The illustrator who won this year’s National Comic Award was a caring child. Hand in hand with her sick mother, little Bea Lema (A Coruña, 39 years old) visited meigas and healers; He processioned among demon-possessed men and open coffins; and he looked for the devil in the corners of his house in the Monte Alto neighborhood, in A Coruña. The woman who brought her into the world suffered from an illness for which no one could find a cure. She said she felt the demon getting into her bed, touching her. From the doctors he received nothing but pills and from those around him, murmurs of pity and shame.
His daughter, the only one who made an effort to understand his delusions and hallucinations, has exorcised that suffering with a graphic novel, The Body of Christ (Astiberri). Its pages are a plea in favor of empathy towards those who suffer from serious mental pathologies and a denunciation of the shortcomings that psychiatric care still suffers in Spain.
It took Bea Lema time to see the world through her mother’s eyes. The woman grew up in the forties, in an isolated village where religion permeated everything and the meigas and the aires (possessions) were part of the collective imagination. Psychiatrists were available to very few and processions and pilgrimages functioned as a tribal catharsis. Those rites freed those designated as crazy from daily oppression. “It was the event of the year in which they could leave the house and express themselves freely,” explains the author sitting at the drawing table in her studio in A Coruña, a renovated storage room in the same building that hosted the story told in the book. In these beliefs and in many charlatans, Lema’s mother found the relief and understanding that science denied her.
The doctor had at most 15 minutes to treat her. When his mother tried to express what she felt and saw in the consultation, her testimony was ignored or despised, Lema remembers. “Psychiatry needs more means so that professionals have time to listen, to have a one-on-one dialogue with the patient. Not even professionals who have that sensitivity can do it, because the system does not contemplate it,” he explains. He also sees it as important to educate families so that they learn to accompany the sick. “When someone has such an incoherent story, the most common thing is to deny them and try to change their mind. But that is not possible. What you have to do is admit that you cannot feel what that person is experiencing and ask them what they need, tell them that you are with them and reassure them.”
The love between mother and daughter
The Body of Christ It is a love story between mother and daughter and a hymn to the duality of life, one of the lessons Lema learned: “All situations, even the most painful, have a kind side. In mine, the love between mother and daughter. They have a relationship of very deep intimacy and understanding that would not have occurred if the disease had not been involved. Without falling into the naive vision of being grateful for experiencing something like this, I think you have to have the ability to see the pain and also the positive.”
Lema regrets that the medical system does not delve into the causes of mental illness. The delusions of these patients, he warns, can hide a symbolic language, the exorcism of some bad experience. “That demon that haunts my mother may have existed in her life, perhaps she felt harassed before. It’s something no one asked him about,” he remarks. “Why do so many women become crazy? Maybe because there is violence that we carry in many ways.”
The jury that awarded the National Comic Award to this Galician author highlights the “exploration of language” and the “alternative aesthetic resources” she uses in her work. The most surprising, the embroidery. His mother was a member of that army of seamstresses from A Coruña on whose backs the Inditex empire was built. He never wanted to teach his daughter the trade because he said that “he was very poorly paid, that he was a very slave.” But growing up at the foot of the sewing machine, surrounded by scraps, made it inevitable that Lema would learn it. With The Body of Christ has wanted to turn it around: “Because it is linked to women, embroidery and sewing have remained within homes and, at most, have been categorized as crafts. However, it should be considered an artistic medium like painting or sculpture.”
Subversive sewing against tyranny
The cartoonist knows only three authors who introduced embroidery in comics before her (the Belgians Aurélie William and Thisou Dartois and the British Gareth Brookes). The idea came to him after learning about the feat of the Chilean arpilleras. During the Pinochet dictatorship, with the press silenced, these women got together to embroider fabric illustrations in which they denounced the kidnappings and murders of the coup plotters. These textile paintings circumvented censorship, left the country and spread abroad what Chile was suffering. “It seemed wonderful to me that a profession that no one considered subversive was being subversive. I wanted to take that witness and take up sewing to tell my story,” says Lema.
At a book signing, an excited reader told her that her grandmother shared with her sister a secret code hidden in the embroidery that they both made and exchanged. Her great-aunt was mistreated by her husband and, through the figures she stitched and the color of the threads, she confided in him her state of mind and the situations she suffered.
Lema’s career in comics is a late vocation. She had drawn since she was little, but it was not well regarded at home. Could anyone in this world earn their bread with art? He studied the Degree in Industrial Design in Ferrol and worked for a few years in Sargadelos. A decade ago he went through a life crisis and began to interact in A Coruña with the comics world and the self-publishing sector, which allows publishing without editors involved. “I saw a lot of freedom there, that things could be done without having to draw canonically,” he explains. That and the “need” to “remember and understand” what happened to her, led her to the illustration that now feeds her: “Until that moment I wasn’t even a reader.”
The Body of Christ It began to take shape in Galician. The Body of Christ A short version of this autobiographical story was published in 2018, in black and seamless lines. The work that has won the National Award was completed in the world capital of comics. Lema obtained a place as a resident at the House of Authors in Angoulême, in France. She spent six months there in 2022. It was the first time she was separated from her mother, whom she had been responsible for taking care of alone since she was a child. The role was awarded to her father and brother because she was the only woman in the house.
The book talks about the crossroads of care. Now Lema is immersed in adapting her novel into an animated short film. Everything he has experienced has made him understand that science still cannot satisfy the spiritual needs of human beings that were previously relieved by religion and superstitions: “Life still has a mysterious part, there are many unanswered questions.” In his case, the void is filled by art and creation, “that silence, that intuitive process, listening to that inner voice.”