Broken Frontier

Coney Island Avenue. Story and Art by Gary Sullivan.  Poetry by Nada Gordon. Elsewhere Vol. 1 no. 2. Gary Sullivan, 2006.

One sunny Sunday last May, I went to Coney Island.  On the boardwalk, in Astroland, at Nathan's, and all around the renovated train station, I saw every kind of person imaginable.  I saw old people, middle-aged, young people, and children.  I saw tall and thin and big and round, parents, grandparents, and dog lovers.  I saw Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and men and women from every continent.  I saw modest chador and dress chador, saris, jeans and T-shirts, miniskirts and tattoos.  I saw Mets caps and Yankees caps, Mexican braids and African braids, and mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, barkers and buskers, all different but all the same.  Everyone was there to have fun and socialize.

In America, the sea has delivered its riches in the form of immigrants from every corner of the earth.  Unless one is American Indian, one inherits immigrant culture, and each of us is a polyglot.  Some immigrant waves have been intensely violent, in the form of conquistadors and colonialists.  But since the latter part of the 19th century, the immigrant experience in America has been mirrored in Coney Island.  The dynamic diversity of Coney Island is only the more visible indication of the nature of American culture, which is the byproduct of the immigrant experience.  Different languages and traditions have mingled, creating new cultural forms and expressions at random, driven by the demands of coexistence, and commerce.  To deny the immigrant is to deny ourselves, to ban the immigrant language is to render ourselves mute. 

I thought about Elsewhere #2 that day, as I'd had some advance press.  I was curious to discover if Gary Sullivan's experience of Coney Island resonated with mine.  Elsewhere #2, Coney Island Avenue, is Sullivan's rendering of photographs taken on a walk up Coney Island Ave.  He says he was inspired by Nada Gordon's poem about Coney Island Avenue, a poem that "riffs off much of the signage and other sights, largely expressive of Coney Island Avenue's immigrant population."

Sullivan took a series of photographs of the sights of Coney Island Avenue by walking up the Avenue from the Boardwalk to Caton Place.  In creating the comic, he relied on Nada Gordon's poem, "concentrating on that which seems to address in some way issues particular to immigrant culture, such as how one navigates foreign environments--literal environments, and, of course, language, which is on a basic level a kind of environment."  He drew from photos of things that "are expressive of these immigrant populations--their signage, what they're selling, their events posters, the people themselves."

The comic reads like stills from a documentary film nearly stripped of narrative. The tumble-jumble of signs and words captures a certain aspect of the immigrant experience, a kind of busy interculturation in which languages meet and absorb each other's vocabulary and conventions.  A sign proudly states, "We speak English - Russain (sic) - Yiddish & Urdu", an incredible accomplishment.  Another, more emblematic of interculturation, speaks expert Spanglish: "Solicito Dish Washer y Bas Boy."   Some images mystify, like the image of Dopey, one of the Seven Dwarfs, dressed like a guerrilla and handling a Molotov cocktail and an AK-47.  Some are overtly political: "Being Muslim is not a crime!"  Others are ironic, like the awning advertising "Twin Towers Insurance."

The poem is every bit as jumbled as the comic, another reflection of the vivid cultural diversity of the Avenue.  Like Sullivan's comic, Gordon's poem reads as a straightforward report of the signs, avoiding interpretation in favor of capturing the pace and rhythm of the street.  

But at times, meaning emerges.  On the final page, Sullivan draws from a photo of a religious image.  Mary the Queen of Heaven is praying, while the Pope and an unknown saint worship her.  Doves fly around her, scattering flowers.  Is this image meant to be calming?  A warning?  Ironic?  There is no context to help the reader decide.  However, the text speaks of grace: "Grace infuses whirling faces with a dissonant gaiety."

Coney Island Avenue parallels my own Coney Island experience, presenting as it does the heterogeneity of Coney Island.  It makes a strong statement that American culture is a living creature born from cross-cultural encounter and conflict, constantly changing due to its steady diet of new incomers, and taking its form as a hybrid emerging from the traces left by one language on another.

Gary Sullivan does not use conventional narrative to tell a story.  He faithfully recreates the experience of walking up Coney Island Avenue, an experience easily recognizable to anyone visiting a vibrant multicultural neighborhood.  He documents the ongoing genesis of American culture. In our day-to-day lives, we may not always be conscious of the myriad processes that conspire to enable our existence.  Immigrant culture is the culture we all share.  In Coney Island Avenue, Sullivan makes American culture apparent at its point of birth the way the Hubble Telescope captures images of the birth of a star.