Llama Llama Red Pajama

On the value of intellectual humility and curiosity when we encounter strong aversions

Llama llama

red pajama

hollers loudly

for his mama

I think this is supposed to be an AABA rhyme scheme. Read out these words: llama, pajama, and mama. Do they rhyme for you?

If I were to say these words in conversation, none of them would rhyme: LAWma, paJAMa, MUMma. For me the vowels are ŏ, ă, and ŭ, like bŏt, răt, and cŭt.

I don’t know whether this is the accent of my home region, or whether moving around has created idiosyncrasies in my accent, so I polled some internet friends. Most concurred that llama and mama rhymed. One linguist transcribed the words in the International Phonetic Alphabet to show her pronunciation, all of them rhyming with comma:

/lɑmə/

/pəd͡ʒɑmə/

/mɑmə/

Some American respondents said that these words don’t quite rhyme but they make them rhyme when they read this book, which perhaps shows that these are amenable people who see that the book is trying to rhyme, and so they go with the flow for the benefit of the child’s literary experience.

Instead of being an amenable person, I sidelined Llama Llama Red Pajama for two years. I may have read it a handful of times with our first child, but it did not make it into the regular rotation of books we read. Then with our second child, Llama Llama Red Pajama became the cornerstone of the bedtime routine. The obvious factor here is that you can’t predict which books a child will really latch onto, and when you see a book making your child squeal with joy, you will read anything just to see that chubby face aglow.

But I must admit that my aversion to Llama Llama Red Pajama kept it tucked in the back of the bookshelf. When I first skimmed the book, it struck me as a bad rhyme (only the unstressed final -MA actually rhymed) with a passable plot. What happened in those two years between my initial recoil and my embrace of Llama Llama Red Pajama? Did parenthood allow me to relate more readily to the plot of a child separating from his mother? Did parenthood accelerate my linguistic Americanization?

I can’t help but compare this to how I would have approached this dilemma if I were teaching a French poem that had an unusual rhyme. With a dose of intellectual humility and curiosity that I perhaps reserve more readily for more distant cultures from my own, I might have researched the literary movement in which the text was produced to see whether there were specific conventions they were forging (or rejecting), or whether the rhymes were deliberate near misses. I might have read up on the poet’s biography to determine how the words were pronounced in the region or time period of the poet. Then I would use this text as a starting point for my students to explore linguistic variance in the francophone world.

This latter approach would lead me to learn that Anna Dewdney (1965-2016) lived in the Northeast United States (New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Vermont). When reading Llama Llama Red Pajama, our class might explore the accent of the Northeastern US by pronouncing all the -MA words as if they rhymed with comma.

This hypothetical lesson plan is making me laugh. Why? Maybe it’s simply comical to see academic apparatuses imposed on toddler culture. Or perhaps because Llama Llama Red Pajama is a product of the mainstream American culture, we are expected to be able to access it immediately, with no contextualization.

Of course, how to pronounce Llama Llama Red Pajama is not a classroom problem for me, it’s more of a question of my linguistic identity and parent-child cultural transmission. Which English am I transmitting to my children? If my “natural” pronunciation is aligned with my home region, I’m tempted to retain it and ruin the rhyme, so that I can preserve my identity as an anglophone Canadian, and the authenticity of my relationship with my kids. After all, it would be weird if I read a book written by a Texan in a Texan drawl, right?

Now let’s consider the other possibility. If my “natural” pronunciation is not aligned with my home region, then it’s not authentic to any geographical area. In this case my vowels are a unique mishmash, some sort of linguistic travel scrapbook. That may mean that there’s nothing particularly valuable to transmit—why should my kid learn vowel patterns that developed from his mother’s peculiar linguistic peregrinations?

It occurs to me that exploring strong literary aversions from a posture of intellectual humility and curiosity tends to be a fruitful exercise.

Curiosity could have let me poll my internet friends two years ago. I could have learned that amenable people (even those native to the same regions as author Anna Dewdney) are making the rhyme work for the sake of their children. I could have learned that actually these words seem to rhyme even better in international English. I could have learned that in modernist poetry or in rap these words would rhyme, and that rapper Ludacris has in fact rapped Llama Llama Red Pajama. I could have realized that the existence of this book is not part of a targeted campaign to make me say POSS-tuh instead of PASS-tuh when I’m feeding my kids pasta. And I could have felt like I belonged to this linguistically diverse and socially amenable place called America, instead of feeling alienated by a board book.

Now I’ve been told that there’s a children’s book in the UK that rhymes “claw” and “door.” Someone tell Ludacris; I’ll bring the intellectual curiosity.