(From Drawing the War [2002] to Salām [2019]: languages, memories, and identities in Lena Merhej’s production)

in La rivista di Arablit, a. XII, n. 24, dicembre 2022, pp. 113-132.

Lena Merhej (Līna Mirhiǧ) is a visual storyteller, born in Beirut to a German mother and a Lebanese father. She is a co-founder of the artistic collective “Samandal”, which published the first magazine of adult comics in the Arab world. In her works, largely focused on the exploration of family and personal memories, the author often addresses the issue of conflict, linking her personal crisis to the collective events of the multi-religious and multi-ethnic reality of Lebanon. She deals expressly with it in the short film Drawing the War (2002) and in the graphic novel Salām (Peace, 2019), two works distant in time and even more distant in terms of style and content, which mark the extreme points of a personal and artistic journey, conducted in the last twenty years. Between these two poles, in addition to the experience gained within the “Samandal” collective, there are two other works dealing with the same topic: A‘taqidu annanā sa-nakūnu hādi’īna fī ’l ḥarb al-muqbilah (I think we will be calmer in the next war, 2006) andMurabbà wa laban (aw kayfa aṣbaḥat ummī lubnāniyyatan) (Jam and Yogurt, or How My Mother Became Lebanese, 2011). My contribution intends to analyse, through the reading of these autobiographical texts, the evolution of verbal and iconic languages related to the narration of social and personal crisis, where the process of defining the individual and collective identity of the author also passes through the search for a linguistic and cultural belonging.