Water’s Visual Potency

Ray McClaughlin is a poet from Etobicoke, Ontario.

Comics encompass larger narratives, dealing with anything from abuse, addiction, family, love, war, history, and nature. Yet comics can be taken for granted as trivial anecdotal afterthoughts, as can the depletion of our natural resources. As creative types, wouldn’t it seem wise and timely to use aesthetic prowess to explore and draw attention to issues that threaten our natural habitat?

I have fond memories of that light blue colour that always represented water in comic books. The icy light blue would be splashed across a character’s face, sit motionless in a glass, or run through rapids, as some hapless adventurer would travel through its lucid contents.

The addition of water to a simple comic strip took me far enough away from the predictable elements of storytelling that I became excited. Coupled with my personal passion for water itself—I spend entire days at the beach in the warmer months—made perpetual, this unique collection of illustrated poems, all the more appealing.

In perpetual, Vancouver-based poet Rita Wong and artist Cindy Mochizuki collaborate on the topic of water and humanity’s relationship with it. The resulting book, published by Nightwood Editions, is a graphic novel, but written in poetry. The book was nearly five years in the making—it was back in 2011 when poet Wong first asked Mochizuki to respond visually to her poetry.

“It was a welcome artistic challenge,” Mochizuki tells me by email. “What I sensed in Rita’s writing was that there was an urgency around the politics of water. There’s a call to action.”

“I think what Rita has also gathered here is also the overlooked messages from the “spirit” of water. I think comics have the capacity to be the multi-form that can hold together many voices, whether it be of creaturely life, the personal, the documentary,” says Mochizuki, who is also a filmmaker, “and in this work these voices speak in unison through image and text to the preservations of our waters.”

She points out that the topic of water is a complex one, “happening at many different levels of life.”

The book formed as a response to Secwepemc-Syilx video artist and scholar Dorothy Christian’s call to protect sacred waters. Christian has also collaborated with Wong, with an anthology called downstream: reimagining water, to be released this June, bringing together contributors in the arts, sciences, and humanities.

In a 2012 interview with The Capilano Review, Wong described her passion for aquatic empathy. “When you start to follow water’s inevitable movement and process of perpetual transformation, you realize that the environment is not just “out there,” but “in here”—air and water circulate, binding us together whether we know it or not. In our interdependency, if we better understood it, may be seeds for hope.”

perpetual could be read as both a graphic novel and experimental poetry collection, attempting to dismantle our ignorant relationship with water by drawing it out, paring down imagery and symbolism to the literal core.

Perhaps, by temporarily abandoning the mass-produced material in the world—the materials that we have created, perpetuate with commerce, and support by depleting our natural resources—we can appreciate what lies underneath us. As Wong suggests midway through the collection, “but waters could be the path to peace, not war.”    

The combination of Mochizuki’s stark imagery mixed with Wong’s pared down poetics energizes the entire book as a call to action—one we should consider, and not simply dismiss as righteousness.

perpetual goes off the script of your standard poetry collection. It can appeal to comic lovers who’ve never embraced poetry and poetry lovers who’ve never embraced comics. While my own passions for water, comics, and poetry were satisfied reading this book, any reader will feel inspired to take stock of their own relationship—or lack thereof—with Mother Nature’s most precious gift.

Image courtesy of Nightwood Editions Image courtesy of Nightwood Editions

Ray McClaughlin is a poet from Etobicoke who is working on a new collection.