10 January 2009
Interview
BEIRUT: Following the opening of the first Middle Eastern stop of "Lighting Lamps," a collection of cartoons from the region, at Lebanese American University Thursday night, Steve Bell of England's Guardian newspaper and Armand Homsi of Lebanon's An-Nahar sat down with The Daily Star to talk about funny-looking politicians, freedom of expression, and how to make a good cartoon.
DS: Mr. Homsi, do you feel you have more in common with Mr. Bell's work or with your fellow cartoonists from the region?
AH: I feel I have more in common with Steve. Maybe it's the style, the way of thinking - I don't know. My work, as per the feedback I get from my work, they all say there's a Western touch in it. I don't know if it's something that you get, or something that you do, what I do know is that you don't do it on purpose, it just evolves in that way. And feeling quite comfortable in the style that you work. And since it's more related to "the West," in quotes, in that sense it's more related to the work of Steve.
DS: Steve, Mr. Bell, you've met with your colleagues in Damascus and Jordan, as well as here and in the UK. What did you learn from your colleagues in the region?
SB: I did a workshop about two years ago in Damascus, and I met some people there, namely Ali Ferzat, whose work is in this exhibition.
I speak no Arabic, and I'm trying to understand these completely different cultures, somewhere like Syria for example, or even Lebanon, which seems very open, but has this chaotic history. Recently the history has been so terrible, but seeing it has been marvelous. Seeing what an incredible place it is, I can't believe they were throwing explosives around only two years ago. It makes me furious to think about it.
Meeting my fellow practitioners is good for me, as sort of a selfish thing. I get some understanding of how you can do things differently, in different conditions. I have a very free hand at The Guardian. They don't tell me what to do and I don't tell them what I'm doing, I just do it and send it in. I realize I'm peculiarly fortunate in that.
But what's more important, for us, as artists, is to say something in an interesting way. Because when you do cartooning day in and day out for year after year after year, you're doing the same subjects. You want to make your point, there's an understanding you want to get across, but you also want to be funny, if possible.
I was very pleased to hear Armand describe [in an earlier public discussion] a similar process that he works by, and I can see in his work how that comes across.
So for me, it's been great. Because the other thing about cartooning is it's a very solitary pursuit. You spend a great deal of time on your own, hunched over a drawing board, trying to think up jokes, trying to make yourself laugh.
AH: [Laughing] It could be worse, for the animators. You know, they have a mirror. It's even worse. You see yourself all the time!
SB: I have to have a mirror - you have to work out expressions and all.
DS: So what came up when you were talking to the artists in Damascus? And weren't you also in Jordan?
SB: I was in Jordan very briefly, there's a couple of Jordanian guys, there's Imad Hajjaj and Jalal al-Rifai. Their style is very simple, and they're working under very different conditions. Jordan is not quite as bad as Syria - well in some ways it is, in fact - Jordan is quite restrictive for a cartoonist, obviously not as much freedom as here, but they have things that they say, and they want to say, and they can say, in those circumstances. And a lot of what I did discover was artists who live in Syria, but they work in Bahrain, say, or Abu Dhabi, or Kuwait, and they can't [publish their work] in Syria. For instance, there was one guy who was forbidden to work in Syria, he wasn't allowed, even though he was a Syrian guy and had lived there all his life.
DS: So most of the concerns voiced were about freedom of expression, rather than the artistic process?
SB: No, I think our concerns are about artistic process. I mean the freedom of expression thing comes up, but there's no point beating on about it. It's just something vital. Someone asked me about objectivity, but what it depends on is the integrity of the journalist. I'm depending on you, for example, not to go out and write this tissue of lies when you go write it up tomorrow [laughs].
It's about the journalist, or the artist, or the cartoonist or photographer. You have to be able to trust them, and that trust is something you have to build up.
DS: I've read from both of you that you have carte blanche at your papers. Isn't this a function of your values, your point of view, being more or less in sync with that of your editor, or the editorial line in general?
AH: It's not true, because I've always said I had a carte blanche from day one. They never knew what was coming, what was the style. In my case, I first started at An-Nahar after a contest, so they only saw maybe six or seven drawings hung on the wall. So on day one, Gibran Tueni told me "You have carte blanche," and he did not know what to expect. And this is not because I was in line.
DS: I thought it was because you and he had a real camaraderie and a mutual understanding.
AH: No, that came later on, that came after. I never knew him before.
DS: So that was a condition of your working there?
AH: If you are someone who does anything that's not relevant, that's not logical, they're going to say, "Whoa, hold your horses, there's something wrong here." But if you're coherent, if you make sense, and what you say isn't wrong, they cannot get you for it. Okay, they might not want to say it right now, but it's not wrong. And this is the kind of thing that grows along with you.
The working process, over the years - you come to have this style and this way of thinking that makes you what you are today. It's a trust and a relationship that comes along, and you go there, and it happens.
SB: That relationship is something that you can only do in certain newspapers. You talk about editorial line as if it's something that's laid down. Well, my experience at The Guardian is I never know what the editorial line is on anything. I never read the editorials, and I wouldn't dream of trying to work out what they were.
DS: In a broader sense, though, in that it's a left-wing, progressive paper, and you're a left-wing, progressive person.
SB: Well, I wouldn't describe The Guardian as a left-wing paper, it's a liberal paper, and people always equate liberal with left-wing. Editorial lines are something you get on other papers, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, they tend to be far more strict, certainly the tabloid papers. The cartoonists there I talk to tell me things are suggested, they get steered in a certain way, and it's very hard to be independent. So the leeway I get is actually quite rare. There are a few other papers that do it, but not that many.
DS: So what advice do you have for cartoonists who don't have the luck that you have, who are working in other circumstances?
SB: Well I'm always keen to say "keep at it," especially if they're good, or if they think they're good. You have to believe you're good, otherwise you won't get anywhere.
It's a strange thing about cartoons, in the sense that newspapers seem to be shrinking and reducing, and people say it's a dying art form, and cartooning is an old-fashioned thing and maybe there's no more need for it. And I sort of feel differently. I think there's more need for it, because the society we live in so very visual, and visually driven. There's a flood of images coming down the TV every day, and cartoons are a way of dealing with it.
They're a very effective way of dealing with that stuff. I use that kind of imagery all the time. I'm sort of turning it over and twisting it in my own way. I think there's a greater need than ever for cartoonists, but it's just how and where you get work is difficult because there's a limited number of papers. There's the Internet, but getting paid on the Internet is difficult. Cartoonists want to be paid money, basically.
DS: In Lebanon, I've seen a lot more cartoonists, and comic books coming out. How much contact do you have with the younger generation of cartoonists?
AH: Well you know, I used to be the younger generation [laughs] ... Actually I know Mazen [Kerbaj, a cartoonist and blogger], his mother is in An-Nahar, so I know him. You know, when you draw cartoons, whether in a newspaper or on a blog, today you have the same feedback, because [the Internet] is an international tool. I get feedback early in the morning from Canada, for instance, comments on my cartoon that appeared in Beirut two hours earlier. Maybe the papers are shrinking but the visual culture Steve was referring to is really huge.
If you look at your Hotmail account for example, whatever you have, you get minimum 10 cartoons per day, whatever the topic is, if you remember for example the Bush shoe incident. People need that. This kind of tool, which is the Internet today, makes whatever you do automatically published. You don't even need to publish books, you just do it for fun or to have a dedication on it.
Otherwise, you have lots of artists who have all their work on their website, so you could make hundreds of books out of them. You don't even need books as far as cartoons are concerned. But the idea of having a cartoon is very important.
Now concerning the younger generation - as you put it - they don't even need to have a newspaper to get published.
SB: It's very true, there are more and more cartoons out there, but you need to have some sort of zeroing-in process.
DS: Steve, I've read things you've written about using labels, i.e. using words and texts in the drawing. Armand, your work is read all over the world, and while in Lebanon the literacy rate is extremely high, in North Africa, in Yemen, it's much less so. Is this something you think about when you draw?
AH: When you draw you think of nobody. When you draw, you are here in front of your blank paper and you don't think of nobody. Otherwise you will not do anything.
SB: That's right, that's very, very true. I agree with that 100 percent. You can't think of some likely audience, the only audience is yourself, and you have to think, does this make sense to me? The important thing is to try and avoid cliche. When you're working on a cartoon, and we're all working on the same thing simultaneously, and you cannot possibly see what other people are doing, people often come up with the same ideas.
AH: It's true. Big events like the September 11 attacks, imagine, all the cartoonists of the world are watching the same image and they are doing the same drawing later on. You need to step out of the crowd. You can take the easy way out, you can do Lady Liberty weeping, or you can try to find something different.
SB: On the other hand, the best cartoon ideas are sometimes blindingly obvious, though. It is the art of the blindingly obvious, in the end. The trick is to be there first, which of course you can't, since we're all doing the same thing at the same time. So people say "Oh, he stole that idea off me." In politics, most ideas are lying around waiting to be picked up.
DS: You've written about American cartoons being quite mild, where you saw a show in Pittsburgh of unpublished cartoons that had been censored, and even those were not particularly offensive to you.
SB: That says something more about the restrictions that American cartoonists work under, which are quite severe, in the sense that being mainly syndicated, the syndicates don't want to offend, so it's this business of, "Well, we don't want to offend that element of the readership because we'll lose that advertising." In that sense, I'm very lucky working for a paper where no one's going to object to that lefty-wing stuff because we're read by a lot of left-wing readers, although we always get objections.
DS: That's interesting. It seems like in the Arab world they're operating under political restrictions, but in America it's quite economic.
SB: Yes, it's actually quite alarming. I remember that exhibition, some of the stuff that you couldn't do.
DS: Now, this show is all-male. Where are all the women cartoonists?
SB: There are a lot of them out there.
AH: It's mathematical. Take all of the cartoonists in Lebanon, maybe there are six or seven. That's not a lot.
SB: In the US there are a lot who are good - who are very good.
DS: Who is the easiest politician to caricature?
AH: MP Walid Jumblatt. He is very easy to draw. You know, the more you draw a character, the easier it is for people to recognize later on. You can go to the extreme, of stretching the characters. What's difficult is if there's a new guy in town. You need time to set him up. But luckily we don't have this problem in Lebanon. No matter how many wars we had, it's the same guys. "You were here 20 years ago! Hey man, you had black hair then, and now it's white!" We need new blood.
SB: You have to know what kind of character they are. Politicians put on a face, a mask, and you have to get under it. I've watched so many politicians, and in a weird way, they're professional idealists - for money, eventually, but they express the ideas we want to hear.
AH: In Lebanon, it's very common to take a position just because it's the opposite of your enemy's. If you say black, I say white.
DS: Did you discuss the Danish cartoons incidents with your colleagues in Damascus or Jordan?
SB: Yes, and I was not surprised that they were vehement about them. There's a different attitude with respect to religion, and respecting it. I found myself making a plea, saying, "Please, we need to make fun, to take the piss. Even in the worst, darkest situations, we need to have humor." Really, it was just a stupid right-wing rag trying to rile up the minority, it's outrageous the reactions it got. "Cartoon deaths," embassies burned down. But with freedom of expression, when people get offended, I don't know if you can talk about a "right to offend."
AH: It was obvious that the cartoonists didn't have any idea what they were doing, that they'd never been to an Arab country, and never seen what kind of respect people have for their religion. They were not good drawings, they were made in like two minutes to offend, not even done in an artistic way. Even if you forget the content and judge the drawings and the layouts and ideas, there was no effort put into them.
But it was still not an excuse for the reaction.
SB: A stupid journalistic piece of crap.
Copyright The Daily Star 2009.
