Comic Review: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

For the Immigration Module, one of the suggested additional readings was The Arrival, writing and art by Shaun Tan. I had already read it, and I thought I had written about it before, but I haven't really said much.

This is probably because words would be so inadequate. Although you could make as good a case for it being a picture book as a comic book, it does come up in discussing comics, and a complex conversation on The Arrival goes like this:

1st person: Or The Arrival!

2nd person: Yes!

1st person: I know, right?

A simple conversation eliminates most of that verbiage for sharp inhalations or exhalations, plus looks.

That probably sounds pretty silly, but it I think it is a natural result of having experienced the book. I know I said I "read" it earlier, but there are no words in the book; it is all pictures.

In The Arrival a man says goodbye to his family and travels to a new land, finding work, making acquaintances, and missing his family. Tan gets fanciful in creating many of the basics. The mode of transportation is something we have never seen. In the new land foods, musical instruments, and pets all look strange. You understand what their purpose is from the context, but you can't recognize them. There is no text to give you guidance.

There are still many things that are familiar. We recognize the need to eat, and how it feels to miss family, how it heals to make friends, a love for animals, and the joy of reunion. Because there are no words, there is no need for translation.

I don't know if it is completely universal. There is a visual reference to The Bicycle Thief that a lot of people might miss, though missing it would take nothing from the story. If you live in a small village where no one ever leaves, surrounded by generations, it might feel different than if you live in a country with a long history of immigration. Still, I think a lot is universal.

The artwork simultaneously brings to mind old sepia photographs and Hieronymus Bosch, but in the front and back there are very realistic portraits based on immigrants who came through Ellis Island, just as many other pictures are based on the Ellis Island experience.

No one in my family came from there. On my father's side, everyone came through during colonial times, before there even was a United States of America (except for the Huguenot line; their path was a little more complicated, and diverted through Canada first). My mother married a descendant of those many colonists, leaving Italy as a young bride long after Ellis Island closed.

I still feel connected to those faces. Our humanity connects us, and our need to survive and do hard things and seek something better. If my ancestors came in different ways, they still came.

So in using his art to bring up both the familiar and the strange, Tan gets us to share in his protagonists disorientation, but also in his longing and in his hope, and to touch on those familiar emotions in us.

Having this emotional experience without words makes these incoherent "conversations" that readers have with each other the most sensible exchanges possible. What we mean is that we felt things, and as we felt them strictly through visual means, without words, that is the most basic level of relating to it. We show it in our faces and we breathe.

The story that The Arrival tells is worth seeing, but it is also worthwhile just to get that example of how powerful images can be. The Arrival shows us what pictures can do.