Sea Prayer

Content Warning: The source material deals with death, war, war crimes, and the refugee crisis as well as the resulting xenophobia of Western countries. Descriptions of violence and grief feature prominently.

The first chapter introduces the letter format and immediately names Marwan as the letter’s intended recipient and the narrator’s son. Both the narration and the illustrations focus on the immediate landscape of the narrator’s childhood home outside the city of Homs in Syria. The composition stretches deep into the horizon line, showing the vastness of this space. The green and yellow colors do not change between the land and the sky, extending the perspective even further. The narrator describes the farmhouse owned by Marwan’s grandfather. No fences or boundaries are shown in the illustrations. Focusing specifically on the narrator’s memories of summertime, the weather allows the narrator and his brothers to sleep outside and further connect their memories of home to the specific sounds of the natural environment. The narrator heavily focuses on the members of the family, always relating them back to Marwan’s relationship to them. While the farmhouse itself is not shown or described, the narrator mentions olive trees, a single goat, and sharing a mattress with his brothers, alluding to the size of the farm and work done there.