Young
Adult literature facilitates an ideal opportunity to examine ourselves in
context of our interests, issues and global challenges reflecting contemporary
fears and future concern. That’s to say, book serve as mirror when reader finds
it familiar to the world they have experienced. Reader identifies himself as
not being isolated in his lived experience. However, novels unlike reader’s experiences
are termed as windows in which there’s an opportunity to look through other
people’s life with an understanding what it is like to be someone else. Windows
and mirrors create ways for readers of all levels of mental health to either
acknowledge their experience or to be aware of people’s life in an abusive
environment or with mental pathology.
The growing number of
novels being published that portrays mentally disability protagonists
highlights an existing interest and demand for a discussion about mental disability,
offering a large platform with diverse perspectives.
All the
Bright Places by
Jennifer Niven, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher andWhen we Collided
by Emery Lord have been
selected to consider the emerging themes of a mental disability along the lines
of parental relationships and/or friendships. These themes offer substantial
areas motivate a reader to develop an insight about how efficiently issues are
depicted in a novel. Recently, several young adult literature have been
adapted on electronic media increasing its accessibility, availability and
preference.
Picture Credits: Awaisha Inayat |
All the
Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
All the Bright Places touches upon neglected parenting and how the complete absence
of parenting causes a distorted image-of-self. Throughout the novel, Finch
suffers from Bipolar Disorder, yet is given no help from his divorced parents. Finch conceives in his mind his father wants
nothing to do with him and has already
replaced his children with his second wife’s kids.
Finch
creates an identity of being replaceable based on his relationship and interactions
with his father. When Finch kills himself, his father acts completely shocked,
showing how far removed he is from Finch’s
life and feelings. He allows his identity to be shaped by his father instead of
turning to other relationships to see how he
could mold his identity based on interactions with people who truly care about him, like Violet. This shows the power of
parental interactions and how characters take
their parental figure’s views of them seriously and form their identity based on their interactions with these figures, either
positively or negatively. In Finch’s case it was definitely negative.
Violet
in All the Bright Places also
recognizes the importance of parental guidance and supervision. After losing
her sister in a car accident, Violet is lost in life and only goes through the
motions day by day. Her parents’ sense these directionless and hopeless
attributes because Violet used to be optimistic, involved in many
extra-curricular activities and always spending time with her friends. Violet
feels like she lives in a different world from her parents until Finch helps
her realize what her parents’ love actually means.
For
most of the novel, Violet cannot understand why her parents are so obsessed
with her well-being and wanting to make sure she leaves the house and starts
writing again like she used to. How invested her parents are in making Violet
happy again is apparent to Violet by the end of the novel and she begins to
mold her sense-of-self off of her parents once Finch has died. By understanding
how to love unconditionally, even in desperate situations when no amount of
help seems to be the answer, Violet sees how the parental role creates an
identity in her and the children of other parents.
Violet
places herself in the shoes of her parents and creates a sympathetic identity
that contrasts her initial belief that no one could help her or understand her
sadness in the loss of her sister. She can now comprehend what it means to be a
parent and love so selflessly, even in the midst of tragedy and when that love
is not reciprocated. Even in seemingly hopeless situations, Violet still
conveys love because of the love she is shown by her own parents.
13 Reasons Why by Jay
Asher
Parental
interactions and family are pivotal in adolescent’s life because every
character has parents, whether present or not. Parental interactions can be
easily understood by the reader because of the universal notion that everyone
has a set of parents. Parental
failures to attend their children are not only limited to the aspect of
understanding them but are also tied to the economic challenges that plagues
middle class family described in 13 Reasons Why.
In the book 13 Reasons why Hannah Baker is a white middle class high school student who
suicide. She as one half of novel’s two voiced narrative explains her reason
for suicide and possible role people played in their suicide through cassette
tapes she had emailed before suicide.
Clay who is
the first recipient of the tapes confuses him because he believes he has always
been a good friend to Hannah. As Clay looks for answers for her suicide,
Hannah’s story of bullying behavior and exclusion raises questions about
complicity and the consequences of cruelty.
In her
taped-retelling of her decision to suicide, Hannah also mentions the financial
pressure her parents face when their business begins to fail. Though her tapes
make clear that many factors, and people, led her to suicide this distance with
her parents makes such issues all that much harder to bear. When her mother
fails to notice the haircut, she connects this with other examples in the novel
where people have failed to see her, see her pain and offer help.
Parent-child
relationships in all of the novels reflect contrasting intentions: these young
protagonists crave parental love, devotion, involvement, and admit they need
it. Whereas they also push parents away to figure life out on their own while
also believing that parents are misfit in their social worlds, “the real world”
that they reside in is far from the love and protection of parents and home.
Adolescence
is a period of human life when the brain, still more intensively than before,
learns to recognize and attribute mental states to ourselves as well as other people.
The unpredictability of the adolescent stage in life is very much a product of
how we are raised and the society that brought us up. Parents contribute to
this atmosphere immensely with their interactions or lack of interactions.
Attributing mental states deals with identity in that image-of-self is formed
by how these interactions with parental figures either build up or destroy
self-image.
When We Collided by
Emery Lord
In the book
When We Collided features one of
the dynamic characters of young adult literature: Vivi Alexander who in her own
words is describes as, full of “fight and art and entire swirling galaxies”.
Her empowering quotes throughout the novel promote a positive self-love. She is
also wonderfully unapologetic about both her personality and her disability.
Vivi had been diagnosed with bipolar
II disorder before the events of the story took place, though readers do not
know this until after several chapters. Visiting Verona Cove for the summer,
she meets Jonah Daniels, and the two quickly fall in love. It certainly begins
with the rather typical summer love story, complete with an instant connection,
dramatic gestures of love to celebrate Vivi’s birthday. Yet novel also goes
deeper into an exploration of mental health that takes precedence over the
admittedly addictive love story. In fact, Vivi is not the only one with a
disability.
Jonah’s
large family is recovering from the loss of his father, and his mother has had
a particularly difficult time dealing with it. Throughout the story, Jonah
worries that her grief has turned into clinical depression since she has seldom
left her room in the past six months, while responsibility for running the home
and family restaurant shifts to Jonah and his older siblings.
As Vivi and Jonah begin dating, her
energetic personality wins the hearts of his siblings, and the two explore
their relationship, Jonah’s grief, and various family struggles. Vivi’s more
obvious mania begins after she decides to find and contact her father, whom she
has never met before. When she realizes that he has had an entire life—complete
with wife and children—without ever trying to get to know her, she
understandably struggles to come to terms with her discovery. This encounter is
not necessarily the cause of Vivi’s mania, as she had suddenly bought a
Vespa a few days before spontaneous decisions being another suggestion of mania
but it does contribute to the extremes of Vivi’s emotions, resulting in a few
days of sadness followed by another mood shift. She ends up crashing her Vespa,
resulting in an emergency trip to the hospital, where her mood is stabilized
and her broken arm and ribs are treated. By the end, Vivi and her doctor can
loosely recreate the timeline as events which occur before the summer
“depression, hypomanic episode in March, depression after the hypomanic
episode,”— and events during her time in Verona Cove—“then new medicine and
manic again”
Jonah for the most part accepts Vivi
for who she is, without trying to change her although he does argue with her
over some of her more overenthusiastic actions. However it effectively reveals
the romanticized trope before showing a more empowering alternative, one which
does not erase disabled uniqueness but rather supports it.
Vivi also directly addresses an instance
when Jonah misunderstands the depression of his mother. Recognizing that Jonah
views his mother as disempowered because of her illness, Vivi points out his
biasness by emphasizing how important it is to listen to disabled
people. Though the two ultimately break up when Vivi moves back to Seattle
after the summer, neither of them regret their relationship. Vivi decides it
must end both because of the distance and because she knows that as she
continues to adjust to her bipolar disorder, she cannot be affected by someone
else’s life. Though heartbreaking to read, Lord positions the reader to respect
and embrace Vivi’s decision to place her mental health over a relationship.
These
characters have thus achieved balance: without forgetting that hard challenges
will always exist, they can still move forward towards making their lives and
their world a better place. These characters do not hide behind the presentable
or normative moments of their daily lives but are empowered by the entirety of
the disabled experience.
Instead of
keeping mental disability or social distress a stigmatized and a taboo topic,
discouraging its discussion at an institutional level (family, schools) would
not lessen its reading rather it will end up in being read and not addressed or
supervised. Rather, discussions over social distress through these books will
be an excellent way to help address adolescents and young adult issues which
otherwise would is difficult to spoke about generally in Pakistani context.
While all
readers should be aware of empowering themes in young adult disability novels,
students and educators in particular can create more inclusive classrooms by
addressing disabilities and challenges associated. One of the concerns for
educators, scholars, and authors is their own disability status, particularly
if they hope to include a disability perspective but feel unsure about their
ability to approach it effectively. The subject of disability is thus an
important topic for all students who have encountered societal norms.
Literature is also a powerful social force and conversation starter about
mental health and distress awareness. Dealing with challenges to one’s mental
health is thus should not be an occasional experience, and educators have a
responsibility to include such perspectives in curriculum. It is thus important
to recognize that educators play a key role in the empowerment and appreciation
for disability which has been the central idea of this article.
(Dear Readers, The following article is originally published at Safety and Security Today (Quarterly Magazine: Apr-June 2019)/ Furthermore, the main idea of the following article has been one of my research work which is published at Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities with my Supervisor Dr Saima Masoom.)
Suggest me a good young adult novel involving mental disability awaisha.
ReplyDeleteAll the bright places by jennifer niven.
Delete