As a genre, graphic novels and comics are certainly not new to the Arabic literary scene, however the past five years have seen an unprecedented surge of such publications in Cairo and Beirut. Given the themes of these narratives and their textual and visual innovation compared to more traditional literary production, it is important to contextualize this surge in relation to the social and political transformations sweeping through the region. Chaos, disorientation, and social and political breakdown are prevalent themes that are expressed both visually and textually. In this paper, I examine three graphic novels and comics: Madīna Mujāwira l-il Arḍ (“A City Close to Earth”) by Jorj Abu Mhayya, published by Dar Onboz in 2012, Hādhihī al-Qiṣṣa Tajrī (“This Story is Unfolding”) by Mazen Kerbaj, published by Dar al-Adab in 2010, and Fī Shiqqat Bāb al-Lūq (“In a Bab-al-Luq Apartment”), which is written by Dunya Mahir, illustrated by Ganzeer and Ahmed Nadi, and published by Dar Merit in 2013. I explore the ways in which these novels’s mapping of the city’s landscape, which is characterized by chaos, collapse, and fragmentation, unfolds through the literary and visual language of the text. I argue that this graphic mapping operates simultaneously as a mapping of the self. Mapping, locating, and finding oneself on the page—in the city and in the text—produces a new narrative of Arab subjectivity through a series of jabs and revisions, lines and distortions. I argue that in these works, the juxtaposing and the meshing of the spatial boundaries between their visual and textual elements, amplify, yet in certain ways contain the social and political fragmentation and implosion of the urban cityscape of Beirut and Cairo in times of tumult. The multiple intertextual references and trajectories, the inserting of photographs amongst the drawings, the combining of different formats of writing, all serve to reproduce a social reality in the imagined and often dystopian versions of the respective cities. The mapping processes I identify in these narratives break with the discourse on Arab history and nationalism through which art and literature are often understood. Thus, theorizing a new genre of cultural production in this comparative context opens up the Beirut -Cairo intellectual trajectory and exchange beyond the Nahda legacy.

Using Life (Istikhdām al-ḥayāt), a graphic novel published in October, 2014 by Dar al-Tanweer, is the result of a unique collaborative effort between novelist, editor, and blogger Ahmed Nagy (b. 1985) and graphic artist Ayman Zorkany (b. 1982). Combining Zorkany's drawings with Nagy's sardonic narrative style, Using Life is, at its simplest, the story of a group of artists trying to document a “secret society” that is responsible for refashioning Cairo's architectural landscape. At the same time, as a reflection of its author's background in blogging, the book unfolds as a veritable “wiki” of all things frivolous and fantastical: classic scenes from Egyptian cinema, the history of Saint-Simonians, the mating rituals of cockroaches, tropes from international comics and manga, fragments of autobiography, and spaces left open for reader contributions. This paper reads Istikhdām al-ḥayāt alongside a history of graphic narrative engagements with the theme of global, transhistoric conspiracy and conspiracy theory, including the works of Alan Moore (V for Vendetta; Brought to Light), and Yusuf Rakha's Book of the Sultan's Seal(2011). Despite the formal differences between these works, each, I argue, deploys graphic narrative elements – whether “doodles” (shakhābīṭ) in the case of Rakha, or fully-fledged “comics” in the cases of Moore and Zorkany & Nagy – as an aesthetic tool particularly suited to document, expose, and mimic the politics of secret societies. In general, these works oppose the khuṭūṭ (lines, traces) of drawing and text to the mukhaṭṭaṭ (plot, scheme) of conspiracy. Specifically, Nagy's and Zorkany's “wiki” of text, images, and footnotes strives to trace and expose the agents of a secret society in the manner of WikiLeaks, while also displaying a profound ambivalence about such methods through their narrative's playful digressions and undeveloped plot lines.

This paper offers a critical and theoretical reflection on the translation of Arabic graphic literature into English. Taking as a case study my translation of the recent illustrated Arabic novel "Limbo Beirut" by Lebanese writer Hilal Chouman (b. 1982), the paper considers the translation of a work with a visual as well as a textual element as a process that engages the translator in uniquely material, imaginative, and affective ways. Each of the five chapters in Chouman’s novel contains approximately fifteen black-and-white drawings by contemporary Arab artists, ranging from the fanciful to the frankly disturbing in their visualizations of the novel’s characters and scenes amid the urban landscapes of post-war millennial Beirut. These illustrations demand the attention of the reader, and I suggest, elicit from him or her a complex repertoire of physical and sensorial responses as s/he moves through the text that add to those evoked by Chouman’s prose. Yet for the translator charged only with rendering the novel from Arabic into English, the illustrations are, as extra-linguistic elements, seemingly in excess of or other-than that which must be translated. They comprise a non-textual, untranslatable mass alongside the written Arabic text, a supplement to it in a different medium. Apprehended non-verbally, I suggest, they cannot be narrated in words but must be conveyed otherwise through the same “vocabulary” of senses and affects in which they were experienced. This paper thus explores how the non-textual, graphic dimension of a work like "Limbo Beirut" interpenetrates and informs the translation of its textual dimension through the medium of the translator’s feeling body. How do her sensory responses to the illustrations carry over into her translation, through and in addition to the words she produces? What new avenues of inquiry emerge from considering reading, writing, drawing, and translating not only as acts of the conscious mind but also of the non-conscious body? If each illustration bears traces of the labor of the artist’s own body — pen-strokes, handwritten words, ink thick on the page — how might these be materially experienced and re-embodied by the translator in her work? In addition to suggesting new ways of thinking about translation, such questions have implications for understanding how Arabic graphic literature circulates in English translation as a cultural and aesthetic object.

The Egyptian graphic novel Metro by artist Magdy El Shafee was first published in 2007 by Dar al-Malamih, a publishing house with a reputation for championing younger and politically outspoken authors. Part of the wave of graphic novel writing that in the 2000s in Cairo and Beirut, Metro tells the story of a disillusioned but principled young Cairo hacker named Shehab who witnesses the murder of a businessman and finds himself involved in a conspiracy of corrupt authorities, a bank robbery, and, eventually, a political protest against government corruption that ends violently. Not long after its publication, the book was banned by an Egyptian court for offending public morals, and all copies were removed for sale. The book paints a bleak picture of political and economic frustration in late-Mubarak era Egypt. This paper will examine some of the formal and linguistic challenges that a graphic novel such as Metro presents for translation. With a fixed visual layout and limited space for text, a graphic novel presents tighter constrictions on the translator than an all-text novel does. At the same time, the visual immediacy of the genre demands an informal, colloquial style: the pull to present a colloquial English translation—a domesticated translation, to use Lawrence Venuti’s term—operates in creative tension with Metro’s immersion in Cairo’s urban cityscape, one that lends itself far more to foreignization. Unlike an all-text novel, the words in a graphic novel form only a part of the entire work. How, then, should a translator attempt to translate the visual aspect of the text, if at all? As is implied by the title, El Shafee uses Cairo’s subway system—recreated visually with images of the Metro logo and background renderings of station maps throughout the text—as a symbol of the hidden lines that connect a city of vast socioeconomic differences. The dichotomy between wealth and poverty is inscribed in El Shafee’s frequent use of overhead images and drawings from a worm’s-eye perspective. The horizontal network of the Metro and the vertical world engendered by economic disparity and corruption two represent visual dimensions of the text that pose additional challenges to the translator. It is these “untranslatable” qualities—the visual and the linguistic—that I will address in this paper.