Biracial Literature using Two Mrs. Gibsons (Daniel Wright)

Two Mrs. Gibsons is a picture book for young children.  It depicts the daily life of a family where the mother’s side of the family is Japanese and the father’s side of the family is African American.  The main character of the story is actually the author of the book and all of the accounts are based on childhood memories.  It is an autobiographical story about growing up in a biracial household.  Toyomi Igus is the author of the book and since it is a book based on memories from her childhood, the book is definitely by an insider.  This adds to the authenticity of the literature and experience. 

The book has a very positive overtone and everyone looks happy in every picture throughout the book.  However, as positive as this book is, there are still portions of it that raise eyebrows with critical readers.  Some of the things that the black Mrs. Gibson and the Japanese Mrs. Gibson do could be considered very stereotypical of them and their race.  It can be hard sometimes to determine whether something is a stereotype, if it is a generalization, or if maybe it is a fact and a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Whichever view you take, it is hard to ignore the glaringly obvious traits the author gives to each woman.

We will examine the black Mrs. Gibson first.  She is our main character’s grandmother from her father’s side.  She is a round, warm looking old woman with glasses and she loves to sing.  It is too bad that the only things she sings are Christian spirituals.  This Little Light Of Mine seems to be her favorite.  Besides her vocals, this Mrs. Gibson cooks collard greens and turnip greens in the kitchen.  She speaks with a bit of southern hospitality, making remarks like such as “Come here and give me some sugar!”  Finally, she likes to put her granddaughters hair in braids when she does it.  Now, surely African American women aren’t the only ones who braid hair or cook greens or sing Christian spirituals, but they are probably more closely associated with these activities than any other culture group.  If you described these activities to someone and asked them to guess what race they thought the character was, I am confident that their guess would be African American.  But, like I said earlier, this is an autobiographical account so the author wasn’t falsifying any ideas to make the character seem this way.  It just goes to show that maybe some stereotypes are true and fulfill themselves all the time in society.

The other Mrs. Gibson is the main character’s mother.  She is from Japan and now lives in America with the family.  Just like the older black Mrs. Gibson, the younger Japanese Mrs. Gibson is portrayed by a series of well know Japanese stereotypes.  She speaks with a different dialect for one.  When she is putting a dress on her daughter, she says “Don’t get dirty,” instead of “Don’t get it dirty,” or “Don’t get that dirty.”  She cooks stir fry and rice when she cooks and she folds origami paper cranes with her daughter.  When she styles her daughter’s hair, she pulls it straight and tells her that she cut her hair short and curled it to look more American.  I am sure that a lot of people associate origami and stir fry with Asian culture and these are just more of what would seem like stereotypes if they weren’t coming from an insider author.

There are some good things about this book and some not so good things to go with them.  The illustrations in the book are beautiful and use warm skin tones to show the different complexions of all the characters.  The book does a good job of showing some things that are usually associated with both African American and Japanese literature such as clothing, food, and language.  In those senses, the book is effective at conveying a point.  On the other hand, the book does not combine the two cultures very well.  The first page and the last page show black, Japanese, and the main character all working together.  All the pages in the middle show only one Mrs. Gibson at a time.  This doesn’t do much for the book in ways of biracial literature.  It basically shows to cultures next to each other instead of one new biracial culture.  After reading this book, the reader will know more about African American culture and about Japanese culture.  But, they will have no real insight what biracial children are thinking or how they feel in response to the main character.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  The book shows two races combining to make one big happy family.  It just doesn’t address the issues and problems facing children who are in biracial homes.  The little girl doesn’t say anything about how she is feeling besides that both Mrs. Gibsons love her and everyone is happy.  This is definitely a feel good book, but I think it could do a lot more to promote the awareness of biracial issues and emotions for young readers.  Not a bad book by any means and not that I have any right to make that distinction, but it leaves me wanting more.