Tag Archives: Slow-Rolling Orientalism

Eddie Campbell on Persepolis and Habibi

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Eddie Campbell had a long comment in which he talked about Persepolis, Habibi, the relationship between art and writing, and other matters. It seemed a shame to leave it at the end of the comment thread, so I thought I’d highlight it here. (I’ve tweaked formatting on a couple of links, but otherwise it’s unedited.)

(in response to Mike)

Matthias wrote, in his opening paragraph : “one is perhaps fooled into believing that the form is finally receiving its due, that we have moved beyond the facile.. “story vs. drawing” discussions of yesteryear.”

And then you entered into a “story vs drawing discussion”.

Such a discussion belongs to the arena of comic books where the convention is that different tasks are assigned to different practitioners (you show that you still dwell in this arena when you refer to Ditko and Kirby). And even if they are not so assigned, this consideration of separateness is now ingrained. An aficionado of the comic books follows his favourite artist from one job to the next, hoping that he will occasionally be teamed with a partner worthy of him.

An essential demand of the newer kind of comics under discussion, in which a unified whole is presumed, is that we find a more apt way of talking about them. Satrapi’s Persepolis, when it opens, is the first person narrative of a ten year old girl. The drawing is perfectly right for the story; it expresses the world view of a ten year old girl living anywhere. Characters are simplified in a way that is charmingly naive and perspective is nearly non-existent. Whether Satrapi is capable of a different kind of drawing is not relevant to a discussion of the book. The artist is not a musician being hired by a symphony orchestra that expects her to be able to play the whole classical repertoire. She is giving us a record of her personal experience. She has a natural grasp of what is important in telling a story, which unfolds with simplicity. By the end of the first book we are surprised by how much information we have taken in, as we weren’t aware of taking it in. We thought we were listening to a child talking.

The authentic voice of the original can be appreciated by comparing it with the more professionally knowing treatment of the material in the animated movie parts of which are
excruciatingly embarrassing.

The professionals who worked on it will go onto their next gig and we may hope they will be teamed with material more suited to their outlook.

As to Habibi, Matthias shows that there is nothing in Thompson’s art that is not in the overall meaning of the book. To praise the art separately is the reflex of the critic who has unconsciously recognized the ‘generosity of intent’ that is all over the work and doesn’t want to end on a rude rebuke. That intent is as much the CONtent as anything in the book that appears to be about the Arabian world. Looking at it again two months after I first opened the work, what I see is a cartoon romantic fantasy. I’m incredulous that it has inspired so much argument, or that in a medium that produces a mountain of crap over and over every year anybody could think this is among the “worst” that comics has to offer in 2011.

As always, the criticism against Thompson is that he didn’t make the book that thinking folk wanted him to make. I recall that the title of the TCj review of Blankets in 2003 (2004?-Tcj is never timely) consisted of those words more or less (‘Why Blankets isn’t the book… ?) Here it’s that Habibi is not a complex poem about modern life as reflected in the travails of the middle east, and also he didn’t draw it more in the manner of Blutch.

I remain however dubious about the remark that there is an implicit assertion that the book is more than broad melodrama. I thought that Nadim’s observation that there was more of Disney’s Nights than Burton’s was apt. And the ecological message isn’t more profound than ‘we need to look after the world because it’s where we live’.

While the lavish attention to tangential information raised hope of profundity, some critics have had trouble with him breaking up the linearity of the story unnecessarily. But I see that as just a Tarantino thing. A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink. There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go. Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting. I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work. We are a society that is weary with it all. We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history. We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom. Lists. the Months of the calendar of pregnancy, the names of the rooms in the palace, the planets, the nights of Sheherezade, the walk-ons of the Cheshire cat, the ninjas of Frank Miller, the Goddess Bahuchara Mata. Witty juxtapostions: the prophet at the farthest limit of human understanding plays out over the slave putting a spanner in the works in the Rube-Goldbergian plumbing inside the heart of Wanatolia. it’s a play-bauble being turned around and viewed from every possible angle. It’s not the ink line that is the virtuoso show, but the cartoon invention, the prodigious flow of ideas. The ink line serves the demands of clarity, of the ‘control’ that has been discussed above, and it speeds in comparison to Blutch’s because that also is demanded of it. It is liquid, and the ideas run as though out of a tap that has been left on, spilling out the supply of water necessary to quench the thirst of a careening dash through this Arabian fantasy.

And as with Satrapi, that is why Thompson’s drawing is inseparable form everything else in the book. There is certainly much that I find odd in it, including a coy Middle American sense of humour, as in the farting little man in the palace. Isn’t farting viewed differently in Arabia? And the convoluted treatment of sex in Thompson’s work will certainly one day attract a separate study.

The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #26

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As I’ve mentioned, the last few issues of the Marston/Peter run have been tough going. Marston was, at this point in the series, very unfortunately dead, and it seems likely that at least some of the scripts were being ghosted. In any case, quality fell off something fierce.

I’m pleased to say that things have picked up somewhat with #26, though. The stories are not especially ambitious, but they do seem to be written by Marston, in all his loopy, kinky glory. Giant women enslaving their menfolk?
 

Check. Insane tiger-lady using pressure points to control men’s wills?
 

Yes. Evil treacherous green men attacking virtuous intergalactic golden policewomen?
 

Yay!
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So since Marston’s in his bonds and all is right with the world, I thought I might try using issue #26 to see if I couldn’t address some of the questions Matthias raises in this post about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Specifically, Matthias argued that critics need to address not only ideological issues, but also aesthetic ones — or, perhaps more accurately, that critics should address ideological issues through aesthetic ones.

Matthias approaches both issues of aesthetics and ideology in Thompson’s work through a metaphor of control. For Matthias, Thompson’s art is unsurprising, slick, and overly pat:

the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed.

Matthias adds:

Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

So above is Thompson’s mound of garbage. Let’s look, in contrast, at an image of Harry Peter’s from Wonder Woman #26.

To start with maybe the most obvious differences, Thompson’s mound of garbage is (as Matthias notes) much more carefully, and even classically composed than Peter’s scene of quasi-classically dressed women. Thompson makes careful use of negative space; the area in front of the garbage dump is blank, setting off the brick-a-brack. The grouping of man, woman, and boat is placed up to one side, isolating it dramatically. The arrangement comes across as painterly, or perhaps as dramatically awe-inspiring in the manner of Doré. The image seems frozen or posed; a dramatic landscape to be placed on a wall and (as Matthias says) admired.

Peter’s illustration is also stiff and still — the guards stand straight off to the side; Wonder Woman stands straight in the center, and the two giants also seem oddly rigid. However, the stiffness here isn’t painterly or dramatic; it’s awkward. The figures aren’t grouped to take advantage of negative space; instead, their just dropped against the disturbing pale green background. They end up looking like paper dolls; you almost want to get a scissors and cut them out. Where Thompson’s drawing seems elaborately finished, sufficient unto itself, Peter’s beckons you to take part — not least by presenting Wonder Woman herself as a puppet, literally manipulated by a cord attached to her neck.

These differences carry over to the use of line. As Matthias says, Thompson’s inking is so sure as to be almost diagrammatic, most noticeably in his calligraphy.

The image above is for the most part bilaterally symmetrical, and the repetition of shapes is careful and more than a little cold. This is miles away from the tradition of Japanese calligraphy, where imperfection — the sign of the writer’s hand — is such a central part of the aesthetic.

Zen Circle by Tanchu Tarayama

 
Peter is certainly capable of graceful lines (check out the eyebrows.)
 

But, as with the composition, he’s not afraid of awkwardness either. The clunky wire connecting the box to Wonder Woman’s neck manages to look so stiff and odd in part because Peter doesn’t keep the two lines forming it an even distance from each other; they bulge out and come together to make an organic metalness. Peter also uses inky blots and daubs almost at random. The patterns on the chief giant’s winged boots, for example, are so joyously messy that they almost fail to parse as feathers. Similarly, the motion lines by the ax are thick and juicy enough that the giant seems ready to grab them. If Thompson’s line is precise, creating a definite, calibrated world, Peter’s line is has a bulbous, erratic grace, which constantly threatening to pull his figures down into their constituent globs.
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I (still!) haven’t read Habibi, so I’m tentative about making wide statements about how the linework might relate to Thompson’s narrative themes and vice versa. So I’ll piggy back on Matthias’ insights, and point out some possible connections that he doesn’t quite tease out. For example, this from Matthias is suggestive:

In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

Matthias seems to see the obsessive sexual transgression as outside of, or opposed to the neatness of the surface…but in fact, I wonder if they’re not all of a piece. As anyone knows who has tried to read de Sade, sadism is really boring. It’s repetitive and obsessive and overly organized; counting whip strokes with the same kind of regular blandness with which Thompson makes pen strokes. Moreover, the very composedness of the junk pile, recalls Laura Mulvey’s comments about the pictorial autonomy of Hollywood cinema:

But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.

If Orientalism is a voyeuristic phantasy, Thompson’s self-sufficient style might be seen as a means to control and regiment that fantasy — a way to keep everything in its place.

Harry Peter’s art, on the other hand, is much less successful at creating an illusion of containment. Wonder Woman’s look over her shoulder seems deliberately to break the plane of the image just as the figures seem cut loose, floating in front of their own background. Power and hierarchy break apart into knowing glances and wiggling blobs; are these lines pretending to be women, or women pretending to be Peter’s? It all seems staged, not as an image for singular consumption, but as a dress up play in which each viewer and each line is invited to assist in limning each role. In its stiff, awkward way, Peter’s style embraces polymorphous perversion. His line encourages not (or not just) scopophilia, but a plethora of interrupted, indeterminate, pleasures of position and pretense. Aesthetically or ideologically, the line draws you in not as master, but as subject.
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Update: The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Supermelodrama

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Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing roundtable on Orientalism, more or less focused on Habibi.
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Throughout high school, Craig Thompson’s Blankets was the only comic book in my collection that people repeatedly asked to see and borrow. It’s telling that I didn’t technically own it, having borrowed it from another friend. I felt a little jealous on the part of the other comics I owned—Blankets was fantastic, but it became the only comic people asked about. My mom read it, and then our neighbors read it. People wanted to tell me that they had heard about this sophisticated ‘graphic novel.’ I chalked it up to a few things: its technical skill justified it as being art (wrongly), its length meant it was serious, and by this point, the name rang a bell. My friends and parents and parent’s friends were used to hearing me talk about comics as a serious form of expression, and now they heard Time or NPR bring up Blankets. I got sent newspaper clippings about it from relatives. People were curious, willing to spend time with the book, to be in the know about something critics declared both revolutionary and emotionally relevant. I was grateful, but again, a little jealous for all the other comics I was reading.

With Habibi on the horizon, I’d set my hopes on Craig Thompson championing virtuosity as a sophisticated and subtle storytelling vehicle, providing a powerful devil’s advocate to the linguistic or minimalist approaches to comics making that seemed, oftentimes, more effective. But I was anxious about the Orientalism foreshadowed by Thompson’s comments, or the remarks of better-informed friends.

A month ago, opening Habibi on the long bus ride back from SPX, I was more than baffled. It was, after all, an Orientalist book. But Habibi—even for a decades-spanning romantic epic—followed a shocking amount of familiar tropes from American melodrama. In fact, it perfectly enunciated not one but two different ‘cluster’ definitions of melodrama. (I had studied narrative at Carleton College, which, yep, I just graduated from.) Two foundational theorists, film scholars Linda Williams and Ben Singer, admit the impossibility of finding a melodramatic work that embodies every commonality they high-light, but Habibi comes pretty damn close.

Saying ‘melodrama’ on a crowded blog might be irresponsible—colloquially, the word is strictly pejorative, and engenders the bad taste of the Lichtenstein blondes that high-brow critics have reduced comics to for years (and while savvy critics now make exceptions, still do.) I’d rather approach Habibi through the lens of film and narrative study, where melodrama is less a genre than an evolving narrative structure or mode, and can be found across most genres and media—particularly in America. The essence of melodramatic storytelling lies in desperate situations of impossibly heightened stakes. When the risk appears ridiculous to its audience, and unworthy of the tears, grandiosity and suffering, melodrama loses its poignancy and becomes kitsch.

This approach comes from scholar Linda Williams, whose book Playing the Race Card and a few killer essays, trace the legacy of melodrama in America’s cultural and racial history — a history which Habibi is indisputably, if unconsciously, a part of. On the other hand, it’s also worthwhile to study melodrama as it’s commonly understood, as a historical mode that exploded and matured in American culture, petered out in the middle of the twentieth century, and stemmed from nineteenth century sentimentalism. Craig Thompson seems to have gone for this explicitly, judging by his mention of ‘Cowboys and Indians.’ This theory is forwarded by Ben Singer in his book Melodrama and Modernity.

I could draft a thesis on melodrama in Habibi, and have a ball bringing in related theories, especially those of Laura Mulvey and Clement Greenberg’s work on kitsch. That’s not what I’m prepared to post here. A survey of William’s and Singer’s points illuminate just how exemplary of a melodrama Habibi is, even where Thompson does subvert the mode in remarkable ways. However, this ‘melodramatism’ problematizes Habibi as an Orientalist and American “text,” and as a book that is slated to receive a fair amount of outside-comics attention.

Visual Excess and Violence, Realism and the Tableau

Formally, melodramas are marked by visual excess, manifesting in traits like overwrought expressions and gestures, thrilling chase scenes, ’swelling busts,’ musculature and gratuitous violence. Williams especially notes that this excess is accompanied by an obsession with realism—not realistic storytelling or behavior, but realistic effects that enhance the sensational thrill of the action. Reading Habibi’s virtousity as a kind of visual excess could confirm some of my worst fears about ‘pretty’ comics, which merits another post altogether. Thompson stirringly choreographs chase scenes, daring rescues, and death-bed hand wringing in the tradition of classic D. W. Griffith melodrama (a comparison already made by Corey Creekmur on this blog.) Habibi is also a remarkably violent work, particularly with Dodola, who we watch repeatedly raped and abused. The sensational visual of Dodola’s naked body also appears across the countless astral, psychedelic tableaus of Zam’s fantasies.


Still from the Perils of Pauline, 1914

The tableau, a melodramatic tendency to ‘freeze’ the action in an appealing and emotionally charged still, is featured prominently in Habibi. The narrative eventually breaks down into a slew of tableaus by the end.

To Habibi’s credit, Thompson does confront this visuality (and the male gaze) in Zam’s horror of it. Near the end, Dodola’s intuits that “a man’s inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it’s the narrative” (639). Habibi is both supervisual at its end (with the tableaus) and anti-visual, especially in the blank nine-by-nine grid of Orphan’s Prayer, where Zam confronts the blasphemy of visuality and image-making. Here his struggle with himself is echoed in Thompson’s, as creator. Zam forgives himself, and the image-making is again permitted, and for better or for worse, Dodola is returned to a visualized object of desire.

Insistence on Virtue, Rural Goodness and Exotic/Industrial Evil

Most, but not all melodramas insists on the virtue of the characters, who in the beginning are tainted by a ‘fall’ from grace and are forced to leave an earthly manifestation of paradise (often depicted as a rural home.) The plot then revolves around their eventual return to ‘home’—either by ascending to heaven through death, or withdrawing from society back to the countryside. The peak of melodrama’s popularity coincided with the rise of industrialism, and melodrama’s nostalgizing of rural living appealed to a increasingly urban population.


reprinted in Ben Singer Melodrama and Modernity

Melodrama must simultaneously taint and preserve its protagonists’ virtue. This is commonly achieved through victimization, physical suffering, and occasionally self-mortification, often expressed as graphically as possible, but without showing actual genitalia. The protagonists’ virtue is further established by reducing the cast, good and bad guys alike, to morally dualistic psychic types, good and evil. ‘Corrupt society’ is often depicted as ‘anti-nature,’ a dirty and over-stimulating center of hedonism and crime, or an exotic location where brutality and taboo-breaking provide a implicit foil to the American rural homestead. The precedents for Dodola and Zam’s rural boat-house, the palace and urban Wanatolia, and even Habibi’s environmental metaphors of water and damming, can be found in Way Down East, the film Giant, and countless other pulps and melodramas– which also predict the ending where Dodola and Zam, orphan in hand, withdraw back to the desert.

Finally, melodrama’s classic emphasis on purity and taint is made explicitly in Habibi’s text and visuals. Dodola is told that the stain of her broken hymen “proves that she was pure” in the first few pages of the book (14). In Zam’s fever dreams during his lengthy, self-mutilating surgery, Zam calls to Dodola, “I’m pure again! Will you take me back?” Dodola replies, “The question is… am I pure enough for you…?” (p. 337). Its worth repeating that this doesn’t make Habibi bad per se; and I think Dodola’s ’de-flowering’ by her first husband is both human and highly nuanced. Similarly, the most powerful subversion Thompson provides is how he makes the issue of ‘purity’ and ‘taint’ irrelevant after The Orphan’s Prayer, even while most of Habibi’s melodramatic facets are restored or accentuated. Dodola goes full-on into sentimental mother mode, (having experienced a significant Scarlet O’Hara + Way Down East child-loss episode before,) and they return to the desert, “God’s Domain” (630).


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Non-Causal, Circular and Non-Traditional Storytelling—“Just in Time”

The ‘magical’ expunging of character’s taint through suffering highlights the most subtle, but perhaps most fundamental commonality of melodrama. Narratives are often called conservative, in that they don’t address the character’s conflict with society, (If X is so innocent, why is she suffering?) Melodramas often can’t arrive at logical conclusions—people either kiss and make up, or withdraw from society altogether, without the conflict ever being ‘solved.’ Melodramas compensate by making sense emotionally, where the audience vicariously experiences the progression of joy to suffering to despair to joy. The return to the rural home-space doubly asserts this circular structure. The extended periods of unremitting suffering and pathos often “burst” in scenes of recognition, (finally!) and rescue, (just in the nick of time!) and occasionally even more pathos (too late!) In either case, the moment of just-in-time/too-late signals the expelling of taint, where the characters are ready to return to paradise. Habibi’s plot is fueled with pathos, from the caravan rapes to palace intrigue, to Zam’s despair and near suicide at the cliff-hanger of Orphan’s Prayer. I’d like to repeat that for all its melodramatic trappings, HabibiTRULY subverts the use of suffering as a purifier, and makes noise in declaring its self-destructive futility. Yet Habibi’s cosmic self-forgiveness, expressed by the tableau of Zam walking home, and its substitution of the concern of purity with child- and motherhood, underlines how Habibirelies on a similar perspective shift as Griffith’s Way Down East and many other melodramas. Habibiending is more believable: no puriticanical foster-parent forgives a fallen woman because she nearly died in a blizzard. Habibi relocates the perspective-shift to the internality of the protagonist, making the victimization an issue of self-victimization. Unfortunately, this doesn’t restore the humanity of the oafish sultan, dwarf adviser or bland eunuch friends.

As a reader, you might say, ‘sure, you just described a lot of points that show ways in which Habibiis melodramatic, and a sophisticated example of one at that. We knew that.’ What is striking is that these are all the major components of two very different examinations of melodrama—and its very rare for one example to possess so many. Habibiis a super-melodrama, a balanced synthesis of the escapist, ‘blood-and-thunder’ serial with the American family epic—and with a good amount of Old South narrative thrown in. Habibiis truly Orientalist in that its not only a fantasy of the Middle East, but an imposition of an American story, involving American concerns of race, sexuality, and industrialization, on a foreign, if imaginary, culture. Thompson has explicitly stated that the project was to bridge Islamic and Christian faith, which he DOES execute with incredible poignancy in the stories of Genesis sprinkled throughout. The melodramatic framework that surrounds Dodola and Zam, and constitutes most of the book, works against his best intentions. Its hard not to read Dodola’s escape with baby Zam from the slave market as a direct homage to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s iconic flight of Eliza with child from slave-catchers. This homage doesn’t prove the universality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as much as an inability to look outside of American storytelling traditions to what is truly local to the Middle East.


from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, reprinted in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card

Habibiis otherwise subversive in several other places: Dodola spends very little time weeping or reflecting on her powerlessness—this soul-searching is left to Zam. But, why is it necessary for Zam to castrate himself, before being reunited sexually with Dodola? Is it just to “heighten the stakes,” to lead the reader to despair of their sexual union, only to reveal a joyous, unexpected solution? Previous melodramas provide troubling parallels with Habibi’s depiction of black male sexuality, which the robustness of Habibii’s melodrama make it hard to ignore.

So what? Habibi for better or worse, seems destined to join Blankets as a ‘Well-Known Graphic Novel,’ the kind your aunt sends you clippings on and seventy-year-old women ask about at baby showers (as happened to me last week.) There’s a chance that they’ll enjoy it—that they’ll be glad to indulge in a rollicking Cowboys and Indians story with enough sophisticated internality, visual reinvention, strong female characters and biracial coupling to qualify a subversion of the mode.

If the reviews in the Guardian and the NY Times are any indication, these aren’t favors the comics community can yet expect from a broader readership. I think the generosity of my reading comes from extensive study of the melodramatic structure—it might be easy to lose what makes Habibi a sophisticated example of Cowboys and Indians in, well, Cowboys and Indians. Let alone the fact that this American story is cloaked in Orientalist trappings, and created and published during our military’s continued involvement in the Middle East. Its hard to ignore that Habibi reflects an American solipsism in our occupation and imposition there, a wishful escape to the world of good-and-evil storytelling, and a refusal to confront really sticky issues of race in a contemporary, or responsible, manner. I’m playing the race card here, but even from my first read through of Habibi, it was hard to ignore. This issue will only be magnified when ‘outside-comics’ readers approach Habibi without any understanding of how innocent Thompson’s intentions were.

Why does lending out Habibi make me feel so much more anxious than lending Blankets did six years ago? Like I said, melodrama is a fascinating and contemporary narrative form, as valid as any other. I recommend melodramas all the time. Yet, how many comic books will a seventy-year-old woman read this year? One, maybe—and if it’s Habibi, I worry that its melodrama, picking up more themes than it can considerately deal with, drifting into kitsch (a term already associated with the comics medium) will represent the entire medium, unfairly, as a space of gratuitous visuality, over-wrought nostalgism, and bad taste.
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Kailyn Kent is an artist and one of the folks behind Carleton Graphic Press.

Caroline Small on Habibi, Said, and Heart of Darkness

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Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.

So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.

It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?

I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.

A Brief Conversation with Corey Creekmur on Habibi

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Corey Creekmur is an associate professor of English, Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He’s also a sometimes commenter, mostly over on our Facebook page. He had a bunch of interesting things to say about Habibi over there…and when he pressed he politely (if a little reluctantly) agreed to let me post them here as part of our Slow-Rolling Orientalism roundtable.
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Corey Creekmur: Frankly, I think this [that is, Suat’s negative assessment of Habibi] is a response Thompson was anticipating.

Noah: What do you mean Corey? Because he mentioned his use of Orientalist tropes?

Corey: Yes, I think his risky gambit was to create a consciously Orientalist work in a post 9/11 context. The criticisms are valid, but they also presume that something “authentic” was possible, and I’m sure Thompson knew that that wasn’t really an option either. It is striking that, so far, praise for the book (in general) concentrates on the art and condemnation emphasizes the narrative, as if we haven’t learned how those intertwine.

Noah: Corey, surely it’s also possible that the art is good and the narrative not so much? Suat points out some works that he thinks succeeded better; would you disagree that that’s the case? I don’t really think Suat and Nadim are asking for more authentic so much as less racist?

Creekmur: People should read this in relation to the earlier essay you folks posted on Orientalism in SANDMAN as well. The large question seems to be what sort of Middle Eastern fantasies are now possible or tolerable in the context of the West’s increased awareness of Middle East realities. I disagree with points in these essays but they are sharp, important criticism. Thanks.

Sure, form and content don’t always mesh, but it seems striking that the positive criticism praises the art and downplays the story, and the negative criticism works in the reverse way. And isn’t a plea for less racism almost necessarily a plea for more authenticity, or realism? Again, I think Thompson risks the use of stereotypes (almost intrinsic to the history of comics) and perhaps fails in that, and does so with a certain awareness rather than ignorance. We may object to what he is doing, but my sense is that he knows what he is doing in regard to the history of stereotypes. (A friend of mine thought what he got most wrong was pregnancy and childbirth, by the way …)

Noah: Corey, would you mind if I posted our back and forth here as part of our ongoing discussion?

Corey: Um, I guess so, though these aren’t the thought-out comments the text, I think, deserves. I work on the history and function of stereotypes, but my comments here are, well, FB comments. I will note I’m bothered that people here have proudly decided not to read it at all based on the criticism. I’d rather people read it and then go after it as hard as they wish than assume that actual reading is unnecessary.

Eastern Trip

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This was first published on Splice Today. It seemed like a good sidenote to our ongoing roundtable on Orientalism.
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Psych Funk Sa-Re-Ga!: Seminar: Aesthetic Expressions of Psychedelic Funk Music in India: 1970-1983 is not an unwieldy academic tome. Instead, it’s a compilation of Bollywood psych funk—all sitars, organ grind, wah-wah guitar and trippy effects—put together by World Psychedelic Funk Classics.

The title, then, is something of a gag, though of the half-serious kind. The impressive booklet included with the CD includes subheads like “Course description” and “Learning outcomes” and suggests that “While not required,” those taking the course would benefit from “a working knowledge of Indian history from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the British colonial period—the end of which, of course, coincided with the birth of many of the Indian Psych Funk pioneers included on this compilation.”

So far, so cute. A little too cute, in fact. The booklet is self-consciously tongue-in-cheek in its anthropological pretentions, but that doesn’t make the pretensions any less pretentious or any less anthropological. They may joke about their scholarly approach, but the approach remains scholarly, complete with biographies of important figures, careful annotations of each track putting it into historical and musical context, and a ton of artwork from the period that must have been quite a job to track down.

None of which is wrong, obviously. And yet there’s something about the careful hipness and hip carefulness that I find a little off-putting. Many of the tracks here are by mammothly enormous stars—R. D. Burman, Asha Bhosle—from the most densely inhabited segment of the globe. This is popular music with a capital pop. It’s like putting together a compilation of tracks by Taylor Swift and Ke$ha and Lady Gaga and then saying, hey, this is a wacky seminar! It’s fun…and it’s good for you! But such is the Columbus-like experience of world music crate diving, in which you compulsively pat yourself on the back for discovering that obscure fruit off which some significant proportion of the world’s population was already living.

And yet the fact remains, even though a lot of people already know about it, it’s still new to someone. In this case, me. I certainly knew who Asha Bhosle was, and I knew some 70s Bollywood, but even so I hadn’t heard most of the music on this comp. And it’s great!

More than that, it’s great in part because of the obsessive annotation. It’s embarrassing to admit, perhaps, but I didn’t catch Bappi Lahari’s flagrant and hysterical lift from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” until the liner notes pointed it out to me—and you can’t truly appreciate “Everybody Dance With Me” until you realize that Lahari is performing Iron Butterfly as if they were the Kingsmen. Similarly, I’d heard Asha Bhosle sing “Dum Maro Dum” a time or two, but somehow never realized that it was about smoking dope—a factoid that definitely adds a certain something. As, for that matter, does the information that she was soon to be married to R.D. Burman, who joins her on the track.

So it goes throughout the album. Would I have noticed the Vegas-meets-free-jazz-while-being-cheered-on-by-spasticly-burping-keyboards in Burman’s insane “Freak Out Music” if the liner notes hadn’t singled the track out for me? Would I have been as thrilled by the heavy garagey lounge groove of German saxophonist Klaus Doldinger’s “Sitar Beat” if I hadn’t been told that the sitar player was also responsible for the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack? Would I have tuned in to Usha Khanna’s contemplative, droning “Hotel Music”—complete with swinging trumpet outro—if I hadn’t learned that she was one of the few female composers in Bollywood?

Maybe. I’ve certainly got lots of compilations that don’t provide a ton of information. I don’t need to have things spelled out for me in order to enjoy an unfamiliar genre. But it doesn’t hurt to be given a little bit of orientation either. I wish the information could be provided without suggesting that it was particularly esoteric. But then, don’t I think I’m kind of cool for being interested in Bollywood, even despite the fact that scads of my hipster peers have been there before me? I’m in the room, I’m taking the course. It’s not clear what practical difference it makes whether I’m smug about that or smug about knowing that it’s kind of icky to be smug about that.

A Comment on the Subaltern’s Progress through Habibi

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[Part of the Slow-Rolling Orientalism roundtable.]

Those looking for a detailed examination of Craig Thompson’s Habibi would do well to read Nadim Damluji’s recently published review on this site.

Nadim’s article had an unexpected side effect. The generous tone of his article convinced me that Thompson’s comic was still worth reading despite its flaws. What that review didn’t prepare me for was the tale’s construction — a collation of tidbits from Islamic art presented in an ad hoc manner in order to denote sincere contemplation. The composition of Habibi seems less governed by concerted purpose than the passing interest of the author who intermittently introduces religious, scientific, and poetic subjects into his work without fully incorporating them into his narrative. Themes are inserted, explained, and discarded in a matter of pages; frequently devolving into distractions and adding little in the way of density to the book as a whole. One imagines a flitting bee, passing from flower to flower ever in search of a suitable subject matter for illustration and juxtaposition, yet bereft of any deep intellectual purpose or real spiritual engagement. The rich thread of narrative weaving and insight is not to be found in this work. Thompson’s characters are caricatures whose actions follow the dictates of a fairy tale less the wonder and the imagination. They are dried husks whose presence is so foul and whose formulaic fortunes are so unbearable as to elicit an all consuming desire to scream.

In many ways, I’m stunned that Nadim managed to get through the comic with so little complaint. I’m certainly amazed at the strength of his constitution or at least his stomach. Perhaps he has taken fully to heart the instructions of the Qu’ran that “…whosoever shows patience and forgives that would truly be from the things recommended by Allah”

As Nadim points out, at least three quarters of Habibi seems to be the product of a mind which chose to pore over images by Ingres, Delacroix, and other assorted Orientalist painters; this as opposed to any adequate political and cultural histories of the Middle East. As Thompson explains in an interview at Bookslut in 2004:

“…it’s a sort of an Arabian folktale of my own making. Not that I have… not that I’m justified in telling such a story; it’ll definitely be filtered through my isolated Western sensibilities. But that’s the stuff I’m reading now, a lot of Islamic art, culture, the original Arabian Nights, the Burton translation. I’m going to go on a trip to Morocco in about a month. I’m just sort of drawing on all these fun, fantastical, exotic elements of Islamic culture.”

And later in another interview at Millions from 2011:

“I trusted the Turkish writer Elif Shafak — she wrote The Bastard of Istanbul — who describes fiction as a way to live other lives and in other worlds. You don’t need to have those experiences directly. It’s almost a shamanistic journey where by tapping your own imagination you access these other roles.  And I trusted that.”

The  comments from 2004 may not tell the full story of Thompson’s creative endeavor but they are revealing. Of note is Thompson’s choice of the Burton translation of The Arabian Nights as opposed to a modern one by a native speaker such as Hussain Haddawy. In the introduction to his translation, Haddawy notes that “from Galland to Burton, translators, scholars, and readers shared the belief that the Nights depicted a true picture of Arab Life and culture at the time of the tales and, for some strange reason, at their own time….Burton’s translation…is not so much a true translation of the Nights as it is a colorful and entertaining concoction.” He proceeds to label an excerpt from Burton’s translation a parody or a self-parody. This is exactly what we get in Habibi. As Thompson explains in an interview at Guernica:

“The late 19th-century French Orientalist paintings are very exploitative and sensationalistic. They’re sexist and racist and all of those things, and yet there’s a beauty to them and a charm. So, I was self-consciously proceeding with an embrace of Orientalism, the Western perception of the East….“Embrace” may not be the right choice of words. The book is borrowing self-consciously Orientalist tropes from French Orientalist paintings and the Arabian Nights. I’m aware of their sensationalism and exploitation, but wanted to juxtapose the influence of Islamic arts with this fantastical Western take.”

Knowing or not, this parody of Middle Eastern culture shows little evidence of irony or cynicism. A charitable reading might suggest that Thompson subverts his source material by revealing the layer of cruelty behind French Orientalist paintings but, as Nadim points out, that sense of barbarism is part and parcel of a scornful ideology which has been promulgated throughout the West and which is accepted as fact today — a view which sees those men and women as objects of fantasy and, more acutely, members of an alien and subhuman world. This is a perception of that society as one which has little to offer the modern world except exoticism and the glories of past ages. It is an experience so infuriating that one would do well to wash out one’s eyes and brains with the novels of Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk having taken it in. The works of the latter author in particular would provide an object lesson in how best to traverse the borders of history, myth, and contemporary society which Thompson has chosen to explore.

What follows is a bare bones summary of Thompson’s narrative. As a young girl, our fair heroine, Dodola, is sold by her illiterate and destitute father to a scribe to be his wife. The scribe proceeds to deflower her but she gains some learning through her husband’s occupation. Her husband is subsequently killed and Dodola is seized by bandits, caged, branded, and enslaved. She manages to escape with a young black slave, Zam, who proceeds to fall in love with her. Dodola struggles to find sustenance and swiftly falls into prostitution, selling her body for food while seeking refuge in an ark-like boat stranded in the rolling sands of a vast desert. There our hapless maiden is violently raped by one of her customers. She is then abducted by a sultan of sorts who promptly puts her in his harem where she is shown at toilet, learns to use her feminine wiles, is raped repeatedly, tortured, and finally made pregnant.

This brings us up to about the halfway mark in Habibi and it should be clear from this synopsis that Thompson has been true to his word and purpose as stated in his interview at The Crimson:

 “The focus of Habibi,… is not political or even historical; the power in this tale lies in human passion, sometimes cruel and sometimes sweet, combined with its geometric precision and deep sense of the sacred.”

In other words, Habibi is a kind of pulp novel with the author layering his cake with stylish Arabic calligraphy and stray excerpts from the Qu’ran; a comic following upon the much superior genre works of Christophe Blain (Issac the Pirate and Gus & his Gang) and their tone of contemplative adventure. Lest one has any doubts as to the motivations of the author, it is also peppered with a selection of half-baked feminist grievances bemoaning the fate of Arab women; this not solely evidenced by the perils of Dodola but also visions of a stopped up dam (“She was a slender river, but we plugged her up good!”) and the inclusion of a lover who mutilates his own genitalia because of the shame he feels in his own sexuality (and perhaps in the male sex to which he belongs)

Later, a short retelling of “The Tale of the Enchanted King” (from The Arabian Nights) is labeled racist and misogynistic by Dodola. It is a moment of self-awareness meant to be self-referential and critical, both of those ancient tales and perhaps all that has gone on before. Where Alan Moore chose to elevate the insanity and inanity of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so as to mitigate the inclusion of the character Golliwog, Thompson inserts sly winks and homages to Orientalist painters, trotting out caricatures without let or hindrance. What I sense is a certain amount of admiration for the technique of those painters, now ingrained with the pathos of oppressed females and the politics of racism. The seriousness of Thompson’s project is further emphasized by his careful study and deployment of Arabic script. This jumbling up of fantasy and political correctness produces not only an uneasy aesthetic alliance but affirms every negative stereotype produced through years of Western indoctrination; this despite Thompson’s presumed best intentions. While it may be true that Thompson’s cartooning lacks the emotive and stylistic range to capture the pain and suffering he is depicting (almost everything takes on the sensibility of an exercise in virtuosity or an educational diagram), it is sufficient to imbue the proceedings with a certain gravitas. If we are to accept the heroine’s predicament as genuine and emotionally involving, so too must we accept the veracity of Thompson’s view of Arab civilization. There are few if any countermanding examples provided.

The resultant comic is one that will excite every Western prejudice imaginable; not only of a depraved society but one of helpless, abused Arabian women begging to be saved from their bestial male counterparts. Just as the picture of a mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time magazine was used to justify the ongoing war Afghanistan, so too does Thompson’s comic inadvertently excite the bigotry of the unsuspecting and the gullible; a side effect which is totally at odds with his project of syncretizing the three major religions of the region. While Thompson displays earnestness in exploring the roots of these beliefs, he is completely facile when exploring their real and far more important differences — in particular the arch and potentially violent disagreements on these similarities. There is no stronger and more problematic symbol of this in our modern age than the Dome of the Rock (and the Foundation Stone contained therein) on the Temple Mount.

Not being a Muslim or of Middle Eastern extraction, it is hard for me to gauge the level of offence Thompson’s comic would cause the average person living in that part of the world. Now I can imagine a comparable comic with a Chinese woman with butterfly lips and dressed in flowing silks, mutilated by having her feet bound, opening her legs in the royal courts, and being bought and sold like live stock. All this before a flash forward to a pollution-ridden metropolis with individuals living lives of quiet desperation built on the foundation of ancient monstrosities. That tale of woe would probably end with our Chinese damsel in the arms of a brawny Caucasian as is the case in classics such as The World of Suzie Wong. In such an instance, I suspect that most modern Chinese would laugh it off as just the work of another ignorant American or an unimaginative, dated satire. From Thompson’s interviews, it would appear that some of his Muslim friends gave his explorations of the underbelly of Middle Eastern civilization a firm thumbs up. As the author puts it in his interview at The Millions:

“There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media, especially the conservative media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult, because the Muslims I know are very open-minded people and would rather engage in a dialogue.”

It might be educational if one of these individuals were to step forward to defend the first 400 or so pages of Habibi. It would count for something if some of them found Thompson’s comic a fair and accurate depiction of their culture. For my part, I found Habibi utterly repugnant and well deserving of a place on a list of worst comics of 2011.