Christopher Myers, Wings
In Christopher Myers’ Wings a young girl recounts the harassment which a winged boy named Ikarus Jackson experiences from schoolmates, teachers, neighborhood kids, and police. When the narrator summons her voice to oppose the boy’s antagonists and celebrate his difference, they both feel freed. Myers’ invocation of Ikarus challenges and revises its Classical precedent. The wings of Myers’ modern Ikarus are intrinsic; they haven’t been crafted by his father, and they aren’t the unwitting means to an unfortunate end. Buoyed by the support of the girl-narrator, Ikarus Jackson’s wings become an expression of full, soaring self, and Myers’ picturebook becomes a recuperative reception of ancient myth. The medium of collage connects Myers’ book to a distinguished African American artistic tradition and suggests that we both make and are made from what our world provides. Wings acknowledges the material, social, and historical constraints by which we are circumscribed but also prompts us to discover within those constraints possibilities for active reassemblage and hopeful, restorative transformation.