Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 09 Dec 2016

Revolution by Sara

It’s hard to imagine a more difficult task to set yourself than producing a fable of revolution without using much more than a handful of words. That’s what the French artist Sara has done with this book and I’m delighted to be able to say that she’s pulled off something pretty remarkable.

Sara is the working name of this Paris based artist who was born in 1950 and who was awarded the Golden Apple at the 20th Biennial of Illustration in Bratislava in 2005. She has pioneered a method of illustration based on using torn paper strips with a dominant use of white, red and black contrasts. And that’s precisely the technique she has used in Revolution.

This is a non-specific story and not a retelling of a historical revolutionary uprising. Rather it’s an attempt to capture the spirit of revolution and to say something about what happens when people are unjustly repressed by an authoritarian state. Sara doesn’t offer some kind of false hope or romantic heroism here either – at the end we don’t know what the outcome of revolution will be and the character at the centre of the story is often depicted as small and very frightened.

The book has been published by Tara Books who have a progressive political agenda and a very explicitly feminist one. Many of their picture books are aimed at the children’s market and I think it’s perfectly possible to make a case for this one being something that both adults and children could relate to. I suspect that the ideal combination would be for this to be shared between child and parent.

One of the founders of Tara Books, V. Geetha has written a short essay at the end of the book called ‘Revolution and Memory’ which tries to contextualise the story and emphasise the way in which this fable fits into historical revolutionary occurrences across the globe. She ends her essay thus:

This book gestures towards diverse histories and events, but the power of what it represents is not exhausted by any of them. The red lion in the flag continues to beckon towards the future, even as it recalls past resistance and martyrdom.

I genuinely believe that powerful and imaginative books like this can often offer a whole lot more than many verbose textbooks ostensibly covering the same academic territory. A book like Revolution not only plugs into your intellectual and ideological socket, it also goes straight to that part of you that harbours your emotional responses – a sort of synthesis of head and heart.

Copies of the book are probably hard to find in bookshops – it’s possible some independents will stock it I guess – but you can get them on the second hand market and you wont break the bank if you order one.

 

Terry Potter

December 2016