Barrack Zailaa Rima's ​Beirut

Reviewed by Salma Hussain

Reviewer's Note and Content Warning:

The city of Beirut has been in the international news lately because of recent attacks. Last week (the week of Sept. 15-21, 2024), the city and surrounding areas endured explosions of communication devices in which at least 37 were killed (including two children and a healthcare worker) and more than 3,000 were physically injured (including becoming permanently disabled). Trauma from this unprecedented form of cowardly and inhumane warfare left everyone who knows, loves and/or lives in Beirut reeling.

That same week and continuing today (Sept. 22, 2024), attacks by Israel have intensified with carpet bombing and air missiles striking residential Beirut. There has been more death, and countless wounded. This is an ongoing situation that is unfolding in violent and traumatic ways. Please exercise self-care in reading the following review of Barrack Zailaa Rima’s graphic-novel trilogy, Beirut, which Rima wrote as a love letter to the complicated, beautiful, traumatized, hurting, resilient city of Beirut.

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(Invisible, 2024)

​QUESTION: 

​How to write a review that will do justice to filmmaker and visual artist Barrack Zailaa Rima’s graphic novel trilogy, Beirut?

​(MY) ANSWER:

​Create an out-of-the-box non-fiction review that will (somewhat) mirror the creativity of Rima’s own work(s) of art.

​WHO IS BARRACK ZAILAA RIMA?
 
Barrack Zailaa Rima was born in Tripoli, Lebanon in 1972 and has lived in Brussels for more than thirty years. Rima is a former member of the Beirut-based Samandal collective and the author of several graphic fictions, editorial cartoons and works of comic journalism. She has exhibited and published projects around the Mediterranean, Tunisia, Switzerland, Palestine, Italy, France, the US, and Germany. Rima’s latest graphic novel, Dans le taxi, received the prestigious Mahmoud Kahil Award for the best graphic novel from the MENA region and the Grenades Literary Prize.
 
WHAT IS BEIRUT?
 
Releasing from Invisible Publishing on September 17, 2024, Beirut is a collection of Rima’s three comics from over a two-decade period. Available in English for the first time, Beirut gathers and places together:

• Beirut (1995). In Rima’s words, this was “a year of hope.” Lebanon had just emerged from civil war and many Lebanese expatriates were preparing to move back home. This section is told from multiple POVs, incl. a tree, a garbage collector, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, ‘Oum Koulthoum’ speaking from her picture in the newspaper, a Palestinian refugee, and ‘one of the last Jews of Beirut.’ Early in the work, Rima alerts us to the multiplicity of voices utilized.

[NOTE: It would be remiss of me not to include this page by Rima in the voice of Hanzala, a Palestinian refugee. One, because it was written in 1995 and accurately reflects the politics of its time; two, because it remains shockingly and tragically relevant today; and three, because the art and history of assassinated cartoonist Naji al-Ali (who Rima references and imitates on this page) is worth learning about.]

• Beirut bye bye … (2015). Rima presents a city in the throes of a waste crisis. This real-life crisis which occurred in Beirut serves as a metaphor in Rima’s art for the traumas and problems impeding Beirut’s progress. Rima reveals a city ravaged by real estate developers who are fueled by petro-dollars, and depicts innocent civilians grappling with disconnection and disillusionment. This feeling of alienation (common for so many of us diasporans from the global south) is captured beautifully by Rima. 

• ​Beirut rewind (2017). In her final and most recent comic, the character of Rima’s mother recounts her youth under the Golden Age of Nasser’s pan-Arabism (a time of optimistic activism for Lebanese youth in the 1950s and 1960s).

Rima shows us that what followed this political activism was chaos and dissolution, a system so entrenched, corrupt and brutal that the much-desired change never occurred. In the final pages—which take place in a time that readers can intuit to be present-day—an assortment of characters meet in a living room for a “ziyara.”

And yet by no means is Rima’s Beirut devoid of hope and optimism. So as not to spoil reader enjoyment, I have left out the pages and panels which posit situations/questions that spark opening(s) for change. The idea that ‘one has to know the past in order to decipher the present and ultimately create a desired future’ is a refrain peppered throughout the collection. Rima never concludes that a better world is not possible; au contraire, she insists that it still is.
 
Enjoyed as the sum of its parts, Beirut is equal parts a love letter to the city of Beirut, a testament to the human spirit preserving under difficult political circumstances, and a wake-up call to our restrained and oppressed imagining(s) of a better world.
 
WHO TRANSLATED BEIRUT INTO ENGLISH (and wisely kept plenty of text in Arabic, and a smattering of text in French to reflect Beirut’s multi-lingual cosmopolitanism)?
 
Carla Calarge and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek are specialists of the MENA region. As long-time collaborators, they have a co-edited a volume of Nouvelles études francophones on (the margins of) Francophone comics and have written more than a dozen articles on graphic works from the Arab world. Their essay, Reframing Beirut’s visual archive: Barrack Zailaa Rima’s Beirut, opens Rima’s novel and thoughtfully illuminates the background and context of Rima’s work.
 
WHAT ELSE IS BEIRUT?

• A must-have for lovers of graphic novels (grid layouts are juxtaposed next to frameless panels; extensive white negative spaces contrast with solid black backgrounds; double-page panels, collages and ink blotches add variety and depth to the work; and the whole coalesces together to provide a feast for the eyes).
• A slim trilogy (112 pages) for curious novices, or aficionados of Middle Eastern history.
• A dream-like exploration of the complex experiences of exile, war, diaspora and belonging.
• An unpacking of “plot” and “story.”
• A love-letter to the city of Beirut, personal reflection + remembrance of a city in flux, and a call to all kinds of revolution/freedom.
• A visual and poetic ode to Beirut’s struggle and strength against all forms of waste.
• An invitation to critique oppressive systems and ideology. 

CONCLUSION:
 
It is impossible to do justice to 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 Rima invites, one will be well-served to critique this current inadequate world and strive towards a better one.
 
Yalla, a better world awaits!

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Images excerpted with permission from Beirut, by Barrack Zailaa Rima, translated by Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek (Invisible Publishing).

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​Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Temz Review, Queens Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Hong Kong Review, Ex-Puritan and Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. ​It was selected for ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List and shortlisted for the Geoffrey Wilson Historical Fiction prize.