Trauma, Memory, History and its Counter Narration in Thi Bui’s Graphic Memoir The Best We Could Do

ABSTRACT

The idea of graphics has long been associated with entertainment, thus underlying the sense of gravity that graphic narratives attempt to portray. But lately this perception has changed and the scholarship in the field of graphic narratives has emerged tremendously, owing much to the texts by Eisner, Spiegelman, McCloud, and Chute, among many others. Bui’s sombre narrative presents the dreadful and horrifying reality of the Vietnam War and brings attention to the alternate representations which are mostly negated by the dominant discourse. Her aim is to locate the marginalised and give a material form to the absent. Loss, absence, trauma, history, and memories are rooted in the framework of the narrative. The choice of the graphic novel as a medium to narrate her story provides a dynamism to the understanding of the above-mentioned ideas. The very structure of the graphic novel is capable of vivifying these ideas. This paper, therefore, attempts to analyse Thi Bui’s debut graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, in order to understand the ideas of intergenerational trauma and counter narration of history as presented in the text and how she uses the medium of graphic novel to elaborate such ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Thi Bui
• graphic Memoir
• Vietnam War
• intergenerational trauma
• history

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to extend their heartfelt gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for such valuable feedback which shaped this paper to its final form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Baranowsky et al. talk in context of Holocaust survivor families. This paper extends the idea to understand the concept of trauma transmission across generations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abhilasha Gusain

Abhilasha Gusain is a doctoral research fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The focus of her research is on the graphical representation of the Vietnam War and the related issues like trauma, memory, history, violence, and migration, mainly through the reading of the graphic narratives.

Smita Jha

Dr. Smita Jha is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. Her areas of specialisation include Indian Writing in English, Linguistics, Critical Theories, Technical Communication, and Soft Skills.