Lamia Ziadé’s ‘Rue de Phénicie’
Lamia Ziadé’s ‘Rue de Phénicie’
By Olivia Snaije
Lebanese artist and writer Lamia Ziadé’s fifth illustrated book for adults, Rue de Phénicie, (Phoenicia Street), is a work of intellectual rigor and personal honesty. It’s a story that begins with finding hedonistic joy in Paris and grows progressively more complicated by her excavations of the past and grappling with the present.
Published in France in October 2025, the memoir spans more than 35 years of Ziadé’s life, focusing on her time in Paris, where she first arrived to attend art school. With fewer illustrations than in her other books, and a number of personal photographs, Ziadé charts her political coming-of-age against the backdrop of her appetite for light-hearted joy and freedom. In the late ‘80s, she approaches this freedom with gusto, having come to Paris from civil-war-era Beirut, where she had lived mostly indoors as a child in order to avoid violence, as she described in her 2010 illustrated memoir Bye Bye Babylon.
At once ironic, self-deprecating, funny, and increasingly serious, Rue de Phénicie, written between January 2022 and June 2024, revisits the moments of her earlier books and arrives at an awareness similar to what Lebanese journalist and writer Lina Mounzer describes of existing during the genocide in Gaza: “Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”
For Ziadé, this discovery was in process for a long time, even if it reached a breaking point after October 7, 2023. As a longtime reader of Ziadé’s, I have followed the unfolding of her thought in the works that followed Bye Bye Babylon in 2010—published in 2015, 2017, and 2021—the last, less than a year after the Beirut port explosion.
Freedom and joy
But if we turn back in the 1980s and early 90s—as Ziadé describes her early years in Rue de Phénicie—she gives herself over delightfully to her new life in Paris. She loves every moment of it, from art-house cinemas to concerts, restaurants, bars, and dancing, to drinking and smoking until dawn. She also recalls the moments of joy when France wins the World Cup in 1998. This event is also described by Faïza Guène in her 2018 novel Millenium Blues, in which she explores the moment as a brief period when France might have chosen a different path, toward accepting its diversity. This sentiment is echoed in Ladj Ly’s 2019 film, Les Misérables.
As Ziadé is enjoying her first job in fashion, then as a freelance illustrator, she is also learning that in France there are Arabs (Christian Lebanese Arabs are acceptable) and then there are Arabs, or those from North Africa. The French hold a grudge against these Arabs for colonizing them, she writes.
Ziadé moves briefly to New York with her French husband and children, shortly after 9/11 and during the US invasion of Iraq, where more contradictions are revealed—of reveling in what the city has to offer while seeing US political manipulations up close. Back in France, she resumes her life, which includes nights out and making art, much of it erotic. In this period, she pushes to the back of her mind words that keep surfacing, including “injustice,” “racism,” “imperialism,” “war,” “occupation,” “destruction,” and “death.”
And then came 2006
Then Israel bombs Lebanon for 33 days during the summer of 2006. It’s at this point that Ziadé decides to write Bye Bye Babylon (2010), her first book with written text, which recounts her childhood during the early years of the Lebanese civil war. This is also when she dives into her father’s library and becomes captivated by her research. Thirty years later, she writes in Rue de Phénicie, “the pieces of the puzzle of my childhood memories magically find their place amidst historical events.”
As the narrative continues, she begins to notice violence more and more, whether it’s in Iraq, Libya, Palestine, or happenings closer to home, such as the 2015 attacks in Paris and the ensuing anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment. Conversations with friends—for whom “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” is like a mantra—become strained. But “Who am I,” she writes in Rue de Phénicie, “to deny this affirmation? I’m Lebanese, impassioned, very angry, and frankly, the last person one should take seriously on the subject.”
Between dinner parties, night clubs, and holidays, Ziadé goes to her first demonstration in 2010 to support a humanitarian flotilla trying to reach Gaza. She investigates cluster bombs in southern Lebanon and explores her Arab roots when she discovers the singer Asmahan. She realizes that she has been saturated in western culture from the start and suspects that this influence extends to her socio-political views.
Recollection and return
Her next book, Ô Nuit Ô Mes Yeux (O Night O My Eyes, 2015) traces the destinies of female Arab singers over 70 years, with major events in the Middle East in the background. Of her research for the book, she writes, “This emotional and intellectual return to the Orient will radically alter my perception of France and the western world.”
Her next book, Ma Très Grande Mélancolie Arabe, published in 2017, (My Great Arab Melancholy, translation by Emma Ramadan, 2024) was a process of “understanding the mechanics of east and west.” In it, she tracks a century of politics in the Middle East.
When this book was published, it enjoyed the same success as her previous books in France, but she notices that journalists always skirt the Palestinian “question” in their reviews.
In 2020, following the Beirut port explosion, Ziadé returned to Beirut to help her parents with their home, which is in shambles. One of her tasks was to organize her father’s library, photographing all the books as an archive. Little was she to know, she writes, that these are days she would remember as the good ones.
Increasingly incensed by world events—from the assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to political events in France—she wants to burn down the house. “You’re not going to burn anything,” her companion JB tells her. “The only thing you can do to let off steam is to write and draw.”
A friend of Ziadé’s aptly describes her state of mind as a reflection of the 16th century painting, by Joachim Patinir. In it, Charon is ferrying souls across the River Styx between the underworld and paradise. The human souls he is transporting must choose their destination. Patinir shows a soul turned towards perdition. In the description of the painting on the Prado Museum’s site, it states: “There is no doubt that Patinir here reflects the pessimism of his turbulent times.”
In the end, the choice Ziadé makes in Rue de Phénicie—and in her oeuvre as a whole—is not to turn away from the violence.
Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.