The earliest recollection I have of a cave painting stems from a history book. I was a middle-schooler, growing up in India, in the 80s . I was fascinated by the painting, but I let it lie dormant as we are talking about India pre-economic boom, pre-internet (pretty pre-historic itself!).
There was limited, if not hardly, any means to research and explore cave paintings.
So a few weeks ago, when I walked into my beloved local library, the first book that was on the table display and that caught my eye was 'The First Drawing'.
Immediately I knew this was going into my book-review basket.
It took multiple reads to grasp the subtle messages in this book.
There are several aspects to this book.
Celebrated writer, illustrator and Caldecott Medalist, Mordicai Gerstein, teleports us into an inconceivable period in the pre-historic world...thirty-thousand years ago...
Mind-boggling isn't it...as to how many centuries and centuries and centuries ago it was!
Seen through the eyes of a modern-day-eight-year old protagonist,
Mordecai makes us descend into the land of cave-dwellers, where humans co-existed with animals (and readers...these are not the domestic-kid-friendly variety).
This was an era of elks and wooly mammoths and rhinoceroses, to name a few!
Chidren are naturally curious and come to this world cloaked with wonder and imagination.
Our pre-historic protagonist is no different. He is gifted with a vivid imagination.
He loves to watch animals as they gather around the river to have a drink of water.
He sees a world of animal shapes - in the white billowing clouds, in the stones that would soon be molded into "spears and knives", in the "firelight" that would cast animal shadows on the bumpy cave walls.
Unencumbered by his family's rebuttal, he continues to dream about them and one day he has a live encounter with a wooly mammoth!
Undeterred, our protagonist looks him in the eye and our fabulous wooly mammoth slips away in the distance.
His admission of the chance encounter with our majestic ice-age friend, leaves his father exasperated.
Not to give up easily, our little pre-historic protagonist, projects his mind-eye onto the walls and ends up making etchings of an elephant!
Transport back to present day and here we have our young modern-day protagonist drawing an elephant on his canvas!
As I mentioned earlier there are myriad aspects to this story.
Children are born with boundless wonder and imagination. However, we adults (caught in the daily trappings of existence), prevent nurturing those skills in children.
Children, in order to please the parents, smother nurturing those special skills and talents that they have been naturally endowed with, leading to often times life-long frustration and unhappiness.
Again, often times, we adults caught in the vicissitudes of life are unable to see, let alone appreciate the talents of our children.
Mordecai captures the behavioral aspects of pre-historic children and adults quite accurately.
Yet he leaves room (as seen through our pre-historic protagonist) to the view point that if one can unshackle ourselves from societal influence one can end up truly creating "magic".
In the author's note, Mordecai mentions that the story is an "imagined version of how and why drawing was invented".
"It's a way to explore and share the vast, invisible world of our imaginations. And to me that is magic".
The illustrations are stunning and evocative.
For someone who often wonders how life must have been like in the pre-historic era, without our luxurious modern amenities, this book is a fragmental glimpse of what life must have been like.
The book is food for thought as to how humans co-existed with animals. How did they brave the weather? What tools did they use to hunt?
When my 12 year old was reading the book, the first thing she mentioned was the story of a social misfit.
I agreed, little children notice things way beyond our adult perception.
The author makes a note that "whoever invented drawing must have been a child".
Nostalgia and magic rolled into one.
A must-read for children and adults :)
