Living in the stomach

I loved Stitches. I appreciated the child pov throughout the graphic; I thought it lent itself well to the overall themes of the story. I especially enjoyed the rabbit as the therapist. Small twisted reality to fit the narrative, and he never paused to explain the twists. Why not have the therapist be a rabbit? His character loved Alice in Wonderland, so it was fitting. Ugh, and the watch was gut-wrenching. Small saw the rabbit as a parental figure but the rabbit always had a schedule to keep.

I thought it was interesting on pg. 63 when he jumps into his drawing and the space is in the shape of a stomach. That image really connects to the images later in the graphic about how Small just wanted to live inside his mouth. I also like this idea that safety is in the stomach. I feel so many emotions in my stomach, and a lot of the times my stomach tells me when I can relax/when I'm safe.

I didn't feel like any of the characters were neglected because I had no intimate moments with the other characters until the end. I think it's when authors give me moments where the main character steps aside for a side character that creates an expectation in me to see the side character develop. But in this graphic I didn't care if I never found out what happened to the father and brother. I did enjoy the real life pictures of them in the back though. That was a very nice touch.

The moment with the mom at the end made me cry. That single tear as she lay dying. Ugh. So moving. I appreciated that Small didn't just leave her as the villain. He gave us some insight into her character. even though she harms him in so many ways throughout the graphic. The ending really showed that Small was ready to talk about his childhood; he was ready to approach his parents as characters and see them in a universal light.

The section about going to Indiana was especially hard for me to read, but Small does a great job at balancing humor with very horrible situations. I was astonished that Grandma burned his little hand. Then his mom yelled at him! He really couldn't turn to anyone in those moments. But I don't know about anyone else, Jesus saying he is a darn fool in his dream made me crack up. There is so much humor in the child pov that Small really tapped into. His utilization of humor really elevated this graphic above "misery lit."

I was very surprised by the revelation that his mom was a lesbian. I enjoyed going back through the graphic to pick up the hints I missed. I especially like the hint on pg. 113 when Mrs. Dillon talks about Brigitte Bardot and she refers to her huge breasts and the frame is looking down into her own breasts. I thought that was quite clever of Small.

David In Wonderland

The graphic novel, Stitches by David Small was highly troubling and full of dense emotion. This is my second time reading it, and it is somewhat traumatizing for both the reader and the narrator. The drawings have an ethereal quality to them to highlight the scary reality that the author had to deal with as a child growing up in the 1950s. There is this fantastical reality that shifts from real-life and dreams, sometimes reality seeming like a scary dream.

Even reading it the second time around was daunting, because most of the novel is troubling, harrowing, and dark. The tone is eerie at times, sticking to Small’s young child-frame-of-mind throughout the text, except when the author grows up. Strangely, it has a somewhat upbeat, happy ending, but the parent’s toll on the child is hindering and the reader can see how negatively their actions, especially the father’s horrible radiation/experiments of the child, affect him in the long run. It is a fascinating text overall, but leaves the reader with a twist in the stomach, trying to swallow down the horror of one artist’s life/childhood through graphic pictures and hand-written text.

My favorite scene in the entire book was the fetus in a jar scene when the author and his mother pick up his father from the hospital. The first scene with the fetus in a jar is on pages 38-41, 45, 147, 308-309. This motif or recurring symbol is strange and alluring, if not creepy. This “fetus” follows Small many different times, and he even goes back to room 4 in the hospital during his mother’s death in 1970. The symbol of the “fetus” could represent the internal anger that seems to follow Small in his adolescent life. In fact, he seems to be drowning in dreams, some that include this fetus” like on page 45 when he says, “Sent to bed with no supper, I dreamed that night of the little man in the jar.” He feels connected to this “little man” by even later imagining it as part of himself, residing in the growth in his neck when he was eleven (pg. 147).

There is also a symbol of the “key” that is seem throughout the book as well. It first appears on page 45, and also on page 202-206. This is the scene where Small finds out that his parents have lied to him about the lump that was removed from his throat when he was fourteen. The “key” is the secret that he actually had cancer, and later in the text he finds out that his father has given him his cancer by his X-rays “two-to-four hundred rads” as a baby on pages 285-287. They symbol of the key is a metaphor to Small’s understanding of the truth. His parents are full of lies and deceit, and the “key” is the key to Small’s unraveling of the actual truth.

By representing David’s first therapist as a rabbit, he is able to open up to this “person” because he was never allowed to open up to anyone in his family, as seen by the text. The rabbit is first seen on page 250-270. He is mentioned later again, “of course, the white rabbit always had his watch… ‘David, I’m sorry, it’s time for us to stop.’ …while I always had to return home where, as I was slowly beginning to pull myself together, my family seemed to be quickly falling apart” (270). Right after that David’s mother’s lesbian secret is revealed to the reader. The white rabbit is the same rabbit from Alice In Wonderland with a ticking pocket-watch that first leads Alice down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

I noticed the theme of Alice In Wonderland in every aspect or dream in the book. It is first mentioned on page 56 where Small declares, “I had fallen in love with Alice. Especially with her long blonde hair. I thought it must be her hair that gave Alice the magical ability to travel to a land of talking animals, singing flowers and dancing teapots. I wanted to go there immediately” (56). On pages 62-63 six-year old David falls into a magical world of his own imagination, which is of art and cartoons. This is also seen earlier on pages 48-49 when his drawings seem to come to life straight out of the page. Two pages earlier, Davis has a dream where the “fetus” occurs, and he is seen falling down the rabbit hole like in Alice and Wonderland. Even the surgery scene emote this “falling down the rabbit hole” mentality. (pages 164-165, 179-180). The scenes where the author is shrunken down to a miniature size is exactly like Alice when she drinks one of the bottles titled “drink me” which was a shrinking potion and becomes super small in size. On page 182 David is seen hallucinating (off of the drugs during surgery) that he is small, inside his own mouth, seen crawling on his own tongue.

Also, after the gruesome scene where he finally sees the scar/stitches from his surgery, he can no longer speak and blends into the background like wallpaper. After that scene, he shrinks back to a miniature sized-Alice state and resides (temporarily) inside his own mouth again. He explains, “At home, late at night, I began to have the sensation that I was shrinking down…and living inside my own mouth…A hot, moist cavern in which everything I thought, every word that came into my brain, was thunderously shouted back at me. I was scared to go up to bed, afraid that the screaming in my head would be heard by the family” (216-217). He is scared of not being able to be heard by anyone, and not being able to speak out loud is harmful to his psyche and mental state because every emotion and fear becomes bottled up, ready to explode at any given moment.

Also, there were recurring themes of houses and rooms, open and closed doors, and dreams. Small’s recurring dream of crawling through the same empty house, while the rooms are getting smaller and smaller resembles Alice after she drinks the “drink me” bottle and grows into to a giant size. On page 222 and 241 Small is a giant crawling and getting to a tiny door, “…narrowing passageways and doors of diminishing size…” (241).

The last event that is somewhat tied to Alice and Wonderland is the scene where David’s grandma goes “crazy” and locks her husband in the cellar, lights the curtains on fire, and dances around naked outside. The grandma reminds me of the Mad Hatter, by the way she joyfully dances with glee in that scene. Small’s mother could represent the Red Queen/The Queen of Hearts and maybe the father as the Caterpillar because he is full of useful advice or medical information. He is always seen smoking out of a pipe, not unlike the Caterpillar’s hookah pipe. His rocky/complex relationship between David and his mother relates to the rocky /complex relationship between Alice and The Queen of Hearts. I did not see all of these “Alice In Wonderland” references until the second time I read the book, but Small’s story seems to real and raw, and the beautiful black-and-white drawings depict this fantastical, if not frightening world that he grew up in. Imagination, therapy, and art actually saved him from following his mother and grandmother into the “asylum” seen on the last pages in a dream.

Silent Language

The very first thing I noticed about Stiches was the lack of words Small uses throughout the novel. Fun home rarely had panels that weren't narrated nor had dialogue and in my small experience with graphics this is the common practice. The images are used in relation to words to tell the story. Small’s book however has entire sets of pages and panels that are entirely without any kind of narration or dialogue, the reader is left solely with images and has to interpret those images without help from the author. This technique works very well when action seems to be taking place, Small walking or being put to sleep but other times I was left wanting to know what was happening in the character’s head. When he is just wandering around I want to hear his thoughts, I want to know his feelings.

             Small I believe intentionally leaves the reader with the ‘silent’ panels. His life is filled with silence both before and after surgery. Before the surgery his silence is a self-imposed silence that he uses to defend himself against the outside world. His family is also filled with silence, and everything seems to remain unsaid. The very beginning of the book starts by defining each of the family members ‘language’ his mother coughs and slams cabinets, his father punched a punching bag, and his brother played drums. These are the only noises Small has that break the silence of his life. This is why we readers often get onomatopoeia in place of narration or dialogue. In many of the ‘silent’ panels there are still small noise ‘screeches’ ‘whaps’ and ‘fffwummphs’ this is the language that Small knows how to navigate. He knows how to use and interpret these noises as a language. So he uses these along with images to tell his story instead of using a language of talking that is foreign to him.

After the surgery as Small puts it his ‘silence was no longer a matter of choice’ (187) he is forced into a silence that he believes will ‘define [him] from her on in’ (186). What this creates is an even more impossible atmosphere of language for Small to navigate. When one has the choice to speak and does not use it, it can give them power or strength. When one cannot use language at all they are weakened further they lose the sense of strength that silence might give them. Small even expresses that his silence made him feel invisible ‘even among my old friends I felt invisible, a shadow flickering around the edges of every event’ (213). These friends were the same once that (theoretically) accepted his chosen silence before. Now that he is forced into this silence, however, they cannot accept his inability to speak though he may not have spoken much before.

By then being able to choose in his book when to use speaking language and when to use his own language of images and sounds Small regains some of his power from being silenced. He is able to control what he wants the reader to feel, if he wants us to feel his silent language or not. It is an interesting choice, and further analysis of the moment he does each would be interesting to do. 

Smiles,

Haley

Shadows, sound, angles, circles

I was incredibly moved by this work, even if I found myself disappointed by the rushed way in which Small seems to sum up time after he leaves his parents’ home. I forgive that ending for the power of the rest of the work. I’ve got a bajillion notes on different things I’ve noticed. Here I’ll try to distill some of the elements that for me made this graphic memoir so brilliant and impacting:

Shadows and silence:

I find it curious and poignant that Small opens his graphic memoir with an image of the Detroit cityscape. The landscape is rendered as a vast haunting shadow, the contours are vague, the buildings are almost indistinct, the belching smog is depicted with the same shade that is used to represent earth. This gestures meaningfully to what is to come in the story. As in: things are contaminated by this moment of industrial fortitude, just as Small’s cancer is the product of the medical milieu: x-rays. These shadows situate us in place and time. Through these shadows the city seems steeped in a profound echoing loneliness. Human presence and interaction are indicated only through the constructed environment: cold, and hard, and static. As Small zooms us in on that landscape in the following pages, the city is desolate, arranged a claustrophobic linear order, with empty parking lots, and empty streets. There is so much separation and space. When we finally enter his family’s home the isolation and silence are already palpable, establishing the emotional tenor in/through which the story emerges.

As a result each time shadow is used, it bears the echoes and saturation of the initial emotions with which it is laden in the first few pages of the work. This seems important then when considering that our first introduction to his mother is through her shadow on the kitchen floor on page 14. In this sense is introduced through a frame of distance and darkness, vacancy. Shadows like ghosts, haunt, so she haunts this first panel. On a symbolic level this represents the ways in which she is haunted by her own silence, pain, shame, secretes. The shadows on her bedroom door and the askew angle at which the light hits it gestures again to the internal darkness and rage with which she wrestles and her great distance from her son. The way little Small watches his father thumping a punching bag from the top of the stairs in shadow emphasizes again the fissures. It would take me many pages to document all of the moments in the text where this holds, but a couple more include:

·      The preserved fetus which he finds on the empty upper floor of the hospital which becomes in a sense a foreshadow (forgive the pun) of what is to come

·      The moment he is given sleeping gas and enters a shadowy oblivion that will eventually produce his literal silencing

·      The way that oblivion enters the space of his throat post operation

·      The way he becomes ghostlike at school

·      The way the world enters perpetual shadow after the psychiatrist informs him that his mother does not love him

·      The image of his father ascending the stairs to his bedroom when he invites him to have dinner in order to confess to him that it was he who ultimately caused his cancer due to overuse of x-ray

In shadow everything is flattened, things are not what they seem, so when we consider how silence and “being left in the dark” figure into the thematic explorations of this work, all these visual cues become profoundly relevant. It is in this (and many other ways) that Smith knits the narrative – what is told in word and image – together with incredible nuance. The way Small places the x-ray – both the machine and the image it produces – into juxtaposition with the shadow and silence, ie. the way in which the x-ray is supposed to lift into visibility what cannot be seen, is supposed to articulate the invisible, but in this story simply produces even greater silence, more shadow, more flattening darkness, seems important; particularly in relationship to the later part of the work, where what becomes redemptive, and where the/a truth is finally uttered, is through the work of creative practice, through artistic reinterpretation. He asserts that it is only through this refiguring through memory and craft that intergenerational cycles of silence that produce illnesses of all kinds are broken. Art was the thing that ensured he did not follow the path his mother was clearing for him in the closing dream sequence to the asylum where his grandmother lived her final days.

Other things I found incredible:

Sound:

The moments where Small gives language to sound ie. the punching bag: “poketa, poketa, poketa.” (17) He creates a rich sensory world inside of the text.

Angles and entry points:

His incredible camera work gives the text so much movement and holds so much control over the pace. On the very first pages we are flying through the air over the city, we are perched in a tree outside Small’s childhood home, we land on the ground where we push open the front door, we enter the home and see the child, we then assume the child’s gaze as he sees his mother’s shadow through the door to the kitchen. There is an incredible fluidity that emerges as a result of this technique. Another example is page 39 where he volleys us back and forth between little Small’s face and the preserved fetus. There is a staccato horror that becomes so incredibly loud with the final close-up on the eyes. Another example of this is page 57-59. Here he angles the camera so we see little Small running as Alice: we chase after him from behind, we see him again from the branches of the tree, we see him through the neighbors window, and then arrive into his point of view on the jungle gym. Obviously this is happening all over the text. The impact is that all of this movement of the camera makes gives Small’s world a deeply shifty uncertain at times fragmented feeling.

Another way in which this is accomplished is the way in which Small hones in on details – fragments of whole images ie. when he depicts the x-ray machine in parts, zooming in on the control panel, or a strange angle of a brick wall. These images become clues in a sense that become deeply relevant as we move into the story. The angles he chooses seem important, as his way of signaling to us that we should pay attention.

Cyclical structure

The cyclical nature of this work is also particularly neat because the symbols he suggests/introduces recur but in a manner that doesn’t feel heavy handed: ie. in the opening he is drawing the White Rabbit, then we learn of his love of Alice in Wonderland, and the way in which the Psychiatrist is then depicted as the White Rabbit. The return to the scene of him drawing in the living room accumulating different angles of story and meaning. The three voices lost in the text – his own, his great grand father’s and his, mother’s. The recurring image of being drawn into a cyclone of space following the wave of his mother’s wrath, the effect of the sleeping gas, the dark cavern of his throat and the silence following. The use of lines as a way to transition the story ie. the stitches on his neck become stairs become rain drops pelting the earth, become his tears in the psychiatrist’s office.

Anyway, so much more but I’ll leave it here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Silence in Sitches

I was struck by the way Small uses visual pauses without dialogue and/or narration to heighten and break down the theme of silence throughout the book. Especially compared to a graphic novel like 'Fun Home' that compressed so much text and analysis into each page, the silences in this book stood out.

The story begins with six pages of silence. The images zoom in from industrial Detroit, to Small's house, up the stairs, to Small drawing on the floor as 6 year old to his mother washing dishes in the kitchen. The reader can gather clues about what is going on--the dreary colors, the factory smoke, the identical rows of streetlights, empty streets. We also know that we are entering a world that is muted.

The first sounds we hear are noises, rather than dialogue. They are the cough of his mother, her quiet sobbingm her violent slam of the cupbaords.  The weight of these sounds emphasizes the silence they are surrounded by. We see how each family member copes with the silence--his father punching his punching bag, his brother on the drums. From a visual persepctive, the build up of the silent, purely visual scenes makes these sounds and text feel jarring and tense. The reader also sees Small in contrast to his family. He is the only one whose 'language' is a quiet one--he gets sick.

The first speech bubble doesn't appear until page 21, and then not again until page 28. The slow buildup with little dialogue situates this story within a legacy of repressed silence. This makes Small's loss of his voice after surgery (182-183) all the more distressing. It puts him in line with his angry, repressed mother, his great-grandfather who destroyed his vocal chords with drano,  and a family who keeps big secrets hidden from eachother (cancer, sexual identity, insanity etc.). On page 101 Small's mother puts her hand over his mouth to keep him from calling his abusive grandmother 'crazy'. She is physically shutting him up, and the look of distress on her face in the bottom panel (perhaps the grandmother is walking past) indicates that she is passing down her own fear of being overheard.

The long 'silent' sections of the book without text serve multiple purposes. They slow down time, reveal the narrator's isolation, draw out an emotional response or slip into the surreal taking us inside Small's imagination.

One of the first of these sections is when the 6 year old Small explores the hospital by himself and discovers the creepy fetus in a jar (p 30-42). The pages without dialogue or narration highlight his alone-ness as well as the surreal, disturbing environment (check out the old man's expression on p 33). When he finds the fetus (38) the surreal element is hightened. Throughout the book, Small indicates the horror/imagination of the protagonist by using extreme angles and close ups. When the fetus gets out of the jar and chases him we see how alone he is in a world void of expression or understanding. The narrative transition into the imagination on page 62-3 as well when Small escapes the bullies and dives into his drawing into a cave of his own cartoon characters.

We see Small's terror at both being silent and of being too loud after he finds out he had cancer. He says "I was scared to go up to bed, afraid that the screaming in my head would be heard by my family" (217). There is no dialogue from page 202-223, heightening the emotional response he has to this revalation as well as his isolation. There is no text for the last half of this section. Small goes to sleep under a table in the living room and has an alice in wonderland-like dream. The multiple 'silent' pages  slow down time and highten the dream-like quality. In this scene, we see the stark contrast between the intensity of the thoughts/noise in his head and the intensity of the silence he is surrounded by.

Small also uses purely visual pages to amplify emotional weight after his therapist suggests his mother does not love him (p. 257-67) and after his dad confesses he gave him cancer (p 288-94). The reaction to his mother not loving him is extended (10 pages!) and mostly symbolic (tears/rain). The impact of this is impressed on the reader through this extended, silent visual metaphor. It seems as though lots of time has passed, although he is back at the therapists office in the next scene. Small is almost turning the oppressive silence that he grew up with on its head by utilizing it to illustrate profound emotional realizations. Or, he is reemphasizing that silence is the container for awareness in his family. The scene with his father is shorter, but indicates an even bigger silence/seperation after the father 'breaks the silence'.

The story ends with Small's adult dream of being a child stuck in a house.  The dream is silent, but the narrator's ability to chose not to follow his familial legacy of repression in the dream rejects that type of silence.

In this graphic novel, Small uses silence to express personal truth, emotion and family secrets, successfully employing the weapon of his childhood on itself.

Sharing narrative choices with the reader: pro or con?

I know since I am one of this week's presenters I can technically take the day off from blog writing but I just had a quick 2 cents to share! I've been thinking about our conversation last week surrounding the areas of Al-Maria's narrative that were brought up and then sort of drifted out of the frame without much explanation or further exploration. I remember Linsey saying she was a little miffed by some of these moments and wished we'd had more info about Al-Maria's choices.

I really appreciated the section Small added to the end of the novel with the pictures of his parents and himself in which he gave a brief mention to the areas he chose not to explore too much because they were "outside what (he) could imagine or understand as a child". He acknowledges one of the biggest bombs dropped in the story, that mama was a closeted lesbian and explains his reason for not delving into it more deeply: "If this had been her story, not mine, her secret life as a lesbian would certainly have been examine more closely".

I am not suggesting that Small owed us this explanation but I liked that he stood up for his memoirist right to tell his story according to the lens of his choosing. I'm curious what you guys think. Did this section help you as a reader? Or could you have just as easily lived without it? Do you like being let in on author's narrative choices? What effect does seeing the 'real' pictures of himself and his family have on you as a reader of his memoir?


Lots more to say about this book but I'll save it for Wednesday!

Mama's Silent Storm: The Resentment of Keeping Secrets and Living an Unwanted Life

Since this post is focusing on analytic themes in the work, I'd like to quickly mention that I really enjoyed this memoir, and it may have been my favorite.

In his graphic memoir, Stitches, David Small uses his vivid imagination to illustrate his tumultuous relationship with his parents throughout his life. His daydreams and dreams are manifestations of the desire for a new life, one where he is happy and not surrounded by family members who curse his own existence. However, Small's mother is the main culprit of the resentment and disdain towards Small, and Small believes it is in part because of her being forced to keep her lesbian identity a secret.

From the very beginning, the readers are given insight on Mama's mannerism and the sadness brewing underneath her grim appearance. The readers know from the beginning that Mama is resentful of her lifestyle, although why is not immediately known, but the sadness is hidden more than her resentment. On page 15, Small mentions his mother sobbing once or twice, but any incidents of crying were always behind closed doors and quietly. The anger that she feels at being forced to hide her true identity and live a life of lies is much more apparent. When I first started reading this memoir, I thought Small's mother might be a lesbian, and re-reading the memoir after this knowledge is confirmed made it easier to see the clues and implications Small worked into the prose and graphics. On page 16, Small describes that he and his brother never knew what their mother's stormy silences were about, but his father did. His father was aware of the secret life and his wife's unhappiness with their marriage, so he hid himself down in the basement and took his anger out on the punching bag. Small never really says if his father actually loved his mother at any point, but it is clear from their interactions that Small's mother did not love her husband.

Small is chronically sick throughout his childhood, and his mother also resents him for that. The scenes on page 18 and 19 demonstrate the mother's resentfulness towards Small and how frustrated and trapped she feels as a mother. In the bottom panel, her face is screwed up in a look of disdain at taking care of Small and the teddy bear lying on the ground. While Mama does pick up the bear to give to Small, the readers see her toss the stuffed animal onto the bed rather than handing it to Small directly. Even the panel where she is seen picking up the bear, she holds it from one arm, in a fashion where she doesn't show much care for the toy or her son. However reluctantly and resentfully she gives the bear back to Small, she did give it back instead of leaving it on the floor. I took that to mean there was some glimmer of empathy for her son, but it was so deep below resentment and sadness.

Mama, who was said by Small to be silently angry throughout most of the book, opens up to her young son when they are returning to her mother's home and where she was raised. I thought this was because maybe she wanted an ally upon returning to her mother's home, because the house itself represents pain for Mama. The grandmother is a reflection of Mama herself, a bitter woman who dealt with hardship, and Mama is afraid to see herself get to that point. There is the scene after Small is left alone with his grandmother, where Mama shows the most emotion she has in the memoir, or at least emotion that isn't completely resentment. The scene starts off on  page 83 with Mama going to play golf with an old girlfriend, which I interpreted to mean that she was going somewhere where she didn't have to hide who she really was or who she was really interested in.

Fast forward to Mama coming home on Page 98, where Small begins to voice his concerns about being left alone with his grandmother. Continuing on to page 99, when Small tells his mother that he is afraid of the grandmother, the fifth frame shows Mama's face frighteningly blank. I use the word "frighteningly" because Mama has always had some sort of expression on her face until this frame, and I got the sense that Small's feelings reflected hers when she was a child, and even in the present. This is further supported by Mama closing the door and showing the first real sign of concern towards Small, and it's because she knows what her mother can be capable of. On page 101, Small begins to say that his grandmother is crazy, but Mama quickly covers his mouth, and the last panel on the page shows Mama actually looking scared and that she is an adult looking this way supports the thought that her own mother, also called Mama by her, treated in a similar fashion that she treated Small a few pages earlier. The creaking noises are familiar to Mama, and she is instantly afraid of what may happen. On page 102, her fear becomes anger and she states "listen to me: I don't ever want to hear you say that word again! Do you hear me? Never!" (Small 102), and I wonder if it is because she is upset that her mother still makes her afraid or if she is upset because she sees her childhood being repeated in Small, as well as realizing she is taking the role of her mother.

Mama's resentment towards Small is really emphasized on with her bridge party. Small is seen as responsible for ruining her good time, especially with her lover (unknown at the time), and Mama is resentful of her son ruining the evening for her. It doesn't even occur to her that her son could possibly be fatally ill, but rather, that he is once again, encroaching on her efforts to have the life she truly wants. One filled with parties and hanging around beautiful women, especially Mrs. Dillon. Small himself says that on bridge club nights, "-something happened to [his] mother. She became someone I hardly recognized" (113-114), but that glimpse of who Mama really is or who she wants to be disappears as she is made aware of his growth on his beck. On page 119, Mama's fists are clenched as Small examines his neck in the mirror, while Mrs. Dillon tells Mama to get his neck looked at. Small's growth is controlling Mama's life again, whether she wants it to or not, and she expresses her resentment at this by lording it over Small that a doctor is a privilege and she makes it seem like Small's need for a doctor is his fault, and not one of nature.

Briefly, I wanted to mention the section where Small's father gets a raise and buys Mama a new car. On page 140, Mama is seen driving the car with both she and her husband smiling, but for different reasons. Her husband is smiling because he believes she is finally happy with what he can provide for her, but Mama is smiling because this car is fast and it allows her to believe that she can vanish from the life that she felt forced into, like a rocket. The bottom frame of the page shows Mama leaving the house behind in her mind, flying off towards the sky with great determination. This is a representation of the life she wants to lead, but only can dream about.

Another moment that really struck me was when Mama comes to visit Small in the hospital room, the night before his second surgery. Any sort of empathy or care towards Small has been reluctant up until this point, but on page 171, Small drew Mama wiping away tears from her eyes. This is the first time the readers and Small himself (to our knowledge) see Mama cry while not being behind closed doors. Small later explains that she was being generous because she thought he was going to die, but he never said whether or not she felt guilty about the way she allowed her resentment to bubble up and impact their relationship. However, I can assume that there was some sort of guilt involved due to the tears, and even then, Mama probably had conflicting feelings about Small and his cancer, resenting that he was so sick but also feeling guilty about how she treated him and for thinking his cancer was his fault. At the end of the book, Small finds the circumstances reversed and he is the one who is standing over the bed of his dying mother. There is no anger or ill-will in this scene, and there is no dialogue, but actions speak words as Small takes his mother's hand and cradles her face in his other hand. On page 307, Mama cries for the second time openly, and it's probably for various reasons, but ultimately, it is because her son found the heart to forgive her and show his love for her when she couldn't do the same for him and when she couldn't separate her resentment from her raising him.

Also briefly, I want to address the dream at the very end of the memoir. I mentioned earlier that Mama perhaps saw herself in both her mother and Small, because she was treated how Small was when she was younger yet she was following in her mother's footsteps in how she treated her son. I interpreted Small's dream to mean that Mama was showing Small the way to follow in her and her mother's footsteps of living a life of resentment and mistreating their children, but Small made the decision not to follow and as far as the readers know, he ended the cycle of resentment and abuse.

Best,
Dani

(I enjoyed being in class with all of you- thanks for a great semester!)

Modern Alienation, Female Adolescent Exile, and David Bowie

In preparation for (hopefully) completing our final project collaboratively, A&B embarked on reading and reflecting on The Girl Who Fell to Earth together, to build our collaborative dynamic, and to explore the possibilities of critical thought generated from conversation. We both brought different elements to the discussion and resultant writing, such as first hand experiences being racially profiled, and the obsession with science fiction.

The Girl Who Fell to Earth reads like a memoir written with a film adaptation in mind. The narrative structure is fairly straightforward, but the jerky jumps between narrators at the beginning (Matar to Safya) would be more seamless on screen (shot jumping to a few years in the future, elements of time period change, scene unfolds) than in print form. It’s impossible not to imagine the story in graphic form, too, because of our discussions in recent weeks, and visual cues in that format would support the changing voices as well. The choice to name each chapter with a name of a constellation within a graphic or visual format would be more effective – it’s often unclear what work those headers are supposed to be doing, but they are given so much weight (because they are in four languages, the three text and the image, because it’s so consistent) it seems important. We know that it is futile to wish a book into a different format altogether, but the most charming and revealing passages of Al-Maria’s adolescence relate to her obsessive diagramming (99) and lurid erotic sketchbook (104). Since we know she draws, it’s impossible not to wish to see these drawings!

Safya’s adolescence is characterized by scores of references to film, pop-culture, and especially music. In a graphic retelling of this tale, those references would be visual and less obtrusive, whereas in this text-only story there are many passages that consist largely of references to other works, threatening to overwhelm the story. However, because we particular two readers are from the same generation as Al-Maria, the references resonate with us and serve as powerful and evocative reminders of place and time. But just as these references (to REM, to Nirvana, to the Subhumans, to early computer game the Oregon Trail) bring us closer to Safya, they are also signs of her isolation from her family (many of whom have different cultural frames of reference) and her peers (who were less interested in dystopian science fiction than she). We experienced the preponderance of cultural references as a leitmotif evoking alienation in the text.

The coming of age story within literature overflows with feelings of loneliness, isolation, and alienation. We found that The Girl who Fell to the Earth is strongly crafted around Safya’s feelings of alienation and exile being thrust through so many homes, she never feels like she has one.

She feels extreme isolation when they live in the cavernous glass house and Matar is away for weeks on the oil rig. She struggles to fit in Qatar, Washington, or Cairo. Safya’s alienation manifests physically with her inability to recognize people’s faces. The author foreshadows this phenomonen in the beginning when family members they’ve never met before ask Safya and Dima if they know their names. Safya thinks she knows Gramma, but doesn’t say out of fear of being wrong. Later on she misidentifies a stranger as “Dad” and is horrified at this misidentification. It builds to Safya being unable to recognize her own brother in a photograph. “Even as a child I remembered being confused by the veiled women all around me and felt a strange jealousy when still crawling babies were able to pick their mothers out of a lineup of identically perfumed and identically veiled women” (131) Her inability to recognize people as close as her brother reflects her struggle and failures at having deep connections with both place and family across Washington / Doha / Cairo. In the quote on page 131, Safya expresses jealousy not just at recognition, but recognition beyond the visual, that there’s a deep personal connection between mother-daughter that she’s missing.

There is a sense that the narrative is careening away from the reader, from place to place and age to age which has a mimetic affect on the reader to make us feel some of her alienation. As readers, were a left with a strong desire for the characters to connect with each other more, rather than coexist and jump through all of these time, place, person, scenes.

The mother sends Safya to Doha during her burgeoning “glitter-grunge gulf” (109) identity and burgeoning adolescence. The mother’s paranoia and anxiety of strange men further fuels her decision to send Safya to Doha to be with her father during this time in her coming of age. This is the opposite maternal choice than in Almost a Woman when the mother insists on moving Esmeralda with her to New York because she was an adolescent and needed to be with her mother. Between these two moments in these two texts, it’s obvious that the sexuality of adolescent girls is terrifying to parents and culture in general. Once Safya arrives to Doha, her father struggles with where to send her; whether she should stay with him or move to be with his aunt Falk. Matar asks Safya about her desires in this moment, which she poignantly reflects on “I wonder how many girls were even given a choice” (122).

The visceral alienation of being female in a male world is a whole other dimension of Safya’s alienation, and this sensation builds as she approaches pubescence. (This particular arc has powerful moments later on with her virginity-losses, both the initial and staged one, and of course her attempt to report being sexually assaulted in Cairo, for which she is punished and threatened with deportation. Because nothing threatens womens citizenship faster than seeking retribution for sexual violence.) Coming of age stories are about finding yourself, and Safya’s moment of revelation is in discovering an entry point to her Bedouin heritage (248). This time in her life where she has the ability to study and read everything she wants using the critical faculties of her adult mind draws together the imaginative, astronomy-inclined, and otherwise science-fiction oriented tendencies throughout the book. In Al-Maria’s author bio, she situates herself and her work within the genre of Gulf futurism, and that is the context in which all these threads and references (fittingly disparate or rather, diasporic) coalesce.

Photo inclusion explanation:

-     --David Bowie from the Man Who Fell To Earth, the obvious reference from the title, with important mentions in the text at 107 in particular

-     --  David Bowie in Labrinyth, evoked at various points in the text particularly when Safya lives in Doha

-       Saint Alia of the Knife, pictured here in Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune. 

   --Safya has a cousin named Alia, which is awesome because she is also obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune and talks about reading it a lot during the period of time when she is bouncing between the US and Doha. This is particularly fascinating because the religion that is practiced by the Bene Gesserit (female order of witches) in Dune is basically space-Islam mixed with some Ayurveda…in Dune it comes off Orientalist at worst and exoticization at best, but since the series is supposed to take place in the far-future (and there are representations of future Catholicism even in book 1 and finally, by the time you get to Chapterhouse Judaism too) he kind of gets away with it. Depending on how permissive you are or how taken you are with the strengths of the work. Safya certainly is taken, and it’s a bit ironic but she reads Dune to treat herself to some English while she’s in Doha. Herbert would be happy, probably to hear of Safya’s identification with Paul Atreides (Alia’s big brother) and the familiar form of the chrysknives. The work that Safya’s interest in Dune does in this text is vast and deserves its own dissertation, FRANKLY.

Sincerely, A&B

Modern Alienation, Female Adolescent Exile, and David Bowie

In preparation for (hopefully) completing our final project collaboratively, A&B embarked on reading and reflecting on The Girl Who Fell to Earth together, to build our collaborative dynamic, and to explore the possibilities of critical thought generated from conversation. We both brought different elements to the discussion and resultant writing, such as first hand experiences being racially profiled, and the obsession with science fiction.

The Girl Who Fell to Earth reads like a memoir written with a film adaptation in mind. The narrative structure is fairly straightforward, but the jerky jumps between narrators at the beginning (Matar to Safya) would be more seamless on screen (shot jumping to a few years in the future, elements of time period change, scene unfolds) than in print form. It’s impossible not to imagine the story in graphic form, too, because of our discussions in recent weeks, and visual cues in that format would support the changing voices as well. The choice to name each chapter with a name of a constellation within a graphic or visual format would be more effective – it’s often unclear what work those headers are supposed to be doing, but they are given so much weight (because they are in four languages, the three text and the image, because it’s so consistent) it seems important. We know that it is futile to wish a book into a different format altogether, but the most charming and revealing passages of Al-Maria’s adolescence relate to her obsessive diagramming (99) and lurid erotic sketchbook (104). Since we know she draws, it’s impossible not to wish to see these drawings!

Safya’s adolescence is characterized by scores of references to film, pop-culture, and especially music. In a graphic retelling of this tale, those references would be visual and less obtrusive, whereas in this text-only story there are many passages that consist largely of references to other works, threatening to overwhelm the story. However, because we particular two readers are from the same generation as Al-Maria, the references resonate with us and serve as powerful and evocative reminders of place and time. But just as these references (to REM, to Nirvana, to the Subhumans, to early computer game the Oregon Trail) bring us closer to Safya, they are also signs of her isolation from her family (many of whom have different cultural frames of reference) and her peers (who were less interested in dystopian science fiction than she). We experienced the preponderance of cultural references as a leitmotif evoking alienation in the text.

The coming of age story within literature overflows with feelings of loneliness, isolation, and alienation. We found that The Girl who Fell to the Earth is strongly crafted around Safya’s feelings of alienation and exile being thrust through so many homes, she never feels like she has one.

She feels extreme isolation when they live in the cavernous glass house and Matar is away for weeks on the oil rig. She struggles to fit in Qatar, Washington, or Cairo. Safya’s alienation manifests physically with her inability to recognize people’s faces. The author foreshadows this phenomonen in the beginning when family members they’ve never met before ask Safya and Dima if they know their names. Safya thinks she knows Gramma, but doesn’t say out of fear of being wrong. Later on she misidentifies a stranger as “Dad” and is horrified at this misidentification. It builds to Safya being unable to recognize her own brother in a photograph. “Even as a child I remembered being confused by the veiled women all around me and felt a strange jealousy when still crawling babies were able to pick their mothers out of a lineup of identically perfumed and identically veiled women” (131) Her inability to recognize people as close as her brother reflects her struggle and failures at having deep connections with both place and family across Washington / Doha / Cairo. In the quote on page 131, Safya expresses jealousy not just at recognition, but recognition beyond the visual, that there’s a deep personal connection between mother-daughter that she’s missing.

There is a sense that the narrative is careening away from the reader, from place to place and age to age which has a mimetic affect on the reader to make us feel some of her alienation. As readers, were a left with a strong desire for the characters to connect with each other more, rather than coexist and jump through all of these time, place, person, scenes.

The mother sends Safya to Doha during her burgeoning “glitter-grunge gulf” (109) identity and burgeoning adolescence. The mother’s paranoia and anxiety of strange men further fuels her decision to send Safya to Doha to be with her father during this time in her coming of age. This is the opposite maternal choice than in Almost a Woman when the mother insists on moving Esmeralda with her to New York because she was an adolescent and needed to be with her mother. Between these two moments in these two texts, it’s obvious that the sexuality of adolescent girls is terrifying to parents and culture in general. Once Safya arrives to Doha, her father struggles with where to send her; whether she should stay with him or move to be with his aunt Falk. Matar asks Safya about her desires in this moment, which she poignantly reflects on “I wonder how many girls were even given a choice” (122).

The visceral alienation of being female in a male world is a whole other dimension of Safya’s alienation, and this sensation builds as she approaches pubescence. (This particular arc has powerful moments later on with her virginity-losses, both the initial and staged one, and of course her attempt to report being sexually assaulted in Cairo, for which she is punished and threatened with deportation. Because nothing threatens womens citizenship faster than seeking retribution for sexual violence.) Coming of age stories are about finding yourself, and Safya’s moment of revelation is in discovering an entry point to her Bedouin heritage (248). This time in her life where she has the ability to study and read everything she wants using the critical faculties of her adult mind draws together the imaginative, astronomy-inclined, and otherwise science-fiction oriented tendencies throughout the book. In Al-Maria’s author bio, she situates herself and her work within the genre of Gulf futurism, and that is the context in which all these threads and references (fittingly disparate or rather, diasporic) coalesce.

Photo inclusion explanation:

-     --David Bowie from the Man Who Fell To Earth, the obvious reference from the title, with important mentions in the text at 107 in particular

-     --  David Bowie in Labrinyth, evoked at various points in the text particularly when Safya lives in Doha

-       Saint Alia of the Knife, pictured here in Lynch’s film adaptation of Dune. 

   --Safya has a cousin named Alia, which is awesome because she is also obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune and talks about reading it a lot during the period of time when she is bouncing between the US and Doha. This is particularly fascinating because the religion that is practiced by the Bene Gesserit (female order of witches) in Dune is basically space-Islam mixed with some Ayurveda…in Dune it comes off Orientalist at worst and exoticization at best, but since the series is supposed to take place in the far-future (and there are representations of future Catholicism even in book 1 and finally, by the time you get to Chapterhouse Judaism too) he kind of gets away with it. Depending on how permissive you are or how taken you are with the strengths of the work. Safya certainly is taken, and it’s a bit ironic but she reads Dune to treat herself to some English while she’s in Doha. Herbert would be happy, probably to hear of Safya’s identification with Paul Atreides (Alia’s big brother) and the familiar form of the chrysknives. The work that Safya’s interest in Dune does in this text is vast and deserves its own dissertation, FRANKLY.

Sincerely, A&B