#Bye bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975 / 1979

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Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziadé

I’ve shared books involving the Lebanese Civil War before. There are understandably many, from poetry, children’s books, adult fiction, and nonfiction. Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979 by Lamia Ziadé is a graphic novel memoir published in 2010. Stunning in several ways, it is one of the most visceral I’ve read on the conflict. An album filled with pages of spots, scenery, businesses, homes, family, faces, film and TV, items mundane, ritzy and those of war, the soldiers, militias, flames, firearms, grenades, bombs, death, massacres, assassinations, terror. Interspersed like a journal with all too utilitarian font to the text of even more devastating recollections of childhood yet also the awareness of the adult. There’s a timeline at the back from 1918-1979 too detailing key points that also come up though, the book is most focused on those later years of the 1970s. A designer and illustrator excelling in Pop Art visuals Ziadé manages to put what one might not even think could be expressed on the page. Even though she’s lived in Paris for a long time, she has continued to sort out the trauma, revisit Bye Bye Babylon, and to not look away and bear witness to her country’s history.

  Bye Bye Babylon by Lamia Ziadé is available translated to English by Olivia Snaije, in print from Interlink Graphic      

#graphic novel memoir #bye bye babylon #lamia ziadé #Bye bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975 / 1979 #WIT month #beat the backlist #Francophone Writers From 50+ Lands #Francophone50 #cw: war religious bigotry massacres torture fire