The theory-practice interplay in creating a graphic memoir about the trauma of forced migration

ABSTRACT

In my graphic memoir The Wounds of Separation I combined personal memory and historical fact incorporating conceptual insights to tell a story about the way traumas are remembered. The story describes the forced migration of a child and how, in order to survive the devastation of WWII a young girl is separated from her parents and home causing lasting impacts on her life. The narrative content was enriched by a research process that involved understandings gained from trauma theories. In this paper I explore how these theoretical understandings shaped the creation of my graphic memoir and how representational theories helped direct the narrative choices to communicate the experience of trauma. I show how the conceptual underpinnings have been realised in my multimodal narrative identifying the text/image options that make the graphic memoir an appropriate representational choice. In my analysis of pages I describe the intended meanings I aim to communicate and explain the creative expression of those ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• Graphic memoir
• creative practice
• trauma theory
• postmemory
• graphic representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This acknowledges that a range of stimulating material produces ideas in the form of creative imagination, ‘making imaginative associations between such disparate elements’ (Duxbury 2009, 57).

2. Definitions of the graphic novel are discussed in many scholarly texts including: Eisner (1985); Chute (2006a); McCloud (1993); Sly (2014); Tabachnick (1997) and Versaci (2007).

3. I analysed three sample texts – Marjane Satrapi’s (2003) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, David Small’s (2010) Stitches: A memoir and Una (2016) Becoming Unbecoming – to inform the use of representational and multimodal features for my creative work, The Wounds of Separation.

4. Genette also describes zero focalisation when an omniscient or knowing narrator is giving a global, objective view of the storyworld. However other theorists have questioned such a possibility, Bal (2009) for instance, argues that textual creation by an author means that all writing contains a degree of subjective focalisation.

5. Herman, David (2004); Mikkonen (2008) and others describe how media specific conventions are incorporated into the storytelling.

6. The most notable is Art Spiegelman’s Maus (Speigelman 1991). London: Penguin. In 1991, Speigelman managed to convince The New York Times to move this bestseller graphic memoir from the fiction to the non-fiction list (Chute 2008a); thus establishing the graphic novel as a serious literary framing device for the representation of non-fictional historical narratives.

7. Kristallnacht or ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ (9 November 1938) was an eruption of violence towards the Jews throughout the German Reich.

8. A narrator with the act of metalepsis draws attention to the construction of the story with my figurative presence stepping into the storytelling space but remaining separate (Genette 1983; Kukkonen and Klimek 2011). In the panelled scene the ‘actor’ narrator functions as an omnipresent commentator with the speech directed to the reader, much like the role of a narrator in a play.

9. The role of the narrating-I is to tell the story and explain the contextual significance of scenes (Horstkotte and Pedri 2011). Usually the narration appears as a textual track commonly appearing in caption boxes that accompany the panels, positioned above, within or below.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Queensland University of Technology (CRICOS No. 00213).

Notes on contributors

Catherine Appleton

Catherine Appleton is a visual storyteller, designer, researcher and academic; she gained her doctorate in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research centred on the representational issues in retelling a historic traumatic event as a graphic memoir. Her graphic memoir The Wounds of Separation is soon to be published. Past research has focused on visual communication problem solving and the language conventions used in graphic communication in multicultural contexts.