Gibran, Illustrated: Zeina Abirached’s Take on ‘The Prophet’

"It's the story of our lives, of the lives of our parents and grandparents, and it touched me really deeply. I had to draw him," explains Lebanese artist and graphic novelist Zeina Abirached in her interview with Roza Melkumyan for AramcoWorld when asked about what made her take on the monumental task of adapting legendary poet Kahlil Gibran's globally beloved 1923 book The Prophet into a graphic novel. Published in late 2024 by Interlink Publishing, The Prophet: A Graphic Novel is Abirached's unique and intimately personal exploration of one of the most widely-beloved works of prose poetry of all time.

Gibran's classic delves deep into the human condition, touching on love, grief, joy, friendship, prayer, freedom, passion, and much more through the lens of the titular prophet Al Mustafa. Illustrator and graphic novelist Abirached, a Lebanese migrant like Gibran himself, finds reflected in the book many of her own experiences, and in adapting the prose through her art is able to express not only the intricacies of rhythm and musicality in the poetry, but also her deeply personal connection to the work.

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Particularly striking is her choice of working only in black and white, letting both the poetry and her art speak for themselves in their rawest forms. As seen in her former works like I Remember Beirut (Graphic Universe, 2008), her art style is clean, uncomplicated, and leaves space—both literally and metaphorically—for Gibran's words to shine through. Abirached's illustrations take a great deal of care to manage the pace and rhythm of the prose with entire pages often having no more than a few small blocks of text.

As one of the best selling books of all time and having been translated into over 100 languages, The Prophet is no stranger to adaptation. In a sea of options to experience the magic of Gibran's poetry, through its beautiful simplicity and careful attention to musicality, Zeina Abirached's The Prophet: A Graphic Novel establishes itself as one well worth trying out.