The danger of turning trauma into fiction

Feed the ghosts (Reservoir Books) is one of the great publishing bets of the first months of the year. Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Non-Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, this "graphic memoir" - according to the original subtitle, changed in a disconcerting way by "autobiography in vinyetes" in the Spanish edition - is very ambitious: the North American of Chinese origin Tessa Hulls (Califòrnia, 1984) does not He had only faced a work as long as this one. It is a graphic novel of nearly four hundred dense pages – and a painstaking translation by Juan Naranjo – the result of almost a decade of intense research by Hulls, which traces the family history of three generations of women: her grandmother, Sun Yi, who had to flee China when Mao Tse-Tung came to power; Rose, her mother, affected by her mixed-race status and marked by her parent's mental illness; and Tessa Hulls herself, on whom the accumulated trauma somehow falls, the ghosts that give the work its title and that have accompanied her throughout her life.

What explains Feed the ghosts It is of undeniable interest, and the work intersects cultural, gender, and ethnic issues with obvious relevance. But the work suffers from a pacing problem, and the story bogs down at many moments when Hulls doesn't seem to know how to break the cycle, and where she repeatedly goes over feelings and conflicts that she reiterates in a way that harms her. A dense book like this can't afford to become as dense as it is in some passages, something that is reflected in the artwork: Hulls works with masses of black that provoke a claustrophobic feeling that doesn't help digest the large blocks of text.

It is certainly appreciated that there is a notable effort to visually develop the narrative, but it never manages to be original. Quite the opposite: the borrowings are often obvious. The visual metaphors bear the mark of theEpileptic. The rise of the great evil (Salamandra Graphic, 2019) by David B., another attempt at family healing through image and word, while the drawing with naive touches inevitably refers to Persepolis (Norma, 2000) by Marjane Satrapi. And if Karen Reyes, thealter ego by Emil Ferris in What I like most are monsters (Ventanas / Reservoir Books, 2018-2024), he took on the appearance of a noir detective, here Hulls resorts to the stereotype of the cowboy.

It's in the final chapters that we understand that the book has two driving forces: one is guilt, and the other is the author's search for identity. Because, like virtually any attempt to reconstruct family memory, this comic is, above all, about Tessa Hulls. Which, of course, isn't a bad thing in itself, but in this case it creates a disconnect between Sun Yi's life and the Chinese history lesson in the first chapters and the psychoanalysis session in the last ones that seeks to delve deeper into the mother-daughter relationship. The feeling that the pieces are being forced too far to fit into a narrative is inevitable. And that's the key: Tessa Hulls, from her need to be understood, perhaps forgiven, only understands things by turning them into a story with chapters, character arcs, and a conveniently reconciling ending. But that, of course, is still a form of fiction—of lies?—in which she artificially endows coherence with what usually lacks: life.