My Wasteland

I. A Handful of Dust

I was born in an unknown factory belonging to Greenwillow Books.

My pages are made from trees soon to be lost to deforestation, with paper manufacturing already the country’s third-largest industrial polluter. Each year, I sap 153 billion gallons of water from a quickly desertifying Earth. The ink on my pages releases toxic fumes into the environment that will worsen respiratory conditions. The airplane that allowed me to dance from warehouse to warehouse is only making the world more inhospitable.

The production of my birth has left a harmful scar on many parts of the world. But the contents of my pages—those have perhaps left an equally permanent mark on the minds of the children I have touched.

II. Glitter of Jewels

My owner finds me in a crowded school gymnasium, an academic competition happening around me. My owner doesn’t go to this school, but it doesn’t matter. A Scholastic Book Fair is a Scholastic Book Fair, offering middle schoolers a high they will never be able to reclaim.

I am a jewel among stones, and I know it. Emblazoned on my cover is the word Entwined. Concise, mysterious, fairy-tale-like. To be entwined is to be caught, enraptured. Lost in a web of dreams and fantasy. “The Entwine,” according to my story, is a complex dance for accomplished partners. If my title is not sufficiently tantalizing, my artwork is enough to draw unsuspecting children in. I physically sparkle. Whatever the bookmakers have used on the cover, whatever microplastics beckon to potential buyers—it works, because the leaves on the trees are gleaming.

My owner picks me up delicately. She examines my story’s premise, each problematic component drawing her further into our metaphoric dance. A shadowy, morally dubious man? The first step. A monarchy, bringing to life the excesses of royalty? A curtsy. A 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, based on her favorite Barbie movie? By then, she has chosen me as her dance partner—a waltz that will lead to ruin.

III. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

It starts with the slight creases on my spine. Harmless. All good books are stretched open a little, testament to how much an owner can love. But then I feel the glue that holds the pages together start to weaken. My owner has read me three times already, a small section at my end coming loose. Once she lets her friend borrow me, I completely unravel.

To fix a book is not so complicated as it is to make one. You can buy special bookbinding glue—polyvinyl acetate, aka PVA, aka Elmer’s glue—with a simple Amazon search. If you’re feeling environmentally conscious, you can try methylcellulose powdered glue, mixed carefully with hot water. Perhaps if you’re really desperate, you can drive to a bookstore and beg for assistance.

As my owner’s friend returns me home, I know the damage is done: my owner has no intention of fixing me.

“How did you imagine Azalea?” my owner inquires of her friend, taking me back from her. Hesitation lingers in the words, their friendship as strong as glue holding pages together.

“Like Snow White,” her friend responds confidently. “I try to imagine all the characters in books with pale skin.”

A pause, as my owner considers her next words. “That makes sense,” she finally decides, because what else can she say? Her friend is not wrong. Azalea, the heroine of my story, is pictured as fair and lovely, her setting some magical, (non-colonizing) European kingdom. Her family, her love interests—all of them are white as snow.

Yet the conversation I have overhead has abruptly unraveled a part of her self-identity as if the music has stopped mid-dance. My owner has fallen prey to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie fears is the cost of an under-representation: a child does not believe they can exist in literature.

To fix a book is a simple process. To fix a mind? Potentially impossible.

IV. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

In 2011, the year that I was published, just 10% of children’s books were by or about people of color. Until the past decade, it was not uncommon to never see a nonwhite person as a main, or even side, character in a book—and if they were, it was almost definitely not written by a nonwhite author.

If you strolled through a Scholastic Book Fair today, the people on covers would be far more diverse than they were ten years ago. But the problem persists; the ruin continues.

Postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o once wrote, “The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement.” My narrative depicts a forest of gleaming trees. But where can the nonwhite person see herself in this oasis? How can she believe she deserves to exist in others’ imaginations?

It appears, then, that she must instead find comfort in a wasteland.

V. The Burial of the Dead

I die in an unopened suitcase.

I could have found myself in a landfill, where around 320 million books in America end up each year, the toxic heap of broken images. Perhaps at a local library, where a new young person could start a different dance. Instead, I find myself lost in the bottom of a bag in my owner’s room: the ultimate purgatory.

Years have passed, but I remain much the same. Lines are still etched on my spine, the same chunks of pages coming loose—no methylcellulose in sight.

Come back, I silently beg my owner. No longer is she the wide-eyed middle schooler who spontaneously bought me in a school gymnasium. The waltz has led to an exhaustion—no longer does she have the energy of impressionable youth.

When Thiong’o realized the imbalance of power that was literature, he ceased to write in English. My owner, it seemed, was to refuse to read fantasy at all. She had taken me to college, but never read me; brought me back from college, but left me untouched.

Until one day, the suitcase I’m hidden in is zipped open.

She holds me up, cautiously. Afraid I’ll break, or perhaps afraid that I will break her. My sheen does not sparkle quite so much, more a stone than a jewel. No longer am I the dancing partner that made her imagination dip and soar.

But then she opens me. Without missing a beat, she catches my pages as they fall out. And as she sinks into her childhood bed, memories wrapping themselves around her like a long-lost friend, we begin The Entwine once more.