Comic folk literature in the time of Facebook: Luqmān Dayrakī and his posts on Facebook

Is it possible to consider Facebook as a marketplace where the contemporary folk culture can find one of its spaces of expression? If so, would it be wrong to consider this space a source for the contemporary folk literature, through which we may read our age in a more “popular” light? Recalling Bakhtin’s description of the marketplace and the folk culture as represented in Rabelais’ work, this paper analyses a corpus of posts published by the Syrian poet and writer Luqmān Dayrkī (1966) on his Facebook page. It argues that the form, the technique, the characters, the language, and the images of these posts have most of the features of the comic folk literature and therefore can be representative of a view of the world (Syria in particular) which opposes and subverts the official, serious narrative.