Picture This: Illuminating the Dark
In her new Picture This column, Nicolette Jones takes a look at three picturebooks illuminating dark events.
Anyone who thinks children’s picturebooks are invariably cute and trivial has not looked at many recently. Those who have, know that they can deal with the big topics of our time, including, for instance, refugees and migration, climate change, pollution, war, tyranny, social justice, prejudice, grief, mental and physical health, gender identity and all kinds of love.
Some of these topics – the ones that involve pain and fear – set particular challenges for illustrators when young children are the audience. What do you show of horrors? How do you depict them in a way that is not too distressing, without misrepresenting the truth?
The three pictures I want to look at more closely here all reimagine actual events, and have all appeared as #NewIllustrationoftheDay on BlueSky (@nicolettejones.bsky.social) and Instagram (@nicolettejonesig). They all portray something upsetting taking place but find a way to show it so that the worst of the danger is implied. The more you already know, the more you understand, but the books they come from can be shared with children to increase empathy without giving them nightmares.
The first is an illustration by Vietnamese-born illustrator Linh Dao, now living in Czech Republic. It comes from The Endless Sea (Walker Books), a picturebook which was published to mark the 50th anniversary of the first sea journeys of Vietnamese refugees who became known as ‘the Boat People’. An estimated 200,000-400,000 of them died at sea but the family of the author Chi Thai survived. She was three years old when her family surrendered their home, sold what they could for gold, burnt the rest of their belongings and fled.
The scene is the moment of their rescue. A ship lets down ropes to the refugees, one of whom can be partly seen climbing up the side of the vessel. Thai’s mother is too weak to climb and her family of four is hoisted up on a pallet. Moments later the wooden boat they sailed in goes down.
Murky grey-greens reflect both the storm and the sadness, with scuffled white expressing clouds and surf, with diagonal lines of rain. The frieze of coatless people at the foot of the page all look upwards, calling and waving to the source of their hope. The one raised arm recalls the arm reaching up in the figure to the right of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ – a gesture simultaneously of entreaty and desperation.
The use of scale emphasises the vastness of the sea and hugeness of the ship, against both of which the refugees are small and vulnerable, clustered close to the big black form which seems to lean protectively over them. Protective too are the poses of Thai’s parents, trying to keep their children safe. This is a dangerous episode but the emphasis is on hope rather than fear. It is the miraculous point of reaching security. There is a gentleness in all the faces and postures which belies the terror of the circumstances.
Also a story of people who had to leave their home to survive is The Bicycle (Farshore) written by Patricia McCormick with Mevan Babakar, whose family had lived for generations in Kurdistan in the north of Iraq until they were forced out by the regime. They travelled for four years through four other countries before they found a home in a fifth: the UK. The illustrations for this picturebook are by Asian-American illustrator Yas Imamura.
Although this picturebook focuses on a remembered gesture of kindness, this particular image shows the threat of a time when Babakar’s family were punished for speaking their own language, using their own Kurdish names, or celebrating their traditional holidays. Imamura seems to have researched settings and clothes carefully, and the house itself with its leaded windows and its patterns of tiles is convincing.
The picture shows how the family was menaced beyond what the text tells us. We see a visit from the police/military in their blue shirts and berets, and how they confronted Kurdish people: bullying them in the street, separating them, outnumbering them, invading their personal space, admonishing them, laying hands on them, confiscating personal items, overriding their protests. The simply rendered expressions on the faces variously show anger, anxiety, defiance, and lack of compassion.
In other images in the book of the family home, the plants are lush. In this, the lone, bare-branched tree (in soft pencil or charcoal) conveys a different mood. The colours are from the colder part of the palette, and the white space suggests a chill. This is not a violent scene, but while adults looking at it know what it means to have authorities take things from you and issue warnings, it leaves young people the space to infer as much as they can bear to.
One Day (Walker Studio), written by Michael Rosen, tells the true story of a father and son who escaped from a cattle train heading to Auschwitz and survived the Holocaust. It is illustrated by Benjamin Phillips in hand-made works of pen and pencil and wash that seem to bypass computer programmes. (Phillips is the sole UK artist now in this year’s touring Bologna exhibition of global illustrators.) This spread tells the story with a freedom in the drawing but a precise sense of place – a Parisian street, with its characteristic architecture, shutters, arched doorways, shop fronts, cobbles and gas lamp (an ironic, ominous detail?).
As in The Endless Sea, muted colours convey a serious mood. As in The Bicycle, blue uniforms are menacing – in this case not the uniforms you might expect of the German occupiers but of the collaborating French police. The crowd ignores the drama. Only one head turns in reaction to the call of a policeman, and we see the worried face of Eugene, a Jew who was hoping to go unnoticed through the Marais in Paris to collect new false papers. His father, who walks beside him, looks at the ground in a last attempt to avoid the arrest that is coming. Only two men, walking towards the protagonists, wear expressions that suggest any dismay, but all the faces look as though they are making an effort not to react, no one talks to each other, and straight arms hang down as if holding themselves together. No one swings their arms, looks about them, holds hands, skips along …
A seven-branched Menorah in the window of a bakery reminds us that there were still some Jewish businesses in Paris, and a young face at a window above watches the arrest – with concern, perhaps, about who might be next. Although it is late December, Eugene and his father have no overcoats – already a sign of the hardships imposed on them? Phillips conveys the gravity of this moment by such small hints, and what is not shown – no one intervenes, no one behaves as though this taking of two individuals in the street is unusual. It is an illustration which, in its quietness and detail, demonstrates the banality of evil. Using understatement in images can be a very effective way of making fear tolerable – as all three of these examples demonstrate. And what is missing from a picture can be powerful.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned:
The Endless Sea, Chi Thai, illus Dao Linh, Walker Studio, 978-1529516487, £12.99 hbk
The Bicycle, Patricia McCormick & Mevan Babakar, illus Yas Imamura, Farshore, 978-0008720391, £7.99 pbk
One Day, Michael Rosen, illus Benjamin Phillips, Walker Studio, 978-1529515985, £12.99 hbk
