It hardly needs saying that it is an important time to be promoting work that brings the lived experiences of the marginalised, the displaced and the persecuted to the comics page. Scholastic’s The Power of Welcome: Real-Life Refugee and Migrant Journeys is one such book. It describes itself as a “graphic novel” but strictly speaking it’s a graphic memoir – or a collection of graphic memoirs – with one artist bringing the stories of five subjects to readers.
Said illustrator is Ada Jusic (who also writes her own testimony) who brings to life the accounts of RAMZEE/Ramsey Hussan (who will already be familiar to BF readers through some of our recent coverage of his work), Marie Bamyani, Sonya Zhurenko and Nadine Kaadan. The Power of Welcome is aimed very much at a younger audience with each chapter being preceded by a short illustrated text introduction into the history and circumstances of the region involved before it moves into the comic strip story of its subject.
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Each account is told with sensitivity in regards to that target younger readership but without ever losing sight of the emotional truths of the experiences depicted. Ada Jusic remembers leaving Bosnia (bottom image), almost becoming collateral victims of the war there, and the particular ordeals that Muslim families faced. In RAMZEE’s 16-pager (below) he puts an emphasis on the displacement of his family when they left Somalia as refugees but with a neat narrative twist that reminds us of the power of imagination and grounds things very much in a child’s eye perspective. Structurally it’s also the most ambitious instalment in The Power of Welcome.
Marie Bamyani’s entry is the most self-reflective in the book, giving us a thoughtful meditation on the concepts of refugees and immigrants as she looks back on her life before and after leaving Afghanistan. Sonya Zhurenko speaks with a quiet eloquence about leaving behind everything you knew in her short on Ukraine while Nadine Kaadan provides us with perhaps the most poignant of all these desperately affecting stories, centring on escaping the turmoil in Syria.
Jusic’s art delicately centres her subjects first and foremost. This is not a book for visual experimentation or over-elaborate layouts. Rather the importance here is in clarity and accessible artwork that communicates its message to that school-level audience with respect and nuance. These are powerful tales which will open up many more questions that parents and children can then discuss further. It’s an important time to be having those conversations.
Ada Jusic, Marie Bamyani, Nadine Kaadan, RAMZEE, Sonya Zhurenko (W), Ada Jusic (A) • Scholastic, £10.99
Review by Andy Oliver
