Comics and revolution as global public health intervention: The Case of Lissa

ABSTRACT

In this article, we discuss the inextricable entanglement of public health and political revolution, and why comics is a particularly amenable medium to explore how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. We discuss our process in creating a sequential comic narrative, Lissa, that portrays a working-class Egyptian family, informed by hundreds of interviews and ethnographic research in Egypt on the vulnerabilities that expose people to kidney and liver disease and the difficulties of accessing proper treatment. Lissa also draws on ethnographic research and interviews in the U.S. on a seemingly unrelated topic - the social and political calculus of managing genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer within a commercial healthcare system. We draw out the similarities in bioethical dilemmas between these two disparate clinical realities by composing an unlikely friendship between two fictional characters: Anna, the daughter of an American oil company executive living in Cairo, who has a family history of breast cancer - and Layla, the daughter of the porter of Anna's apartment building, who grows to become a resolute physician struggling for better public health justice and rights in Egypt.

KEYWORDS:

• Comics
• Arab spring
• Egypt
• kidney disease
• genetic breast cancer

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Mandisa Mbali and Jessica Rucell, who edited this special issue centering African voices to global public health discussions of Africa. We would also like to thank Shaden Tageldin whose conference at the University of Minnesota sparked the idea for this issue, and the anonymous reviewer whose excellent suggestions helped clarify our argument. Finally, we would like to thank the tremendous artistic work of Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer who illustrated and helped create Lissa, and the Egyptian revolutionaries who continue to teach and inspire us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Throughout, we use the terminology of ‘Global North/Global South’ instead of Minority World/Majority World to describe the unequal global distribution of power and wealth. We approach the Global South as a geographically flexible, politically-laden framework that allows us to centre the political dynamics of inequality in global North-South relations and to attend to the robust modes of solidarity and resistance unfolding across the South. The Global South, in this way, operates as ‘both a theory of power and a vision of transnational political resistance’ (Mahler, 2018, p. 33).

2 The April 6 Movement was formed in 2008 by young Egyptian activists, including then 27 year old Esraa Abdel Fattah and 27 year old Ahmed Maher in support of the textile workers’ strike in Mahalla el Kobra. The young activists played a leading role in pushing for greater economic equality during the uprisings in 2011.