Beirut

Barrack Zailaa Rima’s celebrated graphic novel trilogy, gathered together and available in English for the first time.

“Full of rewarding fissures and detours, embracing every complication and every contradiction that comes up. A brilliant political portrait of a city.”—Michael DeForge, author of Birds of Maine

Beirut is an intimate and poetic look at a beloved city that is at once autobiographical, documentary, and fantastic in nature. In Rima’s hands, Beirut is a labyrinth of alleyways and stories, a theater teeming with revolts, and a cenotaph to buried memories. With Rima and her family serving as our guides, and through chance encounters with incongruous figures (a librarian, a garbage collector—or the city’s last storyteller), we discover a city that longs for its Golden Age even as it is transformed by neoliberal forces in the aftermath of the Civil War—an evolution whose future remains uncertain.

Dreamlike, tender, and ever-attentive to the beauty of the line, Beirut offers a glimpse into Lebanon’s past and present, which must be pieced together to form a whole. From the promise of the political activism of its youth in the 1950s and 1960s, to the grating difficulties of the 2015 garbage crisis and the struggle to accommodate and assimilate refugees, this is a journey through a city, and an expedition into the idea of home, that only Rima could shepherd. No matter the detours.

Read an interview with Barrack at ArabLit.

Read an interview with Barrack at World Literature Today.

Praise for Beirut

“Zailaa Rima makes her English-language debut with this robust mix of memoir, history, and magical realism, which gathers her graphic novel trilogy into one volume. […] Zailaa Rima nimbly handles the shifts in time with evocative, gestural drawings that capture how sociopolitical upheavals reverberate across generations. Throughout, her restless blend of the personal and the political thrums with urgency. Readers will have a tough time putting this one down.”—Publishers Weekly

“The opening lines of white text on black give way to rich, expressive patches of ink carved up with stark white forms and fine lines, building a city through its architectural geometry and imperfections and through the body language of a street vendor negotiating his cart against heavy traffic and a young refugee shot dead in the street. The panels click along like a film reel, narrated by a Hakawati, a storyteller who speaks through the entire cast: cab driver, singer, author surrogate, mother and daughter in search of the sea, Greek chorus of trash shovelers questioning the nature of the narrative in which they find themselves. The three volumes grow progressively personal, and the art becomes more representational, stiffening into detailed figures cut out against their backgrounds like a black box stage play, delivering elegiac dialogue that dissects existence. All three volumes favor atmosphere over narrative as they wryly but earnestly ponder the refugee’s wandering out of time, a mother’s long-ago involvement in a movement, the machinery of political change, and historical amnesia. Opaque but arresting.”—Kirkus Review

“Decades in the making, graphic novelist and filmmaker Barrack Zailaa Rima’s Beirut trilogy—equal parts love letter and mournful lamentation for a lost, crisis-ridden homeland—debuts in English, thoughtfully translated by Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek… Although Beirut might seem slim, Zailaa Rima’s art significantly and impressively expands her narratives. The electrifying mix of double-page spreads, irregularly hand-drawn and borderless panels, jarring all-black backgrounds, and intricate details alternating with simple outlines reflects the unsettled chaos that is quotidian for generations of Beirut’s residents. Rima acts as privileged cipher, adroitly navigating the fragmentation—personal, communal, national—of being both insider and outsider.”—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

“It is impossible to do justice to Zailaa Rima’s Beirut. The collection is a visual and philosophical journey, both forwards and backwards in time, that one must make themselves. After which, as Zailaa Rima invites, one will be well-served to critique this current inadequate world and strive towards a better one. Yalla, a better world awaits!”—Salma Hussain, the temz review

A graphic novelist and filmmaker, Barrack Zailaa Rima was born in 1972 in Tripoli, Lebanon, and has lived in Brussels for more than thirty years. While she explored a wide variety of media and art forms in her early career, Barrack now devotes herself to comics.

A former member of the Beirut-based Samandal collective, she is the author of several graphic novels, editorial cartoons, and compelling works of comics journalism including Le conteur du Caire, Beyrouth, and Sociologia. Her latest graphic novel, Dans le taxi, published by Alifbata Editions, received the prestigious Mahmoud Kahil Award for the best graphic novel from the MENA region (Lebanon, 2022) and the Grenades Literary Prize (Belgium, 2022).

Translators Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek are specialists of the MENA region. As longtime collaborators, they have co-edited a volume of Nouvelles études francophones (34.1, 2019) on (the margins of) Francophone comics, and they have written more than a dozen of articles on graphic works from the Arab world.