Today we have the second part of Toon Horsten’s fascinating interview with the Lebanese-French artist and writer Zeina Abirached (the first part can be found here if you missed it), discussing her black and white, autobiographical comics which recall her childhood growing up in the Lebanon during the bitter civil war of the 1980s (which was, sadly, a regular feature on the nightly news of the period), the role of religion, language, memory and identity and powerful female figures. The interview originally appeared in Flemish in Stripgids and we’re indebted to them for allowing us to share it here with our readers and to Wim Lockefeer for translating it for us:
Toon: The strongest characters in your book are nearly all women.
Zeina: Is it that obvious? Well, I guess it’s true.
Toon: Does that reflect on the war? Or more on yourself?
Zeina: I think on both. But I must add that all characters really existed. I didn’t make anybody up. And there is Chucri, who manages the apartment building, and who is a very strong male character. Amongst the women, there is especially the character of Anhala, who seems to be able to do anything and is always ready to help people. Ze takes care of the children, bakes cakes, picks up the telephone… Her presence gave us great confidence; we could not be harmed. The tapestry in the hall of our apartment played the same part: it was some sort of a talisman, the proof that we were safe. But I use the dragon on that tapestry in the book also as a symbol for the war, which stays outside for the rest of the book.
(Zeina Abirached at a signing session, pic borrowed from the A Tout Livre site)
Toon: Maybe Anhala is such a strong character because she doesn’t flee. She stays in the apartment – war or no war – and takes care of everybody.
Zeina: That’s correct. Ze also had a very strange history, like she didn’t come from anywhere. As a servant woman she followed a family from generation to generation. She worked with the great-grandmother, with the grandmother, the mother and then with Farah and her husband Ramzi. You felt that she didn’t have any other connections with the outside world.
Toon: You lived right near the demarcation line. What was that border based on? Politics? Religion?
Zeina: Religion, predominantly. I’ll not go too deep into details, because it was all quite complicated, but basically it was a civil war between Muslims and Christians, with the presence of Palestinian refugees and the difficult relation with Israel as complicating factors. As a rule, East-Beirut was Christian, and West-Beirut was for the Muslims. That line changed quite often during the fifteen years that the war lasted.
There wasn’t a wall, like in Berlin. Some parts of the city belonged to the East, and later to the West. Or vice versa. Sometimes you could cross the border to the other side, at other times that was very dangerous. It was quite a flexible thing, that demarcation line. And you also had Christians who got stuck in the Western part, and vice versa.
Only when I was about ten years old, I went to the ‘other side’ for the first time. It was in West-Beirut that it was fairly peaceful, whereas in East-Beirut combat raged between several competing Christian factions. The first two days in West-Beirut I couldn’t believe we were still in the same country. And it was a particular shock that people were able to understand me when I spoke Arabic. It goes to show how something like a demarcation line defines how a child experience space.
Toon: When you read Lebanese writers like Amin Maalouf, you can’t help but noticing that they often write about identity. I can imagine that a war has its impact on the development of the identity of a young child…
Zeina: At the time of the civil war, your religion was still mentioned on your identity card. They even went so far that you had to be either a Christian or a Muslim. There was no alternative. Because I only went to the Western part of the city when I wasn’t little anymore, I had never questioned that. I was Lebanese, and a Christian, because I was born in a Lebanese, Christian family. Only later I started thinking this over.
Toon: I knew that Lebanon had been a French mandate zone for a certain time. Almost every cultural reference in your book refers to France and the Francophone: Enrio Macia, Tintin, Cyrano… Is the bond between France and Lebanon that tight?
Zeina: People still speak French in Lebanon, and I suspect that we inherited the culture together with the language. There still is a French-speaking tradition in Lebanon, but I think that this was more dominant in my family than with other people. My grandfather on my father’s side, whom I’ve never known, had lived through the time of the French mandate, and he educated his children in a particularly Francophile way. And that was later passed onto us. At school, I got my French as well as my Lebanese baccalaureate… I feel related to both traditions. I live in Paris now, and I try to return to Lebanon at least twice a year.
Toon: A real French-Lebanese woman, so to speak. Not unlike Amin Maalouf, whom we spoke about before.
(a scene from 38 Rue Youssef Semaani by Zeina Abirached, published Editions Cambourakis)
Zeina: Indeed. And I couldn’t miss any of the two. Did you read Maalouf’s Les Identités Murtrières (In The Name Of Identity), his essay on identity?
Toon: That’s the book in which he relates how he is a Lebanese in France, and French in Lebanon. Even though he states that identity is never a singular given. It’s everything at once, the result of birth, education, experience… Identity, that’s a thousand little things shaping you into what you are, he says.
Zeina: Exactly. I thought that was a very interesting idea. End being thrown back and forth between France and Lebanon, I can relate to that. Thanks to that situation, I can look at Lebanon and my youth there from a distance… I’d never have been able to create Swallows’ Play if I’d still been living in Beirut.
Toon: If you look at the situation now, it looks as if Lebanon is predominantly the victim of the fact that it borders with Israel.
Zeina: That too. But it’s not just that: there’s a lot more. But the problems in Lebanon will never be solved if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict doesn’t get sorted. Plus there’s a lot of corruption, and quite a few people who suffer from a strange kind of amnesia. Many politicians who played a part during the civil war are still in power. And if they aren’t anymore, then their sons have taken their places. When it comes to that, people didn’t wise up. It’s getting better then six months ago, and it’s a lot better than two years ago, but it’s still far from solved.
Toon: Do you have the feeling that people in Europe understand what’s happening in Lebanon?
Zeina: Ab-so-lu-te-ly not. I don’t even think that many people over there still know where it’s at. It is very complicated. You have to know the chronology of everything that has happened since the independence, in order to gain some insight into the situation. In Lebanon there are eighteen different communities and religions. So, even if you make abstraction of the political and geo-political situation in the Middle-East, it’s still quite difficult to grasp.
When Lebanon became independent, all important government functions were distributed amongst Muslims and Christians based on the number of people they represented. At that moment the Christians were the majority. The constitution states that the president should be a Maronitic Christian, the prime minister has to be a Sunni, etc. But that distribution no longer corresponds with the demographic reality of today. Christians now are a minority, and the Shiites have become much more important…
All this is currently not really being disputed yet, because there are so many other things in Lebanon that need to be solved first. But it is quite revealing about the role of religion in Lebanon.
Toon: And at the same time, I’m afraid that for the average European there’s no difference between a Tunisian, an Iranian or a Lebanese.
Zeina Abirached: Oh, well. I have to live with that, every day. I think this is related to the obsession of the Western media with Islam, and the way in which every Muslim is a terrorist in that view. I’m quite often asked, “What do the Islamists in Lebanon think of your work?”. And then you have to go and explain that there are no Islamists in Lebanon, that there’s freedom of thought and expression, that you can write whatever you want…
Toon: All of your graphic novels up till now were about your youth in Beirut. Have you finished that now, or is there still more to come?
Zeina: When I was working on Swallows’ Play, I was thinking of doing something completely different afterwards: a completely fictional story, in colour. But in the end inspiration from my youth still runs freely.
At the moment I’m working on a project that’s particularly related to another of George Perec’s books, Je me Souviens (I Remember – Wim), in which he collects his personal memories in paragraphs that all start with “I remember…”. His book is a collection of memories that have gone missing in history, but that at the same time do make up our collective consciousness. At the end of the book a notice by his publisher says he has included a few blank pages at Perec’s request, to enable the reader to add his own personal memories. Which should start with “I remember…” When I read that, I thought, let’s just do that as a graphic novel. And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.
(cover to Je me Souviens by and (c) Zeina Abirached, published Editions Cambourakis)
It’s a very pleasant way of working, tracking down my memories, whether they are important or trivial, personal or general, and then get them on paper with as few words as possible. Sometimes I try to catch a memory in one single image; sometimes I elaborate further on one anecdote, like Perec this. But in pictures.
Zeina Abirached’s latest book, Je me Souviens (I Remember), was published recently by Cambourakis. This interview by Toon Horsten first appeared in the respected Belgian comics art journal Stripgids; again FPI would like to thank Toon, Zeina and Stripgids for allowing us to reproduce it here and thanks to our Foreign Correspondent Wim Lockefeer for translating it into English for us.
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