Also known as 'Blumpi, Flores Oliver is an illustrator, drawer of comics, essayist and culture journalist. He has been published in many Mexican newspapers and periodicals. He has a blog of his comics at http://sarcomic-strips.blogspot.mx/
 |
| by: BLUMPI |
After a day's work, Mary Joseph, my three-year old daughter, when not asleep, hopes that for at least a few minutes she can continue with any of the activities with which she is entertaining herself. She can be playing with the dogs, painting or playing soccer. Or reading. Like Olivia, the little pig created by Ian Falconer, she takes four or five books in her hands and pretends to read them all. I, like Olivia's mother, negotiate with her until I convince her that she only read one or two. To see her running toward my room with a book under her arm is one of the scenes that produces the greates pride in me. And also that she does not like Disney princesses. Sometimes one of the books she chooses is 'Where the Wild Things', a book that at first disconcerted me, but which helped me learn to appreciate the different.
'Where the Wild Things Are´ (1963) is a difficult book. It doesn't begin as books often begin, but in an abrupt manner, a bit like the tales of a young child who daydreams and invents stories. It's a challenging book. I bet many parents are startled and do not know what to do when they read it for the first time to their children and get to the part where
His mother called, "MONSTER!"
and Max said "I will eat you!"And I also bet that, in many cases, it is the first and last time they open that book. Thus it is that the literature of Maurice Sendak transgresses in a special way. Sendak leads you to see things from a perspective that is hardly traditional, fulfilling what he said to Steven Colbert in an interview just earlier this year: "I do not write for children. I write," What this statement implies is that he wrote with all the obstacles and all the facility that could occur to him, because his readers are not idiots.
That's a lot of respect to have for the reader, but no pity. Because, as he explained to Spike Jonze, "I don't believe in children; I don't believe in infancy; I don't believe in this demarcation, "Oh, you ought to say this to them! You ought to say that to them." These are the words of Sendak in a part of 'Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak,' the documentary that--oh, damn chance (or life, or luck, or death), was produced by the likewise recently deceased Adam Yauch.
But Sendak elaborated this theme of childhood a bit more in a conversation with Art Spiegelman (hey, I've already written too many articles about him, so I'm not going to go back and say who he is). Published in 1993, in The New Yorker, it is presented as a comic drawn by the two artists, who walk near Sendak's country home in Connecticut and carry on a talk about the creative process and children's books. "CHILDREN are cannibals and psychotic; They vomit on you with their mouth!" exclaims Sendak, but before arriving at that, this dialogue occurs:
MS: Books for children ... books for adults ... that is nothing more than marketing. Books are books!
AS: I suppose so. But when parents give their children 'Maus', my book about Auschwitz, I think it is child abuse ... I want to protect my children!
MS: Art, you cannot protect children ... they know everything! ... In fact, childhood is deep and rich. It is vital, mysterious and intense. I vividly remember my own childhood ... I knew terrible things ... but I knew that the adults ought not to know ... because it would scare them.• • •
What did Sendak know? He knew of death. He knew, too, that sometimes there is nothing more to do than disappear, to close the door of mother's house behind you, to embark to an island inhabited by wild things and not return until they bring dinner to your room. These are the things that children do, they walk around the house wearing outlandish pajamas, naked, scaring the dog, shouting: "I don't care!"
• • •
One minute you're alive and the next, not. One minute your parents are at your side and the next, someone has eaten them and, in the next, three cooks are baking you, and the next you're celebrating your birthday. The title of the documentary by Spike Jonze sums up all this. Children (such as Pierre, Max and Mickey, protagonists of Sendak's books) have to know everything, because they understand and are not idiots. "Tell them what you want. If it´s true, tell them."
What do children do? To what are they devoted? You have to take a look at Sendak's alphabet book "Alligators All Around". Some examples, F: Forever fooling, P: Pushing people, U: Usually upside down, T: Throwing tantrums. But all these are activities that not only children do, we all do, including alligators.
Sendak was a complex child: sickly, homosexual and Jewish, and he lived traumatized by events he encountered in his childhood, one of them, the death of much of his family during the Holocaust. But to live without vital worries does not produce good art, or it produces bloodless art. At the age of four he found out about the sad case of the kidnapping of the 20 month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was kidnapped and was not found until two months later, dead, with a fractured skull, near the house of his parents. Childhood terror.
But Sendak, rather than hide it, revealed it (albeit partially, we'll see why). If children are rebellious, relentless, cruel, nasty, arrogant and difficult, rather than sweeten the reality, he displayed it as it is. If his character Pierre walks around naked through the "Night Kitchen", it is because "children are not only learning about their body, but adjusting themselves to it." Sendak unveiled partly because he never dared to come out of the closet. Instead, he always tried to appear to be very heterosexual (if that's possible) in the eyes of his parents.
Maurice Sendak (1928) died in a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, at 83 years of age, after suffering a stroke. In his home you can see a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama standing, together with his collection of Mickey Mouse toys. Obama paid him one of the best compliments there could be: reading to a group of children "Where the Wild Things Are" (if George W. Bush had done the same, it would have been an insult; moreover, he would have read it standing on his head. Well, as we know, this is the world upside down).
God bless milk and God bless Maurice. Spanish original. Translated by Reed
No comments:
Post a Comment