14. Discourses of Trauma and Representation: Motherhood and Mother Tongue in Miriam Katin’s Graphic Memoirs

The historical trauma of World War II, the personal trauma of survival, and the integrity of the female body are connected in Miriam Katin’s two graphic memoirs: the black-and-white We Are on Our Own (2006) and the amazingly colourful Letting It Go (2013). Katin’s memoirs are very different, both in their topics and in their visual aesthetics: the first is about her childhood as a Jewish girl in 1940s Hungary and the second is about her bias against modern Germany in the 2000s. In this chapter, I show that while these two comics seemingly follow contradictory approaches to colour, page layout, tone of voice, and comics narration, they are in fact both expressions of the experience of trauma. Whereas the role of the gutter is frequently emphasized in the representation of traumatic events and memories in comics, I identify three other ways in which Katin narrates trauma in her graphic memoirs: page design; problematizing the relationship between the female body and its environment; and the visualization of spoken or written Hungarian, Katin’s mother tongue.