Brooklyn Public Library presents an evening with Molly Crabapple, illustrator and co-author with Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, of Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War on Tuesday, May 15th at 7:30 PM. Attendees are invited to explore the accompanying exhibition Molly Crabapple & Marwan Hisham: Syria in Ink, followed by an talk with Crabapple and a reception. Books will be available for purchase.
Brothers of the Gun is a bracingly immediate memoir of the Syrian war from its inception to the present by a young man coming of age and finding his voice as a journalist, whose friends traveled divergent paths through the carnage. An intimate lens into the century’s bloodiest conflict, and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom. Illustrated with over 80 ink drawings by Molly Crabapple.
In 2011, Marwan Hisham and his two friends–fellow working-class college students–Nael and Tareq, joined the first protests of the Arab Spring in Syria, in response to a recent massacre. Arm-in-arm they marched, poured Coke into each other’s eyes to blunt the effects of tear gas, ran from the security forces, and cursed the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad. It was ecstasy. A long-bottled revolution was finally erupting, and freedom from a brutal dictator seemed, at last, imminent. Five years later, the three young friends were scattered: one now an Islamist revolutionary; another dead at the hands of government soldiers; and the last, Marwan, now a journalist in Turkish exile, trying to find a way back to a homeland reduced to rubble.
Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer based in New York, has drawn in Guantanamo Bay, in Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria, and received widespread praise for her illustrated memoir Drawing Blood. Crabapple is a contributing editor for Vice and has written for The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Brooklyn Central Library
10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238
718.230.2100
