I took a six-week online graphic essay class last winter. A graphic essay is a story told through a combination of text, images, and visual metaphor. It was a challenging class taught by Kelcey Ervick, author of the graphic novels The Keeperand The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová. For the class, we were encouraged to think of a story from our life that tugged at us. I created an essay called “The Fallingness of Things: Brief Tales from Dementia-land.” It was the story of my mother’s fall a year or so ago, and how, after breaking her hip, she suddenly saw other objects in her environment as falling or about to fall.
“Watch that, it’s falling,” she was always saying, and “Catch that!”
By the end of class there were beautifully rendered tales of familial relationships; hard stories of addiction, grief and loss; a lovely story about becoming an artist; and one in particular that has stayed with me, a story about the birds of Los Angeles, by Melissa Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick’s graphic essay was published on Crucialcomix.com, but I’ll shorthand it for you: Many beautiful, non-native birds, including parrots and parakeets, have made Los Angeles their home, integrating peaceably and seamlessly into the local flora and fauna, and contributing to the diversity of the region. Running alongside Fitzpatrick’s story of the birds is another story: that of immigrants who likewise became part of the fabric of Los Angeles, yet who, in the era of ICE raids, were being uprooted and disappeared. Fitzpatrick wrote about one paletero who sold ice cream from his vending cart in the same spot for twenty years. He was taken away by ICE, but his cart remains like a ghostly reminder of his fate.
I thought about Fitzpatrick’s essay the other day. I was walking my dogs and ran into an acquaintance. She was looking around at the trees and seemed agitated. I asked how she was.
“These non-native birds are driving out the native birds,” she said. I remembered how much she loves birds. More than once I have been the recipient of an email asking me to turn off my outside lights so as not to disrupt nighttime migrations. I always do.
And I’m no ornithologist but I do have a peripheral understanding of the bird issue. I know that some of them are challenging the territory of native birds, and in some cases, routing them out of their homes. Whether due to increased building construction in our area, as she suggested, or something else, it’s an unfortunate development.
But this was where the conversation went, like the proverbial birds in winter, south.
Suddenly the woman was talking not about non-native birds versus native birds but about immigrants versus Americans. Displacement is hardly new; in fact it defines the history of our very country. It doesn’t make it right, but neither does it mean non-natives as a whole are a threat.
She went on to say that the problem is liberals who seek to destroy America. It was such a slick slide into contentious territory that I honestly didn’t see it coming, though, given how much political news I shovel into my brain every day, I should have.
I won’t go into the details—if you watch the more partisan news media, you know all of my acquaintance’s talking points. But when I explained what I actually believe, which is nothing like what she said I believe, she walked back the rhetoric.
“Maybe you’re not anti-American,” she said, “but all the other liberals are.”
Which brings me to a point that plenty of people have already made, but that bears repeating until it filters down from our brain to our heart: When we don’t get to know people in our midst—when we don’t ask what they actually believe or think—we end up projecting viewpoints onto them that simply reinforce our own.
At the end of “The Fallingness of Things,” I had to ask myself why I was so captivated by this phenomenon I thought I’d witnessed in my mother. Why had her obsession with things falling become my obsession? By the end of my class, I finally understood: It was my mother who was falling, deeper and deeper into dementia. And her entreaties to us kids to “catch that!” were her asking us to catch her.
At the end of her graphic essay “The Birds of Los Angeles,” Fitzpatrick asks the reader to consider how the introduction of new customs, languages and habits lends color and texture to our world, and how we might embrace them, rather than push them away.
If the existing political parties agree on anything, it’s that the world order feels as if it’s falling down around us.
The only way we will soften the fall is to open our arms, and catch one another.
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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].