The evolution of images during the Lebanese civil war in Nathalie Abi-Ezzi’s A girl made of dust and Zeina Abirached’s A game for swallows

Abstract

This thesis discusses two postwar Anglophone Lebanese narratives: Nathalie Abi- Ezzi’s A Girl Made of Dust (2008) and Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows (2007; translated in 2012), a literary novel and a graphic novel, respectively. It questions the Lebanese civil war’s effects and outcomes on children and their families through the study of images from the main young female characters’ perspectives in their narrations. Postwar Anglophone narratives are numerous, since the war caused a literary outburst and unleashed the younger generation’s creativity and literary experimentations. The thesis focuses on the psychological aspects of war’s effects on children. They grow in resilience and empathy, they develop emotional intelligence, altruism and hope. They also definitely grow in their experiences through horrendous life conditions, losing their childhood innocence in the process. Both works are extremely rich in imagery, whether verbal or pictorial, and this study aims at tracing the transformation of their main characters from a stage of childhood to one of adulthood, through a thorough close reading and personal interpretations of these images. They are examples of how the writers’ narratives are dominated by their memories and-or postmemories of the war years they have spent in Beirut. As such, the evaluation of their verbal and pictorial representations demonstrates the children’s forced and early maturation, in a context where time stops, space constantly shrinks, and yet they don’t stop decaying. The research conducted aims at asserting that both genres, the literary and the graphic novels, represent a form of resistance, memory, and individual growth, in the context of the Lebanese civil war. Therefore, the primary texts studied lead us to new questions to be figured out in future studies: whether the analysis of other images, in other works, about other wars, also result in describing journeys of evolution, which may then arguably also qualify as j