In 2022, Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury, an emerging Palestinian-Lebanese artist in Beirut’s underground comix scene, released Titties, a daring comics collection exploring the tumultuous love life of a self-insert persona. With one-page strips, she recounts the ‘scandalous’ escapades she’s had with various partners in Lebanon.
Hifaoui graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in 2015 and sought to immerse herself in the world of visual storytelling. After years of honing her craft in the Lebanese alternative art movement, she was inducted into Samandal Comics, a Levantine collective dedicated to elevating sequential art in the Arab world. Currently, Ms. Hifaoui’s output is primarily in the realm of autofiction, presenting intimate yet provocative stories with an exaggerated style to accentuate their nuances.
Titties was the culmination of a new approach to the age-old medium. By presenting these encounters in a frank manner, Hifaoui examines how women from her background process pleasure during coitus, and comments on the most trivial details in all their absurdity. In doing so, she hoped to provoke the reader into confronting the uncomfortable realities of our carnal experiences in terms of prohibition, repression, and marginalization, as is painfully common in Southwest Asia and North Africa.
A memorable string of panels, for example, includes Hifaoui and her lover figuring out their video call setup. While trying to avoid alerting his roommates, her lover ejaculates prematurely shortly after asking to see her face, leaving her visibly and audibly unsatisfied with his indifference to the incident’s recurrence. This fearless act of transgression is all in service of pushing the envelope of self-expression in a failed state where heavy-handed censorship has, over the past couple of years, reached Orwellian levels, with few options left to meaningfully resist the status quo.
The vignettes presented in Titties weren’t wish fulfillment on Hifaoui’s part, but authentic depictions of sexual relations among local youth that were inspired by her real-life hookups. It was her initial attempt at an open relationship that urged Hifaoui to produce these one-offs. As she navigated its trials and tribulations, she was, for the first time, sexually involved with several people simultaneously, and it opened her up to the possibilities of other forms of human connection.
Following each liaison, she felt compelled to illustrate them in order to process what had happened — then share them with friends as a form of therapeutic release. After a few months of documenting her trysts, she realized that she had laid the foundations for her first solo book.
Graphic courtesy of Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury (Instagram @not_sunny___).
Graphic courtesy of Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury.
“I loved [Ulli] Lust and [Julie] Doucet’s narrative style — works of autofiction revealing so much vulnerability and crudeness while simultaneously depicting relationships with intimacy,” says Hifaoui, who shared the inspiration behind her novel with Raseef22. “These comics made me reflect on my narrative style and my relationships.”
Nour was first introduced to the exhilarating world of sequential art in school when an obscure French comic artist was brought in for a presentation that intrigued her with the notion that she could draw the same character across several pages to chronicle personal anecdotes.
“I would ask too many questions about people’s lives. I wanted to hear their stories, the intimate ones — the ones they wouldn’t share over coffee with a neighbor,” Hifaoui admits when explaining where the origin of ‘Miss Curious,’ the nickname given to her by her university peers. “I wanted to know the origin stories of people, where they come from, and how they became who they are.”
Of course, this desire, as it always seems to be the case with Palestinian creatives, is tied back to Palestine. Like many other Palestinians in the diaspora, Hifaoui never had the chance to visit her homeland due to the fascistic policies of the Zionist occupation, which prohibit Palestinians and their descendants from returning.
Hifaoui was understandably worried about a potential backlash from the title’s publication. She was careful to have Titties distributed in what she deemed to be safe spaces. As for her family, she was certain they wouldn’t try to read it as they weren’t a part of the target audience. Regardless, that didn’t mean Hifaoui’s parents weren’t aware of its impending release.
“Obviously, my mother wasn’t pleased, but she understood that this was my life and my work, and she knew how to detach herself from it. On the other hand, my father has no clue what’s inside the comic; he only knows it's a feminist work exploring women's sexuality."
Graphic courtesy of Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury (Instagram @not_sunny___).
Graphic courtesy of Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury.
As it turned out, there was no cause for concern as the response to Titties was everything she could have hoped for in light of the socio-political circumstances at the time. “I wanted my story published and read in Lebanon by Lebanese people,” she says, “we printed a small batch to see how readers would react, but [the book] sold out right away, so we printed several more editions, and all of them sold out, too!”
The collection eventually reached the shores of Italy when an Italian publisher translated Titties into Italian and sold copies of Hifaoui’s work there.
With fears of a pseudo-religious retaliation having been assuaged by the warm reception to her book Hifaoui plans to release more work in that mold. At the moment, Hifaoui’s working on not one but two erotic graphic novels that will further her resistance against the censors of carnal self-expression in the region and beyond. One of these upcoming opuses will be a followup to her debut, cheekily titled Titties Too, in which the self-insert female protagonist explores her queerness; the next book will be titled A Distance and will tackle lesbianism. She proudly proclaims it to be even more explicit than her first release as she’ll use her self-insert to examine long-distance intercourse facilitated by the latest technological breakthroughs in social media and sensual lifestyle products.
Although sold out in local stores, readers can now purchase Titties from Samandal Comics online.
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