Old Ghosts: Deconstruction of our Superhero

When the first costumed heroes arrived they were quite simple, honorable action men and women of uncuestionable morals and a selfless sense of duty going in colorful, strange and exciting adventures each week with concise dialogs and with an almost minimalistic art style. Superman could fight giant robots one week and become a monkey the next, there were no limits as long as the readers were still entertained. Throughout the years, comic books got progressively more serious, the crazy nonsense decreased considerably and the focus on riskier topics that were socially relevant like racism, discrimination or even drug abuse increased. Nonetheless, the medium was still considered a mere entertainment for young people and no one really pay much attention to the real potential that comic books had. 

That was until 1986 when DC Comics published the miniseries Watchmen, written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons. The main story revolved around the mysterious death of a former hero and the dark implications that it might have. One of the aspects that really got the attention of the readers is how incredibly flawed all the characters are, they have fears, insecurities and needs while being constantly portrayed as morally grey. Bleak characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan & Ozymandias  immediately resonated with an audience that was living through the worst part of the cold-war, when a nuclear menace seemed more than possible. The world was a different place and there was no place for the harmless optimism that heroes like the Flash or Wonder Woman perpetuated.

Superheroes were a reflection of the American culture of the 1930’s, meaning that  the modernist ideals leaked through the speech bubble like Batman and Robin. Moore took this archetypical heroes and turned them upside down, he took this vision of the American Dream and adapted it to modern times where paranoia and fear ruled the world. If Superman was the embodiment of the American Way in the thirties, now we had The Comedian, a sadistic and abusive guvernamental “hero” who represented the new wave of superheroes.

To get his point across even further, Moore introduce Hollis Mason, the original Night-Owl, and the rest of the Minutemen as the representation of the Golden Age of comics and all the ideals and morals that that era represented. Mason looks his days as a vigilante with fondness and misses a past that at least seemed simplier. Since the character works as a  direct stand-in for Dan Garret The Blue Beetle, his brutal death is even more symbolic when one night a mob of people just invades his place and takes him out because of his connection with costumed heroes. The postmodern views destroy and annihilate the spirit and values of modernism, opening the path for a darker and less hopeful vision of world. 

Moore’s iconoclastic behavior is what destroyed and put back together the comic book industry. After Watchmen all the heroes had to be humanized, so we killed Superman and Flash while breaking Batman and driving Green Lantern to insanity. Terms like graphic novel started to be used to make a clear distinction that comic books were no longer a child’s thing. Now everything had to be dark and gritty focusing on bleak storylines and damaged characters. What Moore envisioned as a satire and a postmodern critic to a genre became the norm. This is mainly why in the recent years he has been very vocal about his opinion regarding the medium. In an interview to The Guardian he stated that “I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them.” (Moore, 2013) Those are really hard words from the man who reinvented the genre, but he has a point, until we finally embrace the Neo-Modernism that people like Grant Morrison have been trying to impulse in the last few years, superheroes are dead. 

 

The beauty of simplicity. Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart.

Is is impossible not to be reminded of Hemingway while reading Achebe's 1984 interview published in the Paris review. The reason being Hemingway's famous thinking of the novel as a testimony of truth.  Moreover, this focus enables the reader to notice the small details and apparently simple facts, although once connected, we see a universe.

“until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” 

To begin with, this is exactly the case of the Igbo people once the British arrived, and things began to fall apart. Messing with their identity, replacing custom with theirs,  the 'correct' ones.  But they did not realize the damage -hopefully-, nor the beauty and wisdom of the simpleton savages they were conquering.

“(..) no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us. But at the same time I know that an important message is not a novel. To say that we should all be kind to our neighbors is an important statement; it’s not a novel. (…) it is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language.” (The Paris Review, 18)

Achebe stresses enough this fact, nonetheless, that was not what written tradition on the Africa(ns) subject presented, but one of the 'good white man', who’s intelligent and most likely, fair, arriving at rough diamond lands, craving for salvation. These inhabitants were savages, stupid and ugly people whose portrait will remain with the Colonial novel. 

On the one hand, the novel seemed to be rather difficult to follow, due to its constant odd-to-pronounce lexicon, the underlying meaning was the complete opposite.  In particular, character's names were the most difficult, thus, making the story hard to grasp. Ironically enough for me, Okwonko is one of the most common names, meaning "The sun of Monday", as a result of an Ibo tradition of naming children after one of the four week days. 

On the other hand, something which is complex, is conveyed in the simplest words, the construction of characters and their lives, all of them projections of complex tradition's influence and their logic background. Luckily, the author relies on lbo speech and proverbs, which are “ the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” (Achebe, 3), for some things which cannot be translated without losing its original meaning.

Egwugwu dress. 

“The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. He looked terrible with the smoked raffia "body, a huge wooden face painted white except for the round hollow eyes and the charred teeth that were as big as a man's fingers. On his head were two powerful horns.” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart 1858)

Troughout the book, we follow Okwonkwo and his fears, goals, behavior and so on. 

Nevertheless, it is not just him, is the tribe, and the relation between them, and their handling of the British arrival; they represent something far more complex, religion, power, even roles and duties within the tribe. But there is not much complexity on the ordeal or understanding of these, it is actually quite easy to follow, the book is so well written that nothing leaves hanging.

To illustrate the above, is the hierarchy of the tribe. A man can aspire to as many titles as big feasts he can offer the tribe. Sounds simple, right? Likewise, higher influence means, accumulated wealth -crops- hence, a man will not have the power to rule over the land, since the richer he gets, the higher the title, the bigger the banquet.

In summation, this is just one of the brilliant aspects  from the book. Achebe’s commitment to truth, without forgetting complexity, yet, making it easy to read and dive into the uniqueness of the Ibo culture.  Unluckily, many things are lost due to the conquering era. For example, missionaries created the Ibo-standard language, so that dialects fade away.
Last but not least,  I  wonder, how many other beauties have we missed in order to assimilate into canons, denying our truest self?  (to us and the world) Is it really worth it? 

Works Cited.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Vol. 1: Essays on Literature. "Chinua Achebe"  by Jerome Brooks.The Paris Review, 1998. Print

Achebe, Chinua  Achebe. Things fall apart. City of Publication: Publisher, 1958. Print.

Into the darkness, chaos is accepted

Long Day's Journey Into the Night is basically a play that makes clear how addictions can destabilize a complete family, an objective analysis of O'Neill's own life captured in words as a search for self-explanations to understand his own former family. Every member of his family is included and represented by a character during a normal day in their lives. The addictions of each member has broken their connections as members of a same family unit.
We can notice that there is a truth related to the mother's addiction that is well-known by the other members of the family, but that is a topic that is hard to deal with, being this the biggest evidence of the chaos about the communication that a normal family is expected to have. This addiction acts as a an infection that affects to every member of the family producing, especially on their sons, more
addictions and a feeling of disconnection (or search of it) from reality. This situation is usually confronted by the father, but we can infer that he tries to channel his feelings of rage and worry through his sons, instead of his wife.
It seems to be that through this play, O'Neill tries to understand through daily routine the reasons of why his house is just a house and not a home, since a place full of omissions and addictions cannot be a secure place for a family.

Things fall apart: the conflict of the change

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a work that relies on family conflicts, the strong role of female gender, and the heritage of the African culture and traditions. However, what I highlight from this novel is the constant conflict of the characters to deal with changes. In the novel, there two main conflicts related to this.

The first one is the fight between the colonization and the desire of the people from Umuofia to keep their traditions and beliefs. On the one hand, language “gives them a sense of belonging and they also use it as a means to preserve their culture and heritage” (Maatla, 2013) that is why parents of the village refuse to send their children to school. What is more, Ibgo society seems to ignore the rest of the world since they never talk about the lands outside their borderlines. On the other hand, the imposition of the Christianism makes characters as Nwoye to reconsider his faith, which was somehow easy because he used to criticize or disagree with some aspects of his culture and also the Ikemefuna’s death on his own father’s hands. “Okonkwo ends up disowning his son, Nwoye after he abandons the Igbo religion.” (Maatla, 2013)

The second fight presented in the novel is Okonkwo´s internal conflict. His unwillingness to express his feelings due to his fear of seeming weak in the eyes of his fellow clan members caused Ikemefuna’s death and by consequence the exile of the entire Okonkwo’s family. What is more, this rough attitude and obsession to refuse his soft (or female) side deprived him of being an important leader in his clan.

I personally believe this novel shows us how changes are part of life and maybe their effects could be whether beneficial for our lives or a devastation, nevertheless, we can only accept them and learn how to cope with them because no matter how much we fight, life will to put our world upside-down anyway.

Bibliography

Maatla. L. (2013) Things Fall Apart: An Analysis of Pre and Post-Colonial Igbo Society

Unknown. Chinua Achebe Biography Retrieved from <http://www.biography.com/people/chinua-achebe-20617665>

Unknown. Things Fall Apart: Cultural Changes after African Colonization - Retrieved from <http://schoolworkhelper.net/things-fall-apart-cultural-changes-african-colonization/>

A mouse that does not feel as a mouse.

Throughout history, human-beings have used violence in order to bolster their power, but the entire world has never observed such a planned and brutal as the Holocaust. This event has been captured in the graphic novel “Maus”, exposing the cruelty of the Nazis and its effects not only on the survivor’s life, but in the following generations.

Maus seems to be just a story about war and anti-Semitism, but it is an analysis about cultural aspects and an introspection that the author does regarding his father and his relationship with him.

The victims, the Jewish, are represented as mice. If we scrutinize what a mouse represents, we would understand that it has two interpretations. The first one, the perspective that was usually shown by the Nazis, is that a mouse is somehow a parasitic. That animal goes over everywhere stealing what they found for eating and carrying infections for their “perfect society”.  The second interpretation could be that, as mice, the Jews have been rejected by the world so that they have been forced to run away from one place to another trying to survive by contributing in their own way in different societies.

 

This situation seems to be changed by the Holocaust, since this event modifies the vision that the entire world had in regards to the Jewish, including themselves. This is maybe one of the aspects that are most thought-provoking about Maus, the fact that Spiegelman and his father elaborate a cooperative autobiography in which the perspective of Vladek is captured in the story itself, but the vision of Artie about his father is expressed in the drawings of their present. The contrast between the old Vladek, loving and brave, and the one from the present, cantankerous and distant, is the most special of the story, how the Holocaust can change your personality and your entire life. It can even change the manner in which you establish relationships with others, especially with Artie. His relationship with his father is based mostly in Vladek’s desperate desire of empowering himself and showing to his son that he is a survivor. The problem is that, unintentionally, Vladek limited Artie during his all life by disparaging Artie’s capacities and skills. Artie was not treated as his son, but as a witness and a proof of his own survival. Vladek seems to be, as Mala said in page 93 from Volume I, more attached to things than to people, and that is one of the most serious consequences of the Holocaust on Vladek, he values more the objects than the relationships with other considering the difficulties and scarcities that he experienced just to survive during the massacre. Because of this, Artie has not been able to construct an personal identity as he expected to have, since the vision of himself that he has developed is result of the circumstances as, for example, the suicide of her mother and his feelings of guilt, his vision of himself as a not complete Jewish since he has not suffered what the previous generation of Jews experienced, or his distant relationship with his father that finds a balance at a late point of their lives and only because of establishing a dialogue as a “journalist”, as Spielgelman declares (Hofstra University, 1998).

It is not possible for Artie Spiegelman to feel as a mouse because of all this events considering that it represents a pain that he has not experienced and that destroyed the lives of a whole generation of Jewish people, and because he was raised in a different world without knowing the complete truth about his origins. 

At the beginning of the first volume, Spiegelman introduced a Hitler's quote that said that the Jews were undoubtly a race, but they were not humans. After the Holocaust, some of the children of the Jewish victims were not even able to completely recognize thelselves as members of a community.

Bibliografía

Hofstra University. (1998). True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Greenwood Publishing Group.

The importance of Anja Speigleman in Maus

One of the characters that caught my attention on the graphic novel Maus was Anja, the mother. Probably because of her life story which was marked by terrible events such as the Holocaust, the death of her son, and her suicide in 1968 and also by the image that she projected to her son and husband.

 In one hand there was her husband who saw her as the perfect woman. Vladek always felt that Anja bring out the best of him something that no one had done before. Maybe the fact that in front of his eyes she was perfect right after her death he burn all of her diaries maybe as a way to perpetuate this perfect image.

In the other hand, for her son Art she was a weak mother since he felt that she needed to feel loved and contained by the people who surrounded her.This emotional crisis was deepened with the death of Anja’s first son because she start doubting about her role as a mother.

For these reasons she is one the most attractive character of the comic, since we would never get to know her story from her point of view. But from two different perspectives and we will have to mixed both to create our own image of Anja Speiglman

Modernity and identity: a generational dilemma

Look Back in Anger is not only one of the greatest English plays ever written, but it is also an iconic and influential piece of arts that changed British theatre culture. Since the country developed in various political shades, the attitude towards post-war political changes -liberalism and classicism- evolved, and people started being more conscious about class differences, that were bigger before the fifties, and gained a new concept of a working class increasing its power and social status.

Context: censorship and post-war problems

During the fifties, people lost interest for British literature, since the topics treated were no longer appealing to the population; mostly because of the break up of the British Empire and its economical results, thus it was needed to focus into this new economical and social position to heal and move forward to a new beginning . The “Angry Young Men” -a group of middle-class English writers who belonged to a movement upon this new need of showing the reality to the world and to express the general feeling of the population of a dissatisfaction because of hypocrisy- deliberated the concern of everyday problems that society was having, and the necessity of defeat laws, rather than focusing on economical matters, trying to be more open-minded and leaving behind the Victorian hints. (Suleiman, 2012)

Unfortunately, British society was not prepared for bigger changes, and when the play was opened at the Royal Court Theatre, the Lord Chamberlain Office (which were the official censors of the London stage at that time) censored Osborne’s work due to the new social and political base that they were trying to avoid to not disregard the old traditional background -and if we think of the characters; Jimmy has a strong political viewpoint and a social and intellectual sense of superiority; Cliff who is quite fond upon Alison (a married woman); Alison, Jimmy’s wife, deals with being constantly teased by her husband who makes fun of her and her family because her socio economical background and has to face with a dead baby situation, and Helena, who convinces Alison to leave Jimmy; they would not represent an image of values and traditions of what they would like to publish- therefore, since that would not encourage people to well-behave, from the Lord Chamberlain’s point of view, it was performed anyway, but the play’s director had to change some parts from the original script. (Aldgate, 2005)

Jane Asher (Alison Porter), Victor Henry (Jimmy Porter - white shirt),
Martin Shaw (Cliff Lewis) at Royal Court Theatre London - Great Britain,
October 1968. The interesting thing about this revival in 1968 was that it
was the first since the Lord Chamberlain’s office had been abolished.

Drama as a way to express your thoughts

The main topic of Look Back in Anger is a social revolution. Since the plot is about a married couple and a friend sharing an apartment -and also, sharing insults and unrespectful scenes- we understand that these personal relationships do not only scream to be fixed, but also to be heard.

As Kaufmann (2010) states: “It can simply show what is going on in the society in turmoil at the same time that it allows more than one emotional response to these intellectually unprocessed human facts. It is by nature ironic. Drama is thus ideally the medium of social as opposed to individual negative capability, it can resist irritable reachings [sic.] after fact and theory; and thus carry forward the uneconomical dialogue of self-interpretation that is, the cultural role of art which is not merely upholding and disciplining received attitudes.” Therefore, we can conclude that the genre used by the author is totally working, as drama aims to represent, both political and social poles.

Finally, understanding the importance of angry as an emotion -”a feeling, experienced when a desired goal is blocked. According to the frustration-aggression hypothesis when a negative affect is stimulated it elicits an experience of anger.”- and as an expression -”the expression of anger is commonly defined as aggression. According to the frustration- aggression hypothesis, people aggress instinctually in order to reduce the angry feelings mainly aroused by frustration.”(Berkowitz, 1962)* cited by Tecimer (2005), do you think that the expression of a context and a social dilemma can be well-represented with emotions?

References

Aldgate, James (2005). Censorship in Theatre and Cinema. Edinburgh University Press.

Berkowitz, Leonard (1962). Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis. New York, Toronto, London, San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Kaufmann, R.J. (2010) On the Newness of the New Drama. University of Rochester.

Suleiman, Waad (2012). The Political and Social Reality of Post World War II in Britain as Reflected in the Novel Room at the Top by John Braine. Middle East University. Ankara, Turkey.

Tecimer, Emine (2005). The Analysis of the Theme of Anger in John Osborne's Plays: Look Back in Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, Watch it Come Down. Middle East Technical University. Ankara, Turkey.

Forgiveness in Long Day's Journey into Night

Long Day’s Journey into Night is a considerably autobiographical play in which O’Neill describes one day in the life of a family. The characters are James and Mary Tyrone, who would represent O’Neill’s parents, and their children, Jamie and Edmund, who are about 20 and 30 years old respectively. The story explores the relations between family members and the way they coped (or rather ignored) each other’s addiction; the men were alcoholic and Mary had developed a morphine addiction. None of them seems to have control over the situation nor much will to mend it even though the effects of their addictions in their deteriorating relationship is quite evident.

http://www.wbur.org/2012/04/04/long-days-journey

Besides, the story leaves the reader with a feeling of repetitiveness, we are led to believe that the situation is a cycle that has been repeated several times.

According to Murphy, B. (2001), in Eugene O’Neill’s work journal the first note for Long Day’s Journey into Night was written on 25 June 1939 and 9 days after, he had finished an outline for the play.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is powerful and tragic and O’Neill was not unaware of it, in fact, after writing the mentioned outline he wrote, according to Murphy (2001): “want to do this soon - will have to be written in blood - but will be a great play, if done right"

Although the story deals with a reflection of O’Neill’s family problems, it must not be regarded as reproachful, it is rather a proof of forgiveness towards the author's family. In 1941, Eugene gave the original script to Carlotta as a wedding anniversary present and he wrote in the dedication that he “mean(t) it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play - write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.”

This shows that even if he struggled for several years with forgiveness towards his family, he finally could do it, nevertheless, some assert that for O’Neil, forgiveness took long to be achieved. As Vaillant, G. (2008) points out, “forgiveness does not happen overnight and to forgive we often need a witness to our pain.” In O’Neil’s case, this first willing witness was the Gilbert Hamilton, a psychoanalyst  who Eugene saw for six weeks; during that time, he began writing notes that he would afterwards use to create the play’s outline, the second witness was as already mentioned, Carlotta, his wife.

http://www.cinemind.com/moon/main.html

Forgiveness is a topic shared by most of O’Neill’s late plays, and one that particularly caught my attention is Moon for the Misbegotten, in which once again we read about Jim Tyron. According to Shea, L. (2008). the only character who was not forgiven in Long Day’s Journey into Night is Jim, and O’Neill provides a sort of closure through the character of Josie Hogan, who says at the end of the play ‘May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.’

Bibliography

Berlin, N. (1993). O'Neill's Shakespeare. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Murphy, B. (2001). O'Neill: Long day's journey into night. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

O'Neill, E. (1956). Long Day's Journey Into Night. New Haven.

Shea, L. (2008). A moon for the misbegotten on the American stage: a history of the major productions. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &amp; Co.

Sheaffer, L. (2002). O'Neill: son and artist. New York: Cooper Square Press.

Vaillant, G. (2008). Spiritual evolution a scientific defense of faith. New York: Broadway Books.

Look Back in Anger: Jimmy's Revolution

Look Back in Anger is a play published in 1956 by the English author John Osborne that seeks to encapsulate the essence of British youth at the time, but how does it relate to Chilean reality?  

Jimmy Porter is a character that could work as an analogue to middle-low class youth, he is angry, bitter and feels like he is being robbed from greatness thanks to events that are completely out of his control. He is doomed to live a mediocre life in a post-war world trapped in a dead-end job with two characters that do not validate his pain. Allison,his wife, seems oblivious to the real world thanks to her upper-class background and Cliff, his dim-witted best friend, is not educated enough to grasp the whole situation. Porter sees this as a valid excuse to explode and constantly project his anger against the world, making as much noise as he can in order to wake up the people around him. Leaving out the misogynistic undertones that John Osborne seems to spread throughout the play, the main character could be easily related to how most Chilean youth seems to feel right now: Repressed, ignored and with an undeniable will to wake up the masses that seem to be dormant or simply not interested.

Just like Porter, they feel trapped and running out of options while asking for change to a generation that does not fully comprehend completely what is it what they want. A good example of this is how Colonel Redfern reacts to Allison’s situation, he doesn’t understand why the situation even started in the first place and recognizes that the world that he once knew no longer exists. In a similar fashion, Chilean youth have to deal with the past generations that were marked by a dictatorship that completely shaped their worldview with a regime of fear and silence; ending up with two generations colliding, one afraid of change and another afraid that nothing will change at all. This is perfectly summed up by Allison when she tells her father “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it.”

The Chilean society still has a chance to achieve the goals that it wants, but first it has to reconcile the generational and socioeconomic gaps that currently exist, because otherwise, something like the students movement will end up trapped in an empty rebellion that will lead up to a loop of conformity like the one that Jimmy Porter ends up meeting. Telling himself that there are no good causes left to fight for and that probably nothing will ever change.

Of MAUS and other things...

There are several aspects to which we can pay attention in the process of reading, especially if we are talking about a graphic novel, from which so much information is processed.  In order to understand better and to write from what we have read (just like some of us are doing in this precise moment) we can read what experts on literature have to say whether it is in the form of an article, essay, review, etc. But rarely do we see a work of art through its own writer’s eyes.  That is why in this piece of writing, I will focus on a few aspects I found quite interesting supporting my ideas not only with the literature available but also with Spiegelman’s own vision upon these subjects expressed on an interview from 2 months after having published MAUS’ second volume.

Of MAUS and Time.

As we already know, this book narrows its narrative down to at least three different stories; the story of Vladek’s, a Jewish from Poland who survived the Holocaust; the story about the relationship between Artie (the author) and his father (Vladek); as well as the story of how Artie dealt with his book’s publication and his father’s death. Pablo de Santis (1998) defines this interaction like this: ͑Maus is not just the narration of a survivor but the way in which the survivor’s son understands his father`s story and is able to live with it.

 Throughout this book we can find temporal jumps from past to present and backwards such as one of many moments in which Art interrupts his father’s narrating in order to find out more details. We can also appreciate how past and present coexist in the same frame so as to engage us as readers, to make us react, wonder ourselves and therefore, understand better. “To call the reader into the story is to force an active rather than a passive participation. For instance, the fragmented narratives typical of postmodern writing do not allow the reader to simply absorb information” (Costello, 2006)It seems brilliant to me that the author had taken advantage of the drawings to make us wake up (because to absorb information is one of my talents) and realize this is not a simple narration about a WWII survivor, but more importantly about his son’s interpretation.

"These interruptions would remind readers that this history is being told and remembered by some- one in a particular time and place, that it is the product of human hands and minds." (Young, 1998)

When asked for such technique, Albert admitted that we wanted past and present to become one, this was one of the main reasons why he chose to write this book in the form of a graphic novel. “Something that the comics’ medium makes available because in a comics book (...) you have various panels, those panels are each units of time and you can see them simultaneously” (Spiegelman, 1991)

As we know, an image is worth a thousand words, so another reason to add drawings or pictures to writing is simply that...

Images speak when words can't.-

Of MAUS and Memories.

What about Anja’s memories from the holocaust?

As we discover by reading the first volume of MAUS, Art’s mother was separated from his father before they get to Auschwitz, we also find out that Anja had written diaries about her experience in the camps but in order to leave the past behind (which is impossible when you are marked in such way) Vladek burnt those diaries without even reading them, causing his own son to call him a murderer. It is this absence of memories that make us feel a void in the story, and we only get to know about Art’s origins from this father. And how can you trust someone who says “they lived happy ever after” when one of them committed suicide? Still it seems unfair to question whether they loved each other (I believed it, almost cried a little bit) and Art finds the way of reunite them at the end of MAUS, by placing them together in the same grave.

 What about Art’s memory of his father?

From watching this Upon Reflection interview one discovers that Albert wanted to come to terms with his father and he thought one way of doing so was to share the experience of commenting his father’s experience before and during the war. But was he really interested in his reconciliation? “When he remembers his father's story now, he remembers how at times he had to wring it out of him. When his father needed a son, a friend, a sounding board, Art demanded Holocaust.” This can be perfectly in the moment Art is transcribing what his father told him and he notices he did not listened to his complains about Mala, he cared about only hearing from Auschwitz.Regarding the last moment in the first volume, when Albert calls his father a murderer, he admits “having murdered” his father as well by revealing secrets he specifically asked not to include in his book. One thing he refers to with joy is seeing his father as a collaborator in the publication of MAUS.

To conclude, I recommend you to watch this interview if you want to learn more about Spiegelman’s own writing experience,  and to hear his words about the central dilemma of reading this graphic novel.  What about your reading experience? Did you enjoy this book? Should you enjoy it?

References

Costello, L. A. (2006). History and Memory in a Dialogic of "Performative Memorialization" in Art Spiegelman's "Maus: A Survivor's Tale". Midwest Modern Language Association.

Ravelo, L. (2013). Semiotic analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A war comic with an open ending. Argentinian Journal of Applied Linguistics .

Saraceni, M. (2001). SEEEVG BEYOND LANGUAGE: WHEN WORDS ARE NOT ALONE. Bangkok.

Spiegelman, A. The Complete MAUS. New York: Pantheon.

UWTV. (1991). The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Maus (Art Spiegelman) . Washington.

Young, J. E. (1998). The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History.

Do you see the mountains? the palm trees? the Yam being harvested? Those are my nieces and cousins, my uncles and aunts. The soil you are standing on is my mother: The world is my family...

If you ask me what is that makes Things Fall Apart such a beautiful book, I would not say that is because of the main character Okonkwo, a troubled Igbo who is afraid of being weak and a coward as his father was. I would not say it is because of Okonkwo's second wife Ekwefi, whose bravery is beyond any of the false men of the village Umuofia. Nor because of the trustworthy representation of the effects of colonialism in the Igbo culture. It is true that those elements add up to the masterpiece that Things Fall Apart is.

But for me, the book would be a mere book, one of the million that humankind has written over the years, if it weren’t for the magic of the Igbo traditions presented in the book. It is really a magical trip reading the book, reading the story of Okonkwo, while we also read the story of demons, of a tortoise who flew to a feast in the sky, of gods and goddesses.

I cannot help but remember The Kingdom of this world by Alejo carpentier, another book that filled us with magic, legends and myths. You cannot picture the book without thinking about Voodoo magic, and the magical stories of Macandal.

It is the mix of occidental narrative with the magic of ancestral cultures that makes both book so beautiful, so tasty, so vivid, you can actually feel the magic surrounding your reading.

With Things Fall Apart, You end up fearing the dangers of the night, feeling the beating of the drums before the fights, feeling the calm of the week of peace, and enjoying the stories of the old women. You end up living the Igbo culture, you end up belonging even if it just for a second to that culture.

That’s the beauty of it: you are able to understand Okonkwo position only because you know how his traditions works. You can understand how important   Ezinma was for Ekwefi, how brave was Ekwefi when she followed the oracle of Agbala. You would not understand the tragic story of Okonkwo without the magic flowing from the Igbo traditions that are so beautifully represented in the book.

And it is through the fall of these tradition that we understand how disastrous was the arrival of the white men, and why in the end Okonkwo decides to fall apart himself.

Thank you for reading.

"Remember, boy, that gods used to step on the same soil you sow your yam, drink from the same streams you drink from , marvel at the same stars that watch over us. Remember boy, this is their gift to us. This land is filled with magic, you can see it when the sky opens up after days on unending rain, when you see the flowers bloom, when the women give birth, we're surrounded by it. We are one and many at the same time: that is the most powerful magic, belonging to a place you can call home, surrounded by those you can call your own"