Countering confinement and using comics to make life ‘breathable’

This paper examines a creative, non-fictional comic, Mohammad Saba’aneh’s (2021) ‘Power born of dreams:My story is Palestine’, depicting the experiences of Palestinians across various sites of confinement where movement is restricted by virtue of ethnicity. With this it combines reflections on Mbembe’s work on confinement in ‘The universal right to breathe’to explore how ‘breathable’ lives may be facilitated in the face of the unequal exposure to risk of death that was brought into focus by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shapes the context in which these works have come about. Methodologically, this essay shifts the focus from singular normative centres such as science and the West to draw upon Africa’s authority in using the arts to create knowledge of isolation’s counterpart – ‘planetary entanglement’. It finds that a radical re-evaluation and reimagination of the necessity of communion of both human and non-human life is required in order to enrich understandings of confinement and exclusion