Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish: A Tale of Endless Resistance and Resilience

Reading Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish (1968) as a children’s story of political and philosophical significance, this article examines how the fish’s movement from the pond toward the sea reconfigures relations among space, authority, and agency. Drawing on Beauvais’s distinction between adult authority and child might, the article argues that resistance develops as the younger subject tests inherited knowledge across changing spatial and social conditions. The pond establishes an enclosed order sustained by inherited knowledge and collective conformity, whereas the fish’s departure brings it into encounters that alter its understanding and capacity to act. The sea intensifies this tension by combining expanded mobility with continuing exposure to capture and violence. The article also considers the story’s framing structure, in which the grandmother fish recounts the journey to a younger generation and one red fish remains awake thinking about the sea. This final act of transmission gives the narrative a pedagogical dimension. The article argues that The Little Black Fish presents resistance as a relational process produced through questioning, encounter, and collective action, while resilience emerges through the capacity to retain, adapt, and reactivate knowledge across changing spatial conditions. Beauvais’s account of authority and child might consequently intersects with the tale’s changing geographies where agency develops through what the younger subject learns, carries forward, and makes usable under circumstances that could not have been anticipated in advance.