14 April 2005
BEIRUT: The art of the political cartoon has always been in its ability to make a point with the delicacy and directness of a surgeon's scalpel, using savage caricature and distortion in a way that a photograph or article is unable to do.
Lebanese and Arab cartoonists do it well. From the late Mahmoud Kahil to the likes of The Daily Star's Stavro, Future television's Pierre Sadek and Elie Saliba today, all effectively and simply depict the circumstances, concerns and personalities of the Arab people.
It is lampooning, normally of those in positions of authority on a grand scale. The ongoing Lebanese political caricaturist's exhibition in Beirut's Saifi village, which runs until April 17, demonstrates that skill so well, but combined, like all the best satire, with an ability to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Generally a political, or editorial, cartoon is an illustration or comic strip containing a political or social message. They can be very diverse but most contain the common style of using visual metaphors and caricatures to explain complicated political situations, summing up a current event in a humorous picture.
The editorial cartoon has long been an established feature of newspaper design but what is not often recognized is that it is serious journalism too. Picture the political caricature and the cartoonist behind it - it is how they think and express themselves and the effect of this on readers that makes them more like columnists, visual journalists rather than artists.
Such caricatures like Saliba's savage attack on Prime Minister Omar Karami on view at the Saifi village exhibition, are to use the words of British newspaper The Guardian's cartoonist Martin Rowson, "an oasis of visual anarchy in the neat rows of print."
The cartoonist presents his or her case in a visceral and immediate way, read (or viewed) and sublimated in ways different from the surrounding text.
And as Rowson says, "If cartooning is corrective surgery performed with a cudgel," attacking the powers that be, those in authority with that cudgel could not be more necessary in Lebanon and the Arab world than it is today. Much of what is going on in the region is wrong and cartoonist and caricaturists of the caliber of Sadek and Saliba try to put it right by revealing its faults with humor.
