15 Years Without Samir’s Voice

On the morning of June the 2nd 2005, Samir Kassir was assassinated in Beirut.
This was 15 years ago. Samir was 45 years old. My age today.
I made many drawings and short stories about/for him in the past 15 years, and I decided to gather them in one place, as a slow and never-ending goodbye to a person who meant a lot to me.

When there is text involved, it will be mostly in French language, with some notable exceptions like the page above. I made this one in 2014 as a part of a short story that tackled various subjects i could use for a comics-reportage (you can read it in full here), and I felt it is the most appropriate introduction to this post: a summary of Kassir’s life and a hint about our personal relationship.

Next is the portrait i made of Samir Kassir for the special commemorative issue of L’Orient-Express, four months after his death.

He looks too serious in my drawing – how could he not be, in the given circumstances? – but in reality Samir was a rather funny person, and we both shared an attraction to a certain kind of dark humour. In the same magazine, I published a short comics narrating our last phone conversation, on the 14th of March 2015, in which we joked about his possible assassination.

Three years later, on the 2nd of June, a Lebanese newspaper asked me for a commemorative drawing; I tried to do a “funny” page that mocks our folkloric idea of martyrdom, and the useless yearly commemorations that accompany it, while the shit remains the same.

When the same magazine asked me for a 10 years commemoration drawing in 2015, I couldn’t do anything close to “funny”. Too much time had passed, and I realised that my bitterness had taken over. I realised also that Samir slowly left my memory as a living person to become a character in a story. It is this feeling that I tried to convey in the silent page I made; I think it is the saddest one I did, and probably the last one I will ever do on the subject.

Besides the commemorative pages, Samir kept popping up in other drawings in the past 15 years, mostly as the archetype of the assassinated intellectual. The two examples below are the most eloquent ones.

I would like to finish this long goodbye with the most intimate work I did for Samir.
And the first one.
On the morning of June the 2nd 2005, I received the news of the assassination by a friend over the phone.
I started drawing impulsively directly after hanging up. I needed a way to deal with the absurdity of the situation. A way to accept the reality.

One week later, I put the 28 pages I had drawn together, in a small black booklet titled Une semaine sans la voix de Samir (One Week Without Samir’s Voice), of which I printed 10.000 copies (funded anonymously by a mutual friend of Samir and I). Then, together with some friends, we distributed around 3000 copies to the crowd that gathered in the street under Samir Kassir’s house for the first week’s commemoration. The remaining 7.000 copies were distributed for free with a local newspaper a week later.

I kept around a hundred copies that I occasionally offer to friends, but with the years, the booklet became very difficult to find, if not impossible. This is why I will take this opportunity to make it available as a downloadable PDF for those interested. It is far from being a “good” book, by all standards. But such considerations become so futile in conditions like this one; a truth that I will experience on various other occasions in my subsequent work.