Wordless
More information on Natascha Stenvert (in Dutch) can be found here: https://www.nataschastenvert.com/
In the other blogposts, I have discussed the value of translated Dutch books. In this post, I will be looking at a book that hardly needs any translation. Apart from the title, it has no words. Can readers appreciate picturebooks with only visual text and no verbal text? Not so long ago, I would have rejected the whole idea. Books without letters are hardly real books, or are they? My views changed after I gave a workshop on ‘book fun’ at an international primary school and I had to find a book that is attractive to children from different nationalities, of which some were not fluent in English (or Dutch) yet. I took Natascha’s Stenvert’s ‘De streep’ (The Stripe) with me, and it was an immediate success.
Reading wordless picturebooks is not so straightforward as is often assumed, explains Judith Graham in Butler’s book on children’s literature (62). Children need to have some experience with recognizing story structures and interpreting visual clues. I suppose that when these skills are required in order to read wordless picturebooks properly, reading and discussing them with children will help them to get exactly the kind of experience Graham mentioned! Wordless picturebooks can therefore be a perfect teaching tool. Not only when it comes to an understanding of the build-up of a narrative but also to practice language skills. The Stripe is a complex wordless picturebook filled with lots of appealing elements to discuss. During my workshop, I noticed how the different visual storylines were passports across language barriers simply because we were trying to give words to the events we discovered in the book. Also, the setting of the book was recognized as ‘their own’ by many of the young readers. something I will discuss further on in this blog.
Narratives
The book, in A4 size, holds mainly double-paged spreads with one large illustration crossing the gutter, showing a varied wide landscape in a ‘long-shot’. We see mountains, a road, a forest, a castle, farming land, trees, and on the left page (the verso), we see a small cottage. In the front, we notice a tree, which appears to be the main character in the book. At the first spread, a man puts a red stripe on the tree, and the inquisitive looks from the animals give us some language already. ‘What is going on?’ the animals seem to say to one another (4-5).
The stripe worries the animals and Stenvert chooses to zoom in on the stripe, showing how one of the birds tries to erase it (10).
Worrying about the stripe (does it mean the tree will be cut down just like the other trees on the recto of the first spread?) is only one aspect of the story. The other, smaller narratives are maybe even creating more suspense with every page turn. What is happing with the castle? The scaffolds suggest it is being renovated (11). On the next few spreads, there are coaches and cars parked near the castle (13-15).
The farmer or forest ranger who was chopping the trees on the first spread keeps busy. He is digging a trail, which first seems to serve no purpose at all until it starts snowing, and it becomes a slope for children on sleighs. After the snow melts, it becomes a creek, and we see people canoeing down the hill (40-41). We see campers and caravans arriving. The birds and the young squirrels are having an adventure on their own, which makes it worthwhile to read the book, again and again, each time focusing on different characters.
Setting
The story is clearly not set in a typical Dutch landscape. There are no mountains in the Netherlands, although people in the most southern province, Limburg, would argue their hills are pretty impressive. I have tried cycling in Limburg, and I cannot disagree with this anymore. We might be in Limburg. Or we could be in France, or – looking at the outfits from the hikers - in Germany or Austria. The students I read the book with all had the idea it was set in their home country or in a country they visited during vacations. We could even argue this book is not necessarily about the tree with the stripe, but about going on a vacation… and without giving away too much of the end of the story, the stripe does come to use for tourists!
One could also argue the story is not set in an actual country after all. When we focus on the small cottage, we notice a witch at work. She flies on her broom (page 33 counting from the title page onwards). There is a wolf on the loose behind her cottage, and on some of the pages, we notice a girl resembling Little Red Riding Hood. It makes one wonder… maybe the story is a mixture between reality and a fairy tale. The setting is both strange and familiar, regardless of the readers own background or location. Non-Dutch readers will be able to relate to it as much as Dutch readers will since the elements of spending a vacation in Europe as well as internationally recognized elements of fairytales are found in this visual narrative.
Time
Finding out what the time span is in a visual story is not easy, state Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott in their book ‘How Picturebooks Work’ (159). In The Stripe, the ellipses between the different spreads expose the passing of seasons and this helps the readers to determine how much time approximately passes in the story. Clues can be found in the change of the overall colour scheme, the weather conditions, the behaviour of the animals and the leaves on the trees (see 16-17 and 24-25). The story starts at the end of winter and ends at the end of spring the following year. This change of seasons offers an excellent opportunity for discussions in the classroom as well and gives us more clues about the European setting of this book.
This wordless picturebook The Stripe does not need a translation to reach out to readers. The visual language is an international language. The setting, the elements of time, and the different storylines are recognizable for readers from different backgrounds and allows them to share a story from different perspectives and still find a lot of similarities in how they relate to the narrative. This is why I would like to see this book published in other countries as well!
Discussion in the classroom:
- Which storylines can you detect in this book?
- Can you find out why there is a stripe on the tree?
Cheese:
Since the setting slightly resonates with the province of Limburg, I recommend this smelly but tasty soft cheese to go with The Stripe. https://www.kaas.nl/kazen/echte-limburger/
Sources:
Judith Graham. “Reading Contemporary Picturebooks” pp. 54-69 in Butler, Catherine, Modern children's literature: an introduction, null Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. How Picturebooks Work. 1st pbk. ed., Routledge, 2006.
Stenvert, Natascha. De streep. House of Books 2014