Agency & Gender in the Garden

Do you know that vague whisper of déjà vu you sometimes feel when reading a story that's really old, like the early days of classical antiquity sort of old? And it's as though something is breathing through the story. If you close your eyes and breathe along with it—deep inhale down to your root chakra ... s  l  o  w  exhale ... find the pulse and tempo—then maybe some of those truths, so neatly encapsulated in myths and symbols, will break loose and reveal themselves to you. All those years measured by the movement of stars and continents will fall away, cultures and religions will twine themselves into one strong loop of shared human experience. Our bone-deep connectivity will be laid bare.

While reading the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana by writer Samhita Arni and Patua scroll-painter Moyna Chitrakar, I felt the breath of that something inviting me to read closer, look closer, get closer.

(Arni & Chitrakar 129)

Linguistics

Quick interlude here to talk about linguistics, the scientific study of language. *Short side note: I learned today, completely coincidental to reading this graphic novel, that the first real linguistic study was conducted by the Indian scholar Pãnini in the 6th century BCE contemporaneous to the earliest versions of the Ramayana. Okay, back to linguistics! In the exact way that paleoanthropology works with humans, when you study languages across time by tracing modern words back to their earlier forms, you find that they fit into families. And all those families are related at their protolanguage roots. If—like me—you aren't a linguist and require some visuals, just check out the awesome language tree below to see how language traveled, and when and where ancient cultures connected.

(Sundberg sssscomic.com)

*If you think this map is über cool, then you should definitely click on either the image or the citation link to check out more of Finnish artist & author Minna Sundberg's webcomix!

The Interconnectedness of Words & Stories

So those modern words we were just talking about that connect across languages are called cognates.  To put a finer point on it, cognates are similar sounding words found in different languages which derive from a single older word. 

• Examples
• English
• cat & mouse
• German
• Katze & Maus
• Russian
• kot & mysh'
• Proto-Indo-European
• [cat ?] & muHs

Really old stories are like words, they can also produce cognates. There are lots of super-smart terms to describe these cognates: motif or leitmotif, trope, paradigm, archetype, ... , the list goes on. As these old stories infiltrated different cultures, they were adapted to fit that borrowing culture and the specific storyteller sharing the story. 

Tradition

Before we talk about Sita's Ramayana, let's cover the barebones of the traditional Ramayana. The ancient epic of the Ramayana focuses on the hero Rama who suffers many trials. First, Rama's father, who is king of Ayodhaya, banishes the prince to the forest. Then, the demon king Ravana abducts Rama's wife & lover, Sita, and carries her away to his island kingdom. This event spurs much murderous mayhem as Rama tries to rescue Sita. Finally, Rama is reinstated on his rightful throne as king (I'm guessing his dad found an early grave to nap in). But Sita's chastity is doubted by EVERYONE in their kingdom because, ya know, it's totally their business, and also the measure of Sita's value as a human being *go ahead & give free reign to your anger*. Rama can't handle the rumors so he sends Sita back to the forest. Cool guy, right? Very traditional patriarchal norms, very traditional balance of power between binary genders in this ancient story.

Breaking with Tradition

But Sita's story is a little different. She begins her tale exiled in the forest: as pregnant as the giant blooming flowers which turn their red and blue faces to hers as she pleads, "I am Sita, Daughter of the Earth, sprung from the womb that nurtures this forest ... Let me live here. The World of Men has banished me," (Arni 8-9). And the forest listens (for the next 120 pages) to Sita's story of Rama. Then, in this beautiful panel, the forest welcomes Sita. Here, Arni and Chitrakar are speaking to us in symbols and space and words. The wide expanse of white page with the forest's floating response to Sita is like the forest itself. It opens up a safe space for this woman. The wise flowers twining and caressing Sita are a sorority of midwives protecting her. She belongs here, as Daughter of the Earth.

(Arni & Chitrakar 128-129)

The creators of this adaptation have layered, folded, and boxed deep meaning into Sita by telling her story in a graphic novel form. Arni fits Sita's sharply simplistic narrative—collage-like—atop Chitrakar's paintings. The women pay careful attention to negative space, font type & size, and text placement & orientation (straight or slanted, inside boxes or circles). This highly visual form of storytelling allows us to mine deep meaning instantly without having to decode large blocks of text. I would argue that this graphic novel adaptation, where colors, symbols, and icons  frequently take the place of words, makes the global connections and parallels to other ancient stories easier to identify.

(The Adda Seal)

This phenomenon of near-immediate understanding is explained in another awesome graphics-based book about graphic novels called Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. He discusses the similarities between comics and the pictorial writing/art of ancient Egyptians. Then, he goes even further back to cave paintings, an art that forms a sort of nexus between image and word. McCloud states that "pictures predate the written word by a large margin" and that many of these pictures grew into a system of symbology similar to those protolanguages we were exploring earlier (141). While there are many of these symbols in Sita's Ramayana, as a woman reading another woman's story, the symbols that immediately struck me as having strong cross-cultural connotations were the flowery forest—let's just go ahead and say garden—and the earth.

(Brueghel & Rubens) 

Western readers steeped in a culture of Judeo-Christian beliefs are surely nodding their heads right now. A garden-type paradise with beasts of the air and land, particularly snakes, certainly sounds familiar. Sita's flowery forest is a cognate to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve walked with their god in perfect innocence. Sita's pregnant belly holds the perfect symbol of innocence amplified by the feminine space she finds for herself within the forest. Another cognate might be Lilith of the Babylonian Talmud, she herself borrowed from older cultures, who is portrayed as a demon stalking the night, desirous of babies. In later Jewish folklore, Lilith is Adam's first wife who is made of the same clay as Adam making her a Daughter of the Earth (and not just some lousy rib). Lilith leaves the Garden when it becomes a prison of Adam's patriarchal demands, and begins her life anew in a world empty of men. Like Sita, Lilith sought the safe space which was her birthright.

(Collier)

At the back of the book, the original publishing house Tara Books, who put Sita into our hot little hands, discusses their aim in making stories like Sita with folk art like Patua scroll-painting more modern via their graphic novel format. Tara Books wants adaptations like this to reach readers like us. When we can read across cultures, draw lines between symbols, and breathe with a story; then, can our shared human experience actually feel shared. 

*If  you are looking for another adaptation on the lines of the ones mentioned above,  this super-short short story by Ursula K. Le Guin: "She Unnames Them".

Works Cited

Arni, Samhita. Sita's Ramayana. 2011. Painted by Moyna Chitrakar. Groundwood Books, 2018.

Brueghel, Jan & Peter Paul Rubens. The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. 1615, Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Collier, John. Lilith. 1887, Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1993.

Sundberg, Minna. "Old World Language Families." Stand Still. Stay Silent, 14 Oct. 2014, http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=196.

The Adda Seal. Circa 2300 BCE, The British Museum.