Emigrants – Strangers in a strange land

Abstract

Shaun Tan was born in 1974 in Western Australia. He is a graduate of Fine Arts and English Literature and currently works as a freelance artist and author in Melbourne. He also participates in scenography, conceptual art and animation films. His works of historical character always express a social and political critique and, as the author himself affirms, reveal the “recurrent interest in the idea of ‘belonging’”. The present study focuses on Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival”, 2007 which tells the story, in images,
of a man leaving his family for the unknown. The????emigrant reaches a “crazy” place with strange customs, peculiar animals, floating objects and indecipherable languages. In this way, Tan introduces themes such as the di????culty of adapting to another culture, the importance of the family, identity and the feeling of belonging. In the research for this book, the author collected autobiographical stories of emigrants, which greatly contributed to this work being ecumenical, since it is equivalent to the reality faced by many contemporary emigrants or from other times and from other places. This is a peculiar work because it dispenses with written language. As Tan (2007) points out, “the protagonist can not read or understand anything in that new country, so the reader should not be able to”, so that he can experience a feeling of uncertainty and discovery thus allowing him to easily place himself as the protagonist, assuming that this is a situation that we can all pass go through.
It was in this position that we put ourselves, without suppressing our knowledge of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) visual design grammar, which, being a detailed and explicit methodology, allows the images to be analysed as visual communicative texts, not as a closed text in itself, but inserted in the socio-cultural context of which they are part.