Review by Ian Keogh
It’s strange there’s been no American graphic distillation of Angela Davis and her achievements, so there’s a welcome for this French project from Sybelle Titeux de la Croix and Améziane, who’s become Amazing since earlier translated work.
Davis has lived a life fighting for better conditions and treatment for people she believes don’t get a fair shake in the USA, and protesting against other iniquities, first coming to prominence voicing opposition to the Vietnam War.
A conflated narrative voice is used alongside quotes from Davis’ own writings after a jump back to her childhood recollections of hatred and injustice. The presentation indicates this isn’t a standard biography, but a collection of flashpoints, almost all of which occurred during the 1970s or further back, so this is no comfort memoir either, showing how everything turned out okay in the end. However, regarding the Davis that became known to the public it’s thorough. As it progresses a parallel social history is introduced, detailing the events and protests that motivate Davis as it tracks her life through college. In places de la Croix uses a pinboard method of conjoining events mixing quotes with news reports and personal recollections for a novel educational brew.
Améziane’s approach is equally startling. He uses a broad palette of imaginative artistic techniques beyond commonplace storytelling from cheery cartoon newspaper strips to explain counter-intelligence procedures to a trial presented in the form of courtroom sketches. There’s an awful lot going on in the complex sample page from the visual allegory of the park fence, not the only time substitute bars are seen, to the scared children in the back of the car, yet the actual drawing is simple and clear. Such stark, yet eye-catching illustration forms a statement maintained throughout, whether the pages read across a spread or down.
Much of Davis’ story beggars belief, and for people who don’t know about the events the second half of Ms Davis will read like a procedural thriller as Davis is implicated in murder, arrested and jailed. The words are factual, but readers are left in no doubt that Davis’ treatment is personal, designed to break the spirit of a powerful intelligent person who constantly raises pointed questions about the status quo of sustained discrimination.
At it’s best Ms Davis provokes continual outrage at the lack of humanity, but what has been refreshingly innovative and informative loses its way slightly with the involvement of fictional reporter June Seymour’s use as a sounding board for the jailed Davis to preach at readers. Also a shame is some closing statements being so debatable they challenge the authority of the remainder. Communism was in its final throes in the early 1970s following the revelation of Stalin’s crimes? Really? There’s food for thought, though, in a graph starkly showing the growth of the US prison population that held roughly steady at half a million from 1960 to 1985, yet in the years since has risen to just under 2.5 million. It’s relevant as since being jailed herself Davis has campaigned for decades against the disparity of a system that’s failed.
Ms. Davis begins with what was viewed at the time as the radical agenda of the Black Panthers in demanding equality for black Americans counterpointed by illustrations of the police attacking their headquarters. Much of the agenda would seem basic human rights, and we can only bemoan how little progress there’s been since.
