Using various words for individuality – daftness, madness, crackers – Almond infuses conformity to threaten his characters’ uniqueness: a standardized school test and a “destrangification operation” in My Name is Mina, Aunt Doreen’s dumpling cooking in My Dad’s a Birdman, headmaster Todd’s unquestioned coral punishment in The Fire-Eaters, and Clarence P. Clapp from DAFT (the Departmint for the Abolishun of Fishy Things) in The Boy who Swam with Piranhas.
But the protagonists nobly push back: Mina opts for homeschooling, Jackie continues eating insects, Bobby and Daniel team up to post pictures of Todd’s beatings around school, and the circus Stan joins – a condensed, exaggerated microcosm of the world’s individuality with figures like the boar man – feeds Clapp to the piranha tank. |
“There’s many ways to [discover how to be yourself], Mina.
A different way for each and every one of us.
And you know what? It goes on all your life”
– Malcolm, My Name is Mina, p. 234
In The Boy who Swam with Piranhas, Stan’s identity crisis emerges when he must synthesize his parent memories, his life with his Uncle’s fishing business, and his “destiny” as the next piranha swimmer. The idea that “every one of us needs a drop of madness in us” is expressed through a moonlight superstition (124). Therefore, Almond encourages human individuality and child imagination but acknowledges the effect of a judgmental world, which he captures best in Mina’s thought when she sees Michael move in: “Maybe he would want something to do with somebody like me” (My Name is Mina, 295).