Displacement

Gorgeous and powerful

Kiku Hughes both illustrated and wrote Displacement, her debut graphic novel. The illustrations alone made the reading experience a breathtaking one. Hughes managed to blend fiction and her own personal family history into one story. The use of time travel to take the reader from present-day San Francisco to the 1940’s incarceration of Japanese Americans is so effective and powerful. Kiku Hughes successfully teaches readers about one of the darkest moments in American history while asking us to stand up against the injustices currently happening in this moment. Hughes has also mentioned one of the main inspirations for Displacement came from Octavia Butler's Kindred. Graphic Novels are such an ingenious format to immerse readers in history, as shown by John Lewis' March series and George Takei's They Called Us Enemy. Displacement successfully does the same.