While closely analysing the intricate mechanisms of shame in contexts of caregiving and care-receiving, it is demonstrated that shame is not merely a personal affliction or an interior quality, but that shame always feeds itself on previous stigmatisations that subconsciously influence present experiences. While Roth concentrates on the experiences of weakness, dependency and mortality and what it does to the virility and power associated with manhood, Leavitt focuses on shame within the context of spoilt or damaged identity and thus interconnects her mother’s mental illness and her own lesbianism. Via drawing on two very different somatographies, Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) and Sarah Leavitt’s graphic narrative Tangles: Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2012), shame is explored from the perspective of adult children who care for their ill and dying parents. This essay argues that the ambivalent nature of shame – a feeling that oscillates between the personal and the public, between hiding and uncovering – is meaningfully illuminated in narratives of care. This article engages with both its unusual protagonist, and distinct narrative style, and poses the following question: in what ways does this experimental text appropriate the act of looking? How does it resist hegemonic, masculinist modes of seeing through this? The article interrogates the ways in which the text, that celebrates fluidity and exploration, 1) resists masculinist prescriptiveness through its protagonist’s unusualness and unconventionality, and 2) how through its protagonist’s unusual gaze generates new, potentially feminist ways of seeing through the lens of love, affection and curiosity. In turn this creates a distinct way of seeing (other characters, places and events) through the eyes of this unusual protagonist. The heteroglossia, combined with an experimental use of ‘ink, marker, charcoal and oilbar, crayon and found images’, captures Kari’s psychological landscape in all its complexity, creating a unique narrative framed by her interiority.
Secondly, as an experimental text influenced by multiple media such as art styles from across cultures and many literary and graphic texts, Patil’s work also generates a rich narrative that visualises the many moods of its reclusive protagonist, in a powerful, intertextual way. For one, it brings to the Indian graphic arena an ‘unusual protagonist’, a ‘young, deeply introverted, asocial and queer woman - counterpoint to the hyper feminine prototypes one keeps coming across’, as Patil remarks in an interview with Paul Gravett.
Amruta Patil’s Kari (2008), the very first Indian graphic novel in English by a woman, is groundbreaking for multiple reasons.
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