Past Wars in Present Stories: An Analysis of the Picturebook Vanishing Colors
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Past Wars in Present Stories: An Analysis of the Picturebook Vanishing Colors Silje Neraas1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In a time when war has forced a vast number of children to flee their homes, flight from war is an important and timely topic explored in a variety of ways in contemporary picturebooks. The Norwegian picturebook Fargene som forsvant (2017)— or Vanishing Colors (2019)—addresses the topic through the story of an unnamed girl’s experience of having to leave her home. Vanishing Colors does not shield the reader from the terrible harm war does to individuals; it examines the experience of losing one’s home and former life. By analysing the picturebook in light of the concept of cultural memory, this article explores Vanishing Colors’ use of intertextual and intervisual references to past narratives of war and flight. I examine these references as part of our “collective knowledge” (Assmann 1995, p. 132), which allows the picturebook to recount both the story of an individual and a collective experience of war and flight. Keywords Cultural memory · Intertextuality · Intervisuality · Picturebook · Flight from war · Refugees
Introduction This article presents a literary analysis of the Norwegian picturebook Fargene som forsvant (2017)—or Vanishing Colors1 (2019)—by Constance Ørbeck-Nilssen and Akin Duzakin, focusing specifically on the experience of war and flight shown against the backdrop of cultural memory. Vanishing Colors has been a topic of 1 The picturebook has been translated into American English, and I am using the title of the official translation. However, all quotes from the verbal text in this article are my own translation from Norwegian, the picturebook’s original language. The quotes may therefore differ from the American translation.
* Silje Neraas [email protected] 1
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Children’s Literature in Education
discussion in connection with the ongoing refugee situation, particularly in the context of the representation of refugees in literature, as well as the question of how to address the refugee crisis with children (see Lello, 2018, and Lundh, 2018, for two such instances). The picturebook recounts the story of a child who experiences war and is forced to flee from her home, focusing on the events of the last night the unnamed girl and her mother spend in their war-torn city before leaving. While the mother sleeps, the girl speaks with a bird who helps her restore her lost memories of life before the war. The title Vanishing Colors alludes to the book’s use of colours as a metaphor for memory: as the girl recalls her past, the initially achromatic images gradually fill with colour. A picturebook’s use of colours conveys emotions and influences the reader’s interpretation (Nodelman, 1988). In Vanishing Colors, the colours are closely connected to the girl’s gradual recollection of her past, making memory the clear focus of the story. The girl’s personal memories are only one asp
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