Isabelle Martin

Twenty-seven years after her family flees to America from Vietnam as refugees of the war, Thi Bui gives birth to her son, leading her to revisit her relationship to the war through the stories and memories of her parents. In an attempt to reconcile her identities as a daughter, a refugee, and a mother, Bui recounts her family’s history by creating a visual narrative, using a combination of her parents’ recollections, her own memory, and drawn reproductions of source family and war photographs. For Bui and her family, six Vietnamese refugees among thousands, photographs served not simply as proof of identity, but as proof of existence. By reproducing instead of including the photographs themselves, Bui establishes a conflict with this notion of existence, reflecting a sense of displacement as a Vietnamese refugee caught between two countries, as well as examining the unreliability of her own memories. Intersecting theories of comics studies, Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity, and Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s writings on photography, this paper analyzes the role of photography in relationships between personal memory and collective memory, family history and cultural history.