Between memoir and haiku: architextual tension in the graphic novel Siberian Haiku

This article examines the Lithuanian graphic novel Sibiro haiku (Siberian Haiku) by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki, focusing on the architextual tension between memoir and haiku. While the work draws on conventions associated with ego-documentary narration, its title invokes the poetics of haiku, establishing a productive interplay between two distinct genre models. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of architextuality and Lars Elleström’s theory of multimediality and multimodality, the article analyses how this tension is articulated through the interaction of verbal and visual narrative forms: memoir supplies the testimonial continuity historical trauma demands, while haiku repeatedly breaks that continuity back down into isolated, affectively charged moments that resist formal poetic convention and instead emerge through the work’s multimedial and multimodal structure. In this way, the graphic novel enables the reader to engage with historical trauma not as distant past, but as both a documented historical fact and an affectively present, unresolved experience.