Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Children's Literature Association Quarterly
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
27867
Abstract
While working on the final stages of this essay, I went to a local children’s bookstore to look for a retelling of The Tempest to assist the eleven-year-old in my life with a drama audition. The audition required him to memorize the monologue in which Trinculo finds Caliban on the beach and asks, “What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive?” (2.2.24–25). The owner of the shop—who knows my field of research and advises me when new books arrive that she thinks would interest me—asked whether I had seen the latest Armin Greder book, The Mediterranean, which had arrived in her shop that week. I had not, so she brought the book over to me. The only words in the narrative appear on the first page: “After he had finished drowning,/ his body sank slowly/ to the bottom,/ where the fish/ were waiting.” The echo between Trinculo’s monologue and Greder’s prologue resonates with me as a haunting reminder of the proximity of life and death and the capacity of human beings and federal governments for refusing care.
DOI
10.1353/chq.2018.0044
Comments
Copyright © . This article first appeared in : Dudek, D. (2018). Seeing the Human Face: Refugee and Asylum Seeker Narratives and an Ethics of Care in Recent Australian Picture Books. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 43(4), 363-376. Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved February 14, 2019. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Available here.