Her aim is to resuscitate an unjustly forgotten figure - one who was the recipient of shockingly racist disparagement in the press, and who ultimately disappeared into the shadows of time - thereby heralding her own authorial brilliance. She may or may not be the subject of the Nadar portraits, one of which is reproduced here, of one “Maria l’Antillaise.” And the narrator may or may not actually be writing a book. In “Step of a Feral Cat,” a story whose narrator as well as its subject are unreliable, Marie NDiaye writes in the voice of a contemporary writer who professes to be writing a book about Maria Martínez, a Black Cuban guitarist and singer who attained brief celebrity in Europe in the mid-19th century.

Page spread from Visible: Text + Image, Two Lines Press, 2022

In their place is situated the notion of a single written (visible) language that observes both constituents as fundamentally identical: symbols that manifest meaning. In fact, there is no difference between them, only a problem known as logocentrism.” The project of Visible, inasmuch as it has a discernible goal (genuine art being goal-defiant), is to demolish the categories of word and image entirely. Many of Magritte’s works could be considered proto-memes here, the writer and artist Verónica Gerber Bicecci updates his ideas on the interplay of word and image for our times - the “age of the calligram.” This charming and challenging graphic essay, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, contends that now, more than ever, “The image-text relationship is inescapable. The anthology fittingly opens with a latter-day rewrite of René Magritte’s “Les Mots et les Images,” an explainer originally published in a 1929 issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Between its covers is an eccentric collection of hybrid marvels - poems, fiction, and essays in translation, combined with altered and documentary photographs, graphics, and even mud drawings - that idiosyncratically explore how memory captures the visual, and vice versa. It may not fill a centuries-old Wunderkammer, but Visible: Text + Image (Two Line Press, 2022) is still a cabinet of curiosities.

Visible by Verónica Gerber Bicecci