Title : The man who listened to the bird sing
Text : Christian Merveille
Drawing : Valeria Docampo
Editor: Alice Youth
Release date : June 6, 2024
Gender : Youth, Illustrated book
The man who listened to the bird sing is a large format children’s album for children aged 6 to 9. Published in collaboration with Amnesty International, this modern and timeless tale evokes freedom of thought and civil disobedience in the face of tyranny and torture.
Doing nothing is already resisting
In an imaginary kingdom, the inhabitants are ordered to lie down and cover their eyes whenever the king passes. One day, a man refuses to comply because he prefers to listen to a bird. Arrested, judged quickly, he is subjected to the worst treatment in the hope of making him comply. Yet, clinging to the happiness that the bird’s song gives him, he does not give in.
“Stop me if you want, I want to listen to the bird…”
The violence of arbitrariness evoked in a poetic but unvarnished manner
Mixing several techniques such as painting and collage, Valeria Docampo offers here very beautiful illustrations in a style quite different from those of her other children’s albums like Alva and the shine of memories. The highly stylized images extend vertically with a color palette dominated by red and ocher tones. Relief effects highlight the bird and the vegetation, like little touches of hope in a rigid and static universe.
If the illustrations remain modest, the text addresses the violence of torture unvarnished. We put out the eyes, we burst the eardrums of the man… who will never hear the bird again. The effects of rhyme and poetic repetition, however, help to attenuate the harshness of the subject.
A political and philosophical fable
Who is that man ? Why does he refuse to obey when he is subjected to the worst abuse and does not seem to have any particular demands? Can the action of a single man change the course of history? How can a shoddy regime whose soldiers don’t even have real horses and whose judges wear ridiculous hats inflict so much suffering? Are dictatorships doomed to collapse on their own? Because it raises many questions and avoids simplistic explanations, The man who listened to the bird sing is particularly conducive to discussions with children, in class or at home, on the themes of arbitrariness, freedoms and citizen resistance.
