnessed the atomic bomb, dies at the age of 12 and Nkosi Johnson, the boy who was born with AIDS, also lives a short life. Van Leeuwen’s light style is then almost comforting, as if two arms are wrapped around you while reading. And that is sometimes necessary, because Beginners mercilessly shows everything that has gone wrong in recent history, not avoiding gruesome stories about female circumcision or slavery. In that respect, they are also 24 sketches of morals, stories about inequality of opportunity and stories about expectation and hope that are clear in their message: one human life, however small, can make a difference. Your actions count.
Nazi friends
Van Leeuwen’s lively style, full of humor and amazement, more than once prevents things from getting heavy and makes you laugh at the right moments. Like Audrey Hepburn. That unlucky person is brought from England to the Netherlands just before the war by her mother, who thinks that Germans do have a point. In the Netherlands she weakens and impoverishes. And Audrey kept dancing. Because they couldn’t buy ballet clothes anymore, she wore tights that her mother knitted from torn sweaters. Her mother no longer had any Nazi friends. By now she realized that she had misunderstood something’, Van Leeuwen ends almost casually.
A single youth is difficult to capture in the ten pages, such as that of Gabriel García Márquez who moves from place to place, or the story of the Javanese activist Kartini, where a procession of names and persons ensures that you as a reader keep your attention. have to keep up. It’s easy to forgive in such a remarkable book about remarkable people.
Nonfiction for children comes in all shapes and sizes, but the best nonfiction shines light in dark places, provokes thought and inspires. Van Leeuwen’s novices show that the world can be made. Not easily malleable perhaps, but makeable.
#pizza #crusts #important #lives