Power Born of Dreams: My story is Palestine
written and illustrated by Mohammad Sabaaneh
2021

This reads more like prose poetry than a standard graphic novel, and it’s gorgeous and also devastating. Sabaaneh is an artist, journalist, and political cartoonist who lives in the West Bank but wrote this book while getting his masters degree in London and reflecting back on his time as a political prisoner in Israel and his life in general as a Palestinian. It’s about his life and the life of his community in tiny snippets and stories about oppression and holding onto hope because there’s no other recourse than to hope and dream for better.

I bought this book from the Street Noise Books publisher stall at the Small Press Expo before the most recent series of attacks from Hamas on Israel and from Israel on all of Palestine, but only read it after that was already in the news. The two sets of stories, from reading this book and hearing the news, gave each other context and break my heart. This book is not fictional, for all that it’s structured around a man hearing news from a bird who’s flying through his prison window, and the headlines in the news are not just statistics but real people living and dying and struggling to be free.

The main book is about Sabaaneh’s experience in prison and the small amount of news he was able to hear about what was happening with everyone else, but the afterwards are six single pages with basic introductions to significant historical events, locations, and laws effecting Palestine from 1967 to 2020.

The illustrations are all linocuts (images carved in linoleum and then printed), which are both beautiful and increasingly rare because they’re so time consuming to make. I’m pretty sure the only other book I have that’s similar are the wood cuts in Gods’ Man which was written in 1929.

This book is beautiful and heart-breaking but important, about a current political topic (which is rare for me) and I highly recommend it. Just be prepared to take the emotional hit.