When people hear of “baby book,” they immediately think of those plush scrapbooks where keepsakes and other records of a baby’s very first year are kept, everything from a precious inked impression of the baby’s foot to locks of its first hair.
But what if a baby book meant a book about a baby, more specifically, the first unfiltered experiences of a baby? This was what occurred to Reni Roxas, author of “Méme: The Baby Book.”
One day, Roxas was driving home while, as children’s books publishers are wont to do, singing nursery rhymes to herself. “In popped the word ‘méme’ in my head!” she said “It was a much-beloved Filipino word straight out of childhood, a word passed from parent to child, for generations of Filipinos. The word ‘méme’ is the gateway to sleep.”
Soon came the word “dede,” (which means something to suckle on, like a mother’s breast) and then “bebe, which in some cultures may also mean ‘baby.’ I now had three rhyming words: Méme. Dede. Bebe.”
She wondered to herself if there was a story in there. “The key lay in the fact that all three words had something to do with babyhood. As soon as I made that connection, I was off and running. It probably took an entire month to come up with a full-length manuscript, and under a year to illustrate, design and print the book.”
Putting a book out during a pandemic almost seems like a counterintuitive decision, but Roxas said this was not the case. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned from living in a pandemic—even in the midst of so much pain and suffering and loss—it is that life goes on. Babies are still being born into the world, parents are still raising their children, and lolos and lolas are reading bedtime stories to their apos—perhaps even more so, in the age of quarantine.”
Roxas is cofounder and publisher of Tahanan Books for Young Readers and lives in Seattle, Washington, with her two sons. Typically, she would already be in Manila to prepare for the Manila International Book Fair, the new coronavirus disease changed those plans.
Her sons are now both adults, and she remembered how it was to raise to them, both the wonder and the blunders.
Miracle
The entire experience begins with the birth. “I think it’s pretty miraculous,” she recalled. “When I gave birth to my eldest son, Max, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, I couldn’t believe that this tiny human being had come out of me. My husband and I left the hospital with this tiny breathing bundle, and I remember looking back at the glass sliding doors of the hospital and saying, ‘You mean we get to keep him? We get to bring this little human home?’” Apparently you do, and this book shows what happens next, especially to Filipino families living somewhere else.
“‘Méme’ is a picture book that chronicles a single day in the life of a baby. I’d like to think that my book will appeal to parents of newborn babies. Filipino families living abroad will also appreciate a parallel bilingual text that uses basic, easy-to-understand Filipino words,” she said, adding she hoped parents could share reading the book with their children. “I would encourage mothers and fathers to read the book to their child, and then with their child, and finally, have the toddler child read the book on their own. I’d like very young children to see themselves in the pages of the book, participating in everyday activities familiar to them, and know that they are the bida, the ‘star’ of the book.”
She has long admired Kora Dandan-Albano’s work. Albano’s illustrations of Gidget Jimenez’s “All About the Philippines” impressed her the most. “There is no limit to what Kora can do,” Roxas said. “People love her work.”
Weirdly, enough the biggest challenge of this adorable, seemingly straightforward project happened very late. Originally, “Méme” was to be in Filipino with an English glossary in the back. Roxas asked one of her US distributors how important it was to have parallel bilingual text side by side on the page and the book distributor said it was very important, saying “it spelled the difference between buying and not buying the book at all.” Roxas decided then and there to make the book bilingual.
Additionally, the words in “Méme” couldn’t just be literal translations but instead be those that encapsulate the experience. “For instance, when Baby is crawling on the floor with a thought bubble, ‘Gatas?’ I didn’t just want to just say ‘Milk?’ I chose to say ‘looking for milk.’”
Honest book
“My English translation emphasized the figurative and the contextual over a verbatim translation,” she added. “I also made a deliberate decision not to capitalize and not to use punctuation in the English labels. I wanted English to be as inconspicuous as possible and not rain on the parade of the Filipino text. First and foremost, ‘Méme’ is, at its heart, a picture book in Filipino.”
Roxas also said she set out to put out an “uncensored” book about a baby. What does this mean exactly? “I wanted to write an honest book about babies,” she said. “And I wanted to write a picture book from the baby’s point of view. Babies are clever creatures. They have a laser-focused drive—to find the one person in the room ‘with the milk.’ And babies constantly have plumbing issues: they drool, suck, fart, pee and poo! As children get older, they learn to be discreet about their bodily functions: They are taught to ‘potty’ train and they are made to believe that farting is frowned upon when done in public. Too embarrassing! But when babies do it, a parent rejoices. It means the plumbing is working, and all is well! I wanted a picture book that celebrates the joyful aspects of babyhood.”
Roxas noted that capturing the Filipino baby in a book was a special challenge. “Babies have a way of outgrowing themselves real fast, so you might as well be fully present to them in the moment. Invoke the power of the word. There is a world of meaning in that word. A woman who recently read my book from cover to cover told me she cried after reading it. Why did she cry? ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just did.’ There is power in a word.”
And where does the power of “méme” come from? “We looked it up,” Roxas said. “The University of the Philippines Dictionary simply defines it as ‘matulog na, karaniwang sinasabi sa mga bata,’ which is why mothers rock babies in their arms and sooth them by saying “méme na” over and over again. “For kids today, the word ‘meme’ signifies a unit of information for social media. But we have news for millennials. They didn’t invent the word! In Filipino culture, méme (accent on the first syllable) simply means ‘Go to sleep.’ And Filipino families have been using this time-honored word for generations.” INQ
Available in paperback through www.tahananbooks.ph.