"Changing the Narrative and Finding the Gold": A Conversation with Dr Tamara Pizzoli

photo by James Maiki 

Children deserve the best art, because they understand and appreciate it the most.

Tamara Pizzoli

 

Last week, I had a joyful conversation with Dr Tamara Pizzoli, founder of The English School House, and author of a number of stunning books for children, including The Ghanaian Goldilocks, winner of the silver eLit award for digital excellence in multicultural publishing. From Texas but based in Rome, Tamara is a long-time educator and mother of four. To create her fairy tales, which flip and challenge our expectations of both race and gender (The Ghanaian Goldilocks is set in Ghana and is about a little boy called Kofi, whose hair has been turned golden by the sun), Tamara works with world-renowned artists, including Italian master painter Elena Tomassi Ferroni. Their working collaboration has resulted in books which are both stories for children and works of art. These include Of Gods and Goddesses: Deities of Ancient Rome, which meets and confronts systemic racism in our Western culture and our spiritual imaginations, portraying a glorious curation of Gods and Goddesses of colour. As Tamara puts it, “for a child to open that book and see themselves depicted in that way is powerful beyond any words that you or I could have.”

We discuss Tallulah the Tooth Fairy CEO, a book about the tooth fairy boss, illustrated by Federico Fabiani. (She is currently working on Tooth Fairy CEO and the Corona Challenge - what do you do about tooth fairying in a world of social distancing?) We also talk about The Ghanaian Goldilocks, and its portrayal of a mischievous child embedded in, rather than alienated from, his community. 

Partway through the interview, Tamara tells me a story about walking down a road in Rome one day, while pregnant with her daughter Lotus, and coming across a fallen baby bird. Disturbed and upset, shaken by the possibility of its meaning, she carried on walking to the street corner, when the impulse to turn around and do something to help struck her, and she returned to the bird, to find that someone had stepped on it. For the next few weeks, she could think of little else but that bird, her grief and confusion at having left it, and a fantasy that, had she arrived a few seconds earlier, the bird might have fallen into the nest of her own hair. At a Buddhist meeting, someone suggested she write it as a story.

The book that evolved was the one Tamara shared with me in the interview. Illustrated by Tomassi Ferroni, it's a tale of her daughter Lotus, the daughter who’d been in her belly that day, meeting – and missing – the bird. From racist slurs about Lotus’ hair transformed into a beautific vision of Lotus as a queen with a glorious nest crown, to the wonder-visions of how Lotus might respond to the bird’s death, this is a story which both, in Donna Haraway’s words, “stays with the trouble” and permits our imaginations to enter through grief into a world of wonder. As Tamara puts it, it lets children know that “it’s okay to feel and it’s okay to make mistakes,” and it explores the alchemy of grief: “changing the narrative of what could be just a tough or horrible experience, finding the gold in it and applying that for the future.”

As we discuss afterwards, our children today need stories like this. They live in a world where they are confronted by too many tragedies that should not be. They are surrounded by the unsight of our racist patriarchy, and they live in a world of too many deaths, vanishing companions, kin and lifeforms about which they can do nothing. Stories today need to be comforting, but they also need to be honest, and the most precious narratives are the ones which can do both, the ones which shore our children up to take this world on.

Here is the video. Please note that the utterly wondrous penultimate page of the book didn’t show up, and our video qualities don’t do justice to the pictures, so the best thing to do is to buy it from The English School House and then read it to your children. These are the stories that they need right now.