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

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.

I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib

Title: I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir
Author: Malaka Gharib
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 978-0525575115
Genre: Graphic Memoir
Pages: 160
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5 stars

Malaka Gharib is Half-Filipino, Half-Egyptian, and born in the USA. This graphic memoir is about her life and her family on both sides. This memoir is also about identity, growing up in the US of A – being a part of the country and yet alienated. I know a lot of authors have written about this in some form or the other, however, I also believe that every book written in this sub-genre always sadly has something new to provide. The issue of racism, being a different skin colour, following a different way of life, and being ridiculed for it just doesn’t go away. It is always there – sometimes way too visible, and at other times not so much.

I liked this graphic memoir, in fact loved it, because it made me wonder about my confusion about identity (of course of a different kind) while growing up. I could hard relate to it – I could understand the dilemma of what to follow and what not to. Malaka’s life if seen from the greener side of the grass was very exciting growing-up to parents who came from different parts of the world. The opportunity then to know more about different cultures, and understand was twice-fold. At the same time, the need to fit in and belong is age-old. No one who hasn’t fit in will understand the pain of not belonging.

I Was Their American Dream familiarises you with cultures and traditions you perhaps weren’t aware of. I love reading books that do that, more so in the form of say a graphic memoir that isn’t too taxing. Sometimes you need such reads to also get the “reading momentum” going. Malaka’s illustrations are fun. There are also places where she wants readers to engage with her – so there is an activity to make a zine with her or dress a cut-out of hers, so on and so forth.

There are a lot of books like these – on identity, migration, immigration, the need to belong, and yet there is something about this one that struck home and stayed. It is honest, it talks plainly about how at one point she wanted to be a part of the “white” community so bad, and also how to deal with your past and where you come from. More than anything, what should one do with it, if at all one wants to. I Was Their American Dream is a lovely graphic memoir on how we see the world and ourselves in it.