Jim, a majestic smooth-haired retriever, accompanied the cartoonist François Schuiten (Brussels, 1956) for 13 years. It was common to see them together in presentations, interviews or talks. “If they invited me and he couldn’t go, I wouldn’t go either. Jim was a kind of filter,” explains Schuiten in a telephone conversation with ‘La Vanguardia’. When he passed away he felt the need to express his pain through drawing. Instead of daily walks, he dedicated some time to drawing it. The result is a small and emotional book titled, Jim, an intimate, tender and beautiful mourning notebook, in which Schuiten reflects on the bond between humans and animals and captures his sadness with black ink that evokes the color of his dog’s fur. dog. Libros del Zorro Rojo now publishes it in Spanish, with a translation by Emilio Manzano.
It must be difficult for you to talk about this book…
I had no intention of publishing these drawings. I was working on another project when the disappearance of my dog ??forced me to drop everything because the only thing that comforted me was drawing him. I needed to draw it to capture that emotion that is both cruel and fleeting, very fragile. I knew that feeling would slip away like sand through my hands. That’s why I forced myself to make a drawing a day, no matter what.
It’s hard to talk about the sadness over the loss of our dog.
There is a hierarchy of grief. The loss of a child, of parents, of friends, of course, is not the same. The loss of an animal may seem insignificant to those who have not had a deep bond with a dog or cat. However, the disappearance of an animal touches very intimate areas, which are not talked about much. For me, drawing it was a way to talk about it without shame and without barriers.
How do you explain those bonds to someone who has not had a pet?
Really, the theme of the book is that invisible link, that relationship between humans and animals. The truth is that we are changing the perspective, in another era, an animal did not have the same value. Now we are aware of his suffering, of his intelligence. We must accept that the man-animal relationship is much more complex than we thought, much more subtle.
At what moment did you decide to publish these drawings?
My son put a drawing of Jim on social media. Then he told me: “Dad, you’ve never had so many reactions, not even when I post a picture that you spent three weeks making.” People around me told me that they had seen the drawing and they didn’t talk to me about anything else.
Was drawing your dog a way to remember him?
Drawing it was a way of trying to understand what was happening. For me, drawing has always helped me to observe and understand. I have the feeling that only if I draw do I begin to learn to look. It was about that. And, of course, there was also the pleasure of drawing it, because when I drew it I found it again.
In the prologue he says that this book is a love letter to his dog, but it also seems to me to be a love letter to drawing, to its expressive, therapeutic capacity…
Yes, you are right, there is a value in drawing as therapy, in drawing as relief… It is the first time I draw so fast. My style is very laborious and here, on the other hand, there are drawings that I made very quickly because they are like a scream. I decided to trust the drawing and let go.
By portraying his dog we have discovered the most human facet of his drawing…
In my books, I describe a world deeply inhabited, deeply involved by humans, but it is not what is retained. Jim is the opposite, Jim captures the human, the fragile dimension of life, the emotion.
The small texts that accompany the images make this book very moving.
I worked a lot on those texts. I rewrote them ten times because I didn’t want to be redundant. The text must say something else than the image, it must illuminate it, make the drawing look different. We look first at the drawing, then at the text, and then the meaning of the image changes. The text-image relationship is part of the deepest part of my writing. I need the drawing, but I also need the text. I always look for how to renew this relationship a little to renew myself.
I imagine that when the book was published in French, many people reached out to you to share other experiences of grief with their dogs.
This has been the great discovery I have made with this book. It is not at all the same audience that I have usually had. I find readers who tell me about the book, about their dog… and then the tears come. It is exciting. This book allows us to understand that we can talk about grieving for our dog in another way. We can talk about this pain without being ashamed or hiding the suffering it generates in us.
You now have another dog…
Yes, many people say that when a dog has died it is no longer possible to have another one. Because the one who is gone is unique and cannot be replaced. I was completely aware of that. But after three, four months, I began to obsessively look at the dogs on the street, I wanted to get closer, pet them… I missed having a dog by my side.
I understand…
A dog sets the pace for your day, forces you to go out for a walk… It’s a matter of vital hygiene. And also mental hygiene because you get out of yourself a little. You have to think about something other than your problems and your life. You should think about him and his enjoyment of being outside and with other dogs. It’s something I missed very early on and didn’t want to lose. Having a dog is a very rich experience, it is not just the relationship with it, it is the relationship with the animal world in general. Having a dog is having a piece of the animal world with you. It is looking at the world in a different way.
There are not many books that talk about mourning for a pet.
No, there aren’t many. And even less books with pictures. This is important because I believe that drawing can convey things that words cannot say. This is what obsessed me in this book: What can the drawing say? At what point do you express things that are really specific? I wanted to go to the heart of an emotion that cannot pass through words.
