On the margins of Beirut’s cultural modernism: aesthetics and politics in the inter-artistic works of Laure Ghorayeb

Known for her black-and-white miniatures embedded with Arabic writing, Laure Ghorayeb is a fascinating if understudied figure of Beirut's cultural modernism. Her work occupied a liminal position between French and Arabic and intersected literature and visual art. This article argues that it is precisely this marginality, manifested in Ghorayeb's multifaceted cultural identity, that allowed her to move deftly across mediums, practices, languages, and genres, resulting in a uniquely inter-semiotic oeuvre. Close reading selections from her collections of poems, Noir … les bleus ((Black … the Blues), 1960 and prose, Iklīl shawk ḥawla qadamayhi (A Crown of Thorns Around His Feet), 1965, in relation to her civil war drawings Témoignages (Testimonies), 1985, this article reveals an inter-semiotic exchange on the page. It offers an interdisciplinary rereading of the modern cultural history of Beirut, revealing an interplay between literature and visual art, which allowed Ghorayeb to maneuver between aesthetic experimentation and political engagement at a time when nationalist and ideological divisions were being sown.