02 July 2009

Review

 

LONDON: The Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was assassinated in London in July 1987 and to this day he remains one of the most popular artists in the Arab world. His drawings are relentlessly critical of despotism and repression and are ever-supportive of the underprivileged and those whose voices could not be heard.

When he was alive, his daily cartoons in Arab newspapers were impatiently awaited each morning. The strict censorship of the news, combined with the prevalence of illiteracy in the Arab world at that time, only added to his remarkable success. Twenty years later, his drawings are still timeless and provide a source of inspiration to many current-day cartoon artists and graphic novelists in the Middle East and beyond.

Now, for the first time, Ali's political cartoons have been published in English-language book form. "A Child in Palestine" aims to introduce Ali's work to Western audiences. The artist's eldest son, Khalid, assembled cartoons from different periods of his father's career to show a variety of artistic styles but also to "make sure that the subject matter of the cartoons are still, unfortunately, topical," says the younger Ali. "Hence, the reader will relate to the events that are still occurring in the region through cartoons drawn years ago."

Assembling the cartoons in a book is also an important way to preserve them, since a great part of Ali's earlier work has been lost. "There was never proper archiving at the newspapers in the '60s and early '70s and my father did not keep the cartoons with him at that point," says Khalid al-Ali. In fact, the son is in the process of publishing a series of books in Arabic that contain his father's cartoons in chronological order.

Naji al-Ali was born in 1936 in the Palestinian village of Al-Shajara, in the Galilee, and came to be a refugee during the 1948 Nakba, spending the rest of his youth in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. He began to draw on the camp walls and later published his work in Beirut newspapers and magazines, then in Kuwait and finally for the international edition of Al-Qabas newspaper in London.

The cleanly designed soft-cover "A Child in Palestine" collects 100 of Ali's pen-and-ink cartoons, spanning 20 years. Loosely divided into chapters with titles such as "Human Rights," "US Dominance, Oil and Arab Collusion" and "Resistance," each chapter is preceded by an introduction.

Malta-born US graphic novelist Joe Sacco has contributed a general introduction. He's an apt choice. Sacco is best known for his award-winning book "Palestine," which he wrote at the time of the first intifada. He begins his introduction with "I owe a debt to Naji al-Ali."

Sacco explains that when he made his first trip to the Occupied Territories in the early 1990s to research "Palestine" - then intended to be a comic book series - he was afraid to tell his Palestinian hosts that he would be depicting their stories in cartoons. He thought it might be perceived as a trivial representation. "I needn't have worried," Sacco writes. "Upon blurting out my approach, a smile of understanding usually creased their faces. 'Of course! We had our own cartoonist! Naji al-Ali!'"

As Sacco began to spend time in the Occupied Territories, he naturally became acquainted with the iconic child character Hanthala, Naji al-Ali's ragged alter ego, present in most of his cartoons. In the 1960s Ali said he created Hanthala "to symbolize my lost childhood. This character came out of my life in the camp. A typical child of those days - barefoot, destitute and deprived. I created this character so I would never forget where I came from."

Hanthala is drawn for the most part with his back to the viewer, hands behind his back. He is the impoverished and upright Palestinian, observing, year after year, the desperate situation of the Palestinians, corrupt Arab politicians, an oil-hungry US, a hypocritical PLO, and Israel and the brutal occupier. After the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, writes Sacco, "Hanthala lost his cool. He raised his hands in anger. He threw stones."

In an image from 1983, Hanthala uses a keffiyeh to cover a Palestinian woman who has been tortured to death. In another cartoon from the same year, Hanthala kicks a piece of a puzzle with the Israeli flag on it, part of a larger puzzle of the Lebanese flag, indicating that there is no room for Israel in the fractured assemblage of alliances called "Lebanon."

In an earlier drawing from 1974, Hanthala is in a desert among oil wells. The central character is former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; his nose transformed into a petrol nozzle.

An image drawn the year of Ali's death in 1987 depicts Palestinian children throwing rocks at an Israeli steamroller, while a sheepish-looking Arab ruler pushes it from behind.

Naji al-Ali's cartoons were never cynical, though they easily might have been. Elements of hope and resistance were often present. Hanthala remained his creator's moral compass, giving him the freedom to criticize everyone, which also earned him powerful enemies. Ali never forgot he was speaking for the ordinary citizen, a legacy that other Palestinian cartoonists such as Baha Boukhari and Omayya Joha have continued.

"Cartoons should be speaking about the people," Boukhari has said, "not from a political point [of view]. This is [not] Hamas or Fatah, no, the ordinary people."

One of the youngest rising stars in Palestine, animator Amer Shomali, who works out of his Ramallah-based Zan Studios, says Naji al-Ali is never far from his consciousness.

"The first time I saw Naji's cartoons was in an exhibition in Damascus in 1988 for a memorial one year after his assassination. I was only a kid back then but still can't deny Naji's influence directing me since then. I'm always asking myself, what would Naji draw if he were still alive?"

In 2005 Shomali began to draw a white character with a blank face and an elastic body. It represented "the child inside me, walking over the wall, pushing tanks etc ... [the character] believes in dreams, not in the limits of reality." Shomali's persona is a contemporary Hanthala who has the use of his hands and has stepped into action. Quoting Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, Shomali says his Hanthala represents "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." 

Naji al-Ali's Hanthala, writes Joe Sacco, "remains a potent Palestinian symbol and will for a long time to come. Unfortunately, with the Middle East's twin taps of violence and despair still open, there is all too much for Hanthala to see."

"A Child in Palestine: The cartoons of Naji al-Ali" is published by Verso. For more information go to www.versobooks.com

Copyright The Daily Star 2009.