Franny Choi, author of “Body/Paragraph,” chats about graphics, charts, “walking pornos” and the Absurd.

People often complain that nothing ever happens in my fiction. It has something to do, I think, with having a background in poetry—it’s so much easier to sit in one place and just describe, describe, muse, muse, wordplay, wordplay. But actually moving bodies through space and time? As much as I love stories, I’ve always had trouble telling them without worrying that I was boring people to death. Especially in a culture that increasingly prefers to get its news in the form of graphics, timelines, interactive slideshows, sound bites, and bullet points, the thought of narrating action with big blocks of text can begin to seem archaic, a waste of time, even.

This isn’t me taking a dump on text. Long live text, and long live the rambling complex sentence! In fact, I prefer to think of the graphics in this story as complex sentences, just reorganized in a way that allows the reader to explore them at his/her own pace, from multiple entry points, and, above all, visually. If one is creating literature to be experienced visually, why not optimize that visual potential?

Naturally, thinking about graphic literature got me thinking about other meanings of the word “graphic.” In a way, there’s something pornographic about these charts, something too visual, too easy about telling a story in this way. But being seen, exposed, and analyzed is an experience that those with racialized bodies must navigate every day. Entire histories and discourses are written onto our skin in every room we walk into, with or without our consent. Our bodies are too visual, too easy—walking pornos. Han-soo and Caroline’s story is that of two people whose attempt to take control of the visual representations of their racialized bodies is pushed to the limit, over the edge, ad absurdum.

And for some of us, the Absurd is the only place our experiences make any sense.