The figures about the arrival of immigrants in boats on the Canary Islands coasts have been making headlines in recent months. Numbers that transform the drama of each of these people into a simple fact that numbs the conscience to the misfortunes of others and at the same time ignites the social debate in the face of what is understood as a group devoid of humanity and that allows us to avoid any sense of responsibility . But Antonio Altarriba, as a screenwriter, has always shown that he does not shy away from commitment and decided to look at each of these faces, accompanied by Sergio García on the pencils and Lola Mora on the colors, whose salt water could hardly dry the faces. Few tears shed she left.
The courage to follow the path they had left behind was not associated with the adventure of tracing a delicate thread of Ariadne, but with the pain of discovering that every corner of the labyrinth was marked by suffering. “The Sky in the Head” (Norma Editorial) focuses on the journey of a Congolese boy, Nivek, who knows not what childhood is but the work of the coltan mines that bring prosperity to a few hands who will never know what they are are the wounds caused by pickaxes and shovels. The little boy will discover that the darkness of being buried in the mine is perhaps brighter than the future that awaits him as a child soldier, the beginning of a journey that will take him through the jungle and desert to escape his country and the sea until he reaches a Spain transformed into Ithaca, where no one awaits him, on a journey in which he will encounter not lotus eaters, cyclops, mermaids or laestrygonias, but the greed, meanness or cruelty of those who do taking advantage of the misfortune of those who seek a hope in which they hardly believe anymore.
Illustration from “Heaven in the Head” (Norma Editorial) by Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García and Lola Moral. SERGIO GARCIA
Altarriba, who knows the style of the artists who accompany him, transforms Nivek’s journey into an odyssey in which the places take center stage, so that García shows compositional gems in which the boundaries between the settings and the characters are blurred. The terrible horror of the child soldier’s initiation rite gives way to an imported hope, of training as a utopia of progress with which a first world wants to eliminate its grievances. It puts its finger on the wound of the Janish thinking of countries that exploit resources while providing aid as penance, supported by the generosity of volunteers, while forgetting the cultures and civilizations that lived in Africa. An forgetfulness that the screenwriter repairs by taking the migrant’s long journey through spaces where nature and magic mingle with life, where the happiness of this life contrasts with the little value that some attach to it, until they buy for a few coins. And we will experience stories that seem like traumatic readings of Scheherazade’s stories, that turn into nightmares that Chuck Palahniuk leaves behind in children’s fables and whose exit is only the Mediterranean, the last step towards that long-awaited Ithaca that Nivek doesn’t even know You your name?
García y Moral’s graphic representation of Altarriba’s ideas is impressive: the pages are made up of geometries that form environments of exquisite beauty, the beautiful postcards that come to us from Africa, signed by the most renowned photographers, but in which the artist dissects faces, more and more scars appear, where the smile disappears behind the grimace of pain that is no longer noticeable. Pages in which the color palette establishes its discourse that accompanies the line, playing with the vibrant ochres, greens and blues of African nature, violated by the chromatics that the drama of man leaves behind.
Illustration from “Heaven in the Head” (Norma Editorial) by Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García and Lola Moral.
At the very moment when we admire the aesthetic excellence of the composition, we encounter the trap devised by Altarriba, García and Moral: we cannot stop looking at Nivek. The atrocities are sweetened to make them digestible, so that a reader lethargic by the cataract of horror that the news spews will recognize them as credible despite the horror they recount. But when he looks into the eyes of the child soldier, the truth is reflected in his students. A truth drawn with small, dark strokes that does not hide the fact that it seems to come out of the pages through the long and stylized figures that García draws, transformed into knife wounds from which emerge the horror, that of a reality more terrible as told through the vignettes of this work. That of a hopeless journey to escape a future that doesn’t exist.
The Heaven in the Mind is not just a portrait of the migrant’s harrowing journey: it forces the first world reader to give a name and a face to every single person who lives and dies on these boats. To discover that our world is not the only possible one and that our civilization is just another, that these worlds cannot be allowed to collapse and cooperate only in the exploitation of poverty and misfortune.
Antonio Altarriba, Sergio García and Lola Moral
Standard, 2023
144 pages. 28 euros
You can follow BABELIA on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_