Under the Big Tree is a bilingual book of poetry and is free to use in homes, classrooms, community libraries, school theatres, or even village festivals. It came to life thanks to an ETHER collaboration of Professor Maggie Kubanyiova with an artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer and a Slovak-based Romani translator Anna Koptova. Sophie's original poems and paintings are a creative response to Maggie's fieldwork in Slovakia, accompanied by Anna's Romani translations. Šuňiben kamibnaha is an invitation. It means listening with love. This kind of affective engagement with others refrains from judgment and revels in life. Šuňiben kamibnaha has informed our collaborative encounters and it is our hope that it will inform yours as you encounter the book's voices.

Dr Maggie Kubanyiova:

"Under the Big Tree is an invitation to gather and listen to the voices of others. It has sprung from my long-standing research programme that studies how we (teach or learn to) live our lives in the world of diverse others. This research shows, for instance, that reducing people to labels is a damaging way of living with our neighbours. Doing the same to their language can often have the same consequences. The simple human desire to be heard and encountered is hardly noticed, let alone met, in the busyness of such labelling.

Many kinds of listening, in solitude and with others, have shaped my research and, ultimately, the book you are holding: listening to and with Sophie to her poetry and our shared interpretations; soaking up the soundscapes of the village streets, school corridors and classrooms in Eastern Slovakia; being exhilarated by the acoustic tenacity of lived life in the audio-recordings of Roma children's interactions with one another or with their teachers; marvelling, alongside Roma community members and translators, at the children's ingenuity, playfulness and fluency in doing stuff in, with and through language; attending to the history, imagery and music of language as Anna and I worked together to give Sophie's poems their new life in Romani; discerning, with Sarah-Jane, the book designer, the voices of imagined readers - pupils, parents, community workers, creative practitioners, teachers, citizens - and how they might wish to carry on hearing and encountering.

Suñiben kamibnaha means listening with love. This kind of affective engagement with others refrains from judgment and revels in life.
Suñiben kamibnaha has been the core principle guiding this research and the many collaborative encounters that have grown from it. It is my hope that, through this book of Sophie's poems and paintings, suñiben kamibnaha will make its way to neighbourhoods, classrooms, community libraries, school theatres, village festivals and homes. I'd be delighted to hear about how the book has found you and how you have been using it."

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