Lost in Translation

A graphic novel on Martin Luther King Jr., composed by a Bengali scroll painter, an African-American performance poet and an Italian designer, results in an uneasy clash of cultures, claims SUBUHI JIWANI.

What happens when one cultural history is narrated through the pictorial tradition of another? An act of adaptation takes place: the latter responds to the former in its own visual idiom. The innovativeness of the adaptation depends on how creatively the artist interprets the original text or story, how he translates it through the images and metaphors of his own culture.

Arthur Flowers, Manu Chitrakar and Guglielmo Rossi I See The Promised Land Tara Books 2010 Rs 550/-

While the graphic novel I See The Promised Land is a "collaboration" between African-American performance poet Arthur Flowers, Bengali scroll painter Manu Chitrakar and Italian designer Guglielmo Rossi, the textual narrative drives the novel and the pictorial one is, at best, an adaptation that pays too much allegiance to the original without enough flourishes of its own. (The 'original' here is King's life told through Flowers' prose.) One hoped for intelligent examples of 'cultural translation', of images that became prisms offering new ways of looking at a familiar history, but one encountered instead a story in pictures that aided and illustrated the text. This is not unusual in the Patachitra tradition where the image, which is only half the story, is often pointed at by the oral storyteller as an illustration of an episode in the narrative. Since this project involved the coming together of two distinct cultures, however, one approached it expecting two intertwined narratives and cultural exchange on equal terms.

Arthur Flowers, Manu Chitrakar and Guglielmo Rossi I See The Promised Land Tara Books 2010 Rs 550/-

One must, therefore, enquire into the terms of the collaboration - how reciprocal was the exchange between the poet (also an American university professor) and the folk artist from Naya village, Bengal? Manu Chitrakar took from Flowers' prose the subject matter and the arc of his visual narrative, but did Flowers take into account the oral storytelling tradition of the Patua?

An invocation to the intermediary between the spirit and the human worlds standing at the crossroads, opens the novel: "Lord Legba, open this gate." Asking for the gates to be opened is Rickydoc Trickmaster: a mythmaker, a "Hoodoo Lord of the Delta"1 and Flowers' fictional persona. His opening mantra sets the tone for Flowers' re-telling of King's life - or, as Trickmaster puts it, "rest[ing] a spell". Non- Western peoples have often told their histories as mythic tales, and Flowers who sees himself as heir to both the Western literary tradition and the oral African one, narrates King's life by blending historical events and personal commentaries with well-known biographical details. Flowers does not trace the trajectory of King's or King's family's life; rather, his purpose is didactic and he focusses mainly on the key events in King's career as a civil rights leader.

Flowers considers himself a griot who, in ancient African societies, passed on histories orally. His oratory, then, is "replete with the Will of the Gods, with Fate and Destiny". Trickmaster tells us that the Gods had preordained him to be an instrument of change - "it was his Fa" or destiny - but a life of service comes with its burdens, its costs. It is in such glowing but fatalistic terms that we encounter King.