It remains one of the hardest things to accept today, knowing that we can’t avoid the latest report on hate-based violence, whether rooted in politics, race, opinions, or faith. At least for now, the 21st century is a time for hatred.
People are blinded by it, struggle to actively resist it, even cling to it like a religion, like a belief system to which they are somehow twistedly entitled.
And others cower in the presence of it, incapable of affecting it, helpless to escape its influence.
Yet Image Comics’ ‘Infidel,’ a five-issue miniseries collected in trade paperback written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Aaron Campbell, seeks to exploit hatred in order to demonstrate through recognizable tropes of the horror genre that bigotry is a monster as capable of haunting humanity as any silver screen spirit or unstoppable slasher.
When Aisha, a Muslim woman, and her multi-racial neighbors move into a languishing apartment building — once the site of a terrorist bombing perpetrated by a Muslim man — they discover themselves embroiled in a modern day ghost story where the specters themselves appear to feed like vampires on xenophobia, the likes of which the immediate community appears to possess in no short supply.
Haunted in her dreams by nightmarish visions and voices that appear to compel her to violently lash out against her neighbors, Aisha consistently struggles to find her place within the dichotomous walls of her new home. On the one hand, she wants nothing more than to assimilate into the community of the building — on the other hand, something in the lingering smoke of the terrorist bombing changed the molecular make-up of the building forever. Now, her neighbors’ muted, racist whispers, veiled comments about the character of her background seem to prohibit her from ever finding peace in her new home, challenging her to imagine that she will never be allowed to participate in the American Experiment.
Pichetshote and Campbell’s supporting cast are no less imperfectly human and authentically flawed in their portrayals, each of them demonstrating a singular, familiar response to the infusion of Muslim identity into the more mainstream values of American and western culture. While Aisha’s husband remains impatiently frustrated with the reception he and Aisha have received in the American apartment community, Aisha’s mother-in-law remains reluctant to fully accept Aisha’s cultural background. Her own mother believes that Aisha’s marriage to a non-Muslim is an affront to her faith. Neighbors, the memory of Muslim violence still fresh, remain suspicious of her, failing to linger in the communal hallways for long. Even Medina — Aisha’s closest friend — is at the end of her rope, thinking that things can never be normal in Aisha’s newfound multicultural family.
And these are the living creatures haunting Aisha …
In so introducing the central conflict of the limited series, the creators have constructed a familiar microcosm of the post-9/11 American landscape, almost 20 years later. These are characters suffering from trauma, and trauma itself haunts them like a ghost.
And when hauntings last long enough, people tend to imagine that a spirit inevitably waits behind each corner rather than imagine a medium could ever cleanse the home forever.
Structurally, Pichetshote’s story develops like a philosophical essay that weighs moral dilemmas with social priorities, positing questions about whether prejudice is generational and inevitable, theorizing whether goodness will ultimately exorcise the evil in the world. And just like the greatest philosophical quandaries, the answers that we hope for — perhaps even look for — don’t present themselves easily, and perhaps not at all.
Readers will enter this debate with a clear understanding of their own belief systems, even of those dogmas that they firmly believe they’ll resist. But what at first may strike the reader as a character’s reasonable behavior slowly starts to look a bit more extremist, and this transformation soon starts to look like the product of the same ghostly game play that threatens to change the story’s characters forever as well.
Meanwhile, Campbell’s pencils serve as the perfect lens through which to frame the narrative. His style is at once grounded in natural realism when it needs to be and yet jarring in its viscerally demonic style, and the extremes of these stylistic flourishes perfectly suit the orchestral-like melee of the story’s characterization, conflict, and structural development.
Confronting racism within the tropes of horror is nothing revolutionary, though it can be wildly more purposeful than through more traditional storytelling, more obvious genres (see: the documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror which we review here). If the antagonist of any horror text is a monster, there’s always room for a beast that looks like bigotry, and Pichetshote’s true purpose in opening the doors of this building to readers is to dramatize the fates of those people across the nation who mirror their graphic novel avatars here. And yet, though the series doesn’t definitively take a position that suggests what will ultimately happen — to the adoptive Muslim mother seeking to build a life, to the neighbor shocked into prejudice by tragedy, to the circle of friends who appear too inclusive to be true — the device has been constructed, the detonator set.
And the timer itself counts down to an impending moment — in the series’ conclusion as in the real world itself — when we will finally see if racism can be entirely eradicated from the world or simply defeated for a moment like a cancer in remission, as Medina describes it.
The truth is that we don’t fully know if the monster will remain standing or lie defeated when the smoke from this cultural and social explosive device clears within the context of the real world. It’s a question that the series’ creators hope to resolve before the conclusion of their tale, but no matter the conclusion itself, ‘Infidel’ is not meant to serve as a crystal ball, only as a potential guide, like history, as long as we remain dedicated enough to study it and embrace its lessons.
The destructive explosion of bigotry itself is impossibly inevitable. The result of its fury, though, is not quite as predictable.
It remains one of the hardest things to accept today.
You can find Infidel on Amazon (ad):
Justin Howard Query graduated from the University of Iowa with a Masters of Arts in Teaching Secondary Education and has taught English & journalism for the past 15 years in Oswego, IL, where he is also sponsor of the school’s student (oehowl.org) news magazine, the recipient of state & national awards for the past 10 years. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Image Comics’ Ice Cream Man. Personally, he has not won a single award for the content that he posts (@transl8edpoorly) on Twitter.
