Exile in the works of Elzbieta

Abstract

A child of the exodus and the war herself, the children's author Elzbieta, was shocked by the indifference with which the experiences of children in exile have long been treated. She has set out in her work to "revive the child's [...] way of thinking about the world" by revisiting as accurately as possible the intimate experience of the child she once was. The loss of all conscious memories of her early years and her culture of origin, the learning and forgetting of multiple languages in the course of exile, including her native language, the death of his father and the uprooting from his family, the shaky and sometimes abused construction of his identity, the mortal dangers of nostalgia, but also the relativization of values and open-mindedness, the importance of codes, oral tales and still images in her understanding of the world are all part of her background as a child in exile. She analyses it with finesse in L'Enfance de l'Art and La Nostalgie aborigène. Although exile is the main theme of only one album, the famous Petit Gris, there are many traces of it, sometimes veiled and implicit, throughout his work.

Keywords

• children's picturebooks
• childhood in war
• children's experience of exile