Author of
Lebanon is Burning, vol. 1 (Graphic Mundi)
Yazan al-Saadi is a Syrian-Canadian writer, researcher, critic, and comic zealot. He is currently based in the alluring (yet callous) city of Beirut. He has seen too many airports and often dreams of electronic sheep.
Yazan Al-Saadi
Books by Yazan
Lebanon is Burning, vol. 1 (Graphic Mundi)
Lebanon is Burning is a graphic novel that collects a six-year-stretch of Syrian-Canadian journalist Yazan Al-Saadi's professional comic journalism to provide a unique and compelling view of the Arab World, in the decade since the eruption of the 2011 uprisings gave way to a region-wide regime-driven counter-revolution. Much of the discourse about the Arab uprisings since 2015 often paints an absolute defeatist and miserable picture, but the truth is more complicated and moments of struggle and inspiration persist despite the overwhelming odds.
In these comic dispatches, from Yemen to Sudan to Bahrain, drawn by a wide-range of comics artists throughout the region, Yazan Al-Saadi bears powerful witness to an era of counter-revolutionary resurgence by the entrenched powers clashing against a persistently stubborn struggle for self-determination by people from below.
Where to, Marie? Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon (Self-published, with funding by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung), 2021
Where to, Marie? showcases why and from where these feminist movements in Lebanon emerged and how they have grown over the course of the century, told through four fictional personal narratives. These stories here are all based on extensive research carried out between 2010 and 2015, which included semi-guided interviews with feminist actors of different generations, as well as other sources, such as archival photographs, films, books, and articles regarding feminism(s) and social movements in Lebanon that informed the art and text, as did the experiences lived and witnessed by the authors.
Cardboard Camp: Stories of Sudanese Refugees in Lebanon (Self-published, with funding by the University of Oslo), 2023
Cardboard Camp is a fictional retelling of a major protest by Sudanese refugees via four fictional Sudanese characters drawn from extensive ethnographic research carried out with Sudanese protection seekers in Beirut between 2015 and 2021. The story hopes to spotlight some of the daily concerns and struggles of Sudanese refugees who are marginalized by systems, and to remind readers that such struggles persist alongside and within larger humanitarian governance systems, in Lebanon and beyond.