Past Tense

Sacha Mardou’s new graphic memoir, Past Tense, is capacious in scope, spanning four generations and two continents, from World War II through Me Too and the pandemic. Above all, it prioritizes clarity and legibility as it weaves together three strands: a painful family history, a therapy journey and an explication of the nuts and bolts of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. With a textbook-like table of contents, a large font made from her hand lettering, a bright simple palette and lots of white space around the drawings, it projects harmlessness.  At first glance, it looks not unlike an instructional manual. It is above all else, orderly. The book is equally balanced between the three strands, but the psychological transformation through therapy is the frame, taking time out for flashbacks, present day life, and small tutorials. Mardou keeps a lot of balls in the air here, and exerts such iron control over the material, that it risks strangling much of the narrative, artistic and spiritual pleasure found in her earlier work.

 

In 2019, Mardou started posting comics on Instagram about her experiences with the therapy technique, IFS. Early in the run, she made a comic that declared, “I give myself permission to write the things I want to say.” The strips would often begin showing herself, eyes closed, in a meditative state, focusing in on feelings and physical sensations that were bothering her, and then using the IFS technique, she would drop deeper into her mind to investigate the sources of her pain, mostly memories from childhood.  In the comics about this process, she used a variety of cartooning techniques and visual metaphors to convey these explorations – hydra headed creatures, ghostly child versions of herself, and her own limbs, tangled like spaghetti.  The comics appeared dashed off, with a fluid, diaristic line, colored with muted watercolor washes, giving them an ethereality that seemed just right for explorations of the mind. It was fascinating reading because you were witnessing a person learning a new way to heal herself. The pleasure of discovery and aggregated epiphanies worked well on Instagram. She gained legions of new followers, many of them from outside of the alternative comics reading world – people interested in therapy, mental health and IFS in particular.

Past Tense was born from these strips, but it is altogether a different project; it’s a prequel, if you will, to the Instagram strips. It tells the story of what drove Mardou, Manchester born with working class roots, a woman from a culture that eschewed therapy and championed the stiff upper lip, to seek therapy in the first place. It is primarily the story of her struggle to free herself from family secrets. All families are complex, but Mardou’s contains harrowing entanglements that would challenge any storyteller.

 

While her Instagram strips portrayed fragments of a life – moments of stillness and inward curiosity stolen away from a busy adult life, Past Tense leads the reader through the entirety of her life. It has a larger scale and different priorities. Between the covers of a hard back book, printed on glossy paper, with Mardou’s cozy hand lettering converted into a more professional font, Past Tense has a tight formality that reveals a different side of this artist than what we’ve seen in her previous book, the spiky Sky in Stereo and her Instagram strips. She seems determined, above all else, that the reader will understand the particulars of her family of origin, the sources of her pain and anxiety, and the steps she undertook to heal. But in this zeal for legibility, she has sacrificed a certain looseness. The beauty of the moments hanging in time in the Instagram meditations are nowhere to be found. Whereas Sky in Stereo, a largely un-narrated story that allowed the reader to draw her own conclusions about the unhappy teenaged Iris, Past Tense is narrated relentlessly, often overwhelming the sensitively drawn panels. Mardou seems to have lost faith in how well her visual language speaks. It feels stifling.

As a cartoonist myself, I understand the pain of taking quickly drawn comics that you then want to rework into a more polished version, and feeling the warmth and immediacy of those original drawings slip through your fingers. I also know the challenges of the autobiographical form, summoning the will to be honest versus the fear of hurting loved ones, the complexity of nailing it all down, wrestling with the slipperiness of time. Through multiple drafts, it can be hard to hold on to the ineffable emotion that comes through our pens when we first dash something off. I also understand the warring desires of self-expression and legibility. I think Mardou made this book for the mental health community – a group of people who may not often read comics and graphic novels. I believe she wanted to reach those readers and bring them along in an unfamiliar format. It is not a book made for me. I expected something looser, artier, witchier.

 

The story recounts the sexual exploitation of girl children across generations, and the ensuing silences and abandonments that adult survivors of abuse often inflict upon their loved ones. I learned from this book that these are called legacy burdens. Mardou, who grew up in Northern England during Thatcher’s 1980’s, portrays her 11-year-old self with haunted eyes and drab clothes. She looks like a tiny 36-year-old office worker. I found this the most affecting part of the story because it was so jarring and heartbreaking to see a cartoonist portray her own young self this way. It communicated more effectively what she faced in childhood than the long passages of narration and dialogue. Similarly, the way she drew her sad, feckless step-father completely nailed the sufferings of a particular kind of messed up Generation-X childhood.  The brief appearance of a golden dragon during an IFS session with her therapist reminded me of what I’d loved about the Instagram strips, but there was very little of that in Past Tense. I wish that Mardou had taken more opportunities to let her expressive drawings take flight and tell the tale.

At one point Mardou’s male therapist describes his commitment to therapy as “a spiritual endeavor.” Past Tense, in its unwavering argument for the efficacy of therapy, shows us that for many women, it is something far more urgent – it is a means of self-rescue. Mardou bravely shows the ugliness at the heart of this story: that the violence done to girls by men is a large factor in what shapes the personalities of the women they become. She does not mince words or hide behind gauzy euphemisms. The violence done to girls and women deforms us. We all suffer from this, even when it is second or third hand. The lucidity of Past Tense allows for no mistaking of this message. Mardou shows herself learning that she too had constructed a lot of her own self around defending family secrets and surviving the damage they caused. Mardou comes from a family that some might have fled from, broken contact with, and tried to never look back. But she made a different choice – to heal herself through therapy and to reconnect with members of her family with whom relations had become remote and nearly estranged. It’s clearly not an easy story to tell – it has elements that she probably worried people would be interested in out of prurience alone. She says in the book she worried about breaking confidence with loved ones. It’s understandable that some of the artistic choices she made, to sacrifice the ambiguity of less narration and expressionistic drawings for a kind of plodding realism, results in a work that can be understood by all. The argument she makes for therapy as a way back to connection is a straight line that ends in victory.

 

For those of us who know Mardou’s other work, who know that she’s capable of mysterious and beautiful imagery, visual flights of fancy, and a cool spiritual vibe ---we may miss this. But this is a different project. This book invites people in who may be unfamiliar with comics, unfamiliar with IFS, who might possibly come from families as fractured and estranged as Sacha’s once was and are looking for help. This book is for those seekers, and on those terms, the book succeeds.

 

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