Review of David Small's Stitches

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Annotated Bibliographies

My four annotated bibliographies can be found by clicking here.

It is not often that you can read a book and be impressed the entire way through just by its sheer uniqueness. The lack of words and almost cinematic feel of the “text” was at once old and new, completely strange and oddly familiar. Tan’s ability to create a gorgeous and broad cityscape, as well as the minutely beautiful created the feeling that I was watching a film, following the director’s artistic vision of what shots would be wide and what images would be zoomed in. Aside from his obvious creativity with visual art, Tan is also a provocative storyteller. I thought Tan did a masterful job of capturing the feeling of complete disorientation that comes with moving to a new and foreign place. The writing that is present means nothing to the reader and compliments perfectly the lost feeling the main character must be experiencing.

Shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, I decided to move to Japan for a year and a half to teach English. I had never studied Japanese and knew next to nothing about Japanese culture so the first few months of living and working in the country were a whirlwind of new experiences. It was completely disconcerting to walk into a business and have no idea how to order. I relied, much like the main character in Tan’s text, heavily on the kindness of strangers (I can’t tell you how many times a kind Japanese person would literally take me by the hand to where I was attempting ask to go). Not being able to read, write or talk made me feel utterly alone. On the other hand, I learned nearly every day the amazing lesson that so much can be said without speaking a word. In a similar fashion, Tan proved in this book that so much can be written without typing a single letter.

From a critical perspective, Tan’s use of surrealism to create a sense of disorientation and awe is a dynamic metaphor for the notion of “foreign”. The city the man encounters upon his arrival is so massive and strange that it is completely overwhelming. After immigration, the man physically enters this new world by riding in a telephone booth-looking compartment attached to a giant weather balloon. This notion of coming out of the sky to a new land, of literally landing as an alien alone in a strange and new place, symbolizes the detachment and unease experienced by the protagonist. Another image that worked particularly well was the moment the protagonist moved into his new apartment. He carefully opens his suitcase on his bed. What magically appears for a single panel is his wife and daughter in miniature sitting around their table at home. For just a moment, he is able to be home again. Tan is almost taunting him with this bit of magical realism-where the man’s whole life is small enough to fit into his suitcase, but is still maddeningly out of reach.

A second artistic technique that Tan utilizes is the use of detailing to create a sense of familiarity and a deeper emotional connection with certain characters. When the protagonist is at the market and meets the other man and his son who later take him to their home, they are illustrated in emotive detail, their faces full of feeling and life. To contrast this, in other images, peoples’ faces are left intentionally abstract. Detailing is also used to create emotional intensity, the three immigration stories told to the protagonist are all graphically violent and are presented with a similar attention to crisp lines and facial expression. The surrealism and detailing work to create a world that is entirely believable yet entirely foreign. In the end, The Arrival is wonderfully successful at making the reader feel like a stranger in a strange land.

A couple of weeks after being hired by Champlin Park, I was invited to their staff breakfast in order to meet the department, get supplies for the upcoming school year and get situated in my new classroom. When I got home, I noticed that mixed within my textbooks was a brightly colored book that had all the signs of a comic. On the front page was a note that told me to read this over the summer because the author was coming to visit in the fall. I have to admit that in the craziness of those quick months, this text was all but forgotten. Almost as an after-thought I finally opened it in the week before school began. I had read only a couple of graphic novels up to this point and didn’t have the highest of expectations. To my surprise, this text asked profound questions of racial identity and did not provide easy answers.

Gene Yang’s visit was nothing short of awesome. A fantastic storyteller -he captured my students’ attention and held it for the entirety of his 85-minute presentation. However, they were already deeply intrigued by the book, as was I from the very beginning. The first vignette of the text, where the Monkey-King attempts entrance into a party in heaven and was denied based on the fact that he wasn’t wearing “shoes” unfortunately reminds me of a story my friend told be about a club in downtown Minneapolis. My friend is the bouncer and is in charge of who gets in and who is rejected. He told me that the job is much harder than kicking out drunk people because the club’s owner watches on the security cameras and will contact my friend with specific instructions. My friend will get reports like “don’t let them in, they’re Asian” or “Too many blacks man, slow it down” or “Our Indian Quota is all maxed out”. As a result, my friend will be forced to make up some innocuous reason to turn them away. Maybe he’ll say their shoes aren’t right even though the white person that just got in is wearing the same pair. The end message always being the same, “you are just not good enough the way you are”. This idea is masterfully explored in American Born Chinese.

From a critical perspective, American Born Chinese, directly speaks to the feeling of racial shame that plagues people of color in the United States. Forced to compete in a society that puts an inherent premium on whiteness, people of color are confronted with the notion that the only way to succeed is to deny their own identity and transform. The Monkey-King never noticed his monkey-ness until he was othered by the deities on the hilltop. The psychological turmoil of this experience of shaming disconnects the Monkey-King from his own community and nearly destroys him.

In a similar fashion, the protagonist Jin so strongly wants to rid himself from his racial identity that he is transformed to the popular, white, Danny. Of course this level of psychological tearing creates internal conflict. To this end, Yang creates Chin-Kee, the personification of the darkest Chinese stereotype in order to force Danny to confront his deepest fears and feelings of inadequacy. Chin-Kee, the caricature of the Chinese immigrant upholds all of America’s ignorant assumptions of asian culture and is in effect an example of Yellow-face. Like the Black-face that pervaded minstrel shows in the early 20th century, Chin-Kee reifies what is and what is not white and therefore what is and what is not rewarded. Traditionally used as a method of social oppression, Yang flips the script and reappropriates this stereotype as a way to make Danny understand exactly what he is and what he is not, as the Monkey-King explains, Chin-Kee is a “signpost to [Jin’s] soul”. Danny realizes the mask that Chin-Kee wears is the mask thrust upon him by American society.

Suzy says, “Today, when Timmy called me a chink, I realized . . . deep down inside . . . I kind of feel like that all the time.” As does the Monkey-King when he is sickened by the smell of monkey fur. As does Jin when he perms his hair and later transforms into Danny. Ultimately, In American Born Chinese Gene Yang asks us to consider the ways in which we are made to feel less than human.

I think I was still in high school when my dad tossed me a copy of Endurance, another chronicle of Shackleton’s unbelievable journey. I devoured it and then tossed it to my brother. Not long after, an imax film came out with a lot of the original images, plus updated footage and a recreated trek through the mountains of South Georgia island. The three of us went as a family and were impressed again by the triumph of these men. Through every medium, the story of the Endurance and the men who survived is one of the most amazing in human history-certainly to my knowledge.

Having been an avid fan of this story, I wasn’t sure what an adolescent non-fiction text could possibly add. I was pleasantly mistaken. The imagery and design of this text combined with fantastic writing and excellent pacing forced me to stay up well past my bedtime on a school night. Armstrong unearthed wonderful details that added entire other dimensions to the story. On part that haunts me still was the moment that Hurley was forced to decide which of his photographs to keep. I could imagine his heartbreak and resolve as he chose which to save and immediately destroyed those he couldn’t to prevent regret or second-guessing.

At every turn, there was Shackleton. I truly believe that without his wit, patience and fortitude, the story of the lost Endurance would be nothing more than speculation. He is the reason the men lived to tell the tale. His integrity and ability to lead are especially apparent when he returns to Elephant island to rescue his crew and one man shouts, “We knew you’d come back”. The fact that Shackleton maintained that this was the highest compliment ever given to him is testimony to his absolute dedication to the lives of the men who followed him to the end of the earth.

From a critical perspective, this book was a beautiful success. It was impeccably designed, thoroughly researched and expertly written. The opening line of “just imagine” immediately invites the reader to put himself in the chillingly barren Arctic landscape and the harrowing narrative doesn’t let go until the very end. The collection of pictures that Armstrong selected was excellent, with every turn of the page, the reader was drawn further into the story, glimpsing for just a moment the elation of the crew’s midwinter party or the haunting image of the Endurance listing to its side.

Armstrong’s narrative combines primary source documentation with well-written story telling. A description of a crew-member that had fallen into the ocean in sub-zero temperatures highlight’s Armstrong’s attention to sensory detail. “Holness’s mates began walking him up and down to warm him, because there were no dry clothes into which he could change. Ice crackled off his clothes and fell tinkling onto the floe . . .” Armstrong’s words allow the reader to imagine the fear and the successes, the hope and the desperation of the men as they battled the impossible day after miserable day.

The end of the story also highlights Armstrong’s prowess as a storyteller. After covering the tragic end of Shackleton, the narrative ends with the words of a children’s song, “ . . .here’s to the merry heart that reckons/ The rough with the smooth and never swerves”. These lines that encourage and celebrate exploration, daring, and unerring resolve are a fitting reflection on a truly remarkable life.

The Graveyard Book

I am a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. A couple of years ago, I started reading his Sandman graphic novel series and subsequently explored Coraline, Anastasi Boys and last summer (and again this term), The Graveyard Book. Gaiman is one of those authors that is able to speak to both young and adult audiences with equal sincerity. When I initially read this book, I thought that it read a bit younger than the other young adult literature that we have read for this course, the protagonist’s age for most of the text notwithstanding, the stories and the content didn’t hold the same amount of emotional weight as other texts. This is of course ironically countered by the fact that the entire story is based within dark and violent contexts.

I enjoyed Bod and his community of ghosts. Though I wasn’t as emotionally connected to the text, I was an eager participant in his adventures. I especially enjoyed the characters Gaiman created on the blank canvas of an ancient graveyard. The endearing love of the Owens family, the witty charm of Mrs. Lupescu, and the chilling tenacity of Mr. Frost all work together to provide Bod an exciting context to understand life from the dead. I was saddened at the end when Bod began to outgrow his childhood home, he gradually lost his ability to see in the dark and the once open graves were now hard as stone. Just like we all must travel away from the comforts of the known (no matter how strange that known may be) to seek fortune in the broader world, Bod leaves his graveyard to find Life. Bod’s is a unique coming-of-age story about learning what is most important in life from those already dead.

From a critical perspective, keeping in mind Gaiman’s deep history with graphic novels, it is fascinating to examine his use of imagery in prose. There is a macabre elegance to his language throughout the text. The beginning of the book opens with a dark description of the man Jack murdering Bod’s family. “The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door”. While there are slight illustrations to provide visual depth to the beginning of each chapter, Gaiman is masterful in his attention to detail. The narrative brings to life dark underworlds, benevolent ghosts and evils buried long ago.

Later in the story, when ghouls capture Bod, Gaiman paints a terrific picture of a dead city. “It was a city that had been built just to be abandoned, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone”. The reader can imagine the terrible feeling this place oozes out like clotting blood. Because Gaiman is creating pure fantasy, his must provide his readers with enough textual details to understand and appreciate his vision. Near the end of the book, Gaiman finally reveals the hidden sleer, “The faces were covered in purple patterns, tattooed in swirls of indigo, turning the dead faces into strange, expressive monstrous things”. This evokes the type of terrifying fascination with the truly strange that colors all of Gaiman’s writing. Adults have been lucky to have an author like Neil Gaiman who is both able to imagine these twisted places and bring them to life in such vivid detail for long enough, it is fantastic that he is sharing his talents with a younger audience.

Going Bovine

It is hard to fully express the subtle beauty of this text. I thought the characterization was brilliant, the plot dynamic and the end message of seize life by the gnome hairs was pure. In fact, this book was the first of the lot to bring tears to my eyes, I liked Cameron so much that it hurt knowing behind the scenes that he was going to die.

The book reminded me of Douglas Adams in its predisposition toward the absurd, Haruki Murakami in its ability to make that absurdity beautiful and Jack Kerouac in its homage to the Great American road trip. Unlike Adams and Murakami, I initially read it (and this might be off-base here) not as a fantasy novel, but as a work of fiction bent on plumbing the distressed adolescent mind. I appreciated the complicated plot structure for its ability to allow for gnomes, fire giants, and punk-rock faeries as a manifestation of an imagination forced to retreat into itself for survival, for it isn’t until Cameron’s diagnosis of death that he becomes bent on living. However, this forced me to consider the fates of Balder, Gonzo and the other vividly detailed characters. If they were only figments of a fevered dream, they would be diminished somehow. Perhaps this asks the most important question of fantasy, what is real anyway? Or, isn’t the suppression of belief the reason we read fantasy anyway?

Ultimately, I feel like I need to reread this book several more times to fully appreciate the breadth of details. I kept on getting the feeling that the book was somehow structured like The Usual Suspects where the seemingly inane minutiae of a sergeant’s bulletin board are weaved into the narrative. Like that film, this book had layers upon layers of meaning and the twists and turns of the plot melted, separated and collected again. This is definitely a tale worth getting to know on a deeper level.

From a critical perspective, Going Bovine was a great retelling of the classic epic saga (Bray conveniently spells it out with the references to Quixote and Star Wars). Like Odysseus or Gilgamesh (or Harry Potter), Cameron (granted a far less likely hero) is charged with an impossible quest where he must face certain death to return triumphant. Breaking down the story into familiar archetypes allows for a deeper understanding of the text as a representation of Joseph Campbell’s notion of the Monomyth.

Campbell claims that the Monomyth teaches us to, “how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances”. Cameron’s “departure” on his quest certainly imbues him the skills necessary to truly live, regardless of whether or not he actually left his hospital bed. He stopped caring about nothing and began to live for others, his love for Balder, Gonzo and Dulcie and willingness to sacrifice himself for them is indicative of a profound shift in character. Campbell writes, “when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness”. This heroic transformation allows Cameron to see for the first time what is truly important. According to Campbell, the hero’s greatest task is understanding his own mortality. This does not necessarily suggest that the hero must understand death, but he or she must “acquiesce to death”.

Contrasting the hero to the archetype of the villan (the wonderfully named Wizard of Reckoning, the darkness in us all) shows that the hero’s knowledge of his own mortality provided by the villan is the ultimate power. Cameron plays a b flat on Junior Webster’s trumpet while staring death in the face, it is this moment that he faces and defeats his greatest foe, the fear of dying. The hero’s journey is one of finding a deeper understanding of self in the world. Cameron’s coming of age narrative tragically ends with his own end, but his epic journey reinforced in us the lessons that have been told and retold by humans forever.

Luna

I had initial misgivings about Luna, not because of the subject matter, but I was skeptical about Julie Peters’ ability to portray Luna in a three-dimensional light. I was concerned that the gap in adolescent literature that addresses transgender teens and gender identity was going to be filled by a book of clichés and stereotypes. In retrospect, I found Peters’ narrative style as well as Regan and Luna’s characters effective and purposeful. While Luna did occasionally approach stereotypical behavior, I felt that Peters successfully wrote into Liam’s character such a strong desire to be a woman that his earnestness created an overwhelming desire to display a hidden self.

I was also intrigued by Peters’ decision not to narrate it from Liam/Luna’s perspective. I don’t know if by presenting Luna’s transformation through the eyes of her sister Regan makes the book somehow more accessible or acceptable to readers. It is clear that Regan’s family and community aren’t ready for Luna. When they eat at Taco Bell, Regan describes the look on a strangers face when he sees Luna as “Disgust. Loathing”. Their father’s defeat and mother’s retreat also relay a complete lack of acceptance. I think Luna leaves in the end because unfortunately Peters couldn’t realistically portray a high school that would allow for Luna to exist. I can only hope that Luna’s departure towards a new freedom speaks directly to our society’s own inevitable transformation to something much more open to issues of gender and sexuality. It is clear from countless news stories of late that for youth this is literally life or death.

From a critical perspective, Peters creates multiple characters who are split between what they truly want and the way society dictates their lives. A pivotal point in the narrative is when the mother yells, “I’ve had it with you and these kids and my life. It isn’t enough I keep telling you that, but you won’t listen. I’m dying inside. I just want out!” Before she began working outside of being a mother, Regan’s mother felt that familial and social pressures to conform into a domestic caretaker were robbing her of the life she actually wanted. This negation of a “normal” future was jeopardized the moment she rescued Liam from the scissors and Regan is forced to consider whether or not her mother was actively trying to kill her brother. In the end, it is not resolved whether or not the mother is a killer or an innocent, regardless she is a victim of self versus social expectations.

Somewhat ironically, Luna’s struggle to create an identity had a direct, negative correlation on Regan’s ability to live her life. Regan laments, “My brother was a black hole in my universe. He was sucking the life right out of me. It seemed as if I was being pulled into this crater by a force I couldn’t fight.” Though Regan is for the most part an unfailing source of support for her brother, this text reveals the difficulties faced by even those on the periphery. At the end of the book, as she is waving goodbye to her brother, Regan thinks, “Hello Regan”.

Langston Hughes proposes that a dream too long deferred does not dry up, but rather builds pressure until it explodes. This text reinforces this statement through multiple characters forced to contain identities and desires. In this light, Luna represents not only the courage of a teen redefining her gender in the face of a critical society, but the fundamental importance of self-actualization on all levels.

The People Could Fly Reflection

This collection of folktales is unlike anything I have ever read. Hamilton’s preservation of voice, the sometimes amusing-sometimes violently gruesome subject matter, and the enormity of the context make this an extremely valuable text. Reading through, I was immediately struck by the contrast between these stories and other watered down fairy-tales most often deemed appropriate for young people. The stories in The People often didn’t fit into the paradigm of morality tales that I am most familiar with, though a quick comparison of Little-Red-Riding-Hood versions in class highlights how much even these have been paired away from original versions.

I also enjoyed the way these stories displayed the African-American oral tradition. Stories would start with, “Heard tell about” or “Don’t know some animal tells. Hear um but forget um”. It wasn’t hard to imagine sitting and listening as the tales unfold from the storyteller. In this respect, the most difficult, but in many ways the most interesting story for me was “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble”, because it was translated from Gullah dialect. When reading a passage like, “He tippin right pontop and ‘e shum he yeye”, I had to repeatedly consult the glossary at the end of the chapter. I thought about conversations I had in my pre-service classes about the pitfalls an educator can potentially face when students speak and write in vernacular. Too often, we assume that “standard” English is synonymous with “correct” English. This and several of the other tales in the collection story provided authenticity to a language that is full and vibrant but that isn’t necessarily the “power-language” of the time.

From a critical perspective, the use of metaphor and symbolism in these stories weave a rich fabric of moral lessons, and social critique. One story that displays an interesting use of metaphor is The Two Johns. Big John, in a constant desire to one-up Little John, kills his own prized horses, the other man’s grandmother and eventually himself. Little John proudly (though minus the grandma) marches away with his baskets of money. While it is initially difficult to figure out the moral of the story, Hamilton’s explanation that a message lies in the fact that the little man is smart and the big man is foolish, allows for a deeper understanding. In this tale and several others, size matters less than intelligence and wit. In other words, the quick slave could best the powerful master. This dynamic of the powerless overcoming the powerful speaks directly to the dreams of African slaves, forced into abominable conditions, but escaping through story and imagination.

This sentiment was echoed when Wiley outsmarts the Hairy Man, when Manuel overcomes the king, and in the “Got Free” stories where a slave would get the better of his master. However, the most beautiful use of this metaphor occurs in the last story of the collection. In “The People Could Fly”, slaves return to the magic of their African heritage and fly away from the whips and chains of their oppressors. In this story, the powerless transcend the physical constraints of their servitude and escape to freedom, “The ones flyin were black and whining sticks, wheelin above the head of the Overseer”. This story and the entire collection is testimony to the atrocities that plagued the lives of slaves and to the necessity of story for humans to make sense of our lives.