Secret Weirdo

By Lauren Barnett

Well, for a twenty-page minicomic that is filled with embarrassing stories about childhood, cat police, imaginary adventures, and an opening page offering “free hugs,” artist Lauren Barnett definitely set herself up for a difficult task. One of her biggest pet peeves as a female artist is having her comics be called cute. “I think ‘cute’ is a terrible way to describe someone’s work,” she exclaims in one of the first frames.

Besides the political cry for gender equality in the artistic community in the first few pages, Secret Weirdo is an eclectic collection of stories (or rather confessions) about the artist’s endeavors as a secret weirdo. Barnett’s comical, autobiographical telling of her obsessive entrepreneurial ventures as a child, unusual birthday present request, sick day science experiment with a frozen egg, kleptomania, and more are interrupted by imaginative pages with the Cat Police and imaginary Adventures of Master Driver and Navigirl—alter egos perhaps?

What most attracts me to her style is the lack of pretentiousness in her art. The cover is a gorgeous abstract watercolor that is both lovely and haunting; the inside frames are made up of simple, flat, black and white line drawings, messy bubbles, and scribbled text that give it what one reviewer noted as a "draw now, ask questions later" style, almost as if she is making it up as she goes along.

While her comics might seem cute superficially, there is clearly a darker, deeper level to her appropriated cute imagery; her “adorable” childhood stories are intersected with short, anxiety-filled frames about adulthood: debt, apartment searches, the dangers of diet soda. These glimpses into her personal, intimate realm are quickly interrupted by embarrassed sarcasm, or more Secret Weirdo stories from childhood, because the reality is far too daunting to dwell on. It leaves the reader wishing for more of this darkness, but still leaving us with the knowledge that there is something else behind the 'cuteness'.

In short, even though the stories are oddly specific and personal, the ambition, sarcasm, curiosity, anxiety, and nostalgia of a child and young woman resonated with me strongly, and I recommend this minicomic to other adults and teens that can handle the occasional F-bomb and sarcasm. Also, although the styles and content are completely different, I enjoyed Secret Weirdo for the same autobiographical, humorous, deeply personal snippets of Erika Moen’s DAR! Comic, so if you like Barnett’s work, read some of this, too!

Review by Abigail Chance

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist

By Hiratsuka Raichō
Translated by Teruko Craig
Columbia University Press

In the beginning, woman was truly the sun. An authentic person.
Now she is the moon, a wan and sickly moon, dependent on another, reflecting another’s brilliance.
...
The time has come for us to recapture the sun hidden within us.

These lines launched Seitō, a women's literary journal, in 1911 Tokyo. Hiratsuka Raichō was one of the founders, and she poured her emotions into this opening editorial. Her essay gave voice to frustrations felt by women across the nation, and is now considered part of the canon of Japanese feminism.

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun is Raichō’s autobiography. Teruko Craig has translated the first half of a four volume set, with her own summary of the latter half of Raichō’s life. The book can best be described as a memoir, with more focus on experiences than facts.

Raichō did not intend to become a feminist icon. An atypical young girl, she went fishing with her father as a child, and later fought for permission to enroll in one of the few women’s colleges. Throughout her youth, Raichō squirmed under the oppressive dictates of school and family, conventions we would designate now as patriarchal, though she was not thinking in such terms.

Raichō was given a remarkable amount of freedom for a young woman. She walked alone to and from school and pursued her own activities. Passionate about attaining spiritual growth, she studied Zen for years. Her interest in literature came late, but when it did she began poring through the classics of European thought.

It was a male friend who urged her to found Seitō, "Bluestocking," a literary journal dedicated to fostering women writers. Raichō’s original drive was to inspire women to become their authentic selves. She did not think in terms of men and women, but of people who were denying themselves spiritually.

Raichō became a primary manager of the operation, with a team of other young women, and the magazine remained independent during the majority of its run from 1911 to 1916. Those involved were dubbed "New Women" by the newspapers, and their every action was scrutinized. The editorial team constantly walked the line between asserting their rights to act freely and avoiding the condemnation of society and the government, which banned several issues.

Raichō narrates her memoir in the voice of a confident woman, never apologizing nor boasting. I felt as though she was sitting near me, telling the story simply because I had asked to hear it. She explains her motivations, even when they are not quite what one might expect from a feminist icon. It was only later in her life that Raichō began to fight for the special rights and responsibilities women have as women, particularly as mothers. She describes this as a maturation of view.

Much time is spent on Raichō’s relationships with other writers. Though I was interested in the other women participating in Seitō, there were so many of them that they began to run together. I am sure that, to someone more familiar with the movers and shakers of Raichō’s time, the names will have more meaning, and these insights into their characters will be a gift. Craig points out that as an oral narrative, the text “tends to be repetitious and digressive,” but I rarely found this to be an issue except for these tangential stories.

The only thing missing is more of Raichō’s writings. The preeminent “In the beginning…” essay is only excerpted, allowing tantalizing glimpses into Raichō’s mind without allowing the reader to develop a sense of her full meaning. I feel it would have been helpful to have more of what appeared in Seitō as well. As such, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun is not a one-stop-shop for learning about Japanese feminism. There is a good sense of history and the larger changes in Japanese society at the time, but only in relation to Raichō and her projects. Her motivations and intentions are explained, but her work is not allowed to speak for itself. Nevertheless, the book sheds light on a time and a place that few would think of as progressive in terms of women’s rights.

Review by Richenda Gould

Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas

By Laura J. Beard
University of Virginia Press

Laura Beard’s study of women’s autobiography in its many forms, Acts of Narrative Resistance, is quite unique. There has to my knowledge never been a thorough single author study written which connected and compared such a variety of autobiographical texts from the Americas in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Beard’s study focuses on women’s autobiography in Argentina, Brazil, and what she calls Indigenous Canada (some would argue that the term “Indigenous” in her appellation is superfluous, but we won’t get into that thorny discussion).

Many studies have been published on these genres in those individual countries, studies which have also pointed out some of the central themes brought forth by Beard concerning the difficulties and challenges associated with studying autobiography and its associated forms. All these topics are well summed up by Beard in her analysis, in which she indentifies these narratives “as autobiographical fiction, fictional autobiography, autobiographical novels, semi-autobiographical novels, memoirs, and testimonios.” “Testimonial writings,” as they are called in Spanish, are essential to any study of autobiography in the Americas and quite hotly debated. Many questions are implicit in the study of the testimonio: authorship (who wrote the book?), veracity (did that person tell a truthful story?), and a (sometimes questionable) literary value (can this story be considered literature and/or women’s writing?).

The first two parts of Beard’s study involve cross-cultural analysis. All four authors written about in the first two parts are well known in the Latin American “feminist” canon. Part 1 examines the writing of Helena Parente Cunha of Brazil and Argentina’s Luisa Futoransky. In Part 2, Beard discusses Ana María Shúa of Argentina and Nélida Piñon of Brazil. Parente Cunha was translated and published in English in 1989 by the University of Texas Press while Piñon was published in English only ten years later. While Shúa was published in translation in 1998, Futoransky has only had two translations published in English. All four authors are widely studied by academics worldwide. Part 3 is entirely consecrated to the indigenous writers of Canada, Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling. Although recognized in Canada and examined in recent texts focused on indigenous literature, these native women are still much less studied than the four other women in Beard's book.

Beard’s analytical concept of “Narrative Resistance” is not new, since one of the founding principles of feminist criticism is to examine (all) women’s narratives as new and separate voices in a literary world long dominated by patriarchal tradition. However, Beard coins a neologism to define the works of these six women: natiobiography, defined as the works of women “presenting the (fictionalized) histories of their families as the histories of their nations.”

Perhaps one of the limitations of the study is that Beard did not attempt to draw more explicit parallels between the writing of the indigenous Canadian women and that of the South American writers; the indigenous women, Maracle and Sterling, are once again somewhat marginalized from the main comparisons, quite exceptional, perhaps, when likened to their mostly “white middle-class” counterparts. Although Parente Cunha claims possible African ancestry, Shua Shúa and Futoransky are of Jewish origin while Piñon is of Galician extraction. Indigenous women are once again the doubly-colonized as opposed to the other women writers examined, in most cases “colonizers of,” or immigrants to, the American continent.

Nevertheless, Beard’s study, well structured and meticulously explained, is obligatory reading for those interested in or working on (the concept of) autobiography. It is well-written and highly readable and demonstrates the significance of telling stories for women.

Review by Sophie M. Lavoie