Literal and figurative images in Darkroom

Apologies for the lateness of this entry!

Three words response (sorry I know it's more than three)
1) An empty sheet of photographic paper.
2) Wrenched
3) Vulnerable

Darkroom a memoir in black & white in its very title sets us up to enter a world powerfully, painfully, violently divided by racism and the Civil Rights Movement as it courses around and through the home/town, family and body of Lila Quintero Weaver; complicated frequently by the challenges she and family confront as Argentinian immigrants in a place so very Black and white. The content approached in this memoir, most similarly to Persepolis I & II, strives to knit together a conversational narrative that moves between Quintero Weaver's personal experiences and the sociopolitical dynamics that surrounded her childhood and adolescence.

One of the elements I was most struck by in this work was the way in which Quintero Weaver uses literal and figurative illustrations in conversation and juxtaposition. By literal illustrations I mean the lifelike/photographic drawing techniques that Quintero Weaver employs to depict the majority of the scenes included in this graphic memoir, where the images functioning as a direct translation of the words. By figurative illustration I mean images that offer a metaphorical translation of the text in key moments to eke out language to: 

1) emphasize the profound imprinting a moment/experience rendered on Quintero Weaver's consciousness/sense of self/community
2) focus the reader's emotional response (this is particularly salient as the text itself is rendered so un-sentimentally often with few direct access points to the internal register of the characters depicted)
3) to give visual record of the sometimes unnameable - which is particularly powerful because so many elements of the process of migration, of being strung between two worlds, languages, codes, of existing in a liminal space between in a society framed in binaries, and the upheaval of a society in unpredictable flux against systemic oppression are experiences that rest on the margins beyond words.

Given that Quintero Weaver's artwork is so lifelike in quality, these moments of figurative disruption do a great deal of work. Here are some of the moments that I noted post powerfully:

1) On page 25 she offers a strip of developed film, the frames of which alternate between photos and white space. It is here that she introduces the role of white space in the text as a visual sign signifying what lives only in memory - for which the documentation, even if it does exist, does not do justice to the event. "Of course nobody at all got a shot of what happened just one block from our house on February 18, 1965. Our closest brush with history."

2) In recounting her migration journey she writes, "Much I have forgotten... but not the long flight" (30-31) to which she matches a full page panels of the globe with a disproportionately sized airplane moving flying from South America to North emphasizing the deep psychic imprinting of this journey for which there is no documentation other than her passport.

3) On page 50 she introduces us to her process of learning English, the words coming out of the teacher's mouth are symbolized as lines with no distinct meaning, which communicates to us the profound disorientation in language. She brings this sign back later on page 115 when she is describing her father's process of teaching himself to read.

4) On pages 52 and 53 she uses unfilled-in line drawings in combination with fully rendered images. This happens frequently throughout the work and I've given a lot of thought as to whether there is a consistent purpose in these moments. In this moment Quintero Weaver is expressing her humiliation regarding her parents public use of Spanish - and in this image she and her family are fully rendered while the background figures are in line drawing. What this illustration communicates figuratively is the way in which she felt exposed, visible, vulnerable, and very separate from the dominant white culture she wanted so badly to "blend into" (the title of this chapter).

5) On page 97 Quintero Weaver's father attempts to bring the Black church choir to the white church. In the top panel again we have a mixture of line drawings in the foreground with fully rendered images in the background. The line drawings depict the the white church goers responding with horrified racism to her father. This illustrative strategy at this point in the text does a number of things: we see (again) in a profoundly visual manner the way in which these white churchgoers conceptualize themselves as separate from Black coir members (the Black people rendered in this frame are in the background, filled-in and much more lifelike); it forces us to confront the stark violence of this situation, demonstrating the dehumanization taking place; it requires us to see and consider this moment in a very separate manner, which is key to the building momentum of the narrative she is constructing.

6) On page 112 we see the ways family stories gathered a cinematic quality for Quintero Weaver as a child - where in the second frame she is not simply depicting the story her father is sharing, but has placed herself directly within it - demonstrating the way in which she is immersed in her father's memory.

7) On page 117 she depicts Argentina as a a piece of beef to introduce us to Argentine cuisine in opposition to Southern cuisine.

8) To emphasize the magnitude of what occurred in Selma on March 7th, 1965 she offers a two-page panel on pages 176 - 177 writing "At last the world saw" depicting disproportionately sized newspapers orbiting the globe in space.

9) Skipping way ahead to page 241 she demonstrates the way in which the ties that kept her dislocated family connected with those they had left behind in Argentina was through her mother's diligent letter-writing. In the first framed panel on this page we see her mother sitting on the top of a globe at a desk with a typewriter "tap tap tapping" out letters that descend from her position on the globe downwards.

There are so many more examples.

What all of this emphasizes (in part) are the ways in which this highly visual text is wrestles with:
1) how we can memorialize in image things that we may not have seen/have no visual documentation of but must and do remember; and
2) how the crystallization of truth sometimes happens most powerfully through figurative renderings that focus our attention on the obscene/grotesque/disappointing/unimaginable/magical things that live everyday in our midst

Looking forward to the discussion tomorrow.
mia