Perilous Night Sea Journeys: Graphic Tales of Migration

• In Event: Tropes and Tools of Telling Tales About Political Movement(s)

Abstract

Migration is one of the most disputed political issues in the developed world, not least since Europe’s so-called refugee crisis of 2015 or President Donald Trump’s promise to secure the U.S. border to Mexico. The voices and stories of individual (undocumented) migrants and refugees get lost in a cacophony of polemics and data that add to the visual dehumanization Bleiker et al. (2013) observed in the media. Storytelling, specifically telling individual stories, be it in documentaries or written portrayals, helps shift attention away from discussions that tend to focus on the financial to a debate on the human cost of migration. Stories can thus bridge the emotional as well as the experiential distance between migrants and citizens in receiving countries. In other words, stories may, as Nussbaum (1995) suggests, lead to empathy and, ultimately, to political changes.

In this context, graphic novels may be particularly impactful. In the wake of the 2015 crisis, several graphic novelists and comic artists turned their attention to what was happening on the Mediterranean Sea and in their home countries (Singer 2020). While migrants have been the subject of graphic novels before, with artists like Marjane Satrapi or Art Spiegelman being migrants themselves, recent publications focus less on the integration and lingering presence of past traumata, but rather on the perilous journeys and the effect of migration policies on individuals.

This paper focuses on two graphic novels to show that chronicle the stories of unaccompanied minors: Illegal (2017) by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin as well as Zenobia (2016/2018) by Morten Dürr and Lars Horneman. By taking us across the Mediterranean Sea, these graphic novels – thus the argument of the paper – not only follow their protagonists’ particular type of initiation journey, they also initiate their readers to the realities of European migration policy. C.G. Jung called his own process of introspection a Nachtmeerfahrt, a night sea journey. These graphic novels depict such night sea journeys in the literal and Jungian sense, affecting the readers in the same way. While political processes and decisions are not explicitly referenced in the graphic novels, the readers feel addressed in their duties as citizens.

Author

• Claudia Franziska Bruehwiler Haeusermann, University of St. Gallen