How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses by Tahneer Oksman

Abstract

Reviewed by: How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses by Tahneer Oksman Ari Y. Kelman How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses By Tahneer Oksman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Tahneer Oksman’s How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses is a literary study of Jewish women’s graphic novels. Or, more to the point, it is a study of graphic memoirs by Jewish women. From first to last, the book maintains an insightful and unsteady relationship to both its subject—the graphic memoirs themselves—and to the authors and subjects of the memoirs: the women who wrote them and whose lives they represent. Oksman’s book opens with a discussion of Aline Kominsky Crumb’s 1989 comic “Nose Job,” in which Kominsky Crumb is at odds with her own face. The book closes with a reflection on Leanne Finck’s book, A Bintel Brief, in which Oksman reflects, “Revisiting and revising the past in the present is a way from Jewish women to create spaces in which to dwell.” Both of these capture much of what happens in the intermediate pages as Oksman carefully and meticulously examines graphic memoirs by Jewish women and finds, over and over again, struggles and conflict over categories of identity. Yet, in focusing so keenly on the question of identity, she invariably ends up wrapped around a nearly endless chain of representation. Attending to graphic memoirs means reading, closely, a representation—a self-representation, in fact—of a person for whom the categories of “Jewish” and “woman” are not only mutable but contested. The underlying theme of the novels, Oksman argues, is to make sense of those identity labels by both reclaiming and resisting them. As Oksman observes about all of the books in her book, “self-representations can help revise or reconfigure feelings of being an outsider.” This is the heart of Oksman’s argument: claiming an identity also functions as an act of rejection. Her authors don identity categories like ill-fitting clothes, itchy and uncomfortable, but without other options for ways to present themselves in public. So they turn their dissatisfaction and discomfort into performance that changes both the ways in which we see the clothes and the sense we make of their wearers. Oksman turns what looks, sometimes, like fidgeting, into something that resembles a more carefully choreographed dance. As a result, one of the strongest themes in the book is that of a persistent sense of discomfort. It is already present in the examples above, but she also [End Page 119] refers to the comic memoir genre as a kind of “outsider art,” refers to one character’s “recurrent sense of exile,” and claims that the books about Israel that occupy her penultimate chapter “reimagine home.” Ultimately, the genre itself, as the focus of Oksman’s examination, comes to represent a kind of unstable medium for self-representation, in which the discursive and recursive, self-referential and self-conscious moves lay bare the fictions of identity that often obscure the realities of life as it is lived. This is the source of the book’s greatest strengths as well as its weaknesses. Oksman’s eye for detail, both literary and graphic, leads to numerous keen insights into the inner workings of the graphic memoir form. Yet, her efforts to make the complex combinations of image and text tell the story that she wants them to find her languishing in what sometimes seem like her close readings got too close to their subjects and suffered a bit from a lack of perspective. Similarly, her focus on identity leaves her wrapped around that term, even as the books about which she’s writing seem both drawn to and repulsed by it. To choose the concept of identity as the primary heuristic, even in books that are so much about selves, may have blinded Oksman to other kinds of cultural and political work that the books and their authors may represent. Her selection of subjects definitely captured the range of the genre; she never explained why she chose these particular works and not others like Ariel Shrag’s four-volume queer coming-of-age story, or any of...