Poppies of Iraq, Fascinating Memoir to Boost Your French

Have you ever wondered what you might do if asked to write your autobiography? Where does one even begin? These were questions that confounded color artist Brigitte Findakly when friends and colleagues urged her to share her life story. Born in Iraq in 1959, Findakly immigrated to France with her parents when she was thirteen. For roughly three decades, she regularly visited her relatives in Iraq or kept in touch through various means. That is, until all had emigrated, scattering to countries around the world. Hers is a complicated story to tell, especially to a Western audience that has little understanding of the Middle Eastern context in which it unfolds. Working with her husband, scenarist and illustrator Lewis Trondheim, Findakly finally began recording snippets from her past. The resulting graphic memoir, Coquelicots d’Irak, presents an informative and intimate account of life in Iraq in the last half of the 20th century.

Every Friday we would picnic somewhere outside Mosul and would often go to the Nimrud archeological site. I would play with my ball and climb upon anything I could.
[The photo, top left, shows the author and her brother leaning against an ancient statue of a winged lion. These statues were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.]

Power Couple of Cartooning

Coquelicots d’Irak is a co-production from one of the comics world’s power couples, Lewis Trondheim and Brigitte Findakly. Married since 1993, they’ve closely collaborated on numerous projects as well as pursuing independent work. Findakly is a colorist, the person who often adds life to an illustrator’s black and white drawings. Trondheim is an illustrator and a scenarist, an author and skillful editor who ultimately determines the text that appears on the page. He’s a masterful minimalist, conveying armfuls of information with few words and the simplest of drawings.

Trondheim had long encouraged Findakly to write about her Iraqi roots, but she considered her life rather mundane. Her parents met shortly after World War II while her Iraqi father was studying dentistry in France. Her mother is French, and unlike Riad Sattouf’s French mother (from Arab of the Future) who also married a Syrian man studying in France, Findakly’s mother never regretted her decision. When life in Iraq became increasingly difficult, it was Findakly’s father who pushed the family to emigrate. Her French mother, who would frequently vacation in France with her children, hated to leave.

While Trondheim and others felt that Findakly’s life was overflowing with profound and moving content, she remained unconvinced. I suspect that raising two children, looking after aging parents, and working also contributed to Findakly’s inability to see the appeal of her story. A combination of factors seem to have contributed to her decision to finally tackle the project: all of her relatives had either died or emigrated from Iraq; her father, nearing the end of his life, was losing his memory; for decades the West had been inundated with negative stories from the region, none portraying people enjoying life; and, conditions in Iraq were such that she could no longer foresee a day when she would return to her homeland. Suddenly, Findakly’s desire to record memories from a more peaceful era became pressing.

Concurrent with these circumstances, one of France’s popular newspapers, Le Monde, contacted Trondheim to see if he’d be interested in producing a weekly comic strip featuring current news events for their app, La Matinale. One of the top stories at that time was Daesh’s (ISIS) seizure of Mosul, the city where Findakly was born. Trondheim asked Findakly if he could work some of her memories into strips for the new app, and she agreed. Neither of them expected a book to spring from these short works that now initiate Coquelicots d’Irak.

Brigitte Findakly, as depicted by Lewis Trondheim, at work in her studio.

The Sunny Peaks and Dark Cavities of a Great Story

Coquelicots d’Irak is a rich and tender account of one woman’s complicated relationship with her homeland. Trondheim brilliantly condenses a wealth of thought-provoking material into one relatively thin volume. Findakly provides the raw material and adds color to create the finished product. In interviews, it’s clear they have a very special relationship.

Throughout the memoir, Findakly’s stories of her middle-class childhood are interwoven with a history of Iraq’s tyrannical leaders. Readers bounce between scenes of family life and the folly and foibles of government censorship, between the practices of Orthodox Christians and the slow decay of a secular society, between teenage antics and draconian law enforcement measures, between wholesome childhood play and the toxicity of environmental mishaps.

My mother subscribed to a French women’s magazine that came every month. The magazine would post cover photos of 45 artists from the Hit Parade at the back. Holes regularly appeared on this page. This went on for years before I asked my mother why. She explained that an album by Enrico Macias was removed and that postal workers were charged with cutting out his photo because he was Jewish.

Perhaps the overarching lesson of the book is that people will find ways to live and love even in the most repressive of societies. Leaders don’t change forward-looking societies into crumbling islands of paranoia-ridden dysfunction overnight. Caught up in the necessities of earning a living, caring for loved ones, feeding their families, and carving out time for leisure, most people try to circumvent problems like corruption, injustice, bigotry, and oppression until the pain of doing so becomes too great to ignore. In the case of Iraq, let’s hope the country is finally in a position to create a more open society.

In 1963, General Aref returned, conducting a coup d’état with help from members of the Ba’ath political party. A year later, Aref decided to execute all of the Ba’athists. Ba’athist militants, who weren’t particularly popular (due to their abuses, tortures, and immuring of live prisoners), were hanged in Mosul’s public square. My brother, who was 9 years old, was taken by bus along with his classmates to view the hanging bodies.

Boosting your French Comprehension

If you follow my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I love to read bandes dessinées. I can’t say enough about this literary form. Graphic literature, especially the nonfiction variety, has so much to offer. When text is accompanied by illustrations that convey the setting, facial expressions, appearance, and props, a reader can absorb a great deal of information in just a few pages. This is why I’ve been eager to dive into Coquelicots d’Irak ever since learning of its co-authors, Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim. The dynamic couple contributed to Femme Vie Liberté—another work of graphic nonfiction that I reviewed earlier this year.

Self portraits of Lewis Trondheim and Brigitte Findakly

If you don’t know French, don’t worry. Coquelicots d’Irak (and all the other graphic works I’ve reviewed) is available in English as Poppies of Iraq. If you’re interested in boosting your vocabulary, however, I highly recommend picking up the French version, available at Lireka. Graphic literature is great for language learners. It’s dialogue-centric and typically set in a modern context. Thus, readers are exposed to the way French people speak today. Flaubert and Hugo have their strong suits, but teaching you how to speak like a native speaker is not one of them.

In addition, the illustrations help you decode language that may be unfamiliar. Harken back to the first and second grade when your teacher urged you to look at the pictures to interpret the meaning of words on the page. The same method applies to adult language learners as well. Instead of reading content for first graders, however, you can find bandes dessinées on countless intriguing subjects. In this case, what it was like to grow up in Iraq in the 1960s and early 70s.

Colorful Vocabulary

Below are some examples of colorful words and phrases from Coquelicots d’Irak, that you may not have encountered previously.

My mother would make mouth-watering French desserts that people loved. When she would offer seconds, her salivating guests would politely refuse while waiting for my mother to insist. This she would never do. My mother never got used to this custom… Conversely, her guests ended up changing their habits when they came to our house.

More Reviews of Graphical Biographies

• Arab of the Future, Classic Literature Masquerading as Comics
• A Game for Swallows, Revealing Humanity Beneath the Rubble
• Alain Passard, Revolutionary 3-Star Michelin Chef Who Went All Veggie
• Kiki de Montparnasse, Muse of A Thousand Faces
• Two Graphic Novels, Illuminating Memoirs from the Middle East that are Fun to Read
• Kobane Calling, Captivating Account of Kurdish Struggle in Syria
• Surviving A Massacre—Catherine Meurisse And Art’s Curative Power