Memory, Identity and Resistance: Decolonizing the Palestinian Narrative in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi
Keywords:
Postcolonial literature, graphic narratives, Palestinian literature, resistance literature, memory and identityAbstract
The Palestinian testimony has been dominated by colonial dislocation, political mute and the quest for national and cultural being. In this space, memory operates not just as remembrance but also as resistance to historical oblivion. However, Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015) presents a deep visual memoir that blends personal memory with collective Palestinian history. In this article I analyze the way in which Abdelrazaq recaptures broken histories of exile, statelessness, and resistance in graphic narrative. Building on postcolonial and visual culture theories, the research investigates how memory and identity function as forms of resistance to historical effacement. The visual-textual interplay in Baddawi not only registers displacement and dispossession but also reinscribes agency into the voice of Palestinian others. By turning art into a mode of testimonial politics, Abdelrazaq also rewrites history from the bottom up, opposing hegemonic histories that exclude subaltern experiences. Baddawi therefore operates as a personal archive and an act of mnemonic communion, where artistic representation serves to decolonize our kinship while incubating cultural persistence.
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