Monthly Archives: April 2017

Light VS Dark

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In the reading “Color Struck” by Zora Neale Hurston, it was a play based on colorism and the judgement that black individuals faced in their own communities. Hurston used Emmaline’s insecurity about her own complexion to portray her hatred for fair skinned black women. Throughout the play Emmaline was obsessed with the idea that light skinned women takes everything and they was going to take John away from her too.

Hurston displayed how hatred among these individuals stems from ones’s own hatred, by using Emmaline’s hatred against her in the most contradicting way. Even in her so called “hatred” Emmaline managed to have a baby by a white man thus producing the very thing she hates, a light skinned black woman. Hurston goes even further by extending her jealousy and hatred toward her sick daughter who received compassion from John, a man she “loved” and haven’t seen in over 20 years.

 

Jealousy

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Color Struck’s title focuses on colorism- the idea that people in the black community were judged based on the hue of their skin. Emma, the protagonist, is scared that John, the man she’s in a relationship with, will leave her for a lighter-skinned woman. Throughout the play, Emma exhibits extreme jealousy; a word, and emotion that can be clearly seen throughout the text. Emma even admits to these self destructive feelings when saying to John, “I loves you so hard, John, and jealous love is the only kind I got.” John is constantly reassuring Emma of his love, yet she is still jealous of a lighter-skinned woman named Effie.

In the last scene, John returns after 20 years to propose to Emma and take in Lou Lillian, Emma’s daughter, as his own child. Emma is excited, but wary. As Emma is about to leave to find a doctor to care for her sick daughter, John is tending for Lou Lillian. Emma becomes furious and jealous, once again, and believes John is only tending to Lou Lillian because she is light-skinned. Emma did not realize how destructive her behavior was, not even towards her own daughter. Due to Emma’s jealousy, she faces adverse consequences, such as losing John and tragically losing her daughter to death. While Emma let her insecurities encompass her thoughts and behaviors, those surrounding her were suffering as a direct result of her jealousy.

Whut kin Ah do?

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While reading “FIRE!!”, I was particularly drawn to the play due to my interest in scripts. In “Color Struck” I was admittingly thrown off by the language when I first started to read. It was honestly a bit difficult to read along at first until I got the hang of reading it. Since it is a script, it’s meant to be read out loud and understanding this made the reading experience that much more pleasant. The style of the language is assumingly meant for emphasis on the southern accent for example, “Whut kin Ah do?” (page 10) meaning “What can I do?”. It is interesting how the “broken english” sounds fine when used in spoken word but is much more difficult when written. The emotions, (written like this), also adds to understanding the scenes better as it is more apparent to see the contrast between emotions such as nervous, dull, awkward and etc.

The poem, “From the Dark Tower” by Countée Cullen, felt sad and heavy yet it also showed a sense of hope and potential. The sadness can be felt through the first line “We shall not always plant while others reap”. According to when this poem was written, I assume that the reference in this line has to do with the treatment of African-American slaves. The hope and potential that could be seen is in the last line of the first stanza, “We were not made eternally to weep.” My interpretation of this line is that this is a cry for help or maybe even a cry for justice. Saying they aren’t made to weep forever means that they too have more to live for than the white man’s orders.

Cordelia the Corrupted

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In my reading of the excerpt of “FIRE!!”, Wallace Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude” stood out to me particularly. I found this piece to be very striking in the way it portrays the lives of many young African American women in 1920’s Harlem. Thurman uses humor and light diction in constructing his story of Cordelia, a sixteen-year-old girl who became involved in prostitution. One example of this that I found to be particularly insightful into Thurman’s beliefs on this was his use of the terms “game” to describe the relationship between the prostitutes and the men who were with them. After doing a close reading, I focused in on where this term occurs during the text in order to reach a conclusion about the meaning behind it.

When Thurman describes the situation of how the men in Harlem were approaching prostitutes – the particular location he uses in the story is the “Roosevelt Theatre” – he makes it seem playful, describing it as a game. The narrator makes it seem as though Cordelia is teasing him, walking in a way that seemed to be a “sway of invitation” to “play the game”. This specific diction was specifically chosen by Thurman, possibly to remark on Cordelia’s youth, and how the actions in which she is partaking are corrupting her, stealing her childhood, since “playing games” is often associated with youth. Similar to this, along with his allusion of prostitution to a “game”, Thurman also explains how the prostitutes “grow wise” when they have become aware that a man is pursuing them. When the narrator explains his experience with Cordelia, he states that she “let [him] know that she was wise”, meaning that she knew what his intentions were. But, Thurman’s choice of the word “wise”, seems odd for this scenario. This could be because this word has an underlying irony. The fact that Cordelia is “wise” about what the narrator wants from her is indicative of a loss of the naivety and ignorance that are associated with childhood innocence. Thus, Cordelia is an embodiment of the corruption of many young women who crossed paths with prostitution in Thurman’s Harlem.

What Really Matters?

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This comic tells a story about how the No-Face (a.k.a. Kaonashi) transforms himself from a socially isolated person into a popular star by effectively marketing himself on social medias but he still feels desolate. No-Face is a spirit in the famous Japanese animated film Spirited Away. He is a lonely spirit who begins to show emotions and compassion to other people after receiving a genuine care from Chihiro. Without too much knowledge about the society, No-Face learns by examples and adapts to his surroundings.

At the very beginning of this story, No-Face was still that lonely spirit, isolated by society, nobody cared. He was used to the life hiding behind the crowd and learned to be quite. He has always been needing attention and craves for someone who can truly understand him, however, facing people walking on the street with masks on and being indifferent to each other, he felt lost. No-Face wished to find love and care from the crowd, so he started to make the moves to blend in. No-Face learned by examples so he begins from becoming a smartphone user. He downloaded all the apps that are ranked the highest around his neighborhood and set up on all social media channels. He completed case studies about all the self-made YouTube star, people receives the most likes and followers on different channels. Then No-Face duplicated the model and started marketing himself on social medias. He gained more than enough exposures to the public and eventually became a self-made superstar. Regardless how famous and viral he becomes, he remains lonely and unhappy.

Resemble the underground man’s social isolation feature, No-Face is not accepted by the mainstream. In opposite to what the underground man’s reaction towards his self-isolation, NO-Face wants to step out of his comfort zones and seeks for the true love he is yearning for. Even though he was smart and tried hard on marketing himself and creating his self-image and finally he gained the attention that he was craving for, still he felt empty deep inside, because no one really knows who he is. So here lies some messages that I am trying to communicate with my readers through the slides: the quality of your social network is more important than the quantity. To start investing in the depth of your social life, people need to drag themselves away from the distracting screens that some of them are gluing onto day and night, peel off the filters the social apps make you comfortable using and seriously make the process of socialization personal and genuine.

Through the Dark Wood and Open Door…

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In the first panel, a man is struggling to climb out from the underground. This is represented by the many lines of the wooden panels inserted around his arm. We will know the man by his green shirt. Then, in the second panel, the man has emerged from the underground and into the house, which is pitch dark. He sees light streaming out from the doorway, so he decides to be brave and venture outside, since he is craving freedom. Outside, in the third panel, the biggest and most significant panel, it is revealed that there is only more wood on the ground. The lofty dreams and ideals he has are only in his mind. There is even a hideous cockroach laying near him, paying homage to Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

These three panels are a reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s philosophy mentioned in the text. While he wrote of a man hiding underground to express his free will, I re-imagined it to be a man escaping the underground, whether figuratively or literally, in hopes of finding something more beautiful outside. Both the novel and this comic panel end in disappointment.

This scene is a derivation, a riff, off of the original text. By making these three panels, I’ve given readers a small taste of the novel without them actually having to slog through the 136 pages of philosophy and whimsy. I’ve taken the core idea of the novel and found the easiest simplified example to convey it.

Become more Afraid of Living

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I am in the group 6 project, therefore in this graphic narrative assignment I chose the beloved by stretching this graphic from the story I will  do my own interpretation. in the first panel, 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years, each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. In the second panel the grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Or did they wait for one of the relief periods:

the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed, she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the dozes of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present intolerable since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t.” And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue.

 

The Herbalists’ Impact

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(Click on image for higher resolution)

I decided on adding a new scene just because I felt as though there could’ve been more about the herbalist in the story. I personally believe that she played a crucial role in subconsciously influencing Jin and it was a pity that she was only seen again during Jin’s dream as he was experiencing his transformation into Danny.

The scene in which I have roughly drawn above was inspired by page 204 when Danny was dragging Chin-Kee away from school ready to fight. I had the idea of Danny passing by the herbalist again and being recognized as Jin but was unaware of the herbalist actually seeing him. It is a simple scene but I feel as though it personally adds a little more on the foreshadowing of being able to see through someone for who they really are despite wearing a facade. After the fight as Danny transforms back into Jin and Chin-Kee into the Monkey King, Jin has the shocking realization that he had passed by what he thought was the herbalists’ shop again. This triggers him into remembering what the herbalist had told him all those years ago and it’s taken him the entire back and forth transformation to realize that he had actually forfeited his soul and was lucky enough to get it back.

Although I was not satisfied with the ending of the graphic novel, I chose to add a trivial part into the story instead of creating a new ending because I was unsure of my storytelling ability to create a new ending.

Jin and Suzy’s Hidden Secret

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I chose to illustrate an instance in which Jin and Suzy become friends outside the school despite rumors about their arranged marriage. One day, Suzy stops by 490 Bakery Cafe, the bakery where Jin and Wei-Chen reunites at the end of the story, since she was hungry after school. As Jin is a regular customer at the cafe, he offers a recommendation. From then on, they became close and the cafe was their usual place to hangout together after school. In the second panel, however, Suzy is paranoid by the constant rumors in class and thus, decides to stop seeing each other. Finally, in the last panel, they’re both seen during lunch time at school. Although they want to hang out together like old times, they sadly continue avoiding each other.

I decided to make the last panel the largest among the rest to bring the main focus to how these two children suffer as a consequence of others being stereotypical about their race. I kept the background blend in contrast with some objects such as the tree, grass, school, and so on sketched or colored in order to convey that while they are surrounded by such a bright and happy environment, it feels empty for them inside. It was the same feeling portrayed when they didn’t know each other yet in the first panel. The second panel, however, is filled with a dark blue and black background to indicate the sadness and gloomy dark day had arrived.

The reason why I decided to add this scene is because I was really interested in how their friendship would be like if they were to unexpectedly meet elsewhere. As an elementary child, they are both confused as to whether they should ignore or try to fit in with the rest. In the end, they decide to part since they are unable to stand up for themselves among the majority.

Jin’s Transformation

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In this graphic narrative assignment, I chose to add on to the ending of American Born Chinese. After Jin reconciles with Wei-Chen, Jin unexpectedly bumps into Amelia on the streets. In the first panel of my illustrations, Amelia was surprise to see Jin because it has been so long since they last saw each other. Jin is blushing because he was also surprised to see his first love. In the second panel, Amelia tells Jin that they should catch up with everything. Jin was brave enough to ask she was free to catch up right now instead. In the last panel, it shows Amelia and Jin talking in the bubble tea shop.

I decided to have the first panel the largest because I think that’s the most important scene in my illustration. That’s when Jin and Amelia first encounter, after everything that had happened in their past. Instead of having a blue sky, I made it pink. I want to display the heart thumping atmosphere when Jin sees his first love. And in the last panel, I used the color red because I want it to convey that a love interested is going to spark.

The reason why I decided to add this scene to the ending is because I wanted to show how much Jin has changed. He is now able to finally accept who he is. Jin comes to terms with his Chinese heritage and no longer feels the need to assimilate within the majority. He missed out on his opportunity with for Amelia back then, and he won’t do it again. He will pursue those feelings for her and will not back down because someone told him to. Jin is making the most out of his encounter with Amelia.