Presenting Absence: Migration and Dislocation in Lene Ask's Dear Rikard (2014)

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article analyzes Lene Ask's historical graphic novel Kjære Rikard (Dear Rikard, 2014), the text of which is taken entirely from an epistolary exchange between a Norwegian missionary living in Madagascar and his young son, Rikard, whom he has left behind in Norway at a boarding school. The narrative transports readers to the late nineteenth century, clearly foregrounding its reliance on its archival source texts. However, this apparently intimate connection between Dear Rikard and its documentary sources is unsettled by the images Ask combines with the text. Ask's drawings reveal the elisions, ambiguities, and omissions of the letters themselves. In Dear Rikard, Ask develops a visual poetics in which images always exceed and enliven the written word, making visible the experiences of separation, loss, and displacement that are conspicuously absent in the historical documents. Ask's drawings present us in particular with two conspicuous absences in the historical documents: first, the many far-flung locations and experiences of displacement implicit in global migration; and second, the vital bodies of the historical letter-writers—bodies that were marked by the loss, longing, and violence that accompanies parental separations.