Displaced Region: Graphic Novels of Untold Stories
American University of
Beirut, 2019
It is not easy for me as an artist who lived a civil war to talk about a neighboring civil war with an unprecedented magnitude. It is also uncomfortable for me as a descendent -from my mother’s side- of genocide and deportation imposed on the Christian Orthodox community under the Ottoman Empire during, before, and after the 1st world war, with haunting memories I thought buried forever.
Not surprisingly though, Comics Authors have always addressed civil wars, displacement, and genocide issues.
Most of us know Art
Spiegleman’s graphic novel “MAUS” where the author interviewed his father about
his experiences as a Polish Jew
and Holocaust
survivor.
Many of us are also familiar
with the work of Joe Sacco, the other American Comics’ artist and a narrator who
went to the frontlines of disturbed areas of conflicts such as the Balkans and
his related publications “Gorazde”, “the Fixer”, and “the Journalist”.
But Joe Sacco is mostly known in our region for his epic work entitled “Palestine”, digging into the roots of wars, displacement, occupation, a colonization that the Palestinian people endure, setting the standards of what we call nowadays “BD Reportage”. He was a pioneer in approaching issues related to our region, where it took others 2 decades to follow his footsteps, and disclose stories about global violence and mass migrations in our Modern History.
In the last few years, a new wave of graphic novels related to the above issues emerged in the comics market. Maybe, the Syrian ongoing tragedy was the trigger behind such awakening.
It could be also a pure
coincidence that in Europe, and since 2014 a major focus on the centennial
commemoration of the 1st World War took place. Funds were spent on
publications (and comic books especially) related to that era, where some of
the most dramatic and violent events reshaped our region. Publishers unleashed
without knowing, demons from the past through the voices and the perspective of
those who suffered the consequences.
It could be also that the new
“BD Reportage” genre is gaining ground within the graphic novel's audience looking for more real stories rather than fantasy fiction, pushing the Comics
authors into fields they never look at before, reporting and investigating big
issues in graphical narrative form.
What these voices point at in common, is the theme of Remembrance. When asked about the Holocaust, Hitler answered: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?“. 100 years later, authors (not all Armenians) revisited the remains of history in an attempt to engrave in the minds of young generations, stories, and graphical content so they “never forget”. “Medz Yeghern” (2010-2015) or the Great Crime as referred to within the Arminian diaspora, falls under this category. It might not be the 1st graphic novel, but definitely, the one that depicted the cruelest scenes, that ISIS might look tolerant in comparison to the absurdity of violence that it depicts. Highly documented, it became one of the visual references of the genocide.
“Le cahier à fleurs” (2011) another graphic novel put the “Armenian Question” in a modern context. It tries to be less violent, with a romance story in the background, defending a more conciliatory attitude towards the present, although stopping short at the idea of forgiveness.
With an attempt at reconciliation, 2 graphic novels were published in the same year of 2015 commemorating the event. “Le Fantôme Arménien” an account of the visit of an Armenian activist to Turkey accompanied by the ghosts of the past, the reactions of the public to his exhibit portraying photos of the genocide, and “Varto”, the story of a young Turk country boy, Hassan whose father asks him on his death bed to escort 2 little Armenian kids Varto and Maryam to a safe place to escape the genocide. Varto was safe but Maryam couldn’t cross the river, and to save her, Hassan stayed with her on the other side and married her afterward to protect her. Years later the descendants meet in France, but the wounds were so deep to heal.
If the Armenian genocide is alive today in our memories, other tragedies are barely remembered, such as the atrocities endured by the Christian Orthodox community under the Ottomans before, during, and after World War 1.
Soloup in “Aïvali” (2015), went in a quest to collect
oral history related to the tragedy under which 1.5 million Greeks were forced
out of their lands, and most of them died in the process of deportation (many
Turkish families were deported under the same agreement). Although most of the
book narrates untold historic accounts, Soloup focuses on the present,
especially after a friendship started between him and a Turkish family touring
the same city. But the weight of history and remembrance is heavier than any
reconciliation: “today, when we look towards Asia minor, we wonder what the
Turks are doing in our Ports” Soloup told his new friend and received a quick
reply “we also wonder what the Greeks are doing in our lands in Anatolia”.
Remembrance means also keeping the memory of the places and not only the narration of events. According to which side you’re on, places change their names.
Therefore, it is common that
original names of places surface again in collective memories: Aïvali or
Kydoniès, 2 names for the same idea and place. In Greek, it is the Quince
fruit, and in Turkish the place, where the fruit grows. Smyrna versus
Izmir.
The international community
is more familiar nowadays with the appellation of Kobani rather than Ayn
al-Arab, the land of “Rojava” (“the West” of Kurdistan) rather than
North of Syria. The same goes for cities in Occupied Palestine where the Jewish
nomination overcome the Arabic ones.
Deportation leaves behind unsolved issues. The major one is the identity crisis lived by the descendants. “Les pieds-noirs à la mer” (2013) et “Le petit fils d’Algérie” (2015), are accounts of the deportation of more than a million of French Algerian-born families after the independence in 1962. In the first graphic novel, Daniel ran away and took refuge with his grandparents who live in Marseille. In Algeria, the grandpa was a French dentist who married Louise, a native Jew, yet the grandfather is anti-Semitic and the grandmother hates Algerians but speaks only Arabic. The cousin is going to marry an Arab. The Book depicts the family account that is still anchored in the events of the past, with a mixture of racism, its contradictions, and its paradoxes.
In the second case, Joel Alessandra asks himself a legitimate question: Were his grandparents' exploiters, racists, or slavers? Were they close to the OAS? They left everything overnight, ruminating forever deep and legitimate resentment against this country, its inhabitants, and of course De Gaulle. In 2013, armed with his passport and a visa (and by the "indispensable" guide on the spot), Joel goes for the first time to Constantine, the city of his family. He is ready to face his fears and doubts. The book traces this journey, ... similar to that of thousands of families, and if it clears the confusion of the past, it deepened the confusion of Joel's emotions towards his family tragedy.
A perfect sample of autobiographical work of constructed identity is Michelle Standjofski’s graphic novel “Toutes les mers”. the book is divided into chapters collecting her ancestors' backgrounds through her mother’s memories, the evacuation on Greek boats of her Italian grand grandmother Maria Caftaro with her single child EMILIA, among 250,000 people during the infamous Smyrna Grand Fire in 1922. From Piraeus in Greece, she meets her Italian second husband, they move to Beirut. In Beirut, EMILIA meets MIKHAEL, the son of a Russian General killed in the civil war, who himself escaped with tens of thousands of people the Bolshevik persecution and landed by boats in Turkish Gallipoli, and from there move to Beirut. Emilia and MIKHAEL meet in Beirut where VERA the mother is born. Michelle’s father originally from Istanbul (from Polish origin Standjofski) ended up in Beirut where he fell in love with VERA, and …… tada, here comes Michelle. Don’t worry, it took me several readings to grasp the family tree. Michelle embraced the complexity of her ethnic and cultural backgrounds like any third generation of migrants who ended up in Lebanon. and speaking of identity (if Lebanese identity is defined by multi-cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds) Michelle is more attached to her constructed identity than others, embracing her native country and refusing to leave it despite the horrors of the civil war.
The search for identity backgrounds becomes more difficult when faced with the silence of the elderly who lived the event and moved on. “Si Je t’oublie Alexandrie” (if I forget you Alexandria) (2018) reopens the case of thousands of Egyptian-European communities who were forced to leave Egypt under the rise of the Arab Nationalist ideology in the 50s, and in this case the Egyptian Jewish community after the 1948 Arab Israeli war. Fully integrated into his French environment, Jérémie Dres tries to investigate the whole history behind his grandparents' emigration, a journey that took him from Alexandria to Tel-Aviv, and back to Paris, to end up with a heavyweight of remorse that his grandfather (an old communist activist) dissipates with the closing sentence: who cares, “after all, this is a very, very old history”.
“Le Silence de Lounès” (Lounès Silence) (2013), retraces the reverse path of the identity quest. Noureddine couldn’t deal with his father’s silence regarding the motives of his immigration to France after the independence of Algeria. Thinking that his father was a Pied-Noir and therefore a “traitor”, he goes back to Algeria to join the Islamic extremists. At the end of his journey, Noureddine discovers that his father was a prominent free fighter, a kind of a national hero, who fled to France to escape the persecution against the Kabyle population by the new Arab leaders in power. It is the reverse path, negating the newly acquired identity to reclaim the original one and the deception that comes afterward!
Ironically, the Past meets with the Present too. Instead of digging into the History of the region, some Authors went to report actual tragedies.
“Kobane Calling” (2016), is the most influential graphic novel from the frontline. Zerocalcare took the road from Mosul in Iraq to Erbil/ Kurdistan to the Turkish-Syrian borders to the Kurdish Rojava region. He reported for months to the account of the Italian newspaper Liberazione, with sarcasm, black humor but also sadness and bitterness about the heroic fight and resistance by Kurdish women fighters facing alone ISIS in its highest moment of glory in Kobané. during the course of the narrative, Zerocalcare depicts tragic stories of persecution and deportation of the Kurdish population in our modern history.
Speaking of reporting, what makes comics unique as a genre is that they can represent visually the essence of the situation that a documentary or a photograph, or an essay can’t do. “Our heart is there, from this roof we took over the whole of Kobané. Meter by meter”. “And what strength must this woman have to bear the weight of the wreckage of all this humanity?” or what the wise man of the village always repeats rightfully to the author: “It’s the Derik Martyrs’ cemetery, [what you find here] it’s worth more than a thousand essays on geopolitics”.
2 remarkable graphic works stand out by choosing to go personal and intimate. Instead of collecting stories about emigration, the Tunisian collective “Lab619” chose a more artistic and personal approach, which gave each artist the freedom of expressing himself. “Al-Hijra” is one of the most Powerful poetic and personal narrations of the theme, with powerful visual representation. In parallel, “Amour minuscule” tells a love story between an Argentinian young girl IRIS and a Syrian university student Ismail. He has to leave for Syria where the communication is lost. During this forced separation, Iris discovers that she is pregnant while Ismail is fighting to return home. Once reunited the difficulty for Ismail to overcome his trauma leaves the relationship open to an unknown ending.
A displaced region. from the mountains of Sinjar in Iraq to the forgotten lands of South Sudan, graphic novels were the only medium where artists visually recreated untold accounts of persecutions, deportations, and atrocities committed by terrorist groups or governmental militias.
A displaced region. From refugee camps in Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, to the unwelcomed emigrants' camps in Europe, artists volunteered to go, witness, defend and collect stories of people with names, coming from villages and cities that have names, running away from torturers who have names, waiting for an unknown future.
Artists from Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany, narrating the stories of thousands of people coming out of history books, from the streets of Damascus, down the Iraqi mountains, or crossing the Libyan deserts, to perish in the Mediterranean Sea, or to be stopped at the border of civilization. Through these artists, Madaya mom, la dame de Damas, Salima, Haytham, Noureddine, Zenobia, and thousands of others won’t be forgotten in this region of continuous displacements.
Thank you.
