MANILA, Philippines - Last month, Jeff Smith’s fantasy graphic novel Bone had its final fully colored volume released by Scholastic. After I turned the last page, I was met with a curious image of a sepia sketched suited man clutching a suitcase and peering down a strange- looking creature. It wasn’t a dog or a cat but a white rabbit-like oddity. I soon found myself with the same expression as the man in the picture. Having never been magnetically drawn up over a drawing in such a long time, I googled up its title The Arrival by Shaun Tan and found more postcards like sketches that were definitely somewhere but not here.
Each image in the preview resonated with a sense of familiarity that quickly was swept under the rug by a detail of great peculiarity. Yet, it was a peculiarity of the good kind because of the drab books lately that capitalized on cookie cutter formulas. While The Arrival certainly has arrived for its ability to tell a brave and compelling story as you will see, prompting me to go book scavenging for this lost locale.
Destination Somewhere
When you turn the first few pages of The Arrival, you realize that it is an immigrant’s story richly told by expression. There are no words but the silent narrative gives way to the emotionally packed story of a man who leaves his country, wife and daughter to work for a better life. In this brave new world, Shaun Tan imaginatively brings us to the deepest feelings of our hero grappling with unfamiliar familiarity. We are met with paper birds, incomprehensible signs, and strange produce. Yet, in the middle of this foreign anxiety, we also encounter natural solace in the universal language of the human person, that is facial expressions and body language. Although everything is lost in translation, Tan’s intense illustration articulates the story to its definitive drama. Without words, we know how grand our hero’s new city is by the generous wonder in his face or his desolate sorrow by the way he stares into the picture of his family. Also, our hero survives his desolation by reading the welcoming faces and gestures of his new neighbors.
Australian Shaun Tan, whose immigrant parents were from China, in a Viewpoint magazine interview says that he was daring enough to create The Arrival because he was “attracted to a kind of intuitive resonance or poetry we can enjoy when looking at pictures, and understanding what we see without necessarily being able to articulate it.” He adds that “These sepia sketches work by inspiring memory and urging us to fill in the silent gaps, animating them with the addition of our own storyline.” He does this geniously through what he describes as “exploiting a sense of visual timing from Japanese manga.”
If you read The Arrival, these explanations are felt as there are homages to various kinds of immigrant stories that you can fill in based on people you know or a personal experience. Specifically, the homage that caught my eye was the stirring image of the giant soldiers scorching a city to ash based on a immigrant’s memoirs of his past life. It is because these threats and reasons for leaving, although imaginary, have very real counterparts such as Filipinos going abroad to work in far places like America, Dubai, Japan or even Brazil. Thus, making this book very timely for our world where anywhere but here is a greener pasture.
Yet, The Arrival doesn’t promote or condone leaving our homelands. It does teach though that there is no place that can be unfamiliar for us humans as long as people thrive in it. In the common language of a smile, wherever we go, the ambiguous gaze turns into a transparent welcome. Thus, in this journey of life, we will never get lost as we allow persons to come with us. And best of all, like in the close of The Arrival, there will always be our family waiting for us in the end.
The Art Of Storytelling
After being moved by Shaun Tan’s work and locally last week by Jomike Tejido, I am now aware how overlooked children’s books and its art are by adults for their simplicity or by its label. However, I think simplicity should not be the reason to dismiss these kinds of literature — we should appreciate it even more. It is because we have to realize that adult stories do not become mature by racy situations but rather through the depth of their message. This can be found in children’s books such as The Arrival, which tackles the issue of immigration, by the power of its artwork, in a stripped-down manner. This is a feat in itself for not going into unnecessary melodrama. We just need to be a kid again to see the fundamental things that these books can teach us or recognize the craft with which these artists fill up in the spaces. — Jan Vincent Sarabra Ong
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The Arrival by Shaun Tan is avaible at National Bookstore.
Learn more about Shaun Tan at http://shauntan.net
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Want to be the next Shaun Tan? The Philippine Board on Books for Young People is now accepting entries to its 2009 Alcala Prize that awards budding illustrators with a P25,000 prize and an opportunity for your book to be published. More details at www.pbby.org.ph/alcala_2009.html.
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