Blind - Must Be Fed

Special Exits by Joyce Farmer was a difficult graphic memoir to read, but it too aptly reflected what my family experienced during my grandmother's last days, and having just experienced the death of the woman who raised me since I was two, it was difficult to comprehend the pages, to digest the emotive "nonverbality" of the narrative panels, and to process that death in today's modern hospitals are, more often than not, induced or sped along quickly by the institutionalized dehumanization of patients. It's frustrating. This graphic memoir was frustrating in that aspect. How Farmer revealed her father's and step-mother's last days was intimate, agonizing, and expressionistically acute, and I really appreciated having my hands on this during this time. As I said, I spent this past weekend with my big, big family, and the last time we were all together was my grandmother's death--marriage and death, the two big events of one's life. I liked how Farmer wove together this family's narrative, this family's mosaic--aptly depicting the past with fancy cloud outlines as the panels' borders--and though the tale honestly reveals so many failures, vices, and racist/missionary tendencies of Lars and Rachel, I felt like as a graphic memoir, its presentation and portrayal heeded first to that verisimilitude. And in that sense, "Blind - Must Be Fed" felt like a painstakingly reflection of this narrative. Let me explain:

The drawings and panels were quite simple--they were black and white, followed each other linearly (showing the natural passage of time, such as "A few days later, a month later, etc."), and changed shaped when they were in flashback or memory or recollection (over markers showing change in modality or structure)--and in this sense, it's a classic graphic novel, as the drawings were also quite cartoonist, with the shifting perceptions of the body, and in a strange way, they were as realist as a cartoon/graphic memoir can become. The lines are bolded, the backgrounds are focused in and detailed, and the faces are incredibly expressive and emotive--telling and giving. As the novel progresses, showing the bodily downfall of Lars and Rachel--starting with the car accident--the narrative builds into this metaphor of death and passage of present time (rightfully pairing with Lars's and Rachel's Danish clocks). It becomes a narrative that represent how present time feels like in realism, the ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum flow of time, and we experience both Lars's and Rachel's "special exits" as mundane experiences, as the "next" panel, as "one moment they're here; the next, they're gone." And that's how death works in our awareness of time. When my grandmother passed, our life went on and on and on, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, and when my family finally reconvened this weekend, we talked about Lola Pacing as if she had never left, retelling memories, slipping through her voice and accent, recalling her whims and her vices and her laughter and her spirit. In a sense, this narrative captures Joyce Farmer's father and step-mother in a similar way--it's like we're going through the moments with Laura, and it's painstaking, it's frustrating (her father never listens to her, but old people are stuck in their own ways), and it's heartbreaking. It's a realist and honest way of depicting death. The black and white drawings, the crude facial outlines, the expressionistic faces and torsos somehow produce a reality of death that's more truthful, more painful. Death isn't pretty, time moves and moves, and in the next panel, we could be dead or alive, and the ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum of Farmer's narrative relays those sentiments. I really appreciated that.

The briefness of Chapter 10 really got to me. The skinness of Rachel really got to me. It's just such a sad progression--you see it in the body, you see how death can claim a body.

~ Melissa