‘Palimpsest’, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
This post belongs to our series “Reading East Asia” so perhaps this new entry, which analyses a graphic novel published in Swedish (and read in Spanish), may not fit in with a strict definition of what to include under the label “East Asia”. But works such as Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s ‘Palimpsest’ open up our readings to include diasporic identifications and stories that conceptualise the idea of ‘home’ and belonging and lay bare the existence of porous borders.
Palimpsest, a graphic memoir, is the story about the author’s transnational adoption and her effort to find something, anything, about her Korean birth parents and her origins. Adopted as a young child by Swedish parents, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom starts her search to find answers to the constant questioning of her nationality, which she perceives as an interrogation, the policing of others. Not knowing, the racist attitudes she faces in Sweden, and her first futile efforts to obtain information from the adoption agency in Korea lead her to internalise an undesirability, to think that she should have not existed.
As an adult with her own family, Lisa feels the need to try and trace once again her genealogy, afraid of transmitting the silences with which she grew up onto her children, and suspicious about the possibility that hers, like many others, might have been an illegal adoption. And this is the greatest struggle around which Palimpsest is structured: the refusal of most institutions in Korea to provide her with information, their disorganisation and apparent lack of coordination, the slow revelation of details, the construction and reconstruction of the beginnings of a life. She fights against the idea of being just a number on a file, against the misinformation that states that she was, in fact, an orphan. She fights against the idea of having no past.
Lisa eventually travels to Korea, where she admits she is a foreigner but where she finally feels at home, and where she will meet her birth mother. Lisa wants to know her biological mother’s story and she takes particular care to show her in all her humanity. But there are still too many silences and far too much confusion: the Korean institutions do not fare well here and they are complicit in throwing Lisa, and we can only assume that others like her, down a rabbit hole of false hopes and multiple gaps that are not only the result of mere incompetence but also of falsification.
Palimpsest is the personal story of Lisa’s search of and reunion with her birth mother but it is also a criticism to the systematic and institutional difficulties and impossibilities that adoptees often face. This is a graphic novel about memory, about exploring what the protagonist feels as a traumatic effacement. But with palimpsests, one can always unearth the traces of previous writings. Palimpsest gives Wool-Rim Sjöblom the opportunity to write her self into her own history and move from the apparent superimposition of palimpsests to their dialogical nature and to the establishment of a palimpsestic memory, one which, as Max Silverman argues, is never linear and is created by the dynamic interaction of individuals and collectives.
Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s memoir ends with an explanation of the word “Han”, which she defines as the suffering one and one’s people feels after having suffered injustices and oppression for a long time. But this feeling also includes hope and acceptance. Palimpsest ends with the intertwining of the personal with the collective and the historical but above all it ends with a call to tell those stories that cannot be forgotten.
If you want to read about transnational adoption and Korea check Jessica Walton’s Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption: Embodiment and Emotion (Routledge, 2019). For an analysis of transnational adoption in literature, read John McLeod’s Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
