Waleed Rising

It started way back when with Tarzan, Sir Lancelot, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. While in my pre-teens, I thought I wanted to be an artist.

So, with images I could copy or pictures in my mind, I took colored ink pens and began to draw. The results weren’t bad nor were they particularly good. Several comic books and many draw-ings later, my mind wandered off toward other cerebral distractions. I thought perhaps I’d try drawing words on paper instead of cartoon images.

Now fast forward some fifty or so years and another kind of image came back to my mind. This time it was a skinny hippo and he had a story to tell.

Waleed came into focus last fall. But truth be told, he’d been hiding in the shadows of my mind for a very long time. The exact origin of the story line has long since been lost among the crags of my foggy memory. I do know it started out about fifteen years ago.

It was a rather simple story of a hippopotamus that wasn’t like all the other hippos. Waleed was skinny and feeling very unsure of himself because of his slender physic instead of the robust form of the other hippos. Once planted in my brain, the storyline began to grow and take shape. Without a lot of fanfare and deep thought, the story evolved into a children’s moral tale or fable with a wise old fish, indifferent fellow hippos and one sad little guy.

Years before, I had initially worked with an illustrator who created one cover illustration which I loved. Unfortunately over the ensuing months, nothing much happened in terms of creating this children’s story. So eventually we terminated our effort to produce the tale of a skinny hippo.

Fast forward to last summer and a drought in my writing projects. My editor, Vida, suggested we revisit my children’s story about the little hippo that couldn’t. Only this time, we went the internet route and found five web sites just for freelancers of every ilk and talent. It was a veritable wishing well of illustrations of every form, function, style, technique, and skill level.

Initially, Vida and I found 92 different illustrators over five web sites to review. That, in turn, was whittled down to four I really liked. Finally, we settled on two artists who seemed to meet my criteria of a drawing of a cute and cuddly little skinny hippo.

Waleed, in Swahili, means ‘he who hides.’ That, in turn, seemed the perfect male name that best described someone who was an introvert and afraid of his own shadow. The name matched perfectly my loveable tiny hippopotamus.

I also wanted it to be authentic in that I wanted to place the story in a real river (the Pangani River) near a real area (the savanna near Mount Kilimanjaro) with real animals (elephants, giraffes, etc.) on the plains and with real fish (Jipe Tilapia and the Oreochromis Tilapia) in the river.

The final winner was an artist out of Bangladesh who goes by the artist’s name of Shamima. Her drawing of little Waleed won my heart over.

After deciding on Shamima, we asked for a fully illustrated panel that showed Waleed, his fellow hippos, an African background setting and other animals. That panel came back and then we asked for the full set of twelve panels to tell our story.

The first set of panels (illustrations) were close to perfect with just a small number of changes and revisions needed. The second set of revisions came back and we were off to the races.

I made several passes at editing my original text to try to get it down to a child’s reading level. Then we had to figure out just what ages it might be most appropriate for. Last fall, Sharon and I had attended the Minnesota Children’s Book Festival in Red Wing and got a lot of great ideas for children’s books.

We studied book sizes, placement of text, full panel drawings, half page drawings, isolated images on the page, multiple images on one page and other assorted techniques to drive the colorful impressions home. We also decided that the accompanying text would be more interesting if it were in both English and Swahili, the language of places where hippos reside - like Tanzania. So, we found a Kenyan translator by the name of Hannah and we were off to the language races.

The translations are quite interesting.

Waleed, the Skinny Hippo  |  Waleed, Kiboko Mwembamba

A bilingual fable in English and Swahili  |  Hadithi ya lugha mbili katika Kiingereza na Kiswahili

My two cohorts in this project are, quite literally, worlds apart.

Illustrator:  Jubayda Sagor (Shamima)

Shamima is an expert children’s book illustrator and digital artist. She lives in Bangladesh.

Translator:  Hannah Kwirikia

Hannah Kwirikia is a native Swahili speaker and translator who lives in Kenya.

The building blocks are in order. Now the real job begins of designing and creating this book for children. It will call for a totally different marketing approach than from my adult novels and plays. The packaging, the marketing, and distribution will be a whole new ball game.

There’s already some thought given to future stories of Waleed, the skinny hippo. Our world offers up numerous moral tales for children. Although most adults think they’ve got all the answers already, I think there are truisms and honest facts about life that children, along with many adults, could well be reminded of.

Waleed just might be the little hippo that shows all of us a new way of looking at life.