Oct

25

2024

Solomon Brager (director of community engagement): Beirut, a graphic novel trilogy by the Lebanese filmmaker and author Barrack Zailaa Rima, was originally published in 2017 in French, but was translated and published in English just this year by Invisible Publishing. Beirut collects three short comics made over the course of 20 years, depicting Rima’s comic avatar’s return to Beirut, a city seemingly trapped in an impasse of crisis. In each comic, Rima narrates her own movement through Beirut’s streets, observing it as a kind of loving outsider: Rima is from Tripoli, not Beirut, and has lived in Belgium for many years, yet she, like so many, is drawn to the city’s iconic status. It’s all too easy to call Beirut timely—of course Lebanon is in the news and of course the Palestinian refugees that populate the pages of Rima’s comic are front of mind. But, as Rima writes in the last part of the trilogy, in 2017, “It doesn’t matter at all if you are in Beirut or elsewhere. Today, all cities are alike.” The struggles feel familiar, if particular. Society collapses and so does distance. Indeed, I recognized in Rima’s depiction of Beirut a crumbling I am familiar with in New York, a similarity that collapses distance not only in the physical likeness of urban decay but in the fact that our government is currently funding the bombing of that city rather than fixing our own crises.

There is power and pleasure granted by this long-term trilogy, in seeing the rich development of one artist’s style over a number of years. The comic from 1995 is starkly drawn in black ink, yet simultaneously surreal in its flaneur-wanderings through a cross-section of the city. Every page is dripping with hopeful nostalgia—elders tell stories of their younger days protesting; lines from folk songs appear as text on the page; Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s character Handala crosses the pages, casting a long shadow; the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, twenty years dead, asks from a photograph, “Do you believe everything that is written in newspapers?” In short, the comic posits, something old is being lost—but to a future that holds possibility. The second to last panel of the 1995 comic reads, “I will tell you the stories of my city,” but the last panel is blank, carrying us into the open future. The next two sections, drawn two years apart in 2015 (“Beirut bye bye…”) at the beginning of Beirut’s garbage crisis—a result of the government’s failure to find a place for Beirut’s waste when the only trash dump serving the city shut down—and 2017 (“Beirut Rewind”), focusing on the continuing protests of what became known as the “You Stink” movement that responded to Lebanon’s ongoing garbage problem.

These entries exhibit the sophistication of a long-developed style: Rima moves thoughtfully between detailed cross-hatching and heavier painted lines, with the significant additions of grayscale and, crucially, collage. In “Beirut bye bye…,” a photograph of dunes peaks out from a panel at the seashore; the overwhelm of new development and privatization in the city is felt in the silhouettes of ominous, looming construction equipment and planes overhead, cut out of paper in contrast to the drawn people; a child in the backseat of a car passing a locked-down, locked-out city, thinks, “How can it be made bearable?” Extremists rendered in spray-painted stencils burn books, and spray-painted and paper-cut flames lick at both the pile of books and the taxi that carries the narrator throughout the stories. The comic ends with the narrator in a plane, leaving a burning city. These new entries are less charming, darker, more distressed. But Rima is still funny; she refers to developers as “ninja turtles,” and, as she flies away from Beirut, the avatar of the city’s memory, now a trash collector, calls out, “Safe travels… and come back to see us soon!” Two years later, Rima’s narrator turns to the cyclical nature of political hope, connecting the nostalgic stories from the 1967 anti-imperialist protests in the trilogy’s first comic to the second comic’s 2015 protests against corruption—an attempt through time travel to develop something like a strategy, a road map to something better. It’s a beautiful collection of work that I think everyone should read. And, if you’re in New York, I recommend picking up your copy and other SWANA comics and art books in-person from Storm Books and Candy, the new, wonderfully curated Lebanese-owned bookstore in Greenpoint.

Nathan Goldman (managing editor): The day after I read Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger (which I recently recommended in this newsletter), I ran out to my local bookstore to pick up a book that Hammad cites: Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European. Like Hammad’s text, Said’s began its life as a lecture—delivered in 2002 at the Freud Museum of London after its original hosts, the leadership of the Freud Society of Vienna, made the outrageous decision to cancel the scheduled talk because the Palestinian American intellectual had been photographed standing in Lebanon, preparing to throw a stone toward a military guard tower in Israel. (Said described the act, which harmed no one, as “a symbolic gesture of joy” celebrating the recent end of Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon.) The lecture—which was delivered while Said was in the late stages of his battle with leukemia, and which became the last book he published before his death in 2003—is an unorthodox meditation on Sigmund Freud’s own final completed work, Moses and Monotheism (1939). In this puzzling and provocative text, Said explains, the founder of psychoanalysis indulges in a series of quasi-historical conjectures, proposing that the prophet Moses was not an enslaved Hebrew secreted away into an Egyptian household, as the book of Exodus teaches, but rather was born as an Egyptian—and that Moses introduced monotheism, an idea invented by the pharaoh, to the Israelites.

Said is less interested in the historical veracity of these claims than in what they suggest about Freud’s understanding of Jewishness. For Said, by offering an “opening out of Jewish identity towards its non-Jewish background,” insisting on a continuity between Judaism and its “non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries,” Moses and Monotheism powerfully “undermine[s] any doctrinal attempt that might be made to put Jewish identity on a sound foundational basis, whether religious or secular.” This vision, he argues, stands in stark contrast to the Zionist conception of Jewishness as a stable, singular national identity. “The establishment of Israel,” Said writes, “consolidated Jewish identity politically in a state that took very specific legal and political positions effectively to seal off that identity from anything that was non-Jewish.” In the wake of this violent ossification, Said urges us to return to Freud’s destabilized, “irremediably diasporic” Jewishness, and to heed its broader lesson that even collective identity is necessarily intertwined with the Other.

Reading Said’s text now, amid Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Lebanon, I find its generosity at once inspiring and difficult to bear. Who am I to receive such a potent reimagining of my own identity from someone so deeply affected by the cruelty perpetrated in its name? I sense a trace of this same discomfort in the Jewish scholar Jacqueline Rose’s response to the lecture—which was originally delivered after the talk, and which is included as a postscript in the published volume. After praising Said’s recovery of Freud’s bewildering text as “a political parable of our times,” she asks whether he has been too charitable. Where Said emphasizes the openness of Freud’s portrait of Jewishness, Rose highlights the ways in which the great psychoanalyst remained committed to a kind of Jewish essentialism and exceptionalism. Likewise, while Said proposes that Jewishness and other “besieged identities” might transform historical injury into a rigorously solidaristic “politics of diaspora life,” Rose meditates mournfully on how such wounds shape peoples: “Trauma, far from generating freedom, openness to others as well as to the divided and unresolved fragments of a self, leads to a very different kind of fragmentation . . . and causes identities to batten down.” For Rose, this is less an analytical disagreement than a difference in degrees of hope. But perhaps it also points to a dual responsibility for Jews in this moment: to strive bravely toward the vision that Said articulates while also soberly confronting our daunting distance from this ideal.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It might seem superfluous to recommend Robert Caro’s widely acclaimed biography of urban planner Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and which I recently reread for the first time in many years. The book is not only perhaps the greatest biography ever written by an American, but—in its sweep, its insights into character, and its magnificent writing—a classic of American literature. Caro helps us understand how Moses transformed the face and life of New York both for the 40 years he ruled its parks and highways and in the six decades since his departure from the scene. His highways, the construction of which committed the city to cars over mass transit, cemented New York as a place where it is equally impossible to get around by car (due to traffic) or public transportation (as spending is diverted away from subways, trains, and buses). The cars that flood into Manhattan from Moses’s highways turn New York into a perfect trifecta: It’s also a city in which it’s impossible to get around on foot.

A friend, a professor of political science, recently admitted to me that he hadn’t read The Power Broker; no 1200-page book, he insisted, could be devoid of unnecessary material. I told him he was wrong. Despite its size, Caro’s account of how one man obtained so much influence—and how he was able to maintain it across generations—is a page-turner, and every word is necessary. It’s not just that Moses’s maneuvering and machinations require space to explain, but that Caro is appropriately scrupulous in his portrait—crediting Moses for the good he did by spending long stretches of the book describing what a drive from the city to Long Island was like before Moses’s arrival, as well as the paucity of playgrounds and green spaces for New Yorkers to enjoy. But just when it seems Caro is going to become part of Moses’s chorus of admirers, he immediately switches tone and gives us the other side of the coin, rigorously cataloging the evil that Moses did. Caro’s Moses is a savior and a devil, a bully and a boon companion; for better and worse, he is all of us in one man (though his worst is worse than most of us can ever aspire to). Caro is clear that Moses was a racist, and that he also hated middle- and working-class white people only slightly less than Black and Latino people. And yet, Caro shows that in many ways, Moses wanted to do good for those he disdained. Indeed, the moral question at the heart of The Power Broker is the same one posed decades later in the first season of the sitcom The Good Place: Can an act be considered good if performed for the wrong reason? For Caro, the good Moses did was done to increase his personal power. So does that change the nature of a park built where none was before?

Revisiting The Power Broker now, I kept thinking that, as bad as Moses was, he got things done, some of them worth doing. Now we New Yorkers live in a city in which nothing gets done. It has taken longer to rebuild the oval tracks in Marine Park, a few blocks from my home, than it did for Moses to have the entire park built 90 years ago. Even worse, we lack the will to fix the ills he imposed on us, as the governor’s cowardly failure to impose congestion pricing proves. We have weak politicians and a populace that hates the present and refuses anything new. Maybe we deserved Moses; maybe we needed him. Maybe we need someone like him still.