Her fables, she says, mean something entirely different for different people. “I didn’t choose the form or the animal characters, they just came together from the debris of images, stories and poems floating about in the bottom of my mind and from what forms the rag and bone shop of the heart," she says. Images that leave an impact, whether from Shakespeare or a comic book, all contribute to Namjoshi’s fables. She is as nimble with her language in a picture book like Little i as in the beautiful love poem, All the Words, from the Flesh And Paper collection.Īll the words have leaped into the air like the cards/ in Alice, like birds flying, forming, reforming, swerving and rising, and each word/ says it is love. That is exactly what she goes about doing, stealing their vowels, and having some fun." I figure that she would probably like to make friends and play.
For example, when I think of a character like Little i who is a runaway computer programme, I try and think of what she would want to do now that she is outside the computer and in the real world. Then begins the hard part of cleaning it up till it finally begins to sound right and the end result, whether it be a fable, a poem or something else, is something that takes shape through the process of writing. These images start talking to each other and following their own inherent logic.
On being asked for the nth time about her affinity with the fable, Namjoshi elaborates once again: “What the writing starts off with is an image, and a set of lines. Little i is a symbolic representation of the mathematical imaginary number, a little hat-tip to the self and a small but extremely important alphabet who keeps wanting to assert herself as the writer spins a witty and playful pictorial fable around her. Little i is the latest instalment from Namjoshi’s imaginarium-a clever, whimsical and “stroppy little character" who is actually a runaway computer programme from an earlier book, Beautiful And the Cyberspace Runaway. “They wanted Aditi to come to them and so I wrote Aditi And the Thames Dragon." It was often such odd twists that caused the series to grow, and the places that Namjoshi visited, along with the things she liked-computers and the cyberspace, for example-wound their way into the books. There I was in front of a sea of brown faces in a school in London and all the children were thrilled to see me because I looked like them and I had also written a book about a character who was just like them," she recalls. The second Aditi book also happened by chance after Namjoshi went for an event to the Blue Gate Fields Junior School in London, UK.
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