Ferdinand is 23 years old, has CHARGE syndrome, was born with a severe cleft palate and has had three operations. He cannot hear and his eyesight is very poor, which makes any attempt at communication quite difficult. A little “Johnny got his gun” who wouldn’t have made a war. Arrived at this level of the blog note you say to yourself “Don’t throw any more, it’s to cry”.
Except that the book written by Ferdinand’s father and mother-in-law, very nicely illustrated, tells with fantasy and humor the daily life of a child who might be thought cut off from the world but who shows an overflowing and permanent imagination. to relate to others.
This beautiful album (well done to the publisher, HD, who was not afraid of the subject), is aimed at children from 3 years old and explains why Ferdinand growls, touches everything, stamps his feet when he is happy. The more we move away from normality, the more we do poetry. Ferdinand listens to music with his hands, is passionate about refrigerators, loves to think in his bath. Behind the pranks of an eternal child, slices of life, funny anecdotes and unusual discoveries, there are the implicit texts. What very young readers will not perceive, which will set their parents’ throats: the increased energy of a whole family, as well as its inventiveness, to interact at all costs with this child from elsewhere. You have to hold his hand when he’s a baby, and in a certain way, carry him, a lot, to show him that he is not alone, and point to everything. Then it is with the drawings that Ferdinand is taught the safety rules. The day his parents and three sisters realize that the youngest communicates with sign language, everyone gets down to it. The family is mobilized to support the progress of this child who is not loved despite his difference but who is visibly loved, too, for its singularity.
I find in this album what I felt every time I interviewed mothers of disabled children. A strange and disturbing feeling. This feeling that beyond the suffering, the exhaustion, the anguish, the injustices, these parents and these children had woven a very particular bond, of an intensity and a truth inaccessible to the others, the “Normal”. And can I write it down? It happened to me during these talks to feel a pang in my heart at the idea that I will certainly never live this communion with my children who are so well.
Meet Ferdinand, Jean-Benoît Patricot and Francesca Pollock, HD éditions, € 10