Do you remember the first storybook you read? How did you feel about it? Was it a picture book? When you close your eyes, can you see the colours and the characters in the story? Can you smell the book’s scent or feel its pages’ texture?
For many children, their earliest interactions with stories take place in their foundational years. Some children hear verbal stories – oral folklore passed down from generation to generation. Others get to touch the pages of storybooks. Stories are an unavoidable part of our lives. Regardless of where we are in the world, in which society, or under what circumstances we live, we can’t stop making and sharing stories. Stories are in us.
However, access to storybooks as a child largely depends on where you were or are born, to what kind of parents, and your family’s economic situation. If you were born for example in the UK, Australia, or the US, you likely had access to a children’s library to borrow books even if your parents couldn’t buy them. But if you were born in Afghanistan, as I was, it might have taken a couple of decades to read children’s stories. Yes, I am a latecomer to the party – both literally and metaphorically.
I was born two weeks before the civil war started in Afghanistan in 1992. I doubt anyone bothered to tell me stories during those early years amidst war and destruction. Survival was a higher priority. When I was four, we fled the country and became refugees in Pakistan. As we were fleeing, my elder sister decided to take the only children’s magazine we had at home. When you leave a country, it’s often sudden, rushed and under intense fear. Your priorities are clear. It’s to survive and ensure no one is left behind. It’s not to decide which books are coming with you, but sometimes people do make strange choices at critical moments in life. My eldest sister is one such strange person. That night, in 1996, we had a few hours to leave before the city was taken over by the Taliban. It was middle of the night, it was dead silence in the streets except for gun shots, my sister picked the only children’s magazine we had at home and managed to rescue it. This magazine would form the entire basis for the children’s literature in our home for many years to come as we lived as refugees in Pakistan.
I’m not sure when I learned to read, but I loved that black-and-white magazine. I still remember it. It had a puzzle that I loved solving again and again. In this puzzle, I had to take the little girl back to her home, crossing all zigzags and confusing paths. Probably, it was resonating with my emotional state of feeling dislocated and lost and wanting to get back home.
Fast forward to today, where I with my colleagues lead my country’s largest chain of mobile libraries for children. Life is strange, you can grow up with one magazine, but end up making libraries. In 2018, I started a library project, turning a public bus to a mobile library and today we have 36 libraries running across Kabul and every day hosting 3000 children, half of them girls,
For the past six years, my life has revolved around one question: how to get more books to children in my country and ensure they have the basic literacy skills to read them. This is no easy task when only 7% of children in Afghanistan achieve basic literacy skills by the time they finish primary school due to bad quality of education. Eight million children are out of school, a few million due to lack of access but four million girls of secondary age who are not allowed to study just because they are girls.
Last summer, as my colleagues and I were debating ways to improve children’s literacy in Afghanistan and create more libraries, I dropped by a children’s bookshop in Oxford and picked a book. For the next part of the year, I read children’s books in cafes, on flights, between meetings, during lunch breaks, and at airports. One after another. I couldn’t stop reading. My three favourites so far are “Murder Most Unladylike” “The Secret Garden” and “The Wombles“. As I read, I giggled at some of the clumsy Wombles running across London picking up trash, felt an intense curiosity to find out who committed the murdered in “Murder Most Unladylike,” and longed to have my secret garden and a little robin.
That summer, I realised what I had missed as a child. The truth of life is that when we don’t have something, and we are not even aware of what we don’t have, we don’t miss it. Probably because we don’t know what we don’t have and what it means to have it. But once you have it, you know what you have missed.
Children’s literature plays many roles, but the most important is that children can be the main characters who solve problems, think, and explore. They are not inactive, obedient, or invisible. They are empowered, and life always gets better for them. Children’s stories can be about hope and reclaiming the agency of children, particularly girls, an aspect that healed the child in me who grew up in war, feeling invisible and unheard.
I believe that children’s stories are crucial for those growing up in difficult contexts. Contrary to what some in the humanitarian Aid community might think, that its a luxury. Growing up amid poverty, drought, famine, and conflicts, you need stories that empower you, stories that resonate and allow you to imagine a different world you can someday create. These stories redefine the role of children as complex, creative individuals with a sense of agency, who think, feel, have opinions, and must be seen and heard. We must create more libraries for children who are stuck in conflict. And I invite those of us who missed reading children’s books the first time round, to do it now. It’s never too late for a happy, literature-filled childhood.