Visual Brilliance/Narrative Deficiency

Visual Brilliance/Narrative Deficiency

José Manuel Mateo (author) and Javier Martínez Pedro (illustrator). Migrant. New York: Abrams, 2014.

The first thing that one notices when picking up José Manuel Mateo and Javier Martínez Pedro’s Migrant is the elegance of the book as an artifact. The large, rectangular text is bound in black cloth and a black bow. Such packaging is an interesting gesture to restore to the book the sort of reverence and specialness that gets lost these days with the gaudier tendencies of cover design.¹ It effectively puts the reader into an appropriate mode by prompting a mature approach to the subject of the book and the book itself as a work of art.

Opening it one discovers an accordion fold-out that extends to a length of over 4 ft. This fold-out features one continuous 9 x 54 in. illustration extending from top to bottom. The written narrative appears in a blank margin to the left of the illustration. In the “Author’s and Artist’s Note” at the end (or bottom) of the book, the reader learns that the illustration is in the form of a codex. As Mateo and Pedro explain, “Rather than use separate pages and then bind them together, as we do today, the ancient people would use one long sheet of amate and then gather it in an ‘accordian’ fold. It’s called a codex.” The use of the codex for the purposes of this book is quite powerful and merits high appreciation. Separate illustrations on separate pages have the effect of chopping up a story into compartmentalized pieces (one only has to bear in mind the popular saying of “just turn the page” to realize the internal disconnection/amnesia that actually occurs within a conventional picture book vis-à-vis the distribution of the art and narrative being across disparate pages). The use of a codex here positions the reader to process the connectedness of that which in another mode would be regarded as disparate elements. It enables broader and more comprehensive thinking and perception by literally laying out (or, we might say, insisting on) connectedness. Specifically, the use of the codex to tell the story of migration is a brilliantly apt decision (more on the aptness of the codex for this kind of narrative in a moment).

As regards the story that the codex illustrates, in all honesty, the book presents a familiar story. The narrative voice belongs to a Mexican boy² who describes for the reader his life in Mexico, his trek to the United States with his mother and sister, and, finally, a little bit about his hard life in the United States. The structure is what one typically finds in migration narratives (such as Francisco Jiménez’s The Circuit and Amada Irma Pérez’s My Diary from Here to There). So, too, is the content. The narrator recounts economic troubles in Mexico, the trauma of leaving home, the undertaking of a dangerous journey north, fear of getting caught in the course of the journey, and the stress of living in the shadows of the United States while eeking out a living working menial jobs. Of course there is a poignancy to the narrative, which renders it a potentially valuable read for children to help them think about migrant experiences. As Leo Chávez has pointed out with regard to Mexican immigration in the United States infosphere, by and large coverage of immigration has been “limited at best,” serving more to stoke xenophobia than to impart insight and illumination that could provide “a more complete picture of undocumented immigrants” (Shadowed Lives xi). Narratives such as Migrant offer to redress the inadequacy of popular understandings of migrant experiences.

Yet there is something quite dissatisfying about the narrative of Migrant owing to its relative lack of depth (which is why The Circuit and My Diary from Here to There immediately stand out as working much more effectively). Basically, Migrant reads likes a very, in fact excessively streamlined account of a migration experience, with its efficiency occurring at the expense of details and development that would have made it an even more compelling and illuminating (and haunting) approach to its subject matter. For example, once the boy’s mother resolves to take her children to the United States to reunite with the father (who is already in the United States and had been sending money home but has suddenly stopped), we learn that the child, his sister, and his mother illicitly hop a train for a ride north. We learn nothing about the trials and tribulations of the train ride, however, other than the fact that “When the train stopped, all of us who were travelling up on top of the roofs of the cars got down quickly. …[M]en who looked like the police were chasing after people and putting them in yellow trucks.” As the text elides details about this and other aspects of the migrant experience, thus smoothing out the migrant experience, the text becomes increasingly dogged by the sense that more could have been done to nurture fuller respect for the ordeals endured by migrants.

Perhaps most strikingly, the actual crossing is way too simplified. After managing to elude arrest at the train stop, the narrator says, “Later we came to a very high wall. We had to jump over it. Suddenly some police arrived and let their dogs loose…I was very scared. But then they called the dogs back. Who knows why…” Honestly, I find such a portrayal baffling and ultimately frustrating. The crossing experience is far more complicated and risky and scary than jumping over a high wall, especially if one is entering the Southern California region (as indicated by the sentence, “That is how my mom, my sister, and I arrived outside Los Angeles”). That a migrant would just jump a wall grossly overlooks assorted challenges that crossing can actually entail. And that dogs were let loose only to be called back "who knows why?" comes across as a narrative cop out.

In short, the details portrayed in the narrative progressively do not add up to a realistic portrayal. My reason for holding up verisimilitude here as a touchstone for evaluating the authorial choices in Migrant come back to maximizing insight into and respect for migrant experiences.

Incidentally the author’s biography features the disclaimer, “He has not lived or suffered the experience of migration, but he wrote this story considering what could have happened to him and his family at one time.” To be sure, it is fully possible for one to write a story about what one has not lived through. Doing so requires that one do a lot of research, however, to ensure proper handling of the experience. Migration leaves me with questions about how much homework Mateo invested into the development of this narrative. As the narrative stands, it seems more a caricature of migration as opposed to a nuanced delving into the experience. The implication in the author’s biography that this narrative is a product of authorial speculation only irks me even more because it only underscores the unactualized potentiality of this kind of book as a book for children. Indeed, un-researched speculation seems to be masquerading as a testimonial that channels the spirit and nature of migrant experiences.

Authorial presumptions about children’s literature might also account for the thinness of the narrative. The biography for Mateo indicates that he “writes poetry, stories, and essays. …He has worked as an editor for many years and is now currently teaching university students.” No mention is made about writing for children. If it is the case that he has no prior experience writing for children, it could of course wonderful that he has undertaken this project. The genre always needs new voices to help it grow and evolve. But the problem—one which I noted yesterday in my review of Dale, Dale, Dale: Una fiesta de números—is that writers can easily underestimate the genre, perhaps by underestimating children. The narrative of Migrant broaches some gritty realities, but it leaves these realities unexplained, and it overlooks others. Even if this occurs because of the child narrator—which is intrinsically a narrator who occupies a position of incomplete knowledge and understanding—it would have been in the best interest of the book to disclose more than it does—even in the guise of being written by a child migrant—rather than just duplicate what the author imagines to be the limited perspective of the child.

Now, to come back to the codex…this part of the book is astonishingly intricate, and as such it demands close reading on the part of the child audience. Above all else, and as suggested above, the singularity of the codex makes it possible for the reader to realize the ongoing simultaneity of the social dynamics that the narrative points toward. That is, the codex, defies liner, sequential modes of story and history through a synchronic representation which brings to mind what Fredric Jameson dubs “the spatialization of time” (Stephanson and Jameson 6). Explaining what he means by “the spatialization of time,” Jameson says, “Time has become a perpetual present and thus spatial” (6). Bearing in mind this idea as well as additional glosses such as “Our relationship to the past is now a spatial one” and “Our theoretical categories also tend to become spatial: structural analyses with graphs of synchronic multiplicities of spatially related things” (6), we might consider the temporal, geographical, historical, and relational implications of Pedro’s codex. All at once Pedro’s codex covers and cuts across these different dimensions, rendering them simultaneous and ongoing. While Jameson goes on with regard to “spatialization replacing temporalization” to say, “This is bewildering, and I use existential bewilderment in this new postmodern space to make a final diagnosis of the loss of our ability to position ourselves within this space and cognitively map it” (7), it strikes me that a productive, powerfully complex cognitive mapping—one that explodes the cognitive foreclosure that diachronic representations otherwise engender—is precisely what Pedro accomplishes with the spatialization that he performs.

Thus, while the narrative of Migrant comes up short, there is much to say about—and do with—the artwork.

--phillip serrato, San Diego State University

Notes

Source: Bowman

¹ The difference between Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret with a dust jacket versus the book without one encapsulates this tension. When one sees the book with its dust jacket, one encounters a high-colored design concocted to imply a certain vibrancy as well as some secret or adventure waiting to be unlocked. Overall it all gives the feeling of overdesign. In contrast, without a dust jacket one holds a thick, hardback volume with a simple black cover. Regarding the book without its dust jacket, one blogger describes it (in a post aptly titled "Why you should read every hardcover with the book jacket OFF") as “A minimal and simplistic cover that mirrors interior pages. Stark black, with a knocked out frame. I prefer this version. It’s as if it is a canvas, waiting for Brian to show up to fill it with illustrations” (Bowman). The book without the dust jacket also just seems more elegant and so appropriate for this book, whereas the dust jacket just whores the book out by resorting to the usual visual gimmickry in an effort to catch the eye of passersby. As elitist as it may sound, I am struck by the thought that there is something to be said for an aesthetic of elegance and for returning elegance to the book (not always, but where appropriate).

² Unless I have missed something, I do not think there is anything in the text to indicate that the narrator is in fact a boy. But in the “Note” at the end the author and artist say, “In our codex, we tell of a boy and his sister and mother, and how they left their house in Mexico to search for a new hope, in life, a place where there is work.” While they thus pin down the gender of the narrator, it occurs to me that leaving it unspecified would have been more interesting.

Works Cited

Bowman, Erin. "Why you should read every hardcover with the book jacket OFF." 18 August 2011. http://www.embowman.com/2011/why-you-should-read-every-hardcover-with-the-book-jacket-off/

Chávez, Leo. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1992

Stephanson, Anders and Fredric Jameson. “Regarding Postmodernism—A Conversation with Fredric Jameson.” Social Text 21 (1989): 3-30.

When Things and Words Meld into Poetry

Brown, Monica. Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

When an author writes a biography, an assortment of political implications arises. Obviously, and in the first place, there is some kind of motivation for writing about the biographical subject at hand. As Julia Watson notes in remarks about autobiography which are equally appropriate for thinking about biography, the writing and publication of biographies “giv[es] cultural status to particular lives” (61). Upon undertaking a book project on a given individual, an author has decided—and concomitantly signals to readers—that this individual’s life is worthy, at the very least, of attention.

When reading a biography, it befalls the reader to deduce why this individual is indeed worthy of attention. The reasons can include the individual and his/her story being admirable, inspirational, and/or cautionary. There might also be an intended educational component to a biography as a biographer might seek to redress a popular ignorance or misconception about a certain person or issue or aspect of history. Of course, all the while there is the matter of what is included in the biography, what is not included, and what kinds of opinions and perspectives the reader is positioned to adopt.

If a given biography is crafted (or marketed) for children, the abovementioned stakes are heightened. One can wonder why exactly a young reader is being introduced to this specific biographical subject and what he/she is calculated to take away from the text and the introduction to this individual.

More than anything, Monica Brown crafts Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People to inspire readers to read and write, which to be sure is something direly needed nowadays as growing numbers of kids spend their time glued to video games and television screens. Granted, such an assessment of the text might raise alarms about biographical objectivity and the integrity and purpose of nonfiction. But in actuality, any text, including, if not especially, a biography, has its own slant and objective(s), not only because in a biography—especially a short picture book biography—choices have to be made and material has to be organized and directed, but because any and every text is biased. This is the point, for example, of George Szanto in Theater and Propaganda when he asserts that any and every text is propagandistic. With such a premise established, Szanto argues that the job of the critic is to evaluate the ideology that a given text propagates and its subsequent effects.

Brown’s picture book begins with Pablo as Neftalí, a child who “loved wild things wildly and quiet things quietly.” Brown then launches the dominant theme of this text when she explains that words “whirled and swirled [around the boy], just like the river that ran near his home in Chile.” Preferring reading over soccer, Neftalí decides as a child that he wants to become a writer.

Notably, a big jump occurs between a teacher giving the young boy books to read and the statement that “when he was a teenager, Neftalí changed his name to Pablo Neruda and began publishing his poems.” At this spot in the text, I actually thought some pages had stuck together, causing me to miss the bridge between his teacher’s gift and the dramatic change that occurs when the boy becomes a teenager. But, no, the narrative really does take this jump. As much as this book is about a writer and implies the magic of writing, I was disappointed that the texts doesn’t go into more depth as to why the boy wanted to become a writer and how the books impacted or otherwise affected him. Such additional commentary might have inspired reluctant readers/writers or resonated refreshingly with others.

I was able to move beyond this disappointment a few pages later when Brown provides a lush, almost excited inventory of the writing that Neruda began to do. She relates,

Pablo wrote poems about the things he loved—things made by his artist friends, things found at the marketplace, and things he saw in nature.

He wrote about scissors and thimbles and chairs and rings.

He wrote about buttons and feathers and shoes and hats.

He wrote about velvet cloths the color of the sea.

So nice about this passage is its emphasis on the fact that writing can be about anything, including our familiar surroundings (which is something Francisco Alarcón does splendidly in his poetry for children, by the way). In effect, writing—and poetry in particular—is demystified and celebrated for younger readers. The accompanying 2-page illustration by Julie Paschkis features streams of images and words. Among other things, this works brilliantly to suggest the endless fluidity of words and things and implies the poet’s ability to bend and otherwise play with them.¹

Indeed, the complentarity between pictures and text in this work is one of the best that I have seen in a picture book for children.² Brown clearly wants to convey that the world can be seen in words, and Paschkis does a fine job of visually demonstrating and enacting this. The result is nothing less than an enticing invitation to the reader to turn empirical sense into poetic sensibility.³

Over the final section of the book, Brown tries to segue into Neruda’s social and political activism. While the move from “Pablo loved mothers and fathers, poets and artists, children and neighbors, and his many friends around the world” to “When Pablo saw the coal miners working dangerous jobs for little money, he was angry” feels a bit clunky, Paschkis’s illustrations hold things together with a sustained portrayal of the omnipresence of words and their polymorphousness. By the time Brown mentions that “[Pablo’s] poems made leaders angry” and that he therefore had to flee the “soldiers [who] came to get him,” she provides important information, but it all makes a line like “Pablo loved opposites, so he wrote about fire and rain and spring and fall” seem like it comes from another book read long ago. But then, perhaps this again just shows the ways that words and poetry are available for all occassions as we grow up.

All of this gets back to the inherently difficult task that a biographer for children faces. Biography carries a host of responsibilities, including completeness. Yet a picture book for children is a very tight space. This particular picture book is at its strongest when it carries on about the wonders of writing. The material about Neruda’s activism seems somewhat included out of Brown’s sense of her obligation as a biographer, but this is fully understandable. To be sure, I might seem to be on the cusp—if I am not doing so already—of complaining about the inclusion of this material, but I don’t mean to do so, really. (If it had not been included, it goes without saying that I would probably be complaining about that.) If anything, I am being sensitive to what strikes me as some difficulties with this book with cohesion. At bottom, I think the difficulties I am seeing stem from an imbalance between the different components or strands of the narrative. That said, what perhaps becomes necessary in the final analysis is a recognition of and respect for the challenges intrinsic to the genre of the biographical picture book. Overall, this is a beautiful and effective picture book that gives readers a lot to think—and hopefully write—about. 

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ I cannot help but point out that for a moment I personally found this 2-page illustration to teeter on being overwhelming. Words and images are different types of signifiers and require different modes of processing. As they spill across the two page spread, the viewer’s eyes toggle frenetically trying to take everything in and the mind just about convulses trying to process the disparate material. Incidentally, such a moment brings to mind a comment by Fredric Jameson on schizophrenia:

[T]he breakdown of temporality suddenly releases [the] present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, [the] present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material—or better still, the literal—signifier in isolation. This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, [possibly] described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. (27-28)

I find fascinating the resonance between this passage and the cognitive dynamics precipitated by the encounter of the reader with Paschkis’s illustration (plus Brown’s accompanying rush of text). It strikes me that the reader is put in a schizophrenic position from which he/she will, ideally, emerge with the euphoria that Jameson describes (rather than, or perhaps after overcoming, any initial anxiety and loss of reality). It becomes especially interesting that this is taking place in a book for children. The child is a subject coming to terms with the real world, and it might be said that there is something fundamentally schizophrenic about the child’s negotiation of the real and the not-real. (This is probably where I ought to be consulting the work of D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein.) Incidentally, if we follow the lead of Jacques Lacan, we could read into the growth of the child his/her entry into the symbolic order. In effect, we might read the illustration in Brown’s picture book as one that captures or recreates or compels a schizophrenic drama in which the child negotiates the material world, the symbolic order, and the infinite horizons engendered by both.

² For an instructive discussion of picture book dynamics, including relationships between text and illustrations, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picture Books Work.

³ Richard Flynn offers an illuminating discussion of children, poetry, and children’s poetry in his article, “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?”

Works Cited

Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (June 1993): 37-44.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott. How Picture Books Work. New York: Garland, 2001.

Szanto, George. Theater and Propaganda. Austin: U of Texas P, 1978.

Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik, 57–79. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

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