The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The following article is the first part of an interview Toon Horsten conducted with Lebanese artist and writer Zeina Abirached for the respected Stripgids comics art journal about her autobiographical work Swallow’s Play (and its left me wondering why no-one has translated this book into English yet?). FPI would like to thank them for allowing us to reproduce it here and thanks also to our regular Foreign Correspondent Wim Lockefeer for translating it – Joe.

In her autobiographical graphic novel, Swallow’s Play (Le Jeu Des Hirondelles) Lebanese cartoonist Zeina Abirached has collected her recollections of the civil war in her country.  Abirached was born in 1981, and memories of her youth and the war are inseparable.  “Because it lasted so long, people started organising their lives with the war in it, they learned to live with it.  War became a common thing: it was always there“, she says.  Stripgids’ Toon Horsten spoke with Zeina Abirached about her new book, about Lebanon and about why she is not the new Satrapi.

(Zeina Abirached, pic borrowed from this online biography)

In the 1980′s the civil war in Lebanon was a mainstay on the television news.  Christians and Muslims were mad for some reason, and particularly at each other.  That much was clear.  You also had Druses, but nobody seemed to be able to tell what they were exactly (if you want to know – Wim).  And what exactly the part of the Israelis and Lebanese in Lebanon, was way beyond our Western understanding.  But it was complicated; that at least we could grasp.

Zeina Abirached was born and raised in a war-torn Beirut, and war was daily business to her.  It seemed like the war had always been there.  Twenty years later she lives in Paris and has published a graphic novel, Swallow’s Play, in which she looks back on her youth in Beirut.  She shows how people looking for safety and security hunker together, and lock out the harsh reality of the war.  Her art is in stark black and white, with very rigid layouts.  On a graphical level, it’s in-between commercial design and the harsh black-and-white of Frans Masereel’s woodcuttings.

(the cover to Le jeu des Hirondelles by and (c) Zeina Abirached, published by Cambourakis)

Zeina Abirached: I was educated as a commercial designer.  Every day we were confronted with two-dimensional imagery.  They taught us how to develop posters and logos in what you could call an advertising language, bringing across as much information and emotion as you can with a minimum of means.  And that certainly still lives in the comics I crate.  And I do see some resemblance with woodcuttings, even though I work with ink on paper.  Quite often in white on black, though, so a little like linos and woodcuttings.  I like to combine different techniques when I work: I use brushes and ink, but also felt-tip pens and the computer.  And I use all of that to create a completely personal visual language.

I was influenced by other cartoonists, of course.  Lebanon as a country does not have a comics tradition, and so I predominantly looked at Western cartoonists.  I liked comics from the Franco-Belgian tradition as a child; Hergé (Tintin – Wim), Franquin (Spirou et Fantasio, Gaston – Wim), Uderzo and Goscinny (Astérix, Houmpa Pa – Wim)…  And later I was influenced by the alternative French scene, and by a few American authors.  David B.’s books had a very big impact on my work.  His graphic novel, Epileptic, was a revelation: a graphic novel that was about something, in black and white, and quite similar to the things I was interested in.  David B. really pushed me towards putting down my own story in a graphic novel format.  As did the work of Jacques Tardi, especially Ici Même, which was written by (Barbarella Creator – Wim) Jean-Claude Forest.

Toon: It probably wasn’t easy to start creating comics in a country that has no comics tradition

Zeina: I was very lucky in that my parents started buying comics for me when I was very young.  Before I had learned to read I was already browsing through the books, looking at the pictures.  And for some strange reason I felt quite early that comics were a natural way to express myself.  I couldn’t imagine a better way to tell my story.  David B.’s books confirmed to me what I had known instinctively all along.  Comics, that was my medium.  Even though I still draw a lot of inspiration from film as well.

Toon: When I read Swallows’ Play, it reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.  Your book is something of an antithesis to the film, in which James Stewart plays a guy who watches the outside world from his apartment, and observes what happens out there.  In your book the people in the flats turn their backs on what happens outside.

Zeina: My story indeed plays behind closed doors, that’s correct – it’s a huis clos.  And besides that, you also have the classical unity of time, space and action, like in French classical theatre.  And just like in Rear Window, my book contrasts two locations.  On the one hand the inside of the flat, a small space which is cosy, warm and safe, where people gather with their stories and memories.

In the art, this translates as quite elaborate drawings of tapestry, clothing, hair, … All against a black background.  There, in that space, you find human emotions and relationships, and it’s there that my personal memories of the war play.  And on the other hand you have the outside world, with the war.  In the book I visualise that reality with a big, white panel.  It may sound strange, but because we were protected from the harsh reality of war during our youth by the adults, it has always remained something abstract to me.

Toon: You also quite often use another technique from film, namely repetition.  Three identical panels are juxtaposed, with only a minute difference.  An eyebrow being raised, for example.

Zeina: That’s something that I learned from Jacques Tati, who is probably my favourite film hero.  He was very apt at playing with repetitions, with almost abstract imagery that he nuanced by using very small, minute details.  A film like Playtime is more than a film to me; it’s a manifesto for the power of the image.  My greatest dream is to one day create a comic that uses imagery in the same way as Tati did in his films.

Toon: In your book you also include quite a few references to literature.  At a certain point you have your characters tell an anecdote in several different ways, a bit like Raymond Queneau’s Exercices De Style (and Matt Madden’s 99 Ways To Tell A Story – Wim).  And the book as a whole reminded me of George Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual, a book that you can read as the biography of an apartment building.

Zeina: I don’t think I was influenced consciously by them, but there certainly are parallels.  I’m enormously intrigued by Queneau, Perec and the other members of the OuLiPo group (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, a French formalist literary circle, which inspired the comics movement, OuBaPo – Wim).  The limitations they put upon themselves when writing (for example, Perec wrote the novel La Disparition without using the letter “e”) are interesting anyway, and Perec also worked a lot with memories, which is a theme that is very dear to me.  The way in which he describes and tries to classify things and objects appeals to me greatly.  He tries to grasp the world around him, in a way that is at once serious and light-hearted.

Toon: Are you trying to do that yourself?

Zeina: I was born in 1981, while the war had been raging since 1975.  I grew up in the middle of the war, and I was ten when it was over.  To me the war and the memories of my youth are very tightly interconnected.  The war was my youth, my youth as a whole, and I don’t have just bad memories of that time.  Because it lasted so long, people started organising their lives with the war in it; they learned to live with it.  War became a common thing: it was always there.  While creating my graphic novel I was constantly aware that I shouldn’t turn it into a pathetic melodrama.

(a family scene from Le Jeu des Hirondelles by Zeina Abirached, published Cambourakis)

Toon: It’s a very warm book, considering that it’s about the war.

Zeina: Tender, certainly…  But I must add that we were very lucky, of course.  Everybody in my family survived the war.  A bomb hit our house, but nobody was killed.  That makes things easier to digest, naturally.

Toon: What’s also very striking, is the solidarity between the people in the flat.  The war is their common enemy.  Did that solidarity end when the war was over ?

Zeina: It was different, in any way.  At the end of the nineties, when Beirut was in full reconstruction, I was in a taxi, a collective taxi that only leaves when it’s full.  The people in the taxi don’t know each other, but they do start talking to each other.  When I got in, I heard somebody say in Arabic, “The war, that was a great time.”  From what I gathered, the man had been saying that because he missed the solidarity among the people.  People suddenly had other business when it was over.  I even had the impression that a lot of people simply erased the war from their memory.

Toon: Perhaps it is comforting thought that people look after one another in times of war.

Zeina: During the war Beirut was literally cut into two pieces.  The different sectors were separated with a wall of bricks, containers, sand bags…  People were left to their own devices, which led to all these small microcosms sprouting up.  My brother and I were lucky enough that we were still children; our parents solved all our problems for us.  Inside our cocoon, our own microcosm, life was quite comfortably, actually.

Naturally we were afraid during the raids, and we had to flee, and we even had to move quite a few times…  But when we had to flee, my mother tried to disguise it as going on a holiday.  I remember one day when we had to leave very early, because the situation had become unbearable.  We lived very near the demarcation border which cut right through the city, and the fighting kept creeping closer.  My parents were under enormous pressure, it was very exciting and everything could go wrong.  All of a sudden my mother said, “We mustn’t forget the bikes.”  And while the bombs were falling around us, and even though she didn’t know how we would manage to leave Beirut, my parents tied the bikes to the car…  Simply to put our minds at ease.  It was comical and tragical at the same time.”

Toon: A bit like Roberto Benigni in La Vita è Bella…

Zeina: Almost.  It didn’t go that far, but still…  Playful is too strong a term, but it was a good way pour faire passer la pillule.

The second part of Toon’s interview with Zeina will follow on the blog soon, same time, same bat-channel.