This chapter explores the multiple voices of evil in the award-winning graphic novel The Divine. Written by Boaz Levie this text is based on the actual story of the twelve-year old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo, who in the late 1990s led Karen refugees in guerrilla warfare against the Burmese army in Myanmar. Reaching legendary status that was imbued with myth, magic and religious miasma these twins encapsulated the Janus embodiment of evil as coincidentia oppistorum. This conjoined double signage arguably underpins all narratives dealing with evil, the supernatural and the monstrous It represents a point of double signage in which there is slippage between elements such as self and other, deformity and wholeness and truth and falsehood. Indeed, the concept of twins is the most ancient of narrative tropes that deal with the disruptive liminal portal cultures must enter and deal with, to find what Deardorff has termed “deep life” and authentic “communitas” of spirit. Using the tools and frames of mythic narrative analysis, the twins and the other human protagonists in The Divine reveals that the narrative taking place in the fictional country of Quanlom deals not only with America’s imperialist actions in Southeast Asia, but the precursory threads of militarism that has led up to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. In essence, The Divine speaks to the concept of how America’s misdirected underpinning foundational ideology of white supremacy has left an indelible “narrative stain” of racist myopia on both a national and global scale.

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Do Any Lives Matter? Polyvalent Representations of Evil in The Divine

  • Phil Fitzsimmons

摘要

This chapter explores the multiple voices of evil in the award-winning graphic novel The Divine. Written by Boaz Levie this text is based on the actual story of the twelve-year old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo, who in the late 1990s led Karen refugees in guerrilla warfare against the Burmese army in Myanmar. Reaching legendary status that was imbued with myth, magic and religious miasma these twins encapsulated the Janus embodiment of evil as coincidentia oppistorum. This conjoined double signage arguably underpins all narratives dealing with evil, the supernatural and the monstrous It represents a point of double signage in which there is slippage between elements such as self and other, deformity and wholeness and truth and falsehood. Indeed, the concept of twins is the most ancient of narrative tropes that deal with the disruptive liminal portal cultures must enter and deal with, to find what Deardorff has termed “deep life” and authentic “communitas” of spirit. Using the tools and frames of mythic narrative analysis, the twins and the other human protagonists in The Divine reveals that the narrative taking place in the fictional country of Quanlom deals not only with America’s imperialist actions in Southeast Asia, but the precursory threads of militarism that has led up to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. In essence, The Divine speaks to the concept of how America’s misdirected underpinning foundational ideology of white supremacy has left an indelible “narrative stain” of racist myopia on both a national and global scale.