Simon Lamouret: 'I wish we had more narratives with an Eastern gaze on the West'

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

What do you love most about the graphic novel as a literary form? Graphic novelist Simon Lamouret (Courtesy the subject)
There is more to a graphic novel than simply combining words and pictures. Creating a language that lies within the interaction between text and image is what I love most. There are so many ways of doing this, and there are multiple layers of complexity. I am really interested in this as a reader as well as a practitioner. I tend to look at each of my books — whether it is Bangalore, The Alcazar, or L'homme Miroir — as an opportunity to experiment and play with this language. I approach comics not as a form of cinema translated on paper but as a literary form with its unique possibilities.
Do you use the words 'comic book' and 'graphic novel' interchangeably?
(laughs) I know why you are asking me this question. There are some people who are very touchy about the term that is used. I think that is just an expression of their vanity. For me, it is pretty much the same thing labelled differently. Usually, people like to refer to my books as graphic novels because of their format, size, length and number of pages.
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Which graphic novelists do you look up to?
As a child growing up in the early 1990s, I read French and Belgian comic books. In my teenage years, when I began to think seriously about what I would like to do in terms of my education and my career, I discovered new ways to draw and tell stories beyond the boxes that comic books had been restricted to. The medium was no longer addressing only kids or never-growing adults. It was also for adults interested in social issues, intimacy and philosophy. I look up to people like David B, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco and Chris Ware.
When I hear the word 'novel', fiction is what comes to mind. But works of graphic non-fiction are also called graphic novels these days.
I get my inspiration from real life, so my non-fiction is also personal in a way. I like to blur these classifications and categories. In The Alcazar, for example, I tell the story of migrant workers toiling on a construction site in Bangalore. Their job is to build a residential complex on an empty plot. The book addresses social facts but I have built it up almost like fiction in the sense that I do not interfere as a researcher in the story. I do not represent myself. I tell the story using the facts that I observed, and the data that I collected on the field.
Two of your books are set in India. How did that happen?
Soon after my education in France, I moved to Bangalore and taught at a design school from 2013 to 2018. Being in India was a great opportunity to see things from a different perspective. When you live somewhere, your interaction with a place and the people is different from how it would be as a traveller just passing by. Initially, I thought that I would be there for a year. That turned into two, and eventually I ended up staying for five years.
I was in my early twenties, and was just starting to master the skills to produce something publishable. Since I was in India, my environment provided the material that I worked with. I think of my book Bangalore as a travelogue because it is about my discovery of India. It is a portrait of the city through its public spaces. The gaze is more external. The Alcazar does not look at the city as a whole. It focuses on a tiny plot of land, and the people who work there.
While telling stories of the construction workers, what kind of ethical questions came up for you? When people from the West come to formerly colonized nations, there is an anxiety around how people might perceive their work, and some degree of caution about not exoticising locals. Is this something that you dealt with?
Bangalore was my first book. I was young and there was an urge to produce something, so I was thinking more about my right to represent as an artist. You could say that there was some kind of entitlement there. I had a genuine appetite for capturing the city.
Through the process of making that book, I started asking myself more questions. That process continued after the book was published in France, and I began to listen to reactions and receive feedback. Only parts of it were published in a magazine in India. With time, I got more interested in post-colonial issues and also read Edward Said's book Orientalism. That helped me understand the political and intellectual discourse, and also know where I stood.
I do not believe that people who come from the West should not be able to talk about the East, or that men should not portray female characters. How things are done matters. It just comes down to that. I also wish we had more narratives with an Eastern gaze on the West.
Besides, there are stories that are out there to grab. If there were already a lot of stories representing construction workers, maybe I wouldn't have felt the need to document them in The Alcazar. I felt that there was a gap to be filled as most Indians in my surroundings did not know much about construction workers, who seemed to live in a world kept completely apart.
I was quite vigilant in terms of doing things the right way, not silencing anyone, and not speaking on behalf of anyone. I was trying to be a voice porter or a voice carrier. I got an Indian friend with a background in ethnography to help me with documentation. Other friends helped with interpretation and translation. We talked a lot about the right questions to ask workers, and how to portray them. I also shared my storyboard and sketches with the workers and collected their feedback when I was in India. When I moved back to France, and was finishing my work on The Alcazar, I stayed in touch over phone calls and WhatsApp.
I did not want it to be read only by French people, so I was thrilled when Comix India came on board to publish the Indian edition. When we had a launch in Bangalore, Mehboob and Rafiq, who are two of the main characters in the book were on stage with me and they had the opportunity to represent themselves and interact with mostly upper class Bangaloreans.
Why don't we have more books about construction workers? Is the lack of knowledge about their lives related to divides around religion and caste in India?
Yes, I mean that could be one of the factors. But it could also be a question of just forgetting the mundane because it is right in front of our nose and we do not see it anymore. Construction sites are everywhere in India because cities are developing rapidly. Initially, I wanted to do a case study on different construction sites and build a more objective picture but then I gave up on that. For me, it came down to being a book about certain characters. They are human beings with struggles determined by their profession and class but their life has more than that. Construction work is only a part of their identity. Many of them come to the city because there is a lack of opportunities in villages. They build houses from scratch for other people but they do not have permanent housing. By the time they are 40 years old, their bodies become weak from the physical labour. Their goal is to invest the little money they manage to save and start a small business that does not require much physical work.
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How different are the lives of construction workers in India and France?
One of the key differences is that, unlike India, construction workers in France — who come from Portugal and Eastern Europe — do not live on construction sites. The vast majority of migrants have a rented house to go to. From a storytelling point of view, it was interesting to see how the lines between the personal and the professional got blurred because all my characters in The Alcazar lived where they worked. They almost did not exit the site. This might be one of the reasons behind why they were misunderstood by the rest of society.
Did any of your conversations with them happen over meals?
Yes, I ate with them. When I had to go away for a few months, we had a little celebratory dinner. We also had tea a few times. We could not have long conversations because I could not bother them so much during their working hours. I had been granted permission to observe them and talk when they were free. There was more time to talk during evenings and on Sundays. I told the contractor that I was an architecture student on an internship, and was interested in learning about building techniques. I don't think that I would have been given permission if he knew that I was interested in the lives of the construction workers. Even observing how people moved, looked at each other, and interacted, gave me so much non-verbal information about them, which I could use later to build up my characters.
LISTEN: BOOKS & AUTHORS PODCAST WITH SIMON LAMOURET
Tell us about your new books L'homme miroir and In the Land of the Lama.
L'homme miroir is about a workaholic single mother from the city who moves to the countryside with her son when a property comes up for sale. She has to get rid of the objects that belonged to the previous owner. While going through them, this woman, her son and her parents begin to form their impressions of him. What they see in him shows who they are.
It was a great pleasure to collaborate with Pema Wangchuk Dorjee — a journalist based in Sikkim — on In the Land of the Lama. This comic book is set in the late 1960s along Sikkim's frontier with Tibet. It draws inspiration from the story of Sepoy Harbhajan Singh. He was an Indian Army soldier who passed away in 1968 because of the harsh terrain and extreme weather but he continues to live on through myths and legends that have grown around him.
Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.