The Power of Story: Historical Graphic Memoirs to Educate and Enlighten

Belonging has a unique and engrossing format, almost more like an annotated and illustrated scrapbook than the fairly common comic format of many graphic memoirs. Krug’s memoir is about her process of coming to terms with her family’s involvement in the Holocaust. She was born in the late 1970s, and her parents weren’t born until after WWII ended, but the memoir is about the work she does to figure out exactly what roles her parents’ siblings and parents played in Germany during this horrific period of history. Krug’s illustrations are accompanied by archival ephemera that pack a powerful punch.

As if the subtitle “A Memoir in Conversations” wasn’t enticing enough, the fact that said conversations are between author/illustrator Mira Jacob and her 6-year-old son adds another layer. Because, well, in a book about race and ethnicity (among other things) in the contemporary moment, you just know the presence of a child is gonna infuse some humor into the hard conversations. I love that this book supplements these conversations with Jacob’s own experiences as the child of immigrants, delivering a dual U.S. history that connects late-20th-century racism and the sociopolitical turmoil leading up to the 2016 presidential elections. This historical graphic memoir provides a powerful framework for thinking about race and sexuality in a moment during which it’s critical we do so.

Bui’s graphic memoir is about her family’s experiences as Vietnamese refugees in the wake of the U.S. war in Vietnam…but that history is nestled within the frame narrative of the author’s transition into motherhood. The red-tinged illustrations and straightforward text are incredibly evocative. This is another historical graphic memoir that takes on the author’s family history — and larger international colonial histories. The catalyst for this deep dive into Bui’s family history is her newborn son, and his presence adds to the importance of the intergenerational history at the heart of this memoir.

Wake contains more fictional elements than the rest of the books on this list, combining graphic memoir with imagined details Hall is unable to locate through archival research. Nevertheless, it’s Hall’s memoir about her attempts to grapple with the ongoing impact of histories of enslavement for Black women in the U.S. Hall, whose grandparents were enslaved, hones in on the often untold histories of revolts led by enslaved women as a means of excavating their legacies of resistance and strength.

Julia Alekseyeva’s book is a sort of intergenerational memoir. Her great-grandmother Lola secretly wrote a memoir of her experiences living in the USSR from its inception to her family’s immigration in the 1980s. After her death, Alekseyeva’s family discovered her handwritten memoir and discovered many previously unknown bits of family history. Soviet Daughter is Lola’s memoir, a work of historical memoir about the USSR, and a graphic memoir featuring Alekseyeva’s striking monochromatic illustrations.

Originally published in 1946, Citizen 13660 is artist and author Miné Okubo’s memoir of her experiences in the U.S. Japanese incarceration camps. Born in California, Okubo and her family were among the more than 100,000 incarcerated in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The graphic memoir’s republication (sans the editorial censorship done to the original publication) features Okubo’s deceptively simple illustrations alongside her straightforward text. This graphic memoir is an important work of literature and art.

The three-book March series follows civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis’s experiences as a civil rights leader. Threaded throughout the trilogy is a storyline that links the history of the civil rights movement with the events immediately leading up to Barack Obama’s first term as president. Book 1 lays the foundations, covering Lewis’s childhood and coming of age into adulthood. Book 2 builds from there, focusing on Lewis’s activism with the Freedom Riders and involvement in such famous events as the 1963 March on Washington. Book 3 covers the next two years, examining the challenges the civil rights movement faced — both internally and externally — and depicting historical events such as Bloody Sunday. It’s a powerful trilogy that gives readers a lot to think about both through its portrayal of historical events, but also the resonance it locates between past and present.