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Abstracts
Professor Evelyn Arizpe, School of Education, University of Glasgow
Child Evacuees and ‘Ambivalent Nostalgia’: The case of the picturebook Mexique and ‘The Children of Morelia’
Subtitled in English as ‘A Refugee Story from the Spanish Civil War’, Mexique (Ferrada & Penyas 2017) is a picturebook that focuses on the sea voyage undertaken in 1937 by 456 children sent to Mexico from Spain, on board a ship called ‘Mexique’. They and their Republican parents expected to be reunited within a year, but only a handful of them ever returned to Spain - and not until many years later. This paper starts by looking at Mexique in the context of other picturebooks based on historical evacuations of groups of children (mainly, England, Finland and Italy) during the first half of the 20th century, exploring the ways in which nostalgia may or may not fit with the textual and visual modalities through which ‘the loss of childhood’ in this literature of exile (Starobinski 1966) is expressed. Building on the concept of transculturality in relation to child displacement as proposed by Kuusisto-Arponen (2014), I argue that the ‘ambivalent nostalgia’ (Hirsch & Spitzer 2002) that appears in these picturebooks is part of the complex and conflicting memories and identities that result from the characters having to negotiate emotions, subjectivities and bodily and political agencies but also from the ways in which the ‘emotional turning points’ (Kuusisto-Arponen 2014) of the evacuations are represented by others after the events. I refer to the visual metaphors of these traumatic moments (Österlund 2022) in the picturebooks but, in the case of Mexique, I also connect these to the memories of the evacuees themselves, known as “Children of Morelia”, as well as to the Mexican government’s social and educational discourse regarding these children at the time. The intersection of text, testimony and official discourse come together to complicate our understanding of nostalgia in this historic case.
References
Ferrada, M. J. and Penyas, A. (2017). Mexique. Barcelona: Libros del Zorro Rojo.
Kuusisto-Arponen A. (2014). Silence, Childhood Displacement, and Spatial Belonging”. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(3), 434-441.
Österlund, M. (2022). Confronting the trauma of the child evacuee: picturebooks as entrances to visual literacy. A.M. Ommundsen, G. Haarland and B. Kümmerling-Meibauer (editors), Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education. London: Routledge.
Starobinski, J. (1966). “The Idea of Nostalgia”. William S. Kemp (translator), Diogenes 54, 81-103.
Keywords: child evacuees, ambivalent nostalgia, Mexique, Ma. José Ferrada, ‘The Children of Morelia’
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (University of Tübingen) & Jörg Meibauer (University of Mainz)
On the Run: The challenges and multiple dimensions of picturebooks about flight and expulsion
Since flight is a complex event, it is not easy to represent its multiple dimensions in a picturebook narrative. For this reason, different aspects of a general script of flight are accentuated. First and foremost, flight is triggered by life-threatening situations such as dearth, oppression, and war. Very often, the reasons for escape are not explicitly stated or altogether omitted, as if the menace comes out of the blue, as an unexpected and incomprehensible intrusion into the heretofore peaceful world of life. Another dimension points to the preparation and execution of the flight in which the family members and family cohesion play a central role, although there are also stories about children fleeing on their own. The flight itself is often portrayed as a dangerous adventure, since profiteers such as smugglers are potentially jeopardizing the refugees. The next challenges usually happen upon arrival in the country of destination due to poor housing conditions, lack of or insufficient language skills, and inadequacy of education, thus emphasizing that the recovery of freedom is associated with new efforts which often go in tandem with restrictions of agency. Against this backdrop, objects, often toys, that have been left behind or taken on the run epitomize the past happy situation in the home country. These things are associated with nostalgia, with longing for the former state, either by the hope to return to one’s home country in the future or by establishing a new home in the country of destination. Hence, nostalgia dovetails reminiscences of the past, an adherence to one’s native culture while adapting to the new one in the present, and aspirations full of hope for the future. Concomitantly, new things, such as a satchel for girls who were excluded from attending school in their home countries, symbolize the newfound freedom. Owing to the different audiences addressed in these picturebooks – children and families affected by experiences of displacement, children and their families in the host country, and adult mediators in educational institutions – picturebook makers choose different artistic strategies to convey the emotional and cognitive conditions faced by refugees, thus stimulating emotional engagement. The procedures employed include anthropomorphization of the characters, a specific color palette that signals harm and fear, and collage that represents the juxtaposition or chronological sequence of memories. Furthermore, an autobiographical perspective may organize the arrangement of images and texts.
In addition to picturebooks that address universal aspects of flight, we discuss picturebooks that focus on Germany as a place and destination of flight. In this regard, various refugee movements are discernible. Refugees may flee from territories occupied by the Nazis, from East Germany to West Germany during the Cold War, or they choose Germany as their new home. By exploring these different kinds of flight, we will show that experiences and narratives of flight are anchored in society’s collective memory and that picturebooks about flight co-constitute and change this collective memory.
References
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Elena/Loescher, Gil/Long, Katy/Sidona, Nando (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 2010. How Autobiographical Stories Become Picturebooks. In: Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, and Cecilia Silva-Diáz (eds). New Directions in Picturebook Research. New York: Routledge. 205-216.
Keywords: emotional engagement, flight script, collective memory, nostalgia, restrictions of agency
Petros Panaou, University of Georgia
The Nostoi of two Immigrant Masters of the Art of the Picturebook: How Allen Say and Peter Sís Turned to Art to Negotiate the Paradoxes of Nostalgia and Identity
“How does one ultimately recognize one’s island?” Barbara Cassin asks. And she answers: “One recognizes it, I think, because one is recognized there, that is, because one has one’s identity there” (2016: 15). She continues to assert that the entire Odyssey is powered by Odysseus’ quest for identity as much as it is by his nostalgia for Ithaca (15).
This paper explores the work of two highly acclaimed immigrant picturebook artists, who have travelled their own illuminating Odysseys, setting sails on boats made of images and text. Only a few years after the end of World War II, Caldecott Medal winner Allen Say emigrated to the U.S. from Japan with his father and stepmother at the age of sixteen. And during the Cold War, Hans Christian Andersen Award winner Peter Sís fled from the communist regime of former Czechoslovakia to the U.S., at the age of thirty-three. Even though they came from different cultures, geographies, generations, and emigration experiences, I claim that through their highly autobiographical picturebooks both immigrant artists turned to Art to negotiate their yearning for nostos, comfort, and identity.
The term nostalgia, coined by a Swiss medical student in 1688, combines the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain or yearning) to describe the suffering caused by a person’s yearning to return to their homeland, which was initially perceived as a homesickness decease with severe bodily and mental symptoms. Modern psychology has since moved on to more positive perceptions of nostalgia, with multiple studies having shown it to function as an important resource for a person’s psychological health and well-being (Routledge et al, 2013: 808). Svetlana Boym (2007) identifies different types and functions of nostalgia, with beneficial or detrimental effects for individuals and social groups.
Analyzing several picturebooks by Sís and Say, I claim that through Art they found access to nostalgia as a source of comfort and identity; in the process, they also experienced loss, pain, and discomfort. The centrality of Art in this process is evident across these artists’ work. Peter Sís’ autobiographical picturebook The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007) begins with the phrase “As long as he could remember, he had loved to draw” and concludes with this: “As long as he can remember, he will continue to draw.” And Allen Say’s part picturebook memoir, part graphic novel, part narrative history is fittingly titled Drawing from Memory (2011). Several of their other works, including Say’s Grandfather’s Journey (1993) and Sís’ The Three Golden Keys (1994), can be read as complex and diverse nostoi through the powerful medium of Art. Being an immigrant myself, having emigrated with my family to the U.S. from Cyprus in 2014, I find these picturebook Odysseys helpful in exploring my and my family’s algos for nostos and identity. Might they be similarly helpful to readers who are new immigrants and refugees, I wonder.
References
Boym, S. (2007). Nostalgia and Its Discontents. The Hedgehog Review, 9(2), 7-19.
Cassin, B. (2016). Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? Fordham University Press.
Routledge, C., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Juhl, J. (2013). Nostalgia as a Resource for Psychological Health and Well-Being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 808–818.
Keywords
immigrants, picturebooks, Art, nostalgia, identity