While reading the interview in the back of Exit Wounds, Modan’s discussion about victimization was particularly enlightening (p. 183). She says that the Exit Wounds is about dropping the victim role, specifically for Israelis to stop playing that role so that they may move forward. When read through the lens of victimization, the story takes on a deeper layer than the surface story of an estranged son meeting his father’s estranged lover and falling for her offers. When we break down the various characters, it seems that they all embody the victim. For instance, the lady in the morgue is very cheery, which is juxtaposed by her position as being the morgue receptionist. Her defense is a particularly bothersome sunny disposition that we are not privy to seeing beneath. She is nonchalant about death and to her everything is just a matter of course. In other words, while Numi and Koby are freaking out about the fact that an unidentified body might be Gabriel and now they cannot be sure because he has been buried, the receptionist goes off to lunch and dismisses their emotional distraught-ness as nothing important. Her defense mechanism is her impenetrable upbeat-ness, which is a sign that she is thoroughly entrenched in the victim role. Instead of dealing with the facts of the bombings and bodies constantly moving in, she has become blind and untouchable to the atrocities around her.
Numi and Koby are both acting within their victim roles until the very end, when they lay such roles aside to be together. Koby’s emotional distance is indicative of his victimization, specifically by his father. When he does open up to Numi, because she has shown him kindness by getting him a perfect present that his father failed at, and they start to have sex, he overreacts to her joking comment, “Like father, like son” (p. 139), and leaves. He is not confident enough to take her joke at face value. Numi, on the other hand, plays the victim when it comes to her looks. She is not beautiful and is awkwardly tall – in no way is she the typical or even celebrated female and because of this she has been victimized. She is ready to assume that everyone believes her ugly, and does not want Koby to see her body (“Don’t look” (p. 136)). Both Koby and Numi, then, are equally victims, only in different ways.
Gabriel is perhaps the more complex of the characters because throughout Exit Wounds we mistakenly think Gabriel has been a victim of a bus station bombing (probably by Palestinians, though this is not mentioned). We find out throughout the course of the graphic novel that he has been the victimizer to both Numi and Koby. He victimized Numi by betraying her; Koby by not being a good father. The link between Gabriel and the Palestinians is interesting because in a way I think Gabriel represents the Palestinians, though this link is more complex than a simple straight line. If he does represent victimizers of Israel, but is also thought to be a victim of those victimizers, it would mean that Gabriel is a victim of himself, which I don’t think is necessarily wrong. This would probably need to be thought out in more detail, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
Finally, Koby sheds his emotional detachment and goes after Numi. The many obstacles he faces (gate, high wall, dogs, Numi’s initial rejection) are ones that would have probably convinced him to give up if he still was still playing the victim. Because he has finally shed that role, he is able to continue on. Numi likewise sheds her victim role, and in fact is able to use her physique to save Koby, thus validating her untypical femaleness. The happily-ever after ending takes place only because both Koby and Numi shed their victim roles thus giving them the capability of moving forward and being together.
I think your spot on with the victimization analysis in Exit Wounds, and that certainly provides a fascinating angle to the story given that it’s set amidst the larger cycle of conflict in the Middle East. As you point out, both Koby and Numi have suffered psychologically from Gabriel’s actions. It’s interesting that their intimacy is based on this shared victimization at the hands of Gabriel, and that they both need someone who has a personal understanding of this to ultimately find happiness (or at least a potentially successful relationship).
I think Modan takes a really unique approach to portraying victimization at the familial level and the daddy issues that linger for Koby. Exit Wounds isn’t the first text we’ve studied this semester that deals with characters facing problematic father-child relationships, but it broaches the subject in a very different way than either Maus or Fun Home. While both of these works contain lots of character interaction between the child and father in question, the figure of Gabriel is totally absent from Exit Wounds. Yet despite Koby’s inability to have any physical or verbal interactions with Gabriel, I do get the impression that he reaches some form of resolution in his fractured feelings towards his father.
I mentioned this briefly in our Twitter discussion, but for me, it felt like the absence of Gabriel really haunts the text. Early on, when Koby goes to his father’s abandoned home, the left over beers, the discarded dishes and piles of mail all create a weird sense of liminal space in the apartment. The son never gets a chance to interact with his father, but instead we see him interact with the left behind remnants of his father’s life, rummaging through the mail and even drinking one of the beers in the fridge. Even though Gabriel is physically absent from the moment – it seems like the boundaries built up between he and Koby begin to dissolve. When Koby waits at the house of his father’s new wife for Gabriel to return near the end of the text, it created a similar feeling for me. In fact, the majority of scenes in the text are defined by Gabriel’s absence, which in an odd way, serves to make him an omnipresent figure. Even in Koby and Numi’s interrupted sexual encounter, they are unable to escape Gabriel.
I would agree that Koby and Numi both seem on the road to overcoming their issues at the end of the novel. It’s interesting that they reach this resolution from a shared coping process with each other, rather than any direct conflict with their victimizer, in this case Gabriel.
I really like how you describe Gabriel as haunting the text. His absence is almost a presence, and I’m tempted to read Gabriel as both a metaphor and a metonym—as both a sign of something else entirely and a fragment of a much larger social reality. Is anyone with me on this? Aside from an absent father for Koby, how else might we read Gabriel?
I think the link between Gabriel and Palestinians is striking particularly because they’re both absent. I’m tempted to believe that Gabriel represents the larger conflict between Israel and Palestine via Gabriel as the Palestinians (even more fitting because he’s the father) and Numi and Koby as the Israelis. The fact that it’s a family conflict just drives that representation home for me. Beyond that, though Gabriel, because of his absence and his influence, also seems to be any sort of force that inflicts pain or disaster. As if Gabriel is chaos itself, or at least a large storm.
I felt like reading Waltz with Bashir alongside Exit Wounds provided even more evidence of the victimization you discuss here. While Waltz addresses the conflict between Israel and Palestine and Israel and Lebanon more directly, it still seems to fall in line with what Modan describes as an unwillingness for people to understand the underlying notions of the conflicts. Modan avoids the politics of the situation completely, while Waltz appears to dive right into them. However, Waltz still fails to acknowledge many of the issues, such as an Israeli state that supported the Lebanese Philangists and also helped create the Palestinian refugees who were massacred in Shabra and Shatila by Philangists in Lebanon. While I see the characters in Waltz more as trauma survivors than victims, there are still many parallels between the two works, except Waltz doesn’t have the “happily-ever-after ending” you describe. .