Children and childhood
are strongly associated with the idea of home, as is children’s
literature
through the depiction of safe and unsafe homes, fantasy dwellings as
well as
realistically portrayed homes. But due to the close connections between
childhood and home, homelessness too becomes topical. There are
numerous fictional
characters who, either mentally or materially, are represented as
homeless. How
children in different time periods and societies deal with
marginalization,
exclusion and exile say a great deal about the nature of the social
order of
that time and place. The homeless child is rootless but not voiceless.
Homelessness is not
necessarily associated with social stigma and vulnerability. It can
also
represent self-reliance, freedom and having an open mind. To be
homeless can
thus be indicative of a productive stance and a new orientation. Forced
homelessness is both threatening and dangerous to children, but at the
same
time homelessness can lead to liberation from the constraints of
repressive
homes, institutions and societies. Homeless children, whether they are
liberated and allowed to grow or whether they are victims, challenge
the notion
of the good society as well as the very nature of the child. That is
why
children’s literature is filled with homeless children, from Charles
Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1836), Laura
Fitinghoff’s Barnen på Frostmofjället
[The Children
of Frostmofjället] (1945) to Astrid Lindgren’s Rasmus
the Tramp (1956). The theme of homelessness liberates the
child character from the strictures of the home, both in terms of
mental and
material landscape. The homeless protagonist also offers the reader
suggestive
settings and places, such as the dilapidated garage in David Almond’s Skellig (1998), the country road in Rasmus the Tramp or the tunnels under
the hovel in Sonya Hartnett’s Thursday’s
Child (2000).
Homelessness
shows that
home can be “unfixed” and made mobile.
For instance, the YA novel Karikko
(2012) by Seita Vuorela, winner of the Nordic Council award, is set in
a
strange landscape of hybridity where the reader cannot be sure of who
is dead
and who is alive. The book is based on a real event in Åbo, Finland,
where boys
playing in an abandoned silo fell to their deaths. The story takes
place in a
sleazy caravan park where a mother and her two sons are stranded after
their
car has broken down. Thus the mobile home is situated in a symbolically
rich
landscape which allows the author to weave a very elastic and subtly
intertextual
tapestry.
Maurice
Sendak’s We’re all in the dumps with Jack and
Guy
(1993) is an example of the ways in which the picture book can deploy
themes of
homelessness and challenge traditional norms and values. Disposable
trash, the
byproducts of consumer society, plays a significant role in this book
where
seemingly insignificant objects are laden with new meaning. For
homelessness is
closely associated with the deconstruction of nationality in the wake
of
globalization. Girls’ and boys’ books of an earlier era labored hard to
promote
the dual concepts of home and nation. There is no corresponding agenda
in
contemporary children’s books, where hybridity and the dissolution of
family
and nation are topical. The concepts of home and homelessness rather
point to
overlapping historical, psychological, economic and cultural discourses
(of,
for instance, gender, class and consumption patterns). Given these
fundamental
changes, children’s literature appears to have an exciting future.
In
this Barnboken theme the scope and
depth of
homelessness is gauged. Hanne Kiil and Elise Seip
Tønnessen
analyze a recent Norwegian version of Red Riding Hood, Skylappejenta
(2009) by Iram Haq and
Endre Skandfer. In this controversial picture book Pakistani and
Norwegian
identity constructions merge in the girl protagonist. The critical
underpinning
of this article can be found in postcolonial theory of cultural
encounters,
globalization and hybridity. Concepts like reflexive identity and
cultural
identity (Anthony Giddens and Stuart Hall respectively) are used, as
Homi
Bhabha’s critical use of the term hybridity. With these conceptual
tools the
authors attempt to show how the picture book investigates the story and
instates a new discursive terrain for multicultural girlhood. In this
text the
theme of homelessness appears as uncertain or hybrid when the girl
protagonist
navigates between different nationalist discourses that resist
harmonization.> Mavis
Reimer’s article “Mobile characters, mobile
texts: Homelessness and intertextuality in contemporary texts for young
people”
points to a recent tendency in today’s YA fiction. She reads
homelessness as a
metaphor and highlights the intertextual aspects of books such as Skellig by David Almond, Commedia
Infantil (1988) by Henning
Mankell and Stained Glass (2002) by
Michael Bedard. With the help of Julia Kristeva’s concept of
intertextuality
she shows how the novels engage in an intricate play of texts where
ideas of
homelessness are brought to bear both to the uncanny and to the effects
of
globalization. Reimer particularly points to mobility as being
characteristic
both of characters and the textual patterning, and she anchors her
analysis
both in socio-economic and cultural contexts.
These
two articles are to be seen as a starting point.
We welcome further articles on the theme of homelessness.
Mia Österlund
Scientific
editor
2013
©2013
Mia Österlund. This
is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License
(http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution,
and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
Citation:
Barnboken tidskrift för
barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol.
36,
2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.14811/clr.v36i0.163