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December 23rd, 2021 
Awake Goy POWER BORN OF DREAMS
My Story is Palestine
by Mohammad Sabaaneh
118 pp. Street Noise Books $15.99
In Mohammad Sabaaneh’s new book he uses the character of a bird to tell the Palestinian narrative. The bird communicates with an imprisoned artist, Sabaaneh himself. “You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories,” the bird tells the writer.
“This bird collected the stories of Palestinians to show that they are imprisoned, some of them [prisons] small and called jails; others larger and called towns and villages, which are surrounded by military check points, walls and settlements,” Sabaaneh writes.
The image is reminiscent of the poem “Sympathy,” which Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet wrote in 1899. Some of its most famous lines:
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting— I know why he beats his wing!
Dunbar was one of Maya Angelou’s favorite poets, and she used the first line of the last stanza as the title of her 1969 autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Sabaaneh and Angelou have a lot more in common than their use of the image of a caged bird. I met Sabaaneh in 2007 in the Jenin Refugee Camp when he was on the board of the Jenin Freedom Theatre located there. We had just started the Friends of the Freedom Theatre in New York. Maya Angelou, who was also a friend, was very supportive of the Freedom Theatre. In fact, she was on our Friends Board of Advisors until she died in 2014. She saw similarities between the Black Liberation Struggle and the struggle of Palestinians for freedom.
Sabaaneh has been an award winning political cartoonist for many years—and a political prisoner too. He was detained by the Israeli military in 2013 and held for five months on administrative detention for supposed links to a terrorist group.
This new book tells us a lot about what goes through prisoners’ minds as they are dragged to interrogation and back to cells– and it is clearly an allegory for the Palestinian experience. As usual Sabaaneh’s art work is incredibly evocative. Though in the past he has used a black pen, his technique is different this time:
I did not draw the pages of this book; I used linocut printing. I was unable to carve my name onto the walls of my prison cell. I’ve long wondered how prisoners are able to care their names into those rough prison walls. For this reason I’ve decided to carve their stories and share them with the world.
Sabaaneh has made many straight line cuts even in some of the faces of prisoners. But, with exquisite shading and emphasis on lips, eyes and facial expressions the reader gets to imagine what the prisoner is feeling. Some of my favorite lines:
“Thamer spent months convincing his daughter that her father is not a photo” – of a prisoner reunited with his daughter after many years away.
“My son, I’ve kept you warm at night for all your life. How can I keep you warm in the morgue?” – a mother whose son’s body is being held by Israel because he died resisting occupation.
“Sir, when I become a martyr will you paint my portrait?” – a boy’s question to Sabaaneh, who is painting a portrait of his older brother killed by Israeli forces. The boy soon died in the same manner, leading Sabaaneh to stop providing this artistic service to grieving families.
There is even a page with a guard pushing a blindfolded prisoners down steps that look like M.C. Escher drew it. The darkness of prisoners’ lives and of living under occupation comes through making the reader deeply think about it.
As friendship with Mohammad has taught me, he is a positive person. Thus, his last frames are pictures of a baby growing in the womb as the mother participates in resistance activities and the father is imprisoned. In the last image, the glowing sun circles the newborn’s head. Throughout Sabaaneh’s artwork he shows his respect for women as leaders in the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
Terry Weber
Terry Weber is a retired NYC math teacher. He has long been active with the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre.
BEFORE YOU GO – Stories like the one you just read are the result of years of efforts by campaigners and media like us who support them by getting the word out, slowly but doggedly.
That’s no accident. Our work has helped create breakthroughs in how the general public understands the Palestinian freedom struggle.
Mondoweiss plays a key role in helping to shift the narrative around Palestine. Will you give so we can keep telling the stories in 2022 that will be changing the world in 2023, 2025 and 2030?
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