Beneath the Rainbow: Enchanting Stories and Poems from Kenya, Illustrated by African Artists

Lovely modern-day fables based on African mythology.

Although some of the world’s most influential storytelling was created in eras before “the West” as we know it even existed — from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey set in Ancient Greece to Arabian Nights representing the Middle East — the vast majority of modern storytelling permeating popular culture today, especially when it comes to children’s books, has a decidedly Western bias.

Enter Beneath the Rainbow — an enchanting collection of mystical children’s stories and poems from Kenya, published by Kenya’s Jacaranda Design and distributed by global literacy nonprofit Worldreader as the first in an ongoing series, featuring motifs and characters from traditional African myths reimagined by modern-day writers and brought to life with expressive illustrations by African artists.

Sun, Wind, and Cloud, written by Kariuki Gakuo and illustrated by Phyllis Koinange and John Okello, tells the story of an ancient quarrel the Sun and the Wind had over who was stronger, which only a tiny white Cloud floating overhead is able to settle.

When each element tries to prove its supremacy, fire and drought ensue — the Sun burns the land and the Wind blows the smoke into the little Cloud’s eyes. But as she begins to cry, she restores balance and safety to the animals, who had begun to flee in horror, and helps the Sun and Wind realize that strength only matters if it is a life-giving force, not a destructive one.

In the sky, Sun and Wind agreed that Cloud was stronger than either of them.

Even to this day, when the animals see the clouds growing dark and heavy with rain, they stop what they are doing to give thanks and praise to Ngai, the god of all living things, who saved them from both drought and fire.

It is a parable about ego and selflessness, construction and destruction, vanity and valor — an African version of the familiar Aesop’s Fables.

In “Run,” poet Sam Mbure and illustrator Pat Keay explore the gentler face of the elements with a beautiful celebration of private everyday happiness:

Come down sweet rain;
Come rain on me
Like you rain on the tree,
The maize and the grass;
And they grow and grow.

Come down sweet rain,
End famine and thirst.
Soon the market will overflow;
Vegetables and fruits, maize and beans;
And I’ll grow and grow and grow.

Come down sweet rain
Wash away dust and dirt
Fill our drum with sweet rain water
So that tomorrow I can sleep till nine.
And I’ll be happy, happy to rest.

Come down sweet rain
Shut out drought and heat
Swell rivers, ponds and seas
Then as I swim naked in the pool
I’ll join the frogs singing for you.

The Ostrich and the Wizard, written by Kariuki Gakuo and illustrated by Sironka Averdung and John Okello, tells the prehistoric tale of young Earth and creatures first began to populate it. The Ostrich, unsure of whether she was a bird or an animal, struggles with her quest for identity — heartened by laying a large white egg, she decides she’s a bird; but when the other birds realize she can’t fly, they ostracize her with scorn. She runs and runs, unable to find where she belongs.

The ostrich ran faster and faster and the cloud of dust whirled thicker and thicker. The giant eyes of the crocodile were red and swollen with the dust, while the salty tears of the elephants and hippos formed great pools around their feet. In the hot sun the pools of tears dried up and formed deep salt licks.

But the ostrich did not stop running. Faster and faster she ran while behind her the cloud of dust whirled thicker and thicker.

Gorgeously illustrated and beautifully written, like all the stories and poems in the collection, it’s an allegory about the essence of home and belonging.

Complement Beneath the Rainbow with The Night Life of Trees and Waterlife — two equally wonderful children’s stories from another part of the world, based on traditional Indian mythology.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald may be the source of some timeless wisdom on the theory of writing and a feisty literary idealist, but he was also a man of uncommon sensitivity to the living fabric of language. In this chillingly beautiful recording, Fitzgerald reads John Keats’s 1819 classic “Ode to a Nightingale,” found in the indispensable The Oxford Book of English Verse (public library) — enjoy:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?

Complement with Keats on “negative capability” and the art of remaining in doubt and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heartening advice to his young daughter.

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Seamus Heaney Reads “Death of a Naturalist” and His Nobel Lecture on the Power of Poetry

How poetry works to “persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness” and remind us that we are “hunters and gatherers of values.”

Beloved Irish poet, playwright, and translator Seamus Heaney (April 13, 1939—August 30, 2013) was the recipient of innumerable awards, including the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, and was noted in his lifetime as the best-read living poet in the world in the past few decades.

To celebrate his legacy, here is Heaney’s exquisite reading of the title poem from his 1966 anthology Death of a Naturalist (public library), followed by his timeless wisdom on poetry, politics, and culture from his Nobel acceptance speech.

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Nearly thirty years later, in 1995, Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Unlike Hemingway’s laconic acceptance speech, Heaney delivered an epic 51-minute lecture, found in Nobel Lectures: From the Literature Laureates, 1986 to 2006 (public library), reflecting on his influences, the role of politics in poetry, and his “journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival … turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.” Heaney begins by crediting poetry’s enormous personal and cultural gift:

Poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind’s centre and its circumference. . . . I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.

Despite having come of age in violence-torn Northern Ireland, an experience that profoundly shaped his voice as a poet, Heaney acknowledges his effort to “make space in [his] reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous,” and illustrates poetry’s magnificent power as a tool for expanding our scope of empathy with an example from Homer:

At the sight of the man panting and dying there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears,
cloaked as they were, now, from the company.

Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer’s image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman’s back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable.

The form of the poem, Heaney argues, only amplifies its power to stir us into our own humanity:

The form of the poem … is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

Two years later, Heaney revisits the subject in this lengthy Paris Review interview, taking it a step further to explore the political power of the poetical — a power of indirect but monumental impact:

I think the poet who didn’t feel the pressure at a politically difficult time would be either stupid or insensitive.

[…]

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. … People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

Thank you, Seamus, for half a century of entrancing us above our possibilities.

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The Making of a 21st-Century Illuminated Manuscript: Inside Debbie Millman’s Creative Process

How an illustrated poem comes to life.

“Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it,” wrote friend-of-Brain Pickings Debbie Millman in her superb illustrated-essay-turned-commencement-address on courage and the creative life, based on her 2009 book Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design. That piece, in fact, went on to become one of the most-read, most-shared articles in the entire history of Brain Pickings, as well as the source of some of the most moving and personal reader letters I’ve ever received, and other excerpts from Look Both Ways emerge as the most-played Literary Jukebox pairings of all time. So it’s with enormous joy and excitement I share the news that the sequel to this gem, Self-Portrait as Your Traitor: Visual Essays by Debbie Millman — a spectacular collection of illustrated essays and poems on everything from love to (self-)forgiveness to the Super Bowl, blending the deeply personal mesmerism of a memoir with the profound, universal resonance of philosophy on our shared human triumphs and tribulations — is coming this fall and has just been released for pre-order.

Debbie’s enchanting hand-lettered type — sometimes tender, sometimes gritty, always breathtaking in its visceral candor — makes for a moving masterpiece of a singular art form that speaks to our deepest longings for beauty, honesty, and the ineffable magic of what it means to live.

In the introduction, legendary graphic designer Paula Scher captures the book’s singular spell:

Debbie Millman has demonstrated her ability to combine thoughts about design and everyday life with her own obsessive hand-drawn typography, creating a new form of visual poetry. She has invented a 21st century illuminated manuscript.

To celebrate the pre-release, here is an exclusive behind-the-scenes peek at Debbie’s creative process for “Pebbles,” the book’s final and most personal poem, which began as a submission to the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest:

And here is a sneak peek at a portion of the contact sheet containing the remaining illustrated essays and poems from the book:

Start getting excited about Self-Portrait as Your Traitor, and revisit this taste of the magnificent Look Both Ways.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.