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Human-not-machine

BooksApril 26, 2022

Human not machine: how autistic writers are writing new space for themselves

Human-not-machine

Wellington writer Andi C. Buchanan on how their new novel, Sanctuary, is part of a rich autistic canon.

The idea of the changeling – a baby swapped by the fae for one of their own – is now often thought to have arisen from observing autistic children. Some infants suddenly start to display autistic traits at the age of 15-30 months, leading parents to the conclusion they’d been replaced. Other parents, while not literally believing the story, found it a way of describing a “different” child – or an excuse for harming them.

Such beliefs about autistic people not being quite human have been used to dismiss and harm us for centuries. More recently we’ve been compared to Spock or robots, which is less dangerous, but still perpetuates stereotypes – especially about lack of feelings – and can be dehumanising.

Some autistic people have reclaimed these ideas, finding meaning and ways to understand themselves in these fictional portrayals, or better ways of explaining their experience to others. An online discussion board for autistic people that was popular in the early 2000s is named “Wrong Planet”, reflecting the sense for many that they are like aliens brought up among humans. But for many other autistics, such comparisons are still too uncomfortable.

There’s another way these non-human ways of being – fae, ghosts, robots, aliens, and more – can be used to explore the autistic experience. For many creators we are not these creatures or constructions – but we might be friends with them. They might be people we relate to, people we can help or who can help us. We have much in common with them, but not at the expense of our own humanity.

I’ve been fascinated by this idea for a while. My short story Even the Clearest Water (Fireside Quarterly, 2020) is about a water fae that saves autistic children from drowning; it explores obligation and exchange as the basis for a relationship. My recent novel Sanctuary (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2022) is about a neurodivergent found-family who live in a haunted house, and how they are building community with and alongside the resident ghosts.

I’m far from alone in exploring this. Wellington writer Rem Wigmore tells the story of a shepherd who lives on the outskirts of a village in their novelette Basil and the Wild (Middle Distance, Te Herenga Waka University Press). Basil, the shepherd, is non-specifically neurodivergent, rarely speaking, and spends most of his time alone. He is able to do most of what he needs to, but needs some support. While he has a strong relationship with his sister, most in the village view him as worthless, and his brother-in-law reacts to his impairments and support needs with hostility.

In the forest Basil meets Makarios, a “wild man”, unusually large and with cloven hooves, whose “mind turns differently too” – while no diagnostic terms are used for either character, Makarios can be interpreted as being bipolar. In their growing relationship, and ultimate retreat from the village to the wild, there’s both the indication of cross-disability solidarity, as well as human/non-human.

While autistic people in space opera have frequently  been associated with aliens – notably,  Star Trek’s logic-driven Vulcans – Kaia Sønderby’s Xandri Corelel series tells of an autistic human who is skilled in inter-species diplomacy. Being autistic is an advantage for Xandri in being able to communicate and reach agreement with these diverse species. Her skill stems in part from her ability in pattern recognition, and in part because she’s had to learn to read people very closely to survive.

Why are autistic people so attracted to these magical or other-worldly connections? Most of us experience loneliness and isolation – and if we are repeatedly rejected by humans then the idea of friendship with ghosts or aliens may almost seem less far-fetched.

It’s also the fantasy we might be able to meet someone else on equal terms; both of us having to adapt to and learn each other’s way of communicating, rather than always having to be the ones who make the effort, exhausting ourselves to the point of burnout. Rather than the assumption that we’re not normal and have to fit in with those who are, there’s the potential for two people who are equally different to explore building relationships and community.

Being equated with a non-human can feel dehumanising; it also carries the weight of being compared to them in all respects, whether or not they are accurate. I may relate to a non-human character because I like wordplay, don’t have a very expressive face, and may struggle to see the emotional underpinning of someone else’s decision, but I definitely have emotions, won’t steal your baby, and am only malevolent on my bad days. By exploring how an autistic human might relate to someone of a different species there’s room for that nuance – ways we are and are not similar, do and do not connect – rather than all the assumptions a direct comparison brings.

There is an interesting flipside here. When the Mars Rover Curiosity landed in 2011, it spawned commentary, tweets, webcomics and more from its point of view. We humanised it. While some picked up on the perceived melancholy of its isolation, others commented that what is truly defining of humanity was not that we have evolved to the extent we can put a robot on Mars, but that we taught it to sing Happy Birthday to itself while it was there.

There is a difference between a sentient non-human – a fairy or an alien – and an inanimate object; a microwave, say, or a hat. Robots, especially fictional robots, fit somewhere along the spectrum. But I also think the autistic tendency to personify even clearly inanimate objects is relevant here. It’s not exclusive to autistic people and not all of us do it, but it’s one of those shared traits that meet with shared recognition despite not being in any diagnostic criteria.

I am far from a minimalist, but an aspect of Marie Kondo’s method that resonated for me was thanking items before getting rid of them. While many, especially in the Western world, found it silly or awkward, it made a lot of sense to me, even though I have no connection to its religious origins. It’s not, for me, about whether my old sweater vest can understand my thanks – it’s about how I relate to it, my sense of my place in the universe and what is around me.

Our feelings of connection to the non-human can definitely emerge from feelings of isolation or loneliness, of not having ways to explain our difference. It can come from having – contrary to some stereotypes – more empathy than normal, even if we’re not always sure what to do with it. But it also comes from open-mindedness, playfulness, and skill in connecting with someone who is not like you.

In writing Sanctuary I wanted to convey these ideas of friendship, identity, and resonance. Autistic people are as human as anyone else – not ghosts, robots, changelings or aliens. But many of us like the idea of hanging out with them sometimes. 

Sanctuary, by Andi C Buchanan (Robot Dinosaur Press) is available via the author’s website and can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

Keep going!
Photo of a Māori girl beaming as she exits a tunnel slide; design feature out the side shows a zigzag of green with book emojis.
Terrific books just keep coming down the pipeline (Photo: Jane Ussher, featured on the cover of board book Ko wai te papa tākaro?; Design: Toby Morris)

BooksApril 23, 2022

The glorious resurgence of New Zealand children’s books

Photo of a Māori girl beaming as she exits a tunnel slide; design feature out the side shows a zigzag of green with book emojis.
Terrific books just keep coming down the pipeline (Photo: Jane Ussher, featured on the cover of board book Ko wai te papa tākaro?; Design: Toby Morris)

The magic is back and thank goodness for that, writes books editor Catherine Woulfe.

I’m wincing as I type this but: for at least a couple of years there it was rare to come across a New Zealand picture book that was done well. Where the words weren’t a screaming shambles, and care had been taken with the design and artwork, and everything bopped along with joy and story and little-kid magic. Eirlys Hunter, a longtime teacher of creative writing for children and a writer herself (most famously of the Mapmakers’ Race series), laid it out in an essay we published last year

Even without the constraints of rhyme, too many picture books ignore rhythm. To be fair, they’re not too hard to identify as they usually also have dull illustrations, are written in banal clichés and tell a hackneyed story – or no story at all. They come from a cynical production line and there’s no love of writing – or respect for children – involved in their creation.

I love picture books, I truly do, and every time a new book arrives I go in optimistic, but for a long stretch things just felt flat. Tired. Not-great book after not-great book turned up on my doorstep and each one made me sad. Oh there were still flashes of storytelling wizardry, but they were too often swamped by cliché and earnestness, badly-drawn kiwi (they have straight beaks, you guys) and trippy-uppy writing. It felt like there was a disconnect between all our huge talents, the brilliance of our writers and artists, and the finished books themselves. I had a big moan about this when the finalists for the 2021 book awards were announced. 

But now! Whatever was wrong – and it was partly Covid, of course, but it wasn’t just Covid because it had been going on for ages – seems to have abruptly come right. For the first time in a long time, our cup runneth over with top-tier books, the kind you can read right after Where the Wild Things Are and Hairy Maclary and not feel like you’re lurching down a level. When this year’s children’s book awards finalists are announced in June, the picture books category in particular is going to be absolutely stacked. Our lucky, lucky kids.

Two picture book covers, one grand and mostly black, the other cheerful, with a blue elephant perched on top of a small child.
(Images: Supplied)

Two of this terrific crop I’ve written about before, so I’ll skip over them here: My Elephant Is Blue, by Melinda Szymanik and Vasanti Unka, and Gavin Bishop’s splendid big hardback Atua. They alone were enough to make me feel like we were on an uptick. 

But just after Christmas, Huia snuck out the dark rockpool adventure The Eight Gifts of Te Wheke, with Steph Matuku on words and Laya Mutton-Rogers on pictures.

Photograph of picture book showing birds eye view of two children on a beach facing a giant octopus in the water.
A gift (Photo: Catherine Woulfe)

It’s about a giant octopus, Te Wheke, dragging a little girl into his undersea lair, and about her brother, who rescues her. The story is so strong you could read it without pictures and it would still be lush and tense and creepy as hell. 

“Give her to me,” said Te Wheke. “I’ll make her stop crying.” 

And, as he drags her in: “Now hush, little girl … Be as quiet as a fish.”

But the illustrations are astonishing. Mutton-Rogers nails a huge range here: close-ups of shocked faces, a birds-eye house interior, a faceoff between boy and octopus, a feast. The spread I love most shows Te Wheke’s lair: think Graeme Base’s teeming Animalia but with an anti-capitalist wink. The detail doesn’t really come through on a screen, so here’s just a section of the spread: 

Illustration showing a giant octopus spread over a treasure trove of junk.
A close up of the hoary old capitalist (Photo: Catherine Woulfe)

You could easily spend 15 minutes looking at this one spread, and we have. Another thing I love: the mum in this book is drawn big and strong and she has boobs. She looks like she gives great hugs but takes zero shit. She looks real. 

Illustration showing two kids and their mum sprawled on the sand, a huge octopus slumped in front of them.
The rarely-seen picture-book mum who actually has boobs and a bum (Photo: Catherine Woulfe)

I’m going to throw another Huia book into the ring here too. (At the moment they’re up there with Penguin as our strongest publisher for kids – you can always pick a Huia book by their vibrant covers, their impeccable design and production standards, their baked-in sense of humour.) The Greatest Haka Festival on Earth is a hard-case story about Nana and the kids travelling to Te Matatini. Words by Pania Tahau-Hodges, illustrations by Story Hemi-Morehouse, it’s quite a long one to read aloud but worth it. I’m sure it has helped tide kapa haka fans over while Te Matatini has been on ice – there hasn’t been an IRL festival since February 2019. 

Photograph of two picture books, one in grey and brown tones, the other bright blue.
(Photo: Catherine Woulfe)

I thought things couldn’t possibly get any better, but then a couple of weeks ago the kids tore open a big flat courier package and found a book called The Lighthouse Princess. READ IT, the three-year-old commanded, smacking it onto my lap. And so I did. And honestly it was like Christmas morning when you’re a kid, like when you’re the first one up and you wander out to the lounge for a fizzy moment of reverence, just you and the tree. 

The Lighthouse Princess is a perfect book. It’s full of cosy nooks and light touches – there are chocolate fish in the sea, friendly penguins that pop inside for a bath – but it’s also hardout feminist, in a matter-of-fact way that sits so much better than all those strident girl power books the shops are flooded with. It begins: 

The princess lived in a tower by the sea.

She wasn’t sad, and she wasn’t stuck. 

This princess wears dungarees and carries a spanner; she gets things done and fixes stuff that breaks. She rescues a boy who shipwrecks nearby. Does she need rescuing from the tower, he asks? No, she says. She likes it here. Their relationship continues like that, a healthy, open call and response, and it’s still fun, because they’re also sliding down the banisters and swimming with seals and fishing (for chocolate fish, natch). My two-year-old daughter adores it and so does my seven-year-old son, and so do I. All by itself this book is enough to shore up my faith in our children’s publishing industry.

Spread from a picture book showing a storm at sea, and a girl racing over rocks to save a drowning boy.
Check out those slicey fast-running hands (Image: Supplied)

The story is put together with tenderness and zing and a poet’s ear – it’s a delight to read aloud, even when you’ve already read it aloud 39 times in the space of four days. It doesn’t bother with rhyme but it pays a lot of attention to rhythm, and assonance – the wonderful clunk and snick of words put together just so. “The birds tucked themselves away among the rocks.” “The wind whipped the waves up high.” Whipped – you’ve no choice but to say it like you mean it, to say it like the wind on the sea. Later, after the storm, you say “the restless shine of the sea beyond”, and it sounds exactly like a sssh. Ssssh

These wonderful words are by Susan Wardell, a Pākehā mother who lives near the harbour in Dunedin, and who also writes creative nonfiction and poems and academic papers (she’s a social anthropologist). 

The illustrations are by Rose Northey, a Wellington mechanical engineer turned artist. And they jump with just as much life and music as the words. The colours are fairly toned-down – a lot of woody light browns, a lot of grey-blue – and the pictures are lovely to look at, but they’re in no way ornamental. Northey has taken the story and sewn in her own, adding great confident whorls of magic and mystery and the plain old weird. (Why, my boy keeps asking, does the girl use the moon as her lighthouse light? How does that work?) 

Spread from a picture book showing gorgeous wooden interior of a lighthouse, two kids whooshing down the banisters. All sorts of cosy nooks.
It’s feminist but it’s also, crucially, fun (Image: Supplied)

For awards purposes board books get bundled in with picture books, and on that front, too, things are looking better than they have in ages. David Elliot’s put out the very cute and properly funny wordplay book Bumblebee Grumblebee (Gecko Press). Gavin Bishop continued his run of gorgeous wee board books via Gecko, with Koro (plus an English version, Pops) telling the simple sweet story of a girl and her grandfather making egg and puha sandwiches.

Covers of four board books for littlies
Consider this a baby shower shopping list (Images: Supplied)

And Massey University Press has poured all its design and execution nous into a series of excellent, glossy little bilingual and te reo Māori board books. (The main picture on this piece is from the cover of the second in the series, Ko wai kei te papa tākaro / Who is at the playground?, which is out in June.) Words are by Te Ataakura Pewhairangi and Jane Ussher is on photography, but the real stars are the kids – delighted, guileless, sure-of-themselves. At the centre of things, as they should be. 

All of the books above are available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington. Only five will be named as finalists in the picture book category of the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Finalists in all categories will be announced on the 2nd of June.

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