Joe Ollmann Reviews Thomas King's Borders, illustrated by Natasha Donovan
Borders. Thomas King, illus. Natasha Donovan. HarperCollins. $21.99 CDN, 192 pp., ISBN 9781443460675
Borders is a graphic novel adaptation of the classic 1997 short story of the same name by Thomas King. It must be an anxious task to adapt a story by the legendary Indigenous author, but the young Métis cartoonist Natasha Donovan — listed as “illustrator” on the cover — is an experienced creator of graphic novels, and is herself a rising star in the world of comics for younger people.
The graphic novel is a very faithful adaptation of the short story. The text is used verbatim and I don’t think they’ve added a single word. It strikes me that a short story is about the perfect length to adapt to a graphic novel without losing too much material as sometimes happens when adapting a novel to another format. Borders is truly a collaboration between the original text and adaptation illustration. Donovan tells the story in a simple, clean-line, young reader friendly illustration style. Beyond visualizing the characters for us, her biggest contribution is to fill some of the spaces Mr. King left for us to imagine in the sparse, episodic style he employs in this story. The art style skews to a younger audience; it’s a clean and pretty style. It’s less gritty than I personally like, but it tells the story effectively and works well for both young and older readers.
Borders is the story of an Indigenous mother and her young son travelling to visit her daughter, who has moved from Lethbridge, Alberta to Salt Lake City, Utah under a small cloud of rancour with her mother. At the US border, when asked her citizenship, the mother will only say “Blackfoot,” as her nation. After much bureaucracy, the two are sent back to the Canadian border, where again, the mother will only respond “Blackfoot,” to the question of citizenship. The mother and her son are then trapped in a red tape, limbo, no-country between the two borders which are arbitrary to her.
To me, the story is about a young person learning the difference between being good stubborn and bad stubborn. We see him watching disapprovingly, as his mother and sister are so rigid with each other before the daughter leaves home. But he obviously admires his mother’s tenacity in her interactions with government officials: “Pride is a good thing to have… I figured that someday I’d have it too.”
The story is told from the boy’s perspective, and King’s understanding of how a child thinks is clear in the narrative; the confusion over adult issues, the unselfconscious selfishness and the burgeoning beginnings of understanding are all perfectly conveyed.
Donovan also highlights King’s focus on the velveteen-wrapped violence of polite border guards, smiling and speaking with civility while continually touching their guns, and of course, never budging from their protocols and actually hearing the Blackfoot woman’s protest.
An interesting aspect of re-reading the original short story for comparison with this adaptation is how radical the central act of civil disobedience in the story must have seemed at the time of its publication. Why wouldn’t the mother just “follow the rules” and answer her citizenship, even though these borders weren’t recognized historically by Indigenous People and were the result of stolen land, genocide and broken treaties? And now, reading it again in the present day, in this new format of a graphic novel for kids, the mother’s interactions with government officials seemed totally reasonable to me today. I suppose this is a sign of the shift of perception and awareness of First Nation issues from a settler point of view since 1997 that writers like Thomas King have helped to influence.
This graphic novel adaptation of Thomas King’s story is an effective introduction to civil disobedience and issues of Indigenous sovereignty for young readers. It could be useful for parents and teachers in starting conversations with kids on these issues and the book will make for empathetic readers.
Cartoonist Joe Ollmann is the author of eight books. He co-curated This Is Serious, a 47-artist retrospective of indie comics in Canada at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. He won the Doug Wright Award in 2007 for his book, This Will All End in Tears, and lost that same award many other times for other books.