Zena al Khalil has done much to create a vocabulary, both verbal and visual, of modern Beirut. Her art  takes politics and pop culture in equal measure, using Hezbollah logos with fairy lights and glitter with guns. Her art collective, xanadu*, encourages young artists in Lebanon, and is the impetus behind such intriguing projects as the Samandal comics, the experimental, trilingual comic books now launching their fourth issue.

Born to Lebanese parents in 1976 in London, she grew up in Nigeria, and has lived in New York. She moved to Beirut in 1994, and her love-hate relationship with the city has long informed her work. She became, to the wider world, a voice for Beirut when she began a blog, beirutupdate at the beginning of the July 2006 war. Chronicling her fears, personal responses and the struggle of her best friend to get chemotherapy as the bombs fell, the blog has now been transmogrified into a book, Beirut, I Love You. Published in English in Beirut, and this week in London, it is a love story about a city full of charm, but equally full of problems.

Speaking to NOW Lebanon, Khalil explained how the blog began in 2006, "Living in Beirut was very scary and difficult to deal with,” she said, "so I just wrote." What began as a way of updating her family and friends on what was happening became, "not only writing about war, but also about everyday reality things we had to deal with that people don’t usually consider... at the time my best friend was diagnosed with cancer, so it included writing about Maya and problems we were facing, even simple things like trying to get to the hospital for chemotherapy." As such it became a personal account, but also a universal one. The Guardian newspaper published parts of it, although when a book was suggested, she retorted that, "I don’t even know if I am going to live, if I am going to be alive tomorrow, I can’t plan this far ahead into the future," the war formed the core of what became the book.

But while the war inform the structure of the book, and it encompasses very painful and personal issues for Zena herself, what is most interesting, and perhaps controversial, for a Beiruti reading it is her railing against the contradictory social conventions of the city. Beirut, as many before her have observed, does not feel like a conservative place, but try living as a single woman on your own and you may well be faced with judgment. She says that the response, “has been very good. A book like this hasn’t been written yet in Lebanon, and I am very honest about many things. A lot of people in Lebanon struggle with political and social issues.” What political dimensions does she address exactly? “I write about how the men who were militia leaders during the war,” now sit in parliament, she says.

“It is something that we know,” she goes on, “…we know who they are, we know their history, yet, no one really stands up and says that a man who carries a gun is not fit to sit in a parliament seat.”

This subject matter may, she says, cause a stir when the book is translated into Arabic. “Especially,” she says, “the political things, and when I write very openly about alcohol and sex. That is still considered taboo, this is still something people don’t write about. They do it, but they don’t acknowledge it.”

“This is one of the ironies that we live in,” she says, reflecting on the age-old Lebanese dichotomy. “We are considered one of the biggest party cities in the world, yet no one openly  writes  about sex, men, alcohol. It is just this double-edged sword we live in Lebanon. We have so many extremes.” But, although she is strict about the idea that she could change Lebanon, she does say that in her writing and art, “I would like to try and contribute even if it is in the smallest way to kind of open up people’s eyes; they have become so blasé.”

But Beirut has been living this double life for a long time. Does she really feel like one more book can make a difference? Well, maybe. Many of the people who have read the book, she says, we rapt in it and then, understandably, rather depressed by it. “There are so many issues,” she says, “that were brought up that a lot of people find themselves going back  to their lives and trying to deal with things that maybe they’ve always been putting on the side.”

She knows, she says, that she cannot try to make Lebanon a better place, as that would be, “a huge responsibility,” and that, “What is right for me might not be right for you.” However, in her art and in the book, she has tried to find the “visual language, visual vocabulary,” to express the fact that, “In Lebanon there is so much beauty, but there is also so much pain and destruction.” If her readers and viewers take anything away from her work, perhaps it would be this: “I can’t assume that what I know is better , but there are some simple things – and I think that we can agree that war benefits very few, selfish people.”