The sewn cowl of Bea Lema’s El Cuerpo de Cristo (all photographs courtesy Astiberri Ediciones)
Bea Lema doesn’t draw back from the vulnerability of autobiography. The Galician artist and author’s transferring new e book El Cuerpo de Cristo (The Physique of Christ) parallels her personal life rising up with a mom who suffered from extreme psychological sickness. Illustrated in marker and thread, the e book follows the younger Vera, who desperately needs to guard her mother Adela from the demons who torment and even threaten to finish her life. Although centered on a single household’s ache, El Cuerpo de Cristo can be the story of ladies’s experiences throughout three generations in Galicia, Spain, providing a extra common meditation on trauma, caretaking, and disgrace.
Tales like Lema’s are sometimes suppressed by society, however El Cuerpo de Cristo means that society is usually what contributes to sickness within the first place. The narrative jumps between Vera’s youth within the busy port metropolis of A Coruña within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s and her mom’s small village within the Costa da Morte through the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Vera’s life is drawn in pastel marker, whereas flashbacks to her mom’s previous are sewn in black thread, with the latter echoing the late painter Castelao’s depictions of rural Galicia from the early twentieth century. Vera’s mom is dominated by her abusive and alcoholic father. Later, married and residing within the metropolis, she’s confined to child-rearing, housekeeping, and stitching. Adela’s debilitating sickness is met by an ineffective medical system, the place a string of medical doctors — all males — endlessly diminish and mishandle her ache. Confronted with an absence of clear options, Adela turns to faith for aid.
Lema showcases features of her homeland’s tradition all through the e book’s wealthy illustrations — together with nods to Galician mainstays like Sargadelos porcelain and Bonilla la Vista potato chips — however Adela’s spiritual fervor offers readers perception into the area’s particularly distinctive non secular life. Galicia has been a website of spiritual pilgrimage for hundreds of years, and its deep pagan and Celtic roots have infused its Catholicism with a way of mysticism, particularly in rural areas. Vera visits a folks healer and attends the procession of Santa Marta de Ribarteme, the place those that have miraculously prevented demise have been paraded in open coffins (the ritual has just lately been stopped). In one other scene, the mom tries to exorcize her demons on the Santuario de Nosa Señora de O Corpiño, to no avail.
Although many of the El Cuerpo de Cristo is rendered in marker, Lema embroiders passages that take care of the mom’s harrowing previous and most intense factors of psychosis. These are sometimes probably the most tragic moments within the e book, however the stitching imbues every web page with a way of ongoing care: In any case, the method of embroidery requires contact, time, and tenderness.
Sewn illustration from El Cuerpo de Cristo, with textual content studying: “September 10, 2021, that day Mommy went down to the beach.”
Although she’s solely a toddler, Vera takes on the large emotional weight of her mom’s sickness. After one more blow-up, this time as a result of Adela has began consuming to fight her situation, Lema depicts little Vera amongst her toys, cradling her doll-sized mom in her arms. The heartbreaking function reversal is captured solely by this picture and easy textual content on the unfold: “Yo te cuido, Mamá” (“I’ll take care of you, Mommy”). Years go by, and Vera remains to be the principal caretaker for her mom whereas her older brother and father stay painfully out of contact. Lema dedicates the latter a part of her e book to the struggles of caretaking, each imbalances between calls for on women and men and the issue of taking care of oneself whereas caring for an additional.
In September, El Cuerpo de Cristo was named the winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional del Cómic. I attended a panel dialogue that featured Lema at a bookshop in A Coruña a month later, and was struck when one of many viewers members identified that the writer was solely the second girl to win the award. Based by the nation’s Ministerio de Cultura in 2007, the celebrated prize was granted to Ana Penyas in 2018 for her work Estamos todas bien (We Are All Okay). At the moment, in line with a survey of main comedian prizes in Spain, greater than 90% of awards because the Nineteen Eighties had traditionally gone to males.
Each authors have been acknowledged for works that make clear ladies’s often-overlooked tales: Penyas on the era of ladies who survived the Spanish Civil Conflict and the sexism that adopted it, and Lema on the complexity of psychological sickness, household life, and therapeutic. El Cuerpo de Cristo tells a narrative we don’t usually get to listen to, and does so within the unconventional, extremely private language of ink and thread. As with Vera within the story, Lema discovered to stitch from her mom, who in flip discovered it from her personal mom. Although usually labeled “women’s work,” stitching is each an artwork and an important instrument for mending, repairing, and adorning. On this manner, it’s a meditative type of caretaking that extends the lifetime of one thing held expensive, whereas providing its creator the house for psychological peace.
Illustration from El Cuerpo de Cristo
Illustration from El Cuerpo de Cristo
Illustration from El Cuerpo de Cristo
Illustration from El Cuerpo de Cristo
El Cuerpo de Cristo (2024) by Bea Lema is printed by Astiberri Ediciones and is offered on-line and thru impartial booksellers. A French model of the e book was printed by Éditions Sarbacane as Des maux à dire.