Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

Fifteen-year-old Tina Malhotra's life is thrown for a loop when her best friend since kindergarten, Alex, deserts her and starts hanging out with the popular kids. Alone but defiant, Tina chooses to spend her time on her existentialist diary -- a project created by her teacher for his English class. Spouting wisdom straight from Jean Paul Sartre's books, Tina attempts to navigate high school and life using Sartre as inspiration, mentor, and friend. Although Tina is certain that she is not like any of the other teenagers in her school, the existentialist project does spur her on a journey of self discovery. Interestingly, this self-discovery revolves around the one obsession that she does share with all the other teenage girls in her school: the hallowed, mysterious and magical first kiss. Or, in Tina's case, the lack of one.

Tina's Mouth is written by Keshni Kashyap and illustrated by Mari Araki. The book is aimed at a young adult audience. Born and raised in L.A. by Indian parents, Kashyap is a screenwriter and director whose student films Hole and Good Thing won her UCLA Spotlight Awards. Originally from Japan, Mari Araki is a surrealist painter and digital artist who now resides in Southern California. While Tina's Mouth is Kashyap's first book, Araki has previously written and illustrated the decidedly adult Five Dicks the Charm.

Tina’s Mouth is dominated by text, often featuring prose-style sections as Tina writes in her journal. Since Tina's Mouth is the diary of a teenager, the art is aptly amateur and unpolished, which lends authenticity. However, Araki does manage to weave some surrealism into the panels. This is most obvious in a splash page where Tina asks, “What is nirvana, mon philosophe?” Her question is accompanied by a two-page spread of paisley patterns, flowers, butterflies and hearts at the center of which is Tina's mouth shooting out a rocket. The visual is representative of Tina's inner feelings; she's all butterflies and hearts as she prepares for that exquisite experience of her first kiss.

The artwork in Tina's Mouth is rendered in black, grey and white, with grey being the dominant shade. However, pairing huge swaths of grey with the white background of the page itself makes the artwork less arresting than it could have been. One of the other problems with the art in the book is not the artist's fault. On the splash pages, Araki's work is swallowed up in the middle by the binding, making some words unreadable and often throwing off the symmetry of the piece.

Tina's Mouth also veers away from traditional graphic novel format in that the book is not divided into panels uniformly. Panels often appear on the page next to huge chunks of text but often, there are no bordered panels at all. In this sense, Araki is extremely creative in her organization of text and art, and it is never difficult to follow the story despite the lack of conventional borders to divide one panel from another.

In the immediate aftermath of Alex's withdrawal from her, Tina finds herself in the unenviable position of having to start over in high school. The pressure does not destroy her sense of humor, however. She wryly notes one evening, while accompanying her parents to an Indian party that, “1. There is no point to anything. 2. Because death is final and random. 3. And existentialism is brilliant.” As soon as this realization hits her, she informs her parents that she is “not making my bed anymore. There is no point to it.”

Alex may have been Tina's first heartbreak but her story really begins when she falls in love with Neil Strumminger, a skateboarder. He's the one she wants to kiss. Mixing her newfound existentialism with her Hindu upbringing, Tina dreamily wonders, “Who knows why people fall in love. They just do. Maybe he looks like somebody from a past life that I was in love with.” Enchanting as Neil is, Tina learns about love, heart-break and angst in her brief and often confusing relationship with him.

Tina's narrative often goes beyond herself to include her parents, her sister Anjali, her brother Rahul and the larger South Asian community. The result is a portrait of an Indian family that thankfully breaks all stereotypes. As Tina herself notes, her parents “have never tried to lock me into a child marriage, nor have they pushed me into spelling competitions.” Instead, Tina's mother is something of an atheist, her sister is an artist and their world is anything but conservative. Of course, that doesn't mean that they are devoid of their cultural flavors. The Malhotras attend lavish parties thrown by their Indian friends, argue about the amount of ghee in the daal, and misguidedly try to set up Anjali with a suitable match when she returns from New York depressed over a failed relationship.

Sassy and funny with a wry sense of humor, Tina is an easy protagonist to relate to. With her easy wit and astute observations on life, which often make her seem more mature than her age, Tina resembles the title character from the 2007 film Juno, but without the teenage pregnancy bit. Every South Asian in America will identify when she notes that there are two questions people ask her when they find out that she's Indian: “What's a good Indian restaurant” and “What does the dot mean?” In the page that follows, more stereotypical questions spiral toward her as Tina stands in the center, her middle finger raised in a defiant gesture.

All in all, Tina's Mouth is a humorous and philosophical coming-of-age story that will appeal more to teenagers than adults. Kashyap captures the high school universe and articulates teenage angst with a finesse and dry wit that will charm fans of Catcher in the Rye and Juno.

Anisha Sridhar is a journalist and writer who writes all day and sometimes gets paid for it.