Graphic novels about Palestine reveal the exceptional everyday demands of exile

Nahrain Al-Mousawi

Friday, 10 April 2015


Baddawi (2015) is a coming-of-age graphic novel by Chicago-based artist Leila Abdelrazaq about a boy raised in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon; it's a poignant tale based on her father's early life. The eponymous Baddawi is the refugee camp where Ahmad was born after his parents' expulsion from Palestine in 1948. Just published with a promoted launch next week, it is one of a few graphic novels which attempt to capture the exceptional, uncertain, often surreal, quality of Palestinian lives in chaotic exile as the mundane, everyday tasks demand to be met.

Going to school, studying, using the library — activities that require a certain measure of certainty and are dependent upon rules, conventions and institutions — are shaken to the core in the story by questions about handling war, weaponry and national identities. While the certainty of childhood expectations contrasts with the uncertain conditions of war and exile, this contrast is not only jarring but poignant when represented through Abdelrazaq's simplistic style of illustration that emphasises the juvenilia, childhood memory and adolescence associated with the graphic-novel form.

The lineage of graphic novels depicting Palestine can be traced back to arguably the most well-known work, Joe Sacco's Palestine (1996), based on his two-month visit to the territory in 1991-1992. Like Abdelrazaq, Sacco's narrative focuses on the minutiae of the mundane in the occupied territories, revealing everyday tasks transformed into momentous struggles, humiliations and frustrations. Academic Ella Shohat has stated that "maps, borders, checkpoints and the Wall have now become signature icons of the Israeli/Arab conflict." While these borders appear to be stable, they are overrun by new Jewish settlements within the territories and by the state's mobile walls, enclosures and "flying checkpoints". Sacco captures the political strategies of spatial control through illustrating the material realities of the everyday; the home, a bus trip, a walk.

Most of the scenes in his book are conversations between Sacco and Palestinians; his dense, crammed, jumbled panels reveal that the spatial strategies of confinement and contingency are not distant concepts. When Sacco's avatar is not crossing checkpoints, he is observing events near a wall or fence. Almost every person he meets has been detained by Israeli forces or knows someone who has been in an Israeli jail. The homes that Sacco depicts stretch the definition of "shelter", as they are subject to attack, demolition and deterioration through the occupation and poverty. He visits his friend Sameh in the Jabalia refugee camp, where the homes, made of corrugated metal and makeshift doors and windows, have the appearance of the temporary, the contingent. At his friend's house, the roof leaks, and there's a lamp on the sofa, gaps in the structure of the building and exposed wiring. At the same time, Sacco shows attempts at domesticity, ranging from carpets, plants and paintings, revealing a paradoxical interior aesthetic that struggles between the temporary and permanent.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/17973-graphic-novels-about-palestine-reveal-the-exceptional-everyday-demands-of-exile