As a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at the University of California, Davis, I have created my dissertation as a graphic memoir titled The Queen of Snails. I chose to draw and write my dissertation because the chimeric graphic narrative form is so effective for weaving together autobiographical narratives and metacognitive insights with transgenerational and collective memories in an accessible and engaging way. Each panel and page of this work is a meditation on my embodied experiences of growing up as a refugee from domestic violence…and of growing up as a girl.
My own story of being whisked across borders as a seven-year-old mirrors my mother’s narrative of violent displacement by the Russian Army when she was seven. In various ways, we were both subjected to the effects of militarized masculinity that exceeds war and contributes to familial and individual crises. This project can be read as a #MeToo investigation, an intersectional feminist examination of personal and familial memory, history, and gender-based violence. The title, Queen of Snails, refers to my childhood fascination with snails, and these tiny mollusks are one of several recurring biological and geological metaphors I employ in my project. Just as the snail’s shell is conjoined with its soft body, the cultural and historical “baggage” one carries is inextricable from one’s identity and physicality. I thus address trauma as a transgenerational and embodied phenomenon.
This work telegraphs that the most vulnerable members of family and nation are typically the last and the least likely to receive consideration and protection. To demonstrate this, I weave in various sorts of inherited injury—not only my own and my mother's and grandmother's, but also those of my African American classmates in Chicago and other people I meet along the way. The drawings and writing braid together insights based on my own coming-of-age story with macrocosmic events.
The Queen of Snails begins with my emigration from Germany to the United States as a child in the 1970s. I weave my own coming-of-age story together with my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences of the Second World War, their displacement from Silesia (then Germany, now Poland) by the Russian Army, and their eventual emigrations to the United States. In listening to their narratives, which I call “memory shrapnel,” as a child, I try to make sense of my grandmother’s admiration of Hitler and Nazi relatives, of my mother’s apparent amnesia about much of her childhood during and after the war, and of her born-again Christianity. I don’t only recount these stories, but also pay close attention to the gaps—the silences—inherent in my relatives’ accounts. Desiring to exemplify what German postwar author Christa Wolf terms “fantastic accuracy,” I employ both research and imagination to reconstruct these absent presences, resurrecting ghosts who are sometimes benign, sometimes not. The German word for ghosts or specters is Gespenster. Gespinste are webs or constructions spun from fine threads; this word is closely related to spanan, spannen, which originally meant to spirit—to coax or pull—someone away, as if by an invisible thread. The idea of being drawn by haunting threads of ancestral memory, by ghosts of the past—is central to my project, as is the idea of my own longing to weave a new identity as a homesick young immigrant.
Though I start with personal experiences and familial stories, I do rigorous research to situate those narratives in a historical and cultural context. My investigation further draws on the disciplines of memory studies, trauma theory, German literature, comics studies, and on the emerging field of graphic medicine. My work is in conversation with authors Nora Krug (Heimat/Belonging, 2018), Barbara Yelin (Irmina, 2016), Jennifer Teege (My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me, 2013), Birgit Weyhe (Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt, 2013), and other non-Jewish Germans of my generation (termed Kriegsenkel, or war grandchildren, in German literature). I am compelled to look critically at my relatives’ collusion with the National Socialists, but I also examine their suffering resulting from that regime, including rape, violent eviction, and refugeeism. The figure of my maternal grandmother embodies the complexities of women’s responses and adaptations to conflict, ranging from complicity to acts of defiance against fascism and the horrors of war. It is entirely possible to be a villain, a victim, and a bold resister simultaneously, and my portrayal of my relatives is accordingly complex and compassionate.
My work owes much to the strong tradition of women creating graphic narrative works that examine personal and familial stories and their linkages with broader social and political histories. In addition to the creators mentioned above, this influential genre includes the work of European Jewish women, such as Charlotte Salomon (Life? or Theatre? completed 1943), and of contemporaries such as Miriam Katin (We Are on Our Own, 2006), and Sarah Lightman (Book of Sarah, 2019). My work is unique in that it features metadiscourse about memory, trauma, and resilience, while engaging readers using graphic narrative techniques. I draw on biological, botanical, and geological imagery to create a work rich with metaphor and layers of meaning. Each page is inked, colored, and hand lettered.
