(Anpu Varkey)
If nostalgia has a graphic novel form it is here in Anpu
Varkey’s 2019 self-published book titled ‘Summer’s Children.’ Truffaut-esque in
nature the protagonists in this graphic novel are a pair of siblings who spend
a summer’s day in an extremely ‘meaningful’ fashion. Like a pair of curious
puppies they move around their home looking for sensory experiences and
ultimate fun. Anpu perhaps transposes her remembered childhood in a sylvan
rural scape in Kerala on to these siblings and in a way becomes a witness of
their relentless merry making. It could be even a story that she has imagined
for her lost childhood.
(Summer's Children, a Graphic Novel by Anpu Varkey)
Anpu Varkey, an international known street artist who likes to work on the mammoth sized public murals all alone, turning herself into a live brush perching on the moving cranes and hanging from ropes and pulleys, in her graphic novels too prefers to see the world from those high and weird angles. Her style in the graphic novels is different from what she employs while working on the street art pieces. The public art works and their styles are often determined by the spaces available and the structures are inherently intricate on which the artists hardly have any hold. But Anpu Varkey and the artists of her ilk tame these impossible spaces with their sense of images, scale and style.
(From Summer's Children)
Graphic novels being intimate expressions of an artist who
is adept in storytelling demand a different approach mainly because of the human
scale as the given surface of expression. There is no need to scale up the
images and the distortions demanded by the huge walls and the perspective
distances are of a different nature when it comes to the graphic novel. Like a
ballerina who is dexterous enough to express both tragedies in grand movements
and comedies in lighter flights of the limbs Anpu Varkey too moves her brushes
different here in the graphic novel.
(From Summer's Children)
The siblings are like Esther and Rahel, the famous and
controversial protagonists in the novel, ‘God of Small Things’ by Arundhati
Roy. In fact like Arundhati, Anpu also shares the same local flavor in the
rendering of the story. The siblings are so close to each other that they not
only resemble in form but also in gender. Though there are no characteristic
highlights that differentiate the siblings in terms of gender, one is tend to
feel that the author deliberately makes their genders fluid; a sort of
hermaphrodites who could be either male or female. One has a knicker with a
pair of suspenders and the other doesn’t have it. Do the suspenders indicate
the gender of the boy while the other is left to a fluid zone?
(From Summer's Children)
The question is relevant only when we see the graphic novel
as an autobiographical tour of the artist/author herself. Keeping the author
out of the narrative (which is almost an impossible task) one could perhaps see
them as two boys snooping around their home and neighborhood. The story opens
with the smell of a jackfruit. Oh yes, in a graphic novel how does one smell
the fragrance of a fruit? Anpu has an answer; she starts off with the extreme
close up of something which as we pull out, I mean turn the pages, comes to be
seen as a jackfruit. Then it is cut open to show the sugary golden fruits and
you do smell and see the golden yellow though these are pictures done in black
and white. Though the images around the children are done realistically, the
children have a painterly fluidity.
(From Summer's Children)
Constant form shifters they are like the mischief makers in
a Truffaut’s movie, they are seen anywhere and everywhere in the village,
emulating the acts of the grown up in an imaginary world while the nature goes
on nonchalantly. The children imagine all sorts of pleasures and dangers, yet
they are unstoppable. Anpu hardly portrays the grownups in the world of
children; there is the presence of a grand old lady at the cocoa tree or the
hen’s pen or the man who opens the tender coconut for the children. They are
like Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali; the only difference is that they don’t wish
to travel into the unknown world. The world of imagination ignited by the
lascivious greenery around is more than enough for them.
(From Summer's Children)
Anpu Varkey is an extremely sensitive artist and an adept
storyteller as she winds up the story with the children looking wistfully at
the night sky filled with stars and suddenly Anpu replicates the world of
wonderful lights in the closer to home realities with the chimney light and the
light of the glow worm. Lying next to the mother or grandmother the children
listen to two musical renditions; of the kri kri sounds of the crickets hiding the
fields, enjoying their nocturnal flourish and of the story of a jackal told by
the mother in a sing song voice. Sleep creeps into their eyes of the children as
they try to see the jackal prowling by and Anpu closes the story taking the
viewers/readers outside to show that a cunning fox is already carrying a hen
away.
Graphic novels are the latest fad among the new readers though
their favorite styles come from the Japanese Manga and Anime. Anpu Varkey
stands differently like Marjari Satrapi, Joe Sacco and Nicholas Wild. Anpu
tells the story of a village through a pair of siblings and she doesn’t turn
the graphic novel into the more text based productions like Jeff Kinney or Bill
Waterson. Anpu in this work remains more provincial and this provincial narrative
has already got an international traction through the new genre of graphic
novels. Let’s wait for Anpu’s next graphic novel which perhaps would speak of
her journey as a street artist.
-JohnyML
