The incredible work that the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival (LICAF) are doing to bring the stories of those affected by events in Gaza needs far more acknowledgment. Their From Palestine initiative has already seen a number of comics and graphic narratives published (you can find many of them covered via our Palestine resource list here) but their latest offering, The House My Father Built, takes a different perspective by transporting us back to the events of the late 1940s.
Young Comics Laureate Mollie Ray (Giant) adapts the story of Sophie Shamieh Mukarker, now in her 90s, to the comics page in this comics memoir short. Set in Nakba in 1948 it revisits a point in time when thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes by Zionist groups and removed not just from their communities but from the only lives they had known.
Ray has just 17 pages to capture and portray these events and it’s to their credit that in such a limited window they manage to pace this story with such delicacy and empathy. The build-up of the first few pages is concerned with the everyday life Sophie originally had in that home built by her father. It’s all ominous foreshadowing of course; a happy life where she spent time in the bird enclosure her father constructed for her, attended the local school with Jewish best friend Judith, and a time when the family business was successful and thriving.
And then, suddenly and dramatically, all of that is brutally ripped away from the family.
Post-displacement, life is very different for the family as they are forced to rebuild and adapt. Ray’s red, black and sepia-tinged colour palette is highly atmospheric, acting as a tonal expression of the horror of events. Ray roots the story in both nightmarish realism and striking symbolism. The House My Father Built is once again a testament to the visual storytelling skills of an artist whose distinctive voice has an emotional depth to it that is quite remarkable in its potency and range.
While the sense of echoing injustice and loss is profound throughout these pages there’s also something lyrically haunting about The House My Father Built. Despite the the pain and horror it recounts there’s also a celebration of family and community that shines through all the darkness and oppression. Another crucially important piece of comics testimony to come to us via LICAF.
Mollie Ray (W/A) • LICAF, £5.00
Review by Andy Oliver
