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Meidän piti lähteä (We Had to Leave, 2018) is a wordless picturebook by the Finnish author Sanna Pelliccioni. It is a work of 41 pages, most of which are formed from pairs of images with matching colours produced in acrylic. It starts with images of a family enjoying their life, but shifts to images of aeroplanes bombing a city, a journey over the sea to a place where people build snowmen: the implied narrative is that of a family caught up in the recent refugee crisis seeking asylum in Finland. In this article, I examine the literary strategies in narrating the refugee experience in this wordless picturebook. The approach is pedagogical as I ask: How can a picturebook, such as Meidän piti lähteä, give voice to the refugee experience? I also ask whether picturebooks about the refugee experience can teach about empathy, without essentializing the Other. Two not controversial, but differing views related to the notion of “giving voice” frame these questions. While emphasising the pedagogical opportunities, Julia Hope (“One Day” 302), argues that the refugee experiences in children’s literature form “an ideal context for sharing the stories, feelings and fears” that children have experienced, but also expose stereotypes and media myths. On the other hand, Gayatri Spivak famously argued in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) that, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak. This article situates Meidän piti lähteä, in the midst of these discourses to present wordless picturebooks as an arena for diverse narratives about refugees, which have the potential to support empathy, but which may also reinforce stereotypical and tokenistic images of refugees. The analysis suggests that the visual discourse creates an effective narrative, with space for listening. In addition, the article suggests that refugee narratives can foster critical self-reflexivity.

Abstract: In this article, representations of multiculturalism in Swedish and Finnish picturebooks are examined through the Förskolan Rävlyan and Tatu and Patu series. In the article, multiculturalism is understood and studied with an intersectional approach. This means considering sociocultural categorizations such as ethnicity, gender, nationality and disability to be meaningful to the existing social, political and economic structures of societies. These categorizations are seen to have the power to reproduce and circulate dominant discourses that effect the social inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people. Thus, the social categories are examined as performative textual discourses, meaning that texts are acknowledged to be not only reflecting, but also creating social reality. Both series present diversity as an integrated part of the story by means of non-explicit multiculturalism. The analysis reveals that both series of books contain representations of diversity that can challenge some possibly exclusive social categorizations, such as nationality. In conclusion, these books can be seen to be progressive in their attempts to promote a transformative understanding of today’s Nordic societies. Keywords: Diversity, Intersectionality, Multiculturalism, Performativity theory, Swedish picturebooks, Finnish picturebooks, Siv Widerberg, Aino Havukainen, Sami Toivonen