CRAFTING BIBLES FOR ALL AGES, COLORS, AND CREEDS
“What am I supposed to get her?” my partner asked of the illustrated Old Testament I was making for our goddaughter. His family is South African, and his sister was adopting a two-year-old who had been left by her mother in a hospital in the Eastern Cape. It was the only time I’d been asked to be a godfather where the family actually went to church, and I was researching a dissertation on the Hebrew Bible and modern art. I had also been known to fashion my own Christmas cards and to elevate giftwrapping to photographable standards. Attempting a summary from cut paper seemed obvious.
Collage was the perfect medium because it reflected the crafted nature of the ancient texts. Historians don’t agree on the specifics of the supposed sources, or in what order along the oral-to-written road they were integrated, but one thing is clear: the final editors weren’t afraid to let the seams show. The jump in vocabulary and perspective between Genesis 1 and 2:4 attests to this. Most books reveal redaction, and the entire collection is multi-textured and frequently contradictory. Like an abstract arrangement of elements, one has to consider it from multiple angles, to ponder its particularities and its totality. There is a lot of blank space. One has to interpret.
Then there was the issue of how to represent the characters. I am white and my goddaughter is Xhosa. While I appreciated other illustrators’ attempts at inclusion, the quota approach leads to counting games. I also didn’t like the saccharine effect of cute faces. So I bought a roll of brown kraft paper and began cutting out Adam and Eve in silhouette. Rudolph Steiner, I learned, determined that dolls without faces allow children greater imaginative identification, and I believe that’s what my figures invite. Turn David or Delilah into caricatures with polka dot eyes and they’re just another cartoon. Suggest their shape and apply a Neisha Crosland pattern for their clothes, and they pop.
Halfway through making this gift I realized the spiral-bound volume of black card stock was becoming a mock-up for something that should be brought to market. When I decided to create a publishable version, I had to strategize what could be included in the expanded page count. I found it a sacrilege that most children’s Bibles left out the Exile, an event which was responsible for the development of Judaism and consequently the birth of Christianity and Islam. I especially needed to truncate Genesis if I was going to fit in more Judges and prophets, and a page on Psalms and another on wisdom. Simple additions to the draft could throw off double-page spreads, like the Wilderness Quest board game and Solomon’s visit from the Queen of Sheba. And how to conclude it so that Jewish and Christian parents alike could read it to their children? I’d make it “To be continued…”
I worked on The Oldest Bedtime Story Ever during term breaks while I was finishing my PhD and for four years after that. I embedded references to Gauguin, Matisse, and Charles Renee Mackintosh. I included strips of a photograph of my late mother in the whirlwind when Job meets God face to face. And I nearly lost my mind weaving the rush of Esther’s seat and pasting down two layers of tissue for the edging along her gown.
In my last year, my partner and I set up an eco-project not far from where our goddaughter had been born. I replaced Abraham and Isaac’s costumes with shweshwe (“shway-shway”), the traditional fabric of the region. People from the surrounding villages, many of whom knew no English, looked at the pages I had printed. Their eyes lit up when they recognized the burning bush, and they laughed when they saw the slices of manna toast floating down from heaven. “Jesus!” one of the mamas exclaimed over this miracle. Well, sort of. But it was moments like this that showed me how God can unite people and erase racial barriers. If my Bible could touch the people of Mtwaku and appeal to my evangelical relatives in Virginia and even my atheist friends in Scotland, it was working. I had wanted to create something accessible to all, and Mama Nosakhe seemed to be telling me I had done so.
I paid homage to Nosakhe in my New Testament, where more cuttings of shweshwe can be found. She’s the one in the bandana rejoicing over Paul’s explanation to the Hebrews that we no longer need to be slaves to sin and death. She’s there again on the book jacket, lower right.
I needed to be methodical planning my New Testament narrative: forming a single story of the life and death of Jesus from four gospels; leaving ample room for the acts of the apostles; and figuring out how to transform the epistles into pictures. I also had to cover Revelation in four pages and make an Apocalypse that wouldn’t give kids nightmares. “The fine print” at the back summarizes the context and paper credits more succinctly than the seven pages I devoted to this material in the Old Testament.
I upped the ante on the details in the Christian sequel, with lorgnettes and python trimmings to bring the debate over Scripture to life and a pink feather fan for the sexy sinner Jesus befriends to the consternation of the Pharisees. Mary gets two looks: Pucci for her panic at the Annunciation, and an iconic First Lady’s ensemble for her mourning at the Deposition. The devil at the Temptation swirls down from the sky like circus entertainment, seductive spectacle rather than scary Satan, because who’s going to be tempted by an ogre with a worm crawling out his nose?
Mary at the Annunciation in Pucci
By the time I started illustrating The News about Jesus and How He Saved the World, I was a pro at how best to prepare my files for printing. Photoshop shortcuts cannot render the clean edges the scanned artwork requires, so I spent hours zoomed in and clicking the polygonal lasso tool. Executing this method for the strips I crushed to create withered grass on page sixty-seven—a minor detail few would likely ever notice—required herculean patience. Ditto for the number of times I re-made the Cadillac chariot above it. The switch to colored backgrounds instead of black led to wrangling when the printer’s Epson proofs failed to match what came out at press. It turns out changing a CMYK value to make one sheet’s green look more green can make other pages look like they were dragged through dishwater. But I persisted and they reprinted.
The day I made the last page, I showed a friend the freshly glued letters that read, “Jesus Saves.” He asked me, encouragingly, if I believed that, and the answer I fumbled indicates what I consider to be my Episcopalian reticence when it comes to proclaiming my faith. “I think so,” I said, explaining that I didn’t entirely know what it meant, but yes, love can save us. Another friend gave me a more media-ready answer when I related this incident to her a few months later: “Jesus was a rabbi, and rabbis were teachers, and education saves. So Jesus saves!”
It’s easy, living in New York, to feel alone in my attempt to have a relationship with God, but friends like these prove I’m not. There are still plenty of people on earth who are trying to pass on their experience of whatever that divine something is, and plenty of people who want their children to experience it too. It is no picnic trying to spread the word in the age of Instagram, when it seems like you have to be contentious or take your clothes off to draw interest. But it is my hope that my interpretations of the greatest classic of all time will reach them.
There’s a sad ending to the story about my goddaughter: by the age of twelve, her older brother had convinced her to be an atheist. Living in different hemispheres has stymied my soft diplomacy on the divine subject, but I have on a few occasions attempted to introduce certain metaphors and abstractions. I can at least take comfort in the fact that the kids in her mother’s Montessori school have been flipping through my pages on Moses and life in the promised land for the past seven years. Maybe somewhere a spark has been struck.
