An Ocean of Silence: Vulnerability in Comics About Migration

This chapter examines the silence of oceans and photographs in three graphic narratives about migration, The Best We Could Do, Vietnamerica, and The Arrival, to delineate how these visual silences attest to the lived experiences, emotions, and feelings that unite immigrants and their families. Approaching silence as a narrative strategy that at once announces and withholds that which it speaks, it traces how the silent spaces of photographs and oceans motivate a shared vulnerability that can lead to reflection and understanding on the part of characters and readers. By denoting multilayered and complex histories of displacement and exclusion, borders and boundaries, belonging and unbelonging, silence opens up possibilities for affective sensibility that can activate a productive re-envisioning of private and shared lived experiences of migration through vulnerability.