Thanks for the opportunity to begin to think about ways in which we might compare contemporary books for young people across nations. As I look back over the posts Debra and I have exchanged on this site, it seems to me that we could list a number of sets of terms as ones that we could use for such work:

- representations of home and homed subjects, in relation to representations of homelessness and homeless subjects

- given homes or filiativel families, in relation to chosen homes, or affililiative groupings

- the encoding of spaces as private or public, with particular attention to sections of texts in which such encoding is discussed

- the "proper" or "normal" citizen subject in relation to the abject subject.

As administrator for this thread, I can see that there have been more than 100 visits to this discussion. I'd be interested to have some of our silent visitors take up one of these terms and topics, and suggest other ways we might think about them. I will continue to check from time to time to see if any of you have done so. For now, however, I'll sign off and wait for another administrator to start a new discussion topic.

Best wishes,

Mavis Reimer

Happy New Year! And happy summer from Australia.

I’ve just finished reading Tom Finder and was thinking more about private and public spaces, about being inside and outside homes, about belonging and alienation. This passage from the novel seems particularly pertinent. Riding the LRT, Tom

looked out the window at the houses, wondering who lived there, how they had picked that house in that spot. Each one was a hiding place, a place to be invisible, to do all your private acts. He rode standing up. He stared at the houses. Sometimes, if the curtains were open, he could see in, see children watching TV or people sitting at the table. They were just glimpses, like postcards.

            He felt a huge sadness inside, this big, empty, locked-out feeling, like everything good had to happen in a house, like all of life happened in houses and no one would let him in and he didn’t even know how to ask. He liked the little houses as well as the big ones. He could have been happy to call any one of them home, but none looked familiar. (18)

In this passage, Tom is a mobile subject, encased in the LRT, standing not sitting. He exists both inside and outside public and private spaces. At this stage in the novel, he doesn’t remember the trauma that has occurred inside his familial home (at the hand—and feet—of his mother’s boyfriend), so he yearns for the belonging he imagines one must feel inside homes. The novel makes clear that houses are not necessarily good and safe spaces.

I agree that these Canadian novels about homelessness—especially street kids/people—represent affiliative homes as an alternative to filiative homes. I think that this distinction could be another point of comparison between Canadian and Australian narratives about home and homelessness. It seems to me that Australian refugee narratives focus more on the difficulties of maintaining a filiative home. Or at least a filiative family. Does Said distinguish between home and family?

Some of the main aspects of Australian refugee narratives focus on the push factors that lead families to seek refuge in another country and the journey between homes. Upon arrival in Australia (or in a detention centre), the often damaged family struggles to stay together. Instead of interrogating the circumstances that lead people to escape to the streets in the Canadian novels we’ve been discussing, these Australian refugee narratives examine the conditions that lead people to escape to a new country. I wonder if there is a correlation between the Canadian streets and the Australian nation state. Both are imagined places of refuge from trauma and neither place provides a safe haven. If both street people and refugees are characterised as abject subjects, then these novels challenge these perceptions.

Kind regards,

Debra

Sorry for being away from this discussion for so long: Christmas and all that entails intervened.

I really like Debra's suggestion that we might extend our terms as we think about the question of what I'm calling homelessness: "homelessness" has always seemed to me a figure for a larger theoretical, philosophical concern. And the possibility that that concern might have to do with the boundary between the public and the private is worth exploring.

If I think about *Tom Finder*, the Canadian YA novel I mentioned in a previous post, it's clear that these could be resonant terms. While Tom is running away from an abusive home, his last name is one he has been assigned by an old Aboriginal man he's met in the public park where he's sleeping. The old man is looking for his son, who is also living on the streets, and he enlists Tom (rather warily, but in response to a vision he's had) to help him to find the young man. Negotiating new relations with Aboriginal people is, arguably, among the foremost public, political issues in Canada at present. So, using the terms Debra proposes, we could possibly read *Tom Finder* as a story about the inadequacy of definitions of home that take it to be only a private place.

Or, perhaps, only a given place. One of the patterns in Canadian texts that I've discussed in previous articles is the extent to which chosen homes are valued over given or inherited homes, a pattern I've identified through Edward Said's vocabulary as the valuation of the affiliative home over the filiative home.

Do the refugee narratives you mention, Debra, also value affiliation?

Best,

Mavis

Hi Mavis and IRSCL colleagues,

I've been thinking about the representation of homelessness, too, and have been keeping an eye open here in Australia for Australian books that deal with street kids. I might be making a broad generalisation, but it seems to me that homelessness in Australian texts for young people feature refugees or asylum seekers rather than street kids. A quick look on the Austlit database shows only two children's literature titles listed under the keywords "street kids": Margaret Clark's Back on Track: Diary of a Street Kid (1995) and Gregory Roger's Way Home (1994). As a comparison, there are 58 titles listed under the keyword "refugees." While this search may be a start, it doesn't cover all the books. For instance, two other Australian books that deal with children living on the street are Ranulfo's Nirvana's Children (2001) and Margaret Wild's Woolvs in the Sitee (2005).

This reply doesn't quite address your question about embracing the street, Mavis, but I'll continue to think about your questions and to think about how Australian texts represent public and private spaces. I wonder if for characters who are refugees, the traumas are those that take place in public spaces, whereas for street kids, often the trauma that leads them to the streets occur in private, which is the case inthe Canadian novels Pain and Wastings by Carrie Mac and Sketches by Eric Walters, both of which I just finished reading.

Happy holidays,

Debra Dudek

Do other people have examples of books from their countries in which young people are embracing "the street," or other public spaces, rather than staying within such private spaces as family homes?

Mavis Reimer

As some of you will know, I've been interested for some time in what seems to me a growin g interest in homeless characters in texts for children and adolescents. I know this is true in Canada, the contemporary literature I know best, but I think it's also true internationally, from the sporadic searching I've done on the topic. I hope that, during the next few weeks while I'm facilitating this forum discussion, we can 1) develop an international list of interesting titles of such books; 2) talk about what these books might have in common; and 3) think together about critical and theoretical approaches to studying such literature.

Am I right that there is a new interest internationally in homelessness in texts for the young?

Mavis Reimer