Dwelling in grief: the traumarchitecture of But I Live (2022)

Edited by Charlotte Schallié, But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (Citation2022) performs an innovative experiment in collaborative authorship. Pairing three witness testimonies with three graphic artists’ interpretations of them, it compels the reader to focus on the role of the creative imagination in every act of remembrance, while acknowledging the urgent need to take collective responsibility for historical trauma. This essay examines how the authorial/editorial team bends and stretches the conventions of the graphic novel and the materiality of the comics page to evoke the silences and stutters that accompany such testimonies. It reads the visual strategies deployed by the artists/illustrators (such as the presence or absence of demarcated panels and their overall arrangement, choice of colour palette, and the stylistic aesthetics referenced) as architectural elements that draw the blueprint of what we propose to call the ‘traumarchitecture’ of the narrative. Invoking conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and Thierry Groensteen’s formulation of spatio topia, this essay argues that studying the traumarchitecture of But I Live leads us to a deeper understanding of what it may mean to make art after Auschwitz.