The Baobab Tree

One of the stories in The Butterfly Heart is about a Baobab tree. These trees are a feature of the Zambian landscape but are also found throughout Sub Saharan Africa, Australia and Madagascar. There are also three famous Baobabs in Savanur, India which are believed to be thousands of years old - and local people say Lord Krishna brought the seeds there from Africa.

The tree has many alternative names - the Tree of Life, The Upside Down Tree, Lemonade Tree, Monkey Bread Tree, Cream of Tartar Tree, Mbuyu (Swahili).

I think the Tree of Life is the best name because this tree is astonishing in what it provides for humans; water, shelter, food, rope and cloth from the bark and medicine; and for animals, food (baboons love the fruit, elephants eat every part of the tree and bats drink the nectar from the flowers and act as pollinators...) and shelter (birds build nests in it, in the branches and in the little holes in the trunk).

The fruit looks like this -

and there are endless uses for it:  in some parts of Africa the roasted seeds are sugar coated and sold as snacks, elsewhere the seeads are eaten raw or roasted, the pulp can be cooked, dried, powdered, stewed, grilled - eaten in any which way, and is filled with Vitamin C, Calcium and all sorts of other things that are good for you. It is often used to make cool drinks and the cream of tartar in it is used in baking.

The tree itself is an extraordinary looking plant, and some are so huge they have been hollowed out and used as living spaces. They live in areas often affected by drought and bush fires - and survive all of this as their timber naturally stores enormous amounts of water. Traditionally people have also found ways to hollow them out to store additional water for use during times of drought.

There are Baobab trees which have been around for 5,000 years and some of the huge ones found in different parts of Africa have over the centuries been put to weird and wonderful uses: one in Zimbabwe was used as a bus shelter, another one for storing wheelbarrows and tools; in West Africa sometimes they were used as burial places and in Nigeria one was used back in the nineteenth century as a prison!

Luckily for the Baobab its wood is not much use for anything - it is too spongy and wet - which may explain why so many of them live to a ripe old age.

Here's a picture of a baobab put to an unusual use..

A man and his Cobra

A central character in The Butterfly Heart is a man called Ifwafwa (which means Puffadder). The children call him that for a number of reasons but one of them is that he has a way with snakes. He is the man that people called to their homes if snakes have got into their house. This idea came to me from a story my dad used to tell us as children - he always told us true stories which took place in Burma, India and Kenya where he had lived as a child and then as an adult. In this particular story, which took place in Kenya, a large cobra had come into a neighbour's house and my dad called on a man who he knew could handle snakes. It so happened this man was in the local jail. He was allowed out of jail to come and get this snake. Once he had it he put it into a bag and he went back to jail - with the snake! He knew how to milk the venom from the fangs of the cobra, so he did this on a regular basis.  (The name cobra by the way comes from a Portuguese term cobra de capelo - which literally means Snake with a Hood)

Once he got out of jail he used to ride round the countryside on his bicycle and people would pay a little money to see this man with his cobra. He would take the snake out of the bag and handle it - which he could do as there was no longer any venom in its hollow teeth. He did this for many years - it was how he earned his living.

But this man got too comfortable with his Cobra and became lax about milking it. The venom in a snake is produced in venom glands and once those are emptied out (either through biting or milking) they quickly replenish it.  One day when he took the snake out to show a small audience that had gathered round him, the snake turned round and bit him. He died about a day later. One of the many sad things about this story is that if he had had access quickly to an antidote he may well have survived, as many victims of a cobra bite do in fact survive, but he was in a small village in rural Kenya and had no chance.

As a side fact - in the US there is actually a job description for a Snake Milker - and to become one of these you would need a Degree in Biology or similar. It's not a job I'd like.

Working with Walker

 The Butterfly Heart is the first one of the books I have written that is being published, and I feel extremely privileged to have ended up with Walker Books.

My own children grew up on Walker books - at no stage in our lives has there been a bookshelf without their titles on it. When I started thinking of writing for children I could not, in my wildest dreams, have imagined that one day I would be published by them. Yet here I am, clutching my book, and there's that little bear down at the bottom of the spine, holding his candle.

Before being published I had heard and read horror stories of working with editors and designers, demons who would change your words and let you have no say in the cover design ... If there are any demons at Walker Books I didn't find them. The editing process was painless and I could mutter away to my hearts content about the design of the cover and the designer listened. I had precious little to mutter about mind you as I loved her design.

So, a big thank you to the Walker crew for making this experience so good.

So, where are you from?

A normal part of being human is being from somewhere, and it's an easy way for all of us to learn a little bit, quickly, about a person we meet. It might appear to be an easy question - but it's not so for everyone. For me, it's a question that does not have a one word answer. I was born in Kenya, grew up in Zambia, spent many years in South Africa and now live in Kilkenny, Ireland. To be 'from' Kilkenny your family have to have lived here for a minimum of 150 years ... last week I heard someone say, 'Well, sure, that family only arrived here in the late 1800's, they're only runners,' so I am quite sure my eight years here do not qualify me ! Having said that I feel very at home here and have been welcomed without hesitation by people in the city. My parents live in North Wales now, having moved there from Africa in the nineties, but my dad also lived in Burma and India as a child, and my ancestors came from England, Burma, Holland, Scotland and Ireland. So, a mixed bag. My answer to 'where are you from?' would probably be - 'Well, different places really, but from here at the moment.'

I feel privileged to have lived in different places and from each of them I have learned different things. I sometimes think it must be satisfying to have a complete sense of where you are from, a national identity, a confidence to say, 'I am Irish' or 'I am Zambian' but never having had that it is not something I miss.

Naming Characters

When I'm writing, the names of my characters are always very important - quite often it takes me a long time to get to them. Sometimes when I do it's a plain old name that arrives (in The Butterfly Heart the neighbour is called Fred) or it can be something a little off the wall: one of the twins in the book e.g. has the name Madillo, her parents naming her after  a certain creature that inhabits South America and whose name, in translation from the Spanish, means 'little armoured one.' I suppose for those who, like me, write from character rather than from plot, names do acquire a significance. I want to know my characters well, really so I can see where they're heading with the story!

Kalulu the Hare

As I mentioned yesterday The Butterfly Heart contains many references to myths, legends and folk tales from Zambia. In my research I came across Kalimatundu a website by Vukani Nyirenda, a Zambian living in the US, and the author of  Kalulu the Hare Outwitted, an illustrated book for children. Take a look! Kalimatundu means 'The country of wild bougainvillea. I found him on JacketFlap a networking site for children's writers, illustrators and people interested in children's books - librarians, teachers, publishers etc. Worth a visit.

Folk Tales

While writing The Butterfly Heart I read many folk tales that come from Zambia. Some of these I have included in my book. All over Africa there are tales of wonder and magic, tales that have morals, tales of the way the world began, cautionary tales for naughty children and tales of fear. In Zambia there is a rich tradition amongst all the different groups of storytelling, and through my book I hope I have brought some of these stories to an audience who may not have come across them yet. In my view these stories are timeless, long before they were written down they were told around fires under starlit skies. People from Zambia have written these tales down and in this way given us access to them. I, for one, thank them for that. It struck me while I was researching some of them that this is another thing that links all of us throughout the world - we tell stories to explain our world, and we pass these stories down through our children.

Kalulu the Hare was always the hero of the tales we read in school. Kalulu outwitted everyone, from Hyena to the lioness to the hippo. He was smaller than all of them but thought himself a whole lot cleverer and he loved nothing more than telling everyone what to do. We probably all know someone who is just like Kalulu! I will post links to some of the folk tales from Zambia in another post for those of you who might like to read some of them.

Amnesty International

Amnesty International placed an endorsement on my book which I am delighted about.  Amnesty was formed fifty years ago in 1961 and for me one of its strengths is the way in which it involves ordinary people the world over in the campaign to end gross human rights abuses. In their own words .......

Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 3 million supporters, members and activists in more than 150 countries and territories who campaign to end grave abuses of human rights.

Our vision is for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. 

We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion and are funded mainly by our membership and public donations.

If you wish to become a member or supporter of Amnesty, you can go to their website. In Ireland you can go here, and for their headquarters you can go here

First post

I decided to set up this blog so I could write a little about my writing and about the country (and continent) it comes from. So, here goes.

My first book is called The Butterfly Heart and it is a story set in Zambia, a butterfly shaped country right in the heart of Africa (hence the title!) It has been published by Walker Books and is going to be released on the 3rd of March 2011.

I  moved to Ireland in 2003 and in 2005 I started attending a Writing Course run by our now Children's Laureate Siobhán Parkinson. It was a brilliant course and during it I started writing my first book (not Butterfly Heart - but another children's book set in Ireland called All Fall Down)  Ireland seemed to be the right place to start writing in because despite it being a small country it is filled to the brim with writers, musicians and artists.

It was on the basis of my first book that Sophie Hicks became my agent and through her that I found such a wonderful home in Walker Books for my second book, The Butterfly Heart.

My partner, Tom O'Neill, has also had a book published during this time and his is called Old friends - The Lost tales of Fionn MacCumhaill, published by Little Island.  A  magical tale described in a review by Gemma Hussey as ‘Wonderfully irreverent, engrossing … a tour-de-force of storytelling’ .

In between writing we breed horses - a varied collection of  Irish Draughts, Cobs and Clydesdales on our farm in Kilkenny, all gentle creatures.  You can visit our horses at www.laragh-horses.com

Ireland is different in some ways from the countries in Africa that I lived in, but similar in others. The sun doesn't shine asoften here, that's one difference. And when it does shine, it's not as hot! But at the end of it all Ireland is country where people are trying to make a living, entertaining one another and doing what they can to get by in this world. The Irish, like Zambians, have folk tales, myths and legends and an ancient history. They have music and art and dance, like anywhere in the world. So, for me moving continents was not hard - I have grown to love things about Ireland in the same way as I loved things about Zambia, about Kenya and about South Africa. There are things I would get fed up with as well, in all places, but that's life. and we all have to do what we can to change those things.

Here's the cover of the book!