A group of men, women and children huddle in the shadows under a tree, turned inwards to face each other. One woman stares at her phone and a small child sucks on his fingers, his cheeks puffed out. In the background, a makeshift tank – a 4x4 with a gun mounted on its roof – churns out a roiling cloud of dust, and two silhouetted men are recognisable only by their helmets and guns.
Illustrated by journalist and artist Molly Crabapple, Brothers of the Gun, a memoir by Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham exposes the brutal realities of life in Raqqa under ISIS rule.
In Zenobia, written by Danish author Morten Durr and illustrated by Lars Horneman, a young girl named Amina escapes Syria by boat and is pitched overboard in rough seas. She uses the legend of Zenobia, the great Syrian warrior queen, to remind herself to be brave.
Gaphic novels conveying the refugee experience
Moving drawings from both works are on show at Beit Beirut this month as part of In Transit: Displacement and Seeking Refuge as Seen Through Comics, an exhibition exploring the power of graphic novels to record and convey the refugee experience.
Featuring more than 350 artworks, the exhibition highlights the growing corpus of graphic novels based on biographical, autobiographical or fictional narratives exploring what it means to be forcibly displaced.
In a speech launching the exhibition, Crabapple, who has reported from refugee camps around the world, drew attention to the unprecedented numbers of refugees globally, and the increasing hardships they face.
"In Transit is so crucial because we are at a time where there are 68.5 million refugees in the world … These are people who have been forced out [of their home countries] by war, by poverty or by climate change, but increasingly, they're greeted not by open doors, but by demagogues who demonise them. They're greeted by a world that builds walls and inscribes borders in blood and then demands increasing paperwork, increasing waits and increasing obstacles just so they can restart their lives," she says.
The exhibition, which is organised by the American University of Beirut and the Mu'taz and Rada Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative, showcases extracts from comics and graphic novels by 37 artists from 12 different counties. Reproductions of panels from these works provide a glimpse into diverse stories and highlight the vast range of artistic styles used to convey the experiences of refugees. The exhibition is divided into three sections, beginning with the reasons that force people to flee their homes, capturing the dangers and terror of the journey and exploring the obstacles that make it so difficult to settle in a host country.
In Eternal Refuge, Egyptian artist Migo captures the dangers of crossing the Mediterranean in a wordless series of panels dominated by the bright orange of life jackets, showing refugees crowded onto a small boat in the dark, before the boat sinks and they are scattered among the waves, later washing up lifeless on a sandy beach. In Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco's neat black-and-white illustrations capture the privations of life for Palestinians who were forcibly displaced during the Naqba of 1948.
Lebanese artist Zeina Abi Rashed uses simple, stylised black-and-white panels to share memories of how her childhood in Lebanon was interrupted by the civil war in I Remember Beirut, and Egyptian twin brothers Haitham and Mohamed El-Seht explore the building of the Aswan Dam and the displacement of the Nubian community in The Hoopoe.
Many of the books are the result of collaborations between artists and writers, like that of Hashem and Crabapple for Brothers of the Gun. "We started working together in 2014, when he [Hashem] sent me photos he had taken surreptitiously in Raqqa – something that he would have been killed for doing. I would draw from these pictures and he would write captions and we would publish them in Vanity Fair," Crabapple explains. "After we had done several collaborations like this, we decided to do a book together and he moved to Turkey so that we could work together."
The final book contains 82 of Crabapple's black-and-white illustrations, which are filled with raw energy and often splattered with ink that pools on the paper like blood. "I'd interview him and then I'd do sketches and he would look at these and tell me what I got wrong," she says. "Sometimes he'd even pose himself, just to show how people stood. He'd find references for me and then we'd go back and forth until I got something that was true in his eyes and that was as close to his memories as possible … I feel like there isn't a line drawn or a word written in that book that isn't a fusion of both of us."
Telling their story
Many of the graphic novels on display focus on the story of a single character to convey the complexities and hardships of life as a refugee. South Korean artist Kyungeun Park collaborated with French journalist Nicolas Henin, a former war reporter who was held hostage by ISIS for 10 months, to tell the story of Haytham, a Syrian boy who was forced to leave his home and journey across Europe, eventually seeking refuge in France.
I'm moving every few months. I'm still in the process of finding home. It's so exhausting when you have your whole life in a suitcase.
"I wanted to understand why the events in Syria started and how the people came to fight against dictatorship," says Park, who lives in Paris. "When I listened to their experiences, it reminded me a bit of my own story, because when I was growing up in the 1980s, we had a lot of protests against the president, who was not ruling our country democratically. There is an episode in the graphic novel where Haytham discovers the true face of his president, [Bashar] Al Assad. I think that as youths, we have been through more or less the same things."
Syrian artist Diala Brisly has first-hand experience of life as a refugee, having been forced to leave Syria in 2013. "I'm moving every few months. I'm still in the process of finding home," she says. "It's so exhausting when you have your whole life in a suitcase … I want to print photos and take them with me, I want to build things, but I don't know what is more exhausting: carrying all these things or having empty walls."
Brisly has produced several comics. For one project, Bokra, Inshallah, she interviewed dozens of refugees in Lebanon and then distilled their experiences into a single narrative about a Syrian family. She also collaborated with Italian journalist Francesca Mannocchi to tell the true stories of four refugee children. Brisly says although her work isn't autobiographical, she sometimes embeds scenes from her own life into her drawings.
"In the book I did with Francesca there is one kid, who has two dogs, with her sister. Actually, I drew mine and my sister's dogs," she explains. "There is a star falling in one of the illustrations, so I put my brother's name on the star because I lost my bother during the war. I like to put secrets in there that you can't always understand but I know they're there."
Lina Ghaibeh, a graphic designer and comic book artist, and the exhibition's curator, believes that the format is particularly well-suited to conveying personal stories because the artwork adds an extra emotional dimension. "Look at Molly Crabapple's work. It's rough lines that dig into the paper. There are splatters and scratches everywhere," she says. "Migo uses the orange of the life vests as something that saves people, so everything is blue and orange in the day to day and then for the past and the reasons people left he turns it into black and white, to give this cinematic shift into different parts of the story. I think there are so many ways you can tell a story with the art that can affect the way you receive it."
For Crabapple, illustration is a way to create a record of something that might otherwise be suppressed. "I think it's one of the real powers of art," she says. "There are things that people don't want you to see. Prison guards don't want you to see certain things. ISIS didn't want people to see certain things and so there's no photos that exist, but with art we can take people's memories and we can make visuals from those. We can steal things from being forgotten."
In Transit: Displacement and Seeking Refuge as Seen Through Comics is at Beit Beirut until March 24
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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Killing of Qassem Suleimani
If you go
The flights
Etihad and Emirates fly direct from the UAE to Chicago from Dh5,215 return including taxes.
The hotels
Recommended hotels include the Intercontinental Chicago Magnificent Mile, located in an iconic skyscraper complete with a 1929 Olympic-size swimming pool from US$299 (Dh1,100) per night including taxes, and the Omni Chicago Hotel, an excellent value downtown address with elegant art deco furnishings and an excellent in-house restaurant. Rooms from US$239 (Dh877) per night including taxes.
What can victims do?
Always use only regulated platforms
Stop all transactions and communication on suspicion
Save all evidence (screenshots, chat logs, transaction IDs)
Report to local authorities
Warn others to prevent further harm
Courtesy: Crystal Intelligence
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Company profile
Name: Dukkantek
Started: January 2021
Founders: Sanad Yaghi, Ali Al Sayegh and Shadi Joulani
Based: UAE
Number of employees: 140
Sector: B2B Vertical SaaS(software as a service)
Investment: $5.2 million
Funding stage: Seed round
Investors: Global Founders Capital, Colle Capital Partners, Wamda Capital, Plug and Play, Comma Capital, Nowais Capital, Annex Investments and AMK Investment Office
Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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F1 The Movie
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
Profile box
Company name: baraka
Started: July 2020
Founders: Feras Jalbout and Kunal Taneja
Based: Dubai and Bahrain
Sector: FinTech
Initial investment: $150,000
Current staff: 12
Stage: Pre-seed capital raising of $1 million
Investors: Class 5 Global, FJ Labs, IMO Ventures, The Community Fund, VentureSouq, Fox Ventures, Dr Abdulla Elyas (private investment)
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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When Umm Kulthum performed in Abu Dhabi
Known as The Lady of Arabic Song, Umm Kulthum performed in Abu Dhabi on November 28, 1971, as part of celebrations for the fifth anniversary of the accession of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan as Ruler of Abu Dhabi. A concert hall was constructed for the event on land that is now Al Nahyan Stadium, behind Al Wahda Mall. The audience were treated to many of Kulthum's most well-known songs as part of the sold-out show, including Aghadan Alqak and Enta Omri.
Game Of Thrones Season Seven: A Bluffers Guide
Want to sound on message about the biggest show on television without actually watching it? Best not to get locked into the labyrinthine tales of revenge and royalty: as Isaac Hempstead Wright put it, all you really need to know from now on is that there’s going to be a huge fight between humans and the armies of undead White Walkers.
The season ended with a dragon captured by the Night King blowing apart the huge wall of ice that separates the human world from its less appealing counterpart. Not that some of the humans in Westeros have been particularly appealing, either.
Anyway, the White Walkers are now free to cause any kind of havoc they wish, and as Liam Cunningham told us: “Westeros may be zombie land after the Night King has finished.” If the various human factions don’t put aside their differences in season 8, we could be looking at The Walking Dead: The Medieval Years.
BIGGEST CYBER SECURITY INCIDENTS IN RECENT TIMES
SolarWinds supply chain attack: Came to light in December 2020 but had taken root for several months, compromising major tech companies, governments and its entities
Microsoft Exchange server exploitation: March 2021; attackers used a vulnerability to steal emails
Kaseya attack: July 2021; ransomware hit perpetrated REvil, resulting in severe downtime for more than 1,000 companies
Log4j breach: December 2021; attackers exploited the Java-written code to inflitrate businesses and governments
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