Gaslighting Books, Resurfacing Traumas, and 17-Year Cicada

 Sarnath Banerjee, 17-Year Cicada, Chapter 4

According to Wikipedia, the seventeen-year cicada is a species whose individual members' lifecycles are synced. For most of their lives, these cicadas feed and grow underground and, once every seventeen years, they surface together to mate before dying. Artist, author, and publisher Sarnath Banerjee's new graphic novel, named after this species, features similar cycles of emergence and re-emergence, only instead of insects, Banerjee writes about books. On the webpage substrate of 17-Year Cicada, he proposes that when we read we absorb past wounds, re-establish them within ourselves, and then expel them outwards. Banerjee's wit, his investigations on the rise and recession of ideas, and his layering of the contemporary with the ancient coalesce under the premise of a student, Nihal, trapped in a library afterhours. Nihal's  PhD research and hoarding of information lead to traumatic awareness and sleeplessness while the editorialising of history confuses and gaslights her. The more she reads, the more the stories surrounding her on the library shelves recur as memories of her personal and romantic encounters. The library at Dubai's Jameel Arts Centre is releasing 17-Year Cicada episodically and, so far, eight of a total ten chapters are available online. 

At the top of the webpage, each chapter is accessible as a dot on a thin outline of mountains. Scrolling up reveals alternating seafoam green and white panels hosting a collage of illustrations, jpegs, clip art, and archival photographs. Broad brushstrokes layer with penciled scribbles forming the gesture of a hand, the tilt of a neck, the sway of long tunics in golden yellows, mint, and watery reds. Sometimes Banerjee reveals the edges of his scanned sketchbook pages so that a corner lifted a millimetre from the scanner bed or the faint outline of coil binding protrude from the impossible smoothness of the webpage. Black text with broad counters and gently curling serifs narrates the births and deaths of books. "Chapter 3: History's Own Marie Kondos" lists some rulers who destroyed libraries, accepting only the ideas that, for them, must have sparked joy. Among them, Han dynasty historian Sima Qian claimed "old books need to burn to make way for new ones."¹ The Banu Musa brothers in 10th century Baghdad authored a foundational text in Arab mathematics while also witnessing the confiscation of their rival's library. Delicate linework in a sketch of the brothers floats up through translucent pigments. Turbans outlined in lazy circular flourishes, their heads are drawn from behind and are tilted up toward a diagram from their own book. The leftmost brother strains to fit into frame, leaning against the others, shoulders touching, so that the trio is rendered cute. It is as though no conflict had ever arisen. Not long after, a photo from Nazi-occupied Berlin rises into view. An enormous, overexposed bonfire lights an otherwise shadowy crowd. These "unGerman"² books were dragged from personal collections into a public square to burn, and among them perished a novel by Heinrich Heine who wrote the following:

Sarnath Banerjee, 17-Year Cicada, Chapter 3

However, fire does not post the biggest threat to books, nor to people. Banerjee is preoccupied with the distribution and popularity of stories, and he notes that like trigger warnings giving to otherwise bland Facebook posts a bit of conflict and interest, banning books may actually draw more readers.³ Yet as stories become ever more accessible online, print publications are as likely to die of obsolescence as they are to be burned or banned, and "sometimes a library is the best place"⁴ for this. With aisles of books sitting unvisited and out of circulation, libraries can be more like graveyards than sanctuaries. After waking from an unplanned nap, Nihal finds herself trapped among such aisles, not knowing if anyone will come search for her. She has been discarded or, more likely, forgotten with benign intentions among the stacks. Who can guarantee that someone will ask after her at the front desk, or that she will be remembered among these other writers? Nihal wonders, when will the library reopen? Nothing guarantees under strict lockdowns that the public will be invited to reenter the next morning, or even the next month. 

Nihal feels increasingly isolated in the library, yet she now also sits with many fellow protagonists abandoned to dust, rot, and termites. An illustrated Mongol exits his habitat in history texts to enter into Nihal's world. He wakes her up and offers a fresh stack of books, as if for sustenance, and Nihal's own stresses and ruminations also share residency with her and the Mongol on the textureless surface of the web-novel. She resists the instinct to call a cheating ex-boyfriend, the "sea-lioning and gaslighting"⁵ Mansoor, to help her escape, yet the same picture of him has intruded twice already. This watercolour of Mansoor with arms crossed, moustache curved downwards, and leaning against a doorframe resembles, through its thumbnail scale onscreen, photos of loved ones carried in pockets and wallets. 

When accompanied by persistent thoughts of Mansoor, the process of rifling through uncountable volumes of information online and in libraries has overwhelmed Nihal. She has accumulated too many stories for her PhD thesis and the stress of having to "Marie Kondo her way through the excess material"⁶ has given her insomnia. Mansoor is her only acquaintance in the city, and now that they've broken up Nihal has no one to coax her to sleep with bedtime stories. The insomnia is how she fell asleep in the library to begin with. 

Sarnath Banerjee, 17-Year Cicada, Chapter 8

While the topic of her thesis is never discussed overtly, the passages describing historical events might provide direct access into Nihal's research process. Here, instead of images of the grey maze of the library and Nihal's dark, curly hair and moody expressions, the perspective shifts so we see straight into Nihal's observations. Her thesis paper might come to bear a title like: 'Instances of Historical Editorialism Via the Destruction of Books: Sima Qian, the Banu Musa Brothers, and Nazi Germany.' If Nihal has spent the last few years deliberately seeking out moments of literary revisionism like those prompted by these figures, and if she absorbs and expels these traumas, then it is possible her own reality has become unstable. Her heightened attention to others' writing and "going to bed with both Mansoor and Kondo [has] had a devastating effect on her life."⁷ Like her ex-boyfriend, these books are gaslighting her. 

Nihal might actually carry a thumbnail portait of Mansoor with her or, perhaps, a vivid mental image of his derisive expression haunts her... surely she must at least have a couple snapshots of him on her phone, which is quickly dying. Dreading having to face his snide remarks once again, she cannot bring herself to call him. Between the web-novel's chapters on historical revisionism and chapters on Nihal's distress, Nihal's consciousness becomes a collage of fragments recalled from memories of research and lived experiences. As if to invite readers to share in Nihal's hoarding and confusion, each chapter of the novel ends with a bibliography of related books that can be checked out from the Jameel library. Like the water-borne mystic from Chapter 8 who guided poets toward the right words, Banerjee forwards these stories onto his readers. Was the bibliography arranged by Nihal for her thesis, by Banerjee for his own research, or does it exist outside of the frame of the novel, merely for readers? Through shifts in perspective, the distinctions between what is real, historical, fabricated, or fictional become hazy. Nihal's vision must be in a similar state from staying awake one night too many. In a way, she's living the dream. She had fantasised about what it would be like to spend a night alone in a library, wondering "what kind of thoughts would enter her mind,"⁸ but this isolation with no end threatens instead to become a night terror. 

If there ever existed firm boundaries between falling asleep and waking up, or between sensing the surfaces of pages or screens and sinking into the lively narratives of words, these distinctions are blurring for Nihal. And this lack of certainty is traumatic for her and for other writers, as seen in "Chapter 7: Richard Wright." The fantasy of being trapped in a library is one shared among authors, but for writer Richard Wright and other Black Americans in the early 20th century, the library was also a site of oppression. Through vigilance and guardedness, Wright learned to "look as illiterate as possible"⁹ so as not to be seen reading. Wright lived a double life, feigning servitude and empty-headedness to access authors who "could express their views so freely."¹⁰ It was only through careful consideration of surfaces (Would that white man be charitable enough to lend a library card?) and of stories that Wright came to express his own views. 

"This could be a great way to advertise books. She checked for CCTV cameras. 

Luckily the juiciest parts of the library were not under surveillance." 

Sarnath Banerjee, 17-Year Cicada, Chapter 4.

Nihal's double life manifests in the contrasts in her thoughts and anxieties. Her mind overflows when she reads others' words, yet she remains aware of the judgements that others might have in perceiving her. She predicts that Mansoor would berate her were she to request his help. At the same time, she wonders if staging her own death by library catastrophe might amuse her followers on Instagram. Could a timely post on her feed free her from the library, or would her image and its caption become lost in the onslaught of online photographing, editing, posting, and deleting? Through research, and the dreamlike consciousness it causes, Nihal inherits ancient destruction of knowledge. These wounds resurface through her ex-boyfriend's gaslighting to join, in some small way, the countless editorialisms within cycles of reading, writing, and erasing. Recursion over time, like that of repeated book burnings or revisionist philosophies, can obstruct any hope for clear understanding for those who revisit historical events. When hosts and platforms, like the library in which Nihal is trapped, never close, when they "merely fade out for a few small hours and fade right back in,"¹¹ what happens if the cycle is ruptured? Sarnath Banerjee explores a possibility for rupture in a library that has finally shut its doors. Perhaps this infrastructure can finally spend some time underground, feed, and rediscover for itself its purpose for existing before inevitably resurfacing once again. 

Footnotes

¹ "Chapter 3: History's Own Marie Kondos."

² Ibid.

³ Ibid. 

⁴ "Chapter 5: The Ultimate Fengshui."

⁵ "Chapter 2: Mongols Are Coming."

⁶ "Chapter 4: Island of Hallucinations."

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ "Chapter 7: Richard Wright."

¹⁰ Ibid. 

¹¹ "Chapter 2: Mongols Are Coming."

Works Cited

Banerjee, Sarnath. 17-Year Cicada, Chapters 1-8. Dubai: Jameel Arts Centre Library, 2021. https://17yearcicada.jameelartscentre.org/