Strange Fruit (Or, A Book Display For Whale Talk

Chris Crutcher's Whale Talk is a challenging book. As we debated between creating a display or writing a booktalk, part of our process was knowing what to talk about in a book that contained two plots that addressed very different issues. On one hand, the story was about T.J. Jones' quest to form a swim team to get athletic jackets for a bunch of his high school misfits. The other plot dealt with T.J.'s life as a person of mixed-race in a very white town with some very racist citizens.

Trying to deal with both plots in a booktalk would have been too confusing. We ultimately eliminated the booktalk route because we thought no one would want to read the book after being hearing what would no doubt be a thoroughly depressing booktalk (Whale Talk involves many instances of child abuse, the death of a young child and a brain damaged teenager who gets picked on by students and teachers. And that's just a taste.) We decided to do a display of other materials that deal with issues of race over the theme of outsiders because racially motivated storyline had a greater impact for all of us when we were reading the book.

Taking a cue from Hello, Groin, our display would consist of a human face divided to racial sections (do not ask how exactly this would be done, as we did not discuss the practicalities). Materials would then be displayed that dealt with issues of race and would point to the appropriate section of the face. These would not necessarily be items specifically for teens, partially because we couldn't brainstorm a lot of YA books that dealt with race. Some possible materials could be: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Hurricane directed by Norman Jewison, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King. We also would want the display to have strong Canadian component that could either support or question the idea of Canada as a multicultural country.

There was also talk of pulling quotes from Whale Talk, with this one from the first page fitting in quite well: "The facts. I'm black. And Japanese. And white. Politically correct would be African-American, Japanese-American and what? Northern European-American?" This quote not only summarizes T.J.'s struggles of figuring out who he is, but also works with the visual design of our display.

-Kayleigh, Lauren, Meghan and Mike