The Postcolonial Graphic Novel and Trauma: From Maus to Malta

• Published in: Postcolonial Traumas pp. 83 - 96
• Main Author: Knowles, Sam
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: London Palgrave Macmillan UK 2015
• Subjects: Chain Link Fence; Comic Strip; Graphic Narrative; Jewish Parent; Subaltern Study
• ISBN: 1137526424; 9781137526427
• DOI: 10.1057/9781137526434_6

With this dramatic epigraph, Art Spiegelman begins My Father Bleeds History (1986), the first single-volume publication of the graphic novel Maus (serialised from 1980–91) that tells the story of the author’s life through the lens of the experiences of his Jewish parents in Poland in the Second World War. I quote this line in particular because it raises a central tenet of Nazi policy, the purported racial hierarchy that justified ‘The Final Solution’, and this is a fallacy that Spiegelman explores through the graphic aspect of his work: the Jewish people — Spiegelman’s parents included — are portrayed as mice, Germans are pictured as cats, and non-Jewish Poles are pigs, among other bestial representations of racial difference. I do not wish to focus extensively on the question of race in Maus, Spiegelman’s use of animal imagery, or the racial typing inherent in far-right European ideology of the early twentieth century; apart from the fact that these subjects lie beyond the bounds of this chapter, they are covered thoroughly by extensive criticism of Maus in the decade following its publication.2 Spiegelman’s foregrounding of the issue of race, through the graphical forms populating his work, though, shows how useful graphic novel literature can be in exploring relationships between those of different races.