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Description
“Magical...Lamia Ziadé tells the story of the explosion as she experienced it: from afar but in the heart. A book of love, mourning and anger”-- Elle
On the evening of August 4, 2020, an explosion tore through Beirut, leaving nearly 200 people dead, 6,000 injured, and 300,000 homeless. The blast was caused by storing thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate alongside a stash of fireworks—a deadly arrangement about which the government had known but done nothing.
For six months straight, French Lebanese author and artist Lamia Ziadé wrote, illustrated, and recorded every new piece of information, every photograph of the wreckage or the wounded. In My Port of Beirut, Ziadé weaves together the play-by-play of the tragedy and the history of Lebanon with her own personal stories and her participation in the 2019 protests against state corruption, laying out the historical and political background that made such a catastrophe possible and, perhaps, inevitable.
Lamia Ziadé is a Lebanese author, illustrator, and visual artist. Born in Beirut in 1968 and raised during the Lebanese Civil War, she moved to Paris at 18 to study graphic arts. She then worked as a designer for Jean-Paul Gaultier, exhibited her art in numerous galleries internationally, and went on to publish several illustrated books, including Ma très grande mélancolie arabe, which won the Prix France-Liban, Ô nuit, ô mes yeux and Bye bye Babylone.
About the Author
Lamia Ziadé is a Lebanese author, illustrator and visual artist. Born in Beirut in 1968 and raised during the Lebanese Civil War, she moved to Paris at 18 to study graphic arts. She then worked as a designer for Jean-Paul Gaultier, exhibited her art in numerous galleries internationally, and went on to publish several illustrated books, including Ma très grande mélancolie arabe which won the Prix France-Liban, Ô nuit, ô mes yeux and Bye bye Babylone.
Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, RI, where she also co-owns Riffraff bookstore and bar. She has received the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Fulbright for her work. She was named the Translation Fellow for 2023 by the National Endowment of the Arts. Her translations include Sphinx and In Concrete by Anne Garréta, Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, Zabor, or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud, and A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa.
Praise For…
'Magical ... Lamia Ziadé works as an alchemist. My Port of Beirut tells the story of the explosion as she experienced it: from afar but in the heart. She draws the faces of the victims, collects the stories, reproduces the graffiti against the corrupt leaders, and explains these destroyed buildings which to us are only buildings for us but for her are symbols, memories, her life... A book of love, mourning and anger'
'Elle'
'A very moving tribute... the Franco-Lebanese illustrator and writer has been developing a very personal literary genre for several years, made up of very colourful texts and drawings, reproductions of photos taken from private archives or press articles... Here, she erects a mausoleum to the victims of the disaster, and over the pages, the simple succession of their faces and their names creates intense emotion'
Les Inrockuptibles
'Lamia Ziadé tells here in the first person the contemporary history of her native country, its violence, the very year of her birth in 1968, which is also that of the first stone laid for the port silos, for which she has had a passion since childhood... Through this emblematic place that she makes her own, her port of Beirut, she writes a Lebanese autobiography of words and images that will speak to every reader'
Le Point (April 2021)
'Lamia Ziadé tells not only her personal trauma but also the story of the familiar and common violence that crossed her country (and all her life since her birth in 1968) and to which the explosion of the 2,750 tons of nitrate from ammonium from hangar 12 gives an overwhelming sense of endless curse... She mixes narrative and drawings, entangling her biography in the collective destiny to honour here, first and foremost, the memory of victims she did not know.'
Livres Hebdo (30 March 2021)
'Brutal, touching... '
Politis
'To re-see the Port of Beirut explosion through the softened lens of Lamia Ziade’s watercolors, paired with her personal and family memories of the port, is to re-live it with a raw tenderness that remains full of rage-struck grief'
M. Lynx Qualey, Founding editor, ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly
'Haunted by the city’s violent history, this polyphonic diary of the Beirut Port apocalypse is as poignant as it is meticulous. With the tender rage of a broken heart, Lamia Ziadé turns helplessness into a dazzling act of bearing witness.'
Omar Berrada, writer and curator
‘Extraordinary’
'Ms. Magazine'
'A personal, impassioned account of a crime committed against the Lebanese people’
Ursula Lindsey, ‘New York Review of Books’