Fabien Toulmé's Hakim's Odyssey, Book 3: A Review

Fabien Toulmé. Hakim's Odyssey, Book 3: From Macedonia to France (University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, 2022). 249 pages. Translated into English by Hannah Chute.

The third instalment of this collection follows Hakim and his son Hadi in their journey across Europe. Having left Syria and tried his luck in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (Book 1), they cross over to Greece in a leaky boat and are confronted by the EU barriers of dilly-dallying bureaucracy, the rogue people-smugglers and price-gouging scoundrels as well as the widespread animosity against people who are simply feeling political repression and persecution (Book 2).

Hakim's Odyssey, from Syria to France, completed in close to three years.

With his wife Najmeh having already settled in France, Hakim decides not to wait for an administrative miracle of sorts and pushes on, crossing the border into Macedonia, followed by Serbia and Hungary. Now, Hungary may be part of the Union, but that does not make it a welcoming place for refugees. In fact, once in Hungary, Hakim and Hadi are put into a camp where conditions are, simply put, dreadful.

No comment...

Not every day in their odyssey is beset by bad vibes and hostile attitudes, though. In some places they are given assistance by total strangers; other people who share their plight offer advice and provide very useful information on border crosses and how to avoid arrest. Yet money runs out too quickly. They are exposed to bad weather; Hadi is constantly hungry and also gets a little sick. But Hakim’s perseverance pays off and after several months they make it to Austria, Switzerland and finally, Aix-en-Provence, in France, where Najmeh has been waiting for their arrival for two years.

This kind of person should be forced to walk across Europe with hardly any money in her pocket and fleeing political repression. And every time and wherever she was told to "leave", she should be forced to backtrack her way by 350 Km. Just for the sake of it, just so she would get fitter, since a change of mind or heart appears to be impossible. 

Someone knocks on a door and an extraordinary trilogy is born... FIN.

In his epilogue, Toulmé stresses the fact that Hakim’s odyssey does not simply end when he reaches France, because their life journey keeps going: they need to integrate into their new country, learn the language, find jobs and enrol their kids at school. They will contribute to their new community in ways that few local people will actually realise. This is a reality that gets distorted by the lies, the misinformation and the hatred of the antimigrant discourse regrettably so prevalent in the West.

The three books in this trilogy should become part of middle and high school reading sets. It is a sobering story, magnificently drawn and narrated.

 Yes, it is important to record certain details of History. City of Vienna Information for Refugees Arriving from Hungary at Westbahnhof Railway Station. Photograph by Manfred Werner (Tsui).

Reseña: Walk me to the Corner, de Anneli Furmark

Anneli Furmark, Walk me to the Corner (Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2022). 228 páginas. Traducido al inglés por Hanna Strömberg.

'Hey, that's no way to say goodbye'. Leonard Cohen y Julie Felix, diciembre de 1967.

Elise publica un artículo sobre la ansiedad causada por el cambio climático y los problemas de sueño en la sociedad actual y acude a un acto cultural, donde conoce a Dagmar. Elise está casada con Henrik, tiene dos hijos ya adultos; por su parte, también Dagmar está casada (con una mujer llamada Ann Charlotte) y tiene dos hijas. Pero durante el breve tiempo que dura el acto y al despedirse, entre ambas ocurre algo indefinible y surge una atracción que conduce a lo que Furmark titula 'Lo inevitable'.

El comienzo de lo inevitable...

Si para Elise zambullirse en una relación sentimental con Dagmar es algo completamente extraño, novedoso y, en cierto modo, inexplicable, para Dagmar ese magnetismo que ambas han descubierto es tenaz e irrenunciable. Elise se lo confiesa a Henrik, quien, completamente dolido se aleja poco a poco de ella y encuentra refugio o consuelo en una compañera de la universidad. A Dagmar, en cambio, no le entra en la cabeza la idea de renunciar a la estabilidad de su unidad familiar. Sin embargo, sigue pidiéndole citas a Elise.

Utter miserableness... Henrik y Elise con la abogada. 

Walk me to the corner es una historia inusual. Pocos autores escogerán una historia de atracción sensual y romántica entre dos mujeres adultas. Furmark lo hace. Y es a través de una novela gráfica con delicados dibujos sin encuadre. Los diálogos son frecuentemente textos enviados de un teléfono móvil a otro, apenas unos pocos caracteres. Mucho más comunicativos pueden resultar los dibujos que ocupan toda la página o páginas repletas de dibujos sin palabra alguna.

Como si fuera un parque de atracciones, y de pronto, se encienden las luces...

Con una refinada paleta de colores suaves, Furmark transmite lo que es un drama intensamente emocional. El último capítulo, 'Amusement Park', concluye la historia de la mejor manera posible. Un buen libro con una estupenda traducción al inglés a cargo de Hanna Strömberg.

Fabien Toulmé's Hakim's Odyssey, Book 2: A Review

Fabien Toulmé, Hakim's Oddyssey: Book 2: From Turkey to Greece (University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, 2022). 254 pages. Translated from the French by Hannah Chute. 

Book 1 of Hakim’s Odyssey ended with Hakim in Turkey, wandering the streets of Istanbul where he had been trying to make a living while working out how to obtain a visa to France (eventually refused to him and his son). In Book 2, Hakim, frustrated with the many obstacles and administrative barriers imposed by all governments, decides to make the (officially deemed to be illegal) trip to Greece, the European Union, by boat. It’s not a unique story: Hakim has to find his way among the dodgy opportunists who exploit human desperation and make a huge profit from the tragedy of forced migration. There are overpriced, taxi services by grumpy and menacing-looking drivers; there are the crammed hotels where receptionists charge extra as soon as they recognise a desperate Syrian refugee; then there are the store owners prepared to sell you anything you may need when you board an overcrowded boat in the Mediterranean Sea.

How important can it be to learn to prepare a milk bottle?

And then there is the night of the voyage: the mafias who arrange transport to the beach where they force a hundred human beings on to a shonky inflatable boat that should normally hold 25 people maximum. Toulmé’s craft unambiguously conveys the terror of these people as they cross the sea and the engine fails in the darkness, as water starts leaking into the boat and the certainty it will sink assails their minds.

No room at the inn... Unless you're prepared to pay more than others.

When disaster seems imminent, all the men on the boat jump into the water and hold on to the side to delay what seems inevitable: it will sink. In Hakim’s case, this lot were lucky. A Greek border patrol ship finds them. They are rescued and taken to a refugee camp where they will be held for 48 hours. Then they will be free to wander in Athens or attempt to move on. Carrying his very young son with him, Hakim will choose the latter. Hence the Book 3 in this series.

Words are always inadequate to explain this kind of situation.

The unpalatable reality is that boats sink all too frequently. The victims of this unstoppable migration can be as young as eight months old. In the meantime, heartless neofascist politicians continue to spit their xenophobic hatred against people whose only crime is to seek a better life.

And a daytime scene of Victoria Square...

Victoria Square, Athens, photograph by Badseed. 

Fabien Toulmé's Hakim's Odyssey, Book 1: A Review

Fabien Toulmé, Hakim's Oddyssey: Book 1: From Syria to Turkey (University Park, PA: Graphic Mundi, 2021). 262 pages. Translated from the French by Hannah Chute. 

The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey is close to 4 million people. The war began in 2011 around the same time as the so-called Arab Spring, now a distant memory of the short-lived push for Western-style democracy in many Arab-speaking countries. Few pundits will currently believe it has any chances of a resurgence.

Hakim is the fictitious name of a Syrian refugee who fled the country. His story is narrated by Fabien Toulmé, a French graphic artist with a cause. In his prologue, underneath the drawing of a plane flying above clouds: “Curiously, the urge to write about the migrants who are crossing the Mediterranean came upon me because of a disaster that had nothing to do with this problem…” (p. 2) The plane was the Germanwings Flight 9525 that left Barcelona but never reached Düsseldorf. Toulmé contrasts this terrifying tragedy with the recurrent tragedies of boats sinking while trying to reach Europe. Why do the deaths of tens of thousands of refugees who try to make it across the Mediterranean (when not a very high fence in Melilla) hardly ever make it to frontpage news? Why are we never told who these persons were or what dreams they had?

Toulmé suggests it is an issue of empathy: we are able to picture ourselves as passengers on a doomed plane, of course. But never would we imagine ourselves as the precarious overload on a leaky boat escaping war or famine or political repression or all three of the above.

The story has been divided into three volumes. The first one introduces us to a young Hakim growing up in a country that has been ruled by one family dynasty, the Assads. He comes from a family of gardeners who have successfully run a plant nursery near Damascus for decades. When the trouble starts, Hakim tries to avoid it as much as possible. But one day, at a military checkpoint, soldiers find a mask in the boot and immediately suspect him of being linked to terrorists.

In a peaceful country you are able to work and smell the roses...until a genocidal dictator decides otherwise. 

He is arrested and tortured. His freedom is attained only because someone in his family circle agrees to pay a hefty amount for his release. The family nursery gets confiscated by the army; so when his brother disappears, Hakim makes up his mind to leave Syria and look for work in Lebanon. He is not alone, of course. Jobs are hard to find in Beirut, so he goes to Amman in Jordan. The same situation confronts him there: badly paid jobs, discrimination, precariousness, the risk of being under surveillance from Assad’s agents…

"Their questions got crazier and crazier..." As if answering any of them would be of any use!

Eventually he arrives in Antalya, southern Turkey. Hakim meets Abderrahim, a wealthier Syrian who has also fled the country. He and his family help him to get jobs and make some headway. So much so that he marries Abderrahim’s daughter Najmeh. Volume 1 ends with their move to Istanbul.

Their wedding reception takes place in a small pizza parlour in Antalya. Unforgettable!

The message about the horrors, the repression and the corruption of the Assad regime comes through loud and clear. The fact that the character is a humble nursery gardener makes it even easier for the reader to make a connection. But he is just one of the hundreds of thousands whose stories deserve to be widely divulged.

Hakim’s Odyssey is composed in very simple artwork, yet it works really well in terms of backing the narrative with few colours and details. Toulmé acknowledges he had to use the services of an interpreter to interview Hakim. He is completely aware that his story is doubly mediated. This is a great story told through very simple yet powerful images.

Ana Penyas' Estamos todas bien: A Review

Ana Penyas, Estamos todas bien (Barcelona: Salamandra, 2018). 112 pages.

I was born twenty-five years after the Civil War ended, but was a very young eyewitness to (in the opinion of many) some of the worst years of the Francoist regime: the early 70s. For someone like my mother, born in 1936 just months into the conflict, those forty years of Fascist rule were a completely different story. Life was extremely hard – particularly in regions Franco and his collaborators chose to punish with gusto. Under Franco, women were the target of two powerful, tyrannical entities: the Spanish political version of Fascism (Francoism) and the Catholic Church, which were (and still are) solidly joined at the hip, as if they were Siamese twins.

In Estamos todas bien (which I would tentatively translate as We’re all fine, girls!) Valencian illustrator and graphic artist tells the life-story of her two grannies: Maruja and Herminia. More a homage than a proper narrative, given the constraints the graphic novel as a medium imposes upon the creator, the book seeks to be, quite understandably, a tribute, not a tale.

Penyas contrasts the past with the present of Maruja’s daily routine: loneliness, ageing and the resulting difficulty of moving in a pedestrian-unfriendly environment are shown in the first pages. The long walk back home from the park that used to take barely a few seconds now takes her minutes. Memories mix with current events through images and voices.

Does TV make it bearable to be alone for hours at a time?

Migration in post-war Spain is another of the topics covered by Penyas. In the case of Granma Maruja, she moved from Las Navas del Marqués, north of Madrid, to Gestalgar, a village in inner Valencia, an excursion to which remains one of my earliest memories as a child.

With friends like these, who needed enemies?

Penyas is a very subtle narrator, allowing her drawings to tell the reader as much as the reader wants to find out. See for instance the example below, where Maruja is being harassed by one of the bar’s regulars. The work is boring, the customers (all male, of course) are sexual predators, while the photograph of the genocidal dictator who happens to be Head of State “por la gracia de Dios” presides over the scene. Below, the dreary view from the bar reinforces the dispiriting outlook for a young woman like Maruja.

It may sound like an urban myth these days, but many people went to Madrid to make sure the dictator was truly dead. He was indeed, but his adherents and followers remain conspicuously active. At my grandmother's shop, by midday that day all the cava had been sold. Some celebrations!

For her part, Herminia also migrated with her husband and children to Valencia, the city, from Quintanar del Rey, a small village in Cuenca. With a large family to look after, they struggled to make ends meet. The dream of returning to the countryside slowly faded into oblivion, while one of her daughters became involved in left-wing politics fighting through outlawed newspapers against the agonising regime and the dictator.

Estamos todas bien has won two significant awards, the National Comic Award in 2018, and the 10^th FNAC-Salamandra Graphic Novel Award in 2017. As a heartfelt tribute to the two grannies who must have helped her become who she is now, the book is simply astounding. As a narrative, however, it lacks punch. The story meanders between the nostalgic and the denunciation of the extremely discriminatory culture against which the two women must have battled through the years. It is, moreover, a sad state of affairs that a neo-Francoist political party has resurfaced (which goes to prove Franco has never really “died”) and attacks women’s rights (as well as those of migrants, linguistic minorities, the LGBT community and others).

The guy at the bar in front of you could be a murderous criminal one day... the one behind you by the bottle of brandy is a genocidal dictator. Where would you go?

An enjoyable book, no doubt. Perhaps a much longer version would have enhanced the story and the message, although it would have made the book a lot more expensive. Moltes gràcies, T. M’ha agradat moltíssim.

¡Chisss! ¡Camarero! Un par de tercios y una ración de sepia a la pancha. Ellas les hacen el gasto. Sin el bar de la esquina, la economía española estaría más hundida que el Titanic.

1 March 2023: Great news! Estamos todas bien has been published in English by Fantagraphics, translated by Andrea Rosenberg as We’re All Just Fine.

Paco Roca's La casa: A Review

Paco Roca, La casa (Bilbao: Astiberri, 2016). 131 pages.

People of my generation will easily identify with the circumstances and the scenario depicted in Valencian Paco Roca’s La casa. The second half of the 20^th century meant a huge populational move from small villages and towns to what we in Australia colloquially call ‘the Big Smoke’, the cities, yet many of the houses the generation of post-war parents left behind in order to make a living in cities are still standing, holding various secrets and a kind of poignancy that only those who have lived the place know well.

It's never too late to learn.

In Paco Roca’s case, the trigger was his father’s demise. Returning to the house of his childhood summers, the father’s presence is still profoundly felt in every nook and corner. The house may be now uninhabited, but memories of his old man are still inspiring feelings in each of the siblings and even in the grandchildren. But there are also disagreements: what to do with the house?

Characters are roughly explained. Both parents are gone, but there are three adult siblings, their spouses and children. An initial decision has been reached: fix the many issues the house has, repaint it and then sell to the highest bidder. Is that what they really want to do?

The longer they spend at the house, the more uncertain they all are about the decision. Each of them recalls very personally meaningful moments. The house still hosts the presence of their parents, although Roca seems to focus far more on the dead father.

Remembering moments with your grandpa while taking a dump. A priceless chunk of the best humour.

There is also a neighbour, a man of the older generation, who is always around providing advice, asking questions, offering to help. What works best in La casa is the way the story-line moves back and forth. Roca is highly skilful when it comes to infuse the narrative with merely hinted-at feelings, such as grief or filial love. The inexorable passage of time is also a theme Roca carefully develops throughout this little gem of a book.

An extraordinary way to finish a book: I'll take the fig-tree with me, thanks!

As we slowly approach that age at which death, though fortunately not imminent (or at least I hope not!), becomes an ineluctable prospect, the question arises: what should we do with the family home? Is the sentimental value more important than its monetary value? And is property ownership a worthwhile undertaking in a world that seems increasingly unstable and dangerous?

La casa is a wonderful effort on a universal topic. It would undoubtedly deserve to be translated into many languages. Gràcies, T.

5/3/2022: Published in English as The House by Fantagraphics in 2019 (translation by Andrea Rosenberg).