Healing and Perpetuating the Holocaust

Some time ago, I read an essay on the novel Beloved that explained how important was the "orality" in the novel. Beloved is dedicated by the author, Toni Morrison, to those voiceless African-American

people whose history was written and imposed by white Americans; therefore, Morrison gives voice to these voiceless people through orality, through the sounds present in her novel, giving it a characteristic of the oral African tradition, and at the same time the written characteristic of the novel assures the fact that the orality of it will not be gone with the wind, but it will perpetuate in time, having a concrete document of the own history of African Americas. Bärbel Höttges, the author of the essay that I mentioned before, which is called "Written Sounds and Spoken Letters: Orality and Literacy in Toni Morrison's Beloved", proposes that the orality, the sound, has the property of healing as it washes away all the pain expressed by words and sounds. All things considered, according to the author of the essay, what makes great Beloved is its capacity of finding a relief to the pain of African Americans when they were slaves through the orality which is mixed with the written form, perpetuating the history of Black people, not allowing anyone to forget what they felt.

Now, to relate the previous with "Maus: A Survivor's Tale", I would like you to watch at this two complete and interesting interviews of the life of Art Spiegelman before, during, and after Maus.

While reading Maus and when watching the interviews, I couldn't stop thinking on the aforementioned essay because of Art's words regarding him using the novel as a way to deal with memories about the consequences of the holocaust in his private life. In the interviews we can hear Art talking about his prompts to write the comic --as he calls it. The experience of the author's parents during the holocaust marked not only their lives, but also Art's life, having to live with their suffering as well as --Do you remember we talked about this during class?-- him struggling with his identity and the pain suffered when his father burned his mother's diary. Additionally, in some point of the interviews, he talks about the topic of the novel as one that was needed to be talked about in a time when there weren't the best Oscar-nominated movies of the holocaust.  

So, connecting the analysis of the essay on Beloved with "Maus: A Survivor's Tale", I would dare to say that the same principles are applied in Art's comic. Orality is present in Maus through the use of dialogues, and we can have access to it as it is a written "graphic novel". Therefore, the use of dialogues, the orality present on it gives Maus the power of healing the pain and misery suffered by Jewish people during the Nazi regime. Taking into account Art's word about him writing it as a way to deal with the experience, the dialogues are an orality that not only aims to heal Jewish people's pain, but also his own pain regarding the situation. Then, taking into account his words again, when he claims that it was a topic that needed to be talked in a time that almost nobody did, the written characteristic of the novel gives it the possibility to older generations to don't forget, as well as it gives younger generations the possibility of having a concrete piece of information that through its orality will --hopefully-- re-live and be empathetic with what other human beings suffered without having deserving it.

So, I hope that my point was clear to you and any comment in favour or against is more than welcomed.