Amira’s Darfur: The Red Pencil

Red Pencil

In The Red Pencil, Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrator Shane Evans, create for us, Amira.  Amira is growing up in Darfur. We in the US hear the word Darfur and think genocide. Amira insists that we see a bright, lively, loving culture within which her family grows “Ya, wheat – such abundance!”

Amira shows us how to wake the moon, for good luck: “Tradition tells us/ to make the waking loud./ To rouse that moon. To scare it out,/ to full sight.// I grab a pan./ I beat,/ beat,/beeeeeat.”

This is a verse novel. The verse is quick and light, full of sound. Full of  ways a child might get her heart’s desire from her mother – to go to Gad Primary School. Her life takes shape with goz (sand): “In goz,/ I belong./ Goz is my place to be./ I’m at home in so much sand./Ya, goz./ Where my new twig/ and I/ wander, wander, wanter./” Amira’s twig is her freedom. With it she can “Fly./Dream./ Shape./ Swirl./Make./ Me./ Free.” With the stick she draws. And when she draws she imagines and loves and empowers herself. When the Janjaweed militia attack, the reader is prepared for Amira’s spirt to sustain her.

This is a middle grade novel that offers younger readers an entry to the long, long wars in Sudan in a way that they will have hope for the culture and Amira. Amira and her father, Dando, have a game, “What else is possible?” which they play when they need things to be better. One of Shane Evan’s memorable sketches is of Amira and Dando lifting their sandals into the air after they pretend that they are made of gold. “I wave my sandals, too,/one right, one left.//”Lift them high,” Dando says. “High!/ They are new, and glistening, our sandals.”

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