Abstract
Loneliness is intimately related to the ongoing epidemics of systemic forms of oppression, including white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism. The epidemic of loneliness has only intensified and grown during the isolation engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we aim to think about how children's picturebooks wrestle with explaining loneliness and its antidotes (connection, community) and how these picturebooks are themselves manifestations of ongoing conversations related to Emotional Justice. We conclude by reviewing a number of children's books in order to think about how the picturebook might itself be an artifact that helps to fight feelings of loneliness as well as teaching children and adults alike about the importance of connection.
Our movements themselves have to be healing, or there's no point to them. (Cara Page, Kindred: Southern Healing Justice Collective, https://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-so-brief-personal-history-healing-justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016)
Introduction
Discussions abound on the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to and intensification of an ongoing public health epidemic of loneliness. From immigrants and refugees who lack connections in their new homes (Said, 1990), to millennials who are working hours that make it difficult for them to connect with others (Fekete et al., 2018), to the elderly and people with disabilities who may have health challenges that inhibit them from maintaining connections, a significant rise in loneliness was well documented even before the start of the pandemic (Bruce et al., 2019; Mund et al., 2019). Loneliness invites many definitions from such disparate fields as health economics (Macdonald et al., 2018), urban planning (Okkels et al., 2017), nursing (Pitkala, 2016), social work (Hagan, 2020), psychology (Cacioppo et al., 2015), sociology (Bauman, 2007; Illouz, 2007; Yang, 2019), literature (Bentley, 2019) and memoir (Laing, 2016; Nagata, 2016). These include feelings of aloneness or apartness from others or a desire for the company of others that goes unmet – including an ‘unwelcome feeling of lack of companionship’ (Bekhet et al., 2008: 207). The challenging effects of loneliness are documented everywhere – from its significant role in depression and anxiety, to its contribution to a decrease in life expectancy, to its role in the rise of totalitarianism (Arendt, 1985) and premature death (Gilmore, 2007). From the unprecedented pandemic lockdown, to sped-up and longer workdays, to the upheaval caused by neoliberal policies and climate change, to the impact of ongoing forms of ‘white supremacist capitalist (hetero)patriarchy’ (hooks, 2000: 90), to the prison industrial complex or the impact of placing romantic love and the nuclear family at the centre of governmental laws and policies (Strömquist, 2018), the structural challenges to our abilities to come together in community are monumental. With shaming and blaming culture on the rise, a cultural trend only facilitated by new media and information technologies (Huffman, 2016), our ability to form communities and live across difference needs strengthening. In this article, we posit that children's books – books specifically focused on teaching children how to identify and make space for their emotions including their feelings of loneliness and their need for connection – are central for learning both to identify and tolerate loneliness and to come together. As children's books are a form of reading practice that can be both collective and community-oriented (reading out loud with a child, reading to a group), they also may be understood as a helpful tool for combatting loneliness while they provide the possibility of learning about one's emotional landscape.
Children's books are uniquely skilled at clearly distilling complex teachings about how to tolerate one's difficult emotions, as they explain to children (and adults) how to identify and sit with one's feelings of discomfort (Garner and Parker, 2018; LaForge et al., 2018). As Rich (1979) reminds us in her foundational essay ‘On Lies, Secrets, and Silence’, we must learn to sit with uncomfortable truths, or else we risk shutting ourselves down to the point where we no longer know how we truly feel. This is a form of lying to oneself, one that Rich argues engenders the ‘greatest loneliness of all’ (Popova, 2014: para. 4), in which we lose contact with our inner voices. Learning to both name and tolerate our feelings enables us to connect with one another as well as to respond to one another in ways that are not simply reactive. In this way, books aimed at teaching emotional skills can facilitate the possibility of connection. In doing so, they can serve as a profound antidote to loneliness, one of the core teachings behind bibliotherapy (Sevinç, 2019). By encouraging us to sit with and unpack what it means to feel ‘bad’ (whether angry, anxious, sad, bewildered, overwhelmed or lonely, etc.), books that help us to connect to our feelings of sadness, rage or despair also help us to know when we are feeling moments of quiet joy, elation or contentment, since it is not possible to shut down our negative feelings without shutting down our positive feelings (Johnson and Wood, 2017). That is, knowing and allowing ourselves to feel sad and lonely is what allows us to also feel joy and happiness – because if you shut out the shadows you also shut out the light (Brown, 2008).
Learning the emotional skills that enable us to come together in community has a longstanding history in movements centred around Emotional Justice. Emotional Justice itself is rooted in queer of colour, disability and Indigenous thought, and centres the importance of listening to one another across difference if we are to build collective movements. In his brilliant novel Starlight (2018), Richard Wagamese examines coming together in community across difference as a way to heal from the trauma of settler colonialism. Wagamese highlights the potential of getting in touch with feelings as allowing us to build community that fosters a sense of interconnectedness – both to one another and to the natural world. As Wagamese writes: everything is alive. So everything is movin’. We just think things are still. But if we learn to sit with things we can get so we can feel them movin’ even if it's just in a small way at first. If we learn to be real still an’ quiet we can feel like we’re parta all that movin’ and it's a part of us (2018: 161).
Following Chela Sandoval, queer of colour theorists Aimee Carillo Rowe and Francesca T. Royster argue that part of our ongoing political task is to mobilise ‘affect for social action’ as a critical praxis (2016: 245). In doing so, these thinkers remind us that thinking about loneliness critically is a social justice project.
Drawing on queer of colour and disability theory about the possibilities of Emotional Justice strategies aimed at enhancing our emotional skills as well as our tolerance for discomfort, we think about the possibilities of children's books for building these skills. We understand these books as part of a larger social justice project aimed at giving us the expertise that we need to connect with one another. That is, how might children's books teach us to frame our universal desires for love and acceptance more broadly within calls to note our differences, remain present to them and be attentive to the changes in our ways of living that they require? Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and settler colonialism are loneliness-making projects that are destroying communities and the planet (Tallbear, 2019). How might children's books teach us to know and understand when we are feeling lonely and to tolerate those feelings, as well as giving us the skills to engage with one another? How are children's books a medium organised around listening, as well as a form of collective reading practice that helps to teach the skills that are so essential to growing healthy, emotionally just communities?
‘Feminist Loneliness Studies’ and Emotional Justice
A feminist commitment to prioritising connection over individual achievement can be a path that feels deeply countercultural at times. Political forms of disconnection are found everywhere. From everyday systemic microaggressions to busy modern lives in which we run frantically from one event to another with too little time to connect – all can leave behind feelings of existential aloneness. In the poetic words of memoirist Olivia Laing, loneliness is that feeling that makes it ‘possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others’, as loneliness doesn’t require ‘physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection’ (2016: 3). As Robert Weiss notes in his ground-breaking study of loneliness, it is in fact a state: hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connection. This is far easier said than done, especially for people whose loneliness arises from a state of loss or exile or prejudice, who have reason to fear or mistrust as well as long for the society of others (Weiss, 1975, cited in Laing, 2016: 41–42).
In words, loneliness is intimately connected to systemic forms of oppression. Loneliness is well studied in other particular communities – among the elderly (Nicolaisen and Thorsen, 2012), among people with Alzheimer's (Balouch et al., 2019), among people living with HIV/AIDS (Nokes and Kendrew, 1990; Fekete et al., 2017). Under patriarchy, loneliness is engendered by a system that encourages boys and men not to know what they feel, a state of not-knowing that leads to disconnection and/or to the dissolution of relationships. For example, in his work on Emotional Justice, emotions educator and activist Yolo Akili Robinson (2012) describes a man he saw in his practice: I can recall specifically one scenario working with a young man, let's call him ‘Marlon’, who kept going on and on about how his wife was ‘too emotional’ and ‘too sensitive’ and how he and all other men were not like that.
Upon hearing this, I invited him to revisit the scenario that led him to work on his anger. He then recanted how he threw a chair, screamed at his wife, broke two mirrors and pushed his wife up against the wall.
After he finished his story I asked him, ‘Now tell me Richard, was that … emotional?’
His response: ‘I was angry, that's … different.’
Here we see clearly how many men are taught to not see their hurt and rage as an emotion. Instead the women in their lives are the embodiment of emotion, and they themselves perceive to be completely rational. In this case, the emotional disconnection of patriarchy has performed its function, which is not to remove emotionality from male embodied people, but to disconnect and push them into deep denial about their emotional complexity, and project/unload that onto women.
Emotional Justice holds that it is a form of feminist activism to begin to learn what we are feeling, in part so that we might learn how to stay in connection and community with one another. As we will show below, children's books are uniquely skilled at allowing us to do so. Without an understanding of our emotions, people do not even know that they feel lonely and nor do they know how to connect. And of course, loneliness is intersectionally meted out and received. From the loneliness of a person of colour trying to name racism whose white friends or colleagues refuse to recognise their reality (I don’t know / can’t see your world) to the above example in which patriarchy teaches us the false dichotomy of reason versus emotion such that our relationships become marred by violence rather than connection, systemic forms of discrimination produce the conditions of possibility for widescale loneliness. As Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) writes in her ground-breaking book Care Work, ableism, disability and loneliness are woven together under neoliberal capitalism in ways that mean that people with disabilities can’t get the care they need. In her words, ‘crip emotional intelligence is understanding isolation. Deeply. We know what it's like to be really, really alone. To be forgotten about, in that way where people just don’t remember you’ve ever been out, at meetings and parties, in the social life of the world’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018: 98). Systemic ableism can mean that loneliness becomes a killing system in which people are deprived of the care they need to survive.
Of course, loneliness can also be generative – experienced as a relief. From the lonely child who takes an interest in bugs and then grows up to be an entomologist (Barry, 2002) to the pleasures of an ongoing quiet in which being alone ‘does not have to be killing: it can also be an oasis of calm, quiet, low stimulation, and rest’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018: 98), loneliness is a complex emotion, which theorists from Charania (2011) to Gordon (2008) remind us is a fact of great analytic importance. In particular, the relationship between loneliness and the production of art is significant: from playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1969) to musician Woods (Song Exploder, 2019) to writer Olivia Laing (2016), all cite the importance of feeling lonely to the creation of art. Artists are also at the forefront in exploring the systemic reasons why we are so lonely. Woods (Song Exploder, 2019) cites James Baldwin's essay ‘Letter to My Nephew’ as allowing her not to feel so alone in the pain of the ongoing struggle of trying to explain anti-Black racism to disinterested and/or hostile white people. In Laing's (2016) study of art and isolation, The Lonely City, she examines how – as a mid-thirties single woman – her very being engendered a particular kind of misogynistic ageist response. This response to Laing's aloneness made her feel alien in a way that intensified her existing feelings of loneliness. In her memoir of anorexia, Appetites: Why Women Want, Knapp (2003) (made famous by her memoir Drinking: A Love Story, and who died precipitously from cancer at age forty-two) provides one of the most desolate descriptions of the political reasons for women's loneliness that we have read – one at which we could feel our eyes well up at the magical experience of having our lives suddenly witnessed by the words we were reading. Engaging with a description by Germaine Greer of the frequency with which we see women weeping – the woman quietly weeping at the cinema or emerging with red-rimmed eyes alone from a bathroom – Knapp writes that: Women weep […] because they feel powerless, and because they are exhausted and overworked and lonely. Women weep because their own needs are unsatisfied, continually swept into the background as they tend to the needs of others. They weep because the men in their lives so often seem incapable of speaking the language of intimacy, and because their children grow up and become distant, and because they are expected to acquiesce to this distance, and because they live lives of chronically lowered expectations and chronic adjustment to the world of men, the power and strength of women's emotions considered pathological or hysterical or sloppy, her interest in connection considered trivial, her core never quite seen or known or fully appreciated, her true self out of alignment with so much that is valued and recognized and worshipped in the world around her, her love, in a word, unrequited. (2003: 177)
The particular skill of all of these writers is in the ways they seamlessly chart a new terrain for what might be called a ‘Feminist Loneliness Studies’ that shows how gender, race, class, sexuality and disability have a shaping influence as to how loneliness develops.
Emotional Justice
As Emotional Justice activists note, we tend to prioritise thinking over feeling in our movements. We too often do not know what we are feeling, nor what messages our feelings are giving us. How can one work to combat the loneliness we are feeling if we don’t even know we feel lonely, angry or sad? Emotional Justice, which has arisen out of queer of colour, Indigenous and disability organising, is a movement aimed at teaching emotional literacy (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Emotional Justice also offers an intense focus on the importance of listening, including an emphasis on teaching people how to listen to our emotions (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). For children's literature, which is a medium centred on listening, Emotional Justice holds many possibilities. A knowledge of what one is feeling is so essential to collectively coming together, and acknowledging how we are feeling helps to teach us how to connect through conflict, rather than breaking apart. Without the development of a tolerance for discomfort, it is difficult to come together in the communities that are so essential to warding of loneliness. Emotional Justice movements, rather than shutting down our emotions in order to do the ‘real’ work of activism, understand charting our emotions as activist work. One example might be found in the work of Russo (2017), on brokenheartedness. As Russo notes, there exists an anaesthetic aesthetic that ‘avoids, minimizes, distances, and evades pain and suffering in order to maintain its domination and entitlement’ (2017: 290). As Aimee Carillo Rowe adds, an ‘avoidance of feeling works as a tool to realign even progressive activism with white heteronormative power systems’ (2016: 249). A manifesto of feeling as activist praxis and feeling, Russo suggests an embrace of ‘brokenheartedness’, a position that combines emotional vulnerability and the willingness to be changed as a critical tool against privilege: Resisting the gravitational pull (Chris Crass) of the hegemonic mandate toward glossing over differences between, turning away from harm, evading deeply considering what is in front of me—and on my own oppression and innocence in relation to the ways it is connected to the harm against others (Razack), a praxis of accountability and brokenheartedness asks for a deep recognition of how we are actively related to the ongoing production of power differences between myself and women and trans/queer people of color (2017: 291).
Children's books provide a number of learning possibilities. Books for children can help produce new forms of critical thinking in part because of their ability to generate a wide range of emotional responses, from embracing ambiguity, to opening up to hurt, to pausing for interruption, to witnessing resistance, to hearing silences (Whitelaw, 2017). As Whitelaw argues, children's books have a ‘generative potential for cultivating critical inquiry’ (2017: 36). With the term ‘critical inquiry’, she follows Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) in signalling ‘not just the asking of questions but rather a stance, a critical habit of mind, a dynamic and fluid way of knowing and being in the world’ (Whitelaw, 2017: 36). Not least is the potential for an affect of hopefulness that children's picturebooks facilitate. As Whitelaw notes: Hopefulness in the face of loneliness: the same way through either words or images alone. Because of these affordances, the picturebook has a unique potential to leverage the critical and the aesthetic when social issues are represented and explored through visual art and words in a genre widely characterized by a sense of hopefulness. This potential for experiencing the simultaneity of both struggle and hopefulness may be especially promising in the word/image juxtapositions found in the picturebook (2017: 36).
Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress
In Baldacchino and Malenfant's (2014) picture book Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (illustrated by Isabelle Malenfant), we get a gentle, yet radical, look at young Morris Micklewhite who loves his mother, his cat, pancakes and the colour orange. While this simple list of likes might be relatable to any child, the manifestation of Morris’ love of orange provides the reader with a powerful flashlight into loneliness, ostracisation and radical self-love.
When Morris, who is identified in the text with he/him pronouns, falls in love with a tangerine-coloured dress that lives in his classroom's dressing-up centre, he is perhaps unprepared for his classmates’ reaction. His love of the dress is described with pure, spare text and a sensory attention to detail that anyone who has ever loved an object can understand: ‘Morris likes the color of the dress. It reminds him of tigers, the sun and his mother's hair’ (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014). The page that features this beautiful text has swirling citrus-coloured paint, with Morris central to the flame-coloured representation of his mother and his own sense of self. Indeed, what is so radical about Morris’ love of the orange dress is his awareness of what it represents for him as a person and how this reaffirms the love and safety he has at home. The affirmation that Morris finds in the dress is pure and simple: ‘He likes the noises the dress makes – swish, swish, swish when he walks’ (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014).
Predictably (sigh), yet heartbreakingly, his classmates do not react well to Morris loving and wearing a dress. Neither Baldacchino's text nor Malenfant's illustrative interpretation need to pin down whether Morris is genderqueer, trans or just loves to wear a dress, allowing for multiple reader interpretations and connections. As readers, we sense that Morris’ tangerine-coloured dress might be seen as an object of anti-loneliness, an object that reasserts self-worth. Nevertheless, his classmates respond on gendered terms, largely claiming that a boy cannot appropriately love or wear a dress. Though this reaction is initially quite painful to Morris, a pain illustrated with sparser and darker colours so contrary to the warm engulfing image of the dress he loves, ultimately the text resolves with Morris affirming his love for the dress and pushing his classmates towards acceptance. While the story remains important for its overarching message of acceptance towards all expressions of gender identity, it is the object of the dress and how it functions for Morris that is so important to a discussion on loneliness. As the dress swish-swish-swishes, we might imagine that it engulfs him with knowledge of his mother's love. Indeed, when the end of the book comes not every classmate has been swayed, yet when a young girl reaffirms her belief that boys cannot wear dresses, Morris – who has had time to sit and listen to himself in his loneliness and his desires – simply asserts that ‘this boy does’ and moves on with his day. In the silent object of the tangerine-coloured dress, we see how a personal narrative of acceptance (which Morris had prior to his classmates’ responses) is interrupted; Morris pauses and remains with his own moments of pain, and ultimately chooses self-worth and self-acceptance (Baldacchino and Malenfant, 2014). Without a reframing in relationship to Emotional Justice, this beautiful book might stay categorised as a simple exploration of gender identity and resistance, when it ultimately offers the reader an ever richer and deeper template for sitting with and moving through loneliness.
Wild
Another salient example of Emotional Justice explored deeply by a work of children's literature is Emily Hughes’ (2015) picture book Wild. The book begins with the words ‘No one remembered how she came to the woods, but all knew it was right’ (Hughes, 2015). Facing this assertion is an illustration of a tiny naked child, with a green curlicue of hair, surrounded by wild landscape and wild animals all featuring happy smiling faces (yet somehow still deliciously wild). Hughes’ scratchy line work and green-tinted palette imbue the book with the pulse of nature on each page. The young girl in the book, never given a name, grows to fish with bears, speak with birds and play with foxes. It is worth noting that when the young girl does play with foxes, she takes on a delightfully vulpine quality, going so far as to gnaw on the tail of another fox cub. One day the young girl is faced with ‘new animals in the forest’ and is ultimately brought to the home of human caretakers (Hughes, 2015). Here Hughes’ brilliant work as a storyteller shines, as each page shows the young girl struggling and disliking what her caregivers ask of her (for example, to eat with silverware or to speak their language), while the text claims ‘They did everything wrong!’ (Hughes, 2015). This simple reversal leaves a clear path for those looking to identify and tolerate feelings of loneliness. The book also hints at the pain and loneliness that grow from any colonial project of removing a person's language and forcing them to speak another. It is difficult to imagine just how lonely the little girl, filled with a wild love of nature and her bear/fox/bird kin, would be in a human-made box designed for decorum and separation. What a disjoint from the visceral life she lived before!
The book closes with a celebratory cry as the young girl leaves her clothes and captors and rides off on the back of the family dog, ‘Because you cannot tame something so happily wild’ (Hughes, 2015). What reads as a beautiful story can easily be read as an allegory for breaking through structural misogyny to live free and wild. Certainly this is a simplification, yet what ultimately saves the young girl is her refusal to see the boxes and barriers her captors have inflicted upon her as anything wrong with her. Though the girl likely feels lonely, angry and afraid, the writing clearly tells the reader that it was ‘the strangers’ who were wrong (Hughes, 2015). The young girl never seems to believe in what they are trying to sell to her, choosing to defy them in every illustration and ultimately fleeing their confines to remain peaceful with herself. Her tolerance of loneliness is limited in that she refuses to accept the systems that inflicts it on her (here, ‘the strangers’). With reasons for systemic loneliness as varied and deeply rooted as the same systems inflicted on the young girl (for example, society's need for appropriate dress, hygiene, speech or competencies), the book practically yells from the shelf to be read by those seeking emotional justice and, really, wildness.
Rocket Says Look Up!
In Nathan Bryon's beautiful book celebrating Black feminist brilliance, Rocket (so-named by her mother because ‘a famous rocket blasted off into space the day I was born’) looks dreamily and scientifically to the sky (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 4). Rocket is in sharp contrast to the people around her, all pictured staring at their newspapers or talking on or looking at their phones, including Rocket's brother Jamal. Undeterred by their lack of interest, Rocket continues to educate the people around her. She tells her family, other children and any grownup who will listen all of the space facts circulating in her head: ‘Did you know . . . most meteors are smaller than a grain of sand? Did you know . . . the best time to see a meteor shower is when it's dark, with no clouds?’ (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 10). Rocket goes so far as to seize the mic in her local grocery store and use it to tell all shoppers that there will be a meteor shower that very night. Jamal remains equally unimpressed and embarrassed by her enthusiasm (his sister Rocket is a child; he is an adolescent). Although initially undeterred, the indifference of those around her wears Rocket down. When the meteor shower doesn’t appear as planned, Rocket exemplifies the deep loneliness that anyone with a passion for a subject, a passion that others do not to share or refuse to understand, can experience. As Rocket states: ‘Maybe the Phoenix Meteor Shower was a myth, after all. Maybe that's why Jamal didn’t want to come along. Maybe everyone is upset with me for wasting their time. I’ve never, ever felt this sad before’ (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 23–24).
But then in a dramatisation of the miracle that happens when loneliness comes face to face with connection, Rocket's brother Jamal looks up from his phone at his sister and really sees her in her distress: ‘Jamal looks at me for the first time today. It feels like the first time ever. “I’ve turned my phone off, sis,” he says’ (Bryon and Adeola, 2019: 24). In a happy circumstance, the meteor shower is visible after all. In showing how loneliness can be alleviated and transformed through the power of being truly seen by another, perhaps even for ‘the first time ever’, Rocket Says Look Up! is a book that both explains and dramatises loneliness and how we can heal it through loving connection and the act of being seen.
Cannonball
In a water-soaked take on confronting the challenges of hegemonic masculinity, Cannonball (Cotter and Morgan, 2020) is the story of a young boy who wants to be able to do a cannonball just like the other people in his Maori community. (‘Do an amazing cannonball around here, and you’ll be something all right. SomeONE’; Cotter and Morgan, 2020). Our protagonist endlessly receives advice from other swimmers, and yet he remains fearful of doing a full cannonball; he is catcalled when he hesitates before jumping and told to get out of the way. Lightly, this book celebrates the role of grandmother-caregivers, as it is his Nan who teaches him all about different jumps (‘What you wanna know, sunshine?’; Cotter and Morgan, 2020). Nan helps him to practise jumping off the diving board by trying it at home onto a cushion, but our young hero remains scared up on the board. In a heart-breaking narrative that suggests that he is not capable, the protagonist has to choke back tears when other older boys tell him that ‘Kid, it's time to accept what is TRUE! Cannonballs aren’t for someone like YOU!’ (Cotter and Morgan, 2020). The author-illustrator team of Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola also gently suggest that it is our protagonist's vulnerable, queer take on masculinity that also contributes to him standing out from the rest in ways that make it difficult for him to fit in, engendering the deep loneliness of childhood difference. On the lonely walk up from the beach after he is told that diving is not for him, Nan reminds him that he can jump his own way, by connecting to who he is inside: ‘Listen to your heart, to your mind, to the pull that's inside’ (Cotter and Morgan, 2020). Pictured jumping off a diving board helped by his rainbow bathing suit and peacock blue feather boa, the protagonist's Nan helps him to undo the loneliness of failing to fit in by encouraging him to jump in his very own way. Nan teaches him to listen fiercely to the ‘voice that comes from me’ (Cotter and Morgan, 2020). In a long tradition of grandmothers who help their grandsons to grow into just who they need to be, dealing with some of the loneliness that comes with being different and afraid, Cannonball dramatises feminist thinking that refuses that there is one way of being, and embraces alternative futures for children outside of hegemonic masculinity.
The Rough Patch
In any world, but certainly in this post-COVID world, we are sadly in need of books to help children deal with the tidal wave of loneliness that follows in the wake of loss. The Rough Patch is a beautiful meditation on the terrible life disruption brought on by death (Lies, 2018). As the book begins, Evan (a fox) and his dog ‘did everything together’ (Lies, 2018). They work in the garden, they play ball, they eat ice cream and share ‘music and adventure’ (Lies, 2018). That is, until the ‘unthinkable happened’ and his dog dies (Lies, 2018). With a page that looks like a black explosion with a hole at the centre, we are told ‘and nothing was the same’ (Lies, 2018). Evan puts his heart in a bottle, to use Oliver Jeffers’ metaphor, and without his beloved friend, his garden, previously his refuge, becomes a ‘bitter and lonely place’ (Lies, 2018). Allowing weeds to grow into monstrous shapes in his grief, Evan shuts himself away. He allows only one pumpkin plant to grow, as its crooked and monstrous-looking tendrils appeal to his spirit full of sadness and rage. He cares for the pumpkin plant, and it responds to his care, flourishing and growing a huge pumpkin, at which point Evan decides to take it in and enter it in his local fair. Although now unaccustomed to the company of others, he manages to attend the fair and to talk with old pals. When his pumpkin wins third prize, he is offered either US$10 or a puppy. In a scene that so beautifully captures how loneliness actually makes us experience the possibility of connection as a threat (Nagoski and Nagoski, 2020), Evan at first recoils, and plans to take the money. But when he hears the puppies in a box, he thinks it can’t hurt to just take a look. In the final celebratory page of the book, Evan is driving home with his new puppy by his side, turning towards connection (and of course, with it, the possibility of more loneliness and loss).
Conclusion
In a beautiful book titled What Color Is Night?, author/illustrator Grant Snider (2019) reminds us that there are so many shades of darkness. Night is not only black, but is also the yellow of a rising moon, or the ‘silver streak of a train rolling by’ (Snider, 2019: 12–13). So too does loneliness have many shades. The books we review above wrestle with the shades of loneliness. All of these books are outside those marketed as based on presence and attentiveness, and yet we feel firmly that they are deserving of this type of attention. More importantly, they frame connection within a social justice framework, asking: What does it mean to be attentive to our own desires and selves? And while we might note others’ discomfort with or desire to change us, how can we continue to resist their longings for us?
This so carefully captures and reminds us of both the emotional toll and the systemic nature of being forced onto the outside. It is the loneliness of the child who listens in from the doorway of the lunchroom while the other children talk and laugh; it is the loneliness resulting from being left out of the important conversations as a result of sexist racism. And it is also the loneliness resulting from having a political, scientific or artistic vision, and that vision – and your creativity – going unseen. As we continue to work for change, alone and together, to sweep back the tide of toxic culture with our brooms, to have our priorities reshifted around community and connection rather than individual achievement, to produce a world in which goods and services are shared rather than hoarded, we need these writers and illustrators to help us to chart our journey. Reading wise and politically conscious investigations of loneliness and exclusion can have almost an alchemical impact, transforming our feelings of loneliness the deeper we delve into them.
