Monster Portraits

by Sofia Samatar, Del Samatar

Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny autobiography of otherness, it offers the record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of mixed-race children growing up Somali-American in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday—Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief notes and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary not the sum but the derangement of its parts.

Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the multi-racial child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. Monster Portraits resonates in a world obsessed with the Other, using captivating nomenclature, art, fiction, and essay to examine society’s damaging desire to define and divide. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, Art, Graphic Novels, Essays

88 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2017

About the author

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.

Everything I've read by Samatar has been excellent, but this is amazing. I've read it three times in three months and liked it more each time, and gotten new things out of it.

Now I guess I'll go read all her other writing, and also all the writing mentioned here. Including the people (Anne Boyer, Bhanu Kapil, Eduardo Corral) who gave Advance Praise, because obviously they have great taste. Apologies if I have omitted anything.
Field Theories
Silver Road: Maps, Essays and Calligraphies
Lover's Discourse
The Lover
An Elemental Thing
Poetics of Relation
Frankenstein
The Arabian Nights
The Hour of the Star
Romeo and Juliet
Constructing 'Monsters' in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture
Ariel
Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology
Coming to Writing and Other Essays
A Question of Power
On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature
Summa Theologica, 5 Vols
Thomas Talbot Waterman, Selected Readings in Anthropology UCB 1919
Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting
The System of Dante's Hell
Deborah Higgs Strickland, "The Future is Necessarily Monstrous"
Alfred Jarry
Monster Theory: Reading Culture
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
Kim
Elizabeth Costello
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Blood and Guts in High School
Anatomy of Restlessness
Samuel Butler's translation of the Odyssey
Aimé Césaire "a zone of incandescence"
On Monsters and Marvels
Slow Lightning
Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Can be read here: https://experimentalpoetsofcolor.file...)
Garments Against Women

Here at the end I'm reduced to begging you: Endure the scar. Let an insight come and find you.

Endure the scar. When you're alone, on the bus, on the tracks, in the vacant lot, on the edge of the bathroom sink, that's where they find you.

We went into the field to study monsters and they found us and they found us and they found us and they found us.

[TAP · Rating 4 out of 5]

One day I called my brother on the phone. He didn’t pick up, so I left a message saying we should tell our lives through monsters, as the ancient Egyptians told the year through the myth of Osiris. A mirror becomes architecture when you pass to the other side: this is what we had understood as children. I wanted to find that depth again, to plumb a vertical field. “Our world is another,” I managed to say before my brother’s phone cut me off. Late that night he texted me back: “Sounds dope.” I was encouraged by this, as dope suggests both a hallucinatory, pleasurable experience and crucial information, as in give me the straight dope. It didn’t occur to me then that it also means a fool.

My assumptions upon approaching Monster Portraits were incorrect. I expected a fictional journal cataloging monsters with little stories to bring them to life—and that is what you get on the surface, with detailed illustrations and anecdotes. But if you pay attention, you come to realize that the esoteric poetics describe the real monsters. Samatar has created a social commentary dissecting Othering, racism, and the internalized racism that arises out of viewing oneself as monstrous.

Monsters are so named because (White) society treats them as such, and society is the monster for doing so, but then the victims assimilate the self-hate and invoke the monster. Othering is damning.

Samatar makes clear what it means to be Other; it’s a hatred of the perpetrator, but also the victim. Society tries to categorize each human into their place. But what happens when you fit none of the molds, if you are not Black enough, not White enough, simply uncategorizable? Rejection from society and from self. Monsters abound.

Until the real monsters are clarified and classified and charged, people will suffer nonsensically. Ignorance isn’t bliss for all. Silence is complicity.

We went into the field to study monsters and they found us and they found us and they found us and they found us.

[Ashley Daviau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book was such a wonderful, unexpected gem! I picked it up at a library sale and I’ll forever be grateful because I probably would never have come across this without that sale. This magnificent book had me instantly wrapped around its finger as soon as I started it, it’s just absolutely dark and magical all at once. The art is phenomenal and adds so much to the story, it really brings everything to life! The story itself is fascinating as well, the poems and tales and monsters were all thoroughly spell binding.

[Mir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actual review, finally: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And author photo:


[Edit: I totally failed to post updates the second time, too. Third time's the charm!]

I'm going to reread this immediately. It will probably get 5 stars the second time.
I'll try to post updates and mark quotes this time.

While you wait (haha) go read her story in Long Hidden.

[Bogi Takács]

This was great, but so short! I would have liked to keep on reading! Also, I spy some oblique Renee Gladman references, waaaaaahhhhhhhhh *outpouring of emotions*

I have a bunch of short books to review, so I will probably put some of them together - I just wanted to quickly update my Goodreads so that I don't forget what's in my own queue. :)

Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sofia Samatar continues to be a genius -- this is in part, reworking / updating of Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, in part a highly idiosyncratic, somewhat collaborative memoir, in part a collection of obliquely linked stories; definitely a conceptual project. Unnervingly gorgeous writing. Vibrant illustrations.

[Idyll · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest, this book went over my head so high and so fast that it might have hit King Kong in the mug and knocked him out. But, I couldn't stop reading it. It is a monster that locks your eyes on the page, and hypnotises you with its strange words, and makes you feel intense feelings. Sometimes, the world and the Otherness is familiar. You find that sentence that lures you in and pulls you through a strange paragraph full of abstraction, until you meet another stunning sentence, and you keep turning the pages.

I read a review of this book on NPR that I fully understood and loved. But, I didn't get any of what it said from the book. I may have caught glimpses of it if I really tried, but some books really make me wonder if they are purposely speaking one thing to me and a different thing to someone else. They are monster books with many loudly disagreeing heads.

Some day, I might attempt some of the books that the author references in her text, because those lines are truly brilliant. It's a great ode to authors who write about monsters.

[Inda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm never disappointed with Sofia's work. I had no idea what to expect with this one, especially since it's supposed to be the story of her and her brother's lives as they were growing up. I'm reminded a bit of her short story "Ogres of East Africa" but with some hints of autobiography or memoir, which is a very interesting way to provide a dictionary of various monsters. I won't go into any spoilers, especially since the short book can be read in less than an hour, but I will say there were lines and some passages throughout that haunted me. Highly recommend.

[Allison Hammond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brimming with imagination and startling language, but maybe a bit too arcane for me. The Notes section at the back of the book is a great bibliography for further reading, but it felt too much like a key to all that came before. I think I wanted more story and less allusion. That said, I intend to read this again.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful mix of drawings and language from a brother-sister duo. The artwork had a similar look/feel across the selection, which was interesting but also a bit disappointing. Variety would have been appreciated. I was not surprised that Del Samatar is pursuing a tattoo career, as I could see his style being applied to that medium. The text by Sofia Samatar was at times quite powerful and incisive, and at others quite imaginative and far-reaching in its borrowing and references. Overall, a fabulous piece of work that might have done better with more of both offerings. Probably a book of greater value owned than borrowed.

[Avi Silver · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Sofia Samatar's writing in breathtaking. This collection reads both like poetry and an academic dissertation, and Del Samatar's illustrations are haunting. This book has made me feel a lot of things, and I have the sense that I'll need to reread it at least twice more before I even begin to understand them.

[Glennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reads like if the biologist from annihilation was trying to write bluets by Maggie Nelson. The blend of reality and imagination is so well done, and by that I mean, it’s actually very confusing. Certain fragments will stick with me for a long time, and the art certainly will.
Ty k for the rec

[enricocioni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sofia Samatar’s idea was to “tell our lives through monsters, as the ancient Egyptians told the year through the myth of Osiris”, to which her brother Del replied, “Sounds dope”. Sofia therefore does some research (“Most monsters, I read, have a horror of the camera, but will allow their portraits to be drawn by hand”), packs her bags full of pens (not knowing “what writing utensils were used in the monstrous regions”), drives to the station, and boards the train (careful to enter the car “marked with a diagram representing a human or a starfish”) that will take her deep into the monstrous regions—places like Carvay, Fanderlee, Snimron, Muramanae.

Sometimes she interviews monsters over drinks (“her fingers clicked crustacean-like against her cup”), sometimes she bravely crashes their weddings (“you will be presented with balls of scented wax. Press these into your ears to protect them from the hymns”), sometimes she observes them from a safe distance (“From my balcony, I watch them devouring their breakfasts of locusts and honey and shitting in the canal”). But almost from the very start of her journey Sofia begins to question the line that separates her (and her brother) from her subjects. If to be a monster means to be an assemblage of incongruous parts, does that mean that the Samatars—mixed-race Somali-Americans—are also monsters? What about being a woman, is that monstrous? What about being someone who thinks and writes for a living? Does Samatar’s profession make her like the blue-skinned scribes that sit atop the tallest pillars in the monster cities she visits, able to see everything but never acting on what they see, only ever writing about it? Her field notes become short, erudite essays, shot through with quotes and references to a broad range of authors, living and deceased, as well as memories of her and her brother’s childhood in the nineteen-eighties.

For my full review, including thoughts my childhood obsession with monsters and monster catalogues, head over to my blog, Strange Bookfellows: https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...

[Anna (lion_reads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ugh, this was so beautiful! Del Samatar's black and white illustrations are otherworldly. Sofia Samatar's writing is poetry. Together they explore Otherness through the fantastic and the surreal.

I love it all but here are some of my favourite bits:

"I packed a bag. It was mostly pens, and there were pens in my pockets and hair. I didn't know what writing utensils were used in the monstrous regions, and I was afraid of arriving unprepared...I felt the need to write faster, to make space for what was to come."

"While is monstrous. Simultaneity is monstrous.

Eye that can look at one another. To look, from a single face. Something unbearable."

"Like all monsters, we don't belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival. We arrived before community, before language to describe us, before the "Other" box on the census, before the war."

[Holly Walrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Samatar has teamed up with her brother for this hybrid speculative memoir of small, almost prose-poetry entries in a field guide of a woman's experience. These are not pieces that you can read quickly or easily. They need time to rest and be fed. I have kept this book by my bedside and read one piece at a time over a series of weeks. What I love about these is how personal and yet public they are, how Samatar negotiates the liminal of our understanding of self and the journey therein. This book is a short, but powerful.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was unlike anything I’ve ever read before and I thoroughly enjoyed every magical minute of it. It is poetry, part personal essay, part research, part myth making, and part myth unraveling—complemented by the most imaginative and detailed illustrations. It’s truly a treasure of a book that explores vital questions and social issues. Honestly, it’s so rich that it’s impossible to describe. Just read it!

[Yesno S · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the sixteenth century, the Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier used a play on words to attack the reverence for the sacramental wafer. In his pun, the monstrance holding the wafer became the monster that rises from the sea in Revelation 13. O monstra, monstra, monstratis nobis monstruosa monstra! 'O monster, monster, you have revealed to us the unnatural monster!' The sin was the worship of the creature in place of the Creator. The error was a passion for the image.

The Green Lady left me retching. I’d forgotten to hold my breath.

The monster itself is a revelation.

Balthasar Hubmaier was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. His wife, a stone around her neck, was drowned in the Danube."

7/10 rounded up

[Freesiab BookishReview · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved all of this. The metaphors of monster were excellent. What are we when we feel like a monster and what makes a real monster set into the backdrop of a fantasy quest with original art. Well done.

[Jbondandrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and different sort of read. I thought the drawings very good and enjoyed the style of writing.

[Grace]

I started reading this book they day the Queen died, and somehow that just feels right.

[Jennifer Pullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange and beautiful book. I will be thinking about it for a long time.

[Dax · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I really wanted to like this I just couldn't get over how pretentious the writer was. He would swing back from writing something that sounded beautiful to just masturbatory in nature. The art is great and the stories have promise but the writing lost me.

[Gina Zappa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She said she had claws on the inside too. Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching itself."

"Monsters are abjection. Monsters are the future. Monsters are sex."

"I don't know. What does it even mean to embrace your nature? Surely it can't mean explaining it all the time."

"Beseech, worry, and fascinate desire."

"Who hasn't ever wondered : am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person."

"Exiles and insomniacs share this feeling : that each is the only one."

This was a wonderful little book. It was filled with beautiful illustrations and equally beautiful writing.

[Magdalena Hai · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, this tiny book was amazing. I have no words. I have only quotes. I have so many quotes. Here's two of my favorites:

"Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that all women were caused by error: weak semen, unsuitable materials, or accidents such as "winds from the south". I tried to explain to the Miuliu that as a female and a Miuliu she would be considered, in my country, a monster twice over."

"Last night I said to a friend, another writer: "We insist on suffering because we feel so much guilt for living this way. To live for ideas, that's not an acceptable life."

Not an easy book, but a gorgeous one.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deft meditation on otherness, racial violence, gender and sexual oppression. Part poetry, part autobiography, part academic discourse, Samatar explores the definition between monsters (the other) and monstrous (those acts often perpetuated against the other) and where the lines blur between the two and what it means to except the labels. It’s both an indictment of contemporary culture and a beautiful book about survival.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like how she deals with monstrosity tbh.
Not sure about this bit though:

“I struck my fist against my chest and shouted about my clan. The children looked up in surprise from weaving their moth baskets. What is the truth of feeling? Without wishing to conflate or appropriate, I feel myself in the clan of Alan Turing dying of cyanide poisoning.”

[just.one.more.paige · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review originally appeared on the book review blog: Just One More Pa(i)ge.

I am not completely sure how/when I first heard of this collection. It’s very outside of my normal genre/style for reading, as a sort of graphic illustrated mini essay reflection memoir sort of thing. But, I am trying to branch out a bit in my reading, just a little bit at a time, and this seemed like a very unique way to do so.

This short collection is by a Somali-American brother-sister duo, one who wrote the essays and one who illustrated them. According to the blurb on the back, it is supposed to be a sort of memoir about their time growing up in America in the 1980s. Each essay/story is titled after a different kind or species of monster, with reflections that somehow tie into their life experiences. Now, I am a fantasy/sci-fi person at heart. I love a good escapist/imaginative story and am generally willing to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt much farther than the average person. And from that perspective, I absolutely loved the creativity in the different types of monsters, what they represented or how they were created/developed, that were included in this collection.

But there was definitely also a large disconnect for me throughout this reading experience. I really struggled to understand the essays/stories in the context that they were, theoretically, describing. There were a few moments where the messages were very clear, a few pieces where I was hit with meaning like a punch to the gut (I’ll point out some of those moments/passages/quotes specifically at the end of this review). Also, I did, from somewhere, get the general sense that these monsters were all meant to be personifications of the “deformities”/monstrousness/otherness these authors either saw in themselves or were seen by other people. But for the most part, I feel like I really didn’t “get” most of this collection, writing-wise. It was incredibly abstract, esoteric, erudite (as far as the number of references to people/quotes throughout that I knew I was missing eliciting deeper meaning from), in a way that made me, as a reader, feel very distant. Maybe that feeling was purposefully fostered, but I ended up ending up too disconnected, I think. *As a heads up to future readers, there is a section of “Notes” in the back that explains many of the references throughout the pieces and, after looking through that and then rereading a number of sections, I definitely feel like I have a slightly better grasp of the collection. So, make sure you look back/use that to begin with, if you decide to read this; the clarification it provides is really helpful.

The high point, for, was the illustrations of the monsters. They were, simply put, breathtaking. The amount of detail in each was astounding and I think I spent more time looking at each of them than it took for me to read the corresponding essays. The visual enhancement that they granted to each written piece was phenomenal. Just…stunning graphics.

This was less of a “read” and more of an “experience.” It was unique and creative and stirring and super intelligent and an artistic treat for the eyes. And it was short, so if you feel like any part of the above review speaks to you, I’d say go for it. Definitely worth the time to see what it’s all about. But, it’s hard for me to truly say I liked/enjoyed reading this, because of the effort it took to stay intellectually invested. (Emotionally I was present though, because like I mentioned, a few sections hit quite hard, and those kept me waiting/looking for the next one.) Overall, this successfully got me out of my comfort zone!

The Green Lady - Even though it was right at the beginning, the started as, and remained, one of my favorite stories and favorite illustrations, all together.

“Strangers, gods and monsters: interpreting otherness.”

The Clan of the Claw ¬¬– Another favorite. It had so much tangible-ness to the feel of it.

“I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens.”

“She said she had claws on the inside too. Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”

The Early Ones – Wow. My second favorite overall, and probably the most realistically (understandably) striking.

“But to see us run on the great plain at dawn is to see the landscape return to itself, beyond plastic and smog, returned to its archaic splendor, the panoply of acacia shadows, the thousand and one varieties of blue. We run. Sometimes we are fleeting and sometimes dancing.”

“All monsters, I thought, express relationships: not the ones we dream of, but the ones we have.”

“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

“The monster evokes, in equal measure, both compassion and its opposite.”
Everyday Monsters – One last full essay that I want to point out. This one was really striking and did one of the best overall jobs helping me really feel what these siblings felt while growing up, and the challenges/suffering they faced growing up.

“Light is a thing but lighting is a relationship.”

“Try as much as possible to conform and you will be saved by a wily grace. Imperfection is your genius.”

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens.

This is a unique book. In her brief introduction, Samatar writes that one day she messaged her brother to say "we should tell our lives through monsters."

Late that night he texted me back: "Sounds dope." I was encouraged by this, as dope suggests both a hallucinatory, pleasurable experience and crucial information, as in give me the straight dope. It didn't occur to me then that it also means a fool.

And here it is. A brief field guide describing their travels through the world of monsters, with words by Sofia and illustrations by Del. Hallucinatory, pleasurable, critical, and crucial.

The Samatars' mother is a white Mennonite, their father a converted Somali Muslim; they began their lives in Somalia before moving to a Mennonite community in the U.S. I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens. Their book conveys a veiled sense of this experience, of being seen by almost everyone as not quite normal, as not fully belonging, something outside and other, a type of monster. And what it feels like to be treated as such. A veiled sense, intertwined with the descriptions of the travel and the monsters.

From "The Abyss"

First, it was necessary to see them as monsters. . . .

I fear it is wrong to posit an opposition between monster and monstrous, yet I cannot escape the feeling that their relationship is special. It is not like the relationship between, for example, disaster and disastrous, which arrive together like rocks crashing down a hill. Disaster comes with disastrous to assist it in its work. But monstrous comes upon the monster while the monster is asleep. Think of the radio broadcasts in Rwanda, which, before the monstrous act, described the Tutsis, who were to be massacred, as cockroaches.

The gap between being and doing. Impossible to tell how deep. . . .

The monster is monstrous only insofar as it enables the monstrous act.

The language is a mix of personal, poetic, and academic, hyphenated and not fully belonging to any category itself; and the images are evocative. It's an experience for both the mind and the emotions, hazy and intuitive and precise all at the same time.

From "The Clan of the Claw"

Here, then: monsters combine things that ought not to go together. They are sites at which objects come into contact wrongly. To create a monster, collect pieces of different corpses and sew them together. Draw a human with long fangs or a pair of horns. Break down the line between humans and beasts. Revoke God's contract with Adam. Blend racial categories, mix genetic codes. This cross-breeding is fatal to the best qualities whether of the white man, the black, or the Indian, and produces an indescribable type whose physical and mental energy suffers.

Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that all women were caused by error: weak semen, unsuitable materials, or accidents such as "winds from the south." I tried to explain to the Miuliu that as a female and a Miuliu she would be considered, in my country, a monster twice over. . . .



Indescribable type. The monster destroys the integrity of the body. . . . The monster destroys the integrity of the (social) body. . . . The monster destroys the integrity of the body (politic). I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens. . . .

An indescribable type. Whose physical and mental energy suffers. The Miuliu gave me a basket to light my way back to the hotel. She said she had claws on the inside too. Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.

Unique, fascinating, and wonderful.

[Sienna · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, and the admission that I probably need to read it another 2-3 times (alongside some of the reference material) to properly understand its genius.

When I read Sofia Samatar, I'm expecting the kind of prose I got from Stranger in Olondria: so thick and luscious you can hardly breathe. It's absolutely divine, but not very accessible. So reading Monster Portraits and finding that each bite of fiction was, at least on the surface, very accessible indeed was a pleasant surprise!

I think short stories/prose poems are interesting because you don't need to explain yourself--and in fact it is sometimes harmful to the integrity of the story to try. They're little glimpses into strange worlds and lives, and it's okay if you don't get what's going on, as long as you feel something. I got that sense a lot with Monster Portraits, whose vignettes are strung loosely together with the underlying story of "my brother and I went to study monsters, here are our field notes". I didn't get the sense of any strong plot from the stories themselves; instead I got flashes of colour and smell and motion. The illustrations, obviously, helped with that. It was a wholly sensory experience, and I'd highly recommend it.

I think my favourite was the Miuliu, for two reasons: one, the illustration was so calm and sweethearted. Two, this was where I finally felt I'd breached the surface of the narrative and touched upon the critique of 'monstrousness' that it is. While it invokes all the sensory experiences I mentioned before, Monster Portraits is a meditation, a collection of little philosophical musings on what we ascribe the quality of monstrousness to, and why. It took me some time to settle into that kind of critical mindset, but once I was there, I was stuck there.

It's lingered ever since--like that suckerpunch of a last line.