Hanna Alkaf is a young reader’s novelist, she writes Malaysian stories, one of them being The Weight of Our Sky. She came to talk about her experience as a former journalist and a current novelist. Growing up, her family prioritised reading books and getting their youngest child to read as many books as possible. She was surrounded by books of many genres, and she would often sneak into her siblings (and sometimes even mother’s) room to read some of their books. At some point she realised that all the characters in the books were nothing like her. Blue eyes, blonde hair and Caucasian, instead of Malaysian with brown eyes. She grew up in a world with no mirrors, no role models that she could look up to that looked like her. And so, she decided that she had had enough and would create mirrors for children by writing Malaysian young adult and middle grade stories.
She used the projector to show us an image (seen on the right), which absolutely blew my mind. Something that I had felt deep inside, was proved, by numbers and words. Hanna Alkaf explained the image. There are different ethnicity groups represented by a drawing of a child from that group, holding a mirror. On the very right there is a Caucasian child which multiple mirrors followed by a bear, an African American, Asian, Latinx and a child from a First Nation. The percentage below represents how many children books have that ethnicity group as their character. All the four ethnicity groups combined would still be less than the “Animals/Other” group. She explained that the reason why the Caucasian had such a high percentage was because the publishing industry was dominated by Caucasian people.
Statistics for children’s books, updated version for 2018