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.
Highlights
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 on the experience of war and flight shown against the backdrop of cultural memory
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
The girl’s personal memories are only one aspect of this theme,. While she is remembering her past in the form of flashbacks, the book weaves in references to armed conflicts like the Syrian civil war, the Bosnian civil war and the Second World War
Summary
This article presents a literary analysis of the Norwegian picturebook Fargene som forsvant (2017)—or Vanishing Colors (2019)—by Constance Ørbeck-Nilssen and Akin Duzakin, focusing on the experience of war and flight shown against the backdrop of cultural memory. Intertextuality and historical references have been of interest to international research (see for instance Kalogirou and Economopoulou, 2013; Kerby, et al, 2019) In this analysis, I will examine how the contemporary picturebook Vanishing Colors employs references to other narratives of war and flight as a literary means of expression, and will place these references in the framework of cultural memory as defined by Jan Assmann: The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose "cultivation" serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. The simultaneous presence of an individual and a collective narrative emphasises that the act of remembrance occurs in a sociocultural framework, where memory belongs to both the individual and their cultural context (Erll, 2011a)
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