Maine authors publish multilingual children’s book, bringing immigrant stories to the page

Surveys indicate that, for kids, reading books whose characters reflect their identities and experiences can lead to improved literacy. And as Maine has become an increasingly popular destination for Central African immigrants, two Portland authors have published a multilingual picture book, to give some of the new arrivals a chance to see their own experiences reflected on the page.

When 13-year-old Diane Niemba and her family arrived in the U.S. last year from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she said she felt like a stranger who didn’t fit in.

Then, her family received a book about a family fleeing central Africa and finding refuge in a fictionalized city that bears a certain resemblance to Portland.

“When I read it, I was like, ‘Wow! It’s talking about us, how is that possible?'” Niemba remembered.

Reading this book, she said, it feels like she could be the main character.

“Now we feel like we’re not the only one,” Niemba said. “There’s many people who are like us.”

The book is titled “Kende! Kende! Kende!” which means “go, go, go” in Lingala, a widely spoken language across central Africa. The book is written in French and English, with Lingala phrases sprinkled throughout.

Diane lives in Westbrook with her four-year-old sister and their mother, Rossy Niemba, who said it’s helpful to have more reading material in French.

“I’ve got to speak French with my kids,” she said, at a recent multilingual literacy event at the public library in Cumberland. “So they can still communicate with their grandparents, aunts, and uncles. We have to preserve the language.”

The story deals delicately with difficult subject matter.

The main character, a girl named Lolie, likes to “go, go, go” as her father pushes her around their village in a wheelbarrow. But one day, with scary noises and smoke rising from the horizon, her family fills that same wheelbarrow with their belongings, and the need to “go” takes on a more urgent significance.

Co-author Kirsten Cappy said the goal was to help immigrants kids feel like they belong in their new communities.

“Seeing yourself in classroom material, seeing yourself in a book, can really ground you and reduce resettlement trauma,” Cappy said.

Cappy runs a Portland-based organization called I’m Your Neighbor Books that collects and distributes immigration-focused children’s literature, and co-wrote the book with a Congolese friend.

She said aside from recent gains in Spanish-language publishing, it’s difficult to find kids books in languages other than English, and nearly impossible to find stories set in the home countries of some of Maine’s largest immigrant communities.

“There is really nothing from the Great Lakes region of Africa,” she said, referring to countries including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda. “And that’s where a lot of the resettlement is coming from.”

To help the book reach more immigrant children, Cappy recruited community members to translate it into five additional languages. The translations are recorded as audio files that readers can access via a QR code stamped inside the book.

In a studio at WMPG community radio in Portland earlier this year, Jean Hakuzimana recorded a version in Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda.

Hakuzimana said when he sat down to do the translation, the story felt familiar.

“It’s also my story, in a way,” he said. “When I was eight, we had to leave, we had to leave our place just to run for our life.”

In the chaos of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, Hakuzimana remembered his family abruptly fleeing home, joining the ranks of over one million internally displaced people.

As an eight-year-old, he said his job was to carry the family’s chickens in a sack.

Now that he’s raising his own kids in the U.S., Hakuzimana said a book like this is one way to teach them about what his generation lived through before immigrating.

“It proves the point that they often ask us, ‘How did we end up here?’ So that’s one way of educating them,” Hakuzimana said.

Having a children’s book recorded in so many languages has proven useful to Olga Koni, who runs a nonprofit group aimed at promoting multilingual literacy in Maine.

“When you read a story in your language, it goes really deep,” Koni said.

Koni said she has distributed more than 50 copies of the book so far. She says Lingala-speaking families in particular are clamoring for a sequel.

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