“They are in detention to be punished … not processed”

This was probably the most impactful line for me in the entire graphic novel. The author perfectly captures what it means to be an immigrant in a dominantly white, first-world country with this line and the series of images that accompany it. I think the author chose to highlight this irony to engage with the reader on a very emotional level. People react more to things they can connect to, as opposed to methodical data on some fact sheet. This line also helps to summarize the visuals that preceded it in a great way. We can see the globe of tormented faces of the immigrants get closer leading up to this statement but these words help to solidify the intent of the images we are looking at. It offers a very real explanation for their poor state of mind. I also think this line can be connected to the entire situation with Yusuf and how his protesting got him thrown in prison. Again, in that scenario, we see the irony of sending a man to a place to be punished (the prison) simply on the basis of him requesting to practice his autonomy as a human being. Instead of something productive like actually accelerating the speed of processing these people or analyzing the underlying causes of their protests, the government chooses to keep them in a state of limbo where they are persecuted simply for being “the Other”.

“I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t take them off the fan twirling over my head. It reminded me of wanting to put my hands into another type of fan in my mother’s restaurant when I was little and seeing if it would really cut my fingers off as my mother had warned me it would. It also reminded me of being hushed by my mother whenever I asked her about my father, until one day, when I was twelve, she blurted that he had left her before I was born and wanted nothing to do with us. This is what kept me from looking for him. This is what made me wish he would die”

Danticat 16

This excerpt is a great example of flashbacks being used in a seamless way to connect the current moment to another life-altering one in the past. The author uses an object (the fan) as a gateway to explore the narrator’s childhood and relationship (or the lack thereof) with her father. In these fleeting moments, the reader gets a clear idea of her father’s estrangement and her lack of motivation to mend their bond. In the present, standing in front of the dead body of her father, Nadia’s feelings are clouded. She has spent years building this purely evil caricature of her father in her head and now, with the revelations from her mother (how she never informed him of her pregnancy) and stepmother (how he had found out about her but only when she was a teenager), she feels her world deteriorating. I found this section especially moving because now we see that something as absolute as her father’s death isn’t going to help her sort her feelings out even if she had hoped for it at some point. In fact, it only complicates them further now that there is no physical entity to direct her pain and anger towards. This is an incredibly humanistic concept and made me enjoy this reading more than almost every other one this semester.

“You pass a building sitting in a sea of dust and you think, It’s some latrines for people just passing by, but when you look again you see the building has written on it Pigorr’s School. You pass the hospital, the Holberton Hospital, and how wrong you are not to think about this, for though you are a tourist on your holiday, what if your heart should miss a few beats? … Will you be comforted to know that the hospital is staffed with doctors that no actual Antiguan trusts; … that when the Minister of Health himself doesn’t feel well he takes the first plane to New York to see a real doctor” (Kincaid, Pg. 7 – 8)

This excerpt from the reading was very interesting to me because it is juxtaposed with a tourist riding in the back of an expensive Japanese car. You are left to wonder how can such a car be available to commonfolk when they lack other basic amenities. The author’s use of internal dialogue is excellent in helping us understand these conflicting ideas and their overall implications on the island’s current state. For example, the mention of the Minister of Health not trusting the doctors in his own country enough to use them is indicative of people in power clearly understanding the poor condition of their nation. Instead of working towards a better healthcare system that can be accessed by the less fortunate who live there, government officials choose to outsource for their own needs. The inner dialogue also helps to establish a pattern of corruption in the country. In addition to the hospital situation, the state of a school building is also described. We, as the reader, can see that the tourist may mistake this building for a public bathroom. This dilapidation of an essential institution in the face of high-ranking officials flying out of the country over small things truly displays how terribly the funds of the country are distributed. The public enjoys nothing while people in power have an excess of things, a classic trope in many developing nations.

I was very intrigued by these lines because they portray Julius’s self-righteousness in a great way. Although hints are spread throughout the book, I think the author’s careful diction here paints the best picture. Using phrases such as “healer” and “cure the mad”, the author establishes Julius as someone who is seeking to free the world of its ailments. However, this is contradictory to his own ideas earlier in the chapter where he is exploiting the illnesses of patients by indulging his friends with their stories. He even goes as far as to pass off the stories of his peers’ patients as his own to keep them entertained. So, the wording here clearly shows how out of touch he is and how grand he thinks his value is in this world. These lines seem to parallel his pseudointellectual rant from earlier about how people in today’s world are sheltered from threats and can’t live life to the fullest. Again, he seems to have this idea that he knows the “real” truth about things, and everyone around him is too self-absorbed to see the greater design.

On his flight to Brussels, Julius meets a fellow passenger, Dr. Mailotte. The author’s heavy usage of imagery is a very important tool here as it exemplifies Julius’s tendency to avoid intimacy in favor of highlighting the details of the world around him perfectly. Julius over describes this stranger (down to irrelevant details like the type of earrings she is wearing) in order to drown himself out, leaving little room for the reader to engage with him as a person. Although this is hardly the first time that Julius has made such an effort to stay anonymous, this specific passage is interesting as we see his desperation. Having nothing but the person next to him to describe, he overcompensates by going down to the most minute detail. By painting such a vivid and clear image of the woman sitting next to him (even including the colors and patterns on her clothes), he tries to distract the reader from himself.

The author uses vivid imagery here to convey a dominant theme from the narrator’s (Julius’s) storytelling: being the silent, omnipresent observer prevents one from diving into the specifics of life. Throughout the reading, he presents a detailed account of his journey through New York City. He spares no aspect of his surroundings, however mundane they may seem in the grand scheme of things. He is constantly looking at the people around him and how they carry on with their lives. However, these lines reveal how his role as the “watcher” keeps him from forming connections that mean something. Despite his alertness, he missed something as important as the death of another human being right on the other side of his walls. The author includes the various situations where Julius has interacted with Seth, his neighbor who lost his wife to a heart attack, to drive forward the point that his constant surveillance had failed him where it mattered. This imagery also shows just how many times life presented him with the option to reach out to others and how he turned them down each time in his unconscious pursuit of solitude.

“I’d like to visit a coloured township. I could perhaps come and see you at home some time, Grace? For tea? she adds, as if that would make it better. Grace doesn’t know what to say. She knows that now her silence is ungracious, but what can she do? Imagine, inviting yourself to tea. No, such a palaver would wear her out, and already she feels a wave of weariness lapping at her feet. What a business that would be on her day off, and with her china set all chipped now, no longer at its best. That woman will just have to do without, and she, Grace will hope for the best, hope that it’s idle talk.”

This passage is similar to a few different passages spread out through the text because of the slightly comedic effect it has. The author uses dramatic irony here to depict how two characters react to each other while assuming the thoughts of the other. Grace is annoyed by the idea of having to cater to Fiona on her day off of work. Although it is just a visit for tea, Grace is convinced that she will have to make special preparations (like bringing out her china) to accommodate Fiona’s visit. On the other hand, as the reader discovers later in the reading, Fiona is anti-apartheid and is genuinely interested in the way of life in South Africa, especially the life lived by black South Africans. So, while Grace is uneasy with a friend of her employer coming over to her house because she will have to put up a facade to be more presentable, Fiona believes her request is a show of good faith and friendliness. This juxtaposition is one of many (like when Fiona asks about Grace’s skincare routine and when she declines Grace’s offer to iron her clothes) that brings some humor to a text that has more serious undertones throughout.

“Kerry: Look at the curve of my chin. Look at the dip of my nose. I don’t say the evidence is irrefutable. Not by any means. But even you can see in the offspring the traces of your father’s-our father’s-diabolical seed. Here, feel those arms. I’m nerved with sinews. Of steel of black mortar mixed with the blood of Dutch immigrants. My mother was a poor ignorant girl out of the bush when she came to work for your corrupt, rotting family. She never knew what she had let herself in for. The midnight knocks in the servant’s quarters. The demands for late-night cocoas and hot-water bottles. (Softly) Your damned father. Our father used her, old Johannes Joubert. Do you understand that? He took advantage of his position as an employer. That was rape. The result was me. I’m your past! Why don’t you accept me!”

This passage was the perfect outlet for the anxiety that I had built up while reading the play. I was left with terror and empathy when I read this part. The author’s careful and impactful word choice was probably the most important in bringing up these feelings. Dr. Kerry seems to accept the responsibility that Gloria was pushing onto him, the good and bad parts altogether. Using adjectives such as “diabolical” and “corrupt”, the author drives home the point about the inhumane nature of Dr. Kerry’s father and how neglected he must have felt. I also noticed how Dr. Kerry’s mother was painted in a much more vulnerable image that makes the viewer of the play instantly side with her plight. The final sentences of the passage are “I’m your past! Why don’t you accept me!”. This complete shift in attitude suddenly puts Dr. Kerry in power, overshadowing the mysterious Gloria and her impressive bank of knowledge about his past. I interpreted Gloria as a figment of the doctor’s conscience and this switch of the power dynamic further reaffirmed my beliefs because she had been probing him to remember things throughout the entire play. By admitting his past, he is free of his guilt and her hold on him, even if it leaves him emotionally damaged.

“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.”

The excerpt above had a big emotional impact on me because I have experience with the concept of generational trauma and understand how it is passed down. Kapil uses the metaphor of a glass of water for the trauma itself. Through this usage, she made the abstract concept of trauma a more tangible thing, therefore, making it more relatable. In fact, she cites an idea that is familiar to me about how we are told this trauma is never to be undermined even if I, as the latest generation of my family, have never been affected by it directly. Like she observed in her own life, my parents and grandparents have had a certain sort of reverence for the terrible experiences that have plagued them while growing up in the transitionary and post-transitionary periods in the Indian subcontinent. Although I completely empathize with their pain, being born into a different lifestyle and time has kept me somewhat isolated from their trauma. This sometimes leads to misinterpretations and inter-family conflicts when I “spill the water” on accident. However, the most intriguing part of the excerpt to me is this contradicting idea of wanting to be trapped in this cycle of torment, even if it is unconsciously. Perhaps letting this trauma weigh me down at all times isn’t the only way to respect my heritage. I find it more powerful to be at a place where I can overcome my past and do things that people in my family have only dreamt about for ages, like a peace offering for all their trials and tribulations. Kapil’s use of the water metaphor also opened me up to the idea of the glass eventually becoming empty after many cycles of spillage. Will these future generations still be a part of my family history? Or is generational trauma the only way to validate our identities?

I had a very similar response to the ending as you. The Urdu translation makes the story’s message even more effective than I previously thought. I feel like the story itself raises a lot of important points in regards to the aftermath of rescues that take place in war-torn countries. More specifically, it highlights how women get the worse end of it all in these types of scenarios and how their plights are often overlooked in the grand scheme of history. Sakina’s response to the command to open the window captures how she has shut out the world in order to dull the pain, not even recognizing it is her father with who she is reuniting.

In “Sorry”, Manto uses vivid yet unsettling imagery to depict the practice of checking men for circumcision (to clarify whether they were Muslim or Hindu) that was common in the context of the partition era in Indian/Pakistani history. Being Bengali and Muslim, I learned about the horrors of the time from my grandfather at an early age and Manto’s short poem captured it very effectively. He uses words like “plunged” and “slashed” to describe the mutilation of a man at the hands of another in a very casual way. The succession of these words creates a sense of fluidity as if the killer is devoid of emotions while carrying out the commonly agreed upon “cardinal sin”. It is only after he finds out the man he is killing is ideologically on the “same side” as him, does he feel some sense of regret. The nonchalant dichotomy of these two emotions (from hateful to sympathetic) truly paints the perpetrator as the heinous, bigoted monster that he is.

The nuanced message of the second Manto piece, “The Return”, didn’t really hit me until the third read. Once it did, however, I was left in a very uncomfortable headspace for a while. The piece of the text that stood out to me the most was the second to last paragraph depicting Sirajuddin’s reunion with his daughter, Sakina. In my first couple of reads, it completely puzzled me that the young soldiers never reported finding Sakina to her father. It is only when the reader is told of Sakina for the second time can they understand why. Her shift in mannerisms (from shy to desensitized) also supplement this understanding. Furthermore, Manto’s word choice, employing phrases such as “painful slowness” and “groped”, makes the reader thoroughly aware of the sexual abuse she had experienced by her “saviors”. I felt like Manto ended his story on a quite haunting note because the father is overjoyed at finding his daughter safe, but the idea of safety can be contested by the reader and leaves them questioning the meaning of “rescue” altogether in this situation.