Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution

by Sherine Hamdy, Coleman Nye, Caroline Brewer (Illustrator), Sarula Bao (Illustrator)

Overview

As young girls in Cairo, Anna and Layla strike up an unlikely friendship that crosses class, cultural, and religious divides. Years later, Anna learns that she may carry the hereditary cancer gene responsible for her mother's death. Meanwhile, Layla's family is faced with a difficult decision about kidney transplantation. Their friendship is put to the test when these medical crises reveal stark differences in their perspectives...until revolutionary unrest in Egypt changes their lives forever.

The first book in a new series, Lissa brings anthropological research to life in comic form, combining scholarly insights and accessible, visually-rich storytelling to foster greater understanding of global politics, inequalities, and solidarity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487593476
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Series:	Ethnographic
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sherine Hamdy is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently writing a young-adult graphic novel that tells the coming-of-age story of a Muslim-American woman. Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She was born and raised in Virginia, but now lives in Vancouver, BC. Caroline Brewer graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 with a degree in Illustration and a concentration in Literary Arts + Studies. They are the author of Autodesk's science fiction anthology FOUR. Currently living in Brooklyn, NY, their work explores themes of childhood, gender, love, and the magically real. Sarula Bao graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 with a BFA in Illustration. Based in Brooklyn, NY, her sequential work explores the queer Chinese-American experience.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Lissa and the Transduction of Ethnography by George E. Marcus

Part I Cairo

Part II Five Years Later

Part III Revolution

A Note About Page 235, Featuring the Art of Ganzeer

Afterword: Reading Lissa by Paul Karasik

Appendix I Timeline of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution
Appendix II Creating Lissa: Concepts, Collaborations, and Craft
Appendix III Teaching Guide
Appendix IV Key References and Further Reading

What People are Saying About This

Egyptian revolutionary street artist/author Ganzeer

I would, without hesitation, deem Lissa required reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian revolution, but also for anyone interested in the complexities of being human and being alive in the twenty-first century.

Emmanuel Guibert

"...offers an intimate and powerful understanding of contemporary medicine and politics."

Margaret Lock

"...a brilliant fictional account of organ failure, genetic testing, and organ transplantation...a must-read for our alarming times."

Egyptian revolutionary Ganzeer

"...required reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian revolution, but also for anyone interested in the complexities of being human and being alive in the twenty-first century."

Mohamed and Haitham Raafat El-seht

"A tangled and controversial journey through injustice and disease, infused with a healthy dose of revolutionary spirit along the way."

Faye Ginsburg

"...a compelling entry into how issues of illness, mortality, and decisions around them are always shaped in the particulars of history and politics. Bravo!"

Ian Williams

"...deftly explores diverse political, medical, and ethical themes in one accessible yet erudite package. Essential reading for the graphic medicine community."

Anne Fausto-Sterling

"...brilliant storytelling and stunning scholarship."

Benjamin Dix

"A visually compelling and sensitively presented work that demonstrates how juxtaposing sequential art with narrative can render extremely complex global processes and phenomena into a gripping human story."

Jack Shenker

"A dizzying, gripping, and beautiful journey into the world of medicine and mortality—not just its complex emotional universe, but the political realities that structure it too."

Margaret Lock

"...a brilliant fictional account of organ failure, genetic testing, and organ transplantation...a must-read for our alarming times."

Nur Amali Ibrahim

"I assigned Lissa in my Contemporary Islam seminar that included both undergraduate and graduate students. Despite my initial apprehension about leading a class discussion on a graphic novel, the conversations we had were most exciting and energetic. ... I believe my students responded so well to Lissa because it presents a fresh and innovative take on what is possible in scholarship. I would certainly assign this book again and again and I hope it gets the wide readership it deserves."

Matthew Noe

"With Lissa, the creators have set a new standard for academically oriented comics."

Lina Ghaibeh

"Lissa utilizes comics to the fullest, weaving the complexities of friendship, illness, and faith together in a way that bridges cultures and dispels misconceptions, while offering a narrative that engages readers to the very end."

Editorial Reviews

"Revolution is as intimate as family and as mammoth as regime change in this graphic novel focused on the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations. This is the book's greatest strength: its belief in decency, even amidst violence and trauma. Its hopeful mood is mirrored by the book's rounded, flowing visuals: Bandages flutter like hair ribbons, water sluices down Anna's surgical scars, and Layla's eyes are wide as she tends to the grievously wounded. This is a chronicle of conflict, to be sure, but it is also a tribute to persistence of friendship and the power of a people united."—Publishers Weekly
"Whether you read Lissa to educate yourself about health issues or research methods, or you just want to find out what happens to Layla and Anna, this graphic novel shows the huge and still untapped potential of comics for use in medicine and global health."—The Lancet
"In Lissa, Hamdy, Nye, their artists Bao, Brewer, and Parenteau show us how we can collaboratively transform anthropology's ways of seeing and communicating depth and nuance in our ethnographies. As the first publication in the new ethnoGRAPHIC series from University of Toronto Press, Lissa sets a high bar and positive tone for what we can expect from this series. Like most great books, Lissa allows the reader to bring different meanings and needs to the book, engaging them in multiple conversations that explore the ways in which we are connected."—Somatosphere
"The complexity of the various ethical and medical dilemmas gives the work depth and pathos without making the arguments appear didactic. It is indeed the ethnographic research—the minor characters and their voices—that give the book its special strength."—Parismita Singh, graphic novelist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"With the University of Toronto's imprimatur and its ethnoGRAPHIC series, surely there are no more excuses not to expand what counts as professional, promotion-worthy ethnography. And Lissa offers a fantastic model of how to proceed. Congratulations to its visionary authors and editors."—Lochlann Jain, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"offers slices of contrasting Egyptian and American biomedicines and uses the characters' dilemmas to pry open the contradictions within and between these medical systems."—Stacy Leigh Pigg, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Lissa is an eminently teachable text, and it was clearly designed with the classroom in mind.—Christine Sargent, Anthropology Book Forum
"The storytelling in LISSA is innovative in the sense that it shows people's lives without resorting to broad stroke generalizations. The novel also nicely covers key aspects of cyber-activism, social media and texting - tools that were instrumental in communicating during the revolution."—Eduard Cousin
"Through its story of intercultural friendship and its backstory of international and interdisciplinary collaboration, Lissa invites us to take an unusual – fictional, graphic- and highly original path to the heart of the ethnographic encounter. It is a journey I am excited to take with my students, and I look forward to seeing the next titles in the ethnographic series."—Martha Radice, Dalhousie University, Anthropologica 60, 2018
"As the debut of a new editorial series (ethnoGRAPHIC) that aims at promoting long-form ethnographic accounts into comic form, Lissa is without a doubt an editorial break-through that helps to bring balance to an otherwise dominantly textual field."—Kim Tondeur, Anthropos
"Lissa intertwines academic knowledge and storytelling, Egypt and the United States, as well as the private sphere in which individuals/families make medical decisions and the public sphere in which health care systems operate, governments govern (or fail to do so), and citizens rebel against governments. The outcome, as academic and non-academic reviewers unanimously attest, is a highly informative yet readable and engrossing book."—Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw, Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature
"I have nothing but admiration for this book. The story is compelling—even a page turner. Moreover, it is informative, historically and culturally situated and uplifting—or, at least, it ends on a hopeful note—teaching hard truths, or glimpses of them, in an accessible and digestible way."—Shelly Errington, Anthropology Now
"A dizzying, gripping, and beautiful journey into the world of medicine and mortality—not just its complex emotional universe, but the political realities that structure it too."—Jack Shenker, author of The Egyptians: A Radical Story
"...required reading for anyone interested in the Egyptian revolution, but also for anyone interested in the complexities of being human and being alive in the twenty-first century."—Ganzeer, Egyptian revolutionary, street artist/author
"...a compelling entry into how issues of illness, mortality, and decisions around them are always shaped in the particulars of history and politics. Bravo!"—Faye Ginsburg, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University
"...brilliant storytelling and stunning scholarship."—Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ph.D., author of Sexing the Body
"...offers an intimate and powerful understanding of contemporary medicine and politics."—Emmanuel Guibert, author of The Photographer
"...a brilliant fictional account of organ failure, genetic testing, and organ transplantation...a must-read for our alarming times."—Margaret Lock, Ph.D., author of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
"A tangled and controversial journey through injustice and disease, infused with a healthy dose of revolutionary spirit along the way."—Mohamed and Haitham Raafat El-seht, Twins Cartoon
"A visually compelling and sensitively presented work that demonstrates how juxtaposing sequential art with narrative can render extremely complex global processes and phenomena into a gripping human story."—Benjamin Dix, Director, PositiveNegatives
"Lissa utilizes comics to the fullest, weaving the complexities of friendship, illness, and faith together in a way that bridges cultures and dispels misconceptions, while offering a narrative that engages readers to the very end."—Lina Ghaibeh, Professor of Animation and Comics, American University of Beirut
"...deftly explores diverse political, medical, and ethical themes in one accessible yet erudite package. Essential reading for the graphic medicine community."—Ian Williams, physician, cartoonist, and founder of graphicmedicine.org
"With Lissa, the creators have set a new standard for academically oriented comics."—Matthew Noe, author at Graphic Medicine
"I assigned Lissa in my Contemporary Islam seminar that included both undergraduate and graduate students. Despite my initial apprehension about leading a class discussion on a graphic novel, the conversations we had were most exciting and energetic. I believe my students responded so well to Lissa because it presents a fresh and innovative take on what is possible in scholarship. I would certainly assign this book again and again and I hope it gets the wide readership it deserves."—Nur Amali Ibrahim, Indiana University

From the Publisher

"I have nothing but admiration for this book. The story is compelling—even a page turner. Moreover, it is informative, historically and culturally situated and uplifting—or, at least, it ends on a hopeful note—teaching hard truths, or glimpses of them, in an accessible and digestible way."

Shelly Errington

"With the University of Toronto's imprimatur and its ethnoGRAPHIC series, surely there are no more excuses not to expand what counts as professional, promotion-worthy ethnography. And Lissa offers a fantastic model of how to proceed. Congratulations to its visionary authors and editors."

Lochlann Jain

"In Lissa, Hamdy, Nye, their artists Bao, Brewer, and Parenteau show us how we can collaboratively transform anthropology's ways of seeing and communicating depth and nuance in our ethnographies. As the first publication in the new ethnoGRAPHIC series from University of Toronto Press, Lissa sets a high bar and positive tone for what we can expect from this series. Like most great books, Lissa allows the reader to bring different meanings and needs to the book, engaging them in multiple conversations that explore the ways in which we are connected."

Somatosphere

"Whether you read Lissa to educate yourself about health issues or research methods, or you just want to find out what happens to Layla and Anna, this graphic novel shows the huge and still untapped potential of comics for use in medicine and global health."

The Lancet

"The storytelling in LISSA is innovative in the sense that it shows people's lives without resorting to broad stroke generalizations. The novel also nicely covers key aspects of cyber-activism, social media and texting - tools that were instrumental in communicating during the revolution."

Eduard Cousin

"As the debut of a new editorial series (ethnoGRAPHIC) that aims at promoting long-form ethnographic accounts into comic form, Lissa is without a doubt an editorial break-through that helps to bring balance to an otherwise dominantly textual field."

Anthropos - Kim Tondeur

"...offers slices of contrasting Egyptian and American biomedicines and uses the characters' dilemmas to pry open the contradictions within and between these medical systems."

Stacy Leigh Pigg

Lissa is an eminently teachable text, and it was clearly designed with the classroom in mind.

Christine Sargent

"Through its story of intercultural friendship and its backstory of international and interdisciplinary collaboration, Lissa invites us to take an unusual — fictional, graphic- and highly original path to the heart of the ethnographic encounter. It is a journey I am excited to take with my students, and I look forward to seeing the next titles in the ethnographic series."

Anthropologica 60, 2018 - Martha Radice

"The complexity of the various ethical and medical dilemmas gives the work depth and pathos without making the arguments appear didactic. It is indeed the ethnographic research—the minor characters and their voices—that give the book its special strength."

Parismita Singh

“Lissa intertwines academic knowledge and storytelling, Egypt and the United States, as well as the private sphere in which individuals/families make medical decisions and the public sphere in which health care systems operate, governments govern (or fail to do so), and citizens rebel against governments. The outcome, as academic and non-academic reviewers unanimously attest, is a highly informative yet readable and engrossing book.”

Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature - Dominika Ferens

01/08/2018
Revolution is as intimate as family and as mammoth as regime change in this graphic novel focused on the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations. Egyptian Layla and American Anna meet as childhood friends in Cairo and support each other through the deaths of parents, neighborhood strife, and, as Anna returns to the U.S., a separation spanning thousands of miles. But as Anna discovers that she is likely to inherit her mother’s fatal breast cancer, and as Layla’s medical education is derailed by political upheaval, their connection frays. The plot is anchored in moments of grace; as Layla picks up prescriptions for her ailing family, Anna wakes from an elective mastectomy, and protests turn bloody, the focus is on the helpers. This is the book’s greatest strength: its belief in decency, even amidst violence and trauma. Its hopeful mood is mirrored by the book’s rounded, flowing visuals: bandages flutter like hair ribbons, water sluices down Anna’s surgical scars, and Layla’s eyes are wide as she tends to the grievously wounded. This is a chronicle of conflict, to be sure, but it is also a tribute to persistence of friendship and the power of a people united. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly