Dina Mahmoud’s presentation examines comics as a metrolingual art form emerging from the interweaving of its components in forms such as image as text, text as image, silence as text and/or image, and blankness as image and/or text. Walīd Ṭahir’s Ḥabit Hawā (A Bit of Air, 2008) is a poetic comic about the desolate sense of idleness, loneliness and apathy permeating Egyptian society at the time of its creation. Ṭahir’s juxtaposition of hand-inscribed vernacular Egyptian poetry with iconic caricatural drawings problematizes the typical modes of contextual interactions between image and text in the comics medium. This presentation brings Ḥabit Hawā in conversation with Adam Jaworski’s theory of metrolingual art (2014) and Tina Campt’s discussions of the enunciative and affective potentials of images in Image Matters (2012) to destabilize linguistic expression as a primary mode of dialogic communication. It argues that the interpenetration of different verbal, visual, aural and spatial elements on the pages of the comic accentuates the spectrum of metrolingual communication of cynicism as a strategy of collective survival in conditions of political, social and economic precarity.
Adrienne Resha’s presentation focuses on Kuwaiti psychologist Naif Al-Mutawa’s The 99 (ال 99 or تسعة وتسعون), a superhero comics series first published in Arabic, then English. Co-created with American writer Fabian Nicieza (X-Men) and a number of artists with credits across Marvel and DC, the series features an X-Men-like group of characters. Each of these characters takes their name and superpowers from one of the 99 names of God found in the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and in hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The team, including women and girls like Noora the Light and men and boys like Jabbar the Powerful, is led by Dr. Ramzi, their own Professor X, across a 36-issue series, six special issues, and a crossover with the Justice League of America. Translated between languages and formats (text and artwork right-to-left in Arabic, left-to-right in English), the series also translated ideas: introducing English readers to Islamic traditions and history via superhero comics and Arabic (and English) readers to new, American-style superheroes from the Muslim world, including, before Muslim Americans Simon Baz and Kamala Khan became Green Lantern and Ms. Marvel, the United States. This presentation argues that The 99 involved the translation not just of language but of language and image and genre, such that the series translated superhero comics across Arabic and English languages and audiences.
Aram Shahin’s presentation discusses one of the most influential figures in the development of comics in Arabic: Nādiya Nash’at, and the important role she played in the transmission of American comics to Arabic readers and the translation and adaptation methods used in comics magazines. Nash’at was responsible for the translation and adaptation from English into Arabic of a number of major comic book series published in Egypt and Lebanon during the 1950s and 1960s. One of these magazines, Samīr, became the longest running children’s periodical published in the Arab world. Magazines Samīr and Mīkī offered complete American comic book stories in Arabic for the first time in the 1950s and early 1960s. Nash’at left for Beirut in 1964 where she helped found the publishing house al-Maṭbū‘āt al-Muṣawwara and obtained the rights to publish DC comics stories. For the first time, complete stories of Superman, Superboy, Supergirl, Batman, and Robin, were made available in Arabic through the weekly magazine Sūbarmān. Nash’at was the chief editor of the magazine from its inception in 1964 until her return to Egypt in 1965 after publishing 84 issues of the periodical.
Together, the presentations propose a theory of communicative imagination that frames communication through translating and adapting different material components of comics between Arabic and English languages. They continue and extend the conversations from previous MLA sessions, such as: Teaching Global Arab Comics in the US (2018) and Comics and Conflict in the Middle East (2011), and are of particular interest to audience in comics studies, Arabic studies, popular culture, and translation studies.