“I can’t draw,” he said. “I’m one of the few artists where the paper becomes less valuable when I draw on it.”
As an aspiring cartoonist with no artistic ability, Martin was in a tough spot. So last year, he contacted the illustrator and cartoonist Harry Bliss and asked if he wanted to work together.
Our manner of collaborating was this: working from David’s literal translation of a manuscript of Yi Lei’s poems, I would listen to the poem’s statements and the images, essentially trying to visualize the poem’s realm, and to align myself with the feeling and logic of the work. Then, I’d attempt to re-envision and re-situate these things in English. Occasionally, this was a matter of shifting toward smoother, more active, evocative language. Often, it entailed locating a relationship between verbs and nouns and aligning those features within a new metaphor or image system.
Have you read a book review recently? The ones that make the rounds, dropped in DMs and threaded down Twitter timelines? They all fixate on a certain quality. Critics—and the authors they cover—seem to be obsessed with self-awareness. Writing about oneself isn’t new at all, but what’s current (and quickly growing stale) is the overtly self-conscious way contemporary writers have chosen to go about it.
The novel felt like it had been written for me. I am dark-skinned and was called “fat, black, and ugly” nearly every day of my teenage years. Claudia MacTeer, one of the novel’s narrators, is also dark, but she has something I instantly realized I didn’t: an ability to question assessments of beauty and worth. When her peers have “a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was,” Claudia narrates, “I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley.” Likewise, other children love blue-eyed baby dolls, but Claudia relishes dismembering them. To my mind, these were unthinkable displays of strength. And this was a strength particularly valuable for African American girls.
As we head into what looks to be a cold, hard winter exacerbated by the coronovirus pandemic, British writer Katherine May offers some warming advice: Embrace your winter!