Metaphors Screaming His Name

Meg Petrillo

Interview by L. Valena
February 8, 2024

Can you describe the prompt that you responded to?

I received a poem called Metaphors Screaming My Name. It had 21 segments.

What were your first thoughts and feelings about it?

When I first received it, I was intimidated because I wasn't expecting something like this. As I really got to know it, I was able to see it in a cinematic kind of way. There are a lot of cut scenes, which made it kind of interesting. Since there were so many scenes, it felt like a natural fit for a comic.

There's this idea of an elephant in the room, which appears several times. But sometimes it also jumps to something very raw, and difficult. Themes of displacement, leaving a homeland and missing it. Thinking about that elephant in the room, some things that seem irrelevant on the surface level, and some things that are breaking the fourth wall. At other times, it talks about social and global issues, and really just jumping all over the world, all over this person's life and their sense of identity. It was super interesting.

Where did you go from there?

It felt like there was so much going on, and it was so beautifully dissonant, that you could take just one or two of these poems and they would stand alone. But taken together, there was a lot of context switching. So when I made the comic, I decided to arrange the panels around what seems like the elephant in the room to me: international conflict. That has been taking up a lot of space in the public consciousness and in social media. It's something that people want to engage with, or try really hard not to engage with, but either way it's there.

I went into my sketchbook. I did some studies of drawing elephants, but ultimately decided that this particular piece didn't require a perfect rendering of an elephant. I focused on getting the story down, kind of like a storyboard.

In panel #5, I decided not to even render it, but to take a photo from a grassroots reporter named Motaz Azaiza. I wanted to put that there, because I think a lot of people have seen it. I put a New York Times headline in there somewhere. Things that people react to. The writer of the poem alludes to the conflict a few times, and I didn't want to just ignore or glaze over it. I could have just taken one piece from this poem that was easier to grapple with, but I wanted to take the hard thing and make that the center.

And just to actually name the elephant in the room, we're talking about Gaza.

Yes! I'm so used to being intentionally vague, especially in professional contexts. That is absolutely the elephant in the room. The writing was so subtle, and kept the narrative just kind of skirting around this issue of the genocide in Palestine.

Even when there is a horrendous, terrifying genocide happening in the world right now, there is some sort of societal expectation to just go about our day as if nothing is happening. It does make things feel... fragmented.

Yes, and conflicted. This issue has put me in conflict with a lot of people I thought were thinking about things the way I do. Suddenly my trust in certain news sources has changed, political organizations and power structures... my thoughts about all of these things have changed. I suddenly find myself trying to do a lot of research, and also being cautious about where that information is coming from. For me, everything has changed. I guess I've become a lot more thoughtful, and the information surrounding us has become in some ways more accessible and in some ways less accessible and obscured. Yes, it's strange, and as you say, we also just have to go on living our lives. I've started having trust issues with everything, and I find I'm constantly asking questions these days. Why does this deadline have to be so soon? Maybe there's a reason we have to struggle to get by – they don't want us to protest or call things out.

There are a lot of things that branch out from that. If I could make this an infinitely large comic, and I had infinite time, it would just expand outward and keep going. I'm sure the writer feels very similar. You could go and fragment another conversation you have. A day that you read something in the newspaper or saw something on Instagram. It all kind of weaves a tapestry, as international conflicts happen, and as the nature of information seems to be changing. On social media, people are having to get creative with their wording when they're talking about the genocide in Palestine to avoid getting censored. They substitute different symbols for letters, or post screenshots where things have been crossed out... all to just talk about the news.

I've been to many protests over the years. I hope that the US stops funding this genocide. The voters know that our tax dollars, instead of going to our infrastructure, education and healthcare, are going to other militaries to extract wealth. That is supposed to somehow align with US interests, but it's not aligned with the citizens, just the handful of wealthy people who benefit from these acts.

Yeah, our entire culture is built on a foundation of cruelty and violence, and once you see it, you just can’t unsee it. Now that you've been through this process, do you have any advice for another artist approaching this for the first time?

I guess I would say to decide what you want it to be before you get started. It really helped me to know that I wanted to draw something simple from the beginning. If you're working with a large body of work, like what I had, it helps to take a step back and condense. Try to get the spirit of it, and emphasize what you want to emphasize, and then proceed from there.

Call Number: M90PP | R92VA.peMe

Meg Petrillo is an illustrator who hopes to become a good person someday. Meg sometimes works part-time, and is a freelancer. Meg lives in Munsee Lenape territory, also known as Rego Park, NY.