A Game for Swallows, Revealing Humanity Beneath the Rubble

I’ve long been fascinated by stories that take place in the Middle East and as a bande dessinée fanatic, when I come across a French graphic memoir that tackles the subject, I often can’t resist obtaining a copy. Such was the case last month when I discovered the French-Lebanese author and illustrator Zeina Abirached. Abirached was born and raised in Beirut in the 1980s, smack dab in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. A brief bio of this award-winning artist intrigued me. So, I decided to get to know her work, starting with her first superhit, a memoir titled Mourir Partir Revenir, Le Jeu des Hirondelles.

An Unexpected Sighting

In 2006, now living in Paris, Abirached was browsing a French national website that archives all audiovisual materials produced for French radio and television. A story filmed in Beirut in 1984, three years after her birth, caught her eye. She watched with interest as journalists interviewed residents of a street located near the Green Line—a band of demarcation that separated Muslim neighborhoods, predominantly located in West Beirut, from those of Christians, predominantly located in the eastern part of the city. Abirached writes in the preface to her story:

The experience provoked unexpected memories from what Abirached describes as a happy childhood and led to Le Jeu des Hirondelles. In 2012, the book became the first graphic novel to receive the FACE French Voices Grant, awarded by the PEN American Center and the French Embassy, resulting in the English edition titled A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return.

A Day in the Life

Le Jeu des Hirondelles describes a single day from its author’s childhood. Zeina and her brother live with their parents in the ground-floor apartment of a multi-story building in East Beirut. Over time, the war has rendered nearly every room of their spacious flat uninhabitable and the family now lives in the safest room of their home, the entry hall. Indeed, this small refuge is the safest space in the entire apartment building. So, when the sounds of shells and mortars can be heard outside its walls, the other residents descend and are welcomed inside the family’s cramped quarters to wait out the conflict.

The story unfolds on a day when fighting breaks out after Zeina’s parents have left to visit Zeina’s grandmother who lives less than three blocks from their home. The route between the two dwellings is peppered with hazards, including a sniper who fires at random passersby and has become a regular fixture of the neighborhood. Even on a normal day, the trip to grandma’s must be conducted with the utmost caution. But, on a day when bombs are exploding, the trajectory is impossible.

Cut off from their children the parents try to call their apartment—not only to check on their kids but to inform adults in the household that they are okay. However, phone lines across the city have been extraordinarily compromised. It’s hard to establish a connection and even after doing so, interference on the line hampers all communication. Happily, Zeina and her brother are only vaguely aware of the danger as each adult neighbor that enters their family’s sanctuary provides a new distraction to occupy their thoughts.

Life in a War Zone

What I love about Le Jeu des hirondelles is its unwavering focus on the human spirit. Without explicitly revealing her characters’ intentions, Abirached’s illustrations show how each neighborly grown-up takes an interest in entertaining the children, shielding them from the peril that could penetrate the deteriorating walls at any moment. Each individual has their own colorful backstory, a bar owner, a French teacher, a cab driver, a former beauty queen, a nanny that helped raise three generations of the same family…

The book is apolitical, never taking issue with a particular side or the meddling foreign interests that fueled many of the hostilities in the region. Abirached masterfully arranges an uplifting tale of childhood merriment, occasionally inlaying a looming indication of danger, like a massive chandelier located on an upper floor that tinkles with every distant blast.

The war is ever-present but the expressions on the characters’ faces, aside from sideways glances exchanged between adults, remain largely carefree and commonplace. Toward the end of the story, I had the feeling that the children were (unknowingly) protecting the psyches of the adults as much as the adults were protecting theirs.

A Satrapi Look Alike?

Some of Abirached’s critics have written that her work lacks originality, following far too closely in the same artistic and literary footsteps of Marjane Satrapi, the Franco-Iranian author of Persepolis. I have to admit to having similar reservations before reading Le Jeu des Hirondelles. Upon first glance, Abirached’s black-and-white, block-print style is quite similar to Satrapi’s.

I’m a huge fan of Satrapi. So, before I began reading, I wondered if Abirached’s book would end up feeling somewhat plagiarized. It did not. To paraphrase a line from the movie Wonder Boys, great writers make great choices. I’m very familiar with Satrapi’s work and found that the choices that Abirached made in telling her own story, both in images and in words, were very different than the ones I’ve come to expect from Satrapi. In my opinion, Abirached is a gifted artist in her own right with a unique perspective and distinctive joie de vivre.

A Game for Swallows

I read a lot of books and watch a lot of films about war. Perhaps it was just happenstance, but Le Jeu des hirondelles moved me in ways that few accounts do. I almost never shed a tear but when I reached the end of this book, I had to fetch a box of Kleenex. I wasn’t feeling sorry for Abirached or her brother or others that lived in her building. In my mind, the story is about mankind’s resilience and propensity for optimism. What got to me were the countless tragedies obscured from view—the pointless decades of destruction that Abirached’s narrative gracefully evades.

The book’s title is based on graffiti that Abirached noticed scrawled on a wall separating East and West Beirut. In an afterword to the 2020 edition, Abirached describes how she tried to track down the rebellious spirit behind the spray paint who had signed only as Florian. Several candidates presented themselves but the identity of this poetic agitator remains unclear.

Abirachad writes:

Let’s hope for lasting peace.

More from cas d’intérêt on war and the Middle East

• Two Graphic Novels, Illuminating Memoirs from the Middle East that are Fun to Read
• Kobane Calling, Captivating Account of Kurdish Struggle in Syria
• Contradictory Paths Out of a Casablanca Slum, Sidi Moumen
• War in Afghanistan, Life of the Combat Soldier
• The real frontline in the battle against Muslim fundamentalism
• Review of Le Photographe, French photojournalist’s travels in Afghanistan
• The Miseries of War, 400-Year-Old Portrayal of Treachery