Sexellent

Self in past, self in present, and self in future are three separate entities expressed in Sexile. I’m thinking of our class last week when we discussed the narrator’s point of view, and how time, language, relationships, perspectives and emotions play a role in shaping our understanding of the narrative voice.

There are times when Adela’s image of herself feels like a projection into the future, like the woman she hopes to emerge as in America, and I think we can tell a lot about her attitude about herself from these projections. On page 35, for example, Adela imagines herslef with her back faced to the reader. This is a HUGE indication of the narrator’s perspective, and I interpret this to mean that even in Adela’s own imagination of her future, she is still unknowable. Unreachable. She is literally turning away from herself. I also think it might indicate that her feelings about who she will become are mixed: her clothes seem like they're drooping off her body, maybe wet? but she has on gorgeous hoops. This contradictory self-image is ethereal yet ambiguous and foreboding to me. On the one hand, I understand the ambiguity of imagining oneself even fifteen minutes in advance. Can't do it. Won't do it. However, and I ask this rhetorically and knowing it sounds trite, aren’t we supposed to know ourselves? Why can’t she see her own face in her imagined future? Isn't that kind of scary? Adela’s future-self’s feet are not real (they are swirlies). The swirly feet and the back facing the “audience” -- which is also Adela, since this is her future -- are my clues as a reader that this is a projection. I get the sense, from this current narrative perspective (just this snapshot on p. 35, I mean), that Adela's attitude about her future is totally uncertain. For me, the beauty of this image lasts above all else, persisting long after I forgive her turned back and absent face.

Other times, it feels like Adela’s point of view of herself is from the present as she tells this story. Take page 40, for example. Bottom of the page. Adela’s appearance feels like those angelic sun rays breaking through the clouds! I don’t know how else to describe it. The situation she’s narrating is so bleak, and she “breaks through” and comes into focus at the bottom of the page to tell the reader something in retrospect: “I was a wreck, child.” And she narrates this with such a tonal shift that departs totally and completely from the scene above, wherein she meets this man at the Arkansas military camp/cute prison who promises her a warm bed in exchange for sex. What am I saying here? That Adela’s perspective breaks through as being from the present. She narrates in past tense, her image comes into focus, she is almost an angel with the way her hand floats out, like she is delivering her own words.

Ok, and since I mentioned self in the past as well, I should talk about it. It’s not too hard to summon evidence, since the first portion of this graphic novel was building backstory. What I want to point out, though, is how it feels sad to me. Her body in the tree on page 5 looks like she is stitched up. I see the lines of her jeans/shorts extending into the lines of her body, like the stitching continues onto the skin. Ummm, also, she looks like she is about to fall off that branch! Just a cell before, Adela talks about how painful it is to remember her childhood… just as the line of the fishing pole drops into the water. Like something is lost forever. So Adela’s self-from-past perspective is rendered as images of loss mixed with beauty… it’s not like just losing a pair of keys, here. It’s not a Bishop poem. Nature is the vessel that carries Adela’s loss.

Loss and promise are two threads that weave inextricably in Sexile by Cortez. In a lot of ways, promise and loss tangle & complicate each other, sometimes existing as one emotion.