‘You can express feelings and sensations in black and white’: Graphic novelist Zeina Abirached

When you read Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows, you might think it was written only yesterday, given that the world ladles fresh violence onto our screens every day. Abirached, a French-Lebanese graphic novelist and illustrator, is known for her autobiographical memoirs. A Game for Swallows is set in a Beirut indexed by sandbags and bricks and terrorised by shelling and snipers, where two children wait for their parents to return home, and the neighbours in the building come together to make sure they’re safe.

A review called this memoir “apolitical”, but a piece of literature so universal and articulate is nothing but that. The noun “apolitical” yearns for exactitude, faltering given that such an endeavour is impossible in a quotidian shaped by politics. While it’s true Abirached doesn’t “take sides”, that’s anyway beside the point in a memoir that attempts to articulate a child’s naïve experience of a day in a war-torn city. In choosing to question how children, who often don’t have the vocabulary of unimaginative adults, see those around them during the war, she unbinds the story of her childhood from the larger politics, shifting the gaze onto people who are otherwise mere numbers.

Abirached spoke to Scroll about her novel’s focus on the platitudes of lives...

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