ish

By Katie Kidwell

After devouring de Souza’s ish in one setting, I grappled with what to say about pages full of scribbles that made me feel something. This collection of three zines – -ish (2017), and so you write it down (2018), and coda (2021) – are short, strange, and moving. Each vignette within the collection has its own distinct flavor, though all are visually and thematically connected.

At the start of ish, a girl overhears her father learning of her mother’s death, embedding a rock of anxiety and sadness inside her. A stray cough interrupts a musical interlude, a reminder of someone no longer there. A young woman uses a sensory deprivation experience as therapy; numbed by tragedy, the process unlocks associations, as she swirls through the confusion of heartache and beauty existing simultaneously. The narrator laments how a song’s meaning, once significant to both the listener and the writer, fades with time. He wonders “would you write/ what you have/ again if you knew the song’s spell would fade? [unpaginated]” comparing the way they diminish to memories faded to a single point. The collection ends with optimism, a recognition of the hard and happy parts, a move towards coexistence.

Generally, the collection is abstract in both image and narrative. Chunks of the comic are structurally familiar, with a large portion of the story placed in panels, illustrated in black ink and graphite. Still, the comic on the whole is more freeform, as lowercase letters, limited punctuation, and the multiple full-page spreads speckled with color keep it from conventionality. A prime example is below, the flat, exaggerated figure reminiscent of Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. Throughout, the illustrations are defined just as much by negative space as by the art itself, an apt metaphor for those of us who have experienced grief. Our lives are as much by what is missing as what is present.

From ish                                                                     The Old Guitarist, Picasso

While parts of ish follow a linear path, others are meandering, more musings than story. Over and over, de Souza grapples with the persistence and unreliability of recollection. This is personal trauma as art, de Souza reflecting on the malleability of memory, how insufficient it is at capturing and keeping experiences. This examination of personal mythology could easily feel messy. I found it instead allows for the full range of emotions, both ephemeral and enduring, that radiate from grief. While it feels lazy to say the collection defies categorization, this is the kind of material that is simply better left experienced. I suspect ish is divisive for readers; like all art, it either speaks to you or it doesn’t. ish might be inaccessible for folks looking for resolutions, clear meanings, and a maturation throughout, as the collection relies so heavily on a willingness to feel, trusting in the journey, much like the process of healing.

At one point, the narrator acknowledges that there is a sadness growing inside, seeking to fully consume her. She knows destroying it would not be helpful. Instead, she says, “i [sic] aim only for a balance.” In my own grief, I find this equipoise is ideal. Grief is ineffable, and while it cannot be fully articulated, neither can it ever be ignored – like the cough during the concert. This, I think, is also a fitting approach to de Souza’s work. Attempt to understand what exactly it means, and you leave too large of an emotional expanse. Feel it too fully, and its potency can be suffocating. Without clear resolution, the end instead brings reconciliation, lines crisper and color brighter. The narrator is working to make peace, bridging a divide, “steady now in the horrible and the beautiful.”

____________________

Katie Kidwell just finished her MS/LIS at Simmons University, serving as an Associate Fellow at the National Library of Medicine this year. She enjoys watching & arguing about movies, reading books and comic books, especially about grief, and living just outside of Boston.