Restorying the Greco-Turkish Population Exchange and the Partition of India and Palestine Through Graphic Narrative Hand-Drawn Lines, Embroidered Histories, Portable Homelands

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War in 1923, included a convention ratifying the first compulsory population exchange in modern history, displacing nearly two million people from their homes in Greece and Turkey. In the aftermath of World War II, this exchange provided a model for forced population transfers in many other parts of the world, yet the experiences from these forced displacements have rarely been brought together in a comparative framework. By drawing attention to four graphic narratives—Threads: From the Refugee Crisis by Kate Evans; Small Lives by Theodoros Papadopoulos and Fotis Papastefanou; This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh; and Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq—this chapter probes the legacies of forced displacement, in Europe and beyond. The aims of the chapter are twofold: first, it draws attention to the ways in which the materiality of comics form helps to foreground and archive migration experiences as an antidote to “regimes of unseeing” at the core of both past and present practices of border-making. To do this, the chapter traces the haptic visuality of graphic narratives, observed primarily through hand-drawn lines and fragments of textile included in those narratives. Second, the chapter draws attention to the ways in which comics architecture can be used to foreground forced displacement as a process which extends well beyond the initial events leading to this displacement and has far-reaching consequences. While cultural medium provides shape to the stories of forced displacement, formal experimentation allows authors to re-story an established course of events and offer a pathway to navigate maps that never got drawn.