Ma très grande mélancolie arabe

by Lamia Ziadé

Dans ce livre, il y a des ruines et des martyrs, des vestiges, des temples, des sanctuaires, des portiques, il y a des tombes, des cercueils, des mausolées, des cimetières, des épitaphes. Il y a des sépultures mythiques et des fosses communes. Il y a des résistants tués, des révoltés abattus, des leaders assassinés, des enfants massacrés, des partisans torturés, des nationalistes pendus. Il y a des rebelles héroïques. il y a des saints, des prophètes, des dieux, des vierges, des archanges, il y a des victimes et des assassins. Il y a aussi des châteaux forts, des citadelles, des basiliques, des mosquées, des dômes, des minarets, des phares, des miradors, des barbelés, des carcasses d’hôtels, des camps, des prisons. Et des détenus, des captifs, des séquestrés. Il y a des condamnés à mort. Il y a des miliciens et des dictateurs, des fédayins et des moudjahidines, une infirmière kamikaze, une miss univers et un prince rouge, des émirs, des pachas, des califes, des patriarches et des poètes. Il y a l’élégance, la classe, le style, la manière, la touche, la griffe, il y a la flamme, la passion, l’idéal, la cause. Il y a Septembre Noir et la bataille de Kerbala, la corniche de Beyrouth et le discours d’Alexandrie, la tête de Jean-Baptiste et celle de l’imam Hussein, la fiancée de Naplouse et l’artificier de la Casbah, la prisonnière de Khyam et la dactylo d’Alger, les Boeings de la Pan Am et l’automobile du Roi d’Irak, le minaret de Jésus et le rocher de Mahomet. il y a aussi un imam disparu, un cheikh caché, un ayatollah inspirant, un mufti éliminé et un mufti ambigu. Il y a des keffiehs, des treillis, des lunettes noires, des turbans, des sahariennes, des drapeaux, des uniformes, des journaux, des slogans. Il y a la plume, le mot, le verbe, l’éloquence, le discours, l’étendard. Il y a des attentats, des enterrements, des processions, des funérailles, des cortèges, des pleurs. Et aussi des colonnes, des chapiteaux, des gisants, des sarcophages. Des tombeaux phéniciens, des cénotaphes sumériens, des nécropoles romaines, des pyramides égyptiennes. Il y a le Saint Sépulcre, le temple de Salomon et le dôme du rocher. Il y a des massacres, des tueries, des boucheries. Il y a des blasts d’explosions. Il y a du sang, des soupirs, des larmes, des lamentations, de la poussière, de la fumée, de la boue, des bris de verre, des décombres, la désolation, la tristesse, l’agonie, le drame, la tragédie, le deuil, les couronnes, les fleurs, les rubans, les chants, les youyous, le paradis. C’est une danse macabre.

Dans ce livre, il y a un siècle au proche orient.Après Bye Bye Babylone (Denoël 2010) et Ô nuit, ô mes yeux (P.O.L 2015), plusieurs fois réimprimé.

Ma très grande mélancolie arabe, est le troisième roman graphique de Lamia Ziadé et son deuxième aux éditions P.O.L.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Lebanon, Graphic Novels, Bande Dessinée, Middle East, Memoir

420 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Lamia Ziadé is a Lebanese author, illustrator and visual artist.

Born in Beirut in 1968 and raised during the Lebanese Civil War, she moved to Paris at 18 to study graphic arts. She then worked as a designer for Jean-Paul Gaultier, exhibited her art in numerous galleries internationally, and went on to publish several illustrated books, including My Port of Beirut, Ma très grande mélancolie arabe which won the Prix France-Liban, Ô nuit, ô mes yeux and Bye bye Babylone.

Reviews

[Abir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toujours le même plaisir à lire Lamia Ziadé qui a bien choisi le titre de son ouvrage remarquable, parce que la mélancolie est là dans chaque page, chaque dessin..

[Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first thoughts reading this book on a trip to Cairo for the first time in years were “I would give it 6 stars if I could”. I was already in a melancholic mood lamenting what could’ve been [of the Arab world] and I think the romantic mournful tone of the book made the perfect match for how I was feeling. Even if I wasn’t already searching for a read to get me that upsurge of melancholic emotions, I’d still think it’s a beautifully written and illustrated book.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is sometime in the mid-2010s, and French-based Lebanese writer and artist Lamia Ziadé is taking us on a tour of the southern reaches of her homeland, and Beirut. We open, driving south towards the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre, now close the Lebanese-Israeli border. Along the way, like a good tour guide, she takes us to places of note, to meet people of significance, and to explore through those places and people the lives, the histories, and the cultures of this region. Yet these are not the rich and famous, the old families of landowners and political leaders, state builders, entrepreneurs, and celebrities. They are, instead, ordinary villagers, residents of local graveyards, the dead, the missing, and the disappeared making lives, as much as they can, for themselves in this warzone – a zone that embodies the struggles over occupied Palestine, where forces of states, their proxies, and sectarian self-interest contend, seldom in the interests of occupied Palestine despite their rhetoric, and often in the interests of its occupier.

Ziadé then spins off from these people, these places, these encounters to explore and unpack the Palestinian struggle against a backdrop of occupation and the settler state, but more forcefully against shifting politics of the Arab world, especially the post-war, post-mandate histories of Jordan and Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria – although for all its influence now Syria plays a much smaller role that present circumstances might suggest. We meet key figures and consider their significance and outlooks, are reminded that the first suicide bombers in the area were young Christian militia women fighting against the Israelis and their Lebanese allies, and move near the border with, among other things, its sharply ironic tourist lookout points and benches with views that include that highly militarised border. This is a beautiful and intimidatingly sublime exploration of a contested space and its many meanings.

This part the tour ends as Ziadé returns to Beirut, and her family home, while her continuing encounters spiral out to tell an expansive story of the 20th century Arab world through moments and events in Lebanon. Much of this second strand of her exploration of these places turns on visit to Shatila, one of the biggest Palestinian refugee camps and the site of a massacre by militia allied with Israel during its 1982 invasion. This visit is, in part, to find the former husband and the daughter of a woman she met near the border, for whom the bleakness, violence, and alienation of the camps was less problematic that the border war zone, swapping one trauma for another.

Yet her tales of Beirut also take in Lebanon’s fraught contemporary history, its political and social factions, its meddlesome neighbours, and its willingness, at least until the 1982 invasion, to provide a home for Palestine’s liberation movements. Spinning out from this she weaves in the stories of many of the Arab world’s key political leaders – both heads of state and vital figures in social movements. She explores not only how and what they did, but also looks to how they are remembered and marked, or not as is the case for many. Our journey with her around Beirut is marked by loss and tragedy, of assassination and betrayals, but also I couldn’t help but reflect on the destruction of much of that city in the 2020 port explosion that is the subject of her previous (in English, although this one is earlier in French) book My Port of Beirut as she wrote of the city’s pock-marked, war-damaged infrastructure.

Lavishly illustrated with her watercolours of landscapes, cities, and people, of iconic images and traveller’s photographs, Ziadé evokes a place and its people, a global zone and its leaders, and a place of destruction, resistance, and survivance that is much more subtle and nuanced, richly diverse and cosmopolitanly complex than the simplicities that our predominant Orientalist outlook and framing suggests. By focusing in on the local and the specific, Ziadé is able to tell much bigger, much wider story of one the vital zones in the current global order, and one the merits our closer attention and better consideration. And on top of that, it is a beautiful book.

[Léo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Très très bien

[Fayrose Hajer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking.
I need to go back and visit my homeland.

[Farah Youssef · Rating 5 out of 5]

deeply melancholic and romantic

[Doyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Les pérégrinations nostalgiques de l'autrice-graphiste à travers Beyrouth, Tyr ou encore Le Caire croisent l'histoire glorieuse et/ou sanglante du XXè et XXIè siècle du Proche-Orient arabe, sur des visuels invitant à repasser certaines rues encore debouts ou à se souvenir de l'architecture à jamais disparue où se tenaient Raïs et habitant.e.s quelques décennies encore auparavant...

Parfois décousu et reliant très artificiellement la petite histoire à la "grande", dans un souci de focus sur chaque "grand" personnage du monde arabe d'alors, Lamia Ziadé hésite entre le catalogue des grandes figures ou mouvements politiques allant du Maghreb à l'Iraq et leurs liens parfois ambigus avec la cause palestinienne, et le récit plus intimiste de voyage personnel. La mélancolie est indéniable et communicable en tout cas, même si elle se teinte d'une certaine mansuétude pour des personnages moins charmants que leur aura comme Nasser.

[Myriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volet politique moins bon que le précédent volet culturel.
Trame: une histoire du Proche-Orient à travers ses martyrs.

[Apolline Troncin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnifique, instructif, poétique

[Conor]

The title is crucial. Ziadé's history of 20th-century leaders and radicals in the Middle East is better understood as a personal meditation, or rumination, on a theme. Her brief accounts of figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Leila Khaled, Wael Zwaiter, Yasser Arafat, Sana'a Mehaidli, even Husayn ibn Ali, tend to start with the circumstances of their deaths. Her hundreds of beautiful illustrations, many of already existing photographs, look like achingly belated attempts to breathe life into people and places that are long past gone. All this seems to point in the direction of some Western frames of reference—Levantine Sebald, say, or an acute case of Derrida's archive fever. But we are not dealing with secular death or loss. Throughout we are reminded of martyrdom, shahid. It doesn't make death easier to cope with, but it does do something to our sense of its finality. People live on in how their actions affect the actions of future generations. That is near all Ziadé can guarantee us. Hope is the wrong word—the book's final image makes sure of that—but utter despair is wrong too. We are left with something sharp and bitter in between. I've never read a book that left me so bitter. Please, read it.

[Farah - OhMyBookness · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Problem with democratic countries is that they forget about all their values when it comes to us.”

(Defiant, Poetic, Nostalgic) Wow! What a lovely personal reflection of growing up in the Middle East. A masterful blend of events and personal memories woven into a captivating read. I especially loved the book’s ability to capture the resilience and enduring spirit of the Arab world, in honoring those who dared defy oppression and colonialism. The illustrations in this book are particularly noteworthy, capturing the essence of the Middle East’s rich history and culture. Their bold, colorful style resemble hand-painted posters, and evoke a sense of nostalgia and longing. I am almost certain that the title itself mirrors the state of mind of most Arabs. I really enjoyed this and finished it in one day!

[Anneke Guns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Onverbloemd geschiedkundig relaas, een eeuw Midden Oosten geschiedenis, vanuit het standpunt van Palestina en Libanon. Over vermoorde kinderen en verraden weerstandsleden, over ruines en tempels, over martelingen en vernielingen. Over dictators en onderdrukking, over politiek en revoluties. Vlammend passioneel geschreven en indrukwekkend en liefdevol geïllustreerd door de auteur. Misstaat niet als complementair deel bij de tentoonstelling Cités Millénaires van het IMA. Ik ben erdoor platgeslagen. https://www.imarabe.org/fr/exposition...

[Amelia Holcomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book and its illustrations are quite amazing in what they capture of an Arab perspective on Middle East history and culture. My principle scruple was that historical events, persons, and stories of martyrdom were not presented in any kind of chronological context. Because I only read bits and pieces at a time, I often found myself lost as to where various vignettes fit with others in the historical timeline. It also didn't feel like there was chronicity as a travel journal or cultural memoir to make up for that. This only hindered my learning though and not my general reading experience. I think I might've liked to see some of the real pictures also and not just illustrations.

[Jnoub101 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this a five, a wonderfully written book with even more wonderful art work it is really encapsulates the feeling of a lost future so common in the Arab world. The lingering issue through the work is the occasional historical and ideological hiccups - here I mainly speak to the kind words given to Bachir Gemayel and Saddam Hussien. But on the whole, a fantastic book.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really human perspective on history of southern Lebanon and the middle east. I was deeply moved by this book, and mesmerized by the scenes of Beirut and Cairo. A valuable book for gleaning the history of Lebanon. It feels important to read and to know.

[Zeina J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books ever. The illustrations are breathtaking, the stories interwoven, and the yearning for an Arab world that once was, so potent. I learned a lot of history, and will be referencing this book a lot.

[Emilie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly have never read anything like this before. A heart wrenching tour around the Levant and Egypt. The research is rich and the description is delicate and melancholic. History with human heart at the centre, as it should be.

[Jack McGrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautifully illustrated tour through the history of Arab resistance