It’s called Zugag and the first graphic novel published by wetlands will be released in bookstores on Friday 13 March. A work with an international scope, which in an original way intertwines two opposite realities – Venice and Sudan – and reflects on what it means to call many places – and no place – home. The author of the work is the internationally renowned Sudanese cartoonist Khalid Albaih, who created a good part of the work during a month-long residency in the lagoon, right at the lagoon publishing house.
The Sudanese call zugag winding streets where you end up getting lost or finding yourself in someone’s backyard. Not so dissimilar to the Venetian streets. Even for a world traveler – a professional foreigner – finding your way around is not easy. And even less so is finding your way back to an ever-changing home.
In his comic essay, Albaih parallels the stories of Venetians overwhelmed by tourism and Sudanese resisting displacement, to challenge the reader’s own ideas about foreignness and belonging, offering an uncompromising vision of the world as it is and its possibilities.
The author
Khalid Wad Albaih is a Sudanese political cartoonist, civil rights activist, artist and freelance journalist, who grew up in exile within the Sudanese diaspora in Doha, Qatar. His drawings and articles have been published in some of the major international online media, such as Al Jazeera, The Guardian and The Continent, and exhibited in museums and exhibitions around the world. Since 2017 he has lived and worked between Norway and Qatar.
The cover
