Let's Peel
Baddawi
Created by
PERFECT if
Perfect if you want to see exile drawn from the inside: a child’s view of displacement, humour, and persistence.
Style / Atmosphere
Ink-washed memory and absence. Drawn in black lines over white space, Baddawi feels like a diary written on whatever paper was at hand—direct, tender, unguarded.
Synopsis
“Home was a word my father learned to draw before he ever lived in one.”
Based on Abdelrazaq’s father’s childhood in the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, the book traces ordinary life under extraordinary conditions. There are football games, curfews, songs, and long walks to water. The tone is neither tragic nor heroic; it’s intimate, sometimes funny, always aware. The panels build a sense of continuity—history told through daily gestures.
Line Work
Fine ink outlines, cross-hatched restraint, and a cool blue wash give each frame the stillness of archival memory. The geometry comforts and confines — a hand trying to stay steady while remembering trembles.
The pacing
Carefully measured. Each panel holds its breath. Page turns feel like walking through long hallways: you sense the echo before the sound. Time folds in on itself — moments revisited from multiple angles until they align.
The Voice
Bechdel’s narration overlays the images like transparent vellum — analytical, ironic, tender. Text and image never mirror; they negotiate. Where her voice retreats, her drawings lean closer.
From Page
to Screen
Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical (2013, dir. Sam Gold) — a stage adaptation that turns Bechdel’s visual silence into song.
The comic’s symmetrical structure and literary layering influenced how Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino) and The Father (2020, dir. Florian Zeller) visualise memory as architecture — intimate rooms echoing with withheld truths.
Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Baddawi
Created by
Style / Atmosphere
Ink-washed memory and absence. Drawn in black lines over white space, Baddawi feels like a diary written on whatever paper was at hand—direct, tender, unguarded.
Perfect if
Perfect if you want to see exile drawn from the inside: a child’s view of displacement, humour, and persistence.
Synopsis
“Home was a word my father learned to draw before he ever lived in one.”
Based on Abdelrazaq’s father’s childhood in the Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, the book traces ordinary life under extraordinary conditions. There are football games, curfews, songs, and long walks to water. The tone is neither tragic nor heroic; it’s intimate, sometimes funny, always aware. The panels build a sense of continuity—history told through daily gestures.
Line Work
Simple, expressive pen strokes. Figures outlined boldly, faces open and quick to smile or flinch. The visual restraint lets emotion breathe; white space becomes the camp’s sky.
The pacing
Fragmented but flowing. Short chapters act like stories told around a table—pause, laugh, sigh, continue. The rhythm mirrors the rhythm of remembering: stops and starts, always unfinished.
The Voice
Warm, unpretentious, storytelling through conversation. Abdelrazaq blends family anecdote and political context without lecture. Her narrator listens more than she explains; the voice invites rather than insists.
From Page
to Screen
No film adaptation yet, though Abdelrazaq’s work has informed short animations and exhibitions about Palestinian oral history.
Its quiet realism shares spirit with 200 Meters (2020, dir. Ameen Nayfeh) and The Present (2020, dir. Farah Nabulsi) cinema where borders and daily love coexist on the same road.