Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit
by Maria Popova
A beautiful illustrated celebration of women’s journey toward creative freedom and mobility.
Amid a children’s book ecosystem marked by a lamentable lack of ethnic diversity and gobsmacking presence of female protagonists in only 31% of books, here comes Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit (public library) — a heartening antidote from the young artist-storyteller Amrita Das andTara Books, the remarkable Indian independent publisher who for the past two decades has been giving voice to marginalized storytelling through a commune of artists, writers, and designers collaborating on beautiful books based on Indian folk traditions.
Das’s story is both semi-autobiographical and universal, a celebration of the “sliver of chance” that came her way and catapulted her into a life of creative independence, the same serendipitous happenstance that every so often makes life so strange and wonderful for each of us.
A young girl leaves her tiny village and goes to the town of Chennai to learn art. On the train, she meets another girl from a poor family and in her eyes she sees not only her own story, but the wider story of what it means for a girl to blossom into a woman’s life, free to make her own choices and speak for herself in a culture where women are routinely spoken for.
Das’s gorgeous artwork is based on the Mithila tradition — the same folk art style that gave us the superb Waterlife — but subverts it to unusual ends for a result that is both radical and respectful of its cultural heritage. Sometimes symbolic, sometimes humorous, sometimes imbued with metaphoric commentary on culture, her drawings become succinct visual epiphanies that explore the boundary between the known and the unknown, the given and the earned.
From the tangle of train tracks to the commuter chaos of the city street, Das’s drawings extend beautiful and poignant visual metaphors for the plight of mobility amid social conventions designed to keep women static.
The poor do have pride. They don’t ask, and they have nothing to offer in return.
In an inquiry pursued more directly in the wonderful Drawing from the City, Das also explores what it means to be a young, independent woman in the city. And though the specificity of the narrative weds it to the context of Indian culture, implicit to it is the broader question of what it means to be a member of a marginalized group — any marginalized group — in a mainstream society designed to limit your options and oppress your opportunities for self-actualization.
A girl’s life is hard, especially if you’re cursed to be poor. It’s gone even before you start on it. There’s all the work, but even more than being tied to these endless tasks, it’s the mean and hurtful way people speak to you.If you dream for a moment, you’re asked why you’re twiddling your thumbs.You’re not supposed to want anything, let alone allow your heart or your self to travel. No one lets you forget that you’re born a girl, not a boy.Freedom. What does that word mean to us?
Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit is impossibly wonderful from cover to cover, both as an aesthetic experience and an emotional journey. For more of Tara’s treasures, see The Night Life of Trees, a breathtaking handmade homage to Indian mythology, Waterlife, a collection of exquisite illustrations of marine creatures inspired by Indian folklore, and I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, a Victorian “trick-poem” illustrated with stunning die-cut Indian art.
Images courtesy of Tara Books
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