Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

Golnar Nabizadeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781472481566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317066095
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: 'How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?', 'How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?', and 'How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?'

The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.

1 Migrant memories in Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival by Shaun Tan

Introduction

Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) illustrate the challenges and promises of migration through diverse visual techniques. The texts were produced in vastly different contexts, indeed in different centuries, but are united in their exploration of the significance of migration in relation to language, the body, and affect, and collective and individual memories. Their respective creators experiment with visual and verbal modes of signification, two elements fundamental to the record and representation of memory. Both texts have received theatrical treatment; The Arrival has been adapted into stage performances by Tamasha/Circus Space (2013), Spare Parts Puppet Theatre (2012/17), Red Leap Theatre (2013) while TheatreWorks Silicon Valley created a musical called The Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga in 2017. The restaging of these texts illuminates the ways in which diverse aspects of migration, its lived experiences and legal, historical, and practical implications, can be enlivened anew and reinterpreted. The adaptations of Kiyama’s text signify the incorporation of the migrant narrative into dominant American culture. From a ‘Japanese experience’ to an ‘American musical manga’, the change in titles not only suggests a merging of what were ‘other’ experiences into broader imaginary of the United States, but also assumes familiarity with the term ‘manga’, which speaks of the popularity and transnational influence of manga in the United States and worldwide.

This chapter focusses not only on the representation of memories of migration, but the way in which memories of the past migrate through time, acquiring diverse inflections through their material re-construction. Through a discussion of their haptic and mechanical properties, the analysis elucidates how comics have provided a significant forum in which ideas about belonging, memory, and experientiality are tested, and through which visual testimony is borne. This is of particular importance given the prevalence of migration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the way that discourses on these movements frequently provoke anxieties about financial security and cultural identification at the level of community and the nation-state. Readers may be familiar with the way that some media outlets reify the status of migrants and refugees so that the particularities of their circumstances are lost within narratives that play on fears about difference. Against this ossification, comics help explore difference through narratives that frequently focus on the personal and the particular as a political mode of engagement. Indeed, the tensions that comics sustain between word and image act as a highly productive analogue to the strain, ambiguity, and misunderstandings that can permeate lived experiences of migration. These multiple narrative registers – verbal, visual, and spatial – can effectively mimic the disorientation, misunderstandings, and humour that emerge when confronting the unknown in processes such as migration.

Four Immigrants Manga

A relatively little-studied comic from 1931, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 by Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, demonstrates the power of comics to capture and convey the complexity of migrant memories. In February 1927, Kiyama exhibited his comics sketches at the Golden Gate Institute in San Francisco (Kinmon Gakuen – a Japanese language school) under the title Manga Hokubei Iminshi (“A Manga North American Immigrant History”). The exhibition proved popular, comprised of 52 episodes that Kiyama would go on to self-publish as “Manga Yonin Shosei” or “The Four Students Comic” in 1931. The comic was printed in Japan, and Kiyama brought a few copies back to San Francisco four years later. It was not until Frederik L. Schodt located a copy in a University of California library in 1980, translated the text, and eventually published it through Stone Bridge Press in 1999 as The Four Immigrants Manga, that the work became available to a wider readership in the West. Thanks to these efforts, readers now have access to what Schodt posits as potentially the first American graphic novel (“Was the first”).¹ While this status remains uncertain, The Four Immigrants Manga is an extraordinary text that operates as a proto-memoir to the later long-form graphic novels that would not gain dominance until around 40 years hence in the work of Justin Green (1960s) and Art Spiegelman (1970s) in the USA, and in the work of Japanese artist Keiji Nakazawa in the 1970s, among others. The work thus stands as a landmark exploration of transnational migrant memories through its visual and verbal record of issei (first generation Japanese immigrants to the United States and Canada) experiences in San Francisco.

Described as a ‘documentary’ comic book, The Four Immigrants Manga depicts the misadventures of four young issei in San Francisco, who adopt the names Henry, Fred, Frank, and Charlie, upon their arrival to the city in 1904. Through Kiyama’s pen, the episodes provide a unique vantage point on historical events such as the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (and a visit to the city by Dr Fusakichi ōmori, a famous seismologist, in the quake’s aftermath); the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition; the arrival of Japanese migrants from Hawaii; as well as socio-cultural phenomena such as the popularity of so-called ‘picture brides’, and the rise of the Asiatic Exclusion League, which advocated the segregation of all ‘Asian’ children in San Francisco schools. At the time of its publication in Japan, the Japanese consul general (1930–1933) Kaname Wakasugi’s introductory remarks to The Four Immigrants Manga are illuminating; “[o]ur lives as Japanese in America have a unique historical significance eminently worthy of study” (27). Indeed, the episodes powerfully convey the affective dimensions of these historical events, located in their broader socio-political contexts, embodied through the eyes, bodies, and language of the four protagonists as they interact with other characters, places, and spaces. The stories draw directly Kiyama’s experiences in San Francisco as he migrated to the United States in 1904. The character of Henry is closest to the author’s avatar, and like Kiyama, studies art at what was then the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art before it was rebuilt as the San Francisco Institute of Art in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Kiyama would go on to win several awards, particularly for life drawing, as well as a scholarship from the New York Art Students League (Schodt in Kiyama 1999, 10), before returning to settle permanently in Japan in 1924.

In its style and visual lexicon, The Four Immigrants Manga demonstrates an ongoing transnational connectivity between US and Japanese comics readerships and influences. From the 1920s, domestic weekly pictorial magazines in Japan such as Asahi Graph (1923–2000) began to serialise comics such as George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913–2000). A few decades later, strips such as Polly and Her Pals (1925–1927) by Cliff Sterrett, Fred Hopper’s Happy Hooligan (1900–1932), and cartoons such as Felix the Cat (1919) by Pat Sullivan were also popularly received in Japan. Frederik Schodt draws attention to observations by Japanese artists such as Ippei Okamoto (1886–1948), who were largely responsible for introducing American comics to the Japanese market. For example, Okamoto explained that “[t]he American people love to laugh”, and that “their laugh is an innocent one, that instantly dispels fatigue” (Koyama-Richard 2008, 43). Readers of The Four Immigrants Manga can perhaps identify a similar sentiment at play in the comedic style of Kiyama’s story, where he combines the pacing of American gag strips with Japanese word play and cultural memories. This particular affective circuitry is emphasised through the structure of the comic, in which the episodes, although of varying length, usually conclude with a visual or verbal gag. At times, characters fall out of bed while dreaming at the end of an episode, in a style reminiscent of McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904–1925) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1926). Kiyama deliberately engaged with and explored American comic strips, particularly the ‘Sunday funnies’, incorporating their visual and stylistic cues into his aesthetic style. The episodes in The Four Immigrants Manga privilege humour, even when exploring the difficult economic, social, and political circumstances in which the characters frequently find themselves – an impulse that Chapter 4 on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis explores further.

As an artist, Kiyama had a diverse and varied visual style, incorporating influences from comics and cinema into his work. For example, in one sequence from The Four Immigrants Manga, Henry follows a woman down the street, thinking that she is a Japanese woman he has been courting. When she eventually turns around, he is shocked that she is black. As Richard von Busack notes, this is a direct adaptation of the same scene portrayed in the Buster Keaton silent comedy, Seven Chances (1925).² Kiyama’s portrayal of African Americans in the comic deliberately mimics popular caricatures published in newspapers and magazines of the time, a strategy that provides a clue as to Kiyama’s interest in exploring the particularities of form and representation across different mediums. As Kom Kunyosying notes, there is a stark difference in this mode of representation compared with the approach that Kiyama adopted in his oil painting, which demonstrates a particular sensitivity in the portrait of an unnamed African-American man (2011, 52–53). The presentation of street scenes, character dress, and appearance are also notable for the way that they mimic the streetscapes and fashions in films such as Safety Last! (1923) and Speedy (1928), both featuring the silent film star Harold Lloyd. Kiyama’s incorporation of multiple cultural forms within the text demonstrates the ability of comics to reflect, parody, and contribute to the formation of cultural archives, leading to what Groensteen terms the “semantic enrichment” of comics (2007, 147). The multiplicity of form and content, and the ways in which they abrade one another in clear and surprising ways is, I contend, analogous to the operation of memory itself.

Kiyama could turn his hand to various artistic styles. Frederik Schodt comments that “[m]any of Kiyama’s works survive today and are occasionally exhibited in the Yonago City Art Museum in Tottori Prefecture”, adding that he has a “considerable reputation in the area of his birth, not as a cartoonist, but as an example of an early local artist who mastered Western art techniques” (jai2.com). In this respect, Kiyama is a transnational artist, whose multidirectional practice of borrowing elements from Western art styles can be located within a longer tradition of artistic exchanges between Japan and the West, exemplified in the work of Hokusai (1760–1849), whose woodcut prints (Ukiyo-e) helped generate the movement known as Japonisme after European trade resumed with Japan in the 1850s, and which in turn had a profound impact on the development of impressionism, the aesthetic movement, and Art Noveau (Tate Modern). In the twentieth century, Osamu Tezuka’s (1928–1989) manga and anime, respectively, demonstrate the ongoing influence of Disney [and particularly films such as Bambi (1942), which Tezuka adapted into comic book form in 1951], and whose artistic legacy has also had a significant impact in Western comics cultures.

One of the innovations of Kiyama’s comic is that it was written as a bilingual text – specifically in English and Meiji-era Japanese. Kiyama rendered the ‘foreign’ words and sounds in broken English to distinguish them from the lines of fluent Japanese dialogue. This technique allows Kiyama to literally draw attention to the heteroglossic environment in which the characters find themselves, creating a vivid sense of the cultural perturbations in early-twentieth century San Francisco. The wavy, attenuated line of Kiyama’s lettering indicates the four protagonists’ uncertain entry into a new and unfamiliar culture. The Western names they adopt following their arrival in the United States – Charlie, Frank, Henry, and Fred – are also hand-lettered, which produces, as a haptic graphology, the impression that the names are being sounded out in a similar way to the testing of their new environments. The record of these migrant memories is thus ‘materialised’, to use Art Spiegelman’s term, through the variety of lexical contours that distinguish the various domains in, and through which, the characters move. In Schodt’s translation, the Japanese spoken between the friends is rendered in typeset English, while their interactions with non-Japanese speakers retain Kiyama’s hand-lettered English transcriptions. In the original, Kiyama hand lettered speech in both English (in the protagonists’ dialogue with non-Japanese characters) and Japanese (as they speak among themselves). As Schodt notes, this reveals Kiyama’s poor business acumen; the original text would have found only a limited potential market because readers would have needed to be fluent in Japanese, and possess considerable knowledge of English. Schodt goes on to note that contemporary Japanese readers also find the original language version difficult to read because of the changes to the language over time.³ Nonetheless, this feature allowed Kiyama to incorporate not only the protagonists’ limited English in their spoken expression and comprehension, but to generate much of the text’s humour and impact through the gaps, silences, and misunderstandings generated through the interplay between word and image.

These features are evident in the book’s opening episode, “Arrival in San Francisco”, which commences with Henry, Fred, Frank, and Charlie’s arrival to the city, where Frank and Charlie are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Comics, memory, and the visual archive
• 1. Migrant memories in Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga and The Arrival by Shaun Tan
• 2. Racism and cultural afterlives: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang and Pat Grant’s Blue
• 3. Narrating trauma in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
• 4. Memories of illness in Epileptic by David B. and Stitches by David Small
• 5. Multimodal memories: The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Guibert et al. and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and David Polonsky
• 6. Comics online: Memories from the exclusion zone in “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” by Wallman et al. and “Villawood” by Safdar Ahmed
• Afterword
• Index