a dire simoom

“A Dire Simoom" is an artist book of a series of drawings I made on subway commutes during the years 2014-2016.

These drawings are loose transcriptions of the final chapters from Amen Rihani’s novel, Book of Khalid (1911), in which the protagonist wanders through the Egyptian desert.

The drawings were originally made in black ink. I digitally colored them in the following two years, to ground them more in the language of the sequential narrative.

I welcomed the vibrations and bumps on the train as a way of introducing an aleatory element into the drawings. The parched landscapes continually erupt into storm (“simoom” is from an arabic term for a desert wind), evoking the tension between Lebanese and American cultural identities with which Khalid struggles, and the epochal transformations that human-made climate change is effecting in our world.