Contemporary Authors

• Poppies of Iraq - 2017 Drawn and Quarterly, https://smile.amazon.com/Poppies-Iraq-Brigitte-Findakly/dp/1770462937/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526859156&sr=8-1&keywords=Findakly%2C+Brigitte

• Amazon - https://smile.amazon.com/Poppies-Iraq-Brigitte-Findakly/dp/1770462937/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526859156&sr=8-1&keywords=Findakly%2C+Brigitte

  About the Author

  Co-writer and colourist Brigitte Findakly was born in Mosul, Iraq, in 1959 and lived there until 1973. Cartoonist Lewis Trondheim was born in Fontainebleau, France in 1964. They have two children and live in the south of France.

• The Comics Journal - http://www.tcj.com/brigitte-findakly-and-lewis-trondheim-interview/

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I started writing down my own memories of Iraq three years before we started the book. I didn’t know at that point I would end up putting a book together, but I wanted to get down on paper everything that I could recall. So, there were straightforward notes on exactly what happened during my time there.” Several events motivated her to write the book, she told Wong. “When all my cousins began to emigrate from Iraq, I realized I would never end up going back,” she said. “My father was having health problems as his memory was failing him. My mother started to talk a lot more about her childhood. Before, she had always kept that part of her life to herself. Once Daesh entered Mosul –my birth city–that was the point of no return for my relationship with Iraq.”

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  “We’ve Worked Side by Side for 25 Years”: Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim Interview
  BY Alex Wong Sep 27, 2017

  Poppies of Iraq is a deeply personal graphic novel written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by her husband Lewis Trondheim. The memoir takes a deep dive into Brigitte’s years spent in her childhood growing up as an Orthodox Christian in Iraq, and traces her life through to when her family moved to France, while showing through Brigitte’s personal lens how the political shifts in her home country of Iraq affected her own family and others.

  Along the way, we’re treated to bits of humor, personal reflection, and plenty of poignant moments that give us a glimpse into life in a country that many of us have only heard about in passing, whether it is in news clips, or conversations with other people.

  Alex Wong: How did this book come about?

  Brigitte Findakly: When all my cousins began to emigrate from Iraq, I realized I would never end up going back. My father was having health problems as his memory was failing him. My mother started to talk a lot more about her childhood. Before, she had always kept that part of her life to herself. Once Daesh entered Mosul -- my birth city -- that was the point of no return for my relationship with Iraq.

  It was just at that exact moment that Frédéric Potet of Le Monde, a French newspaper, asked if Lewis Trondheim, my husband, would be interested in creating a weekly comic strip for their new app La Matinale. The project would be to create a strip that was three to four panels long about something from the current news cycle.

  At that point, Lewis asked if it would bother me if he tried to put some of my memories in order for that purpose. I had shown him the photo of myself as a child before a door at Nineveh, with the winged lion statue that had been decapitated by ISIS two weeks before. He immediately began from that point, and even used the photograph in his strip.

  What was the process behind gathering and choosing key memories and moments from your life for the book?

  Brigitte Findakly: I started writing down my own memories of Iraq three years before we started the book. I didn’t know at that point I would end up putting a book together, but I wanted to get down on paper everything that I could recall. So, there were straightforward notes on exactly what happened during my time there.

  When I decided it should be an actual book, I started trying to make them accessible for the potential readers, but I just couldn’t find the right narrative frame for these stories. Whatever I wrote ended up being either too simple or too influenced by old feelings.

  I wanted to write this story because Iraq had changed so much since I had lived there, and the situation was only getting worse. When I would speak to my family on the phone, they would tell me that I wouldn’t recognize Iraq if I ever went back, and they told me how dramatically their everyday lives had been transformed. I wanted to write this book for myself, so I could preserve my memories and their stories.

  The exercise of writing these memories down gave me the chance to figure out the most important memories and the defining moments I wanted to talk about. I also figured that, having these memories written down, one day my children would be able to know what happened by reading the book because we never really had the chance to discuss my childhood.

  That must have been a challenging process, and I assume there were difficult memories to think back on.

  Brigitte Findakly: Everything became much simpler once Lewis chose the photo of me in front of the winged lion statue and I decided that would be the start of the story. It was a thread we pulled on that unravelled the whole story.

  The book isn’t 100 percent chronological, but that’s because, given the current landscape of Iraq, it felt like the present and the past resonated with each other. We thought it would be much more pleasant to narrate the book in this way.

  After finding the starting point, Lewis would ask for clarification or additional detail about anecdotes in the story. Sometimes, I wouldn’t have an answer for him, so my mother and my brother -- who is six years older than me -- became excellent resources to turn to.

  Because of Lewis’s questions, I ended up learning about things that had gone under my radar while I was living them as a little girl. For example, when we were living in Mosul, we were always friends with Christians and Muslims. I figured that was normal, and that the same was true of my family in Baghdad. Whereas the way the capital was set up, my family was only interacting with other Christians. I had no idea about that.

  What was the collaborative process like with your husband Lewis, especially for such a personal project like this?

  Brigitte Findakly: When I started working on this as a solo project, I quickly realized my writing was too sentimental. My life wasn’t horror or tragedy. What I wanted to tell was the story of one family. I didn’t want to romanticize it, so I didn’t want there to be a bombastic storyline. I also didn’t want to make up conversations, recreate specific situations, or overstate what had happened. It would have been impossible to keep the narrative pragmatic or be efficient in my storytelling without Lewis.

  Emptying your guts to tell your life story doesn’t make it a more interesting or moving one, it just makes it messier. Sometimes restraint leaves more room for empathy from the reader. There is emotional content in this book, but we didn’t want to play anything up unnecessarily.

  From the first few panels of the book, I was totally sold on the storytelling technique and drawings that Lewis suggested. I would tell him a bunch of stories and he would quickly sort through them and help me decide if they were interesting, and if that story should be told now or later in the book or not at all.

  Sometimes I’d tell him something as background to another story and that would end up becoming an anecdote that made it into the book. That’s what happened with the anecdote about men handling the groceries in Iraq. We’ve worked side by side for 25 years, not always on the same projects, but we know each other very well. Lewis put himself at my service and really listened to what I was saying.

  I’m the sort of person who asks a lot of questions before starting a project, whereas Lewis just goes for it once he’s found an entry point. But since we needed to have a strip every week, I didn’t have the chance to prevaricate over them and I think it worked out much better that way. The regularity of the strips meant we had to keep moving forward to avoid falling behind on the project.

  What reassured me about working with Lewis is that he wouldn’t hesitate to remove stories I would suggest. Things that seemed important or touching to me, sometimes he’d find them boring or extraneous to the narrative. If I had been working with anyone else, I’m sure they would have just gone along with whatever I asked of them. But since I had confidence in his ability to tell a story in comic form, we could make decisions together on what needed to stay and what could be cut.

  Lewis, what were your thoughts about the collaborative aspect of the project?

  Lewis Trondheim: The main risk wasn’t that we would mess up the book, but that we would split up over it! Which, thankfully didn’t happen. On my end, another big challenge came from the fact I was drawing 108 pages that were almost exclusively narration. Sometimes I found a solution to avoid that, but often it was difficult to avoid having the text and image being redundant, or to avoid using the same tricks.

  But we dug deeper, and would always come up with a solution, and it became a game to keep the storytelling fresh. I ended up using a few sweet visual tricks that wouldn’t normally occur to me, like the parallel between the golden plastic keys of the Iranian fighters and Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law’s Mercedes keys. There was a lot of politically driven violence in the period we’re writing about, so I couldn’t stay with a sweet naive tone, I had to include blood and dead bodies, even if I was lying by omission in my drawing.

  In terms of documentation, a Google street view look at Mosul or Baghdad doesn’t exist, but I discovered a website called Panoramio that had a decent selection of street photography that I could reference. Before using them, I would ask Brigitte if these were buildings or homes that could have been there while she lived in Iraq. My experience with sketching was also useful for bringing these to life.

  There were also Brigitte’s family photo albums, which helped me get a sense of the interior decor, clothing and cars of the era. People were forbidden from taking photos on the street at the time, and if you took photos of public spaces you could be arrested for spying, which is why there are so few photos available.

  Back to you, Brigitte. In the book, you convey very well the overall experience of growing up as an Orthodox Christian in Iraq. How would you describe that experience now that you’ve had a chance to reflect on it?

  Brigitte Findakly: I didn’t think about it. I just grew up thinking I was a normal little girl. Life in Mosul was very calm. Our neighbours were our best friends and they were Muslim. When there was a coup d’etat, the only perceptible consequence was that we wouldn’t have to go to school the next day. I never saw hangings, dead bodies or any sort of war scene. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this book, to show that Iraq in the 1960s was different from the place we’ve heard about on the news for so many years.

  There’s a lot in the book about the history of Iraq juxtaposed against your own experiences living there.

  I learned Mesopotamian history in school by heart. For the book, I really wanted to juxtapose my family’s personal history with the larger sweeping headlines from political and historical events. I was hesitant to delve too far into the past. I wanted to stay in my area, beginning in the 1950s. I would have loved to be able to talk about other older facets of history in Iraq. I think Americans would see a different side of the country if they knew that it was the birthplace of beer (Not Budweiser, of course, but just beer in general).

  I especially loved the “In Iraq” interludes in the book where we get to learn about traditions and customs of the country.

  Brigitte Findakly: Those pages gave us the chance to talk about the culture of Iraq and things that were true to most people who grew up there. It was important to me that this could be seen as a history of many of the millions of Iraqis who exist, and that I wasn’t just telling my story.

  There are social customs in Iraq that are specific and different from many other cultures. Specifically, you mentioned in the book about marriages and relationships, that 95 percent of marriages in Iraq are arranged. Did that shape the way you approached relationships at all growing up?

  My parents did not have an arranged marriage so I knew I wouldn’t end up in one, even before we left for France. I think my parents were much braver than I was when it came to this. I am and have always been puzzled that my family continues to believe in the practice of arranged marriages. I’ve become pretty fatalistic about this position, though of course everyone is certain their way of being is the right and only way.

  Do you have a custom that you miss most?

  Brigitte Findakly: The custom I miss most is the polite refusal of second portions of food. I’ve never learned to cope with this sort of polite behavior. Even last month, I was staying with an Iraqi friend in San Diego. I love her with all my heart, but even though I told her several times I didn’t want to play that game, that I didn’t want to have to pretend to not be hungry when I actually wanted seconds, she had a hard time adjusting to it.

  Other than that, I think something that always struck me is the closeness in Iraq, where people would just casually drop by other people’s houses to talk. In the West, people are more closed off. Whether it was family members, friends, or just neighbours, you could expect any of them to drop by without notice at your house. There was no expectation that you had to warn someone you were coming. I liked that a lot.

  Are there specific things that you miss most about your childhood?

  Brigitte Findakly: The same things as most people, I imagine: family get-togethers, my family network, my childhood friends. On the other hand, I don’t miss the harsh discipline that was part of the school system in Iraq at all.

  You father, as a doctor, was often very generous and didn’t charge some of the patients he treated. It was such an altruistic approach and I’m curious whether that ever affected your family, from a financial standpoint, or otherwise?

  Brigitte Findakly: In certain ways, yes. My mother was worried because she could see that my father was never able to save up and put money aside. But he also spent so much money because he wanted to provide for us. For instance, he sent us to France every summer even though he had to stay in Iraq. He taught me by example, as did my mother. I think that generosity was simply part of the way people were back then.

  In your first school assignment in France, you felt challenged because you had to express an actual personal opinion on an essay, something you didn’t do while in Iraq. Were there other adjustments that stood out to you?

  Brigitte Findakly: I had to learn the distance and seemingly coldness of people in France wasn’t something I should take personally, but that it just took more time to get to know people there.

  There’s an anecdote in the book where you drew the Arab oil for Arabs illustration regarding the oil crisis and it was hung publicly at your school. What was it like to realize, as you say in the book, that if you had stayed in Iraq, you might have become a famous propaganda artist for Saddam Hussein?

  Brigitte Findakly: In the book, I definitely mentioned that in a joking way. In reality, if I had stayed in Iraq, I very much hope my parents’ guidance and my education would have protected me from becoming a propaganda artist. It sends a chill up my spine to think of any other outcome.

  What is the culture of artistic expression like in Iraq today?

  Brigitte Findakly: I’m too far away from Iraqi culture to know exactly what is out there. I understand there are creative movements, but I don’t know of any myself. So don’t expect me to become Iraq’s next minister of culture any time soon [laughs].

  You haven’t been back to Iraq since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and started the Gulf War. With everything that has happened since, how do you feel about your home country today?

  Brigitte Findakly: Pessimistic. Often hopeless. Maybe things will start to turn around, but I can’t see that happening any sooner than 50 years from now, and that’s if things go well. When Iraqi gas is no longer an international issue, the exterior pressures on our country will finally begin to ease off.

  Did your parents end up reading the book and what did they think?

  Brigitte Findakly: By the end of his life, my father no longer had the ability to read or comprehend what was being read to him, so he passed away without having read the book. As for my mother, she was very happy that the book came out, and she’s read it many times. I think the most exciting thing for her was one morning when she picked up the daily newspaper and saw an article about the book. If that wasn’t enough, the article included the page in the book where she’s making cake for everyone!

  Lastly, what do you hope readers get out of Poppies of Iraq?

  Brigitte Findakly: I hope they discover a pleasant country with a friendly populace, and that they understand that emigration demands a lot of sacrifices, that people don’t emigrate for the pleasure of a new place. Often the decision to leave is made as a question of survival, survival for oneself, but especially survival and a better life for one’s children.

  FILED UNDER: Brigitte Findakly, Lewis Trondheim

  One Response to “We’ve Worked Side by Side for 25 Years”: Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim Interview

Quoted in Sidelights: “Small in size but large in impact, this intimate memoir is a highly relevant and compassionate story.”
Findakly, Brigitte: POPPIES OF IRAQ
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Findakly, Brigitte POPPIES OF IRAQ Drawn & Quarterly (Children's Informational) $21.95 9, 5 ISBN: 978-1-77046-293-9
From the daughter of a French mother and Iraqi father comes a touching memoir of childhood in Iraq. Writing with her husband, Findakly strings together memories and facts from her family's past and present as well as from Iraqi culture, as if she is sharing herself with readers over tea. She begins with happy childhood moments in Iraq and her school days, her parents' backgrounds and how they met, and introductions to other family members and neighbors. Especially poignant are the portrayals of her French mother's successful adjustment to Iraqi society over 23 years and Findakly's own process of growing apart from Iraqi society after her father decides they should move to France when she is a teenager. Trondheim's charming cartoon drawings, colored by Findakly, help readers envision the worlds the family straddles, while occasional pages of family photographs remind readers of the author's historical reality. Readers feel they are getting an inside look into an impenetrable world with cultural and historical notes on pages titled "In Iraq" interspersed throughout the book. This personal portrayal of the impact of war and societal upheaval on one family will help many Western readers to see how the past half-century of conflict has devastated a region rich in ancient culture. Small in size but large in impact, this intimate memoir is a highly relevant and compassionate story of family, community, prejudice, and the struggle to love when the forces of the world push groups apart. (timeline) (Graphic memoir. 10-adult)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Findakly, Brigitte: POPPIES OF IRAQ." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364935/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d0dc3763. Accessed 20 May 2018.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “a moving tribute to familial love in times of war.”
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Poppies of Iraq
Eva Volin
Booklist.
114.2 (Sept. 15, 2017): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Poppies of Iraq.
By Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim. Illus. by Lewis Trondheim.
Sept. 2017. 120p. Drawn & Quarterly, $21.95 (9781770462939). 741.5. Gr. 5-8.
Growing up in Mosul right before the reign of Saddam Hussein, memoirist Findakly recounts stories from her childhood in a country undergoing radical changes. Beginning with family picnics and short vignettes of her Iraqi father's dental practice and her French mother's slow acclimation to life in a country very different from hers, the focus shifts to more sobering tales: the casual censorship of everything from magazine articles to phone conversations; students being sent to mandatory work camps; a cousin being disfigured on the battlefield. Each story arc is punctuated by family photos and cultural notes that help bring the family to life and make their experiences personal. Findakly is never naive or sentimental, recounting her life in Iraq with the innocence of a child but the cognizance of an adult. The illustrations by her husband, acclaimed cartoonist Trondheim, complement that innocence, staying true to the political upheaval described, while keeping much of the trauma offstage. A moving tribute to familial love in times of war. --Eva Volin
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Volin, Eva. "Poppies of Iraq." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359921/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=48de82b4. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A507359921
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Poppies of Iraq
Peter Dabbene
ForeWord.
(Aug. 27, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim (illustrator); POPPIES OF IRAQ; Drawn and Quarterly (Comics & Graphic Novels: Comics & Graphic Novels) 21.95 ISBN: 9781770462939
Byline: Peter Dabbene
Brigitte Findakly, along with her husband, cartoonist Lewis Trondheim, provides perspective on the history of Iraq through her graphic memoir, Poppies of Iraq.
Findakly grew up in Iraq. Her book begins with a memory of visiting the historical site of Nimrud as a girl, and a quick mention of the fact that the site's famous winged lions have since been destroyed by the group Daesh, or ISIL.
This brief study in contrasts creates the framework for the book. Findakly continues to recount small, sometimes fond memories, and to note changes to those landscape over time; or, with the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, she reflects on the larger forces at work during those periods.
Here, then, is a firsthand account of the everyday impact of political change -- coups and counter- coups, the rise of Saddam Hussein, and the Iran-Iraq War -- as seen through one woman's eyes.
Trondheim's illustrations give a clear sense of life in Iraq, and the combination of art and text is more powerful than either could be on its own. Both focus on the domestic and personal aspects of living in Iraq, which brings emotional weight to Findakly's experience and results in a greater impact than any mere history lesson could make.
Poppies of Iraq was first serialized in the French newspaper Le Monde; this translation from Helge Dascher gives the English-speaking world access, via a unique window, to the people and practices of what can sometimes seem a very foreign land.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dabbene, Peter. "Poppies of Iraq." ForeWord, 27 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502036048/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=afaca04f. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502036048
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Poppies of Iraq
Publishers Weekly.
264.29 (July 17, 2017): p205. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Poppies of Iraq
Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim.
Drawn & Quarterly, $21.95 (120p) ISBN 978-177046-293-9
An Iraqi childhood is cherished, examined, and let go in this tender look at youth amid upheaval. The daughter of an Iraqi dentist and a French woman, Findakly recalls picnics alongside archaeological sites, memorizing verses of the Quran in school, and censored phone calls between family members, all with an adult's heartfelt clarity. Though these memories are rendered whimsically, in delicate watercolors and a charmingly rounded style, terror is never far-- she notes often which sites of her youth have been destroyed, rendered unrecognizable, or taken over by ISIS. This contrast is the book's greatest strength: Findakly and cocreator Trondheim, her husband and an acclaimed French cartoonist himself, understand intimately that children do not stay children forever and innocence is not eternal. Neither, however, do they wallow--death is never far from the door in this book, but life still happens. Findakly's story is an ode to a lost era, to be sure, but one with its feet planted securely in the present. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Poppies of Iraq." Publishers Weekly, 17 July 2017, p. 205. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498996952/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ebc09131. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498996952
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FINDAKLY, Brigitte & Lewis
Trondheim. Poppies of Iraq
Ann Foster
School Library Journal.
63.11 (Nov. 2017): p108. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* FINDAKLY, Brigitte & Lewis Trondheim. Poppies of Iraq. tr. from French by Helge Dascher. illus. by Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim. 120p. chron. photos. Drawn & Quarterly. Sept. 2017. Tr $21.95. ISBN 9781770462939.
Gr 8 Up--This absorbing graphic memoir offers an insider's view of the rapid cultural changes that beset Iraq in the latter half of the 20th century. As in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Raina Telgemeier's Smile, the author of this work is both cocreator and protagonist. Brigitte is an energetic guide through a series of childhood experiences, at once universal and distinctly her own. Short vignettes about her family, school, and local customs are alternately bittersweet, funny, and affecting as a series of military and political coups impact her family's life in Iraq. Vivid illustrations contrast with black-and-white family photos, bringing to life actual individuals. An opening scene finds young Brigitte playing amid ancient ruins at an archaeological site, and the work ends with a time line tracing the history of the region, from ancient Mesopotamia to present day. This bookending underscores the variety of power structures that have come and gone, demonstrating how Findakly's family's experiences are part of an ongoing historical narrative. VERDICT A moving, thought-provoking title for all collections.-- Ann Foster, Saskatoon Public Library
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | Tr Hardcover trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding | Board Board book | pap. Paperback | e eBook original | BL Bilingual | POP Popular Picks
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Foster, Ann. "FINDAKLY, Brigitte & Lewis Trondheim. Poppies of Iraq." School Library
Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 108. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A513759743/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bb026935. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513759743
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"Findakly, Brigitte: POPPIES OF IRAQ." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364935/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d0dc3763. Accessed 20 May 2018. Volin, Eva. "Poppies of Iraq." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2017, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A507359921/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=48de82b4. Accessed 20 May 2018. Dabbene, Peter. "Poppies of Iraq." ForeWord, 27 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502036048/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=afaca04f. Accessed 20 May 2018. "Poppies of Iraq." Publishers Weekly, 17 July 2017, p. 205. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498996952/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ebc09131. Accessed 20 May 2018. Foster, Ann. "FINDAKLY, Brigitte & Lewis Trondheim. Poppies of Iraq." School Library Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 108. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513759743/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=bb026935. Accessed 20 May 2018.

• CBR
  https://www.cbr.com/poppies-of-iraq-brigitte-findakly-lewis-trondheim-inerview/
  Word count: 1354

  Poppies of Iraq Shares Reality of Growing Up in an Oppressive Regime
  09.05.2017
  by Michael C Lorah in Comic News Comment
  Poppies of Iraq Shares Reality of Growing Up in an Oppressive Regime

  Brigitte Findakly and her husband Lewis Trondheim have been collaborating on comics for decades. Trondheim, co-founder of the French comics publisher L’Association, has created international hits such as Dungeon, Little Nothings, Kaput & Zosky and more. Throughout Trondheim’s award-winning career, Findakly has been the primary colorist of his comics, abetting his artwork and stories.

  In their latest release, the creative dynamic is flip-flopped, as Findakly takes the lead in co-writing her memoir Poppies of Iraq from Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Recounting her childhood as a religious minority in a turmoil-ridden country frequently subjected to internal strife and outside invasion, Findakly and Trondheim take readers into the daily community of life in Iraq, contrasting a warm and family-focused side of the country rarely depicted in media with the political chaos that instigates her eventual departure from her homeland.

  CBR, with translation assistance from Drawn & Quarterly, spoke with both Findakly and Trondheim about inverting their creative partnership, balancing the Western view of Iraq by examining both familial and political situations, and exploring on the common humanity we all share despite our cultural differences.

  CBR: Brigitte, do you find that people often misinterpret what it means to be Iraqi, or even from the Middle East in general?

  Brigitte Findakly: Most people don’t know anything about Iraq other than what they learned from the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s acts of violence, the second Gulf War, or ISIS. As a result, it’s hard for them to imagine it as a place where you could live a peaceful life with loving people.

  There’s a tale in the book where a boy in college couldn’t believe that you are a Christian.

  Findakly: The Christian communities of the Middle East are not very well known. Just because someone is Arab, it does not necessarily mean that they’re Muslim. Being Arab means that you come from a geographic region, the region of the Middle East. So there are many Christian Arabs and even Jewish Arabs.

  Did confronting those biases inform any part of your decision to make this book or your approach to it?

  Findakly: No, it was more that I wanted to collect my memories and get them on paper. Despite their love for Iraq, my whole family has now fled the country in the hopes of offering their children a better future. They’ve scattered around the world — New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, France, Canada, the USA… I always had the thought in the back of my head that I would return to Iraq, but now that all of them have left, it seems impossible. And then my father, with his illness, lost his memory… So finally, when Daesh/ISIS entered Mosul, the place I was born, that was the coup de grace for the Iraq I knew. All that was left were my memories and I wanted to write them down so I could be sure I wouldn’t lose those too.

  The “In Iraq” pages are tremendously interesting, as they give readers insight into rituals and traditions that influence daily life in Iraq. At what point in developing Poppies in Iraq did you realize the story benefited from more insight into the rites of daily Iraqi life?

  Findakly: In this book, I’m balancing the personal (my family history) and the historical (charting the political changes in the country). In regards to my own history, there were aspects of life that affected everyone, not just my family. In addition to providing a rhythm to the book, the “In Iraq” sections offered a way to tell those stories and to encapsulate how we lived in those days, to show that it was how much of the Iraqi population lived. I’m telling my story, but my story is also at certain points everyone’s story. After working on the book for a dozen pages, I realized I needed to find a strategy to make our story’s universal elements obvious.

  You move quickly from anecdote to anecdote in a mostly chronological way, but don’t hesitate to jump forward and backward in time to follow certain threads. The effect provides readers with a very full picture of your Iraqi experience. Was there a conscious decision to stay away from a heavier central narrative?

  Findakly: Yes, I wanted to share my memories in a way that felt like the reader was seated next to me, having a conversation with me. So there’s a central chronological framework, but I allowed myself to digress, especially when the current events in Iraq would capture my attention while I was writing the book. I found that more pleasant.

  Did Lewis’s Little Nothings strips influence that approach at all?

  Findakly: Actually, the process was that I would share my memories with Lewis and he would suggest a way to tell them and draw them. My primary goal was for the readers to understand what I wanted to share with them. Often I wanted to go much deeper in explaining a situation but Lewis would push me to have confidence in the reader’s intelligence.

  Brigitte, you’ve worked as a colorist for a long time. Have you done much published writing?

  Findakly: No, this is my only experience as a writer.

  Lewis, you’ve never visited Iraq, correct?

  Lewis Trondheim: Correct.

  While the West has seen many, many images of war-torn Iraq, you are tasked in this book with showing a more everyday side of the country. Did that lack of familiarity create any challenges in presenting the subtleties of a life in Iraq?

  Trondheim: Oh definitely. But the biggest challenge was to draw people and not animals. Beyond that, I had three or four photo albums at my disposal, none of which had many exterior photos, since people were forbidden to take photographs in the street — the government was scared of spies. And since there’s no Google Street View of Mosul, I found another website, Panoramio, that had a lot of recent photos of Mosul. So I’d look at the photos, and then ask Brigitte if this or that building, street, mosque existed in the 1960s. And beyond that, if I drew something that didn’t work for whatever reason, Brigitte’s memory or her brother’s came to the rescue.

  How many times did you accidentally start to draw somebody as a bird-person?

  Trondheim: [Laughs] No, that didn’t happen, even if I would have very much enjoyed drawing Saddam Hussein as a pig.

  Brigitte has colored much of Lewis’s work. How was the collaborative dynamic different working together as writers?

  Findakly: In the beginning, there was a bit of apprehension — we’ve been married for 25 years now and we didn’t want to destroy our marriage over a book. But actually everything went very smoothly — there was a lot of listening to one another. And a lot of putting confidence in one another. If I worked with a different illustrator, they might not have dared to tell me no, as Lewis did when I proposed including certain anecdotes that didn’t seem interesting to him.

  What’s next for you both?

  Findakly: We just saw Nadwa, my childhood friend. I hadn’t seen her in 28 years. Maybe I’m going to visit the rest of my family around the world. But I’m pretty sure that won’t be a book; that would just be for me.

  Poppies of Iraq is on sale in Wednesday, Sept. 6 from Drawn & Quarterly.

  Tags:
  poppies of iraq

• World Literature Today
  https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/january/poppies-iraq-brigitte-findakly-lewis-trondheim
  Word count: 438

  Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim
  MISCELLANEOUS
  Author:
  Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim
  Translator:
  Helge Dascher

  The cover to Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly & Lewis TrondheimMontreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 120 pages.

  Poppies of Iraq, an autobiographical graphic novel written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by Lewis Trondheim, contains familiar tropes of contemporary graphic memoirs. Findakly negotiates national identities with one parent from the Middle East, one parent from western Europe; she conveys a disarming coming-of-age story in war-torn Iraq, lured by the dream of France; and captures the beauty of home, even amid cultural and religious repression. With nonlinear pacing and vignettes, however, Poppies of Iraq adds a unique storytelling angle to the themes of Marjane Satrapi’s seminal Persepolis and Riad Sattouf’s acclaimed The Arab of the Future. Findakly trusts the reader to collect her personal stories into a complicated understanding of home and belonging.

  Findakly and Trondheim bring years of experience to this project as a colorist and cartoonist, respectively. Trondheim is celebrated for his Kaput & Zösky and Donjon series, among others, as well as being a founder of French independent publisher L’Association. The husband-and-wife team combine their singular experiences to create a narrative that captures the naïveté of childhood as well as the understanding of hindsight.

  Poppies of Iraq opens with a young Findakly picnicking with her family at the archaeological site of Nimrod, the landscape spotted with wild poppies. These ruins are later bulldozed, and the destruction of Iraq’s history reflects the complicated relationship Findakly has with her own history. Her series of memories not only reflect the episodic quality of memory but also the unpredictability of Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s state control.

  When Findakly is thirteen, her family moves to Paris, where and she immediately encounters isolation in school, saying, “Most difficult of all was probably my first essay assignment. Not because it had to be written in French . . . but because I had to express a personal opinion on a subject, something we were never asked to do in Iraq.” Her two cultures seem incompatible, which opens up the loneliness of exile.

  Poppies of Iraq is a series of whimsical illustrations that tell the profound stories of homeland and belonging. This is a book that is a loving but critically honest depiction of Iraq. Findakly ends the book with a full page entitled “Good Memories,” where she says, “I loved those moments when we all had to stay home together.”

  Claire Burrows
  Austin, Texas

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/middle-class-childhood-middle-east-brigitte-findakly-lewis-trondheims-poppies-iraq/
  Word count: 1073

  Quoted in Sidelights: “The rich effect of Poppies of Iraq, written and co-illustrated by Findakly and her husband Lewis Trondheim, comes from the manner in which the sweet and domestic rests alongside horror,” remarked Nathan Scott McNamara in the online Los Angeles Review of Books. “The book is packed with reminiscences that are part wholesome—playing on ancient monuments and going on class field trips—but that are scorched by political violence.”

  A Middle Class Childhood in the Middle East: Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim’s Poppies of Iraq

  Graphic Novels Reviews

  By Nathan Scott McNamara09/23/2017

  Illustrations of old radios fill one sequence of Brigitte Findakly’s graphic memoir Poppies of Iraq. Findakly writes that after the fall of the monarchy, when Iraq was declared a republic, the people of her country often tuned into an Arabic radio show broadcast from Israel, the only source of uncensored news about the Iraqi government. The program ran for over 20 years and was strictly banned: “Those who listened to it ran the risk of stiff prison sentence,” Findakly writes. “The show was a favorite and everybody tuned in.” But Findakly, at 11 years old in 1970, wasn’t everybody; an illustration depicts her sweetly smiling in bed with a radio on the pillow beside her, listening to Voice of America for English pop songs.

  The rich effect of Poppies of Iraq, written and co-illustrated by Findakly and her husband Lewis Trondheim, comes from the manner in which the sweet and domestic rests alongside horror. The book is packed with reminiscences that are part wholesome — playing on ancient monuments and going on class field trips — but that are scorched by political violence. ISIS soldiers destroyed those ancient monuments with dynamite and bulldozers. On some of those field trips, students were persuaded to publicly cry for dead generals, or to salute new ones. In 1964, Findakly’s nine-year-old brother and his classmates were taken by bus to see the hanging dead bodies of Baathist militiamen.

  In one spooky frame of Poppies of Iraq, we see a nearly-full movie theater with Arabic across a black screen. Most in the audience are leisurely smoking cigarettes and a footnote at the bottom of the page provides the translation: “For the security of the nation, we warn citizens to beware of spies, enemies of the peoples, and intruders colluding with foreign powers. To report suspects, call the following number…”

  Paranoia runs through the bloodstream of the social engagements throughout this memoir. Families like Findakly’s worry about their children being kidnapped. It’s dangerous to disparage the government, dangerous even to not commend it. People hang pictures of military leaders and don’t complain.

  Consequences in Findakly’s childhood are severe and social codes conservative, even in the era before Saddam Hussein. When Findakly is nine, she befriends Anissa, a 14-year-old from the country who comes to work as her family’s maid. Findakly and Anissa love each other, and Findakly even helps Anissa with the chores so they can play together longer. When Anissa is 17, Findakly’s mother notices her flirting with a boy across the street. She alerts Anissa’s brother, who comes without hesitation and picks her up to take her back to the village forever.

  Findakly’s mother was French and her father Iraqi, and they met on a train platform in Paris, when her dad was there to study dentistry. While Findakly was born in Iraq, she also has the security of being able to leave. That privilege is part of her alienation, too. She’s part-French in the Middle East. She’s a Christian in a Muslim country. She’s middle class in a poor region.

  Findakly and her family leave Iraq by 1973. Her father tells them that they will return once things improve. “But that was underestimating all the adversity ahead,” Findakly writes, “with Saddam Hussein becoming president in 1979, the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to ’89, The Gulf War in 1990, the economic sanctions that followed, the second Gulf War in 2003, and now Daesh.”

  When Findakly returned to Iraq in 1989 at the age of 30, the shock was greater than usual. “Cracks went unfixed and loose tiles weren’t replaced because of shortage of building materials,” she writes. “My female cousins had stopped working. They were married and had children. We used to have drinks together before dinner, but now they were busy serving their husbands.” With finesse, Findakly weaves together the anxiety of aging with the experience of conservative living. Even as she escapes parts of the latter, there is still time and mortality to contend with.

  As an Iraqi person in the world, danger and trauma are always proximate. Findakly’s cousin, a military doctor, is blown up and later dumped into a truck full of dead corpses. At the hospital later, they discover someone in that pile still breathing. On her 1989 trip back to Mosul, Findakly sees this cousin. He is bald, stooped, and has a reconstructed jaw, and Findakly can’t bring herself to look him in the face at dinner. Another cousin enlists in the Army during the Iran-Iraq war. Findakly says it was the same situation every day: he shot down young Iranian soldiers with a heavy machine gun. Findakly writes, “The Iranian soldiers all wore a necklace with a golden plastic key that their recruiters said would let them go directly to heaven.”

  Even after they move to Paris, the danger isn’t far from Findakly’s family. In 1978, a Palestinian man shot his way into the Iraqi Embassy, and held hostages, including Findakly’s father. The man eventually surrendered to the police, but not before killing one officer in a gunfight out on the street. But in terms of our experience of this event — and this is the unique touch of Poppies of Iraq — we experience the event primarily through the domestic household. “Our car, which had been parked in the street, was punctured by a bullet,” Findakly writes. We don’t see people nervously cowering in the embassy. We don’t even see Findakly’s father during the hostage crisis. But we do see the entire family in the car afterward, stoically staring out the windshield. Findakly writes, “for a while, whenever it rained, I’d catch the water that dripped in through the glass.”

• Salon
  https://www.salon.com/2017/10/05/poppies-of-iraq-chronicles-a-young-girl-growing-up-in-mosul/
  Word count: 1170

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Throughout this bittersweet book, Findakly and Trondheim interweave the political and personal in a way that mirrors and heightens real life. ‘Poppies of Iraq’ is about big events as seen through small eyes: there’s a universalness underneath the specificity.”
  “Poppies of Iraq” chronicles a young girl’s life growing up in Mosul
  Brigitte Findakly writes about coming of age in an Iraqi city with no public life for women
  Mark Peters
  October 5, 2017 10:59pm (UTC)

  For an adult, it’s confusing and appalling to see your people lose freedoms as society spirals into chaos and totalitarianism. Imagine what it’s like for a child.

  Actually, no need to imagine. Just read “Poppies of Iraq” — by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim. This graphic novel is a plainly stated, emotionally devastating memoir of Findakly’s life as a Christian girl in Iraq and her relationship to that country after moving to France. The details of Findakly’s life (illustrated by her cartoonist husband Trondheim) will be fascinating to anyone interested in Iraq before and after the rise of Saddam Hussein. But “Poppies of Iraq” hits even harder because it’s a relatable story about growing up anywhere in this baffling world.

  All kids kick balls and climb whatever they can: Findakly just happened to spend her carefree childhood moments messing around on the ruins of Mosul, which were demolished in 2015 by Daesh, The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Findakly didn’t fully realize the historic important of the site at the time, and she certainly didn’t realize its days were numbered: “It was the perfect spot for climbing on ancient stones. And for picking poppies.” The destruction of these ruins — culturally important to Iraqis and personally important to Findakly — was the impetus for this book, which was originally published in French.

  This graphic novel is, to use a trite phrase, a “coming-of-age story,” but it’s a lot more than that.

  Findakly’s words and Trondheim’s images show what it was like for a young Christian girl to grow up in Iraq from her 1959 birth until 1973, when her family moved to France. “Poppies of Iraq” is about Findakly’s evolving relationship with Iraq, a place she’ll always love but became progressively estranged from, thanks to a succession of repressive regimes and her own awakening as a feminist.

  When Findakly did return after moving to France, each trip became more and more painful, especially as Findakly saw how her extended family suffered under governmental insanity (pictures of Saddam Hussein were mandatory in every home, while children were taught pro-Saddam songs) and terrible shortages (there’s a depressing anecdote involving the scarcity of apples). These details are as important to the life of Iraq as the life of Findakly. In addition to being an engrossing memoir, this is an impressive work of journalism.

  Like any great comic, even one about the real world, “Poppies of Iraq” creates its own reality for readers to get lost in — a world told via plain, blunt language and non-realistic, cartoony figures that interweave the personal and political. One of the most subtly brutal sequences in the book involves a marriage. In a tense two pages, Trondheim presents three short conversations consisting of the words “So?” and “Completely.” The three conversations are relaying some unclear information from a man to another man, that man to a woman, and then that woman to another woman. The meaning of these simple words is eventually made clear: in Iraq, a husband has the right to demand his bride remove all pubic hair before the wedding, and these two pages show that information being carried from groom to bride. The simple fact of male power over women is awful, but Trondheim’s subtle cartooning makes this sequence particular and devastating. This kind of graphic power is on display through “Poppies for Iraq.”

  Some scenes are reminiscent of a Seinfeld episode, showing that even among frequent coups and mounting oppression, the Larry Davidian aspects of life never go away. Findakly and Trondheim show the culture clash between her French mother and native Iraqis in many ways, but most memorably in a difference in manners. Findakly’s mom often made delicious French pastries, but it’s an Iraqi custom to turn down seconds unless asked again, which was not the French way. As Findakly dryly puts it, “It was the guests who finally changed their ways when they came to visit.” Makes sense. Customs are important, but French pastries come first. This humorous episode takes on additional absurdity when the subject shifts to a military coup on the next page. Few comics make better use of juxtaposition.

  Trondheim tells the story with a six-panel format, creating a strong visual rhythm: the big blocks of the six panels feel like large bricks coming down one by one, as Findakly’s life eventually flourishes in France while Iraq’s society deteriorates. Trondheim’s art is made of clear lines and tiny, cartoony figures that emphasize the smallness of a child — and the relative smallness of everyone when the world is spinning out of control. The art is interrupted occasionally by photos of Findakly’s family, emphasizing the nonfiction nature of this book. Actual pictures of Findakly as a little girl, her father in his dentists’ office, and the ruins of Mosul are a strong counterpoint to Trondheim’s art.

  As the book wraps up, Findakly narrates the continued deterioration of Iraq and her loss of ties to home, as her family members all end up emigrating elsewhere (some becoming stubbornly Islamophobic, much to Findakly’s sadness). As Findakly discusses the present-tense of her life and Iraq in the usual six-panel pages, Trondheim switches up the visual format on other pages: these feature full-page panels accompanied by Findakly’s good memories of Iraq. This is an effective and moving way to end the book and show the power of childhood. The present is imprisoned in tiny, constricted panels, but the past is an expansive place that can’t be erased.

  Throughout this bittersweet book, Findakly and Trondheim interweave the political and personal in a way that mirrors and heightens real life. “Poppies of Iraq” is about big events as seen through small eyes: there’s a universalness underneath the specificity. Anyone, even with a boring childhood, should find something to relate to here. No child asked for their particular family or circumstances: no child (or maybe adult) truly understands what’s going on around them or why the world is the way it is. This is an unforgettable, devastating, sweet book.

  Mark Peters

  Mark Peters is a freelance writer from Chicago. He writes jokes on Twitter and is a columnist for Visual Thesaurus and McSweeney's. He is the author of "Bullshit: A Lexicon."
  MORE FROM Mark Peters

• Sequential State
  https://sequentialstate.com/blog/review-poppies-of-iraq-findakly-trondheim/
  Word count: 604

  Review: Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim
  October 4, 2017 Alex Hoffman 0 Comments Brigitte Findakly, comics, Drawn and Quarterly, lewis trondheim, memoir, memoir comics, poppies of iraq, review
  poppies of iraq sequential state
  poppies of iraq sequential state
  poppies of iraq sequential state
  poppies of iraq sequential state

  I’ve been having a hard time finding graphic memoirs that I truly love. I reviewed Tillie Walden’s Spinning earlier this week, which, while captivating, left me a little cold. I recently took the plunge on Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim’s Poppies of Iraq, which was published in English by Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly. The book is truly a co-creation between the married French cartoonists. Cowritten by the two authors, illustrated by Trondheim, and colored by Findakly, Poppies of Iraq details Findakly’s childhood in Iraq and subsequent immigration and political exile.

  The beginning of Poppies of Iraq sets a strong tone; we see Findakly and her family picnic at the ruins of Nimrud, a cultural heritage site of the Assyrian people that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Findakly uses the links between her childhood and the current regional instability to show contrast between that time and now, and tries to do that throughout the book. But from that place of strength, Poppies of Iraq wanders off into the distance.

  The storytelling of Poppies of Iraq is a bit scattered. The majority of the comic is a kind of chronological telling that jumps from past to present, interspersed with pictures of Findakly and her family. But interspersed are anecdotes and stories that flesh out Findakly’s home life and the vision of a child in a country trending towards despotism. These stories are some of the best parts of Poppies of Iraq, but they also serve to slow down and disperse the comic’s narrative momentum.

  Throughout Poppies of Iraq, Trondheim’s spare cartooning dominates. Findakly as a child looks perpetually like a five year old, and other characters are simplistic, almost ragdoll looking. Trondeim is relatively well known for a cartoony style, but this is much more pared down, and I think the book suffers for that. The lines do get more complex as needed, the illustration isn’t always stark and simple, but it’s close.

  The one part of the book I found that rose above the median was Findakly’s watercolors, which were warm and inviting. Part of the reason I picked up this comic was Findakly’s wonderfully colored cover. There were a few scenes I found remarkable; the most prominent of these, found in “The good memories.” section of the book, which acts like an epilogue to the overall tale, shows Findakly watching a shoe shiner work in the courtyard of her home in Iraq. The sky is beautiful, and the way Findakly colors the trees is quite lovely.

  Ultimately Poppies of Iraq, while a competent memoir and a quick read, doesn’t leave any lasting impressions. Whether it’s Trondheim’s overly spare illustration, or the book’s fuzzy progression that holds Poppies of Iraq back is hard to say. Poppies of Iraq is a serviceable but unremarkable comic.

  Sequential State is a comics criticism project dedicated to art comics, independently published work, small press comics, and manga. Your support helps improve the site and support the alt-comics community by paying cartoonists for illustrations and other work. If you’d like to support what I’m doing here, please pledge your support at Patreon.

• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/08/31/childhood-saddam-hussein-iraq/rlx772k9xyO7lcrk974HUI/story.html
  Word count: 160

  the discovery
  A childhood in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
  September 01, 2017

  Brigitte Findakly’s poignant and powerful graphic memoir recounts her childhood as an Orthodox Christian in a middle-class family living in Iraq. Co-written by Findakly and husband Lewis Trondheim and illustrated by Trondheim, “Poppies of Iraq’’ (Drawn and Quarterly) offers a window into the culture and history of Findakly’s homeland. It also serves up details about arranged marriages, wedding-day practices and pubic hair, economic divisions in homes and schools, food, and familial ties, as well as a look at the oppressive political landscape under Saddam Hussein. Nuggets of detail are deftly depicted by Trondheim in hundreds of small illustrations, and photographs of the author’s family are leafed throughout. Findakly has lived much of her life in France, and above all, the book is a meditation on the ache and longing for a place you can no longer return.

  NINA MACLAUGHLIN

• Under the Radar
  http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/poppies_of_iraq/
  Word count: 465

  Quoted in Sidelights: “Trondheim’s relatively simple, cartoonish style never dominates the snippets of Findakly’s experience, which she shares with a pointed precision that renders almost every moment memorable,”
  Poppies of Iraq
  Drawn & Quarterly

  Sep 01, 2017 Web Exclusive By Zach Hollwedel

  Find It At: Amazon

  From husband and wife collaborating team Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim, Poppies of Iraq is a deeply touching original graphic novel, simultaneously intimate and universal. Perhaps more appropriately termed a graphic recollection, the moving book offers a vignette-style series of Findakly's memories, recalling her youth and adolescence in Iraq. The first-hand account provides a crisp, genuine, personal reflection (from an Orthodox Christian point of view) of an Arabic nation undergoing major cultural shifts in the 1960s and 70s. Findakly openly recalls her first 14-years of life spent in Iraq, from her joyful and relatively carefree childhood, to the increasing political turmoil that ultimately prompted her family to relocate to France (where, as an adult, she would meet Trondheim). Post-emigration, she returned periodically to her native country, only to feel herself growing ever more removed from the events and lifestyles there.

  Poppies of Iraq's great success is that it achieves so much with seemingly so little. (Findakly's and Trondheim's talents are undeniable, and it becomes almost too easy to overlook the mastery required to create such a beautiful book.) Trondheim's relatively simple, cartoonish style never dominates the snippets of Findakly's experience, which she shares with a pointed precision that renders almost every moment memorable. Trondheim's illustrations compliment Findakly's anecdotes perfectly, imbuing the impressive account with added layers of relatable humanity. Individually, the moments they capture are not always Earth shattering, but when taken as a whole, they paint an important and highly impactful portrait of a country embroiled in change. Especially to the modern, younger reader, Iraq is a distant world, one with perhaps dubious intents and a corrupted history. What Findakly and Trondheim do so brilliantly is to turn that perception on its head; yes, there are issues within the nation's borders (as there are in any country), but its is a history of its people (just like of any country). And as one of those people, Findakly compels readers to recognize the humanity the propelled the country forward for millennia. Her memories, especially the more picayune, could have stemmed from any family the world over. This universal quality is what makes the graphic memoir such vital reading, and when coupled with the co-authors' sharp writing and Trondheim's circumspect illustrations, Poppies of Iraq becomes a work of near-perfection. (www.drawnandquarterly.com/poppies-iraq)

  Author rating: 8.5/10
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• The Rational
  http://therationalonline.com/2017/11/30/poppies-of-iraq-review/
  Word count: 2926

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  seemed too flat, or too sentimental—I wrote with too much feeling/nostalgia and it just wasn’t working,”“My life in Iraq was not horror, it wasn’t a tragedy; it was just the story of a family,” she told Starr. “I didn’t want to romanticize it, so there aren’t overly dramatized scenes. I didn’t want to invent dialog or overly reconstruct scenes. To deliver a narrative that was pragmatic and efficient, without overly dressing it up, seemed necessary and possible with Lewis. Every anecdote we told came from some note I had taken.”

  ‘Poppies of Iraq’ Review
  Book Review/Interviews
  Posted on November 30, 2017
  January 19, 2018
  Brigitte Findakly discusses her graphic memoir

  Interview conducted and translated by Britt Starr, with French editing support by Julia Pohl-Miranda.

  Read the original interview in French here.

  Brigitte Findakly can trace her father’s family history back to the year 300. She is a descendant of the Banu Taghlib, a Christian Arab tribe that left the Arabian Peninsula around that time and settled in what was then the center of Syriac Christianity, only moving north to Mosul a millennium later because of Mongol invasions. How far can you trace your ancestry? And what do you know of who these persons were?
  Self portrait and other art by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Seven generations ago, Brigitte’s forefather was a mason and a stonecutter by the name of Alnakkar, which means “sculptor.” When the Persians tried to invade Mosul in 1743, her forefather’s gate withstood the attack, earning him a new name from the pasha: Findakly, which means a kind of precious gold. Generations later still, Brigitte’s grandfather was also a sculptor. Just recently, the Wahhabi Islamists of Daesh destroyed an 11th century Mosque that he had helped to restore. And so, in Poppies of Iraq, Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim weave together past and present, heritage and history, and the personal and the political to tell Brigitte’s story.

  More than a graphic memoir, Poppies of Iraq is a feminist memorial project: it tells (and shows) history through one real person’s recounting of her life, with loving attention paid to the quotidian details that reveal both culture and the individual, and with consideration given to the personal, communal, and national consequences of how power has been wielded—in this case, brutally. Readers come away with an appreciation for what it was like to be Brigitte, to grow up as a happy, middle-class child in Iraq with a French mother and an Iraqi dentist father whose army affiliation sometimes helped the family and sometimes hurt. We learn that despite growing up amidst the dizzyingly incessant, violent coups of the 1960s, what Brigitte lived was “not a horror,” as she says in our interview, although the devastation to her culture now, after decades of continued violence, she would likely categorize as such. She doesn’t think she can ever return.

  Subtle, nuanced, and multilayered, the graphic text eschews linearity. Findakly and Trondheim opt instead to piece together the story as one might recollect it—in individual micro-narratives, out of chronological order, and conveyed simply through clever combinations of image and text. The book feels generous, as though written with the intention to help an outsider imagine, and also perhaps to help an insider remember. None of Findakly’s family or friends has stayed in Iraq; those who grew up there were trained not to express their own opinions (making it hard to even think them), and knew never to speak critically about the government, even behind closed doors. “The national pastime in Iraq was gossip,” Findakly writes, “and it still is.”

  So, using her voice, which she began to discover in the secondary education system in France, and with the help of her partner in work and love, Lewis Trondheim, Findakly tells her story. Expressed through personal vignettes that intersect with unfolding political turmoil in Iraq, and interspersed with scrapbook-like collages of actual family photos and panels that depict customs from daily life in Iraq, Poppies of Iraq is the poignant result.

  It is a story of realizing the home of one’s childhood memories no longer exists. It is a story of the maddening destruction of dictators and the ever-widening ripples of grief and loss they cause. It is a story of piecing together one’s story, a story of growing into oneself, in exile. Never didactic, always inviting, and often heartrendingly charming, this graphic memoir is a brilliant and tender gem.
  INTERVIEW

  You have an impressive career as a colorist, but Poppies of Iraq is your first written work. Was it difficult to write? How did you find a creative process that worked for you?

  Yes, this is my first time writing a graphic novel. Several events led me to write this book: the situation in Iraq, which has not relented, and which has no hope of improving any time soon; my cousins’ decision to emigrate so that their children could have a future; and Daesh (ISIS)’s invasion of Mosul, my hometown, on July of 2014, and the destruction that followed.

  At first, I didn’t know how to broach the subject. Should I begin from my birth, or from when we moved to France, with flashbacks? But what I wrote seemed too flat, or too sentimental—I wrote with too much feeling/nostalgia and it just wasn’t working. That said, all of these first attempts at writing helped me figure out the important and noteworthy things that I wanted to talk about in the book.

  It’s also the first time that you and your husband (celebrated animator Lewis Trondheim) worked together, right? How did that go? How do the two of you work together?

  Lewis saw that I had a deep need to put my memories to paper, and he witnessed how hard it was for me to write anything that felt satisfying to me. So he offered to help me articulate what I wanted to say. I showed him the photo of me as a little girl in front of the Nineveh Gate, with the lion that had been decapitated by a jackhammer by Daesh. Right away he knew that was the starting point, and that we should use that photo in the first story of the book.

  From this first story, I was convinced by the narrative trajectory and design that Lewis envisioned.

  My life in Iraq was not horror, it wasn’t a tragedy; it was just the story of a family. I didn’t want to romanticize it, so there aren’t overly dramatized scenes. I didn’t want to invent dialog or overly reconstruct scenes. To deliver a narrative that was pragmatic and efficient, without overly dressing it up, seemed necessary and possible with Lewis.

  Every anecdote we told came from some note I had taken. We would discuss it, Lewis would give it form, I would look over it to make sure it cohered with the narrative as a whole, and then he would draw out the page and I would color it.

  Is it easier to work together with Lewis or alone? What surprised you about working together?

  We have worked by each other’s side for 25 years– not always on the same projects, but we know each other well. Lewis puts himself fully in the service of a story and he’s an attentive listener.

  Me, I’m more the type that asks myself a lot of questions before deciding, whereas Lewis is someone who dives in as soon as he’s found his angle.

  Truly, I had complete confidence in Lewis, which was very important since the story was so personal.

  Illustrations by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Staying on the topic of marriage, would you tell the story of how your parents met? You say in the book that they met at the St. Lazare train station. That sounds very romantic, to meet the love of your life at the train station!

  When I told my mother I was going to write a book on my memories of Iraq, she was very happy and she even started to tell me her own memories (including how she met my father). It was surprising because my mother had always been very private about her past. But with this, she really opened up to me, and I was so touched and happy.

  You say that in Iraq today, 95% of marriages are arranged, and you describe how your idea of arranged marriage changed after living in France for a few years as a young woman. How did you think of arranged marriage as a young girl in Iraq?

  The idea of arranged marriage always bothered me. I knew that my parents got married for love and I found that beautiful and normal, even if people in Iraq said that love comes after marriage, in the course of daily life together!!! Since the age of 9 or 10, I would tell everyone in my family loud and clear that never in my life would I marry someone if it was arranged. But because I was a little girl, it made them laugh.

  In one particularly sweet illustration, you remark that because of the shoeshine man who came to your neighborhood, you wanted to be a shoeshine woman when you grew up. What were some of your other aspirations? What did other girls in Iraq imagine for their futures, and how did their aspirations change alongside the decades of turbulence?

  When I was in Iraq, I wanted to either be a shoe-shiner or a surgeon so that I could open people’s stomachs and see what was inside.

  However, I don’t remember discussions with my friends or my cousins about their professional aspirations. My cousins, all being older than I, mostly talked about prince charming.

  You mention in the book that people can’t talk about politics in Iraq because the government has so successfully instilled in folks the fear and suspicion of neighbors and friends. What happens to friendship in this climate? What happens to one’s identity?

  Ultimately, humans can adapt and become habituated to anything, even to not talking about politics, especially when one knows the potentially dire consequences of expressing disagreement with the party in power. People become fatalistic and content themselves with talking about personal lives (both their own and those of the people they know) and which products are missing from the grocery store [on account of the political turbulence].

  As a student in Iraq, you were supposed to be quiet; then as a student in France, all of a sudden you were supposed to express your opinions (through writing and speaking in class), and it was extremely difficult to start voicing opinions after never having done so before. Can you say more about other differences in the expectations at school in France versus in Iraq? Also, were expectations different for students of different genders?

  In Iraq, one of the goals of public education was to teach students discipline and respect for authority. To shine in class, you had to memorize lessons. Obviously in France, as elsewhere in the Western world, students are pushed to develop their own critical spirit.

  I think I was so well trained within the Iraqi system, that even today, expressing myself doesn’t come as naturally as it could.

  In the U.S., even though most people are racist (I would argue), it is shocking to imagine a teacher making overtly racist statements to his or her class, like the teacher you had in France. In the US, people tend to keep their racist views private (although people seem to be more comfortable going public with their racism now since the last election). Have you spent time in the United States, and what were your impressions vis a vis racism here?

  I have been to the US five times since 1993. I’ve never experienced/felt racism from people, but at the same time, they didn’t know that I am originally from Iraq. However, the difficulties I experience every time I come to the US are at the airport (in France before boarding) when I show my French passport in which it’s written that I was born in Iraq. I am always then subject to further interrogation, control, and waiting.

  You say that despite all the turbulence of the 1960’s, you only ever felt in danger one time in your youth, and it was in France. I find this detail and your delivery of it wonderful in disrupting readers’ presumptions about terror, fear, and danger in Iraq. With that said, given the political turbulence, how is it that you felt safe during your youth in Iraq?

  I had a happy and carefree childhood surrounded by my parents, my family and friends, and yet, I lived in a country rife with political instability. The effect of all the coups d’états was frequent school closures for a day or two at a time, which always came as happy news to us kids!

  In the book you say:

  ‘In eleventh grade, I had a feminist German teacher. We would take time in class to talk about current events. I had experienced the huge inequalities between men and women in Iraq, but she made me realize that things in France were far from perfect, and that it wasn’t all inevitable.’

  What do you mean when you say, “she made me realize that…it wasn’t all inevitable”?

  She allowed me to realize that the inequality between men and women was not a foregone conclusion. That we women can contest, we can revolt against this inequality. In Iraq, when something wasn’t fair, one could merely think that something wasn’t fair. In France I discovered that when something isn’t fair and one is not okay with whatever it is, one can express one’s ideas and even protest to let everyone know that these inequalities are not acceptable.

  Does feminism continue to play a role in your life?

  Yes, feminism is still important to me. I find that unfortunately gender inequalities are still present in so many facets of daily life: inequalities in salaries and in job positions, in raising children, in housework, in the fact that women are used to sell various products in advertising, etc…

  I’ll tell you a little anecdote: in general, when we receive administrative mail, it is addressed to both my husband and me. A few months ago, the mayor’s office sent a piece of mail addressed to me only, but it turned out that it was to inform us that our garbage day was going to change: something which could only matter to the woman of the house!

  What has feminism brought to your life?

  Self-esteem has a huge value in my eyes. And when someone acknowledges you and respects you, it reinforces this self-esteem. [Feminism] also gave me self-assurance and allowed me to have conversations more easily with many friends and cousins from Iraq about their conditions as women in their marriages, as always inferior to their husbands, always submissive, still in 2017.

  What do you hope this book will do for readers?

  I made this book, first and foremost, for myself– to preserve my memories, memories which have been disappearing because of all these decades of chaos and destruction.

  I hope that readers will have a different image of Iraq than the one they are used to seeing in the media. They will discover that it’s a country in which people lived happily (with their own customs) despite the different coups d’etats and the dictatorship.

  Do you have plans to return to Iraq? What would it take for you to return?

  Almost all of my family and friends have left and immigrated to various places all over the world. I don’t see myself returning any time soon and I especially don’t see myself finding all the people that I loved so much and still love today. I am also discouraged from returning by the fact that my hometown (Mosul) has been largely destroyed.
  Britt Starr

  Britt Starr is The Rational’s Book Review Editor and first-year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Maryland. She holds an MA in English Lit. from Mills College and a BA in Comparative Lit. and Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. She spent half a decade working in the wine industry between degrees, which was fun, but also helps her appreciate the privilege of being funded to study such topics as global feminist studies, 20th c. literature, critical capitalism studies, science and literature, critical thinking, critical pedagogy and lots more. She invokes Martha Graham and Virginia Woolf when the going gets tough.

  SUBMIT YOUR WORK

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/11/brigitte-findakly-lewis-trondheim-show-the-persona.html
  Word count: 1722

  Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim Show the Personal Vulnerability of Middle-Eastern Strife in Poppies of Iraq
  By Hillary Brown | November 9, 2017 | 9:00am
  Comics Features poppies of iraq
  Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim Show the Personal Vulnerability of Middle-Eastern Strife in Poppies of Iraq

  Brigitte Findakly was born in 1959 to an Orthodox Christian Iraqi father and a French mother. She grew up in Mosul, Iraq, but moved to France with her family in 1972. Since then, she’s visited only a few times and not since 1989. Most American comic readers may recognize her as the wife of French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim, in whose Little Nothings strips she appears as a sort of long-beaked bird creature. (Trondheim interprets himself as the same mixture of human and animal, but with a shorter, sharper beak.) But Findakly has a cartooning career of her own, as a colorist, but Poppies of Iraq, an autobiography of sorts and a collaboration with her husband, offers far more insight into her storytelling prowess.

  POPPIEScoverRGB1400.jpg

  It’s a slim book with an episodic structure, and it doesn’t try to give an in-depth history of the country. Instead, it dips in and out of Iraq’s trajectory, sometimes discussing facts, sometimes politics and sometimes cultural differences, like the fact that Iraqis refuse second helpings of food, forcing the host to insist in order to get anyone to take more. The graphic novel doesn’t attempt a sweeping narrative scope, but its impact lies in the personal nature of its story. Reading a fat book about the history of a place rarely leaves the reader with empathy for the people who live there. This restrained story about individuals, on the other hand, builds bridges and leads to greater understanding, case by case by case. Findakly and Trondheim answered some questions via email about their collaboration process (they didn’t get divorced!), character design and the importance of distance in creating this story.
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  Paste: Can you talk to me about the process of creating this book? I know Brigitte wrote, Lewis drew and Brigitte colored, but it was probably a little less separated out than that. Who did what and how did you collaborate?

  Brigitte Findakly: I began with notes I had jotted down over the past few years—the things I remembered about Iraq. As I told Lewis an anecdote, often, he would ask me follow-up questions to determine more about the circumstances and the places I was describing. He also asked for photos. When I needed a little more help remembering, I’d ask my mother or my brother. Based on that information, he would edit and structure the anecdote as a comic. I would come back with more precise details and small clarifications. He would draw the page and I would color it. Sometimes I would ask him if what we were doing in Poppies was too elliptical, and he reassured me that you need to have confidence in the reader’s intelligence.

  Paste: You both have a history of collaboration with other writers/artists: how is working together with each other different from working with other people?

  Findakly: Lewis was there to listen, open. He knew better than anyone what would be good or bad for the book. He’s been making comics for 30 years; he knows how to structure a story. The only danger of working on this project was the risk of divorce over book-making disagreements. But that didn’t happen!

  POPPIESinterior4.jpg
  Poppies of Iraq Interior Art by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Paste: Do you prefer to work collaboratively?

  Findakly: I tried to write the book by myself but my writing was too sentimental. The book called for a certain distance that I wasn’t able to create on my own.

  Paste: How did you know this could be a book? What was the deciding factor in starting to make it? In other words, why now?

  Findakly: My father was losing his memory, my family was emigrating to every corner of the earth and Daesh (ISIS) invaded my birthplace, Mosul. It was too many things all at once. I felt the need to write down certain memories from my childhood. I wanted to show a different side of Iraq, and I wanted to preserve those memories for my children. I could tell that this would make enough material for a book, the problem was figuring out how that book would look.

  Paste: The visuals are fairly cartoony and simplified. Why? Lewis, I know that’s your style, but these are even more so than usual (for example, the people don’t really have hands and feet).

  Lewis Trondheim: I have never drawn in a realistic style. And even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have succeeded. Even when I force myself to draw more realistically, or I ask someone else to handle the drawings on a book, I think that a minimalist drawing’s impact is that it allows the reader an easier entry point into a story. Usually I draw people as animals, here, I’ve drawn them as humans, but using the bare minimum of detail, like a children’s drawing that’s got a bit more structure to it. And we made the decision to place Brigitte’s family photos as anchors intermittently throughout the book—I initially used these as resources for my drawings. Even if the reader knows Poppies is a true story, seeing the photos makes it all the more striking.

  POPPIESinterior10.jpg
  Poppies of Iraq Interior Art by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Paste: The book is more a series of related stories than one long, unified narrative. What led to that?

  Findakly: We were working for the newspaper Le Monde in France. Each week they would publish a chapter. And so it made more sense to tell stories that didn’t need to be read in order, but were just short strips. This format happened naturally, and when we went back to read the whole thing together, we would rework certain pages here, add pages there and so on to create a coherent book from the strips.

  The most important thing for us was not to get lost in the pathos of the situation. We didn’t want to romanticize the history or recreate conversations. So we stuck with a very fact-based history, with many anecdotes, as well as humor, and the necessary shifts back and forth in time, but all without exaggerating or blowing things out of proportion.

  Paste: It seems like there have been a lot of comics about the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future, Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem, Harvey Pekar’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, etc.). Why do you think that is?

  Findakly: The Middle East has a very rich cultural history but is sadly known more for the instability caused by the various conflicts that have taken place there or are taking place there currently. If one has lived there or even if one spends some time in the Middle East, it becomes important to talk about this place in a real way. The books you mention, as well as our own, offer an intimate testimony that goes above and beyond to take these very complex conflicts and explain why and how they happened.

  POPPIESinterior68.jpg
  Poppies of Iraq Interior Art by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Paste: Did you make a conscious effort to distinguish your book from them?

  Findakly: I wasn’t too worried because every book is different since every author has had his or her own experiences. In Poppies of Iraq, I describe my memories of growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s. My life in Iraq wasn’t a horror story or a tragedy, it was just the story of one family. I didn’t want to romanticize it, so we chose to avoid bombastic or over-the-top scenes. I didn’t want to invent dialogue, re-enact scenes or overstate my experiences.

  It seemed very important to both myself and Lewis that the focus of the story remain very pragmatic, and that we were efficient about the way we told my story. Just because you spill your guts about every last detail, that doesn’t mean you’ve told an interesting or a moving story. Sometimes keeping the story more restrained allows the reader to develop more empathy for a situation. There is certainly a lot of emotion in this book, but we didn’t want to play on people’s emotions.

  POPPIESinterior101.jpg
  Poppies of Iraq Interior Art by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  Paste: How did the translating process work? Was there a lot of back and forth?

  Findakly: Helge Dascher translated this book. She lives in Quebec and I live in France. We spoke a number of times over Skype, sometimes because she wanted to be certain she had understood certain turns of phrase, sometimes because she wanted to clarify the details of certain events described in Poppies. I very much appreciated her method of working, her way of immersing herself in each story to be able to translate it as best she could.

  Paste: What do your kids think of the book?

  Findakly: My children (21 and 22 years old respectively) very much appreciated this book because they knew very little about my life and about the life of my family in Iraq. Before this book, I couldn’t see myself saying to my children, “Come sit down next to me, I’m going to tell you about my life in Iraq, from when I was born until when I arrived in France.” My brother’s children are older than my own, and they were also very touched by the book. They told me that it helped them better understand their father and their grandparents.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/12/poppies-of-iraq-brigitte-findakly-lewis-trondheim-graphic-novel-review
  Word count: 722

  Poppies of Iraq review – the ruins of a lost childhood
  Brigitte Findakly’s moving memoir, drawn by Lewis Trondheim, captures a more innocent time both for herself and the home country she had to give up
  Rachel Cooke

  Rachel Cooke
  @msrachelcooke

  Tue 12 Sep 2017 04.00 EDT
  Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.50 EDT
  A frame from Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim.
  ‘A marvellous economy of style’: A frame from Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim. Photograph: PR from publishers

  Brigitte Findakly begins her wise, touching and wonderfully vivid graphic memoir, Poppies of Iraq, in the archaeological ruins of Nimrud, which lie outside Mosul where she grew up. Founded by the Assyrians more than 3,000 years ago, Nimrud holds a special place in her memory, for as a girl it was often to its dusty remains that her parents – her Iraqi dentist father and his French-born wife – would drive their family on Fridays, a picnic stowed in the back of their car. There she would climb on the ancient stones, and sometimes her father would photograph her by the huge man-headed winged lions that guarded what had once been the city’s palace gates.

  This was a long time ago: Findakly was born shortly after the 1958 coup in which King Faisal II was executed, and almost a decade before Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party came to power. Things have changed in the years since. In the 60s, the Iraqi government was so keen to preserve the site that those leaving it, and the ancient city of Hatra a little further away, were subject to searches so soldiers could check they had not removed some precious artefact.
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  But no longer. Who would visit Nimrud and Hatra now? In 2015, Isis bulldozed much of what remained of both, on the grounds that their “idols” were blasphemous.

  Findakly’s memoir covers an extended period in Iraq’s recent history; by the time it ends it is 2016, and the cousins she left behind when her family moved to France in the 70s have finally followed her out, worn down by years of war. Yet the half century ticks by with amazing ease, its author managing to tell both the story of a (complicated, fearful) nation, and that of one family of exiles coping with a new life in Paris. Some of this seeming effortlessness she owes to the warm, deft drawings of her husband, Lewis Trondheim, whose cartoons have a marvellous economy. Mostly, though, it is thanks to the dexterous way she flips between disjointed memories of her Orthodox Christian childhood in Iraq and the holidays she spent there as a young woman, when the country was descending into totalitarianism.
  A scene from Poppies in Iraq by by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  As the gap between the two time frames grows ever wider, there is a melancholy letting go. Although it was the Gulf war that put her return visits to an end, she knows that even had they continued, she would have felt increasingly distant from her birthplace: having become a French woman, she ceased to be cut out for the restrictions of Iraqi life. These days, Findakly’s contact with Iraq consists solely of the sometimes painful phone calls she has with her relatives, now living in America, Canada and Sweden. Their Islamophobia, born of their experiences in a country where Christians are increasingly persecuted, is hard for her to hear. In her day, people got along; her mother could walk down the street with her head uncovered. But still, she will not argue. Their voices are all she has left of Iraq now. She is determined to go on loving them exactly as they are.

  • Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/29/poppies-of-iraq-by-brigitte-findakly-paperback-review
  Word count: 323

  Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly review – childhood memories of Mosul

  A sweet, sad graphic memoir provides a window on Iraq’s various regimes

  James Smart

  Fri 29 Sep 2017 06.00 EDT
  Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.09 EST
  A detail from Poppies in Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim
  A detail from Poppies in Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim

  The events of recent years make it hard to imagine Mosul without seeing a city shattered by war. But when Findakly’s French mother moved to Iraq in the 1950s, she was the one drawing sympathy. “Because she was from a country that had been through five years of war, people were polite enough to accept her.” Findakly’s account of her childhood as a middle-class Arab Christian mixes personal anecdote with wider history, accompanied by the odd family photo and her partner Lewis Trondheim’s cute cartoons.
  An extract from Poppies of Iraq
  An extract from Poppies of Iraq

  The result is a likable memoir that offers a window into Iraq. Regimes come and go, touching her childhood in often bizarre ways. Her brother is sent on a school trip to watch traitors be hanged; a dictionary has the entry on Iraq ripped out by censors – collateral damage for the removal of Israel on the adjoining page. Bright panels give the narrative pathos as Saddam’s power grows, food becomes scarce and paranoia slides its hooks into everyday life. Findakly lives in France now, and her sweet, sad book is full of affection for the place she once belonged.

  • Poppies of Iraq is published by Drawn & Quarterly. To order a copy for £16.99 (RRP £14.44) go to or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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