9 minute read
An Interview with Tracy Chahwan
Tracy Chahwan by Audra McNamee
Tracy Chahwan
Tracy Chahwan is a cartoonist and illustrator from Lebanon. Since 2016, she has been working closely with the Beirut music scene, designing posters and visuals for numerous venues and concerts. In 2018, she published her first graphic novel Beirut Bloody Beirut with Marabulles. She is a member of many collectives, including Lebanese comics collective Samandal, and Zeez, which aims to be a truthful alternative to mainstream media. Her latest work includes contributions to Guantanamo Voices, published in 2020 by Abrams books, and Where to, Marie?: Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon.
Interview with Tracy Chahwan
By Forest Wihtol and Debarghya Sanyal
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/TracyChahwan
Debarghya Sanyal: How did you get involved with comics journalism? Tracy Chahwan: I think it’s with The Nib. I’ve been wanting to try it out for a while and Yazan (al-Saadi) contacted me a few years ago to work on this 10-page comic about Syrian refugees in Lebanon, so I just wanted to try it out. And after that I worked on a book called Guantanamo Voices written by Sarah Mirk. And the last one I did was a book about stories of feminism in Lebanon.
Forest Wihtol: You are a trained, ALBA [Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts]-educated artist, but you also have a family connection to journalism, through your mother. How do you bring these two elements, drawing and journalism together in your work, and have there been any dinner conversations about the changing tools and approaches of journalism across generations? TC: My mom is a journalist and a translator. Her passion is really translating literature, so there hasn’t really been any link to that. I think me working on comics journalism wasn’t really related to her. But the general climate in Lebanon, a lot of my friends, a lot of people who traveled there are journalists, and it’s always something that I thought I’d love to do if I wasn’t into drawing. I’m very curious about just going on the field and reporting on a subject. So I didn’t get to that point yet, but when The Nib contacted me, and working on all these different comics, it was kind of a step into this. I think a lot of people who live or lived in Lebanon have this approach on things; it’s a place where there’s so many subjects to dig into, so it’s generally very curious people who like to live there. I think it just came a bit naturally to me. There hasn’t been any discussion at the dinner table yet. DS: You work in fiction, and you work in memoir, and comics journalism. How do you distinguish between fiction and documentary, and do you feel that you shift your style accordingly? TC: Yeah absolutely. My first try at comics journalism, I was asking myself these questions, like “How do I adapt my way of storytelling or drawing to such a serious subject?” So with the first comic I did—the one that’s going to be exhibited—I wanted to try and keep it subjective. The last page was more philosophical. The writer was asking questions about humanity or politics, so I wanted to find a graphic way to tell that through a more illustrative approach, not a first degree approach. But it depends on the comic really, for instance with the comic about stories of Lebanese feminism, I try to stay as far away as possible from pure factual storytelling. I kind of did it through posters. I wanted to use the way that the posters from the 70s talked about politics. FW: Can you tell us a little about your methods and especially what it looks like when you collaborate with writers like Sarah Mirk or Yazan al-Saadi?
TC: Okay, so with Sarah, she had a very precise, detailed script, so that was very helpful and easy to follow. Every frame she tells you, “I’m thinking of this, that, this angle, this is going on,” and she was very open to making changes if the illustrator feels like it, so I didn’t really change anything. And also the story had a lot of material going on, so I didn’t really feel like I could add something to it. But for instance with Yazan on the last feminist project, there was a lot of reimagining to do. I had to think a lot about how to depict the 70s in Lebanon, The Civil War; how to use the graphics of the time, through my storytelling, so a lot of the pages actually look like posters,more than like comics. The fact that it was in a certain period, which was very rich visually, helped me a lot, and was very inspiring for me. But that’s the difference, with the Sarah Mirk project, which was more like I’m going to concentrate on the characters and what’s going on with them. DS: So tell us a little bit about your major inspirations or artistic influences. Are there any particular comics journalists or comics artists whose work pushed you toward journalistic comics? (As a reader I was drawn to the fact that some of your artwork reminded me of Love and Rockets by the Hernandez Brothers.)
TC: Nice. It’s funny because I didn’t read a lot of American comics. In Lebanon, I think we have the influence of Europe a lot, so I was reading Tintin a lot, or like Franco-Belgian comics in general. I think, naturally, my way of drawing, maybe it’s the bold line—there’s a lot of indie American artists who have this kind of thick line. And, of course, these later became influences like the Hernandez Brothers and Charles Burns.
I got interested in journalistic comics through a friend, an amazing artist who works with The Nib a lot, and we used to work together in Beirut. So I was like, “Wow! I hope I can make something for The Nib one day too.” His name is Ghadi Ghosn, his work is great. Other than that, as I said, for some projects, political posters from the 70s, 80s have been a big influence, a lot of art from the period also. But not necessarily journalistic comic artists. DS: How has living internationally influenced your sense of audience and your sense of comics as a global media? TC: Yeah, that’s a great question. Because I grew up partly in Lebanon and partly in Cyprus in a French school. I was always kind of in between three languages, three cultures, or more even.
So when I came back to Lebanon at 18 and started doing comics, you always ask yourself who is my audience? Who am I writing for? And I still don’t know honestly. I would like to translate more like what we do with Samandal. We translate everything in three languages, English, French and Arabic. But it’s not always easy. Finding the right publisher in the Arab world is not always easy. Lately I’ve been writing more and more in English, more than French for instance; I’ve steered away a bit from the French. When I’m doing my own personal comics, I try to talk about something that’s relevant to me. For instance, now I’ve been doing a lot of things about being a new immigrant in the U.S.: how it feels, how I see the U.S. Digging back into Lebanese history is also something when you’re abroad. My first comic Beirut Bloody Beirut was inspired a lot by coming back to my country, being in my 20s, just how it felt at that time. I just feel this thing where I’ve grown up in between different cultures, [it] has made me maybe more curious. When someone comes to me with a project about, for instance, Guantanamo, I was super curious. It was something I had heard about briefly, but it’s an occasion to understand what’s going on there. And this is what I love about this kind of work, just to dig into something unknown. FW: So what are some of the structural limitations that you feel are plaguing comics journalism today, and how have you encountered limitations with publishing your work? TC: I think for me I choose the subject. There’s a lot of projects that I refuse because I don’t feel like I can do something purely journalistic. For me, I have to be inspired somehow visually. Because a lot of times, it can feel like
homework if you’re not that into the subject. The ones I worked on, for instance, the scamming of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, because I could see that while I was living there, so I definitely wanted to depict it. Sometimes people come to me with things that I’ve never seen. I feel like it will be a homework. If I work on it, I will just have to research and draw well without putting something from my heart in it. DS: In the time that you have worked on comics, what are some of the changes in practices, tools, and approaches that have most attracted your attention? For instance, web comics and interactive comics.
TC: I don’t think I’ve experimented enough, and now there is also a lot of sharing comics on Instagram, which is very different from the way you think about a comic in print, which has its limitations, but also can be a good way to communicate, especially with what we’re living now when everyone is separated and abroad. So I’ve been experimenting a bit with this aspect of web comics, which is more direct to your readers and they can react, et cetera. For now, I have a preference for the print, the way the page is thought out in print. I don’t know that I could answer this question; I don’t feel like I’ve experimented enough with digital myself. FW: What kind of advice would you like to give to aspiring comics journalists or comic artists in general? TC: Wow. It depends, case by case, but I would say it is a ton of work. It’s very hard. But it’s also very rewarding. When I’m doing it, I forget about time and space. I feel like I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because you know, things have been hard creatively since I’m in the U.S., and I can’t go home for a long time. And people keep telling me keep doing comics, keep expressing yourself. And it’s very hard, because it takes a lot of time, and if you’re not feeling well morally, it’s not always good for you. But when you do it, it’s a medium where you can express yourself, much more than any other. I feel like it’s magical because every way of drawing is unique to each person. DS: Any last thoughts about the medium about looking forward to projects? TC: Yeah, I would say with everything that’s going on, especially in Lebanon—for myself, I’m talking—I always ask myself, should I do something journalistic that tackles issues frontally or, should I stay in something fictional and personal. Because I think telling your own story can be political, in a way. Lebanon is not just all the...it’s also people, and I feel like now, I want to work on something. I’m steering away a bit from journalistic stuff to work on something more personal... to kind of process what we’ve been going through.
