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Redrawing the Archive: Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi and the Reconstruction of Palestinian Visual History
Abstract
In Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (2008), Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi tell the story of the PLO film archives, which mysteriously disappeared sometime during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1989). The film archives serve as both a literal and symbolic representation of the communal loss of much of the Palestinian visual archive: films and photos that disappeared from family and institutional collections throughout wars, migrations, and forced exiles. This disappeared archive presents an interesting challenge for graphic novelists: how to draw a communal history whose visual representation is often fragmented and displaced. Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel Baddawi provides an intriguing rejoinder to this challenge by linking classic tropes of Palestinian literature with her father’s stories and iconography similar to contemporary Palestinian film in order to reconstruct a Palestinian diasporic narrative that intertwines with her own family history. To meet this challenge, Abdelrazaq draws on iconic images from film and comics about the Palestinian experience, such as Handala (Naji al-Ali), Footnotes in Gaza (Joe Sacco, 2010), West Beirut (Ziad Doueiri, 1998), and The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009). Abdelrazaq joins this iconography with representational comic elements (McCloud, 1994) as the graphic novel depicts periods of communal violence experienced in Palestine and Lebanon, with the artist herself noting that she did not have the experiences to more literally depict war. Finally, Abdelrazaq merges her father's stories with images drawn from the literary canon of Palestinian nostalgia, such as olive trees and a chessboard melding into a kefeya melding into the Lebanese civil war. Through this merging of visual, literary, and family tradition, Baddawi serves as an example of the continued presence of Palestinian resistance art, while also demonstrating how artists have built an alternative pattern of visual representations to remember diasporic communities and replace those visual representations of Palestinian lives that have been lost.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Identity/Representation