In These Times
Review of Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
"Fantastic Voyage"
by Kari Lydersen
December 2002From old Chinese folk tales to The Wizard of Oz, it is a classic tale told a million different ways through the ages: A young person sets out on her own to make her way in the world, conquers obstacles in her path, and finds her own sense of strength and courage in the process. For our own troubled times, artist and activist Eric Drooker adds his poignant and inspiring Blood Song to this vast and varied body of literature.
Blood Song, told entirely through pictures with no captions or dialogue, is a tale of a young girl torn from an idyllic life in an undeveloped tropical country. When her father is killed in a military invasion--it's never explicit exactly which military, or even where she lives--the young woman flees the cruel, stone-faced soldiers through the forest, accompanied by her trusty dog, until she finds a rowboat on the ocean. She rows and rows, encountering many challenges on the high seas, eventually landing in an unnamed big city reminiscent of New York. Drooker, the author of another "silent novel," Flood!, is well known for his politically charged work. Some of it is collected in Street Posters & Ballads, which is filled with images of clashes with police, squatters' struggles, protests and prisoners. In Blood Song, he combines an overall political awareness with a more personal and timeless tale. "There are various themes here, militarism, the global economy, police brutality, the environment, which I hadn't dealt with much before," he says, walking through a gallery of Dutch masters, some of his favorites, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
While Flood!, a semi-autobiographical work, took place completely in the urban jungle of New York, Blood Song dwells in the realm of nature, even once the girl reaches the city. Drooker attributes this shift partly to his move to the Bay Area five years ago after spending almost his whole life in Manhattan.
"San Francisco is still a city, but living there feels like the Amazon compared to New York," he says. "I feel like I'm living in this humongous paradise with palm trees and hummingbirds all around. In Manhattan, I felt like I was suffocating, literally. I needed a different landscape, and all of this influenced my work. I was really enjoying drawing organic shapes, vegetation, animals." As in Flood!, the new novel depicts the image of the primitive in the city, as well as primitiveness in urban life as a whole. The heroine lands barefoot, bewildered and dripping wet in the city, having survived storms, whirlpools and hunger on the way across the sea. She sees a street musician being hassled by the police as he wails on his saxophone. She befriends him.
Impulses take over, and soon the couple are having sex on a rooftop, passionately conceiving a child. After tear-gas-filled battles with police, imprisonment and other urban adventures, the story comes full circle: While at the start the girl had been sleeping outside among thatched huts and birds, in the end she is sleeping on the roof with the stars above her and pigeons all around. The book was drawn entirely with a knife on black scratch-board, highlighted with watercolors for dreamy bluish hues. Bright colors are interjected sparingly for special effect, as with the red blood of her period and the yellow wailing of the saxophone. Drooker says that the girl's menstrual blood, referred to in the title, is an especially important part of the story's symbolism and place in literary tradition.
"It means that now she's ready to embark on this journey, it's a classic literary device," he says, noting that a girlfriend had the idea that the dog would likely be the first one to notice this sign of the girl's womanhood. "Usually it's done more subtly, like Snow White pricking her finger or Dorothy's ruby red slippers. Even Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella, there's always something about puberty and coming into womanhood as a subtext."
The Wizard of Oz was a definite inspiration for Blood Song, Drooker says. He adapts the same girl-and-dog motif, and like Dorothy, the girl's adventure begins after her family is destroyed. "Fairy tales and mythology really repeat themselves," he says. "I wanted this to be in the tradition of the heroine, the odyssey, even down to using classical motifs like the moon, water, the boat. There is symbolism all over the place. Then where it's really anchored in contemporary reality is the fact that it's not a tornado, but the military that kills her parents."
Though the girl's homeland isn't specified, it could easily be Chiapas, Colombia, Cambodia, Vietnam or any lush, undeveloped country where military helicopters have descended on the peasant population. Once she gets to the city, the girl finds the global struggle for land and dignity repeated in a microcosm, as street musicians struggle to be able to practice their art and squatters demand a place to live.
"I can relate to the experience of the street musician," Drooker says, referring to time he spent selling his work on the sidewalks of New York. "I was always playing this cat-and-mouse game with the police, always having to pack up quickly and move on. Then you got the [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani zero tolerance, where he's saying being a street musician is a quality of life crime." He calls the city in Blood Song a "generic 21st-century city, really a police state, a George Orwell dystopia with hidden cameras everywhere."
While much of Drooker's work is highly political, he sees that more as an extension of his person than as an obligation for all artists. "If you feel strongly about the colors of the sun on a haystack, you do that," he says. "If you feel passionate about politics and raising consciousness, you do that. Pictures are a language for what you feel."