It Me: Annotation and Restraint

I. Restrained

When I am feeling pulled in many directions at once by my interests or my values or my actions, my friend Adam has long advised me that we must "inhabit our contradictions." It is something I now find myself repeating as I urge my students to trust their own voices. They are distressed that there can be more than one reading of an object. What if some other evidence can be mobilized to pose the exact opposite argument from the one they've just mounted? I say, What if it can? Haven't you had two conflicting feelings at the same time or over the course of your life? Aren't you still one person? Aren't both feelings still true to you? I say these things, but I know what my students mean. A single narrative feels right; it is coherent, compelling, safe. And no one wants to be wrong.

When I think about my own life as an object, if I'm being honest, I want to be something that's held in the hand and examined closely and found to be worthy and enough. But this same life also produces grant applications and annual reports in a tone that must say, I am beyond your judgment. Beg me to take your grant. Beg me to stay. We must surrender to the directive to restrain our narratives to a singular and coherent voice — or, at least, appear to.

In academia, our annotations — the hasty markings made on our own work, only to be erased or properly absorbed later; our marginalia on the work of others, embarrassingly tucked away — must be kept private or viewed as a step toward mastery, not as an end in themselves. Leaving temporary omissions and insertions as is, annotation produces the feeling of affective draftiness, revealing or doing away with layers of an encounter and demanding that the otherwise uncontested or unannounced gets a second look. Improvised annotation gestures toward argumentative stakes without supplanting the object's primary voice. Added last and read first, it scrambles the logic of reading and captures the vulnerability of the page to what is brought to bear upon it.

What I love about graphic memoir is its negotiation of this incoherence, its graphical representations of annotation and restraint that reveal our unthought, unsaid, unseen contradictions — the chance at visualizing the both/and of our lives. The genre succeeds at resisting the injunction to merely intellectualize negative affects — as if intellectualization could relieve us of their rawness and their constancy. It welcomes the intrusion of competing and simultaneous feelings saying, You, too, have a place here.

In 2015, I borrowed the first issue of Power Up by Kate Leth and Matt Cummings from my housemate Anna. I hadn't read comics since high school. Power Up is brightly colored and stars Amie, a person of color like me. She works at a pet store and is on the verge of becoming a magical girl — she just doesn't know it yet. Early on in the comic, I came across an illustration of the protagonist's excited face that actually made me LOL and my love for comics hasn't wavered since. What's funny to me now is that despite this gleeful reintroduction, I've gravitated instead to the seriousness of memoir — especially those on illness. It is to some of these that I now turn.

II. Unthought

I had seen John Porcellino's The Hospital Suite on a bottom shelf in Forbidden Planet in New York while browsing.1 Just as I stepped up to the register line I turned and ran back to grab it, deciding at the last moment that I couldn't leave without it. Maybe something bad would happen. I was, at once, curious and repelled by the idea of reading a comic so close to something I had personally experienced. But, with graphic memoir being my favorite fandom, I was no stranger to a painful read. In this one, Porcellino chronicles the spontaneous decline of his health, the slow failure of his romantic relationship, and life with a severe anxiety disorder.

In a cell in the last chapter of the book, Porcellino fixates on a chimney missing from the building he has inked for the cover of his then-forthcoming book. As a result, he gets caught in an argument with himself about whether or not to produce yet another new drawing for the cover. Above, his thought bubble reads, "Just use the new drawing!! Don't give in to your OCD!!!" Below, a second thought bubble counters, "But what if they die?" "They" being the cartoon people inside the cartoon building, unseen in the image. A black scribble floats between them. In the lower left, Porcellino's face grimaces, his eye is closed, his teeth are gritted, stress lines radiate around his head that we could mistake for the joy of sunshine if it weren't for the expression they stem from and the inescapable strife they point to.

The rational mind is represented as exaggerated, peppered with excessive punctuation and filtered through imperatives. We can see that he is trying to will himself to believe what he is thinking. The rational thought bubble emerges from the top of his head, closer to his brain. He knows what is real.

The irrational mind is posed as calm and thoughtful, with appropriate punctuation. A single question mark, like the single thought it is attached to, floats untroubled in the lower right corner. As if we almost escaped the cell without getting sucked back into the uncertainty that obsessive compulsive disorder produces so well. If we looked only at the content of the words, we could tell what was legitimate and what was not. But the graphical representation helps us to see that it is not that simple. There is so much struggle in this line drawing. The two thoughts collide in the center of the image in the tangled, dark, continuous yet simultaneously fragmented line that doesn't reveal its content to us in words but in its density and its focus. In contrast to the light, airy thought bubbles, the weight of the tangle with its scrambling frenetic energy can't be tugged at or undone. There is no discernable endpoint to leverage — instead there are too many. Porcellino's argument sits on two planes in this two-dimensional illustration, but the OCD mass at the center gestures toward something that exceeds its dimensional and temporal constraints. Porcellino is cycling back and forth between these two thoughts. It is a repetitious movement that gets stickier and stickier with each urging of the self to forgo the uncertainty, illustrated as a gentle asphyxiation coupled with an increasingly desperate appeal to imperatives. But what if, but what if, but what if // Just!! Don't!!! Just!! Don't!!! Just!! Don't!!!

Porcellino himself takes up so little space in this image. Each thought bubble is greater than he is. And that's the point. Subordinated to the dance of these thoughts, the best way to describe the tension is not to use words at all. The scribble annotates the image, capturing the unthought, the process of looping, of becoming trapped, of being subordinated to/by something more threatening than the imagined death of imagined people.

III. Unsaid

Eleanor Davis's recent memoir, You & a Bike & a Road, sat nestled in the staff recommendations section of Hub Comics in Somerville, MA.2 Its gorgeous cover, vaguely reminding me of the queer flora tattoos of the Bay Area, drew me in. The cashier turned out to be the recommender and gushed a little as she rang me up. The project follows Davis's cross-country bike trip from New Mexico to Georgia. Produced in the style of a diary sketchbook, many of the drawings are spare, in pencil. Looking at the short but smooth and sweeping lines comforts me. Davis's renderings of herself feel so honest, outlining in an almost cookie-cut way the legs/pants and feet/shoes as they flow together into one single shape. Much of the text is an account of her encounters with strangers, her fluctuating feelings about making the journey, and managing her knee pain.

She's consistently asked why she's making the trip and early on she shares with the reader these explanations. On the left-hand page, Davis summarizes the repetitive exchange with two different strangers. Davis's family is folded into her replies, putting the emphases on others rather than herself as she says, "My husband & I want a baby so I figure I either do this now or wait 20 years" or "My Dad built me this bike and I hate boxing & shipping bikes so I decided to just ride it home!" The "or" is a direct quote from the page, sitting just outside the voice bubble, an annotation wedged between the two interactions and near Davis's foot — as if to say, here are some grounded responses. Stable explanations. One listener faces her with an open body, hands on open hips, elbows pulled back, opening the chest as well. The second listener is also attentive, relaxed with his arms at his sides, a slight bend. He makes direct eye contact as Davis answers.

On the opposing page, it is implied that Davis is asked again. This time there is a single exchange, providing an answer that is only about herself. She says plainly and offhandedly, as if recounting something mundane, "I was having trouble with wanting to not be alive." There is no alarm. Slightly below this, hugged close, she continues in a second voice bubble, "But I feel good when I'm bicycling."

The imagined comportment of someone hearing Davis's other truth is inward-turning. The listener holds her own hand, self-soothing and frowning. Her chest is closed, her hips are covered, the concern is palpable. Even though what Davis imagines saying to her is an expression of intent to do what it takes to re-stimulate the desire to live, you feel her listener get stuck in the first bubble without regard for tense. The annotations on this page sit outside the voice bubbles. "I don't say:" introduces the first bubble. After explaining "why biking," her annotations sit at her feet again, not so spatially constrained this time, abutting the bottom of the page. She says, "But that is also true." Out of the three illustrations Davis produces of herself across these two pages, the last stands the tallest — though not without a hint of slouch. We get the sense of viscerality, of containing many narratives and being unable to share them all.

Davis captures for us the feeling of being caught between comfortable and uncomfortable truths. In the graphic memoir form, she provides three layers of meaning: the embodied, the verbalized, and the annotated. In her annotations "People ask. I say:" and "I don't say:" the colons act as portals into the otherwise foreclosed zone of coherence. Suicidal ideation shows up in the text as the surfacing of an expression and enactment of care. Davis says what's not said, and in her penciled simultaneities she achieves a sense of coherence that was not available on the road itself but in a reflection upon it, with us sitting just outside the text like her annotations, looking in on what both of 'em be.

IV. Unseen

I looked at the cover of Tom Hart's Rosalie Lightning for months in Cape and Cowl in Oakland, CA before I finally picked it up.3 Not just because I have an aversion to hardcovers. But, also, the pixelated nature of its style makes me uncomfortable. I never cared very much for the aesthetics of classic newsprint comics; moreover, I get nervous that the dots will trap me. I feel like I am falling in between them.

Since reading it, the book has become the graphic memoir I recommend the most to anyone interested in dipping a toe in the genre. Probably because it is one of the most painful, telling the story of the spontaneous death of Hart's firstborn child, Rosalie Lightning, just before turning two years old. How can you find a way to compose narrative structure out of grief that deep and that wide? I'm not a parent. I thought I would be, before my wife and I got separated. Still the story moves me. I imagine it would wiggle deep inside you, too.

At the end of part three, set in Gainesville, Hart is remembering the last few months before he would lose her. The center cell on the page shows Rosalie most clearly. It's as though she is moving into sight, into focus. At first, she is facing forward and in the midst of being carried in her parent's arms at a distance; the reader has to squint to see her. Then bang! She's in full form, close up and chasing a cat. When an uncle of mine passed away, my friend Jasy wished me clear memories of him. I think of that phrase now as I look at Rosalie laughing. Frozen, but fully alive. Startlingly clear. In the next cell, she is partially visible, half in and half out of the frame, on the back of Hart's bicycle. At the bottom left of the page, she is turned away, and almost entirely obscured by a child bike-seat, as though the bike is just now peddling by. Slipping out of the frame, carried away from you, receding into the past.

And then there is just white space where a cell should be. No border. No frame. No hint. Just emptiness. The space between memory and the present. The space between fantasy and the unreality that blots out all it touches. The final cell of the page that abuts the empty space shows Hart and his partner Leela Corman reduced to their shadows on the ground and their upright, backlit bodies. It's as if the loss of borders in the previous cell bleeds into this one. The shadows are nearly shapeless; it's more like they're shards, jagged as they are. The silhouettes, too, have surrendered clear boundedness. That their edges are sharper is the only way to tell the body from what it casts. Like shadows, they are genderless, existing only as disproportionate sizes. Like shadows, they are ageless, existing only as a suggestion of time. But, like bodies, their shadows look more like wounds scraped across an organic surface. It hurts to look at — while somehow less cutting than the white-out to its left.

The sun shines so brightly on them. They walk into it and lose their edges. Or, they walk toward it and start to dissolve. The fence to their left is a weak restraint. They pass by and pass through. But the question coats everything in the scene: is "through" even possible? Is it the right word? Toward what we cannot see and even less can know. Mirroring Rosalie in the bottom left, Hart and his partner also face out of the frame, are mostly obscured, and recede into the future as their child is swept along in the other direction. Like a blown-up version of the pixels on the book's cover, I fall in between these two cells now, in the gap that telegraphs grief without words; an empty slip of paper that says it all with economy and precision. From down here at the base of grief, I look up but not out. There is nothing else to see. Annotation is enacted through deliberate and total erasure.

V. Unrestrained

Tiptoeing up to these annotated feelings — fear, depression, grief — I wonder at my own unspeakable feelings and the restraint that academia legislates. I tiptoe over to myself, peek in and wonder, Who can say it? and, Who can I say it through? How is it said and how can I hold it? The problem of sharing affects as academics is not limited to the negative. I think of Sami Schalk's celebratory tweet and the harsh reaction it received, policing the viscerality of feeling when it crops up in the researcher's body, the teacher's body. I wonder what feelings we are allowed when I'm less clear on whether we're allowed any feelings at all. For our negative affects, we go in search of the proper object to do the talking when we are discouraged from producing a narrative of our own pain without jeopardy. If we choose wisely, the right object performs a kind of sleight of hand: it conceals who you are while it lets you sign your name to it. You get all the emotional payoff of getting close to your object without any of the risk of artistic authorization. It's only academic. Our funny little alibis produce the suspicion of correlation without our having to own up to the overlap. Evasion through examination. No annotations here. But, in print and in private, someone else pauses; someone else underlines in that uncareful way where the pen dips down into the next paragraph accidentally; and in their worst and unrestrained hand, that someone else scratches out, "it me."

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Ianna Hawkins Owen is an assistant professor of English at Williams College. Owen earned a PhD in African Diaspora Studies from UC Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Owen's book manuscript, Ordinary Failures, examines negative affects in black literary and visual culture. Owen is also currently working on a browser-based game, write back soon, and a graphic novel.

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