Review by Woodrow Phoenix
“One cold morning, late in Amsterdam’s Hunger Winter of 1944/45, when my mother was five years old, she heard a blackbird’s uplifting song. She asked my grandmother whether the blackbird knew it was wartime. After giving it some thought, my grandmother answered, ‘Yes, I believe the blackbird knows. And I believe it sings so beautifully not in spite of it, but because of it.’”
Song of a Blackbird begins in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2011. A teen girl Annick, is curious about her family history after learning of her grandmother’s experiences as a child during the Second World War. She decides to find out more about what happened back then by investigating the five places shown in prints hanging on her grandmother’s wall, the only souvenirs of that traumatic time. The story then switches to April 1943 in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. After a discussion in class about resisting propaganda, teenaged Emma meets up with her teacher at night in the deserted school. They watch Nazis rounding up Jews in the streets beneath them and Emma decides to join the resistance, entering the world of printing presses and counterfeit documents, helping Jews to escape the concentration camps. Annick’s story in 2011 and Emma’s story in 1943 then unfold in alternating chapters, both focused on the places shown in those five prints.
Maria Van Lieshout’s graphic black and white shapes are often placed over photographs of locations featuring in her story, with a minimal colour palette of pale green, with red accents for wartime and yellow for the near past. The last piece of her storytelling jigsaw is narration from the eponymous blackbird in strong black captions, which tie the two timelines together with an omniscient, poetic and sometimes ironic tone of voice as the bird comments on the two girls lives and their journeys on parallel paths. Structurally this is a lot for a young reader to take in, and it feels like this narrative structure is configured to give an otherwise simple story something extra, as both Annick and Emma glide through their difficult experiences with very little friction.
Older readers will likely find more food for thought in the 24 pages of historical references and extensive bibliography at the end of the book. These provide the solidity and real life background of the places and people the story was based on; the theatre, the school, the women, the church, the office, the publisher, the printers, the NSB Dutch Nazi party, the SS, and the photographers of the locations. The author seems to admit as much as she writes a disclaimer from the blackbird on the final page:
“… if you’ve felt anything during our flight back in time, it is not because the story is a factual story. It is not. It did not happen exactly this way. It is fiction. Improvised and imagined. I take full credit for that. But like every good story worth its ink, it contains a kernel of truth. Of fact. Indeed, many kernels. On occasion, an entire chunk of factual truth. You will learn about these just ahead. This means it is time for me to say goodbye. Historical facts, figures, and events are simply not my jam.”
Given the mission of arousing curiosity and reminding children of a past that some would like to forget, Song of a Blackbird is a useful primer on life during wartime, to get young readers thinking about the history of those times.
