Green Almonds

June 11, 2018
In this humble epistolary graphic memoir, Anaële Hermans leaves her native Belgium to volunteer at a youth center in Palestine. She charts her travels in letters and postcards—which her artist sister Delphine illustrates in black and white with strategic charm—of a land where guns and checkpoints trample a pastoral way of life. Their correspondence, punctuated by Delphine’s carefully shaded bowls of fruit and almonds, depicts the intersection of the unimaginable and the mundane. Anaële describes a “Swiss cheese” landscape where Israeli settlers have taken all the hills, squeezing Palestinians into the lowlands. The opening presents a cavalcade of facts, matching Anaële’s saturation as a wide-eyed foreigner, but the story picks up when she falls for a local guy named Majdi and her investment in Palestine becomes personal. When Anaële returns to Belgium, she encounters stark lines, in contrast to the gentle shades and dark corners of Palestine. There is no shortage of travel narratives by Westerners whose eyes are opened in war torn countries, but Anaële doesn’t pose herself as a savior. She is simply a visitor who shares her life and labor with people in a difficult situation; together they create small, human spaces beneath the barbed wire of conflict. If the Hermans’ thoughtful, poignant travelogue feels unresolved, it’s because anything else would be fiction.