Celebrating Walter Dean Myers by Julianna Kershen

Celebrating Walter Dean Myers by Julianna Kershen

​Julianna Lopez Kershen, Ed.D. is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education in the department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum’s English education program. She is a former NBCT high school English teacher. Julianna’s research focuses on how ambitious, affirming teaching leads to opportunities for youth and their teachers to engage in deep and meaningful learning. Her text studies center YA, war literature, and magical realism.

My friend, colleague, and YA scholar, Dr. Crag Hill encouraged me to try writing a post for Dr. Bickmore’s blog. Deciding to give it a go – I want to celebrate one of my favorite YA authors, the late Walter Dean Myers. It’s been almost ten years now since Mr. Myers passed, and I’ve missed all the books he might have written. His books changed my classroom, along with those of Sharon Draper and Rita Williams-Garcia. I’ve been going back and rereading Mr. Myers’s books and thinking a lot about how our English and humanities classrooms serves as safe spaces of engagement with challenging current events. ELA teachers are so often the ones who give teens the opportunities to “talk about emotionally charged, violent events… in measured, respectful ways … to help students understand historical context, process current events, and use media literacy skills to analyze news coverage and social media responses and misinformation” (Langreo, 2023). 

​In this case, the quote above refers to the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis now happening in Gaza. In the wake of the Israel – Hamas war, I reread Myer’s 1988 novel, Fallen Angels, a novel about Richie Perry, a young soldier from Harlem serving in the Vietnam War. Myers wrote the novel seeking to understand the 1968 death of his brother, Thomas Wayne “Sonny” Myers, also a soldier in Vietnam. In a 2013 interview with The Horn Book, Myers shared that he chose to write honestly, with profanity, interrogating issues of race, and depicting the intimate friendships of soldiers trapped in brutal close combat situations. His characters were doing their best to make sense of a senseless war.  

​Fallen Angels, and Myers’s later novel Sunrise Over Fallujah (2008), have a lot to teach us about this moment and the events in Gaza. These novels can help us to talk about the trap of othering  people, of staking dichotomous claims about who I am in ways that mark me as something different from you. Othering quickly slips into dehumanization. Dehumanization becomes the tolerable narrative of war. It is the narrative that allows combatants to kill and injure combatants and noncombatants. It is the narrative that endangers civilians caught in warzones; people whose choices have been stripped away from them. Dehumanization is the narrative that allows the observers to look away.

In an age of militarism and Forever Wars, Myers’s Fallen Angels challenges many of the stereotypes we have of soldiers and heroes. Myers’s recognized that many war novels are “stories are retold to fit the mood of the country.” Some novels valorize events and people, but not Fallen Angels. Myers said he wanted his novel to “counter that trend.”
 
Fallen Angels presents complex characters like Perry and Peewee, whose friendship is born out the devastation of fighting, death, fear, and survival. Myers gives his characters the opportunities to cry and mourn their fallen brothers, sisters, and themselves. He gives them space, even, to mourn the war writ large, as Perry realizes over the course of the novel that war has made him someone else. He will never be the person he was before. How can he reconcile that?
 
“I thought about what Peewee had said. That I had better think about killing the[m] before they killed me. That had better be my reason, he had said, until I got back to the World. Maybe it was right. But it meant being some other person than I was when I got to Nam. Maybe that was what I had to be. Somebody else.” (p. 216)

After the Hamas attacks on October 7 I felt devasted. I still feel that way. As the 9/11 mindset leapt back into cultural conversations, and revenge, vengeance, and othering began to dominate the boundaries of discourse I thought about how ELA teachers create spaces in classrooms for teens to wrestle with complexity and humanity.
 
We are capable of seeing each other as fully human. In Sunrise Over Fallujah, Miller, an army doctor is confronted by a superior officer as she prepares to care for injured Iraqis. She tells him:
 
“I don’t have a good answer for you, Captain,” Miller said. “But my gut feeling is that you don’t let people die if you can help it. You got a better answer?” (p. 228)

It’s complicated, this work of being human.
​
In the years following the September 11 attacks in the United States, in New York, Washington D. C., and Pennsylvania Nobel Prize winning writer (1993) and national treasure, Toni Morrison spoke repeatedly of the mistakes she saw in U.S. foreign wars and policy. Knowing full well the destructive paths we had already taken in our national history, to wage wars on the many Indigenous Peoples of the North America and lead and perpetuate the enslavement, importation, and inhumane treatment of thousands of African peoples, Morrison looked to the xenophobic, revenge driven wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in horror. She refused to be silent, “refusing to accept a myopic government’s own narrative of its behavior” (2019, p. 27).

In her speech at Oberlin College’s 2009 convocation, Toni Morrison, asked her audience, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” Morrison asks this question as catalyst for her audience and for us today to consider how our conceptions of home shape how we position ourselves and others in the world.

She goes on to tell her audience, “the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples, voluntarily or driven, and raises complex questions of dispossessions, recovery, and the reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization – a process that can infect the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s xenophobia?” (p. 18) Her 2019 book, The Source of Self Regard is a collection of incredibly beautiful essays, speeches, and meditations teachers can bring to high school readers. 

Many of Walter Dean Myers’s books grapple with concepts of home and other. His legacy pushed open doors for so many readers to see themselves in books, in futures, in day-to-day realities that always centered the whole person. Writing just months before his death in 2014, Mr. Myers’s editorial in the New York Times read: “Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?”

“I realized that this was exactly what I wanted to do when I wrote about poor inner-city children — to make them human in the eyes of readers and, especially, in their own eyes. I need to make them feel as if they are part of America’s dream, that all the rhetoric is meant for them, and that they are wanted in this country.”
 
At this time when I look out at the world, and I am shaken by the easy turn towards othering and dehumanization to meet the ends of vengeance, I look back to Myers’s books to reconnect with humanity. To find hope. To know that loss is universal and so is love.
 
I can take heart in Toni Morrison’s words, spoken in Edinburgh Scotland in 2004 as the United States fought in Iraq: “no more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing out humanity must be met with more humanity” (2019, p. 29).
 
Meet the day with me. Let your heart bleed. I’m so grateful for teachers who see all the children youth in their schools and communities with full humanity. Let us take up the books that dare to show people as complex, as beautiful, and as willing to reflect on the ways we can use peace and diplomacy as means to end conflict. Books that show the suffering of war so that we might reconsider.

Walter Dean Myers wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Dean_Myers
Walter Dean Myers https://walterdeanmyers.net/
Sharon Draper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_M._Draper

References
 
Langreo, L. (2023 October 9). How to Talk About the Israel-Hamas War: Resources for Educators. Education Week.  https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-to-talk-about-the-israel-hamas-war-resources-for-educators/2023/1
 
Morrison, T. (2019). The Source of Self Regard. Vintage International.
 
Myers, C. (2014 March 15). The Apartheid of Children’s Literature. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-apartheid-of-childrens-literature.html?unlocked_article_code=1.aU0._mNj.Zfnt8iRuCjxt&smid=url-share
 
Myers, W. D. (1988). Fallen Angels. Scholastic.
 
Myers, W. D. (2008). Sunrise Over Fallujah. Scholastic.
 
Myers, W. D. (2014 March 15). Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrens-books.html?unlocked_article_code=1.aU0.A6lE.oiaLlrNQeyUc&smid=url-share
 
Mr. Myers has received two Newbery Honor medals, five Coretta Scott King Author Book Awards, and three National Book Award Finalist citations. In addition, he was the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award for his novel Monster.
He was the 1994 recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).
 
https://www.hbook.com/story/walter-dean-myers-on-fallen-angels