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Abstract
Following its substantial diversification over the past two decades, graphic literature now occupies numerous symbolic locations within both the artistic field and other areas of representation and social discourse. While notably (auto)biographical, testimonial, and non-fictional graphic storytelling has contributed to the medium’s increased legitimization and visibility, it has also become fertile in addressing complex political issues such as war, displacement, and migration. Yet these newly “engaged” productions of a polysemic medium touch on several complex, partly interrelated questions. On the one hand lingers the reduction to the solely illustrative, on the other the suspicion of simplification and superficiality – all of which cannot be easily dismissed when graphic texts become simple pre-texts for other presumably extra-textual matter: identity, politics, society, and so on. However, like in the case of literature, certain forms of fictionalization and aesthetic play may meet with (ethical) reservations for topical issues which seem to rather call for “serious” and “factual” attention. And, of course, discursive and visual expression entertains a multiple relationship, where one may compensate for, double, or strategically contrast the other. Informed by such interrogations about the specificity of the medium and the intricacy of its new “engaged” formats, this essay focuses on the graphic work on migration and displacement of selected contemporary Francophone authors (Edmond Baudoin and Troubs, Yvan Alagbé, Jean-Philippe Stassen) and discusses several ways of representing and reflecting on death of migrants and refugees in these narratives. It will demonstrate that writing about such sensitive problems does not have the same scenographical implications, nor does it trigger the same (empathetic and critical) response as drawing them. This ultimately reveals that the aesthetic and political relevance of these graphic works lies in the medium’s characteristic interplay between text and image.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the artists and publishers for their kind permission to reproduce the images in this essay. This work was supported by funding from the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong (Ref. number: 18601921).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the French throughout this essay are mine.
2 The use of “author” and “artist” throughout the essay is related to the manifest (self-) perception of French “comics” creators as being part of a highly visible and recognized mode of expression in a country where bande dessinée is seen as “art”, located beyond the popular entertainment industry, and not insignificantly invested by auteurism.
3 These three authors have indeed become iconic in the Francophone bande dessinée scene and beyond. Their work has been largely translated. Notably the series Persepolis (Satrapi) and L’Arabe du futur (Sattouf) earned major critical and commercial acclaim worldwide, the former also featuring as a successful animated film.
4 By way of example, Jérôme Ruillier’s L’étrange [The strange] (2016) has been supported by Amnesty International. Artist Lisa Mandel has associated sociologist Yasmina Bouagga to her Les Nouvelles de la Jungle (de Calais) [News from the Jungle (of Calais)] (2017).
5 One may here see an analogy with Alessandro Corso’s work on doubt as constitutive to an understanding of ethics in anthropological research in borderland situations. Cf. “Thanatic Ethics” Webinar (14 January 2022), https://www.thanaticethics.com.
6 For the general topic of migration, see Marie and Ollivier (Citation2013); Arnold (Citation2019); McKinney (Citation2020). It often relates to the graphic textualities of the larger field of postcolonial comics (Mehta & Mukherji Citation2015).
7 In this auteurist production, migrant death is also addressed, e.g. in Charles Masson’s Droit du sol (2009) or Vincent Zabus’ and Hippolyte’s Les Ombres (2015).
8 This cannot be generalized though, given the existence of graphic literature without any discursive material.
9 Mondzain’s ideas of the “imaginary zone” and the “fictional leap” as a fertile ground not only for author, but also for reader agency, may indeed benefit from being read in conjunction with affective or transactional approaches from reception theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt and Wolfgang Iser. I’d like to extend my thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this possible connection.
10 For a critique of such sensationalist representations in graphic literature about the Rwandan genocide, see Arnold and Plaiche (Citation2015).
11 One of the merits of Stassen’s collection is indeed to represent African migration above all as an intra-African reality rather than a sole centrifugal movement to the Global North – which remains indeed a dominant interpretation within Western mainstream media and political circles and public opinion. This principally intra-continental dimension of migration is depicted on an expressive African map showing the characters’ intricate itinerancies at the end of Stassen’s collection.
12 Amongst such irony is the subtle use of the “bien sûr” (of course), again between commas, when looking for the reader’s approval about the – possibly not so obvious – reality of the Spanish enclaves in Morocco which therefore rather appear as a remnant of colonial regimes. A more explicit form is the author’s invitation for the reader to put inverted commas around the verb “rendre” (give back) when speaking about the Muslims “giving back” Tarifa to the Christians in 1292.
13 Indeed, the text panel with the questioning of the term “giving back” appears on top of a partial representation of a commemorative plate in Spanish which becomes a visual leitmotif in the sequence and literally translates as “[Tarifa] won over from the Moors” (“ganada a los moros”).
14 I’m borrowing the expression from Carolina Kobelinsky’s paper entitled “Making a Place for the Dead by Migration: Experiences from Catania (Sicily)” (“Thanatic Ethics” Workshop 1, Montpellier, 1 April 2021).
15 Though there are no migrants visible in Stassen’s passage, the clash of these antagonistic universes recalls the street art by the Mexican graffiti artist Yescka, for example, his mural in Tarifa confronting a white surfer walking with his board towards a black refugee fleeing with a lifebuoy; https://spiderwebassembly.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/yescka-the-street-is-a-mirror-for-the-people.
16 By way of an example, he uses the migratory space to subtly criticize various forms of (interracial) allegiances. He questions the supposed Muslim brotherhood between Arabs and Black Africans (24), makes fun of naïve Western philanthropy in support of “the Black people oppressed by the White Man” (26), and demystifies Black solidarity.
17 Not insignificantly, the Moroccan character speaks of “envoyer” [sending] the body to Algeria rather than “rapatrier”.
18 This closing passage of Stassen echoes with sociologist Valérie Cuzol’s and photographer Frédéric Lecloux’s work on intimacy and politics in ethnobiographical filmmaking about death in the immigrant space between the Maghreb and France. See “Thanatic Ethics” Webinar (4 February 2022).
19 For the use of reportage in graphic literature, see e.g. Miller (Citation2008).
20 Baudoin has made several public interventions committed to the migrant and refugee cause, like his graphic engagement for the show “Un mot, une actu, un dessin” [One word, one news item, one drawing] on the French national radio station France Culture on 28 January 2019.
21 It should be noted that Alagbé’s controversial use of the offensive term “Nègres” in French – both in the 1994 original story and its 2012 publication in the collection – resonates with the no less problematic use of “Negroes” in the English translation (Alagbé Citation2018), where the term also appears in a final addendum (as quoted later in this essay). Such contentious rhetoric arguably contributes to the highly political and provocative artistic stance of the Franco-Beninese author.
22 This is reminiscent of Ray Fawkes’ experimental graphic novel One Soul (2011) where each of the parallel characters depicted disappears into a black panel upon his death.
23 While I concur here with McKinney (Citation2020, 259), Alagbé’s figurative experimentation does not only concern characters related to migratory and postcolonial issues but constitutes a general stylistic trait in the artist’s oeuvre, thus contributing to “universalise” his themes as focused on marginality as they may be.
24 The artwork can be consulted on the artist’s website: https://pierredelavie.com/radeau-de-lampeduse. Its title, “The Raft of Lampedusa”, refers to the famous oil painting The Raft of Medusa (1818–1819) by French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault.