Decades in the making, graphic novelist and filmmaker Barrack Zailaa Rima's Beirut trilogy--equal parts love letter and mournful lamentation for a lost, crisis-ridden homeland--debuts in English, thoughtfully translated by Carla Calargé and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek. The longtime collaborators, who specialize in Arab graphic titles, also provide a contextualizing, illuminating introduction to Rima's global status as an award-winning Arab comics maker. Beirut comprises three books: Beirut (1995), Beirut Bye Bye (2015), and Beirut Rewind (2017)--each spare volume recounts a temporary return to Rima's birth country. Although Rima remains based in Brussels after earning her degree at the Brussels' Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the mid-1990s, "fleeing," she insists, "is not a solution."
In Beirut, Rima re-creates the once "sumptuous Beiruti house" of her youth, abandoned and occupied by others, just as Beirut is home to growing refugee populations, particularly from Palestine (and later, Syria). In Beirut Bye Bye, Rima is traveling with her family when their intended visit to the sea traps them at the bottom of a surreally expansive garbage dump. A literary tour brings Rima back again in Beirut Rewind, in which books become portals for immersive understanding and desperate escape.
Although Beirut might seem slim, Rima's art significantly and impressively expands her narratives. The electrifying mix of double-page spreads, irregularly hand-drawn and borderless panels, jarring all-black backgrounds, and intricate details alternating with simple outlines reflects the unsettled chaos that is quotidian for generations of Beirut's residents. Rima acts as privileged cipher, adroitly navigating the fragmentation--personal, communal, national--of being both insider and outsider. --Terry Hong