Seite - 167 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty 167 brainwash [her] vs. Birthright is actually pretty reasonable” (Glidden 2016: 27). To do so, the courtroom is peopled with Sarahs: not only is the judge one iteration of Sarah, but so are the witnesses and the members of the jury, each one representing a different view on whether Birth- right is giving a subtle historical account or trying to sway the participants’ minds. As Matt Reingold argues, “These mini-Sarahs act as both conscience and devil’s advocate; they judge, they accuse, they defend, and they enforce” (Reingold 2019: 531). This sudden plethora of Sar- ahs on the page works on two levels: firstly, it makes her confusion literal and tangible for the reader. She is torn, as she is not just of two minds but of several minds, and each of these minds is represented by a separate Sarah. But secondly, within the text, it is an attempt of hers to work through her confusion, and to solve it, as each Sarah is either making a different argument or listening and having to make up her own mind based on what she hears. This difference and variety in argument on the textual level, however, is contrasted with the striking sameness on the visual level — though the arguments vary, the look of the person saying them does not. All of them are Sarah. Writing about nonfiction comics, Sara Kersten argues that “[t]hrough mul- tiple modes, we read multiple truths” (Kersten 2017: 24) — the simultaneous multimodality of comics can present us with different truths at one and the same time. Something related hap- pens here — in presenting us with a diversity of opinion, Glidden is showing us that the truth, for Sarah, is not just multiple but absent; in its place, Sarah finds a variety of argumentative strands and perspectives. In reconstructing this autobiographical comics narrative some time after the trip, Glidden is once more navigating the uncertainty she was faced with on the trip itself. In travel writing, the author aims “to articulate him or her self through the writing process” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 7); here, this happens through Glidden’s “boxes of memory” (Smith 2011: 67). What we are seeing and reading is uncertainty felt in the moment and depicted at another. In autobi- ographical comics, both is true at once: we are witnessing the story as well as the act of the story’s narration. Though this is not so different from other literary forms — there is always the level of narration and of plot, the level of what is told and the level of the telling — it is particularly overt in comics, since we always see traces of the physical presence of the hand. As Hillary Chute writes, “Comics is largely a hand-drawn form that registers the subjective bodily mark on the page; its marks are an index of the body” (Chute 2011b: 112). While this is generally the case in comics, Glidden draws on this when she “returns us, and her protagonist, to bodily experience, and suggests that truths must be embodied” (Kahn 2016: 245). Through the embodiment of Sarah’s physical presence in Israel, the multiple depictions of Sarah, and the marks on the page, Glidden depicts how Sarah is moved to change her views while traveling: Moving from one truth, her clear-cut stance from early in the comic, to one where “truth” is continually destabilized. There is no one truth that the quarreling Sarahs will ever arrive at. Conclusion How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less “is for a large part a journey of exploring [Glidden’s] American-Jewish identity through the encounter with Israel” (Fischer 2015: 305). In it, Glidden makes use of the panel structure of the comic, along with the fluid-seeming watercolors, to make visible and render legible her undecided, ambivalent stance with regard to Israel. In “Facing the Arab ‘Other’?: Jerusalem in Jewish Women’s Comics,” Nina Fischer argues that Palestinian life