A David Lewis, Ph.D., Instructor of Healthcare Business and MHS Program Coordinator at MCPHS University, has formed a non-profit organization, Comics for Youth Refugees Incorporated Collective (CYRIC), in response to the massive trauma of the Syrian civil war. Lewis’s work specifically focuses on refugee children; “I wanted to give them their stories back,” he says. The result is Haawiyat, a 48-page, full-color comic anthology of Syrian folk tales, currently being distributed to around one thousand Syrian children in border refugee camps. We sat down with Lewis to learn more.

Let’s start at the beginning—what was the origin of the idea to put together a comic book?

The suggestion came from a dear friend in 2014. I was feeling particularly aggrieved by the news coming out of Syria, partially because I had just had my second kid and I was seeing images of babies and small children suffering, and was feeling very frustrated and powerless, thinking these could be my kids. She said, “Well, you do comics, why don’t you make a comic?” At first the idea felt silly; I wanted to do something grander or more impactful, but then it started to make sense. Let the people who can offer medical help and legal aid and foreign policy work do their part; maybe I can do something healing and supportive.

Soon, the idea developed into creating a comic that would provide emotional support while also reconnecting refugee children to their own folklore, and that was the nucleus of the nonprofit I formed in 2016, CYRIC (Comics For Youth Refugees Incorporated Collective). Every single story I adapted for the comic was from Syrian folklore. I didn’t want to send our stories abroad, and many artists and collaborators felt the same way. These children had to leave a lot of books and toys behind, so the tagline became ‘give them their stories back.’

The title, “Haawiyat”, has a meaning in Arabic; loosely, “vessels” or “containers”. It’s the closest Arabic translation to an “anthology”, but it could just as easily refer to the containers and shipments of help going abroad. We teamed up with the nonprofit NuDay Syria, who offered to take our books across with their other goods and disseminate to the kids in the border refugee camps.

How did you pick the stories?

I’m an academic, so I did research! I’m not a native Arabic speaker or reader, so I was looking for stories already in translation (many of the current translations are British). Additionally, I contacted a number of colleagues in ethnic and religious studies for stories they understood to be Syrian in origin. Next, I had to vet the stories for themes that could be triggering, or that might not be communicating principles that we all share, and I had to cut stories down to the most nurturing and the most connective stories possible, which left me with a much shorter and more manageable list of scripts that I could match with artists.

A panel from “Bird of Golden Feather”, one of the folk tales in Hawiyaat. Illustrations by Anna Bron.

Tell me about that matching process.

I already had a network from my days in self-publishing comics, so I could just talk with people, but I also put out a call for interested comic artists via social media and work sites. No direct tie to the region was required, nor was there a foreign language requirement, but I made it clear that artists needed to support some basic UN-type principles, and I wanted them to understand how their art would be used.

We got some private funding from donors, and some foundation support as well. I started taking quotes from artists I didn’t know and reviewing portfolios. I was looking for people who worked particularly well with animals, people who worked well with non-Western settings and attire, and also for variety in different art styles. The end pool of artists was incredibly diverse: I got both men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, US and international artists.

Another panel from a story entitled “Abu Nuwas and the Eggs”, illustrated by Deena Mohamed.

What was the editorial process like?

It was messy, and varied a great deal. I wish I could say I had a better managerial system! Frequently, I would get the art uncolored, so at any point in the process I could ask for something to be adjusted or moved, and a few experimented with different layers, which allowed them to move elements around. With some panels, I had to ask the artists to redo it—with others, it was just small tweaks to make room for lettering. I was working with a very talented letterer, Taylor Esposito at GhostGlyph Studios, who is fantastic, but lettering the book was a new challenge to him because it was his first foray into Arabic lettering.

So he wasn’t an Arabic speaker?

Correct. There’s a challenge with word placement in balloons, so he was making sure those balloons didn’t obscure art, that there was readability and correct emphasis, and of course he was working very closely with the translators to ensure that no words were missed.

Tell me about the reception of the book.

So, the test comic that we sent got great feedback. I got pictures of kids reading it, and all these delighted faces, which is what pushed us to seek funding for this bigger, new book, of which we have now sent a thousand copies. The books are being distributed through schools and classrooms and clinics as well as refugee camps, but of course this is no replacement for any of those services.

Schoolchildren enjoying Hawiyaat. Photo credit: NuDay Syria.

My overwhelming impression from the first wave of books was what normal delight the kids showed. It was not at all a desperate “thank you sir for this cold porridge” kind of Dickensian thing. For any kid, being given a free colorful book is simply exciting, whether it’s at a local library or a refugee camp. I’ve read about any number of terrible refugee camps, but that was not reflected in the delight shown in these pictures. I saw two boys kidding around and pointing to stuff in the book; I saw another little girl lying on her belly and reading it with her legs in the air, like any kid you know. That made me particularly happy, to know that they’re not being completely forgotten, that they’re still getting to have a childhood. I was looking for a way to contribute to that childhood—and comics seem to be my way.