Shake Girl: a graphic novel. Written and illustrated by the members of the 2008 Stanford University Graphic Novel Project. http://www.stanford.edu/group/cwstudents/shakegirl/
By Beth Hewitt
Shake Girl is a remarkable book—not least of which
because it has forced me to relinquish a long-held belief
in the impossibility of corporate authorship. The “graphic
novel” (as it is official subtitled) is the creation of 15
undergraduate students studying at Stanford University, who
were members of the 2008 Stanford University Graphic Novel
Project. As the editors, Adam Johnson and Thomas Kealey
(who were also the students’ professors) note, it does seem
“a little miraculous” (I would say more than a little) that
these students were able to write, illustrate and
design Shake
Girl in six
weeks. Also miraculous is the novel’s aesthetic and
emotional cohesiveness and beauty. Their story is based on
a true tale of a young Cambodian woman who wants to be a
dancer, but ends up the mistress of a wealthy Cambodian
businessman. According to Johnson and Kealey, once the
students heard her tale (by way of a visiting journalist,
Eric Pape), they immediately determined her story would be
the subject of their graphic novel project.
The novel gives us an intimate portrait of one small and
powerless individual—the eponymous heroine, who makes her
living selling fruit shakes in the streets of Phnom Penh.
Although she was born long after the fall of the Khmer
Rouge, the novel represents the ways in which the legacy of
Pol Pot affects all its citizens. The book begins with her
explaining that “one of the best spots” for a shake stand
is in front of the Torture Museum. Tourists, anxious to
“get their mind off genocide,” buy lots of shakes, and,
eager to assuage any guilt, they tip her heavily. And yet,
for all the political context of the narrative, the story
of the Shake Girl follows a very conventional novelistic
archetype: a tragic seduction tale.
We follow the Shake Girl’s first-person narrative from a 14
year-old working at the stand to a 15 year-old girl working
as a karaoke girl in a bar patronized by wealthy
businessmen, government officials, and military men—many of
whom were former members of the Khmer Rouge. The karaoke
girls are pretty young Cambodian women who serve drinks and
flirt with the clientele, and we learn that many of
them—including our heroine—become lovers and mistresses of
the men they meet in the bar. The Shake Girl meets a
wealthy man, Frankie, and the novel reveals the life of
being the other woman—not the “first wife”—as well as the
horrible crimes inflicted on these poor women. Although my
description of the novel as a tragedy will indicate that
this is no fairy tale, I won’t reveal the details of what
happens to the Shake Girl, save to say, it is a moving and
heart-wrenching story of what is, in fact, the commonplace
violence against women.
Although in his afterword, Eric Pape tells us the real
heroine’s name, the writers never provide her name in the
novel: she is forever just Shake Girl. I will confess that
I did not notice she was nameless until I read back through
the novel to try to discover it. This fact speaks to the
complexity of the novel, which offers us the life history
of an individual person, and yet, also subtly allows us to
see this individual as allegorical. This effect is also
achieved because the multiple artists, who illustrate her,
draw her differently—always with the same basic features,
but with subtle mutations. Consequentially, she is always
the heroine of her private tragedy, but she also stands in
for the many (Cambodians, women, post-colonial citizens
subject to wars both foreign and civil, etc.).
The novel’s ability to relay the Shake Girl’s private tale
as One that, like a pebble in a pond, patterns the stories
of Many also characterizes the Graphic Novel Project
itself, which coordinates the voices and vision of fifteen
different authors into their effortlessly cohesive novel.
Each of the students was involved in either writing the
script or in illustration: thus, this was not a project in
which the committee talked through the tale, ultimately
relinquishing creative control to one writer and one
illustrator. Often times, when I have read a novel that has
multiple illustrators, I find myself annoyed by the
variety—anxious to return to the style or look that I like
best. I never felt this in reading Shake Girl: not because the illustrations were so
similar, but because the illustrative change seemed a
stunning way to visualize the story of this young woman’s
passage through life. Unlike the art, I could not determine
any stylistic differences in the narrative (despite my
knowledge that different people had written different parts
of the script): the voice I heard was always the Shake
Girl’s. And, thus, the novel can brilliantly end with her
proclamation, “I am still myself.” We should all read their
story of her story of self.
