fantasy, separation, disappointment

     Many words and feelings came to mind while reading Darkroom; mainly disappointment, separation, and fantasy. Weaver's family story unfurls against the painful and blighted back drop of the early American Civil Rights movement in a dangerous racist world. Her interactions with her new Alabaman neighbors are disquieting and go unexplained. Weaver recreates a narrative larger than her memory of her own past in order to organize and reconcile her shame and disgust at what she witnessed and felt complicit to in her community but was powerless to stand against.
     I felt disappointed while reading this story-- like a child, helpless to influence the all-important sphere of the adult world, the reader is bound to Lila's powerless lens. She is too small to act on her feelings, but her deep desire for fairness draws her along through the narrative. Disappointed in history. Disappointed when the narration is tossed into the future and the potential of the bright young woman is erased when she "dropped out of college and married young" (245) and ceases to push against the political agenda that she seemed to have such real passion in changing.  Disappointed because that happens all the time, people acquiesce under the heavy, squirmy load of social responsibility in exchange for a private life, away from the frictions of community.
     The whole story is predicated on separation. The Weavers suffer separation from Argentina, the extended family, the values and culture, the food, the language; the townspeople suffer the separation of segregation, the separation of fear and violence. The narrative, too, is separated between personal and political. There are scenes experienced and remembered and those pieced together through later research. There is separation between ones feelings and the ability to act or respond to them. Separation between the adult world and the child world. Separation between home and school.
     Fantasy occupies the space between 'shoulds' and deeds. The first being the American fantasy: what the two little girls expected of America before landing amongst the low, square buildings of Marion (38). The pools, blondes, kisses, bathing suits, constant leisure and fun are no match for the prim, religious, and silently warring community that they find upon arrival. When the first fantasy is shattered, another begins. A cultural cleansing is enacted against herself: she refuses her language and her family's culture. She can't bear to be uncovered, can't bear the thought of also being rejected like she has seen happen to the other 65% of her town. As she grows and finds more ability to respond to the world, she creates a fantasy about her new community of African American allies with whom she is joined against bigotry, but that fantasy is hotly rejected. Layered amongst all of this is Weaver's fantasy of her father, who's past motives are romantically exhumed and postulated on without enough evidence to really support. Use of conditional verbs like "would've" in narratives about her father seem a little wishy washy. Did he or didn't he do what she is describing? Or he just would have if...?
     I particularly enjoyed the parallel illustrations of the packhorse who's back broke under a heavy load as he crossed a gulch and the one of Lila, breaching the ravine between her home life and her school life and straining under the burden. Parallels in illustration and organization of the story was very masterful, especially for someone who hadn't intended to publish the work. The use of repeat 'photos' and piles of photographs was very nice, and her timing with respect to grey scale was really satisfying. Weaver seemed unafraid of changing techniques mid chapter, which, rather than feeling jumbled, seemed to handle the quality of the passage in a deft way. Pages with regular frames collide with those unframed, wide open. Text changes fonts and lives in and outside of lines to great effect. Songs slide out of frames, growing as they do to encompass other arts of the page. 
     Overall, a brave exploration of a woman's memories and qualms.