Lamia Ziadé's Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979 (2011) is an illustrated memoir originally published in French and translated into English. The book includes a sparse autobiographical narrative, archival materials and original artwork that represents Lebanon in the 1970s. Like other 21st century Arab diaspora narratives of the civil war, such as Rawi Hage's novel Dinero's Game (2006) and Wajdi Mouwad's play Incendies (2003), Bye Bye Babylon portrays the Lebanese situation within a global cultural and political frame. While Bye Bye Babylon evokes the national context largely through a set of autobiographical nostalgic recollections, Ziadé's memoir depicts globality through stylized images of commodities, ranging from imported foods to imported weapons. Bye Bye Babylon recaptures the materiality of daily life, but often through pastiche, which is its principal technique. The book is nostalgic in its title, which bids farewell to and also brings forth that lost place of memory that perhaps was only ever a myth. Furthermore, the nostalgia of the graphic memoir is inflected with political irony that finds expression in the contrasting forms of the narration, as the book moves between Ziade's account of her subjective childhood memories of family life during the war (the national) and her more objective factual cataloguing of weapons, militias, personalities and events (the global). This unusual book is situated in the spaces between Arab and World Literatures. This paper argues that Ziadé's appeal to nostalgia in the genre of the memoir operates within a familiar and romantic national discourse on Lebanon that is complicated and critiqued by the representation of the cosmopolitan consumerism of Beirut's violent urban culture in the 1970s, which is itself an effect of globalization.