Tan’s The Arrival is the most perfect and universal of the many refugee narratives that have been produced in recent years, so he was asked to write the forward for the exhibition, reproduced as the introduction to the book. Writing with modesty and eloquence, Tan sums up the project: ‘All migration is an act of imagination, a flight of imagination. Can small gestures – a picture, a friendly message – make a difference? By creating, looking, asking questions, confronting despair, we invest back in to an economy far greater than any stock exchange, far nobler than any political system. We help sustain the will to imagine a better world, for adults and especially children, for whom the positive inspiration of art and story can never be overestimated.’
both sides and the visitor could walk through them. Each vibrated on being touched. Subsequent installations, in South Africa, Nami Island in South Korea, and in Worcester have adapted the display to the local environment. The framework structure used in South Korea reflected a sense of a cage or imprisonment.
For Piet, for Tobias, for the whole Worcester Team, the exhibition has had a powerful emotional resonance, due to the idea of postcards / illustrations taking flight and making their way to them from across the world. They are proud of the variety of postcards received and the range of responses. One of the remits of the ICPBS is to showcase work from outside the Anglophone community, and by having artists such as Isol and Roger Mello in the book (both of them recipients of global prizes but not published in the UK) the work has gone some way to achieving that. The Migrations book too is a source of pride, beautiful to hold and a showcase for the work of illustrators. As Piet says, each entry reflects the way illustrators think and see the world and demonstrates that illustration is not passive. Illustrators are passionate and dynamic, have political and economic responses to contemporary situations and care about the world. The book stands as demonstration of this and as a legacy for the collaborative work of the team. And also to the editorial and design teams at Otter-Barry.
Many of the contributors themselves are migrants. Maja Stanic from Bosnia & Herzegovina, now based in the UK, describes arriving as refugee from war in 1933 and writes: ‘In my suitcase I had eleven paintbrushes. I thought they would help me survive in my new life’. Axel Scheffler from the UK makes a more contemporary comment ‘Borders – not what they used to be’.
The book is full of so many individual items of beauty, of beauty in words and images, that it is impossible to single out favourites. It is organized into four sections: Departures, Long Journeys, Arrivals, Hope for the Future. Each is an exploration that provokes an emotional response. Only a selection of just over 50 postcards, from the over 300 received to date for the exhibition, is included. Each postcard is reproduced with the illustration on the right side of a double page and its message with the back of the postcard, including address, stamps and franking, on the left. The text of each postcard is also reproduced typographically and translated into English where necessary. Many of the illustrators have written their own messages, others have selected poems or quotes to reinforce their message. Jackie Morris worked with Robert Macfarlane to submit a joint card, a striking image of a Peregrine Falcon with Macfarlane’s accompanying poem. This is used to make beautiful endpapers. There is a brief biography of each illustrator at the end of the book.
For the first Migrations exhibition in Bratislava, the postcards were contained in see-through sleeves and hung on a network of wires crisscrossing the exhibition space, so that they could be seen from
Submissions for the exhibition from illustrators are still open and the project is ongoing. The Migrations website on
www.picturebookinsociety.org is being redeveloped. It will contain a map plotting all the submissions, showing both the journeys made and the regions not yet involved. We can only hope for its ongoing success and for this to lead to a second book.
Proceeds from the sales of the book will be divided between Amnesty International, where the postcard format resonates with their campaigning, and IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) whose networks have promoted the call to illustrators around the world.
Migrations Open Hearts Open Borders, ed. the International Centre for the Picture Book in Society, Otter-Barry Books, 9781910959800, £9.99hbk
If you’d like to get involved, postcards can be sent to: MIGRATIONS, The University of Worcester, City Campus, Castle Street, Worcester WR1 3AS
Pam Dix is a former librarian and chair of Ibby UK.
Books for Keeps No.236 May 2019 15
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