ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the documentation of the ‘urbicide’ of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and modes of post-war urban reconstruction in two recent Lebanese comics, Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (2011) and Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows (2012). For Martin Coward, urbicide is the intentional destruction of the built urban environment in order to transform a heterogeneous society into a sectarian and ethnically homogenous one (2009). Framed as memoirs that recount the authors’ childhood experience of urban warfare in Beirut, both Ziadé and Abirached recover the private space of their childhood homes to foreground an historically overlooked narrative of everyday resilience, one which is then mobilised to reconstruct a democratic and heterogeneous public space within contemporary Beirut. As for much Lebanese fiction in the early 21st century, they reclaim through their child protagonists’ perspectives a ‘passive survival’ narrative that is oriented towards conflict resolution in the present—these comics are both informed by the sectarian division and traumatic histories that remain indelibly marked into the physical and psychological infrastructure of contemporary Beirut, but they self-reflexively document these divisions in order to heal and transcend them.
Though formally very different, Ziadé and Abirached both use the unique architecture of comics, with its combination of panels and gutters (or presences and absences), to look back to the traumatic violence of the war (to remember it) but also to eschew any political or religious affiliation (to forget it). Meanwhile, the grid of the comic and the grid of the city are conflated, as Ziadé and Abirached use comics’ spatial form to reconstruct the city as an archive—they each draw on the safety of their private lives in order to reconstruct post-war Beirut as public space, that is, an open, democratic space rather than a ghettoised, divided one. Ziadé and Abirached reconstruct these private spaces as alternative public spheres in the post-urbicidal present, as their depictions of private spaces circulate materially through the public space of the city. In so doing, both artists reconnect their readers to the resilient, everyday lives of the war’s victims, mobilising this history in order to, first, resist selective memorialisation towards political ends so as to heal the traumatic past and, second, look forward to the reconstruction of a city still divided along sectarian lines.
