[Fantagraphics; 2024]
Grandmother Vilma is dead. Her granddaughter, Rocio or Ro, moves into the house that Vilma has left behind in San Martin. Thus opens Mothballs, the latest graphic novel by Argentine artist Sole Otero. It seems Ro is lucky: The house is huge and all hers. But the house is, in a way, haunted: by memories of what her grandmother was like and everything else—the mundane things such as the furniture or the cat—of which her life was a product. Living alone in the house, Ro revisits Vilma’s life and times, and gains a lesson or two in politics and identity. She realizes that she and Vilma are a lot like each other, and that is not a good thing, given that Vilma was seen as a “difficult” and “isolated” person. Like Vilma, Ro does not seem to care much about other people’s emotions and needs. She also realizes that one cannot afford to stay away from politics either: It stamps everyone in ways too deep to be visualized or become obvious.
The artwork displays three distinct styles: The panels for stretches or sequences of moments from the lives of Vilma (in the past) and Ro (in the present); the fluid reflections of Ro about her grandmother; and the depictions of the house as Ro explores it. Vilma’s story begins with her mother’s, who escaped Mussolini’s regime in Italy. Vilma’s life is intertwined with others’ desires, actions, and manipulative tendencies. The result is that she turns into a bitter person, turning loved ones away from her at every step. The house has witnessed all these episodes and seems to be opening them up as visions through old photographs or memories to Ro so that she realizes she can do better (as opposed to remaining caught up in the past or not being able to exercise her agency). In one scene, Vilma rebukes Ro for wearing what she finds to be very revealing clothes because, she thinks, it is a woman’s responsibility to not draw men’s attention to herself or her body. The narrative of what women can and cannot, should and should not, do runs throughout the story. The tragedy is that Vilma’s character cannot help seeing the trap of misogyny and patriarchy around her: She continues to come down strongly on others, alienating her two sons, and even Ro. These memories occupy a liminal space: These are reconstructions emerging from the time Ro spends in the house but not explicitly reconstructed by Ro in her voice. These memories are more like separate histories or episodes constituting an independent narrative in itself.
The other thread is that of larger politics. For instance, Ro listens to the devaluing of the peso, or learns about the burning of a factory to claim insurance. Or that Vilma’s parents’ migration to Argentina, in search of a place less capitalistic, evokes strong economic connections between the personal and the political. Even though both Vilma and Ro say that politics is boring and does not interest them, one can’t help but notice that politics can never be far away from the self. Communism, capitalism, currency, economic policies, abortion rights, and so on define peoples’ lives.
The panels seem straightforward: boxes of varying sizes or volumes with speech balloons in capital letters for conversation (mostly in Ro’s timeframe) or carrying plain visuals to show movement. The conversation ones employ a unique method of identifying who is doing the speaking. Instead of arrow-like pointers to the speaker, these, very economically, carry multiple dialogues like flowcharts intertwined among characters while also ordered in a way that clarifies the order of speech. The arrow markings are replaced by scribble-like lines making the attribution of speech fun in terms of design. The scribbles join the dialogue boxes to the mouths of the speaking characters, making the situation and the story quite dreamy. The artwork does not show much difference (except when showcasing the house itself (more on which below): The present and the past are discerned in the setting, the characters, the clothes, and so on.
Ro’s reflections about Vilma are not organized in panels. The reflections are more like diary entries handwritten in cursive style, combined with rethinking of certain thoughts and word choices:
After all the time we spent together, i thought i would feel
sadder about your death.
Is it because you weren’t a good person?
I don’t really know what it means to be a good person, but if somebody asked
for examples, I’d never include you on the list.
Why does a person turn out that way?
How does a person
turn out that way?What has to happen to a person for them
to become so isolated?
When Ro imagines Vilma talking to her, berating her for not working hard enough, the panels and the diary styles merge: The speech balloons have cursive writing. The two styles of framing blend the past and the present.
Another variation on the full-width panel diary pages is that of recreating one scene out of different moments as examples of different conversations with the grandmother. For instance, there is a double-page spread on the same terrace of a house depicting Vilma’s four different visits to Ro.
The scenes and the artwork focused on the house are black, white lines in darkness or dark and long shadows of Ro and other things. The house, through its door, appears in most moments depicting the coming home and going away moments of different characters, demarcating episodes in the whole narrative. Ro imagines that Vilma appears to her one night calling out to her as her granddaughter. When Ro says she is not her granddaughter, Vilma, or the spirit in the form of a gigantic snake, says, “But you owe your life to me. Same difference. You’re going to repay me by carrying this bitterness.” The scene, with its black setting, is horrifying: It shows the terror that the house and the grandmother are capable of evoking in Ro’s head.
Mothballs is a unique specimen of story and art that revisits the “personal is political” slogan of second wave feminism, while drawing attention to the intimate or personal aspects of living with the consequences of oppressive religion and patriarchy. It also sensitizes one to the need to break away from traditions that turn women into victims while also alerting one to the need to break away from the practice of blaming oneself and/or others, holding them responsible for whatever has gone wrong with them, for instance, in the way Vilma begins to resent everything, incapable of loving her family, occupied with cherishing the idea that she has been a victim of everything. The interesting thing is that this is hardly possible or realistic: In the process of confronting the system, one cannot quite overcome the bitterness produced by the system while also resenting other women for whatever success they might be able to enjoy. Women continue to perpetuate the oppression from which they seek liberation. Sole Otero, however, makes it possible to imagine the oppressive nature of patriarchy, while also drawing attention to the care and tenderness that women must not distance themselves from. An inability to recognize the love of men in the family blinds oneself and future generations to explore other ways of living and, well, participating in politics to make things better. One hopes Mothballs gives strength to young women to make better choices in living, loving, and thinking.
Soni Wadhwa teaches English at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, in India. She is a regular contributor to Asian Review of Books.
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