![]() ![]() Fishtail le Sewer, le Spewer, Manure, they call him, and much more. The class bully, Barry Bagsley, and two of his acolytes make mincemeat of Ishmael’s name. It becomes a narrative of a particularly challenging school year. ![]() ![]() The book is in the form of a journal, written in the first person and kept by the protagonist, fourteen-year-old Ishmael, to help him understand the problems his strange name has created for him. That is what the protagonist is called in Michael Gerard Bauer’s young adult novel, Don’t Call Me Ishmael!. ![]() So imagine a kid in a rough-and-tumble Australian boys’ school having a name like Ishmael Leseur. But where bullying does occur, it can potentially leave scars for life. In fact, two kids at the top of the social pecking order there carried a Greek and an Italian name. It’s not inevitable: I never copped it for having a foreign name, though I went to an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon school. In a school where Class A bullies rule, the results can be devastating. IT’S NOT EASY having a weird name, as many teenagers with foreign or experimental parents can attest – or unusual looks, or a stutter, or being too fat or too skinny, or shy, or any other characteristic that marks a child out from a very narrow mainstream. ![]()
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