Perspectives on exile | The Press

“It’s difficult to go into exile at 30… There is something that dies in us…”, says the character of Fadi in The end of the beginning. This comic book by Fadi Malek and Anne Villeneuve is one of two books, along with the novel Beirut-sur-Seine of Sabyl Ghoussoub, to address the issue of exile this fall.

Laila Maalouf
The Press

Born of an unexpected encounter, The end of the beginning recounts the arrival in Montreal of a Lebanese who left his country to no longer have to endure family and social pressure while concealing his homosexuality.

“I often tell Fadi that I feel he is my Michel Tremblay of Lebanese literature,” says author and illustrator Anne Villeneuve. He was really successful in portraying characters from his family, uncles, aunts… It can be really, really hard to have a family that puts a lot of pressure on you, and I think that’s universal. »

Anne Villeneuve met Fadi Malek quite by chance, in a Montreal café where she was settling down to work, in search of inspiration. A cafe where people approach each other without embarrassment and where he approached her, one day, to comment on his drawings. “We started talking about this and that, then as time progressed, he must have felt that he could trust me and he started to reveal himself and tell his life story,” she recalls.

Friendship settled quietly, followed by confidences. “The more it progressed, the more I had the impression of seeing a comic strip before my eyes; the script was done by itself, I saw the war scenes [au Liban]. »

Fadi Malek was barely 14 years old when he heard the first bombings and had to take refuge with his relatives in a cellar, scenes which are skilfully reproduced in the comic strip. Between the flashbacks, from his adolescence to his university studies in Lebanon, we glimpse his installation in Montreal, in 1999 – his first winter, Christmas far from his family, his loneliness.

But if it is she who tells us all this, it is because in fact, Fadi Malek is a pseudonym.

“When we started working on the comic strip, he had difficulty going deep into the scenes,” explains the author. Then, I understood that he still had the fear of being discovered. So that’s where the idea of ​​publishing under a pseudonym came from. From then on, the channels opened and creation was much brighter. »

Even if he still wants to stay in the shadows, Fadi Malek wanted to answer our question about his exile by email. “My life will remain viscerally linked to the destiny, even to the sorrows of these people that I left behind me”, he wrote to us, returning to this feeling of being disoriented and losing bearings, depicted in the tape drawn, which he experienced on his arrival. But he found in his host land an unexpected freedom, he adds, which helped him in his “march towards [sa] reconstruction”.

sons of exiles

Exile is also at the heart of the novel Beirut-sur-Seinewhere the author, Sabyl Ghoussoub, reflects on the estrangement experienced by his parents, who left Lebanon for France at the start of the civil war, in 1975. “At the age of thirty-one, I knew nothing of their past, of their arrival in Paris, of their war in Lebanon and of the suffering that exile was for them,” he wrote.

As in The end of the beginningthe story alternates between past and present, in addition to interweaving personal memories – of the author, of his parents – and historical facts about the conflict that ravaged the country for 15 years and which had repercussions as far as France. .

The tone is far from dramatic – it is even rather funny, at times, since Sabyl Ghoussoub portrays her parents with humor and deep affection: the quarrels between her father and mother over the date of their arrival in Paris, the mania of his mother to serve him food each time he visits them or even that of his father to fill the fridge with boxes of The Laughing Cow, “as if war was going to break out tomorrow”, his wife mocks him.

Then the story becomes more introspective, as the author comes to question his own identity, and we understand that he wanted to write this book out of love for his parents who “during their whole life […] recreated Beirut at home without realizing it”.

The end of the beginning

Fadi Malek and Anne Villeneuve

New address

184 pages

Beirut-sur-Seine

Sabyl Ghoussoub

Stock

308 pages