In Displacement, a fictionalized version of Kiku is spirited back on three different occasions to 1940s San Francisco, where she is rounded up by the US government and incarcerated, first at the converted Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, California, and then at Topaz in Delta, Utah. In Butler’s 1979 story, a Black woman is pulled out of her life in the 1970s and deposited on the antebellum plantation where her ancestors - enslaved people and enslavers both - lived more than a century earlier. In her graphic novel, Displacement (published in August 2020 by First Second), Hughes uses science fiction to express her search for answers about her grandmother’s time in Japanese American concentration camps during World War II, borrowing the plot of Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred. How does one make the past clearer, then? For cartoonist Kiku Hughes, the answer was time travel. It can feel like a loss rather than an inheritance, a fog blurring even the closest surroundings.

Family history, after all, is incomplete by nature: a mix of oral history, self-centered recollections, limited documentation, and silence. But even as trauma reaches into the present, the events that catalyzed it can be difficult to understand or even imagine. GENERATIONAL TRAUMA can shape our experience in ways both concrete - the loss of a mother tongue, the separation of a family, a tendency toward hoarding - and more obscure.

Kiku hughes