Barrack Rima on Her Beirut Trilogy & Why Art Is (and Sometimes Isn’t) A Path to Liberation
By Layla Faraj
Barrack Zailaa Rima’s time-hopping graphic-novel-trilogy Beirut is out this fall from Invisible Publishing in Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek’s co-translation. In it, Rima and her family serve as guides to the city as we travel through time, hopping over to a Beirut of the 1950s and 60s and, in another breath, through the trash crisis of 2015.
A former member of the groundbreaking Beirut-based Samandal comix collective, Rima is the author of several graphic novels, 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). An excerpt of Rima’s work, “Nap Before Noon,” appeared in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, tr. David Kanbergs.
As part of our Women in Translation Month coverage, Rima and ArabLit’s Layla Faraj spoke about the forthcoming trilogy in an interview that’s been edited for length and clarity.
Also today, read an excerpt from Beirut.
Throughout the three sections of this trilogy, there is a tension between those who remain in Beirut and those who leave. Can you speak more on the relationship you have to this question of remaining and leaving? How does this “outsider-insider” position inform your own artistic and storytelling practice?
Barrack Zailaa Rima: There are always relationships between everything and its opposite. This is the idea. Leaving and remaining it’s—for me—my story, because I left, and some friends stayed there, but I always try to go back. And I thought I was trying to go back to the place, but actually I was trying to go back to the time, not to the place. And so this is the concept of remaining. I still remain there. I left, and I remained. Now, how does this influence my process of creation? It is everything. In the process of creation, you need to experiment with one thing and its opposite. And what is essential to comics is that you have these opposites.
The main opposite is that you have—at the same time—an instant and a duration, because they are on the same page. You have the sequence and the singular moment. You also have the contrast between the text and image, and the time it takes to read them: to read an image it takes an instant, but to read a text takes time. You also have the contrast between the outside and the inside. What you call here, outsider-insider, it’s not only outside in the sense that I am far from Lebanon, and inside to mean that I am in Lebanon. It’s also the visible and the invisible. In Sufism they say, al-zahir wa al-badin, that which is revealed to us and that which is hidden. In comics, there are a lot of things which are hidden. So all of these dichotomies play a role in this story.
I don’t like to answer this question saying that I am an exile, or to talk about my nostalgia for my country, or to sit and draw a tree or a bird, that isn’t what this question is about for me. It’s more about how everything is in contrast. It isn’t positive or negative. My exile isn’t something negative. People say “I miss eating a man’ousheh, or labneh”, but I have that here. I have man’ousheh and labneh. But I am also a stranger. Without a doubt. We are strangers here, in the countries we migrate to, but we are also strangers to the countries we migrated from. We are strangers to them. I no longer say that I am returning to Lebanon. I say that I am going to Lebanon, and returning to Brussels. But still, I am a stranger here. I am not Belgian. Sure, I speak French and I can get along just fine, but I am not Belgian.
The hakawati plays a vital role in this story, appearing in different sections of the trilogy and is represented by different people, from taxi drivers to little children. What is it about the figure of the oral storyteller that attracts you as a visual and written storyteller?
BZR: The hakawati is alive and present in all my works. For instance, a comic book I made in 1998 was titled “Le conteur du Caire,” which can be translated as “The Hakawati of Cairo.” This book is about a quick meeting I had with Youssef Chahine. I was a film student, and I was going to Egypt in the hopes that I would get an internship with him. Of course it didn’t work out, but I did meet with him and I then wrote this comic book about that meeting, where Youssef is the Hakawati in Cairo.
Youssef actually only appears on one page; the rest was about Egypt and what I discovered in Cairo. I remember thinking “Wow they speak just like they do in the movies here.” I’m serious, this was my impression of Cairo! I just kept thinking about how they spoke just like the people from movies.
The truth is, we as a people don’t get to know the hakawati. I only saw one once, in Marrakech, but he was different from a hakawati in the Mashriq. He was standing in the middle of a square, and people were gathering around him, and he was telling stories. He was holding a stick and speaking in Darija, so I couldn’t really understand everything he said. For us, in the Mashriq, and specifically in Syria, there was a hakawati up until not too long ago, maybe the beginning of the 2000s, but I never went to see him. He used to go and sit in a cafe, and tell a story. When cinema and television came around the hakawati began to disappear.
This role of an orator in a coffee shop disappeared, but new versions of the hakawati emerged. There is a theater troupe called The Hakawati Troup in Jerusalem. In Beirut, there is a different theater troupe named after the idea of a hakawati. They took this idea of the hakawati, that he would stand up in front of an audience, but it would invariably be different. Rather than sitting in a coffee shop we are now sitting in a theater.
In comics, there is something really contradictory about importing the idea of a hakawati, since comics are not an auditory medium. Now, personally, I am shy. I don’t have the guts to stand in front of an audience and tell a story, but I can draw and you can say that there is a hakawati in my stories. In “The Hakawati of Cairo,” my hakawati declares, “I am a hakawati, but not in the traditional sense. I am a hakawati of ink and paper.” So this hakawati has shown up in all my works, in the Beirut Trilogy, and in Danse le Taxi, and even now, I am working on something new, and this idea that there is someone telling the story remains.
For us, in the non-oral arts, this role is filled by the narrator. That’s who the hakawati is. They’re the ones who tell the story and my stories always have them. The narrator for me is a persona, a kind of character that we invent, that I have invented, to hide behind. Because this character is telling my story. My work is autobiographical, but it also isn’t me. There is nothing in my stories that proves to you that what I am saying is factual. The narrator plays this role for me.
And why is he so important? He is also the figure that makes it possible to share a story with the public. Not with yourself, or your aunt, or your sister, or your daughter, but with someone you don’t know. The narrator makes a story universal. It isn’t just about ego. What becomes important is the question of how to share the story. Everyone can see themselves in a well-written narrator.
This work speaks on the 2015 protests following the trash crisis in Beirut and the ensuing protests more generally. In an interview discussing another one of your works, “In the Taxi”, you said that “Liberation is a path that never ends, we are never completely free.” Can you speak on this path to liberation and the role your art plays as you move along this path? What advice would you give to young artists who hope to answer the call to liberation with their work?
BZR: Art, naturally, is a path to liberation. Actually, no. Art can be a path to liberation. It isn’t all the time. Sometimes it can have the opposite effect. But it can be a path to liberation. Why? I actually don’t know why, but it’s clear and obvious. It doesn’t need to be discussed. How? We can discuss how. The first thing is that art allows you to break rules. You make your own rules on how you want to work, even though these are always changing. When you’re thinking about breaking away from restrictions, you’re thinking about why those restrictions exist and what role they serve. You ask yourself, what would happen if I did this, or if I changed that? You have no idea where you’re going beforehand. This is art. Not knowing where you are going.
You’ll think to yourself, maybe I should go down this road to see what happens, only to realize that you don’t like where you’re going. You’ll take a right turn. You’ll stop. You’ll go back to where you once were. That’s art. And what is liberation other than to constantly be moving in this way? It’s about being on a path, it isn’t about arriving, or wanting to arrive. You’ll never arrive. It’s about moving along this path. And you can stop, take a break, eat a date. That’s all okay. It’s still enough. That’s still the path to liberation.
One aspect of my work is my deep relationship to my dreams. I catalog them, analyze them. I have vivid experiences in my dreams, and I draw them. My previous comic featured in ArabLit, “An Afternoon Nap,” which I started before my transition, is about my dreams. That book was like therapy for me, regardless of whether or not there was an audience for it.
I have gone through many difficult times in my life, and if it wasn’t for art, I would have died. Art saved me.
This all means nothing to the public, or to the idea of Art, but it is important to me as an individual, as a person. Every person is in need of some form of therapy in order to be liberated. My advice to young artists would be to keep trying and don’t despair. It’s hard. It isn’t easy. It needs work. Art needs work, without a doubt. But work. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful.
In the foreword to this new English translation, your work is described as a “visual archive”, detailing how many of the locations featured in this graphic novel no longer exist after the explosion of 2020. How has this changed your relationship to this work, and to the way you view your artistic practice more generally?
BZR: Sometimes I feel like I have the ability to predict the future. I don’t know how, but I predicted it. Even though it isn’t too hard to predict that something like that would happen, and I didn’t know that there would be an explosion and that there would be such destruction, but I guess what I’m saying is that the situation in the country was really dire. It still is dire. There may be a war on the horizon, we really don’t know what will happen.
There was another time when I was able to accurately predict that something bad was going to happen in Lebanon. I used to write for a column in a Lebanese newspaper, where I would publish a page of comics every week. In that publication, I drew a page where Beirut was drowned beneath piles of garbage. This was before the crisis that happened, where Beirut really did drown. That was eight months later. So I felt in that moment that I predicted what was going to happen. It’s a scary thing, that these places are so volatile.
How this changed my relationship to my work, well, right now there are bigger things. Now there is a genocide. Something like that, that is so gruesome, of course it’s changed my relationship to my work. But how? When the genocide in Gaza started, I stopped drawing for nine months. I didn’t know how to anymore. At the time, I was working on a book, which I’m still working on now, about death. The story takes place after death. I started to feel like that book didn’t mean anything anymore—it didn’t mean anything to write such a thing when there was a genocide happening at the same time. Now I’m working on it again and everything is different. It’s still the same story, but really it’s all different.
For my work, I need to constantly be connected to everything that is happening. It can be my personal life, but also the general life around me: in Lebanon, Belgium, Gaza, Sudan, next door to my house. So my relationship to this work, and to my artistic practice, is changing all the time, because gruesome things are happening all the time. If not in Beirut, then in Gaza, and if not in Gaza, then in Sudan, and if not Sudan then Myanmar… even here in Brussels. I think of my neighbor who is abusing his wife, or those who lie asleep on the sidewalk because they don’t have a house. All of this stops me from sitting down and drawing romantic art about flowers and birds and trees. It’s indecent. If this work can in any way, for me or for others, be a path to liberation, then that’s what I hope to achieve.
Also: Read an excerpt from Beirut.
Layla Faraj is a rising senior at Barnard College studying English and Literary Translation. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love section of the New York Times, in a short film in collaboration with Whatsapp, and elsewhere.