Normally, in seeking to learn more about a singer from the past, such as American contralto Marian Anderson, a picturebook might not be our first port of call. Wouldn’t it be more useful to look her up on YouTube and Wikipedia? Well, let’s look at Pam Muñoz Ryan and Brian Selznick’s “When Marian Sang” to find out what the picturebook form may contribute to our discovery of this extraordinary singer.
As soon as we open the book, two sumptuously illustrated double page spreads transport us back to the turn of the century and the glittering Old Met in New York City. The curtain rises on a girl framed by a brightly lit window as she sings into the night. We turn to the title page, and from the verso we catch her glorious alto tones: “[…] With one breath she sounded like rain, sprinkling high notes in the morning sun. And with the next she was thunder, resounding deep in a dark sky.”
Then on the recto we read When Marian Sang: The True Recital of Marian Anderson, libretto by Pam Muñoz Ryan and staging by Brian Selznick. In other words, through images, simile and metaphor, and the playful allusion to concert program discourse, the paratext is framing the text as something more than a typical picturebook. It’s framing it as an opera.
This framing device, as well as the rich shades of sepia and the sleek, hieratic elegance of the Art Deco style of the illustrations, suggest from our first contact with this book that Ryan and Selznick are not afraid of adopting a “foreignizing” (Buttler and O’Donovan 82-86) approach to history, one which deliberately focuses the reader’s attention on the differences between past and present.
To give you an example, the author has avoided today’s common practice of utilising modern discourse and slag to make the past more relatable to young readers. And perhaps controversially, “In order to address the era in which this story took place, [she] has, with the greatest respect, stayed true to the references to African Americans as coloured or Negro.” This, as she goes on to explain in her notes, is based on the singer’s autobiography My Lord, What a Morning in which “Marian Anderson referred to herself and others of her race in this manner” (39-40). Rather than being disrespectful, this foreignizing approach would seem to construct an immersive narrative that is authentic to the Segregation Era, and promote debate and critical thinking.
In this spirit the “Encore” and “Ovations” sections at the back explain the extensive research and the personal journeys the author and illustrator undertook in creating this book: the archives, trips, and, most movingly, the encounters with people who knew Marian personally. This has the seemingly contradictory effect of both validating the historicity of their narrative text, but also of presenting it as their own version of the facts. An important distinction thus emerges between two of the fundamental meanings of the word history: the facts that took place in the past and the telling of those facts. These paratextual notes therefore draw attention to Ryan and Selznick’s mediating role, and encourage the young reader to pic up on their creative and historiographical choices.
Further support in this sense is provided through a list of sources and a number of suggestions for museums to visit, books to read and recordings to listen to, thus opening the narrative well beyond the confines of the book cover into what we might call elective research. Within this peritextual space the young reader may question why, for example, some extremely important events that took place during Marian Anderson’s life (such as World Wars I and II, and the Great Depression) do not feature in the book at all. Another issue that might attract the reader’s attention is the selection and placement within the narrative of Anderson’s life events. In particular, the choice of ending the picturebook with her triumph at the Met instead of her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, “a historic event that has been called America’s first civil rights rally” (Norman). One might argue that this emplotment choice (Butler O’Donovan 167-169) establishes an ascending narrative arc which celebrates Marian Anderson as an icon of Black American history while maintaining some of the unique tensions and contradictions she experienced as a performer and “an uncomfortable activist”(38) of her time. She was, in seems, first and foremost a singer, and stood up for civil rights on her own terms, through her music and her success.
This is, after all, a book about music, with the spirituals Marian Anderson sang commenting on the scenes like arias in an opera. So the elective research implicitly suggested here is to listen to recordings of these hymns and learn to sing them. The reader’s appreciation for Anderson’s singing will be enriched and refined by learning the spirituals, especially if they can muster the gumption to sing them as they read her story.
Therefore, the lively interplay between text, paratext and peritext in When Marian Sang becomes a call to the young reader to undertake their own personal voyage into the life of Marian Anderson, into the history and the music. This elective research, over time, will nourish each re-reading, establishing the reader as co-creator and the text as ever-changing.
Here is a link to a video of Marian Anderson’s legendary concert at Lincoln Memorial on 9th April 1939:
© While all images of the books and all the written content on this blog have been created by me, original copyright of the books belong to the authors and illustrators.
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