Children’s Literature in Jamaica Essay -- essays papers

Childrens Literature in JamaicaAs children in the United States, we grow up listening to the stories of Dr. Seuss and Curious George as we steady down off to sleep to the sound of our parents voices echoing in our dreams. As we start to grow older and the poetry of Shel Silversteins, Where the Sidewalk Ends no time-consuming holds our imagination as much as it did at eight years old, we begin to read stories that are a reflection of the environment we live within. We sedulous ourselves in the lives of such characters as the Hardy Boys and Willy Wonka. What these stories lacked however, are the social issues that are ever present in todays society. Not all of American childrens literature is without social content, but the literature many of us grew up with was about adventure and mystery. On the other hand, Caribbean childrens literature tends to al-Qaida its work on survival. The stories of Jamaican folklore for example, tell the tales of the original inhabitants of the Caribbea n Island and how they survived colonialism, slavery, poverty, and racism. From generation to generation these stories have been passed down in their original form through oral history. ad-lib tradition is a method that I believe is no longer preserved in American culture. Rarely do you read of an individual who was sit down down on his grandparents knee to hear the childhood stories he or her was told by their grandparents before them. In todays society, all a child has to do to be entertained is turn on the television, or log on to the internet to hear and read the rhetoric of todays entertainment industry. Whether it is a lack of communication between parent and child, or a loss of innocence, the tradition of a parent telling the story of his or her ancest... ...ren are forced to deal with throughout life. BibliographyBerry, James, Everywhere Faces Everywhere, Simon and Schuster Publishing, New York, 1996Bolden, Tonya, Rites of Passage Stories About Growing Up by Black Writers from Around the World, Hyperion Books for Children, New York, 1994Dance, Daryl, Folklore from present-day(a) Jamaicans, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1985Dawes, Kwame, Wheel and Come Again An Anthology of Reggae Poetry, Goose Lane Publishing, Canada, 1998Jekyll, Walter, Jamaican Song and Story, Dover Publications, New York, 1966Jennings, Linda, A Treasury of Stories from Around the World, Kingfisher Publishing, New York, 1993Ribelli, Piero, Jah Pickney Children of Jamaica, Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, Jamaica, 1995Sherlock, Philip, West Indian Folk-tales, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1966