Visualizing the Language of Pain: A Reading of Inverna Lockpez’s Graphic Novel Cuba: My Revolution
Volume 3 Issue 1 Winter Edition 2023
Keywords:
Visual Representations, Women, State, Body, TortureAbstract
Aim: In the recent times visual narrative is taking a stronghold than a written text and it is making an attempt to fathom the realities to get a plausible answer to any situation. The representation of pain and torture becomes more real through the striking depictions in the illustrative pages of a graphic novel. The graphic narrative has encompassed numerous representations focusing the significant issues of our socio-political scenario and pertinent examples can be placed of the remarkable depiction of the mayhem of holocaust and its aftermath by Art Spigelman in his seminal text Maus which bagged him Pulitzer Prize. Depiction of history, conflict, war, genocide, torture, pain have fascinated the artists of graphic texts too since the last decade. The female artists of graphic narrative also played a significant role in representing a temporal period and their individual history in particular. The pain and suffering of the protagonist while languishing in jail is represented through striking images that evokes a visual sensation. The paper shall make an attempt to analyze the text as an expression of the issues of trauma and pain. The paper shall also probe into the issue of the visual language of pain and argue whether the pictorial representations in a limited space are feasible enough to understand the pain of the tortured and emaciated body of Lockpez in particular and “women” in general who becomes a victim of the repressive machinery that a state beholds. Methodology and Approach: The study is based on the graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution which will be analyzed through the trauma theory in visual narrative and women studies. Outcomes: The novel is a modest representation of a woman who becomes the victim of the diabolic state machinery and the torture inflicted on her mind and body remains with her throughout.
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