Shaun
Tan didn’t have to look far from home when he was creating The Arrival, his wordless
graphic novel about to be staged by Glasgow-based Solar Bear theatre company.
The Australian artist, writer and filmmaker’s story about a man forced to leave
his home to find work in an imaginary country in order to support his family is
a tale that could apply to the hardships of thousands of migrant workers across
several centuries. While such scenarios are particularly pertinent in the
current political climate, and although The Arrival is in no way
auto-biographical, Tan’s story has a more personal root.
“My
father was from Malaysia, and came to Australia in 1960,” he says. “Perth where
we lived was pretty backwards then. It wasn’t necessarily racist exactly, but
although there was a strong aspect of other cultures, the community there was
pretty British. I started off with questions about what we call home, and I
arrived at lots more questions about history, which I found pretty boring when
I was a kid, but as an artist, when I was working on The Arrival, I was more or
less the same age as my father was when he came to Australia, and that became
pretty interesting.”
While
looking at the history of migrants in Australia, Tan looked too at Ellis Island
in New York, which in 1892 became the nineteenth century gateway for immigrants
coming to America when it became the state-legislated immigrant inspection
station. With more than eight million immigrants having arrived in New York in
the previous thirty-five years, in Ellis Island’s first year alone more than
450,000 immigrants passed through. It was while looked at old postcards from
that period that the aesthetic for what would become The Arrival became clear
to him.
“I thought
wouldn’t it be great to tell the story of immigrants in a way that was like
picture postcards,” he says, “and to do that by inventing a country, because
how else would we know what it felt like to arrive somewhere we didn’t know. I
thought about this idea of trying to tell a story that could only be told in
pictures for a long time, and I wondered why hadn’t anyone thought of that.”
The
book took Tan five years to finish, and went through several different versions
along the way as other influences crept in. This included a seminal graphic
novel which was also wordless.
“Initially
The Arrival was a combination of text and image,” Tan says, “and the text was
very straightforward and direct. Then I picked up a copy of Raymond Briggs’
book, The Snowman, which was completely wordless, and looks like a children’s
story, but is actually an adult book which mourns childhood.”
There
was a practical reason too for Tan’s decision to use only images in The
Arrival.
“I
found that people read my work too quickly,” he says, “but if you put a series
of pictures together without words it tends to slow things down. Not having
words to rely on brought out the problems of living in a world where the
characters are unable to speak the language, so it was logical that a reader
should only be able to understand what they see. That created a kind of magical
silence.”
Published
in 2006, The Arrival went on to win numerous Australian book awards. An earlier
book, The Lost Things, published in 2000, was adapted into a fifteen-minute
film by Tan with Andrew Ruhemann. With narration by Tim Minchin, Tan and
Ruhemann’s film went on to win an Oscar for Best Animated Short.
By
the time The Arrival came out, the world had lurched into a crisis in which
immigrants were becoming increasingly demonised. This gave Tan’s book an
up-to-the-minute pertinence which he couldn’t have planned for. The way Tan had
told his story reached out in other ways.
“One
of the best reviews was from a deaf guy on YouTube,” he says. “For him, the book
explained what it was like to be hearing impaired and having tyo rely on other
cues to communicate. In early versions of the book there were people who were
disabled in some way, and who’d had to overcome some kind of difficulty to get
to this place, so it didn’t surprise me hugely that this kind of resonance
became important for him.”
This
is also what makes The Arrival perfect for Solar Bear, whose work with D/deaf
actors and artists for D/deaf audiences has blazed a trail in its field since
2002. This won’t be the first staging of Tan’s book, with several stagings
taking different approaches in ways that Tan seems to relish. Images of the
book were projected during a concert performance of Shostakovich’s String
Quartet No. 15 by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. While this non-verbal
accompaniment speaks volumes about the book, at its heart is the alienation of
being an outsider that matters.
“Immigration
continues to be an important issue,” says Tan, “and unfortunately it’s always
political. You can’t talk about immigration without people drawing up the
political battle lines. With The Arrival I wanted to look at it in an
apolitical way, and in a very human way.
“Australia
is an island continent, and that ferments a certain sense of isolationism in
terms of attitudes, and a great paranoia about people arriving here on boats.
There’s a lot of anti-Muslim feeling in the same way there’s been a lot of anti-Vietnamese
feeling, and there’s a sense sometimes of who’s going to be scapegoat of the
month.
“That’s
the dark side, but on the plus side, Australia is a very multi-cultural
country. A huge percentage of people here are descended from immigrants, and we
pride ourselves on an identity of tolerance and freedom. That’s hard sometimes,
because things are always changing. That’s possibly something else that The
Arrival taps into that people can relate to even after twelve years. Some of
the concerns about immigration might change, but as an issue it never cools
down.”
The
Arrival, Scottish Youth Theatre, Glasgow, September 26-27; Eastwood Park
Theatre, Giffnock, September 28; Tayside Deaf Hub, Dundee, October 5; Spectrum
Centre, Inverness, October 12; Carlops Village Hall, October 18; Howden Park
Centre, Livingston, October 26.
The Herald, September 20th 2018
ends
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