The Heart of Language: Ashley Bryan
Ashley Bryan does not “recite” poems. Recitation implies monotony and rigidity; Ashley’s delivery is riveting and athletic, occasionally cathartic. Nor does he “read” them: he holds a book in one hand, shaking it occasionally and jabbing at the page with his other hand for emphasis, but he never looks at the printed poem. Perhaps the poem is not even on that page; perhaps it’s in a different book entirely. It doesn’t matter: the poem is inside him. “Poetry is at my center as a human being,” he once remarked in an interview. “I believe that poetry lies at the heart of the wonder and mystery of language.”
As the creator or co-creator of almost forty picture books, Ashley Bryan has captured the mystery of language in volumes that are cultural records as well as works of art. He has interpreted African legends and popular songs (his illustrated version of What a Wonderful World is one of the most popular books used in the Maine Humanities Council’s Born to Read early literacy initiative). He has compiled an ABC of African-American Poetry and several volumes of spirituals, about which he writes, “Wherever I travel, people sing these songs. Often they do not know that they are singing spirituals [that] come to us from the time of slavery in the United States.”
But Ashley is an educator, not a historian. Even as he preserves cultural artifacts in his books, he adds new contours and colors and tones. When he performs poetry by such masters as Langston Hughes and Eloise Greenfield, he pulls each word from within and lets it travel through him, gathering meaning as it goes. He imbues the poems with the voices of their creators, so that to hear him is to read them, to watch him is to know them, to join in with him is to become them. The volume of his voice ranges from a whisper to an unabashed holler, according to the exigencies of the language. We are not used to hearing words stretched and tossed around in this way. “We take language for granted,” Ashley has said. “I would like thereader to be shaken out of the doldrums of just decoding and for the work to become alive, meaningful.”
In May 2005, Ashley shook a small swath of the Portland community out of the doldrums of a drizzly night when he appeared at the Born to Read conference, “Early Literacy in a Changing World.” The children in the audience spent most of the program squirming, poking each other, and peering under their seats, as children in an auditorium are wont to do. No one thought to make them sit still. After all, Ashley was in motion too, clutching at his podium and dancing about the stage. During his call-and-response readings, the children echoed his words intuitively from their perches on laps, armrests, and carpet. Even the adults in the audience showed little self-consciousness. They surprised themselves by shouting and murmuring and swaying along with Ashley, and emerged looking rapturous, dazed, slightly exhausted.
It was Ashley who ought to have been exhausted. In the space of twenty-four hours, he had accepted a key to the city of Portland and an award for Leadership in Arts Education from the Maine College of Art (both accolades received as graciously as if they were his first, although he has also received the Coretta Scott King Award, the Arbuthnot Prize, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, and the Maine Library Association’s Katahdin Award). He had also spent time with students at Reiche Elementary School and met friends for a tour of the Portland Museum of Art, and was scheduled to address another Born to Read audience the next morning. Despite careful planning, the booksellers who brought Ashley’s books to the event sold out of their stock long before the book-signing crowd showed any signs of waning. Any other 80-year-old might have been grateful for this excuse to head to dinner, but Ashley requested a stack of blank bookplates and kept on signing. When they left that night, his grateful fans carried stickers with the author’s scrawled signature, their palms still tingling from his warm handshake, poems still coursing through their hollow places, then settling like sediment at their centers.
Ashley’s connection with this Portland audience is not unusual. Wherever he travels—South Africa, San Francisco, his parents’ island of Antigua—he wins the devotion of the people he meets. Revealing what he called “his secret” to an interviewer, he has said, “whether with a child or an adult, I am striving for an exchange.” Ashley was born in Harlem, grew up in Brooklyn, and began visiting the Maine coast in the 1940s. He returned to, and eventually chose to live and work on, Little Cranberry Island, which “reminds me very much of the neighborhood in which I was raised.” Ashley sees no dissonance between his island and the New York City borough because he has connected with the people who inhabit both communities. “If you are in the moment,” he once said, “you are stretching out to reach that which you recognize in others.”
Ashley’s message to fellow educators is that children are more likely to become joyful readers if they find meaning in stories. He explains that he holds a book even when he doesn’t need to see the text because he wants children to connect poem to page, sound to symbol. (Incidentally, specialists in early childhood development are trying to promote the same connections, except they refer to them as “concept of print” or “alphabetic principle.”) The teachers and librarians who heard Ashley in May have told Born to Read that he gave them the courage to share poetry with children for the first time. Thanks to the wisdom of a Maine master, these children are discovering that books contain enough volume and motion to fill an auditorium, enough meaning to last a lifetime.
Ashley Bryan has recently been nominated by the International Board on Books for Young People for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to one author and one illustrator of children’s books. Only one illustrator from the United States is nominated each year. The winners will be announced in March 2006. The Council looks forward to bringing Ashley Bryan to more Maine audiences next year—please watch our website for specific engagements.
