Tracy Chahwan is a storyteller, comics are her language

Copyright © Tracy Chahwan, as part of ICD Brookfield Place’s ‘Do Arabs Dream of Electric Sheep?’, Dubai, 2023.

Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili.

It all started with the Beirut Groove Collective. That’s when Tracy Chahwan got her start in illustration, designing posters for music artists and club nights like Yukunkun Club, where the Beirut-born and bred artist was resident poster designer. It was evidently a strong start – she has since illustrated for The New Yorker, WePresent and Middle East Eye. Her first comic, produced in her final year at university, was about two girls at night in Beirut. Through the journey alongside the girls, Tracy takes us on a journey through all the neighbourhoods of Beirut. – her work is often a mouthpiece for daily Lebanese and Arab life, ranging from gender issues to socio-political issues and representing creative Middle Easterners.

“When the protests happened here, I started using drawing to process a bit of what was going on,” Tracy tells me over a Zoom call from the beach in Beirut (I try not to look envious looking back at her from my gloomy London office). “And I did a lot… more political stuff. And I got into comics journalism… any theme that interests me, because, you know, it's a lot of work to do comics. So you have to be really interested or else it's just labour.”

Her recent work includes, for example, a “comic on how Syrian refugees get scammed by people here in Lebanon”, as well as a book on Guantanamo Bay Prison, ‘Guantanamo Voices’, which tells the stories of ten people whose lives have been shaped and affected by the prison. And a comic about Lebanese feminism, ‘Where to, Marie? Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon’.

Even when she’s not making comics, her illustrative style is adjacent to the flat, two-dimensional world of comics. “I've never thought about it like that,” she replies when I relay this observations. “I love telling stories. For me now… I go through something, and I'm already thinking about how I can put that into a comic. So it's a language that you learn.”

Citing them as early influences, she takes cues from Argentinian illustrator José Muñoz, notable for his black and white style, and Canadian comic illustrator Julie Doucet, who creates underground feminist comics. Tracy remembers finding the latter’s work in a library at University and thinking, “wow, this is what I want to do”.

Tracy is based in Philadelphia but still calls Lebanon home. During the pandemic, she was stuck in the US and couldn’t visit family for two years. “It was very traumatising”, she reveals. “It's also it's weird to move at 28.” Moving country has also given her the gift of a change in scene, though, and with this, she’s been able to immerse herself in different scenes and find new inspiration for her work. “Here in Lebanon, my work is more viscerally linked to [Lebanon]. I understand things much deeper and three-dimensionally here”, she tells me, “But when I was [in the US], I was more interested in not working on my feelings as an immigrant but more about being an immigrant in a society that's alien to you and how you see them.” Tracy finds that westerners are often intrigued by situations in Iran or Lebanon, so when she publishes work in the west, she thinks it's interesting “to do the opposite and show them a mirror of themselves sometimes”, continues the artist.

Tracy doesn’t necessarily need to use comic books on the page to tell stories either. She uses comics in various ways; the most recent example being her work in ‘Do Arabs Dream of Electric Sheep’, which was shown at ICD Brookfield Place, Dubai.

The exhibition, which opened with performances curated by Palestinian online radio station, Radio Alhara, was conceived by Palestinian researcher, curator, and culture producer Adam HajYahia. It aimed to showcase the work of upcoming and established artists from the region exploring themes of futurism through culture, language, history, and place. The artists used traditional crafts from the region, and by doing so, in a way have to go back in order to look forward.

Using ancient Persian and Afghan rugs as inspiration, which often depict scenes from stories, Tracy thought about what kind of rug she might receive from the future; what kind of scene would this future rug depict? The resulting quartet of medium-sized rugs, Resembling Resilience, show scenes critical of the ideas of dystopia and utopia.

“We're actually living in the dystopia” claims Tracy. There's no linear story in these rugs, rather vignettes of a Lebanon “trapped” by constantly juxtaposing images. On one hand, images of destruction and war repeat themselves, and and on the other hand, Lebanon has a reputation in the region for being a “haven” – a catch-22. One of the rugs illustrates a woman smoking – a |still life of Lebanese pleasure, like smoking, having a beer, eating by the beach, like right now!” Tracy says, pointing at her own present moment as we speak to one another. “She looks very anxious at the same time.” In the background of this still life, two men with guns flee. “We grew up with this image of sectarianism and militias. So it came to me a bit subconsciously”, Tracy says of the work. “These are the best drawings, when you don't think so much.”

For now, the artist is going with the flow; she let’s work come to her organically and, other than working with an Arabic futurist band and participating in an exhibition, both of which are based in New York, she tells me, “I don’t have a specific plan, honestly!”

Follow Tracy here, and find more of her work here.