A Transnational Exhibit (continued)
Although each method of telling presents certain affordances that enable and sometimes constrain the narrative, each is striking and spellbinding in its own way. All display a wistfulness for past multilingual literacy experiences. Reading Debleena’s written text, we never see Debleena but must imagine her as the young girl she describes in words and reveals in a tattered and blurred photographic image. We also don’t see the adult Cornelia; we hear only her voice and see old photos go by in the video stills of her as a young child. We are treated to an aural interpretation interspersed with a running video of still images rather than a written text that we must interpret through reading. The audience must listen carefully. With Lisa, we both see and hear her adult self as she relates her narrative of living in the Netherlands for 17 years and also see the Dutch picture story of Jip en Janicke. We listen and watch, adding our own interpretation to an emerging literacy that moves from the “kinderlijke” Dutch she learned through her children to a Dutch that enabled her to work professionally as a translator. All three narratives use children’s picture books as a leitmotif signaling an early connection to literate practices but overall seem concerned with much more. Taken together, these narratives provide a small exhibit space to which viewers might turn for a glimpse into the early literate practices of those who cross, or whose parents cross, geographical and linguistic boundaries.
Despite the similarities that for us convey a certain coherence—an exhibit—each narrative and each method of reporting tend to require different kinds of inferences and imaginings on the viewers’ part: picturing Debleena who is barely seen and never heard as the storyteller; envisioning Cornelia, who is only heard, as an adult woman with memories; and conceiving of Lisa as a 20-something monolingual speaker of English, attempting to learn Dutch from her children and their schoolwork. Thus, this small section of the DALN that we curate is all about transnational literacy narratives that distinguish themselves by attention to place, cultural perceptions, memories, and family relations—even as the tools of reportage set the stories apart.