No Seasoning, No Soul: The Shortsightedness of the White Imagination in Rain by David. M. Booher

This post begins with a cover buy: a minimal cover that depicts two women (one white, the other dark- complexioned) holding hands and looking longingly into each other’s eye as a bolt of something pierces them. I bought this comic solely because I am a sucker for buying comics/graphic novels that feature Black and Brown women on the cover. The graphic novel Rain introduces us to a lesbian couple about to start their lives together. Honeysuckle Speck and Yolanda Rusted are moving in with the help of Yolanda’s mother, Mrs. Rusted. As Yolanda and Mrs. Rusted unpack the car, the dreaded rain starts. Millions of crystalized rain shards impale anything living, including Yolanda and her mother. Honeysuckle spends the rest of the graphic novel remembering their love, trying to find Yolanda’s father, and protecting the little boy next door whose parents are connected to the origins of this new world. Reader, you can’t possibly fathom the anger that arose in me while I read this story. It’s been a while since I hate-read something, and this graphic novel adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story “Here Comes the Rain Again” proves why there should be no inherent trust in white writers and artists and their depiction of non-white characters in their works. I have a brief rant about this book somewhere on the internet. Still, it was only after reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that I found the language to explain my disdain for this graphic novel adaptation and the original author, Joe Hill. This book uses social justice, queerness, and environmental disasters as gimmicks, resulting in lackluster character development, reductive stereotypes, and a pointless plot. 

Let’s start with our plot device/ character of color, Yolanda. Yolanda Rusted’s characterization barely justifies her being on the cover of this book. She is a woman of color who is light-hearted and snarky (as shown in the brief interaction with the neighbor Martina asking to “join” the couple). She dresses nicely and has a supportive family. Unfortunately, that is all we can directly gather from Yolanda because she dies 18 pages into the first issue.  Yolanda was too perfect. Even with the one throwaway reference to Yolanda not being perfect, there was nothing proving she wasn’t perfect. Humans are inherently flawed, which means there should have been SOMETHING: a reference to a long-standing argument they have had (even if it was small), a reaction from side characters, or to the environment that showed an unlikeable personality trait. We SHOULD have gotten a personality trait that was informed by her family’s experience with racist neighbors and the gun incident Yolanda experienced at 12 years old, but we get none of this. Instead, we get a flat character forced to carry the rest of the story via Honeysuckle’s musings.

Based on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Yolanda and her family serve as a “means of meditation”- both safe- and risky- of one’s own humanity.” Honeysuckle Speck isn’t better because her nondescript personality and actions are buoyed by the Rusted Family and the tragedy they experienced. When the racist neighbor kills Mr. Rusted, she, in a daze, goes up to Yolanda’s room and reads a letter Yolanda’s father wrote to her to give “advice on how to live with Yolanda.”  And as much as I would love to say she sits in silence as a show of respect to Mr. Rusted, this “show” is immediately discarded when she uses his corpse to trick the racist neighbor when he comes back into the home to attack Honeysuckle, posthumously stabbing Mr. Rusted. That was a contemptuous choice made by the author. Hill and company could have used anything else from the house but chose to use his body and bedroom, defiling the man unnecessarily. We also know next to nothing about Honeysuckle as she spends the majority of the story reminiscing about her love for Yolanda and how helpful Yolanda’s family was to Honeysuckle’s life. In fact, there is nothing about her past outside of her parents’ abysmal reaction to her coming out as a lesbian. During a time as devastating as this eco-disaster, I would argue that retrospect on one’s life would include the entire life. We only get her life’s ruminations directly informed by the life lessons the Rusted family taught her, and there were several times when we could have gotten her history. For example, when she survived the prisoner who wanted her to drive to Canada at gunpoint. She finds courage after a “What Would Yolanda Do?” moment (where we learn Yolanda faced down a gun at 12). That would have been the perfect time to include a backstory on our main character.  I understand this story is a flashback, spoken by a character experiencing grief. Still, Honeysuckle has no discernable difference before and after the rain. Outside of the Rusteds, who is she? Unfortunately for Honeysuckle, her identity doesn’t exist without the exploitation of the “other.”

Now, I could have left this story alone and chalked it up to ‘white people not knowing how to write black and brown people; therefore, this was always going to be bad.’ But what tipped the scales for me was the introduction written by Joe Hill. For context, this graphic novel is an adaptation of Joe Hill’s short story “Here Comes Rain Again,” adapted by David M. Booher, Zoe Thorogood, and Chris O’Halloran.  Joe Hill goes on to say:

“nothing makes me wince as much as when a writer tries to explain sincerely with wide eyes and a well-meaning heart the message behind their story don’t do that don’t write Fiction with the message readers can tell the difference between a sermon and a story if they want to be scolded or preached at they’ll go to church or sign into Twitter”. 

I can’t tell you how much this infuriated me. This author’s privilege reeks through the pages of this introduction, ignoring that all literature is political and has a message to impart to its audience. Speculative fiction, specifically, operates to question what would happen if we continued on our current path of destruction or what it could be if we made changes. When you have people who claim otherwise and choose to mine the cultures of marginalized folx rather than respecting the culture, you end up with very piss poor storytelling. ‘Art for art’s sake’ does not work in the empire, Joe Hill and company. In Rain, every “attempt” at conveying a message, at least a convincing one, is thwarted by the authors’ shortsightedness. Crystallized rain shards that kill anyone in everything in sight would be a great message about climate change and the destruction of the earth. Instead, it turns into the petty machinations of a woman angry at her husband. The message of anti-racism and anti-homophobic beliefs is reduced to the simplistic quips of a self-centered, bland main character. Mrs. Rusted even has a political bumper sticker saying, “Voting is like driving- D goes forward, R goes backward.” How does one take something so political only to transform it into something so uninspiring? By rendering out the messaging, the authors claim that art is unaffected by our reality and that position is only held by the privileged and those who actively cause harm.

This comic had to have been my most hated comic of the year. Anytime this comic is mentioned, I’ve gone on a tirade, pointing out its many failures. This comic is one of the reasons why I very rarely read works by white people. For me, it doesn’t make sense to sift through this level of ignorance to find the “good” or determine if it has a message. I’d rather listen to the voices of black and brown folks with stories that haven’t been whitewashed in some way. And while I don’t want to operate within an echo chamber, I worry about reading problematic works without having the time and space to critique the work properly. Joe Hill and company do a great injustice to the speculative fiction genre with this story. This book neither questions what would happen if humanity continues on its current path nor offers a model of what could happen if we made changes, only enforcing Morrisons’ belief that the white imagination is ‘unfathomable, frozen, and meaningless.’