Being Represented

 Lots of the stories I tell myself to make sense of who I am involve being dyspraxic. Lots of the way I make sense of the world involves reading stories. Until today I had never read a book with an explicitly dyspraxic character. 

For quite a while I have been excited about Elle McNicoll's Like a Charm and today I read it. This isn't a review but it is great and you should definitely read it. 

I have been thinking and talking to people about representation in children's books quite a lot for the past 5 or 6 years but it was only somewhen last year (when I saw Elle talking about Like a Charm on twitter) that I thought about that in terms of representation of me, a dyspraxic. I don't know why it didn't occur to me as an axis of representation. It wasn't that I didn't consider neurodivergance at all, it was that I didn't consider dyspraxia specifically. Perhaps it is that it is harder to want more of things you have seen none of. If you are a black child who has only encountered books with white children then it would be easy for an implicit assumption to take root that only white children can be characters. Perhaps that is what happened with me. 

My first thought on finding out about it was how brave and difficult it must have been to write. I have been writing more and more over the last year or so, and am working on a collection of short stories. At no point while doing this have I made a character explicitly dyspraxic, neurodivergant yes, but not dyspraxic. The idea of writing a dyspraxic character feels so pressured, in an environment where there are so few dyspraxic characters in books there is an inevitable pressure to represent as for many people it would be the only book they read with a dyspraxic character. I always like thinking about Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's Danger of a Single story, but someone has to write that first single story. 

Despite knowing this danger I went into reading Like a Charm partially expecting and maybe hoping that Ramya's experience of and relationship with Dyspraxia would be just like mine and of course it wasn't. There were lots of points where I did relate but there were just as many when I thought, "It wasn't like that for me." although for lots of them I could see how it could have been. 

This is why there is a need for ecosystems of representation with lots of different stories in lots of different genres with lots of different characters, all with different relations to their dyspraxia and with different wider lives. Like a Charm recognises this, "if you've met one magical creature, that's it. You've met one magical creature." and throughout explores themes of representation and othering.

One of the triumphs of the book is that it manages to make representation and the plot fit together so organically that it feels both explicitly representative (with the dyspraxia key to the plot) in a way that is needed and a story that doesn't feel just about representation. 

So thank-you so much to Elle for writing this, I look forward to the next one eagerly, and while I wait I might have a go at writing a dyspraxic character of my own.