THE GRAPHIC NOVEL AS TESTIMONY. AN INTERVIEW
WITH BARBARA YELIN
AND CHARLOTTE SCHALLIÉ
What happens to histories of war, genocide and mass atrocities when historians no longer write about the survivors, but actively work with them? An interview with renowned comic artist Barbara Yelin and Professor Charlotte Schallié on working with survivors in public history, the complexity of human memory, and the power of the graphic novel to capture it.
Matthias Lukkes
“Do you take sugar?” Emmie Arbel asks Barbara Yelin while having coffee in Emmie’s living room in Tiv’On, Israel. “No thanks, just milk.” “Me neither”, Emmie responds, “but I always put the sugar box on the table. With its spoon. It is from her. I have nothing else that belongs to my mother. She used to move it, and now I move it. Just this spoon…nothing else.” As Emmie turns the spoon and lights a
cigarette, the scene at the coffee table shifts to one panel depicting Emmie as a child with her family out on the street being escorted by a man in Nazi uniform. Though the street is dimly lit, the yellow Star of David pinned on their clothes are clearly visible. One panel, then the scene cuts back to the present time where Emmie sits at the coffee table again.
With such segments as these, renowned graphic artist Barbara Yelin makes the impact of the past on the present clearly tangible. The intertwining of past and present forms a central theme in her latest graphic novel Emmie Arbel. The Color of Memory. The graphic novel revolves around the life of Emmie Arbel, who was born in The Hague in 1937 into a Jewish family and spent part of her childhood from November 1942 to April 1945 in several German transit and concentration camps in the Netherlands and Germany. Her experiences of the Holocaust as a child have been featured in the graphic novel But I live, published in 2022 as part of a previous interconnected research projecti. Unlike its predecessor, The Color of Memory narrates Arbel’s entire life, stressing how life of a child survivor continued after the Holocaust. Impressively, Yelin weaves together a wide range of themes, including
life in Israel, motherhood, sexual violence, and the continual impact of childhood memories on later life. As a result, the book is much more than the story of a survivor: it captures life in all its complexity.
The Color of Memory, now available in French and German and released in English next fall, is an outcome of a research project initiated by Germanist and historian Charlotte Schallié. I spoke with Yelin and Schallié during an online interview on a spring evening about this significant book.
Barbara Yelin: “I thought about how I could show the contemporaneous presence of memories, and how the experience of her memories break into Emmie’s everyday life. I experienced this while listening to her: we are together, and then suddenly there is a deep memory that comes in.”
How did you figure out how to translate this contemporaneous presence of memories into your drawings?
Barbara Yelin: “This is really something I thought about. How tight can I intertwine these layers of time? It was a challenge to do that, because I did not want to explain it by writing: ‘okay, now we go back to 1942’ - the reader needs to experience it.
“Part of achieving this was a technique where I had pieces of the panels of the comic like pieces of a puzzle. I would have pieces of her memory in the form of statements she made during conversations, or in the form of historical photographs and documents, and photographs from her now. Then, I would ask myself: how can I combine these pieces, this puzzle of memory?”
Were you piecing the puzzle together in dialogue with Emmie Arbel? Or was this something you did?
Barbara Yelin: “I did it, but Emmie had the opportunity to judge it, to correct it, and to respond to it. The entire process consisted of several layers of interaction: I would make a drawing, and then I would ask her: ‘might it have been like this?’, to which she could answer ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘I don’t know’, or even: ‘I
know it better than this.’ Then I would weave her answer into the drawing. Emmie was always accurate about the details of her memories, but also very generous to leaving the artistic decisions to me.“
The working method where survivors work closely with the artist is a central pillar of the project Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives, of which Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory is one outcome. The project, initiated at the University of Victoria in Canada by Professor Charlotte Schallié, brings artists and survivors together to produce visual narratives on histories of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust, the Yugoslav wars and war and state violence in Syria and Iraq.
What is the rationale behind the working method of this book, and the project as a whole?
Charlotte Schallié: “The project is not just pairing an artist with a survivor to ‘quickly do a story’. It is based on trust building that happens over years – four in the case of Barbara and Emmie. This process is deeply embedded in a commitment to work with the eyewitness over an extended period of time,
holding space for everything that may surface as part of thistrust-based relationship. Our collaborative research practice challenges us as historians to think more fully about our own responsibility when we elicit memories of suffering from others. The method of visualization as Barbara and Emmie used can
be a trauma-informed way to record individual memories, because it allows the survivor to tell what they want to tell when they are in conversation with the artist. A focus on reciprocity and mutual care puts agency back in the person telling the story, centering their voice.”
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