Kiss the Dust’ by Elizabeth Laird Egmont Children’s Books
(ISBN: 0794749326)
Used in conjunction with Edward Burra’s pictures ‘Harlem’ and ‘Snack Bar’

‘Kiss the Dust’ is the story of Tara, a twelve-year-old Kurdish girl, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war. The story begins with Tara leading a normal life, wearing western clothes, living in an elegant house and going to school in her hometown of Sulaimaniya in Iraq. The Iraqi soldiers are suspicious of the Kurds, and Tara witnesses them shoot a boy on the town streets. It marks the beginning of terrible events that will change their lives forever.

Her father is involved in the Kurdish resistance movement. The family is forced to flee to a mountain village, where her brother Ashti joins the freedom fighters. In the mountains, they change from western clothes into those traditionally worn in the village. As the war worsens the Iraqi Airforce begins bombing the mountain villages and the family has to escape over treacherous mountains into Iran.

Here the family is imprisoned for many months in a series of terrible detention camps. Just when all hope of freedom is gone, they are helped by a relative, who arranges for a flight to Britain, and they fly off not knowing what the future will hold.

Once in England, they declare themselves asylum seekers and are held in another detention centre. Finally, the son of a family friend, who is studying in London, rescues them and the book ends with them settled in England, but still remembering their old, happy life back in Kurdistan.

Elizabeth Laird, who has travelled in Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon and Austria, explains the inspiration behind her writing:

‘I started writing when the children were small, though I have written a detailed diary since I was a child myself. For a long time I stuck to familiar themes, close to home, or wrote about more important events in my own childhood... I called to mind those years of travel when I wrote “Kiss the Dust”, the story of Tara, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq.’

Elizabeth Laird chose ‘The Snack Bar’ (1930) and ‘Harlem’ (1934) by Edward Burra for her YCC session. Download the pictures from this site.

‘ The Snack Bar’
Burra always enjoyed food and recording eating places, which he saw as an expression of local character and custom. This cheap eatery is either in London or New York and is illuminated by a bare light bulb. In the foreground, a man with a white coat carves slices of cold pink ham, while a woman with plump, be-jewelled hands is furtively looking toward the door. From the outside the snack bar may have looked inviting, but inside it feels cold and unfriendly. Although the open door gives a glimpse of the bustle of the city street, this is a painting about the loneliness and alienation of city life.

‘ Harlem’
Burra lived in New York for six months, in Harlem, the home of the black and immigrant communities. For Burra, who loved jazz, it was a music and dance paradise and he would play jazz records as he sought to capture the vibrancy of black culture in his paintings. ‘Harlem’ is a watercolour depicting a street of poor, multiple-occupancy housing with the elevated railway and city signs behind. The neighbours peer or shout from windows and doorways, whilst a Latin woman stands in fancy clothes and jewellery, with a cool young black man in his bright ‘zoot’ suit.

The author explains why she chose these pictures to accompany her book:

‘I chose these pictures because I realised that when you look at the people in the snack bar, or on the Harlem street, they are outsiders just as Tara and her family become when they flee first to the mountain village and especially when they arrive in England. In ‘Harlem’ the clothes the man and woman are wearing do not fit at all with where they are and what they are doing – what has brought them to that side-walk? Experiences like Tara’s? Do they feel like outsiders?’

A series of worksheets for children further exploring the book and the paintings can be found on this site.

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