While all the comics work we have recently covered on the genocide in Gaza has been deeply affecting, today’s addition to our Broken Frontier Palestine Resource List is particularly heartrending. That’s because Palestinian cartoonist Safaa Odah’s Safaa and the Tent fosters such an intimate and personal connection between reader and page. We first covered the project with a preview here at Broken Frontier last week when I said that it was a collection that had brought me to the point of tears on a number of occasions. Published by the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (in collaboration with cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh) this is undoubtedly one of the most important books of a year where, given the state of the world around us, personal testimony in comics is surely destined to dominate all end-of-2025 round-ups.
When someone of the calibre of Joe Sacco (Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza) describes work as “some of the most powerful and poignant images to come out of Gaza that are not photos” you would do well to listen. Safaa and the Tent is a collection of material from Palestinian cartoonist Safaa Odah depicting her experiences of life in Gaza between October 2023 and December 2024 in short comics and cartoons. With her house destroyed the canvas of her tent has on occasion acted as… well… a canvas when nothing else was available to draw on and her work has been posted to Instagram throughout the war on Gaza.
Where do we even begin with commentary on practice this vital, this important? Through its sheer humanity, raw honesty and unflinching courage Safaa and the Tent is a quietly damning indictment on an atrocity that much of the Western world has refused to condemn, and has frequently even been complicit in. Odah runs us through a gamut of emotions in these pages. Moments of terror, of despair, of weariness, of occasional hope… communicated via visual metaphor, single illustration, sequential art, social commentary, satire and acute observation. An early piece with children being shielded as explosions rain down outside (above) brings home the message even that the most temporary respite from the horror of the attacks has become something to grasp and embrace. It’s a three-panel comic that sets the scene for what is to come in a world where brutality and fear are almost normalised.
One cartoon from January 2024 portrays the displaced Odah having to sleep clothed with a suitcase beside her (above). Underneath are the words “this has been my constant state since the beginning of the war”, inviting us to put ourselves in her place, to imagine how we could possibly cope with a life of such unpredictability and rootlessness. It’s simply heartbreaking. Some entries in these pages are accompanied with near poetic additional commentary, while occasional breaks to the cartoons provide us with insights into Odah’s mental state as her words are placed poignantly in white text on black backgrounds. These inserts ask us to step back from the page for a moment and reflect on the magnitude of the ordeal she and so many others have endured for over a year.
Missiles become anthropomorphised entities taunting their victims, and the quest in this environment becomes one for simple survival. “We lost track of who is grieving who…” says the caption under one drawing (above) while a life away from the war becomes a storybook illustration in the very next illustration (below); a juxtaposition that has an emotional immediacy that is impossible to ignore.
The impact on children who will never return to any semblance of innocence is a frequent theme. A child in clothes that barely fit because they have grown up in a world where no new clothes have been available in months is a smaller observation that nonetheless speaks eloquent volumes. This one-page comic strip (below) with its borderline meta imagery stands out as one of the finest examples in Safaa and the Tent of Odah’s ability to play with the language of the form to make succinctly articulate points about the desperate ramifications for the youngest victims of the bloodshed.
Proceeds from Safaa and the Tent will be going to the cartoonist which aside from the import of the first hand testimony herein is another excellent reason to pick up this book. As I have said in regards to other recent comics work on Palestine this is often incredibly difficult material to read and that is why it is absolutely essential that we do. And also why we need to appreciate the courage of creators like Safaa Odah who continue to document such a vital social record of this shameful point in world history.
Safaa Odah (W/A), Nada Hodali (T) • Lakes International Comic Art Festival, £12.00
Review by Andy Oliver
