What’s a Sad Wolf To Do?: On Lauren Haldeman’s “Team Photograph”
Lauren Haldeman | Team Photograph | Sarabande Books | 2022 | 168 Pages
How many people have tried to make poetry comics? Usually the results fall between two stools. Critics compare the fascinating, nearly-abstract comics of Aidan Koch to modern poems, but it’s still just an analogy (“what I do just doesn’t feel like making poems,” she’s said). Bianca Stone’s charming, compelling, surrealism-influenced poetry comics sometimes illustrate other people’s poems: they can feel like illustration (at best, like Blake’s illustrations) even when the poems are hers. In more commercial, glossier precincts, Matt Fraction and Christian Ward’s ongoing multi-volume ODY-C looks great—it’s a psychedelic, violent, gender-scrambling space opera version of Homer’s Odyssey—and Fraction knows how to write dactylic hexameter, but the results can feel caption-like, and forced, not much like modern poems. Though many have tried, it’s tough to make the art forms work together, rather than squashing one art form under the other: tougher still to get them to agree.
Lauren Haldeman gets them to agree. Team Photograph mixes conventionally printed poems on otherwise white pages with comics she drew and colored, with captions she wrote: each informs the other, so that the parts work better together than alone. The book recalls her youthful experience on a northern Virginia soccer team, encountering (or did she?) Civil War ghosts, and the memory of her dead brother: “I played soccer near the battlefields of Bull Run,” she writes, drawing herself as a curious wolf-headed girl in a background of blacks and greens. “And woke at night to hallucinations.” [4-5] The soccer, the battlefields, and the hallucinations inform the pages with pictures, the maps and comics with words in white-on-black clouds; the pages with nothing but Haldeman’s poems; and, later on, scant pages dominated by other kinds of text, from old newspaper stories to Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems. The poems and the comics follow the school-aged, college-aged, and fully adult Haldeman together as they, and we, see how much American history remains hidden in this country of guided tours, where public and family mourning get cut short, and white supremacy is at once everywhere, and hard for white people to see.
Team Photograph is my favorite poetry-comics hybrid so far. Not just because it’s emotionally coherent, not just because I want to follow the poet’s teen experience, and her adult revelations, all the way through, but because it brings out the potential of hybrid form. The critic Jonathan Culler says (it’s his pull quote) “Fiction is about what happens next; lyric is about what happens now.” Haldeman’s verse lines delve into what happens now—what’s happening inside her head, looking back—while her visual style keeps us reading onwards for what happens next. Purposefully shaky now and again, but always expressive, and streamlined almost in the manner of animation, her wolf-headed teens and shadowy soldiers reminds us that we’re not quite reading realism, but that we are following characters who take actions and move through time. Think MAUS, if you must, but also Megan Kelso. Haldeman has the draftsmanship, and the sense of panel-to-panel transitions, to tell a story you could follow without reading the words.
It’s better to read the words. You could go to town on the way Haldeman lets us notice distinctions between prose genres, as well as thin lines between verse and prose: “the trees were spattered with blood and the ground strewn with dead bodies,” says a plaque at the battlefield next to the soccer field in the first few pages, the field where, “as a child, I saw ghosts.” [4-5] (Always read the plaque.) These words link captions on comics to legends on maps to plaques on historical sites, remembered time (as in memoir; as in history) to present, experienced time (as in lyric poems). And they link the green, brown, and black of what the young Lauren saw to the gray-and-black of her imagined, 150-years-gone Civil War.
That war, of course, retains its local ghosts. “At night I would close my eyes and apologize,” Haldeman writes, to “those eerie visitors at my house and on that field,” the visitors who appeared in her first, “disjointed,” poems, “hurting so familiar as though from another life.” [17, 19, 23] Team Photograph refers, of course, to her soccer team, whose home “fields were so near the battlefields that the referees made us walk them before each game in order to look for artifacts hidden in the grass.” [35] That caption spreads across two panels (a whole page) with wolf-headed soccer players looking down, the first a whole team (one player carries a ball), the second one sad player, all by herself. “We played a sport representative of war,” meant to help kids exercise, work as a team, grow up in peace. [37] The suburb (Fairfax City), like the soccer team itself, like America, recruited young Americans into a choiceless collectivity, one that required them to pledge allegiance, to look ahead, to look alike:
Today is Team Photograph. You must join
Team at the brink of the field. Look,
What they say goes. It is all
In the way you wear your socks. And someone
May come, may point you out. [40]
Meanwhile the real war lay under the ground, except when it surfaced again. What’s a sad wolf to do?
One answer: join. Play along. Haldeman’s panels, some from the young wolf’s perspective, look down at the ball: “When I played, I was a vessel. I was a thing possessed.” [53] Successive pages show a wolf propelled, in black and white, in 3D blue-and-red overlap, distended and distorted like a TV image on a widened movie screen, then exhausted, hands on knees. [54-57]
Another answer: delve. Investigate. The ghosts in her house, “exclusively/ upstairs/ at the/ end of/ the long/ carpeted/ hallway,” [74] do not only bring back the battlefield’s musters: they also bring back amputations, civil war medicine, wounded soldiers, as in Whitman’s poems, which Haldeman goes on to quote, and eventually to reproduce. And they look back at the “home of James Robinson and his family,” once standing near the Bull Run battlefield, now gone. “Born ‘free’ in 1799,” a plaque reads, “James is listed as being of mixed racial parentage.” [82] James had a son with an enslaved woman named Susan, which meant that the son was born enslaved too; James “endeavoured to purchase his son from slavery,” but failed. “They never saw him again.” [90-91] Sad wolves in grayscale, in black clothes, look after a smaller sad wolf, who recedes into shadow: the Robinson family mourns along with the reader.
The ghosts of Bull Run are not only the ghosts of combatants; they are the ghosts of American history, twice erased by the slave system and by the systematic forgetting that still dominates white America. When Haldeman writes “My house was a house full of ghosts,” [83] over a hand-drawn image of a floor plan, she imagines the comics form as something like an exorcism, a bringing to light: it’s hard not to set these thicker-lined, sketchier panels beside the more ambitious, more detailed exorcisms of Alison Bechdel’s famous Fun Home (2005). Much later in the volume Haldeman reproduces a 1993 Washington Post article about an apparent arson at the site of the Robinson home: there follows an erasure of the Post article, and then an erasure of Whitman’s Civil War poems. I’m not sure American poetry needs more erasures—it’s the least interesting part of the whole book—but it’s also an understandable response to historical, well, erasure.
“It was hard to look at this history,” Haldeman captions a panel where she draws a photograph, “not knowing how to engage without appropriating.” This page, in its blow-ups and close-ups, its diachronic focus on a single home, calls back not just to Bechdel but to Richard McGuire’s classic art comic Here (1989-2014). And, like McGuire, Haldeman shows how, the more we take an interest in the past, the more the past seems to take an interest in us. We see Haldeman, still as a young wolf, still in a yellow T-shirt, in the library at the University of Iowa, reading Walt Whitman for “inklings of what might have been.” [115] And we see her engaging with a team photograph, and behind it the empty green space, the forest and “the field, the field, the field.” [127] Images project her outline back through time on a black background as in an old-school vector graphics video game as she remembers beginning to write this poetry-comics-memoir: “I did not know yet that the figures entering my room at night would fuse through time to the writing of this book.” [132] Drawing, hand-drawing, your past and the traumatic past of your suburb, your state, your history: for an artist, there’s no better way to face that trauma, to bring it through and out of your physical body and the way it keeps score.
By the end of the book—and I have been following the book, roughly, through the chapters, to the end—Haldeman has not only asked how she, and other nonblack people, can see and face the ghosts of the racist past, and the racist present, and the unfinished fights of the Civil War, as shown on her custom maps: she has also brought up another ghost, her brother, who died in a random street killing, in Denver, in 2012. “Ryan loved wolves. He was obsessed… So when I sat down to draw Ryan, I drew him with a wolf head.” [i] The rest of the wolf heads followed. “They are all for Ryan.” Reanimating their childhood home, their light-green field, their century and a half of Virginia, Haldeman also calls back to her absent brother, so that this beautifully, invitingly experimental book ends in very traditional family elegy, albeit in modern American free verse. “I was enabled into air// time-fused to you.” [139] “Do I get mixed up with the others… through/ the future// time with all the dying?/ with my brother dying?” [139] Maybe: and yet the voice and the plangent questions come through absolutely clear. Those line breaks—I love them—follow the unanswered questions, so that we too, hearing words, stop short.
Team Photograph isn’t just a startling, crisp, can’t-put-it-down reading experience, though it is that. It’s not just a reckoning, a la Martha Collins’ Blue Front or Jess Row’s nonfiction, with whiteness, though it is that too. It’s not just a way to give the comics depth through the verse, and the poetry forward momentum through visual narrative, though of course it is those things, thanks in particular to Haldeman’s expressive, no-nonsense line. (If my editors can manage to put the wolf-head Haldeman self-portraits from page 125 here, I’d appreciate that: if not, check them out as you read.) It’s also good evidence for two claims about the poetics of comics form, claims that show how poets, given the tools, can back up what comics do.
First, comics are maps. That’s a claim made before, by Dylan Horrocks in his spectacular Hicksville and by the comics critic Emmy Waldman in several recent works. Haldeman shows how and why: her panels, and her writing about them, move from the synchronic, schematics of a battlefield, a single-family home, a sports pitch, a library into the deeper, stranger notion of change over time, the edge of the past, the unknown, or (as Haldeman puts it, in panels filled with autumn leaves) “the far edge of the field.” [61] Comics show eyes, minds, people where to go, how to organize spatial information, what’s important, what to see. Photographs don’t, or not in the same way: maps do.
Second, comics tell stories about ghosts: they bring back—but not with a photograph’s promise of realism; not with every detail—the characters we imagine into being, whose stories we inhabit, at our own pace, with help from a handful of lines and words, made by nothing more than the artist’s hand. In comics, more than any other art form, we see the people we imagine, just as in lyric poems, we hear an absent voice. These kinds of sight and hearing are not lies, or deceptions, or occasions for sadness alone: as Haldeman says, “They know what they are saying.” [49] They return to a past we cannot know firsthand, but only through other minds, other hands. Now those hands are Haldeman’s own. You can hold her book in your hands, now, and see how its own lines speak to one another, and to her brother, and to the Robinson family, and to her team, and her town—and, now, to you.