Suzanne Fisher Staples:
Understanding Cultures, Fostering Peace
by Whitney Stewart

“If ever there was a time when we need to see and respect people as individuals—particularly people from cultural backgrounds that are different from our own—now is the time,” writes Suzanne Fisher Staples in the 2002 introduction to her young adult novels set in Pakistan’s Cholistan Desert Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind (Knopf, 1989), and its sequel, Haveli (Knopf, 1993). “What we need are empathy and compassion—not judgment and stereotyping.”
          Staples first wrote these novels over a decade ago to tell the rich tales of the Muslim people with whom she lived while doing research for a U.S. Agency for International Development literacy project. The books follow the story of Shabanu, an intelligent desert girl who risks her life and that of her family to follow her independent spirit. Little did Staples know then that these two books, and even her subsequent India novel, Shiva’s Fire (Farrar, 2000), might serve a greater purpose after September 11, 2001. They might help readers reconsider that which looks unfamiliar and unnerving on the nightly news. Staples says she hopes her novels “will inspire us to grow beyond our limits to learn understanding. And that this understanding will foster peace in the world by teaching us not to fear differences but to become more compassionate people.”
          Children look to adults for confirmation of their reaction to differences. When children see someone “odd,” they ask adults why it is so. If the adult confirms the strangeness, discrimination is born in the child. However, if the adult confirms the beauty of many ways of being, of living, then the child accepts the beauty and is perhaps drawn to that which once seemed different. In her novels, Staples confirms such beauty. “Different is just different,” she says, “not better or worse.”
          Staples’ true talent is in showing her readers cultural richness in its many forms. She takes worlds, so unknown to most Americans, and unpeels them, layer by layer, to display their color, shape, and pulse.
          “I have learned that the basic experience of being human transcends all of our cultural and environmental differences,” says Staples. “The differences make life so endlessly fascinating. But, we all have the same human instincts—we love, laugh, cry, dream, believe, and disbelieve for the same or very similar reasons.”
          Ideas come to Staples from stories other people tell her about their own lives. She gathers tales and emotional histories to fuel her mesmerizing, never cliché narratives. Her mental repository for stories is large because she has lived amongst such a great variety of people. Getting to know desert nomads, Afghan news stringers, Indian mahouts, former Maharajahs, and classical Indian dancers has allowed Staples to show us that the worlds of Islam and Hinduism are as diverse as the worlds of Christianity and Judaism. She knows the worlds she uncovers, and she respects them. She finds her own humanness in the humanness of her desert girls and of her Indian dancers.
          Staples started her life in Asia as a news correspondent, but then she began to see that the news medium was not necessarily a good one for fostering cultural awareness and sensitivity in America. She needed to tell fuller stories than news editors would allow; and she put her mind to creating complicated, sensitive, and sometimes troubled characters.
          “I have always been more interested in what motivates people and how situations develop than in just looking at the immediate circumstances. I am much more interested in complexity than in simplicity. In the news business, complexity can be confusing to readers, and a news writer can only simplify at some cost.”
          But, a fiction writer, especially one as observant and thoughtful as Staples, can introduce a reader to a foreign character and make that reader weep, laugh, and almost breathe with the character thousands of miles and even generations apart. One of the ways Staples succeeds in this is through careful, time-consuming, and often adventurous cultural and historical research. In writing Shabanu and Haveli, nothing was simple about the research.
          “There is no written historical language for the Indus River Valley civilization,” says Staples. “So, doing historical research involved listening to oral history tapes at the Folk Heritage Institute in Islamabad (actually, I read an English transcript of the tapes), listening to the stories of the Cholistan Desert nomads, interviewing an anthropologist at the University of the Punjab who grew up in the Cholistan area, and reading the British Gazetteers, the records kept by the Indian Civil Service during the British colonial period.”
          To her credit, Staples never writes about a place where she has not lived. Thus, when she launches into a new story, she searches her memories of that place help her bring out the scents, the sounds, the colors, and the language of her settings. She smells the wind; she studies the geology, the cycles of planting and harvesting, and the traditions that follow them; she notes how mothers carry their babies and how elephant trainers touch their animals. She reads about a culture’s history, music, art, wildlife, architecture, and food. She understands where and how her characters live, and what motivates them.
          Awestruck by the blue-tiled mosques of Pakistan, moved by the ancient stories of the Cholistan nomads, Staples crafted her novels very slowly. Her tales were shaped directly out of incidents recounted to her by women sitting around their cooking fires in the evening after a long day of desert labor. Every scene of her first book was based on a true story, and after her story-weaving was over, the work was not done. She showed her manuscript to thirteen scholars before submitting it to her publisher.
          Research for Shiva’s Fire was much simpler, claims Staples. There is much more written on the history of India that is easily available in English. In addition to book study, Staples spent years in India observing villagers, interviewing leaders, gathering cultural facts, and collecting Hindu stories. She wrote Shiva’s Fire while living in the United States, but she returned to India to make sure she had not made errors.
          “I wanted to visit a sandalwood grove and see what the air smelled like, how the bark felt, to watch the mahouts work with and train the elephants to haul logs, and watch the carvers carve statues. I wanted to go to the temples and see how people prayed, what their rituals are. And I made a hobby of traveling to the former maharajas’ states to visit their houses and see how they administered the affairs  of their people.”
          Just as she wove true Cholistan desert stories into her first two novels, Staples also used tales from her Indian friends in Shiva’s Fire. Her scenes are vivid and often tense, and readers can easily be swept away by the emotion of the story.
          Staples is often asked why, if she is not Asian, does she write about people and places in Asia.
          “Books would be pretty dull if we wrote only about people who were just like ourselves,” Staples says. “Perhaps telling a story that arises out of Hindu myth is an attempt to make sense of the experience of living in India.”
          Making sense of experiences is the author’s strength behind all of her books. To her, the world is “wondrous and wide” and writing about it, she admits, has made her more patient, more observant, and more sympathetic. The integrity and power of story has helped her see behind cultural curtains and to cherish cultural variety. Through this seeing and cherishing, Staples gives readers a gift of understanding which may, if readers are open, make them more patient, observant, and empathetic.
          “Until we stop judging people who are different from us as inferior,” cautions Staples, “our prospects for peace look very dim.”

Whitney Stewart, author of young adultbiographies on such subjects as the fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, and Deng Xiaoping of China, is currently writing a middle-grade book entitled Speaking of Peace.