“A book can’t be beautiful if you don’t pay attention to its lettering. It’s normal, the letters are the base of the words. This is what the reader clings to in order to read. Me, I find it atrocious to read a comic with a typeface that looks like Arial or New Roman that you find on your computer. Saena Delacroix-Sadighiyan, a calligrapher specializing in Persian and Indo-European alphabets, is in Montreal to speak, Sunday at the Montreal Comics Festival, about mixed calligraphy. And to discover the common motifs in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic-Persian letters.
“Even when we receive an email, we are sensitive to paragraphs, indents. The message, it goes through all the aspects of the things written, “says the screenwriter, calligrapher and co-author of (A night) (First, 2022), co-signed by Kenza Aloui, Inès Weill-Rochant and illustrated by Odélia Kammoun.
The one who spent a decade with a master in Persian calligraphy from the Nastaliq school to learn the traditional codes and techniques of this writing believes that “we can play a lot more with typography. The comic book is incredible for that: it’s as if you could do special effects, without the big means of Hollywood”.
In (A night)to express ideas but especially the unsaid, Mme Delacroix-Sadighiyan found herself intermingling, like spikes of hair, for the first time, Persian, Hebrew, Islamic, and Latin letters—the last ones she learned to calligraphy, “because French is is my language of study, of reflection, it is there that I feel the most impostor in calligraphy”.
Born in Paris, she bathed in an Iranian cocoon, and only began to learn French at three years old, at school. Paradox: his parents never taught him to read Persian “because they absolutely didn’t want us to go back to Iran. For me, Persian letters are the ban of childhood. So of course, I wanted to do it…”
“When I got my first salary, I paid for my first Persian calligraphy course with a very rigorous, classical master. I learned the codes, the proportions of the letters, the objective of the beautiful letters — they must be ornamental before being readable, we are really on literate illumination. »
First, almost meditate
“The first calligraphy class, she remembers, was a posture class. We don’t even take the reed pen”, this reed of which Mme Delacroix-Sadighiyan now masters the cut, in order to transform it into feathers. “It’s very organic in the hand, it’s a bit of a magic wand. »
All his training as a calligrapher was done on sacred texts. During his apprenticeship, “I only calligraphed the Koran, and poems by Hafez and Saadi, who are almost demi-gods in Iran. But at one point, rewriting the same suras, my letters were perfect, and I no longer felt anything”.
“Now I try to deconstruct the teaching I received. I calligraphy words that cannot be calligraphed. I dared to publish my calligraphies even if my master did not agree — I understood that he would never agree. »
“The first time I wrote a forbidden word, I cried. It was “atheist”. This is the first calligraphy that I did alone, for myself. I calligraphed “unbeliever”. These are complex words. I didn’t show this to anyone. Even my husband, I didn’t show him. »
In (A night), it transgresses other religious and political taboos. She wrote in the same ink (“lampblack, a kind of Indian ink”) “Israel” and “Islam”, in the same pen. She also wrote a prayer from the Koran by making a circle of letters rather than respecting the traditional linearity. Among others.
The law of letters
“Learning Hebrew gave me perspectives on what we could and could not do. In Hebrew, you can write the letters of the Torah as you wish: in a whirlwind, in a line, one above the other. But why don’t we do that also in Persian letters? she wondered. And so she did.
The languages mingle through his head, his curiosity and his mouth as much as his letters under his pen. “I wasn’t allowed to learn Persian, so I learned all the other languages. I speak fluent Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Persian. I also know Japanese, Nahuatl, one of the indigenous languages of Mexico, a little Turkish, a little Arabic, a little Hebrew which I learned for the book. So. »
Who else, in contemporary comics, does lettering that she admires? “Craig Thomson, in Habibi, does a huge job on the letter and its meaning. It’s digital, but it’s goldsmithing. I also like what Marjane Satrapi does (Persepolis), Zeina Abirached (take shelter). Ah, Catherine Meurisse, too, who has extremely violent writing (Human, too human), manual and handwritten. »
Saena Delacroix-Sadighiyan gave up her position as a researcher in sociology at the start of 2023 to embark more on her projects of graphic novels – collective and solo -, calligraphy exhibitions and calligraphic performances, when she writes with the hair of Inès Weill -Rochant, for example. “I give myself a year and a half, then I redo a financial report and I see. And until then, she wants to deconstruct even more all these codes that she knows, and that she also teaches now.