“The Best We Could Remember: Memory, Forgetting, and Family Formation in The Best We Could Do.” Justine Trinh, Washington State University
Memory is the focal point of the graphic novel memoir, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, which tells of her family’s journey from Vietnam during the war to their relocation to the United States. Starting with her own son’s birth, Bui connects this event to her mother’s trauma through the birth and loss of her oldest sister. The death of her oldest sister shapes how the family is later defined. In an effort to cope with their loss and war trauma, the parents do not consider their dead children as part of their family and physically distance themselves in a completely different continent in an attempt to forget them. This is echoed when Bui’s older sister, Bich, runs away from home. The father, Bo, demands the remaining children forget about her. He states, “You don’t have a sister named Bich anymore. She is dead to us” (Bui 27). This statement illustrates the parents equate being dead as forgotten.
However, the dead daughters are not forgotten because they continue to haunt the family. Bui herself considers her and her older sister, Lan, as replacement daughters for the dead ones because their births directly followed soon after. Bui and Lan are constantly compared to the what if scenario of the dead daughters. When thinking about her dead oldest sister, Bui ruminates on “how do the others compare to the memory of the lost one? Have our parents ever looked at us and felt slightly disappointed?” (57-58). In addition, while the parents choose to forget, Bui considers her dead older sisters and the sister who ran away to be part of her family, which goes against her father’s demands. This presentation looks to explore the contradictions of memory in terms of who belongs within a family and who decides who belongs.
Justine Trinh is currently a PhD student at Washington State in the English literature program. She previously graduated from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) with a B.A. in Asian American Studies and Classical Civilization, and a B.S. in Mathematics. She then received her M.A. in Asian American Studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies 4+1 B.A./M.A. Program. She is also involved in several research projects including one that looks at the women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Her research interests include Asian American Literature, Critical Refugee Studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.
“Subjectivity through Time: Retrospective Childhoods in Debbie Drechsler’s Daddy’s Girl.” Mukulika Batabyal, University of Delhi.
The exercise of creating an autobiography in retrospection always involves the process of reconstructing the image of the past as we remember it. This particular clause remains static no matter the choice of medium for expression of that piece. The graphic novel medium however, requires not only a narration of that past, but also images to correspond and represent that narrative. This becomes especially interesting when the subject in question attempts to illustrate a memory excruciatingly traumatic, raising complex questions of misrepresentation, and authenticity. Debbie Drechsler, through a series of comic strips in her semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Daddy’s Girl, brings out the difficulty of reconstructing the image of the self in hindsight especially when the body has been exposed to unfathomable trauma. Largely dealing with sexual abuse perpetrated through complicated relations of incest, the graphic novel follows no linearity or narrative but attempts to showcase incidents as direct reflections of the memories it represents. In this paper, I will attempt to analyze, through Drechsler’s project, the anxiety associated with the reconstruction of the self in the past particularly where there has been an attempt to repress certain harrowing memories. Does the graphic novel medium, with its text-image relationship, then help in expressing the memories which are otherwise difficult to articulate or does it complicate the authenticity of the said memories further by providing the scope for a visual representation? Furthermore, is a reconstruction of a childhood even possible in hindsight especially where the self in question has faced a traumatic disruption in its formative years or is the recollection only a reflection of our perception associated with those memories?
Mukulika Batabyal is a MPhil Research Scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. Her research interests include speculative fiction, late-capitalism, young adult fiction, media and propaganda studies, gender studies, and cinema studies. She uses the medium of poetry, creative non-fiction, and memes to express herself outside the space of academia.
“Performing Care Work: Graphic Narrative and Tensions of Visibility.” Julia Brown, Stony Brook University.
Graphic narratives centralizing around the body open avenues of understanding cultural knowledges of health and care work. In this piece, I examine two graphic narratives—Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass by Dana Walrath and Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s My Mother, and Me by Sarah Leavitt—through the lens of performance studies, in particular using the works of Diana Taylor and Robin Bernstein. I position the graphic narrative as a body of knowledge that is between/both Taylor’s archive and repertoire with the page serving as a stage of sorts—a scriptive thing staging scriptive things. If embodied acts, like Taylor suggests “reconstitute themselves, transmitting communal memories, histories, and values from one group/generation to the next” and “generate, record, and transmit knowledge” what knowledge can we gain from embodied performances of illness, particularly Alzheimer’s—an illness often framed as loss of knowledge? What knowledge can we gain from embodied performances of care work? Through a close reading of these graphic narratives, I suggest that by learning to attend to these scripts, and (in)visibility we can learn how to provide better care for care workers and patients alike.
Julia Brown is pursuing her PhD in English literature at Stony Brook University with a research focus on the intersection of literature and medicine/health. Julia is an editor of Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine and has served as the Assistant Director of the Teaching and Learning Center and an Open Educational Resource Fellow at City College of New York.
