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Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Lyrical writing and magical watercolour illustrations highlight Rebecca Lafond’s debut bedtime story, Fire In Your Belly, which tells children that all emotions, whether joy or anger, are natural, and that pain and beauty can exist at the same time.
“I think now that I have my own kids, it's important to really know that they understand more than we think that they do,” said Lafond, a member of the Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation in Saskatchewan.
“There's just that magical moment before sleep where you're connecting to the universe in a different way. There are messages coming through and I think they get it. You know, I honestly do.”
In Fire In Your Belly, Kookum (grandmother) tells her little granddaughter about how the “sky set fire one day” and embers fell planting themselves in the soil and “that’s how living things came to be…”
Kookum explains that “little pieces of the sky lived warm in our bellies…” and sometimes the embers burn as anger and sometimes they burn as courage and sometimes they burn as happiness.
“As she tucks me in, Kookum says my fire was born from hers,” says the granddaughter. “And hers from her kookum’s. And her kookum’s from her kookum’s. And her kookum’s from the belly of the sky.”
Lafond first put her words on paper as a poem after her mooshum (grandfather) passed away during COVID and she had a “lot of raw memories coming back…so many heavy feelings…and I had to get it out.” It took her about 10 minutes one day to write the poem.
“Then as time went on, it evolved into this story. And I was thinking of times when I was in the kitchen with my grandma and my grandpa and we were drinking tea. I was this 12-year-old kid late at night when I should have been in bed and I was thinking of those moments and reminiscing,” she said.
Lafond said about 75 per cent of the book’s text comes from the poem.
Fire In Your Belly shows that special relationship children have with their grandparents where “you’re allowed to be who you are and maybe you don't show your emotions to your parents the way that you do with your grandparents. There's a different sort of love there but love nonetheless,” she said.
Lafond draws together little incidences the granddaughter shares with her grandparents demonstrating how traditional Indigenous storytelling isn’t linear.
As Lafond writes to the reader at the end of the book, stories “are passed down through fleeting moments in time, when we sit quietly and listen and reflect on the wisdom that knowledge holders choose to share with us.”
Lafond sent photographs of her grandparents and their home to illustrator Aly McKnight, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and is thrilled with how McKnight gave them life.
“I had expected warmth (in the illustrations) and she totally delivered that. It pops out and you can feel the warmth and energy radiating off of it,” she said. “I hope that people, families and children, can hop into this book and feel the love and the warmth that it gives.”
Fire In Your Belly is for children six to eight years of age and was released Sept. 22. It is published by Raincoast Books and can be ordered through https://www.indigo.ca/products/fire-in-your-belly