The Consulate General of France in Toronto is delighted to support the visit of Lebanese artist and author Barrack Zailaa Rima to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA), whose theme is « writing home ». This visit accompanies the launch of the English-language publication of Barrack Zailaa Rima’s graphic novel Beirut (Invisible Publishing, 2024), the translation of which was supported by the Institut Français Paris (Programme d’Aide à la Publication) in 2023. On Saturday, September 28, 2024 at 4:00 pm, the artist will talk with Syrian-Canadian author Danny Ramadan about identity and resilience, two central themes in his graphic novel. This exchange will also be an opportunity to talk about Beirut, a place dear to Barrack Zailaa Rima’s childhood, but whose metamorphoses raise questions about the fate of the city.
Barrack Zailaa Rima
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 throughout her career, she 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 The Storyteller of Cairo, Beirut, and Sociologia. Her latest book, Dans le taxi, published by Alifbata Editions, received the Mahmoud Kahil Award for the best graphic novel from the MENA region (Lebanon, 2022) and the Grenades “Godmother Lisette Lombé’s favorite” Prize (Belgium, 2022). Numerous trips between Lebanon and Belgium have punctuated her career, resulting in publications, workshops, courses, production, and multiple collaborations. She has also exhibited and published in various projects around the Mediterranean and further, Tunisia, Switzerland, Palestine, Italy, France, Germany, the United States…
Beirut (Invisible Publishing, 2024)
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.
