Abandoning Girls in a Circle and In the Middle of the Dark Hallway : Disempowerment in Two Contemporary Iranian Picturebooks

Children’s literature, by default, has children as its addressee, so it shoulders a responsibility to empower implied readers rather than silencing or disempowering them. We focus on two Persian-language picturebooks, investigating how they silence the protagonists and ultimately their implied readers: The Circle (2014) by Navid Seyyed Aliakbar, illustrated by Somayeh Varzdar, and In the Middle of the Dark Hallway (2017) by Mehdi Rajabi, illustrated by Ghazaleh Bigdelou. Via close reading of the verbal and visual narratives, we demonstrate the silencing and disempowerment of both protagonists and implied readers, tying those problems to the cultural silencing of girls in Iran.