Çocuk Yazını - Interview with Elif Yemenici On Representations of Emotions in Children’s Literature

Spot: Our guest in August: Elif Yemenici who is an author and an illustrator as well. Broken-hearted children are closely acquainted with her; we had a healing-like conversation with the author and illustrator of the children’s picture book Oh no! My heart is broken! (Eyvah Kalbim Kırıldı!) about the childhood, heartbreaks of childhood and representations of emotions in narrations.

We know the story of Kalben, but we wonder something that we do not know: The story of Kalben and Elif Yemenici’s acquintance. How did you cross paths with her?

The day Kalben came out was a kind of day for me in which i went through a turning point. I was working on cartoons at a company. The last day for me in that company; i picked up, just have to finish my duties… It was snowing. I closed my eyes, missing summer. I dreamed leaves of Bougainvillaea. I had a terrible heartbreak on that day! I think, the reason why this work is so sincere is the strength of the heartbreak I felt. Then I sat down, I wrote, the story was flourishing quickly. The period of writing finished in a very short time.

As I mentioned, it was a time for me at which I felt as if I was at the bottom. I am leaving the job, have no idea on what I am going to do next. If you live in İstanbul, you do not have a choice like relaxing for a couple of months. Works done in such kind of a mood have a different sincerity, I guess. This is the energy of the bottom! You feel the gravity ten times stronger but on the other hand you feel something high. The day Kalben came out was like this.

Writing period was short but illustrating the story took nearly five-six months. When both the text and the illustrations finished, I had no idea what to do. “This is done” I said, “What’s going to happen now?” I presented it to a couple of publishers I worked, on the anniversary of the period I wrote the story, it met the readers.

Oh no! My heart is broken! (Eyvah Kalbim Kırıldı!) is a very different narration which draws attention to the fact that an action which may be unimportant for others would be incredibly important for the interlocutor. At the first layer of the text, we witness a little girl’s pursuit of fixing her heartbreak whose ice cream “was fallen” by mistake.

At this point “Loneliness of Kalben” is the key point actually: She does not have elderly people around who solace or advise her. There is a girl listening to her own heart, questioning at every single happy moment “is my heart fixed now”, sounding herself. Oh no! My heart is broken! (Eyvah Kalbim Kırıldı!) is an awareness book, right? It makes the children to realise themselves and advises them to "question it, only you by yourself can fix this".

Yes, and this is the way it must be. Parents keep interfering with their children, with children’s emotions. They even believe that they can fix every hurt at once. For example, if this were the real life, remember your childhood, a mother would show up and yell at the other children around “Why do not you play with my child?” As long as parents act in this way children are becoming more and more tender to be hurt by others. They are not going to have their parents always beside them. That is why I wanted Kalben to be “all alone” in the story. I tried to fictionalise this in my illustrations too, it may sound like an obsession but I do not like to have secondary characters, as long as it is possible. If it is really needed, I only use their hands, arms or legs. Because the person who breaks your heart is only a walker-on in your life and heartbreak is an extremely passive situation… Your heart does not get broken just as you sit, it does not get fixed when the other people apologizes. The children shall find solutions and realize what is good for their heart by themselves.

We, as the members of the Children’s Literature, have a file that we have been investigating every month. Our August file is: “Didactic or Empathetic: Representations of Emotions in Children’s Literature”. It is necessary for an individual to get to know their own emotions, to think on them and to express them correctly in order to communicate with themselves, their social circle and the life. Making “thinking over oneself” a habit in childhood shall ease their life and all the relations they will establish.

Kalben’s pursuit of happiness is inspiring yet one feels the lack of her not communicating with friends and not expressing her heartbreaks. Is this a detail that you fictionalised to deepen Kalben’s sorrow with the despair “They are not going to understand me, anyway.”?

Oh no! My heart is broken! (Eyvah Kalbim Kırıldı!) is a hopeful story in fact, I drew the light beams on drawings to show some promise. That is why I did not think as “They are not going to understand me, anyway.” but people who break your heart are only walker-ons in your life and showing their feet is enough, actually. It is not that much important that they come and apologise, the heartbreak will not be fixed even if they apologise. And in our daily lives we do not encounter that kind of graceful people, no one shows up and says, “I saw the errors of my way, I am sorry.” These are passive solutions, what I wanted to realise with Kalben’s story is to let the children find the healing by themselves.

When we look at your drawings, we see that you benefited from traditional patterns; one can easily deduce from the drawings that Kalben lives in a small Aegean or Mediterranean town. There some details such as the embroidered pillowcase on the bed she lies on, string of peppers on the visual where she sits in front of the door. Apart from the drawings, we see a highly universal language throughout the text; let us consider Kalben’s happiness steps: She drinks hot milk, looks at fishes, listens to the sea shells. These solutions could be tried by any child from all over the world.

Here, we realised that you made different choices as the author and the illustrator; what is the reason behind that? Is it a reference to the fact that emotions does not belong to any country but the humanity as a whole? Or basically the desire to let more children have the story? Let us remind our audience at this point that your book was translated to Catalan and Spanish recently.

Country is a thing whose borders are determined by us, it may not be existing in a few years’ time. That is why what I focus in terms of visuals was not country but climate. I determine the climate and the geography of the place before drawing it. I do not pinpoint like this country or this town. My grandparents had a house in Ayvalık, we used to visit them in summers when I was a child, and springs of peppers were always there, too. This remained as an image on my mind. After that, I picked every item that can be suitable for this concept. As an example, let me remind you the next page where you see small stones. When I visited Rodos, I fell in love with the stone pavement and immediately took a photo of it. At that illustration, I intended to represent Rodos’ pavement. Blue painted houses of Alaçatı, I knew not what of Mykonos… I have never been to Spain, but one of my friends did. That friend of mine showed me the flowerpots in Granada once, the details of flowerpots are from that image. I wandered around all the streets via Google Earth and picked every detail that goes with this climate, this is the reason why Oh no! My heart is broken! (Eyvah Kalbim Kırıldı!) does not belong to only one country or city.

Now that we mentioned illustrations, one cannot help admiring your drawings. If your book were a silent book for example, it would be able to narrate the story as well. With the details such as the milk splash left on Kalben’s lips after she drunk the milk, worried looks of the cats whom she strokes, you made the story more realistic, actually.

Beyond these details, what draws attention is the dominance of the childish point of view not only on the text but also the visual language. To set an example, when the ice cream fall, what is seen is only the tiptoes of the other children, which means the angle was fictionalised from above… Or in the scene where Kalben looks at the fishes: Here, since the angle is from underwater the sorrow on her face is seen clearly.

How should visuals and the text go with in a thriving children’s picture book, how should the principle of childish point of view reflect on the visual language?

The text and the visuals should support each other, none shall be superior to the other one, they should be integrated. Colours should be chosen to support the emotion in the story such as positive colours or pessimistic colours. I pay attention to light, for instance, if it is a light beam it promises hope. Apart from this, angles used in movie industry also matters; I used an angle from above in the scene where Kalben lies on her bed in order to emphasize her loneliness, to let the readers feel it deeper. Angles, colour choices, all of these factors are to supply or to perfect the narration. When I work on character’s facial expressions, I place my mirror in front of me. For a single facial expression, I keep looking at the mirror almost two hours, I work in this way.

You meet children frequently on the occasion of various activities. How do young readers react to Kalben’s story?

I have visited a great number of schools this year. We hold both drawing workshops and interviews. They love this kind of activities very much. Then I ask them “What heals your broken heart?” I get quite interesting replies differing by the socioeconomic infrastructure of the school. When I visited a private school, a little girl replied, “Wearing my crop tops and doing gymnastic exercises.” Another one replied “A dollop of ice creams with mastic and hot chocolate along with it.” If I am at a suburban school they mostly reply as “bird calls” or “to apologize.” All these replies contribute to my work, in fact, you cannot produce children’s literature being disjointed from them. It makes me feel good, too…

Let us share the news which will excite the ones who love Kalben’s story: As far as we followed on your social media posts, second volume of the book is on the way, right? When are we going to read it and are you working on any projects other than Kalben’s story?

Kalben has been my agenda for a long time. Until the moment I met you I was working on the last page of the book, actually, it is almost finished now. I have some stories that I wrote time to time and put aside. I am crazy for each of them, I cannot wait to illustrate them, so I am going to concern myself with them. I am planning to get one of the stories not only as book but also a stop motion short movie. The protagonist of that story is also agoraphobic, a phobia I experience in myself. Now I laugh when I tell it but it was a compelling period for me. The character will be something between cat and human, story will narrate its having to go out… I was inspired by my cat, actually. My cat is just like the character, it is afraid of everything. I have already built a house by using egg cartoons for the preliminary preparations of the short movie. I will have to work on a lot of little bitty things, it will probably take moths to be completed. Stop motion requires a high level of patience. We will see, hopefully I can accomplish it. The texts I mentioned before, the ones I wrote and put aside, are also fictionalised through emotions. I do not write with an intention like “I shall teach the children” but everyone has its own style and mine will go on this way, I suppose.