RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThese alternating sections of memoir and historical fiction are held together by a cohesive and reflexive narrative, mirrored in illustrator Hugo Martínez’s delicate and sinewy lines, which move and angle to suggest the busy-ness and frisson of a world that always exceeds itself ... Like many works in Black Studies, Wake is committed to envisioning the things we know to be true, but that have, by design, been made difficult to prove ... Toggling between the present and the historical past, between the paucity of recorded details and the undeniability of historical events, Wake turns a rebuttal against the designed difficulty of empirical proof into the grounds for its own story. It’s this meta turn that fascinates, for it so brilliantly makes use of the positionality of the character Rebecca. Her actions, her embodiment, her movement through the world, all dramatize the complexities of being a Black woman in a white supremacist patriarchy ... we begin to know something without having been given any words we can cite to prove, or even just point to, where our knowledge comes from ... The memoir sections, in other words, don’t tell us what it’s like to be Rebecca, so much as they set the intellectual and personal aspects of her project in juxtaposition. The distribution of the life to images and the work to words makes powerful use of the comics medium, inviting the reader to sit with epistemological as well as formal connections. The visual world of this text, the comics that illustrate but more often propel the story, does something that work in Black Studies also does, though in a medium the field has rarely engaged. Wake accomplishes what the best work in Black Studies aims to do: not just to teach us something new, but to teach us how the very shape of our knowledge could be different ... wonderfully turns what might seem like a limitation or a lack of objectivity toward acts of learning and creating. It pushes past the limits of what’s possible, to tell us a story that wasn’t but now can be.
