To The World
In this sixteen-page comic zine, a Palestinian youth is determined to travel the world and share her culture. Rising against her dreams are the realities of genocide in Gaza. Surviving hardships and humiliations, she pens her small message and sends it on a kite to the world. A tale woven to clothe the unseen with dignity and freedom.
“The inspiration to write a comic started with my many experiences of displacement, as I left my house next to Al-Shifa Hospital and was then displaced from one place to another and from one tent to another. I thought of the art of comics as an international art to convey the images of our suffering to the whole world, and this is the least of daily suffering.” —Jehad Abu Dayya
“In the midst of the genocide and without any pretense, the charcoal that remains from burning wood to prepare food is the drawing tool that saved me from the whirlpools of drowning while waiting for a ceasefire.” —Esraa El-Banna
Letter to the Reader
In a world where we have become a burden on life, where death, in its most grotesque forms, has become our exclusive fate, and where hope holds endless funerals in our consciousness—farewells without shrouds—like a love story in which you are the ghost who crafts the impossible, yet remains unseen, for the world has yet to invent lenses capable of perceiving the marginalized.
It is as if sorrow once descended upon the world in fragments, but this year, it refused to fall except a single, crushing mass upon us. We were struck by what should have afflicted the whole world. You might think I am writing a story in a displacement tent after losing my home, members of my family, and my dream of becoming a doctor who defies the odds and challenges the world. But wait—you have not seen my neighbor in the tent, a man with amputated legs, who lost his only son after twenty years of struggle, along with his entire family and wife. He still listens to the radio, searching for news of a truce.
And I wonder: If a truce means returning life to zero, what would he want from it when he has already lost his zero? As if he always saw the question in my eyes, he would answer: “We have lost life—must we also lose the dignity of grieving it? A truce is the moment I remind myself that I am not a superhuman. Just one of these losses should be enough for me to mourn for the rest of my life. And yet, am I to be denied even that solace?”
Jehad Abu Dayya
Reviews
“This comic gives us outsiders a small, searing glimpse of life inside the occupation. There are four stark black-and-white panels that will stay with me for a long time, in which an Israeli soldier degrades the protagonist, Farah. Farah is courageous in the face of the soldier’s petty cruelty: she will go on writing, just as the author and illustrator have. May we all have this bravery in the face of genocide. This is an urgent appeal to the world to listen, and a wonderful example of the power of comics.” — Sarah Leavitt, cartoonist and educator, Canada
“Jehad Abu Dayya’s sharp writing and Esraa Al-Banna’s bracing illustration provide an urgent dispatch of grief and steadfastness from the worst horror imaginable. The work of these two artists is a gift -- one the world does not yet deserve, but I hope can one day earn.” —Michael DeForge, Author of Holy Lacrimony, Birds of Maine, Heaven No Hell, and others.
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