ABSTRACT
Conventionally in children's literature, the child who is isolated, possibly a misfit, develops a sense of self and social validity through a relationship with a nonhuman animal. The entanglement of doomed animality, color, and violence is dramatized further in the dyad of Ginho and Isaura. In southern African fiction children who are "mutually embroiled" with nonhuman animals "in queer kin relations that matter" are as vulnerable and as doomed: Azarias is discounted for his entanglement with the cattle he tends before he dies. Rather than imagining "animals and young children together in complicit innocence and simplicity", Affrica Taylor suggests the process of "robust matting child and animal become mutually embroiled in their common worlds, reconfigured as queer kin relations that matter". Ill-equipped to deal with nonhuman creatures who are "wild" and potentially dangerous, their responses to nature, to the agency of "wild" animals, have been stultified by the fantastic and by artifice.
