Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
A soulful sidewise gleam at the loneliness of the immigrant experience.
“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,” Maya Angelou told Bill Moyers in their magnificent 1973 conversation. But what do freedom and belonging mean in an age when immigration — that is, institutionalized otherness, divisiveness, and exclusion — is remapping humanity’s geopolitical and emotional landscape?
That is what zoologist and author Nicola Davies and illustrator Laura Carlin explore with uncommon tenderness in King of the Sky (public library) — the lyrical story of a young immigrant boy, trapped in unbelonging after his family leave their native Italy for the gloomy and forlorn hills of Wales.
His hollowing loneliness spills from the pages under Davies’s poetic pen and Carlin’s soft, deeply alive illustrations:
It rained and rained and rained.
Little houses huddled on the humpbacked hills.
Chimneys smoked and metal towers clanked.
The streets smelled of mutton soup and coal dust.
And no one spoke my language.All of it told me This is not where you belong.
Throughout the story, we see the boy’s family — his mother, his infant sister — only as a ghostly and fragmentary presence, further contouring his all-consuming sense of isolation. Dislocated and desolate, magnetized by nostalgia, he finds solace in the improbable friendship of his elderly neighbor — a retired coal miner who spends his days caring for and training racing pigeons.
Just one thing reminded me of home — of sunlight, fountains, and the vanilla smell of ice cream in my nonna’s gelateria.
It was Mr. Evans’s pigeons in their loft behind my house, cooing as if they strutted in St.
Peter’s Square in Rome.
Every day, the boy visits Mr. Evans and watches his pigeons soar “above the chimneys and the towers, up to where the sky stretched all the way to Italy.” One day, Mr. Evans puts a grey pigeon with a head “whiter than a splash of milk” into his young friend’s hands — a pigeon he believes is going to be a champion, one whose “eye blazed with fire.” He…
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