Page 4 - A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return, Expanded Edition

In a crisp, accessible black-and-white style, reminiscent of Marjane

Satrapi’s Persepolis, Zeina Abirached shows us both the horror and
the beauty that can emerge from war. It’s 1984 in East Beirut. Very
young Zeina has never known anything but war. She lives in the mid-

dle of the war zone with her parents and her even younger brother.
The family has closed off most of their apartment and moved into
the foyer, the only safe room in the house. They’ve dragged in their
mattresses, their chairs and rugs. Hanging on the wall is the fam-
ily heirloom, a tapestry depicting Moses and the Hebrews fleeing

Egypt. The tapestry is separated into panels, like the comic page
that contains it: a comic within a comic.

Zeina’s parents have gone out to visit her grandmother, who lives a
few blocks away—and they have not returned, although they left for

home an hour ago. And here’s where the beauty comes in.

The neighbors all filter down in ones and twos, to stay with the kids.
Soon, nine people fill the tiny foyer. Some of them have lost loved
ones to the war. Some of them are preparing to flee to Canada, like
Moses and the Hebrews in the tapestry.

They drink strong Turkish coffee and listen to the bombardment
outside. Anhala, an old woman, makes a Lebanese cake called sfouf
that sounds delicious. Should the worst happen, these kids will be
loved and cared for!

As I write this, the newspapers and the Internet are full of tributes
to Marie Colvin, the journalist who was killed by shelling in Syria
on February 22, 2012, along with a French photojournalist named
Rémi Ochlik. With her black eye patch, which she wore after losing
her eye to shrapnel while covering conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001,