Read 211 of 2021. Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams

Title: Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame
Author: Erin Williams
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
ISBN: 978-1419736742
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Pages: 304
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

We go through life hiding all the shame, and not acknowledging our innermost thoughts, what we really think and what we would really want to do. Erin Williams not only bares her soul through her art, but in the process also helps others internalise the trauma and talk about it, well to some extent.

Commute is a book that is about so many things – it is about Williams’ daily commute to and from work, it is about her sexual encounters – past and present, about her past relationships (the guilt associated with some and the idea of them not working out), about men always taking space (whether on the train or in life), making women second-guess, gas-lighting, and asserting their right on women’s bodies.

Williams does this with a touch of humour but doesn’t ignore the intensity and seriousness of it all. Commuting is so local, global, and more than anything personal. Each individual’s journey is so unique, and we see that through Williams’ journey – regardless of the places, and what’s happening, we are constantly observing – what others read, what other commuters are doing, and in that we also tend to drift. What is it like travelling in a female body? I will never know. I can only learn and empathise and that’s what I did from this book.

Commute is mostly told through feedback, reminiscent of childhood and teenage years. Commute makes the male gaze visible in 300 pages or less. It is a graphic memoir that was needed to be told and a most essential addition to the list. Read it on the train, perhaps.  

Books and Authors mentioned in Commute

• James Patterson
• Anne Carson
• Kierkegaard
• Fear and Trembling
• Eve Ensler
• I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
• Slant Six by Erin Belieu
• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
• Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
• Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
• Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
• The Gift by Barbara Browning
• Mary Roach
• Natalie Shapero
• After Claude by Iris Owens
• Valleyspeak by Cait Weiss Orcutt
• Clive Cussler
• Anne Rice
• Dostoevsky
• Freud
• Keats

Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder

Title: Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir
Author: Tyler Feder
Publisher: Dial Books
ISBN: 9780525553021
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Pages: 208
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

There are so many books written on how to deal with the death of a loved one. So many of them. In different ways, at different places, and each time I read a book on how to deal with the death of a loved one, it just makes it harder, no matter how much time has passed. Do we really get over? Do we really move on?

“Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir” by Tyler Feder is a tribute to her mother, and the full life she led till she lost her mom to cancer. The funny times spent together, the sad ones recalled, and the ones that will be lived without her – all of it makes this book so relatable for anyone who has lost a loved one. I found myself smiling and crying through this graphic memoir. I found myself thinking about my father who died twenty years ago.

Feder speaks of the intimate details – of the times she turned to look for her mother and she wasn’t there. Of how she coped and coped and tried so hard to fit in after her mother’s death, which was even more difficult for an introvert even before. Of how some old traditions need to go and new ones need to take their place. Of how her father and her siblings processed this grief.

“Dancing at the Pity Party” isn’t an easy read, and it being a graphic memoir doesn’t ease the pain either, if you have also lost a loved one. But read you must. It is emotional and funny and answers all questions you might’ve had when it came to how to deal with your grief. It is the kind of books that stay and stick to the heart. A read that helped me cope.

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui

Title: The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
Author: Thi Bui
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
ISBN: 978-1419718786
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Pages: 344
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

It isn’t easy, living this life. I do not know where I read it, or who told me this, but I guess this is true in some way or the other for all of us. It just isn’t easy. Till it becomes bearable I guess, in one way or the other that you make it. I was reminded of this, and more as I turned the pages of The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by This Bui – about her parents who escaped to America from Vietnam in the 70s, right after the fall of South Vietnam, and the lives they struggled to build for themselves and their four children.

Of course this is the kind of book that makes you ponder through its simple illustrations – it is a book about so many stories, so many narratives that Thi Bui makes the reader aware of – conflict, what it is like to not be at home, what is home in the larger scheme of things, identity at the core of restlessness and wanting to shake that off as well, and more than anything the unspoken love between parents and children. I think to a large extent I could relate to the love that remains unspoken. I don’t recall ever saying I love you so casually to either of my parents, and the same goes for them. We don’t say it enough. Like Thi Bui says, it gets stuck in the throat.

The Best We Could Do is also about coping with life on a daily basis, with the past almost overseeing and controlling events. It is also about what it means to be a parent – from the child’s perspective, and that of the parent’s. It is about the racism that people face in the United States of America, and what it takes to “fit in”. And before you know it, you are rooting for her and her family at almost every page. The empathy is real. I cannot begin to imagine what it must take for her parents to build a life from scratch. I also while reading the book wished I had more time with my grandparents to have asked them what it was like when they moved from Pakistan to India during the Great Partition.

The Best We Could Do is a book that will grab you by the throat and make you see the beauty and the ruthlessness of humanity. It shows all sides without bias. It doesn’t take sides. For Thi Bui to be this objective, and tell the story of her family is a feat in itself. It is all about doing the best, and finding your place in the sun.

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna. Translated from the French by Helge Dascher.

Title: Year of the Rabbit
Author: Tian Veasna
Translated from the French by Helge Dascher
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
ISBN: 978-1770463769
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Pages: 380
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

History is witness to totalitarian regimes. Regimes that are autocratic, xenophobic, paranoid, and highly regressive. Khmer Rouge was one such regime that ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. They murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived opponents, and also tortured and killed citizens, under the pretext of creating a better world, where everyone was equal. The Cambodian genocide led to the death of 1.5 to 2 million people in that time period.

Life under the regime was tough. Everything was out of bounds – culture, art, schools, hospitals, banking, and currency. What ruled the roost was agriculture. The ruling body was called the Angkar, which took all major decisions.

“Year of the Rabbit” is a story of a family in the times of Khmer Rouge. Tian Veasna was born just three days after the Rouge takeover in Cambodia, and this book is the story of his family journeying from Phnom Penh in the hope of freedom.

The book is universal in its theme of freedom and what it means to live under a regime that has no empathy or humanity. Isn’t this what is being seen throughout the world right now? Even after decades of autocrats being and behaving in a manner that is harmful to the state, yet no one learns. The same mistakes are repeated. But, back to the book.

Despite all this, there were times I smiled through the book because Veasna also shows us the compassion of humans. Of how his family and relatives were treated with kindness by some along the way, and how at the same time, they lost some family. “Year of the Rabbit” shows us how horror becomes the everyday living, the routine, and that is scary enough. It shows us both sides – of blind faith in a person or organization, and at the same time the sparks of hope that things will get better.

The drawings are clear and precise. The stories are told from various family members’ perspectives, so you might tend to get lost sometimes, but the family tree given at the beginning is handy.

1975 Cambodia till 1979 Cambodia wasn’t an easy place to live in. I haven’t read much about that time in reference to the place and what happened. I had heard of Khmer Rouge but didn’t know enough. I am glad this book was published and brought these stories to light. Read “Year of the Rabbit”. You won’t be disappointed at all.

Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong.

Title: Grass
Author: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
ISBN: 9781770463622
Genre: Nonfiction, Graphic Memoir
Pages: 480
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

 

Before reading Grass, I wasn’t aware of “comfort women”. I wasn’t aware of how they were treated by Japanese soldiers. These women were largely Korean and were forced into sexual slavery during the Japanese Occupation of Korea before and during World War II. This is the account of how the atrocity of war ruins women’s lives – no matter the country, no matter the place – the suffering of women is universal. Men go to battle. Women get raped. Men go to battle. Women must bear all consequences.

Grass is the story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee (becoming Granny Lee Ok-sun) – from her childhood to how she became a comfort woman to depicting the cost of war and the importance of peace. The “comfort woman” experience was most traumatic for Korean women that took place from 1910 to 1945, till they were liberated from the Japanese.

This book is painstakingly honest and brutal. It moves the reader but does not take away from the story and the truth, as should be the case. It is as I said before a woman’s story as a survivor – undergoing kidnapping, abuse, and rape in time of war and imperialism.

Grass opens at a time in Granny Lee Ok-sun’s life when she travels back home to Korea in 1996, having spent fifty-five years as a wife and a mother in China. Kim’s interviews with Granny is what forms the base of this book. Some memories surface clearly, some don’t, and yet it doesn’t take away from the book at all.

To tell such a story through the graphic medium doesn’t reduce the significance or the emotional quotient of the narrative. I found myself most moved so many times in the course of this read. Just the idea that these women were not given the agency to think or feel for themselves, and treated with such brutality, made me think of PTSD and how they didn’t even have the vocabulary to explain this or understand what they were going through. All they knew was they had to be alive, no matter what. In the hope of either being saved by strangers, or finding ways to escape “comfort houses”, to get away from conditions where getting a proper meal is a luxury, where your child is taken away from you, where men constantly enter and exit at will, and ultimately to feel human.

The artwork by Kim is brilliant. The scenes that are tough to digest are portrayed with such beauty – in the sense that it exists, hovers above you as you read it, and yet somehow makes you understand, keeping the dignity of the women. I think also to a large extent, the book is what it is because of the translation – which is so nuanced and on point when it comes to brevity and communicating what it has to.

Grass is a book that needs to be read to understand how people get away with the utmost damage to the human soul. Given the fight of haves and have-nots, of gender differences, of how unequal society is, this book should be read, and reread to understand where violence and also empathy comes from.