'I'm the child that's been buried in leaves': Social Ghosting, Child Spectres and the Possibilities of Play in Ali Smith’s Spring (2019) and Companion Piece (2021)

In a House of Lords debate in June 2021, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth recounted how a Public Services Committee inquiry had shown that ‘more than 800,000 vulnerable children are, according to the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, totally invisible to public services.’ (Hansard, 18 June 2021) Such ‘ghosting’ of certain groups of children within social, educational and care provision provides just one example of how the position of ‘child’ within contemporary society by no means guarantees the protections and visibility it might be assumed to assure.
The child who is a refugee or who is seeking asylum is particularly vulnerable to this kind of phantomogenic disappearance, with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children going missing from state care at a rate of one per week according to a recent FOI request. The spectralisation of such children, their status as ghostly even in life, might be understood as, in part, a product of their literal and philosophical troubling of national borders, spaces which the theorist Achille Mbemebe terms ‘dead spaces of non-connection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity.’
The fiction of Ali Smith is populated with such precarious figures, whose troubling of borders - not merely national but epistemological – forces them to occupy multiple modes of spectral existence. In this paper, I offer a reading of Ali Smith’s Spring and Companion Piece, works written and published against the backdrop of refugee crises in mainland Europe and on the border between the United States and Mexico. Proceeding from an understanding of both texts as reconfiguring the ghost story genre to accommodate the social spectre, I analyse Smith’s deployments of phantasmic children who exist precariously on national and communal borders, considering the ghostly ‘games’ these young people play in order to negotiate their categorisation as ‘vagrant’, as ‘designated unwelcome person’, and the possibilities and limitations of such play in the face of Mbembe’s paradigm of ‘borderization’.