There are distinct advantages and disadvantages of any storytelling medium, and the graphic novel/story is no exception to this. One of the most compelling features of a graphic story is its ability to follow the golden rule of “show, don’t tell.” This is especially true when it comes to fantastical metaphors that can sometimes feel almost forced in standard literature. To illustrate this, I would like to point to what I found the most powerful scene in Safdar Ahmed’s “Villawood: Notes From an Immigration Detention Centre.” Towards the end of the work, when explaining that “there are hundreds of stories like this,” we see an illustration of a small ball. In the subsequent panels, we see the ball grow larger and is described as “a mass of depression and mental illness.” Finally, we get close enough to this “mass” to see that it is made up of all of the contorted faces that the system has failed. This powerful and emotional visual metaphor would not have had nearly the same impact had it been merely described in words. The power came in us, the reader, seeing the ball get larger while curiously wondering what it, Even when the faces do appear, it takes us a moment to understand what we are looking at. These visual metaphors allow the artist the unique ability to show emotions, rather than telling them.

“I was thirsty again, like I had just swallowed a gallon of seawater. My mouth felt dry. Still I managed to say, ‘Did he really ask for me to come here?'” (Danticat, 10).

When I first read the above simile, I was admittedly quite confused. Sure, we all know that seawater can dehydrate, but why use water in a simile for thirst at all? Would the point not have been more clearly conveyed by comparing her thirst to a person in a barren desert? However, upon deeper thought, I understood that the comparison was quite intentional; Although it is well known that the high salinity of seawater dehydrates, shipwrecked castaways often end up succumbing to their thirst and drink some anyways, often leading to dehydration induced delusion. Similarly, Nadia found herself in a situation where she was being given many painful truths. Just before the simile, she was told that her father actually found out about her when she was a teenager, but never sought her out because he felt that he had already waited too long for her to forgive him. Then, sitting there thirsty for truth (although she knows that the truth will actually be more harmful to her as seawater is to a thirsty castaway), she still continues and asks “Did he really ask for me to come here?,” only to hear the painful answer that, even at the end of her father’s life, it was only her father’s wife who thought to invite her.

Second person narrative is known to be the most difficult of all of three perspective to employ in literature. As a narrator, I can tell a story of someone else and I can surely tell a story about myself. But, to tell the reader something about themselves is certainly a difficult task to attempt. Jamaica Kincaid does just this in the first section of “A Small Place” and does so with purpose.

She begins with a hypothetical proposition: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see” (Kincaid, 3). Here, Kincaid makes no assumptions about the reader but merely tells the reader about what they will see as a tourist. As she continues however, she starts to make some bold assumptions about the reader: “Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white”(Kincaid, 4). But how can Kincaid know this about the reader? As the narration is third-person, surely she does not know what kind of tourists we are! She continues later on even more aggressively: “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.” (Kincaid, 14). And, with this quote, we can understand the impact of Kincaid’s choice of second-person narrative. If this was written in the third-person, we can understand that the tourist of interest is an ugly human being, but surely not us! But, by writing in the second-person, Kincaid is telling us that, if we are tourists, we are ugly human beings. It’s a personal call to self-reflection only attainable by her masterful use of point-of-view.

The focus of my last couple of blog posts—as well as one of the central topics discussed in class—has been about the stark lack of plot in Open City. Instead of again focusing on the uniqueness of having a novel like this, I will instead focus on how Cole was able to still captivate readers’ attention despite this. The answer, of course, lies in Cole’s tone of writing. Other’s in the class have mentioned how Julius’s judgemental remarks are admittedly relatable to the New Yorker in each of us. But it’s also the way in which he constructs his sentences. For example, on page 176 when he read about the skydivers, Cole writes, “There had been a plane traveling at such a height above us that the grumble of its juts was barely audible over our discussion. Then only its faint contrails remained, and just as that faded, we saw the three white circles growing. The circles floated, appearing to fall upward at the same time they were falling down, then everything resolved, like a camera viewfinder coming into focus, and we saw the human shape within each circle… the parachuters were expert, floating toward each other until they were kind of shuttlecock formation…”
I loved reading that passage. As you start, you feel just as confused as Julius and his friends, with no idea what the white circles can be. With Cole’s camera metaphor, however, you discover that the circles are parachuters with the same clarity that the metaphor itself is implying. Especially in the modern era of smartphone cameras, everyone’s experienced the clarity obtained by focusing on a subject in a photograph, as the background fades into a distant blur. Cole delivered this metaphor perfectly at the moment he choses to reveal that the circles are divers falling into focus.

As we’ve discussed in class, Open City narrative tone is quite unique, with the plot often seeming pointless which allows the storyline to feel almost like a journal from Julius’s daily happenings. I’ve noticed that Cole uses various different methods to obtain this feel to the narrative. For example, when Pierre is telling Julius his life story in chapter 5, Cole writes the following:

“Pierre paused. Another customer, a balding businessman wearing a too-tight suit, came into the shop and, seemingly out of nowhere, a sullen young man appeared to clean his shoes. The businessman labored for breath. Pierre glanced over at his co-worked. He called out, You need to call Rahul about the schedule for next week. I’m off tomorrow, and I can’t do it. Then he rubbed my shoes down with a dry cloth and picked up a foot-long brush.”

Here, we see an almost meaningless interaction interrupting Pierre’s story. Novels are not real life, and there is no need for Cole to have created that interruption that served no purpose for the plot other than for the sake of invoking a certain feeling in the narrative. It almost makes Julius’s story feel like real life, how he journals his stories that contain real-life, pointless interruptions.

“I lost track of time before these images, fell deep into their world, as if all the time between them and me had somehow vanished… When I eventually walked down the stairs and out of the museum, it was with the feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance” (Cole, 36).

The narrative of Open City is quite unique in that there does not seem to be many significant characters or major plot-lines. Rather, we follow Julius through the first four chapters with his thoughts in his daily adventures and interactions in New York City. As such, Open City reads more like a journal than a novel, with the author even choosing not to include quotations marks around dialogue. This initially made the story feel mundane for me, as so much of what Julius chooses to tell us seems so pointless and arbitrary. However, as I continued into his story, I realized there is a simplistic beauty in his recounts of his daily activities merely for the sake of sharing his thoughts without any greater purpose. For example, when reading the passage about his trance-like state when viewing art at a museum (a place where Julius only chose to enter on a whim and did not drive the plot discernibly forward), we get to hear how the art made him feel—and even feel it for ourselves—in a manner that was only possible due to the novel’s peculiar format, a collection of Julius’s thoughts.

Zoë Wicomb employs various different uses of perspectives throughout “Disgrace.” The story focuses on three main characters with the narrator focusing on the perspectives of Grace and Fiona. However, Wicomb interestingly chose for the narrator to switch from third to first person narration a couple of times early in the story. After Fiona begins the story by asking Grace for her secret, the narrator explains Grace’s thoughts from the third person, “Grace stares at her blankly” before strangely changing to the first person, “But I don’t have secrets anymore.” The same sort of perspective change happens just a few paragraphs later. After Grace realizes that Fiona was asking about her secret to her youthful look, the narrator explains, “Grace knows it’s flattery” before switching, “No, you must just keep busy, that’s what I say, that’s what keeps you young.” Perhaps the narrator is not actually changing perspectives, rather just telling over the thoughts of the character without explicitly mentioning it as such. This would perhaps fit with Wicomb’s choice to not include quotes around dialogue sections, as the story begins, “So Grace, what’s your secret? asks Fiona.”

There’s a clear reference to Romeo and Juliet in Lewis Nkosi’s “The Black Psychiatrist” towards the end of the play:
Woman: What’s in a name? Anyone can change a name
Moreover, the scene continues with Kerry explaining that he couldn’t be with the woman because her father found out about the affair. We know that Woman subscribes to Juliet’s famous questions “What’s in a name?” as the character herself is merely called “Woman,” implying that there is no significance to her name. Moreover, she introduces herself by a different name than she had when Kerry knew her. Kerry, however, does not subscribe to this view: His character has a name. Juliet’s question also continues: “That which we call a rose \ By any other name would smell as sweet.” Interestingly though, when Woman attempts to seduce Kerry early in the scene, she argues that “the sight of a woman’s nether-garments would be no more disturbing to you than the glimpse of a rose-bush would be to an experienced gardener.” In response though, Kerry argues, “Mrs. Gresham, this is not exactly a rose-bush, is it?” showing that, while a rose would smell just as sweet under a different name, Kerry knows that the situation is not a rose at all.

Bhanu Kapil writes about how families will often implicitly assume that family trauma is automatically passed down to future generations that themselves have not experienced the trauma. She writes:

“Is inherited trauma like the water passed from one generation to another, placed in the hands of each person in turn? But if the glass is broken. If even one drop is spilled. You will be punished so severely you will not be able to leave your home for many days. Years. Yes.”

But why does this need to be the case? Surely, the ancestors who experienced their trials and tribulations would do anything for their children to not have to experience any more grief on their behalf. This is a feeling that I am certainly used to feeling, having grown up with my great-grandmother constantly reminding our family about the prejudices she faced living as a Jew in Austria leading up to the 2nd World War. However, Kapil ultimately gives permission to these descendants to rid themselves of this forced guilt:

“To anyone whose family system or nervous system. Has been marked by a war. That preceded their life span. And it goes without saying. That you don’t have to go there…”

Hannah, I really your explanation on how the reader is experiencing many of the same emotions as Sirajuddin. If I can build off of this, the string of questions that Sirajuddin wonders also puts the same impact on the reader as we were not aware of these questions before Sirajuddin wondered them. As such, the author’s choice to ask them all consecutively also gives the reader a sense of wild wonder as we also are forced to consider these many questions quickly without any answers.

From the very beginning of “Sorry”, the reader is given a sense of intention; “The knife plunged” implies a purposeful stab, and certainly not one that was accidental. Continuing in the poem reaffirms this sense of intention, or, at the very least, knowledge of what is occurring. Of course, the man with the knife must know that he is ripping the belly and moving down the midriff! However, the reader concludes by learning that it is only after the man with the knife slashes the string holding the man’s pyjamas that the man with the knife realizes what has transpired and apologize. Evidently, the man was either oblivious of his actions the whole time (or, rather, he just didn’t care). It is this reveal that the pyjama string was the waking moment for the man with the knife that makes the poem such a tragedy, as cutting through actual blood and flesh was not what stopped him, but a small string of cloth.