French / Belgium
Le piano oriental
(The oriental piano)
Abirached, Zeina
(text/illus.)
Bruxelles: Casterman, [2015]. – 232 p.
ISBN 978-2-203-09208-2
Cultural identity | Graphic novel | Music | Paris | Beirut
Reading age: 14+
White Ravens issue: 2016
In “Le piano oriental”, Zeina Abirached’s best novel to date, the Franco-Lebanese author tells two family histories. The first is about great-grandfather Abdallah, who seeks to connect the music of the “Orient” and that of the “Occident” by means of a piano he invents. The second story follows the young artist as she finds her way to an inner acceptance of her francophone and Arabic roots. On the one hand, Abirached demonstrates how an ancient, multi-cultural heritage, when abused for the sake of power-seizing, can lead to stereotypes and enmity, and even to a stress test for a whole country, as in the Lebanese civil war. On the other, she vividly shows what a fulfilled life with multiple, if not always consonant, identities can be. She has found her way to an unmistakeable pictorial language. Her graphically challenging work is based in black and white; colours are used ingeniously to interweave the different narrative planes.