In this volume, I tell stories from before and after 1990 – the end of the civil war. Do you want to continue the series?Ībirached: Of course. Your comic book ' Je me souviens Beyrouth' ('I Remember Beirut') has just been published in German. New buildings are put up and the old have to make way for them. Sadly, I found out recently that the wall had been demolished. Whenever I’m in Beirut I go back to that piece of graffiti. Some time later I realised that the swallows symbolised people caught up in the war – constantly up in the air and uncertain, always waiting for better days. After the war, I was able to cross the road for the first time and I found a wall on the other side with the graffitied slogan 'A game for swallows'. As a child, I thought that was where Beirut ended.

How big did the world seem to you at the time?Ībirached: We lived on Youssef Semaani Street, with a high wall of sandbags intended to protect us from snipers. But in between was the demarcation line, the frontline of the war.

The distance between you and the western half of the city was less than three kilometres. You were living in East Beirut with your parents and your brother. In your graphic novel A Game for Swallows, you take the readers back to one night in the midst of the civil war. What was difficult then was to go deeper and deeper into situations and to link them up. Talking to my mother unleashed a flood of memories, and one story led to the next. I had very little understanding of what was happening to us at the time. I was just a child when the war was going on in Lebanon.

My parents said they hardly remembered anything. On the contrary: adapting also means fighting and resisting.'Ībirached: The conversations were very slow and difficult to begin with. But when people talk about adapting, it doesn’t mean we ignore reality.

She also discusses the influence of OuLiPo, and especially the writings of Georges Perec, on her comics.Zeina Abirached: 'People say that the Lebanese can adapt to almost any situation. She focuses especially here on the dimensions of time and space, history and geography, and memory and autobiography in her work. In this artist's statement, originally written for a keynote lecture given at the American Bande Dessinée Society conference held at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) on 3 November 2012, she presents her four comic books published to date, all of them autobiographical: Catharsis (2006), 38, rue Youssef Semaani (2006), Mourir, partir, revenir: Le jeu des hirondelles (2007), published in English as A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Live, To Return (2012), and Je me souviens: Beyrouth (2008), published in English as I Remember Beirut (2014). Zeina Abirached, born in 1981 in Beirut, is a cartoonist who studied at the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts (ALBA) in Beirut and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, France.

A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached