MESA Banner
Communal Identities and Belonging in Brigitte Findakly's Poppies of Iraq
Abstract
Since Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking work Maus (1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) comics have been increasingly recognized as a legitimate literary medium thanks to its capability to convey content and meaning in a unique way. In particular, graphic novels have witnessed a surge in popularity as a way to engage in historical, non-fictional narrative. Graphic novels allow the reader to think outside the sanctioned conventional norms of narration thanks to its ability to subvert temporal and cultural boundaries. However, the academic interest in this genre has been largely focused on graphic novels as representation of history, its limits and its subversion (Chute 2006, James 2000, Joseph 1989, Ostby 2017) or, in the case of Muslim protagonists, in the ways the medium subverts but also reproduces Orientalist and neo-Orientalist representations (Hancock 2018, Stromberg 2011), thus overlooking processes of communal formation. This paper analyzes the ways in which a counter-hegemonic historical conscience of Iraq is articulated in Brigitte Findakly's Poppies of Iraq. Written and colored by Brigitte Findakly on the drawing of her husband, Lewis Trondheim, Poppies of Iraq is Findakly’s autobiographical graphic novel narrates her life growing up in Iraq as the daughter of an Arab Iraqi Orthodox Christian, her father, and a French Catholic, her mother. The book is both a personal and familial history and a collective interreligious history in the ways it is situated in the political and historical context of Iraq. By means of utilizing a textual, visual, and formal analysis, this paper shows that not only does Poppies of Iraq make complex historical events readable, as Chute has argued for Maus (2006), it also defuses their power and, consequently, any teleological reading of the history of Iraq and its religious minorities. By means of unsettling not only the conventions of historical memoirs, but also the conventions of graphic novels (the book makes no use of panels, chapter numbers, nor page numbers), Poppies of Iraq relegates to the background the disruptive power of historical events, such as the several coup and counter-coups that occurred in Iraq since the 1950s, thereby bringing to the fore alternative articulations of communal identities and patterns of belonging.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries