Bearing Witness
Suffering from postpartum depression after the birth of her first child, a 42-year-old musters up the courage to try for another baby. Struggling through two trimesters of nausea, exhaustion, and recurrent, intense dreams, she hopes to hit the 20-week milestone and see the light at the end of the tunnel, only to discover during a routine ultrasound scan that her baby has passed away in the womb. And so begins a surreal life on the other side of loss, where grief and ecstasy are often bedfellows, tears come from nowhere, other people’s babies become the objects of intense affection, and where the baby that never came to be shows up in stars, stones, seeds, and her toddler’s imagination.
Excerpt
Difference Engine, 2022
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
Vinita Ramani
Vinita Ramani is a writer and editor. She has previously worked as a journalist for various local and regional publications, and as a publicist for film festivals, both in Singapore and abroad.
Griselda Gabriele
Griselda Gabriele is a Singapore-based Indonesian artist with experience in editorial illustration and visual development for games and animation. She is passionate about storytelling, and interested in exploring the diverse history, (pop) culture, and faiths of Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
Short Notes with Vinita Ramani & Griselda Gabriele
What does "Mata Hati | 心眼 | Eye of the Heart | மனக்கண் வழியே" mean to you in writing?
Vinita Ramani: Revealing the raw beauty of living emotions.
Griselda Gabriele: Deep emotions, expressed honestly.
What does your writing process look like? Do you type or write? Are there multiple drafts, long pauses, or sudden bursts of activity?
Vinita Ramani: I used to write, but now I predominantly type. Multiple drafts and sudden bursts, with lots of tweaking in between.
Griselda Gabriele: I’ll try to adapt this to the illustration process. When we started the project, we already had a complete story in prose and some reference photos from Vinita, so I started with dividing the text into parts that will be preserved dialogues/narrations and parts that will be adapted to visuals. From there I went through three main stages: Thumbnailing, sketching/lining, then final rendering and speech bubbles. Thumbnailing was the most difficult part of the process since it set the flow, so I had multiple drafts and periods of researching followed by sudden bursts of drawing.
What does your working space look like?
Vinita Ramani: It’s the world out there. Cafes. Streetsides. Bus rides. Bedrooms. Stolen moments as life drifts by.
Griselda Gabriele: I have a little messy working desk with a PC, drawing tablet, and a stack of books and scrap papers on it. I do illustrations mostly on the PC, but scrap papers are useful to do very rough thumbnails and brainstorming.
Make an elevator pitch for your shortlisted work in 30 words or less.
Vinita Ramani: A story about both articulating loss and embracing the ones we’ve lost.
Griselda Gabriele: Bearing Witness is a raw and beautiful recounting of a real miscarriage experience, an often taboo topic. It explores the roles of medicine, community, and faith in the grieving process.
Could you share a pivotal moment as you were writing this work?
Vinita Ramani: Pregnancy and pregnancy loss can feel very temporally disorienting. It’s a time out of time. To locate the experience in time and allow myself to grieve, with the benefit of some distance from the experience, was powerful.
Griselda Gabriele: I would say it’s when I identified moments of beauty and joy in Vinita’s story and their importance to the book. These moments were when Vinita found respite in her faith and her daughter’s presence. Her miscarriage was sorrowful and painful, but ultimately, she regarded her son as beautiful and divine. It was the first time I had really heard of the experience presented in that way.
If you could give one advice to yourself when you were writing this book, what would it be?
Vinita Ramani: Say everything you need to say, first and foremost, to yourself. Let it sit. Then go back and be discerning about what is just meant for you, and what is meant for the world out there.
Griselda Gabriele: For Vinita and me to collaborate closely on adapting her prose into a comic script at a start. It was our first time working on a comic book together, and we were still figuring out a good workflow!
