The Representation of Collective Trauma Experience of the Palestinian Refugees in Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi

Abstract

This article aims to navigate the representation of the collective trauma experience of Palestinians in the poignant graphic novel Baddawi (2015) by Leila Abdelrazaq. This study examines how stories of violence, displacement and exile such as the Safsaf massacre and Al-Naksa are not just historical events but lasting sights of pain and resilience for generations. The research uses a qualitative methodology that includes close reading of images-text interplay, panel structure, visual motifs, symbolic framing, and temporal and spatial mapping. Drawing on Alexander (2004), Eyerman (2001, 2004), Smelser’s (2004) and Erikson’ s (1976) cultural trauma postulates, this study is concerned with how narrative and graphic elements collaborate to construct, circulate, and inherit suffering on collective level. Rather than distinguishing trauma as a purely psychological rupture or individual experience, cultural trauma occurs when the members of a community perceive a particular rupture as a threat to their collective identity and it persists beyond generations through their collective consciousness. The symbolic imagery such as checkpoints, maps, traditional tatreez patterns, as well as muted lines and minimalistic drawing have been utilized in the text to integrate trauma into   corporeal and spatial realities. Denied futures and historical absences continuously shape identity have been portrayed in the form the transitional area of refugee camp. The protagonist Ahmad is raised in a Lebanese refugee camp amid family members who are always talking about a country that has vanished from the map and a lost home. Finally, the article argues that Baddawi does more than narrate trauma; it stitches memory, endurance, and longing into visual form, presenting the ongoing Palestinian experience as a tapestry of loss and hope, sustained and transmitted through both story and image.