14 March 2008
LONDON: It has been just over 20 years since master political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was assassinated in London. To commemorate this sad anniversary, an exhibition of original artwork, "Shooting the Witness: The cartoons of Naji al-Ali" opened here last week. The venue, fittingly, is London's respected and alternately serious and rollicking, Political Cartoon Gallery.
There are many elements that make Ali's work compelling but what is initially striking is how contemporary his drawings remain, after 30 years. The Palestinian situation is possibly worse than ever, the US and Israel continue to be military partners, oil is at the top of everyone's agenda and some fear Lebanon's present political paralysis will lapse back into chaos.
Ali, who left his Palestinian village in Galilee during the Nabka, came of age in the refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, then on the outskirts of Sidon, in South Lebanon. As political awareness made its way into the camps in the 1950s, Ali began to draw on the walls of the camp and in Lebanese prisons, where he was confined for his political activities.
In 1961, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani gave Ali his first break by publishing his cartoons in "Al-Huria," the official magazine of the Arab Nationalist Movement. Two years later, he moved to Kuwait where he found work with the magazine Al-Talea (Avant-Garde).
It was in the wealthy Gulf state that Ali created his alter ego and his guardian angel, the iconic 10-year-old character Hanthala, who shares the cult-like status of his creator. The reason he introduced Hanthala (literally "Bitter Desert Fruit") to his readers, Ali explained, was that "the young, barefoot Hanthala was a symbol of my childhood. He was the age I was when I left Palestine and, in a sense, I am still that age today.
"Even though this all happened 35 years ago, the details of that phase in my life are still fully present to my mind. I feel that I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine.
"The character of Hanthala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily toward Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense - the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa."
Ali's steadfast and lifelong commitment to championing the rights of the underprivileged, and his portrayal of human suffering and the fat-cat politicians and governments responsible for it, made him enemies in all camps. Indeed, his assassination remains an open case for Scotland Yard: while there has been much speculation that the PLO or the Mossad was involved, the assassins were never captured.
Three months earlier, in what could be an eerie prediction of his own murder, he'd published a drawing of Hanthala's death - face down with an arrow in his heel. Ali's original cartoon is among those on display at the Political Cartoon Gallery.
"My father used to say that his pen should be like the knife of the surgeon, cutting through hypocrisy and rhetoric," says Khalid al-Ali, the cartoonist's eldest son, who was in London to help organize the show.
A mathematician who now lives in the Gulf, the younger Ali was born in Ain al-Hilweh. As a 15-year-old boy, he accompanied his father to inspect the devastated camp after the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon. He is actively keeping his father's work and memory alive by organizing exhibitions and, most importantly for him, the first of what he hopes will be a series of books of the political cartoons, going back in time in chronological order.
Although Khalid al-Ali estimates that his father drew about 12,000 cartoons in his lifetime, he says that some 75 percent of them have been lost. The family has collected the remaining drawings, most of which are black-and-white, in pen and ink, although 50 or so exist in color and some are painted.
Because of the nature of the cartoons and the power of his message, his son says, Ali's artistic side has always been overlooked. Standing in front of the original drawings, though, it is easy to see that Ali's gestures were fluid yet precise, and some are decidedly painterly, evoking expressionism and the social realism of the Depression-era United States.
The ragged little boy Hanthala is in almost all his drawings, his back to the observer, a silent witness to the horror and absurdity of the region's politics. His hands, clasped behind him, have been read to signify the dejection, or binding, of the Palestinians or the polite voyeurism of non-Palestinians. In one particularly powerful drawing, though, Hanthala's furrowed, anguished face is visible, turned toward a couple of Palestinian peasants ploughing their occupied land with an AK-47, while sowing it with heart-shaped seeds.
Hanthala occasionally participates in the action such as in one image, published in the Kuwaiti paper, Al-Qabas in 1984, in which Ali prophesized the intifada many years before it happened. Hanthala joins a woman and a girl in throwing stones at both Israeli soldiers and Arab politicians.
As time went on, Ali's drawings became increasingly critical of Arab leaders, his son observes, and he portrayed them as ugly, misshapen, and bottom-heavy figures.
Ali had returned to Lebanon in the 1970's to work for the recently launched As-Safir newspaper and his drawings reflected his disgust with what he felt was the corruption of Arab regimes selling out to Western powers - a wealthy elite that ignored injustice and the destitute, and the continuing brutality of the Israelis toward the Palestinians.
In a 1999 documentary by Kasim Abid, an Iraqi filmmaker, Ali's wife, Widad, describes how in Lebanon he was receiving death threats regularly and that she would wake up each morning to start his car for him because she felt that, "if something were to happen to me, it wouldn't make a big difference. But as for Naji, he was irreplaceable."
In the end, something did happen, but his work endures and is, unfortunately, just as timely. As Ali himself put it, "Hanthala, [whom] I created, will not end after my end. I hope that this is not an exaggeration when I say that I will continue to live with Hanthala, even after I die."
"Shooting the Witness: The cartoons of Naji al-Ali" runs at London's Political Cartoon Gallery until April 19, 2008. For more information check out www.politicalcartoon.co.uk
Copyright The Daily Star 2008.
