Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, Meg Medina, The Sun is Also a Star, Nicola Yoon, A Guide Book for the Newly Sired Desi Vampire, Samira Ahmed
Maya Angelou said it best when she said, “I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition–about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and survive.” While these YA authors are not writing about the African American experience, each author used their culture and heritage to define a unique point of view. Meg Medina’s linguistic style places the reader in the mind of a teenage Cuban girl by using phrases in both Spanish and English that give voice to her character. At the same time, Nicola Yoon and Samira Ahmed point out how their language and culture can be diluted and appropriated within their stories. Samira Ahmed tells a vampire story like no other by incorporating the impacts of colonialism and their heritage. Nicola Yoon creates romance in the midst of life as an immigrant. The power of each of these books is that, as readers, we can all imagine the life of the characters even if we don’t have the same background, but as I read, I wondered if there is such a thing as nostalgia in people of color’s lives. It’s not that people of color don’t have fond memories, but once you surpass the surface level of an event or time, eventually, color and history will cast a shadow on all events. Creating fantasy and romance without the tribulations of being a person of color is sought after by some readers, but denying your characters’ entire life experiences seems wrong to me as an author. As authors, part of our goal is to explore the human condition, even if it doesn’t hold any nostalgia for the reader. These authors conveyed the importance of writing from an honest perspective, even when directing it to a younger audience.