Drawn Across Borders: A book review

Book author: George Butler

It’s always a pleasure to roam inside a book shop and discover a book that is promising for your reading taste. Through my first glance at this white hardcover, it looked like a perfect living room table’s art. Then I approached the book and voila, it’s about immigration! One of my recent interests.

Happily, I purchased the book, feeling like trading a rare gem, which is true. Drawn Across Borders is George Butler’s collection of sketches of immigrants. He drew them in the front line of war, in the abandoned war cities, in refugee camps, in borders and in re-established cities. However critical a war or a crisis is, through George’s sketches we see how simple these immigrant people are, how they struggle and accept life. The resilience of these people amazed me!

Some immigration were not about fleeing a regime or crossing a border. They were immigration from rural villages to cities for want of work.

The drawing of Kenya reminded me so much of Bangladesh. You can see hawkers selling cheap plastic toys, the roof of a bus stuffed with luggage- overpopulated crowd. For want of work this extra population comes to the city and they have very limited space to sleep at night, very limited wage for manual labor and their family are separated from them most of the year.

Often we forget to realize behind the heavy figure of war casualties or refugees that there are individuals and each of them has a unique story. George Butler presents us some of those stories with few words and vivid portraits and sketches in this book and makes us think, how heavy it is to leave a home against your choice.