Plates, Panels, Speech Bubbles Between Languages: Representations of Languages in Zeina Abirached’s Graphic Novel "Le piano oriental"

Abstract

Published in France by Casterman in 2015, Le piano oriental is the fifth graphic novel by French Lebanese comic artist Zeina Abirached. Like her previous graphic works, this book is part of the autobiographical comics movement, although it takes a slightly different perspective. The author is no longer dealing with the facts of collective history, recounting the Beirut of her childhood ravaged by civil war, but she explores her linguistic biography, reflecting on her bilingualism and her dual heritage. Combining images and words, Le piano oriental retraces the author’s linguistic journey and the experience of a mother tongue that is not always pacified, culminating in the conquest of a linguistic in-between. After giving an overview of the textual manifestations of bilingualism in the book, this article aims to carry out an analysis of the representations of the author’s/narrator’s linguistic universe. The aim is to highlight the potential of the graphic metaphors inviting us to think about the mother tongue in a “post-monolingual” perspective.