Documenting Trauma in Comics

The zombie has a long history in American culture. Fear of voodoo and zombies as forces to be used against white rulers by oppressed black people date back to slavery, with a clear flashpoint around the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) when the island and its people won their independence from the French. This marks the zombie as a traumatic, racialized body. Haiti again played a prominent part in the American cultural consciousness following its military occupation by the US from 1915–1934. A key example of this is White Zombie (1932), widely regarded as the foundational text for zombie cinema. In horror comics of the 1950s, zombies and Haiti frequently reappear, drawing on and repositioning these traumatic histories in new domestic and geopolitical contexts. The imperialism evident in American interventions in the Caribbean and South and Central America, including the occupation of Haiti, is positioned against the growth of economic, cultural, and ideological empire in the early Cold War. Domestic contexts contribute to racialized readings and the perceived threat of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement to existing racial, social, and economic hierarchies. Lastly, the zombie can be read in terms of the traumatic deaths of soldiers in the Second World War and the Korean War, with both conflicts offering exoticised settings and the threat of the ‘native’ Other. The zombie therefore offers a space through which multiple past and present traumas, as well as anxieties about future practice and its impact on the US, can be explored.

Social haunting, as defined by Avery Gordon, is the sense that all is not as it seems; that something is happening that cannot be detected by our empirical senses. For Gordon, social ghosts are ‘haunting reminders of lingering trouble’ that notify us that ‘what’s been concealed is very much alive and present’ (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: xvi). This chapter draws on findings from two projects informed by the notion of social haunting, and which involved working with two contrasting groups in northern England: the first from a traditional working class community affected by deindustrialisation and the second a group of migrant women who have come to the UK from Bangladesh. While the experiences of these groups differ in many ways, both projects used aspects of comics creation to produce graphic narratives that in some way represent traumatic or unsettling events that have had an impact on participants’ lives.

In this chapter, we examine how three different graphic narratives from the anthology This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (2016) contribute to puncturing the silence that has long obscured the violence accompanying the partition of the Indian subcontinent. We argue how these narratives, in their collaborative authoring and through their textual and aesthetic strategies, defy artificial borders to create a new collective memory culture, one that seeks to confront and thus to heal a suppressed social trauma that continues to haunt these nations. Through explorations of genre, narrative voice, and aesthetic representation, we demonstrate how these graphic narratives challenge violence, whether of colonial historiography or postcolonial state policy, and how comics can effectively portray displacement and resistance. The resurrection of old memories and the sharing of traumatic testimonies also build empathetic solidarities that counter the habitual and mutual othering that informs antagonistic national histories, thereby inviting the recognition of shared pasts and hope for shared futures.

It is commonly assumed that comics are uniquely able to facilitate ethical engagement and empathetic reading practices through a collaborative meaning-making process. This chapter reads Leila Abdelrazaq’s comic Baddawi to challenge this celebratory claim, showing how it is particularly precarious in relation to non-fiction comics that deal with issues of conflict, violence, and human rights—or what Sidonie Smith calls ‘crisis comics’. Such readings have shifted critical discussions from the subject matter of the comics to readers’ ability to see and recognize the subjects on the page as human. In considering Baddawi’s relationship to contested history and its mobilization of the medium’s inherent visuality, I argue that Abdelrazaq breaks away from other ‘crisis comics’ by granting her subjects what Nicholas Mirzoeff describes as the ‘right to look’. By emphasizing the way in which history collides with the individual and shapes their autonomy as a subject, Abdelrazaq uses the medium to assert a fundamental right to exist and a right to narrate the experience of the lives of the dispossessed—in her case, Palestinian refugees.

In her afterword to Documenting Trauma in Comics, Hillary Chute offers her thoughts on the collection and the chapters collected therein. She focuses on the collection’s presentation of distinct definitions of trauma, and distinct viewpoints on the value of the field of trauma studies, as well as the lexicon, both formal and colloquial, it has inspired. She argues that what is key to consider is that comics, the form, is not a vehicle for preformed content, but rather that ‘thinking in comics’—the work of creation—shapes the experience and articulation of what is documented.