(In)visible lives: trauma, grief, and anxiety in graphic narratives on the Lebanese Civil War

The Lebanese Civil War of the late twentieth century led to nearly one million refugees and internally displaced persons. This massive displacement and the associated trauma are rarely depicted in popular literature. Zeina Abirached's graphic novels, A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return (2012), and I Remember Beirut (2014), visually articulate the intense emotions of life under siege through her childhood experiences. This paper explores Abirached's work through trauma studies, focusing on the expression and repression of overwhelming feelings. It examines the concentrated spaces of the displaced and expelled, using black-and-white graphics to reveal the (in)visibility of emotions like fear, trauma, grief, vulnerability, and anxiety during war. The study challenges the notion that extreme emotions are invisible or unsayable by highlighting the paradoxical muteness of traumatic expression. By analysing spatiality in Abirached's graphic novels, this research reveals how war survivors express their bare life and the overlooked emotions of waiting, anticipation, and anxiety in a warzone.