graphic novels – Frank Brown Cloud

Most ancient stories, including several considered sacred by contemporary societies, are riddled with sex, violence, and gore. In the Old Testament, Samson goes berserk and murders a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey. In the Iliad, Achilles goes berserk and drags a corpse across the battlefield, hoping to defile the body of his foe. In the Edda, Thor goes berserk and starts smashing skulls with his hammer.

In the Ramayana, an army of monkeys and an army of demons meet murderously on the battlefield. From Robert Goldman, Sally Sutherland Goldman, and Barend van Nooten’s translation of the Ramayana:

In that terrible darkness they slaughtered one another in battle: the monkeys crying, “Are you a demon?” and the demons crying, “Are you a monkey?”

“Kill!” “Rend!” “Come on!” “What, running away?” Such were the tumultuous cries that were heard in that darkness.

…

A tremendous din could be heard as they roared and raced about in that tumultuous battle, though nothing at all could be seen.

In their towering fury, monkeys killed monkeys, while demons slaughtered demons in the darkness.

And as the monkeys and demons killed friend and foe alike, they drenched the earth with blood, making it slick with mud.

The weapons described in the Ramayana are so fantastical that some Hindu nationalists cite these passages as evidence that ancient Indians had access to advanced military technology, like atomic bombs. Which, um, they didn’t. These claims are equivalent to the Christian archaeologists who scour rocks for evidence of Yahweh’s genocidal flood in the Old Testament.

Ancient myths tend not to be literally true.

But, even to a generation raised on Mortal Kombat and action flicks, mythological battle scenes are pretty intense. Especially in the Ramayana, what with those magical weapons, flying monkeys, and angry demons. Luckily for us, Vijayendra Mohanty and Vivek Goel have collaborated to produce The Ravanayan, a gorgeous series of comic books depicting this story.

Divine arrows that explode on impact? Yup.

The Ramayana is an intricate, expansive myth. Whenever I attempt to summarize it to someone, I begin tentatively – the story includes deep meditations on fate, and its chains of causality often seem involuted and intertwined. One action causes another, but the second action also caused the first.

For instance, Rama kills Ravana because Ravana kidnapped Rama’s spouse. But also, Rama was born for the express purpose of killing Ravana. Their collision was pre-ordained.

In some tellings, Ravana is a demon. A monstrous figure who, like Lucifer, initiates an assault on the gods and must be stopped. Because Ravana is immune to harm from deities, though, Vishnu must be incarnated as a human to slay him. During Vishnu’s tenure as a human, other characters intentionally waste his time because they are waiting for Rama / Vishnu’s divinity to fade sufficiently for him to be able to fight Ravana.

In other tellings, Ravana is an enlightened figure. Ravana is vegetarian, whereas Rama’s vice-like passion for hunting is so strong that he abandons his spouse in order to pursue (and kill) a particularly beautiful deer. By way of contrast, Ravana exemplifies asceticism, forebearance, and learning … but is doomed by love. In the essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” A.K. Ramanujan writes that:

In the Jain texts … Ravana is a noble hero fated by his karma to fall for Sita and bring death upon himself.

And, in some Shaivite interpretations of the Ramayana, the supposed villain has orchestrated the entire affair for the good of the world. In these tellings, Ravana is like Jesus, intentionally sacrificing himself to potentiate salvation for others.

Mohanty and Goel’s Ravanayan follows this tradition. In addition to stunning illustrations (seriously, check out Goel’s pictures of Brahma, a creator who contains galaxies), their books offer deep psychological insight, especially in their explanations for Ravana’s seemingly irrational behavior. In their telling, Ravana is perfectly aware of the pain that he is causing, but he believes that the only way to save the world is by sacrificing himself and those he loves.

Goel often depicts Ravana alone, repulsed by the suffering that he himself must cause in pursuit of greater good.

Precisely because Mohanty and Goel do such an excellent job depicting other portions of the Ramayana, I was disappointed that their series skips the Shoorpanakha episode. In this scene, an adventurous woman is traveling alone when she meets Rama and his brother. The two are so gorgeous and charming that she feels smitten and begins to flirt. The brothers tease her briefly … then mutilate her face by hacking off her nose and ears, a standard punishment for sexual impropriety.

As it happens, the woman whom Rama and his brother have abused is Ravana’s sister. Shoorpanakha returns to her brother’s kingdom to show Ravana what was done to her. Only then does Ravana decide to kidnap Rama’s spouse, hoping to punish the brothers for assaulting his sister.

In ancient India, it was unacceptable for a woman to travel alone. Much worse, Shoorpanakha felt infatuated and attempted to act upon her desires. Female desire was seen as inherently dangerous; Rama and his brother could been seen as exemplary men despite this assault because Shoorpanakha deserved to have her face sliced open.

Although Mohanty and Goel don’t show Rama and his brother disfiguring Shoorpanakha, her depiction in the first volume of their series is decidedly unsympathetic. She is described as “wildness itself, chasing after anything that moved.” When she and her siblings find an injured jungle cat, her younger brother says they should nurse it back to health; she wants to eat it.

And then, as part of his plan to sacrifice himself for the sake of the story, Ravana murders Shoorpanakha’s husband in order to send her mad with grief. Because no sane woman would be so bold, possessed of such unnatural appetites, as to want to seduce the beautiful, charming, divine men she meets while traveling.

The Ramayana is thousands of years old. It’s unreasonable to expect ancient stories to mirror contemporary sensibilities. We know now, obviously, that many people whose cells contain two x chromosomes enjoy travel, adventure, and sex. They shouldn’t be judged for their desire. And certainly not assaulted in retribution for it, as Shoorpanakha was.

Except that … they are. The New York Times recently ran an article on some of the women who have been attacked while (and quite possibly for) traveling alone.

Women are still punished for their appetites. For perfectly acceptable behavior, things that would seem strange for men to fear.

If the world were different, I probably wouldn’t fault Mohanty and Goel for their depiction of Shoorpanakha. After all, they’re working with ancient source material. The original audience for the Ramayana would have shared a prejudice against adventuresome women.

But, until our world gets better, I feel wary of art that promotes those same prejudices.

A beautiful comic book could change the way kids think about the world. In The Ravanayan, Mohanty and Goel push readers to feel empathy even for a story’s traditional villain. I just wish they’d done more. Our world still isn’t safe for women. Shoorpanakha, too, has a story that deserves to be heard.

Graphic novelist Nate Powell, alongside his March co-authors John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, will be speaking in Bloomington next month. I’m excited about the talk.

I first learned about Powell’s work by reading The Silence of Our Friends about the civil rights movement in Texas. That book was especially meaningful for me because I’m generally non-confrontational, preferring to quietly do the right thing rather than make a fuss. It’s important for me to remember that silence in itself can cause harm — silence can be interpreted as assent — and there are times when it’s necessary to instead advocate for change. My little family is always a bit over-scheduled these days, but we try to make time to act upon & advocate for our beliefs … and both K & I turned down careers in academia in order to work toward changing the world for the better more effectively.

Yesterday, in preparation for Powell’s talk, I read the first volume of March. Hopefully I can read the second volume during naptime today. It’s a nice book, does a great job of mixing contemporary and historical scenes to depict the long arc of the moral universe. And the pages showing the students’ preparation for the sit-ins were amazing — in those, the reader sees students spitting on, assaulting, & verbally denigrating their friends as practice, to be certain that they wouldn’t lose control and strike back during the protests. A beautiful panel shows a serious young man bowing out, apologetically announcing that he would not be able to remain non-violent, that he would act to defend himself and his allies.

Even though he is an unnamed character in a graphic novel, it hurt seeing that young man leave, unable to participate in the protests because he felt too strongly about their cause.

This is something that might not have made such a deep impression on me had I not recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (which you should read — it’s short, fast, and enlightening. But if you’re worried that it’ll be a while before you can make it to a library or a bookstore, click here to read the condensed version he prepared for The Atlantic. A lot of the key pieces of his book are included and with the time you save you can read his “Case for Reparations,” which I’ll try to put together an essay about sometime in the next few weeks).

Here’s what Coates wrote about his experience being taught the history of the civil rights movement in school:

Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the civil-rights movement. Our teachers urged us toward the examples of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent?

I’d never thought about the psychological ramifications of depicting exclusively non-violent protest for the civil rights movement, of history classes full of pictures & video clips of black protestors being beaten, bitten by dogs, sprayed with hoses… and never fighting back. Because it takes power away from those advocating for change. Not that those protestors weren’t powerful. They were. I liked that March showed what steely resolve was necessary to maintain non-violence in those circumstances. But, still, the civil rights protests depicted in U.S. history classes required change to come from the horrible white people. The protests waited on those white people to stop being violent, to stop opposing, to stop yelling, to stop murdering men & women & children.

Yes, for anyone watching that footage it’s blatantly obvious that that the brutalized black protesters are heroes and that the white aggressors are villains. But power is still shown to be on the side of those who were acting, i.e. the villains, and the change comes from their having stopped acting.

I’d never thought about what it must have been like for Coates, or any other brown-skinned student, to be shown so much footage with the implicit message if you’d like to be treated as a human being you have to submit cheerfully to abuse and perhaps your abusers will realize that they are in the wrong.

This isn’t the way we celebrate other victories in history class. (Look at that last sentence I pulled from Coates again: Why were only our heroes nonviolent?) We show the dramatic action of the Boston tea party. We show Americans killing the British in the revolutionary war. We celebrate violent conquest. For World War II, our “good war,” we celebrate violent reprisal against those Germans who were oppressing and murdering their Jewish population.

But violent reprisal against the arguably more horrific treatment of blacks in the United States is rarely shown. Even though his rebellion failed, if Nat Turner had been an escapee from the German concentration camps his story would’ve been long celebrated as a glorious tragedy, at least they killed some 60 Nazis before they died! They went out with honor!

(Although someone is making a film to celebrate this uprising… a mere 180 years later. Should come out sometime next year.)

(And, yes, it’s troubling that they killed children. The enemy nation they were at war with also killed children, though, and tortured children, and enslaved them. Plus, given the paucity of their armaments, Turner’s army needed the element of surprise to succeed — survivors would alert the enemy nation.)

Or there’s Charles Deslondes’ revolt. Until the bicentennial, I’d never even heard of it.

And, look, I dislike violence. I don’t watch violent movies, I’ve read as little about war as possible (I think it’s necessary to learn the underlying causes of armed conflict, but I hope never to read anything celebrating the tactics employed in the Civil War or WWII), I think the Sanskrit ahimsa is one of the world’s most beautiful words. I think those who employed satygraha in India & those who practiced nonviolence in the U.S. should indeed be celebrated as heros.

It’s just that, before reading Coates’ book, I’d never considered the message being sent to black students by showing only protestors being harmed. As though we’re trying to convey the message that only by suffering might you receive fair treatment. So thank you, Coates, for helping put my own racist education into perspective.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: graphic novels

On ‘The Ravanayan’ and women traveling alone.

On depictions of (non)violence for the cause of justice.