Beirut – Barrack Zailaa Rima

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.

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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. 

Invisible Publishing, 2024