Cartoonists for Egyptian newspapers regularly draw in the wake of a tragedy. On December 11, a suicide bomber attacked attacked St. Paul and St. Peter Church, leaving 25 dead and 50 injured. While Egypt has experienced targeted assassinations, attacks on police outposts, and a plane crash in recent times, the strike on the Coptic churches was the most drastic example of targeting civilians in the capital. How would illustrators react to the brazen act of terror?
In spite of the dwindling space for dissent in Egypt, independent cartoonists harshly criticized the government’s response. Cartoonists for privately owned newspapers often go father than columnists or reporters in lambasting the government’s misdeeds. Even I was surprised by their boldness this week as they penned provocations in the shadow of terrorism and as President Abdul-Fattah El-Sisi sought to allay fears about the targeting of Egyptian Christians. Meanwhile, in government-run newspapers, there were strong expressions of solidarity with Egypt’s Christians and absolute support for the state.
The duty of the cartoonist is to push the reader beyond the normal scope of contemplation, to offer a joke, jab, or insight. That is exceedingly difficult in the midst of national mourning. These five cartoons about the heinous attack offer a variety of perspectives on terrorism, violence against Christians, and fissures within Egypt today…
Continue reading at the website of the Institute of Curren World Affairs.
For nine weeks in 1943, Josephine Baker electrified Cairo. Night after night, she rallied the Allied Troops, drumming up funds for the French resistance.
She pulled all-nighters carousing with European diplomats. She snubbed the portly King Farouk for a handsome Englishman, causing a stink. Little wonder that Picasso called her, “the Nefertiti of Now.”
Baker didn’t leave behind any audio recordings. But in downtown Cairo I discovered another trace of her sojourn: a caricature.
In a cluttered antique store, a small sketch among a cacophony of gilded frames caught my eye. It’s a drawing of Josephine Baker from her time in Cairo, the dealer boasted.
The artist is Georges Sabbagh. An Alexandrian by birth and a Parisian by training, Sabbagh captured the faces and landscapes of semi-colonial Cairo. He is one of Egypt’s seminal modern painters.
I can’t verify that the drawing is really of Baker’s pretty face. But it appears that Sabbagh was living in Cairo from 1936 to 1945. Can’t you imagine the gentleman-painter sitting at the Shepherd’s Hotel bar, scrawling a portrait of Josephine Baker on a cocktail napkin between cigarettes?
In the New York Review, Zadie Smith writes of the Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji’s unjust imprisonment:
“I think I understand now,” writes Naji, in Using Life, “that the bullshit inside of us is nothing but a reflection of the bullshit outside. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, the outside bullshit eventually seeps inside, and settles into the depths of our souls.” But on the evidence of his own writing the bullshit has not yet settled in Naji, not even in his jail cell. He is part of a great creative renaissance in Cairo, of young novelists and poets, graphic novelists, and—perhaps most visibly—graffiti artists, who have turned the city’s ever increasing walls into a staging site for political protest and artistic expression. Since 2014, President Sisi has cracked down on this community, with new restrictions on the press and multiplying arrests of artists and writers, and yet the Egyptian constitution guarantees both artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Naji has been prosecuted instead on Article 178 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes “content that violates public morals.”
An attempt to appeal was rejected in February. Naji’s last appeal is on December 4. If you read this and feel so moved, tweet #FreeNaji and any other social media action that occurs to you. Hundreds of Egyptian artists and intellectuals have signed a petition in support of Naji but there are also loud voices who feel that his example should not be used in a “freedom of literature” argument because they see his writing as not really literature, as fundamentally unserious. Using Life is certainly comic, sexual, wild—the work of an outrageous young man. We should defend his freedom to be so. “Falling in love in Cairo,” I learn, from his novel, “You have to prepare for the worst. You just can’t walk over to her and say, “Mona May, I’ve got the jones for you.” Words like these could get a man hurt.” Over here, in New York, words won’t get you into too much trouble—not yet, anyway. What would we dare to write if they did?
—Illustrations by Ayman Zorkany, published in Ahmed Naji’s hybrid novel Using Life.
Abdullah Jaber may well be Saudi Arabia’s boldest cartoonist. He cracks jokes about vexing issues of economics and politics that most others wouldn’t touch, all drawn in lines reminiscent of Matt Groening’s.
For background and more illustrations from Jaber, read my post from earlier this year, The Saudi Art of Caricature.
The Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart has already served 25 days in prison and is being held indefinitely, along with eight colleagues from the newspaper Cumhuriyet, pending trial. Their charge: "committing a crime in support of a terrorist organization without being a member.“ It seems that in Turkey, all journalists run the risk of being falsely and maliciously accused of terrorism.
This July, just a week before the failed coup, I had the pleasure of interviewing Musa Kart. He is a soft-spoken gentleman and caricaturist-ombudsman. A fearless critic of authority, he faced a lawsuit in 2004 for depicting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a kitten.
Kart, who has cartooned for over two decades, spoke bluntly about the perils of cartooning in Erdogan’s Turkey. “I can say in the more recent period that there has been more pressure than at any other time,” he said. As for the battery of legal cases against him, Kart has often said that it’s all rather cartoonish. “If I get convicted, it will turn into a tragic comedy,” he remarked.
What can be done to draw attention to the unjust incarceration of Kart and his colleagues? The United Nations has sent a special rapporteur to monitor the situation. The British Cartoonist Association has applauded Kart. The Committee to Protect Journalists honored former Cumhuriyet editorCan Dündar. But in the midst of an arbitrary crackdown on the press, the case of Kart and his colleagues has fallen off the map.
“Caricature is a way to directly and concisely express a concept,” Kart said, “and there’s a great need for this kind of communication in this country.” For now, we must look back at Kart’s archive to fill the void. His daily slot in Cumhuriyet remains empty.
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“Do not play with the settings on your receiver,” says a fuzzy President Erdogan. “The image on the earth is corrupted.”
Even experimenters need time to experiment. For the past several years, the cohort of creative cartoonists in Cairo have participated in Inktober. Each day of October, they pull out their pens and draw fun stuff, which they then eagerly share on Facebook. Gone are the tricks afforded by tablets and styluses; gone are the constraints of editorial cartooning or graphic novels.
A recent show at Medrar showed off these unruly works. The result: Expired Ink, a tightly curated introduction to Egypt’s established illustrators and emerging comic artists.
With ten inkers letting loose, I noticed two trends: nostalgic pastiche and supernatural fantasy.
What is it about Inktober—and the return to basics—that draws out melancholia? Take note of Mai Koraiem, an Alexandrian artist and author of the 2015 graphic novel Cavafis, a bio-comic of the poet Constantine P. Cavafy. For Expired Ink, Koraiem presented five detailed compositions of Egyptian nostalgia, including stamps, receipts, postcards, and other ephemera that together tells a story of Egypt’s modern archaeological record.
Koraiem, 2016
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Similarly, Ahmed Hefnawy rendered ghosts of the past. His realistic characters might have written the correspondences or signed the receipts in Koraiem’s collages. Hefnawy’s solemn characters stand beside iconic objects. Are they an homage to the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema or to the Golden Age of advertising? Are these images earnest or ironic? Elegantly framed and beautifully finished, Hefnawy’s Inktober drawings ask us whether the class structures of the past—the bashas and effendis—are still with us. They are also reminiscent of his “Made in Egypt” series for the alt-comix zine Tok Tok, which features portraits of downtown Cairo mainstays. Recentshows in Cairo have focused on the objects of modernity. Hefnawy asks us: Who used these objects? Why are they important?
Hefnawy, 2016
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The rest of the artists entered worlds strange and whimsical. Makhlouf offered up roosters five ways (Would you care for it intricately crosshatched or as a simple line drawing?). Mohamed Tawfik let his quirky characters—bounty hunters, bar hounds and cowboys—go wild. Hicham Rahma’s works were a stream of consciousness of bizarre love triangles, fallen angels, and unreal animals. Rahma’s sketchbook, sitting open in the gallery’s corner for viewers to peruse, was a highlight—an opportunity to gaze further into his twisted mind. Likewise, Ahmed Tawfig’s creatures were otherworldly.
Tawfig, 2016
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Makhlouf, 2016
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If the thirty-one days of Inktober are a provocation for digitally-inclined artists to return to the drawing board, then Expired Ink ought to serve as an inspiration to curators. Framed black-and-white drawings are always a pleasure to savor, and Egypt has no shortage of talented illustrators mining their memories or their imaginations.
As news spread of America’s next president, so did the caricatures. By now, I have seen many of the Planet Earth crowned by a straggly blondish pompadour. But only a handful of cartoonists have offered an original take on the president-elect.
Among them is Andeel, cartoonist for the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr. He is one of the few artists in the region to already hone his Trump caricature. When Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Andeel challenged his readers to caption an image of the two macho men standing face to face.
In Andeel’s cartoon from yesterday, both are already buds. The drawing reflects the purported affinity between the two bungling leaders, a topic that Middle East commentators will surely explore in the days to come. It is no coincidence that yesterday Sisi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump. For his part, Trump has called Sisi, “a fantastic guy.”
“No, you’re the real boss,” says Sisi to his orange counterpart in Andeel’s contribution to Mada Masr. (Perhaps it’s a sneak peek of Trump’s forthcoming Cairo visit?) Buildings behind them smoulder; the city is a hot mess, a veritable dumpster fire. So the two men roll up their sleeves. But one wonders if they are more likely to stoke the flames than to extinguish them.
That sentiment is similarly rendered in a multi-panel gag from the Egyptian comic artist Islam Gawish, who imagines President Trump getting his hands on the nuclear codes.
“Sir, this is your nuclear briefcase,” says the assistant. “This button is to strike Iran. And that’s for Russia and that’s to strike the Middle East and…”
“Let me try,” says a bug-eyed Trump. He clicks SELECT ALL.
The Heinous Assault on Saad Zaghloul at Cairo Station
“It was first reported that Zaghloul’s wounds had proved fatal, but later it was asserted that the injury was relatively slight.” After the attempted assassination of Egypt’s anti-colonial crusader Saad Zaghloul, a crowd at the train station nearly lynched the assailant. Safiya Zaghloul left her own sickbed and went straight to the hospital to tell her husband, “Be of good courage. It is for the fatherland.” Out of respect, King Fouad cancelled a planned reception. The British Foreign Office “expressed deep regret.”
This cover above is from the July 21, 1924 edition of Al-Lataif Al-Musawara, an early member of Egypt’s vibrant illustrated press. The pages herein contain many photographs, caricatures, and advertisements. But nothing compares to the stunning cover, which captures the instant the attack.
Before the portable camera, it was the artist’s hand that could best capture the intensity of a news-making moment. Note the impressive details: the carefully rendered ceiling of what is now known as Ramses Station, the men eagerly heaving their canes at the shooter, the shocked faces of onlookers, the oblivious yet stately gaze of Zaghloul, his cane resting upon his forearm. A pity that the artist is unattributed.
1924 spelled a season of assassinations in Cairo: Four top colonial leaders were whacked. Though Zaghloul spent a brief stint in hospital, it seems he was unfazed by his near death. A week later, crowds cheered as he boarded a special train from Cairo to Alexandria, and onward to Europe to negotiate with the British colonial overlords. Surely there was deep symbolic meaning and an air of defiance to his Westward expedition so soon after his encounter with a bullet. Indeed the Timesreports that the hatchetman—an Egyptian medical student in Berlin—sought to deter Zaghloul’s negotiations with the British.
Even as those efforts failed, the premier went on to fight for Egyptian rights. “We will never admit, not will those who come after us, that a single foreign soldier shall remain on Egyptian soil,” Zaghloul said. In his villa in the Cairo neighborhood of Mounira, his bloodied grey jacket hangs, a relic of his survival.
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How did Zaghloul’s supporters view the shot heard ‘round Cairo? Luckily, a political cartoon on the backside of Al-Lataif Al-Musawara offers a clue:
Here the “stupid crime” is committed by none other than an ass. A hand labeled “the opposition” pushes the would-be killer toward his target.
Not to fear! A tall and powerful woman labeled wearing a crown that says “Egypt” holds up the the great freedom fighter Zaghloul. In spite of the shot, his tarboush is scarcely off kilter. The brightness that is Egypt will provide.
Few artists’ penmanship these days is this elegant, yet many aspects of the 1924 cartoon’s composition endure to this day. The simple, propagandistic message mirrors the unfunny punchlines that often appear in Egypt’s semi-official press. Similarly, the depiction of Egypt as a woman and the over-saturation of labels remain common in such publications.
Though the periodical Al-Lataif Al-Musawara is widely cited in recent histories and studies of Egypt, precious little has been written about the origins and trajectory of Iskandar Makarius’s weekly rag. Be in touch if you have any more information about it, or else I’ll just have to meander through their back issues and figure it out myself.
“How will they explain this to the world? I am being taken into custody for drawing cartoons,” said Musa Kart on Monday.
The Turkish cartoonist was speaking to reporters amid a raid on the newspaper Cumhuriyet, where he serves on the board. Soon thereafter, authorities detained Kart along with at least twelve of his colleagues. Kart is still being held, without access to an attorney. His home has been raided and searched.
The detention of Kart and his fellow journalists at Cumhuriyet should come as no surprise. Wide swaths of the Turkish media have been caught up in the government’s widening dragnet. Over the past decade, authorities have hurled a barrage of lawsuits against defiant Turkish cartoonists, and the situation for media actors has only deteriorated in the aftermath of the failed coup d'etat.
A government crackdown on the media following the July 15 coup attempt has exacerbated the risks for Turkish humorists. Yet even before the clumsy military uprising and ensuing government crusade against dissent, the state of affairs was dire. In 2016, being a cartoonist in Turkey has been more difficult than ever. State prosecutors and Erdogan loyalists have used the crime of “insulting the president” to muzzle critics. Over 1,500 people—including cartoonists, celebrities, journalists, private citizens, and even a German comedian (in a case launched in Germany) — are under investigation or prosecution….
Legal threats have failed to upend Turkey’s long history of mocking politicians because Turkey’s cartoonists feel a deep obligation to castigate the powerful. “In these circumstances for a critic to remain silent would be unheard of,” said Musa Kart, a veteran caricaturist for Cumhuriyet, a Kemalist daily, who has battled several high-profile lawsuits for caricaturing Erdogan as a kitten and as a bank-robber. “From the perspective of the West, [the legal attacks] are something comical and absurd. But here it is not abnormal. There is no serious journalist or cartoonist who doesn’t have a case against him.”
Erstwhile, thugs nearly ransacked the popular comic weekly LeMan, and police seized the print run of their “Special Coup Issue.” Authorities detained the cartoonist Dogan Güzel alongside 22 of his colleagues from the Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem. (And this was not the first time that Güzel had been locked up.)
Musa Kart, Cumhuriyet, 17 July 2016. More of his cartoons here.
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I visited the offices of Cumhuriyet for a wide-ranging discussion with the cartoonist Musa Kart on July 8, but a week before the mucked up coup. Upon entering the lobby, the first thing I saw was Kart’s caricature of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan beside Hitler—undoubtably the sort of drawing that offends the very sensitive leader. I went up to the top floor (from my experience cartoonists don’t always get prime office real estate, so I was already impressed). He greeted me warmly, and we bonded over our shared appreciation of the cartooning prowess of The Economist’s Kal.
“Humor can be a very powerful way to fight the government,” Kart told me. “Even if we do not accept the pressure [of government censorship], we have our guards up because we know they’re coming.” I couldn’t help but think of the armed guards at the gate downstairs and in the lobby.
“Cumhurriyet is one of the last bastions of resistance,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Political discourse,” by Musa Kart, via New York Times.
Cheeseheads: I’ll be conducting a Comics Workshop on Graphic Journalism— October 13 in at University of Wisconsin-Madison, as part of their cutting-edge Applied Comics Kitchen. Please register here.
Vermonters: I’ll be lecturing at Middlebury College on Arab comics on October 19.
Snapshots from day one of the Middle East’s underground comic con.
If this is the first you’re hearing of the Cairo Comix Festival, here’s my dispatch from the 2015 confab:
The action-packed CairoComix Festival, held September 30 through October 3 at the American University in Cairo’s Tahrir Campus, convened artists and fans to celebrate the new wave of sequential narratives that has drenched the Arab region. A festival of this magnitude could not have happened five years ago: there was no market or interest, not enough publications or professional output. More than a dozen stalls in AUC’s courtyard were a testament to the arrival of Arab comics, among them neo-Pharaonic superheroes (El-Osba), kitschy futuristic serials (Foot Aleina Bokra), literary explorations (Cavafy’s), and an array of comic strips and caricaturists. Serving on the jury for the festival’s six awards, I was introduced to a whole bookshelf of comics, from amateur ventures to highly professional publications.
The festival was a milestone as regional comics enter a new phase. It’s no coincidence that a movement of adult comics in Arabic has transpired in the past decade – it corresponds with political change. In 2007, Lebanese artists launched the Arab alt-comix zine Samandal, and CairoComix co-founder Magdy El-Shafee published his comic noirMetro. And since the 2011 uprisings, the rest of the region has produced worthy competition, notably Egypt’s Tok Tok, Morocco’s Skefkef, and Tunisia’s Lab619. Defying the hierarchal editorial structures of mainstream publishing, each of these periodic ‘zines has been created by a collective of varied artists. The fact that so many new comics have emerged in Egypt and Middle East means we need new methods for reading illustrated stories, and not just to excavate the political from the silly and sober.
Keep reading at Mada Masr, and stay ‘tooned for my notes from this year’s funfair.
Early this morning, a man gunned down Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar. The scene of the crime was outside an Amman courthouse, where Hattar was to stand trial for a Facebook post containing a “blasphemous” cartoon. The story is still unfolding, and the identity of the gunman has just been reported.
Hattar’s family quickly blamed the Jordanian government for putting the writer at risk; the Interior Ministry was apparently aware of threats against him and clearly did not provide sufficient protection. The Arab Network for Human Rights Information similarly blamed the government. Meanwhile, a high-level government spokesperson was quick to condemn the murder. So was the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. The Jordanian Cartoonists Association has yet to issue a statement.
It is also worth noting that Hattar was a supporter of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, so it is possible that the assassin’s motive does not relate to the offending cartoon but rather his political leanings.
Nevertheless, the very fact that the Jordanian state had put Hattar on trial for a cartoon goes to the heart of a broader set of concerns about the fluid red lines of acceptable speech in the country. Here are some initial reflections on a matter that demands further thought and reflection.
First, a word on the medium: Hattar shared this cartoon on Facebook. We know that cartoonists navigate tricky red lines set by states and violent extremists, and in the Middle East the job has always been dangerous. With social media as a primary platform for communication these days, the risk is rapidly shifting from cartoonists/creators to users/sharers. Hattar’s case highlights the dangers of sharing or re-posting cartoons. (It is not clear who the artist was of the offending cartoon, but it seems to be from a semi-popular atheist Facebook page.)
One alarming example—which admittedly is in a different country and on a rather different scale—would be the case of Amr Nohan, the Egyptian military conscript who was convicted for sharing a Facebook meme of a Mickey Mouse president. In both cases, and several others, Facebook is the medium of offense. What can the platform be doing to protect its blasphemers and dissidents? A lot more, I would argue, and free speech advocates should be calling Facebook for their comment.
Second, blasphemy is an ambiguous and contested category of speech—it is anything but static. Its inherent vagueness is why “insulting religion” is a charge so often lobbed at atheists or liberals. Each such case demands scrutiny. In Arabic editorial cartoons, there are frequently characters with religious undertones or overtones, such as Father Time, the grim reaper, or angels—and in the past even drunkard sheikhs. Sometimes “prophets” like Adam and Eve appear, though this too can be considered “insulting.” The definition of blasphemy evolves over time.
Furthermore, the legal issues surrounding blasphemy do not exclusively relate to Islam. Anyone abhorred by the fact that the cartoonish case against Hattar was able to reach a Jordanian court should also keep in mind that the Catholic Church sued the Lebanese comic magazine Samandal for “insulting religion”—and won.
Importantly, it is often cartoonists themselves who are the most influential voices in challenging the boundaries of blasphemy. Consider the case of the Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Sabaaneh, who was nearly fired for drawing the Prophet Mohammed even though he had just drawn a robed figure. As I reported last year:
“We should oppose everything that is forced on us, by governments or dictatorships or the authority of religion,” says Sabaanah. And as for respecting religious symbols, Sabaanah claims that’s exactly what his cartoon was intended to do: “The way to defend Islam is through art. When Islam is criticized through art, we should respond through art.”
It should come as no surprise that Sabaaneh was one of the first artists to memorialize Hattar in a cartoon.
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Third, I want to point out that Jordanian cartoonists consistently lampoon ISIS in their daily drawings. One of those cartoonists, Osama Hajjaj has faced death threats from ISIS (he is the illustrator of the blood-stained glasses above.)
Many commentators are claiming that the cartoon that Hattar posted insulted ISIS rather than religion, and that the two shouldn’t be conflated. Others have censured the cartoon itself while also condemning the chilling murder. Some news headlines have described the cartoon in question as “anti-Islam” and others “anti-ISIS,” distinctions that demand further inquiry.
Will news outlets agonize over publishing this offending cartoon as was the case with Charlie Hebdo? So far, most have paraphrased or quoted the punchline therein.
