Je me souviens de Beyrouth: Zeina Abirached’s Perecquian practice

Abstract

The French experimental writing collective the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Oulipo for short, is often imagined to be inward-looking, Pariscentric and deeply entangled in the threads of French literary history. However, the group has become increasingly diverse and its influence now extends far beyond l’Hexagone. This article will consider some of the ways in which oulipian techniques, games, themes and concerns might be transported and adapted to other national and cultural contexts. It will take, as a case in point, the complete works, to date, of the Franco-Lebanese graphic memoirist Zeina Abirached. Abirached adopts and transforms oulipian practices – in particular those of Georges Perec – in order to grapple with the memory of growing up during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Like that of Perec, Abirached’s ‘oulipian’ practice appears as a means of managing individual and collective memory. However, Perec’s Parisian experiments take significantly new directions in the context of post-war Beirut where the relationship between individual and collective memory remains extremely fraught