"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge."*
If you can come up with a more gripping first sentence, tell me, because I can't find one. I am quite biased, true, since I know the rest of the tale. I don't care; it's a stellar beginning to a book I could just sit with all day and flip through, marveling at the dazzling strands of story/web that Atwood spins so skillfully.
And the many threads of this tale - be they elements of science fiction, family relations, the nature of war - pull a reader in slowly, without warning as s/he navigates the layers: The narrative of Iris Chase Griffin and her sister, Laura, is only the beginning. Set against the historical backdrop of the last century, these two daughters of a once rich and influential Ontario family are also the subjects of much ridicule and suspicion. And there are so many dimensions that are pieced out, luring the reader to continue - fragments and hints. As one begins to map out the mystery surrounding Laura's death with the details that the now elderly and confessional Iris wishes to divulge, there is a sense of great depth and breadth to the novel. Atwood may be telling a very specific fictional tale, but there is also truth residing within - about the nature of family, friendships, grudges, overwhelming sadness and love.
*Excerpt from the novel
I can barely imagine what it would be like to navigate a new environment where I could not speak the common language and communicate with others. Because in my reality, even when I have been in countries, I can always revert to English. It can so easily be your only language - it's relatively simple in most foreign places to tell someone of that nation that you don't speak their language, only English. It's a true privilege to be able to speak this world-dominating language.
Along this line of thought, images can say so many innumerable, infinitely diverse things - think a picture can speak a thousand words. And they can be employed to voice something simply and across the so often thorny, tricky barriers of language. A gorgeous image's ability to be evocative is indeterminable. And an image's ability to transcend what seems fundamentally different and alien renders it, at times, much more powerful than words in any given language.
This power is what makes Shaun Tan's graphic novel The Arrival so extraordinary. It is a tale told only in images - there are no words written on any of the pages. This brings those who pick up the book into league with the protagonist, a man who - in a true worldly story - has come to the decision to journey far from home. He is sailing to a distant foreign land in order to begin constructing a better life for the family he left behind. He does not speak the language of the new land he has arrived in. And he is thrown immediately into a crowded, busy environment full of alien sights and sounds, populated by such various people, all with whom he cannot communicate in a common spoken language. So he learns to use simple drawn images to voice his many questions and needs to those who take the time to attempt conversing with him. And slowly this unnamed man begins gaining traction in the slippery foreign society in which he is establishing a new life.
The story is simple and common in our increasingly fluid society. It is full of recognizable themes. Yet it also has such complexity and such layers - think about how there are still much-debated wars over borders between countries and nation-states all throughout the world. And media storms over the legitimacy of refugee claims and immigrant status within our own country. There are battles fought on state level about the cultural acceptance of foreign languages being spoken in certain settings, such as schools and other institutions. There are so many obstacles that we have fabricated that vastly distance us from other people - those we have deemed foreign and fundamentally different from us.
It's my aim to see more of the commonality between myself and others. This is a constant, uphill process. And it is important to always remember, while undertaking this course of action, that discovering a commonality does not mean I immediately understand someone else. A similar circumstance or factor is only part of the context of that other person. Based on that, I should not fool myself into believing I have a complete blueprint for who that person is. Instead, commonalities should be seen as building blocks on which to begin constructing further awareness. Like simple pictures which can be infinitely added to.
Perhaps what I've pulled from this graphic novel is too granola-ish, too much peace-loving nonsense. I've been accused of that before. But what's wrong with thinking this way? Why is it a bad thing to decipher great possibility in different forms of expression? I believe it leaves a lot to the potential of each individual as they bring their own contextual lens to something, allowing everyone their own interpretation. That should be exciting, not scary, right?
At some point in our personal family lineages someone left the old country for the new, to pave the way for what they hoped would be better lives. We all have some ties to immigration, in one way or another. It's silly to deny it and pretend that those who aim to seek out asylum and hope in our country nowadays are so different from our ancestors - wherever they may have traveled from. We should trace our histories as we look at these people and remember always that there are foundations for understanding. They are present at the many intersections between their narratives and our own.
"Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge."*
