Baddawi and the Visual Politics of Memory: A Conversation with Leila Abdelrazaq

This interview with Palestinian American comics artist Leila Abdelrazaq explores her acclaimed graphic novel Baddawi (2015) and her broader creative practice as a visual storyteller of diasporic and intergenerational memory. The conversation examines how Abdelrazaq’s minimalist drawing style and fragmentary narration work to represent inherited memory and displacement without sentimentality or spectacle. Discussing Baddawi’s autobiographical and intergenerational aspects, she reflects on the ethics of representing loss, the visual integration of word and image in documenting Palestinian experience, and the unique capacities of comics to convey the entanglements of personal, political, and intergenerational memory. The following conversation was conducted in November 2025 as part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Riwayati programming, a One Book initiative in which the incoming first-year class reads a common text and participates in related events.