Windy Nights

A collections of illustrated poems with actions that take place in a windy night.

UPDATE (Oct. 2018) : Windy nights was published by KAPSIMI publication company: https://kapsimi.gr/kapsimi/nyxtes-me-aera

The order of the chapters is:

Let us describe
Arrival
Rider’s Song
Close the window
The determined ones

Let us Describe: This short comic is based on the short poem Let us Describe by Gertrude Stein. This poem is one of the most descriptive ones (even though it ends with a more stein-ish manner). The poem’s text is the following :

Let us describe how they went. It was a very windy night and the road although in excellent condition and extremely well graded has many turnings and although the curves are not sharp the rise is considerable. It was a very windy night and some of the larger vehicles found it more prudent not to venture. In consequence some of those who had planned to go were unable to do so. Many others did go and there was a sacrifice, of what shall we, a sheep, a hen, a cock, a village, a ruin, and all that and then that having been blessed let us bless it.

The poem describes a somehow vague story. Filling in some small details (and hoping that i didn’t meshed the whole poem) guided me to the decision of the inverted colors. The pictorial style (resembling cubism at least at some points) was influenced by Stein’s friendship with Picasso (it is a slightly more cubistic approach to his portrait of hers that we see in the first page).

Arrival: A first version of the text of “Arrival” was written a few years ago in a totally different context. Having recently read the Seventh Man (Antifa Scripta, 2012), I decided to illustrate this old poem by modifying some of the original text.
The Berger, Mor book deals with immigration before 1975 (when migratory laws began to change in most countries) but contains many useful elements and overturns several myths that still apply today. The two quotes on the first and last page of the comic illuminate two of the central ideas behind the illustration.
Pages 8 and 9 derive from the idea of transferring surplus value from the low organic composition capital (stores, restaurants, bars etc, small bosses of all kinds), where immigrants often work almost as slaves, to the highly organic capital structure (companies with high technological advanced and very expensive equipment, nuclear plants, etc). This idea is developed in George Caffentzis’ “The work/energy crisis and the apocalypse“.
Many of the comic images came from searching the web (or photos from the Seventh Man). Especially for the last two pages I found the picture here: HOME FRONT, the “Muslim” proletariat in Britain after the 11th 9th.

Rider’s song: This comic is an interpretation of one of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems with the name Rider’s song (or Horseman’s song -Canción del jinete). The original poem is the following:

Córdoba. Lejana y sola.

Jaca negra, luna grande,
y aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aunque sepa los caminos,
yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba.

Por el llano, por el viento,
jaca negra, luna roja.
La muerte me está mirando
desde las torres de Córdoba.

¡Ay que camino tan largo!
¡Ay mi jaca valerosa!
¡Ay que la muerte me espera,
antes de llegar a Córdoba!

Córdoba.

Lejana y sola.

To transcibe the poem into a comic / illustration (and give my own interpretation perhaps unrelated to the original intentions of the poet) I had specific historical facts in mind: Lorca was executed on August 19 by the fascists of Franco in an area named Alfakar outside Granada. During this period (from July 1936) Cordoba was under fascist occupation (with over 2,000 executions since the first few weeks). Shortly after Granada falls into the hands of Franco’s army. On August 19 to 22 an attempt by the democratic army to recapture Cordoba fails. In a small analogy to present day both cities who were under fascist rule and oppression (Cordoba and Granada) had been important Muslim centers in the past.

Close the window: This text was written a long time ago, without having any intention of making a comic out of it. However, here i decided to illustrate it in order to add it to a collection of poems with the title “Windy Nights”. This work can be considered a small intro to the rest of the poems /comics.

The determined: The Determined is a comic based on a text by the poet Nazim Hikmet (translated by Peter Markaris). It is a poem titled 8-10-1945 written while the poet was in prison and was published in a collection titled “The poems of 9-10pm”.

Similar with the other poems I have illustrated (Let us Describe, The Song of the Rider) I chose a course of meaning from the many that could arise from reading these texts. This was done without any intention of counterfeiting or limiting the range of
these poems. On the contrary, I would like these comic to be another reading proposal.

As for the illustration itself, my original intention was to digitize the sketches (and reverse the colors), as I did in the other two poems. However, because the result did not satisfy me, I finally kept it in only three pages, where it seemed to work.

We want everything

For my own good

The Death of William George Allum