Watch this YouTube video and learn to make tabbouleh in under two minutes. Food is another important part of Lebanese culture. Listen and see a performance of it here: Ģ. She mentions the song “Ayyam El LouLou” by Sabah.

Zeina Abirached remembers some of the music that filled her home as a child during the war.

I Remember Beirut is a great addition to both graphic novel and multicultural collections.ġ. After all, a teenager growing up during a civil war is still a teenager who is desperate to learn how to drive and get her license! I found myself rejoicing over the memory of Kit-Kats wrapped in foil, cassette tapes, Flo-Jo’s nails at the Olympic Games, even smoking on airplanes seems quaint expressed in her nostalgic style. Teens to grandparents from all backgrounds will find commonality and delight in this memoir. Abirached’s remembrances are peppered with items that readers across cultural lines will appreciate. She grew up in Beirut as fighting between Christians and Muslims divided the city streets. The anxiety of her family is expressed comically as her father tunes out the world to classical music, her brother makes a game of collecting shrapnel, and her mother packs the car with board games and snacks to distract the family from the chaos as they flee to safe refuge during the worst of the skirmishing. Blackouts and blown out windshields became just a way of life as young Zeina grew up in Beirut. For a child, the war was completely devoid of politics or religion, and made up only of the everyday concerns of a kid such as getting to school and watching cartoons. In her case, it was the Muslim west versus the Christian east, with Abirached’s home perched right on the “green line” of demarcation. In this brief yet elegant graphic novel, Zeina Abirached gives readers a child’s perspective on growing up in the cross hairs of a civil war. Print.īorn in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War that occurred between 1975-1990, author Zeina Abirached recalls the people, places and things that shaped her war-torn childhood using dramatic yet childlike black and white graphics and text.

I Remember Beirut by Zeina Abirached