A few days before Christmas in 2003, Marzena Sowa told her partner, cartoonist Sylvain Savoia, a story of how the people in Poland buy a live carp for Christmas and keep it in their bathtub until they cook it for the festive dinner. Savoia was struck by the vividness of the story, and asked her to write down her memories of her home country.
The result is Marzi, a series of short vignettes about life in Poland in the early 1980’s. They centre around Marzi, a young girl who lives in a nondescript town in an unspecified part of the country, in a tower block with her mother and father. Her mother always nags at her, whereas her father dotes on her. Marzi tells of how she likes playing in the hallway with the other kids, what she enjoys in school; she tells of her family’s holidays to the country and of her holy communion.
(cover to Marzi by Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia, published Dupuis)
The story of the Holy Communion serves as a centre piece in the book, as this story also illustrates how the young girl opens her eyes to the world around her. She’s mortified when she has to go and buy toilet paper with her family, and her mother makes her hang the rolls on a piece of rope around her neck. Other tales of rationing and scarcity involve oranges, petrol and meat, and each time the reader is confronted with the daily humiliation that ordinary people have to endure, but also with the inventiveness and solidarity (no pun intended) that scarcity invokes in people.
As the vignettes follow one another, a different subtext is introduced in the stories, in which inventiveness no longer suffices for people. When a state of war is declared in the country (but it is never specified who is the enemy), people openly criticise and question the government and the Chernobyl disaster occurs, and all Polish children need to be monitored and treated for radiation, the lack of sufficient health care is laid bare. The final story, which tells of the rise of the independent labour movement, and later political party, Solidarnosc, closes the book on a hopeful note.
Sylvain Savoia, the artist of this book, was one of the first cartoonists in France to use the visual vocabulary of Manga in French comics, and this is quite clear in Marzi. Even though he doesn’t use manga’s quite expressive and dynamic page layouts (on the contrary, Savoia’s pages are rigidly laid out with a fixed number of panels per page), the characters physiognomy and expressions are clearly inspired by manga examples.
Marzi originally ran as a series of short stories in Spirou Magazine, and was previously published in traditional album format: four large sized books of about 46 pages, with quite traditional, realistic colouring. This treatment, which is quite common for shorter, often humoristic Spirou features (think Boule et Bill, or more recently, Kid Paddle), didn’t really do justice to Savoia and Sowa’s stories. Granted, they were short, and often quite funny, but their general tone was more reflective and even melancholic.
The current edition, with its rigid page design (which reminded me of Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese) and toned-down colouring, ties the different stories from the first three albums together, and lifts up the narrative to a level beyond the mere anecdotal. Marzi is more than “Poland as seen through the eyes of a child” – it is a testament of a world which has passed, and a salute to common people trying to cope with difficult circumstances.
(General Wojciech Jaruzelski, effectively the Soviet Bloc’s puppet military dictator in Poland in the 80s, declaring martial law; fortunately they never succeeded in crushing the Solidarity movement)
If you were impressed by Zeina Abirached, Marjane Satrapi, Allison Bechdel or Craig Thompson, you will love this book. There’s also an interview (in English) with Marzena Sowa on the Cafe Babel site which you can check out.
Sylvain Savoia & Marzena Sowa: “Marzi, La Pologne vue par les Yeux d’une Enfant”. Published by Dupuis, 2008, 262 pages.
[youtube -2WjyKwdWcY]
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium where his memories of the 80s include being menaced by inner city gangs of urban Smurfs, unless of course he just imagined that; you can read more on his Ephemerist blog.
March 11th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
If you were impressed by Zeina Abirached, Marjane Satrapi, Allison Bechdel or Craig Thompson, you will … HATE this book.