On rites, ritual and our personal transformations.

Lately, I’ve been thinking that to some degree, especially in the Graphic Memoir / Medicine genre, we are seeing our storytelling return to the function of Rite and Ritual. (Note, I’m accidentally using rites and rituals a little interchangeably, though as I understand it, technically a ritual exists within the larger rite.)

What I mean is: rites, large ones anyway, serve to mark and assist our psyche, and community, in moving us from one stage of life to another.

Sometimes these rites rituals are small—let's put on our sports jersey and rise for the national anthem before the football game, as we are transitioning from ordinary life to sports-team-fandom-game-day-life. Etc.

But the big ones: marriage, bah/t-mitsvahs and other adolescence rituals, childbirth, anniversaries, grieving rituals, are more like what we do here.

We who are marked by some real life situation, we strive to move from the person who is in a state of shock (sometimes gentle, sometimes not so gentle), to a state of acceptance and wisdom.

We do that through the rite of art making and of personal story telling.

Some authors of old, a lot of white guys to be sure, would go through the Bildungsroman ritual, after looking back and realizing they were mature adults, they would look back and document it, for themselves, for their psyche, and their community of readers. This is the The Maturing Ritual.

Some of us probably have great Bildungsromans in us! :)

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other genre/rituals that serve us here.

My example.

I'll use myself as the first example.

I lost my daughter—an utter absolute shock. What would help me move through one phase of life to another?

For me, made a grief memoir. I observed the Grief Memoir Rite. Which included a lot of art-making rituals, writing and drawing rituals, fleeing rituals, communing rituals, etc.

Everyone's rite is different. We seek guidance, but there is lot of solitary activity.

(For other artists, it might be paintings, or sculpture or quilts or what have you. Processing. Turning one thing into another marks our own turning from one thing to another.)

Mine was 4 years long, and involved trying to sort out the story for myself, and share it with my community. Getting to the other side of despair was the purpose of the rite. Crafting the story, making the drawings were the rituals. My conscious, tool-using mind, and my wounded subconscious were becoming intertwined by the work.

SAW member Anna Blomfeld said “The smell of the ink, the feel of the watercolor paper, filling up the water jar, pulling out the paintbrushes, getting ink on my fingers—that all feels like ritual.”

(There is the actual non art-making in the Grieving Rite too, which is also personal, and doesn't get discussed much because it is difficult. Some communities have something— sitting shiva, for instance, helps the grieving family, as well as the memory of the lost, be held by the community. A lot of communities have ways of dressing or adorning our dress during long periods of grieving, etc.)

Other RITES we perform in graphic memoir.

There are lots of rites/rituals we see in the SAW Graphic Memoir/Medicine Community. They are all beautiful and very necessary.

I'll try to identify some.

The Aging Parents Rite
The Illness Rite (Could be coupled with the Bad Medical Experience Ritual)
The Mentally Ill Family Member Rite
The Bad Job Rite
The Gender Identity Rite
The Childhood Trauma Rite
The Generational Acknowledgment Rite
The My-Place-In-History Rite
The Travelogue
The Birth Parents / Adoptive Parents Rite
The Bad Parents Rite
The Siblings Rite (where we integrate who we are collectively with who we were collectively.)

I hope this isn't making light of any of these things. In fact, I hope it allows us to identify two things:

1. that we are all unique and beautiful

2. that we are going through something difficult that is common, though still unique to us.

This commonality can and should be a source of strength.

What we do in the rite.

This is the most important thing:

Our job is not to be great artists, or original, our job is to come out the other side.

That usually involves a lot of confusion, a lot of skill-building, storytelling, and a lot of noticing that we are still being held and supported by the community.

SAW member Cara Gormally said in making their memoir, it felt like they were “building a monument.”

It's a long transformation.

Like a lot of rituals, there are some accepted norms and rules. And antecedents have shown us the way. Think Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, or Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, or Art Spiegelman's Maus. These have given us clues as to what we might do.

Doing it their way will work for a lot of us. And the community can help, by seeing what the ritual is, and guiding.

But here's something interesting too:

Artists throughout history have been dissatisfied with the usual rituals.

So a lot of our desire to move through this transformation is realizing that our ritual, and only our ritual, makes sense to us. So we have to make some of it up on our own.

This might be a wild re-invention of the rite (all three of the above books are good examples of re-invented rites.)

Or it might come when we realize Bechdel's model isn't exactly right for us, or that as much as we wish, we don't write and draw like Chast, etc.

So as we go, we have to realize we have the strength to do this, but the path is probably our own. We ask for help as we feel it out.

Thus our art has returned to one of its original purposes. Not sales, but the Transformation of the Artist, and the Sharing of the Final Artifact (the Book, the Story).

And this final product, this artifact, this book, this story, helps us readers navigate our own transformations...

Anyway, that's what I think we're doing here, and it's a privilege to be part of it with all of you.

Thoughts, responses? Let us know!

Tom Hart

Original Substack Post

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