Commentary: “How did so many different people end up in my kingdom?” asks a king portrayed as a blue, bearded head.
A mustachioed advisor answers, “Your most marvelous majesty, it’s been a long time since you left your castle. All of these people live here now.”
Thus opens “The Wall,” a 2018 children’s book by Giancarlo Macrì and Carolina Zanotti published in English last month.
The story purportedly offers parents a simple allegory, accompanied by beautiful art, as a way to begin talking with children about border walls, be they China’s, Hadrian’s or Donald Trump’s.
“Banish everyone who doesn’t look like me!” orders the king, surrounded by a cacophony of unique faces dappled in various colors, like a bag of Skittles spilled across every page.
Halfway through the book, a laminated wall pops up, with the little blue faces on one side and various other colors repatriated (in a bloodless ethnic cleansing) to the other side.
The first problem is embedded in the plot structure. The king needs the red faces to come back because they are the “wall builders,” and then he wants gardeners so he calls for the green faces to come back, and because he desires scientific research the purple faces must be readmitted, and so on.
While it is sweet that the king comes to appreciate different kinds of people regardless of what they look like, this does not reach the theory of human value expressed in the Declaration of Independence that all people are equal and — indifferent to their utility to the powerful — are endowed with self-evident rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There is also the obvious flaw in assigning particular aptitudes to classes, or colors, of people. Eventually he comes to view them as valuable, exclaiming, “How nice to see so many talented people in our kingdom!”
Yet they still live under monarchy, and here we arrive at a wider problem: how to inculcate democratic values in simple moral fables, when republican governance, division of labor and structures of social control are complex.
It is easy to understand why storytellers use kings to personify state power, but it does not help explain the unique ways democracies fail to liberate all those colorful dots so their lives truly become their own.
The artistic design of the book, by Mauro Sacco and Elisa Vallarino, is lovely yet the story’s central analogy requires a parental warning against ethnic stereotyping. Even then, its applicability to the politics of Trump’s border wall is remote.
There is no suggestion that many of those dots were present on that land before the blue “kingdom” was founded; nor a hint that the dot-people, despite the riotous mix of colors they represent, share class interests that conflict with those who erect walls and battlements.
In my storybook, the dots would overthrow the silly king, legalize the entire bag of Skittles once and for all, and take ownership of the kingdom’s tools so they are never divided by class hierarchy again.
All right, I admit this is much more difficult to produce as a story for children; and “The Wall” is, at least, a well-intentioned fable about appreciating diversity.
It may not explain much about why borders are useful to capital or the system’s historical arc, or introduce much about how contemporary nation-states and their governing political parties preserve them, but this creative team may be up for that challenge one day.
Desert Sage enjoys hearing from readers and listeners at adammassa@lcsun-news.com.