Artbooks as witness of everyday resistance: Using art with displaced children living in Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

Artbooks, which are a combined form of picture and story book created using mixed media, can be a simple yet powerful way of supporting children affected by war and displacement to tell their stories. They allow children to work through the creative arts, which protects them from being overwhelmed by difficult memories. They also allow, even very young children, to show us how they cope with past violence and present injustice by recalling and representing the small everyday overcomings of their lives – a garden they planted in DRC, a mother who walks them across a busy Johannesburg street, a curtain blowing in the door of their new home – just as it did in their old home. The books allow them to witness to the injustice of xenophobic violence by neighbours and the immoveable bureaucracy attached to accessing documents, through representing the small details of their lives in crayons and paint. Making artbooks also allows for some measure of meaning-making in the chaos of the everyday in a hostile city where their parents struggle to maintain a normal life for them. Books are also a powerful way for children to safely share their stories and advocate for changed attitudes, laws and policies in the increasingly migrant-hostile South African society. The article will tell the story of a book-making project run over a number of years at a community counselling centre that works with families on the move in Johannesburg South Africa. It will also describe how some of the children’s books have become a powerful advocacy tool through their inclusion in the digital library of the African Storybook project. The article will explore some of the practical details of the project and the theory around the power of the representation of the everyday which we are beginning to derive from the work.