Found and Bound

I'm still ambivalent about whether it was a good or a bad idea to choose a book on a topic I was already heavily invested in. On the one hand, I got an intellectual head start in that I'd already thought about a lot of the issues embedded in the text that I wanted to bring to the surface. On the downside, this meant that I really was very dependent on the text, and on my need to preserve it. There was a danger that my work would tend too much towards the illustrative, as opposed to making something new. I also think I tended—both because of this, and because of my deeply ingrained respect for the physical book—to be pretty conservative about treating the book as an object.

This conservatism definitely became apparent in class, as I looked at some of the much more physically creative manipulations my classmates had come up with. It had never occurred to me to do some of the things they'd tried, including the fairly extensive scribbling/blacking out of text, and also some of the more adventurous cutting techniques. My book really depends on four basic modifications: collage, pasted in images, shaped cut-outs placed to reveal glimpses of either image or text, and pasted in text shapes—the negatives of the cut-outs. In a lot of ways, I guess, you could really say these are all versions of the same idea: I sought to create unexpected combinations of word and image, in some cases treating word as image, and in some cases the reverse.

"Unexpected," of course, is a relative term. My book is very tightly bounded thematically (again, something that has its pluses and its minuses), so I don't, say, have a random image of an emu, or a hot dog, in a book about India. What I did, though, is try to build on an initial discordance suggested by the book's title, and to push it in ways the author might not have intended. The book is Prison and Chocolate Cake, and it's a memoir written by one of Nehru's nieces about growing up during India's independence movement and—in particular—travelling to the United States to go to college, due to political instability at home. I was struck by the juxtaposition between the pleasurable (cake) and the painful (prison), as well as the concomitant one between childishness and seriousness—which seemed appropriate for a text that is, in many ways, about growing into adulthood. Finally, I was struck by a contrast the author doesn't really address directly: the one between her own immense level of privilege, and the lives of the vast majority of Indians whom her uncle fought on behalf of.

One of the first things I did to the volume was paste in a picture of a chocolate cake, and cut out prison bars in the few pages in front of it. I also created a collage of a small child playing superimposed on an Indian prison scene, which I eventually used in another chapter. I was also interested in the implicit contrast between the US and India, which I tried to address throughout via collage, and through cut-outs that showed the Indian through an American "lens" (or hole) and vice-versa. I was interested in the idea of what was left out by certain world views—the absences they created—but also in what you could see when you looked at the familiar through a new aperture. One of the chapters of the book is on the "first glimpse," and that notion of glimpsing—of seeing something in a fleeting manner, out of the corner of one's eye, rather than facing it head-on—is something I tried to emphasise. So, for example, although in a few places I used watercolour to highlight words I wanted to call readers' attention to, I quickly abandoned that technique, deciding that it was a little too obvious. I preferred to leave a window of text visible through an archway, and invite the reader to look a little harder in order to make connections or engage in interpretation him or herself.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with the book conceptually, although less so artistically, if that makes sense. I'd like to have been more gutsy, at the same time that I think I'll enjoy the finished product more the way it is than I would if I'd totally ripped it apart in order to make it new.