I Am Not a Monster: Jess MacCormack’s Shame Shame Go Away explores the horrors of trauma in a remarkable new graphic novel

CW: The following article discusses specific traumas, including suicide and sexual abuse.

I’ll never forget seeing Jess MacCormack’s Shame Shame Go Away images for the first time. At once monstrous, inscrutable, yet somehow also familiar and even grotesquely comforting, MacCormack’s imagery for this 2020 graphic book is primal and captures essential aspects of traumatic dysphoria. I felt like I recognized – in the imagery Jess uses to capture unspeakable horror and subsequent shame and fractured identity – a shared visual language of trauma. I brought the pictures to other people I knew who work on trauma. Sure enough, they recognized the iconography in Shame Shame Go Away as well. Indeed, there’s a fascinating literature out there on exactly this: the consistent, repeated visual motifs chosen by traumatized people to characterize the feelings and experiences that traumatized them. But the visual register can be so much more powerful than text or talk therapy when it comes to representing extreme states and emotions, and Shame Shame Go Away toes that difficult line between making something incredibly personal and creating a work that can speak to – and even help – many others too.

Like Jess, I had a friend who died by suicide when she should have been celebrating sweet sixteen, and like Jess, I have spent much of my life trying to make sense of trauma, sort through fragments, heal myself and help others to do the same. What I don’t share with Jess is a condition called DID, or dissociative identity disorder. In the case of the art book, Shame Shame Go Away, Jess MacCormack, an adult part (who deals more with the outside world), did not produce or was not aware of producing the images for the book. Instead, they woke up to them, fully formed, and worked to bring text and coherence to a burgeoning body of cryptic but intensely saturated images.

Mask-like faces, faces within faces, scarlet red genitals leaking fluids, and toothy bleeding mouths – there is a nightmarish, carnivalesque aspect to MacCormack’s iconography of shame that is truly unforgettable. When I first stumbled across the book’s Instagram account and was exposed to its remarkable imagery I thought to myself that I hadn’t seen visualizations this potent since Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, or Kiki Smith. The fact that the art was produced by dissociated personalities is a further testament both to the powerful drive, in the unconscious, to make sense of seemingly senseless violence and other bewildering life events, as well as to the wisdom of trauma. MacCormack’s palette of pastels plus hypersaturated primary and secondary colours makes it easier for the viewer to let go of conscious control and enter the planet of pain Shame Shame represents. Most of us do not want to stay here; but still, we can learn a great deal from revisiting, temporarily, the most overwhelming experiences of our young lives, and visualization can be essential to these creative and affective reconstructions.

DID develops as an attempt to protect the child from this kind of intensive pain. Trauma is, most literally, nothing more and nothing less than stimulation and disruption beyond what the self can actually process. In the case of DID this “self,” usually a young child, reacts to ongoing trauma by splitting into multiple selves so that each of them can take on a piece of the event(s), protect the other selves from it, and thereby continue to function. As maladaptive as the coping strategies cooked up by the unconscious ultimately are, they’re still astounding – and more than that, they’re still an attempt to be healthy and emotionally free.

But shame often clings to abused people like an unspeakable goo. “I am not a monster,” reads one of the many free-floating snippets of text in MacCormack’s graphic novel. It’s not an insignificant observation given the dirty, stained, tainted feeling many abuse victims have. In my article for TV Guide on the television show Sharp Objects, which is partially about adolescent self-injury, I discussed the notion that our traumatic pasts can at times make us feel like we have been ruined. MacCormack’s line “it seemed like one day I was still playing with Barbies and the next I was on drugs, partying in a ravine” speaks eloquently – and familiarly – to a ruination of childhood innocence. Later, the line “you looked away while I died” speaks even more poignantly to the broader issue of parental abandonment than it does to any particular abuser. In fact, this is one of the great strengths of MacCormack’s graphic novel: my reading of Shame Shame was shot through with the difficult but essential understanding that hurt people hurt people, and that for that matter prison does not provide solutions either. Shame Shame Go Away: Trauma, Me and D.I.D. is a brave, bold, and beautifully ugly book on the possibility of integration after trauma and redemption after regret, and it opens up a space for all of us to consider and attend to the disparate and sometimes unpleasant parts of ourselves.

Never Apart is hosting a virtual book launch for Jess MacCormack’s Shame Shame Go Away on Sunday, July 4 at 7:00 pm. The Zoom event features artist Sheena Hoszko and curator/artist jake more discussing trauma and art with MacCormack and will be moderated by Jordan Arseneault. Register for the free event here. Shame Shame Go Away is available now.