A Sustaining Book

This week is Bella’s fifth birthday, and I spent most of the day and night yesterday finishing a book I have spent the last six months making for her on the Blurb website, called Bella and Baba Make Images: Five Years in Words and Pictures. It’s not for the child she is now but for the woman she will become, a sustaining book I will give to her for her Quinceañera, or leave for someone else to give her, if I’m not still here. It’s the kind of book I wish my grandparents could have made for me, full of pictures of us doing all the things we did during my first five years of life as they helped me to lay down the foundation of who I would become. I like to imagine what words they might have included, if they had made me a sustaining book.

I started making books for Bella when she was only a few months old. I suppose they are what photo albums used to be, but the words have always been as important as the photographs. This is the biggest one I’ve ever made and includes 180 photographs, eight poems I’ve written for her, and about thirty quotations from my favorite authors, including Arundhati Roy, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, the Dalai Lama, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, T.S. Eliot, and some writers less known for their writing than for other things, like Isadora Duncan and Nelson Mandela. 

I put this one by the picture of her second birthday party: “As you set out for Ithaka/ hope the voyage is a long one,/ full of adventure, full of discovery” --C.P. Cavafy, “Ithaka” in Collected Poems. By a picture of her starting pre-school: “We start out in our lives as little children, full of light and the clearest vision. Then we go to school and then comes on the great Army of school teachers with their critical pencils, and parents and brothers (the greatest sneerers of all) and cantankerous friends, and finally that Great Murderer of the Imagination--a world of unceasing, unkind, dinky, prissy Criticalness”--Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A book about Art, Independence and Spirit (1938).

I have many pictures of Bella reading, and by one of them I include this: “When people say that poetry is a luxury, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language--and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place” --Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 

I ordered two copies, a hardback for her, on the very best photo paper, and a softcover for me, on standard paper.