Bishkek discovers children's books

The lack of children's literature in the Kyrgyz language has prompted two mothers to publish at their own expense a series of books based on local stories and traditions told to their children. These initiatives have quickly met with considerable success. They talk to Current Time: ‘They will make our people's boat stronger’.

Bishkek (AsiaNews) - The historic lack of children's literature in the Kyrgyz language is prompting many parents and teachers to create interesting and innovative texts in many different formats on their own. Publishers and people sensitive to this issue talk about the need to develop this sector a lot, to help preserve Kyrgyzstan's national identity.

Two authors from Bishkek spoke to Currentime: Chynara Sultanalieva, who is working on interactive books for young children, and Gulnaza Asakeeva, who has published a collection of books entitled ‘My first library’. The two projects are completely independent of each other, but they found themselves in a common tension to fill a deserted area with content, that of content in Kyrgyz for children.

Činara has been an environmental activist for some time, mainly involved in plastic recycling projects, and started thinking about books after the birth of her first child: ‘When he was 4 months old we started reading to him from time to time, and we realised that in Bishkek there is nothing good for young children in our language’.

Seeing their child's interest in multimedia texts, the parents began to buy them, especially when they had to travel, but they could only find them in English. In the first Kyrgyz book she published, you can hear how a snow leopard roars, how the tajga barks, how a yak moos, getting to know the animals you can meet in Kyrgyzstan.

As Činara explains, ‘it's strange that we know how a cheetah roars, but not how a ilbirs, our leopard, expresses itself’. For this reason she wrote to the Snow Leopard Trust association, which deals with the protection of snow leopards, asking for audio and video with the authentic sounds and movements of these Kyrgyz beasts.

‘These animal sketches help to show how rich our country is’, assures the mother-writer, who was immediately supported by many friends and interested people, starting with relatives and even a singer, whose well-known name helped a lot to spread the initiative.

The first versions of Činara's books were printed at her own expense, but they immediately found the interest of many, allowing her to increase the print runs and develop variations for different age groups, so that they were not just ‘pages with a button, a picture and OK’, but with content that grew together with the children themselves, with lots of sound effects about animals together with Kyrgyz rhymes and songs.

Gulnaza Asakeeva is a lawyer by profession, and founder of the Bereke Books publishing house in Bishkek, which also publishes books in Kyrgyz for young children, with similar motivations to those of Sultanalieva.

She too put together the first collection for her youngest daughter, and immediately all the families of friends became fond of Gulnaza's texts.

She made the effort to publish a thousand copies, without even thinking about whether she would be able to sell them. After posting the first advert on Instagram, the boxes of books in the cellar were emptied in no time.

Gulnaza also took similar books in foreign languages as a model, filling them with content related to the daily life of the Kyrgyz, and four variations immediately came out: on numbers, on flowers, also on animal sounds, and on words. Paying attention to detail, the edition was made using paper and colours that are not harmful to children's health.

The two authors observe that ‘from all sides we are met by the language, culture, ornaments, history and life experience of the Kyrgyz: the clothes, the music, the little clips they send us, the creative works of people we meet even by chance... The wave of the Kyrgyz tide has begun, and it is taking us far with our face and with the increasingly solid boat of our people’.