Arts, Faculty of
Information, School of
DSpace
UBCV
Navascués, Logaine
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Both magical realist fiction and the graphic novel as a form have been widely recognized as counternarratives with the power to destabilize the dominant literary forms¬ of the Western world by their ability to showcase underrepresented voices and stories from the margins. Their relationship to trauma has also been studied in depth, as they allow their creators to re-present the unrepresentable nature of historic, collective or personal traumatic events. However, the interaction between comics and magical realism has not yet garnered much academic attention, let alone in relation to literature for young readers. With this thesis, I aim to bridge this gap by analyzing how magical realist fiction and the graphic novel work together to highlight the traumatic experiences of marginal voices in children’s literature. In my academic paper, I first identify the key elements present in magical realist literature following Wendy B. Faris’s studies, and the underlying principles of comics creation based on Scott McCloud’s seminal work on the form, and explore their relationship to trauma. I then discuss other visions and versions of trauma of growing up, including the effects of bullying, racial discrimination, immigration and intergenerational trauma. These findings, along with Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, serve as a framework for my close reading of Kiku Hughes’ young adult graphic novel Displacement through a magical realist lens. Using this same framework, I then reflect on my creative process writing the middle grade graphic novel Nuna and the Nose. The story combines Nuna’s first-person point of view and a first-nose perspective to showcase Nuna’s fragmented sense of identity. This magical realist device enables me to address the complexity of Nuna’s traumatic experience as an immigrant dealing with bullying, self-image issues and anxiety, and her disconnect from her own roots. This hybrid thesis highlights the power of combining the multimodal form of comics and the multidimensional scope of magical realism to portray the voices of diverse, underrepresented characters in their multilayered experience of trauma.
MAGICAL REALISM AS A STRATEGY TO EMBODY TRAUMA IN COMICS FOR YOUNG READERS by Logaine Navascués Honours B.A., Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, 2000 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Children’s Literature) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2023 © Logaine Navascués, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Magical Realism as a Strategy to Embody Trauma in Comics for Young Readers submitted by Logaine Navascués in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Children’s Literature Examining Committee: Theresa Rogers, Professor, Language and Literacy Education, UBC Co-supervisor Kathryn Shoemaker, Professor, Language and Literacy Education, UBC Co-supervisor Sarah Leavitt, Professor, School of Creative Writing, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Both magical realist fiction and the graphic novel as a form have been widely recognized as counternarratives with the power to destabilize the dominant literary forms of the Western world by their ability to showcase underrepresented voices and stories from the margins. Their relationship to trauma has also been studied in depth, as they allow their creators to re-present the unrepresentable nature of historic, collective or personal traumatic events. However, the interaction between comics and magical realism has not yet garnered much academic attention, let alone in relation to literature for young readers. With this thesis, I aim to bridge this gap by analyzing how magical realist fiction and the graphic novel work together to highlight the traumatic experiences of marginal voices in children’s literature. In my academic paper, I first identify the key elements present in magical realist literature following Wendy B. Faris’s studies, and the underlying principles of comics creation based on Scott McCloud’s seminal work on the form, and explore their relationship to trauma. I then discuss other visions and versions of trauma of growing up, including the effects of bullying, racial discrimination, immigration and intergenerational trauma. These findings, along with Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, serve as a framework for my close reading of Kiku Hughes’ young adult graphic novel Displacement through a magical realist lens. Using this same framework, I then reflect on my creative process writing the middle grade graphic novel Nuna and the Nose. The story combines Nuna’s first-person point of view and a first-nose perspective to showcase Nuna’s fragmented sense of identity. This magical realist device enables me to address the complexity of Nuna’s traumatic experience as an immigrant dealing with bullying, self-image issues and anxiety, and her disconnect from her own roots. This hybrid thesis highlights the power of combining the multimodal form of comics and the multidimensional scope of magical realism to portray the voices of diverse, underrepresented characters in their multilayered experience of trauma. iv Lay summary Magical realism fiction and the graphic novel form have been widely researched in their relationship to trauma. However, how they interact and work together to depict trauma has not yet garnered much academic attention, let alone in literature for young readers. This thesis explores how graphic novels that include magical realist devices are effective in portraying the traumatic experiences of marginal voices in children’s literature. v Preface This Master of Arts thesis is an original, unpublished, independent work of the author, Logaine Navascués. This is the academic portion only of a hybrid academic/creative thesis. The creative portion is an original graphic novel manuscript titled Nuna and the Nose. vi Table of Contents Abstract ……………...…………………………………………………………………………………………... iii Lay Summary …………………………………………………………………………………………………… iv Preface …………………..………………………………………………………………………………………… v Table of Contents …………….………………………………………………………………………………… vi List of Figures ….…………….………………………………………………………………………………… vii Acknowledgments .…………………………………………………………………………………………… viii Dedication ………….…………………………………………………………………………………………….. ix INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER ONE: NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA 1.1 Magical realism and the traumatic imagination ..…………………………………………… 3 1.2 Graphic novels and embodied trauma ………………………………………………………… 8 1.3 Summary ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 12 CHAPTER TWO: MAGICAL REALISM AND TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY GRAPHIC NOVELS FOR YOUNG READERS 2.1 Different visions and versions of trauma …………………………………………………….. 13 2.2 A close reading of Displacement by Kiku Hugues ………………………………………… 16 2.2.1 Framework and methodology ………………………………………………………………… 17 2.2.2 Magical realist elements .……………………………………………………………………… 18 2.2.2.1 Unsettling doubts, the phenomenal world and the In-between…………………… 18 2.2.2.2 Writing from the periphery: other voices and the self …………………………… 29 2.2.2.3 Disruptions of time, space and identity ..…..………………………………………… 33 2.2.2.4 Embracing a femin(ist/ine) voice ..……………………………………………………… 39 CHAPTER THREE: WRITING NUNA AND THE NOSE, A MIDDLE GRADE GRAPHIC NOVEL 3.1 Introduction and motivation .…………………….……………………………………………… 45 3.2 Creative choices ……………..……………………….……………………………………………… 46 3.3 Magical realist elements in Nuna and the Nose …………………………………………….. 50 CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSION ….………………………….…………………………………………… 53 Works Cited ………………………….………………………….………………………………………………56 vii List of Figures Figure 2.1 Displacement, page 1…………………………………………………… 19 Figure 2.2 Displacement, page 5…………………………………………………… 22 Figure 2.3 Displacement, page 6…………………………………………………… 23 Figure 2.4 Displacement, pages 12 & 13…………………………………………... 25 Figure 2.5 Displacement, pages 18 & 19…………………………………………... 26 Figure 2.6 Displacement, pages 139 & 140 ..……………………………………… 28 Figure 2.7 Displacement, page 77 ………………………………………………… 30 Figure 2.8 Displacement, pages 272 & 273 ……………………………………… 31 Figure 2.9 Displacement, pages 34 & 35 ………………………………………… 34 Figure 2.10 Displacement, pages 115 & 116 ……………………………………… 37 Figure 2.11 Displacement, pages 187 & 188 ……………………………………… 39 Figure 2.12 Displacement, page 234………………………………………………… 42 Figure 2.13 Displacement, pages 276 & 277 ……………………………………… 44 Figure 3.1 Nuna and the Nose, 3 x 3 grid ………………………………………… 48 Figure 3.2 Nuna and the Nose, 4 x 4 grid …….…………………………………… 48 Figure 3.3 Nuna and the Nose, full-colour layout with nose panel………………… 49 viii Acknowledgments Just as it takes a village to raise a child, sometimes it takes a community to get through a Master’s Degree–especially when you are an immigrant and a mom, and you dream about writing books for children. I wouldn’t have been able to complete this research, or Nuna and the Nose, without my family’s patience and encouragement, the company and support of my friends, and the guidance of so many wonderful UBC professors. Thank you, Dr. Theresa Rogers, for believing in me and seeing beyond the words written on my application. Dr. Rick Gooding, thank you for the trust, the knowledge, and the many conversations about life and children’s literature–and all the in-betweens. Dr. Emily Pohl-Weary, Prof. Sarah Leavitt and Prof. Sheryda Warrener, thanks for your insight, passion, and the eye-opening, provocative readings. And a big thanks to the School of Creative Writing for their BIPOC award, the MACL Rob Jobe Award and the BC Arts Council for their scholarship. Their support gave me an extra dose of confidence. I am especially grateful to Dr. Kathryn Shoemaker for being a role model and an inspiration. Your generosity, thoughtfulness and care nourished my mind and soul when I needed it the most. I’ve been fortunate to share this journey with many amazing MACLers and other crazy beings whose curiosity, love of learning and questioning shaped my own way of thinking and writing in many meaningful ways. Juli, thank you for everything. I feel privileged to have found such an amazing community of book lovers and creators; a place where I feel at home. Rodrigo and Ananda, thank you for being my home. ix To my daughter Ananda and Mamama Leda. Magical realism lives through you. And to my thirteen-year-old nuna, and this nose. 1 INTRODUCTION Magical realism and the graphic novel share some common ground: they were both born as counternarratives with the power to destabilize the dominant literary forms of the Western world. They are also recognized as effective creative vehicles to portray traumatic experiences. The relationship between trauma and magic realism (Angulo 1995, Zamora & Faris 1995, Faris 2004, Arva 2011) and trauma and graphic novels (Chute 2010 & 2016, Romero-Jódar 2017, Szép 2020, Davies & Rifkind 2020, Gilmore 2011) has been widely studied. However, up to this date and to the extent of my abilities, I have not been able to find any academic research pertaining the use of magical realism in graphic novels to portray trauma, let alone, in literature directed at young readers. Although some contemporary graphic novels for teens and young adults include magical realist elements–such as Anya’s Ghost (2011) by Vera Brosgol, American Born Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang, or the more recent The Legend of Auntie Po (2021) by Shing Yin Khor–the interaction between comics as a form and magical realism as a narrative strategy to portray trauma has not been studied in depth. Thus, I aim to bridge this gap by identifying the elements present in both magical realist literature and graphic narratives, and analyze how they work together in contemporary literature for young readers to depict traumatic experiences. In Chapter 1, I focus on magical realism as a creative response to historical trauma, and the graphic novel’s ability to embody trauma by drawing the self on the page. Chapter 2 highlights how these forces interact with each other in a close reading of Kiku Hughes’ Displacement (2019), a historical graphic novel for young adult readers that narrates Kiku’s fictional experience following her grandmother in a Japanese American internment camp in the 2 U.S. The book was selected as a 2020 ALA Asian/Pacific American Award Honor Title, and listed as one of YALSA's 2021 Great Graphic Novels for Teens. Chapter 3 is a reflection on my process of writing and illustrating Nuna and the Nose, an original graphic novel manuscript that serves as creative companion to this academic paper. The story combines the power of the verbal and visual modes to narrate Nuna’s challenges as a newcomer to Canada, feeling different because of her Latin American background, name, accent, and physical attributes–namely, a prominent nose. The book alternates chapters in conventional written form and chapters in graphic format: the girl’s voice is heard through a first-person prose narrative, while her nose’s is expressed in first-nose comics form. This magic realist device creates a dual narrative structure that enables me to address the complexity of Nuna’s traumatic experience–her anxiety, issues with self-image and disconnect from her Latin American roots–from different yet complementary perspectives. 3 CHAPTER ONE: NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA 1.1 Magical realism and the traumatic imagination Magical realism is associated with the literary tradition that flourished in Latin America in the 1950s, after Cuban author Alejo Carpentier referred to the concept in his Manifesto on the Marvelous Real in America (1949). In their extensive research, Zamora and Faris (1995) give an account of how the term was originally coined in 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to describe the return to a new kind of Realism in painting after Expressionism’s more abstract style. Today, however, it is used to define what could be the “most important contemporary trend in international fiction” (Faris I) having spread to all corners of the world. In its most simple definition, magical realist fiction “combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them” (Faris I). This blurring of boundaries is one of magical realism’s most prominent traits, as it also moves the narrative focus from the dominant voices of the colonial world to the marginal voices of postcolonial society–thus serving as an effective decolonizing agent. In the same spirit it interrogates the limits between fact and fiction, it also questions the relationship between the self and the other, the world of the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, and ultimately, remembering and imagining. For, in magical realism, imagination can also take the place of memory (Faris 108). Faris identifies five primary characteristics of magical realist writing in her book Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. The first one is the presence of an “irreducible element” (Faris 7) of magic, something that cannot be explained through logic, sensory experience, belief or familiar knowledge, but that is still narrated as an ordinary event. As Faris explains, this element is accepted by the characters in such a normal 4 way that it models the same response in the reader, and in doing so, it also increases their participation, “in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events” (7). This brings about the second element, the appearance of “unsettling doubts” (Faris 17) in the reader, since the narrative is still anchored in reality and presents detailed “descriptions of the phenomenal world” (Faris 14), the third trait. The resulting fourth characteristic is the “merging of different realms” (Faris 21) as I have previously mentioned when referring to the blurring of boundaries–ordinary and extraordinary, ancient and modern, magic and real, to name a few–thus creating a third space, an in-between that exists at the intersection of two worlds. These worlds can refer to different cultures, beliefs, religions, social status, geographical location, or even different moments in time. Characters in magical realist narratives are usually speaking from the margins, combining a multiplicity of voices seldom heard. Often, the magical element serves as an invitation to question individual identity but from a very detailed, realistic, historical point in time. Thus, these stories also “disturb received ideas about time, space and identity”, its fifth characteristic (Faris 23). As Faris asserts, “the multivocal nature of the narrative and the cultural hybridity that characterize magical realism extends to its characters, which tend toward radical multiplicity” (25). Magical realism in Children’s Literature has not been studied to much extent, as Ian Rudge (2004) clarifies. Fantasy texts are common in literature for young readers; however, magical realist texts differ from ‘pure’ fantasy in their ability to portray magic events as part of everyday life in real contexts, as I have already explained. This singularity defies much of the common frameworks of categorization, like Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of The Fantastic (1939), also referenced by Faris. Rudge focuses on looking at the structure of magic realist texts for 5 children to understand their underlying characteristics. To start, he affirms that the reader’s positionality is a key element: the main character or narrator is usually a child or young adult immersed in a realist setting that children can identify with and relate to. This “gives the actual child reader a peer-contemporary within the text, who appears to share their view of the world” (134). He then asserts that the magical elements usually appear when the tone of the text has already been set as realist, so that they are seen as “solid” (130) and their existence is not doubted. To achieve this, the narrator’s voice has to be consistent both in presenting real and magical descriptions of objects or events. Rudge also notes that the purpose of fantastic elements in magical realist texts is not to provide magical solutions to children’s problems–they might even create more complications for the characters–but, on the contrary, to problematize the child’s point of view of the world, exposing them to different voices and experiences. This, I believe, is one of Rudge’s strongest claims. As he further explains, Through careful and sparing use of the fantastic within the framework of a realist text, children’s magic realism can open a liminal space combining these two, supposedly incompatible genres. It is here that emotionally challenging issues can be present to the reader of the children’s magic realist text with the safety offered by the distancing device of fantasy whilst still using the conventions of realism. (Rudge 139) Yvonne Hammer (2006) asserts that the power of magical realism relies on the use of a “manner of play that is already firmly established in children’s fictions”–that of fantasy–but that “redirects fantasy’s subversive intent into an exploration of ideological paradox” so as to “sustain conflicting perspectives in order to interrogate cultural ideologies” (64). As a result, through magical realist devices readers can question social conventions and cultural biases 6 regarding topics like race, gender, cultural privilege, identity, or the politics behind historic traumatic events. This is where magical realism and trauma come together: in a liminal space where emotionally challenging issues can be discussed; where ideologies, perspectives and experiences can be interrogated, or where truth can be retold. As defined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (2016), “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). Since the magnitude of the event cannot be assimilated as it occurs, trauma is produced as an aftershock, a belated mental image or account of that which took place, that insists on returning to haunt the victim. It is, as Caruth emphasizes, “the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language” (Unclaimed 4). In this sense, Caruth goes on to explain, traumatic experiences not only haunt the victims because of their violent nature, but because the depth of this violence and its consequences cannot be completely known at the time of the event itself. Rather, they may only be understood in their full magnitude precisely because of their constant, permanent return afterwards. In their remembering and retelling. Thus, magical realism serves as an effective narrative strategy to deal with trauma–with the known and unknown, ungraspable nature of such devastating, almost impossible to believe, real-life events. These events can be sudden, as Caruth describes, but they can also be the product of the progressive and cumulative effect of certain experiences, such as war, immigration or bullying, as I will discuss later. 7 Faris examines how authors like Salman Rushdie addresses the traumatic process and aftermath of the India-Pakistan Partition in Midnight Children, or how Toni Morrison approaches the intergenerational trauma of slavery in Beloved, to name a few examples. Eugene L. Arva (2011) expands this analysis to other magical realist texts, through what he calls the traumatic imagination: When the overwhelming violence of an event prevents it from being rationalized and archived in the subject’s consciousness as it occurs, the traumatic time-space (shock chronotope) is so shaky that making it visible (…) requires an act of imagination, which I call traumatic. Magical realist writing should be regarded not as an escape from horrific historical “facts” or as a distortion meant to make them more cognitively or emotionally palatable but rather as one of the most effective means of re-creating, transmitting and ultimately coping with painful traumatic memories. (5) Magical realism, thus, allows a re-presentation of the unrepresentable nature of traumatic events, those which are usually suppressed, or too difficult to remember matter-of-factly, but that cannot be forgotten either. Through its use of multivocality, magical realism can re-present the repetitive nature of trauma. Through the blurring of boundaries and merging of realms, it re-creates that in-between where trauma survivors commonly dwell, continuously reliving the past in the present. In doing so, it disturbs received ideas about time, space and identity. Through these strategies, a narrative memory is created, one where the real is not based on facts–what actually happened–but on what was experienced as happening (Arva 5). 8 I will develop these concepts further in my close reading of the graphic novel Displacement. For this purpose, it is important to understand how graphic narratives work in their relationship to trauma. 1.2 Graphic novels and embodied trauma While magical realism was developing in Latin America as a decolonizing force, in the U.S., the comics medium was about to be revolutionized too, taking a huge leap away from its ‘funny’ newspaper strip origin and latter superhero tradition. As recounted by Hillary Chute in Graphic Women (2011), the 1960s culture of home-made and self-published fanzines inspired by the satirical tone of magazines like Mad boosted a generation of underground cartoonists. In the following decades, these creators would address sensible issues that had not been tackled in comics form yet in a desire to “explore the self seriously”. Chute affirms that “the underground shifted what comics could depict (its purview, its content) and, crucially, how it could depict” (14). Aimed specifically at adult audiences, these comics left room for self-expression and creative risk-taking, allowing their authors to explore personal and collective traumatic events, from intimate stories of grief and abuse to the horrors of genocide and war. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980) is probably the world’s most well-known example of trauma graphic narrative, as it depicts the psychological, emotional and physical horrors of the Holocaust. Not only did it establish that comics could be used as a medium to share serious, literary content, but as Davies and Rifkind (2020) suggest, it marked a milestone “as a site for thinking through the complexities of representing … traumatic events” and the “formal agilities and reflexivities that make comics so adept at documenting trauma” (8). The authors go further to assert that Maus is 9 the “authorial site” (8) that has shaped the way we view, approach and analyze graphic trauma narratives, and that pushes the form forward to challenge its own structure and rigidity. Chute prefers the term graphic narrative over graphic novel, as she studies how the graphic form is appropriated especially by female writers to show and tell their experiences in a way that could not be communicated otherwise. This femin(ine/ist) point of view is also relevant for my future analysis of Displacement, as I will later develop. However, I will use the term graphic narrative, graphic novel and comics alternatively to refer to the medium that combines words and images to create a sequential visual narrative composed of panels, and that also takes advantage of the space between them, the gutter. As explained by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993), the gutter defines comics as a unique form, as it provides the possibility to create closure. “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 67). Hence, the reader acts as an accomplice by willingly filling in the gap between panels with their own experience, previous knowledge or imagination. For McCloud, comics is closure. In Making Comics (McCloud 2006), he identifies five choices every creator must make to achieve clarity in comics: 1) choice of moment: what will be depicted in each panel and how the transition between them takes place; 2) choice of frame: the size and shape of the panel, position of elements (angle, distance, height, balance) and point of view to create a sense of space; 3) choice of image: the artistic style and level of detail of each drawing to affect the mood or create an emotion; 4) choice of word: to communicate ideas, using voices and sounds; and 5) choice of 10 flow: how to guide the reading experience–the flow between the panels–so that it seems seamless and effortless. Why is this form so adept at documenting trauma, then? Chute’s approach is rooted in the belief that to be traumatized is, citing Cathy Caruth, “precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Unclaimed 3). Hence, the use of images and words to represent and think about trauma is both a reflection and a reflective response to such events. On one hand, graphic narratives allow authors to literally draw their bodies on the page to re-present their traumatic experiences. Thus, the common conception of trauma as unspeakable and unrepresentable is challenged by making the body and the self be present again. This portrayal of the self requires each artist to develop what Chute calls the “idiom of witness, a manner of testifying that sets a visual language in motion with and against the verbal in order to embody individual and collective experience, to put contingent selves and histories into form” (3). Leigh Gilmore (2011) expands on the topic of bearing witness in her analysis of Marjane Sartrapi’s Persepolis, an autobiographical account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution after the Sha’s overthrow. For Gilmore, comics offers Satrapi the possibility of representing historical suffering and personal trauma at the same time through the lens of Marji, the child witness, but framed by the adult author, Satrapi herself, who positions readers as witnesses, too (157). In this sense, Satrapi draws “what can and cannot be seen (…) both the unrepresentable violence and the challenge of witnessing” (160). On the other hand, comics share the same structure as traumatic memory, Chute asserts. She cites Lenore Terr’s research on traumatic memory and how it “tends to be more fragmentary and condensed than regular memory–a good description of the basic form of comics” (Chute 114). The ‘filling-in-the-gaps’ of a traumatic event resembles the process of closure upon 11 reading into comics’ gutters. In this sense, both memory and comics are punctuated by the pauses and absences, especially in traumatic childhood experiences that are usually relegated to silence and invisibility, “too awful to remember, but impossible to forget” (115), as Chute quotes Lynda Barry from her book One Hundred Demons. Self-defined by Barry as an “autobifictionalography”, One Hundred Demons defies the notion of what truth is to focus on how it is told: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts are?” (Chute 108) Barry asks. Chute argues that this graphic narrative deals precisely with how memory is created, in its relationship to the past and to space, since “one needs a sense of space for memories to come forward and take shape” (113). Comics physically provides the space of the panel to make visible the invisible, that which has never been told or that has been impossible to forget. It also uses the panels’ spatial potential, the ability to express the shift in space and time through closure. “Closure in comics fosters an intimacy surpassed only by the written word, a silent, secret contract between creator and audience” McCloud emphasizes (69). Intimate, silent, secret are words that also define trauma, making its connection to comics even more evident. The complex, elaborate ways in which these visual elements and narrative choices can be combined to convey meaning constitute the form’s agilities and reflexivities, as Davies and Rifkind mention, and highlight its potential to address the complex, personal nature of trauma itself. If, as Gilmore asserts, “trauma fractures time into past and present. It threatens the survivor’s sense of and belief in generational continuity and persistence of self” (Graphic 158) then the comics form is able to capture both the fracture and the possibility of–finding-creating-imagining–closure. 12 1.3 Summary The multilayered nature of graphic narratives is akin to the nature of magical realism as a literary device. While comics are defined by the indivisible relationship between words and images, magical realism stresses the indissoluble, organic presence of magic within the real world. If the comics form takes advantage of the gutter as an in-between space to create closure, magical realism creates an in-between, liminal space that forces the reader to work through unsettling doubts and suspend disbelief. Both demand the active and willing complicity of their audience to convey meaning. The origins of comics and magic realism are also linked. Just as graphic novels originated in the underground scene, giving voice to creators from the margins, magical realism developed as a counternarrative to Western realism, serving as a decolonizing agent. Both modes defy the status quo and challenge the dominant narratives of their times. When comics artists draw themselves on the page, they are creating a literal space–the panel–to embody and re-create their traumatic experiences. They often incorporate elements of fiction to tell their own, personal truth. When authors use elements of magical realism, they are creating a third space, a “merging of realms” where fact and fiction collide to be able to make sense of traumatic events. They set their traumatic imaginations in motion to tell the truth. Both strategies make the invisible, visible. If the fragmented nature of comics echoes the fragmented structure of traumatic memory, magical realism addresses the essence of trauma itself: it re-presents the unrepresentable, that which makes an event, or memory, traumatic. In the following chapter, I aim to identify how magical realism and comics work together to portray trauma, engage the reader and challenge the status quo from within, with selected examples from Kiku Hugue’s graphic novel, Displacement. 13 CHAPTER TWO: MAGICAL REALISM AND TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY GRAPHIC NOVELS FOR YOUNG READERS 2.1 Different visions and versions of trauma Contemporary graphic novels for young readers are not exempt from depicting traumatic experiences although they do so in different forms and intensities: the death of a loved one, physical, emotional, sexual and verbal abuse, racism, peer pressure, bullying, or historical events such as war and displacement are some examples. Speak: The Graphic Novel (2018), is an award-winning adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel by the same name, illustrated by Emily Carroll. It deals with the trauma of being raped–and silenced–at only thirteen, and finding the courage and strength to speak up. The million-copy bestselling series by Alice Oseman Heartstopper (2019, 2020, 2021), although mostly focused on Charlie and Nick’s sweet love story, also narrates Charlie’s stressful experience while coming-out as gay in his all-boys school and having to cope with bullying, harassment, mental health issues, and food disorders. Although both stories are fictional, they are able to portray trauma in today’s contemporary world. Anya’s Ghost (2011) by Vera Brosgol tells the story of Anya, one of two Russian kids at her school, and her difficulties with weight, body image, and fitting in, just as she befriends the ghost of a girl who died at her same age. This unexpected presence will teach her about her own identity and values. Acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006) by Gene Luen Yang highlights the weight of racial trauma. Jin Wang is the only Chinese-American at his school, and his dreams magically become true when he wakes up as an all-American boy. Told through three different perspectives, the graphic novel merges myth and magic to narrate Jin’s struggles defining his own identity while surviving high school. 14 Although different in content and style, all of these works present teen protagonists who, from their perspective, are going through traumatic events. As Cathy Caruth explains in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), the experience “may or may not be catastrophic, and may not traumatize everyone equally” (4), but it feels real both in mind and body, like a recurrent, vivid image. In the award-winning documentary The Wisdom of Trauma (2021), Dr. Gabor Maté explains that “trauma is an overwhelming threat that you don’t know how to deal with”, whatever its nature. He goes further to assert that trauma does not necessarily come from being hurt by “terrible things” happening to a person, but by being left alone with the hurt. “Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you,” he explains. Therefore, to his understanding, trauma has generated today’s “epidemic of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse.” The film’s synopsis also states that suicide is the second most common cause of death in the United States for youth aged 15-24. According to Youth Mental Health Canada statistics for 2019, 1.2 million children and youth are affected by mental illness, 70% of mental health problems have their onset during childhood or adolescence, and youth aged 15 to 24 are more likely to experience mental illness than any other group. The United States Center for Disease Control claims that ADHD, behaviour problems, anxiety, and depression are the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children. It also affirms that children who suffer Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) like discrimination based on race or ethnicity have higher percentages of one or more mental health conditions. In a study of the role of trauma and bullying in child rehospitalization, Makota (2018) discovered that “youth with a history of trauma were significantly more likely to experience ongoing bullying” and that “bullying remained significantly associated with increased risk of hospitalization” (12). 15 Penning et al. also studied the connection between bullying, victimization and trauma. They identified four kinds of bullying roles: bully, victim, bully-victim and bystander. As they discovered, the victim role has the highest correlation with traumatic symptoms, namely anxiety, depression, dissociation, post-traumatic stress and anger (138). Interestingly, however, these are also present in children who play the other three roles, including bullies themselves. Even if the most common form of bullying consisted of verbal threats, they note, they were “real enough for the boys to experience them as genuine” (140). As they conclude, the ongoing victimization and repetitive nature of bullying can be considered as a form of chronic trauma, although it differs from the current PTSD diagnosis, which focuses on acute trauma as a result of an extreme, one-off event. In this context, social anxiety can also be seen as a manifestation of trauma, like in Anya’s Ghost. The traumatic event doesn’t have to be experienced in first person only, it can also be transmitted vicariously, by being a close witness or bystander, or intergenerationally, like in American Born Chinese, or Kiku Hughes’ Displacement. These three works are examples of graphic novels that, in my point of view, can also be read through a magical realist lens, as they all include magical elements that are integrated into ordinary life to address anxiety, depression and other effects of trauma. While Anya’s Ghost and American Born Chinese are fictional, Displacement is based on historical facts. Hence, the magical elements it presents are anchored in real-life events, as I will now analyze through a close reading. 16 2.2 A close reading of Displacement by Kiku Hughes Kiku Hugues’ Displacement is a fictional account of a real and important part of her family’s history: the reclusion of her young maternal grandmother and great grandparents in a Japanese American internment camp in Topaz, Utah, during World War II. It’s June 2016. After a short trip to San Francisco with her mother in an attempt to find their family’s original home in the West Coast, sixteen-year-old Kiku is spontaneously transported back in time to 1942, to relive the internment experience along with her grandmother, also sixteen. Kiku feels confused and displaced as she tries to make her way in this new era and place. As she is taken from Tanforan Assembly Center in California to their definitive place of confinement in Utah, she realizes how little she knows about life in these camps even if she comes from the future. She also questions how memory and trauma have been transmitted from generation to generation within the Japanese-American community and her own family. In her three visits to the past, she becomes more aware of the challenges of the present: the constant racist attacks to ethnic and religious minorities after Donald Trump’s election as President. The tension increases when she notes that past and present seem too similar. Upon attending her grandmother’s high school graduation in camp, Kiku is then confronted with the fact she must, too, think about her future, even if she never goes back to her life in current-day Seattle. When she does go back to Seattle, she engages with her family and community to take action against the political attacks towards the LatinX, Black and Muslim communities. In doing so, she finds a way to reclaim her voice as a Japanese American. 17 2.2.1 Framework and methodology To understand how magical realism and the graphic novel form work together in Displacement to portray trauma, I will first identify the presence of key magical realist elements as defined by Wendy B. Faris. In order to analyze how these are depicted in graphic form, I will reference Scott McCloud’s work on Making Comics (2006) and Understanding Comics (1994), and the choice of moment, frame, image, word, and flow explained in the previous chapter. These findings will be complemented with Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s three systems of spatial composition–information value, salience and framing–defined in Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996). Information value refers to the position of elements in the image or page: left and right, top and bottom, centre and margin. If an object or person is to the left it represents something known or Given, something we can take for granted or matter-of-factly, while the information value of the right is New, something unique, unexpected, revealed or unknown. The information value of the top shows an Ideal, a promise, aspirations, desires, what might be, while the bottom is grounded on the Real, with factual, practical information (Kress 186). Something placed at the Centre represents the nucleus or core, while objects in the Margins act as secondary, dependent elements. Salience refers to the importance of an element on the page, and it is realized by any or all of the following factors, such as size, sharpness of focus, colour, contrast, perspective, or even cultural associations (Kress 202). It measures the weight of an image, or its capacity to attract attention to itself. Framing establishes how elements connect to each other, if they are perceived individually (with a frame that separates them) or as a group (with no frame). Frames can be 18 lines, colours, objects or backgrounds that generate a sense of discontinuity or continuity (Kress 203). I will discuss the presence of magical realist elements in Displacement using these graphic notions. Following a standard practice in the analysis of texts where the author is a character inside the narrative, I will refer to Kiku when talking about the protagonist of the graphic novel, and Hughes when focusing on the writer. 2.2.2 Magical Realist Elements in Displacement 2.2.2.1 Unsettling doubts, the phenomenal world and the In-between The first and most evident feature of magical realism in Displacement is what Faris calls the irreducible element of magic, present here in visual form, in the shape of a cloud. This cloud is visible in the cover, the title page and in the first and last panels of the first page too, before appearing intermittently throughout the graphic novel. The cloud usually breaks the panel and invades the gutter, creating a visible rupture in the narrative. After seeing it a few times, the reader is trained to identify it as an agent of change: it marks the transition from Kiku’s present life in 2016 to that in the internment camp in the past. Its presence in the opening and closing panels of the first page foreshadows this importance. Located in the top left and bottom right corner, the cloud fills almost all of the page. These are the biggest, most salient panels on the page’s layout. They occupy top and bottom, and left and right, what in Kress and Van Leeuwen’s terms signifies the union of the Ideal and the Real, the Given and the New. Thus, the cloud pervades everything. But it’s also something abstract and unknown. So, what does this cloud mean? 19 Figure 2.1 Displacement, page 1 The dark blue hues add another layer to the reading: it is nighttime, but it’s also a mysterious, unsettling moment in the protagonist’s life, as we can imply from the text, floating at the centre of the first panel. The caption reads: “It was June 2016 when I first traveled through time” (1). The abstract nature of the image contrasts with the very specific words. This matter-of-fact narration of an incredible, highly improbable event is typical of magical realism. Kress and Van Leeuwen’s principles of information value, salience and framing all work together to highlight this panel and the cloud’s visual and semantic relevance. 20 Next to this opening panel, Hughes draws Kiku for the first time. We see a close-up of a girl’s hand holding a pencil next to her chin. Her image is fragmented, as is her memory. Kiku says “No” and continues to explain that “Time travel isn’t exactly what it is–” in panel three, doubting her own self, and making the reader doubt too. A glimpse of light appears next to Kiku’s image in this same panel, as a lamp directs our attention to the notebook she is writing on, possibly her diary. Then, the light directs us to the word displaced, written by hand, in panel 5. This light is a physical presence emanating from a lamp, but also a symbolic reference to the story we are about to read: Hughes’ effort to bring to light a part of history that has usually been kept in the dark. While Kiku the character writes displaced on the frame, Hughes is doing so too in the graphic novel we hold in our hands, merging both realms. Another postmodern and magical realist trait. Thus, by the middle of the page, Hughes has already created the unsettling doubts Faris also deems vital to magic realism: where is this girl? And when and how did she travel through time? Is this a fictional or factual story? Kiku’s somber image throughout the page is fragmented or shown mainly from the back until we see her in a medium shot in the last tier, on panel six, with a sad, lost look that guides our attention to the cloud in the last panel, to the right. A set of three laddered text captions extend toward the corner of the page connecting both panels. “I’ve been trapped in the past for over a year. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to go home again. But I’ll start from the beginning,” they state. In this last panel, the cloud breaks the frame and escapes into the gutter, bleeding off the corner of the page. Closure is not created here yet. On the contrary, the gutter is opening up a new, uncertain path. As readers, we still don’t know where this story is taking us. And this, I 21 believe, is again part of a magical realist strategy: to create a space of suspended disbelief where everything can happen. Did she really travel through time? We continue to wonder. The page’s layout is set up to guide our reading from the cloud in panel one to the word displaced highlighted in panel five, to the cloud again on panel seven. The combination of moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions contribute to create a sense of suspense. McCloud explains how these transitions allow our eyes to wander around the scene in slow motion, taking into account every detail and thus, generating tension. The overall composition and flow of the page support this slow pacing, while directing us to the final panel. I’ve taken the time to analyze this first page in detail, not only because it opens our reading of the graphic novel, but also because it serves as a prologue, as it stands by itself before the start of Part 1: The West, in the following spread. I believe the decision to include this prologue supports the magical reading of the text, preparing the reader to accept the possibility of magic as Rudge suggests in his reading of magical realist texts for children. As readers, we are left in an intermediate space, an in-between, without any certainties. Faris stresses that the irreducible element of magic needs to be grounded in the phenomenal world for it to feel real. And this is exactly what Hughes does in the pages that come immediately after the prologue. The opening splash page has a bleeding image of San Francisco and the iconic view of the Golden Gate Bridge as background. A caption at the top of the page reads: “The first displacement took me while mom and I were visiting San Francisco” (5). On the bottom, two other panels float over this background. The one to the left shows us more information about the city: steep streets, a cable car, and two people walking, following a map. The caption reads: “It was my first time in California.” The next panel shows a close-up of Kiku with a look of 22 indifference, and an older woman–her mother–looking attentively at something above her. The caption states: “I was unimpressed.” Figure 2.2 Displacement, page 5 The idea of the displacement, which could seem fantastic or imaginary, is at the top, in the Ideal zone, as Kress and Van Leeuwen suggest, but it is placed in the context of a city that can be easily identified as existing, and close to two other panels at the bottom–the Real zone–that ground it with more concrete, factual details. This is a real girl–the author–with her mother, in a real city, San Francisco. There is no doubt that this is the real world, we understand. 23 To further confirm the veracity of the story, on page six Hughes presents more visual evidence: panels that resemble old photographs, drawn in sepia and with photo corners, as if borrowed from an antique photo album. Then she brings her personal story to life, by confiding that the house in the photo was one of those classic San Francisco row houses, divided for several families to live in. My grandmother and her immigrant grandparents lived there until 1942… when they, along with 120,000 other people of Japanese descent up and down the west coast, were forced out of their homes and into American Incarceration Camps. They never saw San Francisco again. (6) Figure 2.3 Displacement, page 6 24 By now, we are convinced these displacements are taking place during a part of history that is real, and to a real person who is sharing her own personal story. The images in these photos also generate a magical realist effect: they both show the exact same house, from the same angle and position. However, in the first photo in panel three we can see Kiku’s grandmother, Ernestina, and her parents, standing at the front steps, while in the second photo in panel four, they have magically disappeared. A FOR RENT sign has been added to the window. This image, combined with the appalling number from the text, have a very clear and disturbing effect: how can 120,000 Japanese American citizens vanish so quickly? Can this be true? Then, after a few pages with more details about the city’s streets, sights and signs–in Japanese, since they are visiting Japantown (6)–the cloud appears again, when least expected. In McCloud’s terms, the choices Hugues makes on pages 12 and 13 to sustain the magical realist effect in this second introduction of the cloud are quite relevant. Her choice of image and frame show Kiku in San Francisco in three different panoramic panels that highlight both the clarity of the cloud and the urban setting. The magic and the real are understood to coexist at the same time. Hughes also plays with distance, alternating open shots and close-ups to establish an intimate relationship with Kiku in this process of being displaced, so that as readers we can feel her surprise and sense of confusion. She then introduces a new colour palette that will be repeated throughout the graphic novel. Shades of green are used to portray the cloud in the present, and the same shades of blue shown in the prologue are used for the past, to create continuity. Later on, Hughes chooses to paint the cloud in shades of brown while in the camps, as they were located in isolated, desert zones. 25 Figure 2.4 Displacement, pages 12 & 13 Her choice of words is also relevant. First, the cloud is named as a thing–a fog. On page 13, Kiku explains “When I opened my eyes, all I could see was a thick fog. But when it cleared at last… I was somewhere entirely different.” She is describing an extraordinary experience using common, ordinary terms. Then, the terms Hughes chooses to express the impact of this first displacement also foreshadow the magnitude of what’s coming her way. Kiku says “I was in shock” and “To my horror …” (14) before realizing she’s at her grandmother’s violin recital, sometime in the 1940s while still living in the city. However, what strikes her most is not the displacement itself, but a sign that reads NO JAPS IN OUR SCHOOLS hanging at the Native Daughters of the Golden 26 West building. This is when the fog appears again, bleeding from the bottom left edge of the page towards the right, invading the last panels that showcase Kiku’s discomfort. Its appearance is surprising and unexpected, breaking the rigidity of the grid, as it seems to echo Kiku’s internal turmoil. On the panel to the left, Kiku is drawn in a medium shot, looking distressed after reading the sign, while to the right, we see a close-up of her mouth tightly shut, containing her fury and frustration. The caption in these two panels round-up Kiku’s feelings: “Of all the shocks to my system that afternoon, that sign was the worst. / It was the last thing I saw before the fog came back again” (18). Figure 2.5 Displacement, pages 18 & 19 27 By the next time the fog appears, Kiku already knows what to expect, as does the reader. The fog is now perceived as a common and matter-of-fact element since, as Kiku later explains: “IT’S ALWAYS FOGGY IN SAN FRANCISCO” (38). Hughes’ strategic choice of an element that is part of the city’s landscape reinforces the magical realist effect, grounding the magic in reality. This same strategy is used when Kiku arrives in the camps, where the clouds of dust where also common. “The few times my great-grandmother had spoken of camp to my mom, she had apparently always mentioned the dust,” she explains (140). Thus, while the cloud appears to be perfectly real and common in each given context, it also becomes this magical force that takes Kiku away from one place and era to the other, without any kind of explanation as to why or how it happens. This is the essence of magical realism, in visual form. It is important to note that this visual resource is also generative, and not static at all. As the story progresses, the cloud gains in symbolic value, and tricks the readers in their trained expectations. The incarceration conditions become worse and more difficult to bear, especially when Kiku has to move from Tanforan Assembly Center in California to her definitive stop in Topaz, Utah. Upon arriving here after a two-night train ride–with papered windows so that they wouldn’t know the way, and with motion sickness, restlessness and claustrophobia–the first thing Kiku encounters is the dust. Hughes writes: “We emerged into a landscape like nothing we had ever seen” (139) in a panel at the center of the page, where we see a group of people floating inside a cloud of brown dust. To the left, Kiku is drawn with no frame, suspended between panels, and surrounded by the same cloud. This seems like a dream–or a nightmare– located in the top half of the page, the Ideal zone. However, the reality is clear: in the final panel, on the bottom, a panoramic view of 28 the camp depicts it as a jail, with its subsequent rows of dark rectangular houses, a fence and an invigilation tower. Figure 2.6 Displacement, pages 139 & 140 As readers, we hope this will be another transition, that Kiku will be magically transported out of this harsh reality. But on the following page we are immediately confronted with the truth. The cloud is only dust here, restrained to the panel, to the limits of the frame and the real world. It is impossible to change the past and the lived experiences of the thousands of Japanese people who went through camp. Again, Hughes makes this evident through the choice of image, frame and words. As she draws Kiku immersed in the dust, she writes “So I ignored the faint flicker of hope as a cloud of it was blown over us. / I knew I wasn’t going home. / This was my only home now” (140). 29 The level of disappointment and disbelief is highlighted through what I identify as another magical realist strategy, questioning the nature of reality itself. What is more impossible to believe: that a wind of gust will take you away? Or that a government can unjustly incarcerate innocent people because of their race? This is also a perfect example of how the traumatic imagination is set in motion to make sense of events that surpass logic. Arva emphasizes how it “transforms individual and collective traumatic memories into narrative memories and integrates them into an artistic shock chronotope” (5) thus “converting unrepresentable events into accessible fictional images.” It also underscores the notion that magic can be used as a tool for satire or political commentary (Faris 14) to highlight historical atrocities. 2.2.2.2 Writing from the periphery: other voices and the self Displacement is written from Kiku’s perspective as a teenage girl living in camp, trying to mirror her grandmother’s experience at the same age. It is not her grandmother’s story though, because she was never able to meet her or have access to her thoughts and emotions. The story is built on the memories passed down to her through her own mother, and others that come from collective knowledge and/or experience. Thus, even if writing from her own voice, Hughes is also representing a multiplicity of voices; those that live within herself–daughter, granddaughter, teen, Japanese, American, artist, activist–and those that belong to the collective, to any of the thousands of anonymous people who lived through camp, or the specific few who actively opposed the system. Hugues takes advantage of the resources afforded by the graphic novel form to portray this multiplicity. Page 77 is a great example of how two contrasting realities can coexist at the 30 same time. The zigzagging line of tiny human silhouettes that serves as background and crosses the page from left to right and back to left serves to highlight the massive impact of this experience. Thousands of men and women, reduced to shadows, march in anonymity with no clear purpose or destiny. However, this image is combined with four panels that tell a different, parallel story. Their position at the margins is a reflection of their marginal, uncommon nature. They are fully coloured too, as opposed to the blackness of the zigzagging line of people. These panels use an action-to-action transition to show Kiku’s experience with Aiko, her roommate, a Nisei (second generation Japanese American) woman like her grandmother, but not at all like her: she is “rebellious and vocal about her opposition to incarceration” (77). Figure 2.7 Displacement, page 77 31 The first and second panels show Kiku and Aiko working together to make their home more livable, arranging sacks of grass as pillows. The third panel shows them having fun while eating together, while the last one to the left shows Aiko arguing with someone. These personal details make life in camp more colourful and bearable, and make the story more human and memorable, too. The irregular frame of each panel seems to suggest that these are also irregular, uncommon instances: life inside the camps is usually hard and dull. Since the general layout of the page appears to be balanced, the imbalance of both situations is visually exacerbated. Page 272 uses other graphic techniques to highlight the importance of nine people who opposed the system. At the top we can see their portraits, as a reflection of the Ideal they represent. They are presented in three neat rows of three panels each, possibly emulating a yearbook where their image and story can be kept forever. Figure 2.8 Displacement, pages 272 & 273 32 Kiku looks at them with hope and respect from the bottom center of the page, and from the Real, contemporary world of 2016. Her image is the most salient, attracting the attention to her attitude and the accompanying text: “I was inspired by their bravery and the determination they had not to let history be repeated. It was a fight I wanted to be a part of, too.” The layout looks solid, centered, symmetrical. The light colours and the clean lines transmit a sense of peace and authenticity that contrasts with the chaos and turmoil on the opposite page. An image of Donald Trump at the center and left of page 273 is the most salient element, attracting our attention to his speech: “We don’t want them here.” The other five panels gravitate towards this image from top left to bottom left and all the way around the right side of the page, to show different conflictive points of view. Kress and Van Leeuwen explain that a central configuration establishes a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. This layout also suggests that the Given image of Trump to the left brings a New set of catastrophic consequences to the right. At the top left, the Ideal picture of a welcoming group of people marching for equality of rights reads “Refugees are welcome” and “No ban, no wall.” But then the Real starts to sink in as we move from top to bottom, and from panel to panel. Three panels portray news anchors giving long updates and opinions on complicated immigration policies. The last panel on the bottom right is the image of a girl trapped behind a fence, in a detention center at the US-Mexico border. The scene-to-scene transition highlights that all these seemingly unconnected events are actually bound together by Trump’s power and voice. While page 272 symbolizes Kiku’s desire to learn and reflect about the past, page 273 reflects how the old establishment is repeating ideas and errors from the past, in a continuous 33 circular motion. Here again, information value, salience, framing, and the choice of moment, frame, image, word and flow are combined to create a contrasting effect. 2.2.2.3 Disruptions of time, space and identity Faris asserts that magical realist texts often address particular historical wounds (80) and that they also present opportunities to re-encounter the past and heal them. In her author’s note, Hughes explains that as she researched and learned more about life in the camps, she understood that her grandmother’s story “didn’t end with her. The camps left scars on our whole community that were passed down through generations” (279). The transmission of memory and trauma through different generations is at the core of Displacement. This is in itself a disruption of time, space and identity, an idea that Hughes develops through the graphic novel form in different ways. First, she highlights how memory is an embodied experience, a concept that is common to trauma theory and to the graphic novel form, as I discussed in chapter one. This is made clear on page 34 during Kiku’s second displacement. She has just arrived to the past, and finds herself walking along a multitude of Japanese Americans toward an unknown destination. When she sees a soldier holding a rifle, she gets scared and falls to the ground, hurting her knee. On page 37, Kiku is brought back to contemporary life, and when she sits down in a taxi, she realizes her knee is hurt. The pain is there. The wound is still bleeding. The scar is still fresh. This notion of a wound from the past that is still open in the present is made literally visible thanks to the graphic novel form, and is acknowledged as a possibility due to the magical realist lens. 34 Figure 2.9 Displacement, pages 34 & 35 The effect is even greater when we analyze the composition of page 34, the choice of images and words. The fall itself is portrayed in a wordless layout composed of four irregular panels in a moment-to-moment transition that creates more suspense, highlighting Kiku’s sense of insecurity and surprise. In the top right corner, the soldier holds the rifle in a borderless panel, enhancing his presence and power as he breaks the confinement of the frame. Kiku, in contrast, is emotionally and physically constrained inside the frame. When she falls, however, she also breaks the border of the panel as her hand and knee touch the floor, in the white space of the gutter. This effect is visually conveying the power of her fall, but also its future effect, the disruption of time and space. Hughes is foreshadowing how this event will mark Kiku’s life, and scar her in body and mind. Kiku’s bent image at the bottom-Real margin of the page is in a pose 35 of submission, and drawn directly underneath the standing soldier, who is located in the top-Ideal area of the page, exerting his power. On page 35, the five-panel layout is very rigid and structured, providing some stability that contrasts with the movement and chaos of the previous page. A young Japanese man asks Kiku if she is OK, to which she answers “I think so.” But then, his next question seems to destabilize the situation again, prompting the cloud to appear and transport Kiku back to present-day San Francisco. “Miss, are you sure you’re supposed to be here?” the young man asks. “I don’t know” is Kiku’s answer in the wide panel at the bottom of the page, showing her confused expression as the fog invades the scene again, and breaks the frame to escape through the bottom right corner. This question addresses Kiku’s own sense of self: if she had been alive at the time, would she have been there? Would she have been sent to the internment camps as well? Up to this moment we have learned that Kiku doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t know much about her Japanese family either. She didn’t even know her grandmother’s name, Ernestina, until after the first displacement. However, this question marks her as much as the physical wound on the knee, forcing her to start researching about the past. As she discovers, even if she is only half-Japanese and usually passes as white (40), she would’ve inevitably been incarcerated. Page 41 shows the results for her Google search on Japanese internment camps: anyone with one-sixteenth of Japanese ancestry or more was sent to camp. But as she concludes, “That certainly didn’t mean we belonged there. Nobody did” (41). Identity is formed in part through a sense of belonging. And in a magical realist, metafictive way, writing Displacement allowed Hughes to reclaim her space as a Japanese American as well. As she told me during our interview, “it became a metaphor for my own 36 journey of learning about camp, through both family inherited memory, through finding artifacts in my family home, through discussing research … The process of writing this book is sort of mirrored in the book, in what my character goes through.” Thus, she also shared, the novel allowed her to “come to terms” with her own identity and help her “negotiate what race is” in the United States. When I asked about the scene of the injury, she told me she created it to intentionally portray the way in which memory is physically stored in the body. “These big traumas have a lasting physicality and a physical presence. It’s not just passing down a memory, it’s also passing down this very physical way in which that memory is stored,” she explained. Drawing the body on the page is not only a symbolic act of re-creating oneself, but reclaiming the memories that live within us, in this same body. However, drawing the body on the page through a magical realist lens also allows Hughes to imagine other possible pasts, and futures. In this sense, I believe she also disrupts the notion of time, space and identity when she depicts Kiku in a romantic relationship with another woman during her incarceration. According to Yasmine I. Raggis, there is almost no evidence of queer stories inside Japanese internment camps because of a series of factors: at the time, homosexuality was illegal; Japanese families were very conservative, almost forbidding public displays of affection even within heterosexual couples; and the camps were crowded and overpopulated, with large numbers of people living in the same house, which difficulted having intimate relationships. In this context, the fact that Kiku meets May Ide and develops more than a friendship with her defies the norms of the times. Their story belongs in this alter-space, the in-between where they are able to showcase their affection both in private and in public, as pages 115 and 116 show. 37 Figure 2.10 Displacement, pages 115 & 116 Here, Kiku explains how, to make life more bearable, people in camp organized events like high school dances. The straightforward, clean and symmetrical layout of the page contributes to create a sense of calm and conveys the ordinariness of the event, however unusual it may have been to have a party. Through moment-to-moment transitions, the first four panels show Kiku getting dressed for the dance, with the help of her roommate, Aiko. The pacing is slowed down so that we pay attention to the details of the scene, portrayed in the upper half of the page, the realm of the fantasy and the Ideal. At the bottom of the page, May appears on the first panel to the left and compliments Kiku’s outfit, in a stereotypical masculine line. Then, the next and last panel shows a close-up of Kiku’s face, and highlights she is blushing. Hughes is allowing this relationship to be real, both in the eyes of Kiku and Aiko, her roommate, but in a 38 shy and measured way, as the grid reveals. In page 116, however, Hughes takes the reader–and Kiku–out of the private realm and into public life, as she draws them dancing together at the high-school event, in a conventional man-woman dance pose. May wears pants and a jacket, while Kiku has a dress; a visual cue that suggests May is standing in for the male partner. The wide, top panel floats over a panoramic view of the dance floor as background. Kiku and May are the most salient elements, located at the center of the panel and page, while sharing a tender look of complicity. The information value at the top of the page suggests this is an Idealized vision. However, since this panel floats on top of a bleeding image of the dance itself, the dream becomes a Reality. In this scene, we see them dancing together like any other couple at the event. The choice of words highlights the importance of the moment in a caption located at the center of the page and under Kiku and May’s close-up. The text reads: “Each of us fought a daily battle to hold close all that was dear to us.” (116) Later, on page 187, Kiku and May dance again. But this time there are several elements that underline this is a magical moment. The cloud of dust surrounds the panels on page 186 and directs the reader’s gaze to the girls dancing on page 187. Located in the top left corner of the layout, this panel is the most salient image on the page. In panel four, a man addresses the guests and thanks them for “coming out” and attending the event, in an evident wordplay. Then, at the bottom of the page, Kiku and May walk in a hug, under the shadow of the night. In this setting, they also have their first kiss, as shown in the following page. The scene is drawn in the lower margin of the page, with no frame. This is an act of freedom, written from the margins. 39 Figure 2.11 Displacement, pages 187 & 188 The ability to speak from the margins and portray alternative points of view is a key characteristic of magical realism. As Faris explains, “the text suspended between those two discursive systems (magic and realism) corresponds to the postcolonial subject suspended between two or more cultural systems” (135). Suspended between Japanese and American culture, the past and the future, the magical and the real, Hugues is able to envision this reality for Kiku, in what I also consider a feminist lens. 2.2.2.4 Embracing a femin(ist/ine) voice In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute asserts that autobiographical comics by women make visible “feminist concerns about embodiment and representation” (19). When drawing the body on the page, they are able to show that which may have been kept hidden due to the historical 40 oppression of the dominant patriarchal culture, thus “undo(ing) culture’s masculinist predatory gaze” (81). Comics by women, she asserts, “counter that being-looked-at with its own looking, drawing and framing” (83). Faris also notes how magical realism frames reality through what could be called a feminine voice. Regardless of the gender of the author, it is possible to “locate a female spirit” in its concern with “investigating possibilities for transgressing boundaries and limits, including, especially, the opposition between selves and others, and with questioning dualistic modes of thought,” (171) she explains. I believe the magical realist elements in Displacement can also be seen as feminist, since they afford female characters the possibility to speak up and gain agency both in their personal lives and as part of a collective. During our conversation, Hughes mentioned that one of the things that was really important to her was telling this story through the lens of a woman, since this point of view has been more difficult to access. “So many women had an impact on how camp was run day to day. It was mothers who were keeping things together most of the time. They are only just now being researched into the specific experience of being a single woman or a woman who was alone in camp and the hazards that came with that” she told me. It is no surprise that Aiko, Kiku’s roommate at Tanforan, is an independent, inquisitive and politically engaged single woman, or that an educated Nisei woman from Berkeley becomes the transitory History teacher at the internment camp’s school. By drawing these women on the page, their stories also become visible, and as readers, we do not doubt they are real, even if they may be fictional. It is the possibility of their existence that matters. 41 Ernestina–Kiku’s grandmother–on the other hand, is a real person, not only a character. However, Kiku does not get to talk to her during her time at the camp. It is during her grandmother’s graduation ceremony that Kiku decides to finally approach her, right before the fog appears again and takes her back to her life in Seattle. Since Hughes never met her grandmother, she didn’t want to engage in an imaginary dialogue with her and take the risk of getting her voice wrong, she explained. She didn’t want to alter this part of their story. However, this also gives her the freedom to focus on the present, a space where she can explore the possibilities of her own voice. Just like memory and trauma were passed on to her from woman to woman, she decides to pass her own memory through this graphic novel, incorporating new possibilities in the past, but also towards the future. Thus, in the last part of the graphic novel, Hughes focuses on exploring her own place and space in this story, through the present. When she tells her mother about her displacements on page 232, to her own surprise–and ours, as readers–she discovers that her mom had also experienced them before. In yet another magical realist twist, Hughes normalizes the displacements and explains them through her mother’s words: “I don’t think we are traveling through time or space, really. / I think we’re traveling through memory” (234). 42 Figure 2.12 Displacement, page 234 The layout of the page adds verisimilitude to her mother’s words. The symmetrical composition makes it feel balanced and stable, truthful even. Her mother’s serious face in the central horizontal panel is the most salient image on the page, attracting our attention. The close-up makes us feel part of the scene, adding intimacy, while her frontal gaze seems to be staring at us as well, and not only at Kiku inside the page. The following image shows Kiku’s mother with her arms crossed in front of her chest in a borderless panel, escaping the barrier of the frame and inviting us into the picture. Thus, we are now immersed in the present with her. We can no longer be mere listeners or witnesses of the story. Her mother’s words engage us even more: “I think sometimes a community’s experience is so traumatic, it stays rooted in us even generations later. And the later generations continue to rediscover that experience, since it’s still shaping us in ways we might not realize.” 43 With this new consciousness, and with the reader as an accomplice, Kiku embarks now on a voluntary journey to the past, revisiting history along with her mother. As they start talking about her grandmother’s life, the fog appears again and takes them to Ernestina’s concert while studying at Juilliard, then to the apartment where her mother grew up, and finally to the scene of their departure from New York and back to the west coast, where they now live. Through sharing these stories, they find their way back home. Throughout the graphic novel, Kiku addresses how little she knew about her grandmother’s story, and how little her mother talked about this experience. Nagata and Chen’s 2003 study on the intergenerational communication of race-related trauma by Japanese American former internees reveals that the lower frequency of communication among Japanese American parents was likely affected by the Japanese practices of gaman (perseverance-supression of emotions), enryo (self-restraint, reserve), and maintaining harmony. Such practices affected most Nisei internees following the war. They socialized their children to blend into the dominant society, did not actively pass on the Japanese language and culture, and rarely talked about their discriminatory experiences. (268) Hughes attempt to tell this story is, then, a transgression in and of itself. She is breaking the silence, and breaking boundaries is a common trait of feminist works, the graphic novel form and magical realism, as I have already explained. The notion of home can also be interpreted as the safe place/space where Kiku can finally tell her truth. At home, in Part IV of the graphic novel, the relationship between mother and daughter is strengthened even more as they start their own research about this moment in history 44 and take action in the present, when Trump’s administration threatens Muslim and LatinX communities. We see Kiku, her mother and her sister–unknown to us until now–, creating posters while preparing to march for these people’s rights. The chain of memory is transformed into a chain of strength and resistance that grants women power and control over their own stories and bodies, an idea that resides at the core of feminist theory. As Faris asserts, “such a paradigm reversal needs magic to impose itself on our collective imagination” (175). In the last double spread of the graphic novel, Hughes draws Kiku and her mother marching next to a mass of anonymous people, in blue hues. The bleeding image is crossed at the bottom by the dusty brown fog, bringing back the memory of the internment camps, but also directing our attention to the present, to the last panel, on the bottom right corner. In this scene, we now see Ernestina appear beside them. The past will always live with her, but she will use it to create new memories, too. Because “memories are powerful things,” Kiku Hugues affirms in her last words. Figure 2.13 Displacement, pages 276 & 277 45 CHAPTER THREE: WRITING NUNA AND THE NOSE, A MIDDLE GRADE GRAPHIC NOVEL 3.1 Introduction and motivation Nuna and the Nose has been a way of making sense of my experience as an immigrant child who had to adapt to three different schools in three different countries before turning thirteen. Not only did I have a strange accent and name, like Nuna, but I also became aware that my nose was a big, prominent nose, after other girls started calling me names. For me, as for many other children, growing up was a traumatic experience, although not marked by one specific extreme event, but by the cumulative effect of feeling different and in a permanent state of adaptation. Traumatic stress, anxiety and worry thoughts are known consequences of such situations, and their exhausting presence can take a toll on mental health, as I have already explained in chapter two. The noted developmental psychoanalyst, Erikson, affirms that in the process of becoming teenagers and young adults, children form their identity and notion of self, while longing to build strong connections and create a sense of belonging at the same time (94). Often, contradictions arise between their perceived self-identity and the desired social identity, the one defined and accepted by their community, the media, or social standards. In her book Under Pressure, Tanya Lloyd Ki explains that scientists have identified two different kinds of stress: “the fight-or-fly response we feel in a crisis” and the “simmering stress caused by worry” (17). Penning et al. highlight Van der Kolk’s “psychiatric classification of Developmental Trauma Disorder” recognizing the developmental influences of an ongoing repetitive traumatic experience like bullying (132). 46 These circumstances, along with the “potentital trauma that acculturative stress plays on a child developing in a household of immigrant parents (…) regardless of whether or not it was experienced as traumatic,” (Shantobi 10) definitely shape Nuna’s world. During my research for the novel, I came upon the story of Radhika Sanghani, an author and journalist who, in 2019, founded the #sideprofileselfie online campaign. Growing up with a big nose that also made her feel different and not beautiful enough, she decided it was time to celebrate big noses and make them part of the body positivity movement, encouraging people to take profile photos of their noses and share them. To her surprise, the initiative went viral and was used around 50,000 times in just a few days. I also read Flawed (2018), a book adaptation of an animated film created by Canadian animator and film-maker Andrea Dorfman that tells her struggles with a big nose, growing up and “accepting herself for who she is, imperfections and all” as the book’s jacket states. Finding one’s own sense of self and place, while trying to fit in, will always be part of growing up, as these stories demonstrate. It is part of my story, too, and it made me relate to Radhika and Andrea’s works. I hope young readers will be able to see themselves in Nuna’s story, and find the courage to speak in their own voice, too. 3.2 Creative choices At thirteen years of age, Nuna is finding it difficult to adapt to her new life and new school in Vancouver, especially after a group of people start calling her names because of her prominent nose. To her, this comes as a striking surprise, as she had not been made aware of “the nose issue” in her previous school in Peru, or the others before that. 47 When “the nose issue” becomes “a thing”, it gains presence and a voice of its own. This is why the graphic novel combines Nuna’s perspective in conventional prose form, and the Nose’s in graphic form, so as to establish that the nose has a permanent presence, weight and effect. I have already explained how trauma theory acknowledges that memory is fragmented, and how this relates to the comics form. In Nuna and the Nose, the appearance of the Nose as a character in and of itself attests to this fragmentation, giving it a separate, visual presence. It also refers to the repetitive nature of traumatic memory, like a constant voice that reminds victims of past events. Hence, the Nose is also constantly talking and accompanying Nuna wherever she goes. However, instead of projecting the Nose’s voice as a negative presence, I wanted to highlight its transformative potential. Once Nuna is able to acknowledge that the Nose’s voice also carries ancestral wisdom and experience, and that it all belongs to her, she is given agency to re-create her reality and speak her own truth. Using a hybrid written-graphic form affords the possibility of showcasing Nuna’s journey from a visibly fragmented self to an integrated individual. As Ian Rudge mentions, the fantastic element in magical realism acts as a distancing device that creates a safe space to talk about emotionally challenging issues. I believe the Nose’s voice also adds a beneficial dose of humour and lightheartedness to topics that could otherwise be seen as too dense or dramatic. The decision to write from the Nose’s point of view is also creative, aiming to engage and surprise young audiences who are used to consuming visual content. To this effect, I also made three strategic choices that affect the graphic novel’s structure. Firstly, to differentiate when the Nose’s voice is heard independently from when it coexists with Nuna’s I changed the 48 page’s layout. The Nose’s voice is usually expressed in a 3x3 standard comic grid, giving most pages a solid, stable look, while the pages when Nuna and the Nose are aware of each other’s existence and interact with each other are drawn using a 4x4 grid. The sixteen small panels allow me to show more aspects of a given scene, adding more detail in moment-to-moment and action-to-action transitions. They also make the page denser and more saturated, adding to the feeling of being overwhelmed by this constant voice and presence. Figure 3.1 Nuna and the Nose, 3 x 3 grid Figure 3.2 Nuna and the Nose, 4 x 4 grid Secondly, when Nuna and the Nose meet, I chose to draw the Nose as a panel. Instead of being portrayed as a character inside the panel, its presence shapes the pages’ layout and the narrative itself. It thus becomes a visually, symbolically and semantically disruptive element. 49 Figure 3.3 Nuna and the Nose, full-colour layout with nose panel Thirdly, I decided that the change of grid would also be accompanied by a change in colour. The Nose’s comic pages in the first part of the graphic novel are drawn in black and white, with certain details highlighted in purple. Through repetition, the reader learns that those purple accents and remarks form part of the Nose’s identity, associating the colour to the character. On the second half of the book, we transition to full colour panels in the 4x4 grid. This helps as a visual reinforcement of the shift in the narrative structure: Nuna and the Nose are actually able to talk to each other now, so they both belong in the same plane/realm, while in the previous black and white spreads we could only have a partial view of the world through the 50 Nose’s graphic monologues. In this second part, the Nose is still portrayed in purple, to maintain continuity. The addition of colour is also relevant to the story’s plot, as Nuna’s search for an artistic language relies heavily on her appreciation of colour, which she starts collecting throughout the novel. 3.3 Magical realist elements in Nuna and the Nose The portrayal of the Nose as an embodied presence on the page, with a voice of its own, is the first and most evident magical realist feature of Nuna and the Nose. In chapters four, seven, ten and fourteen the Nose talks by itself, in a monologue that also addresses Nuna and the reader. But then, when Nuna attends a shamanic ceremony in Cusco in chapter 16, she suddenly starts hearing the Nose’s voice. This not only changes the visual structure of the book from alternating chapters in verbal and graphic form (3x3 grid) to purely comics form (4x4 grid), and from black and white to full colour, but it also changes the reader’s engagement as they adapt to this new setting where Nuna actually talks back to her nose. If at this point there was any disbelief left, it is now completely suspended as we, as readers, understand that Nuna is able to communicate with her nose. Faris dedicates an entire chapter of her book to establish a comparison between the figure of the shaman and magical realist writing. To her, both share an act of balancing between two worlds, the real and the extraordinary. Since the image of the shaman is well-known throughout many cultural traditions, then it serves as a popular symbol to understand how magical realism works. “The reader of a magical realist text participates in a textual performance analogous to a shamanic trance in which voices that are imagined as coming from another realm are produced,” (78) she explains. In Nuna and the Nose, this voice comes from Nuna’s internal realm, and 51 although we as readers have been listening to it throughout the first chapters, Nuna is only aware of its existence after the shamanic ritual. The merging of realms and the creation of an in-between is also made visible after this encounter. The initial chapters when Nuna and the Nose speak separately represent that in-between state of knowing and not knowing, while their reunion, starting in chapter 16, creates a new reality where both coexist. Nuna’s life also develops in that in-between: Canada and Peru, modern vs traditional knowledge. That is why her voice also comes from the periphery, and is in a constant dance between the notion of others and the self. This liminal state of being is part of the teenage experience in itself, but in Nuna’s case it is highlighted due to her foreign origin and the fact that her identity is also defined by the stories she doesn’t know about her family’s roots. These are only made available later, in the process of reconnecting with her grandfather, and through the Nose’s voice. In this case, the Nose is also disrupting notions of time, space and identity. On one hand, it brings forward ancestral knowledge that otherwise wouldn’t be available to Nuna, acting like a record keeper. On the other, it acts like a medium in the present world, connecting Nuna to the secret voices of her peers through their own imperfect body parts. The Nose is able to hear someone else’s Ears, Bum, and other Noses, normalizing the fact that almost everyone has some kind of body-related shame. This discovery is a turning point in the graphic novel and in Nuna’s psyche, as she understands how Susana, the girl who bullies her, is acting from the fear of being called out because of her own imperfections. I believe that these issues also align Nuna and the Nose with a feminist discourse, presenting a strong female character that is able to overcome her insecurities and find her own voice and identity, forged on her ancestral roots but also integrated to the 52 present. I hope the reading enhances body positivity and the importance of being authentic and true to oneself, rather than complying with standard parameters of beauty, or even girlhood. Nuna means soul, and in the context of this story, Nuna’s quest is both spiritual and material. It is through her physical imperfections that she will be able to find a way back and into her true self: an identity that is grounded in her rich history and tradition, but that can also help her claim her space and find comfort in the present, bridging both cultural worlds. 53 CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION This thesis examines how magical realism and the graphic novel work together to portray trauma in contemporary literature for young readers. Although each form’s ability to convey the complex nature of traumatic memory has been studied in depth separately, the points where they productively intersect to portray trauma have not been used as a framework to analyze works aimed at young readers. Thus, this academic paper aims to bridge this gap and contribute to the study of children’s and young adult literature by identifying the presence of magical realist elements in graphic form, and understand the underlying forces that make it such a powerful combination to portray trauma. Through a close reading of the graphic novel Displacement, I aimed to bring to light the strategies used by author Kiku Hugues to effectively communicate the transmission of intergenerational trauma after her grandmother’s experience at a Japanese American internment camp. To achieve this purpose, I analyzed Wendy B. Faris’ key elements of magical realism and Eugene L. Arva’s notion of the traumatic imagination, along with Hillary Chute’s studies on autobiographical graphic narratives, and their ability to embody trauma and develop and idiom of witness. I then applied Scott McCloud’s and Kress and van Leeuwen’s models for reading comics and images, respectively, to an analysis of Hughes’ work. In this process, I was able to identify the different strategies at work to re-present the somewhat unrepresentable essence of trauma in terms of page composition and layout, and through the use of graphic elements such as panel transitions, framing, colour, point of view, and salience, among others. This analysis highlights the creative potential of combining magical realist elements in graphic form. Not only is Hughes able to re-create this traumatic experience in an attempt to make sense of her own story; she also offers an alternative narrative that revisits this historic yet 54 personal traumatic event and breaks the boundary between fact and fiction to heal the past and write new possibilities for the future. In doing so, she succeeds in presenting female characters that act as agents of change, and is able to claim her own place and space in history. Although I do mention other graphic novels that use magical realist elements to portray trauma, my research has been limited to the study of only one other work besides my own. I believe it could be expanded to the analysis of other titles–American Born Chinese, The Legend of Auntie Po, or Anya’s Ghost, for example–to provide further insights regarding the dynamic relationship between magical realism and the graphic novel form. In the process of writing Nuna and the Nose, an original graphic novel manuscript, I also put these strategies into practice, confirming their creative potential to express the multidimensional experience of trauma through a multilayered narrative. Instead of offering escapism, magic enables authors–and consequently, readers–to interpret experiences from an-other point of view, giving a voice to those who usually remain silent, living at the margins. Thus, graphic novels that use magical realist elements to portray trauma are successful in presenting counternarratives with the power to destabilize the dominant narratives of their times. Using fantasy as a bridge to re-present emotionally challenging issues from everyday life creates a space where readers feel safe enough to connect and engage with these different points of view. In Nuna and the Nose, it allowed me to portray the different voices that live inside of Nuna while facing the traumas of growing up as an immigrant girl with anxiety and self-image issues. I believe this thesis also contributes to highlight the important role graphic narratives and magical realism play in today’s visually-oriented world, helping young readers access diverse stories from underrepresented authors–and characters–through a medium that feels both familiar and attractive at the same time. The multimodal form of comics and multidimensional scope of 55 magical realism can be seen as a common and effective language to portray the multilayered experience of traumatic events. 56 Works Cited Angulo, Maria Elena. Magical Realism: Social Context and Discourse. Routledge, 1995. Arva, Eugene L. The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction. Cambria Press, 2011. Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995. 75-88 doi:10.1215/9780822397212 Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. --- Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 Chute, Hillary. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Harvard University Press, 2016 --- Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics. Columbia University Press, 2010 Courtney, Deborah. “Understand the Brain. Understand our Children.” Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents, edited by Mery F. Diaz and Benjamin Shepard, Columbia University Press, 2019, 263-280. doi:10.7312/diaz18478 Davies, Dominic and Rifkind, Candida. Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage. Springer International Publishing, 2020. Dorfman, Andrea. Flawed. Firefly Books, 2018 Erikson, Erik H. Identity and the Life Cycle. Norton, 1980. Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. 57 Gilmore, Leigh. “Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony.” In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by Michael A. Chaney. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Hammer, Yvonne. "Defining Magical Realism in Children's Literature: Voices in Contemporary Fugue, Texts that Speak from the Margins." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, vol. 16, no. 2, 2006, pp. 64-70. Hughes, Kiku. Displacement. MacMillan Publishers, 2020 --- Personal interview. 23 June 2023. Luen Yang, Gene. American Born Chinese. First Second, 2006 Maté, Gabor, et al. The Wisdom of Trauma. Science and Nonduality, Sebastopol, Calif., 2022. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 1993. --- Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels. William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2006. Penning, Susan L., Anil Bhagwanjee, and Kaymarlin Govender. "Bullying Boys: The Traumatic Effects of Bullying in Male Adolescent Learners." Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, vol. 22, no. 2, 2010, pp. 131-143. DOI: 10.2989/17280583.2010.528580 Rayyis, Yasmine I. “Searching for a Queer History in the Japanese American Concentration Camps.” US History Scene, https://ushistoryscene.com/article/searching-for-a-queer-history-in-the-japanese-american-concentration-camps/. Accessed 31 August 2023. 58 Roh, Franz. “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Duke University Press, 1995. 15-31. doi:10.1215/9780822397212-002 Romero-Jódar, Andrés. The Trauma Graphic Novel. Routledge, 2017, doi:10.4324/9781315296616. Rudge, Ian. "Magic Realism in Children's Literature: A Narratological Reading." The New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship, vol. 10, no. 2, 2004, pp. 127-140. Sanghani, Radhika.“I'm proof you can learn to love a big nose... Thanks to a special portrait – and my campaign to help women like me in our image-obsessed world.” Daily Mail UK, 20 November 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7707733/Im-proof-learn-love-big-nose-Thanks-special-portrait.html. Accessed 6 September 2023. Shamtobi, Sanam R. Intergeneration Transmission of Trauma and its Effects on the Second Generation's Mental Health as Moderated by Parental Communication Style, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2016. Szép, Eszter, OAPEN, and DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books. Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability. The Ohio State University Press, 2020, doi:10.26818/9780814214541 Tarbox, Gwen A., and ProQuest (Firm). Children's and Young Adult Comics. Bloomsbury Academic, London;New York, NY;, 2020, doi:10.5040/9781350009233. United States Government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data and Statistics on Children’s Mental Health. March 8, 2023. www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html Accessed 15 August 2023. 59 Wargo, Jon M. "Sexual Slipstreams and the Limits of Magic Realism: Why a Bisexual Cinderella may Not be all that “Queer”." Bookbird, vol. 52, no. 1, 2014, pp. 43-50. Youth Mental Health Canada Charitable Foundation. Youth Mental Health Stats in Canada. Updated 2019. www.ymhc.ngo/resources/ymh-stats/ Accessed 15 August 2023. Zamora, Lois P., and Wendy B. Faris. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke University Press, 1995
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Children's Literature
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Rogers, Theresa
Shoemaker, Kathryn E.
Magical realism as a strategy to embody trauma in comics for young readers
Text