Norsk

Abstract

Abstract

In this article I analyse the Norwegian picturebook Papelina (2017) by Randi Fuglehaug and Jill Moursund. The story of Papelina tells of a family of parrots that leave their home, and travel across a vast ocean to go to a parrot palace. It is also a story about being in flight. The picturebook is one of several picturebooks and other aesthetic works for children that came out in Norway between 2016-2017, addressing what has been named the European Refugee Crisis from 2015. A journey across an ocean has been pointed out as a central feature in picturebooks for children, with the European refugee crisis as their publishing context (Vassiloudi, 2019; Duckels & Jaques, 2019; Pesonen, 2019; Warnqvist, 2016; 2018; Arizpe 2021). The object of this article is to examine what the ocean, a central point of reference of the European refugee crisis, articulates in Papelina. The analysis focuses on how the picturebook draws on established literary motifs – topoi – of the ocean in a contemporary refugee narrative. By being connected to its historical context, the topoi generate a tension in the meeting between the literary ballast of the topoi and the specific time and a specific space that belongs to the European refugee crisis. The tension in Papelina opens for discussing the use of the ocean and what cultural conceptions are expressed of the European refugee crisis, and a contemporary refugee experience. At the core of the discussion stands the collective base of knowledge between author and reader (Eliassen, 2020, s. 153).