Warning for our readers: This article includes graphic imagery.
When designing my course, “Dying for God: Martyrdom from Antigone to ISIS,” for the first time in early 2016, I wanted to include an assignment that combined creative and analytical methods. The goal was to provide students with an opportunity to reflect upon the “production” of martyrs in a way that would make this historical phenomenon tactile and tangible. At a small bookstore in New York, I unexpectedly encountered Martyrdom: The Coloring Book (Zest Books, 2015), written by Hallie Fryd and illustrated by Julia Gfrörer. Marketed humorously as the only coloring book with a body count, this book toes the line between reverence and satire. Commenting on her approach to depicting the gruesome violence of a martyr’s death, Gfrörer notes: “We wanted to be respectful, religiously and culturally, while still highlighting what makes these stories so fascinating: the stalwart faith in the face of unrelenting and creative violence, and the mythical touches of talking animals, dragons and angels.”[1] Each page contains a lurid rendering of a martyr at the moment of their death, a brief and witty summary of the martyr’s story, and other factoids (such as location, manner of death, and feast day).
As I flipped through page after brutal page of vivid images, I thought immediately of the question Elizabeth Castelli poses at the conclusion of her monumental book Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making: “What are the consequences, intended and unintended…of repetitiously reinscribing the link between violence and truth? What sorts of identifications and alliances are formed by celebrating this conjunction?” (p. 195). If a quick browse of the coloring book’s images prompted me to think about the participatory quality of martyrdom, I thought students, too, might find interacting with it useful in the same way. It occurred to me that coloring might be a helpful and engaging prompt into the deeper questions posed by the so-called “discourse of martyrdom.”
The first challenge of using a coloring book in a college class is overcoming the perceived stigma and creating a context in which the students understand their coloring to be purposeful. I have used this assignment four times, modifying it each time with those concerns in mind, but always receive the same mixed results. Some students find this assignment to be the most memorable and thought-provoking aspect of the course. Others, fewer in number but great in zeal, deem it infantilizing and pointless. I believe strongly in the idea of this assignment but the response from students has consistently raised questions about its effectiveness. With some humility, I describe both the positive and the rather negative reactions to this assignment in the hopes that, even in our pedagogical misses, we teachers learn something valuable from each other.
No Witnesses Without Witnesses: Coloring and the Production of Meaning
In her article, “Savage Miracles: The Redemption of Lost Honor in Roman Society and the Sacrament of the Gladiator and the Martyr,” historian Carlin Barton compares the brutality of the gladiator’s death to that of the Christian martyr. Emphasizing the role of the audience, Barton observes how the victims of Roman violence were “re-honored” by virtue of those spectators who, after the fact, imbued violent death in the Coliseum with a sacralizing force. Barton notes, “A martyr was a witness. But there were no martyrs without martyrs, no witnesses without witnesses” (p. 43). Martyrdom, as they say, is a spectator sport.
The first half of my course is dedicated to ancient stories of noble death and martyrdom--moving from Antigone and Socrates, to 2 Maccabees and Seneca, and then into the early Christian material that culminates with the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. By midterm, students have come to realize that martyrdom was not defined by a static list of “identifying characteristics.” As Elizabeth Castelli argues in Martyrdom and Memory, the martyr is made in the eyes of the audience, in the remembrances of those who tell the story, and refers to “a certain practice of culture making…by which meaning is generated out of suffering” (p. 196)
This insight – that later narration produces martyrs – formed the narrative frame for the course. Supplementing traditional writing assignments, the “Coloring Martyrdom” assignment was designed to facilitate an experience of “crafting an image” of martyrdom. By directly interacting with the images on the page, the one coloring becomes an active participant in producing the visual narrative of martyrdom. Coloring is a uniquely tactile way for students of varying artistic abilities to grapple with the fact that they are not just consumers of meaning but also makers and manipulators of meaning.
The assignment had two basic components:
Each student was to select three martyr images from the coloring book, two of which were required to be martyrs discussed in class. I recommended colored pencils, though some students used markers. The students were simply asked to “render the image of the martyr in vivid detail according to your own creative interpretation.”
After completing the coloring assignment, each student was asked to write a five-to-seven page (double-spaced) essay, responding to the following question prompted by Castelli’s argument: In what way is the tradition of martyrdom and noble death a “practice of culture making?” Urging them to select one theme we’ve explored (gender, maternity, kinship, purity, eternal rewards, painlessness, etc), I asked students to analyze how martyrs become symbols for broader cultural, political, and religious values.
o In a section just prior to the conclusion, students were asked to comment on their creative decisions in coloring, analyze how the experience of coloring martyr images affected their reading of the narratives, and reflect on how this activity deepened their understanding of martyrdom as a whole. I asked them to attach copies of the colored images, either hard copies or images on the pdf. I was clear from the outset that students would not be graded on their artistic abilities. The coloring would be assessed only through the reflection on it that they incorporated later in the paper.
In a later iteration, I encouraged students to select the images they would color with the theme of their essay in mind. If they focused on the theme of maternity, they would reflect that in their artistic choices in order to integrate the two components of the paper more fully.
This assignment had three specific outcomes. I wanted students to be able to: 1) identify and analyze the role of martyr stories in the production of a particular religious “truth”; 2) demonstrate this through persuasive readings of primary and secondary texts; and 3) reflect (self-)critically on the role of the audience/narrator in the production of the martyr, comparing historical narrations to their own coloring of martyrs’ images.
Student Reflections on the Assignment
While student reaction to the assignment was mixed, their actual analysis and reflections were illuminating and prompted lots of vigorous discussion in class. For example, one of the more interesting outcomes of this assignment was that students often commented upon their choices of color for skin tone. Here are two versions of how students rendered St. Agatha:
One student remarked:
“It wasn't until I finished coloring St. Agnes that I realized I instinctively chose a light skin tone that matches my own. In doing so, I made her more like myself, making her easy to identify with. Although it wasn't intentional and I don't feel any particular identification with her, it made me consider the way the martyrs are portrayed, both verbally and in art."
This issue was of particular interest when it came to how students chose to visualize Sts. Perpetua and Felicity. The question of skin complexion, a historical detail that might not arise in discussion of an ancient text from North Africa, immediately presents itself not only as a question of historicity but also a question of the presuppositions readers bring to ancient texts. For example, here are four different takes on the same image:
Some students found that coloring caused them to think about specific scholarly interventions they had encountered earlier in the semester. One student noted:
“Coloring St. Bartholomew’s muscles red...felt like common sense, but when I reached for a pencil to color his draping skin Stephanie Cobb’s article “Divine Analgesia” came to mind. Cobb explores the concept of spirit/body dualism; she explains that the absence of pain is symbolic of Jesus’s presence with the martyrs to help them heal, find strength and endure pain.”
Because this course is cross-listed with Women’s and Gender Studies, gender is a major focal point and always a popular theme of student interest in assignments. Many students choose to write their midterm on gender--sometimes focusing on sub-themes like masculinity or maternity. This student, for example, drew connections between their own religious upbringing and the martyrdom tradition, and the coloring made them self-reflexive about their desire to find an icon of feminist resistance in a female saint:
“Although my paper delves into the illusion of self-agency for female martyrs, coloring them made me feel a certain amount of pride in their stories and the memories they leave behind for other Christian women—even to the point of believing in their self-agency....St Lucy is my confirmation saint and I remember being very proud of her as a woman who rebelled against marriage in hopes to serve the poor and hungry of her time.”
This assignment encouraged students to confront and interrogate their role (even, at times, their complicity) as active participants in forming martyrdom traditions through the act of vivifying these images with color. Some students showed remarkable introspection about discovering their willingness to contribute so readily to a discourse that they had spent the previous six weeks analyzing and critiquing.
"I came to realize that what actually happened matters less. It is more about how the survivors and witnesses and storytellers feel about what happened."
"[Coloring] helped me manipulate certain elements of the stories to fit my own understanding....the act of coloring as experiencing the imagery of the martyrs brought me closer to feeling like I, too, was a witness."
"In being able to color this picture according [to my own interpretation], the story not only became Agnes's but also my own....I felt like I could manipulate it in any way to fit my life and my own struggles."
“Of course, the ‘coloring in’ of martyrs is not lost on me. The exercise reaffirmed the notion that not only martyrs, but history itself is ‘colored in’ by those who both record it and consume it.”
“I was drawn to portray the martyrs, the heroes of the stories, in more vibrant colors, and make their backgrounds and the background characters--their adversaries--more dull. It is interesting to think about how every person has shared their influenced perception of the martyrs in this way, and how many people's thoughts about them bleed into their stories to this day."
Concluding Reflections
Here I have provided examples of how some students found this assignment effective. In these cases, students combined rigorous analysis and nuanced self-reflection about the “discursive” function of martyrdom. Despite these more encouraging cases, each time I use this assignment, a handful of students express having significant frustrations with it. Some students found coloring not only ineffective but also offensive: “The coloring project was a joke. How can you make college students color? It was almost mocking our intelligence.”
No other assignment in my teaching career has generated such disparate reactions from the students than the one that involves this coloring book. In both the essay reflection and end-of-semester evaluations, students remarked that they felt self-conscious about how others would perceive them if they worked on the assignment in public. Some students always struggled to bridge the coloring activity with the analytical work, viewing the former as a waste of time. And a few even remarked that they felt the assignment confirmed the stereotype that humanities courses are unserious fluff, not as rigorous as the work they do in STEM classes. This is a risk, I think, with any creative assignment. Yet other such assignments I’ve used (composing a hagiography, for example) never receive the same level of heated negative feedback.
Every professor must learn to sift the ambivalence of student feedback with a thick skin and an openness to revision. But, if I’m being honest, the possibility that my assignment was serving as fodder for ridiculing the humanities dampened my enthusiasm for it--especially on a liberal arts campus that is rapidly tilting toward pre-professionalization. Last summer, as I was preparing to teach the class once again, the bookstore informed me that the coloring book was no longer available and so my decision was made for me. I pivoted to the wonderful graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey, a visual adaptation of the martyr’s story. Something was lost, though, in the shift from coloring book to graphic novel. While the graphic novel received a more uniformly positive response, the constructive reflections outlined above demonstrate that many students found the tactile, participatory aspect of coloring useful. As an activity that blends creativity, interpretation, and analysis, the coloring book provided students with a unique opportunity to understand why martyrdom isn’t simply the circumstances of a person’s death but rather the social and political consequences of how we remember the past.
[1] Marcia Z. Nelson, “The Red-Hot Adult Coloring Book Trend Reaches Religion and Spirituality,” Publishers Weekly (September 8, 2015).
The images and feedback are included in this article with the permission of the students.
John David Penniman is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. You can find him on Twitter.