By Ibtisam Benez
Alarby
May 16th, 2017
The Palestinian artist and comics artist القصص المصوَّرةLeila Abdel Razzak does not sign up her work, but her fingerprint is evident in those works, despite their difference and the diversity of their style. Abdul Razzaq takes the art of comics to express the concerns it concerns, especially with regard to the Palestinian cause. The Chicago-born young woman, a Palestinian father and an American mother, focuses on the ridicule and symbolism affected by Naji al-Ali, to name a few, she says in an interview with The New Arab.
Her failure to sign her work, especially those she does as posters to support political or social campaigns, is the belief that she is a public property and wants people to use them in the way they see fit, mentioning the source, but giving more weight to the subject and not to the person who designed the work.
These actions, especially posters, come within the framework of certain campaigns such as the boycott campaign or the campaign in support of the strike of Palestinian prisoners, which was launched by youth groups in different countries and can be seen in bus stations in many cities such as London. The viewer of the poster notes that the main figure who is screaming against security coordination and in support of the prisoners’ strike is a strong young woman.
“My mother is a feminist and politically conscious woman, she is not a political activist, but I learned from her this awareness and undoubtedly it is reflected in my work,” she said. The young Palestinian artist lived until the age of 11 in Chicago, and then moved with her family to live in South Korea because her father got a job there. She returned to the United States to complete her undergraduate studies in theatrical art and Arabic studies at the University of Chicago to settle in Chicago.
With the start of the study, I began to draw intensively and went towards comics drawings, without that study having a direct relationship with her art, she did not study art or painting except through some workshops during the school.
Abdel Razzak has completed short storys she posted on her blog, “Beddawi Camp” for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, where her father was born and lived before moving to the United States. The blog evolved into a graphic novel of the same name and was published in 2015 in English.
| “It was necessary to talk about the Nakba and the displacement of my father’s people from their village” |
On the idea of turning stories into a novel, Abdul Razzaq tells Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed: “The publishing house approached me and presented the idea of turning those stories into a novel. Interestingly, the house has never published this kind of novel before and I have not published a novel. We started to collaborate and it was an exciting experience. I had to take those stories about my father’s life in the camp and the lives of others, and I tried to relate them to each other.”
Abdul Razzaq believes that it is necessary to see refugees as actors, not just as victims. “The refugees in the Palestinian camps, despite the harshness of their lives, live life in all its intersections and complexities of beauty and ugliness.
Part of the chapters, for example, revolved around a story that my father kept telling about his life in Baddawi camp as a child and playing for Al-Bannair, in which he found a way to cheat other children. Then I went to more complex and perhaps difficult stories and I did not want the novel to deal with the camp as if it came from nothing, so it was necessary to talk about the Nakba and the displacement of my father’s parents from their village of Safsaf, near Safed, and the massacre and rape that happened there to three women.
| “She keeps looking for ‘playing’ and artistic pleasure within her feistiness” |
Do not only document what she sees around her with her feather, but she takes a position and expresses ironically and painfully about things that some may prefer to be silent about. In one of her works, she talks about “tourism” visiting the apartheid wall, which was erected by the occupation authorities. “When you go to Palestine occupied in 1967, the occupation is evident in many pictures, including the wall, soldiers and settlements. But what is more painful, if you will, is going to the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948. This reminded me of this in the United States and the white colonizer erased any trace of the indigenous people. In Palestine, I was very sad when I saw the sea and remembered my grandmother, who could not see him again and return.
“I always look around, including my work to observe my development and what I do, as well as other artists,” she says. Experimenting and searching for new forms of expression and painting is their error. Abdel Razzaq says she does not accomplish “art for art” but that her artwork comes to express different concerns and issues through which she tries to use the best artistic means she deems appropriate to express that issue.
Abdel Zarraq has released other comic booklets on several issues, including the story of two Palestinians from Gaza who arrived after a long journey of torture to the United States through Mexico, but were held at the border in a detention center for more than a year
