Graphic novelist draws on refugees’ plight
British cartoonist channels her activist past in graphic novel
In 2015 and 2016, Kate Evans visited The Jungle, a makeshift camp in Calais that was home to more than 8,000 refugees. The living conditions in the camp, the people sheltered there, and the brutal treatment they suffered from authorities are the subjects of Evans’ graphic novel Threads: From the Refugee Crisis.
The book combines Evans’ cartooning chops and her activist experience, a practice that the British cartoonist has been honing since the mid-’90s.
Her first book Copse: The Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting, grew out of her comics-based reportage on anti-roads protests for the Guardian newspaper in the mid’90s.
Her storytelling methods have changed since, she says.
“I have quite an eclectic attitude toward combining words and pictures,” she said.
Only her last two books, Threads and Red Rosa, a biography of Rosa Luxemburg, have been what the author calls “conventional graphic novels.”
“Everything before that has been science or issue-based, a mixture of text and graphic,” she said. “And also I think graphic novels themselves have become more mainstream and more accepted. The whole medium has grown and matured.”
Various sub-genres of the medium have also grown, including comics-based journalism. Threads’ mix of cartooning, reallife incidents, and dialogue transcribed from interviews can also be found in the works of Joe Sacco (Palestine), Guy Delisle (Pyongyang), and Sarah Glidden (Rolling Blackouts), to name a few.
What Evans brings to the form is a cartooning style that is warm and fuzzy but that can turn foreboding and dark, as when, in Threads, the military police invade the camp. The British cartoonist (born in Montreal) has a free-ranging design sense that, for Threads, incorporates the use of lace-like patterns for panel and page borders, formal typeface for captions, and photos interpolated with art for added verisimilitude. She also juxtaposes anti-refugee messages (including two written in reaction
to her work) with the incidents and people she describes.
Though her storytelling methods have changed, the essence of some of the material hasn’t. She sees a lot of overlap between her experiences in Calais and the pro-tree/ anti-roads protests, for example.
Similarities include “the idea that you’re not living in a house but outside in quite extreme conditions,” she said. “And that you’re improvising things. It was basically a refugee camp that was constructed from items bought from the local bricolage/DIY store. And there were quite a lot of people (volunteering in Calais) who had previously been involved in environmental protest.”
Evans’ Chan Centre appearance is part of a brief North American tour. She says she always brings “a performance aspect” to discussions of her work, which includes previous books like The Food of Love (a guide to breastfeeding) and Funny Weather: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Climate Change But Probably Should Find Out. For her presentation on Threads, she said that “rather than talking about how I work, I’ve chosen some of the sections that are really going to engage the reader more. I’ve tried to choose something that will give people a sense of what people go through at the hands of forces on the French and British borders.”
Iranian-Canadian hand drummer Hamin Honari will accompany Evans during her reading. Afterwards, the cartoonist will be part of a panel discussion on using art as a response to crisis and a means to inspire social change. The panel includes Iranian theatre artist Fay Nass and Shawk Alani. Alani leads photography workshops for Syrian children in Vancouver.
In October of 2016, French authorities decimated The Jungle. But, as Evans notes, the refugee problem can’t be solved with flak jackets and military batons.
“Now we’re probably in the stage where we’re going about to construct another one (camp),” she said. “Because, strangely enough, you can evict people, but it doesn’t stop them from having nowhere to live and needing to get to the U.K.”
KATE EVANS: THREADS Sept. 29 at 7:30 p.m. Telus Studio Theatre at the Chan Centre Tickets and info:
from $20 at chancentre.com