Without Words But Not Speechless

Evany Zirul is a retired surgeon and an accomplished artist. Working as a sculptor of metal and drawing and painting in a variety of medium, she sent Fomite Press a collection of cartoons/comics she composed during Donald Trump's first term after Ishmael Reed mentioned this project to her. Like Reed's drawings, the art is mostly wordless. Although focused on the person of Trump himself, the cartoons from Reed and Ziruly reveal an important truth: Donald Trump is both a personification of his authoritarian/fascist politics and a metaphor representing those in the US population whose white supremacist politics and the cruel manifestation of those politics is their essential identity.

Ishmael Reed is one of the greatest US writers in the English language. His wit, imagination and critical understanding of US life and history shouts, whispers, entices, jokes and seduces the readers of his novels, poetry, criticism, commentary and journalism. In a manner that is not merely imaginative but damn right psychedelic at times, his tales of African-American life and lives (which by default are also tales of white American life) are tinged with tragedy told with a humor and sensibility that defies classification. In this tract, Mr. Reed has left words elsewhere, providing us instead with a few cartoons mostly drawn in the first act of the trumpian tragicomedy. These cartoons serve both to remind us that Trump and his minions never made any bones about their project. The fact that some residents of the USA still act surprised when the trumpists do what they said they would is a contrived naivete that either hides their agreement or shows their gullibility (or is it stupidity?)