Word Pictures
JL22: José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Jacki Lyden, The Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, 2004.
For almost all my adult life, I was on the radio. I grew up on the radio, at NPR, starting in the 1970’s, and not leaving for over three decades. Day after day, week after week, year after year, if I wasn’t making a radio piece, I was thinking about making one. Who would the audience be? Who were the protagonists? And what about the language? I would consider a whole aural color palette: tone of voice, speed, coloration, diction, regionalisms, pitch, and what might come trippingly on the tongue. Most of all, in that pre-computer age, I asked myself how I would describe the drama. In radio, all the images were in our imagination, or at least, those of us making the piece had to re-imagine them for the on-air script. Word pictures, we used to call them. Together with the human voice, with speech, and with words, we’d make these pictures in the air. These pictures are with me still.
The electro-magnetic energy of a radio transmission is akin to many things—certainly the kinetic energy of creativity itself. If my voice can be converted to electro-magnetic energy, then to whom—or what else—does it speak?
I wrote a book, a memoir, called Daughter of the Queen of Sheba. The memoir is about growing up with my mentally ill mother, who became the Queen of Sheba and bequeathed me Mesopotamia when I was twelve. I grew up to become a Middle East correspondent, a war correspondent and radio host. Eight years after publishing it in 1997, in the distant mountain province of Antioquia, my book became a Colombian artist’s daily muse. Every morning after a swim, this man drew pictures from my book that illustrated his own musings from the text.
I had never heard of the artist. His name is José Antonio Suárez Londoño, or JASL, and I learned about him only when a New York gallery called The Drawing Center was having a show of his work called “José Antonio Suárez Londoño: The Yearbooks.” They phoned me to invite me to the opening in November. The premise was intriguing, and the company was positively celestial: JASL was inspired by other books, too. The gallery displayed his small intimate notebooks, each about 8.5 by 11 inches, all drawing from the diaries of people like Paul Klee, Eugène Delacroix, and works like Ovid’s Metamorphosis, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Patti Smith’s poetry—a total of 65 writers over the previous fifteen years. Twelve pages of the drawings shown from 2004 were from my memoir. JASL had even recreated even the cover of the Viking Penguin paperback, me grinning beneath a giant parasol, three years old, from a modeling shoot of my mother and me in 1950’s Milwaukee. In fact, the paperback cover, precisely and now figuratively redrawn by JASL, was the poster for the Drawing Center’s exhibit.
Apparently, JASL had picked up the paperback copy of my memoir at the Borders Store in Daytona Beach, where he was visiting his brother at Christmas, and began work on it in 2004. Of all the conscious and unconscious communions JASL had chosen to engage in his work, I was astonished that my mother’s hyperreality of the decades was even among them. His depictions of my translations of her on his own page created, in another form, an entirely new work. I thought of this much like a broadcast, shimmering inner dialogue entering an imagination so far away. Strange, and yet it also made sense. Her imagination would indeed prove, like a radio wave, to radiate and resonate again and again and again.
A month after the opening, I went up to New York from DC to read from Sheba at the gallery. As I concluded I thanked the gallery for the reading and the mounting of the twelve JASL drawings.
“Why do you think there are only twelve drawings,” the curator, Claire Gilman, asked me later. She is now the curator of modern and contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum.
“Because there are only twelve drawings here,” I said. “Twelve pages, anyway. “
“Ah”, she said. “He drew a few more. “
Twenty-four, I guessed. Fifty.
She shook her head.
The show was called “The Yearbooks,” but I didn’t take the hint.
“He drew from Daughter of the Queen of Sheba every day for a year in 2004, so there are 365 notebook pages, and over 600 drawings.”
On his blog, JASL writes, “There is no art less spontaneous than mine; inspiration and spontaneity are unknown to me; the same theme must be repeated ten, even a hundred times." So indeed, perhaps I should be using the word kinesis, a movement, a motion, and not the word “inspiration.”
In fact, there are closer to 700 little sketches and portraits and word plays and images drawn, colored, rubbed on, and rubbed out. Closer to 700 balls of color bouncing over botanical and meditative figures which emanate, like dreams, in surprising, almost overwhelming profusion, and then come back later for a second, third, or fourth act of haunting. In this way, they are ghostly. Flickering. Dancing, tiny calligraphy in a Romanesque style surrounds the images. Because this is his diary too, there’s a palimpsest quality to the images. He writes over his pictures or in marginalia. His calligraphic words accompany every drawing and echo over mine, and sometimes—often, in fact—the clips of speech on the page are my text, transcribed. I like this. Text as transmission, as voltaic act. There are observations on the yearbook pages, weather, things recorded in Spanish in the margin, even, I think, a dental appointment.
José Antonio Suárez Londoño studied both printmaking and fine art in Geneva, but as a child he was obsessed with the Larousse medical dictionary. In 1977, he graduated from the University of Antioquia with a degree in biology. I feel a kinship to this line of inquiry. At eight, when we went to live with my stepfather, a doctor with his own hospital, I was obsessed with his medical magazines and the depictions of organs and operations. My grandfather was a hunter and fisherman and shot anything that moved and ate it and generally gutted it or smoked it or carved it in the basement. And when my own father suffered a head injury which deafened him—he’d fallen from a friend’s roof when I was six—I drew a picture of the inner workings of the ear and brought it to school. My mother helped me. Language and image both attempted to fix time’s crushing continuity. Here was the anvil, the hammer, the tympanic drum, the Organ of Corti: all in the conch shell of the ear. I was curious about the insides of things; the things we could not see. Like the inside of a sparrow’s egg, or a nut. All of this was in JASL’s pages.
Often, in JASL’s drawings, there are variations, which operate like a frequency that can be switched on and off. They vibrate here, in bold color, then they have faded to mere outlines on a later page. Other times, this is reversed…the outline is solid. On, off, on the page. When I learned of JASL, picturing him drawing, each morning in Medellín, a bit of a hermit in his studio, no emails, no faxes, just the communion between his texts and brain and his jar of colored pencils, stuck there like a desiccated bouquet, I imagined in my mind that he and my mother and I were speaking, or at least communing, and yet there was no speech. This was an intimate, nonverbal radio transmission.
In 2012, after learning that there were so many, I asked, and received, permission to photograph them: all JASL’s 2004 “Yearbook” pages from Sheba. It took my husband, a Washington Post photojournalist, nearly a day. It has taken me even longer to look at all the images. Over a decade.
My interaction with JASL was brief. Hurricane Sandy had just roared through New York before the show opened, and he was going back to Colombia the next day. I remember a pleasant, affable and rather shy man. I really had no idea that he was obsessive, as intent on an inner phantasmagoria of an image he could make with his pencil, as I was with mine for text. He clung to alternate rhythms of time and expression, as my mother had. Now that I have at last steeled myself and spent hours wandering amid the 2004 Yearbook’s drawings, they fill me with awe at what one critic called his “meticulous madness.” Obsession as an act of meditation—a beautiful act of meditation. But they also fill me with a lingering sadness, and at my most uncertain moments, wandering through the images, the multitude of them overwhelms me. There is a heartbreaking story in the turned backs, the deaf ears, the rushing bodies. JASL’s work shows the lack of communication with my father and with my stepfather. What tiny people my mother and I were, really, in a universe of dread, even when the delicately drawn lines hum with energetic life.
I do ask myself why I am sadder looking at some of these images than I am turning my own pages, and I can only surmise that it is because I am not the one holding the pencil. JASL has rendered our sorrows, and I was rendered apart by them. I put my world back together in my way, and he has made a drawing, which remains his vision. My emotions are fixed in these drawings; and I can’t outrun them. And I am a runner. Or, I was then.
One of José Antonio’s drawings early on in “The Yearbook: 2004” shows me below an immense, turquoise blue knife, a sort of child’s painting of a butcher knife, leading my mother, and my two younger sisters up a hill. It is a cloud of a knife. The knife is pointing the way, but it also floats over our heads and could destroy us. There I am, in the lead, and behind me are my mother, and two smaller girls initialed “S” and “K,” for Kate and Sarah. “Like a string of paper dolls.” I’d described us that way in the memoir. Sharp objects come up in my memoir, too, along with my wish to wield them.
Yet the drawings also fill me with light, just as they are. Here is Sheba’s urn spouting a fountain of gold, like Aladdin’s lamp. My mother’s hand is outstretched, though disembodied. In his rather cramped, interesting cursive writing, JASL has copied “She said, “I am the Queen of Sheba, and I offer each of my three daughters a country. For you, Jack, Mesopotamia. In my head I tell her, ‘I accept.’”
This happened back in 1966. My mother had tapped on my bedroom door, and when I opened it, there she was, wrapped in her silky yellow nylon bed sheets. I was twelve.
On JASL’s cover, the child me sits behind a heaping bucket of blueberries, which come to a pyramid point, precisely drawn. The pyramid will be important, for I like pyramids and am drawn to them, as many of us are. I was first lost at one of the pyramids of Teotihuacan outside Mexico City when I was twelve, in real life. I’d climbed up to the Temple of the Moon to imagine myself as an Aztec princess. My mother lost track of me — she had absent mindedly given permission, and I knew full well she’d barely paid attention — but who thinks their daughter is going to go off and climb a pyramid? She was furious when they couldn’t find me. I loved being on the top of the Temple of the Moon, which I remember vividly, and imagined my twelve-year-old sacrificial Aztec counterpart standing there with me. No one from our group was around when I climbed down. My excursion delayed our whole busload of doctor’s wives from the luncheon fashion show, and I had to drive back with our guide, who sang “La Cucaracha” to me in the car on the way back.
A pyramid of blueberries. In JASL’s drawing, the blueberries are so singular you could pluck any one of them for breakfast. They were given to us. People used to pay my stepfather, our small-town doctor, with produce, like buckets of blueberries or cartons of tomatoes. He was a pillar of the community, and we were in his shadow. Perhaps I divined that the Temple of the Moon was higher than his small town pillar.
But JASL has reversed the parental units. My stepfather, who I was forever trying to escape, is there with me on the “cover.” He floats in a small black pool, next to the blueberries, a tall, elegant man in a white summer suit and white fedora. Richard Corey, in the poem by Edward Arlington Robertson: Whenever Richard Corey went downtown, / We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, / Clean favored, and imperially slim. I had written in Sheba that, to my mother, my stepfather did indeed, initially of course, appear as Richard Cory does in the poem, “glittered when he walked.” But in JASL’s drawing, he is transfigured, tiny, in a dark pool into which he has fallen wearing his white suit. Beneath him is a green lily pad with the words, “Lac La Jolie,” the name of lake where we lived with him in Wisconsin.
And there is my mother, a kind of Persian queen, dark-haired, running, with a full skirt billowing all around her. She has a diadem on her head, and the childhood tiara, and her whole body, viewed from the sky, cants downward, as if she’d fallen from the stars. She is carrying… what is it? Is that a baby with dangling arms? No, I wrote that, upon her first “nervous breakdown, it was if the maypole in her mind spun backwards, the ribbons of her mind spinning with centrifugal force.”
In another image, which was part of the Drawing Center show, there is my father. His hands are in his pockets and he is whistling out the window, as he used to do, for we lived near the lake and had many birds, especially red-wing blackbirds in the spring. But the birds are all colored solid red, and they are flying away from him, a flock speeding away like bottle rockets. His whistle, which had always been beautiful and bouncy when I was a little girl, is now atonal and harsh. My father can no longer hear his own whistle; the fall from the roof split the auditory nerves in both ears. When he fell, I realized, without anyone having to say it, that he would never hear my voice again because he is stone deaf. My parents’ marriage, already fraying, unraveled and the Doctor, who my mother will marry, was indeed already on the scene. My father explained to us girls that he could still hear, because he had a conch shell and when he held it up to his ears, he could hear the waves. And there it is on the page: he holds a red conch.
In the real world, my father’s voice somehow gained water in it; he gurgled in a riverine voice. And there on the page, the consonants and vowels come out in waves, rubbed faint as lace and they pool, between the girl and her father, now colored in scarlet, and the alphabet of letters tumbling into him, between him and the little girl. She is no color now, but a pale outline, an alphabet which floats and rises and dances. The chair in which he wants the little girl to sit on his lap, which my father did, to see if we sang into his ears, he might hear us…the chair is depicted as having four red feet, and like sirens, they are speeding away. All his life, my father refused to accept that deafness. He was proud to tell you he’d never met another deaf person, and refused to learn sign language.
The color red, rich, scarlet, like a tanager, electric, appears a lot in these drawings. There is a little girl, shaking her mother’s red maracas at the world, trying to make it all go away. I’m shaking them at a black cloud which is spinning and spinning. Later, I will think of something like this as a djinn, from the Middle East, hovering up in the corner, ready to descend on us. There is the jewelry box my father brought my mother from Japan when he was a paratrooper in Occupied Sapporo. The jewelry box has a small painting on it of what I now know to be the Dewa Sanan, the three sacred mountains of Japan, which stand for “past, present and future.” In that scene, I have written:
My grandmother asked, didn’t I want something better for my mother? Maracas shifted in the mirror, a dancer danced in Japan, an animal crashed free in a thicket of brambles, bounded into the dusk. Yes, indeed, I wanted something better. I wanted to come too, wherever she was going. Even if it meant we were going to live in the doctor’s house, I’d go.
And there, in the JASL year book, are the Doctor’s paraphernalia, the things which fascinated me when he came to live in our small house until we finished the school year. His suits. His cufflinks. Hair oil. Cologne. An old-fashioned electric shoe buffer, one side red, and one side black. I used to love this machine. I’d smell the shoe polish, smell, too, the cologne on the doctor’s suits. The whir of perfection; the buffed shoe! And on the same page, I’m sitting now on the doctor’s lap, demanding he read to me. But instead he’s pushing me off onto the floor, saying I’m too big for this. On the yearbook page it says, Tell me I’m pretty. Tell Me I’m Smart. If you can’t do that then tell me you like the way I stack the dinner plates on the table. Swing me to the trees. Tell me whatever you like but tell me I exist.” My words. Next to me is a large wood, shaped like a heart, or a basin of rivers.
I look at the picture of the blue knife repeated again on page eight of the Yearbook. Only here it is not blue. It is a shadow knife which has been erased and hovers over the words “Don’t go,” me pleading with my mother not to go out. She was brushing her long and beautiful hair; there is an image of a queen with hair like a river. And there is the hairbrush, the one she hit me with, when I begged her, “Don’t go.”
On one page, nearby, floats a name, with the word murio before it. That is Spanish for deceased, or died. There are absolutely no images on the page. Just the date, July 4th, 2004. There are no images at all. His own mother, I wonder? A few pages later, another word Mediano. Medium.
I’m not sure what it refers to. Still another word: Membrana, he writes…on the page in large letters. Membrane, in English. The membranes of the organs of the body. The membrane that divides his work and life are things he draws daily. The membrane on these pages is a scrim through which we can see enough to hear and entrance one another, or frighten each other. Membrana, the thin layer of tissue which encloses our cells.
There is a lot of violence in the drawings in the 2004 Yearbook. There is the cruel murder of my mother Dolores’ father just six weeks before she married my own father. I write a lot about this in Daughter of the Queen of Sheba. My grandfather, Ray, was gunned down in Milwaukee in 1950, on August 2nd, in a tavern called Gaynor’s. In the old clippings from the Journal-Sentinel, “Murder in Midtown Bar at Gaynor’s,” there is my grieving grandmother Mabel and my mother, holding each other. My mother is 20, Mabel is 50. A couple murdered Ray, two people, though only one was the triggerman. Ray tried to take the gun away from a bandit with a fedora and handkerchief, who shot him straight through the heart. I have always speculated that Virginia, the girlfriend in this couple, the partner of a drifter and a Great Lakes Naval Base sailor, named Phillip, pulled the trigger. I write about Ray as a chalk outline on the floor. The murder became a cold case. Without enough physical evidence to tie the couple to the murder, they eventually went free. Membrana.
Ray on the floor, Ray taking the gun away, Ray falling down again and again in the pages.
And here is my grandmother, Mabel’s, green coke-bottle eyeglasses. They drift near me, a girl child again, dressed in yellow, throwing up blue vomit from a child’s game my mother used on us Girl Scouts: eat the mystery food. Oysters! Cold spaghetti! Pigeon’s eggs!
And here is a little girl at a sink, me, attacked while brushing her teeth, and five years later, me again, thrown against a wall, my mandible cracked. The blow from my stepfather dislocated my jaw, and I went into the bathroom and forced my jaw back in. My stepfather was an osteopath, and knew how to manipulate bones. I have, I hope, long since healed from these things, or developed a second skin, emotionally and physically. And yet because the parental parade was so chaotic, I am fascinated at the agitation of this ether by JASL’s drawings. It’s like the black box from a ship or an airliner, beating in an organic pool and it catches my attention. Here is an image of me, the girl at the bottom of a deep green well. Here is my beautiful mother. Here is the stone diary—the stones I collected in South Dakota as we learned that Marilyn Monroe had taken her own life while we were at a diner with a screen door.
“Oh no,” murmured my mother, hearing it on the radio, “she couldn’t have.”
The stones: jasper, feldspar, rose quartz, road tar, sandstone, chalcedony, black agate, and the petrified sandstone wedge I convinced my stepfather to buy. Then I slipped it under my pillow at night, in case I’d have to defend myself with it.
What I am sure of is that these are my dreamscapes and memories, my autobiographical account of the years I spent grappling with my mother’s mental illness, my kaleidoscopic childhood, the long shadow of my stepfather’s cruelty and a constellation of terrifying and manic delights.
I’m able to tune into this now. I am fully aware that my life is not as infinite as my broadcasts, which will radiate into the galaxies. The point though, is the resonance: the drawings of José Antonio Suárez Londoño that have an energy my memory may someday lose, as my mother’s has begun to slough off colors and chapters. My imagination is reformed here together with hers, and his, in a whispering chamber in which waves vibrate and find their way to image.
There is my language.
Here is his. The drawings.
Here they meet. Word pictures. Membrana.
Writer and journalist Jacki Lyden was an award-winning NPR correspondent for over three decades, hosting flagship NPR shows and reporting throughout the US, the UK, and especially the Middle East. She is the author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, a memoir of living with her mother’s mental illness that The New York Times called “a classic.” She was named the American Psychiatric Association’s “Patient Advocate of the Year” and a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health journalism fellow. Lyden is a member of the National Steering Committee for Writers for Democratic Action and, as the Wisconsin State Chair, fights for literary democracy and the first amendment. Since 2017, Lyden has led writing workshops in the US and Ireland called “Love Comes in at the Eye.” She is married to Bill O’Leary, a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer formerly with the Washington Post. Her memoir-in-progress is called Tell Me Something Good, which entwines her NPR reportage with a personal history of radio. The book begins with Marconi’s radio transmissions from Lyden’s ancestral hometown in Clifden, Ireland to Wisconson Public Radio in Madison, where she was first on the air as a child. Lyden lives in Silver Spring, MD, and her hometown of Delafield, WI.