Author: michelle (Page 8 of 13)

This piece was originally published on 21 September 2018 at WorldKitLit.

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A reflection on the importance of a full range of world stories in beautiful, artistic translation:

By Michelle Anjirbag

I wasn’t supposed to be buying books, but somehow, I can’t resist at conferences — even those I’m not actually attending. I’d scooped up a highly recommended graphic novel depicting refugee journeys, and an illustrated book of stories tied to constellations across cultures. And then the burnt orange cover, arabesque textures, and a very particular shade of blue spine caught my eye. An illustrated, comprehensive retelling of Shahnameh, brought by a vendor to a Picturebooks Conference at the University of Cambridge, sat on the table. And somehow, both a little more lost and a little more found, I could breathe easier.

My last name, loosely, means “fig garden”. This was not something that I knew as a child growing up on the Connecticut shoreline with very loose connections to a larger sense of my culture. I was a child taught to describe myself as Parsi and let people know they could think of me of Persian if that made it easier to place me, a child who knew the fairy tales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and Greek and Roman myths but didn’t know that her people, too, might have stories equally filled with wonder and power and daring deeds. It wasn’t that I knew nothing of my heritage and culture; there were some books brought by relatives, mainly the creation stories and ones about Zarathustra’s life, but truthfully, they were in limited supply. They were written in or translated into English, but it wasn’t the same language and syntax as what I had grown up reading as a voracious consumer of texts. It wasn’t what I had been conditioned to see as beautiful language and it didn’t follow the mode of storytelling I had been acculturated to. The translations and transliterations were clunky and the art was different. So, while they communicated their points and I had a sentimental attachment to them, I didn’t have the same sense of ownership over them as felt regarding other texts, such as stories about Robin Hood and Merlin, fairies under hills or fleet racing women who could outrun the wind and had to be tricked to be beaten.

It was a love of fantasy and fairy tale adaptations that led me to be able to learn about the textures and flavors I didn’t know I was missing, the things that could help me to bridge the gap between the things I was told were part of me and mine to remember and preserve, and the things that actually felt like a part of me as a typical New Englander. I was a hybrid child, to be sure — but that didn’t mean that a part of myself didn’t feel foreign when I had to explain it, even though I could do it by rote from a young age. Identity is hard to describe; it’s harder still when we ourselves have to embody the bridge between conceptualizations of languages and culture without knowing fully to what we are affixed. I’m still learning how to build that bridge for myself, which means, in many ways, I am still learning to see that all parts of myself, all the identities that I embody simultaneously, are normal. I never questioned my identity, or that I found myself in books as a child. But as the publishing landscape has changed, I’m finding more opportunities to see myself, my people, my family, in the stories I find. And that experience has been heartbreakingly profound, across three books in particular: Susan Fletcher’s Alphabet of Dreams (2006), Tanaz Bhathena’s A Girl Like That (2018), and a translation of Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings retold by Elizabeth Laird and illustrated by Shirin Adl (2012). One made me hate looking for myself in books, one made me see myself in a book for the first time in my life, and one gave me back a glimpse of a sense of wonder when I was least expecting it.

Prior to coming across Fletcher’s book, I was really, really used to dealing with questions like, ‘no, what are you, really?’ and some far more insulting things about vultures and fire worship and demon worship, which, to this day, I don’t have a good (read: polite) response to. And when I found Fletcher’s book, I wasn’t looking for something that would connect to my culture. I was more intrigued by the thought of the girl and her brother disguising themselves, and of a child that could dream what would come. Reading it, however, left a bittersweet taste in my mouth; even as a young adult, I recognized bits and pieces of the culture I grew up with twisted to fit someone else’s narrative. Something was taken, twisted, mutated, and written into a narrative that supported some other culture’s dominance. I think this was the point where I actively stopped exploring Middle Eastern or Persian folk lore and legend. I didn’t want that experience again. I embraced Norse mythology and the tapestry underpinning the British Isles and I really didn’t look back. Not seeing myself at all was better than seeing a misleading distortion, being mythologized to fit someone else’s story.

I forgot about that for a while, until asked to review a #ownvoices YA book about a half-Zoroastrian/Parsi girl living in Jeddah and having to navigate all of her multiplicities, all the things that come of being labeled “a girl like that.” What was meant to be a quick job turned into me sobbing on a train between Cambridge and London without being able to understand why, necessarily, it felt like a new door had been opened onto my life and all the inner conflicts I’ve had throughout when it came to naming myself. Because reading the names of your extended family, seeing their exclamations and phrasings on a page, having a book affirm that your life, your experience, is valid and real, well, it hurts. I don’t know if there is a better way to describe it. And perhaps, if I had lived elsewhere, perhaps, if I could take the time to learn other languages and open the doors to other literatures, these experiences wouldn’t be quite so jarring. But I was taught to assimilate to the local; it was supposed to be enough. And I am hardly the only person who receives that messaging. If we stop to think about all the different nuances of identity and experience confined by the language we think of them in, we see quickly how categorizing people, categorizing otherness, can become an erasure. If we can’t remember what we’re forgetting, if we’re not given the tools with which to educate a society to all the things they are yet to discover, how do we ever create new spaces? What does own voices, mean, in such a context, or even, translation? We need a broader language to talk about ourselves, and to build these bridges, so that we can build our local selves while not losing the ability to talk about who, else, we are — and so that it can be understood better by others. Otherwise we miss our pasts, we miss our parallel selves ­– the people we could have become — and when we do connect with that part of ourselves, we risk becoming too overwhelmed with dysphoria to truly understand where we might have fit in, where we too, were once normal.

Which brings me back to buying a book I wasn’t supposed to buy at a Picturebooks Conference. Somewhere in the great vast multiverse, there is a version of me that grew up being told different stories, that grew up speaking different words, that internalized the knowledge that at one point, the things which I was consistently confronted about being “not real,” were once widespread, and known. She would have grown up not just knowing vaguely that her family bears the names of kings and queens and heroes, but understanding how that heritage can build a stronger sense of herself. She would have dreamed about a horse named Rakhsh, as well as Bucephalus or Black Beauty or Misty of Chincoteague. She would have been inspired by Simurghs, as well as Phoenixes. She would have imagined in not different but more patterns and textures and flavors, considered more possibilities, had perspective to ask more questions and wonder from different angles. And don’t get me wrong, I like who I am, I like what I’ve achieved and I’m happy with the road I’m walking now. But still, tracing fingertips over Shirin Adl’s illustrations, I can’t help wonder: with more access to more translations as a child, who, else, might I have become?

Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a PhD student at Center for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, studying children’s literature. She has been an experiential educator, a ballroom dancer, an audiobook editor, a running shoe expert, a local news reporter, a book reviewer, and a writer and editor. Talents include baking cookies, reading while speed-walking through cities, and managing to still be a better journalist than Rory Gilmore. Her bylines include Roar Feminist, Fourth and Sycamore, Byrdie, and GOOD.is. One time she accidentally found herself on a radio panel. You can find her on Instagram: @michelle_anya and on Twitter: @anjirbaguette (she likes bread).

This piece was originally published on 28 August 2018 at the CRCLC blog.

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Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a first year PhD student at the Children’s Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge researching fairy tale adaptations, especially those done by Disney. This life choice follows a stint in journalism — among other careers involving professional writing. Her prose, as noted in the photos (with permission from her supervisor) can still sometimes use a bit of work.

Maybe I’ve appropriated the above title from the Audemars Piguet trademark, but Pablo Picasso also said something similar — “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Both statements apply to the art and craft of writing, and perhaps especially academic writing, something I was reminded of through rounds of feedback as I really started to sink my teeth into the upgrade report.

While it is easy to become preoccupied with the research process, training to be an academic is not only about learning to do the research, but also about learning how to disseminate that research in a way that is approachable for and understandable by people who don’t necessarily share our direct areas of expertise. While it is absolutely overwhelming to swallow the criticism of something we are all trained to think of ourselves as experts in by nature of reaching higher education, if there is anything I learned from various professional writing jobs, it is that there is always a way to get better at what we do.

I remember the first time that a professor held me accountable for my writing. I had skated through high school and more than half of my undergraduate degree confident that I could just do what I wanted, write what I wanted and that it was good enough. It was my creative license to communicate my thoughts in my way. And then I was holding my first assignment from a nature writing class with a large “D” on the back page and red ink scrawled everywhere. The note accompanying the grade? “This is lazy and sloppy. You can do better”. It stung. It was right. I made a point of continuing to take that professor’s courses because I was pushed to improve my writing whether in analytical papers or expository writing assignments. It was far from the last time that someone critiqued my writing, but looking back I can recognize that about ten years ago I had a choice in how I could react to criticism. And to be frank, if I hadn’t been willing to learn then, to learn how to better evaluate my own writing and my habitual mistakes and my weaknesses, I probably wouldn’t be here at Cambridge today.

That course was far from the last time that someone red-penned my work. From the student newspaper to the last newspaper I worked at before Cambridge, to essays I get commissioned to write now, and open submissions, there is always an editor. There is always feedback. I remember being on a voting results deadline with an editor literally leaning over me and copy editing as I was writing by hand. I remember having opinion columns cut in half because I had managed to argue both sides of the point in a span of 800 words without realizing it. I have had work shredded. The trick was remembering it was never personal — it was my job to be clear, to write a certain way, to address certain audiences at certain times, and good editors were there to hold me to account.

Good supervisors and advisors can and do fill the role of that good editor. Their feedback is not only about how the research is being conducted and where else one might explore in terms of concepts, but also about how the writing is. From comments about too-long sentences to advice that one should maybe break up the text with different headings, to when and how technical and subject specific language is used correctly and necessarily, these are notes that make the PhD better, and teach us how to write for yet another different audience effectively. And to be honest, in every writing community I’ve belonged to, taking courses or attending workshops and retreats to better one’s writing — even from people with multiple books out or who frequently publish in top-tier journals and magazines — is normal. With this in mind, there is no reason why academic criticism specifically about one’s writing should rankle.

So, what do we do, when we see those hours of work reduced to red comments across the pages? How do we create the space to process this, and be able to take it as feedback on our work, not on ourselves? Personally, I read it, and I walk away from it. I let myself have my moment of processing if I need it. And then I sit back down at the computer with a separate notebook and make a list of what is being flagged as needing improvement in my writing. I track and see where I am actually processing the edits and getting control of my prose, and where I might actually need to ask for some more help. For example, currently, my challenge is working on my paragraphing; I’ve spent so much time writing for newspapers and different media outlets that I lost touch with how to write complex things in a way that they are communicated simply and yet retain their complexity. Best moment? Having a paragraph recently flagged as exactly what my supervisor was looking for in terms of control.

Writing is hard; writing well comes from striving to constantly improve, especially when the notes that will allow us to do that are freely given in the context of the pursuit of higher education. So, from one professional writer’s perspective, the red pen and comments are not a bad thing or something to fear, but merely, another opportunity for growth.

This piece was originally published on 7 August 2018 at the CRCLC blog.

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Michelle Anya Anjirbag is a first year PhD student at the CRCLC with an interest in adaptations of fairy tales and folklore. Her current project is on depictions of diversity in post-1989 Disney films. You can also find her elsewhere on WordPress, Twitter, and Instagram.

Adaptations and transmediations (a work translated into a different medium) spark conversations, connections between different versions or iterations of the same thing, and evoke memories of previous experiences with a particular narrative. Part of the beauty and the challenge of reading or viewing works in adaptation and/or transmediation is that the reader or viewer is challenged to reconcile those differences as part of the process of engagement. I think this is especially true when considering adaptations that translate narratives that are largely internalized and driven by a character’s emotional response to their surroundings — such as Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 A Wrinkle in Time — to a much more visual medium, in this case, Hope Larson’s 2012 graphic narrative adaptation (yes, there are also several screen adaptations, but this piece will not focus on those, primarily). But as we found when our summer reading group considered Larson’s text, before even considering the result of the adaptation process, this is a novel that requires some context.

Shaggy, curly hair. Glasses. Always feeling a little bit wrong. Meg Murry was my introduction to a science fiction heroine, and one of the first times I remember seeing myself in the pages of a book, at a time when a character reflecting my internal state was the best hope I had for some sort of representation (and let’s be honest, that hasn’t actually changed all that much). And so, I read her story over and over again. I don’t think I would have grown into the child I was, and the human I became beyond childhood without Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and yet, I still hesitate to define it neatly as a book for children.

It hovers, like its protagonists, on many cusps. It can be — and has been — considered and interpreted both too openly and in too absolutist ways. It belongs to the deeply religious, the lightly spiritual, the cynic, and the reader looking for something a little different in both fantasy and science fiction, among others. L’Engle writes as though she knew exactly what she wanted readers to know and think after reading, and yet, I’ve never had the same conversation twice with anyone about this book ­ — and our reading group raised many questions about what this book is meant to be, meant to do, and who it is or isn’t for. It has kept me company through my life, and I have had many different relationships with it at different times in my life. The one thing I have never thought, though, is that it could have been done differently. This is why, I think, I have been wholly surprised by the ways in which successful adaptations of this novel have been achieved across various media.

Translating from a narrative constructed through language to a narrative constructed through image, even when words still accompany it, reveals details about how the artist (and the publisher, or producer, or any financial backer) sees the world and believes is possible to be believed by an audience. Even when considering fantasy or science fiction narratives rooted in “real” spaces, the audience knows that this is not the “same” world that they themselves exist in. It is constructed by someone; things are added, things are left out. For someone working on depictions of diversity, construction of imagined spaces becomes a map to hegemonic structures. Thus, I find assumptions — of what people should look like, of who is automatically granted different kinds of access, of what would seem “normal” or “recognizable” — interesting.

Because I am more interested in that construction — especially in how different iterations construct the same things and either disrupt or compound bias about what becomes normative, my reaction to Larson’s adaptation was mixed. On the one hand, certain things were spot on for me — Aunt Beast could have been pulled from my seven-year-old imagination, the beginning was wonderfully atmospheric, Mrs. Whatsit’s first appearance was perfect, and there was some beautiful illustrative mirroring between the bruise on Meg’s face and the Darkness they were fighting. As a whole, I took the same emotional journey I usually do reading the novel which means I sobbed on a too-hot train to London in early July. But on the other hand, when I stepped back to consider the visuals, I did wonder if Larson had missed something important — and that was the spirit of experimentation and boundary bending that defined not only the novel but its place as an American children’s classic.

From genre-bending to a female protagonist, to blending American liberal religiosity with fantasy and sci-fi, to not fitting the parameters of a neatly defined target audience, A Wrinkle in Time broke a lot of the rules of publishing in the 1960s. I had hoped to see more of that come out of a graphic adaptation, and this is where I felt disappointed. Larson clings, to me, to the Cold War context that informed L’Engle, especially in the depiction of Camazotz. The images pick up on the anxieties that the idea of imposed uniformity posed to the themes of exceptionalism and individualism that were not only a part of L’Engle’s time, but were woven through her novel. And while I appreciate that this might have been done to somehow stay “true” to the narrative, I do wonder if this was the strongest visual approach in 2012.

In comparison, I know that there were mixed reviews to the depictions of Camazotz in the 2018 film adaptation by Ava Duvernay as a beach party, seen as a vast departure from the atmosphere of Camazotz as written. However, I think that by shifting the visualization to something that reflects the current zeitgeist and cultural anxieties about individual engagement and letting something larger make the decisions so that “we” can “just enjoy,” was a calculated risk that ultimately helped to re-contextualize the narrative for a new audience that would not have grown up with an awareness of L’Engle’s cultural anxieties, but can draw connections from something similar in their own cultural context. Additionally, as one member of the summer reading group noted, the color palette was very soothing. This is something I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that Meg’s journey is so emotionally charged. She’s angry, she misses her father, she literally filters her world through that kind of a pain, and I think that the muted visuals downplayed Meg’s reactions which are so important in the novel.

Criticisms aside, I would return to something I said above — this graphic narrative transmediation brought me back to all the times I’ve read it before, and all the times its touched some nerve. It made me pause, and think about different parts of the narrative the might not have stood out to me in previous readings. I really like being made to think, and reconsider my own previous habits of thinking about the things and the books and the narratives that I love and that I’ve grown up with. What I like most of all, is that considering this text in this form has given me a new avenue by which to appreciate something with nostalgia, but also as an academic who is looking forward to the day she has time to do some serious writing on this novel, and its more visual interpretations.