DANA WALRATH
A writer, artist, and anthropologist, Dana Walrath likes to cross borders and disciplines with her work. After years of using stories to teach medical students at University of Vermont’s College of Medicine, she turned to writing her own. Her award winning verse novel, Like Water on Stone, was completed during the year she spent as a Fulbright Scholar in Armenia. Her graphic memoir series Aliceheimer’s has brought her throughout North America and Eurasia to speak about the role of comics in healing including talks at TEDx Battenkill and TEDx Yerevan. Her recent essays have appeared in Slate, Foreign Policy, Irish Times, Somatosphere, The Lancet, on Public Radio, and in numerous edited volumes including Menopause: A Comic Treatment — a New York Times Best of 2020 Graphic Novel.
Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris
You’re a writer, visual artist, and anthropologist. How do these identities intersect?
The visual and verbal feed and free each other. If I am stuck with writing, working with my hands makes words bubble up. Making art and comics involves paring down words to an essence. Going back and forth, using physical books as raw materials in my artwork, brings me closer to the subconscious processes underlying both.
Meanwhile, anthropology gives me theoretical ground, social legitimacy, and authority to express some of the challenging concepts our world needs right now. Bits of theory, research, and even footnotes can appear in my creative work. Sometimes, as with my genocide project, an interactive art installation drawn into the surface of a mid-twentieth century zoology text, it's a matter of taking a concept — in this case dehumanization — and making it visible and public in order to end it. Now’s also the time to get rid of the notions that greed, competition, and violence are the natural human state and focus instead on our long evolutionary history of social cooperation.
In school at Barnard College, Columbia University, you studied painting with Milton Resnick and printmaking with Tony Smith. What did you learn from them that you still think about today?
When I studied with him, Milton Resnick’s work was completely non-figurative, thick, and muddy. Still, he was the first to convey to me the notion of killing “precious darlings,” of covering parts of a painting to which I was attached, something that matters as much in writing as it does in visual work. To see figures emerge in the works he made as he approached his death, also stuck with me as this speaks to reinvention along with deep human connection. From Tony, I learned a fantastic array of intaglio techniques, a deep love of process and the liberation it confers, the magic of working in reverse, and the happy buzz of a print studio community. The pandemic has closed down many such community spaces. Putting the “Hippocampus” series made at Dublin’s Black Church Print Studio on my studio wall during lockdown, brought me right back into community.
"Hippocampus" series
Could you tell me about your work as an educator? How did you use art and stories to teach medical students? How did your students respond?
Much of the first year of medical school resembles a hazing in which students learn 6,000 new words (the equivalent of a foreign language), cut into dead bodies, and prove that they can memorize a deluge of esoteric facts many of which will be of limited use for taking care of people who are sick. I brought in stories and art to counter the internal and outward distancing and dehumanization this creates.
The most powerful storytelling took place in small groups of six to eight students as invited guests. They spoke of their own experiences, of losing a child, of living with debilitating mental illness, of addiction, of systemic racism, and more. Even the most reluctant students of medical humanities (and there were a handful each year) were touched by these intimate encounters. For other students, stories and art were a lifeline. We used the university art museum’s collection to hone observation skills and to talk about prevailing dominant narratives in visual culture. Giving students course time and space to write their own stories and make art legitimized their humanity in face of the onslaught of traditional basic science education.
Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, Penn State University Press, 2016
Your book Aliceheimer’s could be considered a work of Graphic Medicine, or a work “which uses the medium of comics to explore sickness and health.” What is it about comics that make them a good medium for such storytelling, especially for Alzheimer’s patients?
By bringing together the fundamentally outsider medium of comics with biomedicine, a realm which lies firmly within social legitimacy, Graphic Medicine helps us heal. Healing depends upon creating shared meaning among the person who is sick, the healer, and society at large. Comics’ capacity to represent multiple simultaneous realities in a single panel gets right into the thick of negotiating meaning. People living with stigmatized conditions suffer because of the social death and dehumanization they experience. Comics remove stigma by showing the faces and the daily reality of people’s lives. Finally, because we subconsciously associate comics with laughter they give us permission to laugh at sickness and death. Laughter is respite. It loosens us up, fills us with new ideas about how to cope, and it lets us imagine a different world.
In the context of dementia, comics keep books accessible for life long readers who might be losing their words. Graphic storytelling honors the integral humanity, sophisticated thinking, and the capacity for humor that people living with dementia retain. Comics bring all of us back to our deepest memories, to a time when we could communicate — give and receive stories — through the looks in each other’s eyes, through touch, through facial expressions, actions, and gestures.
Aliceheimer’s takes up notions of care and caregiving. (How) is storytelling an act of care?
I wrote the first Aliceheimer’s comic to remember and celebrate the healing, laughter, and magic of the years when my mother Alice and dementia lived with me. Sure, this was a time of me caring for her in basic mechanical ways, but the healing was mutual. I learned so much from watching her use every ounce of her creativity to function without her short-term memory by communicating metaphorically, through hallucinations, and more. The daughter of refugees, she had spent her life following the rules in order to assimilate. Dementia freed her and let her say things that she never would have said before such as, “You should quit your job and make art full time.”
I followed her advice and built a new life. Dementia activists ask us to use the words “care partner” instead of “care giver” to honor the reciprocity of care. Aliceheimer’s rewrites the dominant narrative of dementia built into the biomedical model which focuses solely on loss and the burdens of care. After drawing the first Aliceheimer’s comic, I showed it to my mother, who was already deep into dementia and I told her it was a love story. She paged through it saying, “There she is,” each time she found herself on the page clothed in text cut from Alice in Wonderland.
In one panel, you depict a caged bird (is it sleeping? Dead?) illuminated by a tunnel of light while a man looks on. The text on the left of the panel reads, “Our bodies are exquisitely tuned to our environments. Social + political forces have cellular consequences.” Would you please elaborate on the social and political aspects of health and well-being?
This panel comes from “A-men-o-pause,” my contribution to the 2020 anthology Menopause: A Comic Treatment, and focuses on mother earth instead of my mother, Alice. The bird, the proverbial canary in the coal mine, is dead or nearly so on account of the toxins to which she was exposed. The canary speaks to how our bodies encode oppression and systemic injustice as with the disproportionate deaths of black and brown people from COVID-19. This reveals the health impact of anti-black and brown racism, from the stress racism engenders, from poverty, from access, from a legacy of medical experimentation that has built mistrust, from asthma rooted in urban pollution, and from carcinogens released by manufacturing. A cure requires deep change at social, political, and economic levels. In terms of encoding, think, too, of the stigma that surrounds any form of cognitive diversity, be it psychosis or a disability. The people described as “mad” or somehow as less, reveal to us places where our social systems likewise fail making it impossible for some people to live in peace. Their “symptoms” show us all that we must collectively fix.
Many works of Graphic Medicine take up the medical community’s obsession with the cure and the way “normative” bodies and experiences set the standard against which health is measured. What do you make of this? In your opinion, how can we improve the ways we think about the notions of care and cure?
Biomedical cures derive from expert manipulation of the biology of individuals, leaving out multiple layers of bias, exclusion, and injustice that create our individual and collective health. To be a theory geek again, I love medical anthropology’s focus instead on three interconnected bodies: the physical, the social, and the political. The social gives the meaning to specific states and creates those “normative” standards. The political decides who gets sick and who stays well and how care gets accessed both in a crisis and across a lifetime. Again, the pandemic includes all these layers. We collectively negotiate wearing masks in the social body. The biomedical overemphasis on the physical meant that we normalized extreme isolation only to create other dangers. Collectively we depend far too much on cures. Instead of relying on the vaccine to end the pandemic, it’s time to reshape the global infrastructure of the political body in order to protect all of us from the next pandemic that will surely come.
In a recent essay, “Infectious Words,” you write about the “stickiness” of the phrase “social distance,” and the way it assumes a privileged subject who can afford to be socially distant from others.
Some may argue that the phrase is valuable exactly because of its stickiness — it is memorable, succinct, and provides instruction. What do you think about the tension between the phrase’s usefulness and its inherent assumptions? How do we navigate that tension? What would you propose as an alternative phrase or course of action?
“Social distancing” sticks on account of its resemblance to another dangerous misnomer; social media. Andrew Marantz, Jason Lanier, Shoshana Zuboff and others show how deeply “anti-social” and even dangerous social media is, both on account of the surveillance capitalism at its core and the ease with which extremists can use it to fuel lies and hate.
Since the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, a collective awareness of the dangers of social media has finally come about, leading the corporations who profit from it to finally start taking action. I would love for us to use the term “physical distancing” instead because it provides the real instruction that aligns with public health protocols. Words matter. Think of the stickiness of terms like slavery or prisoner but what we all gain by shifting our language. To say that someone was enslaved or incarcerated restores their humanity. This language also demands that we look at who has profited from the act of enslaving or imprisoning another human being. In terms of action, let’s find ways to be truly social and engage in difficult conversations with people outside of our usual circles in order to find common ground. I make art to help start those conversations.
What are you currently working on that you would like us to know about?
For the last six months, I have been immersed in The Book of Genocides project, currently part of this show at the Southern Vermont Arts Center. It started as 2016 art installation integrating nine of genocides of the past 500 years including my own family's experience with the Armenian genocide through a series of exquisite corpse books. I returned to it as the pandemic revealed the fatal health consequences of systemic anti-black and brown racism. I went back to the original zoology text and redacted it to make a series blackout poems that capture additional layers of dehumanization and objectification that were embedded both in genocide and in the colonizing and extractive approach of science to nature. All this was part of transforming the installation into a book manuscript. Both of these images [below] come from the Armenian genocide section.
Three of the life size exquisite corpse books from The Book of Genocides
Dana Walrath’s official site
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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.
