Neighbors Under Fire

Abstract

In the first few pages of her 2007 graphic novel Le Jeu des Hirondelles (Translated to A Game for Swallows in 2012), Lebanese author and artist, Zeina Abirached, provides detailed illustrations of her East Beirut neighborhood during the year 1984. Through twelve black and white panels, Abirached moves slowly from the map of Lebanon to views of the neighborhood, streetscapes, apartment buildings, and close-ups of architectural details, before she introduces her first character. In all these introductory panels, Abirached very skillfully depicts and overlays the war landscape over her neighborhood’s streets and architecture. Elements such as deserted streets, bullet-torn drum barrels, piled-up intermodal containers and building blocks, barbed wires, and bullet holes, altogether through visual representation and textual narration, introduce the reader to the experience of the civil war in her neighborhood of Beirut. It is this representational capacity of literature that this chapter analyses, to investigate how the Lebanese war literature represented, drew meaning from, and overall intersected with the concept of the neighborhood as a bounded socio-spatial unit. The employment of the neighborhood as an analytical unit emerges from its capacity to generate new insights by shifting the focus to a limited spatial setting where the intensity of social relations relations between group members of quasi-comparable socio-cultural-economic classes becomes easier to capture. The notion of the neighborhood is presented here not as a rigid planning unit, but as a fluid spatial setting that is a product of multiple social operations which are constantly being reimagined and redefined.