The Human Rights Graphic Novel : Drawing It Just Right 9780367030544, 9780367626822, 9781003110255

Citation preview

THE HUMAN RIGHTS GRAPHIC NOVEL

This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few. The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form. The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields. Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His most recent books include Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire, 1830–1940 (2020); Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Culture and Literature (Routledge, 2019); Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global (2018); Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017); Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights (2016); Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance (2015); Posthumanism (2013); Frantz Fanon (2013); the edited collections, Colonial Education and India, 1781–1945 (Routledge, 2019); Women in Colonial India: Historical Documents and Sources (Routledge, 2014); and Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Constructions of Human Rights in India (Routledge, 2012).

‘Prolific polymath, Pramod K. Nayar has done it again! Deploying his trademark nimble and piercing humanistic analytic lens, he peels back and vitally reveals how graphic narratives forcefully wake us to the traumas of our planet’s most vulnerable. In an awe-inspiring sweep of comics from Africa and Asia as well as the Indian Subcontinent, Middle East, Balkans, and Indigenous Americas Nayar beautifully articulates powerfully generative concepts that enrich deeply our sense of how visual shaping devices like the panel function as more than windows to witness brutalities, humiliations, genocides. They wake us to new ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling that deeply connect us with the most vulnerable. They wake us to action. Nayar does with Comics Studies what Judith Butler and Barbara Harlow have done for human rights and the humanities. A must-read tour de force!’ — Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, and Eisner Award winner for the best scholarly work in Comics Studies

THE HUMAN RIGHTS GRAPHIC NOVEL Drawing it Just Right

Pramod K. Nayar

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Pramod K. Nayar The right of Pramod K. Nayar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-03054-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-62682-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-11025-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For My Parents and Nandini & Pranav

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsviii 1 Introduction: graphic humans and rights

1

2 Staging vulnerability – I

12

3 Staging vulnerability – II

51

4 Cultural trauma

88

5 Witnessing

121

6 Resilient resistance

152



180

Conclusion: the face of human rights

Bibliography193 Index206

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is another volume in the ‘vulnerability-precarity’ series I have been engaged with for the past few years (Human Rights and Literature 2016, The Extreme in Contemporary Culture 2017, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic 2017, Ecoprecarity 2019). It has been a long haul in harsh terrain, and my own vulnerability as a result of overwork is often kept in check due to the efforts and affections of many, to each of whom I express my gratitude here, again. My parents and parents-in-law for unstinting care and support; Nandini and Pranav – as he himself moves beyond Batman texts – for their very generous understanding and love; Nandana Dutta, for engaging in WhatsApp debates over a medium she is not fond of with me, of whom she most definitely is; Friends who regularly ask after health and work (not in that order): Haneef, Naveed, Ajeet, Premlata, Vaishali, Shruti, Bhalla, Neelu, Mini (Abraham), Ibrahim, Archana, Om and Soma. Rebecca Tarun (Ron) for her enthusiasm for and sharing of graphic texts; K. Narayana Chandran, who continues to fuel my thinking in innovative ways through throwaway lines and book mentions; Molly Tarun (‘Chechu’) for her prayers for and enquiries after her ‘little one’; And: Anna Kurian, comrade, friend and interlocutor who shapes my thoughts, and who adamantly (annadamantly) refuses to acquire the necessary undiluted fascination for the form, but, fortunately, just as adamantly remains lovingly committed to me and my work on it. Then: Shoma Choudhury and Shashank Sinha of Routledge India agreed to the book within seconds of my broaching the subject. The Routledge India team has been tremendously encouraging throughout the project (which, they were

Acknowledgements  ix

glad to note, was finished ahead of schedule!) and this book is the better for their support. To Frederick Aldama, distinguished Comics Studies scholar and originator of the lovely descriptor ‘the planetary republic of comics’, for his carefully thoughtout interview of me, his own amazing work and for that unbelievable endorsement (I have to now live up to that), much thanks. I owe to Shalmalee Palekar, for sending me when I needed it ‘hot off the press’ Jane Lydon’s amazing Visualizing Human Rights, several panels full of thanks. To those who have now made it a lovely habit (long may it last!) of sending me their books – but for this habit of theirs, my own work would have suffered considerably – many, many thanks: Elizabeth Goldberg, Sidonie Smith and James Dawes (who sent me within weeks of its release, his The Novel of Human Rights). To Appupen (George Mathen), creator of the ongoing Halahala saga in his incredible series (complete with ‘Rashtraman’ and ‘Modis Operandi’), a very special ‘Thank You’ for the signed copies he sent. Appupen: your work inspires. Research scholars, Meenakshi Srihari and Akshata Pai procured essays, often at short notice, and deserve a special ‘thank you’ here. Sections of the chapter on Cultural Trauma appeared first as essays: ‘The Forms of History: This Side, That Side, Graphic Narrative and the Partitions of the Indian Subcontinent’, (     Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.4 [2016]: 481–93), and ‘Radical Graphics: Martin Luther King, Jr., B.R. Ambedkar and Comics Auto/biography’ (Biography 39.2 [2016]: 147–71). The arguments on witnessing in Incognegro were rehearsed in ‘From Graphic Passing to Witnessing the Graphic: Racial Identity and Public Self-fashioning in Incognegro’ (Image & Text 28 [2016]: 7–26). Figurative realism and representation in graphic narrative was first tested in my ‘From Documentary Realism to Figurative Realism: Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks and the Holodomor’ (CounterText 3.4 [2018]: 362–81). Some parts of the analysis of Sacco’s representation of resilience will appear as ‘Visualizing Resilience: Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde’ in Critical Survey and of Munnu in ‘Graphic Mortality: Malik Sajad’s Munnu and the Culture of Death’ in South Asian Ways of Seeing: Contemporary Visual Cultures. Questions of memory and trauma were explored, albeit in a different way, in the essay ‘Graphic Memory, Connective Histories, and Dalit Trauma: A Gardener in the Wasteland’ (English Language Notes 57.2 [2019]: 143–50). Pareidoliac reading in the illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was tried out in an essay in Artha. The reviewer said of my manuscript submitted to Critical Survey that s/he likes ‘smart people who do comics’. If I may reverse-attribute the comment, many such smart people have contributed to this book in singular, unpanelled ways. For their prescient comments that enabled my final work to be much improved, I  thank the distinguished James Phelan of Narrative (on ‘Postcolonial Graphic Lifewriting: Finding My Way and the Subaltern Public Sphere’, Narrative 26.3 [2018], Kavita Daiya (on ‘Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic: The Snake and the Lotus’, South Asian Review 39:1–2 [2018]); Janet Wilson and Sam Knowles of Journal of Postcolonial Writing. I  also thank, in addition to the preceding, the anonymous reviewers of

x  Acknowledgements

Biography, CounterText, Image and Text, Critical Survey, Narrative, Image & Text, South Asian Review and Journal of Postcolonial Writing for their comments and suggestions. Sections of the chapters on vulnerability and witnessing were delivered as a paper at the symposium ‘Refugee Narratives: Research Symposium on Statelessness, Literature and Aesthetics’, 16–17 December  2019, Södertörn University, Stockholm. I am grateful to Stefan Helgesson for his detailed response, comments and queries by Mike Frangos, Agnes Woolley, Nicklas Hållén and above all to Sheila Ghose for inviting me to the Symposium.

1 INTRODUCTION Graphic humans and rights

The field of ‘Literature and Human Rights’ is a fast-growing and rapidly diversifying field. It ranges from studies of specific genres to superbly eclectic anthologies that cover a gamut of themes and forms in the broad area of Human Rights (HR) literary-cultural studies and to specific work on victimhood, gender, perpetrators and witnessing. We have seen book-length works that offer a typology of the ‘human rights novel’ or first person human rights narratives  – exemplified, most recently, in James Dawes’ The Novel of Human Rights (2018), but also in earlier works like Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004), Joseph Slaughter’s now classic Human Rights, Inc. (2007) and Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity (2012). Then there are works that examine the specifics of perpetrator-representations and discourses, as in James Dawes’ Evil Men (2013) and Joanne Pettitt’s Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives (2017). Key anthologies such as Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012) and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (2015), Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2016) and Crystal Parikh’s The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019) have brought together scholars from diverse academic domains, from narrative theory to Comics Studies, invigorating the investigations into the field that, in their earlier volume, Goldberg and Moore termed an ‘interdiscipline’ (2012). A glance, first, at what a Human Rights perspective means. The editor of The Journal of Human Rights Practice, Ron Dudai puts it this way: Adding a human rights lens to the way we view a specific problem or debate – poverty, criminal justice, climate change, the risks facing elderly people  – means understanding the problem differently, categorizing it in a specific way, framing it in another narrative, imagining remedies and therefore also

2  Introduction

envisaging certain types of interventions (Dudai 2019). A human rights framing brings to the fore certain desired aspects of social reality: the obligations of the state, non-discrimination, accountability; it helps in articulating certain claims and deploying certain mechanisms for redress (Dudai 2019). It can entail, for example, internationalizing a form of injustice hitherto considered a local peculiarity (Bob 2007), drawing attention to remediable injustices in the context of what hitherto appeared to be unfortunate yet unavoidable suffering (Mégret 2011), or exposing abuses inherent in a certain social policy, such as in relation to drugs (Golichenko et al. 2018). Framing a grievance as a human right can strongly influence the way people understand both the problem and the solution (Clement 2018), and a human rights framework often also interacts with, contradicts or complements other frameworks guiding practice, such as medical aid, humanitarianism, and political action (Filc et al. 2015). . . . [T]he idea of human rights itself becomes an independent social variable, which individuals, institutions, states, and other actors put into play for a wide range of purposes. (2019: 275) For Dudai, activist-scholarship that brings the HR lens to bear on topics, concerns and issues, such as poverty or climate change, is central to the practice of HR itself. In other words, the HR perspective used in examining socio-political situations and texts within academic work is integral to the larger field of HR practice. I take this to mean that the HR perspective is a form of reading texts that constitutes activist-scholarship and contributes, consequently, to HR cultures and HR practices. In this book, the focus is on an HR perspective to aid our reading of texts and discourses, a common focal point of the interdiscipline, ‘Human Rights and Literature’. The emphasis in much HR academic work on the link between narrative (of many kinds, including the visual) and rights (including the ‘right to narrate’) has been the foundation for the interdiscipline, one could argue. A ‘human rights– oriented literary criticism’, write Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, attends to what is shared by narratives of suffering while at the same time recognizing the particular situations and positions of those who suffer; it explores how narratives probe the limits of language, representation, and translation to depict their subjects adequately; it reflects awareness of the arguably “west-centric” history of human rights, taking account of representations of non-western approaches to human rights, and of economic and social rights as well as third-generation solidarity rights; and it engages in both reflection upon and critique of the theories of the liberal subject and the liberal democratic state that underlie the modern international human rights system. (2012: 3–4)

Introduction  3

Even when granting the primacy, even necessity, of a narrative foundation to HR, commentators studying literature produced from within conditions of torture, oppression and death, caution us that, for many, ‘the relationship between life and narrative is triangulated by violence, which very often takes the form of law, or is subject to its command’ (Slaughter, “Life, Story, Violence,” 17; also see Judith Butler reading Poems from Guantanamo Bay in her Frames of War). Others have suggested that, ‘any text can be read and taught through the lens of human rights, in the sense that most texts reference the human, with attendant vulnerabilities, connections, contexts, and conflicts that make up the field of the human in human rights’ (Moore and Goldberg 2015: 3) and that ‘human rights as a mode of reception benefits from explicit links between literary representation and rights-speak’, even as, on occasion, ‘close readings of literary and narrative form can reveal the deep structures of violation with respect to rights and their representation’ (4). Slaughter (“Vanishing Points”) and Butler (Precarious Lives) alert us to contexts in which a victim of rights violations may not be able to produce narratives, critiques or histories, while Anker, like Slaughter (Human Rights, Inc.), identifies key features of genres aligned with HR discourses. Others have traced the various genealogies of the ‘HR novel’, such as the sentimental novel (Hunt, Inventing Human Rights). Yet others scrutinize genealogies of the humanitarian movement – central to the HR campaigns and discourses in the twentieth century  – within the European Enlightenment and imperialism (Barnett, The Empire of Humanity). In doing so, they drew attention to the evolution of the idea of the human. Such works, as Gareth Griffiths notes in the introduction to a collection of essays on the ‘cultural imaginary’ of HR, offer a ‘challenge . . . to the idea of a unilateral and uncontested concept of human rights’ (3). One must consider, James Dawes cautions, the risk involved in ‘the pernicious flattening out of context [of] human rights legal universalism’ (18). This means, he argues, paying attention to the ways and extent to which ‘narrative patterns’ in contemporary HR literature draw upon a diverse tradition of writing: Soviet dissidents, representations of transitional justice in South America, anti-apartheid activist literature, African American literary traditions and the neo-slave narratives of the contemporary era (18–19. Also see Parikh 2017). Merging two abiding interests – HR and graphic novels and comics – this book continues themes pursued in my own earlier work: vulnerability and precarity, representations and rights, in literary and popular texts. While in my earlier directly HR-related works I  have examined the question of rights in various literarycultural texts (Writing Wrongs, 2012; Human Rights and Literature, 2016) and explored the form in another (The Indian Graphic Novel, 2016), this book focuses exclusively on the genre I term the ‘HR graphic novel’. This choice of the graphic novel as its subject matter locates the book within visual culture studies of HR. The visual media’s links with HR discourses and campaigns have also been studied, even if these were not situated within the field of HR but opted to study adjunct fields where HR themes do find resonance, say, aboriginal lives, refugees or war. As a subfield – although Comics Studies scholars may agitate at this taxonomic violence – of visual culture studies, the graphic novel

4  Introduction

has also been extensively examined for its representations of war, violence, genocide and trauma. One shortlists here: Hillary Chute’s Disaster Drawn (2016), Andrés Romero-Jódar’s The Trauma Graphic Novel (2017), Harriet Earle’s Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War (2017), Laurike in ’t Veld’s The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels (2019) and Jane Chapman et al.’s Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima (2015). Besides these extended works, individual essays such as Rebecca Scherr’s (2015) on Joe Sacco, or Weber and Rall’s (“Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 2017) study of the visual strategies that communicate the sense of authenticity in comics journalism, come to mind here. Based on the assumption that popular forms in literature and culture provide the necessary visibility to disaster, disaster victims, the violated person, as well as generate the language – representational modes – of Human Rights, this book is situated within the field of ‘Popular Culture and Human Rights’ (one could easily discern such a field emerging, and not just in terms of the books listed in the previous paragraph, but also in work such as Lieve Gies’ ‘Celebrity Big Brother, Human Rights and Popular Culture’). The graphic novel is a pre-eminent form to thematize HR concerns, with its ability to merge text and image, force a critical literacy upon the reader, enable a visibilization of the act – and politics – of witnessing, capture trauma, embody violence, generate empathetic and affective connections, to cite a few key features of the medium and the genre that find their place in the current work as well. The HR graphic novel as a genre within the medium of graphic novels, plays a significant role in what Michael Galchinsky terms ‘the culture of Human Rights’. This ‘culture’, writes Galchinsky, is generally not as concerned about the juncture between facts and norms (Habermas 1998) as it is about the juncture between feelings and forms. It is less about establishing an agreed code, and more about sharing individual experiences. Emotionally resonant human rights art typically doesn’t change laws or regimes; rather, it seeks to change the prevailing ethos, by depicting what human rights mean for the individuals who are deprived of them, who witness the abuse, who perpetrate it, who mourn the victims, who intervene, who provide aid, or who transmit the stories. By relating such experiences, human rights culture tries to shape a durable recollection for the wounded community. (viii) It seeks ‘to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos’ by producing structures of feeling that appeal across national borders (2). Thus, this culture contributes to the making of a ‘global civil culture’ (5). This latter is defined as ‘an attempt to strengthen the support of publics around the world for human rights and humanitarian norms, treaties, and institutions’ (110). For such a culture to emerge, it is essential for a human rights imaginary, a language and set of modes of communicating vulnerability as well as resistance, traumatic collapse as well as

Introduction  5

resilient subjecthood to be in place as well. The human rights imaginary is driven by affect and the demand for a response. Galchinsky is keen on establishing four ‘socio-political emotions triggered by human rights violations’: a communal sense of fear, outrage, and desire for solidarity (protest); the urge to witness, remember, and narrate (testimony); the need to satirize, express the absurdity of life under violation, and find relief (laughter); and the yearnings for mourning, renewal, and reconciliation (lament)’. (6–7) These are emotions found across HR texts, and the graphic novel is no exception, as we shall see. There is considerable heft and valence to Will Eisner’s claim that comics artists use ‘universally understood images’ (cited in Schmitz-Emans 386). Galchinsky’s observations resonate with HR graphic texts’ instantiation of what Ngugi wa’Thiong O identified as the globalectic imagination. Ngugi’s definition of ‘globalectics’ is worth citing in full: Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization. (36) The HR graphic novel allows us, indeed forces us, to see the interconnectedness of suffering, the mutuality of vulnerability, the similar but not identical instantiations of resistance across different physiognomies, bodies and contexts. They appropriate the globalizing ‘rights discourse’ alongside a dialectic between the local specifics of, say, violations or resistance and international concerns (refugees, torture, war humanitarian interventions). The dialectic of local/global, in short, may be productively harnessed with global rights discourses in a form adequate to the task. The formation of a global civil society is rendered possible through the creation of the HR graphic novel medium and genre (although it must be said, the medium is now a huge bandwagon, and much of the work appearing is often below par). If the literary enables the making of civil society and a public sphere at local and national levels, then it stands to reason that a global civil society requires a form that may attain such a readership, generating a global critical literacy around HR. It is the assumption and claim of this book that the Human Rights comics is such a form, and the graphic novel is a constituent of ‘world literature’, as Monika Schmitz-Emans argues (2013), and not the least for its concerns with rights, justice, oppression and the nature of victimhood.

6  Introduction

The HR graphic novel functions if not as an exact equivalent, then as a resonant form with photography from the humanitarian projects of the twentieth century (studied, among others, by Lydon, Flash of Recognition, 2012; Allbeson 2015). It enables a narration, and more importantly, a visualization of vulnerability, trauma, witnessing, resilience and resistance so as to produce the structure of feelings of empathy, sympathy and politically charged emotions central to HR. The HR graphic novel is now integral to the extrajuridical support system for both HR regimes and humanitarianism through its documentation of the state of the dispossessed, the disappeared, the violated and the extinguished. Graphic novels’ pedagogic role in generating an interest in HR topics has been well documented (Carano). Admittedly, none of the critical work (including this current book) on rights or the forms/genres of rights work, assumes a (naïve) direct correlation between the visual foundations of empathy and the campaign for HR. But it does assume what numerous critics have pointed to: that a culture or lingua franca of HR requires multiple forms, genres and media. Mark Philip Bradley, discussing photography and the US role in the global rights imagination makes the case for another medium, photography, succinctly: ‘The photographs . . . spoke to the possibility of forging empathetic connections between themselves, their subjects, and those who encountered their work’ (2014: 9). Lynn Hunt famously demonstrated the role of the eighteenth century (European) sentimental novel in generating such empathetic connections: [R]eaders of novels learned to . . . empathize across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even adults and children. . . . [T]hey came to see others – people they did not know personally – as like them. (2007: 40) Critics concede that empathetic connections are not adequate to address real misery and structural social inequalities (‘We pose the question poorly (or perhaps ask the wrong question entirely) when we think of social inequality and injustice as problems of the realignment of sentiment or the redistribution of sentimental resources (rather than, say, the redistribution of real resources)’, writes Joseph Slaughter, “The Enchantment of Human Rights” 51. On the failure of Human Rights storytelling, also see Dawes, That the World May Know 10–11). The graphic novel is an important development in the direction of making Human Rights visible, embodied in material suffering, with cognate themes that foreground contexts and people so that there arise the ‘possibilities of forging empathetic connections’ (Bradley). The graphic novel as a medium and the HR graphic novel as a specific genre within it contribute to a transformative cultural script, whether consumed as ‘light’ reading or in the classroom to alert students to the state of indigenous people, victims or the dispossessed. If, as Samuel Moyn says, ‘the human rights revolution of the 1970s ultimately followed from a transformation of hopes for all peoples everywhere’ (174), then the fictional, near-fictional and real

Introduction  7

worlds represented – we do not forget that these are representations, while recognizing that, in many cases such as Sacco’s or Stassen’s, there are real people behind them – in these texts draw us with this hope. James Dawes writes: What draws readers through the landscapes of ruined bodies is the hope of a just conclusion. But even as each novel works hard to maintain reader interest with that tantalizing promise of recompense, each is also deeply skeptical about the satisfaction that any justice can deliver. . . . But the point of much of this literature is that we are caught in a terrible double-bind: we must seek recompense even though we know there can never be any recompense. And we must produce novels readers will wish to read, novels that deliver some form of narrative closure and satisfaction, even while recounting histories defined by lack of closure. (193–4) Dawes notes that the authors of such work are conscious of their possible complicity in commodifying violence, in simply ‘representing’ and not intervening in real situations. But, he adds, Countering all of these fears is the hope (recognizable sometimes only as the shadow of hope, as the resisting lament of an ill) that literature can, by expressing something true, participate in – or at the very least, as [Lawrence] Thornton put it, act in solidarity with – the work of human rights. (218) Among such diverse studies worrying about the role of literature, empathy, sympathy, language and representation, many argue a case for the reader’s efforts at decoding the themes of the graphic novel. For instance, Charles Acheson, examining the significance of the gutter in Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, argues that the structural elements of this genre force readers to work at ‘forging’ memories: By recognizing the comics medium’s structural multidirectionality in the gutter’s indeterminacy space, the first half of the forged memory equation becomes fixed. The medium generates reader engagement by demanding direct interaction with the narrative to make full meaning of the various page elements. This demand for engagement actuates the second element of the forged memory equation: completing the experience in the narrative by infusing personal experience to complete the missing visual and verbal lexicon. (292) This present book is in the tradition of such works that have examined both HR texts and the comics/graphic novels. It is a study of a variety of graphic novels and their modes of representing HR themes. Texts devoted to individual-centric

8  Introduction

violations of rights sit alongside graphic texts about the refugee crisis that involves thousands, genocide, childhood in totalitarian states, interment in wartime, sexual slavery and war, to mention a few. It excludes, except for one text (Croci’s Ausch­ witz), the Holocaust as well, given that almost every aspect of that horrific event in its literary and cultural memorialization has been studied extensively. That said, the texts chosen here do not claim they are doing ‘the work of human rights’. However, this study is based on the recognition that, in James Dawes’ phrasing, the ‘authors are writing within what may be called an aesthetic awareness of human rights and humanitarian discourse’ (17). The HR graphic novel has extraordinary variety within itself, and this signals the flexibility of the form. The autobiographical/memoir narrative, arguably rendered a global popular form by Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – probably the most studied examples of this form, and hence not a part of the present study! – has perhaps monopolized the non-fiction graphic novel market (for a history of the genre, see Andrew Kunka 2018, and for perceptive studies of individual graphic autobiographies see, among others, Rocío; Whitlock, “Autographics”). Within this genre we can also list the now-expanding genre of graphic medicine (Ellen Forney, Brian Fies, David B, David Small, etc. See www.graphicmedicine. org). Multivolume sagas such as the manga autobiography of the atomic bomb survivor, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (10 volumes), have also appeared. Trying to capture some of this variety in the genre, the book’s ambit encompasses fiction as well as non-fictional documentary in terms of its genres. Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll’s Speak is a graphic adaptation of Anderson’s novel of the same title and discusses rape and the silence that surrounds the subject. There are war novels from around the world: Josh Blaylock and Hoyt Silva’s work on the Armenian genocide, Operation Nemesis; Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo; Ethan Young’s Nanjing, on the rape of Nanjing during the Second World War; Brian Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s exceptional tale, Pride of Baghdad, about the lions from the Baghdad zoo during the war against Iraq figure here. There are two Vietnam war texts here: Marcelino Truong’s Such A  Lovely Little War and Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart’s The Other Side. Genocide is the subject of Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz; Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde; Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias; and other texts. Modern-day slavery is the subject of Vannak Anan Prum’s The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea. Graphic novels about African American history and the Civil Rights movement include Mat Johnson and Walter Pleece’s Incognegro; John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell’s three-volume March; and Ho Che Anderson’s King, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Life under totalitarian regimes has been the subject of different kinds of works: Guy DeLisle’s travelogues (Pyongyang and Burma); autobiographical memoirs such as Riad Sattouf ’s three-volume The Arab of the Future; Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (URB); Hamid Sulaiman’s Freedom Hospital; and Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi. The Partition of the Indian subcontinent, with its trauma of dispossession and violence, is the subject of Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side That Side while the

Introduction  9

‘troubled’ state of Kashmir is Sajad Malik’s subject in Munnu. Graphic novels that offer biographies of Dalit leaders include Srividya Natarajan, S. Anand and the Vyams’ Bhimayana (on BR Ambedkar); Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland (on Jotiba Phule); and Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and S. Anand’s Finding My Way (on Shyam’s life as a Gond artist). Its geographical spread, in keeping with the – yes, ‘flattening’, as Dawes puts it, but valuable nevertheless because we have nothing else in its place – universal aspect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is equally wide: BosniaHerzegovina, Palestine, the Indian subcontinent, China, the USA, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam and Cambodia, Burma, North Korea, Japan and others. Admittedly, the styles and tones and the themes and textures of these graphic novels are varied. In focusing exclusively on HR themes, this book perhaps performs an injustice to specific artist and author styles or the traditions they draw upon, or for that matter ‘comics work’ (defined by Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston as ‘any labor within the field of the cultural production of comics that contributes to or informs a comic’s production’ (3, emphasis in original). This injustice – odd, for a book on rights – was unavoidable. It also excludes for reasons of space, themes that would have added several edges and trajectories to the debates on HR. Among the notable exclusions is the urgent field of climate change and human rights, and graphic narratives such as Philippe Squarzoni’s Climate Changed (2014) or adaptations such as Nick Hayes’ The Rime of the Modern Mariner (2012) that appropriate a demotic medium to address concerns of global warming or eco-disaster. Stephen Humphreys’ Human Rights and Climate Change (2010) was one of the opening moments in the debate, and remains, deservedly, a useful guide to contextualize this missing dimension. Another omission from this book is health and human rights, especially in connection with the genre of graphic medicine. With stimulating work appearing around ideas of ‘therapeutic citizenship’ (Nguyen), genetic citizenship (Heath et al.) and a journal devoted to it (Health and Human Rights), the field is promising. Disability studies has also contributed to a large subfield within Comics Studies, as witnessed in the scintillating collection by Chris Foss et al., Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (2016). Compendia and research work on Latin American comics by Frederick Aldama and others (Aldama and Christopher González, Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future, 2017 and Aldama, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comic Book Storyworlds, 2016) have significantly opened up the form. Bearing in mind the prevalence of a posthumanist sensibility in the twenty-first century and of course its cultural embodiments in comics and graphic novels, Scott Jeffery’s The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics (2016) nearly tempted this project to move in that direction as well, but exercised restraint eventually. Dystopian texts that map such posthuman futures  – Appupen’s masterly The Snake and the Lotus (2018) meshes posthumanism with jingoistic nationalism and green concerns (Nayar, “Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic”) – would be a case in point. *

10  Introduction

The book hinges on four key themes that are immanent to HR discourse: vulnerability, witnessing, trauma and resistance-resilience. It deals with these as discrete themes, but all combining to construct a Human Rights subject, with varying routes into this subjectivity; in some cases it is ontological vulnerability being exploited, in another it is the loss of dignity and in yet others it could be a resilient subjectivity that emerges from conditions of extreme suffering. Questions of recognition, comprehension, witnessing, testifying and language are constitutive of each of these themes, as we shall see. It foregrounds vulnerability as the foundational condition in which certain bodies find themselves – conditions and history not of their choosing. The opening chapters are, therefore, studies of the HR graphic novels’ representations of vulnerability and in line with earlier work (Writing Wrongs, Human Rights and Literature). HR graphic novels, Chapter  2 demonstrates, rely upon a politics of vulnerability, and its embeddedness in conditions of precarity. They construct victims in the form of ‘vulnerable subjects’ (Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject”, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State”). HR graphic novels represent pain through both documentary and figurative realism, thus situating the body of the human within a set of social relationships defined in terms of pain. This chapter moves from examining corporeal-ontological vulnerability that signals the embodiment of the human person to its ruination as ‘debodiment’. HR graphic novels, after presenting damaged, broken bodies as sites of ruination, locate these bodies within specific contexts. Marking the ‘situational vulnerability’ (Fineman) of all humans, these graphic novels document how HR violations may be seen. The chapter explores how HR graphic novels highlight embedded vulnerability of the human rather than just the inherent vulnerability supposedly ‘natural’ to it. In Chapter 3, I study the construction of vulnerabilities in HR graphic novels in terms of processes and situations  – hunger and acute poverty, annihilation of their sense of being persons, humiliation and debasement – that constitute, broadly, dehumanization and the loss of dignity. It concerns itself with symbolic humiliation, which may or may not be accompanied/supplemented by material acts, that then render the victim without any dignity, agency and, therefore, rights. Chapter 4 turns to the construction of collective identity through acts of memory work. The focus here shifts away from individual to collective trauma. Adapting the work of cultural trauma and cultural memory theorists, this chapter opens with the ‘personalization of the victim’. It then moves on to the HR graphic texts’ attempts to attribute responsibility. Finally, it argues that objects and materials are important to the modes in which collectives and communities perform memory work. In Chapter 5, I turn to a core aspect of all HR literature: witnessing. The testimonial encounter in HR graphic texts involves the creation of a ‘witness space’. It demonstrates how this witnessing space has two levels: of the panel, where the panel is a window through which we as reader-spectators see and hear the witnesses; and of the panel as a diegetic space that functions as a space of proximate encounters between witnesses and between witnesses and mediators. This space is

Introduction  11

not an alienating space but one that connects, and thereby proffers a history of connections, overlaps and belonging: in short, of witnessing. The panel-as-witnessspace also works to invoke a sense of response-ability from the witnesses and the reporter. The chapter discusses the forms of witnesses one encounters in these texts and addresses the themes of silence and testimony in select texts. While HR narratives are often assigned the status of misery-literature due to the preponderance of the suffering-theme and an insistence on victimhood, there exist numerous HR graphic texts that highlight the transformation of vulnerability into something else. The sixth chapter explores the interrelated themes of resilience and resistance in HR graphic texts. It moves from an examination of social resilience to the nature of ‘resilient subjectification’ and its ‘epistemic regime’ of novelty and surprise, the insistence on adaptation, care and vulnerability, before the evolution of ‘adaptive resilience’ and finally, the assembly as a space where a conscious, agential ‘mobilization of vulnerability’ (Butler 2016) is asserted by the resilient. In the brief conclusion, I propose pareidoliac reading – seeing human faces and patterns in things like emojis and even rocks and other materials – as a method of reading solicited by the HR graphic novels’ employment of unnamed, unidentified faces. It argues, via Levinas and others and through a reading of the illustrated version of the UDHR, that in the panel-as-place we encounter the unidentified stranger, the Other, towards whom, by virtue of being within this ‘place’ (panel), we have to respond. It argues that the HR graphic texts’ strategy of placing these strangers within our visually and haptically proximate space, calls for an acknowledgement of the completely alien Other’s common ground with all humans: the potential for suffering. This pareidolia of the HR graphic novel brings to us the face of Human Rights. The HR graphic novel, by bringing together literary and visual texts into, so to speak, the same panel, is now indisputably, a member of what Comics Studies scholar Frederick Luis Aldama terms the ‘planetary republic of comics’ (5).

2 STAGING VULNERABILITY – I Corporeality, debodiment and ruination

In a fascinating narrative strategy, Olivier Kugler in his Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (2017) draws black-lined shapes of people and their objects, superimposing them on full-bodied, colour sketches of these same people. Take Wisam’s story, for instance. Wisam is narrating how he had been shot at in his home in Syria, an incident that forced them to flee their homeland. After describing the event, on the facing page, Kugler draws Wisam from the waist down. The legs are drawn fleshy and marked with bullet injuries (and are labelled ‘bullet wounds’ in an ekphrastic mode). Yet, the part above the knee is a swirl of lines and curls. One can vaguely discern an arm, a head leaning forward and down as though checking his own legs and, oddly, another leg behind Wisam’s body. Kugler achieves some truly spectacular effects here. First, he transforms the flesh-and-blood Wisam of page 64 into a quasi-spectral Wisam on page 65, symbolizing a literal lessening of the person by virtue of being a refugee. This lessening, or reduction into a set of lines rather than the embodied flesh of a realist painting, drawing or p­ hotograph – and Kugler does have a da Vincian fascination for depicting musculature, skin tone and curves  – is compounded by the extremely fleshy and injured legs that are drawn simultaneously. Thus, Kugler depicts flesh that is fragmented, injured  – v­ ulnerable – and the person who ought to be larger than just his corporeal identity dissolving into lines and shades.1 Flesh here is broken up, the person spectralized. Are the lines representing Wisam symbolic of a personhood in the crisis of dissolution, an abhuman akin to the dissolving bodies of the Gothic variety?2 Ontological vulnerability is represented, undoubtedly, in this drawing. But Kugler also makes sure we understand that the vulnerability has been exposed to helplessness as a consequence of specific social, political and legal contexts. Wisam’s story that frames this image (minus, it may be noted, panels) is one of governmental precarization and situational vulnerability where his living conditions make it impossible for him, or

Staging vulnerability – I  13

his family, to live. This contextualization is something we are alerted to by the positioning of the spectral Wisam image. Wisam’s fleshy feet (as opposed to the spectral remainder of his body) intrude, or stand upon, a screen shot of a mobile phone. The screen shows missiles firing. This screen shot is an expanded image, as though it is a blown-up shot, of a phone. The phone is held by a young boy, with both boy and phone being drawn (as opposed to the blown-up image of the phone which resembles a photograph). Wisam’s injuries and his corporeal vulnerability, Kugler shows, is literally embedded in the war-torn Syrian soil seen on the phone screen. Further, it symbolizes something much more than corporeal damage: with his feet touching Syrian soil in/on the image of the phone, Kugler shows how Wisam really never left Syrian lands: his injuries are Syrian, exactly as his identity will remain, at some point, embedded in the frame that is Syria. Syria constitutes his ‘wounded attachments’ (Brown), defines his present, and is presented by the image of the foot touching Syria on the map. In the space of just a handful of visuals, Kugler moves from ontological injury to situational vulnerability.

Vulnerability and vulnerable subjects HR graphic novels, like most HR texts, rely upon representing vulnerability and its embeddedness in conditions of precarity. They construct victims in the form of ‘vulnerable subjects’ (Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject”, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State”), but do not always equate vulnerability solely with victimhood, going so far as to offer, in some cases, images of resilience and resistance. Vulnerability, in the HR graphic text, may be defined as ‘a state of constant possibility of harm’ (Fineman, Vulnerable Subject, 11). It is an inherent condition of all humans and lifeforms, which philosophers and political thinkers have proposed. Applying the vulnerability thesis to politics and international relations, Lauren Wilcox proposes that ‘the subject’s vulnerability to violence is foundational to an understanding of subjectivity and politics’ (18). HR discourses, one could argue modifying Wilcox’s work on security discourses, hinge upon the production of certain ‘bodies that can be harmed’ (167). For Judith Butler et al. if . . . vulnerability emerges as part of social relations, even as a feature of social relations, then we make (a) a general claim according to which vulnerability ought to be understood as relational and social, and (b) a very specific claim according to which it always appears in the context of specific social and historical relations that call to be analyzed concretely. (4) They argue that ‘vulnerability and invulnerability have to be understood as politically produced, unequally distributed through and by a differential operation of power’ (5). Elsewhere in the same volume, Butler asserts, ‘we cannot understand

14  Staging vulnerability – I

bodily vulnerability outside this conception of social and material relations’ (16) and that ‘the body is less an entity than a relation, and it cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living’ (19). This also implies, argue others, an ethical response of the world to those rendered vulnerable or helpless. The idea of vulnerability, writes Estelle Ferrarese, presupposes a moral evaluation: vulnerability would thus appear only insofar as it entails a horizon of obligations . . . of normative reasoning and of political arrangements and discourses. It enjoins us to a form of action, of protection, of care. . . . Lastly, it can be accompanied by the disapproval of those who take advantage of fragility thus formed. (3) Observing the increasing reliance on images and discourses of vulnerability across various domains, interests and campaigns Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage write: First, bodily vulnerability is increasingly used to mobilise awareness and political action and to circulate information about global injustice. Second, bodily vulnerability has become a key theme in discursive struggles over, for example involvement in war, contested national pasts, and the legitimacy of political protest against climate change. We argue that bodily vulnerability has become a strong social force. (1) Where critics such as Elizabeth Anker have theorized the embodied subject as the foundation of HR campaigns, discourses and practices, Butler and those who argue for the relational autonomy of bodies propose that the focus be on instruments, institutions and infrastructures within which HR may be available or taken away. Butler writes: By theorizing the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world, we foreground the ways in which we are vulnerable to decimated or disappearing infrastructures, economic supports, and predictable and well-compensated labor. (21, emphasis in original) Autonomy, this line of thought proposes, is not inherent in the body. Thus, Catriona Mackenzie et al. write about relational autonomy: Relational theorists understand autonomy as a socially constituted capacity, in the twin senses that its development and exercise requires extensive

Staging vulnerability – I  15

social scaffolding and support and that its development and exercise can be thwarted by exploitative or oppressive interpersonal relationships and by repressive or unjust social and political institutions. (17) Mackenzie writes later that, keeping the ‘duties arising from vulnerability in mind . . . the duty to protect must be informed by the . . . aim of enabling the development of, or fostering, autonomy whenever possible’ (35). For a human being to be autonomous, paradoxically, the institutions and social support mechanisms need to work. But the discourse of HR begins with the body. The ‘body’ in these texts is an ‘encountered sign’ (Gilles Deleuze’s term, appropriated by Jill Bennett and employed by Anthony McCosker), even when there is, as we shall see, a mere outline of a body, or a ghostly body. An encountered sign is one that is ‘felt, rather than recognized or perceived through cognition’ (Bennett, 2005: 7, as cited in McCosker 21). For the HR graphic novel, the representation of pain in terms of both documentary and figurative realism means situating the body of the human within a set of social relationships defined in terms of pain. Pain, as theorists now note, is a form of relationship. Anthony McCosker treats pain and its intensity as central to communications: In the contexts of war, torture, disaster, masochism, persecution and illness, among others, pain provokes and amplifies, incites and resonates. Forms of aversive affect, intensities derived from bodily pain, are contested within, and shape media and communication ecologies. (22) And elsewhere: Pain, and the aversive affects that flow from and around it intensify media, create powerful intimacies, constitute communities  – local, global or networked  – communication environments and direct attention  .  .  . pain images . . . produce social discord and enable social integration and shared experience. (2) The appeal is to our senses, particularly to our sentiments, as readers. The characters in HR graphic novels suffer, and their identity as ‘vulnerable subjects’ is one determined by her/his ‘wounded attachments’. Wendy Brown argues: [Political identity] installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity. In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a “reason” for the “unendurable pain” of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an

16  Staging vulnerability – I

ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics and can hold out no future – for itself or others – that triumphs over this pain. (406) Pain and wounded attachments characterize the subject of HR. HR graphic novels foreground, this chapter demonstrates, a shift from ­corporeal-ontological (‘inherent’) vulnerability that signals the embodiment of the human person to its ruination as ‘debodiment’, where debodying ‘profoundly distorts the human form [so] that it appears as raw flesh or meat – a “thing” rather than a living being, less comprehensible than even the animal body’ (­Hernandez). These texts, after presenting damaged, broken bodies as sites of ruination  – ­examined through Ann Laura Stoler’s work (2013) – proceed to locate these bodies within specific contexts. Marking the ‘situational vulnerability’ (Fineman, following Kirby) of all humans, these graphic novels document how HR violations may be seen. Section I of the chapter therefore studies the representations of broken bodies. Section II proceeds to examine how HR graphic novels highlight embedded vulnerability of the human rather than just the inherent vulnerability supposedly ‘natural’ to it. In short, the chapter moves outwards, from the person’s body to her contexts.

Representing ontological vulnerability The construction of the vulnerable subject and her/his wounded attachments demands the representation of pain, since pain is foundational to any discussion of vulnerability. The authors and artists studied here seek ways of documenting and representing pain, manifest in themes of debodiment. Debodiment is at the heart of documenting the ontological vulnerability of all human beings. Ontological vulnerability in HR graphic novels is usually represented in the form of broken, sick, injured or incapacitated bodies – bodies that clearly vary from the norm of what a body should be like. In most cases there is no attempt to metaphorize either the body or its injuries in line with the conventions of documentary realism. But in other cases the pain of the violated is presented in ways that are beyond the conventions of realism. Documentary realism, psychotic realism and figurative realism, as we shall see, become key modes of painting the vulnerable subject in HR graphic novels.

Embodying debodiment and documentary realism In Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks he draws emaciated and dying bodies, in addition to corpses. Closely recalling the ‘muselman’ of the concentration camps, as described by Primo Levi (If This is a Man), Igort draws abject bodies

Staging vulnerability – I  17

shuffling on roads and squatting by the roadside (44), corpses in bed with their eyes staring and clearly dead of starvation (45), men who have lost the use of their limbs and are now helpless (75). Ontological vulnerability is of course mapped on to the body. In Elaine Scarry’s terms, these are ‘bodies in pain’ (The Body in Pain). In other words, the text compiles visual signs of pain in lieu of the pain itself, since, as Scarry would argue, pain is inexpressible and one can only have representations of pain. For Elizabeth Dauphinee these images are ‘representational alibis for actual pain: images of starvation, of emaciated concentration-camp victims, of hooded prisoners, of broken and bleeding skins, of blood-stained floors in prison cells, and so on’ (142). This emphasis on the body is common to the humanitarian narrative as well, argues Thomas Laqueur: the humanitarian narrative relies on the personal body, not only as the locus of pain but also as the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help and as the object of the scientific discourse through which the causal links between an evil, a victim, and a benefactor are forged. (177) John Lewis’ March documents repeated instances of beatings of the African American civil rights activists, but also verbal abuse and humiliations, such as having dirty water thrown on them, or spat on (March II: 10–11, 77 and elsewhere, III: 34–5, 151, 200, 204–5, and elsewhere). Vietnamese immigrants are called ‘gooks’ and spat on by white Americans in The Best We Could Do (Bui 67). We see heads being broken, teeth spilling out, blood spurting in all these texts. Indeed, the broken black body is one half of the binary in March, the other half being the ultradignified, calm body of the activists. The transformation of the activist body from calm, poised and neat into a pulverized one literalizes debodiment, even as the broken body as a visual symbol comes to stand in for the iniquitous system itself in March. Igort would also redraw Picasso’s Guernica to depict the violence perpetrated upon various ethnic groups (248), gang rape of minors (213) and extensive mutilation and wounding of Chechens (211) in Russia. Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart’s Vietnam War graphic text, The Other Side, shows blood-spattered bodies, dismembered bodies and the ghosts of the dead every second page. In one image, the Vietnamese protagonist, Vo Binh Dai clambers over a mountain of dead bodies (91). Even in accounts of mass killings and genocides, the ‘personal body’ becomes central to the HR text. We see images of prisoners and slaves being beaten in Vannak Anan Prum’s The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, with bleeding bodies and faces scrunched up in pain (112, 204). The individual’s fragile ontology, it would seem, has to be communicated primarily through the representation of broken, pulverized and bleeding bodies. The demands of visual symbolization ensure that pain is represented in corporeal terms with a considerable degree of realism. Very often, the HR graphic novel draws the cause of the pain: injury, hunger, beatings, among others. Igort,

18  Staging vulnerability – I

for instance, shows emaciated bodies with hollowed cheeks to show (and tell, since this is expository discourse, too) what hunger does to a body. These are realist-yetsymbolic representations of a world defined by pain. The realism of bleeding wounds, blood splattered across and filling the panels in many cases communicates in no uncertain terms the injured and violated body. This is an embodying of ontological vulnerability and the processes of debodiment that reduce a person to ‘flesh’ and eventually, in some cases, to the non-living. Such an embodying works along the lines of the participatory documentary mode in the HR graphic novel. In the example (from Escaping Wars and Waves) with which this chapter opened we saw a refugee with bullet injuries in his legs. He is an able young man but for the injuries. In representing Wisam, Kugler takes care to show us a body complete in all outward respects but for the injuries. The injuries and their continuing effects point to the injurability of a human body but also, when accompanied by the text, the body vulnerable to the mechanisms and processes through which injuries come to the body. The representation of ontological vulnerability is made possible through a two-step process here. First and foremost the injured body is positioned on the page in such a way that we recognize that Kugler is seeing the injuries himself. That is, when focusing on the injured body, Kugler is not speculating on the sources or extent of the injuries or reconstructing them realistically. This is an authenticating device that signals Kugler’s eyewitness role, which further testifies to the authenticity of his narrative. If the photograph, the dominant visual language of witnessing, attests to what Roland Barthes termed the ‘certificate of presence’ – that is, the camera implies the cameraman was there – the drawing adds a further layer to the authentication of Kugler’s presence. Kugler was present when Wisam showed him the injuries. Second, this same Kugler drew the injuries. Comics, as Hillary Chute notes, ‘is a drawn form; drawing accounts for what it looks like, and also for the sensual practice it embeds and makes visible’ (4. Also 17–18, and Miller 103). The graphic novel as a drawn form attests to the eyewitnessing and the physical act of drawing of whatever was witnessed (even if the drawing is from a recall). It materializes a history ‘through the work of marks on the page [and] creates it as space and substance, gives it a corporeality, a physical shape’ (Chute 27). On the drawing of and from photographs, as distinct from simply incorporating ­photographs, see Baetens. For the employment of both – photographs and drawings from the photographs – we have Guibert and Lefèvre’s now well-known The Photographer. Here the photographs are reproduced, in some cases they are marked with a red X. This deliberate drawing of attention to the editorial act of composing the page and selection of photographs is an unusual feature of The Photographer and is meant to suggest the working of an embodied hand that drew these marks. Documentaries claim authenticity by erasing signs of mediation (Mickwitz 21). Mickwitz, instead of thinking in terms of authenticity in documentaries, refers to a documentary ‘mode of address’, where ‘the evidential force and apparent transparency of the recorded image is underscored by the implied lack of manipulation or intentionality within the text’s overall presentation’ (24). Further, Mickwitz

Staging vulnerability – I  19

suggests, instead of erasing and rendering invisible the representational aspects of the represented (the camera in the hands of the cameraman in the case of documentary films would be an instance), in ‘documentary comics the performative aspects of production assume a more visible and central role, thus drawing attention to the subjective aspects of both experience and communication’ (27).3 Authenticating his (Kugler’s) presence foregrounds the subjectivity of the eyewitness account, while the act and product of drawing (rather than photograph/y), foregrounds the subjectivity of the representation. In short, in texts that are eyewitness accounts of trauma and HR violations, the subjectivity of the artist is what lends the auratic effect to the events and vulnerability represented. This is as close to the realist as one can get precisely because the observing and the representing are both performed by an embodied witness-artist. I suggest that this is a participatory documentary mode where, in the place of truth claims and authenticity-claims, the writer-artist foregrounds the affective and the subjective when documenting the HR violations upon the body. A participatory documentary emphasizes that the document to hand is not merely the testimony of a survivor but a testimony narrated to the comic book writer, and a testimony mediated by this writer. The writer and artist in other words, foregrounds his role in collecting the testimonies from the victims: he participates in the process of representation. If Kugler uses the cursive font to indicate a transcribed and written account, Igort in The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks uses several strategies of communicating this subjective element of the artist-writer. Igort’s work is titled ‘notebooks’, and before the testimony section opens we see a page in the form of a ruled notebook page (3). Igort is shown arriving in Dnipropetrovsk in 2008 (6). After a short account of his stay he writes: I strained to hear their stories and decided to draw them. I simply couldn’t keep them inside. These are true stories of people I met by chance, on the street, who’d had the lot of being born and having lived in the tight grip of the Iron Curtain. (16, emphasis added) All this is written in cursive font, again meant to convey the impression and illusion of a notebook in which entries were made by hand. Now, the foregrounding of the ‘hand-made’ nature of the text suggests authenticity and immediacy but also calls attention to the subjective element in the drawings and therefore of the representations (Chute, Graphic Women 11; Mickwitch 33). Further, unlike a ­photograph – which has to refer to a real referent for the photograph to exist and have a truth value, a drawing by an artist or cartoonist does not require any such referent. Benjamin Woo puts it this way: ‘while comics do not have a necessary logical relationship to objective reality, they do have such a relationship to the subjectivity of the artist: a drawn image implies that someone drew it’ (Woo 175). Several points about the preceding passages demand attention. Igort foregrounds the ‘notebooks’ to suggest a ‘daily diary’ style of documentation, and even

20  Staging vulnerability – I

draws the notebook for us. It is not, therefore, to be read as a memoir, a biography or a prosopography (though this is really the genre of the Igort work), but as a recording or observation book. It also lends itself to the suggestion of something not quite sophisticated, unfinished and perhaps unpublishable. The notebook is raw, full of notations and on-the-spot thinking rather than sustained, polished publication-worthy writing. This careful titling of the work with a specific page design (lines indicating it is a notebook) signals a metanarrative mode that asks us to reflect on the appropriate textual form in which to talk about the Holodomor. Igort foregrounds his subjectivity and the mediation of evidence by dating his entries as well. Then, he informs us that he ‘strained’ himself to hear the stories of the people in the Ukraine. The word gestures at the physical but also affective dimension of listening to people. It emphasizes the mediatory role of the artist/ author, through whose embodied senses the stories have been filtered. As an interesting verbal instance of the witnessing moment, Igort draws our attention to the inevitability of mediation in the very act of listening. Then Igort asserts his agential choice when he informs us that he decided to ‘draw’ the stories and the people. Unlike the traditional documentary that erases and effaces the role of the recording equipment, Igort foregrounds it: he is an artist, and he will draw the stories he hears. Igort’s emphasis on the subjective element in the process of documenting the horrors of the Holodomor even before the testimonies begin alert us, as Nina Mickwitch has argued, to the documentary as a performance, of the engagement, through the artist, of the real and the representation of the real. The real, Igort informs us implicitly, is always made available only in the form of a mediated representation. The documentary to follow, therefore, is a mediated representation of the sufferings of the Ukrainians in the Holodomor. The stories themselves stage both authenticity and the participatory/mediated nature of the documentary comic. Igort begins the individual stories by describing the setting in which he met the survivors: When I met her, Serafima Andreyevna no longer has much of a desire to live, let alone remember. . . . She looks at me and says hello, but doesn’t smile. . . . It’s a bit intimidating. . . ‘Tea is nothing; it’s just sugar water,’ she says, and offers me something more substantial. . . . I see her face darken. So I accept. . . . [She] then pauses as if waiting for memories to come. (19) Igort draws Andreyevna with a drawn and lined face (19), perhaps as he saw her. Andreyevna speaks of the hardship of famine where horsehide was given to children: ‘hours and hours of gnawing and sucking; they lasted forever. . . . [I]t’s not that it took away the hunger, but it kept you busy’ (25). After this episode, Igort again draws Andreyevna with her gaunt, grim face, lined with suffering, underscoring his perception of her as the witness, even as her face is a corporeal manifestation of not just her memories but of her own bodily sufferings over the years.

Staging vulnerability – I  21

‘The Story of Maria Ivanovna’ begins thus: It’s cold on these November days. When I see her for the first time, she’s there just outside Most-City, the big shopping center in Dnipropetrovsk. . . . Maria Ivanovna is a small woman, but from the way she waits so patiently . . . you can tell she has a will of iron. . . . Every time I go to the supermarket I see her, and I say hello. . . . Sometimes I see her from far away; she looks like someone who is lost in thought. After almost a year I gather my courage and ask her how old she is. . . . The day before my departure, I invite her to have something to eat and to tell me her story. . . . I have learned, over time, to listen and not judge. (Igort 115) In these accounts of Igort’s meeting with the survivors, a poetics is discernible. Commentators have noted that, in the case of subaltern writing, a staging of the scene before the account of the life really begins, occurs in testimonial narratives. This could include editorial prefaces, translators’ notes, and the protagonist’s own comments preparing readers for the story. It includes, among other elements, the ‘setting’ of the narrative and its protagonist (Brooks; Nayar, “The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity” 244). The fairly detailed account of the embodied encounter with the Holodomor survivors is part of the performance which is the participatory documentary. Igort’s attention to detail, the bits of information about weather, location or appearance all contribute to the air of authenticity even before the testimony opens. We see this mode of staging authenticity in other texts, too. Foregrounding the subjective by providing details of the encounter with the witness is occasionally restricted to the frame narrative. Guy Delisle’s Hostage is the story of Christopher André, a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, kidnapped and kept hostage by Chechnya militia in 1997. The events are narrated to Delisle, as noted in the book’s opening pages that show Delisle setting up the recorder saying: ‘it’s recording. We can start’ (unpaginated), thus foregrounding the setting of the conversation and offering an air of authenticity to the story that follows. In Evans’ Threads, the first observations are of her own responses to the sight of the Calais refugee camp: ‘Oh My!. . . . I don’t know what I thought I would see, but I didn’t expect this’ (8). Recording her feelings becomes Evans’ mode of indicating to us that she was herself appalled and perturbed by the gritty reality she came face-to-face with there. Even before we see the encountered signs of tired bodies, failed dreams and desperate aspirations of a people marooned with minimal facilities and in a repressive regime, we are prepared for it by the Evans response, because she sees first-hand and then proceeds to report/document. In like fashion, Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal in their story about Cooper’s Camp – the transit camp for refugees established in 1950 in Bengal – would offer as an authenticating device the sheer corporeal difficulties experienced in reaching the Camp: driving across ‘potholes, waterlogging, demon-driven overloaded buses and solid, incessant rain’ (Gupta and Mittal 237).

22  Staging vulnerability – I

After such a staging, the narration of the Holodomor testimonies begins in Igort. Here, too, Igort foregrounds the subjective element of the testimony. The employment of eyewitnessing (Igort in the Ukraine, meeting survivors of the Holodomor) and autobiographical memory (by survivors and/or their descendants) together produce the participatory documentary mode in URB. Igort draws attention to the fragility of witness-memory. Andreyevna says: ‘I’m losing my memory’ (26), thus cautioning against an over-reliance on distanced reporting. Kate Evans starts talking to various people and, like Joe Sacco (of whom more in a later chapter), draws her own expressions of horror, sorrow or anger when listening to the stories of the refugees. While Igort effaces himself, like Kugler, Evans inserts herself into the story. But even with Igort or Kugler, we realize that everything being reported is mediated by the participating subjectivity of the author-artist. It is documentary realism that relies on the participatory mode: it is at once an observational mode and a subjective one (Mickwitz 64). I suggest that over and above the emphasis on the emotional engagement of primary and secondary witnesses (in this case Igort) in the URB stories, Igort’s opening moves – staging – in the stories indicate that he functions not only as a trigger to the process of recall but also as an empathetic participant in listening to the story. The merger of journalistic documentary – noting date, year, and location of his encounter – with the emotional recall by the primary witness-survivor transforms the narrative into a participatory documentary rather than either autobiography or objective documentary. The participatory documentary mode in URB is contingent upon Igort emphasizing not only his subjective mediation, as noted earlier, but invisibilizing himself as a listener. Igort never enters the physical frame and diegetic space of the testimony. He obtains the narrative but does not show him receiving the narrative. However, the medium allows Igort to demonstrate an ‘empathetic listening’ (Lunsford and Rosenblatt 138–42). Igort listens to the Holodomor survivors and transforms their narratively ‘recalled’ lives, then drawing these lives and their privations. The images of starving children, dying bodies and destitute homes in URB are visualizations based on his empathetic listening. This is the case with Evans and Kugler as well, where the refugees’ accounts of their ruination back home, the journey to Calais or Kos and their life in the Camp is narrated to the author-artist, who then imagines and images a pain that s/he never experiences when transferring it to the page. In other words, it is the participation as a feeling artist in the stories being told that enables Igort or Evans to create an idiom – images of tortured, starved and suffering bodies. Evans’ facial expressions that reveal her emotions when perceiving the state of the refugees is a clue to her role as a feeling artist and empathetic listener who draws the vulnerable body from her deeply unsettling encounters with such bodies. Like Lunsford and Rosenblatt (141), I turn to Elaine Scarry’s work, The Body in Pain, but for a different reason. Scarry writes about torture: [P]ain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. Whatever pain achieves, it

Staging vulnerability – I  23

achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. (Scarry 4) Igort’s solution to the problem of finding a language, or norms of apprehending life itself, into which he can translate the horrors he has heard is to draw ghostly bodies – bodies minimally recognizable as once human and reduced by pain into something no longer so. Emerging from his own empathetic listening to stories of other bodies, Igort’s drawing of starving and dying bodies imposes ‘norms of intelligibility about life’ (Butler 7). In the face of the suffering of others, writes Butler, our response to this suffering depends on a ‘certain field of perceptible reality  .  .  . one in which the notion of the recognizable human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as the human’ (64). Susan Sontag would argue that ‘the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look’ (42). But Sontag would also then argue that these images are necessary: Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget. (115) Sontag hints at a ‘moral spectatorship’ (Cartwright) here, which, effectively, is what the documentary realism of Igort also achieves when it documents the dead where ‘uncensored image and video hosting signifies a maturity within contemporary visual culture, providing a means for viewers to bear witness to that which a sanitized or propagandist mainstream media excludes’ (Tait 107). Conscious of transforming victims into affecting spectacles and viewers/readers into affected spectators, these texts breach the latter’s ignorance, maybe indifference, even at the risk of rendering them mere passive consumers. Yet, as noted in the Introduction, this affecting spectacle and affected spectator are part of an emerging cultural script of hope, transformation and empathetic identification, making, arguably a moral spectatorship.4 In his documentation of the Holodomor stories, Igort adopts a grotesque ­realism of dead bodies, starving bodies and dying bodies throughout the text. He can imagine the Holodomor entirely in terms of the mass production of dead bodies, so to speak. The corpse, writes Thomas Laqueur, ‘enabled the imagination to penetrate the life of another’ (177). And the Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks is full of corpses. The entire Holodomor history that Igort hears then manifests as embodied history – the bodies of the starved. It is not pain that comes into our midst: it is bodies that have been produced by and within pain. Likewise, Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz is littered with corpses, of those Jews who were shot or gassed (12, 44, and elsewhere). Sacco’s works, as is well known, show numerous

24  Staging vulnerability – I

instances of mass executions, and fields, pits and streets with scattered bodies. In Salman Rashid and Mohit Suneja’s Partition story, ‘I Too Have Seen Lahore’, we encounter a page whose two-thirds space is occupied by dismembered heads (Ghosh 217). Splotches of black ink signifying blood add a particularly grotesque dimension to the horrific scene. These narratives emerge from empathetic listening when Igort, Evans, Croci and others seek to capture recalled pain in their drawings, transforming the Holodomor, the Partition or the Holocaust from a historically verifiable event through an oral-narratively reconstructed memory by the primary witnesses, into an image by Igort or Croci. They participate as empathetic listeners so as to facilitate their own narratives. The subjective and the documentary come together in the representations of broken bodies. With documentary realism he embedded the bodies in the official archive in ‘The Kulaks’ and ‘Bolshevik Murder Litany’, but in those sections made of personal testimonios, Igort intertwines the dead bodies in the private archives. This is also the shift from the relatively objective documentary realism to the subjective participatory documentary. Foregrounding the participatory documentary mode in order to highlight ontological vulnerability is only one form of the HR graphic novel. In many cases, including Igort’s work, the graphic novel refrains from a direct corporealizing of pain and violations, adopting a strategy identifiable as ‘figurative realism’.

Spectralizing debodiment and figurative realism In Delisle’s Hostage, André, weakened by days of being chained and on a poor diet, is shown getting up to stretch. The two images show him standing up, trembling and finally sitting down. The text says: ‘When I get up to stretch, my head spins . . . my legs are like jelly. . . . Sitting back down, I spill some of my soup’ (327). Three small squiggles are placed at the head level in the first image to indicate his spinning head. In the second a spiral rises from André’s head. Putting these images and texts together, we see beyond the trembling body to a causal factor: hunger and weakness. Thi Bui does not draw dead bodies or ghosts, strictly speaking, but instead colours the landscape an angry red. On page 157 of The Best We Could Do, she summarizes a history of Vietnam: In the decade of the first Indochina war  .  .  . an estimated 94,000 French soldiers died trying to reclaim France’s colony. Three to four times as many Vietnamese died fighting them or running away from them. These sentences are placed within a black strip that divides the page in two. Above this is an image of a land which has shapes lying around, some of which resemble human outlines. But Bui splashes a red inky patch over the land to symbolize blood. Beneath the preceding text recounting history, we see two panels. In one, Bui writes: ‘this was the human cost of ending France’s colonial rule in Southeast

Staging vulnerability – I  25

Asia’. In the next she says: ‘and winning Vietnam’s independence’ (157). The image shows the French and Vietnamese flags being hoisted. If the landscape was coloured red in the image discussed previously, here in the two adjacent panels, the skies are coloured red. The landscape and horizons that are so coloured, the text that offers a count of the dead and the patches on the ground together lead the reader to imagine that the ground is covered in dead bodies. Bui’s strategy forces us to see the human cost of independence and colonialism in the land, literally, writ in the land’s shapes. It does not require that the artist draw bodies – we end up seeing bodies in the land – as a consequence of the artist’s rendering of the land. Igort uses a different variant of this symbolization, in what one may term a strategy of figurative realism. The years of the Holodomor’s events are inscribed like transparent holograms inside the panels, so that we see the events through the numerals representing the year written in large font (‘1928’, ‘1932’), with human-animal figures intertwining and intersecting with the numerals and vice versa (20, 21, 116, and elsewhere). The effect is startling. The (numeric) years are literally seen through the horrors of the Holodomor. The numbers are windows into the events of the past, or seem to function as a camera’s apertures or even a sightline. The strategy generates an uncanny effect. We see things beyond the calendar year in these panels, almost as though things that ought not to be seen have been brought to the surface (a feature of the uncanny).5 As an exceptionally powerful textual tool, the ghostly, shadowy, palimpsestic nature of the page disrupts the borders of the text (and image) we are supposed to read because we cannot read the present without simultaneously reading the past. Or, rather, the linearity with which we read textual accounts is disturbed when we are forced to read the account across the present and the past, since these two time frames literally intersect on the page. The hologram effect in the text, on the page, is also uncanny because the representation symbolizes a ghostly memory in the mind of the speaker. The numerals are white, pale and transparent. They seem a part of the events around, in and behind them (it is impossible to distinguish). It looks as though the survivor can only see the numerals through the events, and vice versa: the year exists in terms of the trauma they endured. The uncanny is also the persistence of what is not there any more. It is also possible to read Igort’s strategy of ‘dating’ the Holodomor events in this fashion for another effect. The uncanny, as Freud originally theorized it, is a double perception of any space which is at once familiar and strange, safe and threatening, ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’. It is the unheimlich, the loss of home and sense of homelessness that haunts the victims. That is, the ghostly dates implicitly signal the unhomeliness of the home for the starving Ukrainians. The panels with the dates are usually located at the opening moments of the story or to indicate a major event (the date of birth of the protagonist-survivor, the year the famine began). The spectral date/year haunts the past, shades into the lives of the victims when they recall the Holodomor. It is also possible to read the people ‘behind’ or embedded in the ghostly numbers as being rendered spectral, ghostly in their starved,

26  Staging vulnerability – I

dying state. Their homes having become unhomely and their country inhospitable, they are no longer citizens but ghosts of citizens. I take my cue for this spectral effect built around the numerals, the people and the spaces of the panels (the panels being the spatial equivalent of the region, home and homeland in Ukraine) from the trauma aesthetic employed by Igort, Evans, Bui and others, especially around the human figures. It is a multilayered spectral effect that Igort creates to generate the uncanny. They are human-figures, verging on the disembodied and indexing debodiment. The figures drawn are mostly gaunt and with sad physiognomies. Andreyevna’s story, in the panels between the two year-marked panels (20–1), is delivered to us in the form of figures of orphans, the dead bodies of her grandparents and a panel about her mother who died in childbirth. Images of starving bodies follow (22–3). It is the insistence on the embodied nature of the tragedy that makes the trauma aesthetic so haunting: we see bodies reduced to sticks, shadows and ghosts, less human than human.6 In his work on the trauma-aesthetic, Allen Feldman writes: ‘the trauma-­aesthetic signifies the irruption of the abnormal and the pathogenic . . . the trauma aesthetic is the continuation of the modern project, particularly its dependency on a politics of the body’ (185). He adds: I suggest that the trauma-aesthetic installs and smuggles into the human rights discourse a visual genealogy of witnessing and testimony-giving that sorts victim and witness into positions of hierarchical observation, compulsory visibility, and non-reciprocal appropriation of the body in pain. (186) Igort’s trauma aesthetic underscores this hierarchy and the resultant subjective recall, observation and documentation. The spectral is the haunting bodies of Andreyevna’s memory, rendered visible for us in Igort’s drawing of the starving humans. These humans are mediated through the subjective recall by Andreyevna, and further (for us) by Igort’s interpretation of Andreyevna’s descriptions that are then rendered into drawings. Igort documents the Holodomor through Andreyevna’s memories, each memory haunted by starving bodies. He aurally witnesses Andreyevna’s memories, which in turn draw upon her eyewitness memories. The increasing distancing of the Holodomor in historical time, the thinning of Andreyevna’s memories (‘I’m losing my memory . . . ’ she says at one point in her narrative, 26) and the thinning of the bodies that she recalls reach their climactic moment in the very last image in Andreyevna’s story (27). This image is not enclosed in a panel. From the left of the space extending to the right is a streaming shadow, thick and round at the beginning and thinning out later, which could be smoke or some gaseous substance. Inscribed in the middle of this rounded ball of black smoke/gas is ‘1932’ in skinny white lettering. Just a bit beyond the letters standing slightly bent is a figure – androgynous, with no visible features, and a darker shade than the streaming smoke or gas. Slightly hunched, thin, and perhaps shaven-headed, the figure, not unlike Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus,

Staging vulnerability – I  27

seems to be staring at the ground or the smoke, or perhaps at the year that has passed or is passing. The figure is ghostly, and Igort’s powerful image suggests a ghostification: the year and the smoke have both rendered the human an unrecognizable one, or even a less-than human. Perhaps this is a disappearing figure, a human being rendered into a ghost, wasting away from starvation. We see a recurrence of this shading/shadowy figure on page 109. On page 108 Igort draws three bearded men. The year is 1928 and the number ‘5.600.000’ is at the top of the page, indicating the number of deaths. On the facing page, 109, is the year 1934 and the number ‘149.000’ on top. But this time, instead of the human we see only a shaded line sketch of a bearded man. The man is literally thinning out, disappearing, and is more a smudge than a portrait or a figure. Here, too, Igort’s figurative realism uses the metaphor of ghostification as a way of describing the missing, or dying, Ukrainian. Avery Gordon in her reading of the spectral argues that the arrival of the ghost is the arrival of a ‘social figure’. It calls attention, Gordon continues, to ‘modernity’s violence and wounds . . . about systematic injury in the social world’ (24–5). If Gordon is right, then Igort’s trauma-aesthetic is predicated upon the ghostification of the Ukrainians through a systematic state policy  – which he has already explored in ‘The Kulaks’ and ‘Bolshevik Murder Litany’. Thus, the arrangement of the sections and the stories easily embeds the ghostification in state processes, contextualizes the personal testimonios, and shows us that the ghosts are remainders and reminders of the violence of Russian modernity. Ghosts and stricken figures are questionably human: they are rendered ghostly through the social processes and the failure of cultural protection, suggests Igort. The figurative realist enables us to see the human behind the stick/shadow-figures and ghosts. We see a parallel ghostification of the human form in Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis. After the police raid the Calais refugee camp, the refugees lose even their temporary homes. Suzanne Partridge, having lost her art centre in the camp, gets the refugees to cheer up by having their body outlines drawn on the paper. They lie down, sit, squat and draw their body shapes (162–3). The next set of pages shows a stunning image. The paper, cut into human shapes are ‘hung out to dry’, as the page’s first text box declares. We see crisscrossing lines of red tape, not different from festoons, from which these shapes are hung, looking uncannily like human bodies hanging (164–5). Some flap around, twisting in the air and resemble tortured, twisted bodies. They generate a powerful uncanny effect through their resemblance to and difference from the human, but invoke the human, thanks to the text and the plot so far. It is also possible that Igort’s line drawings, Bui’s black patches or Evans’ humanshaped paper, all looking as though something more needs to be done or added to render them humanized, is itself a strategy that communicates the inexpressible. Michael Taussig has argued eloquently about the use of drawings in field notebooks by ethnographers: Whether looked at on their own or in the context of their surround of text, the drawings in notebooks that I have in mind seem to me to butt against

28  Staging vulnerability – I

realism, with its desire for completeness. The drawings come across as fragments that are suggestive of a world beyond, a world that does not have to be explicitly recorded and is in fact all the more ‘complete’ because it cannot be completed. In pointing away from the real, they capture something invisible and auratic that makes the thing depicted worth depicting. (13) Igort’s and Evans’ drawings point at the real – deaths, dying, suffering (there are torture accounts in Evans’ text) – and then in their very minimalism suggest that there is a lot more not drawn here, but which may (must) be imagined. In Croci’s Auschwitz, over and above the realism of screaming, dying and injured bodies, he also takes recourse to a figurative realism to speak of the ‘event without a witness’, that is, the events within the gas chambers. The figurative realism by which he represents the debodiment of the Jews at once obscures and reveals the horror. Croci leads up to the debodied figures by getting one of the Jews, a gravedigger (as he is described, 36), tasked with collecting the bodies from the gas chambers, to speak. The textual narrative goes thus: You have to imagine the gas as it stars to take effect, spreading bottom to top. And in the terrible struggle that ensues . . . You have to imagine the lights going out in the gas chamber . . . it’s dark, you can’t see anymore, and the strongest strive to climb higher and higher. . . (38, ellipsis in original) The gravedigger has not witnessed the events and process of debodiment, but he imagines what it was like inside the chamber. He also calls upon the listening team of fellow gravediggers to, likewise, imagine the frantic struggles inside, thus preparing an interpretive community of potential, and fungible, victims. After the textual narrative, the Nazi officer is seen ordering the gravediggers to start their work (41). What follows is a key instance of figurative realism. We encounter two facing pages (42–3) of four panels each and three text boxes, each positioned like a connective between panels and across the gutters. Panel one on page 42 is slim and simply shows a few clouds. As we move our eyes down the page, panel three is the largest, showing a massive amount of cloud/gas. The facing page, where again the third panel is the largest, shows clouds/gas. In short, the two pages show precisely nothing except clouds of gas. The text boxes read as follows: Where the zyklon had been poured, there was nothing. Where the crystals had been, there was nobody. . . The people were injured, filthy, bloody, bleeding from their ears and noses. They had struggled and fought. . . Some lay crumpled on the ground, crushed beyond all recognition by the weight of others. . . Children with their heads split open, vomit everywhere. . .

Staging vulnerability – I  29

Menstrual blood too, perhaps. . . No, not perhaps, for certain! (42–3) Susie Linfield and Anna Szörényi (“The Images Speak for Themselves?”) both propose that viewers of trauma photographs need to ‘look beyond the images to understand the complex realities out of which the photographs grew’ (Linfield 51) and that we need to study the effects of each collection of photographs as a whole, and the relationships between these photographs and the accompanying written text, or in some cases absence of written text. Each statement (or absence of explicit statement) conveys particular messages which inflect the meanings of the photographs, propagating in the process a particular view of the truth status of the images, and of photography in general. (Szörényi 25) Croci’s text boxes link the panels in which, literally, nothing can be seen. Croci’s figurative realism is initiated by the gravedigger’s injunction to ‘imagine’. The absence of anything beyond the swirling gas in the panels’ representations of the interiors of the gas chambers forces us to forge the relationship between the text and the ‘empty’ images and, further, to imagine what lies beyond the wall/cloud of gas. The text tells us that there are crushed bodies, bleeding bodies and broken persons behind the wall of gas, but the images show us nothing. Croci’s figurative realism is reinforced also by two specific textual cues in the first text box: Where the zyklon had been poured, there was nothing. Where the crystals had been, there was nobody. . . The gas and the crystals reduce the persons inside to ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’ in a classic instance of debodiment. What is left of the Jews inside is debodied persons, and hence non-persons: crushed, broken, bleeding. The emptying of the signifier that is the human form is figured in the use of ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’. Yet it calls out to us to acknowledge that the ‘nothing’ and ‘nobody’ were once persons. Page 44 has only one panel, filling the entire page. A gravedigger has opened the doors of the gas chamber. The focalization is from the reader’s perspective so we see the gravedigger framed at the door in the centre, but at the far end of the panel, with his gas mask obscuring the expression on his face. A few streams of gas continue to flow down on either side of the door/gravedigger, literally framing him. Top right, a cloud of thinning gas still hangs in the air. And, right from the doorway to the edge of the panel and page where the reader’s fingers are likely to be located when s/he is holding the book, are the corpses of the gassed. Frozen in the rictus of death, mouths open and screaming, fingers twisted into claws in their struggle to escape the inevitable, the bodies are piled on each other. Croci’s

30  Staging vulnerability – I

perspectival brilliance shades the figurative realism of the previous two pages into a vision of the unseen-and-unimaginable-turned-real. Like the gravedigger staring down into the chamber at the far end, the reader, too, stares at the state of massive debodiment. Two text boxes intervene. One says: ‘there was every imaginable thing in this fight for life . . . this fight against death. . . ’ (44, ellipsis in original). If the gravedigger visually maps the scene of debodiment, the reader grasps it within the page when s/he holds it. We had been told to imagine, and now we see what was obscured in the preceding pages: every imaginable horror has now materialized. If figurative realism drove us to imagine the worst, Croci himself pushes this aesthetic against the horrors of the realized. The doors literally open our eyes and mind to what we had thus far only imagined: the extent of the production of death. A cognitive assemblage of the page, the image’s extent and colouring (which lends a certain horrific hapticity) and the visual horror of dead bodies, following immediately after the obscuring figurative realism of the previous pages achieves more to communicate the dehumanization of persons than simply a set of bodies would have done. Figurative realism marks the next stage of the ‘trauma aesthetic’ where, instead of the ethnographic, gritty realism of a Joe Sacco, the fabular realism of Art Spiegelman, or the formal realism of a Satrapi, we meet a realism that brings us close to the events but supplements the reading experience of those events. This supplement is the leavening of the official with the affective, grounding the dry-as-dust documentation of the OGPU (Obyedinyonnoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye pri SNK SSSR, the Joint State Political Directorate, essentially, the Secret Police) writings on the deaths with the affective stories of the survivors. Igort prepares us for the figurative realist by moving towards the subjective in the documentary mode itself, so that we realize that the realism is inadequate to communicate the horrors of a genocide.7 Croci’s and Igort’s figurative realism drives both our fascination and aversion for the debodied humans who have lost their rights. Figurative realism, which relies on spectralization (Igort) and obscurity (Croci), transforms the debodied humans into ‘encountered signs’. The intensification of pain as a social relationship impacting the body is achieved through the mix of documentary and figurative realism in these texts. Igort’s and Croci’s images, in the words of Susie Linfield writing about photographs of the victims of political violence, ‘show how those without rights look, and what the absence of rights do to a person’ (37). The denial of food rights and basic human rights in the Holocaust and the Holodomor produce these kinds of debodied ‘persons’ who are no longer persons but whom we are invited to imagine as once having been persons. This call to imagine, I suggest, is central to the cultural imaginary of HR in the graphic texts. Rocco Versaci has argued that in comics the creative use of images ‘emphasize[s] the humanity and the stories of the victims rather than overwhelm these features, as realistic representations – especially of atrocity – are wont to do’ (98). Thus, the aesthetic most relevant to the comics form is not realism but ‘impressionism’ (102).

Staging vulnerability – I  31

Chute’s argument, through a reading of Iri and Toshi Maruki’s fifteen-part The Hiroshima Panels (1951–1982), discerns an ‘aesthetic distance’ in their work (Chute 125–6). It is possible to see how the very nature of an illustration or drawing communicates the humanity of a human person, whether complete or fragmented. In the case of torture victims – as in Abu Ghraib, for instance – the bodies that we see in the photographs communicate the idea that anybody hooked up to electrical wires or with blood spilling out of him has moved away from the recognizably human. The debodied human form – emaciated, starved, dying on the streets – destroys our sense of the normative human, substituting in its place a ‘figure of the nonhuman’ (Butler, Frames of War 64) and is an ‘encountered sign’ that draws our sentiments towards it. This specific attribute of the image or visual, read along with the text verbally narrating the events of the Holodomor, the Holocaust or the refugee crisis, that immediately delivers the nonhuman enables, I suggest, the making of our frames of recognition. We recognize that humans cannot live like this any more. A subset of figurative realist portraits of HR issues such as debodiment may be found in Stassen’s graphic text about the Rwandan genocides, where the protagonist Deogratias is often represented as a boy suffering from delusions in which he is a dog. The transformation is drawn out over two pages (52–3), although the descriptor ‘dog’ has been used to describe Deogratias before (28, 50). Critics argue that Stassen introduces the disjuncture between real animals and metaphorical animals to draw attention to the construction of the symbolic animal, and the ways in which the internalised dog figure ultimately comments on Deogratias’s human behaviour. As the story progresses, Stassen carefully hints at the character’s deteriorating mental state by slightly changing parts of his physique into canine features. (Veld 51) It is traced to the events of 1994 when dogs were found eating the corpses of the massacred: The shocking image of the dogs eating the corpses of his friends becomes the basis for Deogratias’s dissociative state in the present. The dog figure comes to stand in for the loss of his friends, as well as symbolising Deogratias’s role in the events.  .  .  . Deogratias’s dog-like exterior can be viewed as a visualisation of his split self. Through the process of doubling, the protagonist’s identity fragments into an innocent boy and a feral part that takes over in order to survive. (Veld 53) What Deogratias enacts is the animalization trope used throughout the book, especially in the rhetoric employed in the days leading up to the massacres: of the Tutsis

32  Staging vulnerability – I

as cockroaches, for instance. Deogratias’ debodied state is not simply about seeing himself as a dog but also a referencing of the times when humans were no longer human (or humane). In Stassen’s psychotic realism Deogratias remains tethered to the world he saw during the genocide. As in psychosis with its fascination with ‘exteriority’, he becomes what he saw and felt. Speaking of the psychotic realism of art, Mario Perniola says: In the more advanced artistic trends, the traditional structure of separation between art and the real seems collapsed definitively. A new species of ‘psychotic realism’ is born that collapses any mediation. Art loses its distance with respect to reality and acquires a physical and material character that it never had before: music is sound, theatre is action, the figurative arts have a consistency both visual, tactile and conceptual. They are no longer imitations of reality but reality tout court, no longer mediated by aesthetic experience. They are extensions of the human faculty that no longer have to account to a subject because this is completely dissolved in a radical exteriority. (22) The self that was/is Deogratias can no longer be separated from the events he saw or the acts he committed – we know as the story progresses that he was a victim-turnedperpetrator and may have been responsible for some of the killings and betrayals. Thus, his self has been subsumed under the events of 1994 where he had become an ‘animal’. Stassen’s art seeks to demonstrate the continuing trauma of those who were responsible for such trauma inflicted on others. In the aftermath of the genocide, the vulnerability of others – Benina, Apollinaria, Augustine – that Deogratias had turned into their helplessness, becomes his own vulnerability. Figuring and drawing Deogratias as an animal that he believes he is, Stassen maps a continuum of vulnerability, and exemplifies it as a psychotic condition of and as, animal-life. A far more direct instance of psychotic realism being employed to speak of the horrors of ontological (and social) vulnerability may be found in Aaron and Stewart’s The Other Side. Billy Everett encounters the ghost of a dead Marine for the first time in the training camp (17). The ghost starts staying by Everett throughout his stay in Vietnam. It is occasionally joined by the ghosts of other dead Marines. Further, Everett’s gun ‘speaks’ to him, mocking him, disabusing him of his abilities and even inviting him to turn the gun on himself (‘Put me in your mouth’, says the gun, 21). The ghosts do not talk – Everett’s pet ghost does not have a jaw – and simply make noises like ‘Ah’ or ‘Mmmmph’ (22, and elsewhere). The ghosts represent the futility of war, and Everett is shown, literally, this futility in terms of the ghosts. The ghosts are now wispy, ‘immaterial’ or dematerialized forms. In Aaron and Stewart’s conceptualization, the ghosts of the dead Marines are still in uniform, albeit tattered. One can discern limbs, even though broken, injured and incomplete, and faces. The ghosts that Everett sees are instances of a psychotic realism because

Staging vulnerability – I  33

they are proof visible only to Everett – one cannot say ‘living proof ’, I suppose – of a process that has reduced innumerable persons to non-persons. They embody Everett’s discomfort and disbelief in the rhetoric of war that is literally beaten into the soldiers during their training. One ghost-face screams at Everett: ‘Why did I die?’ (26). This image follows a panel in which Everett is seen lying on the ground watching as the ghosts advance on him. Each ghost has a line in this panel: I was young, and the young love to travel. Except for gook whores, I was still a virgin. I died for a nameless hill. I was fragged by my own troops. My M-16 jammed. I had a baby I’d never seen. Blood makes the grass grow. (26) Each ghost has a story to tell, and each story shows up the futility of sacrificing the young men to war, of lives unfinished and aspirations unfulfilled. But these are what Everett imagines the dead are saying; each captures an aspect of life that, perhaps, he wishes he will live to fulfil. When the tale ends, the ghost of the one man Everett kills, Vo Dai, is standing facing Everett. This is literally the ‘other side’ because, for once it is not the ghost of an American Marine, but the ghost of a Vietnamese soldier, whose diary Everett retrieves and reads so that he is aware of the identity of the man whom he had killed. Everett will now be haunted by this named, identified ghost from the ‘enemy’ side. Aaron and Stewart’s psychotic realism shows how Everett’s mind is firmly entrenched in the harsh reality of a war that, at best, is irrational. The irrationality of the haunting ghosts is the ‘natural’ consequence of the irrationality of a war that leaves numberless, unidentified dead (the graphic novel is full of bodies), but concludes in a very different manner. The key point here in Aaron and Stewart’s work is the identity of the ghost at the end, a change from the anonymous ghosts that people Everett’s mind. Everett’s intimate knowledge of the ghost now is a tragic irony of war itself, where the dead are unidentified and unnumbered and where Everett can know the ‘other side’ only in Vo Dai’s death. Thomas Laqueur argues that [w]e live in an age of necronominalism; we record and gather the names of the dead in ways, and in places, and in numbers as never before. We demand to know who the dead are. We find unnamed bodies and bodiless names – those of the disappeared – unbearable. (366) In such a necronominalist age, the only way for Everett to recall the war is not through memories of heroic deeds but by inscribing the dead Vo Dai into his own memory, his own life. Vo Dai’s death and reanimated existence in Everett’s life

34  Staging vulnerability – I

and mind becomes Aaron and Stewart’s critique of the war itself: the survivors are haunted forever. In Everett’s case, they are haunted not by anonymous ghosts but by persons. The construction of ontological vulnerability through the documentary and figurative realist modes in these texts, forces us to pay attention to the ‘encountered sign’, evocative of pain and suffering. It forces us to respond in terms of both cognition and feeling, and communicates, through text and images, the state of the human who is defined as a human-in-pain. The transformation of vulnerability into ontological helplessness, however, is rarely depicted solely as the crisis of inherent, individual vulnerability alone. All HR graphic novels present vulnerability as the product and process of a social relationship, that is, emerging within specific contexts. It is to this contextualized and situated vulnerability that I now turn.

Situational vulnerability Isabell Lorey notes that precarization is governmental, where the state ‘destabilizes’ the ‘conduct of life and thus of bodies and modes of subjectivization’ (14). HR graphic narratives locate embodiment within a system of what Lorey calls ‘biopolitical governmentality’ (23), where ‘the vulnerability of existential precariousness [has to be reduced] by techniques of self-formation’ (27). It is no longer, Lorey notes in her version of situational vulnerability, a system of solely repressive governmentality but rather one of internalized self-discipline and self-control so as to regulate one’s precariousness (29). Yet, many ‘bodies’ find themselves in environments where the self-regulation is not of their choosing, nor is even possible. In Illegal, when Ebo and his brother, with some friends, arrive at Tripoli to await a boat that would get them to Europe, Ebo is ill. Kwame, his brother, is desperate for medication, and determines to get Ebo to hospital. Their friend, Razak, says, ‘Kwame, if you go into a hospital you can get caught without papers and arrested’ (98). Kugler’s and Evans’ texts (and that of Eoin Colfer’s Illegal) have references to the dearth of medical care for the refugees arriving in European camps, and where the camps themselves are, with their poor hygiene, breeding grounds for disease. When Riad is ill with a raging, delirious fever, his father goes out to find essential medicines and returns to report: ‘I tried six pharmacies. No luck. There are no more antibiotics to be had anywhere in Homs’ (137). In Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo and Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, hospitals function with minimal equipment and supplies. In Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicle, he links the military regime with the absence of medical facilities and consequent denial of a therapeutic citizenship to many regions of Burma: Two politically sensitive regions where independent armed groups control a number of zones. Inside these zones, which have no health systems, the population is left to fend for itself, without access to medical care, victims of political discrimination. (unpaginated)

Staging vulnerability – I  35

It is Doctors Without Borders (MSF, in French) that steps in when ‘from 2001 to 2004, MSF managed to make its way into the most remote regions’ (unpaginated). Delisle draws a small schema of the kinds of medical facilities set up: mobile clinics, permanent clinics, hospital support, etc. Later, an MSF doctor explains that the Burmese government was forcing MSF to work in Mudon, which ‘isn’t in a conflict zone, and it has no minorities that are the victims of any specific discrimination’. It is in fact, a ‘zone that should be taken over by the state health care system. Not by MSF’. Delisle mentions other such regions where ‘even the MSF physician hasn’t been authorized to go’. Delisle and the MSF doctor are pointing to the government’s reneging on its duties in terms of providing health care. Here in Burma, biopolitical governmentality reaches its most frightening climax, excluding millions from the possibility of medical care, thus ensuring that some populations of particular ethnic identity will suffer diseases and suffering. Subject to the biopolitical governmentality of the receiving society, the stateless are also denied a membership in the therapeutic economy. They do not, in other words, acquire a ‘therapeutic citizenship’, defined as ‘a form of stateless citizenship whereby claims are made on a global order on the basis of one’s biomedical condition, and responsibilities worked out in the context of local moral economies’ (Nguyen 142). Nguyen points out that ‘access to treatment is contingent on social relations and the ability to capitalize on social networks’ (133) and repeatedly references global movements such as Doctors Without Borders and research initiatives as an essential ‘biopolitical movement because what is eminently at stake is life itself, both in access to lifesaving and -shaping drugs and the new forms of life – from therapeutic relations to drug-resistant organisms – that it spawns’ (141). The stateless do not acquire a therapeutic citizenship unless activists such as Kate Evans or Doctors Without Borders fit them into ‘moral economies’, the texts suggest. The right to health and medical care that characterizes therapeutic citizenship does require local initiatives because the (racialized) bodies are embedded in local regimes of the biopolitical variety. By consigning the stateless refugees to transit camps for years on end with minimally hygienic living conditions is to refuse therapeutic citizenship as a mode of governing entire populations. Biopolitical governmentality also asserts its presence in direct relation to vulnerable and individual bodies in graphic medicine. This relation takes the form of (i) the system of biomedicine and its apparatuses as they embed the body and (ii) the discovery and acknowledgment of a process of systematic ordering of the self and the everyday as a way of ‘helping’ oneself get better and deal with, in some cases, progressive degeneration and deterioration. In other HR graphic novels biopolitical governmentality appears in the form of an emphasis laid on the governance of corporeal precariousness through military measures and coercion, very often violent, and which constructs the vulnerability of the victims of HR violations as a social one. This is achieved through the positioning of the embodied victim within a space containing perpetrators and tormentors – essentially representatives of the social order that renders some persons vulnerable.

36  Staging vulnerability – I

In Nina Sabnani’s graphic short story about the Partition of India, ‘Know Directions Home?’, we see the people displaced from Pakistan seeking to enter India. The ‘military stopped us. They would not let us pass’, says the text on the panelless page. Four doll- or puppet-like figures are positioned on the left of the page; on the right of each, a group of displaced persons in pleading/praying postures. The dolls on the left are in military uniforms wielding a stick (emblematic and metonymic of a gun, perhaps), the stick pointing towards the pleading refugees. At the foot of the page there are two more such military dolls, and halfway up the page to the extreme right, is one more. In effect, the displaced are in the centre, with soldiers surrounding them from three sides (Ghosh 101). This creates a powerful image of the socio-military apparatus in full control of the space and the inhabitants of that space. When the victim shares space with the perpetrators, the debodiment assails us, the readers, with double the force: the victims are debodied in contrast with the full-bodied, able and safe perpetrators, as a result of a specific social relationship (victim-perpetrator). Critics note that in expository discourses of humanitarian photography the display of photographs of ‘others’, is not only an exercise in ‘humanising’, or creating ‘sympathy’ for, those others, it also [sic] an exercise in defining the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’, the exposition implicitly argues, are those who look. ‘They’ are those who are looked at. (Szörényi 29) However, the presence of the bystander or the perpetrator in many of these texts suggests that the ‘us/them’ binary does not adequately capture the scene of debodiment and situational vulnerability. The victim/s is one/are those who is/are distinct from the other figures occupying the panel even before they are distinct from us readers. Thus, it is not possible to see the vulnerability of the displaced, of the injured or even the corpse exclusively, because the images of these texts draw the focus away from the victim towards the perpetrators or bystanders as well. Spencer Clark argues that the manner in which an author positions the actors vis-á-vis the historical events helps us, the readers, determine the constraints placed on an actor’s agency (502–3). The speech of the actors and their nonverbal reactions help us understand this positionality (502). The spatial arrangements – positionality – and the text boxes humanize the historical narrative because they foreground v­ isually the impact of the law or wars and the subsequent loss of agency of the human actors in the events that render their vulnerability into helplessness and victimhood. Take, for instance, Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660. We are made aware of the increasing vulnerability of the Japanese in American cities after Pearl Harbor in the initial pages of the book, even before they are sent into ‘protective custody’. Okubo describes life in Berkeley, California, in the immediate aftermath of the 8 December 1941 US proclamation of war on Japan. In the first striking panel (12), Okubo draws a bus in which she is one of many passengers. There are at

Staging vulnerability – I  37

least seven people around her, and we are shown the seating through the window pane, the focus angling down into the bus. Of the seven co-passengers, six are turned towards Okubo. Three of their faces are clear, but one of them has a distinctly unfriendly, even hostile expression. The others are impassive. Now, while they are not, strictly speaking, perpetrators of the atrocities that would be inflicted on the Japanese in the internment camps, they constitute a social order in/from which perpetrator, witnesses and bystanders to the atrocities would emerge. Okubo genders the context of her obviously scarring bus journey: three of the six people staring at her are women (one’s gender is difficult to read, but the visible fragment of the coat suggests a woman). Okubo forces us to reflect on a social order where American women (and men) appear to subscribe to the dominant discourse that sees and treats the Japanese woman among them as a potential enemy. The hard and impassive expressions on the faces of the women passengers do not mark them as perpetrators but, as Barbie Zelizer reading photographs of Nazi women in the camps would caution us: Harsh, angled, angry, and often maniacal, female perpetrators constituted the conscious underside to women’s involvement in the atrocity story. Female perpetrators were the antithesis to all that was subjunctive and desired about women’s gendered artefact in the camps. (252) Here Okubo clarifies the expressions on the faces of the co-passengers when she writes: ‘The people looked at all of us, both citizens and aliens, with suspicion and mistrust’ (12). Through the play of spatial arrangements, locating herself in the midst of unfriendly bodies and expressions, Okubo depicts the situational vulnerability of the Japanese. The Japanese are vulnerable in terms of their relationships in the social order of Berkeley and in the everyday spaces of the USA. That is, vulnerability is not the horrific extreme of the camps but the quotidian social order of the everyday life of the Japanese in America. Embedded in antagonistic – mistrust, suspicion – social relations, Okubo’s vulnerability is amplified within the routine, and this sets the stage for the events that will follow. These are not perpetrators, as already mentioned, but they constitute an aspect of the social order where the ‘ordinary’ men and women would eventually allow certain horrific acts to be perpetrated. In a subsequent panel we are shown Okubo about to climb the stairs, perhaps to her apartment (the text says they have to be home between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., so we assume she is heading home). She is looking over her back at a man standing at the street corner, a posture traditionally implying both insecurity and a real or imagined threat. The man’s head is not clearly drawn but seems to be angled in a way that suggests he may be looking at Okubo. Even if we discount the man’s position in the panel for a moment, the fact that Okubo is looking over her back at him signals a sense of anxiety and vulnerability in the context of a routine everyday

38  Staging vulnerability – I

moment. The biopolitical governmentality of the regime has extended from the marking of curfew hours to informal surveillance on the streets. In short, Okubo’s positioning of the antagonistic Americans in routine settings, captured in one panel and her nervous posture in the next constitute an anterior moment to overt perpetrator-acts in the later sections of the narrative. The vulnerability presaged in the two panels already discussed gathers strength in terms of a more hostile environment depicted a couple of pages later. Okubo is show entering a Civil Control Station  – a frightening nomenclature with all the semantic weight in the word ‘control’ – to register herself and her brother. The image shows Okubo stepping into the doorway of the Station, and the door has two armed soldiers on either side framing/guarding the door. Both of them appear to be looking at Okubo, and Okubo herself has turned her head towards one of them. The panel is dominated by the soldiers. If, as Spencer Clark says, the positioning of the characters and figures in panels is indicative, at some level, of their position and role in the historical events represented, then Okubo emphatically positions the American military at the locus of, and the dominant actor in, the American nation’s historical role in the War. That aside, by positioning them on either side of the female character, not only does Okubo signal the implicit gendered threat from the military but also shows the circumscription of the Japanese (woman) within a perimeter defined and guarded by the military men. Symbolically anticipating the constraints placed on Japanese mobility in the camps – also guarded, fenced in by the military – Okubo effectively implies that the history of the Japanese Americans (or the Japanese in America) after 1942 is almost entirely controlled by the dominant actors: the US military personnel. This reading is also invited by the panel on the facing page. The Japanese are all seated, awaiting their turn to register. At the bottom left of the panel we see an American soldier with a gun. The gun extends into the panel, across a man’s shoulder and touching the newspaper that Okubo is reading. The gun protruding and extending into the space occupied by the Japanese literalizes the metaphor, ‘under the shadow of a gun’. By positioning the military personnel at the corner so that the gun cuts into and across the space where the Japanese wait – to be registered for displacement into internment camps, it may be remembered – Okubo informs us that from this moment on, the Japanese role in American life and history – will be carefully monitored by armed men. The space is patrolled by military personnel and the Japanese are being made aware of the nature of the space – American – and the conditions under which they, the Japanese, occupy that space: under the watchful eyes of the gun-bearing men who will move quickly, if required, to prevent any Japanese from indulging in any act that the Americans may perceive as threatening. By introducing first, the antagonistic Americans on the bus and in the street, and now the stiff military personnel, Okubo firmly positions the Japanese as vulnerable, under threat and surveilled. The panels’ spaces, it appears, have become too confining, with the close-up shots of faces alongside Okubo’s (in the bus sequence), signalling an unwanted, even antagonistic, proximity. The social order, at least for the

Staging vulnerability – I  39

Japanese, has deteriorated, their freedoms curtailed. Bodies, then, are surveilled in the regime of biopolitical governmentality. A similar anticipation of the ‘actual’ horrors to follow is also seen in Croci’s Auschwitz. Kazik, through whose eyes the story unfolds, is an Auschwitz survivor. When the story opens, the setting is 1993 ‘former Yugoslavia’, and Kazik, traumatized by the civil war (ostensibly, since the opening panel shows dead bodies strewn across the urban landscape) says ‘the time has come to open the closets’ (6). He then recounts the train journey into Auschwitz: we know this is the destination because one of the coaches/vans of the train has the label ‘Auschwitz’ on it. When they saw the trains pass, most of the Poles would laugh. They were rejoicing . . . they were getting rid of the Jews. March 1944. . . That kid beside the track. I can see him now! My last glimpse of the world . . . before the gates of hell. (7) The kid beside the track makes a cutting motion across his neck, and smiles as he does so – to show that the Jews in the coaches were headed for death. Anonymizing perpetrators is a strategy common to quite a few HR graphic novels (Veld 88). However, such an anonymizing is accompanied by specific visual cues about the perpetrators. In Auschwitz, for instance, the Nazis are shown ramrod stiff, with uniforms and bodies drawn equally stiff and with clear, hard lineaments, symbolizing, according to one critic, a specific aesthetic of control (Veld 85). In Croci’s text, the Nazi officer is at one point depicted as a vampire, wherein ‘his cruelty works in tandem with the full Nazi attire to position him as a coldblooded and immoral figure’ (Veld 87). Igort does draw the Russian military personnel who terrorized the Ukraine in the early 1930s in a similar vein. When depicting the forced deportation of the Ukrainian peasants in 1931, in this two-page spread we have only a military truck with soldiery. We see them from the side, the truck positioned in such a way that its sides are open. Two of the men point their rifles at us (the readers), one man stands guard outside, glaring at us. They are all in long coats, belted and hatted, and six of the seven stare out of the panel/page, at us. The stiff but ready posture of the men show them geared up for violence, their sartorial and physiognomic lineaments lacking any sobering or softening lines. The fact that the truck and the people occupy the entire double-page suggests their complete dominance of that space, but also the space of the history of the Holodomor (in the top right, there is a logo of the KGB, the Russian secret police, in bright red) (Igort 42–3). In Prum’s depiction of prison treatment (The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea), the guard striking the prisoners is absolutely expressionless, suggesting his indifference to and routinization of the act (204). Prum implies an indifference to both the victim he beats up and the act of violence. Very rarely do the people inflicting pain and torture in these texts have identities – they become, then, generic ‘evil men’. Casting them into uniforms compounds the anonymity even though these

40  Staging vulnerability – I

characters, when they occur in panels, arguably occupy a large space by themselves. Take, for example, Prum’s scene of the prison (204). The page is divided into two halves, one half occupied by a panel and the other, abutting into the panel in a way that the right-side border of the panel is obscured by a larger panel with square borders, except for the one that touches the left panel. The border abutting into the left panel is ragged in its edges. In the left panel we see the prisoners being disbursed food and in the right, being beaten. If the first (left) panel suggests a certain collegiality and community of prisoners (some are even smiling), the right one shows their shared torment. What is important, however, is that the panel that depicts the beating juts into the one where food is being served, suggesting that no matter what they may construct for themselves as a community, the violence enters their life just the same. The panel entering the scene of communal eating shows how the perpetrator and his actions are spatially never far from the prisoners; indeed the jagged edges of the ‘beating panel’ implies a violent abutment into the cells where they share a meal. Their life is doomed forever to be intruded upon violently by the various prison guards, exactly as the space of their cell is. Their bodies, as always, remain the focal point for any regime to govern the states of precarity. Anonymization of the uniformed perpetrators as they enter the world of the victim, in Igort, Croci and Prum may be linked to the ‘the dissociation of self from act’ as one study of the moral neutralization among perpetrators terms it (Anderson 46). When the artists draw the perpetrator as generically evil, depersonalized and without identifying markers other than their uniforms and emblems – icons of their official status and hence power  – they also, I  suggest, show how the precarity of the social order in which the victims are embedded is governed in a dehumanized fashion. That is, the governance of precariousness and the precarity of the social order is a purely administrative and mechanical exercise in which the perpetrators do not have a ‘self ’ but simply a role. While on the one hand this suggests that the perpetrators have dissociated their selves from their heinous actions that determined the fate and future of their victims, on the other it also nuances this reading. For, it is then possible to see the actions of the perpetrators, enacted without a sense of self (if we concede Anderson’s moral neutralization argument), as dehumanizing the perpetrators as well. Such HR texts propose a social order in which dehumanization becomes a norm rather than an exception, and both victims and perpetrators are dehumanized in the endless iteration of violence, with the victim experiencing greater vulnerability because of the onesided nature of the social and power relations. I am, it should be clear, embedding Anderson’s moral neutralization argument within a more famous predecessor’s. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism had argued that in ‘an atmosphere of moral depravity, one need not be a monster to create monstrous acts because any independent faculty we may possess to distinguish between right and wrong is impossible for many. Evil becomes “normalized” in such a situation’. Precariousness is amplified when the social order is given over to such a normalization. The

Staging vulnerability – I  41

facelessness of the perpetrator in HR texts, or rather the uniformity of fungible, impassive faces suggests that their acts have been normalized, and there are no individual selves any longer in this situation. When we see the conditions that amplify pre-existing situational vulnerability to induce helplessness in victims and enable dehumanizing acts by the perpetrator, then we come to recognize the power of contexts – historical, economic, political – in the making of such roles as ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’.8 This makes the moral evaluation of the perpetrators – faceless, identity-less and dehumanized – more complicated. As Joanne Pettitt puts it, ‘such a view allows for the understanding that the Holocaust was a human rather than a specifically German crime; consequently, the reader is forced to recognize his or her own capacity for wrongdoing’ (10, emphasis in the original). Rebecca Jinks writes: This ‘facelessness’ [of the perpetrator] contrasts with the humanizing representation of the victims: we are shown individuals’ histories and fates, and encouraged to identify with their suffering as a way of understanding the impact of genocide. (34) By making the victim and the perpetrator share the same space, but caught in an asymmetrical and unequal power relation, the HR graphic novel in the very process of dehumanizing both of them also forces us to see that they are trapped and defined by the historical moment represented by and as the panel. That is, if the panel is a moment in time, then the panels here in HR texts are moments in history that embed and construct, as people like Zygmunt Bauman (1989) have proposed, victims and perpetrators of those who may otherwise have turned out to be very different people given a different context. In Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis, two pages dealing with the assault on refugees in Calais, France, arrest our attention. The chapter is ironically titled ‘Safe in France’. Three Syrian refugees are brutally beaten by black-clad, masked men carrying batons. In the mostly black and grey images, the only real colour is the blood flowing from the Syrians’ injuries. The accompanying text says: We never saw their faces. I can tell you their clothes – they were wearing blue suits. Like the ones that the police wear, but with the emblems torn off. (31) Evans contextualizes the assault with the text on the top of the page: More than fifty serious unprovoked attacks on refugees have been documented in the past year; assaults by members of the public and by the police. It’s not clear which this was. (31)

42  Staging vulnerability – I

This particular page also has a striking image. The street has walls on either side that stand grey and hard-faced, the lights are dim, adding to the threatening atmosphere. The three Syrians are in the foreground of the page, one of them lying down, two sitting. The image’s play with perspective is achieved by positioning the attackers at the far end of the panel/page and therefore of the street. Their silhouettes, from the street lights, are therefore elongated towards the victims. Evans in this image is not solely focusing attention on the incident. She is suggesting an extension of the threat towards the refugees, where the elongated shadows, like in popular Gothic and horror texts, appear to be creeping towards the already injured Syrians. The page itself seems to have a sense of looming, threatening presence. Now, given the emphasis on the anonymity of the attackers in the text above the image and the extending shadows, Evans may very well be suggesting that literally anybody could be terrorizing the refugees. The darkness, anonymity and collusion of the law-enforcement authorities that Evans depicts here situates the vulnerability and helplessness of the refugee ‘bodies’ within a context of a large-scale antagonism of the social order towards the refugees. That is, Evans does not indict just the present attackers for the incident, but rather situates the attackers and their victims in the general ethos of distrust, anger and threat in which both victims and perpetrators find themselves. It is the social order, the setting and the context that transforms vulnerable refugees into helpless victims and the French public into victimizers. The idea of situational vulnerability is, ironically, also extended in some cases to the perpetrators. In Croci’s work, for instance, the Nazi herding the Jews into their groups orders the young mother to pick up the fallen Star of David. When she refuses, he shoots her baby dead. The panel shows the shocked mother on the ground, arm extended towards her dead baby. The Nazi officer, gun in hand, screams, ‘Running this camp is not a delicate affair . . . have you any idea of the number of problems I have to solve here?’ The young mother responds, ‘Do your job, murderer’, and he very obligingly shoots her dead, too. The last panel on the page shows the mother lying dead; a stream of blood snakes across the ground soaking, partially, the Star of David. The Star is located between the feet of a Nazi officer (we are shown only the lower portions of his legs, with boots and trench coat). A dog on a leash leans forward to sniff the woman’s body (12). Croci’s contextualization of the Nazi officer foregrounds the standard reasoning offered by the wardens, guards and officers of the Third Reich: they were executing their jobs and duties. It is the situational aspect of the Nazi’s actions that Croci (perhaps problematically) foregrounds, suggesting that, in the given context, ‘traditional humanistic conceptions of morality’ are subsumed under a ‘teleological system that was rooted in ideas of duty and honour’ (Pettitt 33). This specific ‘teleology’ is emphasized when the Nazi is upbraided by his superior officer who asks, ‘Do you want total panic to break out?’ (13). The senior officer then says: ‘Put away that gun. It is possible to carry out an efficient selection calmly’ (13). This senior officer is standing smoking a cigarette in a holder and, unlike the other officer (who shot the woman and the baby) is stone-faced, calm. Croci here is pointing to the cultural training imparted by the senior man who is proposing that the other officer train himself to

Staging vulnerability – I  43

ensure that extermination be carried out dispassionately. It is in this context that the cold ruthlessness of the Nazi perpetrator emerges. These examples bring together victim and perpetrator on the same page, within the same panel of history, thereby emphasizing the fact that vulnerability is situational. Beyond the theme of vulnerability, both inherent/ontological and situational, HR texts also document the process by which the vulnerability of individuals and populations is exposed to ruination, as a result of which their identities are defined in terms of their experienced pain.

Ruins, ruination, ‘Wounded Attachments’ In a powerful image in Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, he depicts a street scene: kids playing football, a man ferrying some stuff in a wheelbarrow, another walking off wearing a backpack, an adult walking a child. The houses are bullet-marked. The entire image is, in fact, a tableau vivant. A tableau vivant is a set of short narrative sequences  .  .  . in which the “real life” hidden beyond the still image is exposed. . . . Such tableaux do not represent scenes picked out randomly from a chain of events, but rather particular “pregnant moments” in which past, present and future are condensed. (Mario Gomes and Jan Peuckert 123) The text boxes state: ‘Goražde had lived’ and ‘how?’ In a second image, a man with a set of jerry cans (perhaps transporting water or fuel), wearing a weary expression is in the foreground; the others in the street, too, do not look cheerful. The top half of the image shows Sacco navigating a small piece of wood as they cross a deep crevice. The tableau therefore captures the past, present and future of Goražde. The ‘why [is he here in Goražde]’ is answered by Sacco by pointing out that Goražde lived, survived. The ‘how’ refers to the merging of time. The bullet-marked and patched up houses (the roofs have cloth/plastic to plug holes in them) are accompanied by the reference to the deaths from Goražde’s past, in the text box, and are in a dynamic and tragically antithetical relationship with not just the word ‘lived’ (indicating the present) that Sacco uses, but also the image of boys playing football and people with backpacks (perhaps carrying rations). It is not ruin, but the process and continuing and tangible effects of ruination that make up Sacco’s focus, most notably a ruination seared into the memory of the victims, whose present identity is defined by the pain of ruination, or ‘wounded attachments’ – identities and pain resulting from their very difference from normative identities. To take ruination first. These two images from Sacco’s iconic work reveal a literalization of ruination. Sacco is being shown, by Edin his friend and local guide, ‘marks in the road where a Serb tank had stopped and turned’, the ‘footbridge under the second bridge built to shield pedestrians from snipers’, the ‘car of one of his best friends, killed in the first attack on Goražde’ (16). On the very next page,

44  Staging vulnerability – I

and two pages after the tableau vivant, we are given another street view. In this panel, which takes up half the page, Sacco shows us faces worn with suffering, pinched and drawn with anxiety and from a hard life. Young and old both have such faces. Juxtaposed with the (re)construction work in and around Goražde, is a street scene. Again, worn faces, people ferrying fuel in jerry cans, and pockmarked buildings fill the scene. There are numerous accounts and images of the repairs the Goražde inhabitants undertook to their damaged homes (‘making it the most habitable ruins in the area’, says Sacco of Edin’s home), the painfully slow collection of wood for the winter months, the lack of electricity and the innovativeness with which they constructed turbines to generate electricity from the neighbouring rivers. The past wars and strife, violence and injuries are constant and tangible presences, as Sacco draws them, in the lives of the inhabitants. His attention is to the connective tissue that continues to bind human potentials to degraded environments, and degraded personhoods to the material refuse of imperial projects  – to the spaces re-defined, to the soils turned toxic, to the relations severed between people and people, and between people and things. (Stoler 7, emphasis in original) The remains and debris are tangible, where ‘tangible’ most commonly refers to that which is ‘capable of being touched,’ equally referring to that which is substantial and capable of being perceived’ (Stoler 5). Goražde’s ruins are tangible but what is also tangible in Sacco is the disposition of the people embedded in, and responding to, the debris in which they lead their lives. That is, Sacco is, undoubtedly, painting ruins, but in the process he is doing much more. Vulnerability as a continuum is also staged in HR texts such as Sacco’s through a thematic and formal strategy of ruination. Ann Laura Stoler explicates ‘ruin’ and ‘ruination’ by invoking multiple semantic possibilities and scope of the terms. Stoler writes: By definition, ruination is an ambiguous term, being an act of ruining, a condition of being ruined, and a cause of it. Ruination is an act perpetrated, a condition to which one is subject, and a cause of loss. Ruination is a process that brings about “severe impairment, as of one’s health, fortune, honor, or hopes.” Conceptually, ruination may condense those impairments or sunder them apart. To speak of colonial ruination is to trace the fragile and durable substance of signs, the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain. But ruination is more than a process that sloughs off debris as a by-product. It is also a political project that lays waste to certain peoples, relations, and things that accumulate in specific places. To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations, neglect, and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present. (10, emphasis in original)

Staging vulnerability – I  45

Stoler’s call to ‘move between ruins and ruination, between material objects and processes’ (25) may be traced in the documentation of vulnerability as a continuum, as a legacy and after-effect, in HR graphic novels. The buildings are veritable ruins (ruins, defined as ‘what people are left with: to what remains blocking livelihoods and health, to the aftershocks of imperial assault, to the social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things’, Stoler 9). But an alertness to what Sacco does when he gets the people living with ‘what they are left with’ to speak of the reasons for those ruins, signals ruination. Sacco’s images show the effects of processes of ruination – war, civil strife – but their retention within the present as, shall we say ‘living ruins’, implies a reappropriation to serve the current politics of reconstruction, aid, etc. The material ruin of the buildings is mirrored in the gaunt ruined faces of the inhabitants, who are still alive but whose mechanics of living include dealing with food shortage and uninhabitable spaces inherited – ‘what people are left with’ – as tangible effects, because, as Stoler tells us, the effects of ruins live on in ‘the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind’ (9–10). In Deogratias the very act of recollection is in fact a document of the ruination wrought on human persons. Stassen’s image captures both the object and the process. To the left of the panel we have Deogratias’ face, eyes staring. To the right, and occupying the bulk of the panel’s space is the land, with three tendrils of smoke rising up. His face has a streak of blood flowing down across one eye. The text tells us in graphic detail of the mutilations and savagery inflicted upon the Tutsis, but the first part of this text consumes us: ‘my head’s spilling out into the day the insides of bellies are blending into the inside of my head . . . ’ (53). With the injury – which is a symbolization at this moment in the story, because he is not injured – Deogratias’ is a ruined body and face. But that is not the point. His ruined body through the psychotic realism exteriorizes a recollection of severe ruination – the cause, process and effect of ruining – of others’ bodies in the past. The ruined face is the continuing effect of the events shaping the ‘hollows of landscapes . . . the microecologies of matter and mind’. That is, the wound on his head is the material vivification of the ruination Deogratias effected on other people’s bodies, even if this vivification is a psychotic episode and not real. The blood he believes flowing down his head is the symbolic equivalent of the blood he caused to spill from others’ bodies when he betrayed them. Stassen moves between the material object of Deogratias’ body and the process of wreaking ruin on others’ bodies, both linked in/by Deogratias’ memory and depicted through the psychotic realism of a haunted boy. Stassen suggests that any subjectivity of Deogratias is divided between his victim and perpetrator role, between the ruination he inflicted on Augustine, Benina and others whom he betrayed to the Hutu militia and the ruins of his body addicted to liquor. Ruination, in short, endures in the memory and occasionally manifests as visible indexical or symbolic signs of ruins, themselves signs of vulnerability upscaled into helplessness.

46  Staging vulnerability – I

More importantly, the injuries experienced and sometimes healed, become the ground from which an identity is launched. Ruination produces wounded attachments where, for instance, Deogratias remains connected to the injuries he suffered and inflicted in the past. His injuries align/attach him with those who suffered – a shared history of shaming, humiliation and injury – but they also, problematically, locate him as a perpetrator. Injury shapes his identity But this is only one, and an unusual, mode of staging the ruination of and from the past. A more common mode is visible in texts dealing with refugees and war. Works like Sacco’s, Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer, Kate Evans’ and Olivier Kugler’s are built on conversations with the displaced and the dispossessed, who recall the process of ruination that brought them to their present-day state/status. Bettina Egger coins the term ‘oral history comic’ to describe works such as The Photographer where the comic book writer and/or artist makes use of her interviews with the injured and the victim to create the comic. For Egger, these comics represent a process of archiving the raw material of interviews, photographs, letters and others that are remediated as drawings or quotes into the comic form. In this way, the ‘archival material can regain access to the sphere of active remembering’ (63). The comic, then, is always already multimodal, built from oral narratives, with the oral texts being redrawn and recited. The drawings may also connote ‘the impossibility or unwillingness to photograph’ (65), or be photographed. In this way, the comics also make ‘processes of archiving visible’ (70–1. Also see Pedri 2011 for a reading of The Photographer’s multimodal method). I suggest that one way of staging vulnerability in terms of ruination – now in the past but with after-effects in the present – is by way of the comics’ memory-work. Ruination is embedded in the narrated but often unnarratable memories that are then reframed and recontextualized in the comic book. Archivization, then, of the bodies, writings and memories instantiates wounded attachments to the past they went through, but remains the defining marker of their identities even today. If the ruin evokes melancholic memories, as traditionally argued, where does ruination find its memory-work? Ruination is only retrievable in the oral history comic form where events from the past are delivered with cause-effect and chronological sequencing in the form of interviews and conversations that are then redrawn into the comic book as images. The comic book reactivates the memory of ruination even though/when ruin-signs of former homes, places and families are no longer physically/materially present today, except as ruined physiognomies steeped in memory. In the episode/story, ‘The Afghan’ in Escaping Wars and Waves, Kugler has an author’s note: On my last day in Calais I briefly met a tired and confused looking young Afghan. He did not want to be photographed and he didn’t want his voice recorded. The quotes on this spread are what I  remember from what he told me. (66)

Staging vulnerability – I  47

Kugler’s remediation, from memory, is all we have of the Afghan’s story. That is, ruination, in the absence of ruins, survives as archival footage remediated as drawings and reported conversations – what Hillary Chute commenting on Alison Bechdel’s work, calls ‘reinscribing archival documents’ (183) – and in the gaunt visages of the survivors. This is tangible because the archive, remediated, is what the Afghan or other refugees are left with: it has tangible effects in terms of Wisam’s injury, their sad faces, their dispositions. All of Kugler’s and Igort’s work is, in effect, a ruination narrative culled from archival footage and remediated as reported speech and redrawn images. Occasionally, this remediation can take the form of photographs of their former homes shared by the survivors, photographs that may then be reproduced as they are, or redrawn by the artist. (Spiegelman’s use of photographs in Maus is now well known. See Hirsch, 1992–93, among others, for a study.) In the absence of material evidence – ruins – the process of ruination finds expression in the archive that is the HR graphic novel. When Prum draws himself drawing, he is creating a textual embodiment of the archive of this body, the body that has literally inscribed upon it the ruination visited over a long period of time. Further, when Prum draws himself drawing tattoos on others’ and his own body (100, 101, 173), the entire set of drawings – a corpus, literally so – is the Prum diary, so to speak. Written in and on different locations, drawn by hand, the Prum archive is a distributed and open one, to be consumed in different contexts depending on where the text-archive may travel. He redraws his injuries from the past as well. Or take an episode from Evans’ accounts of the refugees. Jez and his friends are repairing a porch when they hear a popping noise. Jez thinks: ‘Must be fireworks’, and the panel is a close-up of Jez smiling at the sounds. The next panel, the middle one in the page is a longer shot of the scene. Around the tent three people can be seen lying face down on the ground, and one curled up inside a tent. One screams at Jez and his companion, ‘GET DOWN ! GET DOWN !!’ The thought bubble from Jez says: ‘If they’re from a war zone, of course they’ll be nervous about fireworks. It’s the trauma’ (71). The war zone from the past is inscribed onto two sites here: the refugee’s crouched or prostrate body and the refugee camp itself. The present body/land is transformed through the aural recall of the war zone, into the war zone. The body archives the trauma, carries it as a wound from the past, which in turn determines how the person deals with the present of the refugee camp, even going so far as to call out to the others to save themselves. Rachel Miller examining the diary form and the comic-diary form has argued that forcefully drawing out a daily record kept by hand of the imagined labourer, diaries sit at the intersection of graphic modes of embodiment and a unique mode of textual embodiment in which the diary effectively becomes or stands in for the diarist’s own body. (107–8)

48  Staging vulnerability – I

Ruination demands an archive in the HR graphic text, and the body in these cases becomes the tangible archive: a storehouse of memories of the processes that have rendered the human person into a debodied, broken ‘person’. The corporeal diary is the history of ruination, in short because when the witness is unable to offer her/ his story, the witness’s body is the story (Derrida). Kugler places notes to the reader in the form of labels and descriptors. He labels the material objects in the refugees’ homes and tents. For Rachel Miller, these are devices that ‘not only authenticate each textual artefact as wilful acts of composition  .  .  . but encode the public consumption of such private documents as an ethically ambiguous task’ (110). They are authenticating devices that archive the current life of the refugee in terms of their bare possessions. In Ankur Ahuja’s ‘The Red Ledger’, a story of the Partition, the tale revolves around the businessman Birdhi Chand Naunaq Ram’s ledgers, ‘his daily diary of profit and loss’ (Ghosh 170). The image of the merchant writing in the ledger is followed by two images. The ledger being delivered and the hand reaching out to collect it, and in the lower right half, a set of accounts in numerals and Urdu script. But placed under this is an image of a hand getting ready to start writing in the book (170). Ahuja would focus then in the text on the very material art of writing: Every night, after dinner, he would sit hunched over the red book, fingers stained with ink, furiously calculating, recording, keeping a meticulous account of debits and credits. In Urdu, a language that no one else in the family could read. To me it was a personal diary filled with stories of adventure lurking under his stoic character. (170) This inscription of the commercial account, consumed by some as a ‘personal diary’, is crucial because it will eventually be subsumed under the official ­documentation – a ‘certificate from the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation’ that terms him a refugee (175). Elsewhere I have argued that [the certificate] is a classificatory document, identifying the receiver as a refugee. The letter’s destination is the recipient, but encoded in the letter with its humanitarian gesture is the man’s individual and familial history because, as we are told, nothing of the man survives but a certificate. . . . A communiqué in the form of an official letter or certificate is the official history and categorical imperative that literally frames the personal tale. (Nayar 8–9) There are no other material ruins to reference in refugee texts because these are ruins back home and they no longer have access to those homes, and so the archive survives in many cases as fragmented textual evidence. If the archive is remediated into the present in the form of such letters, recorded and reported conversations, they are the sole reminders and remainders of ruination (in this case wreaked by

Staging vulnerability – I  49

the Partition) because there is no tangible ruin left. When Ahuja says that the ledgers were sold to the used-paper buyer, and no record survives except for this certificate, he is linking the measly remainder of the archive to the process of ruination, even as he tells us how to read the images. The man’s handwritten record, which would serve as the embodied story of his life – the material act of composing – has disappeared, like his body. Debodiment then, the result of ruination, is connected to the loss of the embodied, non-official and affective text, texts that were composed by hand and constitutive of who he was; when the ledgers disappear, the key identity of the business man disappears, leaving behind only his identity as a ‘refugee’. The disembodied hand writing in the ledger looks forward to the debodiment of the person himself, which will eventually also be mirrored in the loss of the ledger, too. The emphasis on material archiving (with the corporeal dimension of drawing) and embodiment in these texts foregrounds, ironically, the very loss of materiality and the debodiment in the process of ruination. In Miller’s apposite phrase, ‘an elision between her fate and the close of the text itself ’ (113), the ledger and the life both fade away, debodied and archived only in the official text (the communique) and the remembered/repeated story. Just as the text is vulnerable to loss, erasure and effacement, so is the body that produced the text. The process of ruination is social, situational and therefore is the context in which rights may be denied or lost. The inability of the victims and the vulnerable to move on in many cases documented by Kugler, Evans, Stassen and Igort, suggests what Stoler has been arguing: the continuing, and tangible, effects of the ruination. When Kugler’s refugees or Stassen’s Deogratias break the law (Kugler is told stories of how they try to escape the camp, evade the police, etc.) or even in cases of individual ruination such as Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, where Melinda’s inability to speak at all (her mouth simply seizes up when she tries to enunciate) is tied to her inability to speak about her rape, then we recognize the depth of what Wendy Brown poignantly terms ‘wounded attachments’ (Political Theory). The HR graphic text’s embodying of wounded attachments is a reflection on the after-effects of ruination. * The texts’ staging of vulnerability, both corporeal-ontological and situational, before unpacking the ruination writ in the form of archivization of wounded attachments, is a key anterior component of rights discourse principally because these texts not only identify the victim-subject denied rights but also highlights the contexts in which they become such subjects. The HR graphic text moves outward from the body to the contexts in which the body is located, as we have seen. This chapter examined the various methods and strategies through which the HR graphic text foregrounds vulnerability. The chapter assumes that vulnerability – which may now be defined as a set of conditions and contexts in which individual persons or collectives may experience

50  Staging vulnerability – I

precarity, leading to the loss or diminishing of their rights – is foundational to the HR discourse. Locating this vulnerability as social rather than inherent or ontological alone enables us to see how the question of rights is primarily a question of the contexts in which rights are made available, denied or taken away. HR graphic novels document the contexts even as they present the human body as vulnerable.

Notes 1 Kugler uses this method of spectralizing to indicate movement as well, as in representations of high-speed movement. 2 For the dissolving body in Gothic texts and the resultant abhuman see Kelly Hurley (Gothic Body). 3 James Dawes offers a taxonomy of narrative positions (and genres) in Human Rights writings: the omniscient narrator, the transitional figure, and the star (Dawes “Truth-Telling: Reportage and Creative Nonfiction”). 4 Lisa Cartwright theorizes empathetic identification as a condition where ‘I recognize the feeling I perceive in your expression’. She elaborates: ‘In thinking I know how you feel, I do not need to know about you or identify with you’. But more importantly, Cartwright argues: ‘I may feel in some sense responsible for your grief – not because I believe I have directly caused it, but because I feel that I might, or should, intervene or help – that I can make a difference for you’ (24). 5 There is a sense in the uncanny of an ‘apprehension . . . of something that should have remained secret and hidden which has come to light’ (Royle 2). 6 In a sharp distinction, Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart have ‘real’ ghosts in The Other Side: the many dead soldiers, American and Vietnamese, haunt the living. Everett (the American soldier in Vietnam) constantly sees the ghost by his side. 7 There is, as Lauren Berlant has argued, the risk of the seductive power of affect when discussing trauma. This risk is a very real one, since the audience is called upon very often to respond in terms of their sentiment to the horrors perpetrated (see Ferrarese “Vulnerability” for Berlant and the ‘problem’ of affect). 8 I am not here considering those views that account for the dispositions of some people to become perpetrators, given the right circumstances, but choosing to focus on the contexts of such roles (for the various debates around the dispositional and contextual factors in the making of perpetrators see, among others, Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust; Scarre “Understanding the Moral”; Pettitt Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives).

3 STAGING VULNERABILITY – II Dignity, humiliation and dehumanization

In the first volume of Riad Sattouf ’s The Arab of the Future, he documents waiting with his father to get food from a cooperative. When they reach the counter, the man dispenses the usual: bread, eggs and Tang (freeze-dried orange drink). Riad’s father asks: Haven’t you got anything other than eggs? That’s all we’ve had for two weeks. The kid can’t eat just eggs all the time. . . The indifferent man handing out the sanctioned supplies retorts: Give him some Tang, or tell your wife to give him her milk! (19) Father and son walk away, the father, hot and sweaty, unable to even respond to the man’s extremely rude and personal remark. In Joe Sacco’s ‘Kushinagar’ (in Journalism), he visits a Dalit colony in the state of Uttar Pradesh, northern India. After enquiring about employment and state schemes, he turns to the subject of food. The haggard-looking inhabitants appraise Sacco: Bhelu says they augment their diet with snails and fish caught by hand from pools of water. . . Suvanti answers our queries without hesitation: the women go to the fields where the rats are, and we collect the grains that [they store] in their holes and bring them here. (169)

52  Staging vulnerability – II

Another man tells him: ‘I try to find food in the holes of rats’ (170). Sacco will inform us a few pages later that ‘local journalists have documented 45 adult hunger deaths in Kushinagar since 2005’. Sacco’s text is placed adjacent to the image of a man with severely emaciated limbs (178). Recounting his childhood, Ambedkar in Bhimayana recalls how an ox-cart driver was reluctant to transport him and his siblings when he discovered the children were of the ‘untouchable’ Mahar caste (35). There was, Ambedkar notes, the fear in the operator that the cart/carriage would be ‘polluted’ (36–7). Years later, he is refused accommodation in Baroda (Gujarat state) because he is an ‘untouchable’ and spends the night in a public park (68–71). The locals turn hostile when they discover that Ambedkar and his friends have drawn water from a tank (85). John Lewis describes the first steps in being incarcerated: being mocked (‘sing your freedom songs now’, March II: 100), then stripped and sent into showers: It was dehumanizing, as was our being forced to shave all of our facial hair as part of an effort to strip away our dignity . . . our very humanity. (March II: 102) The preceding examples are not, as is obvious, about physical violence and the ruination of corporeal identities as studied in the preceding chapter. The protagonists are not broken ‘bodies’ with their vulnerabilities prised wide open. Yet, we get the sense from the texts that it is a form of symbolic-material violation of these individuals as persons, as humans. John Lewis’s observations (‘strip away . . . dignity. . . [their] very humanity’) when recalling his jail experiences effectively capture what this chapter sets out to do. This chapter examines the staging of vulnerabilities in HR graphic novels in terms of processes and situations – h ­ unger and acute poverty in Sacco’s account, annihilation of their sense of being persons in Lewis, humiliation in Ambedkar, debasement in Sattouf  – that constitute, broadly, dehumanization and the loss of dignity. It concerns itself with symbolic humiliation, which may or may not be accompanied/supplemented by material acts, that render the victim without any dignity, agency and therefore rights. Before turning to depictions of dehumanization as symbolic-material instantiations of violated human dignity, a few preliminary remarks on the link between dignity, human rights and vulnerability are necessary.

Dignity, vulnerability, human rights Insult is not the same as humiliation, in the view of several scholars. ‘To insult someone means to diminish his social position. To humiliate someone means to diminish her self-respect’ (Margalit 119–20. Also see Statman). Christian Neuhäuser elaborates: The first [insult] might be an attack on his honor, but only the latter ­[humiliation] is an attack on her human dignity. So it is not only important

Staging vulnerability – II  53

that a humiliation is about a shared part of identity, but it has to be a shared part that is constitutive for self-respect. (27) The UDHR opens its Preamble with the following statement: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. And in paragraph three: Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. Article 1 of the UDHR states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. The United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) states: Considering that, in accordance with the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, recognizing that these rights derive from the inherent dignity of the human person. Numerous commentators have noted that the concept of ‘dignity’ is connected, in legal documents and conventions but also in our understanding, with the concept of ‘human rights’. Doron Shultziner states: that human dignity and human rights are two separate and interdependent concepts.  .  .  [H]uman dignity in international instruments is the foundation and justification for rights and duties legislation: because of human dignity, human beings have rights and duties. (74–5, emphasis in original) He concludes: human dignity is regarded as the source or the supreme value upon which all rights and duties, and all state actions depend. Because human beings have dignity they should be given certain treatment and human dignity must not be degraded or humiliated. (77, emphasis in original)

54  Staging vulnerability – II

Marcus Düwell, via Arendt, offers the option that we ‘understand human dignity – in line with Hannah Arendt – as a ‘right to have rights’ (29). Acknowledging that a concept of human dignity would require a moral recognition of the ‘person’, Düwell argues: To see human rights as based on or derived from respect for human dignity would here be the recognition that it is morally required to respect human dignity, to ensure the legal provisions of the human rights would be an institutionalized answer to this moral requirement. (32) Extending this to questions of human autonomy, Düwell writes: One is a level of most basic rights: I must be alive, must have access to food and sometimes healthcare and must have some basic control over myself in order to live a life of my own. If others influence these basic conditions of my life, the respect for my dignity requires that they refrain from intervening negatively and help me if they are able to do so. (38, emphasis added) He also concedes that there are cultural factors involved in how we see the autonomy of an individual, and therefore how we envisage dignity: So accounts of human dignity would have to investigate to what extent their plausibility depends on culturally specific presuppositions. If we can justify the universality of the claim to live in societies that are able to protect the possibility of each human being to live an autonomous life or to live under conditions in which he or she can flourish, the question would arise what kind of political, civil and legal institutions would be required to ensure this possibility. (Düwell 42) If we see dignity as inherent to all humans, and the foundation of their rights, then the question, ‘what happens when a person’s dignity is eroded?’ automatically invites the answer: ‘the loss of dignity would mean the loss of rights’. Having identified the link between dignity and rights, we turn to the processes – excluding physical violence – by which dignity and therefore rights may be eroded or denied. These processes are summed up under the header ‘humiliation’ because humiliation, scholars tell us, is the violation of the dignity of persons. Vulnerability here is the openness of persons to humiliation. Gopal Guru sees humiliation as the opposite of self-respect (3). Guru argues that unless there is self-respect there cannot be humiliation (10). Others link it to shame (Palshikar) or the loss or violation of pride, honour, dignity and self-respect (Baxi). Self-respect itself may be defined as ‘an evaluative attitude we have towards our individual dignity’ (Stoecker 15).

Staging vulnerability – II  55

Like Guru, Phil Leask situates humiliation in the context of social relations, especially those where power lies asymmetrically. Leask defines humiliation in the following terms: humiliation is a demonstrative exercise of power against one or more persons, which consistently involves a number of elements: stripping of status; rejection or exclusion; unpredictability or arbitrariness; and a personal sense of injustice matched by the lack of any remedy for the injustice suffered. (131) And: humiliation is an act that causes a change for the worse in the position of the victim and in the victim’s feelings about himself and his relationship to the world. Since power is central to humiliation, the victim of an act of humiliation can be described not as feeling but as being humiliated, as the victim of an act of power. Humiliation is something actively done by one person to another, even if through institutions or directed in principle at groups. It is a demonstration of the capacity to use power unjustly with apparent impunity. (131) Like Leask and Guru, Avishai Margalit also links the process/acts of humiliation to social structures: ‘A decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people’ (The Decent Society). His definition chimes with Guru’s and Palshikar’s: ‘Humiliation is any sort of behavior or condition that constitutes a sound reason for a person to consider his or her self-respect injured’ (“Understanding Humiliation”). There are obvious ways in any society through which an individual may be denied self-respect or forced to lose her dignity. Torture, for instance, is a common example wherein, as Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain) has ably demonstrated, one loses self-respect in conditions of extreme pain. With aging and increasing dependencies that are natural to human persons, there is a diminishing of dignity, as commentators on care and bioethics argue (Ballenger; deFalco). Ralf Stoecker tells us: Torture, of course, is not the only way of violating human dignity. Perhaps the most common violation of human dignity is world hunger and poverty, since almost every individual personality is dependent on a sufficient satisfaction of the person’s basic needs. (15. Also Schaber) Christian Neuhäuser moves between individuals and groups when examining both dignity and humiliation. He argues that ‘individuals indeed share dignity within groups’ (22). Very often, ‘it is by virtue, and only by virtue, of being a member of this group that these individuals are humiliated’ (22, emphasis in original). Neuhäuser also notes that an entire group may not be humiliated as one.

56  Staging vulnerability – II

Instead, ‘a symbol of the group is in some way defiled, which then constitutes a humiliation for all members of this group and therefore a group humiliation in the sense of a humiliation of shared dignity’ (24). One recalls how in Guantanamo Bay, the Holy Koran was trampled upon by the Americans and provoked massive hunger strike protests by the Muslims incarcerated therein. Neuhäuser terms this ‘symbolic group humiliation’ (23), although he is quick to add that symbolic humiliation may very well stem from conditions in which material harm may be inflicted upon a group: ‘the defilement of a group symbol must be connected to a real threat in order to constitute a symbolic group humiliation and not merely a form of mocking’ (24). He proceeds to argue that ‘If a member of a group with which I identify is humiliated as a member of this group and I  happen to live in a society where nobody cares about this humiliation, then I am humiliated too’ (29). We return now to John Lewis’s characterization of the prison’s systems as ‘dehumanizing’. Dehumanization was the standard process of the Nazi camps. It ensured a physical and corporeal degradation of the human, but also a consistent undermining of the emotional and psychological state of the incarcerated Jews. It is not easy, especially in the case of rape and beatings, for instance, to separate physical from emotional-psychological humiliation, although this chapter’s emphasis veers more towards the latter. An early definition of dehumanization was given by Herbert Kelman who argued that it involves the denial of both identity and community (“Violence Without Moral Restraint”). Since humanity is ‘an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other, who recognize each other’s individuality and who respect each other’s rights’ (Kelman), to be denied this community is to be denied one’s individuality. Building on Kelman, Sophie Oliver defines dehumanization as the denial, in part or whole, of the humanity of a person or group of persons. It is possible to think of degrees of dehumanization; we might speak of extreme or “mild” forms of dehumanization, the former occurring in instances of, for example, genocide and torture, and the latter in the everyday structures of social, political and economic marginalization, where ambiguities about what might constitute inhuman or dehumanizing treatment are most likely to arise. (86) Oliver argues that By excluding a person or persons from our moral community, it becomes possible to act inhumanly towards them, or else to allow harm to be done to them by others, without invoking any sense of moral inhibition or self-reproach. (87)

Staging vulnerability – II  57

And further: Dehumanization, then, is the process by which human beings are rendered so radically other that it becomes possible for their persecutors to commit murder on a mass scale, and for bystanders to stand by without objection or remorse. (89) Citing Nick Haslam, Oliver identifies two prominent metaphors of dehumanization: the animalistic and the mechanistic (88). Humiliation, one may then surmise, is the social and moral exclusion of persons that leads to a loss or denial of their sense of dignity. It reduces them to less than humans, lacking both will and ability to lead autonomous lives. Since dignity is inextricably linked to rights, the erosion of dignity directly impacts the rights of the persons. Humiliation erodes rights in contexts where those denied their rights are in asymmetrical power relations with those who deny them rights, where the latter can afford to do so – indeed are enabled and empowered to do so – because the victims are already excluded from the category of ‘persons’ or ‘humans’. Humiliation is embodied, most often, in processes and structures of dehumanization in HR texts, including the graphic novel. It may or may not, be accompanied by physical violence, directed at the entire group, target a symbol valued by a group/ community as a whole. Humiliated, expelled from the broad category of ‘human person’, the victim is an embodiment of the loss of Human Rights. She loses the sense of her self and experiences what Martin Luther King Jr appositely termed in his famous ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ (1963), a ‘sense of nobodiness’. The construction of this sense of nobodiness is the prising open of human vulnerability as well.

Symbolic vulnerability, humiliation and social rejection While all right violations are not solely symbolic, most violations do have a symbolic or ritualistic component to them. Recognition, so central to a person’s dignity, is what is at stake when the person is excluded from the social world or abused for being of a particular ethnicity or race. Although even humiliation is a form of recognition (Kuch 45), it does not amount to a recognition of dignity. ‘Dignity [is] symbolic vulnerability . . . we consider human dignity not so much as worth or as a form of strength but rather as a specific fragility’ (Kuch 38). Speech acts such as name-calling, gestures, ritual humiliations and intentional practices of dehumanization, even when not necessarily accompanied by torture or imposed suffering, constitute forms of social rejection because these target the symbolic vulnerability, or fragility, of human persons. The young Ambedkar in Bhimayana pleads with the school peon to give him some water. The Vyams draw Ambedkar, arms stretched forward, palms held

58  Staging vulnerability – II

together, pleading: ‘I’ve waited for my turn. And my home is a long way from here’ (20). The peon retorts: ‘now off you go. I’m done pumping water . . . Go on, dammit!’ and literally shoos Ambedkar away (20). On the facing page Ambedkar is shown walking off, hands held out in the same (universal) pleading gesture (21). Interrupting these two moments is a small segment showing other school children – ostensibly those who have been served water – wandering or standing around in a group, surrounded by the Digna that Bhimayana adapts from Gond art. The Bhimayana text, dispensing with the usual graphic/comic book organization of panels, shows these two instances – Ambedkar being denied water and Ambedkar walking away, still pleading – across two pages (20–21). The peon’s pointing fingers are replicated, with three more such hands with pointing fingers, all gesturing and shooing Ambedkar away. The entire sequence as a tableaux vivant has several points of interest. Ambedkar is pushed into a social relationship where he is clearly an outsider. This is the classic mode of insult. The peon’s words and gestures are to be read within the context where both characters, Ambedkar and the peon, and some bystanders (the other children) are situated: the school. The words and gestures are clear attempts to exclude the young Ambedkar from the ambit of the social order (the entire school) which has access/rights to drinking water. The words ‘off you go’ is at once a threat as much as a directional statement and a mobility-imperative: ‘you should go away from here’. The words and the gesture constitute, together, an insult, as defined by Stephen Hermann, ‘the insult tries to exclude its addressee from a social context within the social sphere’ (140, emphasis in original). By shooing Ambedkar away, pointing to an elsewhere, the peon is actually gesturing at the outside of the social order, indicating that the outside is Ambedkar’s rightful place. Social exclusion, then, is built into both, the words and the gestures. Further, the additional hands and fingers replicating the exact same gesture of the peon’s, also ordering Ambedkar away, clearly signals the fact that it is not one man alone who sets out to exclude Ambedkar. The other three metonymically represent an entire society which simply echo the same exclusionary orders and gestures. Thus, the insult is delivered orally and gesturally by the peon but is a part of an entire socially configured exclusionary semiotics where people like Ambedkar are to be always shooed away. The gesturing fingers of one man are replicated and mirrored by others as a universalizing semiotics of exclusion in the Vyams’ imagination. Ambedkar is wished, gestured and ordered away in a language that has been designed for such a process of exclusion. This argument about the socially configured exclusionary semiotics stems from the disembodied fingers employing the same gesture. It becomes a universal symbol even when disembodied – not accompanied by a human form performing the gesture  – because exclusionary practices and their signage can now function indexically and independent of any human. In an inversion of this insulting gesture that excludes him from the social order, Ambedkar first stands with palms together in a gesture of seeking something. He walks away with his hands in the same posture/gesture. If the peon’s fingers and

Staging vulnerability – II  59

hands, and that of the social order, constitute the universal semiotics of exclusion, then Ambedkar’s hands are a universal supplicating symbol. When Ambedkar walks away, in accordance with the order issued to him, excluded and unwanted, he retains his hands in the same supplicating gesture. The insult solidifies in Ambedkar’s gesture precisely because he is unable to stop being a supplicant in a society that not only insults him but can also, horrifically, deny a child drinking water. The supplication-continuum where Ambedkar walks away is an embodiment of the disembodied exclusionary gesture by the society. Is Ambedkar then condemned to remain a supplicant? The answer to this question will also be delivered by the Vyams in the form of a semiotics: through the latter parts of the book, when Ambedkar has grown up, the supplicating hands have been replaced by hands that point upward, teaching, pointing out, arguing (48, 51), clearly beyond the supplicant stage. In March III, activists appearing on television speak of how the policemen arresting them would ‘say other horrible names’ (110). At the Selma protests, John Lewis is called ‘an outside agitator’, to which Lewis responds: ‘I may be an agitator, but I am not an outsider, I grew up ninety miles from here’. We see the large white man scowling at Lewis, whose expression is calm and unflinching, looking straight back into the white man’s eye (86). Lewis then records how a judge called them ‘a bunch of chimpanzees’ (61, 141). The white activists are often called ‘nigger lovers’ throughout the March texts. Ambedkar is called a ‘dirty Hindu dog’ by the Parsis in Bhimayana (68). In Operation Nemesis, the old Armenian who begs for water is abused as a ‘typical Armenian cockroach’ and ‘useless, witch-nosed pig’ (Blaylock, unpaginated). In Deogratias, the young boy is not only called ‘dog’ often, the other boys also make barking noises whenever they see him. The Russian military enters Grozny and searches for ‘terrorists and weapons’ (Igort 255). When they could not find anything, they simply rounded up ‘all the men between fourteen and sixty’. The image shows an armed soldier ordering a young boy and two older men along: ‘move your asses, you sons of bitches’ (255). Women are frequently called ‘bitch’ or ‘whore’ in Igort’s account of the Russian excesses against the Chechens (213, 247). A young Chechen had had ‘his teeth sawn off with a metal file’ and the soldiers mock him, ‘the Chechen wolf has lost his teeth’ (211). The images show a young face, mouth all bloody, eyes staring in pain. The boy is so unlike a wolf. The use of ‘lost’ layers the insult: animals, like humans, may lose their teeth with age. Here, the Chechen does not lose his teeth: they are taken from him in an excruciatingly painful manner. The wolf, the Russians suggest, is no longer a dangerous predator since he has ‘lost’ his teeth. The fact that Igort draws a young boy, imagined and represented as a boy with his face damaged beyond repair, points to the intentional misrecognition that enables the Russian to mutilate him: they treat him as they would treat a dangerous animal. Metaphors of inhumanity, such as the animal names, are modes of dehumanization, directed at ‘people perceived to be lacking in uniquely human characteristics such as rationality, civility, refinement, and moral sensibility’ (Oliver 88). Further,

60  Staging vulnerability – II

the use of terms like ‘dirty’ or ‘filthy’ constitute a rhetoric of disgust and revulsion – and suggests that these ‘persons’ evoke revulsion in the perpetrators. Transforming names into an insult is a routine mode of social exclusion, in the same way that the ascription of the name works as a degradation and socially exclusionary act, argues Stephen Hermann (140–1). Animalizing names, like ‘chimpanzee’, ‘wolf ’ or ‘dog’ expel the African American, the Chechen or the Tutsi to the outside of the human social order. This enables the perpetrators to beat, torture or even kill the other exactly as one would kill an animal ­(Savage 2013). This misrecognition, crafted with definite intent and purpose, morphs the insult, which is symbolic, into potentially threatening material action, or may accompany the action. When in Bhimayana the individual is described as an ‘untouchable’ or addressed by his caste-name (‘mahar’) we see another form of de-individuating. Savitribai Phule is mocked, abused and threatened as she makes her way to school in A Gardener in the Wasteland. The Brahmins stand along the road and scream: Shameless sudra slut! So you think you can teach school like a man? Snakewoman! Witch! (Natarajan and Ninan 12, 14) The caste-name becomes her name, and absolutely random features can be ascribed to the community and from there on to the individual, even as animal tropes continue (‘sudra slut’, ‘snakewoman’). That these insulting names and ascriptions are accompanied by assault in the form of rubbish and stones being pelted on Savitribai aligns symbolic humiliation with physical violence. But that is not all. Savitribai ‘wears an unwashed sari to the school every morning . . . changes into a good sari for classes, and changes back into the dirty sari to get home past the hysterical mobs’ (14). We are shown Savitribai marching along in a sari full of patches and smudges of dirt upon it. Here the imaging of ‘dirt’ and ‘dirty’ serve as evocative and poignant symbolism for the events being recounted. First, there is the attempt to shame Savitribai as a metaphorically ‘dirty woman’ with the use of the potent signifier, ‘slut’. Second, there is the physical flinging of dirt on her body as she walks past. Third, she wears a dirty sari, and a stoic face (as Ninan draws her) to work, to withstand the mud and stones being pelted at her. The first, the epithet, is an insult because it targets her social identity and seeks to relocate her outside the domain of ‘good’ people. It implicitly rejects her inclusion in the category of a ‘good’ woman. This is further underscored with the sobriquet, ‘witch’ flung at her. Witches, as scholars note, were women in possession of special knowledge, who were always consigned to the outskirts of the social order (Purkiss). Here Savitribai is cast out for being a ‘lower-caste’, possessing education, and for her efforts at an inclusive education system. The title of ‘witch’ transforms her into a human with special, if morally

Staging vulnerability – II  61

suspect (in the eyes of the Brahmins) powers and knowledge. Addressing her as a ‘snakewoman’, another trope borrowed from well-known Hindu myth and animal fables where the snake-woman is seductive and dangerous, reassigns her to the category of a dubious, dangerous and untrustworthy woman. ‘Slut’ and ‘witch’ serve as socially exclusionary insults, the physical assaults construct Savitribai as a human target, an object, for the anger of the upper-caste men (there are no women in the crowds that harangue her). Yet, her agentic dirty sari underscores the dignity Savitribai willingly abandons – as a schoolteacher – so as to attain her goal of reaching the school to teach the children. Natarajan and Ninan suggest that the dirty sari paradoxically emphasizes the dignity Savitribai possesses at the very moment when the upper-caste men insult her and seek to erode it by calling her such names. The dirty sari then becomes a double-layered sign. It is an indexical sign because it points to the dirt literally but also metaphorically thrown at her and her efforts. The dirt on her sari is a correlation to the dirt flung on her, and the anger and revulsion of the upper-castes at her emancipatory efforts. Yet, this indexical sign also serves as a symbolic sign of something greater than Savitribai, triggering strong emotions in the process: it becomes a symbol of Dalit resistance and battle for dignity. When she wears the dirty sari en route to school, Savitribai bestows upon it the weight of dignified resistance even as dirt, literal and metaphoric, is flung at her. In embodying the dirt thrown at her in the form of the dirty sari, ironically, she escapes dirtying and humiliation because she wears it willingly. Savitribai’s dirty sari does not conflate itself with the dirt flung at her, but separates itself from the dirt. In this separation, we find the dignity she espouses and seeks. A ‘dirty’ name, to which the supplement is the intentional sartorial indignity of the dirty sari. Working on such instances of dehumanization and insults, Stephen Hermann writes of the name-calling of Jews in Nazi Germany: [T]he power of the name to establish individuality increasingly disappeared. The Yellow Star instead transformed its bearer into part of an anonymous mass. This was exactly the effect intended by the Nazis. They were no longer interested in the power of naming to establish identity but, conversely, in subsuming individuals into one class. (142) The use of the caste or community name (‘Jew’, ‘mahar’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Chechen’), becomes a method of ‘general invalidation’: the individual is only a type. Further, these are names used by the state, and so ‘it no longer solely depends on individual or collective acts of misrecognition, but is decreed by the state’s sovereignty’ (Hermann 142–3). In the place of the state, we have the entire upper-caste community that dehumanizes Ambedkar or Savitribai. In the case of March, there are the white communities across the USA that dehumanize the African American protestors. The policemen, lawyers, politicians, city mayors and leaders who endorse slavery, lynching, racism and the violent reprisals against the protestors and activists are

62  Staging vulnerability – II

constituents of the state machinery, in ways not very different from the genocidal state of Nazi Germany. De-individuating by calling persons by their community’s name or names used pejoratively (‘nigger lover’) serves as an exceptionally powerful tool of social misrecognition because the person ceases to be a person now. If, as critics have noted, HR depends on the human being as foundational, the refusal to accord the status of an individual in these texts readily shifts their identity away into ‘nobodiness’. The name, when identifiable as a caste, tribe or community no longer serves as the proper name of a person but rather is ‘a declaration about this person on a connotative level’ (Hermann 141–2). Stereotyping and essentializing, even false essentialization, serves the purpose of ‘dehumanization . . . the identity of the members of the dehumanized group must be essentialized, that is, considered inherent to that group’ (Savage 143). Thus, John Lewis, by book III of March is a recognizable person, but is reduced to the title and attribute of an ‘agitator’. ‘Lewis’ connotes agitation, trouble and dissent, in the white man’s view. Each of these modes, namecalling, ascription of names and qualities and connotative signs/names become modes of social misrecognition and exclusion. In Riad Sattouf ’s case, his cousins repeatedly insult him by calling him a ‘Jew’. A curse on your father, you son of a bitch! Get lost, Jew, or I’ll beat the shit out of you! (Sattouf I: 134) When they complain about Riad, they simply stereotype Jews and, as a result, Riad hears them say: Grandma, why are you talking to that thief    ? They stole our big house from us . . . He’s a Jew, and so’s his mother. . . (135) When acts of social exclusion such as the ones cited occur, other forms of identity built around a different order of recognition may occur in the HR texts. For instance, in Bhimayana, Ambedkar has an accident due to the incompetence of the ox-cart driver. When he comes back to consciousness he is informed by the people who rescue him: We are mahars . . . Babasaheb, the tongawallas wouldn’t drive you here. How could we make you walk? (81 emphasis in original) Ambedkar responds: ‘So, for the sake of my dignity you risked my neck!’ (82). The incident is revealing in many ways. First, the members of the community are conscious of Ambedkar’s dignity even though, and because, the local ox-cart drivers had refused to transport him. Walking, for the community, was an additional insult

Staging vulnerability – II  63

to their leader and icon. Ambedkar’s response gestures at the foundations of identity: dignity, even if this endangered his life. The fact that the community takes it upon itself to ensure the man’s dignity implies the formation of an in-group when he had been excluded from the larger community. Ambedkar’s identity emerges, in other words, in the recognition of his dignity by his community even as this dignity was precisely what is eroded by the exclusion inflicted on him by the upper-castes. It could also be argued that the locals who rescue Ambedkar discern in this one individual’s dignity, the symbol of a collective dignity as well. Hence their rhetorical question to him: ‘how could we make you walk?’ Being made to walk – or being made to walk along certain routes only – was symbolic humiliation, suggest the local supporters of Ambedkar. Other graphic novels document instances of such ritualized humiliations. In March III, Lewis et al. direct us to a very clear instance of such rituals of social rejection and humiliation, one practised by the Ku Klux Klan. ‘In a single night, the Klan burned crosses in 64 of the state’s 82 counties as a warning’ (III: 66). That the Klan was also notorious for its violent excesses, of which lynching of African Americans was the most common variety, only ensures that we understand that the symbolic and ritual burning of crosses was a preliminary to more material acts directed at the African Americans. If humiliation, as Hans Kuch says (50), is a communicative act, then symbolic measures and rituals are messages to the potential and imminent victims. In March such rituals are accompanied by ritual shaming and refusal of service to the African Americans. As part of their campaign, the African Americans turn up at Woolworth’s lunch counters, restaurants and diners, and movie houses. They are inevitably told by stony-faced or angry-looking white staff that that they don’t serve African American people. The refusal here is a symbolic humiliation because the African Americans are paying customers and yet are unable to secure services from the white staff. We are shown the white people with only one of two expressions in these panels: astonishment or anger at the temerity of the African Americans. In other texts there are far more frightening instances of ritualized social rejection that appear in the form of communicative acts. In Incognegro, two men at the party proudly exhibit their souvenir photographs made available as postcards. The visual grammar of the scene is revealing: the formally clad gentlemen leering at and taking obvious pleasure in torture porn (    Johnson and Pleece 75). A masculine solidarity is being built through the circulation of these icons of white supremacy; indeed, the cards represent the common language of the KKK and white supremacy embodied in the gentlemen at the party. Carl, the black man passing as white at the scene is terribly upset at the cards, and his expression changes visibly. The white man commenting on the cards says: ‘the nigger’s neck snap[ping] like a turkey’s. They roasted him the same too’ (75). Unable to cope with these horrific visuals, he is forced to rush to the washroom to throw up (76), and comes out to see the suspicious Klansman waiting for him. Carl’s ‘passing’ is effectively over when his response to the communicative act – the postcards being circulated – does not fit in with those of the whites around him. As I have argued elsewhere (2016), it is

64  Staging vulnerability – II

Carl’s inability to respond like a white supremacist to the visual language of lynching that outs him. Carl’s response is not that of a foreigner or Englishman, but as an African American man – and the Klansman recognizes this. The visual language of racialized torture is what finally exposes Carl – to not respond in the same language of voyeuristic pleasure (as the others do at the gathering) to the visuals reveals him as an outsider to the white culture of lynching. That is, his expression of revulsion, an unexpected register in a ‘white’ man in the view of the racists at the gathering, is what gives him away. Ironically, the language of the postcards – lynching – is not truly foreign to Carl, since, as an African American in America, the history of the process is surely available to him. Carl is tested through the communicative act of images of ritual humiliation (including torture). When he is unable to sustain his ‘whiteness’ at the sight of the lynching, he is himself lynched. The symbolic dimension of the ‘material’ practice of lynching when presented to Carl, renders the practices humiliating. In the process, he reveals his identity leading to his own humiliation and death. There is a further point about the exposing of symbolic vulnerability through the exposure to humiliating communicative acts. Carl in Incognegro pretends to be a landowner now seeking new properties. He informs Zane, his friend and the real Incognegro: ‘I told them I was in town to buy some land to add to my American holdings, and these jokers ate it up. They don’t see a negro in front of them, all they see is green’ (37). The whites in the town who receive him believe this story, as one white man says to another: ‘I’m a land-rich man. And word is he is buying up property by the acre’ (52). After being exposed as a black man and not either white or a landowner, Carl is lynched. Lynching here is at once a form of violence against the body and person of the African American but with strong symbolic connotations. For, as critics examining lynching photographs argue: hanging, as most of these black bodies are – a few feet, sometimes only a few inches – above ground, the opportunity to count, to matter, to belong, to occupy a plot of land, by simple virtue of standing on that solid ground, is summarily denied them. They are condemned to hang over land that would kill them were they even to attempt from that position to touch it with their feet. (Alexandre 76) The man who ‘passes’ as a white landowner, then, loses his life dangling over a short strip of land that he cannot touch. The absolute control over the victim is the subject of emphasis in numerous texts. This control manifests in the form of humiliation, threats and then physical violence in many cases. Carl is humiliated – mocked, derided – and then executed. Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who is the main protagonist of Igort’s Russian section in The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks is repeatedly threatened with execution when seized by the military. On one occasion, exactly as in the Nazi concentration camps, she is taken out at night so she can hear the Russian

Staging vulnerability – II  65

planes bombing Chechen villages. She is made to kneel on the ground to the background of the bombing. Igort draws the events in dark silhouettes to a blue background in the three panels. He reports what Anna recalls and narrated: “He screamed through the roar of the rockets.” Now you’re going to die, and no one will notice. No one will hear. “I  thought it was all over. People disappear like that in Chechnya. I crouched down and wept silently. Then Durakov motioned for me to go”. (307) Politkovskaya’s humiliation is through the faking of her execution that brings her, literally, to her knees and leaves her weeping in fear for herself.

Poverty and humiliation In Thi Bui’s graphic novel about Vietnamese migrants, The Best We Could Do, we are told the story first of Bui’s grandfather. He had sought to make up with his wife by blackmailing her, showing her their hungry son, Bô (112). Bui also draws other children, drawn as gaunt and scrawny bodies, scrabbling around for a bit of chewed-up sugarcane (113). Some privileged children eat well, and many others starve: there are four children who are fighting for the chewed-up sugarcane that the young Bô has thrown away. Bô stands staring at the children, fighting for his leftovers. Vietnam’s poverty is produced through the measures enacted first by colonizers. Bui reports Bô recalling how ‘a few people owned all the land and too many people had nothing at all’. She draws images of wasted bodies to accompany her father’s report (154). By then Khmer Rouge’s policies have reduced its population to starvation several times in its history, Bui shows. Igort’s work of course is devoted to the famine in the Ukraine, and consequently is filled with starving, dying bodies, beside corpses. Poverty ensures that the poor cannot realize their rights. Peter Schaber writes: Poverty violates human dignity, because, and insofar as, poor people are dependent on others in a specific way. It violates dignity when it is responsible for the fact that a person’s survival and her way of survival are placed at the mercy of others. Individuals who have to live in poverty are not able to stand up to others when it comes to securing their own survival. (155–6, emphasis in original) Thus there is a definite link between poverty, humiliation and the loss, or erosion, of human rights, and many graphic texts do explore this link. In Journalism’s last ‘story’, Sacco is informed that many of the inhabitants of Kushinagar keep body and soul together by burrowing through rat holes to steal the rodents’ collection of rice grains (170). Sacco has prepared us for poverty in

66  Staging vulnerability – II

the preceding pages when he documented the unemployment, the low wages, the starvation in Kushinagar. Their income is ‘pitiful’ (168) and ‘mechanization is slowly making their labour surplus’ (168). The result is hunger: ‘we don’t even feel hunger’, says a woman to Sacco (169). Sacco disputes this with a text box in the middle of the panel: But people do feel hunger. (169, emphasis in original) Venkat Singh Shyam, speaking of his days in Delhi, writes: If there were days when I had puris to eat there were also days when I had nothing to eat. To remember those days of hunger, I now keep a day-long fast on Tuesdays. (Shyam and Anand: unpaginated) ‘There would be days’, he writes, ‘when no work came my way. I survived such days on chai’ (unpaginated). In Sacco, the poor are citizens of India, and they are also entitled to the various schemes and welfare measures put in place by the government. Yet, none of these schemes work and the poor rely on food gleaned from rat-holes for survival. In Sacco, the emaciated human form is the result of poverty, and can be read as their loss of bodily integrity (even when they are not subject to violence that breaks up their bodies). These bodies lacking bodily integrity, as we know it, reflect situational vulnerability that generates dependency in the people. Even when there are no direct representations of what Barbie Zelizer terms ‘accoutrements of atrocity’ (249) such as gas chambers or ovens, the faces and bodies implicitly signal the conditions under which such bodies are produced. This is achieved in some HR texts through the drawing of ‘visual foils’. Sacco draws the ‘village chief ’s henchman’ (160, 170), a ‘Block Development Officer’ (174), upper-caste men who are the ‘power behind [the Dalit] village chief ’ (176), a local journalist (177) and finally the ‘rajas of Kurwa Dilipnagar’ – the ‘Singh brothers’ (180–7). All these are uniformly plump and look cheerily healthy. In Zelizer’s terms, Sacco uses ‘visual foils’ (262) where these healthy-bodies of the upper-castes are contrasted with the emaciated bodies of the peasants, the labouring classes and the oppressed. The use of visual foils suggests that the peasants’ or Dalits’ bodies are embedded in unequal social systems. The Dalits of Kushinagar are dependent upon government schemes, the activists and the upper-caste community for survival, since clearly they cannot survive on their own. Schaber would speak of the ‘special kind of dependence’ in the case of poverty: The dependence I am concerned with here is a special form of dependence. It applies when, in order to acquire vitally important goods, I have to rely

Staging vulnerability – II  67

on others without having any choice. It is the lack of reasonable options that makes dependence on others degrading. Of course, everyone depends on others’ willingness to, say, sell food. Nevertheless, as long as one can choose between different ways of obtaining basic goods, and as such has options, this form of dependence is not degrading. If it is this special form of dependence that makes poverty a violation of dignity, it is clear that poverty violates dignity regardless of whether or not it is self-induced. (157) The dependence, Sacco shows, is not always productive, since the government schemes fail and the upper-castes keep a tight control over all matters, from agriculture to aid and employment. While Sacco does not directly blame the healthy-looking bodies for the condition of the Dalits, the connection between the luxurious lifestyles of the uppercastes and the relative health of their bodies forces us to see the inequality and asymmetrical, exploitative power relations within the social order. Julia Müller and Christian Neuhäuser argue that ‘It is our relative wealth and the advantages that go hand in hand with it that are the cause for their [the poor’s] humiliation’ (160). But more can be said about Sacco’s representations of poverty. It is through ‘micronarratives of national and ethnic identity’, as Harriet Earle characterizes Sacco’s work, focusing on individual lives and suffering that we see the human torn apart (Earle 117). Sacco first draws the ‘rajas’ who ‘sit in shady repose and survey their Dalit hirelings beating the seed out of mustard plants’ (180). This image is a long shot and we can only see the outlines of the ‘rajas’. In the panel beneath this, we see a close-up of the two, and their portly bodies. One notes that these portly bodies occur after Sacco has drawn several emaciated Dalit bodies. Sacco forces us, I suggest, to see the preceding emaciated and starving bodies as linked in some cause-effect sequence with the latter portly, healthy ones. The pain of the former is drawn in terms of the visible cause of the pain: the upper-caste stranglehold over Kushinagar’s Dalits. One body fattens at the expense of another. If ‘people become representations of their plights’ (Dauphinée 142), then Sacco’s representations show certain people as inducing and producing the savage plights of and in other people. Different but not entirely so from Sacco’s use of visual foils is Igort’s representation of the Soviet leaders responsible for the Holodomor. On the one hand are several dozen starving bodies across The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks, with many devoted to emaciated and about-to-expire children, whose silhouettes themselves seem to be fading away (see 106–7, for example). Igort then draws the portraits of the Soviet officers, politicians and leaders: Stalin (34), Kaganovich (36) and Menzhinsky (38). Now, it is possible to argue, as I have, that ‘the portraits, in black and white, are realist but not only because they resemble the existing photographs and are therefore readily recognizable. They are realist because these immediately give us a teleology for the Holodomor’ (Nayar 2018, ‘From Documentary Realism to

68  Staging vulnerability – II

Figurative Realism’: 365). But that is not all. The visual foils in the form of the uniform-clad healthy bodies of the Soviet military and political leaders provide the visual and affective shock when they follow the emaciated bodies of the Ukrainians, just as the starved bodies of the Dalits shock us when they are followed by, and contrasted with, the corpulent upper-castes. The point is, for Igort and Sacco the indignity of poverty is imaged in the form of both starving bodies and healthy ones. If the former are the representations of human dependence, systemic failure and above all, pain, the latter are the peoplecauses of the pain of others. To reiterate, while there is no direct violation in the representations of poverty in these texts, the causes of poverty that erode human dignity for some can only be perhaps drawn in the form of symbols of health and prosperity. The Dalits’ or Ukrainians’ symbolic vulnerability and its material correlate (hunger) are directly, in other words, linked to the corpulence of another set of bodies. Together, these capture the social order with its iniquities and therefore of persons denied personhoods and rights.

Labour, dignity and rights As already mentioned, Sacco observes how the upper-caste ‘rajas’ in Kushinagar sit and survey their Dalit labourers toiling in the field in Journalism. In Igort’s work on the Holodomor, labour is used as a mode of exploitation and control of the Ukrainians, reducing them to undignified, overworked and starving bodies. In A Gardener in the Wasteland, the Brahmin relaxes and the Dalit labourer toils under inimical conditions. The starving Venkat Singh Shyam pulls a cycle-rickshaw to survive in Delhi in Finding My Way. HR graphic novels align poverty, labour, dignity and rights in interesting and challenging ways, and in consonance with the international conventions on labour. The International Labour Organization (ILO) writes: Forced labour cannot be equated simply with low wages or poor working conditions. Nor does it cover situations of pure economic necessity, as when a worker feels unable to leave a job because of the real or perceived absence of employment alternatives. Forced labour represents a severe violation of human rights and restriction of human freedom, as defined in the ILO conventions on the subject and in other related international instruments on slavery, practices similar to slavery, debt bondage or serfdom. In its 2005 Report, the ILO develops a typology of forced labour: The ILO’s “A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour” 2005 report . . . aimed to develop an initial typology on forced labor. This typology referred to the sector in which forced labor situations could occur and included as forms of forced labor: slavery and abductions; compulsory participation in public work; forced labor in agriculture and remote rural areas; domestic workers

Staging vulnerability – II  69

in forced labor situations; bonded labor; forced labor exacted by the military (with particular reference to Myanmar); forced labor related to trafficking in persons; and prison-linked forced labor. (Shields 176) The ILO also developed a concept of ‘decent work’: Productive work under conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity, in which rights are protected and adequate remuneration and social coverage are provided. . . . [Decent work] involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income; provides security in the workplace and social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their concerns, organize and participate in the decisions that affect their lives and equality of opportunity and treatment for all women and men. (cited in Shields 179). As Shields puts it, ‘if we consider labor standards in their human rights cloak, the link between labor standards and the protection of dignity becomes clearer’ (176). Writers such as Sacco, Natarajan-Ninan and Igort, among others do make this link between labour, dignity and rights clearer, while embodying this link in the labouring body, the social relations of labour and the conditions of labour. Igort’s section titled ‘The Kulaks’ opens with the ‘intentionally provoked’ famine (30), through the requisition of ‘the grain reserves of millions of peasants’ (30). Then he turns to the forced labour in the region: The Kolkhozniks have accumulated at least five hundred days of work* *Twelve- to sixteen-hour days, without days off. (48) The image shows a man ploughing a field with a horse. The horse is just bare bones, and Igort draws the peasant in shaded lines, almost as though the body is merely a shadow. Nikolay Vasilievich recounts how the Nazis made them work in the labour camps: ‘working naked in the snow’ (90). In the Russian section of the work, Igort shows the Chussov district where the settlers are considered ‘a labor force to be exploited mercilessly’, and labour becomes, as in the Nazi camps, a mode of exterminating the Kulak settlers (335). Igort dwells on how labour serves this purpose. Here ‘the eight-hour workday is not respected; the special settlers work for twelve hours a day’. In addition: No work attire is supplied; the standards for productivity and wages are not consistent. And the latter have not been distributed for quite some time. There is no record keeping; the workers are regularly cheated. (334)

70  Staging vulnerability – II

And: ‘unusually strenuous workloads; employing children, the unfit, the pregnant women in the same capacities as men in good health  .  .  . moral and physical abuses’ (336). Igort records how, unable to keep up with the workload, the settlers ‘began to die in hordes’, and ‘by winter’s end, 50 percent of the deportees could no longer work’ (337). The images show beatings, burial (while alive) in the snow, and other abuses of the labourers (335–8). When Igort depicts beatings and the ‘moral and physical abuse’ of the people, he shows muscular men, one armed with a stick, kicking a person (gender unidentifiable) on the ground. The ‘person’ is only nominally one: in order to emphasize the loss of ontological as well as existential personhood, Igort only draws the victim as a flurry of lines in the broad shape of a human form. One can make out caved-in ribs and a scrawny set of limbs, but the ‘face’ is more or less skeletal already. The conditions of work are evidently not in consonance with the idea of ‘decent labour’. In Natarajan-Ninan’s A Gardener in the Wasteland, labour is organized around the caste system. On page 11, Natarajan-Ninan show a Brahmin relaxing. In the same panel, to the right is a visual of a couple working in a field: the woman is planting, the man is hacking away at the ground and the sun blazes on them both. The Brahmin thinks: ‘running the farm is a breeze. The shudra slave-labourers do the grunt work’ (11). We are shown here the difference the labour system engenders: the scrawny ‘untouchable’ couple slave away in the fields, the rotund Brahmin relaxes.1 The Dalit working away has no right to the field’s produce. In Kushinagar, after the work they do, the Dalits do not have any food and scrounge for grains in rat-holes. Such conditions of labour are thinly disguised conditions in which death is produced. They are conditions in which those such as Ukrainian peasants, incarcerated Jews, African American slaves and Dalits – persons who have already experienced social death – are transformed into labourers prior to their ‘real’ death. The experience of death follows social death and its conditions of loss of dignity and personhood. In other words, labour becomes the means of dehumanizing persons into bodies, denying them the dignity of labour and eventually exterminating them. There are two key aspects to this social death-leading-to-physical death in HR graphic novels: the first and foremost is the social death that destroys the dignity of the person, and then causes this person to simply become an instrument of work, and, secondly, the nature of labouring bodies in such a context. African Americans, David Marriott argues, live under the command of death (as citizens, parents, siblings, and subjects); consequently those who obey this rule are said to live under a law of symbolic death and are regarded as subjects who are already dead. Social death has to do with how rules of life are connected to the symbolically dead. (34) Forced and bonded labour, as seen in Nazi, Ukrainian camps, in American prisons or in the caste-based society of Kushinagar, may be read as labour that draws upon the social death of the persons employed as labour. That is, only those who have

Staging vulnerability – II  71

already been ‘committed’ to a social death are to be employed as labour in these conditions. In Igort, Sacco, Natarajan-Ninan and in sections of Lewis’ March, labour roles that re-enact social death produce a new conception of living, ‘beyond the common wretchedness, neuroses, and social dishonor’ (Marriott 61). In this process of the re-enactment of their social death in the form of labour that enhances their lack of dignity before inducing death, one can argue that their dignity is not the indignity of death but the indignity of living as though they are corpses without agency. Igort’s drawing of peasants labouring therefore presents them as the walking-dead, barely living. But this seems to be a rather tame reading of the horrors of labour itself, given that the working body seems more corpse-like than a living body. I suggest, following Giorgio Agamben, that the slave uses his body, but does not perform work or labour. The Dalit, Ukrainian or African American prisoner who labours is not human but allows others, specifically the upper-caste landlord, the Russian or the factory owner-capitalist to be human (Agamben 2015). In other words, the labouring body does not possess agential control over his/her body or labour. It is deemed non-productive except when it serves the interest of the upper-caste in an inverted biopolitical regime. The slave’s body mediates between the product and the body of the landowner, the factory owner and the upper-class family, as Agamben argues. The African American, the Dalit, the prisoner, who are already socially dead, become instrumentalized when assimilated into the machinery  – capitalism, racist or casteist organization of labour, the Gulag. If the mechanistic metaphor is a mode of dehumanizing (Oliver 88), the conversion of the slaving body into a mere agency-less instrument to serve the body of the owner is also a form of mechanizing dehumanization. He is an ‘animate instrument’ (Agamben). The slave is one who ‘does not have legal personhood and whose acts are imputed to the “person” of his master’ (75). The slave exists to produce things for the owner: The slave constitutes in this sense the first appearance of a pure instrumentality, which is to say, of a being that, while living according to its own end, is precisely for that reason and to the same extent used for another’s end. (75) This ‘end’ could be roads in Nazi Germany or crops in the Ukraine and India. Sacco notes that over a period of time, even this instrumentalization is not available to the Dalits: the machines replace the slave labour of the Dalits. Agamben would compare the machine and the slave in this fashion: ‘[T]he machine is presented from its first appearance as the realization of the paradigm of the animate instrument of which the slave had furnished the originary model’ (78). Sacco, Igort and Natarajan-Ninan take pains to highlight the continuum of instrumentalized ‘life’ (since it is barely ‘life’ when one is condemned to simply serve as an instrument of a machinery such as caste or imperialism) of the Ukrainian

72  Staging vulnerability – II

peasant or the Dalit. In such cases, the possibility of escaping this ‘life’ does not exist. One could then say that the ‘form-of-life’ in such cases is the absence of all possibilities. Agamben writes: A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which, in its mode of life, its very living is at stake, and, in its living, what is at stake is first of all its mode of life. What does this expression mean? It defines a life – human life – in which singular modes, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all potential. And potential, insofar as it is nothing other than the essence or nature of each being, can be suspended and contemplated but never absolutely divided from act. . . [F]orm-of-life is a being of potential not only or not so much because it can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose itself or find itself, but above all because it is its potential and coincides with it. For this reason the human being is the only being in whose living happiness is always at stake, whose life is irredeemably and painfully consigned to happiness. But this constitutes form-of-life immediately as political life. (207–8, emphasis in original) The form-of-life is a political life for the Ukrainian, the Dalit and the African American precisely because their instrumentalization as ‘bodies’ working for somebody, the denial of personhood and the erasure of all potential is made possible through the social death already written upon them. To phrase it differently, their social death engineered through political structures such as racism or caste then leads to their configuration as (i) labouring bodies without personhood or agency and (ii) as bodies without potential or possible lives. Labour then becomes yet another means of stripping away the dignity of those who have already experienced social death, while also dehumanizing them as instrumental bodies who lack all potential to live an autonomous life.

Gendered violence and humiliation In texts like Delisle’s Burma Chronicles we are told of Burmese girls who come to work as prostitutes in the jade mines in remote regions. The mining region is a haven for drug addicts, where the miners are ‘paid in shots of heroin’ (unpaginated). The women who come, says an MSF volunteer to Delisle, ‘are subjected to vaginal searches [for jade being smuggled out] under such unsanitary conditions that they wind up with infections’ (unpaginated). The conflation of poverty with both gender-specific humiliation such as body searches and medical risk serve as instances of the threat of violence women experience in certain parts of the world. In Riad Sattouf ’s The Arab of the Future, he shows the gender inequalities in Arab society: the woman, carrying the baggage, walking well behind her husband (Sattouf 2: 43), the women of the household not being allowed to dine with the men (25), etc. He also speaks of the hegemonic masculinity within Arab society

Staging vulnerability – II  73

that puts pressure on boys to behave like ‘men’ (12, 52). As a result, Sattouf even as a boy, tries to pretend he is unafraid and strong: ‘I didn’t want him to think I was weak’ (20, 68). The pressure to perform masculinity from an early age becomes a form of violent cultural pedagogy centred around gender stereotypes. Sattouf portrays his Syrian father deliberately criticizing women, including his French wife (Sattouf ’s mother) so as to fit in with other Arab men (91). Later, Sattouf would record a case of ‘honour killing’: the widowed Leila is killed by her own father and brother for becoming pregnant (by her late husband’s brother). Sattouf ’s father reporting the events to his wife (and Sattouf the child eavesdropping) says: ‘Some said they were right to kill her, because getting pregnant outside marriage is the worst dishonour a daughter can give to her family, so we should say nothing’ (115). Throughout the three volumes, Sattouf ’s French mother finds the life in Syria claustrophobic and severely patriarchal: what worries her is that her husband, although a product of the French higher education system, seems to be slowly assimilating this patriarchal modes of thought. But Delisle’s and Sattouf ’s are rather ‘tame’ examples of the theme of gendered inequalities and gender-based discrimination and humiliation one encounters in HR graphic novels. Sexual abuse, incestuous abuse, genocidal rape (rape as a part of ethnic cleansing) and wartime rape are scattered across HR graphic novels, some of which I examine here. Feminist scholars argue that sexual violence targeting women treat rape and violations as an assault on the body of the woman but also on her dignity: with the rise of the human rights movement, dignity violated by rape is conceived primarily in terms of equality and autonomy of women . . . in women’s rights instruments, which have been developed since the mid 1990s, rape has been defined as a form of gender-based violence and thus gender-based discrimination. Discrimination has also been linked with a negative conception of human dignity. (Ivana Radačić 120) Representing sexual violence however runs the risk of serving up materials as ‘entertainment’ (    Jowett 2010, cited in Veld 150). Commentators note that: Showing awareness of these dangers, the graphic novels that deal with sexual violence in the context of genocide make a decided attempt to avoid a sense of sensationalism and titillation; in eschewing spectacular images of sexual violence, these works alternate between a simultaneous presence and absence of women’s experiences of violence. (Veld 150) Veld’s work deals primarily with genocidal sexual violence in works such as Deogratias and Fax From Sarajevo. However, when discussing how sexual violence is represented as a violation of dignity and hence of human rights, it becomes necessary

74  Staging vulnerability – II

to move beyond extreme situations such as genocide and war. With works such as Anderson’s Speak, Green’s Lighter than My Shadow and Thomas and Eipe’s Hush, sexual abuse (including child sexual abuse) in everyday lives has become more visible. In wartime, the conquest of the enemy’s land runs parallel with the conquest of the enemy’s women by the invading military. The sharing of the other’s women among themselves through gang rapes, performed in strict order of the military hierarchy then becomes one more mode of affirming their masculine solidarity (Mühlhäuser 38). Indeed, one of the contemporary conflicts that drew attention to the role of organized sexual violence against women (both civilian and military personnel) was the Yugoslavian one: [T]he significance of rape in a contemporary European conflict produced very different levels of visibility. So much was this the case that rape is now seen as one of the defining characteristics of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia and the weapon par excellence of “ethnic cleansing”, occasionally even relegating massacre to second place. (Branche et al. 3. See also www.stoprapenow.org)2 Rape in wartime ‘is projected as a desire for biological domination through arbitrary control of the bodies and reproductive capacity of the targeted population’ (Branche et al. 10. See Beverley Allen 1996 for the concept of ‘genocidal rape’, Card “The Paradox of Genocidal.”; Bergoffen Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape).3 Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo explicitly links sexual violence to ethnic cleansing. The Serb perpetrator declares to the Muslim women: ‘You two are most fortunate. You will be permitted to live . . . and you will have the honor of bearing Serb children. The fathers of your children stand before you. . . now’ (102, emphasis in original). In this case, gendered violence exploits the vulnerability of the women as a means of imposing a biopolitical regime: bodies, individual and collective, reproduction and ethnicity. If, as Anne McClintock (1995) and others have pointed out, the woman is the place holder and boundary marker in the colonial contest (but not restricted to it), she remains so, particularly in wartime. The Serb leaders informs the men and the women what they, the Serbs, intend to do. For Veld, ‘genocidal rape is constructed through perpetrator speech, thereby enacting an erasure of the lived, somatic experience of the victims and survivors’ (158). We see this in some cases such as Operation Nemesis. In this text the survivor recounts, in graphic detail, what was done to the women (and to boys as well): ‘those who did not obey orders were pieced with bayonets and had their legs torn apart . . . they even crushed the pelvises of pregnant women . . . took out the foetuses and threw them away’. The description is accompanied by the image of the Turkish soldier dangling a foetus dripping fluids, although all of this is in silhouette (unpaginated). But in others, it is emphatically not just perpetrator speech. By stating his intentions, the Serb leader in Fax from Sarajevo signals the future. Rape here is not, as

Staging vulnerability – II  75

the Serb leader clearly states about the present, but about the future of the women, and their community. Agreed, at one level it is erasure because the act and the somatic experience is not depicted. But given the fact that the speech outlines in no uncertain terms the Serb leader’s plans for the women’s today and the future, the verbalization is itself proleptic violence. The words do not just erase the somatic experience, they frame them in terms of both intention and method, compounding the horror. If human rights is the right to choose a life plot from those available to us (Booth “Individualism and the Mystery”), then the Serb leader identifies the plot that they, the Serbs, have chosen for the women: rape and compulsory motherhood. The woman’s lack of agency over her body is compounded by the Serb leader outlining the future that lies in store, a future in which the plot is entirely out of the hands of the victims. That is, verbalization of intentions is a constituent of the gendered violence because it very precisely outlines the consequences and long-term plot that is the woman’s future after the rape. Vulnerability here is envisioned in terms of ethnic vulnerability which in turn is embodied, literally, in the woman’s body. The Muslim men are killed: ‘we have no need of you!’, says the Serb leader (101, emphasis in original), before the women are taken away. The indignity here is twofold: the Serbs reject the role (and necessity) of the Muslim men in the new biopolitical regime, thereby constructing a social order where Muslim women are the sole property of the Serbs; and further, the Muslim woman continues to be treated as property, being now taken over by the Serb militia. When Kubert draws a group of shocked, wide-eyed Muslim women, he portrays them as dehumanized into mere bodies. In the next panel Samira reports: They took us someplace . . . to a camp . . . all women. To make us pregnant with Serb children. (104, emphasis in original) Now the camp itself is not shown, although the chapter is ominously titled ‘The Rape Camp’. We hear Samira reporting the events in the camp, the camp’s purpose (‘to make us pregnant with Serb children’) and the response from Ervin and his family. What Kubert also does is to show us, from the outside, the building in which this conversation is taking place rather than the camp itself (104). The site of reporting (Ervin’s residence) becomes the space where the rape site and its horrors are invoked in language: Samira’s speech. I suggest that the site of violence is relocated into language. This relocation mirrors the first one wherein Samira and other women were displaced from their homes  – places of safety  – to the rape camp. Now, Samira returns from the rape camp again to the safety of a home. When Ervin and his wife plead with Samira to stay with them, she refuses saying ‘N-No. I have family. I came only to warn you. B-Be careful . . . for yourself, and Maja’ (104). Samira’s reference to her family and that of Ervin (including Ervin’s wife and very young daughter, Maja) is savagely ironic. It underscores the

76  Staging vulnerability – II

horror of the tale she has just narrated: the women have been impregnated and new configurations of bloodlines and family, as well as community and ethnicity, have been forced upon them as a result. She cautions Ervin and his family, with a special emphasis on his wife and daughter, implicitly signalling how her own ‘family’ has been reconfigured violently (her brother and father were gunned down in her presence before she and her mother were taken away). Her home has been torn apart and the future of her family altered irrevocably by her rape: this violence and its aftermath are coded into the expression of concern for Ervin’s family. While Veld is undoubtedly correct to argue that there is simultaneously a presence and elision of sexual violence in these texts, I suggest that Kubert does something more. By refusing to portray the camp, he emphasizes the social stigma of having been raped, a stigma that per force marks the woman-victim. A stigma that calls attention to the woman’s horrific past, renders her a spectacle, and the only option left in such cases is to invisibilize, to erase, this history. By refusing to show anything beyond the capture of the woman or the camp itself, Kubert is actually emphasizing the utter loss of the women’s selfhood: she can no longer be visible unless she is visible as a raped woman and as the mother of future Serb children as a result of the rape. Erasure here is itself a feature of the humiliation. In what may be seen as a metanarrative comment on gendered violence, Kubert implies that the violence results in the necessary invisibility of its shamed victim. If social validation is a component of our selfhood, then a social validation that marks you primarily as a rape victim and the bearer of Serb (that is, ‘enemy’) children is a potent threat to the sense of the self. Like Kubert, Josh Blaylock in Operation Nemesis, a graphic novel about the Armenian genocide, refuses to depict rape directly. The women are shown being taken away and called ‘whores’, but the rape itself is not shown (2015, unpaginated). Later, an advertisement announcing ‘$5 buys a pretty Armenian slave’, is reprinted with the image of four Armenian women, with the inset of over half a dozen Kurds and Turkish men. The text says: ‘how the missionaries are redeeming from shame and drudgery the branded victims of the Turks and Kurds’. The entire advertisement is cast in a faded brown colour scheme that is meant to recall old documents, and thus implies such adverts were indeed commonplace, and so was the sexual slavery/rape of Armenian women. There is a reference to naked bodies – gender unspecified – lining the streets too (unpaginated). Sacco’s representation of mass rape in Safe Area Goražde (117–9) again elides actual graphic scenes. We are shown women being taken away, women crying and a naked woman lying curled up, presumably after her rape, while dishevelled Serb soldiers eat and drink in the same room. Forcing us to imagine the rape rather than being shown it, Sacco both makes visible and invisibilizes, as Veld argues, sexual violence in war time. The soldiers’ (masculine) solidarity and merrymaking clearly occurs around the woman’s body: the drinking, the revelry, the bare-chested appearance cathect masculinity, to which the woman’s body in the corner serves as a necessary appurtenance or object (119). That she is turned away from us so as to

Staging vulnerability – II  77

lack any identification/identity renders her all the more dehumanized, even as we recognize the very human sense of shame in her. Like Sacco, Igort depicts rape without depicting it. In ‘Musa’s Story’, Musa narrates the horrors visited on the fourteen-year-old girl who was visiting her mother in prison, having paid ‘5000 rubles for five minutes with her mother’. Igort writes: ‘those five minutes turned into four days of torture and rape’ (213). The page has six panels. The girl’s image is superimposed in a manner that she is the link between all panels, her image cutting into each of them. We are shown only a part of her legs and we hear her screams. The rape itself is off scene. It is described: ‘they took turns raping her’ (219). On the very next page, paradoxically, Igort talks of a boy who had been raped and then his ear cut off. We are in this case shown the boy bleeding from his posterior as he walks off (220). The threat to and erasure of the male/masculine self is often depicted in terms of its symbolic vulnerability to the violence against ‘their’ women. In Prum, for instance, he narrates the story of a Cambodian farmer who had been sold as labour. When he tried to escape along with a married couple, also labourers with him, they are caught. He reports: ‘the husband was tied up and forced to watch as his wife was raped’ (168). The image shows the man tied up and trying not to look. One of the perpetrators is trying to get him to watch the wife being raped. Her eyes stream with tears and her head is turned towards her husband who is refusing to watch. Prum’s depiction here, more graphic than usual, focuses as much on the man’s trauma as on the woman’s. The man is injured, one of his eyes is swollen and shut, he is tied up. But the point Prum makes is that the man’s trauma stems primarily from his impotence in protecting his wife. The perpetrator underscores this by pointing to her fate, lying on the ground in front of the husband. This perpetrator and another (who has partially stripped, indicating that he is the next in line to rape her) are grinning. While both man and woman are rendered helpless, the panel’s foreground is occupied by the man in Prum’s drawing, subconsciously giving a cause-effect sequence but also, perhaps, a hierarchy: the woman’s subjection leads to that of the man’s, and his is really far worse because while the woman stares at him when being raped, he cannot bear to look at her. (This may be a bit unfair to Prum’s portrayal, though.) Humiliation here is of the woman, and through this, of the masculine role itself. When Prum has said that the couple had tried to escape, and the rape occurred because they were caught, it implies that the husband did play an unfortunate role in his wife’s victimization precisely because they had tried to escape. The multiplicity of attackers serves to underscore the severity of brutalization. It also means that there is no one identifiable attacker. Where the victim is identified by name (Samira in Kubert’s work, the unnamed but identified wife in Prum), the victimizers are merely drawn as groups of marauding men. We see a hierarchy here: the victims are individuals while perpetrators are simply a collective materialization of evil. The indignity of sexual violation is compounded by the stigma and the enforced silence around the events. As argued elsewhere, the silence of the victim in texts

78  Staging vulnerability – II

like Hush must be read as drawing attention to the cultures of silencing around questions of child sexual abuse (Nayar 2013). In texts like Hush, stereotypes of ‘safe spaces’ – the home/family and the school – are inverted when we see the girl is victimized within these spaces. I argued that images of Maya’s mouth being covered by the perpetrator in Hush is linked to a question of sovereignty: The physical silencing of the victim in this act is also materially coterminous with the denial of sovereignty to and of her body. Speech denied is the denial of Maya’s sovereignty over her own body. Obviously language is material here, just as the body is irreducibly material. (41, emphasis in original) This conflation of the loss of both corporeal and linguistic/rhetorical sovereignty is integral to the depiction of sexual violence in other texts too. As a metanarrative comment, Hush is a wordless graphic novel. Now, when the speech bubble is common to the graphic novel and when Hush disrupts and disappoints our expectation of speech and words, in this case it is pointing to the silence around child sexual abuse itself. It forces us, in what Harriet Earle writing about wordless comics describes as a ‘higher degree’ of engagement by the reader (52), to read the events, the horror and the effects purely from facial expressions, bodily gestures and actions of characters. The traumatic experience, writes Earle – and she could well be describing Hush – ‘exist[s] without words’ (53). Gendry-Kim’s Grass, about Korean comfort women, shows forest after forest of dark trees, with little light, to indicate a space of darkness (312–4). After ‘liberation’, Ok-sun tells Gendry-Kim, the Russian soldiers arrived. They are shown in silhouette fashion in a series of panels. Gendry-Kim in the space of six panels shows the soldiers approaching so that by panel 6 they fill much of the panel, perhaps indicating they had reached the women (367). Gendry-Kim reports Oksun‘s words: ‘they did brutal things . . . so many girls raped then shot or set on fire by those monsters’ (366). The following two pages lack panels and page borders. They show blurred ‘things’, shadows that range from a denser and better defined body-shaped shadow to wispy, grainy outlines. Now Gendry-Kim does not show rape, but the textual account of rape, shooting and immolation of the girls helps (forces) us to speculate on the shadows and blurry outlines. The first shadows appear to be those of men, with some carrying guns and wearing boots. In the later ones, could the blurry shadows possibly symbolize the dehumanized women, whose bodily coherence has been lost through repeated rape? Do the shadows suggest smoke from burning/burnt bodies? That Gendry-Kim never directly depicts rape and instead chooses to show only such shadows and outlines seems to gesture at the impossibility of depicting sexual violence. In Anderson’s Speak, Melinda is unable to speak about what happened to her. Throughout the narrative we see her parents, schoolmates and friends puzzled by her silence. She thinks ‘I can’t tell them what really happened’ (45). She purses her mouth, and people who observe this comment in her hearing: ‘what’s wrong with

Staging vulnerability – II  79

her mouth? It looks like she has a disease or something’ (69). The mouth as something to be erased because it cannot in any case speak out is repeated elsewhere, too, as though ‘stitched together’ (70, 74). ‘It is getting harder to talk . . . my throat is always sore, my lips raw’ (81). The loss of corporeal agency when she was assaulted is now matched by the loss of rhetorical sovereignty. In a key chapter titled ‘Naming the Monster’, Anderson’s rapist returns. Coming up behind her, he whispers, ‘fresh meat’. The image sequence is as follows. In the first panel, he is a silhouette in the doorway. In the next one, he is a greyscale outline close to Melinda. In the third and fourth we see him in sections: a portion of his face as he approaches Melinda (148). The facing page is a visual nightmare. Melinda has turned her face, eyes wide open in shock, and stares at her attacker, and at us, out of the page. We can see only her face and head, on the left of the page, starting halfway down. The entire right side, from the very top edge to the bottom one, is the thick black silhouette of the attacker. The attacker is thus far faceless (we will see him clearly in the next set of images on the following pages). The sheer voluminous blackness symbolizes the overwhelming presence, material but also metaphorical, the attacker and attack itself have played in Melinda’s life. But this is not all. Emily Carroll’s black image is inscribed with three words: IT FOUND ME (149) The lettering is as important as the text. ‘It’ is written as a stand-alone word with the lower tip of the ‘T’ fading into the blackness of the attacker’s silhouette. The letters are also in the silhouette almost as a label or brand/mark. Rather than name him, Anderson-Carroll dehumanizes the perpetrator with the pronoun, ‘it’. Although inscribed upon the face of the human perpetrator, ‘it’ dehumanizes him. Further, it echoes the animalizing and dehumanizing descriptor he uses on the previous page: ‘fresh meat’. The rendering of a person into ‘meat’ by a rapist-perpetrator who is then described as ‘it’, suggests a dehumanization of both victim and perpetrator. The ‘found me’ written again on the shoulders of the attacker are like scratches or slashes on the body. The ‘me’ is in slanted lettering with the ‘e’ appearing to reach out, extend and rise upward, pointing toward the edge of the page. Whether this indicates the anxiety for the ‘me’ to gesture outward, signal the danger she is in or even escape from the page/situation is a moot point – given that ‘me’ is ­captive within the attacker’s body/silhouette that is also coterminous with the page’s physical boundaries. This is a fascinating depiction. If, as Torsa Ghosal proposes in her reading of comics from the Global South, the surface of the page presents the landscape where the ‘struggle of the local population to find an inhabitable space . . . is staged on the page as topos’ (187), then Carroll’s is an extraordinary depiction of Melinda’s potential second rape. The page is the topos of Melinda’s repeat-victimization by the attacker. He occupies a massive extent of the physical

80  Staging vulnerability – II

page, the immediate material space of the school locker room and the space of her life. Her very identity, ‘me’, is written on him, implying that what she is as a subject has been for a very long time circumscribed by and in what he did to her. She is defined by the events he perpetrated, and the hulking body of the perpetrator in which the letters and the identity of ‘me[linda]’ are enfolded ensures that she has no space, even on the physical page where he isn’t obstructing her mobility, cramping her space and blocking her escape. Occupying the entire side of the page, there is no longer a boundary to the page which is separate from him, as though he controls the borders/escape routes. Carroll here indicates the horrific truth of the rape victim’s life: there is no likelihood of ‘me[linda]’ escaping from the clutches of (a) the attacker and (b) the page. Her lost corporeal sovereignty in escaping him and her rhetorical sovereignty in naming him now come together again. She does escape, however, from this immediate danger and on the next page we are shown Melinda running away from the locker room. Andy Evans, the rapist, stands looking at her running away. The two pages, devoid of panels, are slashed across by lightning bolts that constitute the path of Melinda racing away. The dark segments have the images of barren, leafless trees symbolic of her lifeless life. But the key part of this page depicting Melinda’s escape lies elsewhere. In this segment we see the following text: I can smell him and I want to THROW UP. Written in the same slanted lettering as the ‘me’ in the previous page, these words are placed in the dark patch. Right beneath this we see Melinda in her room, sitting on the floor, head buried in her arms. To one side the following letters read: ‘the stink of him’ (150–1). Read together, the image and text work powerfully to indicate the inescapability of her memories of rape – memories that are very visceral. Later, unable to enunciate orally the events of the rape, Melinda writes it in a notebook and shows it to Rachel, once her best friend (331). She then also writes the perpetrator’s name, and Rachel, who is dating Andy Evans, calls her a ‘liar’ and leaves. Underscoring the enforcement of silence around rape, Rachel’s descriptor, ‘liar’, ensures the absence of an audience to the victim who wishes to assert her rhetorical sovereignty. Soon after this incident, however, the events rush to a climax. The extensive locker-room graffiti about him angers Andy Evans, and he finally corners Melinda again in a dimly lit room. His first statement is: ‘You have a big mouth, know it?’ (350). He claims: ‘Rachel said you’re spreading some bullshit story about me raping you’. Later, locking the door, he says, You are one strange bitch. I can’t believe anyone listens to you. You didn’t scream. (352–3)

Staging vulnerability – II  81

Andy Evans’ emphasis on her speech and listening ties in neatly with the key theme: the silencing of the victim. Up to this point, the pages are more or less in the panelmode, although the panels are not arranged neatly and resemble slides or panes. As he attempts to rape her again, first immobilizing her and trying to capture her hands, something changes in Melinda: A sound explodes from me. NOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!! (356–7) She punches him in the nose as she screams. The two-page spread has the NOOO  .  .  . written across it. In the background, as though they are inscribed on the wall, is the word again. The next two-page spread has ‘I scream !! And I scream!! and I scream !!’ (358), suggesting that she has finally broken out of her silent existence. Then, he overpowers her. But then Melinda picks up a shard of glass and holds it to his throat. His mouth is paralyzed. He can’t say a word. I want to slice his head off. I want to hear him scream. (362) On the facing page is the image of Melinda holding the shard to his neck and saying ‘I said no’ (363). The attainment of rhetorical sovereignty here (Melinda’s screams and her ‘no’) is matched by, first, physical movement in the act of violence now directed at the perpetrator and second, the silencing of the perpetrator. Andy Evans’ inability to speak due to the possibility of having his throat cut is matched by Melinda’s desire to hear him scream. From the early parts of the novel where she was unable to speak, to the point here when the perpetrator cannot speak, from when she lost corporeal and rhetorical sovereignty to a stage where Andy Evans has lost both, Anderson-Carroll map the continuum of sexual violence. This continuum is about humiliation, from the violation to the silencing. Anderson-Carroll, drawing panels as panes of glass, sharp-edged and resembling shards or slides, have in any case broken our expectations of a ‘proper’ panel-gutter format. Further, the two-page spreads disrupt any visual evenness that one expects from the graphic novel. Harriet Earle goes so far as to argue that the presence of bleed pages ‘shakes the reader’s sense of security’ (49). Earle is right to point to the instability within our responses when faced with such formal shifts. Stassen opts for representing the sexual violence in one horrific panel in Deogratias, presenting the blood, the implements and the injuries to Venetia, who lies beheaded (74) but layers this one panel with several other discourses.

82  Staging vulnerability – II

Deogratias represents a case of what Rowan Savage terms ‘genocidal dehumanization’. Savage locates a ‘continuum of dehumanization’ in these cases, which includes legitimizing and motivational dehumanization: An Other whose presence is considered undesirable may be constructed in various different ways, considered so for various reasons. These reasons form a narrative of dehumanization that may, or may not, contain the element of threat. When it contains this element, dehumanization is a motivational factor and a legitimizing factor in genocide; this form of dehumanization is sometimes present in genocide. When it does not contain this element, it is legitimizing but not motivational; in this aspect, it is a universal element of genocide. (159) The ‘undesirable’ Tutsi woman is present through the work as a stereotype, dehumanized and objectified. The first instance occurs when the bus Deogratias and his friend Apollinaria are travelling is stopped. When Deogratias objects to the rude behaviour of the French army man, the latter first retorts: ‘why the fuck do you care anyway? You’re Hutu and she’s Tutsi, no?’ In the next panel we see him take Deogratias aside and whisper: ‘I can’t blame you, buddy. Them Tutsi girls are pretty wild in the sack right?’ (23). This comment fits right in with the ‘pre-existing sexualized discourses around Africa and African characters’ about Rwanda (Veld 160). Even the conversations between Benina and Apollinaria revolve around sexuality and sex (48–9). Deogratias himself tries very hard to persuade, unsuccessfully, Apollinaria and then Benina to have sex with him (13–15, 39–40. Benina gives in much later, 57–8).4 Deogratias’s supposed preference for Tutsi girls is part of Hutu discourse when they set out on the massacres (59). Deogratias himself lapses into a masculine protectionist discourse when he tells Benina, ‘We’re like husband and wife now . . . and wives obey husbands!’ (63). She resists and he says: ‘Since you don’t want to be reasonable, I’ll save you in spite of you: every morning I’ll lock you up!’ (64). Stassen however does not let go of the sexualized discourse: when Benina finally meets the injured Apollinaria, the latter’s first question to her is ‘Tell me, did you do it? Did you make love [to Deogratias]?’ (65). When Julius, the leader of the perpetrators describes to Augustine (before killing him) what had been done to Venetia’s daughters, Benina and Apollinaria: ‘The black one, Deogratias had already fucked her, so he left her to us. But the mulatta [Apollinaria], he kept her pussy for himself. That’s the kinda guy Deogratias is: he likes refined stuff . . . You did good, that little whore got nicely fucked” ’ (71). Veld writes: This vulgar use of language exposes what Stassen refrains from showing us, while also underscoring the ways in which perpetrators use a particular linguistic mix of sexual objectification, humiliation, and bragging to

Staging vulnerability – II  83

demonstrate their masculinity and virility.  .  .  . Julius’s remarks expose the dehumanisation of women at the heart of genocidal rape. (157) Deogratias’ complicity in whatever happened emerges as the tale proceeds and climaxes in Benina-Apollinaria’s question when they see their mother’s brutalized body: Deogratias, what have they done to her? What have you done to Mom? (74, emphasis added) And Julius responds: ‘He’ll show you’ (74). The next few panels show dogs feasting on the bodies of all three women (75). In Savage’s terms, even without the threat perception around the Tutsis in the text, objectification through such sexual stereotyping prepares the grounds for genocidal rape. That is, dehumanization provides a legitimizing factor in the events that unfold in the text. Verbal assaults in the form of abusive, sexist language constitute the anterior moment to the events that befall the three Tutsi women. Stassen implies that Deogratias, too, had bought into the sexualized discourse around Tutsi women and hence was, from the very beginning, attuned to seeing them in certain ways when he was ‘courting’ Benina and Apollinaria. When the novel ends we begin to see that he was instrumental in the violence perpetrated against the three women, and this connects to his early, if unconscious, view of them. Stassen also injects another element into the representation of sexual violence. Reference has already been made to the patriarchal comment/command that Deogratias passes about him and Benina being now husband and wife, and wives ought to obey their husbands. The woman being thus reduced to a subject who will then be protected by the ‘husband’ presents a stereotype of the family. Therefore, when Deogratias not only fails to protect Benina from rape-murder but may well have been a party to it (as we see later), he subverts the very ideology and role he had self-fashioned of the protective husband. Benina’s rape-murder then is a violence by outsiders (Hutus) against the patriarchal family and its presumed values. Further, if Deogratias was involved in the rape-murder then he has himself betrayed the ideology of the family that he was busy elaborating to Benina before the massacres begin, subverting the role of the protector. If the latter, then Stassen has created one more stereotype – the dysfunctional African ‘family’ where the male head of the unit is himself responsible for the violence against his family. It is the patriarch – even if he is play-acting – who dismembers, literally and figuratively, the family. (If Deogratias was also responsible for the rape-murder of Venetia then, by his own logic of claiming to be Benina’s ‘husband’, he has violated his mother-in-law, too.) The problem here is: the events of sexual violence are being narrated to Brother Philip by Deogratias himself (75–7). But throughout the tale we have seen that Deogratias is hallucinating under the influence of drink and also appears to have

84  Staging vulnerability – II

lost his hold on reality and on his memories. Recounting the final moments of the rape-kills, he says to Brother Phillip: ‘I came back and the dogs were there’ (75). When he is found, Deogratias is squatting in the rain, next to the corpses on which the dogs fed. The men who find him say: ‘all that’s left are corpses, madmen and dogs’. In this panel Deogratias is drawn with a dog’s head (76). Soon after he tells Brother Philip in the present: ‘I’m only a dog’ (76). But all this is Deogratias narrating the events. By merging Deogratias’ hallucinations of himself as a dog with real dogs that supposedly ate the corpses, Stassen complicates the dehumanization and sexual violence theme. Did Deogratias really see the mutilated corpse of Venetia? Did he participate in the violence against her and Benina-Apollinaria? Did he lose his mind and see himself as one of the dogs that destroyed the Tutsis? Is it that the violence being recounted is solely Deogratias’ staging and dramatizing his fantasies around the Tutsi women to Brother Philip? Was the humiliation repeatedly heaped on him – about being fond of Tutsi women – responsible for Deogratias turning against the Tutsis and joining hands in masculine solidarity with Julius and the other Hutus? Is it his failure to live up to the protector-role of the husband that he fashioned for himself and in his commands to Benina that drives Deogratias to madness? Stassen’s strategy enables him to merge discourses of sexualized women with the discourses of violence (    Julius’ and Hutu rhetoric of massacring the Tutsis). By depicting the eyewitness as one who is mentally undisturbed, prone to delusions, Stassen destabilizes these discourses around the violence. When Deogratias claims he is a dog again at the end of the tale, he has dehumanized himself, as a logical conclusion to the various animalizing tropes directed at Tutsis. Anne Elizabeth Moore in Threadbare, surveying the sweatshops and garment industry across Asia and Southeast Asia, notes that almost all such factories – which hired numerous women – ‘do not operate under safety precautions’ (88). Factories have higher heat levels, lack drinking water, hire child labour, lack first aid and emergency facilities, among others (89). The women who come to work at the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) set up to rescue victims of sextrafficking, Moore notes, quit sex work to come to the NGO but ‘went right back home again later . . . which resulted in her being re-trafficked’ (97). Much of the violence towards and exploitation of women in places such as Cambodia, Moore writes, stem from ‘Cambodian tradition, history, and sensibility [which] demand that a daughter will do what she can to take care of her family . . . but . . . the local economy offers women very few ways to do that’ (102). It is this that allows NGOs to claim ‘income-generation work is anti-trafficking work’ (102). Later, Moore would observe how the workers in apparel production are exploited globally due to an international ‘system’: ‘all made possible by US and EU policy agreements that range in application from trafficking-in-persons to IP mandates’ (147). Moore’s work demonstrates how structural conditions that originate both locally and globally generate the vulnerability of sex workers and sweatshop workers. In Ethan Young’s Nanjing: The Burning City, the notorious ‘rape of Nanjing’ finds its expression in several panels. The older captain and a younger soldier, one

Staging vulnerability – II  85

of the few survivors of the Chinese army, seeking to escape the city, come across corpses of young women (52–3). They witness a young girl, who has just seen her mother shot down, being taken away by the Japanese: when she resists by biting one of the men, she is shot (63–5). They also overhear the Japanese crack sexual jokes about Chinese women and their plans for them (75–6). The Japanese officer is himself seen appalled at the quantum and nature of sexual violence. The dead bodies show him that the women were raped, tortured and then shot (one is shown tied to a chair) (92–6). If Deogratias and Fax from Sarajevo linked sexual violence and humiliation with genocide and ethnic cleansing campaigns, Lighter than My Shadow, like Hush, examines teen abuse. Katie Green’s work is about a teen, Katie, whose psychological complexes around her body shape develop into a full-blown anorexic condition. School life, with the typical round of bullying, cause her to withdraw and pay more attention to her body, which she sees as the locus of her problems, eventually leading to anorexia. The abuse occurs at the hands of Jake, an alternative healing practitioner. Initially, she believes Jake the healer is indeed helping her. Then, one day, at a fair, he tries to molest her. Much later Katie realizes that whenever she had been put into a semi-hypnotic state he had been touching her inappropriately. Green presents the events first in the form of disembodied limbs and body regions to the background of Katie saying ‘stop it’ (307–9). These pages are riveting. First, the disembodied perpetrator represents a form of dehumanization: These disembodied hands and faceless perpetrators pose an ideological problem. As literary strategies, they are profoundly effective. The dehumanisation of the perpetrator has an impact on the reader. On the other hand, a faceless perpetrator manages to retain his anonymity, something the books purport to change. (Lampert 181) Katie is also disembodied in this depiction, humiliatingly reduced to her body parts. But Green has already drawn Jake before, and will draw his face immediately after the page with the disembodied bodies. We know the attacker is Jake. Thus, she moves back and forth between the predator as familiar and the predator as an anonymous monster. If the former forms an identified/identifiable evil, in the latter, he is just a pair of hands molesting and violating Katie. What becomes intolerable for Katie in the rest of the tale is that she had been exploited by the man she trusted to cure her, as she admits to her friend: ‘I trusted him more than I trusted myself ’ (362–9). At one point she has nightmares about being attacked by wild beasts, and among them is the predator Jake (438–9). Jo Lampert would argue that the predator ‘depicted not as a monster but as a kindly familiar neighbour, this “monster” is more frightening than the one stereotypically drawn as a beast’ (182), which is what Green does: there is Jake-the-kind-healer who is really the monster.

86  Staging vulnerability – II

Already extremely conscious of her body, the attempted rape and the recall of possible violations in the past contribute to make Katie ashamed of herself. Her body-shaming is self-inflicted, but exacerbated by the incidents with Jake. Green draws gaping maws in Katie’s body – notably her stomach and back. It is important to note that the first representation of this gaping mouth occurs after the disaster with Jake, and is a stand-alone image on the page (323). If Jake reduced her to a sexual object, Katie reduces herself to an object too: a mouth. I suggest that Green is depicting a dehumanization at two levels. Katie is first a body for Jake and then a mouth in her own perception. The attempted rape and recall of previous possible molestations fracture her perceptions of the world (the loss of trust that Katie speaks of to the therapist and to her friend). Her anorexia fractures her perception of herself. Combined, the two are devastating. Sexual violence adds to the indignity of her anorexic body and flawed eating habits, as Katie sees it. By imposing sexual violence on the already self-shaming body/psychology that is Katie, Green constructs a character whose survival at the end is nothing short of miraculous. * Dignity, vulnerability and human rights are linked in numerous HR graphic novels, as we have seen. Dehumanization that involves an exploitation of symbolic vulnerability and social rejection is also, then, a key form of human rights violation. Chronic conditions of poverty that render the victims vulnerable, the nature of labour and its attendant exploitation are also themes the HR graphic novel grapples with. Sexual violence that appears, now, ‘natural’ to genocidal conditions and war is a part of select HR graphic texts, as these prise open the contexts in which gender roles intersect with other identities such as nationality or ethnicity.

Notes 1 What is startling is the register in which the Brahmin is made to think: ‘grunt work’ and ‘breeze’ take the register of contemporary yuppie culture and give it to the 1840s Brahmin to articulate. This jars, assuredly. But it is in the incongruity between the registers of Brahmin supremacy – cast in the language of scriptures or law (‘caste is merely the division of labour’, 10) – and the yuppie slang that we understand something else: the continuity of inequality in labour or employment from 1840s India to the present. On the theme of labour and how the Indian caste system has valorized the work of the mind over the work of the hands see Kancha Ilaiah’s Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land, a nonfictional essay in the graphic novel format (2007). The policing of dignity as social reification was diagnosed early by Ambedkar. In the chapter ‘The Revolt of the Untouchables’ of his book Untouchables Or The Children Of India’s Ghetto, Ambedkar would write: The Hindu Social Order is based upon a division of labour which reserves for the Hindus clean and respectable jobs and assigns to the Untouchables dirty and mean jobs and thereby clothes the Hindus with dignity and heaps ignominy upon the Untouchables (Vol. 5: 258).

Staging vulnerability – II  87

2 Murder, proscribed in peacetime becomes legitimate in wartime, but rape never is: ‘There is no political or utilitarian justification of rape as a legitimate military practice, just as no rape is committed by virtue of unintended, collateral damage’ (Branche et al. 6). 3 Debra Bergoffen argues: A man forced to witness ‘his’ women being raped, however, is forced to live his vulnerability as gendered women are forced to live theirs – in the shame of involuntary passivity. Gendering vulnerability in this way strips it of its human dignity and allows the exploitation of vulnerability, already normalized in gender relations, to become an effective war time tactic. (46) 4 However, Deogratias’ interest in girls, Stassen suggests, comes from consuming French comic books and romances (13–15).

4 CULTURAL TRAUMA Victims, memory and materials

Walking home one evening with his parents, Riad in The Arab of the Future comes across a scaffold and bodies hanging on it. Riad’s mother, who is French, is shocked, and Riad’s Syrian father assures her ‘it’s horrible, but it’s necessary. It sets an example’ (I: 113). Riad’s father claims it is meant to send out the signal that Syrians are unafraid as a nation. But later, he admits that the president had favoured his own community (the Alawites) and made slaves of the others (131). It is a history lesson that young Riad does not quite follow, he admits, although he stares hard at the hanging bodies (131–2). In This Side, That Side, Syeda Farhana’s ‘Little Women’ narrates the story of Tara, born of a Bihari father and a Bengali mother. Now in a refugee camp, Tara recalls her parents in Chittagong (now in Bangladesh), and how her elder sister and her family managed to leave the camp. But the boat that was to ferry Tara ‘never arrived’, and so they ‘never departed’ (Ghosh 265). These comments by Tara are made to the backdrop of a photograph (265). She and her mother are left alone in the camp, again an incident from history narrated with a photograph as supplement (269). In Riad’s tale, the actual injury is not perpetrated upon him or his immediate family, but the symbolism of the execution is made clear to them as well, as is the effect of the dictator’s actions  – of reducing other communities to slavery  – via the father’s history lesson. In Farhana’s story, the photographs record the absence in Tara’s life. Both Riad and Farhana are documenting not individual but cultural trauma. The legacy of a historical event, especially a tragic and bloody one, like the dictator’s execution of ‘dissidents’ or the Partition, produces, via specific cultural codes, mnemonic devices and symbols. Specific communities have been displaced, silenced and even, in some cases, brought to the point of extermination/ extinction. Such communities, whose rights have been eroded, denied or rejected outright, document this erosion – so that the loss of rights and subsequently their identity becomes their defining feature, what is termed ‘cultural trauma’.

Cultural trauma  89

Cultural trauma ‘occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (Alexander “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma” 1). When Kurds, Armenians, African Americans, the Syrian/Bangladeshi/ Pakistani/Lebanese refugees define themselves they do so by acknowledging a history of collective suffering: It is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but “take on board” some significant responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the cause of trauma, and thereby assume such moral responsibility, members of collectivities define their solidary relationships in ways that, in principle, allow them to share the sufferings of others. (Alexander 1) It defines, in some cases, entire national, racial or ethnic identities, for example, in the case of the Palestinians, or ethnic identities. When the communities enunciate, for instance, a displacement or genocide in their past, as Riad’s father does, they frame the events of the past in particular ways. As Jeffrey Alexander puts it: It is the meanings that provide the sense of shock and fear, not the events in themselves. Whether or not the structures of meaning are destabilized and shocked is not the result of an event but the effect of a sociocultural process. (10) In short, it is in the recollection through specific modes of recall and memorialization that the events of the past come to define identities in the present, where such modes are cultural processes and mediations of the events. Ron Eyerman, whose work identifies forms of recalling slavery as a process that defines African American identity into the twentieth century, writes: The “trauma” in question is slavery, not as institution or even experience, but as collective memory, a form of remembrance that grounded the identityformation of a people. . . . As cultural process, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory. The notion of a unique African American identity emerged in the post-Civil War period, after slavery had been abolished. . . . In this sense, slavery was traumatic in retrospect, and formed a “primal scene” which could, potentially, unite all “African Americans” in the United States, whether or not they had themselves been slaves or had any knowledge of or feeling for Africa. . . . It was the memory

90  Cultural trauma

of slavery and its representation through speech and art works that grounded African American identity and permitted its institutionalization[.] (1–2) Like Alexander, Eyerman too underscores mediation and forms of memory-work/ construction: [T]he trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all. While it may be necessary to establish some event as the significant “cause,” its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation. (2) And again: How slavery was represented in literature, music, the plastic arts and, later, film, is crucial to the formation and reworking of collective memory and collective identity by the generations which followed emancipation. (10) Cultural trauma then is not the province of an individual alone, for it relies on a memory of a traumatic event – such as the denial or erosion of rights – ­transmitted across generations that may not have themselves experienced the events. Commentators such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander focus on cultural modes and mechanisms of memorializing memories and organizing the meaning of these memories. These memories are, as we shall see, not exclusive to individuals, although autobiographical memories do play a crucial role in the making of a collective memory as well. What cultural trauma as identity-making demands is collective or cultural memory. Jan Assmann defines cultural memory as follows: The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. (Cited in Erll 29) Expanding or refining cultural memory as ‘national memory’, Marita Sturken defines the collective memory of a nation thus: When personal memories are deployed in the context of marking the anniversary of historical events, they are presented either as the embodied evidence

Cultural trauma  91

of history or as evidence of history’s failures. Survivors return to the sites of their war experience; they place their bodies within the discourse of remembering either to affirm history’s narratives or to declare them incomplete, incapable of conjuring their experience. They represent a very particular form of embodied memory. While history functions much more smoothly in the absence of survivors, and survivors are often dissenting voices to history’s narratives, history making also accords to them a very particular authority as the embodiment of authentic experience. (688) Astrid Erll qualifies these definitions when she argues that ‘collective memory’ (in the narrower sense) . . . refers to the symbols, media, social institutions and practices which are used to construct, maintain and represent versions of a shared past’ (98, emphasis in original). Erll cautions us that individual memories are framed within cultural schemata, and collective memory is actualized in the form of individual memories. That is, individual memories require socio-cultural frames to generate meaning, and these individual memories therefore constitute an actualization and embodiment of collective memories (108).1 It should be evident, then, that the identity of survivors, refugees and victim-­ communities rests upon the collective memories that have been collected and transmitted even as autobiographical memory-work – which recounts an ­experience – contributes to and is framed by the cultural frames of the community’s modes of recall. Cultural trauma, so central to the HR narrative, is the encoding, organizing, dissemination and decoding of events among survivors and their descendants: those who inherit these scarred memories, read them in certain ways, and continue to be defined, in the large part, by them. Just as Riad’s father defines his present socio-­ economic condition in terms of his community’s deprivations at the hands of the Syrian dictatorship in the past or Spiegelman seeks to locate his identity in the inherited legacy of his father as an Auschwitz survivor, HR graphic novels underscore the link between cultural trauma and collective identities. These texts, as we shall see, frame individual and collective memories in specific ways that are instrumental in generating meanings of those memories but also in creating a collective identity. This chapter studies the construction of collective identity through acts of memory work.

The victim (in) memory Riad as a child is repeatedly taunted by his cousin as a ‘Yahudi [Jew]’ (I: 74, 90, 121. Also II: 28–9, 42 and elsewhere). Traumatized by this name-calling he asks his father, ‘what’s a Jew, Papa?’ and his father tells him: The Jews are our enemies. They’re occupying Palestine. They’re the worst race in the world. . . (I: 133)

92  Cultural trauma

Riad’s French mother, horrified at this, intervenes with: ‘why are you telling him that? It’s total crap’ (133). Between the ‘cool’ expression of the father who has assimilated this argument and the fraught expression of the mother, the panels give us the frisson and tension of memory and recall from two different witnesses. In most cases, the testimonial HR narrative may rely on a single witness or a family to communicate the trauma experienced. The exception to this is Joe Sacco who almost always interviews numerous witnesses and survivors to document trauma. In, for instance, Palestine and other texts, he ensures that we see and hear a range of survivors, often from many different points of view of the events. Collective trauma here is documented through an ensemble of many voices (see Kozol “Complicities of Witnessing”). In cases where an individual serves as a metonym for a national, ethnic or group trauma, there occurs what Jeffrey Alexander (Trauma: A Social Theory) identifies as a core feature of cultural trauma: the personalization of the victim.

Personalization One notes how, in the Sattouf account, Riad’s personal abuse at the hands of his family and school acquaintances is framed by his father’s ‘historical’ account (of Arabs versus Jews), which is disputed by Riad’s mother. The interpretation of the abuse at the hands of the cousins and the pain experienced is no longer then only individual but a collective one. Riad’s suffering, in other words, is embedded in a collective memory of the Arab-Israeli conflict even though Riad has no personal experience of this conflict except as a metonymy. The personalization of the victim, Jeffrey Alexander has argued, is central to the social drama of cultural traumas of the community: Rather than depicting the events on a vast historical scale, rather than focusing on larger-than-life leaders, mass movements, organizations, crowds, and ideologies, these dramas portrayed the events in terms of small groups, families and friends, parents and children, brothers and sisters. In this way, the victims of trauma became everyman and everywoman, every child and every parent. (2012: 65) Bernhard Giesen has argued that ‘the traumatic reference to the past is represented by the memory of victims who have been treated as objects, as cases of a category without a face, a name, a place’ (2004: 114). The Arab-Israeli conflict in its entire historical and historiographic sweep finally cathects onto the story of Riad and his mistreatment at the hands of his cousins. HR graphic novels like Sattouf ’s often refrain from offering expansive historical accounts, preferring instead to offer us the personalized victim story. However, it is important that the personalized victim stories link or embed their individual experiences within a cultural frame that then contextualizes their story and simultaneously actualizes the historical event.

Cultural trauma  93

Riad’s and his father’s stories are instantiations of what Astrid Erll terms ‘collective-autobiographical memory’: the ‘collective remembering of a shared past . . . through collective-autobiographical acts of memory, group identities are created, the experience of time is culturally shaped, and shared systems of values and norms are established’ (105–6). The Arab (marked as ‘our’) past and its engagements with Israel are never shown to us. Instead, what Sattouf does is to have his personal experience as victim explained in terms of a community history. As collective-autobiographical acts of memory, the Israeli-Arab conflict, the Palestine question and the militarism of the region are what Riad’s father imparts to the child. It establishes a set of norms for the interpretation of individual memories but also for, and of, shared experiences. Riad’s cousins accuse him: ‘You’ve stolen our building’ (I: 129, emphasis added). A few pages later, Riad’s father makes the statement already cited: ‘They’re [Israel] occupying Palestine’ (133, emphasis added). Thus, the Israeli ‘occupying’ of Palestine in the adult’s statement is metonymically paralleled in the ‘stolen’ of the childrens’ conversation. For the Riad cousins, the alleged ‘stealing’ of their home, which is an individual experience, can only be framed within Israeli actions in the past. But this also means that this Arab collective memory is what enables the creation of present-day Arab identity, the identity bestowed upon an individual (Riad) and contemporary familial relationships. The personalization of the individual victim  – Riad – can be read as the social drama that (re)enacts historical wrongs: of the Jews upon the Arabs, in the Arab narrative that Riad hears from his father. But the memory of the ­historical wrong is what causes Riad’s victimization as Jew at the hands of his cousins. Riad’s father’s statement about Palestine is part of a ‘collective-semantic ­memory’ (Erll 106), where the historical account is really the organization of collective memory in specific ways. There are other instances too. When the children play with soldier-figurines, Riad gets the Israeli ones ‘shaped in deceitful, treacherous poses’. He draws the figurines with daggers hidden (implying betrayal) and labels one ‘smooth reptilian face’ (I: 120). The game ends when the Israeli surrenders: the figurine comes with a white flag to announce this surrender (121). However, the cousins cut off the figurine’s head even after the surrender (121). A  set of mediating modes, devices and apparatuses are readily available through which the Israeli-Arab conflict can be embodied within a children’s game. The toys serve as the symbolic expressions that constitute the collective-semantic memory of the community. There is however more to be said about Riad’s staging of the violent games that end in the Jew soldier-figurine (belonging to Riad) surrendering and then being decapitated, as we shall see. The nature of the victim, so clearly a part of any cultural trauma (Alexander Trauma: A Social Theory 18), is identified unequivocally in the games and the abuse: the Arab. Although a collective representation of all the victims is not possible or even necessary, by conflating and embedding individual victims into the collective ‘Arab’, Sattouf personalizes the victims and focuses on victim demographics. The child Riad is a victim in Arab memory because he can be identified as a victim only through the personalization of a historical event.

94  Cultural trauma

Igort carefully identifies the individual victims by name when he captions the various sections of his stories: ‘The Story of Serafima Andreyevna’, ‘The Story of Nikolay Vasilievich’, ‘The Story of Maria Ivanovna’, among others. There are, between these personalized victim texts, accounts of the Kulaks, the story of the transformation of the Ukrainian land under Stalin. ‘Images of a lone sufferer’, write Bleiker et al., ‘humanize a political crisis’ (408), and the HR graphic novels’ emphasis on individual, personalized stories clearly fit this paradigm. In all this, the individual replaces the primary historical actor-agent: the Kulak, the Jew, the Arab or the Dalit, a feature that results from the personalization of the victim (Alexander Trauma: A Social Theory 67). This means, also, that there has to be a connection implied, insinuated or subtly enunciated, between the individual victim and the larger population. Through such a focus on the individual personvictim, these accounts and images in the HR graphic novel attempt to render them persons. This may be a means of ‘declaring their humanity, personality, individual dignity and warmth’, especially because it detaches the persons from their material contexts, as Jane Lydon observes of photographs of Aboriginals in twentieth century Australia (157). In the HR narrative, the opposite of what Lydon proposes ensures that we see the individuals as persons: they are embedded in the contexts that seek to dehumanize them. In other words, by focusing on their material c­ ontexts – poverty, caste-based atrocity, racism, genocidal wars, oppressive political regimes – the HR graphic novel forces us to see the contexts in which rights are lost or eroded and the human person dehumanized. There is one further point about the personalization of the victim in representations of cultural trauma. Having followed systematically, more or less, the collective autobiographical route to mapping individual memories within their contexts (hence: collective semantic memory, in Erll’s categorization), the narratives take recourse to what Erll would identify as a ‘collective procedural memory’. This is the appropriation and employment of cultural scripts and stereotypes, values and norms and rituals of memorialization. The most prominent cultural script in HR graphic texts that seek a personalization of the victim is that of the family. In almost all the stories in This Side, That Side, families being sundered as a result of the Partitions (Pakistan-India and the making of Bangladesh later) is a core theme. In Farhana’s story already cited, the father leaves Chittagong, as does the elder daughter. The remainder of the family ‘never departed’ (Ghosh 265). Family group photographs are juxtaposed with the ‘boat that never arrived’ (265). On a wall, a family photograph hangs. The protagonist stands in the stairwell of her home looking up. Between these two images is a text that says: Slowly our relatives started leaving Chittagong. Baba too left with them, with my elder sister. My brother and I stayed back with Ma. I often wonder, why did Ma stay back? (269)

Cultural trauma  95

In Mahmood Farooqui’s ‘A Letter from India’ the protagonist decides after a letter from his uncle in Pakistan: I read this letter and decided to get in touch with my relatives whose names we have forgotten  – our aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters now lost to us. . . (Ghosh 81) An old man from Afghanistan who ‘never made it to Liverpool, to his son, to his grandsons’ waves cheerily at Kate in Threads (64). Most of the children in the Calais camp, Kate is informed, are unaccompanied (79). A pregnant woman who has lost her husband in Iraq hopes to meet her separated sister one day (86). An old mother is drawn staring at the photograph of her son: ‘I think of her thinking of him, every hour of every day’ (107). Prum, sold into slavery, records that on the ship far away from his home he ‘thought of [his] wife and [his] child all the time’ (98, also 180). Throughout Kugler’s text the refugees speak of missing their families, both immediate and extended, ever since they left Syria. Many of course also wonder if their families are still alive (11, 31, 41 and elsewhere). The family as a cultural script and stereotype is a well-tested formula in this process (Bleiker et al. 408, See also Woolley 2014). The ‘family values’ ideology that underwrites these representations reads stability, human dignity and human fulfilment within the structure of the family alone (Briggs 2003). The loss of the family through certain events furnishes a ready-made script to speak of the trauma experienced by the individual. The use of the family trope in these texts intensifies the representations of loss, of belonging and identity through traumatic events. The emphasis on the family is a move towards embedding the victim in a larger context, of other persons, in the HR graphic novel.

The collective Igort employs two strategies towards the end of the Ukrainian notebooks. First, he introduces a term that sounds like a scientific classification in a middle of a paragraph that concludes a section: ‘The fields lie abandoned. . . . Today life goes on by inertia. The Ukrainian Homo sovieticus is a lost being, deprived of a role. (159) The use of scientific nomenclature as a mode of ‘sorting’ of humans is fascinating, given what precedes and follows the term. Igort has until now mapped the various individual victims of the Holodomor, recording their stories and their suffering. He has staged their vulnerability in innovative modes. Then, apropos of nothing,

96  Cultural trauma

he introduces this term as a sort of ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989). Boundary objects, Star and Griesemer tell us have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. (393) Homo sovieticus as it occurs in a notebook (and Star and Griesemer list field notes as boundary objects) means: a human citizen species of the Soviet Union. But, since the term follows a group of stories about suffering Ukrainians, it lends itself to other themes and concerns: are Ukrainians equal citizen species? Since their rights have been, as Igort documents, consistently eroded, are they citizens at all? Then, having given us personal stories, does the genus-species terminology depersonalize the victims, or does it make the Ukrainian victim a prototype of the victim of Soviet policy itself    ? The term, like a boundary object, serves many concerns, while remaining coherent as an instantiation of the last: it is a name of a victim-species, victimized due to the membership of the Soviet Union. Homo sovieticus belongs to the scientific organization of citizens of the Soviet Union but also to the category of Ukrainian victim of the Soviet rule. He/she is a victim because of the Soviet citizenship by virtue of being Ukrainian, but is also a victim because as a Ukrainian her/his citizenship does not ensure any human rights. I suggest that Igort’s use of the boundary object term positions the personal story within a larger population. The individuals he has interviewed so far become subsumed under the category ‘Homo sovieticus’ but do not lose their coherence and identity as victims. Indeed, Igort underscores this tension between the individual and the population when he follows this page (and term) up with reproduced photographs of Ivanovich and Vasilievna (160–1). Homo sovieticus interacts with the discourse of Soviet politics as well as with the personal stories recounted thus far, refusing primacy to either. This strategy forces us to admit that genocidal violence or discrimination may have injured an individual, but the injury was inflicted due to the group identity of that individual. Commentators on genocide emphasize that such ‘personalized violence’ is ‘a politically organized attempt at radically redefining categories of belonging’ (Bringa 194). It also means, as critics working on refugee visuals have argued, a demand for a ‘pressing and personalized concern’ towards the image before our eyes (Allbeson 410). It means, simply, cultural trauma in such texts repersonalizes the events so that we see the effects on individuals, even as we understand that the forces of history are beyond any individual, victim or perpetrator. To repersonalize is to focus on the humanity of the human who has been/is being traumatized, and thereby return us to the foundation of all HR campaigns – the person. This dual movement, documenting the trauma as personalized even as it directs us to the contexts, is emphasized in some texts.

Cultural trauma  97

In Bhimayana, we are told, when the focus was on Ambedkar as a person, that he had been denied water, a house and adequate transport on account of his caste. He suffered in his person when his ‘elemental feeling of thirst’ was rejected (Natarajan and Anand 45, emphasis added). The ‘elemental’ is the basic organism and its needs that constitute him as a human person – a denial of this biological/ physiological need is a denial of his very humanity. It personalizes caste atrocity as something that violates the very being of a person. Yet the narrative does not retain this personalized tone. Ambedkar’s personal account is immediately afterwards interleaved with the atrocity reportage from around India – Dalits killed for digging their own wells or for using the public water-pump (47). Here Natarajan and Anand, having personalized the horrors of the caste system, force us to see beyond the person. The ‘elemental’, common to all individuals as the shared experience of being human, is denied at the level of the group, too. This means, like Ambedkar, many other Dalits have been persecuted as persons to a point where they are no longer persons. This dual movement creates a layer of complexity in the HR graphic novel. On the one hand, the individual face, name and character who is identified, named and recognized as a person in these accounts (even when dramatized or fictionalized) resists the standard mode of war photographs, becoming anonymized as icons.2 In the same breath, however, through the use of nomenclature such as Homo sovieticus (in the Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks) or through the incorporation of generic newspaper accounts (as in Bhimayana) this narrative refuses to foreground the individual victim of rights abuse alone by shifting focus onto a larger population. Recognizing the loss and break-up of the family, physical violence, starvation and oppression as a shared history of more than one individual ensures that others, including the audience for these texts ‘symbolically participate in the experience of the originating trauma’ (Alexander Trauma: A Social Theory 19). This is a key feature of the HR text, so that we always see individuals such as Prum or Ambedkar experiencing pain, suffering or oppression alongside others, even if these others are not identified as individuals for us.

Attribution of responsibility In Kugler and Lewis, there is an originary source of the cultural trauma: ethnocide and racism. Igort’s narrative names and identifies for us the Soviet officials responsible for creating the policy that generated the Holodomor – he concludes the Ukrainian section of his work with the portrait of Josef Stalin. In March there are no specific antagonists other than the policemen and the city administrators (of course, they are metonyms for state- and institutionalized racism) who are the immediate opponents of the African American activists. In Bhimayana and A Gardener in the Wasteland there are groups of anonymized Brahmins rather than identifiable individuals who discriminate against the Dalits. Evidently, there is an entire spectrum of ‘perpetrators’ in the HR graphic novels, from identifiable individuals to faceless masses.

98  Cultural trauma

For Jeffrey Alexander, ‘it is critical to establish the identity of the perpetrator, the “antagonist” ’ for the trauma narrative to become a ‘compelling’ one (Trauma: A Social Theory 19). Yet, in many cases, cultural constructions of trauma do not identify a single, isolated individual as a perpetrator. For instance, in March, Lewis et al. cite Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches where he references the racism, slavery and social inequality of American society at length. When King declares: ‘no lie can live forever’ (III: 238), the perpetrator is systemic social injustice built on the lie and myth of foundational and immanent inequalities between races. When Lewis et al. end the three-volume saga on 20 January 2009 and Obama’s inaugural, it appears as though a clear distinction is being drawn between the past and the present. In Bernhard Giesen’s words, the cultural memory being documented in the conclusion to March ‘could cut the links to the nation of perpetrators that was identified with the preceding generation’ (2004: 128). Does the inaugural then mean the end of the ‘lie’, as Lewis et al. put it? When the final volume ends, Lewis and Andrew Aydin are discussing the possibility of the comic book around the civil rights movement, almost as though, now that the momentous battle for equality is over, one can turn to issues of commemoration and memorializing. There is a distributed responsibility that one discerns in HR graphic novels. That said, Lewis et al. draw the twisted visages of the policemen beating African American activists in order to signify their moral depravity in their actions. Cultural trauma operates here by painting the policeman, the white men free with their fists and the white women who insult the African Americans as perpetrators (III: 26, 40, 86–7, 155, 172). However, the individual policeman or KKK member ‘evokes the complicity of the American people with the nation’s history of genocidal slaughter while retaining a certain aura of individual freedom existing putatively beyond the bounds of civilised life’, to adopt a phrase from Linnie Blake’s study of monsters in 1970s horror cinema (112). That the policemen, mayors and Senators are employees of the state means that their role as perpetrators slides between individual moral culpability and a national ethos of race-based victimization. This is the key: March apportions blame between individuals whose moral codes enabled them to beat unarmed, peaceful civilians and the American state that both implicitly and explicitly endorses such violence. The perpetrator in this case, the way March sees and shows it, is not a perverted individual alone; it merges individual guilt with collective guilt. Therefore, the responsibility for the beatings, torture and dehumanizing humiliation is distributed across the individual who performs the acts and the cultural script that, having already condemned the African race to the realm of the nonhuman, enabled the acts. This same mode of attributing responsibility may be seen in texts like Bhimayana. When Ambedkar, seeking a place to stay, approaches his friend Jai, the latter tells him: Bhimrao, you know you are a dear personal friend of mine. I am sad and angry that these Parsis treated you so badly. You are welcome to stay with

Cultural trauma  99

me. I just want to say one thing, though – if you come to my house, my servants will go. (69) And yet another, Peter, says: I really do sympathize  – it’s shocking, the way the Parsis turned you out. I have a small problem though – I’ll have to check with my wife. You see, I’m liberal in my thinking, but she – you know how women are, they just cannot be weaned from orthodoxy. (71) Natarajan and Anand align the Hindu Jai and the Christian Peter in this narrative of exclusion. Both Jai and Peter shift the responsibility for denying Ambedkar shelter to others: servants and the wife, respectively. Here Jai and Peter are held culpable even though they attempt to shift the responsibility for Ambedkar’s physical (he does not have any accommodation) and mental (he feels isolated, threatened and discriminated against: he says ‘an untouchable has no friends’) trauma. That is, Natarajan and Anand make sure we understand that Jai and Peter are metonymic of a social order that is the true perpetrator of the trauma. But that is not all. Jai, Peter, the photographers and bystanders in March who watch the beatings, torture and exclusions are ‘implicated spectators’ (Möller). Neven in The Fixer makes the implication of bystanders who, like himself, find a career in war, explicit: When massacres happened, those were the best times. Journalists from all over the world were coming here. (Sacco 2004: 49) When the war ends, Neven says to Sacco, ‘Sarajevo’s been left to left-over journalists, the odd cartoonist’. The world will stop reporting the news from Sarajevo because, as Neven puts it, ‘Sarajevo no longer does what Sarajevo does best’, implying war (49). The journalists, photographers and reporters who were bystanders to the crisis and the massacres are also held to account here. (Critics have noted Sacco’s consistent efforts to highlight the subjective reporting of events, collaborative witnessing and ‘questions of privilege, mobility, accuracy and authenticity’ in journalism, Orbán “Mediating Distant Violence.” 4.) This attribution of responsibility that simultaneously ‘widens the circle of perpetrators’ (Alexander) requires some attention. Frank Möller, following the work of Luc Boltanski, argues: Simply by being there, however, they  – like us  – become accessories to the execution, accomplices perhaps, not least because, although “having

100  Cultural trauma

knowledge of suffering points to an obligation to give assistance” (Boltanski 1999: 20), we cannot do anything to prevent it. (31) Working with similar studies of bystanders and the Holocaust, Sophie Oliver explicitly links dehumanization with both perpetrators and bystanders when she writes: Dehumanization, then, is the process by which human beings are rendered so radically other that it becomes possible for their persecutors to commit murder on a mass scale, and for bystanders to stand by without objection or remorse. (89) That is, the bystander, who is a silent witness or a photographer (in March the scenes of beating are almost always depicted with a white photographer present), is equally culpable morally. (That photographers were witnesses is the subject of a later chapter.) The implicated spectator represents a social order that, by not intervening, allows the atrocity to continue. As such, the incorporation of such images of bystanders and implicated spectators signals the indictment in HR graphic novels of not just individuals but an entire society.3 They become, in Nancy ScheperHughes’s reading, a part of the ‘genocide continuum’ where ‘genocide is . . . socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders  – and even by victims themselves – as expected, routine, even justified’ (373). A distributed responsibility is seen in Deogratias. We see and hear a media report: From the capital Kigali, where the evacuation of Europeans has now been completed, come reports that small-arms fire has been heard all night and that many lynchings were witnessed. (66) After Philip, Prior and the other French escape, we see them listening to TV reports on the events in Rwanda. Those watching decide: ‘turn it [the TV] off, Philip, the little one mustn’t see this’ (66). One assumes, since we are shown the French priests leaving, that they are watching the news of the massacres from outside Rwandan borders, or at least in a safe zone within. Positioning the television at the centre of this section of the narrative – the entire four panels on this page (66) are focused on the TV report – is an interesting strategy. First, it is clear that there was media coverage of the genocide, and the coverage extended beyond the killing fields with witness reportage from the sites of the ‘lynchings’. Second, and proceeding from the first, Stassen emphasizes that the world outside Rwanda did indeed know of the massacre as it proceeded. Finally, the world, although aware of the events, preferred to blank out the entire genocide from its narrative memory. Stassen forces us to see the role of the implicated spectator by taking recourse to

Cultural trauma  101

the non-narrated – events that did take place but are not narrated (Prince) – in the remainder of the page. After the four panels showing us the TV reports and the last panel calls Philip to turn off the TV, together occupying a little more than half of the page, the rest of the page is blank, and white (66). Stassen literalizes the nonnarrated as a ‘whiting out’ of the news from Rwanda: the world turned off their TV sets and their screens, blanking out events from narration and hence from both cognition and memory. The non-narrated here, I suggest, is a forceful and poignant image of the implicated spectator. This spectator, despite being aware of the events that demand, ethically, a narrative, opts for the non-narrated. The implicated spectator, in contrast to the model we have seen in March, is not a bystander who refuses to intervene: s/he is one who refuses to take cognizance of a narrative that documents the atrocities. When the TV is turned off, there remains only the pristine white of the blank page, of the screen, even as massacres and bloodshed occurs elsewhere. The non-narrated constructs the implicated spectator because it denies a narrative’s existence, in Stassen’s attribution of responsibility. There is one more dimension to the text from Deogratias. The use of ‘lynching’ to describe the massacres carries echoes of the KKK’s lynchings in the USA. Now, for many critics the emphasis on the Holocaust as ‘paradigmatic genocide’ has been a contentious issue (Sanyal 3). But the evocation of ‘lynching’, which was directed at the African Americans, when speaking of intra-African genocides ensures that the racial divide at the centre of lynching is modified in cultural memory as an ethnic divide. Then, the use of the term brings together two different cultural memories: of white men killing African Americans and documenting this ‘work’ (through photographs and lynching postcards, see Amy Wood Lynching and Spectacle) and the future memories of Africans killing other Africans. That is, Stassen’s attribution of responsibility is spread across both the white and black races and therefore universalizes, through the use of ‘lynching’, the horror of genocide anywhere. Juxtaposing the two ensures that we see both the KKK’s and Hutus’ torture and extermination of their interracial and intraracial ‘Other’ as ‘crimes against humanity’ itself. It is a memorializing of a localized cultural trauma that is made to intersect with instances of cultural trauma elsewhere. Stassen indicts the Europeans for abandoning Rwanda here (extratextual knowledge tells us the French troops had armed the militia before the events of 1994. When evacuating the Europeans, the French and Belgians refused to let any Tutsi accompany them, abandoning them to their deaths). Just a few pages earlier to this, the French priest, Father Prior (whom Deogratias had accused of illicit relations with Venetia) decides to leave. Brother Philip requests that they help some of the Tutsis escape. Prior responds: ‘I also know that you haven’t experienced the soul of its [Rwanda’s] people long enough to know just how dark it can sometimes be’ (61). Prior categorically refuses to wait for anybody (60), and thus abandons the ­Tutsis to the Hutu militia. The naturalization of African violence  – and here the ­stereotype contributes to the genocidal continuum: the Africans will always ­massacre each other – apart from the European escape from Rwanda is an indictment of their spectatorial position. Next, the French sergeant allows Deogratias to leave

102  Cultural trauma

the Turquoise Zone (a safe zone monitored by the French) and return to the place where the Tutsis were being massacred. The French man sends Deogratias off with the words: ‘well, if he wants to get butchered by the others, it’s his business’ (72). The French in Rwanda, from the military to the Church, are indicted for their negligence and indifference that facilitated the massacre. They transform into implicated spectators through their inaction and active escapism. Deogratias’ own role in the massacre of the Tutsis is enunciated explicitly in some sections, implicitly in others and complicated in yet others. When Benina and Apollinaria, hungry and tired, turn up in the presence of the Hutus, we are shown Deogratias holding a large knife (74). From his fragmented narration, it appears that he was culpable for their mother Venetia’s torture and death (74). Benina and Apollinaria ask him: ‘What have they done to her [Venetia]? What have you done to Mom?’ (74, emphasis added). Laurike Veld is correct in arguing that the text ‘reposition[s] Deogratias more firmly as a perpetrator who is part of the genocidal mechanism, thereby further complicating the reader’s sympathies for the protagonist’ (157). But Stassen’s text does not make it easy for us to sympathize with Deogratias. We are shown how Julius and the other Hutu militia not only taunt Deogratias but also threaten him for his Tutsi sympathies: ‘We’ll have to kill you!’ says Julius at one point (72). That is, Deogratias is not portrayed as a willing participant in the massacres nor as an implicated spectator. In his drunken narrative to Brother Philip, Deogratias says: ‘I had to kill them . . . They knew what the dogs would do . . . Venetia, Benina, Apollinaria . . . and all the others before them. We had done good work. Our roadblock was here, in front of the hotel’ (70). On the next page, when Augustine confronts him, Deogratias says: ‘They forced me to, don’t you see?’ (71). In all this, Deogratias is positioned as an unwilling perpetrator who was forced into killing his Tutsi friends.4 Whether Deogratias is a victim turned active perpetrator is a moot point, but his moral complicity in whatever happened vis á vis Venetia, Benina and Apollinaria is on par with that of the French. Complicity of the moral kind here proceeds from (i) an awareness of what was going on and (ii) a refusal to act on one’s moral opposition, as a human, that rejects murder. At the barrier where the Hutus are guarding the border to massacre any Tutsi trying to escape, Benina and Apollinaria totter up to Julius and his gang. Recalling the events (in the presence of Brother Philip), Deogratias says: They were exhausted . . . They had spent weeks in the latrines . . . They wanted to surrender . . . They wanted to die . . . I loved them. (74) Benina and Apollinaria walk up supporting each other and plead: ‘Please . . . give us something to eat’ before they notice that Deogratias is among the Hutus. Julius, on seeing them, has already declared ‘Hey! Here come the big whore’s two little whores!’ (74). From here onwards the events and Deogratias’ role as either active perpetrator or implicated spectator become blurred in his narrative. We are shown

Cultural trauma  103

Venetia’s mutilated body and Julius’ dehumanizing speech about how Deogratias was involved with what happened, Brother Philip’s horrified exclamation before the narrative cuts to the present-day with Deogratias saying, ‘I came back and the dogs were there’. Accompanying this text are two panels showing dogs chewing on Benina and Apollinaria’s corpses (75). Deogratias’ complicity, if any, occurs between these panels, since we are not shown Deogratias acting as a perpetrator although we do see him clutching a massive knife. Then, his claim ‘they wanted to die’, referring to the girls, is a bizarre one, given that we are then shown the girls pleading for food and approaching Deogratias for aid. Just as his active role in the massacre of the women remains unclear and unmapped, this statement on behalf of the girls is also open to question. His admission of complicity is issued under the influence of alcohol, and Stassen has repeatedly portrayed him as delusional and traumatized as a result of the events of 1994. This suggests that Deogratias’ narrative is either an instance of the dis-narrated (the narration of things that did not happen) or the non-narrated (where things have actually occurred), and Deogratias has actively engaged in killing the women ‘and others’ as he reports of his ‘good work’. In Freedom Hospital, Sulaiman makes it clear that it is not just the Syrian President who is responsible for the devastation – the various militia who supposedly seek to defend the civilians are also, through their actions, perpetrators. Sulaiman first draws common ground between the Syrian army and the various militant outfits – they all use the same kind of foreign (Russian) weaponry, and they all end up killing or maiming civilians. At one point, the militia leader Abu Taysir uses the hospital as a space to launch his attacks against the Syrian army, quickly eliciting a massive reprisal strike by the latter. The army bombs the hospital, killing many. Yasmin, furious, turns on Abu Taysir, describing him as a ‘participant’ in the war and says: ‘You gave the army a pretext to bomb the town, you led them to believe there were rebels in the hospital . . . If you can’t protect the town, try to avoid destroying it at least’ (161–3). Rather than simply point to the dictator as the sole perpetrator of massacres and suffering, Sulaiman shows how those opposing the regime are also equally responsible for what happens. While not strictly complicit, their obsession with their ‘cause’ (Abu Taysir, defending his actions to Yasmin says he tried ‘peaceful opposition’ for a ‘long time’, but failed, 162) and their in-fighting produces as much hardship for the civilians as the regime’s tyranny. An awareness of the events and the potential threat of genocide or violence but which does not move the bystanders and the larger society to act or intervene makes the latter complicit. The moral culpability of an entire social order is at the heart of the HR graphic novels’ attribution of responsibility for atrocity and rights violations. Produced after the excesses of the Holocaust, and [a]ccording to the standards of post-Holocaust morality, one became normatively required to make an effort to intervene against any holocaust, regardless of personal consequences and cost. For as a crime against humanity, a “holocaust” is taken to be a threat to the continuing existence of humanity

104  Cultural trauma

itself. It is impossible, in this sense, to imagine a sacrifice that would be too great when humanity itself is at stake. (Alexander Trauma: A Social Theory 77) In terms of an attribution of responsibility, Stassen clearly assigns moral culpability to Deogratias and the Europeans who fled Rwanda, leaving it to its fate. The moral culpability of the (European) implicated spectator is documented in other texts as well. In Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo, the French minister who promises to help Ervin and his family evacuate Sarajevo, leaves without them (127). While the international community makes valiant efforts to help Ervin, he observes that there are others, ‘far worse off   ’ in Sarajevo who need to be evacuated as well (94). In Safe Area Goražde Sacco writes on the very second page: The two other eastern enclaves, Srebrenica and Zepa, also designated safe areas, had been abandoned by the U.N. in the summer. The victorious Serbs entered Srebrenica and Zepa, and, in the aftermath, horrible stories had emerged. . . . When British and Ukrainian U.N. peacekeepers pulled out of Gorazde shortly thereafter, Gorzdans thought they, too, had been abandoned. (Sacco 2) What Sacco draws attention to here is a history of UN abandonment and abdication of responsibility. Sacco makes it more poignant in the two panels that show us this abdication – the departure of the last guarantee of safety for the besieged people is watched by children. Now, the child is often the ‘ideal victim’ (Nils Christie’s term, 1986) in discourses of violence and disaster (Nayar ‘The Child Victim’). Making children the witnesses to the European abandonment of the distressed ensures that Sacco’s critique comes home in no uncertain ways because these witnesses are potentially the first victims of the horrors that would ensue once the safety net is off. And, expectedly, on page 30, we are shown a five-year-old boy on crutches: he had been shot by a sniper. Sacco identifies the rhetoric of difference and ethnic hatred by leaders like Milosevic, Karadzic and others as causing frictions between historically united neighbourhoods and thus putting in place the ‘genocide continuum’ (36, 38). The first signs of the genocide continuum is the erosion of the social fabric of the region. Dr Alija Begovic reports to Sacco how his neighbour informs him that ‘we can’t live together, the only solution is to separate the peoples’ (36). Then one of the guys told me exactly who had burned down my house. It was our neighbors. . . . We used to play football together. We used to go out at night, and if we didn’t go out, we used to spend the evenings together on our street. (87)

Cultural trauma  105

And in another case: When the Serbs got as close as 50 meters, I recognized my neighbors. . . . One of them had spent a lot of time with my youngest son, a lot of time at my house . . . doing homework with my son . . . (79) Later, Sacco’s commentary unequivocally indicts the UN and the USA: In early May the U.N. extended safe area status to other Bosnian enclaves, including Gorazde. But the U.N. had to work out what the concept meant. . . . [T]he safe areas implicitly formalized Serb gains and the concentration of Muslims into what President Clinton warned would become “shooting galleries.” (which didn’t stop the U.S. from supporting the plan.) (148) The US Secretary of Defense declares: ‘We will not enter the war to stop that [the fall of Goražde] from happening’, and Bill Clinton simply asks the warring forces to ‘negotiate a peace and get it over with’ (164). The UN peacekeeping forces were not exactly neutral and Michael Rose, the UN Commander in Bosnia, writes Sacco, ‘continually downplayed the Serb offensive’ (165). This contradicted, Sacco notes, the report from Rose’s own observers who termed the situation ‘grave’ (165). A few pages later, Rose would admit that Goražde was on ‘the brink of a humanitarian disaster’ (179). Edin recalls his hopes from the time: Our only hope was the support of the world. We’d expected that for months and years. We thought they would stop it . . . But they didn’t do anything. (172) The Bosnian President would write to the UN saying the credibility of the UN was lost because they refused to ensure Goražde’s safety (180). Goražde, writes Sacco, had ‘become the symbol . . . of the impotence of the international community’ (184). Later, the British soldiers ‘left Goražde and hid themselves in the deep forest . . . people realized we didn’t have any protection from them’ (204). Sacco’s text fits right into the regimes of memory that document atrocity. Using interviews with survivors as his core text and images of war-torn Goražde, Sacco identifies victims and perpetrators. Sacco documents the memories in interesting and intersecting ways. First, the memories are from survivors like Edin. Then, there are the speeches of leaders and politicians. Third, he gives the accounts of war which, one assumes, Sacco has gleaned from multiple sources. In this process, in order to attribute distributed responsibility, Sacco employs an interesting strategy. Speech is held accountable in Sacco’s text. In sharp contrast to the ‘action’ panels which show war, suffering, injuries, torture and destruction, the statesmen and leaders – Clinton, Milosevic, Karadzic – are drawn only in one pose: talking.

106  Cultural trauma

I propose that one can read Sacco’s portrait of ‘talking heads’, as it were, as first, an indictment of the leaders who generated the discourse of ethnic hatred. Showing the leaders speaking of racial and ethnic differences in the community, then, implies rumour-mongering and discursive dehumanization of Others that commentators see as constitutive of a genocide continuum. Sacco then apportions blame for the events that follow, to hate speech and the verbalization of hatred. Speech-acts are here instrumental in forming the contexts for ethnic cleansing. But the second, and less obvious, signifiers are the ‘talking heads’ of Bill Clinton and UN officers. Sacco, I propose, attributes a considerable amount of responsibility for the disaster in Goražde to the fact that these world leaders either trivialized whatever happened (as Rose did, claiming the figures of the injured in Goražde were ‘inflated’, 187) or only talked about intervention. That is, Sacco’s text questions the wisdom – and of course ethics – of powerful global leaders and officers expending verbiage in the place of active intervention. They are, in Sacco’s representation, reduced to talking heads because that is all they do. Sacco, I suggest, wishes us to see how rhetoric unaccompanied by material intervention is ethically empty and produces the disaster that is Goražde. The world leaders are only ‘talking heads’, and no more – and hence responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe. In Sulaiman’s Freedom Hospital, as the Syrian regime launches the army against its own citizens and massacres and/or arrests many of them, some of the people running the hospital wonder at foreign interventions. One says: ‘If they dared, NATO would make Syria a no-fly zone’. And another laughs while responding: ‘Ha HAAA, NATO promises  .  .  . I hope I’m proved wrong. But I  don’t think they’re going to intervene’ (99–100). Later, with civilian areas bombed, a mother cries out: ‘Why, my daughter was only six years old . . . where is the Arab League? Where is the UN? Where are the Arabs and the Muslims?’, thus offering an inventory of communities, organizations and peoples to whom could be attributed the responsibility, through negligence and silence, of the massacres in Syria (153). Edin, the Goražde survivors and the team running the ‘freedom hospital’ are the ‘carriers’ of cultural memory, but the cultural memory regime includes the oral narratives and speeches of the international community as well. In some texts, older paradigms of atrocity memory are invoked. For instance, in Fax from Sarajevo, one set of people making efforts to help Ervin get out of Sarajevo are the Jews in England. In a telephonic conversation with Joe [Kubert] we see the following: ‘We Jews here in England know that Sarajevo is very much like Germany . . . in the 1930s’ (129). Evoking a parallel with Nazi Germany and the persecution of the Jews ensures that we understand a globalization of not just the Holocaust memory but also see continuities in the making of disasters. The Holocaust then serves as a collective procedural memory in this text where a pre-existing cultural script and symbolism serves as a shorthand for the world’s worst humanitarian crises, universalizing them through a readily available grammar. Yet, what is more important to observe is that Stassen, Kubert and Sacco all point to global indifference and implicated spectatorhood as causal factors in localized disasters such as genocide.

Cultural trauma  107

The materials of memory We have already examined briefly the violent game played by Riad and his cousins, which ends with the Jew soldier-figurine surrendering and yet having his head cut off. There is more to the episode though. The toys are material embodiments, an apparatus, of collective memory. But they are also embodiments of a concept that enables violations of rights (both individual and collective) for, as Karen Barad argues: concepts are materially embodied in the apparatus. In particular, Bohr insists that only concepts defined by their specific embodiment as part of the material arrangement-which includes instrumentation (e.g., photographic plates, pointers, or digital readout devices) that marks definite values of the specifically defined proper ties and can be read by a human observer  – are meaningful. (143) But this is not mere embodiment, for the apparatuses constitute Riad as Jew and the cousins as ‘true’ Arabs for: it is not merely the case that human concepts are embodied in apparatuses, but rather that apparatuses are discursive practices, where the latter are understood as specific material reconfigurings through which “objects” and “subjects” are produced.  .  .  .  [A]pparatuses are the material conditions of possibility and impossibility of mattering; they enact what matters and what is excluded from mattering. (Barad 148) Riad’s ‘games’ with his cousins that involve toys show him that, having been constructed and stereotyped as a thieving Jew or an illegal occupier of land/home, he has to be beheaded – effectively he must lose the mock battle with his cousins. They are no longer cousins at play, they are reconfigured metonymically as villainous ‘Jews’ and ‘victim’ Arabs. In Bhimayana, the apparatuses that institutionalize caste hierarchies are the water pump from which the young Ambedkar cannot drink water because he is an ‘untouchable’ (20–1); the cart that refuses to transport the children (35–7); houses (67–9) and public tanks (86), all of which serve, in the Vyam-Anand representational strategy, as embodiments of discriminating concepts. These apparatuses constitute caste hierarchies, assign identities and determine the nature of social relations. The apparatuses themselves, then, are discursive practices because they construct subjects – in this case, the ‘untouchable’ subject. In both literal and ­metaphoric senses, the bodies that do not matter are constructed as such through the material-discursive apparatuses when the apparatuses (water pump, cart, house)

108  Cultural trauma

become ‘untouchable’ matter, matter to which the ‘lower’ castes have no access or rights. Apparatuses, in the previous examples, are constitutive of cultural trauma when, through their intra-actions and in the form of assemblages with humans, they produce the victimhood of victims, as well as invoke the collective memory of historical tensions (Arab-Israel) and injustice (caste). Thus, another ‘function’ of these assemblages of human and non-living matter is to serve as the medium of memory. Memory theorists have proposed that for the transmission of cultural trauma, some forms of media are essential. Media, in this sense, are also material artefacts and can include symbols, architecture, films, written documents, photographs and even commemorative rituals such as ‘two minutes of silence’ (Erll 24). In this section I turn to materiality and its role in cultural trauma and collective memory. By ‘materiality’, as we shall see, I have in mind both the material objects and things that are part of the storyworld in HR texts but also, in some cases a certain conscious materiality of the texts themselves. Material objects as carriers of individual and collective memory are of various kinds in HR graphic texts: photographs, documents, archival material and of course ‘things’. These do not necessarily occur in their ‘true’ form, as reprints of photographs, in all texts. Photographs, letters and drawings are often ‘edited artistically, or mediatized by being, for instance, redrawn by the hand of the artist’ (Egger 61). Thus, as Egger notes about Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer, two kinds of visual archives can enter the graphic text: the photograph itself and the drawing, with ‘both stag[ing] different kinds of materiality’ (69). My argument is that the merging of these forms of materiality is central to the construction of the cultural memory of trauma. This Side, That Side offers both material symbolism and material-as-symbolism. Elsewhere, I have noted that the text is printed on yellowish-tinted paper made to resemble parchment and old archival records (Nayar, The Indian Graphic Novel). The medium of the book itself arrests us in the past through a certain “haptic visuality” that determines how we read the stories; the term comes from Katalin Orbán’s (“Trauma and Visuality”) work on graphic novelist Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. Orbán writes of Spiegelman’s strategy: [The] stickerlike layers of foil are actually distinct to the touch. Their separation in color and glossiness invites touch, and they confirm the emphasis on materiality and texture in a tactile rather than conceptual way. On the front and back cover too, the glossy black towers, the classic cartoon characters falling from the sky, and the lettering of the title are all superimposed on the matte black background. (75) Cumulatively ‘this strategy of tactile visuality, the touchable image’ (75) contributes to a proximate sense of the work. The yellowed pages of This Side, That Side immediately recall an old book. Given that the text is a series of stories on the

Cultural trauma  109

subcontinent’s two major twentieth-century Partitions, the striking materiality of the pages underscores the book’s history. In other words, we have to see the text’s “pastness”, its retrieval from an archive, not just as a collection of archival details. The haptic visuality is thus a metatextual strategy that informs a protocol of reading whatever is inside. All that follows is an extended amplification of this strategy, calculated to highlight the pastness of events. Superimposed and fragmented maps from an earlier era inform many of the texts (Ghosh 44, 72). Stamps, postcards and official letters figure in others. The endpapers have stamps of entry and exit from various airports (Karachi, New Delhi, Calcutta); in some stories, like ‘I Too Have Seen Lahore’, the text and image bleed into the borders, like history barely restrained by the material extent of the book. This is a clear ‘manipulation of panel transitions’ (in Harriet Earle’s words) that ‘mimic a traumatic chronology’ (49). Maria Litwa’s ‘Welcome to Geneva Camp’ is made up of photographs embedded in black pages, with the blackness thick and wide on most. There are no panels or gutters, just a black page in which these images and texts are embedded. Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal’s ‘The Taboo’ has no borders or panels and events unfold in the shapeless, inky cloud that constitutes some sort of ‘world’. In each of these tales the absence of panels and the coterminous nature of the image with the material of the page ensures that we are constantly uncomfortable with the viewing position that they suggest. When a historical event is thus represented, as in This Side, That Side, it escapes its temporal and spatial ‘box’ and comes to occupy the entire field of perceptions. The event is no longer restrained and the reader can no longer follow a narrative chronology. Certain experiences, writes Erin McGlothlin (“No Time Like the Present”) remain just ‘outside the established frame into the surrounding narrative, refusing to stay integrated into a fully comprehended and comprehensible past’ (191). This summarizes This Side, That Side: there is no clear route into a comprehension of the past. The denial of frames means that the reader can find no obvious position from which to view the historical event. Events in history, in the volume’s many stories with images and texts bleeding onto page borders, are only viewed in terms of how much space they occupy in our visual – and therefore perceptual – field. When they occupy the entire visual-perceptual field, as in bleeding pages and images, this symbolizes the impossibility of limiting our view of events, of containing the past, which takes up all available space. If, as classic trauma theory proposes, trauma has ‘an endless impact on life’ (Caruth 7), then the stories in This Side, That Side, by representing memories of events bleeding out of frames and onto the pages, suggest the illimitable and continuing impact of those events, even if they now exist only in memory. Such a metatextual move in This Side, That Side thus serves as a larger comment on the viewing of the past itself: do we wish to limit it, contain it within panels, frames and borders? Or is it that events situated around border disputes and changes such as the two Partitions can only be delivered to us metatextually through a page format that conveys the absence of borders? In This Side, That Side, with its combined strategy of bleeds, haptic visuality and borderless pages,

110  Cultural trauma

we consume unlimited and illimitable history, just as the visual ellipses and inky blackness  – which really impinges on the material experience of the page and hence the story – spread across the image suggests a history that is out of sight, buried in impenetrable darkness. This is a key mode of disrupting both the telling of history and the consumption of history. It is the very material arrangement of the historical event in the form of text, images and icons that constitutes the project of consuming history. The arrangement complicates ‘closure’, the key process by which readers fill in the gaps between panels, and come to an understanding of the whole through an observation of the parts (McCloud 53). It becomes impossible to distinguish where the various parts end, given their shared boundaries with other parts: photographs merge with the present; maps cut across peoples’ faces; bodies occupy maps; letters and documents merge with physiognomies. The material telling of events without borders, clear frames or ‘boxes’ forces the reader to address the ‘problem’ of closure. Further, such a strategy alerts the reader to the impossibility of assigning any definite and fixed meaning to historical events such as the Partitions, given their continued existence in people’s lives, the remainders and reminders of them in the form of letters or photographs and the corporeal manifestations of historical tragedy in the form of refugees. We understand when events bleed constantly into the present that there is no single perspective on the past. Neither is the past entirely past, given the Partitions’ frequent incursion into the lives of the protagonists. This Side, That Side disrupts the authority of the historical narrative by offering us troubled and subjective histories, invisible histories and ellipses, and complicated modes of emplotment and attention to the materiality of telling. The volume aligns personal stories with official narratives, and very often the historical account is animated through the stories of individuals like Noor Miyan or the refugees of Cooper’s Camp. Orijit Sen’s work in the last pages of This Side, That Side is particularly innovative. Titled ‘Making Faces’, Sen’s narrative consists of papers cut horizontally into three strips. The strips placed flat make up the photograph of a face, but each strip can be lifted up to find below an equivalent strip of paper with an equivalent physiognomic feature. Reminiscent of flap-books for children, this strategy does something spectacular. Every feature on the strip of paper is fungible with a similar feature but from a different face, ethnicity and race lurking underneath. Thus, each strip-cum-physiognomic feature might be replaced by another equivalent but ethnically and culturally different strip-cum-physiognomic feature. We can then proceed by replacing the nose and the mouth/chin area as well, one after another, so that eventually the face we started with has morphed into an entirely new face. The pages/strips carry a photograph on both sides, so that these pages can be flipped either way to read from one or the other, with each lifting of strip/facial feature revealing another. The faces are clearly of ethnically different people, but the very act of “reading” forces us to see a fungibility or replaceable physiognomic feature. This strategy universalizes faces by showing them as interchangeable. In order to universalize them, the reader has to lift the strips of paper, and thus

Cultural trauma  111

replace the features of a Mongolian face with a more Pathan one, for instance. Sen’s strategy is to direct us to understand that we have always, as humans and through politics, ‘framed’ ways of seeing ‘other’ faces. It is time, perhaps, to reconsider how frames are themselves framed, and how limiting, oppressive and restricting these might be in our efforts to ‘see’ other faces. The face occupies the entire page. This Side, That Side suggests that we position another’s face within our cultural prejudices or cultural frames (as in cultural practices of perception and understanding, as distinct from the ‘frames’ of the comics medium). But remove these cultural frames, and one face is interchangeable with another. A cap or a beard is easily substituted with a turban and/or a clean-shaven chin, but in Sen’s text, with its shifting, morphing physiognomies, the cultural frames that read “bearded man” as ‘Muslim’ fall away because they cannot define the face any longer. In the absence of cultural frames, or rather, cultural frames that are untenable with constantly shifting physiognomies and identifiers (beards, skullcaps, moustaches, turbans), we are forced to see one human face as similar to another. This Side, That Side represents a major shift in the way we see subcontinental history and the representability of this history. One of the few texts that actively encourages us to question how we read the Partitions, it tells us that the form of history-writing defines that history for us. Processes of intruding the image into the verbal text, vivifying the chronicle (either in images or text) into narrative through the use of mutually supplemental image or text, erasing the panels and frames that help the reader move sequentially in time and in space, inserting visual ellipses in the images that generate a narrative darkness within the story, and underlining the haptic visuality of the texts themselves – all these are features of the medium that enable This Side, That Side to complicate how we read the traumatic history of the Partitions. There are two further points to be made about ‘Making Faces’. Sen’s work forces us to look at and into the image, an image we haptically manoeuvre. It works as an assemblage where the combination of human agency and the materiality of the paper (and pages) determines (a) what we create (b) what we see. The paper has its own agential property of course, because given the structure of the book, the papers/faces that make up a page swing, fan out, unless one holds them down. It is a challenge to read because one cannot simply turn a segment of the paper – its material arrangement forces us to hold the papers in a specific way. This signals, I suggest, a metanarrative comment on the how of history: how do we cite/ sight, capture/release the memories of traumatic history? Which faces merge and separate out? Then, in this process, we realize we are composing an image, a human face. To image a dignified face, to do justice to the human form is, Sharon Sliwinski argues, integral to Human Rights. Examining the photographs of Frederick Douglass, Sliwinski argues that negative images, say, of non-European peoples in colonial photography, convey the fact that ‘human beings have been denied the right to a dignified image’ (2018: 31). She writes: ‘what we fight for when we fight for human rights is, in part, the right to a dignified image’ (30). How we compose, circulate and contest the old, young, bearded, bespectacled man (these

112  Cultural trauma

are some of the options in the Sen ‘text’) determines and is determined by the social imaginary around the human, or rather these humans. Human dignity, writes Sliwinski, ‘resides at the porous border between the body and the social imaginary. Dignity is both an embodied sensibility and our point of access to the public realm’ (37). It is precisely this border and interface between body and public realm that Sen’s text, via its very materiality, forces us to rethink: do we accord the Muslim or the immigrant the right to a dignified image when we turn and rearrange the papers/faces? Both Ho Che Anderson’s King (the biography of Martin Luther King Jr) and Bhimayana (based on Ambedkar’s ‘autobiographical notes’) use extensive archival footage and documentation from historical materials such as speeches, diaries and accounts. The footage is the documentary component of the narrative, which slowly folds into, or complements the aesthetic component. Michael Chaney has proposed that artifice and the artifact in King merge to produce a new ‘artifactuality’ (180–1). This merging of artifice and artifact is in fact the flowing of the documentary into the aesthetic to make a larger comment on the modes of writing history. Artifactuality is also a form of cultural memory being organized into and experienced materially as an archive. In Ho Che Anderson’s King, the graphic biography of Martin Luther King Jr, we see photographs and speeches reprinted. Extracts from newspaper reports and Ambedkar’s speeches and writings figure prominently in Bhimayana. In the latter, Natarajan and Anand deploy a strategy of multiple temporalities using two different “texts.” One is a newspaper report in Young India (dated 12 Dec. 1929, and edited by M. K. Gandhi) about an untouchable family denied treatment in a hospital. The second set of texts is a newspaper report from the Times News Network (dated 2 Nov. 2007) about two Dalit women thrown out of a government (state-run) hospital. Anderson uses photographic footage of King’s speeches, news coverage of riots, campaigns and debates (44, 47, 137). These are internal paratexts because, like extratextual elements (statistics, tables or figures), they designate additional information. These paratexts force us to move across time zones and history so that we see how, for instance, Ambedkar’s reporting of the Dalit story is the anterior moment to our reading of a similar story nearly a century later. The paratexts represent the documentary and documented history of oppression, injustice and social inequalities in the USA and India. The documentary, I suggest, represents the sign of the state and state policy – whether it is about racism or casteism. The documentary, in other words, becomes the representative of the historical record of social conditions. It comments on the main text – the story being told, of King’s life and of Ambedkar’s life  – and qualifies it. The aesthetic, which is my equivalent of Chaney’s ‘artifice’, is the biographies of the men that need to be read alongside and into the documentary history of their respective countries. If the aesthetic is the dramatization of an individual life, the documentary is the presentation of a sociocultural condition. The documentary-aesthetic alliance is a metaleptic one, forcing us to move between and across narrative and temporal levels: the historical narrative

Cultural trauma  113

(documentary) and the biographical narrative (the story of King and Ambedkar, and the autobiographical observations/speeches from King and Ambedkar). Writing about Maus, Michael Schuldiner claims that metalepsis is always “paradoxical”: Of course, one can always make a kind of “sense” out of the pairing of even the most disparate images, but certain conventions within certain media allow explanations for some pairing to come more readily to the mind of the reader. (110–11) However, metalepsis is paradoxical in a different form here in the graphic auto/ biography. While reading King’s or Ambedkar’s story we recognize that we are in fact reading stories from multiple time zones and contexts. The paradox here is that on the one hand the auto/biography draws us into the ‘lives of great men’, but on the other firmly forces us to recognize a history of the conditions that emplotted their lives. A temporal or contextual paradox is engineered by the metalepsis. The metaleptic shift we as readers make between the documentary and the aesthetic is to frame the King or Ambedkar story in terms of a larger context or time frame. That is, even as we read the individual story, we are forced to ‘see’ it in the context of lynching, racism and slavery that predate King’s life, and caste in pre-Independence India that predates Ambedkar and continues in insidious and not so insidious ways into the twenty-first century, after Ambedkar. Individual story and context: each frames the other, in every frame of the graphic auto/biography. It can be argued that because of these temporal shifts forced upon us due to the intrusion, so to speak, of the internal paratexts, we encounter a break in temporal continuity – which, for memory theorist Astrid Erll, is a feature of the material dimension of memory (24). That is, we begin to experience materially, the different orders of time – historical time, personal time (of King or Ambedkar) and our time  – within the same material page.5 In terms of artifactuality, Bhimayana relies on redrawing the archival material, drawing attention to the fact that an artistic hand has intervened and mediated between the archive and the present. On the penultimate page of the Ambedkar story we see a book, hand-drawn as usual. The book is open and is placed in such a way that its pages are spread across the two pages of the book that we hold in our hand, so that the drawn book is a miniaturized but identically organized version of Bhimayana. One has to read this book, drawn across two pages, as a result. This drawn book is the Constitution of India, and shows us the first lines, beginning ‘We the people of India’, and then the injunction against discrimination (90–1). This artifactuality emphasizes not just the significance of the Constitution but its appropriation: it has been drawn for us to indicate an engagement with it. That is, this hand-drawn book of the Constitution is neither just a legal document nor an artifice, it demands an engagement with it, an engagement that is symbolized in the act of drawing. Further, this hand-drawn book spread across two pages is surrounded by linked blue figures that approximate

114  Cultural trauma

to a human chain; it appears to be people holding hands. This symbol of the human chain is also spread across two pages and the drawn book of the Constitution is in the middle of this chain as well. In terms of sheer visual effect it looks as though the Constitution is being held up by the human chain or the Constitution is what unites all people. Either interpretation acknowledges the literal and metaphoric centrality of the Constitution to the people of India. When we hold Bhimayana in our hands and read it, it feels as though we are also, simultaneously, holding aloft the Constitution and the human chain. A Gardener in the Wasteland opens with a facsimile reproduction of the cover page of Jotiba Phule’s Gulamgiri, so that it constitutes the first page of Gardener, on the obverse of which is the colophon page. This is a neat narrative and structural device. While the book jacket gives us A Gardener in the Wasteland, the first page we see inside is Gulamgiri’s 1873 cover page. What this achieves is at once a distancing into the past but also a palimpsest; we are made aware that Gardener is a reworking, a writing over, a writing into, of the older text, Gulamgiri. This alerts us, yet again, to the mediated nature of the text of Gardener (it reworks Gulamgiri), and thus any questions about its fidelity to the past are evaded. Gardener makes no claims about historical accuracy by foregrounding its reliance on an earlier text, but it makes a larger theoretical-narrative claim: all history is mediated, and their book is no different. Gardener functions as a material reworking of a predecessor text, which also serves as a metanarrative device wherein the conditions of slavery during Phule’s time have continued into the present-day as well (instances of caste- and religionbased discrimination and violence are cited in Gardener). Cultural trauma is not, in other words, confined to the past (embodied in Gulamgiri) but has affected and is repeated in the present. Works such as Bhimayana, This Side, That Side, King and Gardener, then, in their artifactual use of redrawn materials from the past deal with the materials of memory, but more importantly with modes of recuperating this memory for present-day campaigns for Human Rights and against discrimination and oppression. Other material artefacts that embody cultural trauma and collective memory include photographs. In many cases these serve, as argued elsewhere, as ‘melancholy objects’, reminders of death and surviving (Margaret Gibson’s concept elaborated in Nayar, Human Rights and Literature). In other cases, family photographs or photographs of parents when they were younger work slightly differently. Take, for instance, Bui’s The Best We Could Do. About halfway through the narrative we are given the story of her parents and their lives in Vietnam. Bui tells us: ‘I have two photographs from the Christmas party where my parents “met,” so to speak’ (193). In the first panel that references the photographs and accompanied by the quoted text, Bui’s hands are drawn, a photograph in each hand. One can only make out vague shapes of the people in the photograph itself. One panel later, Bui ‘enlarges’ and zooms in on the photographs, which we now see, capture her mother and her father. But these are not reprints of the photographs: Bui draws the photographs and their contents. One of them is even drawn with a corner torn off, implying an old picture. They are both scenes of happiness and pleasure: courtship, romance

Cultural trauma  115

and youth are all encoded in the images that Bui draws from the original photograph. The happy photographs appear in Bui’s narrative after we have already seen her parents’ troubled marriage, her parents’ childhood, the killings in Cambodia in the battle for independence, among others. Yet these two photographs do not communicate any of the trauma from their and their country’s past. Examining such family pictures from the Holocaust era, Marianne Hirsch writes: It is precisely the dis-placement of the bodies depicted in the pictures of horror from their domestic settings, and their disfiguration, that brings home (as it were) the enormity of Holocaust destruction. It is precisely the utter conventionality and generality of the domestic family picture that makes it impossible for us to comprehend how the person in the picture was, or could have been, exterminated. In both cases, the viewer fills in what the picture leaves. (7) Bui is also embodying what Hirsch would term ‘post-memory’: that of the child of the survivor whose life is dominated by memories of what preceded his/her birth. . . . It is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. . . . Photography is precisely the medium connecting memory and post-memory. (8) Bui includes in her work photographs of her family when they arrived as ‘boat people’ (267). The captions to the photographs record name, date of birth, date of arrival and the boat number, thus identifying them with the ‘necessary’ details. They stare out of the photographs at us. The close-up shots of the individual refugees humanize them for, as Bleiker et al. note: Such close-up portraits are the type of images most likely to evoke compassion in viewers. Images of groups, by contrast, tended to create emotional distance between viewers and the subjects being depicted. (399) The captions and the data on these photographs acquire a different dimension in Kate Evans. Evans is at the site when the French police come to the camp. They arrive at the door of a single mother and her twins. She pleads with the police not to photograph her children (127). The police slap her and then photograph all of them. Evans draws the photographs that police took, complete with the captions and data they would have entered on these pictures (128–9). Evans is recreating as a form of collective procedural memory the processes through which refugees are documented, except that she draws weeping, traumatized faces in each ‘photograph’. That is, there are no photographs for Evans to work with: she imagines this is how

116  Cultural trauma

they would have been photographed. There is one additional feature of this cultural script of trauma: in three of her ‘drawn’ pictures, Evans draws the refugee’s head/face seized and immobilized by the gloved and clearly strong hands of the police. Thus, the ‘pictures’ become an archive of the refugees but they also become, whether accurate or not, mimetic approximations of how the photographs may have been taken. There is, as we know, the official documentation (including images) of refugees (see studies by Bleiker et al., Briggs, among others). Evans here nods towards this official archive and memory of the state’s perception of the mother and her twins. Dehumanizing them, treating them as terrorists or unwanted people, these archives are the invisible subtext to what Evans sets out to do with her drawings. Personalizing it without seeking authenticity  – hence ‘mimetic approximations’ (my ­ adaptation of Andreas Huyssen’s term, “Of Mimesis and Men”) – Evans imagines the trauma of being photographed and commits her imagination to ­ public memory in her book. This serves, I suggest, as a form of counter-memory to the dehumanizing official memory of the police treatment of the woman and her family. In Mary Tomsic’s analysis of the visual representation of refugees arriving in ­Australia, she sees Instagram campaigns as working ‘in stark opposition to this [official] dominant visual landscape’ (75), which is precisely what Evans with her hand-drawn ­‘photograph’ does. Such photographs and drawings in Bui and Evans, then, identify the refugee family as a set of individuals, not a threatening group. They are instrumental in personalizing and humanizing the outcomes of a traumatic historical process and hence are ingredients not only of Bui’s personal or familial history but of a national and collective memory as well. There is one significant point that Evans makes when across two pages she draws human-shaped fabric flapping away from the clothes-line, scattering on the ground and floating away (166–7). The accompanying text says: 129 lone children disappeared from the camp during the evictions. No-one will ever know what happened to them all. (166) Evans, like Kugler, has documented those refugees who have left their extended families behind or lost their families on the journey. Here she speaks of those children who have no ‘claimants’, no attached families. When she draws the empty clothes she is implying escape or loss of the bodies that ought to be in the clothes. Her text speaks of the impossibility of mourning the children because they are ‘lone’. The children have been erased from memory and records. When she conjoins this ‘disappearance’ and absence with ‘eviction’ we understand that this loss, or perhaps death, is not accidental (at sea, when coming over as refugee: Aylan Kurdi would be an example). Maurizio Albahari asks: Can there be public mourning, once migrant deaths and needless suffering are understood as not accidental? Can there be mourning when  .  .  .

Cultural trauma  117

responsibilities [of these deaths] . . . are located not at sea, or with smugglers’ unscrupulousness, but at the heart of liberal democracy? (279) Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese extend Albahari’s argument cast as interrogative: What forms might a public mourning take that seeks to bring the dead into view, not as hapless victims of circumstance, but as the targets of official policy, whose deaths are the outcome of a “business model” . . . that has been shaped as much by states as by smugglers? (87, emphasis in original) Albahari and Perera-Pugliese are referencing the impossible public mourning of those who are ‘disappeared’ by the state. Evans is signalling this same condition of impossible mourning by placing before us two salient facts: the children are ‘lone’ and they were disappeared by the state. They do not exist, there is no collective memory because there is no public mourning possible. She cannot draw their photographs in the ‘politics of non-visibility’ as Perera and Pugliese term it. While it is clear that the memories are personal and the trauma is also personal, it is not possible to not think of how the bodies were exterminated. That is, when looking at the photographs placed, in the book after the public history of Cambodia, Vietnam, Hiroshima, and their attendant suffering, we become aware of the fact that these faces and persons we see are the ones whose lives were caught up in the traumatic history of their nation. The family picture or the Christmas picture of blooming youth and cheery romances interrupt temporally and materially the larger traumatic history we have been consuming thus far. In other words, when we read these texts and their material artefacts of memory that constitute an assemblage with the physical book we hold in our hands, our (reading, subject) selves and the symbolic memories encoded within the book’s contents (itself sometimes in the form of other books or photographs), we enmesh personal and public history. One experiences the temporal break already noted previously in this process, and this is the materiality of traumatic memory. There is another dimension to the photographs, reprinted or redrawn, in some of these texts. Igort, one notes, places the photographs of Nikolay Ivanovich and Emilia Vasilievna close to the end of his Ukrainian narrative (160–1). Syeda Farhana places the photograph of Tara’s father at the beginning of the story, ‘Little Women’. In both cases, the photographs are of people who are dead, and therefore function as obituaries, with the story becoming a verbal accompaniment and elaboration. Now the obituary, argues Bridget Fowler, is a means of collective memory, an archive, positioning the dead in a regime of value. Fowler adds: ‘It simultaneously reflects on an individual’s concrete, indeed unpredictable life, while also revalorising a certain view of the past’ (11). The dead, committed to such a public expression of mourning, are not always public figures but ‘the obituarists occasionally

118  Cultural trauma

side authoritatively with a dissident ‘voice’, even against State power’ (12, emphasis in original). In other words, these anonymous dead, whose lives and deaths mattered only to their immediate loved ones, when placed in the storyworld, become ‘grievable lives’ in the public realm as well. When these are lives lost as a consequence of measures adopted by an authoritarian state as in Igort, then [t]hese collective memories of marginalised or publicly-denied experiences are of the type which surface in the demonstrations of the mothers of the disappeared, and which in the end create the raw materials for the obituarists of authoritarian power. (Fowler 40) In cases such as the Holodomor or the Partition, these obituary-esque photographs serve as reminders of loss, but also of systems and processes which, on the one hand ‘produced’ these/their deaths (as Achille Mbembe puts it) and on the other made these deaths into inconsequential ‘details’ (Igort’s work is full of numbers, of the dead). The work of Igort and the authors in This Side That Side, then, perform a recuperation of sorts, by seeking to position these deaths within their own narratives of cultural memory. Photographs also function as personal and familial history and are constitutive, as objects, of the subjectivity of the displaced in refugee texts. In Kugler’s work, refugee families carry images of the family, homes and materials they left behind in Syria. Rezan carries photographs of his place in Syria: Art supplies amid the rubble of my studio. . . . I used to have a lot of my artwork hanging on the walls. Then: This is what is left of the school where I used to give painting lessons. (43) In Evans’ Threads, Hoshyar shows his entire families, home and his cats to Evans, her husband and the other volunteers – all on his phone (57). In these cases the object – the cell phone – is not merely an object, but possesses affective agency in their assemblage with the displaced. Memory and its affective effects here is, then, not centred in the human being alone. Rather, ‘an affective, speaking human body is not radically different from the affective, signaling nonhumans with which it coexists, hosts, enjoys, serves, consumes, produces, and competes’ (Bennett 117). The affective agency of the refugee when s/he speaks to Evans is the product of an assemblage with the device (phone), story (oral) and the image. It is not, in other words, centred and restricted to any one of the item in the assemblage but emerges as an effect of the human-nonhuman assemblage.6 *

Cultural trauma  119

The identity of those denied rights, such as refugees and victim-communities, then, rests upon the memories that are collected and transmitted, where the autobiographical and personal contributes to and is framed by the cultural frames of the community’s modes of recall. The larger point then is: in many of the HR texts, affective stories involve the nonhuman elements in the form of objects – material, images, things – from former homes that are (i) integral to the collective memory of being politically and socially identified as a ‘refugee’ and (ii) constitutive of the subjectivity of the individual refugee. Since ‘home’ and ‘family’ are affective tropes in their stories and memories, the remnants of home and family embodied in these material objects are an assemblage with the humans, and it is not possible to segregate them as human memory/affect and non-human matter.

Notes 1 An interesting experiment in representations of cultural/collective memory in the context of trauma may be found in Brian Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad (2006). Based on a true incident, the tale describes how a pride of lions escaped from the ruins of the bombed Baghdad zoo during the war. The lions are puzzled by the huge machinery of war – from aircraft to tanks. A turtle they meet tells them of the human greed for oil, ‘black stuff under the earth . . . poison . . . when the walkers [his term for humans] fight, they send it spewing into the sky and spilling into the . . . into the sea’ (unpaginated). The lions and the turtle both have memories of human intervention into nature. The lions, starving and wandering through the city, are eventually shot down by American forces. Pride of Baghdad views the impact of war on animals, and poignantly demonstrates how, the creatures of the wild, tamed and domesticated into submission, lose their memories of freedom. 2 Cornelia Brink writes: The only pictures of dead concentration camp victims that are classified as icons are those that provide no hint of any specific time and place and “anonymize” human beings, depriving them of their individuality as much as possible and placing them within aesthetic pictorial traditions. (138) 3 Numerous recent studies, beginning with cult texts such as Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) and David Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1997), have explored the complicity of bystanders in the Holocaust. 4 Christopher Taylor writes based on his ethnographic work in Rwanda: ‘Not only were Tutsi and Hutu “traitors” being killed at the barriers; innocent Hutu were also being forced to become morally complicit in the genocide by becoming both “sacrificer” and “sacrifier” and shedding Tutsi blood’ (162). Stassen’s portrait of Deogratias at the roadblock and the insinuation of his complicity seems to resonate closely with Taylor’s account. 5 On the employment of multiple times – the rhetorical mode of Kairos – in Palestine, see Brister and Walzer (“Kairos and Comics”). For instance, Josh Blaylock in Operation Nemesis uses the simple strategy of inserting a textbox from one temporal setting – in this case, the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the murder of Talaat Paasha – in a panel that is itself set in the past. In one panel where the American ambassador is leaving Talaat Pasha’s house and Pasha is speaking (in a speech balloon) to the departing man,

120  Cultural trauma

the textbox as an inset is about the court’s address to a witness at the Tehlirian trial: ‘Dr Lespius, you’ve taken the oath’ (Blaylock unpaginated). 6 Jane Bennett offers an everyday example of the heterogenous nature of agency: The sentences of this book also emerged from the confederate agency of many striving macro- and microactants: from “my” memories, intentions, contentions, intestinal bacteria, eyeglasses, and blood sugar, as well as from the plastic computer keyboard, the bird song from the open window, or the air or particulates in the room, to name only a few of the participants. What is at work here on the page is an animalvegetable mineral-sonority cluster with a particular degree and duration of power. (23)

5 WITNESSING Spaces, response-ability, testimony

In Palestine, Joe Sacco is visiting a hospital. As he passes by the various injured Palestinians, camera in hand, he approaches a woman and her son. Holding up his camera, he says about himself: ‘I’m warming up to my photo op! . . . I’m prowling around! Looking for angles!’ Then he gets his translator to ask the mother if he could take a picture. The injured man says ‘no’ and Sacco is immediately dragged off to visit other wards: ‘arm-in-arm again, I’m towed down the corridor . . . we push through a door . . . plow through well-wishers’ (32–3). In contrast with Sacco, we never see Igort or Kugler at the scene of the interviews and ‘testimonial encounters’ (Torchin Creating the Witness). They document what they see and what they hear, but unlike Sacco, we do not see them. Riad Sattouf (The Arab of the Future), writing as an eyewitness to the events from his childhood in Syria, draws himself as a child witness, albeit recalled in adulthood. John Lewis in March narrates as an eyewitness too, years after the events of the civil rights movement, and in a historic cultural moment, Obama has just been sworn in as the President of the United States, and Lewis is part of the narrative as well. In a note, ‘About Origins’, appended to Zahra’s Paradise, Amir and Khalil, the creators of the work, speak of Iran 2003: ‘over the past year, hundreds of thousands of Iranians have turned their cell phones into mirrors for witnessing each other’s presence’ (239).1 The paratext here emphasizes the role of witnessing, even as the text itself is a study of the documentation of rights abuses in Iran. In these examples, we see different models of testimonial cultures: those where the testimony is delivered by eyewitnesses, those recorded by secondary witnesses (those who did not experience the actual events, but have inherited memories) and those where the amanuensis is a part of the frame of the testimonial encounter. If witnessing and testimony is integral to the work of Human Rights, then the graphic medium offers numerous instances of such a culture of witnessing, the subject of the present chapter.

122  Witnessing

The testimonial encounter consists of the role of the witnesses (eyewitnesses, secondary witnesses, bystanders), the forms and modalities – aesthetic, rhetorical – through which the testimony is made available to the reporter/storyteller/artist and thence to the reader – all within the medium of the intersecting visual-verbal which is the characteristic of the graphic novel. Witnessing is the tension between eyewitnessing and bearing witness, where eyewitnessing is a factual recording of events by an individual who was physically present at the events. Bearing witness involves a complex negotiation with the cultural and symbolic meanings of the events one has witnessed, in Kelly Oliver’s words: ‘bearing witness to a truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts’ (Kelly Oliver 2004: 80). As I  have argued elsewhere, ‘the act of “bearing witness” is thus an act of making visible the true nature of the state, a “visibilization” that shocks us’ (Writing Wrongs 2012: 71). Such a witnessing and the testimonial encounter emerge in particular political and rhetorical conditions (Whitlock “Sorry Business” 209). Testimonial encounters also, as Leshu Torchin puts it, employ: ‘aesthetic and formal elements  – themselves drawn from visual traditions, popular film, and historical and social contexts – [that] anchor the meaning of the atrocity display and produce ethical claims’ (216). The work of witnessing, Dominick La Capra argued in the late 1990s, generates an ‘empathic unsettlement’ in the secondary witness when s/he ‘puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place’ (“Trauma, Absence, Loss” 722, also LaCapra “Lanz­ mann’s Shoah”). When the one bearing witness is unable to speak or present the story, or when the dead and the disappeared do not appear in the panels or on the page, witnessing takes on an entirely different form. When the eyewitness bears witness to the suffering of others, s/he enters a whole new mode of witness-subjectivity, that then serves as the foundation for advocacy, political activism and claims (Nayar, “The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity”). When the eyewitness bears witness and documents it, it ‘offers us the circulation of affective energies – empathic relations – as modes of comprehending and apprehending an-other life and through this come to a recognition of one’s own subjectivity’ (Nayar 2016: 75). In comics journalism and graphic novels, Hillary Chute posits a ‘visual witnessing’ (Disaster Drawn). About Joe Sacco’s work, Chute observes that he is interested in the ‘everydayness of horror and how the banal becomes the horrific (30). Christine Hong argues for a ‘testimonial comics image’ – the self-figuration of the eyewitness  – that works as a counter to the official histories of the events (2009, 2016). Harriet Earle, extending Chute’s work, proposes, rightly, that Sacco’s technique of showing his speakers, creates a ‘face-to-face encounter with the reader’, enabling him to ‘visually create traumatic affect on the page’ (117). Sacco’s self-reflexive, mocking testimonial comics image of the determined photographer seeking images of trauma and suffering is now a classic in comics journalism. He mocks, writes Wendy Kozol, the stereotype of the intrepid male reporter and disrupts the ‘politics of pity’ in reportage (167). For Hillary Chute, this amounts

Witnessing  123

to a ‘demystifying device that calls attention to the mechanism of reporting and witnessing’ (Disaster Drawn 63). When, for instance, Sacco admits in Palestine that he has ‘seen the Israelis but through Palestinian eyes’ and as a result ‘Israelis were mainly soldiers and settlers’ to him (Palestine 256), he is admitting to the limitations of the ‘objective observer’ perspective.2 In other cases, such as Guibert and Lefevre’s The Photographer, the photographs, the drawings from the photographs and the narrator’s voice are all constituents of the storytelling and witnessing. Critics argue that Lefevre’s ‘narrative voice guides the understanding of both the cartoon drawing and the photographs’. This ‘oral storytelling [has] been filtered through Guibert’s drawing and writing, but so too have his photographs’ in this determinedly multimodal text (Pedri 3). For philosophers like Kelly Oliver, to argue in favour of witnessing as simply offering the possibility of recognition is a deeply flawed ideal. Oliver writes: If recognition is conceived as being conferred on others by the dominant group, then it merely repeats the dynamic of hierarchies, privilege, and domination. Even if oppressed people are making demands for recognition, insofar as those who are dominant are empowered to confer it, we are thrown back into the hierarchy of domination. This is to say that if the operations of recognition require a recognizer and a recognizee, then we have done no more than replicate the master-slave, subject-other/object hierarchy in this new form. (2001: 9) And later: ‘recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression’ (474). Oliver’s focus on power and relationships of power that structure the process of both, denial of recognition in the first instance and then the ‘granting’ of recognition, is a crucial point. Like Gillian Whitlock and Leshu Torchin, among others, Oliver also sees witnessing and its ‘end-result’, recognition, as embedded in contexts (discursive, material) that need to be examined. These contexts are very often the subject of the witnessing project itself, whether this involves attention by the artist-storyteller to the encounter with the witness (Sacco) or the narrator trying to piece together the chronology of events across time and space (Sattouf, Lewis). The testimonial encounter in the HR graphic novels involves, I  suggest, the creation of a ‘witness space’. Comics theorists have long argued that the comics’ panel is a compression of time as space, with panels representing moments in time. For my purposes, there is more to the space of the panel in the HR text. A witnessing space has two levels. The first level is of the panel in the pages where the panel is a window through which we as reader-spectators see and hear the witnesses. The second level is of the panel as a diegetic space that functions as a space of proximate encounters between witnesses and between witnesses and mediators. The proximate space is a key element in the discourse of citizenship and belonging because, as I shall propose, this space is not an alienating space but one that connects,

124  Witnessing

and thereby proffers a history of connections, overlaps and belonging – in short, of witnessing. The panel-as-witness-space also works to invoke a sense of responseability from the witnesses and the reporter. This chapter discusses the forms of witnessing one encounters in these texts before turning to the question of silence and testimony in select texts.

Proximate spaces/witness spaces In Sattouf ’s account of his school days in Syria, he frequently recalls the compulsory singing of the national anthem. In one panel in the second volume, Sattouf draws himself and his friend Omar singing. It is winter and bitterly cold. The anthem’s words are placed in speech balloons coloured green. In this particular panel, the lines being recited are: ‘our noble spirits will never be subdued’. Sattouf draws a shivering Omar whose recital is interrupted by ‘cough, cough’. The text box informs us that Omar had lost weight and ‘was so cold that he couldn’t even move his lips’. Then Sattouf draws arrowed cues/clues to describe the state Omar is in: ‘wild-eyed expression’, ‘frozen but still smiling’, and finally, ‘subdued’ (59). These cues work at two levels: they indicate Sattouf paying attention to every Omar-detail and they tell us how to view the recital. The irony of the ‘subdued’ word being used in the context is not lost upon us. Sattouf ’s very precise observations (recalled as an adult) of Omar’s condition is a map of several things: the weather, the climate of tyranny, the mindless recital of words, the debilitated state of the schoolchild, all observed from an intimate distance and crowded into the same panel for us as well. On the last panel of this page, Sattouf shows all the students and the teacher ‘crowded around the woodburner’ and comments that ‘everyone was coughing’. (The teachers are also violent, and frequently beat up the students. In part 3, Sattouf depicts the teacher screaming ‘dog’ as he beats the students until his cane breaks, 9.) To return to Torsa Ghosal’s suggestion that we see the surface of the page as the landscape where we can discern the ‘struggle of the local population to find an inhabitable space . . . [which] is staged on the page as topos’ (187), the panel can now be read a topos of witnessing. In this topos, there is no attempt at objective or distanced witnessing, but neither is there a solitary witness. The witnessing ‘I’ in HR graphic novels often correspond to what Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson term a ‘collaborative “I” ’ (2016). Identifying types of this collaborative ‘I’, Smith and Watson propose the ‘composite’, the ‘coalitional’ and the ‘negotiated’ varieties. A composite I occurs when the ‘speaking subject is collectively produced by numerous actors’, including the ‘witness and the witness’s community of affiliation, the intended audience within the narrative, the coaxer or interlocutor . . . a publishing ensemble’, among others (248). The ‘coalitional I’ foregrounds the collaborative production (248–9). The first type, they argue, indicates an emphasis on the ‘survivor’s potential for agency’, the second the ‘currents and constraints of geopolitical contexts’ and the third, ‘possibilities for productive narrative intervention’ (249).

Witnessing  125

The ‘Composite I’ (as) witness In the example just cited, Sattouf undertakes several moves in witnessing. First, he begins as an eyewitness to the school’s tyranny – which is metonymic of the national tyranny itself – when he observes Omar’s state of health. The ‘I was there’ sense is very clearly foregrounded. While he himself is quite warmly clad  – he informs us that he has a ‘thick jacket’ on – many of his classmates are coughing. Moving from one single, coughing student – Omar – to the entire class transforms the organization of the panels too. In the first, we are shown, in close-up, just Sattouf and Omar, with the latter coughing. As we move across the panels, we see more students, till the last one shows them crowded around the stove. The coughing students are, I  suggest, a part of the composite (eye)witness, Sattouf. The ‘everyone’ may or may not include Sattouf, but by then we are not shown ­individual children but an entire group, with many not discernible although ‘cough cough’ is inscribed into speech balloons in three places in the panel. The coughing is the primordial sound of a body in a precarious state (to adapt Scarry’s argument about torture, 1985). The forced recital of the anthem – an organized, collective rhetorical act – is interrupted by the primordial cough from various individuals. That is, the eyewitness account here cannot be separated from the documentation of the other sounds of the fellow students. Sattouf ’s description of the state of student health is validated by his documentation of their coughing. In the topos of the panel, then, we have an eyewitness and a corroborative witness-function as well. Sattouf does not present these, let us note, as objective histories, but the use of the corroborative witness-function (rather than a full-fledged witness who endorses verbally what Sattouf says about the school or their own health) implies that the boy Sattouf is speaking with and for the others in that space. By making this corroborative witness-function a primordial, non-verbal sound, Sattouf also underscores the futility of the rituals of nationalism: the cough desecrates the singing, the pain interrupts the sentiment. Sattouf draws himself staring at Omar, who is coughing, and the arrowed cues, as already stated, may also be the line of Sattouf ’s sight directed at Omar. The anonymized ‘cough cough’ in the climactic panel of the page forces us to move from singular to collective, individual to community. I propose that this recasts the witness space itself. First, it alters Sattouf ’s testimonial comics image by juxtaposing his words and visual cues with the primordial sounds from others. Then, by moving from one eyewitnessing body to a group of persons alters our sense of this topos, this locale. Sattouf does not only see Omar and his other schoolmates suffering, he hears them and can feel the trembling bodies because they are all close by, and rubbing their hands or holding them out to the warmth. The aural, visual and haptic proximity renders the topos of the panel a space of connection. The ‘composite I’ witness in HR graphic novels is particularly important because of the altered sense of not just witnessing but of the topos it creates within the witness space. The witness is one who shares the same air as the persons she speaks of, whose unvoiced stories she narrates in the panel’s space. These corroborating but

126  Witnessing

silent copresences in the panel are a reorganization of the narrative (as composite testimony) but also of the potential community. In Sacco’s Palestine, Sacco informs us: ‘the recollections that follow are drawn from interviews with three whose stories seem typical’, Yusef, Mohammed and Iyyad (82). On the next page in the last panel, we are shown men standing crowded in what is obviously a confined space. In the inset we have Yusef ’s narrative: ‘I spent 18 days at Dhahriya . . . I was placed in a room of 4x6 meters with about 40 persons’ (83). This inset masks the faces of several of the men in the larger panel, but those whose visage we can see are all grimacing. This last panel is preceded by one where a toilet bucket is overturned and, says Yusef, ‘we spent five days with the smell’. When Yusef speaks, he speaks for and with the others, all suffering within that same space. Breathing the same air, the comics panel shows a texture of togetherness: bodies touching, experiencing the same sensations. Space here is connective, not alienating. Developing a new view of space and witnessing, Kelly Oliver proposes that we see space not as distance between people but as a plenitude of things that connect us. Recognition, so central to witnessing, is based on ‘that which is between us’ (65). Oliver argues, following Cathryn Vasseleu and others, that vision hinges on touching light: ‘If vision involves touching light, then we are touched by, and touching, everything around us even as we see the distance between ourselves and the world or other people in the world’ (66). Extending this to include air, she writes: ‘remembering air and the density of air reminds me that I am both connected to and different from those around me’ (67). She then moves on to discuss ‘looking’ as ‘caressing’ before arguing: We must begin with the presupposition that space is full of light, air, language, and the elements that make human life possible before we can imagine a public space in which we can speak to each other and, more importantly, listen to each other. We need to recognize our connection, dependence, and indebtedness to each other as individuals and as social groups. The possibility of love, then, is founded on the possibility of public space as full of the elements that connect us to each other. (75) A witness space in the HR graphic novel shows us a community that is built around this sense of connections. The ‘bodies’, so to speak, that are voiceless but share the same space as the ‘composite I’ witness, are connected to each other when they sense the same things in prison, in the traumatic school room or any other topos. There is a fungibility of the bodies/persons in that space of beatings and pain, which indicates the sharing of the sensory experiences and future as well. For instance, in Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi, one page shows how conflict percolates downward, as a trickle-down effect. On this one page, the top-most segment (there are no panels) has Al-Assad of Syria and Sharon of Israel. Al-Assad is dropping some currency and Sharon is playing with a tank and a fighter plane. The next, lower

Witnessing  127

level shows silhouetted soldiers firing at each other, across what looks like a stream. This stream itself seems to originate in the upper segment, from Syria and Israel. Finally, at the lowest level, boys on either side of this same ‘stream’ fling rocks and stones at each other (84). Boys who bear witness to the games politicians like Sharon and Al-Assad play, suggests Abderazzaq, are emplaced, or confined, to the same place as the political arena, and even take on the same violent games as the politicians. As a powerful symbolic representation of the trickle-down effect of violent politics, the children’s games are only a smaller manifestation of the bigger, and more dangerous, manoeuvres of soldiers and politicians. Or, more worryingly, if we reverse this pyramid, it is likely that the children will graduate, as they grow up, into Al-Assads and Sharon, as their weapons also ‘grow’, from stones to fighter planes (Hiyem Cheurfa argues that Baddawi bears witness to a ‘refugee childhood’ by making the child the ‘seeing subject’, 2020). In other words, I am proposing that we see the panel in HR graphic novels as a locale, a specific topos in which (i) the eyewitness is constructed as a collaborative and composite witness, made up of the corroborating presences in the same diegetic space and (ii) the panel serves as a form of community-making precisely by ‘confining’ the persons together, and the connections  – often horrific  – link them together. In short, the witness space of the panel is a topos where those excluded from a full public participation as citizens, or whose rights as citizens have been eroded, exist as a community. Speaking of citizenship and witnessing, Leigh Gilmore writes: When verbal records are impossible to make, or are destroyed, or remain untranslated or uninscribed, a testimonial record nonetheless exists within the body and in the history of bodies of those excluded from the public square as full citizens. Testimony emerges from diverse experiences of violence and multiform exposure to risk and in various forms we must struggle to read. (4) The panel maps these ‘diverse experiences’ into the same space in the form of fungible bodies, with a shared history of seeing, smelling and touching in that space. We must struggle to read the Sacco insets or the Sattouf representation of a coughing schoolroom without a clear navigation in terms of a linear cause-effect or chronological sequence – the absence of a guiding line in that space is a metaphor for complicated connections across and between the testimonial bodies of that space. The panel as diegetic space is not empty just as the space of the carceral or the camp represented in that space is not empty. The ‘composite I’ witness then is not about an individual’s story of suffering but about a community. These are testimonial bodies, so to speak, populating the panel, corroborating the eyewitness narrative, even when only one eye/I is doing the speaking. Our testimonial encounter then is complicated by the very nature of (eye)witnessing in these texts wherein the panels

128  Witnessing

are not easy to read with their insets, crowding and corroborative witnessing. It brings to our attention the fact that we can only read individual voices of suffering in terms of their fungibility with other bodies (     just as they are fungible in the real world) and the eyewitness’s body, all connected within the diegetic space of the panel. There is another form of the composite ‘I’ witness one encounters in texts such as Mat Johnson and Walter Pleece’s Incognegro. The story of an African American, Zane Pinchback, who passes for white in order to be present at the KKK’s lynchings, Incognegro enacts several interesting moves in the thematic of eyewitnessing. This is a witness who ought not to be a witness at all, but should have been a victim. The contexts in which Zane takes the photographs is crucial to the witnessfunction he undertakes. We see from the early pages, Zane taking notes from the white men at the site of lynchings. He also takes photographs and publishes them. Zane insinuates himself into the white crowd and becomes invisible – as ‘one of us’ for the white – and to us as well. I suggest Zane is also a composite ‘I’ witness because he functions as a mnemonic device at the lynchings and incorporates the stories and comments of the whites into his documentation. Thus, Zane’s work on the lynchings is a collaboration, although the whites do not know this. This is what Zane says about his witnessing modes: I don’t wear a mask like Zorro or a cape like the shadow, but I don a disguise nonetheless . . . My camouflage is provided by my genes, the product of the southern tradition nobody likes to talk about. Slavery. Rape. Hypocrisy. American negroes are a mulatto people; I am just an extreme example, a walking reminder. (   Johnson and Pleece 18) Zane’s task of documenting lynching nearly gets him killed in the tale, and causes the death of his best friend Carl. In the case of the first, Zane is showing handling the spectacle of violence with the aplomb expected of a white man at a ritual, serving the cause of white supremacy and power. In the second, however, the role play slips. Carl is balanced on a typewriter and some paper, symbolizing the reporter’s apparatuses, with the noose around his neck (108). He is hanged over the instrument that was symbolic of African-American agency embodied in Zane’s work: the typewriter. The hanging symbolizes the distance of the African American body or African American human agent from any means of asserting agency. The reporter’s tools thus become apparatuses of his execution. By the time Zane arrives at the scene, Carl is dead. The white boys are shown beating the body with a stick, and a sign ‘Incognigger’ is strung around Carl’s neck. The dead Carl is ‘returned’ to his racial identity – nigger – even as the ‘incog’ signals his attempt to escape this identity, however briefly. Zane is reduced to a helpless witness here.

Witnessing  129

Zane’s work has been to eyewitness the gory acts of lynching and now he will need to report the lynching of his best friend as well. Now, the two inset visuals of Zane in the representation of Carl’s execution mark a transition within Zane’s own public self-fashioning. From the suave and controlled reporter of the first lynching we see in the text, we see a horrified, highly emotional Zane in the second. Zane by now develops an empathetic identification with the executed, a state he did not possess at the beginning of the tale (or if he did, we are not shown this). Lisa Cartwright (Moral Spectatorship) theorizes empathetic identification as a condition where ‘I recognize the feeling I  perceive in your expression’. She elaborates: ‘in thinking I know how you feel, I do not need to know about you or identify with you’. But more importantly, Cartwright argues: ‘I may feel in some sense responsible for your grief – not because I believe I have directly caused it, but because I feel that I might, or should, intervene or help – that I can make a difference for you’ (24). It is the onset of this empathetic identification that induces a sense of responsibility in Zane at the end of the text: ‘I want to keep going Incognegro. Somebody has to. I  can, so I  will’ (130). Empathetic identification is about the shift from eyewitnessing to bearing witness, from being merely at the scene of a lynching to report it, to recognizing the social conditions in which such violence is made possible – the violence Zane sees unfolding in Tupelo. Empathetic identification is visualized in the expressionist medium of the graphic novel when we see the suave Zane transformed into the screaming Zane. When Zane demonstrates marks of sympathy, horror and empathy, he has embarked upon the transformation from being a composite ‘I’ witness to bearing witness. If public self-fashioning rendered him a polished ‘white’ gentleman witnessing a lynching (graphic passing), empathetic identification brought on by witnessing the death of his friend (witnessing the graphic) induces the public selffashioning of a more responsible Zane. While this certainly seems to imply that it is only the personal tragedy and not a more anonymous suffering that really stirs one into the empathetic identification mode, Incognegro concludes with an African-American man whose public self-fashioning is now more-or-less in tune with the social order’s expectations of him. This places a considerable burden on him  – given the memory of Carl’s death  – emotionally and morally, but Zane’s acceptance of the responsibility suggests the emphasis remains firmly on his social and political commitment. The white man who shows lynching pictures to Carl and shocks him is also an eyewitness. So is Zane. In both cases, the intentionality is made clear: the white man uses the visuals to enhance his reputation and for voyeuristic purposes. Zane seeks to expose the lynchings. If in the former they constitute a particular kind of pleasure, in the latter they serve as historical evidence. The composite ‘I’ witness here is situated at the risky intersection of ‘passing’ and trespassing, as argued elsewhere (Nayar, “From Graphic Passing to Witnessing the Graphic”).

130  Witnessing

Amanuensistic witnessing In Igort, Sacco and other texts, there is no referent beyond the drawing and the words recreated by the artist from the eyewitness’s oral account. That is, unlike a photograph where a thing must exist in order to be photographed, ‘the images in a graphic novel are drawn rather than photographed, their iconic signification is not accompanied by an indexical relationship to the referent’ (Woo). Woo argues: while comics do not have a necessary logical relationship to objective reality, they do have such a relationship to the subjectivity of the artist: a drawn image implies that someone drew it. And Sacco has drawn everything, so the entire diegesis is mediated through and indexed to his own subjectivity. He thus sutures the gap between subject and object, between knowledge of a thing and the thing in itself, not by the eradication of the subjective (or the imposition of an objective method, which amounts to the same thing) but by absorbing the objective into the subjective and making the process of mediation self-evident. This tricky manoeuvre where the eyewitness’s account is absorbed by and into the subjectivity of the artist and, subsequently, expressed in the form of the drawing is amanuensistic witnessing. Lacking any evidence for whatever Sacco or Igort report from their memories and records of eyewitness’s narrations, the very act of ­mediated drawing – whether this is the vivid recreation of the prison cells and torture in Palestine (104–12) or the expressions on the faces of starved peasants in Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks (31, 46, 47) – draws our attention to the refracted indexicality of the eyewitness image in the graphic novel. Amanuensistic witnessing is the most common form of biographical and documentary narration in HR texts. Foregrounding the conditions of the amanuensis’ encounter with the eyewitness, as Sacco does consistently, describing where he meets the witness and his emphasis on his own terrors, inconvenience and discomfort – enables the amanuensis to generate what Charles Hatfield terms ‘ironic authentication’ (2005). The amanuensistic witness establishes a truth claim by denying that there is unmediated truth, as Hatfield argues. It becomes less a matter of authenticity than trustworthiness (Hatfield 150). The witness space of the panel is one wherein the amanuensistic witness, having already given us authenticating historical information (Sacco on Palestine and Gorazde, Igort on the famine), meets the eyewitness. This witness space is the space of imaginatively reconstructed history, where ‘the imaginative discourses of art and literature can step in and perform functions that, though historical, ­cannot be fulfilled by the work of the historian’ (Van Halphen 1997, cited in Chapman, Ellin and Sherif 33). Amanuensistic witnessing in the comic book and its ironic authentication, to phrase it differently, does not seek indexical referentiality but ensures that we readers see the drawings as mediated versions of what the artist-­storyteller perceived in the faces, events and accounts s/he encountered.

Witnessing  131

The amanuensistic witness, to adapt Andrew Kunka’s work on autobiographical comics (itself following Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics, on visual modalities in comics), with the ‘modality markers’ such as ‘precise detail, background, color, lighting’, amateurishness, even errors in drawing, communicates a sense of authenticity (Kunka 71). El Refaie’s list of such markers of authenticity include black and white images, the incorporation of photographs or ‘pictures that visually resemble photographs’ that then ‘perform authenticity’ (138). The amanuensistic witness, often in the form of frame accounts or paratexts, offers explicit modes of authentication. There is, in Sacco for example, details of how he sent ‘two months in the Occupied Territories almost ten years ago in the winter of 1991–92’ (Palestine vi), Edward Said’s endorsement (Palestine i-v), and the embodied experience of the journey into the Territories: the bus ride in Cairo (3), the crowds in all places he traverses through, etc. Igort documents his arrival in the Ukraine (6), Delisle sweats upon arrival in Burma and is sweating when the immigration officer in Pyongyang interrogates him about a novel in his baggage – Orwell’s 1984, incidentally (Delisle Pyongyang 2). In the paratextual apparatus, in some cases, the author-artist’s photograph is reproduced (Sacco in Palestine or John Lewis in March) for us to compare the photograph with his self-portrait in the book, and any literal resemblance – as is the case with Sacco and Lewis – lends authenticity to the work itself.3 A biographical note attests to the trauma experienced by the storyteller/eyewitness: Khademul Islam, we are told, ‘is writing a non-fiction book about escaping from Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war of independence in 1971’ (Ghosh 82). Hamid Sulaiman, the author-illustrator of Freedom Hospital in his postscript records how he ‘fled Syria’ (unpaginated), how he ‘drew on real events’, ‘integrated images and text taken directly from the news into the story’, even marking the places where such integration has taken place: ‘for instance, the sequence on pages 154–5 taken from a YouTube video streamed after a bombardment’ (unpaginated). Joe Kubert in Fax from Sarajevo reproduces the faxes he and his friends received from Erin, and then uses these to draw his images of whatever was occurring in the distant country. The amanuensistic witness’ attempts to draw are also modes of performing authenticity. Delisle documents his strenuous attempts to draw (beginning with his efforts to acquire the right ink for this work) in both Burma Chronicles and Pyongyang. In the latter, in fact, he informs us that he tried to draw the day’s events each evening: I take out my notebook and, like every night, sit down to sketch the day’s events on the right-hand page and write a few notes on the left. (85) We are shown a large room with Delisle crouched at his desk, ostensibly rendering into images the events of the day. Sattouf records his early efforts at drawing (I: 26–7), the interest a cousin took in his work (II: 26–9), the reception his work acquired at his school (II: 54), his attempts to adopt a different style of drawing, under peer pressure, so as to fit in (II: 54–5), and so on. Kate Evans documents the drawing therapy she and her friend Sue initiated in the refugee camp, and how she

132  Witnessing

worked with the ‘artists’ as they tried to work on their often minimal skills (34–5, 160–3). Sajad draws his early attempts at the craft and at other artistic vocations like carving (Sajad 23, 44, 130–1, and elsewhere). These modalities of showing us the embodied act of drawing is also the performance of authenticity. From this arises the ‘trustworthiness’ that Hatfield proposes: the embodied artist working at his craft for a long time is the trustworthy amanuensistic witness to the eyewitness. It is nothing more than a cue, a modality of gaining this trust from the reader. Marcelino Truong – whose father was the interpreter to the president – in Such a Lovely Little War, having described in some detail the politics (American and Vietnamese) behind the Vietnam war, informs us of the putsch that eventually displaced President Diem in 1963. On one page Truong gives us two postage stamps, ‘commemorating the November 1, 1963 putsch’. He writes: ‘like the Communists, the perpetrators of the coup characterized their power grab as a “revolution.” Here is the stamp showing the army breaking the chains of oppression’ (256). Beneath the stamp, reproduced in its entirety, is a paragraph describing Diem’s Presidency as a ‘Diêmocracy’. Truong writes: ‘but to call a coup d’état a revolution!’ and goes on to say ‘our “liberators” be they on the right or left, prefer to speak with weapons rather than ballot boxes’. Beneath this paragraph is a second stamp depicting people rising in revolution. Functioning as the equivalent of evidentiary photographs, the stamps lend an air of authenticity to the narrative. Truong was, although a child, an ear- and eyewitness to the events unfolding in Vietnam but often witnessed through listening to his parents talk and some encounters. His eyewitnessing is validated by the stamps issued by the Vietnamese government that testify to the events as Truong described, and as they happened. The amanuensistic witness often bears testimony to those who cannot afford to tell their story. For instance, in Journalism, in the section on ‘Migration’, Sacco meets the Maltese Minister of Justice and Home Affairs who tells him: ‘the majority [of African migrants] do not have identification. . .’ (     Journalism 134). While their identification is very often forged, in many cases the migrants have no papers, and hence are vulnerable to be detained. Soon after this interview with the Minister, Sacco meets some Somalian women who are in detention in a camp. Sacco writes: As one of the women fans me – it’s rather warm in there – another walks over to show me her badly scarred arm. Doesn’t this prove she fled a war? Shouldn’t this be her ticket to status? (137) Sacco as an amanuensistic witness is in fact asking us to see the witness’ body as the story, much as Derrida provocatively argues in Demeure: When he testifies the martyr does not tell a story, he offers himself. He testifies to his faith by offering himself or offering his life or his body. . . (38)

Witnessing  133

Drawing the woman with the injured arms  – and it must be noted that this woman does not speak – Sacco points to the impossibility of testifying in words and the necessity of proving one’s identity by offering the injured, mutilated body. Once again embodying Derrida’s comment and resonating with Sacco’s work, in Zahra’s Paradise, Amir and Khalil reference Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photographer who was arrested when taking photographs of the families outside Evin, Tehran’s notorious prison, and never came out alive. Later testimonies, legal and medical, cited in Zahra’s Paradise ‘revealed that she had been beaten, raped, and tortured’. We are shown a group of Iranian women mourning over Kazemi’s coffin (she is herself never shown, even as a drawing). In the next panel a man says: ‘what she couldn’t expose on film, her body revealed in death’ (45). Sacco and Igort are not seeking authenticity through realistic representation alone; they offer us visual modalities such as vivid details, as they remember it, of the traumatized faces of starvation or war victims and in the process perform authenticity. More importantly, I propose along with Kunka, that the amanuensistic witness is keener on documenting an emotional truth than a purely historical one (Kunka 7–8) and, further, the emphasis is on emotional knowledge rather than a merely empirical one. Elisabeth El Refaie writes: graphic memoirists are typically concerned less with trying to capture their outer appearances as accurately as possible and more with expressing character traits and shifting states and emotions. (147) Both Kunka and El Refaie extend what Dominick LaCapra argued earlier: that realism sometimes proves inadequate to tackle certain subjects like trauma and hence texts present trauma’s unrepresentability by giving us a ‘plausible feel for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods’ (Writing History, Writing Trauma 13). When, for instance, Igort sketches Serafima Andreyvna on her deathbed, he does so in a set of two portraits (169–70). We see a gaunt, more or less resigned, face of Andreyvna, mouth slightly open, perhaps drawing her breath in pain. Igort’s accompanying text says: She asks to see me; she gives me a blessing, blows me a kiss. For a moment, she seems less hopeless. (169) On the next page, there is only one centred image. This is also of Andreyvna, except that it is greyscale, blurry and the details of facial expression are smudged, although we can see that the eyes and mouth are closed in this one. The unboxed texts, one at top of the page and one at the foot, read:

134  Witnessing

Serafima Andreyvna dies less than two weeks later, on July 26, 2009. Serenely, without any struggle. (170) The portraits are brilliantly evocative of the hard life and ‘serene’ death of Andreyvna. In these two portraits, Igort only signals the resignation – even when she seems ‘less hopeless’ – on her face. Historical veracity as to how she died becomes ­subordinated to the emotion Igort perceived in her face, and perhaps also the emotion he experienced when he saw her dying, and then projected into the portrait he later drew. The embodied act of drawing – examined briefly in ‘Staging Vulnerabilities I’ – the last days of Andreyvna transforms amanuensistic witnessing into a means of emotional knowledge and emotional memory of the long-suffering woman, with perhaps no more than a touch of historical specificity (the exact date of her death, for instance).4 Even when tracing the absence of an emotion, the emotional truth of the moment is communicated. Take for instance, the case of Freedom Hospital. One patient, known only as Salem, recovering from a head injury, has no memory of his earlier life. In the space of two panels (one hardly a panel, since it is without a frame) Sulaiman depicts Salem’s life as it is today. In the first, Salem sits staring out at us. He says, ‘I don’t know. The last thing I remember is looking down the barrel of a gun’ (43). The next panel is all black and a man’s head and hand pointing a gun is drawn. The assailant’s face has no features, reflective of two things: Salem’s loss of memory about the identity of the assailant and the generic nature of this attempted murder of a dissident. The first one is drawn with Salem’s face on a white ­background – which is the page itself since there is no demarcating border between his face/head and the page. Sulaiman captures the blankness of Salem’s mind  – ­articulated in Salem’s words – through the symbol of the ­borderless/whited-out page. Salem merges with the world, lacking his bounded identity that would separate him from the world. His blank face, lacking adequate gestural cues for us to decode his emotions, is mirrored in the assailant’s masked/blanked-out face. The absence of emotion here is evocative precisely because we recognize the signs of a braindamaged man in its absence: an injury that has left him with no self at all to speak of. In blanking a face out, Sulaiman convinces us of Salem’s story. It is through these modes of performing authenticity that the amanuensistic witness not only gains the eyewitness’s trust but also that of the reader’s. The testimonial encounter then is coded as a ‘testimonial transaction’, as Gillian Whitlock terms it (2015), hinging upon the performance of authenticity and the evocation of an emotional truth, where, first, the eyewitness entrusts her/his story to the amanuensis hoping for a faithful rendering, and we as readers place a certain amount of emotionally gained trust in the recreation of the eyewitness account. The panel is then the space of this transaction. The documentation of others’ suffering and the erosion of rights is thus as dependent on the performance of authenticity and emotional truth as realistic representations by the amanuensistic witness.

Witnessing  135

Spaces of response-ability Human Rights work, if it is about witnessing and bearing witness is equally about responses, ethical spectatorship, recognition and response-ability. The eyewitness who speaks, the protestors who employ silence as a gesture, and the trauma victim unable to speak – all demand a listener, an ethical, attentive one, whose response has to be calibrated in particular ways. Joe Sacco’s work has constantly been conscious of how he listens to the stories and how he recalls what he heard. Andrea Lunsford and Adam Rosenblatt identify four types of listening in Sacco: empathic, instrumental, voyeuristic and rhetorical. He is often prey to instrumental listening when, they argue, he listens ‘not to know a person but to obtain that person’s objectified experience’ (134). He is also, sometimes, a ‘war junkie’ (as Sacco has on occasion described himself    ), and therefore a voyeuristic listener. But on other occasions, Sacco listens in order to understand the speaker, his thoughts and feelings (140). With this, they propose, Sacco ‘works to restore voice where none exists, as well as to provide a material record of torture that exists outside the privacy of the body’ (142). Lunsford and Rosenblatt’s finetuned analysis offers us a perspective on witnessing: the empathic listener.

Rhetorical listening and the logic of accountability The panel and the page in the HR graphic novels text is a space of response-ability, of those who bear witness in the diegetic space but also us, readers. In this space we see strategies of speaking and listening, including its rhetorical companion: silence. The narrator listens to the subject with every intention of being an ethical listener, open to cross-cultural communicative possibilities, and listens from within a logic of accountability carrying ‘an ethical imperative that, regardless of who is responsible for a current situation, asks us to recognize our privileges and nonprivileges and then act accordingly’ (Ratcliffe 31–2). Ratcliffe aligns here recognition and response-ability. When the victim-eyewitness speaks, or is silent (which is also a rhetorical form), and ‘if subjectivity is the process of witnessing sustained through response-ability’, writes Kelly Oliver, ‘then we have a responsibility to responseability, that is to say, we have a responsibility to promote the ability to respond’ (Oliver, 2015, 485–6). Merging Oliver’s and Ratcliffe’s arguments, one can see response-ability as an ethical relation forged between speaker/witness and listener, where the act of listening is not a simple sensorial process but a responsible interpretive one, even when the speaker and listener are from different cultural contexts. Sacco says at one point in Palestine: ‘It occurs to me that I have seen the Israelis, but through Palestinian eyes – that Israelis were mainly soldiers and settlers to me now, too’ (256). For Lunsford and Rosenblatt, this is rhetorical listening (as theorized by Krista Ratcliffe, Cheryl Glenn and others), where ‘Sacco immediately sees the biases that have become part of his listening, understanding that his invitation has been both limited and limiting’ (143). This rhetorical listening which

136  Witnessing

constructs the space of the panel and the page as a space of response-ability does much more. Sacco is not merely identifying his position, biased and partial, but also operates from within a logic of accountability. For instance, Sacco repeatedly foregrounds his anxieties when he sees armed Israeli soldiers (37) or protesting Palestinian crowds (53). Here it comes anyway! Fast and lots of it! Palestinian women and children! They’re singing . . . chanting . . . and marching right at us down the middle of the road! (53) As he listens to the Palestinians, Sacco understands he is an interloper, and presents himself as mortified at the thought of being in the middle of a mob. He is uncomfortable, uncertain. But he cannot also lose the opportunity to take some photographs. Immediately afterwards he tells his friend Saburo: Pretty soon my photos gonna be wired ‘round the world . . . “Scoop Sacco”! Photo-journalism’s overnite sensation  .  .  . There was nothing to it! I’m a fucking natural! (57) On another occasion, listening to the Israeli soldier threatening the Palestinian women accompanying him, Sacco writes: ‘which goes to show the pull of a trueblue American accent sometimes’. In the panel at the end of this page, the soldier is gesturing at the women with his rifle’s butt, and the women lean backward in fear. Sacco writes: ‘He’s about to blow his top! His M-16’s in the air! He’s waving it around! And you don’t need to know Hebrew, Arabic, or Swahili to catch his drift!’ (127). Sacco’s worried expression whenever he meets such antagonism or tensions in the Occupied Territories frames his responses to whatever story he hears: he understands the context of listening as a privileged, protected American in one of the most unstable spaces in the world. His securitization in Hebron or any other city’s streets is embodied as the immunity of being American, even as he leverages this to approach the Palestinian displaced and dispossessed to record their stories. That is, whenever Sacco presents himself as shaken, insecure and threatened, he is in fact employing the logic of accountability: he is the only person in the streets who is immune to the Israelis’ actions and violence. This is his vantage point, in the literal and metaphoric sense, as he records the Palestinians. This is rhetorical listening with its necessary logic of accountability. We, as readers, recognize his responses and hence respond response-ably to the visual cue. Kate Evans in Threads is enquiring after a young boy. She asks after his mother, and he replies with one word, ‘Afghanistan’ (10). She recognizes that he is ‘the same age as [her] son’. Later the boy and Evans set about building a house for him, and immediately Evans notes that he is ‘competent with a hammer’, whereas her son ‘wouldn’t know a hammer, unless it is on Minecraft’ (10). Here Evans can

Witnessing  137

only listen and see the refugee boys and girls as versions of her son, but also clearly mindful of his – and her – privileged position. At a later point in the narrative, having met many such children with no parents and broken families, Evans with a touch of sentimentality, says: ‘And then I phone my son. I really need to hear his twelve-year-old voice’. She calls and says ‘I love you’. The panel capturing this conversation is divided into two, except that it is not a gutter that divides it: it is a computer monitor. Facing the monitor is Evans’ son who now responds to Evans’ ‘I love you’ with: Yeah, Mum, I know. I’m on the final mission on XCOM2. This game is so awesome! Gotta Go! (87, emphasis in original) The boy’s rather terse and indifferent response to her maternal expression of sentiment foregrounds the take-it-for-grantedness of affections in children who have not been deprived of these. Evans’ juxtaposition of the unaffiliated children with her own son suggests an awareness of the privileges the European child (and his mother) possesses but does not acknowledge. Whether this recognition makes Evans more accountable for the Syrian refugee children is a moot point, but the ‘return’ to her own family periodically, after dealing with broken and distraught families, indicates a self-conscious effort at acknowledging her privileged position as a listener to their stories of horror. In rhetorical listening, one concedes that we are not responsible for the origins of a crisis, of ‘being personally accountable at present for existing cultural situations that originated in the past’ (Ratcliffe 32, emphasis in original). But, as Ratcliffe says, we are ‘culturally implicated in effects of the past’ (32). Evans does not see herself as personally accountable to or for the events that befall the refugees in their countries. But her attempts to obtain for them a measure of filiation and affiliation – albeit playing into the stereotype of the family as the dominant metaphor for emotional and intimate ‘security’ – may be seen as an effect of her sense of cultural implication in a collective human past. In Ratcliffe’s words: ‘accountability means that we are all indeed members of the same village, and if for no other reason than that . . . all people necessarily have a stake in each other’s quality of life’ (31). Ratcliffe’s statement resonates with Judith Butler’s arguments (Precarious Lives 2004; Frames of War 2009) about the mutual dependence of – and therefore responsibility to – every/each one’s lives. Guy Delisle is bombarded with propaganda about ‘all atrocities committed by Americans against the Korean people during the war’ (Pyongyang 168). He listens to statements such as ‘Americans are our sworn enemies’ (168) and sees in the ‘Museum of Imperialist Occupation’ paintings depicting American atrocities and Korean bravery. The violation of human rights by Americans is the centrepiece, clearly, of the Museum. Then Delisle as one who bears witness to both, the history of human atrocity and a history of propaganda, does something unusual. He draws himself in an American military hat (Delisle is a Canadian settled in France). This

138  Witnessing

image, devoid of a framing border is therefore unbounded, symbolically perhaps to show that American military interventions are not inscribed within or limited by any international, geopolitical borders. The text above the image reads: Our guide is truly stunning, and listening to her graphic descriptions, I think up a few tortures of my own that I wouldn’t mind inflicting on her. (169) Several things are important here, over and above Delisle’s representation of unbounded American militarism. First, Delisle listening to the accounts finds himself becoming Americanized. Listening to tales of torture, he sees himself as a potential torturer too – suggesting that all humans are indeed capable of evil, especially when brainwashed into it. Now, one notes here that throughout this narrative, Delisle has paid attention to the extreme propagandist discourse that saturates every aspect of North Korea – from the city’s walls to entertainment. He also shows how the North Koreans have bought into the propaganda. Hence this set of panels that show Delisle himself being ‘transformed’ even temporarily into a potential torturer is a self-reflexive drawing. Even a person as aware of propaganda’s power could fall prey to it, suggests Delisle. He implies that discourses, especially propaganda, have a way of engaging listeners that then transforms them into what they are not. Drawing himself in an American military hat (we know it is American because in an earlier panel on the same page he had drawn American soldiers) maps this power of propaganda and alerts us to the dehumanizing effects of genocidal discourses. Listening to propaganda, Delisle implies, requires an alertness to what is being communicated or one risks being convinced by it. He recognizes the fact that even he, a veteran consumer of media and therefore one alert to its manipulative powers, can fall prey to it. Documenting his prejudices and susceptibility ensures that Delisle is no longer simply dismissive of the North Koreans who buy into the propaganda. By showing how he falls short of being the ‘objective’ listener when he has thoughts of being/becoming a fiendish torturer after listening to graphic details, Delisle foregrounds the necessity of rhetorical listening: self-reflexivity, an understanding of one’s frames of interpretation, a sensitivity to others’ contexts and a sense of one’s limitations, prejudices and biases when listening to others’ stories and judging them. The text then becomes, in short, an honest work precisely because he documents his highly subjective listening. Then, in a later panel on the same page, the guide asks him what he, Delisle, thinks of ‘Americans now’. Standing in a posture of authority, hands on his hips, and a rather smug expression on his face, Delisle expounds: I don’t think war is ever “clean”, no matter who is fighting. And I certainly wouldn’t demonize an entire people on the basis of 3 blurry photos and a few paintings. (169)

Witnessing  139

It is possible to see in Delisle’s comments an apportioning of guilt and the exoneration of a collective. He finds the ‘evidence’ offered at the museum unacceptable and refuses, as a result, to pass judgements on North Korea or America. He rejects any moral justification for war. Having seen how the torture descriptions have affected him, driving him to imagine being a torturer, the rejection of war in the last panel is the response-ability of a man who engages in rhetorical listening. Being made aware of how soldiers are driven by stories because he himself experienced this transformation however briefly ensures that Delisle works toward a more robust interpretive schema.

Empathic listening We return to Evans’ work on refugees. After a day at the refugee camp, Evans and her husband Domach step into a kebab place on their way back home. While being served she asks: ‘Where are you from?’ and the man behind the counter says, ‘Syria’. We are then given a set of Evans thoughts at the top of the panel: ‘Oh man, I’ve seen the bombed-out shells of Homs and Aleppo on my news feed.’ Then she records the man’s comment: ‘My family are still there’. At the foot of the panel is Evans’ thought that follows from this comment: ‘I don’t know what to say, imagining the desperate, gnawing worry’ (25). On the next page, now no longer cheerful in her expression, Evans informs the man that she was working at the Calais refugee centre (nicknamed ‘The Jungle’). And the man says: ‘I lived in the jungle for 45 days’. Then Evans gives us her thoughts: ‘The precision of this statement strikes me, like he had tallied up the nights on the wall of a prison cell’ (26). This entire episode is titled ‘interlude’ (25) in Evans’ work, but amounts to much more than that. First, Evans contextualizes the man’s enunciated word, ‘Syria’, with the images of bombed cities and ruined homes that she has seen on the media’s screens. Then, when he speaks of his family, marooned in that context, she imagines his anxiety and worry for their safety. This is Evans’ empathic moment: seeking, from the man’s words, and one assumes facial expression (he looks anxious and a bit sad in Evans’ drawing), to understand his feelings and thoughts, she imagines what it must be like. In empathic listening, the aim is precisely this: to not stand in for the witness/victim but to seek to understand their thoughts and feelings. To imagine, here, is an act of response-ability: a responsible response founded on the discovery (recognition) of a common core of anxiety around the theme of the family. Later, when he gives her the ‘precise’ number of days he spent in the camp, she once again makes an imaginative leap. Evans, responding to the man’s statement, does not measure it as days spent in a refugee camp, but in a prison. Moving from one carceral space to another in her mind, Evans forces us readers also to see the equivalence, if not verisimilitude, between the two spaces. Evans’ response is marked by empathic understanding because she moves beyond the immediate statement and

140  Witnessing

identity of the refugee camp to what it represents and symbolizes: a prison. That is, in listening to the man’s observation about the days in the ‘jungle’, Evans maps the camp’s indexicality in her imagination, and thereby forges a connection between two different spaces (camp, prison) in which the human inmates suffer. This indexicality and connection is empathic listening because Evans is imagining life in the refugee camp as it would have been (even when the man himself does not call it a prison): akin to life in a prison. To be able to unpack the foundational ethos of the refugee camp – incarceration, immobilization, deprivation, surveillance – in terms of what it really is (a prison), is to be able to ‘understand another’s experience’ (Lunsford and Rosenblatt 140) and constitutes empathic listening. In Igort’s Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks he underscores his acts of listening. Some way into the work, he emphasizes his motto when listening: ‘to listen and not to judge’ (115). Early in the narrative, even before the individual testimonies begin, Igort writes: All it takes is a little scratching, and beneath all that Soviet reserve you sense the desire to be heard. (16) This statement is followed by two images: the hammer-and-sickle, the emblem of communism and then an image of a silhouette wielding a hammer. The text to the second image says Igort recalled this was the ‘twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall’, so we understand that the hammer is now being wielded to bring down the Wall. 1989 is written in phantom numerals or watermark in this second image. Beneath this set of two is another framing statement (quoted earlier too): I strained my ears to hear their stories and decided to draw them. I simply couldn’t keep them inside. These are true stories of people I met by chance, on the street, who’d had the lot of being born and having lived in the tight grip of the Iron Curtain. (16) The statement ‘I simply couldn’t keep them inside’ suggests a force too powerful to be contained within both, Igort’s mind and his narrative. The stories are meant to be out there. The responsibility to ensure the stories ‘get out’ is matched by the power of those stories that will not be contained within the narrator. That is, empathic listening ensures that the locutionary power of whatever he hears propels the stories out of him as well. Igort will return to this image of a powerful story-force that will not be contained within bodies or narratives when he introduces Nikolay Vasilievich: When I ask him if he will tell me about himself at first he hesitates, but then he decides to trust me. Word by word I listen to the account of an existence that has become an undigested mass. It pushes its way out from the gut. The following is a faithful transcription of that story. (55)

Witnessing  141

Again, Igort refers to the pathos and power of the story. He has to hear it ‘word by word’, and even when the eyewitness-victim’s tale is a ‘mass’ it possesses enough agency to push its way out. Igort does not, it may be noted, specify whose ‘gut’ is unable to contain the story: Vasilievich’s or Igort’s. But what is clear is: the story will be told. The reference to the process of listening and the process of ethical transcription (‘faithful’) gestures at the empathic listening Igort engages in. When he meets Serafima Andreyevna he reports the meeting’s opening moments: Her granddaughter lets me in and tells her I’d like to talk to her, to hear her story. She looks at me and says hello, but doesn’t smile. Serafima never smiles. It’s a bit intimidating. (19) Igort is setting up the eyewitness-bearing witness narrative by foregrounding the speaking-listening aspects of his testimonial encounter. He decides that the ­citizens of the former Soviet Union all possess ‘the desire to be heard’. The ‘right to narrate’ is also, however, the right to be heard. The nature of his hearing/listening to the witnesses therefore is crucial in our (readers’) response to Igort’s work itself. Hence, Igort describes the situation as a ‘strain’, indicating that he was not a passerby or eavesdropper to the eyewitness account – he made an effort to l­isten ­carefully. While this is an authenticating strategy on the lines of staging the testimonial encounter (accounts of dates, time and contexts of meetings), it also captures the sense of earnestness and subjectivity of the ethical listener. Igort does not imply any journalistic objectivity. Rather, he emphasizes his own subjective position – ‘strain’ can also be the corporeal aspect of leaning forward to listen carefully, perhaps palm cupped about the ear – when listening to the eyewitnesses. The desire to speak, then, is matched by the effort to hear in Igort. Igort amplifies the ‘strain’ when he declares that Serafima’s unsmiling face and general demeanour is ‘intimidating’. We become aware of the fact that listening to eyewitnesses, who are perhaps willing to talk but are under a tremendous emotional strain when they do, is compounded by Igort’s own initial response to the eyewitness. Speech and listening are both embedded within a fraught emotional context, and if Serafima is melancholic and dour from a hard life, Igort is himself not entirely comfortable in the testimonial encounter. There is no journalistic distance, no ‘transcendental’ reporting. It resonates with what Hillary Chute describes as an ‘uneasy groundedness’ in her account of the ‘eyewitness account from the ground’ in Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen: I Saw It (124). Like Sacco in Palestine, vaguely disquieted by the scenes unfolding in terms of crowds and military presence, Igort directs us (although we do not ever see Igort, since he does not insert his visage into the work at any point) to his discomfiture as an amanuensis. One also notes a metanarrative device that signals this disquiet. The text wherein he describes this meeting with the sombre Serafima is not placed in a text box. It is placed directly beneath an unframed drawing of the eyewitness (Serafima), more

142  Witnessing

as a caption than a text box in a comic book. This semiotics of the page invites an interpretation of an unmoored Igort, since the text is mainly about him and his meeting with Serafima. (Hillary Chute observes such untethered panels in Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde as well, 221.) Igort documenting the life of Anna Politkovskaya, the human rights activist, cites her own words on listening and narration: When the effect wears off we realize how alone we are, condemned to search for others like us, who don’t need words to communicate. . . . Maybe we’d like to share our secret – that secret called war – but those who live in peace have no interest in hearing it. (187) The absence of response-ability is what Politkovskaya herself refers to. The refusal and inability to listen to the stories of victims, such as Politkovskaya, is the luxury of those who live in peaceful countries. There is a refusal to address the outcomes of Russia’s Chechen campaign – which is what a refusal to listen to victims amounts to. In such a context, Igort’s ‘physicality of the drawn and printed page and listening empathically to the voice of the tortured . . . works to restore voices where none exists, as well as to provide a material record of torture that exists outside the privacy of the body’ (Lunsford and Rosenblatt 142). Igort takes this stance from Politkovskaya’s own life. About her he writes: She, Anna, couldn’t talk about it any more. . . . Her empathy, her ability to listen and share, took her beyond the limits of her own method. She couldn’t just “see” and “write” once she had taken the position of someone looking at the victims of a massacre. . . . She responded to the atrocities she documented day in and day out in the simplest possible way, which is also the most painful, the most difficult. She had shed the journalist’s distance and was left simply a human being. And that was her death sentence. (189) Igort here proposes a link between empathic listening (he uses the term in his description), documenting the accounts heard and the subjectivity of the listener. By implying that it was her response as a human rather than as a journalist that got Politkovskaya killed, Igort makes a major case for the power of empathic listening. Those who bear witness as a consequence of their response-ability, as Politkovskaya does, place their life at risk in the very act of witnessing. It aligns, therefore, the eyewitnesses who told Politkovskaya the stories of their tortures and others’ deaths, and Politkovskaya in the vulnerability of the act of witnessing. The absence of empathic listeners for/to the stories of victims doubles the injustice done to them, and this is best illustrated through two modalities of silence in graphic texts. Constructing panels as spaces of response-ability and demonstrating how empathic and rhetorical listening is undertaken by those bearing witness, the

Witnessing  143

HR graphic novel calls attention to the need to pay heed to the stories being told. But what happens when the victim doesn’t speak, or employs silence as a gesture?

Silence, protest, testimony In March, the African American activists enter various commercial establishments claiming equal rights. Entering a cafeteria, they say ‘May we be served, please?’ (II: 10). The waitresses, furious at what they see as temerity by slaves, throw garbage and dough at them, or douse them with water. Keeping in line with the principle of silent protests, the African Americans do not say a word (II: 10–11, 13). The campaign’s initial demand having being voiced (‘We would like to be served’ or ‘We would like a ticket’), the entire group stands or sits quietly. The training to put up with these abuses is depicted in volume I. In their ‘non-violence workshop’, the activists ‘call each other names’: ‘you son of a bitch’, ‘nigger lover’, ‘nigger’ (March I: 79–81). When they march into the cafeteria, ‘only one person spoke for the group in an action’ (I: 85). When the establishment declines, in some cases, the activists get up and leave with, ‘no harsh words. No violence’ (I: 86). In another incident, when the local cops intervene and ask them to leave (‘Niggers! Go home!’), the activists just sit there. We are shown them sitting at the counters, not moving, not speaking (94). And, ‘after a while’, says Lewis, ‘they wore themselves out and left’ (I: 94). Through rounds of beating, the activists stay quiet (I: 100). Silence as a mode of protest, writes Ashley Elliott Pryor, resists the trivialization of protests, resists dogmatism, is a form of self-cultivation and ensures that the silent activist comes to ‘occupy’ silence differently (187–90). It cannot be easily appropriated by others. Silence, writes Pryor, ‘opens a “space” that potentially transforms the passive spectator into a more active participant who helps determine the meaning of protests’ (182). In March’s representation of the protests, silence is not the demand for recognition from the whites. If, as Kelly Oliver argues, seeking recognition from structures that, to begin with, consigned some people to second-class status, merely replicates the power structures, then the refusal (by protestors) to break their silence ensures that there is no plea, petition or prayer. The activists just are. The African American activists, historically silenced in terms of being disenfranchised in a democracy (as critics note, the voicing of opinions is an integral part of democratic processes), now come to occupy a silence on their own. Silence here is agential in the protest. It serves the same strategy as rhetoric or polemic. To occupy silence is to refuse to engage in the conversation necessary for democratic process precisely because they have been refused a voice: the vote. Slogans and shouting, the common modes of protest, are missing in several of their campaigns (although the silent protest is not the prototype). The tension between the rude, abusive and threatening speech of the white policemen, establishment owners and even civilians is countered by the silence of the protestor. For Pryor the silent protests by the ‘Women in Black’ movement is not a means to an end, rather ‘their silence functions to engage the spectator, relying on the gesture as opposed to the employment of silence as a tool to a definable end, as a

144  Witnessing

determined practice with determined effects’ (186). Pryor’s insistence on silence as a spectacle is borne out by the March series wherein the silent protests gain attention: ‘people were starting to notice’, write Lewis et al. (I: 96). Their silence does not lend itself to easy interpretation, and leaves the spectators guessing as to what the silence means. One witnesses a silence and is left uncertain as to how to deal with or respond to it. If silence is a spectacle of protest in March, it takes a wholly different significance in Anderson’s Speak. Melinda Sordino’s silence about her rape may be readily interpreted as a sign of PTSD. However, this reading defuses the power of Anderson’s novel and its engagement with both speech and silence. While admitting the argument of Judith Herman ([1992] 2001) and other such trauma theorists that trauma inhibits the victims’ ability to speak, and therefore recovery is linked to the recovery of speech, I suggest this is not a sufficient frame in which to read the silences of victims in the HR graphic text.5 The first reference to Sordino’s self-imposed silence occurs early: ‘if there is anyone in the galaxy I am dying to tell what really happened, it’s Rachel’ (5). The image shows Sordino walking towards a group of girls. Rachel, already identified for us before this, turns to look at her walking towards them. The image is symbolic of the distance between her and everyone else: Rachel is introduced to us as her ‘ex-best friend’. Then the question arises whether Sordino’s silence is because all possible empathic listeners are at a distance? That is, the silence may be traced to her trauma but also to a context in which there is no possible listener/audience. This means, in the absence of a listener and a context for listening, there is no possibility of speaking. Throughout Speak, in fact, Anderson and Carroll highlight not just Sordino’s reluctance to speak, but that there is never a ‘right’ audience for the speaking. Sordino’s family is puzzled by her behaviour and the father is high-handed and authoritarian. Her friends in school have made her an outcast. I  propose that Anderson-Carroll’s representation of Sordino’s silence is also equally about a social order that refuses to ask the right questions: why are you silent, what happened that pushed you into silence? In other words, instead of simply attributing her silence to an inability proceeding from the trauma, one can argue that Sordino chooses silence given the context of an indifferent family and a cruel (if ignorant) social circle. If speaking and communication are integral technologies of belonging, then Sordino – who feels the inability to speak as a visceral sensation of being strangled (45) – gives up this means of belonging. Sordino confesses to a habit: she can’t stop biting her lips (26). This is because she thinks her ‘mouth belongs to someone I  don’t know’ (26). The girls in the school ask each other: ‘What’s wrong with her mouth? It looks like she has a disease or something’(69). The fragmentation of her body that this example instantiates is again to do with the impossibility of seeing her speech organ as her own. The misunderstanding of the state of the mouths, and the derision with which it is treated, again indicates the absence of a community that responds in empathic ways to what appears, publicly, as an injury or hurt. That is, while the trauma of rape is

Witnessing  145

not on her screen, the injured mouth signals something wrong: it is a sign that the school chooses not to read except as a ‘disease’. When the novel ends, there is no reference to her speaking. We are only told that she has ‘suddenly become popular’ and even her ex-best friend, Rachel, called her (367). In the last few pages of the novel we are shown Sordino drawing in the art class. She draws birds flying. The accompanying text however is a narrative of the incident: Andy Evans raped me in August . . . It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow. (368–9) It is clear that this narrative occurs in Sordino’s head, and is still not enunciated verbally to an audience (but we assume, from textual cues, that the others now know of her rape). These two pages also show only her hand, her injured hand, holding the pencil and sketching. In the last panel we see a partial view of her face, one eye, tears running down. The image is halved and we do not see her speech organ – the mouth – except as a thin line, indexing her inability to speak out. On the following pages we see her hand over her drawing to the art teacher. When he asks: ‘You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you?’, she still does not speak. She thinks that the ‘last block of ice in her throat is dissolving’ (370). The last sentence of the novel is written in white on an entirely black page: ‘Let me tell you about it’ (371). Through the text she has not told anybody about it, possibly because of the absence of an empathic listening community. Her last line implies that she is now ready for a public acknowledgement of her trauma: the ‘you’ being the reader. Whether the ‘you’ implies the community she lives in/with is arguable, but in any case the enunciation of the ‘tell you’ suggests the making of a ‘witnessing public’ (Torchin). In sharp contrast to Sordino’s silence is the amount of noisy communication around her. At the dinner table, cautioned by the school about her falling grades, her parents unleash a torrent of criticism. Carroll draws the parents in one panel as dissolving monsters reminiscent of Gothic bodies. Then, on the facing page, the words they use are inscribed on the page’s middle section, bounded on either side by silhouettes of her parents as fire-breathing, monstrous heads. The repetitive ‘blah blah blah’ marks the volume and continuity of noise around Sordino, with no respite whatsoever (152–3). The scene is interesting because neither of the parents asks Sordino for her views, her reasons, for the poor performance or her silence. Once again, Anderson-Carroll point to the absence of a space of listening, of response-ability, that causes the victim to assert silence as a choice. Sordino at one point sees herself making the incident of her rape public. Lying in bed, ill, she watches television. Her thoughts, sparked by the TV, go like this: If they made my life into a show, they could call it: “How Not to Lose your Virginity” or “Why Seniors Should be Locked Up” . . . “My Summer ­Vacation, A Drunken Party, A Rape, and A Shunning” (296)

146  Witnessing

Then, on the TV screen, she sees a flashback of the moment when she made the 911 phone call after the rape (causing the police to break up the party and results in the school shunning Sordino) (297). She next imagines herself on a talk show where the interlocutor tries to tell her that it was rape because she ‘didn’t give consent’. Then the anchor asks: ‘Didn’t you ever think of telling anyone?’ (298). In the following panel, in what appears to be an office, the man sitting behind the desk tells her: ‘It was not your fault. Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me’ (298). It is ironic that everybody except Sordino in these panels is speaking. In the page immediately following these delusions of a ‘show’, we hear off-stage voices screaming at her: Speak up, Meatilda! . . . uh, Melinda! I can’t hear you! (299) The fantasy of a public confession remains the subtext to her silence: what if she were to go public? The tension between a private, traumatic memory and a public admission constitute the boundaries of what the victim can say and cannot say. The televizing of trauma, a commonplace feature of contemporary life, is the frame in which Sordino fantasizes her public testimony. The fact that the interlocutors and maybe the audience does not even get her name right gestures, yet again, at the absence of an empathic witness whose interest lies in the testimony rather than the person who delivers the testimony. Sordino does try to make the events public: she first sends an anonymous note warning Rachel (273) and then actually writes out the series of events in Rachel’s presence, identifying the rapist as Andy Evans. Rachel, who is dating Evans, immediately rejects Sordino’s account and calls her a ‘liar’ (330–3). Now, the question Rachel implicitly asks is: is Sordino’s testimony to be trusted? Trauma theorists (Felman and Laub) arguing the case for testimonial accounts by victims have explored the issue of trustworthiness, false witnessing and testimony-as-knowledge. Knowledge on the part of the speaker produces testimonial knowledge, the audience needs to grant ‘epistemic authority’ to the speaker (Keren).6 Sordino has been accused of being a liar, that is, of fictionalizing her story of rape. The community that refuses to listen to a supposedly fictional story is also likely a community of such readers of fictional works. Thus, admittedly, it is difficult to assume, or measure, what role fictional testimonial works such as Speak, built around victim-narratives, play in the larger social domain. James Dawes asks: I wanted to know what capacity fictional worlds had for creating moral forces commensurate with their mesmeric aesthetic forces. How, for instance, might our capacity for sorrow or outrage in response to an injustice depicted in a novel translate into our relationship with the social and political world, if at all? Can we better understand how spectators of suffering develop (or fail to develop) empathy for persons geographically distant or perceived as alien

Witnessing  147

if we first examine how they can so feelingly respond to the dreams, desires, and dignity of fictional persons? (6–7) Through the text we see Sordino rejected and outcast by her social circle as a liar who brought trouble upon others. Blamed for arrests of some senior boys, the break-up of the party and generally for being an unsocial person, Sordino is not a part of the general conversations in the school – around boys, proms and such social events. Her lack of epistemic authority stems from her act of having called the police, in the view of the other students, to break up the party. Proceeding from this assumption – because Sordino has not revealed that she called the police after her rape – friends like Rachel reject her in toto. It is in this context, again indicative of the absence of both, an epistemic authority and an empathic audience, that Sordino takes her next steps in ‘speaking’ about what happened. When Sordino eventually decides to make a public announcement of the danger Andy Evans poses, she does so in an anonymous fashion. She writes on the washroom walls: ‘guys to stay away from Andy Evans’ (317). She does so in the presence of another schoolmate, an African American girl. A few pages later, we see this same wall where others have, anonymously, added to Sordino’s lines: Should be locked up Call the cops He needs that drug they give perverts so they can’t get it UP. He’s a bastard. – him and he put his hands down my pants during I went to the movies w PREVIEWS. He needs it 24x7 Stay away !!!!!! Creep (335, emphasis in original) Each of the items in the list is written differently to suggest multiple authors. The language here, informal, caustic, abrasive, abusive and injured, is crucial here, for it generates a shared epistemology about sexual violence, the rapist and the other victims. Taking recourse to such descriptors and language is a counter-language to the language of depositional discourse in a court, the language of therapeutic conversations and the language of a teary-eyed victim. Bob Plant argues: To the extent that testimony draws on an inherited, public language, one’s “private” experiences are themselves intersubjectively mediated. One never speaks wholly in one’s own voice, for one’s “own voice” is always that of another who precedes and survives us. (31, emphasis in original)

148  Witnessing

Then Sordino’s text marks the creation of such a language in which others could also offer up their testimonies vis-à-vis Andy Evans. Others recall their encounters with Evans, and they agree, publicly, via the same language and descriptors about the kind of man he is. While the authorship of these texts remains anonymous, the wall represents a speaking out, a form of social, testimonial memory nevertheless, initiated by Sordino (as we know). The writings on the wall, akin to naming and shaming, constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) as well, of primary witness-victims unable to identify themselves to the world but who, when possible, name the perpetrator. Unlike prime-time television, the school washroom walls are not entirely public in the sense; it remains a strictly securitized space accessible only to specific members of the public: the women in the school. However, this does not alter the fact that what we see inscribed on the walls establishes a documentary and a commemorative politics around bearing witness and grieving in public through their integration into the everyday practices of social networks: they offset mug shots with childhood photos and selfies of victims of police abuse, they challenge the purposeful framing of events by photojournalists with an abundance of so-called amateur digital photographs of the same events but from different perspectives. (Gilmore 160–1) Others recall what happened to them when they were with Evans, some prescribe a punishment, others issue the same warning as Sordino’s text does. For Gilmore, ‘this use of social media by grassroots political groups connects what it means to put one’s body on the line, and online politically and ethically’ (161, emphasis added). While Gilmore’s point is well taken, I think the larger concern that Anderson and Carroll raise is the addressability of a public when it comes to events like rape. Sordino does not go fully public, but she instantiates a process of publicizing the perpetrator, and she is immediately joined by several other women who agree with her views on Andy Evans. The building of the social memory around an archive of feelings is a step towards retaining the silence (in terms of one’s own identity in the wake of rape) and prising it open a fraction so as to identify a potential threat. Here the silence of anonymous posting and identification of the culprit is a form of solidarity as well, as the washroom wall implies. The wall with the various indictments of Andy Evans speaks as a collective witness to his actions in the past. The anonymous witnesses, silent thus far, speak through the idiom of rude descriptors, warnings, advise and personal memories of their respective encounters with Evans. In a text where Anderson and Carroll have already underlined the absence of empathic listeners, the speaking wall finds such listener-authors besides Sordino. The everyday and quotidian act of graffiti that, in this case, amounts to ‘a documentary and a commemorative politics around bearing witness’ may not be a legally valid document, but as a ‘site of memory is an unintegratable, residual, unconscious site that

Witnessing  149

cannot be translated into legal consciousness and into legal idiom’ (Felman 162, emphasis in original). The wall-as-social-memory-and-as-testimony shifts between Sordino’s and others’ personal experiences and a public testimonial to Evans’ actions in the past. The wall, with its anonymous yet socially evidentiary testimonials, positions Sordino and the several other victims of Evans in a peculiar witnessing position: of being singular in what she says and yet general because others in the same situation would have experienced/seen/heard the same thing, which is precisely what the others attest to, anonymously. As Thomas Weitin, adapting Derrida’s work on witnessing, writes: That to which the witness attests is his secret, a secret which must however be made accessible to public knowledge. The witness, bound to tell the truth, must keep this secret with himself and at the same time give it up. The witness is irreplaceable because only he or she has seen or heard. He or she must appear in the flesh before the court and speak about what has happened. His or her duty to tell the truth rests however upon the presumption that anyone in the same situation would have seen or heard the same thing. The witness is therefore both a singular individual and a general subject of perception at the same time, irreplaceable yet reproducible. (528, emphasis in original) The wall is a court of sorts. One could argue that Sordino and the others slide between the individual and the public when they admit to molestation, but retain a measure of their traumatic self – which they do not commit to public memory because they refuse to identify themselves. The singularity of several collective experiences not only generates a language to speak of Andy Evans, as noted previously, but also provides a form of perception (about Evans, rape, victimhood), thus reconstituting the social fabric around the perpetrator. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass, the plight of Korean comfort women is mapped from their childhoods: growing up in poverty, starvation, being sold into slavery and finally the years of sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese soldiers. We are, in effect, prepared for the horrors visited upon them. The first pages depicting (in Lee Ok-sun’s voice) the actual event of sexual slavery are heavily blacked. The girls (they are all around 14–15 years of age) are resting after their day’s work. ‘A group of soldiers barged in’, says Ok-sun (199). Each woman there witnesses the other’s rape and, in many cases, torture and beatings. But this is not all that Gendry-Kim does to intensify the trauma of rape. Pages 202–05 are significant in terms of the theme of witnessing. 202–03 are made of 6 panels each, divided by the traditional gutters. The panels are filled with black. There is no image, person, face, or text in the panels in the two pages. The panels are, in short, black boxes. Gendry-Kim’s work here, I  suggest, is symbolic of a literal and figurative black box around the question of rape, witnessing and comfort women. While not quite an ‘event without a witness’ (as

150  Witnessing

the Holocaust has occasionally been described), the black boxes represent the inadequacy of witness-representation: how to represent, to capture, what happened to the thousands of Korean comfort women? Ok-sun brings her life and face to the panel, so to speak, when she tells Gendry-Kim her story (reported in the panels, the drawings and the text boxes) and yet, after a point, she loses her articulation: the black box is the loss of narrative, the erasure of the ability to be present in the storytelling.7 The black box/panel is the unnarratable, the event that has been redacted, blacked/blocked out like a censored text, what Joseph Slaughter has termed ‘when narrative is not simply there’ (‘Vanishing Points’). (It is salutary to note that Slaughter first cites Catherine MacKinnon’s argument about the ‘international failure to recognize rape as a crime against humanity and a form of genocide during the war in Yugoslavia’, 113.) Reading Jenny Holzer’s images of censored and blacked out texts, Slaughter writes: Holzer’s paintings force us to confront the fact that there is nothing behind the black oil paint but blank canvas; close reading might not do for these declassified documents – perhaps they cannot be read closely enough. (‘Vanishing Points’, 114) The unnarrated – ‘which was once narrated, draws attention to itself as a political absence’ (115) – here in Gendry-Kim’s representation where Ok-sun’s narrative slides from what is being narrated into black boxes, is itself a point of view, just as narrative is a point of view. Here ‘the narrative quality [of Gendry-Kim’s images] is activated by the imagination of a viewer who  .  .  . motivates the connection between one vanishing point and another’ (Slaughter 120). Charlotta Salmi proposes that ‘it is the lack of ink, or drawing, or writing, that enables violence to happen in the dark’ (188), but yet calls upon us to imagine the events in that darkness. In other words, we as readers make the connection between the vanishing point, in histories of war, of accounts of comfort women like Ok-sun, and the vanishing point within Ok-sun’s own narrative. * The HR graphic novel’s theme of witnessing proposes different varieties and modalities of the witness-function, as we have seen. Structuring responses as responseability in many cases, these texts also underscore the problematics of authenticating witness-accounts but also of empathetic listening. Spaces where witnessing is possible determine the co-opting of particular earand eyewitnesses by the amanuensistic witness-reporter. Such spaces then are not alienating as much as ‘linking spaces’. Even when silence dominates the rhetoric of witnessing, there is a form of protest encoded into the silence. But silence as testimony demands a context of empathetic listening.

Witnessing  151

Notes 1 Resonating with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, Zahra’s Paradise also directs us to the torture-porn photographic archives from Evin prison. Hassan with the help of a friend (who is also the mistress of a high ranking prison official) accesses these archives (170–1). The presence of the camera at the scene of torture, as commentators have argued, amplifies the humiliation for the victim, who now knows that a visual record of what happened to him is available for circulation. 2 Harriet Earle disputes the argument made by Rocco Versaci (and Sacco himself in his interviews) that his (Sacco’s) stories are not about him. For Earle, Sacco’s ‘character is both the glue for the narratives across all works and a litmus paper for the artistic affect within the texts’ (119). 3 Charles Hatfield writes: [T]he placement of this self-image among other figures within a visual narrative confers an illusion of objectivity. Seeing the protagonist or narrator, in the context of other characters and objects evoked in the drawings, objectifies him or her. Thus, the cartoonist projects and objectifies his or her inward sense of self, achieving at once a sense of intimacy and a critical distance. (115) 4 Elisabeth El Refaie writes on the caricature or cartoonish self-representation in graphic memoirs: Such brazen departures from the realist tradition of conventional self-portraits may prod readers to reconsider the importance of likeness as an indicator of autobiographical truthfulness. Cartoon drawings can, after all, sometimes reflect the “authentic” self more successfully than a photograph or a highly realistic portrait ever could. (148) 5 Louise Du Toit elaborates the link between speech, the loss of speech and rape: the loss of self and world is thus in both rape and torture accompanied by a loss of voice, by a loss of agency and self-extension which is carried or embodied by the ability to speak. (cited in Mack 2011: 202) 6 About the lack of epistemic authority of the genocidal rape victim, Debra Bergoffen writes: The women’s words [after genocidal rape] are not asked because they lack epistemic status. Her voice has no truth value. (45) 7 The use of monochromatic drawings in many of these graphic texts is itself worthy of a separate study. Commentators have argued that such a style ‘makes the viewer work to find meaning on the page’ (Salmi 187).

6 RESILIENT RESISTANCE Subjects, assembly and protest

In Safe Area Goražde, in a set of pages already referred to in an earlier chapter, Joe Sacco is asked ‘Why did you come to Goražde?’ (13). On the next page, Sacco draws the first full-page images of the town, cast as a ruin-panorama. We see people chopping firewood, children playing football, a man transporting something in a wheelbarrow, several pedestrians on the path walking purposefully, a building with a woman drying clothes and college-age students with backpacks. We see haystacks, the distant hills and woodpiles. There is no Sacco in this scene. On top of the page, floating in its own box, is the question ‘Why?’ Across the page flit Sacco’s famous text boxes in which he responds to the ‘why’ with: ‘because you are still here . . . not entangled in the limbs of thousands of others at the bottom of a pit. Because Goražde lived’. The girls, the text box says: were ‘not raped and scattered’ (14–15). The last text box, however, offers another question: ‘How?’ The lettering of this text box is also darker and in larger font, emphasizing that this is the key question: how exactly did Goražde live? The ‘how’ refers to the merging of time spans. The bullet-marked and patchedup houses (the roofs have cloth/plastic to plug the holes) are accompanied by the reference in the text box to the many deaths in the wars. This juxtaposition produces a dynamic and tragically antithetical relationship with not just the word ‘lived’ (indicating the present) that Sacco uses, but also the image of boys playing football and college kids with backpacks (the future). In one full-page spread then Sacco gives us the community’s resilience captured in the coming together of the past, present and future, the old and the young, the ruined walls of houses and the continuity of generations although the town is haunted by its many dead ones. Resilience is the image of continuity. When the book ends, Edin, Sacco’s contact, interlocutor and translator says: ‘If this war was over, and he wasn’t sure it was, then there’d be another war within fifty years’ (227).

Resilient resistance  153

Elsewhere in one of the refugee camps he experiences in Palestine, Sacco, shivering inside a home in the rain, with no electricity and no heating, observes that the Palestinian Sameh ‘sit[s] there hunched up from cold, with that look I’d seen on so many Palestinians – like “what can we do?” ’ (Palestine 181). Resilient but without hope, the Palestinians that Sacco meets have adapted to a context that is also irreversible and unavoidable. Resilience is also a plan of action, an attitude directed at the future, because the citizens of Goražde and the Gaza strip, who expect a war or Israeli attacks respectively at some point, do not see war as unacceptable and an aberration but rather as unavoidable and woven into the everyday. Sacco, like other graphic novelists, is deeply concerned with the resilience of victims of HR violations, from war to rape. What does resilience achieve in terms of a discourse in such contexts but also as a feature of individual and social psyches? This is a key component of the theme of HR itself. Resilience, commentators note, is a feature of neoliberal governance ‘systems’ wherein the responsibility to safeguard and improve oneself is shifted away from the state on to the individual: Neoliberalism works through the social production of freedom and the ‘management and organization of the conditions in which one can be free’. Resilience contributes to this through its stress on heightened self-awareness, reflexivity and responsibility. It encourages the idea of active citizenship, whereby people, rather than relying on the state, take responsibility for their own social and economic well-being. In particular, it focuses on the risk and security aspects of this by encouraging preparedness and awareness. ( Joseph 42. See also Nelson 2014) Mark Neocleous writes: ‘Resilience comes to form the basis of subjectively dealing with the uncertainty and instability of contemporary capitalism as well as the insecurity of the national security state’ (5, emphasis in original). It ‘both engages and encourages a culture of preparedness’ (4). Life, for the citizens in the Gaza camps or in the refugee camps documented by Sacco in Malta, living in a state of both destitution and risk, calls for a resilience that is now part of their psychic make up, at the individual and communitarian levels. It is a form of ‘adaptive survival’ (Vrasti and Michelsen 2017: 4) in conditions where survival itself is rendered impossible. This also means, Walker and Cooper note, that a ‘ “culture” of resilience turns crisis response into a strategy of permanent, open-ended responsiveness, integrating emergency preparedness into the infrastructures of everyday life and the psychology of citizens’ (17). Defining resilience as ‘the acceptance of disequilibrium itself as a principle of organization’ Walker and Cooper speak of ‘the permanentization of crisis response [that] leads to another consequence  – the blurring of the boundaries between crisis response, post-catastrophe reconstruction and urban planning’ (17) – that is, resilience incorporated as a feature of everyday life which prepares for disaster.

154  Resilient resistance

The shifting of responsibility to the individual, for others, is a sure sign of the abdication of the (neoliberal) state, as we can see. However, this also means that no alternative view of the future – that is, one sans disaster – can be imagined, because the resilient subject always prepares for the worst. Sarah Bracke writes: The ethos of resilience  .  .  . thwarts the developing of skills of imagining otherwise . . . resilience is not only incited by the dispossession it seeks to overcome, but it also further creates the dispossession of underdeveloping the skills and capacities of imagining other possible worlds, as well as the agential modalities to pursue those imaginations. (63–4) Thus, there is no attempt to change the possible routes into the future envisioned solely as catastrophic. Instead, the ‘new resilient subject’ (Bracke) only prepares herself for the unavoidable future. This, in effect, as Bracke and others argue, entrenches the status quo: the world will continue as it does now and lead to catastrophe – so be prepared. If, as the previous arguments demonstrate, the neoliberal social order focuses attention upon the necessary responsibility of the individual and the community to develop resilience in their contexts of vulnerability and injurability, others see resilience as the grounds for solidarity as well. Linking resilience with resistance, Wanda Vrasti and Nicholas Michelsen write: Where resilience seems to strive towards systemic stability and survivability, solidarity refuses to take the constituted order for granted, imagining itself in an agonistic relation on the side of the emergent potential of constituent power, essentially the power by which humans become agents of their own history. This agonistic confrontation, which is less about taking power in a classic sense than about expanding the counter-power of those declared unfit to rule, is what places solidarity squarely within the domain of the political. (5) A solidarity of those in a state of permanent crisis but seeking to think of an ­alternative future – even if conceived as pure fantasy – suggests resistance, in Vrasti and Michelsen, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler and Sara Holiday Nelson. Placing their already vulnerable bodies on the line, exposing themselves to potential injury, the already injured present a remarkable model of resistance and solidarity in HR graphic novels. The political possibilities explored by the resilient ensure, these texts imply, that resilience does not mean ‘bouncing back’ and retaining the status quo for the future but also the critique of conditions in which resilience is propounded as a virtue, forced upon the victims and seen as an ‘action plan’. This chapter explores two themes: resilience and resistance in HR graphic texts. It moves from an examination of social resilience to the nature of ‘resilient subjectification’ with its ‘epistemic regime’ of novelty and surprise (Aradau), the insistence

Resilient resistance  155

on adaptation, care and vulnerability, before turning to forms and modalities in the ‘mobilization of vulnerability’ (Butler et al.) by the resilient. To this end, it studies texts that document social movements and protests.

Resilience and a society of previvors In Safe Area Goražde, the images of ruined people and buildings populate every page, although there are also signs of reconstruction and repairs. These are signs of a community’s resilience as it strives to retrieve at least minimal lives. But this is not all, because, as Edin implies, they expect a future war. In Palestine, Sacco sees the inhabitants of the refugee camp, Jabalia, ‘sandbagging their doorways in anticipation of the next deluge’ or ‘spreading plastic sheets over their roofs to stop the leaking’ (183–4). Resilience generates a community of previvors. I adapt the term ‘previvor’ from the medical humanities where it is employed to describe individuals who, because of inherited genetic anomalies, are predisposed to cancer but who have not seen manifestations of the disease, or have survived the predisposition. I hasten to add that genetic predispositions that construct a certain identity as previvor are not exactly analogous to the political acts of oppression and resilience that construct the previvor of atrocity. Yet, there is a resonating resemblance between those who because of their embeddedness in particular structural conditions  – poverty, war, dispossession, racism  – are headed for violence and destruction. This ‘heading towards’ is, like genetic predisposition, involuntary and very often imminent. Goražde’s citizens are previvors by virtue of having survived the 1994–95 massacres and war but who, sadly, await future wars and further destruction (as Edin says towards the end, there will be another war in fifty years). Further, as Sacco in the process of documenting their resilience notes, they have little safety nets or support that will help them if war breaks out again in the future. Sacco therefore presents Goražde’s future as not only constituted from resilient hopes and imminent threat (in the traditional structure of social resilience) but also from the conditions in which Goražde lives now. When the HR graphic novel maps resilience, it also presents us the future of communities encoded as an imminent threat against which the previvor community prepares itself. Previvorship is the state of constant emergency preparation, of expecting disaster and hoping to survive that marks people living in war zones and the frontline of genocidal violence or state oppression. When presenting the social scene in Goražde, Sacco has the pretty women tell us their stories. While they flirt and relax, and appear grateful that they survived the horrors of 1994–95, they also admit to worries about the future, because as Nudjejma informs Sacco, ‘in spring armies begin to march’ (53). Later Nudjejma is assured that she will ‘find happiness with someone new’, but the pretend fortune teller, Sabina, whispers to Sacco: ‘I did it to make her feel better’ (55). In the space of two pages, two major themes are thrown up.

156  Resilient resistance

The resilience which helps this girl recover (from watching her home blasted apart and her parents bleeding inside) is coterminous with her hopes for a better future which, as Sabina’s whisper signals, is mere fantasy. Yet Nudjejma, like Sabina, is also alert to the imminent threat that spring brings with it. Hope and threat seem coextensive, and one lives in the present assuming the worst in the future. Resilience which saw them through in the past, in other words, defines their future as previvors because no other future can be imagined. Bracke argues that resilience is mapped onto an unachievable tomorrow, a fantasy of hope and life, even as it acknowledges the imminent threat against which the survivors have to be resilient. Mark Neocleous defines resilience as ‘an apprehension of the future, but a future imagined as disaster and then, more importantly, recovery from the disaster’ (4). The resilient is driven by the imminent threat and the possibility of a better future, which exists only as a fantasy. We see this right at the outset in Sacco’s narrative wherein the text around the revelry reads: But our new pals . . . they partied like the resurrected . . . not like there was no tomorrow, but because there was a tomorrow . . . they’d been so desperate for so long, and, apparently, just weeks ago, so doomed, that now . . . (9) Even as Sacco draws resilient faces, he quickly signals an uncertain future for the inhabitants (which many wish to escape from). The theme of the future uncertainty is sketched on page 19, soon after his grand resilient tableau vivant (pages 14–15) when he draws the worn street with its worn people and their worn faces. The old man in the foreground, his face twisted in either exertion or anxiety, is carrying two jerry cans – with either water or fuel. Parked next to him is a cartload of firewood. Taken together with his anxiety-ridden face, the image suggests fuel shortages, a return to wood-as-fuel and people stockpiling both. Resilience here is inextricably linked to a future where such shortages are imminent and the life of suffering might return and continue. This image suggests, as Bracke has proposed, that ‘resilience involves an apprehension of the future, but a future projected both as disaster and recovery from disaster’ (Bracke 63). Bracke argues: resilience does ignite a sense of possibility . . . but the material, intellectual and emotional labor an ethos of resilience requires, as well as the temporality in which it is caught up . . . undermine precisely the possibility of substantial transformation. (64) Sacco’s representation of Goražde does not offer any signs of this future ‘substantial’ transformation. Rather, it constructs a condition of previvorship.

Resilient resistance  157

Having documented through numerous testimonies the progress of the war and the consequences for individuals, families and the community, Sacco then prepares us for Goražde’s future. He does so by giving us a brief statement about the health facilities and wage structures in postwar Goražde. Sacco tells us: Soldiers defending Goražde were paid in Drinas [the locally manufactured cigarettes], 30 packs a month while I was there. . . . School teachers had just started earning Drinas, too. On pay day they’d get their wages in a plastic bag and smoke some up in the staff room. (106) Soon after, a nurse recounts her experiences in the hospital during wartime: She’d had no supplies, no gauze or bandages, and during the operations she improvised, the only pain killer she had to offer was “rakija” – brandy’. And there was no tobacco, she said. . . . Now she had Drinas. (107) When the nurses stare out at us from the frames of the page, they are not very different, one could say, from the ‘Angel of History’ in which Paul Klee’s famous figure is looking at both the past and the future. The nurses are drawn with brooding eyes, as though when they speak they are looking back and thinking of what they have come through. However, it also appears as though they indeed have put it behind them. The serrated knife and the bottle – perhaps of analgesic or anaesthetic – sitting on the table with a patient contorted in agony as they operate on him is an intrusive image from the past and captures both this past and the resilience of the medics there. They operated under horrific conditions, but they saved lives. In what is an astonishing touch, the nurses now speak of cigarettes as though they were opiates. In the same frame Sacco’s visualization includes pain-numbing and medically essential opiates – the past and the present mediated by the drugs: nicotine, analgesics and whatnot. In each of these cases, cigarettes used as currency demonstrates the collapse of traditional structures of employment, wages, medical care and social welfare mechanisms in general. There is no currency, no painkiller and no tobacco. Sacco’s insistence on the eroded materiality of their lives might be read in terms of imminent disaster and the identification of the entire Goražde community as one of previvors. While this set of examples presents us Goražde’s past, it also shows how this past shapes their present; there are no longer any real facilities and everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up. I therefore suggest that, like Klee’s Angel, even as these examples are about the past, they are determinants for the present and the future because there is little left in Goražde. What may have to change – and I read these examples as proleptic – are the bare essentials: fuel, water, health facilities. The bullet-marked buildings may come from the past, but that is the only kind of building left for the present and the future.

158  Resilient resistance

Disaster comes to previvors who have no social or welfare safety nets. Disaster, as commentators have noted, is not the event but the effects of the event. In Wolf R. Dombrowsky’s formulation: ‘Disasters do not cause effects. The effects are what we call a disaster’ (14). Sacco presents the future imminent disaster in Goražde ‘as a result of the underlying logic of the community’, as disaster theorist Claude Gilbert puts it (6). Gilbert clearly points to disaster as the effect of social vulnerability. When there is rampant unemployment, food and fuel shortages and, finally, no forthcoming international support, we see a collapse in Goražde of what theorist Dombrowsky has termed ‘cultural protection’. Dombroswky writes: “Cultural protections” may be redefined as realizations of warnings, or, more precisely, of prognoses. . . . On the one hand, they are based on the experiences which have been generated during the evolutionary process of trial and error (Murphy’s law represents the highest generalization). On the other hand, they are based on substantiated imaginations, pictures of possibilities, visualizations, and visions. (21) If resilience helps the Goražde population to survive and recover, the erosion of cultural protection which they continue to battle with resilience (by switching to cigarettes as currency, for instance) prepares them as previvors for future disasters. Among the most frightening collapses of cultural protection that Sacco documents, and one that perhaps has the single greatest role to play in the Goražde peoples’ construction as resilient previvors, is the complete collapse of international intervention. Toward the later parts of his narrative, Sacco notes the withdrawal of the UN’s forces, the dithering over decision-making in NATO, the USA and the UN, the secret deals struck by certain armies with the Serbs (166–7,184, 186–7, 196–7, 202–03, 204, and elsewhere). Thousands were exterminated, says the box accompanying the image of shootings, which, Sacco writes, ‘was the largest mass killing in Europe in fifty years’ (203). At one point Sacco gives us the opinions vouchsafed by Lt. Gen Rose, the UN commander for Bosnia who first wonders why the Serb tanks had not been stopped en route to Goražde: ‘One bloke with a crowbar could have stopped that tank’, accuses the Bosnians of running away and leaving the UN to ‘pick up the pieces for them’ and concluding, after surveying the damage in Goražde: ‘The situation was a lot better than I had been led to believe . . . the town had not been destroyed to the level which I had expected’ (187). Sacco quotes from Edin’s testimony: ‘The British soldiers left Goražde and hid themselves in the deep forest . . . People realized we didn’t have any protection from them’ (204). The international community has effectively abandoned Goražde, as we see here. Edin concludes the book by telling Sacco – Sacco reports – ‘If this war was over, and he wasn’t sure it was, then there’d be another war within fifty years’ (227). Edin, says Sacco, ‘wanted to get on with things’ (227).

Resilient resistance  159

Here, Edin’s attempt at reconstructing his life is given centre stage. Sacco records that he was trying to finish his studies, his friends (with whom Sacco is also shown hanging out, ‘having fun’), extending a standing invitation (for Edin) to Germany, but always expecting another war. Sacco tells us he advised Edin to finish his studies and take a break, but Edin does not pay heed: after all, says Sacco by way of explanation, he (Edin) ‘was looking back on a hole in his life almost four years long’ (227). He could not afford a break. The testimony about the collapse of international support and their faith, articulated by Edin, occurs towards the end of Sacco’s narrative and is, I argue, a climactic moment. It is the moment when Sacco poignantly maps Goražde’s resilience onto a future of betrayals, disasters and wars. Sacco implicitly critiques the international forces and organizations that left Goražde to battle it out on its own. Through a documentation of resilience, Sacco signals the ‘spirit of Goražde’, so to speak, but simultaneously suggests that it is this spirit that causes the UN and the international community to abandon them, to rely only upon themselves. The failure of the international community to intervene that Sacco maps climaxes his sensitive portraiture of Goražde and we are forced to see the former as a consequence of the latter in Sacco’s arrangement of the narrative. To return to Sarah Bracke’s thesis on resilience, Bracke argues that ‘resilience forces its subjects to abandon dreams of achieving security and to embrace danger as a condition of possibility for future life’ (69). All of this is captured in Edin’s final testimony: ‘I don’t want any nice things. I don’t want a place or nice furniture. In the end, probably it will all be destroyed’. Edin’s complete lack of interest in putting together the semblance of a good life suggests that he will survive, but always with the anxiety that war will return. While resilience does not automatically indicate a present and future vulnerability, the loss of faith in, say, foreign aid and peace, in Edin’s words, signal a lack of optimism that things would actually change. Edin’s words are, again, a proleptic narrative, a look into a future where another war is likely. This shapes his present (‘I don’t want . . . ’), but is also, I suggest, a signifier of the loss of certitude, which in turn implies vulnerability: Edin awaits war and destruction because he believes Goražde is open to a reiteration of its past. Resilient communities who exist as previvors anticipating a dire future and preparing for it as a part of everyday strategies of living are seen in other texts as well. Resilience as the making of previvorship that sees the future as an imminent extension and continuum of the same oppression, deprivation and suffering is marked in many other graphic texts too. In Sajad’s Munnu, for instance, raids and inspections by the military and the police in Batamaloo, Kashmir, are a common occurrence. The community has become as resilient to these humiliating and often violent inspections as they are to slipping past the army’s posts (we are shown children and adults sneaking past the army men (15), and elsewhere, suggesting the community has incorporated the army’s potentially violent behaviour and presence into its everyday life). We see Shahnaz, Munnu’s sister, drawing something on their gate. The image has an accompanying text box that says: ‘The army would leave a swastika cross

160  Resilient resistance

on the gates of the houses they checked’. This design is precisely what Shahnaz is drawing. When queried by the young Munnu, she responds: Don’t worry, Munnu. If they catch us, we’ll say this mark is from the previous crackdown. (13) Sajad suggests that the community has endured the searches, beatings and humiliations for long enough to see a future composed of just these. That is, for Shahnaz, like Munnu himself, she cannot imagine a future in which there is no army raid, searches and violence. As we have already noted, resilience as a form of governance becomes effective because there is no alternative imagined or imaginable. In Freedom Hospital, Yasmin and her friends expect the hospital to be bombed several times in the future. After the first bombing, they rebuild it and have just hung the board up again. Sophie asks Yasmin: ‘I just find the situation funny. This sense of déjà vu . . . I feel like I’ve gone back in time by four months’. And Yasmin responds: No. we’re still going forward. Even if they demolish the hospital a hundred times . . . we’ll rebuild it every time . . . We will just build it again. Build bigger. (202–3) Yasmin is, on the one hand, exhibiting a resilience that would help her and her team cope with the war and the regime. But on the other, she cannot imagine a future where there is a different, perhaps more understanding, regime that will allow the hospital to function. She embodies what Bracke describes as ‘apprehending the future as a cycle of disaster and recovery’ (63).

Resilient subjectification In Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal’s text on the Partition, we are told: Cooper’s Camp lived out its strange reality in persecution, pride and unhappiness, in its half-hearted huts on its neat roads. And the world passed it by . . . What were the women doing? . . . They were saving money, taking loans, buying and selling everything from school books to goats, cultivating land on lease, arguing with banks that refused them accounts, attending gram sabhas. And every woman was fighting her own private battle. (Ghosh 240)

Resilient resistance  161

Mixing individual and collective/social psyches structured around resilience, Gupta and Mittal point to a form of subjectivity and subjectivization that emerges in and from the recovery phase after the traumatic events. They also, in the process, signal the structural iniquities and uneven power relations that place the refugees of the camp in the position of the disempowered, for example banks that refuse accounts, the world that passes them by, persecution and leasing land (perhaps at exorbitant rents). They, therefore, foreground, what gets left out when discussing the virtue of resilience exhibited by the women of Cooper’s Camp: power relations. ‘Resilient subjectification’ (Bracke 61) emerges as a necessary condition of survival, but cannot be seen solely as a virtue or an index of the toughness of the human spirit: such a focus deflects attention from what produced the conditions in which a subject was forced to become resilient in the first place.1 Gupta and Mittal embed resilience in the unequal relations of the social order that created the Camp, refused the Camp several human and economic rights and facilities and continued to persecute them. The contours of such a resilient subjectification explored here are the consequences of specific structural conditions: war, risk, contingency and uncertainty introduced due to traumatic events such as forced migration, war or disease, genocide and, in the neoliberal economies of the late twentieth century, systems of governance, surveillance and ‘development’.

The epistemic regimes of resilient subjectification As already noted, the resilient individual or community plans for risk, uncertainty and future catastrophe. Disaster, deprivation and suffering (in the future) are anticipated as unavoidable, and therefore make up the fabric of today’s life. Granted, the refugees of Kugler, Ghosh or Evans anticipate an uncertain future, but the exact temporal instantiation, direction or magnitude of the unexpected remains undefinable and unpredictable. Resilient subjects such as the ones Sacco meets in the Gaza area, Hebron or Goražde, the Kashmiris in Batamaloo and other places in Sajad, and the long-term residents of ‘temporary’ refugee camps in This Side, That Side live and work within a situation where surprise, novelty and shock are integral to their knowledge systems. Claudia Aradau describes the ‘epistemic regime’ where surprise and novelty indicate an epistemic regime in which events are always emergent and potential. . . . Preparedness and resilience are the answers to the surprising event and its emergent novelty. Contingency is not tamed, but incorporated, literally lived with. (77) For Aradau, Resilience is therefore a proactive response to a world that is ‘complex, unstable, unknowable, and unpredictable’. The problematisation that calls

162  Resilient resistance

for resilience is that of ‘un-ness’: unexpected, unknowable, unpredictable, unmanageable events. (78) Surprises and shocks can be ‘local, cross-scale and true novelty’ (79). However, ultimately, all these three types of surprises harbour an element of unpredictability and require resilience and some form of adaptive management. Therefore, surprise as inherent to our social and ecological systems entails a different modality of governance, which is attuned to the unexpected and unknowable, rather than purporting to prevent, anticipate or protect against the unexpected and the uncertain. ‘Expecting the unexpected’ has become the motto of resilience measures, from climate change to terrorism and from disasters to migration. (79) Take Lily’s story in ‘The Taboo’, the text I opened this section with. Malini Gupta, the narrator, tells us how she discovered Lily had started her own garage after separating from her husband. Lily tells her (Gupta is the amanuensistic narrator): More than him [Samar, Lily’s husband], it was Cooper’s Camp I  left  .  .  . Cooper’s is not a transit camp anymore. It is permanently there. Forever. So when he refused to do anything about it, my dreams died with him, in Cooper’s, one by one, day by day. . . . If I had stayed, I would have remained a faceless refugee, disliked, disowned. . . . It hurts to see Cooper’s and Samar: both stand defeated, yet with nowhere to go but the battlefield. (Ghosh 246) In the last line of the text, after Lily’s story, Gupta speaks of the future: ‘the dark, monsoon clouds were round the corner’ (247). Lily’s references are to her recognition of her future: a ‘faceless refugee, disliked, disowned’. This suggests knowledge, anticipation and recognition of a state of future affairs. She leaves the camp after this recognition that comes to her: of impending and imminent disaster as a refugee. Embedded in the gendered and class contexts – her husband’s drinking, and the general disenfranchised state of the inmates of Cooper’s Camp – Lily’s resilience in striking out on her own is founded on her knowledge of an uncertain certainty in the future as a refugee. Her recognition of the social and economic contexts that circumscribe her life as a refugee and as a single woman (the latter she references under the head ‘taboo’) prepare her for a resilient subject position. ‘To me that taboo [as refugee] is greater than the taboo of a single woman’ (246). The ‘battlefield’ is the future of the Camp (and of her husband), from which Lily opts out, for another battle as a single woman. That is, Lily’s leaving the Camp and her husband are proactive measures of avoiding one kind of battlefield – a refugee identity – but moving into another, that of a single woman. The uncertain future

Resilient resistance  163

of a definite refugee status is averted, but only to embrace the uncertainty of a future as a single woman. The assertion of victim agency by Lily emerges from the epistemic regime of uncertain futures she finds herself in, where she chooses one of the two routes, or ‘taboos’ as she calls them, open to her. In other words, resilient subjectification involves choosing your options between two kinds of uncertain futures, but does not allow you to avert uncertainty in toto. Assuming the future will see further reprisals, disappearances and killings, Mehdi Alavi’s brother Hassan in Zahra’s Paradise is photographing the events outside the notorious Evin prison and in the cemetery (47, 163). The presence of the camera and the phone (or rather, the cameraphone) is integral to the entire tale. Amir and Khalil’s story focuses on people unaccounted for, ‘disappeared’ by the regime. When the missing persons’ relatives institute enquiries about them, they are told there is no proof of arrests (106, 159 and elsewhere). There are no bodies to be claimed either. Unmarked graves mark the cemetery, ‘Zahra’s Paradise’ (which gives the work the title) in a section that ‘does not exist . . . has no name and no record’ (163–4). In a country marked by the lack of evidence of state wrongdoing – an epistemic regime of secrecy, ignorance and manipulation – ­Hassan and his friends have co-opted the camera as a part of their resilient subjectification, creating a different epistemic regime from what the state imposes. In the imminent event of disappearances and the subsequent ‘cover-ups’, the camera and the internet in Zahra’s Paradise represents an ‘epistemic regime [wherein] contingency is tamed by accessing secrets, making transparent and reducing nonknowledge’ (Aradau 77). In systems and societies where secrecy and unknowability is a component of everyday life, another epistemic regime is also discernible. In Palestine, Sacco walking through Nablus in the immediate aftermath of the killing of three Israeli soldiers, is startled by the arrival of a contingent of Israeli military personnel. The soldiers start slapping and bullying the townspeople. Sacco reports the behaviour of the other pedestrians in that space: ‘some townspeople frozen in place . . . waiting . . . watching . . . others . . . going about their business . . . like ­nothing’s happening’ (271). This rather innocuous scene  – considering the graphic accounts of violence directed at the Palestinians that has occurred through the book thus far – offers us an instance of a wilful ignorance practised by victims. Instantiating what Diana Taylor termed ‘percepticide’, many of the Palestinians avert their eyes from the soldiers and their action while others await ‘action’. Taylor writes: [The witness] cannot or will not witness the events taking place in front of her. The military spectacle made people pull back in fear, denial and tacit complicity from the show of force. Therein lay its power. The military violence could have been relatively invisible, as the term “disappearance” suggests. The fact that it wasn’t indicates that the population as a whole was the intended target, positioned by means of the spectacle. People had to deny what they saw. . . . To see, without being able to do, disempowers absolutely.

164  Resilient resistance

But seeing, without even admitting that one is seeing, further turns the violence on oneself. Percepticide blinds, maims, kills through the senses. (123–4) Sacco draws the people in this panel with their eyes averted from the soldiers: a woman buys a fruit from the vendor who is carefully focused on bagging the materials, another woman is drawn looking carefully sideways. Here business-as-usual implies percepticide, but also resilient subjectification because survival demands ignoring whatever is happening. In the topos of witnessing (which we examined in the previous chapter), resilience is marked by a calculated attempt at percepticide. Percepticide is a marker, also, of an epistemic regime of willed ignorance. When the knowledge of what is going on elicits brutal reprisals – in Zahra’s Paradise (65), as well as in March, we see scenes of graphic violence inflicted on protestors and marchers – the populace often takes to percepticide. To not see and not-see is a survival mechanism. Sacco’s awareness of the context ensures that his own epistemic regime is fraught with fearful knowledge and uncertainty as to how and when he may be targeted. His role and position as witness, discussed presciently by Wendy Kozol (“Complicities of Witnessing”), is a matter of anxiety for him. Thus, escorting two women through the Arab market in Silwan town, he becomes extremely self-conscious. Devoting a page to documenting this anxiety, Sacco draws his panicky face as he pays attention to everything and everybody around: Is she acting nervous? Hope no one says anything. We walking too fast? He looking at us? Are they? Why is she looking at her feet? She’s acting nervous. . . (258) As witness to others’ fears and anxieties, Sacco opts to focus on his own here. However, that said, Sacco, like everybody else in Palestine, is building his epistemic regime around both, a resilient subjectification and an awareness that the Israeli military presence is capable of extreme measures upon civilians. That is, the predictability of Israeli violence although tinged with uncertainty about when and where it may be directed, generates an omnipresent anxiety in the resilient subject. When Sacco draws Palestinians watching Israelis he is, I suggest, documenting this particular feature of the resilient subject: an epistemic regime of uncertain yet predictable violence. It is built into the very fabric of their everyday lives. Within these epistemic regimes, the victim of HR violations also demonstrates other features of their individual and collective resilient subjectification, notably resistance. Resilient subjectification produces conditions where rights claims can

Resilient resistance  165

be obscured or eroded in the reliance on the individual’s ability to ‘trump’ all odds. Resilience then is not a means of courage alone; it is also a means of anxiety that there are no protective regimes any longer. The critique by Bracke cited previously is salutary precisely because it points to the abdication of responsibilities by the state, concomitantly transferring all responsibility of rescue, survival and protection upon the people themselves.

The resistance of/by the resilient subject To see the Palestinian, the refugee or the Sarajevan as mere victim is to ignore their agential acts, however temporary, symbolic or circumscribed. These acts represent the transformation of her/their resilience subjectification into modalities of resistance.

Adaptative resilience as resistance A small and yet effective means by which Sajad documents the victimhood and resilience of the Kashmiris is via art. Drawing the Kashmiri human as the hangul (the red stag which is the symbol of Kashmir) is a political act. He explains, over two pages, to his editor the symbolism involved in this representation. We are first shown Sajad drawing the hangul with the caption, ‘Endangered Species’ underneath. The speech balloons say: I need to talk to you about a graphic novella I just made. . . . Yeah, I read Joe Sacco’s Palestine. . . . You know how the Hangul is endangered because its habitat’s been wrecked by the army and deforestation? Well, I  did a ­cartoon in 2005 or 2006 in which I put a deer and a Kashmiri next to each other with the tagline “Endangered Species”. In this graphic novella, I’ve made the hanguls humanoid to narrate the tale of Kashmir. . . . I am going with “Endangered Species” to highlight those who’ve been robbed of their ­habitat. . . . Let the world know about us, we’re Hanguls! (333–4, emphasis in original) The anthropomorphizing apart, Sajad’s appropriation of the national animal into a symbolism that unerringly draws attention to the dangerous identity of a Kashmiri today, is a form of artistic adaptation where ‘adaptation means that the peoples need to sustain and reproduce their authenticity and distinctiveness in order to gain recognition and become entitled to certain rights and positions’ (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen 136). The term ‘adaptation’ is being employed in two ways here. First, the adaptation is a proactive stance of the Kashmiri when as individuals and as a community they adapt to a habitat peopled by the military presence. Through the narrative Sajad shows us the community haunted by searches, humiliations, missing persons and executions. The Kashmiris now inhabit an ecosystem where life is unliveable for many, but to which they have

166  Resilient resistance

adapted. Second, this ecosystem becomes the subject of art in Sajad’s hands so as to draw attention to the unliveable nature of the habitat. Adapting the term ‘endangered species’ to apply equally to the animal and the human, Sajad also imputes an authenticity to his representation of the Kashmiri as well as the habitat in which both animal and human live. That is, the use of the interlinked trope of the animal and endangered lives allows Sajad to communicate through a stylistic minimalism the cultural script of militarized Kashmir – a script that has at its centre the national animal and the precarious lives of animals and humans. If the hangul is a national animal and cultural symbol of Kashmiri authenticity and identity, the endangered hangul in Sajad is an authenticating device wherein we are made uncomfortably aware that Kashmir is an ecosystem that no longer sustains life. Kashmiris adapt to these conditions and thus mark themselves as resilient subjects, but Sajad adapts these conditions into art as a mode of resistance and proactive communication with the world to highlight these necropolitical conditions for animals and humans alike. Beaten, arrested and humiliated, the African Americans marching for freedom and voting rights in March burst into song in prison: Ain’t gonna let no Jim Crow turn me around Turn me around, turn me around Ain’t gonna let no Jim Crow turn me around I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’ Marchin’ up to freedom’s land . . . (March II: 103) Once again turning to art, the prison song is adapted from a children’s song, incorporating ‘Jim Crow’ and other racial signifiers. Highlighting simultaneously the text and contexts of cultural production, Lewis et  al. neatly fold ­resilience into resistance. Lewis et al. give us a clear date ‘June 24, 1961’, thereby documenting the historical authenticity of the events. Drawing prisoners singing those words as they stand in the darkness, literal and historical, in their cells, Lewis et  al. point to the significance of the words and the moment of enunciation. They first draw attention to the contexts of the singing: the incarcerated, beaten and humiliated African Americans sing in their cells. We have already been shown their humiliation – refused any clothing – and their abuse at the hands of the white prison wardens before we are shown their singing. Evocative of resistance literature and prison narratives (as studied by Barbara Harlow), the contexts of cultural production are crucial: the song emerges from conditions of unliveable life. As Judith Butler reading poems from Guantanamo Bay puts it, ‘The forming of those words is linked with survival, with the capacity to survive, or survivability’ (2009: 56). For Butler, ‘They [the words of the poems by inmates] interrogate the kinds of utterance possible at the limits of grief, humiliation, longing,

Resilient resistance  167

and rage’ (59). More importantly, Butler, returning to the question of precarious embodiment, writes: In these poems, the body is also what lives on, breathes, tries to carve its breath into stone; its breathing is precarious – it can be stopped by the force of another’s torture. But if this precarious status can become the condition of suffering, it also serves the condition of responsiveness, of a formulation of affect, understood as a radical act of interpretation in the face of unwilled subjugation. (61) Aligning corporeality and materiality – the Guantanamo poems were inscribed on walls, cups etc. – Butler sees the composition of the poems as indexical of precarious material lives but also of a ‘radical act of interpretation’, which may also be called ‘resistance’. In the case of March, the song is not written up but sung, in the face of abusive wardens ordering the inmates to ‘quit singing them damn songs’ and issuing threats for the rebellious singing. Singing, aligned inextricably to the physical act of voice, rhythm and modulated breathing, is an extraordinary act of resistance by those with nothing to resist with – except their awareness of a performance art form (singing) and their bodies to perform with. Adapting a children’s song in conditions inimical to any art also involves inserting the politically essential and racially authenticating signifiers – such as ‘Jim Crow’. The song is a resilient art form, for it survives multiple iterations and appropriations. The prisoners are, likewise, resilient because they survive the wrongs done to their psyches and their bodies. Adapting the song to, first, their racial identity and second, to their conditions of interment, the African Americans in March demonstrate a resistance within adaptive resilience here. Enunciating a song of freedom when their bodies are not free and in conditions where their bodies’ lack of mobility is neutralized, so to speak, by the use of voice, the African Americans transform their resilience into art and art itself into an index of psychic – affective – freedom for individuals and the community. There is another instance of this adaptative resilience via art in March. ‘My country, ‘Tis of thee’, another American patriotic song, is used interestingly in the text to represent African American adaptation. The context is again very precisely dated: ‘U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C., 11:41 AM, January 20, 2009’ (II: 80). It is the Inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the United States, with soul singer Aretha Franklin singing the song minutes before the inaugural. Into the song are inserted the lines Let freedom ring! Let it ring! From the red clay of Georgia All the way to the Allegheny mountains Let it ring! (March II: 79–82)

168  Resilient resistance

The words ‘red clay of Georgia’ from Martin Luther King Jr’s famous ‘I have a dream speech’ (28 Aug. 1963) marks an adaptation. But that is, really, only a minor form of adaptation in March. The first lines of the song, ‘My country, ‘tis of thee’, appear on page 79 across an image of the events around the Montgomery violence. The Greyhound bus station occupies more than half the page, and the image is not within a panel. Signs of violence are clearly visible. At the foot of the page, running as a ticker-tape kind of image, the words of the song appear, heightening the ironic signification of the events and the lyrics. We have just encountered the extreme brutality with which the African American protestors had been subdued (II: 73–78). The song’s opening lyrics point to the supreme irony of the phrase ‘my country’ where ‘my’ clearly is not a pronoun for the black peoples when used in conjunction with ‘country’. The lyric, then, is adapted by Lewis et al. to show the failure of the lyric itself where the image of broken black bodies and violence undermines the denotation and connotation of ‘my country’. This brilliantly sets up the resistance-from-resilience theme on the next two pages. From the image of the Montgomery violence to the Obama inaugural, the same lyric continues, this time the words starting from the top of the page, running through the middle and across both pages (II: 80–1). More than just the traditional ‘bleed’ of the comic book, the words, Lewis et al. suggest, linger, resonate from the 1960s civil rights movement to the Obama inaugural, implying that the same ideals remain in the social and cultural imaginary of the nation across the decades. The progressive larger font of the letters of the lyric on 79–80, perhaps capturing the rising pitch of Franklin’s voice, are interestingly ‘framed’ by small insets. These insets, in square boxes depict: injured black people, a white policeman lighting up a cigarette, two white men smiling triumphantly (one carries a baseball bat), a pair of legs dangling from a car onto the ground with a pool of blood around the leg, a white man’s hands twitching and a white boy being patted on his shoulder by a hairy white hand. Cumulatively, these insets recall the violence of the earlier pages (II: 73–8) where we have seen white men using baseball bats and their fists to beat up the black protestors. Adaptation is here a major artistic strategy to highlight this history of a race. Now, adapting the song with the authenticating device (Martin Luther King Jr’s words) that reference African American identity to the Obama inaugural suggests racial resilience as a continuum. The words framed by the insets also imply a resistance that emerged from such violent contexts and which enabled the undeterred race to eventually have a president from their community. Using the medium of the song, then, Lewis et al. ensure that we understand the history of Obama’s inaugural and what the words of the old song interspersed with King Jr’s have come to mean: both resilience and resistance. But artistic resistance alone does not suffice in most cases, and the HR graphic novel, acknowledging this truism, offers us other forms and modalities by which those denied their rights, claim them.

Resilient resistance  169

Assembly March focuses, as the title indicates, on the gathering of campaigners, activists and those denied their rights. Bhimayana highlights Ambedkar’s attempts to bring together the large and diverse populations of ‘untouchable’ communities in solidarity. Munnu shows the Kashmiris coming together to mourn one more death or to agitate against yet another disappearance. River of Stories, Palestine, Delhi Calm, Freedom Hospital and several other texts have instances of protest movements and public campaigns directed at obtaining rights from the state or seeking redress for the state’s actions. All HR graphic texts seem to be concerned deeply with the nature of the public and public space, linking the ‘political’ with the space of the ‘polis’. For Judith Butler, the assembling of already vulnerable bodies – ‘it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food’ (Butler Notes Towards a Performative 10) – in public spaces is a key moment, and figure, of resistance. As she puts it, ‘sometimes deliberately exposing the body to possible harm is part of the very meaning of political resistance’ (126).

Spaces of appearance/bodies in appearance In River of Stories, India’s first graphic novel, the villagers and tribals who were likely to lose their lands due to the building of a massive dam are on a protest march to stop the construction. They march through the Rewa valley and recreate the ‘Rewa-parikrama’ of the ages when people would ‘journey on foot from her [the river] source  .  .  . to the point where she meets the sea’ (49). They come towards the dam that is, in effect, their future nemesis. En route they encounter two policemen, presumably placed there to thwart the protestors’ march (50). That is, the protestors fighting to keep their land and their river, both of which are to be violently erased – literally, for they are to be submerged – when the dam comes up, face violent reprisals even as they demand the dam be stopped. That is, the vulnerable population of the Rewa-region expose themselves to imminent violence from the state in the form of police assaults or arrests well before the violence of the dam. The arrival of the vulnerable population in the public space marks, in Butler’s words, ‘a bodily demand for a more livable set of lives’ (25). The constitution of the public sphere is itself, writes Butler, achieved through ‘a condition of appearance’ (20). Take, for instance, March, a pre-eminent text for Butler’s argument about the mobilization, in and as public, of vulnerability. Throughout the texts we see African Americans outside, in public spaces: theatres, restaurants, stores, buses, roads, etc. They request that they be served, like any member of the American citizenry: ‘Ma’am, may we be served?’ (March I: 92), or: ‘I have a right to go in here, on the grounds of the Supreme Court decision. . . ’ (March III: 39). The response: ‘We don’t serve niggers in here’ is what they usually get, if lucky. In most cases, however, they are beaten, humiliated and arrested.

170  Resilient resistance

What March does is to examine the nature of the public and the norms that regulate how certain races need to appear in that space. To appear as a black man or woman in public hitherto meant to appear only in specific ways: in earmarked/ segregated spaces as docile bodies. To cite Butler again, ‘the compulsory demand to appear in one way rather than another functions as a precondition of appearing at all’ (35). The paying customer at Woolworth’s lunch counter is acceptable in appearance, function and utility so long as s/he is a white customer. What the campaigners in March do is to alter this demand as to how customers may appear. Norms inform the ‘lived modes of embodiment we acquire over time, and those very modes of embodiment can prove to be ways of contesting those norms, even breaking with them’, writes Butler (29). What the campaigners do in March is to enact embodied presencing at the public spaces – black, paying bodies demanding equal service. That is, their appearance is a performative act that chooses to not perform the identity preassigned to them as subordinated black bodies. Note, for instance, the exquisite courtesy with which the campaigners treat the staff of various public and private offices that ill-treat them. Addressing them as ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’, and phrasing their requests politely (‘one ticket, please’; ‘one-way ticket, please’, March II: 20, 35, and elsewhere), the African American performs, one can see, a different identity. Governed by the decision to be non-violent and polite, the black activist converses in formal speech, with the right inflection of courtesy but – and this is crucial – not servile or grovelling. The norms of how the black body should perform its identity in public spaces – as menial, obsequious, servile – are overturned when formally dressed and courteous black bodies appear in front of the white people and demand (rather than beg?) services and rights. March underscores the performativity of bodies and how specific norms of performing race are inverted in the civil rights movement. The space of appearance and the condition of appearance are also crucial in the way Ambedkar first destabilizes and later inverts the ‘expected’ norms of an ‘untouchable’ body in public. When he is refused entry into a historical fort because he is a ‘lower-caste’, Ambedkar asks: Look, I  am a patient man, but I  will not tolerate your gratuitous insults. Young man, is this what your religion teaches? . . . Just tell us if we can get into the fort or not. If we can’t we don’t want to stop. (87) Like gender, although race or caste or community may be ‘enacted, time and again, the enactment is not always in compliance with certain kinds of norms, surely not in precise conformity with the norm’ (Butler 31). What do the appearances of survivor, victim or activist bodies, non-conforming in terms of the prescribed rules for public appearance entail and what do they achieve? HR graphic novels are particularly interested in this aspect. The very appearance of black bodies at public spaces demanding their rightful services is perceived as a threat, even as violence by those who have denied the

Resilient resistance  171

black bodies rights in the first instance. Butler is no doubt right to argue that ‘concerted actions of people opposing state violence are understood as “violent action” even if they do not engage in violent acts’ (26), and this is precisely what is visible throughout March. When protestors in Palestine stand up to the Israeli soldiers, like the African Americans in March, they place their bodies on the line, exposing themselves to further violent treatment and amplified precarity. In the process, we find an assertion of first and foremost, resilience: the refusal to move or vacate seats, à la Rosa Parks, although centuries of cultural training ought to have ‘told’ them to make way for the white people in March. Then, by risking beatings and worse, they convert their very corporeal vulnerability into their source of resistance as well. Acknowledging that they are likely to provoke violent repercussions is at once the resilience and resistance offered by those who lead lives in unliveable settings. In a large number of HR graphic novels, especially those dealing with questions of state oppression and rights, resilience and resistance are both presented as embodied states wherein protestors, victims, the relations of victims, survivors and activists place their bodies in the line of possible, even imminent, attack. If, as noted previously, resilience is about incorporating the unavoidable as a part of everyday life and actions, the situating of bodies in the line of fire ensures that the imminent police/military strikes are a part of their performance of public appearance. In Butler’s terms such bodies, ‘by virtue of occupying and persisting in that space without protection [are] posing their challenge in corporeal terms so that the ‘body “speaks” politically’ (83). March has page after page of police brutalities and broken black bodies (and some white). In Zahra’s Paradise there are two kinds of ‘bodies on the line’: those of the protestors (40–2) and those of women standing carrying photographs of their disappeared husbands, brothers or sons (37, 49, 138). The first group is seeking human rights and voting rights, and democracy. Often they are arrested, and never seen again. The second group consisting mainly of the mourning mothers, is treated more carefully by the police. Addressed as ‘sisters’ first, they are told to ‘move’. Some mothers argue: ‘This is a public park, this is our park!’. The police retort: ‘But you’re holding these photos!’ (138. This incident invites comparisons with the famous ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ of the Argentinian ‘Dirty War’). The mothers in Zahra’s Paradise refuse to concede that their sons are dead: no bodies have been handed over, but there are no records of the sons, when alive, being taken away either. The representations of the public space outside the Evin prison or the town square in Zahra’s Paradise offers a complicated layering to the ideas of resistance and resilience. First and most importantly, the women, by refusing to move, announce themselves as resilient-resistant bodies, willing to bear the consequences of their embodied actions in defiance of the legal order (‘the law forbids more than two people walking together’, as the policeman informs a woman, 138). Second, the women are mourning and yet not mourning in public. They refuse to mourn

172  Resilient resistance

because they have no body to mourn over. Yet they are also mourning because the absence of either a living or a dead body means that their lives are temporally circumscribed within the frame of the appearance or non-appearance of their son’s or husband’s body (which, by being ‘disappeared’, exists in a different spatio-temporal frame). Their lives, in short, are frozen in time – at the moment when their sons or husbands disappeared.2 Then, the women marching in the town square, seeking justice, drastically alter the concept of the ‘public’ in Islamic Tehran, or anywhere else for that matter. Jean Franco writing about the Argentinian mothers summarizes the gendered inversion of both, the act of assembly and the space of the public when she argues: These women have not only redefined public space by taking over the center of Buenos Aires on one afternoon every week but they have also interrupted military discourse . . . publicly displaying the photographs of sons and daughters who have “disappeared.” This form of refusing a message of death is obviously quite different from the quest for immortality that has traditionally inspired the writer and the political leader. The women interrupted the military by wrestling meaning away from them and altering the connotations of the word “mother.” To the military, they were the mothers of dead subversives, therefore, of monsters. But they have transformed themselves into the “mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” that is, in the words of one of them, into “mothers of all the disappeared,” not merely their own children. They have thus torn the term “mother” from its literal meaning as the biological reproducer of children and insisted on social connotations that emphasize community over individuality. (Cited in Partnoy 2–3) The bodies of the disappeared are also denied as never ever having been present in the prisons. There is, in short, no body or identity that the state recognizes. It is in the place of the disappeared body  – and we note that many of these bodies were taken away from public protests, i.e., public spaces – that the material photographs carried by the mothers appears. Alicia Partnoy writes of the texts produced by the mothers: the mothers engage in the production of those material traces in their own writings. These texts create a material presence in the face of absence. . . . To resist their children’s erasure from the historic memory of their country, the women persisted in representing and idealizing them. (5) Since the photograph implies there was once a person/body that produced this photograph, it serves in these texts as the evidence of matter that has ceased to matter because it has been erased by the state. Placing their maternal, familial b­ odies on the line, in these cases, also means to bring back in spectro-material fashion the

Resilient resistance  173

‘bodies’ who are no longer addressed or acknowledged by the apparatus that erased them. Also inscribed into this embodied resilient-resistant spacing of public space is a rhetoric of challenge and survival in Zahra’s Paradise. When a policeman threatens the women a younger woman screams at him: It’s not enough that you murdered our brothers and sisters, now you want to arrest our mothers? Have you no shame? (138) Hoping to shame the policemen with rhetoric as a means of thwarting their violent reprisals against the women, the discourse of the family also invokes the fact that the family has been dis-affiliated by the actions of the state. The invocation of the dis-affiliated family redraws the boundaries of the family itself. In an adjacent panel, an angry mother asks ‘whoever heard of a family of two?’ (138), although that is precisely what many dis-affiliated families have been reduced to: like Hassan and his mother, once the other son, Mehdi, has been disappeared. In Palestine the family of the dead are not given sufficient time for the rituals of burial and mourning, and even the identity card of the dead boy is taken away, effectively erasing him from all records (241). Invoking the question of the dis-affiliated family in public space by placing their maternal-familial bodies on the line also blurs the distinction between the private and the public. This is a common theme in texts such as Munnu and Zahra’s Paradise. A family in mourning takes the body to the graveyard in the form of a public procession – which is often prohibited by the authorities, or else performed under heavy surveillance. Craig Pollack has argued that there exists in cases of genocide and political executions, a ‘fundamental inability to separate mourning and politics in the burial process’ (127). Instances of this indistinction (between mourning and politics) may be found in Munnu. In one image, one of the mourners prays: ‘May his [the dead Ajaz’s] blood bring colours to this burnt-out valley’ (65). This political slogan in the midst, or guise, of a mourning prayer and ritual for one individual, calls attention to the role the dead play in the life, and aspirations (social and political), of the community. The dead body, with whom the living share the condition of precarity, is called upon to bring fresh life to the burnt-out country. The phrase ‘burnt-out’ is indicative of an extinction but also of a scorched and injured body-politic (the country is a body-politic). It gestures at lifelessness (there are, later in the text, references to cremation, which is about burning of bodies) even as it calls for the dead to revitalize the land. The second voice prays for ‘strength to the proud mothers of the martyrs’. Here the death of one individual, and the occasion for a familial mourning for that specific individual, quickly folds into a call for a political identity (‘martyrs’) and a collective (‘mothers of the martyrs’). That the dead remain integral to the living is brought home to us with Sajad’s elaboration of Munnu’s nightmare of burial (57–9, 242–3). As always, there is a

174  Resilient resistance

crowd waiting for the dead body to arrive so that they can conduct the last rites. Munnu’s family, Adil, Akhtar and Shahnaz, are all present, but all of them ‘disappear into the crowd’ (57), or ‘disappear to join the wailing women’ (35). A coffin arrives then, and as the burial process gets underway, Munnu cries out ‘Don’t bury him!’ (58). Munnu then kicks open the coffin to prove that Mustafa is not dead and discovers that it is not Mustafa but his own brother, Bilal, who lies in the coffin (58). Munnu’s scream then changes: ‘He’s my brother, don’t bury him’ (59). Sajad suggests that burial and mourning are woven into the fabric of everyday life for Munnu, and for other Kashmiris. But two aspects of the series of dream images stand out. First, Munnu’s family disappears into a crowd of mourners. Second, the dead Mustafa mysteriously metamorphoses into Bilal in the coffin. The former is in keeping with the ready interchangeability, or fungibility, of victims and witnesses. The boy’s anxious cry ‘mamma’ (57) is resonant because of the number of children who had lost their parents and relations in the Kashmir crises over the years. Munnu is one more boy who lives with the fear of one day losing his parents and family: he is getting ready for a previvor identity. Whether Kashmir, as represented in Munnu, or Tehran now has a public sphere built around mourning, gravestones, memorials and public ritual performances of grief is a moot point, but one that is necessary to address. Commentators have argued that civic speech – the Habermasian rational/reasonable debate – has for too long been seen as the cornerstone of the public sphere. This means the idea of the public sphere emphasizes the work of the civic actor. Instead, they propose, we need to start thinking of visual modes of address that enables a public sphere – a visual one – as well, which would give space to the role of the civic spectator. It demands a ‘reconsideration of civic spectatorship that takes into account changing modes of circulation and digital technologies, which fundamentally alter the contemporary public culture’ (Cram et al. 228–9). The public space is being radically redefined by survivors, relations of the victims and even the disappeared when their resilience induces them to not only employ symbols of the dead but also position the living as potentially injurable or ‘killable’ (by the state). The mourning processions and the processions of the women from the families of the disappeared are made up of bodies directly on the line but at the same time supplemented by the spectro-material signs of the disappeared. The denial of public mourning or rituals in the interest of ‘safety’ or ‘law and order’ in Munnu, Palestine and other texts amplifies the condition of dis-affiliation for the survivors of the dead. But it also means that the state recognizes the possible instrumentalization of dead bodies – which may, by a stretch of its meaning, be thought of as the resilience of the dead – and so proscribes its ‘use’. A proscription on the ‘use’ of dead bodies, their ‘appearance’ even in the form of photographs becomes in the HR text an attempt to construct what Thomas Laqueur, speaking of different kinds of funerals, termed ‘theatre of absence’: Much more also came to be demanded of funerals than ever before: the body on its way to the grave took on new work of claiming space, power, and

Resilient resistance  175

respect for new constituencies. As the proper funeral became more elaborate and more freighted with meaning, its opposite, the pauper funeral, became more dreadful. A theater of presence – the corpse on its way to the grave – created a theater of absence: no one was there to watch a procession that was almost too minimal to be noticeable even if anyone cared. (316) HR graphic texts critique the state-sponsored theatre of absence created around specific people and their bodies. I propose, following Laqueur, that the absent bodies instantiated as photographs in the proscribed, harassed marches by the mothers of the disappeared are character props-that-protest in this theatre of absence that the state engenders. In the place of the bodies that the state disappeared, and hence will be absent in any future gathering, the photographs are the characters in the play of and for rights. In a similar vein, the refusal to apportion adequate time and space to the rituals of mourning by the families are also theatres of absence. Acts of reverence, memory and grief towards the dead are performative acts that define a family’s or community’s identity: when these are denied the families, they produce, if not an absence, a definite sense of incompleteness. Just as norms of appearance set limits to appearance by the vulnerable, the theatre of absence establishes how the dead may appear in these nations and cultures. Other forms of the voluntary exposing of vulnerable bodies to further vulnerability also exist in HR graphic texts.

Counter-monuments and barricades In Freedom Hospital, while Yasmin and Sophie patrol the streets to photograph events, they are warned of sniper presence. The solution of the resilient locals, long used to sniper attacks, is to immediately barricade the street with rugs, carpets and sheets. Draping these above and across the street like a canopy, the temporary and rather flimsy ‘barricade’ offers a minimal protection from the sniper who can no longer see his potential targets (136–8). Although Sulaiman uses only black and white colours, one assumes the barricade is brightly coloured through the use of rugs and sheets. The barricade transforms the extremely vulnerable space of the street into a counter-monument where bodies acting in concert rise up against the state. I use the term ‘counter-monuments’ from James Young’s work, defining it after him as ‘brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being’ (271). These function, Young argues, ‘against the traditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace the past they would have us contemplate’ (274). In Freedom Hospital the counter-­ monument is not so much a memorial space as a space of memory-in-the-making, for the simple reason that these are streets where people – civilians – have been gunned down, ‘disappeared’ (arrested, never to be seen again) or beaten. That is, rather than serve as memorials for the dead, the streets are transformed, during

176  Resilient resistance

protests and when temporary barricades are put up, including people placing themselves as barricades, into counter-monuments that are by nature temporary, to be easily broken, dismantled or destroyed. As Young would put it, the aim of the counter-monument is not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by its passersby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desecration; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet. (277) The streets, then, become monumental spaces. However, as we see in texts such as Zahra’s Paradise, many of the protests have been physically located at key public spaces and monumental spaces such as Tahrir Square, Freedom Square, Wall Street, etc.3 What, then, happens to the ‘older’ monumental spaces when ‘used’ to physically locate a protest, as embodied bodies voluntarily exposing themselves to more injury, as bodies behind barricades, against the state? Başak Ertür defines barricades as ‘ecstasis of collective embodied action . . . as countermonuments of resistance’ (97). While she admits that when protests claiming rights occur at already designated (that is, designated and constructed by the state, and therefore embodying state power) spaces, the ‘claim remains indexed to the monumental injunctions of a prefabricated space’ (106). While Ertür is right to say that the injunctions as issued by the state remain attached to the monumental space of the Square, it ignores the resignification set in motion by accumulated ‘bodies’ that constitute the space in protests. For instance, the Freedom Square in Zahra’s Paradise is drawn with thousands of bodies holding aloft placards and banners demanding human rights, freedom, democracy and voting rights and denouncing the Iranian leadership. In one corner, atop a tallish building one can see a huge portrait of one of the religious leaders of the country (40–1). If the portrait of the leaders are meant to signify a particular view and meaning of the country, the inversion of this meaning is never clearer than in the placards and banners directly flourishing underneath it. Then, we see actual barricades manned by protesting bodies in Palestine, The 500 Years of Resistance (72, 86) and other texts. Barricades here, to return to Ertür, are ‘temporary embodiments of collective agency that combine spontaneity and structure, and yet in doing so they resist a logic of “utility versus futility”: they shield but only provisionally; they fail but only to return again’ (112). Often, as we can see in Gord Hill’s work, the state’s instruments of oppression themselves are resignified as counter-monuments in the barricades. The vehicles that bring the police to break up the Mohawk protests of 1990 in Oka town are abandoned by the police. These then are used by the Mohawk protestors as barricades against the incoming police forces, and we are shown armoured cars and trucks piled high in the panel (72).

Resilient resistance  177

In each of these cases, the barricades are taken down, destroyed and the people manning them either dispersed or arrested. Thus, the barricades, one could argue, are not sources of protection. Rather, they are provocations to the state to come after those behind the flimsy barricades. In other words, barricades made of vehicles, tyres, stones and wooden furniture are sites of hyper-visible vulnerability: the vulnerable call to the state, which made them vulnerable in the first instance, to reclaim the space for itself by destroying the barricades. ‘Barricades demonstrate vulnerability in resistance’, writes Ertür (115), but one could also see that they represent vulnerability and resilience as resistance. They resist monumentalization as well because, unlike monuments, they do not aspire to longevity or permanence and are built on the premise that they will be taken down. Counter-monumentalization that seeks to transform the public space also relies on a particular resignification of that space. These are spaces administered by the state, even when they are supposedly ‘public’ spaces. When the protests and barricades appear therein, the public is, in effect claiming the space for itself (as Butler argues when she speaks of the ‘constitution of the public sphere as a condition of appearance’, 2015: 20). The ‘occupy’ in these protests is a code for reclamation. However, commentators working on Tahrir Square and Egypt have noted that ‘in Egypt what seems to have happened was the creation of a political space that . . . was neither sovereign nor, at least for fourteen of the eighteen days, effectively part of a state’ (Gunning and Baron 7). Reclaiming space in the name of democracy renders the space neither sovereign and independent (as claimed by the public) nor state-controlled, since the state no longer has any control over the space until and unless it disperses the protesting crowds. Leaving the meaning of the square openended is in fact an opposition to monumentalization in the name of a particular, state-identified leader, ‘national’ event or politician. Take Zahra’s Paradise and its two pages documenting the movement for democracy (40–1). As already noted, one can discern at the top of a building, a portrait of a religious leader whose eyes are drawn in such a way that he appears to be glowering down at the crowds. Reminiscent of the ‘big brother is watching you’ trope, the image is evocative also of the theme of surveilled spaces. But what is also striking is the building next to the one with the Ayatollah’s portrait: carrying the words ‘SEIKO’ on it. Two pages later, a senior man tells Hassan, ‘Siemens, Nokia. You name it. Who do you think runs Iran’s intelligence? Iranians? . . . You think you are capturing their image, but it’s Siemens capturing yours . . . Electronic voodoo’ (47, emphasis in original). Later in the text we understand the ramifications of the two images. Amir and Khalil depict an auction of ‘government contracts’ for morgue freezers and storage cabinets to ‘the highest foreign bidder’. In this image we see the auctioneer, who looks like a religious head, standing gavel in hand. In front of him is a corpse. Bidding are Nokia, Siemens, Tadano and Norinco. Amir and Khalil term this ‘market fundamentalism’ (171). The proximity of the portrait of the national religious leader with a multinational corporate organization (SEIKO) needs to be read in conjunction with the panels on electronic surveillance and the foreign commercial interests in Iran. Cumulatively these communicate a key

178  Resilient resistance

theme: despite all assertions of nationalism and sovereignty, the nation is controlled by foreign technology and corporate interests. Religion sits proximate with profits. But a more, shall we say, sinister reading is possible of the panel on pg. 41. The public space where young Iranians are exposing themselves to injury and amplifying their vulnerability through this exposure is being surveilled equally by an Iranian religious leader, who speaks of purity and religious faith, and by a foreign firm. That is, the campaign for democracy and the attempted counter-monumentalization of this space is being watched by two, apparently contradictory, powers – foreignglobal capitalism and native-religious nationalism. It is this nexus imaged in one panel of the book that is highlighted in the later accounts of ‘electronic voodoo’ and the auctioning of morgue services. In the latter, again, a dangerous proximity of the foreign capitalist and native bodies is imaged. One notes that the auction scene follows pages and panels on missing people (including Mehdi) and anonymous graves, and invites a particular interpretation. The bodies of the disappeared, as already argued, are denied to their families  – indeed even the arrests and the disappearances are denied. That is, the theatre of absence around a missing body or person denies the Iranians their own family members or the rituals of mourning for their loved ones. In effect, the rights of the natives to mourn and memorialize their loved ones are denied them. Hence the auctioning of spaces where the dead bodies are to be kept, to foreign companies becomes savagely ironic: their own families are denied access to the bodies, whereas the foreign companies operate the freezer units and the morgue where these bodies are kept. Even the dead, Amir and Khalil imply, have their ‘existence’ at the nexus of Iran’s native machinery of oppression and foreign capital – or what they call ‘market fundamentalism’. Counter-monuments in public spaces, however temporary and risky, in HR graphic novels relocate embodiment as the centrepiece of the demand for rights. A space is ‘occupied’ here, contrary to the law and principles laid down governing public spaces. Anonymous individuals and the masses of protestors perform, in W.J.T. Mitchell’s terms an ‘occupatio’, ‘taking the initiative in a space where one knows in advance that there will be resistance and counterarguments’ (Image, Space, Revolution 10).4 Mitchell’s invocation of the epistemic regime that makes up protests (the knowledge of certain state reprisals) is particularly important, for it points to the agential resilience of the protestors and survivors who deploy their bodies as a mode of occupying space with the awareness that they will be evicted and evacuated. * The resilience of a community that has been historically disenfranchised often leads, as the HR graphic novel shows us, to a politics of vulnerability. The previvors come together in their resilient subjectification in order to thwart future oppression and disempowerment. Vulnerability is no longer, then, a weakness but rather a means of resistance.

Resilient resistance  179

This resilient subjectification demands the making of new epistemic regimes, planning for the unexpected yet expected reprisals and brutal counter-attacks. Admitting to their own vulnerability and further injury, the resilient in HR graphic novels perform their vulnerability in as public a manner as possible in these texts. The assembly, a mobilization of vulnerability in Judith Butler’s terms, exposes them, but also brings them together in corporeal solidarity. Transforming the space of the town square or the street, setting up fragile but symbolically significant countermonuments, the resilient subjects project an alternative future in these texts.

Notes 1 Sarah Bracke writes: In a classical psychological approach, resilience refers to individual characteristics that are associated with coping with stress situations and mitigating the negative effects of risk factors. While material conditions can be objectively hard, the reasoning goes, there are subjective differences in how people cope with such stress, shock, and trauma. A  psychological approach to resilience is interested in finding those subjective differences and characteristics that account for why some individuals are more resilient than others. What does it take for an individual, hit by disaster and subsequent conditions of hardship, to absorb the shock, bounce back, and overcome those conditions? Such an approach, however, takes for granted that selves do not get shattered, and thus posits a continuity and coherence of the self prior to, during, and after the shock. What falls out of its purview are the operations of power involved in the very constitution of the subject, and the possibility that such a shock might profoundly reconstitute a subject. My interest here lies not in how personal traits might account for the fact that some people cope better with shock or trauma but, rather, in how various resilient subjects of our times come into being. I take resilience, in other words, not as a term to describe the ways in which individuals might deal well with the challenges of contemporary society, but as a key to investigate contemporary operations of power and notably to further explore processes of subjectification that belong to the realm of neoliberal governmentality and biopower. This point of departure understands neoliberalism not only in terms of political economy, but also as a cultural project bent on reshaping the structure of social relationships and subjectivities. (61–2) 2 Marguerite Guzman Bouvard writing about the Argentinian Mothers of the Disappeared notes: When a family suffered the disappearance of one of its members, it was propelled into a netherworld where there were no rules, no institutions to which one could direct one’s concern, and no death to mourn. The family lived in a surreal limbo; deprived of all information and recourse and stripped of social support and comprehension, relatives found themselves in complete isolation. (35–6) 3 ‘Occupy’ produced its own set of art work and comics. See, for a sample, http:// occupycomics.com/2011/11/17/lucky-13-new-contributors-join-the-team-as-week1-finale-of-kickstarter-campaign/ 4 For a collection of essays on ‘Occupy’, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Bernard Harcourt and Michael Taussig, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (2013).

CONCLUSION The face of human rights

In the HR graphic novel we encounter and engage with The Human, one who is the subject of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While universalism is derided all round for homogenizing difference and standardizing singularities, the HR campaign continues to rely, rightly, on the understanding of a common ground of humanity. In what follows, I shall pull together several strands of arguments pursued through the book in order to develop this thesis that the HR graphic texts force us to acknowledge – and we will have reason to return to this italicized term with all its connotations of epistemic structures and politics  – a common ­humanity even as it retains difference as foundational to humans. Admittedly, these are ­representations of humans, but as in the case of literary characters, we do speak of them as though they are real. Panels, Comics Studies scholars tell us, function in many ways. Hillary Chute points to their window-like service: With its febrile, nontransparent lines and its hand-drawn juxtaposed boxes that enclose, underline, and present a succession of moments, almost as in a series of windows, comics offers images replete with their own sense of turning toward the outside’ (179. Also Spiegelman) Windows-as-panels and panels-as-windows allow us to look in. Others see the panel as a topos, a locality and a locale (Ghosal). Several insist that we locate the relations between linear panels (on the same page) or distant panels, spread across pages, as an arthrology (Groensteen 2007). The panels, even when indistinct, frayed, fragmented or absent (the last, in Kugler’s or Joe Kubert’s work) are topoi where we meet people unlike us.

Conclusion  181

The panel-as-topos is an-other place: Palestine, Sarajevo, Kigali, Calcutta/ Kolkata, Birmingham, Pretoria, Vietnam, Baghdad, etc. Into this place we enter to encounter the stranger. (Although we need to acknowledge that we, the readers, may be the strangers there. This sense of being an outsider is something Joe Sacco, more than any other comics journalist, is constantly alert to.) The question of place is tied to the question of the stranger, one who is not from that place. Jolanta Saldukaitytė, adapting the work of Emmanuel Levinas and the German phenomenologist Bernard Waldenfels, writes: ‘the here becomes the locus of this encounter with the Other as stranger’ (2019: 3, emphasis in original). Her definition of place also helps us theorize the panel-as-topos: the ‘place is not where I  can selfishly appropriate or freely “let be,” but the place where I can welcome the stranger. The real meaning of place comes not only from being a dwelling site but a welcoming site’ (7). On the welcome to/of the face of the Other as an indication or call to hospitality, see Derrida’s stirring funeral oration for Levinas, ‘A Word of Welcome’ in his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 1999). The panel-as-topos is a meeting site, a place where we meet the stranger. In Saldukaitytė’s words: it is important to keep in mind that the figure of the stranger in Levinas’s philosophy is not univocal. The stranger, the foreigner, neither exhausts the meaning of the Other nor can be reduced to it. On the one hand, the stranger is a foreigner, someone who comes from elsewhere. On the other hand, “stranger” refers to the absolute stranger, strangeness is linked to the alterity of the Other as such. In the latter sense, the Other is not only different, foreign but fundamentally alien, radically other. . . . The question or status of the stranger as foreigner is tied to the question or status of place. (1) When we see the refugee, the war victim, the abused, the injured and the ill in the panel-as-topos or place, we have encountered somebody unlike us. When we consume a panel or a set of panels across a graphic narrative, we need to see the panel-as-place in a different way (not so different, if we think of the immersive, diegetic space of literary texts). If ‘place is not only the place where I can return but the place where I can greet and welcome the Other . . . not only my home but my country as well where I am able to welcome the stranger’ (Saldukaitytė 7), then the panel is where we welcome people unlike us. What is this ‘welcome’ or encounter with the stranger? What constitutes the stranger’s position vis á vis us? As already noted, the positioning of people in the panels allow us to understand their position in history itself. Within panels we ‘meet’ crowds of faces and people who are not central to the story, and who, therefore, are not identified for us. In HR graphic texts, these unidentified faces, these strangers, are Levinasian. Levinas would say that the stranger is one of the most ‘visible’ faces of the Other: the Other ‘has the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan’

182  Conclusion

(Totality and Infinity 78). The stranger’s otherness is, therefore, constituted by vulnerability and dependence, what Levinas, years before Judith Butler, identified as vulnerability, or what he termed ‘nudity’ (75). The panel-as-place where we see and therefore engage, however temporarily, with this vulnerable stranger, is also, more than a welcoming place as already suggested, but a site of enormous responsibility. Levinas writes: The epiphany of the Absolutely Other is a face by which the Other challenges and commands me through his nakedness, through his destitution. He challenges me from his humility and from his height. . . . The absolutely Other is the human Other (autrui). And the putting into question of the Same by the Other is a summons to respond. . . . Hence, to be I signifies not being able to escape responsibility (Levinas ‘Transcendence and Height’, cited in Morgan 66). Levinasian commentators have often zeroed in on this ‘summons to respond’ as a crucial aspect of his thought, and which I am appropriating to argue a case for reading the panel as a space of a possible, or necessary, ethics towards the unknown stranger/human. Michael Morgan explicates: More correctly, perhaps, in everyday life every social interaction, every encounter between one person and another, is always already such a nexus of plea, command, and inescapable responsibility, before it is anything else – which it always is. Only once the self is confronted by a face can it be responsible and must it be responsible – for and to that other person. (66, emphasis in original) Or, Jultan Saldukaitytė’s gloss: ‘the stranger is the vulnerable one, the sufferer, to whose aid I must come. The Other as such obligates me’ (10). When we read HR graphic texts, with their panels full of unidentified faces, the ethics of encountering any-other in the place means that we see these faces as asking us for a response. (If we think back to Raghu Rai’s ‘Burial of an Unknown Child’ [Bhopal 1984], ‘The girl with the green eyes’ on the cover of the National Geographic [Afghanistan 1984] and Qutubuddin Ansari [Gujarat 2002], the face of the victim has indeed been a key element in the mobilization of sympathy activism and even legal action.) The face is a plea to be not-murdered, violated or ruined: The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with an opposition that is opposition itself. The being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression. . . . [I]t is not the no of a hostile force or a threat; it is the impossibility of killing him who presents that face. . . . (Levinas “Freedom and Command” 21, emphasis in original)

Conclusion  183

And elsewhere in Totality and Infinity: This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving (as one “puts the things in question in giving”) – this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face. The nakedness of the face is destituteness. To recognize the Other is to recognize a hunger. To recognize the Other is to give. (75, emphasis in original) As Morgan puts it: real violence is not war, domination, and so forth; real violence is “ignoring this opposition, ignoring the face of a being, avoiding the gaze,” and this means denying its plea to live and to be acknowledged, aided, and sustained, to ignore its suffering, to kill the face and the other person, and hence to avoid all responsibility. . . . What Levinas is saying, from this point of view, is that in every social encounter, whether violent or benign, the other person stands as other than the self, as a no to the I. But, at this basic level, the no is not one of hostility or anger or threat. It is, as it were, the no of need, of defenselessness, and of dependence; the other says “no” to my unchecked desire, to unbridled self-interest. (68–9) In the panel-as-place in the HR graphic novel, as we scan these destitute but stranger faces of people whose language we neither speak nor understand, we experience an obligation, a ‘moral summons’ (Morgan 71). Simon Critchley, also building on Levinas, writes: The ethical essence of language, from which the experience of obligation derives, originates in the sensibility of the skin of the Other’s face. The meaningful relation to the Other is maintained by a non-verbal language of skin. . . . The original language of proximity whereby the self is related to the Other is achieved in non-verbal sensibility. (179–80) Lis Thomas echoes Critchley and others when she writes: The face of the Other makes such a universalisation or generalisation possible. In other words, the face is the possibility of language which is not just the production of a subject and thus essentially the expression of a subjective world, nor the universal realm of reason which would have to be presupposed for such singular and unique beings to be able to speak to one another. (80. Also see Waldenfels 69)

184  Conclusion

This is precisely the task of reading the HR graphic text: to see and engage with the stranger and thereby generalize about the condition of people we do not know, but whose drawn, damaged faces call upon us to respond in certain ways. If the ‘screen is the space of the appearance of the Other’, as media theorist Roger Silverstone argued (Media and Morality), the panel-as-place is where we respond to the face of the (universal) stranger. The ‘face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan’ occurs across HR graphic texts. They do not always look at us, since they are often passersby, part of a crowd, earwitnesses to the primary protagonist who is narrating her story. Take, for example, Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo. Samira narrates to Erin and his family the rapes that have occurred to several women. She tells them how she met other women, also rape victims, all staring glassy-eyed, in a state of shock. The image of a group of such women staring out at us in this work (103) becomes indexical of the ‘family of man’ theme (I intentionally invoke the title of Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition The Family of Man, curated for the Museum of Modern Art), exerting pressure on us to recall the idea of ‘universal humanity’ via the common human experience of deprivation and suffering – in this case, sexual violence in wartime. In Gendry-Kim’s Grass, after the first account of rape of the comfort women (199–200), she adopts a different style. Ok-sun says: ‘Just like that . . . in front of my friends . . . I was raped like an animal’ (200). The six panels show the face of the now-old Ok-sun morphing into her younger days (which is when she was raped, at the age of 14). Gendry-Kim suggests the youthful-but-scarred face of the comfort woman remains beneath the surface of the old woman’s face. Recalling Jean Amery’s claim that one who is tortured stays tortured, Gendry-Kim’s dissolving-morphing portrait implies that no matter what age the comfort woman has reached, she remains the young girl who was so brutally violated. The staring eyes in the portrait do not, interestingly, change (except for the angle): in both cases (old and young Ok-sun), the eyes seem to be looking into herself, reflecting on what she has become (‘an animal’?). The next page is fascinating. We now see just Ok-sun’s head. The face stares out at us from the page although the eyes seem teary and not quite focused on us. The panels and the gutters are what strike us. The face of Ok-sun appears at the intersection of the gutters and across panels, but is not quite a bleed as in conventional comics. The effect is chilling: it appears as though the head is impaled on a stake, or crucified. The panels are all black, and there is no respite from the inky blackness. The only break in the blackness are the white gutters and the Ok-sun head. GendryKim’s move of decapitating Ok-sun’s head, so to speak, communicates so much more about the victim (the comfort woman), but is possibly also a mode of implying that the victim learns to ignore her violated body. This is, literally, the face of suffering. Two pages later (206–07), Gendry-Kim returns to Ok-sun’s face. In panel 1 of page 206, we see the fleshy, full Ok-Sun face, her head resting in her hand, as though she is thinking. The next panel shows the thick lines delineating the face and shoulders have thinned, the back of Ok-sun’s head is simply not there. In panel 3 we see

Conclusion  185

only a black, silhouette-like Ok-sun, but with a complete head. In panel 4, again, the lines are missing and the face/head seem to lose cohesion and density. In panel 5 there is a little more of Ok-sun’s face and head, and in panel 6 a minimal face and hand appear. The dissolving head (the dissolving body was a feature of Gothic fiction, as Kelly Hurley, 1994, has demonstrated) which alternates with a more substantial Ok-sun face/head seems to imply a movement between present and past, between a complete woman and one who has been literally and figuratively diminished by what happened to her. The loss of cohesion, of the very form of representability (the missing component of her head, the incomplete face), is the symbol of the irretrievable aspects of her life: a loss engineered by her sexual slavery. One cannot see or know Ok-sun’s facial and other features in the panels just as one cannot know what she has lost. Echoing what we have described as ‘vanishing points’ and the unnarratable in the chapter on witnessing, the ‘loss of face’ – and I use the phrase with full awareness of its idiomatic sense – for Ok-sun is the loss of narrative and identitarian coherence. Images such as the ones studied previously (and including photographs), critics note, generate empathy through their ‘narrative strategies that create a sense of proximity and common ground’ (Lydon 161). But what we need to note is that proximity does not erase the fact that the face in the image remains a stranger at one level and yet is somebody we acknowledge as ‘the one who suffered’. That is, the proximity generated through our encounter with stranger faces inside the panel-as-place leads to an acknowledgement of the completely alien Other’s common ground with all humans: the potential for suffering. The panel-as-place may not offer the scope of recognizing the Other except as ‘stranger’ because we do not know, socially, whose face it is. But, as thinkers like Stanley Cavell, often responding to Levinas, have proposed, there is an acknowledgement which goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.) (Cavell 257, emphasis in original) While admitting that one cannot experience the pain of the Other because one is not the Other, Cavell emphasizes: your suffering makes a claim upon me. It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer – I must do or reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what “(your or his) being in pain” means. Is. (This is “acknowledging it to you.” There is also something to be called “acknowledging it for you”; for example, I know you want it known, and that you are determined not to make it known, so I tell. Of course I do not acknowledge it the way you do; I do not acknowledge it by expressing pain.) (263, emphasis in original)

186  Conclusion

Cavell, like Butler and others, speaks of the openness to the world, but this openness need not always elicit sympathy (‘the claim of suffering may go unanswered’, 263). For Cavell, acknowledgement ‘is not a description of a given response but a category in terms of which a given response is evaluated’. A failure to know is admissible, Cavell proposes, but a failure to acknowledge is not: A “failure to know” might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank. A “failure to acknowledge” is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a ­coldness. . . . To know you are in pain is to acknowledge it, or to withhold the acknowledgment. (263–6) To acknowledge, argue Levinas and Cavell, is to admit one does not stand in for the other, or comprehend the Other but yet to say, ‘I know you are in pain’: there is something about the other person, a dimension of separateness, interiority, secrecy or what Levinas calls ‘alterity’ that escapes my comprehension. That which exceeds the bounds of my knowledge demands acknowledgement. Taking this a little further, one might say that it is the failure to acknowledge the other’s separateness from me that can be the source of tragedy. (Critchley “Introduction” 26, emphasis in original) I turn once more to Michael Morgan’s elucidation of the Levinas-Cavell link: The statement “I  know you are in pain” or “I  know she is in pain” are not knowledge claims, assertions based on sensory evidence, or anything of this sort. They are acts of sympathy that express this acknowledgment; they are public expressions of the face-to-face. If Levinas can show how this encounter is fundamental or primary, Cavell has helped us to see that such an encounter is not strange, extraordinary, or ineffable. Indeed, if Cavell is right, as a category, the face-to-face encounter is exemplified regularly in everyday life. What is remarkable would be how basic the role of suffering is and how regularly our respect or sensitivity to it is occluded or ignored. (77, emphasis in original) Thus, a knowledge of the Other is not central to an acknowledgement of the Other’s pain, happiness or suffering. To acknowledge is to admit the moral claim the Other has, irrespective of the Other’s unknowability, her ineluctable alterity. In the HR graphic texts, in conclusion, having examined worked with frames of recognition, testimony and witnessing, I invoke ‘acknowledgment’ as a category of readerly response to those who are not the central characters in the story but yet are part of the world we view through the window, in the panel-as-place. These characters have no name, no identity for us because we have only seen them

Conclusion  187

fleetingly (in most cases these faces that make up a street scene do not recur later in the text), but this cannot and ought not to prevent us from acknowledging, for instance, the anxiety on the face of the man fetching water or fuel in Safe Area Goražde, or on the face of desperate fathers seeking to collect limited portions of essential rations in The Arab of the Future. This acknowledgement is a foundation for the universality of humanity itself. This acknowledgement, made possible through the intimate space of the panelas-place, hinges also on a certain proximate sense of the Other. When we see the character, unknown yet acknowledged, in the intimate topos that is the panel, s/he is seen by us but also generates a sense of haptic connection. This is so because vision, argues Cathryn Vasseleu following Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and others, involves touch, when the texture of light caresses the eye for vision to occur. ­Vasseleu speaks of a ‘concept of vision that is open to or affected by the touch of light’ (12). So one cannot think of vision as an independent sense in which the seer is distanced from the object (2002: 12). In other words, there is a certain tactility, or hapticity, to vision. Within the panel, the Other is caressed by the light falling on her/him. If we treat the panel as a topos where contact with the stranger is enabled, then the sense of proximity to this stranger becomes an obvious consequence. The stranger’s body begins, for us, in being opened up to touch-via-seeing for, as Derrida would put it, ‘the surface of my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in the world’ (Derrida 1973: 79). If, as already argued, this stranger is open and vulnerable to us, and we have a duty to respond to this other in the form of an acknowledgement, then the acknowledgement may well become the source of something more, perhaps justice. Robert Waldenfels proposes that the ‘other’s face is not a case of justice, but its very source’ where ‘the proximity to the other’s face is the source of justice’ (Waldenfels 69, 78). More crucially, given the linkage between the duty to respond to and acknowledge, without altering the Other’s alterity, is a measure of what Waldenfels argues: ‘the otherness of the other manifests the impossibility of our own possibilities’ (69). The impossible injunction is to extend the possibility of justice, where justice is as much about our reader-witness’ possibilities – justice qua response – as it is about the Other. The Other in the panel-as-place then locates and localizes us in terms of extending not just acknowledgement but the possibility that we can extend, argue for, campaign for, theorize justice for the Other. Being in the same place/panel, so to speak, proximate to the Other whom we do not know but whose pain we acknowledge, opens up the Other to us and to our possible future course of action. To phrase it differently, the panel with its stranger/s is a place of possibilities for us to respond, welcome and acknowledge the Other who demands justice and lays claim to our response. Since these are all only faces – we never get to know them, they do not narrate their stories, they often remain bystanders or even props to the main protagonists – across a graphic novel, we ‘connect’ them all into a pattern of otherness. We see

188  Conclusion

generalizable faces, in masses of people, signs that are an index even when there is no one specific individual that we see. We see individual sufferings – each has her/ his own pain which is not the pain of somebody else – in such generalizable faces. Seeing patterns as producing faces, or seeing faces in shapes and lines, from rocks to emojis, is pareidolia. Pareidoliac reading is what we perform when across indistinct, unknown and unknowable faces, we evolve the mental image of the human. If we knew the character, if the face has a name attached, it would not be pareidolia. Pareidolia, in other words, is the foundation for a universal face, unnamed but human. When we engage in reading pareidoliacally we may even, as Meg Jensen notes of the neuropsychological phenomenon of pareidolia itself, ‘with minimum information, ascribe not only a face but a mood to such an object (or) ’ (184). For Jensen, hybrid narratives such as the bildungsroman and misery memoir ‘open a frontier that gives a schematic but entirely recognizable face to human rights and the legacies of its violations’ (185). In addition to the pareidoliac reading encouraged by HR graphic texts, the United Nations itself has made an official text to serve such a reading: the illustrated UDHR. The UDHR booklet, appropriately, uses a stick figure to represent the human  – gender, race and ethnicity unmarked, symbolizing the universal human. Here, the text of the UDHR remains unchanged, but it is Kaci’s illustrations read in conjunction with the verbal text that evokes our affective understanding of HR. Two observations need to be first enunciated about the use of stick drawings in this document. First, this stick figure is any-body and every-body. Second, given the increasing familiarity with chatbots and robots in everyday life via computer-­ mediated communication, humans have learnt to interact with these instances of embodied software, even accepting a robot’s ‘level of “humanity” ’, as one commentator puts it (Westerman et al.). This means we have learnt to read emojis, chatbots and smileys as standing in for the human, and the UDHR simply extends this tendency and form of interaction that causes us to detect and discern humanity in the stick figures. There is, of course, the need for a human face, even if it is a generic one for, as writers on HR remind us, the face is the proof of humanness, and ‘the norms of humanization require a name and a face’ (Butler Frames of War 95). This is not, I suggest via pareidolic reading, entirely necessary. The UDHR document gives us a face in the form of the stick figures, but it could be anybody’s face. The birthing metaphor in verbal and visual form literally performs the birth of the human as the moment of the birth of HR. That is, the image naturalizes rights as a condition arriving with the birth of the human itself. However, the image also performs something more. By positioning the human as emerging from an egg, it draws attention to the vulnerability of the human, metaphorized as the fragility of an egg. Drawing upon the common knowledge of the egg’s fragility, the image signals the fragility of the human and of rights – which, therefore, demands protection.

Conclusion  189

Now, the appeal to common knowledge – of the fragility of human birth, body and life in general, embodied in the egg-image – has the same level of acceptability as the appeal to popular opinion. David Godden has argued that a claim to common knowledge is taken as grounds for its acceptability, whereas appeals to popular opinion are seen as fallacious attempts to support a claim. Against this I argue that appeals to common knowledge generally provide no better evidence for a claim than appeals to popular opinion and, as such, that appeals to common knowledge ought to be just as successful – or unsuccessful – as appeals ad populum. (102) UDHR’s illustrated version, I argue, appeals to both: the knowledge of an egg’s fragility and the potential risk in birthing, and to the popular opinion of the egg as the moment of human origin. By merging two paradigms, common knowledge and popular opinion, the UDHR ensures that a discourse of overall human fragility and of natural rights are made visible even in the schematic representation. The representation of the human person as a stick means that we see a figure who stands in for the person, whom we recognize as a person. The stick figures force us to see humans behind and beyond the lines. But in the very effect of minimalist representation, it implies that these are the irreducible forms of the human: a human cannot be anything less than these stick figures. We cannot, in other words, take away these lines and expect the ‘figure’ or its remnants to resemble and recall a human. The stick figures are the blueprints for the person to come. They are the grounds upon which the edifice of the human has to be imagined, rather like the building plans which, when viewed, cause/enable us to visualize the entire structure.1 In other words, the stick figures are the basic building blocks of our imagining a human person, one who will then be deserving of rights. One does not, suggests the image, require a photograph of a human to imagine a human. With the barest set of lines, one can conjure up a human who then merits these rights. Take for instance the image accompanying Article 11. Article 11 reads as follows: 1

Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence. 2 No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed. The image shows a figure under siege, surrounded by a sea of hands reaching out to grab. The ‘person’ squats at the base of a white flag (of surrender or protection?). The text states that this person is entitled to a fair trial and that no penalty

190  Conclusion

can be imposed that is not mandated by the law. It also indicates quite clearly that all penalties and punishments can only be imposed by the apparatus of the law, and that until proved guilty, the accused is deemed innocent. The grabbing hands are at once accusatory and threatening. Recalling the horrific images of lynching, the image suggests that the person is being accused or threatened or judged by an apparatus that is outside the ambit of the law (he is perched on a block that could very well be read as the symbol of a courthouse). The stick figure is a person under threat from the grabbing hands. The sole protection, witness or defence is the flag, under which this person crouches. There is little more here for us to read, but we understand one thing: there is a solitary, vulnerable person here whose bare existence is guarded by a bare frame of a flag. Later, the basic requirements for a human to live with dignity are spelt out in Article 22: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. In the accompanying image we see the arts (a statue of a dancer) representing cultural rights and the red cross emblem of the health services face the stick figure – who is either appealing to them or is in thrall with them, these social apparatuses of security and self-realization. The schematic images when pareidolically read with the accompanying text invite the following interpretation. The bare minimum is also a human person, and this person also merits a minimal legal protection. The Articles, then, serve as metonymic representations of those mechanisms that offer the basic protection to a person: the right to life, liberty, security and legal redress. Just as the person cannot be reduced to anything less than the stick-frame, legal support and protection cannot be anything less than what the Articles state. When surrounded by the charges or threats to the human person’s security, the barest protection, at least, has to be extended. UDHR, then, is not an ambitious edifice or a grand rhetorical structure. The stylistic minimalism of the document’s images read in conjunction with the text signals something foundational – a blueprint, the bare bones of the story, the framework for building. It is precisely by keeping it to this bare minimum that the UDHR signals its foundational role: this is where it begins, by imagining the human in her basic frame, by devising legal mechanisms that address this basic frame. Everything else has to follow, like a building upon a blueprint. The UDHR’s illustrated version is a blueprint that is also a performative. It constructs a minimal definition of the human person and uses this person as the point of departure to think of basic protections. By ‘reducing’ the UDHR to these minimalist representations, the document signals its foundational nature rather than

Conclusion  191

its simplicity. From those stick figures we imagine a human person, from the Articles we envisage HR. The use of hand-drawn schematic figures consciously calls upon us to reflect on the constructedness of the very idea of the human. The UDHR’s reliance on the drawn line forces attention to the process, the mechanics by which we make human persons, or unmake them. Even when schematic – and I am treating the unknown, unidentified face of the Other in HR graphic novels, like in the illustrated version of the UDHR document, as schematic because we do not have a name or person we can identify as the owner of that face – the ‘illusion’, as Jensen calls the fictive figures in literature, produces a stimulus: The phenomenon in which a vague stimulus is perceived as significant is also a process whereby the unfamiliar (a rock, a few lines of ink) appears to be not only familiar (a human face), but also intimate (we can read its mood) . This intimacy is of course an illusion. . . . The ironing out [in the schematic face] of “complex and unwieldy reality” makes the motive face both “more legible” and a “selective reality”. . . . The false faces we recognize in hybrid autobiographical narratives of rights violations are limited and schematic but generate familiarity and intimacy nevertheless. . . . Rather than this pareidoliac effect of this partial vision in hybrid autobiographical fictions being emotionally distancing, it is precisely their semifictive distance that enables the real-life suffering recounted in their pages to be heard. (188) With just the bare outlines of a face, a schema for a face, we recognize something that exceeds that schema: The Human. The use of the definite article is not meant to claim a one-size-fits-all, but it does indicate a foundational form we engage with when we see these schematic faces. Even if our knowledge says people are different, marked in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, etc., our acknowledgement of the Other’s ‘sameness’ within her/his radical difference is the ‘translation of the humanity of distant others into domestic terms’, to employ Christine Hong’s phrasing from a different context (196). The acknowledgement that the ‘person’ we see in the HR graphic novel’s panel is human although stranger is, I propose then, a first step in our delineation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a document that is about us as well as the not-us, the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ (in Martin Buber’s classic terms), and this is why there is a universal human, even when marked by race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language, etc. ‘To be human is to be open for the unknown, for the Other, infinity, to take the risk of the unknown’, writes Saldukaitytė (4), and this ‘risk’ is what the HR graphic novel invites us to take by way of acknowledgement and responseability to (even) those whom we do not and will not know. *

192  Conclusion

The graphic novels discussed through this book are key constituents of the necessarily generalized discourse and lingua franca of Human Rights. As this conclusion has argued a face of The Human emerges when we read these texts, even when we have no knowledge of those we see in the panels. This urgent necessity to see beyond identity politics when speaking of universal categories, even though identities are the key in many cases to political rights, is precisely what we trace in HR graphic texts. In the HR graphic novel we perceive, in all its tragic clarity, the face of human rights.

Note 1 I am adapting here Louis Marin’s work in Utopics: Spatial Play (1984) where he proposes a link between the blueprints of a building and the architecture built on this plan/blueprint. Marin writes: If architecture is the art of constructing buildings and/or organizing space in order to create a space where humans can live, what is its relationship to the text? If this act involves manipulating and arranging space into a system of spaces through an architectonics of “living space,” what can be said of the connection between architecture and writing and drawing, discourse and blue-print, with signs arranged on a visible surface and constantly grouped and re-grouped, torn apart and rearticulated into new groups? It is not absolutely sure that a dwelling or a city is a discourse translating a blueprint into language, or a written surface transposing words and ideas (i.e., desires) into sketched figures. (113)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary texts Aaron, Jason, and Cameron Stewart. The Other Side. Vertigo, 2007. Abdelrazaq, Leila. Baddawi. Just World, 2015. Amir and Khalil. Zahra’s Paradise. First Second, 2011. Anderson, Ho Che. King: A Comics Biography. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2010. Anderson, Laurie Halse, and Emily Carroll. Speak: The Graphic Novel. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018. Appupen. The Snake and the Lotus. Context, 2018. Blaylock, Josh, and Hoyt Silva. Operation Nemesis: A Story of Genocide and Revenge. Devil’s Due, 2015. Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. Abrams, 2018. Colfer, Eoin, and Andrew Donkin. Illegal. Hodder, 2017. Croci, Pascal. Auschwitz. Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Delisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. Drawn and Quarterly, 2012. ———. Burma Chronicle. Drawn and Quarterly, 2014. ———. Hostage. Trans. Helge Dascher. Jonathan Cape, 2017. Evans, Kate. Threads from the Refugee Crisis. Verso, 2017. Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk. Grass. Trans. Janet Hong. Drawn and Quarterly, 2019. Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. Curated. This Side That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. Yoda P, 2013. Green, Katie. Lighter than My Shadow. Jonathan Cape, 2013. Guibert, Emmanuel, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer. Trans. Alexis Siegel. First Second, 2009. Gupta, Malini, and Dyuti Mittal. “The Taboo.” This Side That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. Ed. Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Yoda P, 2013. 235–47. Hayes, Nick. The Rime of the Modern Mariner. Viking, 2012. Hill, Gord. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. Arsenal, 2017.

194  Bibliography

Igort. The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule. Simon and Schuster, 2016. Ilaiah, Kancha, and Durgabai Vyam. Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land. Navayana, 2007. Johnson, Mat, and Walter Pleece. Incognegro. Vertigo-DC, 2008. Kubert, Joe. Fax from Sarajevo: A Story of Survival. Dark Horse, 1998. Kugler, Olivier. Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees. U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. Lewis, John, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. March. 3 vols. Top Shelf, 2016. Moore, Anne Elizabeth, and the Ladydrawers. Threadbare: Clothes, Sex & Trafficking. Portland: Microcosm, 2016. Natarajan, Srividya, S. Anand, Durgabai Vyam, and Subhash Vyam. Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability. Navayana, 2011. Natarajan, Srividya, and Aparajita Ninan. A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule’s Fight for Liberty. Navayana, 2011. Okubo, Miné. Citizen 13660. [1983]. U of Washington P, 2014. Prum, Vannak Anan. The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery. As told to Ben and Jocelyn Pederick. Trans. Lim Sophorn. Seven Stories P, 2018. Rashid, Salman, and Mohit Suneja. “I Too Have Seen Lahore.” This Side That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. Ed. Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Yoda P, 2013. 207–19. Sabnani, Nina. “Know Directions Home?” This Side That Side: Restorying Partition: Graphic Narratives from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh. Ed. Vishwajyoti Ghosh. Yoda P, 2013. 99–111. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Jonathan Cape, 2003. ———. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. Jonathan Cape, 2004. ———. Safe Area Goražde. Jonathan Cape, 2007. ———. Journalism. Jonathan Cape, 2012. Sajad, Malik. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. Fourth Estate, 2015. Sattouf, Riad. The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978–1984. Trans. Sam Taylor. Two Roads-Hachette, 2016. ———. The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984–1985. Trans. Sam Taylor. Two Roads-Hachette, 2016. ———. The Arab of the Future 3: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985–1987. Trans. Sam Taylor. Two Roads-Hachette, 2018. Sen, Orijit. River of Stories. Kalpavriksh, 1994. Shyam, Venkat Raman Singh, and S. Anand. Finding My Way. Juggernaut, 2016. Squarzoni, Phillippe. Climate Changed: A  Personal Journey Through the Science. Harry N. Abrams, 2014. Stassen, Jean-Philippe. Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda. Trans. Alexis Siegel. First Second, 2006. Steichen, Edward. The Family of Man. Museum of Modern Art, Undated. Sulaiman, Hamid. Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story. Trans. Francesca Barrie. Jonathan Cape, 2017. Thomas, Pratheek, and Rajiv Eipe. Hush. Manta Ray, 2010. Truong, Marcelino. Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961–63. Trans. David Homel. Arsenal Pulp, 2018. United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Illustrated by Yacine Ait Kaci. United Nations, 2015. Vaughan, Brian K., and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad. Washington, DC, 2006. Young, Ethan. Nanjing: The Burning City. Dark Horse, 2019.

Bibliography  195

Secondary texts Acheson, Charles. “Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde.” Studies in the Novel 47.3 (2015): 291–307. Agamben, Giorgio. The Uses of Bodies. Homo Sacer IV.2. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2015. Albahari, Maurizio. “After the Shipwreck: Mourning and Citizenship in the Mediterranean, Our Sea.” Social Research 83.2 (2016): 275–94. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comic Book Storyworlds: Toward a History and Theory. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2017. ———. “Comics Studies Here and Now: An Introduction.” Comics Studies Here and Now. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Routledge, 2018. 1–6. Aldama, Frederick Luis, and Christopher González, ed. Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future. U of Texas P, 2016. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. U of California P, 2004. 1–30. ———. Trauma: A Social Theory. Polity P, 2012. Alexandre, Sandy. “Out: On a Limb the Spatial Politics of Lynching Photography.” The Mississippi Quarterly 61.1/2 (2008): 71–112. Allbeson, Tom. “Photographic Diplomacy in the Postwar World: UNESCO and the Conception of Photography as a Universal Language, 1946–1956.” Modern Intellectual History 12.2 (2015): 383–415. Allen, Beverly. Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. U of Minnesota P, 1996. Ambedkar, B. R. “Untouchables or the Children of India’s Ghetto.” Writings and Speeches. Ed. Hari Narake. Vol. 5. Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, 2014. Anderson, Kjell. “ ‘Who Was I to Stop the Killing?’: Moral Neutralization Among Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators.” Journal of Perpetrator Research 1.1 (2017): 39–63. Anker, Elizabeth S. Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Cornell UP, 2012. Aradau, Claudia. “The Promise of Security: Resilience, Surprise and Epistemic Politics.” Resilience 2.2 (2014): 73–87. Baetens, Jan. “Drawing Photonovels.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 9.2 (2017). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v9_2/baetens/. 30 June 2019. Ballenger, Jesse F. Self, Senility, and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America: A History. Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Cornell UP, 2011. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell UP, 1989. Baxi, Upendra. “Humiliation and Justice.” Humiliation: Claims and Contexts. Ed. Gopal Guru. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 58–78. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bergoffen, Debra B. Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body. Routledge, 2012. Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson. “The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees.” Australian Journal of Political Science 48.4 (2013): 398–416.

196  Bibliography

Booth, Wayne C. “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self: Or, Does Amnesty Have a Leg to Stand On?” Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Ed. Barbara Johnson. Basic Books, 1993. 69–102. Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo. Scholarly Resources, 1994. Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Ed. Judith Butler et al. Duke UP, 2016. 52–75. Bradley, Mark Philip. “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination.” Diplomatic History 38.1 (2014): 1–21. Branche, Raphaëlle, Isabelle Delpla, John Horne, Pieter Lagrou, Daniel Palmieri, and Fabrice Virgili. “Writing the History of Rape in Wartime.” Rape in Wartime. Ed. Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012. 1–16. Brienza, Casey, and Paddy Johnston. “Introduction: Understanding Comics Work.” Cultures of Comics Work. Eds. Casey Brienza and Paddy Johnston. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. 1–18. Briggs, Laura. “Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption.” Gender & History 15.2 (2003): 179–200. Bringa, Tone. “Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992–1995.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed. Alexander Laban Hinton. U of California P, 2002. 194–225. Brink, Cornelia. “Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps.” History and Memory 12.1 (2000): 135–50. Brister, Rose, and Belinda Walzer. “Kairos and Comics: Reading Human Rights Intercontextually in Joe Sacco’s Graphic Narratives.” College Literature 40.3 (2013): 138–55. Brooks, Linda Marie. “Testimonio’s Poetics of Performance.” Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005): 181–222. Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory 21.3 (1993): 390–410. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Penguin, 2001. Butler, Judith. Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. ———. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009. ———. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. ———. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Eds. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke UP, 2016. 12–27. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. “Introduction.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke UP, 2016. Carano, Kenneth T., and Jeremiah Clabough. “Images of Struggle: Teaching Human Rights with Graphic Novels.” The Social Studies 107.1 (2016): 14–18. Card, Claudia. “The Paradox of Genocidal Rape Aimed at Enforced Pregnancy.” Southern Journal of Philosophy XLVI (2008): 176–89. Cartwright, Lisa. Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child. Duke UP, 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976. Chaney, Michael. “Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels.” MELUS 32.3 (2007): 175–200. Chapman, Jane L., Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif. Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015.

Bibliography  197

Cheurfa, Hiyem. “Testifying Graphically: Bearing Witness to a Palestinian Childhood in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2020). DOI: 10.1080/08989575. 2020.1741185. 25 May 2020. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Columbia UP, 2010. ———. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form. Harvard UP, 2016. Clark, J. Spencer. “Encounters with Historical Agency: The Value of Nonfiction Graphic Novels in the Classroom.” History Teacher 46.4 (2013): 489–508. Cram, E., Melanie Loehwing, and John Louis Lucaites. “Civic Sights: Theorizing Deliberative and Photographic Publicity in the Visual Public Sphere.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49.3 (2016): 227–53. Critchley, Simon. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernaconi. Cambridge UP, 2004. 1–32. ———. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas. 3rd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture. Duke UP, 2003. Dauphinée, Elizabeth. “The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery.” Security Dialogue 38.2 (2007): 139–55. Dawes, James. That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. ———. Evil Men. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. ———. The Novel of Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018. ———. “Truth-Telling: Reportage and Creative Nonfiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature. Ed. Crystal Parikh. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 167–77. DeFalco, Amelia. Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. _____. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. ———. “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony.” The Instant of My Death. Ed. Maurice Blanchot. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Dombrowsky, Wolf R. “Again and Again: Is a Disaster What We Call a ‘Disaster’?” What Is a Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. Ed. E. L. Quarantelli. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 13–24. Dudai, Ron. “The Study of Human Rights Practice: State of the Art.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 11 (2019): 273–95. Düwell, Marcus. “Human Dignity: Concepts, Discussions, Philosophical Perspectives.” The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Marcus Düwell, Jens Braarvig Roger Brownsword, and Dietmar Mieth. Cambridge UP, 2014. 23–51. Earle, Harriet E. H. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2017. Egger, Bettina. “Archives and Oral History in Emmanuel Guibert’s Le Photographe.” Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Ed. Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 59–78. El Refaie, Elisabeth. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. UP of Mississippi, 2012. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Trans. Sara B. Young. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. Ertür, Başak. “Barricades: Resources and Residues of Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance. Ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke UP, 2016. 97–121.

198  Bibliography

Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the formation of African American identity. Cambridge UP, 2003. Feldman, Allen. “Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic.” Biography 27.1 (2004): 163–202. Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Ferrarese, Estelle. “Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World as It Is?” The Politics of Vulnerability. Ed. Estelle Ferrarese. Routledge, 2018. 1–11. Fineman, Martha Albertson. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20.1 (2008): 1–23. ———. “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State.” Emory Law Journal 60 (2010): 252–75. Foss, Chris, Jonathan Gray, and Zack Whalen, eds. Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. Fowler, Bridget. The Obituary as Collective Memory. Routledge, 2007. Galchinsky, Michael. The Modes of Human Rights Literature: Towards a Culture without Borders. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. Ghosal, Torsa. “The Page is Local: Planetarity and Embodied Metaphor in Anglophone Graphic Narratives from South Asia.” Comics Studies Here and Now. Ed. Frederick Luis Aldama. Routledge, 2018. 180–90. Gies, Lieve. “Celebrity Big Brother, Human Rights and Popular Culture.” Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 7.1 (2009). www.entsportslawjournal.com/articles/10.16997/eslj.53/. 27 June 2019. Giesen, Bernhard. “The Trauma of Perpetrators: The Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Ed. Jeffrey C Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004. 112–54. Gilbert, Claude. “Studying Disaster: Changes in the Main Conceptual Tools.” What Is A  Disaster? Perspectives on the Question. Ed. E.L. Quarantelli. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 3–12. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About their Lives. Columbia UP, 2017. Godden, David M. “On Common Knowledge and Ad Populum: Acceptance as Grounds for Acceptability.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41.2 (2008): 101–29. Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson, and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. “Human Rights and Literature: The Development of an Interdiscipline.” Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. Eds. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2012. 3–16. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Vintage 1997. Gomes, Mario and Jan Peuckert. “Memento Mori: A  Portuguese Style of Melancholy.” Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Ed. Mark Beringer, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn. McFarland  & Company, 2010. 116–26. Griffiths, Gareth. “Introduction: Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where are We Going?.” The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. Ed. Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead. Ibidem-Verlag, 2016. 1–11.

Bibliography  199

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Gunning, Jeroen, and Ilan Zvi Baron. Why Occupy a Square? People, Protests and Movements in the Egyptian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Guru, Gopal. “Introduction: Theorizing Humiliation.” Humiliation: Claims and Contexts. Ed. Gopal Guru. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 1–21. Hatfield, Charles Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Heath, Deborah, et al. “Genetic Citizenship.” A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Ed. David Nugent and Joan Vincent. Blackwell, 2004. 152–67. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. [1992]. Pandora, 2001. Hermann, Stephen. “Social Exclusion.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 133–50. Hernandez, Julie Gerk. “The Tortured Body, the Photograph, and the U.S. War on Terror.” CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007). http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/ 1481-4374.1019. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2 (1992–93): 3–29. Hong, Christine. “Flashforward Democracy: American Exceptionalism and the Atomic Bomb in Barefoot Gen.” Comparative Literature Studies 46.1 (2009): 125–55. ———. “The World-Form of Human Rights Comics.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2016. 193–205. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights. W.W. Norton, 2007. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mimesis and Men: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno.” New German Critique 81 (2000): 65–82. Jeffery, Scott. The Posthuman Body in Superhero Comics: Human, Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. Jensen, Meg. “The Legible Face of Human Rights in Autobiographically Based Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2016. 184–92. Jinks, Rebecca. Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? Bloomsbury, 2016. Joseph, Jonathan. “Resilience as Embedded Neoliberalism: A Governmentality Approach.” Resilience 1.1 (2013): 38–52. Kelman, Herbert C. “Violence Without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers.” Journal of Social Issues 29.4 (1973): 25–61. Keren, Aaron. “Epistemic Authority, Testimony and the Transmission of Knowledge.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.3 (2007): 368–81. Knudsen, Britta Timm, and Carsten Stage. “Introduction: Politicizing Bodily Vulnerability.” Global Media, Biopolitics and Affect: Politicizing Bodily Vulnerability. Eds. Britta Timm and Carsten Stage. Routledge, 2015. 1–27. Kozol, Wendy. “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature. Eds. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2012. 165–79. Kuch, Hannes. “The Rituality of Humiliation: Exploring Symbolic Vulnerability.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 37–56.

200  Bibliography

Kunka, Andrew J. Autobiographical Comics. Bloomsbury, 2018. LaCapra, Dominick. “Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ ”: ‘Here There Is No Why’.” Critical Inquiry 23. 2 (1997): 231–69. ———. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry 25. 4 (1999): 696–727. ———. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. Lampert, Jo. “Sh-h-h-h: Representations of Perpetrators of Sexual Child Abuse in Picturebooks.” Sex Education 12.2 (2012): 177–85. Laqueur, Thomas W. “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” The New Cultural History. Ed. Lynn Hunt. U of California P, 1989. 176–204. ———. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton UP, 2015. Leask, Phil. “Losing Trust in the World: Humiliation and Its Consequences.” Psychodynamic Practice 19:2 (2013): 129–42. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne UP, 1969. ———. “Freedom and Command.” Collected Philosophical Papers. Ed. Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987. Lindroth, Marjo and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen. “The Biopolitics of Resilient Indigeneity and the Radical Gamble of Resistance.” Resilience 4.2 (2016): 130–45. Linfield, Susie. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. U of Chicago P, 2010. Lorrey, Isabell. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. Trans. Aileen Derieg. Verso, 2015. Lunsford, Andrea A., and Adam Rosenblatt. “Down a Road and into an Awful Silence: Graphic Listening in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. Eds. Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe. Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 130–46. Lydon, Jane. Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights. New South, 2012. Mackenzie, Catriona. “The Importance of Relational Autonomy and Capabilities for an Ethics of Vulnerability.” Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Eds. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 33–59. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?” Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Eds. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 1–30. Mann, Jonathan M., Lawrence Gostin, Sofia Gruskin, Troyen Brennan, Zita Lazzarini, and Harvey V. Fineberg. “Health and Human Rights.” Health and Human Rights 1.1 (1994): 7–23. https://cdn2.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/125/2014/03/4-Mann. pdf. 22 Apr. 2019. Margalit, Avishai. The Decent Society. Trans. Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Marriott, David. “Corpsing; Or, the Matter of Black Life.” Cultural Critique 94 (2016): 32–64. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. Harper Perennial, 1994. McCosker, Anthony. Intensive Media Aversive Affect and Visual Culture. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013. McGlothlin, Erin. “No Time Like the Present: Narrative a-nd Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” Narrative 11.2 (2003): 177–98.

Bibliography  201

Mickwitz, Nina. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Palgrave-­ Macmillan, 2016. Miller, Rachel R. “Keep Out, or Else: Diary as Body in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Cruddy.” Comics Memory: Archives and Styles. Eds. Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 101–20. Mitchell, W.J.T. “Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation.” Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 8–32. Mitchell, W.J.T., Bernard Harcourt, and Michael Taussig. Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago UP, 2013. Möller, Frank. “The Implicated Spectator: From Manet to Botero.” Terror and the Arts: Artistic, Literary, and Political Interpretations of Violence from Dostoyevsky to Abu Ghraib. Ed. Matti Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008. 25–40. Moore, Alexandra Schultheis, and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. “Introduction: Charting New Courses: Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies.” Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. Modern Language Association Options for Teaching Series, 2015. 1–12. ———. eds. Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies. Modern Language Association Options for Teaching Series, 2015. Morgan, Michael L. The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas. Cambridge UP, 2011. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Belknap-Harvard UP, 2010. Mühlhäuser, Regina. “The Unquestioned Crime: Sexual Violence by German Soldiers During the War of Annihilation in the Soviet Union, 1941–45.” Rape in Wartime. Eds. Raphaëlle Branche and Fabrice Virgili. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012. 34–46. Müller, Julia, and Christian Neuhäuser. “Relative Poverty: On a Social Dimension of ­Dignity.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 159–72. Nayar, Pramod K. “The Poetics of Postcolonial Atrocity: Dalit Life Writing, Testimonio, and Human Rights.” Ariel 42.3–4 (2012): 237–64. ———. Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India. Routledge, 2012. ———. “The Rhetoric of Silence/ing: Hush.” Margins 3 (2013): 32–44. ———. “The Indian Graphic Novel and Dalit Trauma: A Gardener in the Wasteland.” Dalit Literatures in India. Eds. Joshil K. Abraham and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Routledge, 2015. 320–38. ———. “The Child Victim as the Face of Modern Suffering.” The Wire 24 Sept. 2016. https://thewire.in/rights/meaning-is-a-physiognomy-or-the-child-victim-as-the-faceof-the-modern-age. ———. “The Forms of History: This Side, That Side, Graphic Narrative and the Partitions of the Indian Subcontinent.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.4 (2016): 481–93. ———. “From Graphic Passing to Witnessing the Graphic: Racial Identity and Public Selffashioning in Incognegro.” Image & Text 28 (2016): 7–26. ———. Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016. ———. The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique. Routledge, 2016. ———. “Radical Graphics: Martin Luther King, Jr., B.R. Ambedkar and Comics Auto/ biography.” Biography 39.2 (2016): 147–71. ———. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

202  Bibliography

———. “Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic: The Snake and the Lotus.” South Asian Review 39:1–2 (2018): 70–85. ———. “From Documentary Realism to Figurative Realism: Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks and the Holodomor.” CounterText 3.4 (2018): 362–81. ———. “Postcolonial Graphic Lifewriting: Finding My Way and the Subaltern Public Sphere.” Narrative 26.3 (2018): 339–57. ———. “Drawing (Upon) Human Rights: Reading the Illustrated Version of the UDHR.” Artha 18.3 (2019): 65–77. Nelson, Sara Holiday. “Resilience and the Neoliberal Counter-Revolution: From Ecologies of Control to Production of the Common.” Resilience (2014). Neocleous, Mark. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy 178 (2013): 2–7. Neuhäuser, Christian. “Humiliation: The Collective Dimension.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 21–36. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Columbia UP, 2012. Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship.” Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier. Wiley Blackwell, 2005. 124–44. Oliver, Kelly. “The Look of Love.” Hypatia 16.3 (2001): 56–78. ______. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. U of Minnesota P, 2001. ———. “Witnessing and Testimony.” Parallax 10.1 (2004): 78–87. ———. “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics.” Philosophy  & Rhetoric 48.4 (2015): 473–93. Oliver, Sophie. “Dehumanization: Perceiving the Body as (In)Human.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 85–100. Orbán, Katalin. “Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.” Representations 97 (2007): 57–89. ———. “Mediating Distant Violence: Reports on Non-photographic Reporting in The Fixer and The Photographer.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6.2 (2015): 122–37. Palshikar, Sanjay. “Understanding Humiliation.” Humiliation: Claims and Contexts. Ed. Gopal Guru. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 79–93. Parikh, Crystal. Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Partnoy, Alicia. “Textual Strategies to Resist Disappearance and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.1 (2007). https://docs.lib.purdue. edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=clcweb. 30 June 2019. Pedri, Nancy. “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe.” ImageTexT 6.1 (2011). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/ archives/v6_1/pedri/. 30 June 2019. Perera, Suvendrini, and Joseph Pugliese. “Between Spectacle and Secret: The Politics of Non-visibility and the Performance of Non-completion.” Visualising Human Rights. Ed. Jane Lydon. U of Western Australia P, 2018. 85–100. Perniola, Mario. Art and its Shadow. Trans. Massimo Verdicchio. Continuum, 2004. Pettitt, Joanne. Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives: Encountering the Nazi Beast. PalgraveMacmillan, 2017. Plant, Bob. “On Testimony, Sincerity and Truth.” Paragraph 30.1 (2007): 30–50. Pollack, Craig. “Intentions of Burial: Mourning, Politics, and Memorials Following the Massacre at Srebrenica.” Death Studies 27.2 (2003): 125–42.

Bibliography  203

Prince, Gerald. “The Disnarrated.” Style 22.1 (1988): 1–8. Pryor, Ashley Elliott. “Gesturing toward Peace: On Silence, the Society of the Spectacle, and the “Women in Black” Antiwar Protests.” Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. Eds. Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe. Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 180–94. Radačić, Ivana. Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Ed. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Rocío, G. Davis. “A Graphic Self.” Prose Studies 27.3 (2005): 264–79. Romero-Jódar, Andrés. The Trauma Graphic Novel. Routledge, 2017. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester UP, 2003. Saldukaitytė, Jolanta. “The Place and Face of the Stranger in Levinas.” Religions 10.67 (2019): 1–12. Salmi, Charlotta. “Visualizing the World: Graphic Novels, Comics, and Human Rights.” The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature. Ed. Crystal Parikh. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 178–90. Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance. Fordham UP, 2015. Savage, Rowan. “Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model.” Patterns of Prejudice 47.2 (2013): 139–61. Scarre, Geoffrey. “Understanding the Moral Phenomenology of the Third Reich.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1.4 (1998): 423–45. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Schaber, Peter. “Absolute Poverty.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Ed. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 151–8. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and Genocide.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed. Alexander Laban Hinton. U of California P, 2002. 348–81. Scherr, Rebecca. “Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.” Textual Practice 29.1 (2015): 111–31. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. “Graphic Narrative as World Literature.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. De Gruyter, 2013. 385–406. Schuldiner, Michael. “Writer’s Block and the Metaleptic Event in Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel, Maus.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 21 (2002): 108–15. Shields, Kirsteen. “Labour Exploitation.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 173–90. Shultziner, Doron. “Human Dignity: Functions and Meanings.” Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation. Ed. Jeff Malpas and Norelle Lickiss. Springer, 2007. 73–92. Silverstone, Roger. Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Polity P, 2007. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law. Fordham UP, 2007. ———. “The Enchantment of Human Rights; or, What Difference Does Humanitarian Indifference Make?” Critical Quarterly 56.4 (2014): 46–66. ———. “Life, Story, Violence: What Narrative Doesn’t Say.” The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. Eds. Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead. IbidemVerlag, 2016. 15–38.

204  Bibliography

———. “Vanishing Points: When Narrative is Not Simply There.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Eds. Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2016. 109–25. Sliwinski, Sharon. “The Right to an Image.” Visualising Human Rights. Ed. Jane Lydon. U of Western Australia P, 2018. 27–38. Smith, Sidonie, and Julie Watson. “What about False Witnessing? The Limits of Authenticity and Verification.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Eds. Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2016. 243–51. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387–420. Statman, Daniel. “Humiliation, Dignity and Self-Respect.” Philosophical Psychology 13.4 (2000): 523–40. Stoecker, Ralf. “Three Crucial Turns on the Road to an Adequate Understanding of Human Dignity.” Humiliation, Degradation, Dehumanization: Human Dignity Violated. Eds. Paulus Kaufmann, Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser, and Elaine Webster. Springer, 2011. 7–20. Stoler, Ann Laura. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Duke UP, 2013. Sturken, Marita. “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment.” Positions 5.3 (1997): 687–707. Szörényi, Anna. “The Images Speak for Themselves? Reading Refugee Coffee-table Books.” Visual Studies 21.1 (2006): 24–41. Tait, Sue. “Pornographies of Violence? Internet Spectatorship on Body Horror.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.1 (2008): 91–111. Taussig, Michael. I Swear I  Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago UP, 2011. Taylor, Christopher C. “The Cultural Face of Terror in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed. Alexander Laban Hinton. U of California P, 2002. 137–78. Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’. Duke UP, 1997. Thomas, Elisabeth Louise. Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics, Justice and the Human Beyond Being. Routledge, 2004. Tomsic, Mary. “Sharing a Personal Past: #Iwasarefugee #iamarefugee on Instagram.” Visualising Human Rights. Ed. Jane Lydon. U of Western Australia P, 2018. 63–84. Torchin, Leshu. Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. U of Minnesota P, 2012. Vasseleu, Cathryn. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2002. Veld, Laurike in ’t. The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2019. Versaci, Rocco. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. Continuum, 2008. Vrasti, Wanda and Nicholas Michelsen. “On Resilience and Solidarity.” Resilience 5.1 (2017): 1–9. Waldenfels, Bernard. “Levinas and the Face of the Other.” The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 63–81.

Bibliography  205

Weber, Wibke, and Hans-Martin Rall. “Authenticity in Comics Journalism. Visual Strategies for Reporting Facts.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8.4 (2017): 376–97. Weitin, Thomas. “Testimony and the Rhetoric of Persuasion.” MLN 119.3 (2004): 525–40. Westerman, David, Aaron C. Cross, and Peter G. Lindmark. “I Believe in a Thing Called Bot: Perceptions of the Humanness of ‘Chatbots.’ ” Communication Studies (2018). DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2018.1557233. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79. ———. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. ———. “Sorry Business.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. Routledge, 2016. 206–14. Wilcox, Lauren B. Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Woo, Benjamin. “Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Experience and information in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form. Ed. Dean Hassler-Forest and Joyce Goggin. McFarland, 2010. 166–77. Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. U of North Carolina P, 2009. Woolley, Agnes. Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Young, James E. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18.2 (1992): 267–96. Zelizer, Barbie. “Gender and Atrocity: Women in Holocaust Photographs.” Visual Culture and the Holocaust. Ed. Barbie Zelizer. Athlone, 2001. 249–71.

INDEX

500 Years of Resistance 176 1984 131 Aaron, Jason 8, 17, 32 – 4, 50n6 Abdelrazaq, Leila 8, 126 abuse 70, 92, 143, 166; child sexual 78; incestuous 73; sexual 73, 74, 78; teen 85; verbal 17 Acheson, Charles 7 acknowledgment 35, 186 – 7 activist-scholarship 2 adaptative resilience as resistance 165 – 8 adaptive resilience 11, 167 adaptive survival 153 aesthetic distance 31 Agamben, Giorgio 71 – 2 agency 36, 72, 75, 141; affective 118; heterogenous nature of 120n6 Ahuja, Ankur 48 – 9 Al-Assad 126 – 7 Albahari, Maurizio 116 – 17 Alexander, Jeffrey 89, 90, 92, 98 amanuensistic witnessing 130 – 4 Ambedkar, B.R. 52, 57 – 9, 61 – 3, 97 – 9, 107, 112 – 13, 169 – 70 Amery, Jean 184 Anand, S. 9, 97, 99, 112 Anderson, Ho Che 8, 112 Anderson, Laurie Halse 8, 49, 78 – 9, 81, 144, 145, 148 Angelus Novus 26 Anker, Elizabeth 1, 3, 14 anonymization of uniformed perpetrators 40

anonymizing perpetrators 39 Appupen 9 Arab collective memory 93 Arab-Israeli conflict 92 – 3 Arab of the Future, The 8, 51, 72 – 3, 88, 187 Aradau, Claudia 154, 161, 163 Arendt, Hannah 40, 54 artifactuality 112, 113 Auschwitz 8, 23, 28, 39, 91 Baddawi 8, 126, 127 Barefoot Gen 8, 141 barricades 175 – 7 battlefield 162 Bay, Guantanamo 56, 151n1, 166 bearing witness 122, 129, 135, 142, 148 Best We Could Do, The 114 Bhimayana 9, 52, 57 – 60, 62, 97 – 8, 107, 112 – 14, 169 bildungsroman 188 biopolitical governmentality 34, 35, 38, 39 black box/panel 149 – 50 Blaylock, Josh 8, 76, 119n5 body-shaming 86 Boltanski, Luc 99 – 100 boundary object 96 Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman 179n2 Bracke, Sarah 154, 156, 159 – 61, 165, 179n1 Bradley, Mark Philip 6 Brink, Cornelia 119n2 Brown, Wendy 15, 49 Browning, Christopher 119n3 brutalization 77

Index  207

Bui, Thi 17, 24 – 6, 65, 114 – 16 Burma Chronicle 34 Butler, Judith 3, 11, 13, 14, 23, 137, 154 – 5, 166 – 7, 169 – 71, 177, 179, 182, 186, 188 Carroll, Emily 8, 79 – 81, 144, 145, 148 Cartwright, Lisa 23, 50n4, 129 caste (India, see also: Dalits) 52, 60, 61, 63, 66 – 8, 70, 71, 86n1, 97, 107 – 08, 169, 170 cause-effect sequence 46, 67, 77, 127 Cavell, Stanley 185 – 6 certificate of presence 18 Chute, Hillary 4, 18, 19, 47, 122, 141 – 2, 180 Citizen 13660 36 civic speech 174 civil war 39 Clark, Spencer 36, 38 Climate Changed (2014) 9 Clinton, Bill 105, 106 coalitional I 124 collaborative ‘I’ 124 collective-autobiographical memory 93 collective identity 91 collective memory 90 – 3, 95 – 7, 107, 108, 114, 116, 117, 119 collective procedural memory 94, 106, 115 collective-semantic memory 93 comic book 46, 98, 130, 142, 168 composite I (as) witness 125 – 9 corporeal-ontological vulnerability 10, 16 corroborative witness-function 125 coughing 125 counter-memory 116 counter-monuments 175 – 8 Croci, Pascal 8, 23 – 4, 28 – 30, 39, 40, 42 cultural memory 10, 98, 101, 106, 108, 112, 118; defined 90 cultural protection 158 cultural trauma 88 – 90, 92 – 4, 96, 98; memory, materials of 107 – 19; responsibility, attribution of 97 – 106; victim (in) memory 91 – 7 ‘daily diary’ style of documentation 19 Dalits (see also: Caste) 9, 66, 67, 68, 70 – 2, 97, 112 Dawes, James 1, 3, 7 – 9, 50n3, 146 dead bodies 17, 23, 25, 26, 30, 39, 85, 173 – 4, 178 Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea 8, 17, 39 debodiment 10, 16 – 18, 26, 28 – 30, 36, 49 dehumanization 52, 59, 61, 71, 83, 85; defined 56 – 7; discursive 106; genocidal 82

Delisle, Guy 21, 24, 34, 35, 72, 73, 131, 137 – 9 Deogratias 8, 32, 45, 59, 73, 81 – 2, 84, 85, 100, 101, 102, 103 Derrida 132 – 3, 149, 181, 187 dignity 52 – 7, 61 – 3, 68 – 73, 112, 190 disaster 106, 153, 155 – 8, 161, 162 discrimination 35, 73, 96, 113, 114 discursive dehumanization 106 disembodied perpetrator 85 diverse experiences 127 documentary-aesthetic alliance 112 documentary realism 16, 22 – 4 dogmatism 143 Dudai, Ron 1 – 2 Du Toit, Louise 151n5 Earle, Harriet 4, 67, 78, 81, 109, 122, 151n2 Egger, Bettina 46, 108 Eipe, Rajiv 74 electronic voodoo 177 – 8 El Refaie, Elisabeth 131, 133, 151n4 embodiment 10, 16, 34, 47, 49, 57, 107, 170 empathetic listening 22 – 4, 150 empathic listener 135, 142, 144, 148 empathic listening 139 – 42, 145 empathic unsettlement 122 encountered sign 15, 21, 30, 31, 34 endangered species 165 – 6 epistemic authority 146, 147, 151n6 epistemic regime 11, 154, 161, 163 – 4, 178 – 9 epithet 60 Erll, Astrid 91, 93, 113 Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (See also: Kugler) 12 – 13, 18, 46 – 712 – 13, 18, 47 essentializing 62 ethnocide 97 Evans, Andy 80, 81, 146 – 9 Evans, Kate 21, 22, 27, 41 – 2, 46, 115 – 18, 131, 136 – 7, 139 – 40 Everett, Billy 32 – 4 exteriority 32 Eyerman, Ron 89 – 90 eyewitness 18 – 19, 26, 121, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135; -bearing witness narrative 141; listening to 141; self-figuration of 122; see also witnessing false witnessing 146 ‘family of man’ theme 184 family values 95 Farhana, Syeda 88, 94, 108 – 11, 117 Farooqui, Mahmood 95

208 Index

Fax from Sarajevo 8, 34, 73 – 4, 85, 104, 106, 131, 184 Feldman, Allen 26 Ferrarese, Estelle 14 figurative realism 16, 24, 30 Finding My Way 9, 68 Fixer, nevenhe 99 foreign-global capitalism 178 form-of-life 72 Foss, Chris 9 Fowler, Bridget 117 Franco, Jean 172 Franklin, Aretha 167 Freedom Hospital 8, 103, 106, 131, 134, 160, 175 Galchinsky, Michael 4 – 5 A Gardener in the Wasteland 9, 60, 68, 70, 97, 114 gendered threat 38 gendered violence and humiliation 72 – 86 Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk 78, 149 – 50, 184 genocidal dehumanization 82 genocidal rape 73, 74, 83, 151n6 genocidal violence 96, 155 genocide 8, 30, 32, 85, 89, 96, 150, 173; intra-African 101; paradigmatic 101; Rwandan 31 genocide continuum 100, 104, 106 Ghosal, Torsa 79, 124 Ghosh, Vishwajyoti 8 Ghraib, Abu 31, 151n1 Giesen, Bernhard 92, 98 Gilbert, Claude 158 Gilmore, Leigh 127, 148 global civil culture 4 globalectics 5 Godden, David 189 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson 1, 2 Goldhagen, David 119n3 Goražde 43 – 4, 105, 106, 152 – 3, 155 – 9, 161 Gordon, Avery 27 Grass 78, 149, 184 grave 105 gravedigger 28, 29, 30 Green, Katie 74, 85, 86 Griffiths, Gareth 3 Guibert, Emmanuel 18, 46, 108, 123 Gulamgiri 114 Gupta, Malini 21, 109, 160 – 1, 162 Guru, Gopal 54 – 5 haptic visuality 108 – 9 Haslam, Nick 57 Hatfield, Charles 130, 151n3

Hayes, Nick 9 hearing/listening to witnesses 141 helplessness 12, 32, 34, 36, 41, 42, 45 Henrichon, Niko 8, 119n1 Herman, Judith 144 Hermann, Stephen 58, 60, 61 Hirsch, Marianne 115 historical veracity 134 Holocaust 31, 101, 103, 106, 150 Holodomor 20 – 3, 25, 26, 31, 39, 95, 97 hologram effect 25 Holzer, Jenny 150 Homo sovieticus 96, 97 Hong, Christine 122, 191 Hostage 21, 24 HR graphic novels 4, 6, 8, 16, 41, 143, 150, 171; testimonial encounter in 123; witnessing ‘I’ in 124; witness space in 126 human dignity 52, 54, 112 human face 11, 111, 188 humanitarian photography 36 humanity 30 – 1, 56 human rights–oriented literary criticism 2 humiliation 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63 – 5, 77; gendered violence and 72 – 86; poverty and 65 – 8; symbolic group 56; verbal abuse and 17 Humphreys, Stephen 9 Hunt, Lynn 6 Hush 74, 78 hyper-visible vulnerability 177 Igort 8, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 69 – 70, 77, 94, 95, 97, 118, 130, 131, 133, 140 – 2 implicated spectator 99 – 102, 104, 106 impressionism 30 incestuous abuse 73 Incognegro 8, 63, 64, 128, 129 In the Shadow of No Towers 108 intra-African genocides 101 ironic authentication 130 Israeli-Arab conflict 92 – 3 Israeli violence 164 Jeffery, Scott 9 Jensen, Meg 188 Jim Crow 166, 167 Jinks, Rebecca 41 Johnson, Mat 8, 128 Journalism (Sacco) 51 – 2, 65 – 7, 70, 132 Kelman, Herbert 56 King 8, 112, 114 King Jr, Martin Luther 57, 98, 112, 113, 168 Klee, Paul 26, 157

Index  209

Knudsen, Britta Timm 14 Kozol, Wendy 122, 164 Kubert, Joe 34, 74, 104, 131, 184 Kugler, Olivier (See also Escaping Wars and Waves) 12, 18, 19, 49, 50n1 Kurdi, Aylan 116 labour, dignity and rights 68 – 72 LaCapra, Dominick 122, 133 Lampert, Jo 85 Laqueur, Thomas 17, 23, 33, 174 Lefevre, Didier 123 Levinas, Emmanuel 181, 182, 186 Lewis, John 8, 17, 52, 56, 59, 121, 143 – 4, 168 Lighter than My Shadow 74, 85 listening 20, 22, 135; to eyewitnesses 141; rhetorical 135 – 9, 142; speech and 141 Litwa, Maria 109 lynching 64, 100, 101 Mackenzie, Catriona 14 – 15 male/masculine self, threat to and erasure of 77 March 8, 17, 98, 99, 121, 143 – 4, 164, 166 – 71 March III 59, 63 market fundamentalism 177, 178 Marriott, David 70 mass rape 76 material-as-symbolism 108 material symbolism 108 Maus 108, 113 memory; collective 90 – 3, 95 – 7, 107, 108, 114, 116, 117, 119; collectiveautobiographical 93; collective procedural 94, 106, 115; collectivesemantic 93; counter-memory 116; cultural 10, 90, 98, 101, 106, 108, 112, 118; materials of 107 – 19; post-memory 115; traumatic 117; victim in 91 – 7 memory theorists 108 metalepsis 113 metatextual strategy 109 Mickwitz, Nina 18 – 20 Miller, Rachel 47, 48 mimetic approximations 116 Mittal, Dyuti 21, 109, 160 – 1 modality markers 131 modern-day slavery 8 monochromatic drawings 151n7 Moore, Alexandra Schultheis 1, 2 moral economies 35 moral summons 183 Morgan, Michael 182, 183, 186

Munnu 159, 160, 169, 173 – 4 murder 87n2, 102, 134; rape-murder 83 – 4 muselman 16 Nanjing: The Burning City 84 Natarajan, Srividya 9, 60, 61, 69, 70, 71 native-religious nationalism 178 Nazi Germany 61 Neocleous, Mark 153, 156 Neuhäuser, Christian 52, 55 – 6, 67 nigger lovers 59, 62 Ninan, Aparajita 9, 60, 61, 69 – 71 nobodiness 62 notebooks 19 – 20 ‘No Time Like the Present’ 109 Obama, Barack 98, 121, 167, 168 ‘objective’ listener 138 ‘occupy’ in protests 177 Ok-sun, Lee 149 – 50, 184 – 5 Okubo, Miné 36 – 7 Oliver, Kelly 122, 123, 126, 135, 143 Oliver, Sophie 56, 57, 100 ontological vulnerability 12, 16, 17; embodying debodiment and documentary realism 16 – 24; spectralizing debodiment and figurative realism 24 – 34 Operation Nemesis 8, 76, 119n5 oral history comic 46 Orwell, George 131 Other Side, The 8, 17, 32 – 4 pain 10, 15, 16, 18, 30 Palestine 121, 123, 126, 130, 135 – 6, 141, 153, 154, 163, 171, 176 panel-as-place 181 – 3, 185, 187 panel-as-topos 181 panel-as-witness-space 124 paradigmatic genocide 101 pareidoliac reading 188 participatory documentary mode 18, 19, 22, 24 Partnoy, Alicia 172 percepticide 163, 164 perpetrators 35 – 7, 41 – 3, 46, 60, 74, 77 – 82, 97 – 100, 102 – 3, 132; anonymizing 39; disembodied 85 personalization 92 – 5 personalized violence 96 Pettitt, Joanne 1, 41 Photographer, The 108, 123 Phule, Jotiba 114 Phule, Savitribai 60 Pleece, Walter 8, 128

210 Index

post-memory 115 poverty and humiliation 65 – 8 precariousness 34, 35, 40 previvors 155 – 60 previvorship 155, 156 Pride of Baghdad (2006) 8, 119n1 protective custody 36 proximate spaces 123, 124; composite I (as) witness 125 – 9 Prum, Vannak Anan 8, 17, 39, 47, 77 psychotic realism 16 public confession, fantasy of 146 public protests 172 public self-fashioning 129 public space 174 racialized torture 64 racism 61, 72, 97, 98, 112, 113, 155, 168 raids 27, 159 rape 49, 56, 77, 145 – 6, 150, 184; genocidal 73, 74; mass 76; wartime 73, 74 rape-murder 83 – 4 recognition 57 refugee 8, 12, 18, 49, 119 relational autonomy 14 – 15 resilience 153, 156, 179; adaptative 165 – 8; and society of previvors 155 – 60 resilient communities 159 resilient subject, resistance of/by 165; adaptative resilience as resistance 165 – 8; assembly 169 – 78; counter-monuments and barricades 175 – 8; spaces of appearance/bodies in appearance 169 – 75 resilient subjectification 11, 160; epistemic regimes of 161 – 5 resistance 167 response-ability 135, 142; empathic listening 139 – 43; rhetorical listening and logic of accountability 135 – 9 responsibility, attribution of 97 – 106 rhetorical listening 135, 137, 142; and logic of accountability 135 – 9 Rime of the Modern Mariner, The (2012) 9 River of Stories 169 ruins and ruination 43 – 9 rumour-mongering 106 Rwandan genocides 31 Sacco, Joe 8, 22, 30, 43, 51 – 2, 65 – 7, 76, 92, 104 – 5, 121 – 3, 126, 130, 132, 133, 135 – 6, 141, 152 – 5, 157, 158, 163, 181 sacrificer 119n4 sacrifier 119n4 Safe Area Goražde 8, 34, 43, 76, 104, 105 – 06, 152, 155, 158 – 9, 187

Sajad, Malik 132, 159, 160, 165 Sattouf, Riad 8, 51, 62, 72 – 3, 88 – 9, 91 – 3, 107, 121, 124, 125, 131 Scarry, Elaine 17, 22, 55 Schaber, Peter 65 self-figuration of eyewitness 122 self-imposed silence 144 self-reflexivity 138 self-respect, defined 54 semi-hypnotic state 85 Sen, Orijit 110 – 11 sex-trafficking 84 sexual abuse 73 sexual violence 77, 81, 83, 86 Shyam, Venkat Raman Singh 9, 66, 68 silent protest 143 – 4 situational vulnerability 16, 34 – 43 Slaughter, Joseph 1, 6, 150 Smith, Sidonie 1, 124 snake-woman 61 sobriquet 60 socially configured exclusionary semiotics 58 social rejection 57, 63 spaces in witnessing 150 Speak 8, 74, 78 – 81, 144 – 9 speech 105 – 6; and listening 141 speech-acts 106 Spiegelman, Art 91, 108 Stage, Carsten 14 Staging Vulnerabilities I 134 Stassen, Jean-Philippe 8, 45, 81 – 4, 100 – 1 stereotyping 62 Stewart, Cameron 8, 17, 32, 50n6 Stoecker, Ralf 54, 55 Stoler, Ann Laura 16, 44 – 5 strip-cum-physiognomic feature 110 ‘substantial’ transformation 156 Such a Lovely Little War 8, 132 Sulaiman, Hamid 8, 103, 106, 131, 134 symbolic group humiliation 56 symbolic vulnerability 57 – 65, 77 Syria 13, 73, 95, 106 tableau vivant 43 – 4, 156 ‘The Taboo’ 109, 162 talking heads 106 teleology 42 testimonial comics image 122 testimonial encounter 121, 122, 127 testimonial transaction 134 testimony-as-knowledge 146 theatre of absence 174 – 5 therapeutic citizenship 9, 34, 35 This Side, That Side 8, 88, 94, 103, 108 – 11, 114, 118, 160, 161, 175

Index  211

Threadbare 84 Threads from the Refugee Crisis 27, 41, 118, 136 Torchin, Leshu 122, 123 torture 22, 55, 57, 60 traumatic memory 117 Truong, Marcelino 8, 132 trustworthiness 132, 146 Tutsis 31, 45, 83, 84, 101 – 2 Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks, The (URB) 8, 16, 19, 20, 22, 64, 67, 130, 131, 140 unequal social systems 66 uniformed perpetrators, anonymization of 40 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 9, 11, 53, 188 – 91 Vasseleu, Cathryn 126, 187 Vaughan, Brian 8, 119n1 Veld, Laurike in ’t 4, 102 verbal abuse and humiliations 17 Versaci, Rocco 30, 151n2 victim (in) memory 91; collective 95 – 7; personalization 92 – 5 victimhood 5, 11, 13, 36, 108, 165 victims 10, 13, 40 – 3, 49, 57, 78 – 9, 84, 104, 128, 163; of HR violations 164; of political violence 30; rape victim 76, 80, 184; of rights violations 3; torture victim 31; war victims 133, 181 victim-species 96 Vietnamese immigrants 17 Vietnam War 8, 132 violence: gendered 72 – 86; genocidal 96, 155; personalized 96; sexual 77, 81, 83, 86 visibilization 122 visual foils 66 visual witnessing 122

vulnerability 12, 51, 52, 54, 57; corporealontological 10, 16; defined 13; gendered violence and humiliation 72 – 86; hypervisible vulnerability 177; labour, dignity and rights 68 – 72; ontological 16 – 34; poverty and humiliation 65 – 8; ruins and ruination 43 – 9; situational 16, 34 – 43; symbolic 57 – 65, 77; and vulnerable subjects 13 – 16; wounded attachments 43, 46, 49 war 33 – 4, 39, 99, 105, 131 – 3, 139, 153, 155, 159 war junkie 135 war novels 8 wartime rape 73 war zone 47 Whitlock, Gillian 123, 134 witnessing 121, 122; amanuensistic witnessing 130 – 4; bearing witness 122, 129, 135, 142, 148; composite I (as) witness 125 – 9; corroborative witnessfunction 125; empathic listening 139 – 43; false witnessing 146; hearing/listening to witnesses 141; panel-as-witness-space 124; proximate spaces/witness spaces 124 – 9; rhetorical listening and logic of accountability 135 – 9; silence, protest, testimony 143 – 50; spaces in 150; visual 122; see also eyewitness witnessing ‘I’ in HR graphic novels 124 witness space 123 – 7, 130 ‘Women in Black’ movement 143 Woo, Benjamin 19, 130 wounded attachments 13, 15, 43, 46, 49 Young, James 175 – 6 Zahra’s Paradise 121, 133, 151n1, 163, 164, 171, 173, 176, 177 Zelizer, Barbie 37, 66