Countering confinement and using comics to make life ‘breathable’

This paper examines a creative, non-fictional comic, Mohammad Saba’aneh’s (2021) ‘Power born of dreams: My story is Palestine’, depicting the experiences of Palestinians across various sites of confinement where movement is restricted by virtue of ethnicity. With this it combines reflections on Mbembe’s work on confinement in ‘The universal right to breathe’ to explore how ‘breathable’ lives may be facilitated in the face of the unequal exposure to risk of death that was brought into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shapes the context in which these works have come about. Methodologically, this essay shifts the focus from singular normative centres such as science and the West to draw upon Africa’s authority in using the arts to create knowledge of isolation’s counterpart – ‘planetary entanglement’. It finds that a radical re-evaluation and reimagination of the necessity of communion of both human and non-human life is required in order to enrich understandings of confinement and exclusion.

Key words: Planetary entanglement, Achille Mbembe, ‘Power born of dreams: My story is Palestine’, ‘The right to breathe’, aesthetics, comics

Introduction

This paper primarily reflects upon a comic about confinement, published in the English-speaking world in 2021, when parts of the globe were also emerging from lockdowns brought about by governments’ attempts to manage the physical health risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The comic is by Mohammad Saba’aneh, written about both his experience as a political prisoner in a cell in Naqab prison in Ramallah in 2014 and his continued confinement as a Palestinian living in the occupied Palestinian Territory of the West Bank, where his daily movements remain physically and administratively restricted by the State. Analysis of this text is combined with Achille Mbembe’s musings on entanglement (translated by Carolyn Shread), illuminating the way confinement prompts the confrontation of existential dread, and his exploration of the use of the metaphor of breath to combine abstraction and embodiment (Mbembe and Shread 2021). Maurice Biriotti (2022: 1) extends this idea of a shared fear of death during the COVID-19 pandemic to include a baffling sense of collective strangeness in isolation, somehow interspersed with stirrings of national identity:

Across the world, as never before in our lifetimes, we would come to feel bound by a bewildering and terrifying common experience. Simultaneously, an opposing force pulled us in the other direction – as lockdowns were announced country by country, we all began to feel in a very tangible sense disconnected from one another... For many people, this was a contradiction of enormous intensity; we were bound by a common humanity and yet utterly cut off from others.

To continue expanding the related meanings of confinement, isolation, interdependence and boundaries, a brief excerpt of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s poetry (studied by Mbembe and written when Senghor was interned in the notorious German prisoner of war camp, Camp Charvein in French Guiana) is also considered. In so doing, the usefulness of shifting the focus from confinement to ‘planetary entanglement’ and Africa’s authority in using the arts to create an especially sophisticated understanding of the community of all life forms becomes evident. This reconfiguration is employed to study possibilities for resisting ‘unbreathable’ lives and the unequal exposure to risk that isolation implies.

Furthermore, Giorgio Agamben’s aligned ideas on confinement proclaim the fruitfulness of using art to think through isolation and reveal that visual forms augment the range of experiences that may be represented in such situations (Agamben and De la Durantaye 2012). Thus, the unique formal qualities of comics – such as the way they confine content to frames – may be leveraged to show how Saba’aneh’s text invites readers/viewers to imagine the materiality of experiences of isolation beyond their own. Combined, not only do these sources show up the way in which normative perspectives and minorities are perpetually reproduced in the face of the unequal exposure to risks that recognised patterns of confinement and freedoms engender; but they also frame the contemporary challenge of confinement in a way that emphasises the need for radically reimagining community and renewing understandings of relational ontologies as part of making life ‘breathable’.

Confinement and community

Prior to the pandemic, Jefferson et al. (2019) indicate the usefulness of studying different sites of confinement (such as asylums, ghettos, townships, camps, leper colonies, refugee camps and prisons) in a single frame. They claim that those who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck or forcibly removed are all doing their utmost to cope and that there are thus interrelations in spaces and times of confinement, even while the subjective experience of confinement across different sites may be illuminated. Furthermore, they note that tactics of everyday life are engaged in all instances of confinement, to resist ‘ever-present forms of abjection, ...[and] death’ as ‘constitutive elements of these sites’ (Jefferson et al. 2019: 1).

Mbembe confronts the existential terror triggered by isolation across various sites of confinement beyond its purely material aspect. While he notes the pathogenic nature of the pandemic (marked by the decomposition of bodies) during the COVID-19 lockdowns, he also simultaneously insists upon the urgent need for a reimagination of community. This is because the pandemic not only reveals the vulnerability of individuals but also accentuates existing disparities in exposure to risk.¹ Furthermore, aligned to the way that Jefferson et al. (2019) treat the experience of confinement and resistance similarly across various sites, in ‘The universal right to breathe’ Mbembe (Mbembe and Shread 2021) argues that the pandemic is also a manifestation of a larger planetary impasse that life on earth is facing, a collective physical and metaphorical suffocation caused by the continual unequal exposure to risk and oppression, which can only be collectively confronted. He explains:

[b]efore this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation... premature cessation of breathing ...that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract ...that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in common, that which, by definition eludes all calculation. By which I mean the universal right to breathe (Mbembe and Shread 2021: 61).

In expanding her understanding of Mbembe’s notion, Marielle Macé (2023) describes our current era as noxious, explicitly linking physical suffocation (caused by pandemics or pollutants) to ‘smothering’ political conditions in which we participate, primarily structured by inequality:

The lack of air, the feeling of a stifling age, even the fear of overwhelming suffocation – such is our current ‘natural’ condition, the primary characteristic not only of our virtually toxic living environment, but also of our smothering, asphyxiating political condition wrought with violence and discrimination...[and]...the way we (rather poorly) create community... For there is a very inequitable distribution of the right to air or to breathe... (Macé 2023: 177).

Macé declares that this pervasive suffocation has permeated our current social and physical conditions and produced a more fractured sense of community through the acceptance of social distancing. She explains the normalised restrictive, choking conditions of our time as a ‘suffocating atmosphere [that] is becoming our customary environment, ecologically, politically, and socially’ and that their only remedy is to ‘affirm “a universal right to breathe” [...] the essential demand for justice [...] now crudely re-emerging in the current pandemic’s attack on the respiratory system’ (Macé 2023: 177, my emphasis). However, she pronounces that the right to breathe goes beyond the right for some to eke out an existence while others live well; it is:

not ‘merely’ the right to live, to breathe in unpolluted spaces, or to share clean air; it is also the right to a breathable life, a life worth caring for. It is the right to love life, life with and among one another: the right to fraternize in and through breath, the right to detoxify our relationships and breathe with others (Macé 2023: 178).

Most importantly, she contends that under conditions of deliberately structured inequity there are those who remain more exposed to risks – unsanitary housing, lack of access to healthcare, occupational diseases – than others. She advocates for holistic solutions which address how ‘the weakest of bodies have become the site where the tragedy of migration, social misery, and the intoxication of the world converge’ (ibid) to provide any lasting results to life on Earth.

The role of arts to create ‘breathable’ lives

Just as ‘breathability’ is necessarily both abstract and embodied, so ‘planetary entanglement’ is a complex agglomeration of ideas calling for a radical reimagination of community through the re-evaluation of the way human and non-human lives mutually sustain each other. Augmenting the notion of the interrelation of life forms are Mbembe’s assertions (2018, 2021) of Africa’s authority in using arts to develop ‘planetary entanglement’. The term overtly offers a counterpoint to the isolated and bordered worlds of national lockdowns (Mbembe 2021, 2018). Mbembe claims Africa’s exceptional authority in the arts (necessarily understood as a combination of interlocking material and abstract processes) has arisen from her long established, nuanced understanding of diversity and interconnectedness, which has constructed knowledge repositories from ‘planetary entanglements’ as opposed to beginning with isolationist ontologies. For all to benefit from this knowledge, he promotes embracing the ‘becoming African’ (Mbembe 2021: 12) of large parts of the world, challenging Enlightenment humanism’s notions of a single normative centre, producing fixed majorities and minorities. Mbembe’s perspective on the necessity of aesthetics for knowledge production is in contrast to a related view of Anthony Reed’s (2014: 364). Reed, an African- American scholar who writes from a minority perspective, cautions the centre against engaging with diversity and belonging simply in terms of representation and the ‘exclusion of black people from public life’ without paying attention to underlying Black solidarities as these may be traced in aesthetic form. In shifting the normative centre to Africa, Mbembe avers that ‘planetary entanglements’ built across assumed borders are not merely aspirational but a tangible reality available to the whole world.²

Mbembe’s (Mbembe and Shread 2021) attention to the physical and metaphorical uses of suffocation and breath in describing the impediments to community life is manifest in relation to his meditations on Senghor’s poetry. Senghor’s poetry draws from the dreamy, moody pulses of symbolism, inflecting this with clear references to the natural world. Mbembe’s meditations echo Négritude’s – of which Senghor was one of the founders – attention to cosmic rhythms. Furthermore, as part of its critique of Enlightenment humanism, Négritude advocates studying Black solidarities as a model for enriching notions of community and interconnection within and across borders. Négritude thus facilitates proposing ‘planetary entanglement’ as a solution to collective suffocation, instead of the continued study of confinement.

Mbembe’s thinking about breath is significantly influenced by Senghor’s short poem, ‘Shadow song’/ ‘Chants d’ombre’. This poem embodies Senghor’s experience of creative productivity during this confinement, displaying a rich range of entanglements with other thinkers. Senghor mentions his entanglement with fellow-poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Mbembe mentions the influence of various prominent Jewish Enlightenment thinkers on Senghor (Mbembe, cited in Gilroy 2020). Furthermore, Senghor’s substantial connection with his own memories of a free African sense of being are evident in this poem, all implicating the voices of others in his own construction. In ‘Chants d’ombre’ Senghor demonstrates profoundly unconfined thoughts as a means of making his life ‘breathable’ during his isolation, manifesting interconnections between the common vulnerabilities of others’ lives with his own. His poetic language provides additional layers of meaning to his reflections on breath, voice and natural, rhythmic changes in light, seasons and generations. An excerpt from ‘Chants d’ombre’, is included below (Senghor and Dixon 1991: 294).

L’aigle blanc des mers, l’aigle du Temps me ravit au-delá du continent.
Je me reveille je m’interroge, comme l’enfant...
Et je renais à la terre qui fut ma mère...
proclame l’irréparable doublement.
Tu fus africaine dans ma mémoire ancienne, comme moi comme les neiges de l’Atlas.
Mânes ô Mânes de mes Pères...
Écoute ma voix singulière qui te chante dans l’ombre... Je te chante ce chant d’ombre d’une voix nouvelle
Avec la vielle voix de la jeunesse des mondes.

African-American scholar, novelist and poet Melvin Dixon (1991: 27) translates this excerpt from the poem as follows:

The white eagle of the seas, the eagle of Time
Lifts me up beyond the continent.
I awaken and I wonder like a child...
And I am reborn to the earth that was my mother.
...Doubly proclaiming the irreparable. In my ancient memory You were African like me, like the Atlas Mountain snows. Spirits, Oh Spirits of my Fathers
...Listen to my singular voice praising you in the shadow, ...I sing to you this shadow song in a new voice,
The ancient voice of all the world’s youth.

In his poetry more generally, Senghor traces the particularity of rhythm not only to external elements such as tides and shadows, but also the pulsing internal rhythms of heartbeats and breathing, drawing attention to the significance of the rhythms of breath and the natural world in forming his imagination. One aspect Mbembe draws from Senghor’s poetry, from the passage above, is the way that shared rhythms of breath – even as these are irreversible – signal life.

Just as Mbembe’s work counters confinement with ‘entanglement’, so Senghor’s emphasis on rhythms counters a stuckness that Jefferson et al. (2019) identify as a distinctive feature of isolation. Jefferson et al. (2019) claim that stuckness during confinement is animated by temporality, where death acts as the ultimate temporal boundary. Yet they differentiate stuckness from passive resignation and mention that while stuckness is:

an existential fear that the immobility of the present will perpetuate itself eternally into the future it also captures the need to act to deal with the sense of desperate stuckness in space and in time (Jefferson et al. 2019: 4, my emphasis).

Furthermore, referencing five African countries, northern Australia, and Palestine, they explain how ‘structures of stuckness, confinement and forced mobility impact on the [very] possibilities of “making life” breathable’ (Jefferson et al. 2019: 2). Thus, being stuck in isolation and with the spectre of death that this implies may be an affective impetus to continuing the rhythms of life and productivity in confinement. On the other hand, this kind of life also includes an overwhelming precarity, which necessarily entangles one’s life with the lives of others such as ancestors, offspring, place, and animals, all of which are imminently affected by the rhythms of time passing (Mbembe, cited in Gilroy 2020). In considering the indirect effect of Senghor’s confinement on Mbembe’s thinking, the discussion expands to encompass the impact of both isolation and communion, stuckness and rhythm.

If art facilitates the understanding of imminent entanglements, the formal qualities of aesthetics register invisible patterns of solidarity and images augment the range of experiences that may be represented, then studying the formal qualities of visual art forms may enable the crossing of boundaries in novel ways. The formal qualities of comics enable borders of experience to be traversed by provoking the reader/viewer to integrate what they see on the page with their own experiences of isolation. This is because the blank gutters in comics are used as a space for readers/viewers to project their own imaginings into the story, making comics a highly participatory medium, visually configured not only by what is represented, but also by what is absent.³ Furthermore, the kind of participatory reading/viewing that comics offer is embodied and thus they can address complex topics in a way that affects behavioural change.⁴ Comics scholar Thierry Groensteen (2010) argues for the impact of hand-drawn images, reminding us that the body of the artist links the reader/viewer to the experiences depicted since these carry the signature of their creator in ways distinct from films and photographs, such that what is drawn may be likened to the passing on of experience as experience to those reading/viewing (Benjamin, cited in Scherr 2013). Saba’aneh himself goes further, even declaring the banality of summarising Palestinian lives in mere single portraits, and gives this up in favour of expressing Palestinian lives in comics sequences (2021: 74). Edward Saïd affirms the inseparability of form and content in comics when he posits that their interstitial panelled fragments are the best way to represent the Palestinian political experience. He states: ‘I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us’ (Saïd 1989: 6).⁵

‘The power born of dreams’

Saba’aneh’s ‘Power born of dreams’ (2021) is about his experiences across two sites of confinement, in a prison cell and in the West Bank.⁶ This comic uses lino-cut images in a distinctive bold, simplistic style of thick white lines on a mostly black background, which are in some ways reminiscent of Art Spiegelman’s iconic short comic ‘Prisoner on the hell planet: A case history’ about Spiegelman’s period of confinement within a mental asylum just prior to his mother’s suicide caused by her internment in Auschwitz (Gonshak 1998). Though influenced by a similar Expressionist style to Spiegelman’s, Saba’aneh’s images are blacker, and their distinctive matte finish suggests charcoal sketch lines on slightly roughened paper, evoking the immediacy of the artist using the charcoal at hand from amidst the burning ash and rubble that he is depicting. Like Spiegelman’s work, Saba’aneh’s also has a strong retrospective quality. In Saba’aneh this confronts his readers/ viewers not only with his past experience but with the current reality of life for him in Israel-Palestine.⁷ Combining Hague’s (2014) extension of the metaphor of haptic visuality in comics with the directed touch that he claims comics are designed to provoke and Scherr’s (2013: 19) notion that texture in a comic’s images induces a multisensory reading experience in the reader/viewer that facilitates them shaking ‘hands with other people’s pain’, the retrospective quality of Saba’aneh’s images is imbued with the added association that running one’s hands over them is more like touching skin than a photograph. Perhaps because of his work as a cartoonist and graffiti artist, ‘Power born of dreams’ also differs from Spiegelman’s in a few striking ways, including in its use of gutters and panels. Several of the pages in Saba’aneh’s comic exceed the borders of panels and bleed into each other in an abstract way, making them even more akin to the surrealistic sequencing of dreams.

Figure 1 below depicts two separate full-page images from the last section of Saba’aneh’s comic, representing life in the West Bank. These images are set alongside full pages of text explaining the political state of play in the places shown in the images, in this case ‘The 1967 Israeli Occupation and West Bank Settlements’, which at the time of writing has seen a marked escalation in violence (Saba’aneh 2021: 100). This section is structured more like an illustrated novel, leaving less room for active reader/viewer interpretation in its formal features. Images such as those in Figure 1 below provide a surrealistic accompaniment to his matter-of-fact writing such that the power of dreaming seems to become the author’s way of making his life ‘breathable’ in the face of the devastating, unremitting realities in the sites of confinement he experiences. He suggests that mundane physical routines such as playing ball and doing art (Saba’aneh 2021: 14) are what liberate his dreams beyond the confines of his daily existence.

Figure 1 Occupying a ‘breathable’ life (Saba’aneh 2021: 100, 112).

In the images in Figure 1, the notion of humans, their song, voice and breath, presumably filling the ney in the man’s mouth, is contrasted with an ominously large tank, which seems about to roll over the pipe player and residential buildings, on wheels that recall the relentless rolling of the cogs of a military machine, snuffing out breath. Aside from drawing attention to the power differential between the tank and the human in their composition, these images also foreground sound and music as part of the distinctive features of ‘breathability’. The cogs in the first image are repeated in the second where the image of the military machine begins to echo the structure of Noah’s Ark – the myth common to the Abrahamic religions in the region – signifying that the only way to right the moral chaos of the tank’s destruction is by some apocalyptic feat of nature. Yet this time, what are in the belly of the ark are not animals to perpetuate the cycle of life but more cogs, implying the ruthless and inevitable suppression of life, which cannot be saved by epic stories. The image pits the rolling of the tank’s wheels against the ‘breathability’ of the flowers and the rhythms of the song being played, as large music notes seem to swell the size of the player against the tank and damage their guns. Moreover, when Saba’aneh is depicting his time in prison, he again focuses on the powerful routine activity of song to support life in confinement. ‘I sing songs to myself...’ (2021: 14) because, like most subalterns (Spivak 2001) ‘...you are not allowed to speak’ to the guards in prison when in solitary confinement (2021: 20). As mentioned, Jefferson et al. (2019) claim that it is the continuing presence of death and the resistance this provokes, across varied sites of confinement, that draws different experiences of isolation together. Just so, Saba’aneh’s work constantly proclaims the dream of an ordinary, ‘breathable life’ (Macé 2023: 177) amidst the state-sanctioned limits placed on the breath of minorities.

Scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani (2020: 278) have described the kinds of confinement experienced by Palestinians in Israel-Palestine with reference to historical patterns of isolating ‘non-Jews’ from public life, national institutions and the economy, including by restricting some to particular Palestinian territories and limiting their movements in and out of these territories. This structured process of state-sanctioned exclusion recalls the work of Louis Everuss (2023) who argues that in Australia and the United States of America the incarceration of minorities is the outcome of racialised, state-sanctioned violence, structured by an underlying system that deliberately excludes them and is not simply to be explained away as ‘a series of isolated incidents, or the unsanctioned actions... but a hidden sovereign structure’ (Everuss 2023: 13). Mamdani also notes that these constant administrative restrictions and policies of isolation have ever-present physical manifestations such as walls. These walls are built to separate Palestinians from Israeli settlers within the Palestinian territories and within Israel itself to separate Jewish-Israeli communities from neighbouring Israeli Arabs, ostensibly to mitigate the noise pollution that the Arab residents create. Macé (2023: 178) connects pollution and breath, declaring that discourses of ‘pollution’ (waste or rubble) are necessarily invested in patterns of exploitation:

The history of pollution is... a question of exploitation as well as a social history: that of the unequal distribution of air and the inequitable exposure (depending on one’s living milieux) to what is oppressive, stifling – in a word, unbreathable.

In Figure 1 above the rubble depicted is from Israeli tanks breaking walls and crushing buildings as the musician resists and creates a ‘breathable life’. Anthony Bogues (2006: 159) emphasises the crucial role of art in restoring imagination during the ongoing ravages of colonisation and argues that using aesthetics uniquely allows the critical confrontation of ‘...imperial power [especially when it is] in its guise as an “empire of liberty’’’. Like Mbembe, Saba’aneh acknowledges the power of art to draw together abstract and embodied practices of resistance and his further assertions about the power of art and the imagination to effect freedom are remarkable: ‘I compose images in the air so my hand stays accustomed to drawing...I was liberated on the blank page, it became my world’ (2001: 14). Saba’aneh muses on the drawing process itself throughout this narrative and encounters decolonisation by confronting his confinement through his art. Furthermore, these assertions suggest that he is liberated from incarceration by his imagination. In Figure 2 below he declares a similar liberation at another site of confinement when he is at home in the West Bank: ‘if you use your imagination, the house can be as large as a playground!’ (Saba’aneh 2021: 79). Additionally, literalising this idea by allowing the images to exceed the confines of the single frame amplifies his declaration even further.

Figure 2 Drawing on unbounded life (Saba’aneh 2021: 79)

As a way of resisting for himself the ‘existential fear that the immobility of the present will perpetuate itself eternally into the future’ (Jefferson et al. 2019: 4), Saba’aneh places emphasis on engaging in ordinary physical routines. In Figure 2 above, Saba’aneh suggests confinement may be reconfigured through imagination, making life ‘breathable’ because of the freedom of resistance offered by the rhythms of ordinary activities. Exceeding regular boundaries also gives rise to novel solutions, such as when the ball breaks the window and the hole it leaves is covered by a book. In this figure Saba’aneh uses the physical manifestations of confinement (walls, windows) to reflect upon living with brokenness as a necessary part of a ‘breathable life’ and suggests that working tactically with irreparability provides a way to confront the immanent rhythms of time passing in isolation. Notably Saba’aneh’s work is filled with depictions of breaking down and fixing walls, buildings and windows, suggesting the need to constantly navigate interrelated patterns of boundedness and freedom to effect ‘breathability’.

Everuss (2023) draws upon the work of Mbembe to amplify the inseparability of ordinary, state-sanctioned policies of isolation and exclusion in the racialised production of minorities, arguing that these give rise to distinctive ontologies of confinement (and I would add, solidarity). If Everuss’s (2023) observations may be applied to Palestinian experiences of physical and social confinement, then Saba’aneh’s portrayals may provide insight into what it feels like to be produced as a racial minority.

Figure 3 Suspended in stuckness (Saba’aneh 2021: 52,3)

Although not all West Bank Palestinians are refugees, they are all arguably confined and displaced into excluded territories. The image in Figure 3 (above) is of the feeling of limbo of a displaced Palestinian, when indefinitely confined. The dark heavy images depict tiny, indistinguishable, box-like dwellings, unanchored and unstructured by the regular, panelled structure of the comic’s form. This image evokes a feeling of the removal of all points of reference and defined boundaries between the homes and the people depicted; and instead shows a person who seems out of place in the image and with a look on their face of what it might be like to permanently stuck, hanging around and only visible against the black background and the white outlines of uniform buildings which do not seem to belong in the environment. Adding Mbembe’s (Shread and Mbembe 2021) and Jefferson et al.’s (2019) notions that the spectre of mortality constantly laps at the edges of confinement, then being stuck in a perpetual minority position involves constant erasure, by the daily physical, social and administrative processes that treat past, present and future as identical. In other words, constantly living in a state of sovereign exclusion and being produced as a minority is not living a ‘breathable’ life, but akin to living in continual disorientation, lasting limbo.

Mamdani (2020: 309) notes how the Palestinian Liberation Organisation gave away the right of return of Palestinian refugees in the Oslo II Accord (1993), thus permanently confining the Palestinians who had been relocated into refugee camps during wars to displacement. Saba’aneh once again merges the concepts of social and physical confinement in his art when he describes the experience of ‘The Oslo Interim Agreement’ (Saba’aneh 2021: 105) in the lives of Palestinians. For Palestinians to move between Palestinian areas requires obtaining a wide variety of restrictive permits and, through this complex system, Israel has managed to isolate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, to prohibit Palestinian access to the old city of Hebron and to prohibit Palestinians from accessing their agricultural land behind the Annexation Wall.⁸ In this way Israel has been able to control the movement of Palestinians living under occupation and to create yet another challenge for Palestinians to endure in their daily lives.

Saba’aneh is not a refugee but, when imprisoned, like Senghor he also stresses his connection to the natural world as a way to make life ‘breathable’. Although the bird that features prominently throughout Saba’aneh’s narrative may not seem as lofty as Senghor’s ‘eagle of Time’ that connects Senghor to his ancestors and the varied traditions of thought that buoy his own reflections, for Saba’aneh the bird is a powerful symbol of freedom and connection. Like playing the ney (see Figure 1 above), where breath symbolises the power of a song of resistance, bird song is also associated with the life of the natural world. Indeed, the bird and Saba’aneh have a conversation with each other throughout the comic, with the bird constantly guiding Saba’aneh’s imaginings of freedom and the manifestations of these in art, as struggles with his life in confinement (see Figure 4 below). However, Saba’aneh emphasises that surviving or escaping from his prison cell is not a dream that will bring relief from the stuckness he experiences since his life or death as a Palestinian resident of the West Bank are always constrained. Thus, for him the bird represents the kind of liberty he can only imagine.

Figure 4 Natural entanglements (Saba’aneh 2021: 94)

For Senghor the ‘Eagle of Time’ lifts him up beyond his exile and confinement and allows him to awaken as if from a nightmare and embrace his family and his land. Similarly, throughout Saba’aneh’s book the bird continuously inspires dreams of the outside world, fetching and carrying the stories of others and bringing them to him. As shown in Figure 4 above, for Saba’aneh the dreams of liberty that the bird heralds pass from the pages of the book he is composing and seem to breathe life into the stories of other sites of confinement. Thus, for Saba’aneh it seems that art and small stories (as opposed to grand cultural mythologies) provide the points of departure for his daily existence and enable him to survive the stuckness and impending violence of the varied sites of confinement that bound his entangled experiences. Also, in Figure 4 above, the bird perches upon the tangled branches of a tree, so that the branches function like gutters. However, these are notably disordered, organic and far from the more organised grid-like panel structure we might expect. This recalls Saïd’s (2003) declaration about the political power of the comic’s form to depict Palestinian lives in his word-image text After the last sky: Palestinian lives. In it he asserts that the comic’s form assists in constructing imaginings beyond expectations, in an unusual leap of logic that he ascribes to panelled representations. In this way, the style of storytelling that Saba’aneh uses places ordinary stories of Palestinian confinement into the hands of viewer/readers as they are directed to touch the roughened pages before these fly off into abstraction.

Conclusion

This essay examines Mohammad Saba’aneh’s (2021) non-fictional comic, ‘Power born of dreams: My story is Palestine’, depicting the experiences of Palestinians across the sites of confinement he experienced both as a political prisoner and that he still experiences as a Palestinian resident of the West Bank. However, it examines confinement from the shifted perspective of ‘entanglement’ and draws from Mbembe’s conception of Africa’s authority in using the arts to create rich knowledge of the ontologies of exclusion and communion. With this it combines reflections on Mbembe’s ‘The universal right to breathe’ to explore how ‘breathable’ lives may be facilitated in the face of the unequal exposure to risk death brought into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic. In so doing it demonstrates an approach that deliberately shifts the focus from single normative centres, not primarily to give voice to subalterns even though this is a result of the approach, but in order to signal a more radical departure from dealing in singular normative centres (such as science and the West) and instead assert the authority of places such as Africa, with an established tradition of dealing in pluralities, built up by using the arts to create knowledge of isolation’s counterpart – ‘planetary entanglement’. In following this approach, it is able to find that to enrich understandings of confinement and exclusion a profound re-evaluation and reimagination of the necessity of communion of both human and non-human life is required.

Notes

¹ During the COVID-19 pandemic two-thirds of the population where Mbembe resides in South Africa live ‘in formerly blacks-only urban townships and... shack settlements’ where ‘[o]vercrowding makes physical distancing very hard, clean water may not be available for hand washing and people are forced to travel in full minibus taxis’ often for long distances, to work (Friedman 2020: np). Furthermore, the far-reaching effects of vaccine inequality also inform his thoughts on entanglement, where several countries in Africa and South America – despite experiencing some of the highest death rates in the early Delta wave – remain unable to secure sufficient vaccine supplies despite the global realisation of the measure of devastation the Delta variant would cause. Thus ‘vaccine suppliers, which had not fulfilled their contracts to South Africa and some other poor countries, bore a huge responsibility for ... an engulfing crisis’ which ensued in 2021 as months of military-style lockdowns contributed to waves of public anger pouring onto the streets with looting, shooting and destruction shaping the struggle to survive without work and without being able to stop to reckon with overwhelming grief at the high number of deaths, which remained unmarked by familiar social rituals because of restrictions placed on public gatherings (Burn-Murdoch and Pilling 2021: np)

² Mbembe (2021) deliberately preserves ambiguity in this term and mentions it as a powerful practice that flows from abstraction to action – beyond the mere instrumentalism and social empiricism of the West. As European universalism is reaching its end, he contends that the shared condition of humanity is materialising beyond continental borders and dismantling binary notions of identity as well as of isolation and connection in an exclusively Western or non-Western world, making
the deprovincialisation of knowledge imperative for the survival of all. He claims that given Africa’s paradoxical nature as sign – as both crisis-prone and leader in addressing concerns that affect all life – it should play a major role as a global laboratory for ‘gauging the limits of our epistemological imagination to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded in’ (Mbembe 2021: 12). He says this provides a necessary alternative to melancholic and colonial theorising of the English-speaking world, particularly in the time of the pandemic; and facilitates the re-imagination of a world of new planetary entanglements, which allow us to ‘work out new ways to live with the Earth’ and new ‘modes of being human and inhabiting the world’ currently required (Mbembe 2021: 21)

³ Comics scholar and creator Scott McCloud claims ‘the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics’ (McCloud 1993: 66, Panel 3). Thus, comics include the reader/viewer in the participatory space outside the frame and in their very structure

⁴ Nicoletta Vallorani (2009) demonstrates the heightened impact of visual narratives because of the physiological process of interpreting images; while scholars such as Saige Walton (2009) draw attention to the multisensory physicality of the reading/ viewing process of comics because they juxtapose image and words, panels and gutters, in shifting configurations. Moreover, another powerful way comics support embodied interconnection and the sharing of experiences is through their support of haptic visuality. This is derived from Laura U. Marks (2000) in her work in global film, where she focuses on the senses other than sight involved in creating and interpreting knowledge, especially outside of the Western world. When haptic visuality is applied as metaphor to comics reading/viewing, the eyes function as organs of touch and this explains the embodied and multisensory impact of encountering visual, sequenced narratives elaborated by scholars such as Rebecca Scherr (2013) and Jeanne-Marie Viljoen (2016, 2020). Ian Hague (2014) and Simon Grennan (2017) develop this extending haptic visuality to describe how comics are physically designed to direct the bodies of readers/viewers and writers to touch them in particular ways in the performance of comics creation and reading/viewing. In these ways haptic visuality foregrounds the body, challenging the dominance of sight as the primary basis of knowledge. By intertwining the senses in the creation and reception of comics, the exploration of invisible experiences becomes tangible

⁵ This contrasts with other visual forms such as war photographs, which Judith Butler (2009), for example, argues tend to render what is present, distant by upholding a power differential between those photographed and viewers

⁶ As with other Palestinian Territories, residents of the West Bank regularly endure intermittent border closures by Israeli authorities. Additionally, during the COVID-19 lockdowns when this comic was written, Saba’aneh’s material context included the Palestinian Authority, in closer cooperation with the Israeli and other Palestinian authorities than usual, quickly imposing further restrictions on the movements of its population, confining them to their homes or quarantine centres when the first cases of the virus were identified in Bethlehem. This was due to the lack of skilled medical staff, protective equipment or fear of the virus spreading in refugee camps with inadequate sanitation and shelter required for physical distancing, or the significant number of Palestinian Territory residents regularly moving outside of their territories for work or to visit family and friends residing within the other Palestinian Territories close by (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs oPt & Humanitarian Partners 2020)

⁷ Saba’aneh explains: ‘[t]o compose my book, I used interviews I carried out with the Palestinians imprisoned with me, as well as people living in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem to show how we all are stuck in a type of prison. Those who are not behind bars are trapped within walls with no chance of getting out. Even Diaspora Palestinians feel like they are stuck because most of these people around the world have this nostalgia to travel back to Palestine, return to their homelands but can’t. Under a debilitating siege for more than a decade, Gaza has been rightfully declared the biggest open-air prison in the world. Meanwhile, the West Bank suffers under a different kind of siege, where every Palestinian who resides there and holds official Palestinian identification papers is a prisoner in their own home’ (Saba’aneh, cited in Rahman 2021: np)

⁸ This is the Israeli West Bank Barrier (a 708km long wall and fence completed in 2006) which isolates the West Bank from Israel, and Palestinians behind it from other occupied Palestinian Territory

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the artist Mohammed Saba’aneh for granting permission to use his images in this article. We also acknowledge that the situation in the West Bank is fluid and may have changed since the time of writing.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper.

Notes on the contributors

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a contemporary literature and visual culture scholar at the University of South Australia. Her work is about the unique role that art and aesthetics play in helping us think through intractable problems in contemporary times because of the ways in which different art forms help us capture what lies beyond language and help us envision situations in which experience may not be immediately visible. Her interdisciplinary international training as well as living and working in contested states with violent histories (such as apartheid South Africa, Cyprus and Australia) drive her engagement with marginalisation and decolonisation. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8197- 0292

Daniel Viljoen is an economics professional working in the Department of Social Services in the Australian Federal Government, with interests in the conceptualisation of social and cultural norms and how these interact with policy. http://orcid.org/0009-0003-2490- 4610.