Gaza cartoonist’s simple style makes child murders by Israeli troops even more chilling
▶ Young artist’s work is winning recognition beyond Gaza, writes Naser Al Wasmi
Every night Safaa Odah, 34, draws under the unreliable light powered by Gaza’s four hours of daily electricity.
She sits at her table, sketching the atrocities she has seen in the besieged strip of land she calls home.
The editorial cartoonist has spent the past nine years creating representations of Gaza’s most pressing issues as citizens continue to resist Israeli occupation.
Gaza has been under blockade since 2007, when the ruling Hamas came to power, prompting Israel and Egypt to partly seal their borders.
On nights when Safaa’s familial duties take longer than expected, she finds her first pen stroke interrupted by sudden darkness, enveloping her work, her home and the rest of the besieged strip of Palestinian land.
“That’s when the ideas stay in my head, for days sometimes, festering or transforming into something new,” she says.
When she does get them down on paper, the juxtaposition of Safaa’s innocent drawing style and the gravity of the subject matter are startling.
Her work almost always focuses on the realities of today’s Gazans. Her latest drawings suggest she has matured, perhaps forcefully, as a result of the increasingly dire state of the Gaza Strip.
“Outside of not being recognised, the situation in Gaza takes whatever ambition or passion one has and takes it away from them,” Safaa says. “But I haven’t once in nine years doubted what I want to do.”
After all those years of little recognition, her work is starting to win recognition at home and abroad.
In a drawing published last week, she shows Death, hooded and straining under its task, pushing a crate full of children.
In the background, billows of black smoke represent the lit tyres from the Great March of Return, in which more than 60 Palestinians, eight of them children, were killed by Israelis.
In another sketch published this month, she depicts a Palestinian mother smiling in her sleep and holding her haloed son.
Another shows paper airplanes arching over an interlacing construct of the Israeli apartheid wall, showing the difficulties Palestinians in the West Bank face in communicating with others in their own villages.
The subject matter, Safaa says, is almost always humanitarian. But when the topic is as highly polarising as the Palestinian crisis, politics almost inevitably seeps into her work.
In a drawing published this month, Safaa shows an outstretched hand in military garb handing out a photo of a child to a series of bullets waiting in line.
“People took that as they want to take it but I stick to what I believe is a humanitarian struggle, a struggle for people to live,” she says.
At times, her work sparks the ire of conservatives. Her subject matter is not exclusive to Gazan issues, as she challenges preconceived ideals of Muslim femininity.
“Sometimes I find myself more confident in these topics, to look at them and to try to get people to think about what they truly mean,” Safaa says.
Regardless of resistance, she continues her work.
Safaa recalls what a professor once told her during her master’s degree in psychology – everybody has talent, it’s simply a matter of discovering what it is.
“This is my talent, this is who Safaa is,” she says. “In Gaza, it’s tough to follow your dreams but I think I have found myself and I continue to learn more about who Safaa is in each drawing.”