The Power in Place 

Places are alive, they breathe and grow, they wither and die. The places we inhabit are a transient, constantly changing background brought to life by our stories. A city’s architecture and shape shifts with shifting people. You may want to preserve a place, but ‘ultimately it’s all gonna go,’ so says Alan Moore talking about his novel Jerusalem, which is about the town of Northampton, where he has lived his whole life. He says capturing places in fiction is ‘the only way that you can save it. Not in the sense of rescu[ing] it, but you can save it like a ship in a bottle, which I think is one of the functions of art.’


But that misses a contextual element. Alan Moore’s Northampton is different to my Northampton. I grew up just outside Northampton and moved away to Liverpool, and the Northampton that Moore sees as needing saving is a different place to the Northampton that I knew when I lived nearby. Can you really preserve the whole of something that means vastly different things to different people? My reading of Jerusalem will be different to Moore’s, and will be different to someone with no relationship to Northampton. Perhaps it’s less preservation so much as it is translation.


This is something I spoke about with Ram V, writer of DC’s Catwoman and Swamp Thing, as well as gorgeous graphic novels like Grafity’s Wall and Blue in Green (both with artist Anand RK and letterer Aditya Bidikar) and creator-owned series including These Savage Shores and Paradiso. He’s lived and traveled all around the world, growing up in Mumbai before moving to the US and then the UK. His stories often lean into a focus on places and he challenges the idea of merely preserving places with storytelling, saying  “If you’re going to use a place as an important participant in your story, I can’t imagine writing a story where the place doesn’t change,” adding “if it doesn’t change, it’s just furniture.”


While creating work with a palpable sense of place could have a certain preservative quality, freezing a living, moving city, Ram points out that change is at the heart of both stories and places. Preserving means stagnation. Ram’s coming-of-age tale Grafity’s Wall is perhaps the most potent depiction of a place in his work. Here, Mumbai is condensed into 120 pages of unmoving sequential images that maintain the tumultuous, unset nature of the city. The book, once written, illustrated, coloured, and lettered, cannot change. But it is not static. There is life and change in the movement through it. It is alive in the reading. Ram describes stories to me as “not really communication; they’re an expression of an artist’s, or a writer’s, perspective, but as a reader that fiction is translated to resonate with your experiences.” The story changes when translated to your circumstances. In comics, the change between panels happens in the blank space of the gutter, the reader has to do the work to see the movement. The events of the story exist as a collaboration between the book and your mind. The static images moving through you.


This collaboration mirrors the creation of any of Ram’s comics works, which are not just his comics, but also his artistic collaborators. For Anand RK and Aditya Bidikar, who live in or relatively near Mumbai respectively, that city is a closer reality than it is for Ram, who only visits to see family. Ram tells me that “everyone sees it a little differently. That’s the joy of collaborating with someone.” Grafity’s Wall becomes a conversation between Ram’s remembered Mumbai, and RK and Bidikar’s currently immersed experience of it. Even within that, each of their experiences are not monolithic. Ram brings up how experiences of class stratification in the city changed during his own life, explaining, “when I was a kid, we were quite poor, but then my father became very successful and we were well-to-do by the time I left Mumbai. I’ve had that translation of experience, where I’ve seen both the poverty in Mumbai and what it’s like when you’re well-to-do. And Anand has had his separate experience of that, Aditya has had his separate experience of that. I think that kind of cross-class, cross-cultural experience of a place becomes very interesting when you collaborate to make a comic.”


Expanding on the politics of representing class in Indian cities, Ram is frustrated at the ‘rich,’ external perspective of many depictions of life in the poor communities of Indian cities. “I'd become very easily annoyed with writers and directors, especially from America and the UK telling stories about India where the subject of the story is on some level about poverty, and it's always looked at as this thing to be pitied, to be horrified by, and moved by. Which are all good things but they're all from the perspective of someone who's not poor. It's a Rich perspective to take, ’ah how sad, that person is poor!’ Poor people don't stop having dreams because they're poor, poor people don't stop having pride because they're poor, poor people don't stop having ambition because they're poor. These kinds of narratives of pity often shave away those things about being poor. [In Grafity’s Wall] I wanted to tell a story where it doesn't matter that [the character Jay] lives in a shack with his grandma, he can still dream of being a rapper. He's still delivering drugs to a five star hotel and so he knows what it's like to be rich.”


He points out differences in how wealth disparities compare in the places he’s lived, “When I look at a place like London, sure there is economic disparity but there is not the difference of scale that exists in a place like Mumbai. That starts reflecting in all kinds of choices, choice of vehicle, choice of fashion, choice of language.” Ram sees the politics of class as vital to painting a picture of any place, “places, their connotations, their changes, their use, are all reflective of a political status quo of a place.”


This politics often manifests as through violence, as characters get trapped in place, unable to leave or move past somewhere, coerced by powerful systems and cycles of history. The young people of Grafity’s Wall are stuck there by external structures enforced by the violence of the police, and of gangs, of the state, of family, but dream of more. These Savage Shores sees 18th century Indian regional powers caught up in wars as the British East India Company attempts to sure up its pre-colonial interests, as the local mythology gets penetrated by European monsters. Blue In Green’s lead Erik seeks answers after his mother’s death in the impenetrable places of her mysterious past, only to get burnt by a repeating cycle of jazz and ghosts.


The places themselves, the architecture and geography, might seem neutral to the violence. Buildings and landscapes are big and solid, separate to the day to day action of life, these large, stable things can only be changed by equally large destructive acts, it is through violence they become participants. Ram says the thing that interests him most about places is “their ability to store fiction,” expanding that “you could be looking at a collection of pillars and girders and floors and ceilings and what not, or you could be looking at a collection of stories, architecturally assembled. The story of why this floor is stained in this one place versus the story of why that pillar has six bullet holes in it.” Acts of violence are how places are created, tearing up the land to make somewhere for people to use. Acts of violence are how places live, they become stained, get riddled with bullet holes, get worn down. Acts of violence are how places die, dramatically demolished, overrun by an outside force. The examples of stored fiction that Ram mentions are scars from violence enacted upon the buildings.


These Savage Shores is seeped in violent monsters, both European and Indian, both human and mythological. On a few occasions immortal character Bishan is asked how he was made, and each time he answers with a different myth of destroying the gods that made the Earth and him, an immortal creature must be born out of the destruction of where it came from. Bishan’s perspective on violence and change in the context of the place is wider than anyone else’s. He’s seen the land change and be cultivated, kingdoms rise and fall. He seems as much a part of the place as the land itself. But in the fifth issue of the first volume he is pulled away. Vampires from England attack his home, turning his lover into one of them while he is fighting a losing war. He leaves the young prince Vikram that he protects to fight with the foreign vampires in London. A colonial force taking away the myths and mixing them with their own through force while mortal people are left behind. Prince Vikram writes to Bishan, “how do I free myself of this place, Bishan? One day, unlike you, I will die. And I will be returned to its embrace, or set adrift in its rivers and seas. What answers will I give to it then?” The young and alive are accountable to, and trapped by, the places they live, affected by the violence of them in a way that the immortal are not. Bishan might appear a part of the place by virtue of being there so long, the mortal and dying are really much more a part of it. In death, the living merge into the ground, tied permanently to one place.


The places of Blue In Green are where monsters have been locked away, hidden. Erik is searching for answers about his recently deceased mother, a spectral visitor points him to a photograph of an unknown saxophonist playing in a club that burned down in mysterious circumstances amongst his mother’s possessions. He tries to find who this man is, leading him into a cycle of interlinked creativity and destruction. The places of Blue In Green are old, “a portion of time caught in stasis” one room is described as in the narration, RK’s art is dusty, it’s been scratched at, it hides secrets. These are places that have stopped changing. Been preserved. But Erik’s search disturbs the monster’s rest, pulling him into a cycle of fire and jazz that burned the man in the photograph. The violence of places was being suppressed, leaving them “in stasis in an attempt to protect Erik from repeating the past. But as long as things stay hidden, if things remain preserved, their stories won’t be told and nothing can change. The cycle is doomed to continue. While less overtly political, Blue In Green does reveal how denialism lends itself to perpetuating cycles of violence.


The eponymous wall of Grafity’s Wall is born out violence at the end of the first chapter, as the state’s bulldozers come against protestors to knock down a slum, all while pages from Grafity’s sketchbook flutter across the page, thrown from a window by his father, with the tragic line, “don’t dream so much,” dramatising the oppressive structures that the cast live with. But turn the page and when morning comes, a wall stands in the rubble, and Grafity asks his friend, Jay, “you think anyone will mind if I go to work on it?” Jay’s reply starts, “No, Grafity…” and is finished, over the final page turn of the first chapter, with a gorgeous piece of formal slippage, by the wall itself, “no one gives a fuck.” The wall becomes a part of the conversation, the physicality of the concrete having the final word of the chapter brings it to life.


Where for the early part of the book the city is this oppressive and overwhelming place, here it becomes a co-conspirator in our characters’ stories, the wall adding its space and perspective like the collaborators creating the comic. But it is only through the violent destruction of the surrounding slum that the wall can join the cast. This joining together of concrete and character allows Grafity to gain some control, to make somebody see him, he explains that the appeal of graffiti “is the idea of being somewhere I’m not meant to be. Like sneaking into someone else’s world and leaving a mark. They have to erase it, you see. Paint over it. You can’t unsee it.”


The wall is left in the aftermath of destruction. The creation of a city means leveling and destroying the nature that was there. These violent acts are necessary for creation. In her book A Director Prepares, theatre director Anne Bogart says that ‘Art is violent. To be decisive is violent […] To place a chair at a particular angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.’ In defying violence, the artist creates their own violence, even the creation of the canvas here stems from violence. Grafity’s work may be painted over (a further act of violence), the seeing of it is irrevocable, he has removed the option of not being seen.


Art requires the artist to destroy their other options, but it doesn’t ask the same of the reader. The scars of creation can be healed in the process of reading. Those gutters between panels, where the magic of comics reading happens, reignites possibilities. How you fill those gaps is entirely dependent on you, and can change each time you read a book, as it translates into your changing contexts. The images might not change, but you do, and you bring your changing self to the page, it is, in Ram’s terms, “a conversation that happens between translations of experiences.” Building a city might be destructive, but the place is reborn, filled with life, as people lead their lives there.