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| Raj Haldar and Jillian Puzzo, River Bend Bookshop, West Hartford, Conn., at NEIBA this week. | |
Raj Haldar, also known as Lushlife, is an American rapper, composer, and producer from Philadelphia, Pa. His third picture book, This Book Is Banned (Sourcebooks Explore), was released at the end of September, right before Banned Books Week. Haldar took a moment out of his day at the NEIBA Fall Conference to chat with Shelf Awareness about This Book Is Banned, his hopes for the title, and Banned Books Week.
You were working as a rapper before you began writing?
Rapper, producer, musician all around. From the age of five, the only thing I wanted to do was be a musician. It was the mid-'80s and I would put on a gardening glove and look in the mirror and pretend I was Michael Jackson. You know that whole thing. I studied classical piano because that's what my immigrant parents reflexively put me in. I grew up in Jersey and it was kind of the golden era of rap music when I was in middle school in the '90s. It was happening all around me and was the vernacular of my youth. I started playing jazz in one part of my life, but then being obsessed with hip-hop and sampling that jazz in another part of my life.
All of that is to say that I never wanted to do anything besides be a musician. I pursued that for many years, and it was very fruitful--doing my own stuff, producing for others, touring.
(Let me tell you that book tours are a lot more relaxing than music tours. You have to be the life of the party every night for two months straight. I need a lot more time to recharge now.)
What I ended up realizing was that 1. I love words and wordplay and 2. I like making stuff. It happened to be records for a while...
How were your immigrant parents about that?
They never really understood it, but they were very supportive.
That's awesome.
Yeah. My brother is seven years older than me and a cardiologist so they kind of also got that. It gave me a lot more latitude to do my thing.
So, loving words and wordplay, it felt like it was a natural extension into books?
My mother was a high school chemistry teacher in India but, when she came here in the mid-'70s, she became an early childhood educator. It was always clear to me that she was a natural early childhood educator. I think having a mom like that built something into my very early that allows me to be a good communicator with kids. To kind of dial into what kids will find engaging and funny.
My parents never got what I was doing in hip-hop but my mother, especially as an early childhood educator, is really happy to see me explore this world that she's also so close to. I'll say... P Is for Pterodactyl, she wasn't a naysayer, but she was like, "Really?" But This Book Is Banned... one of my proudest moments in life was showing her the final book. She said, "This one. It's really good. It's necessary." That meant more to me than many other accolades there could be.
And so, the precursor to this book was your first book.
Well, P Is for Pterodactyl is a book about the love of the English language. The book highlights a diversity of people in it but there was nothing that made me think it could raise the ire of the book banners. We decided to make "O" for "Ouija," which is just a board game that Milton Bradley sells. It's sort of silly. It wasn't just one or two people [who complained]--for a while there I was getting quite a bit of hate mail calling me a tool of Satan. There were all sorts of unwelcome comments. That's what set me on this path. I was incensed by it as a creator, but I was also thinking about our civic life in this country. I started looking into what was going on with this absurd inflection point that we've reached.
Was the book banned?
I didn't have an official challenge but there were calls to take it off shelves. If you go look at reviews online, there's a large minority of reviews that are basically these people wanting to get the book removed.
That experience gave me personal insight into what so many other authors are dealing with--and in a much more personal way. For this, it was silly. It's a Ouija board. It's a silly thing to me. I feel personally attacked as a creator but it's not attacking my person. I was talking to Maulik Pancholy and his book, Nikhil Out Loud, is a middle-grade story about a brown, Indian, LGBTQ+ boy and has been banned. He grew up in Florida and wanted to do a school visit at his own alma mater and they didn't want to have him. Those are the experiences from the side of the author that I was super incensed by. And the number of picture books that have been banned and challenged? It became very clear to me that there needed to be a picture book that helped kids contend with the idea of book bans and censorship and what it means to their lives. Honestly, the toughest part, once I decided to do it, was making it funny.
It does have a sad ending.
It does. Yeah. My daughter doesn't like the ending. But, unfortunately, the reality is that if these book bans continue, there will be a sad ending.
The first book came out in 2018 and you had the backlash, then a pandemic, then you became a father. Was this book brewing all that time?
I think I've been working on it for about two and a half years. And, sadly, in the two and a half years I was working on it, book bans just got worse. It was also the first picture book I worked on in earnest while having a little sentient three-year-old around. I didn't show it to her but, by the osmosis of being a father, I was in tune to the things in children's lives. You know, things like avocados being banned. I don't think I had many avocados growing up. But kids today? That's a very permanent fixture in their lives. Being able to pull together a collection of ideas and objects that are in the purview of a very early reader's life felt like the best way to be funny: "Oh no! Birthday parties are banned?" Now reading it to kids for the first time, I'm experiencing 200 kids having an existential crisis at the same time: "Birthday parties and birthday cakes are banned? Noooooooo!" When I see that, I know it's connecting with them. They're getting what it means to have ideas and voices censored and quelled.
So, how did you make it funny?
I learned from P Is for Pterodactyl that being subversively educational is a great way to connect with kids. I could have executed that book in a much more didactic way. I chose not to and I think that's partially why it worked. I brought that same kind of ethos to This Book Is Banned. Really, once I figured out the style of the book [interactive, fourth wall breaking] it was all about how much I could ratchet up the absurdism and the fun. I knew the payload of the message was there on the last page, so I tried to have as much fun as I could with the absurdity of the banning throughout. One thing that I'm proud of--not that I want message to be aside but--message aside, it's a fun book to read. That's what I hope will ensure they don't just read it once and put it down. I hope they'll keep coming back to it because it's a good time.
And what has the response to this book been like so far?
I made this with librarians and booksellers and educators in mind because they're the ones on the frontlines of this fight. They need all the tools they can get to hold this important conversation. I've never in my somewhat limited experience felt this level of support. Every time I open my phone, there's another indie bookstore posting about it. Also, going into schools and seeing the book really connect has been awesome.
I will say, though, that I was in the suburbs of Pennsylvania the other day doing a book signing and the bookseller told me they had tried to get me some school visits. Every administrator they talked to said they didn't want to open up that can of worms with their kids. That really bummed me out.
Ending up in places that are generally pretty liberal has me preaching to the choir to some extent. I'm trying to find ways and am working closely with PEN America to try to get to Florida or parts of Pennsylvania or Texas. After having gone through many release cycles for books and records, I know that the morning your project comes out is stressful. I always try to fill up that time. So, what I did to occupy myself was find a spreadsheet from the Florida Department of Education that listed every school district that faced a challenge or ban. We found the media services director for each school and sent them a book.
That's a great thing to do.
There's a component to wanting to have this book in the world that I think needs to be coupled with direct action. So, I'm trying to find ways to do that. Some of it is school visits, some of it is mailing... I just have to keep pushing.
Lastly, is there anything you want to say to booksellers?
From my travels in going to bookstores across the country, I am inspired by booksellers and all these amazing, ingenious ways they find to push back against book bans and censorship. Everything that they do is inspiring to me. I hope that This Book Is Banned can do a little bit to help them have these conversations in their communities before This Book Is Banned is banned. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness