History and legend sometimes merge like the Two-headed Serpent, a graphic novel about the encounter between an English convict and an Aboriginal tribe. Enter through this chronicle the sources of colonization.
An Aboriginal History
In the first chapter of The Two-headed Serpent, an elder tells during a vigil of a fight between Aboriginal nomads. After the battle, the return to the village is interrupted by the appearance of a gray man. For the inhabitants, it is the resurrection of a former chief, M'rrangoureuk but this man has forgotten everything including language. His skin was bleached by the passage into the Underworld. The men of the village do everything to help M'rrangoureuk regain his sanity: he is prepared his favorite meal, the men organize a great ceremony for him, they build him a hut away from the village.
The two-headed snake makes us penetrate without angelism into a little-known culture. We see the violence of the war and then the tenderness of the clan and their lives: the construction of huts, food made of larvae and opossums, patriarchal domination and elders, freer sex without taboos. We often flirt with the myth of the good savage and a naturalistic vision of the first peoples. The two-headed snake also has an ethnographic aspect. Back from the Underworld, M'rrangoureuk is first kept on the margins of the village then, by transgression, he returns to the center and opens up to his clan. He remains on the side of the feminine during the fights because a revenant can not fight.
Having seen the unknown in the ultramodity, it is M'rrangoureuk who will negotiate with the whites. Indeed, whites arrive in Australia. This colonization is seen from the side of the Aborigines who suffer a culture shock. They don't understand these white people. This misunderstanding turns into anger because these whites are arrogant.
An English story
The second chapter confuses the reader. These are the memoirs of an Englishman inspired by real events. William Buckley was exiled to New South Wales because of a simple robbery. Not supporting this prison slavery, he fled with two fellow inmates. But they know nothing about this country and will have to experiment to find food and clean water.
Unlike the other fugitives, William will go to the end preferring a probable death to return to the prison. He tries to survive while fleeing the barbarians necessarily anthropophagus. They are the ones who find him but, far from cooking him, they bring him fire and show him what can be eaten. He thinks he is travelling long distances but goes around in circles around the barn. It gradually loses traces of its original civilization such as Michel Tournier's Robinson. It will be necessary to wait until the end of this part to understand the secret corridor connecting these two peoples and then the next chapter reverses the point of view.
Published in the Noctambule collection at Soleil, Le serpent à deux têtes is the work of a single person Gani Jakupi, writer, illustrator and colorist. His drawing is close to a pencil evoking cave art or Hugo Pratt but it can also seem messy. Gani Jakupi limits the colors with an omnipresent brown. Aborigines are part of the landscape, they are in the land rather than above. On the contrary, the colors are more realistic in the chapter on Buckley.
The Two-Headed Serpent is a confusing work at first but quickly hypnotic. Gani Jakupiplunges the reader into the complexity of the period. It's hard to hide the twist in the middle of the book, but this clever construction is an ode to tolerance and a critique of racism. Savages are not who we believe and civilization is not necessarily the most tolerant.
Find on JustFocus, chronicles on other historical comics with On the side of hell and Locke & Key, the golden age.
