Happy reading – HD

Jacqueline Woodson Image: Carlos Diaz

When the announcement of Jacqueline Woodson as the ALMA prize winner of the year arrived, none of her works were translated into Swedish. But now, Woodsons' own note is in Swedish translation, and for that we can be ALMA's jury for ever grateful. "Brown Girl Dreaming" is written in free verse, which makes it stand out both as memoirs and as a youth book. This, despite this, is not difficult at all. Sometimes I have the impression that I am sitting on an old – fashioned slide show with a fast, gentle but accurate narrator. The images dissolve and draw a coherent picture of the education of a brunette girl in the 60s and 70s in the United States, when the civil rights movement changes fundamentally.

Jacqueline was born in Ohio in 1963. She is the youngest of a couple (who later turns into four). Jacqueline's father is proud to have taken the southern family, but his mother Mary Ann keeps nostalgic, although she's still dark in the south, she still can not sit in the bus at the bottom without risking violent harassment

Later, they leave the family, they return to Mary Ann's childhood home in Greenville, South Carolina. While Mary Ann is preparing herself for a new life for the New York family, her grandparents take care of Jacqueline and her sisters and grandmothers do their best to raise them to the Jehovah's Witnesses of the Just. Eventually, the kids are brought by the mother to the new home in New York, and another new chance to sail takes. Jacqueline dreams of writing, of becoming a writer, a dream of growing stronger.

In a particularly strong scene, Mary Ann takes the kids to the library, where Jacqueline picks a really simple book for her – but she has a brown kid on the front, which is absolutely crucial because the book I'm coming from to read should at least exist a few decades later: "If anyone had taken / removed that book / you said, you're too old for that / hate / me maybe I've never thought that someone who looked like being on pages of books could have a story. "

Woodson posthumously wrote that his life was both universal and beautiful, that I agree after reading "Brown Girl Dreaming." This is, on the one hand, a representation of a childhood filled with love, safety and security. 39 fairly common events: on the other hand, a representation of growing up in a brown body in a violently racist United States, where "Only for the white "The signs in the south have only been shyly covered. Having a brunette girl and dreaming of freedom, writing, is a revolutionary act. Or as Woodson writes, "So there is a war in South Carolina / and even when we pray / plant and preach and sleep, we are part of it." It's a good read, at least.