By Ashliegh Gehl
What is more freeing than a kite floating high in the sky, teetering on the wind, gazing upon the world with an envious bird’s-eye view? It’s a feeling Anne Laurel Carter’s words and Akin Duzakin’s pictures evoke in What the Kite Saw, a 32-page picture book published by Groundwood Books.
War is often filled with loss, uncertainty, and unknowns. It’s a challenging, emotionally charged concept difficult to convey so clearly in picture books—and yet here we have a work of art navigating the middle ground with a fleet of kites taking flight. It’s the perfect position from which to invite young readers, ages four to eight, into a fiction that is tethered so tightly to reality. A fiction illuminated by the power of imagination during a time of great distress.
It’s also a shared reality because war is war, regardless of where it surfaces. The heartbreak of loss paired with fear slithers in the storyline’s darkest shadows only to be thwarted by a lantern of hope.
What the Kite Saw was inspired by Palestinian children. It’s very timely and relevant given the resurgence of unfortunate conflict in Gaza. In this narrative, Carter centres the story around a young boy’s point of view. From the first spread, with the streaks of red stratus-like clouds marching with the soldiers in the streets, the story is instantly in motion. You feel the isolation associated with occupation and the devastation imposed on the little boy and his family as his father and brother are taken away. Duzakin’s use of colour in bleak, unbearable moments tells a visual story of separation and what may have transpired.
It’s through the lifting of curfews—small breaths of air—that the story softly lightens and shows children coming together. It’s a space for the boy to mobilize his friends, to inspire them to create make-shift kites. Shaped like stars and strewn from rooftops, the kites can see the world in ways the boy and his friends cannot. It sees the city, in all of its entirety, and can find the place where the boy’s father and brother have gone. While the small joy of kite flying is but a flicker, quickly deflated by gunfire, it is through the release of a kite, one which escapes and lifts off toward the stars, that the child can see, if only in his mind, his father and brother again.
When reading this book, read it three times. First, the words and pictures. Second, just the words to absorb the precision of Carter’s pacing and then revisit it a third time by only reading the art. There’s a story in each spread which not only complements Carter’s words but deepens the reader’s understanding of the child’s delicate perspective in ways that will strongly resonate with visual learners. Every movement in Duzakin’s art is a strategic decision to further communicate the story, unlocking another layer of emotion and truly taking this story to another level. As much as it is a story of war and loss, it upholds what we know to be true. Imagination prevails in the darkest of hours and builds just enough resiliency to carry us through to a brighter tomorrow.