Dar Al-Shorouq's newly-launched Sunflower Books will produce children's books in English. Its publishing manager, Amira Aboulmagd, spoke to Amina Elbendary about the project Click to view caption Summer is here. And reading -- an activity parents always purport to support -- is one possible summer occupation. But what titles are being offered to the bilingual child in Egypt today? The range is sadly limited. The most readily available are cheaply- produced books in Arabic as well as imported English and French children's books. That, though, is unlikely to be the case for long. Several independent publishers have already been testing the waters. And with the launch of their subsidiary, Sunflower Books, Dar Al-Shorouq is determined to offer more choice to young readers. There are already four Sunflower books on the shelves, all the titles by Denys Johnson-Davies. There are dolls and books, mostly children's books, all over Amira Aboulmagd's sunny Madinat Nasr office; neatly stacked on bookshelves, piled high on the floor. Artwork for book covers by Helmi El-Touni hangs on the walls. Aboulmagd is the publishing manager of children's books at Dar Al- Shorouq. She is excited about the project, and about the potential for publishing for children in the Arab world. Dar Al-Shorouq has been publishing books for children since the early 1970s, she proudly told me, but the operation has had its ups and downs as it tried to find a niche in the market. She is concerned that in the Arab world today there is hardly any appreciation for the role of the publisher. "A publisher is not a print shop, you know," she is quick to assert, adding that the backstage work involved in producing a book is often misunderstood and/or ignored. Throughout its 30 years of publishing for children Dar Al-Shorouq has been committed to quality and innovation. "We've been trying to provide the market with something new. Children are always intrigued by what is new. But children's books have always been neglected in terms of quality. The problem begins with school books, which are low quality and unattractive. "The problem with children's books is that if you want quality it will always be expensive. They have to be printed on paper suitable for a child's hands, they should be very attractive, very colourful... you can't rely on black and white... generally speaking, quality of paper and illustrations have to be very high. "We've always dealt with distinguished illustrators. Several of them started with us when they were younger, before they became the names they are today. Among the earliest illustrators to work with us were Mustafa Hussein and Helmi El-Touni. They were young, upcoming artists, but they were distinguished from day one and we were able to work with them on a number of projects. "We also published translated books. Unfortunately the market has always been very slow. For many years, until the early 1990s, people looked at children's books as though they were luxury items, even people who have purchasing power. It's an attitude, a mentality. When we translate books from English people refuse to pay the same price for the Arabic edition. It's tragic, really, that our language is looked down upon, even when it's the same book with the same illustrations and the same paper quality. This too is due to education. We've been programmed to believe that an Arabic book has to be ugly. "Dar Al-Shorouq continued to publish for children until sometime during the 1980s when we slowed down so that most of the work was simply reprints. Publishers abroad print many copies, because there are public and school libraries. Before you print the book you know you will sell at least 10,000 copies: you don't worry about the economics of it because you know that market exists. But as publishers of children's books we don't have a clue whether the book will sell. You won't find a publishing house in Egypt that specialises in children's books. You can't survive on children's books alone." I point out the -- probably only -- example of Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi: "Yes, but they received Palestinian political backing and financial support. And they too couldn't survive. Here we rely on the other books to finance us, which is really a tragedy. Children are supposed to read more than adults, they have more time. If you have a proper education system, by definition it's supposed to promote reading. This is when you can read. Afterwards you become more specialised in what you read. Children are supposed to be the real avid readers. "Mrs Suzanne Mubarak's project changed the balance of power completely because of the interest in school libraries, and public libraries, although these aren't enough to solve my problem as a publisher. Together with the Suzanne Mubarak Competition [for the best children's titles] these projects have moved the market, making it more worthwhile, creating more awareness and interest. The most important aspect would be school libraries, which helps solve the problem of the high price. Any child, even if his family is not willing to invest in buying books, should have access to books through the school library. If there are 30,000 school libraries, and I know that the books I publish are of a high enough quality to be acquired by the Ministry of Education, then I should have nothing to worry about because I will know that I will be selling at least 30,000 copies. This has occurred, but on a very small scale. Whereas the ministry did not use to buy any books, now they buy 1,000, sometimes 3,000. The sad part is that we don't really know where the books go, which schools do they go to, do all the titles go to the same 1,000 schools? "The Suzanne Mubarak Competition and Awards are also very important, giving us good feedback. It's so frustrating that people, even authors, don't appreciate the work of the publisher. This is another reason why I appreciate working with Denys Johnson-Davies so much. He knows what the publisher does." But having rejuvenated their children's publications, what prompted Aboulmagd and Dar Al- Shorouq to venture into new territory, namely publishing in English? With the exception of the American University in Cairo Press there are precious few Egyptian houses publishing books in English. "We've always been quality oriented and received national and international awards; the first was in 1985 for the children's book Al-Amira Al-Maghoula from the Leipzig Fair. The story is inspired from our heritage and illustrated by Helmi El-Touni," she says with obvious pride. Indeed El-Touni's illustrations have become almost a trademark of Shorouq's children publications. "But we've always relied on the West for translations. We did Disney books ages ago. They're popular with children, even after Camp David and during the boycott there was a lot of demand for Disney books. I believe the characters are the main value in these books, they use characters that are already popular with children. It was a successful enterprise saleswise. We also did BBC Entertainment books. At some point we started thinking, we're good, in international standards. The BBC stage and Disney stage passed. We needed to develop and thought, why should we be importing the fiction of other cultures? There's nothing wrong with that per se, we're not sensitive about that, but we want to present children with things from their culture and things from other cultures as well. But when we tried to introduce ourselves abroad, there was no mutual exchange even though our books are internationally recognised. We tried to sell copyrights abroad for the Alf Layla series, but we failed. So we translated and published them ourselves, though it wasn't a successful project. "When I came on board, in late 1997, I felt that we should review our formulas and see what needed adjustment. My publishing plan included buying Arabic copyrights from foreign publishers right, left, and centre, but only of non-fiction books. I had wanted at first to stop dealing with the West altogether and rely on local books. But in non-fiction -- books about science, chemistry, medicine, experiments for kids -- we lack artists who specialise in scientific illustrations. We can't produce a high quality non-fiction book and so it's OK to rely on translated books in this case. Of course, scientific books are the ones the Ministry of Education is more likely to purchase. We still have this belief that information is what matters. We don't feel that a story book is equally important and contributes equally to the development of the child. And this also creates a problem with authors. We don't have enough creative writers, we have professional writers." Dar Al-Shorouq has produced several Atlases for children in this vein, including the Dorling Kindersly Atlas of Discovery and the forthcoming World Atlas. The second part of Aboulmagd's plan was that the fiction books published would be original and intended for local children. "The painful thing is that I discovered that many children in Egypt don't like Arabic books because of a certain reputation. At first I thought it was a language problem; that children enrolled in language schools don't like reading in Arabic. But that's not it. They're just used to the idea that Arabic is boring, and that the vocabulary is difficult, the book ugly. Arabic is associated with this halo of seriousness and rigidity that is off-putting. At the same time people with purchasing power have kids who like to read. And parents who send their kids to language schools also complain that their kids want to read, but there's nothing worth reading except imported books. This is a responsibility. We can't give kids bad, boring books to read and ask them to love them simply out of patriotic duty because they're written in Arabic. Things don't work that way. "So we thought of publishing books in English, but inspired by this culture. I want to address the child who is already used to reading in English and is used to a particular vocabulary and structure," she explains. So the main readers of Sunflower Books are expected to be Egyptian and Arab children who are familiar with English, as well as expat kids living in the Arab world and who need some form of entertainment that is related to the culture and society they're growing up in. It was lucky for Al-Shorouq/Sunflower that they were approached by Denys Johnson-Davies, a leading figure in the field of Arabic literature in translation. Johnson-Davies had previously published children's books with another house that has now closed down, and was looking for a new connection. With his firm grounding in Arabic culture and heritage as well as prior experience in writing books in English for children Johnson-Davies is the ideal backbone for the project. Four Sunflower titles are so far available on bookshelves: Zaynab The Beautiful, Tales of Thieves and Robbers, The Jar of Olives and On A Desert Island. Sunflower titles, though they are in English, are meant to be culturally specific, to have a distinct Egyptian flavour. But this does not mean limiting topics to heritage and history, as do most Arabic books for children. "To build the character and identity of today's children it's not enough to tell them we're descendants of the Pharaohs who built the pyramids. So while we started out focusing on traditional stories from the Arab Muslim heritage we won't stop there but aim to encourage authors to write about contemporary Egypt, and focus on the lives of today's children. This is lacking in books so far." Textbooks and children's books in Egypt don't create links between children so that they might relate and identify with each other, Aboulmagd laments. There is a need for home grown characters that Egyptian children can identify with. Another author Sunflower is working with is Cairo-based American child psychologist Mandy Brauer, who has written a series of books that deal with real life problems of contemporary Egyptian children. There are stories that deal with disabled children, with identity problems and alienation among kids, and all in simple, enjoyable language. There is a story, for example, about an Egyptian child who lived abroad and then returned to Egypt with his family and how he manages to fit in at school with children his age here. Another depicts a boy who moves from Egypt to the US. Another collection of books in the pipeline -- a series of Pharaonic-inspired stories following a particular set of characters -- are written by AUC professor of Arabic literature Samia Mehrez. Many of the children's books Dar Al-Shorouq has already published could also become candidates for translation into a Sunflower title; Salah Abdel-Sabour's adaptation of Ibn Tufayl's classic Hayy Ibn Yaqzan has been translated into English by Johnson-Davies as On A Desert Island. Aboulmagd hopes that translation will also work the other way round: the series mentioned by Brauer is due to be published simultaneously in English and Arabic. Titles expected to appear shortly include four by Johnson-Davies, Companions of the Prophet, which bring historical figures to life in a very enjoyable read, Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Animals Also Have Names which treats the topic of Islam's attitude towards animals, Three Men From Baghdad which is an Alfa Layla wa Layla story and Tales From Syria. Apart from the domestic market, Sunflower's main target, Aboulmagd believes there are opportunities in the US, the UK and, of all places, China. "We always look West and never look East, but we met a group of Chinese publishers at the Cairo Book Fair and they're interested in our books. They're already familiar with the character of Goha, for example. It's part of their culture. We tend to ignore the Eastern influences on our culture as well. As a publisher we're a small enterprise but we're starting to think globally. We have contacts in Africa now. Egypt is a leading cultural influence in Africa but we tend to ignore that. There's a lot of potential there. In the face of hostility towards us, as Arabs and Muslims, we have a way of introducing the world to our culture through the best of all mediums -- children's books. It's the ideal way to present our culture to others." I left Amira Aboulmagd brimming with ideas and plans. She dreams of establishing trademark characters for children that would be marketed in different media; animated pictures, toys, games, clothes. She hopes that once Sunflower Books is established and successful on the market this will allow them to print more copies of each title and reduce the cover price. She hopes that Western markets will open up to children's literature from the Arab world. Meanwhile, we will have more to share with the little one on those endless summer afternoons.
