ABSTRACT
This chapter brings to the fore the multimodal aspects of multilingualism in the Finnish comic artist Ville Tietäväinen’s graphic novel Näkymättömät kädet (2011; Invisible Hands), which tells the story of Rashid, a poor Moroccan man who illegally crosses the Mediterranean Sea to Spain in search of work and a better life for himself and his family. It deals with global inequality, irregular immigration, questions of ethnicity and racism, religion, honour and insanity. This graphic novel of Finnish origin has itself crossed borders in the form of translations into Swedish, German, French and Arabic, but the original work itself is far from being monolingual. Aura Nikkilä examines how multimodal, visual-verbal intertextual references that frequently make use of multilingualism transcend both cultural and national borders, as well as the borders of different media. She shows how multilingual elements, such as Spanish and Arabic phrases in the dialogue, Spanish and Finnish song lyrics, and Spanish-language graffiti, make visible and cut through many kinds of borders: geographical, physical and mental, but also the border between the graphic novel and the reader.
