Paper dolls, literacy tests, reel to reel still frames, magazines, passports, scrapbook photos, textbooks, yearbooks, bulletin boards, silhouettes, eye charts, art lessons, book reports, the black and white ephemera of the narrator's life bears witness to her unique experience.
Darkroom is a memoir pieced together by photographic evidence. The overall effect is the same as the slow reveal of contrasts visible over a chemically timed release. The narrator tells us her family is "overrun by photos", the memoir attempts to order them to tell the story of her assimilation as well as the national story of assimilation and struggle of the civil rights movement in her family's accidental home of Alabama.
Despite the grayness explored by the narrator, and the artistic rendering of the most true to life portraits we have encountered, this also seems to be the most linear and gridlocked memoir that we have read in this class. The rectanglular layout reminds me of photo albums in the only way they used to be imagined. No scalloped edges, no decorative details, this archive is thankfully unsentimental.
In contrast, there is the recurring motif of the bare tree which represents the nascent movement. (p.179) The tree parallels the struggle which unfolds as a organic process and the passage of time is implied simply by the four seasons. The narrator is absent in these panels, perhaps keeping a respectful distance from a story she doesn't feel is hers.
The book is remarkably quiet. Bad news comes. Spray paint pffffftsss. The loudest things in the book are the letters on an eye chart. The most violent image is a silent, hanging man.
Three words:
shame, sympathy, disconnect
You raise an important question- to what degree is this story her's? My feeling is that Quintero Weaver, as a witness to the rampant racism in Alabama where she grew up, feels in some way complicit. When she arrived in America, she made the choice to align herself with whites, because in Alabama you could only be either white or black. She described how she assimilated, and she did so unblinkingly. She wanted to have blonde hair, blue eyes, and an upturned nose. But as she learned more about racism, segregation and brutality towards black people, she felt the need to reveal how flawed the educational system to which she was exposed is, and also how flawed the culture that upholds and perpetuates it is, through writing.
ReplyDeleteYour observation about the quietness of the book sent me back to the pages of the violence perpetrated against the protesters on pages 156 -- 169. Those pages are incredibly violent and very loud. The orders to cut the power (160) and to get off the sidewalk (161) are in larger font than is usually employed in the dialogue bubbles. There are a loud of sounds in those pages, too, vroooom, ooof, craaaash, whack (so much of that 162 -- 163, especially in very large gray font across the bottom of the page), eeeeeeek, slam, aaaaooo, crack, smash, crack, slam, thud, and boom. All these words are white and they are generally in much larger font than the narration or dialogue. They also appear on the drawing and over the black space around the drawings. The boom is different from the other sound words on the page because the font is black and is inside a white sound effect bubble (my childhood tv habits cause me to always think of Batman when I see these). Because the image is dark, the sound effect bubble looks like a flash of light accompanying the sound.
ReplyDeleteI'm so impressed with this book, and thinking about all that makes me even more impressed. I think that making that section so loud, within a context that is more quiet reinforces the very strong impression that scene leaves. Thank you for prompting me to think about it.
Hi K (not sure who K is) I really appreciate your notice of the archival quality of this work - it's the quality that I'm so drawn to and am (hopefully) basing my final project for the class on. There's a tradition of memory art (often outsider or naive art), which employs two- and three-dimensional collage as memoir and I think this work is similar--as if it were a collection of personal ephemera. But of course, it's not collage, only drawn to resemble collage, and to great effect.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that you find this book "the most linear and gridlocked memoir that we have read" because the archival nature of it seems exactly non-linear and free-flowing. As if some of the images are coming off the page and the representative personal ephemera leads me off to different ideas about origins and what is a keepsake or an icon.
Your blog really got me thinking about my project. Thank you!
Darin
You are right Rhonda, about that section that ends in the giant spray can. It does have a lot of Dick Tracy style comic noise. I don't know why I didn't focus on that. And you note the color of the pages. The violence and noise comes in the span of one night's violence, the longest section of black on black image and pages in the book. Point taken. I guess the grayness of the book as a whole seemed quiet to me, on the heels of Persepolis, which seemed so much louder in its contrast. The radio, as it interrupts the story occasionally, is also loud. Announcing King's murder, an echo of the Navy bombing report broadcast earlier in the book when "every now and then things got loud and personal'.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I remember about watching movies backwards, which we begged our teacher to do when she wound the reel back at the end of a filmstrip - (elementary school, middle school, dating myself) was that the sound was off. You can't hear backwards of course. So the images of the prologue carried that silence. I also noticed some of the panels that left noises out. Such as the eyes wide open 26-27 pages, where "all hell breaks loose" and there are images of body parts, fists raised and swinging but all sound is described. Belafonte sings on the album cover Uni Q mentions, on page 76, with his mouth open but we don't hear anything. There are as many open mouthed images as closed, but the more formal portraits are eerily quiet, closed lips, closed cases.
Thanks for correcting me!
Yeah, Darin I think that my reading of the book was very impressionistic, and not irrefutable, but I still think the book is incredibly rectangularly formatted. The front cover with its centered rectangles of title author and cropped photos. Cropping is a grid maneuver. The collage here is not as organic as Bechdel, it's more rigid. It's surprising because the illustration is so fluid and rounded and rich and detailed. It's the layout that strikes me as scrapbook-y. More like I am going to put this photo on this corner like SO. So much typewritten text. The way that the radio "waves" criss cross the page. The film strip squares....
ReplyDeleteGood discussion. I think in many ways this book has a purpose beyond telling story and giving a character struggle. It has the archival qualities Kristin mentions and as a result there is some distance from the inner complications of life--they are included as they are connected to the growing pains of Marion and the positionality of the family.
ReplyDeletee