The Syrian regime has gone to great lengths to silence the
satirical commentary of Ali Ferzat. But the celebrated cartoonist and
Index award winner has no intention of letting the censors keep him
down. Malu Halasa reports
Three
months before the start of the Syrian revolution in March last year,
Ali Ferzat broke with his own satirical convention: he stopped using
symbolism in his cartoons to criticise the regime and began to target
identifiable individuals, including the president himself. He describes
the shift as pushing through “the barrier of fear”. The first cartoon in
Ferzat’s new series showed President Bashar al Assad agitated at seeing
the traditional day of mass demonstrations against the regime, Friday,
marked on a wall calendar. Another had him hitching a lift from Gaddafi
making his own getaway in a car. The third featured the “chair of
power”, one of Ali Ferzat’s iconic symbols, with the springs popping out
of the cushion and Bashar hanging onto its arm.
Drawing
the president, Ferzat admits, was a personal and political breakthrough
— if not foolhardy. “It is quite suicidal to draw someone who is
considered a godlike figure for the regime and the Ba’ath party, but
still I did it and people respected that courage and started carrying
banners with caricatures in the protest to show how they feel about
things.”
Ferzat must have anticipated that his actions might lead
to violent repercussions. Last August, pro-regime forces viciously
assaulted him and broke both his hands. During the attack, one of the
assailants yelled at him, “Bashar’s shoe is better than you.” Article
376 of the Syrian penal code makes it an offence to insult or defame the
president, and carries a six-month to three-year prison sentence.
The most lauded cartoonist of the Arab spring, Ferzat has won countless international prizes — including this year’s Index
Freedom of Expression Award for the Arts. For more than 40 years, he
has been delivering his own scathing messages to dictatorship. Published
daily in al Thawra (the Revolution) newspaper in Damascus for a decade,
he was a thorn in the side of Hafez al Assad. In the early noughties,
the launch of his satirical newspaper al Doumari (the
Lamplighter) was considered a hopeful sign in the nascent presidency of
Hafez’s heir. Last December, when Bashar al Assad was asked about the
attack on Ali Ferzat by the American news commentator Barbara Walters,
he responded, “Many people criticise me. Did they kill all of them? Who
killed who?’” Such comments made little sense and attest to Ferzat’s
power, whether convalescing in a hospital bed or through his drawings.
There
are two cartoons by Ferzat embedded in my own visual consciousness of
Syria during years of visiting and writing about the country. The first
is a drawing of a man whose head has been sliced and popped open at the
airport. Instead of searching the luggage on the rack, a uniformed
authority figure inspects the contents of the man’s brain. The other is
of a dismembered prisoner hanging in a cell, body parts everywhere,
while the jailer sits on the floor, sharp implements to hand, crying
over a television soap opera. Both of them were a comment on the secret
life that routinely takes place in Syria, the self-censorship that is
sometimes needed to survive and the ongoing activities inside prisons
that are rarely officially acknowledged in the state media.
Speaking the truth
In a recent exhibition of Ali Ferzat’s work at the MICA gallery in London, there were numerous examples of his coded messages: the armchair of
salat (representing
ruling power), the shortened ladder to suggest the gulf between the
political elite and the nobodies (sometimes in a hole) or the ever busy
authority figure waving a roll of toilet paper like a flag. The messages
are inescapably clear but their target is not always what one might
expect. In one colourful drawing, a man is trying to pluck fruit from a
tree, but the three ladders on which he is standing have been laid
horizontally, not vertically. Pausing beneath this picture, Ferzat
points out: “Yes, I always speak truth to power. Sometimes it’s not only
the president to be blamed but the people too.” The gallery, usually
closed at the weekend, was filled with Syrians and their families within
minutes of its unscheduled opening. Everyone, from grown men to
children of all ages, photographed the cartoons on the walls with their
mobile phones.
Ferzat’s unique visual vocabulary, developed in extreme circumstances, has had an unexpected reach:
To
survive and get around censorship, my caricatures had to be speechless
and rely instead on symbols. That gave them an international aspect I
did not intend in the first place. So I managed to get the voice of
people inside Syria to the outside, through channels of common human
interest.
During his stay in London in the spring,
Ferzat received good news. There is an interest in reviving al Doumari,
with plans to publish it in exile in Dubai and, ultimately, hopefully
back home as well. One gets the impression that no matter where Ferzat
is — he currently resides in Kuwait because his family thinks it is too
dangerous for him to be in Damascus — living away from the revolution
has been frustrating. He spends most nights watching the Arabic news
channels and drawing until the early hours. His right hand, which was
fractured in the attack last summer, remains a little stiff, although
that is not evident in the first two cartoons he drew when he was able
to move his fingers. One shows an armoured Trojan warhorse with
marauding tanks for hooves. The second is, again, a tank poised on its
back wheels, ready to crush a lone green shoot sprouting from the
ground.
False springs
The Syrian people are a major influence on his work. “Drawing is first of all a means and not a purpose in itself,” he says.
The
artist is always the one who produces an idea, but if that person is
not living within his community then how can he reflect what his
community is going through? Art is about being with your own people and
having a vision of what they need. You can’t sit in your room isolated
behind your window and draw about life — it doesn’t work like that.
The revolution was sparked in March 2011 when young graffiti artists in Deraa,
between the ages of nine and 15, were arrested and tortured for writing
government slogans on the walls. The sale of spray paint is now banned
in Syria unless ID papers are shown.
There have been many false
springs in the country’s turbulent political history. A decade ago, and
just a few months after Bashar al Assad assumed the presidency, Syrian
artists and intellectuals were hopeful that change was possible in their
country, a sentiment that began in Ferzat’s case when Bashar al Assad, a
“tall dude with a large entourage”, walked into his exhibition filled
with censored cartoons. (Ferzat always shows banned cartoons in his
exhibitions.) When the new president asked Ferzat how he might be able
to gauge popular opinion, the cartoonist urged him to simply talk to the
people. Eventually Bashar telephoned him and said he was having a Pepsi
with ordinary folk in the street. This was during the so-called Damascus spring
of the early noughties, when the regime was courting artists and
intellectuals. Imbued by optimism in 2001, Ferzat started his satirical
newspaper
al Doumari, but as the mood of the political elite
reverted to tried and trusted methods, so did the fortunes of his
weekly. By the time it closed in 2003, 105 issues later, he had survived
two assassination attempts that were never investigated. Thirty-two
court cases had been filed against the newspaper and advertisers had
stopped advertising.
An incredible heritage: satire in the Middle East
Historically,
cartoonists have been astute in their circumvention of censorship. As
Fatma Müge Göçek has shown, under the Ottoman press laws of the early
1900s, they sent erasable drawings to the censors and, after approval,
substituted other images in their place. Newspapers at that time also
appeared with black boxes where a cartoon had been censored. As the gap
widened between official pronouncements and reality – or as Václav Havel once
said, ‘People know they are living a lie’ – caricatures became an
important means of expression in the Middle East. Now cyberspace
provides a comparatively safe haven for pictures and ideas that cannot
be expressed in print.
Editorial
cartooning, like journalism, is considered a western invention, but the
convention of satire in the Middle East is as old as the stories of
Alf Laila wa Laila (A Thousand and One Nights). Ferzat’s peers include the Egyptian Baghat Othman, who parodied Sadat, Palestinian Naji al Ali,
creator of the Palestinian barefoot boy Hanzala (with his back always
to the reader in rejection of the world around him) and Algerian Chawki
Amari, now in exile in Paris after serving a three-year sentence in his
country for drawing the country’s flags in a cartoon that was seen as ‘defacing’ a national symbol.
The Syrians also bring something new to the mix, which springs from a
sense of humour coloured by the experience of dictatorship, coupled with
sexual innuendo. This blend is nicely demonstrated by a joke from the
1980s that is still pertinent, as recently told to me by a political
activist.
A guy used to talk about the president. The mukhabarat,
secret police, picked him up and started beating and torturing him.
They told him, ‘Stop making jokes about the president. Stop talking
about the president. You can tackle whatever issues you want, but in the
end you always have to say: this has nothing to do with the president.
The president is not aware of this.’ So the minute the guy is released,
he sees his family waiting by the door and says, ‘Have you heard, the
wife of the president is pregnant and the president has nothing to do
with it. He’s not even aware of it.’
Even in his
comic strips for juveniles, Ferzat has challenged traditional
sensibilities in Syria, a country known for channelling propaganda
through state-sponsored children’s publications. Ferzat was 26 years old
when he created ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta” for the popular Usama
magazine, published in 1977. In the strip, the famous medieval Arab
traveller Ibn Battuta is depicted with a moustache and beard, wearing a
turban in the shape of the globe. Ferzat demystifies Ibn Battuta by
drawing Muhammad Ali, Omar Sharif and the pop singer Abdel Halim Hafiz,
with a turban globe on their heads; as avatars of Ibn Battuta, they
respectively box, hug a leading lady and sing. Later in the strip, as
the historic traveller pulls his donkey into the present day, his size
shrinks, suggesting he is overwhelmed by modern life.
A letter sent to the editor of Usama complained about this portrayal of Ibn Battuta. Ferzat did not use one of the traditional Arab figures of ridicule such as the poet Abu Nuwas
or the folk character Juha as his fumbling protagonist, but instead a
notable historical personage, which the letter writer found highly
insulting. This was at a time when the magazine was already starting to
change, and was publishing less controversial material, as Allen Douglas
and Fedwa Malti-Douglas show in their study of Arabic comic strips.
Self censorship, survival and living without boundaries
Originally from a Sunni Muslim family in Homs, Ferzat describes freedom of the press as “a responsibility”. He stresses:
It’s
not as if I should do whatever I feel like doing, regardless of the
consequences. It is a matter of moral commitment at the end of the day
and varies between countries, depending on the culture and civil
liberties. You have to find the right balance. Some newspapers have no
obligation, not even morally, and they refrain from nothing and then
call it ‘freedom’. Meanwhile other newspapers censor human interest
stories. I see both as bad — whether too much suppression in the name of
commitment, or too much unethical commitment in the name of freedom.
They are both the same.
During prolonged periods of
dictatorship, there have been unexpected chinks in the wall of silence,
which Lisa Weeden outlines in her tour de force Ambiguities of
Domination. One way ordinary Syrians thwarted the cult of Hafez al Assad
that pervaded their daily lives was in their choice of newspapers.
Throughout the 1970s, al Thawra published a daily editorial cartoon by
Ferzat. When he was dropped from the newspaper, al Thawra experienced a
35 per cent drop in sales and was forced to ask the cartoonist to
return. Ferzat’s stories about his days there are particularly amusing
and they reveal just how much leeway can exist in what at first glance
appears to be a monolithic system. In some instances, the offending
cartoon would be published in the paper. Then the abusive phone calls
from the minister of information would begin.
Ferzat continues:
They
came with this new procedure. First the editor-in-chief had to look at
the caricature. If he approved it, he had to send it to the general
manager. If he approved it, or if he found it controversial and
difficult to understand, he had to send it to the minister of
information. Take into consideration that the minister of information
was a bit of an ass, he would say ‘Yes’ because he didn’t understand it
and the next day the people would get the meaning because it only took
commonsense. Suddenly the angry phone calls would start all over again.
According to Italian visual critic Donatella Della Ratta, Bashar al Assad’s Syria is ruled by what she calls “a whispering campaign”
waged by competing elites, the secret police, the official media and
finally the president and his inner circle. All of the different
factions are involved in censorship: it takes many pillars of society to
control the flow of information and ideas in a totalitarian state.
In
such a society, what is the difference between self-censorship and
survival for someone like Ferzat? “What I can tell you is that I have no
boundaries,” he says.
I don’t have a censor or a policeman in my head before I draw. However, it is not requested of fedayeen — freedom
fighters — to be suicidal. As an artist, I’m not going to go and find a
landmine and sit on top of it. I invented the symbols that actually
manipulate the censor and survive the dangers of punishment. I put
simple codes and symbols in my drawings, and anyone who has the capacity
to notice things would understand them. That is what I do to secure
myself and not be suicidal.
He concludes: “At the end
of the day, my drawings and caricatures are part of the daily culture
of the street. I want to represent the consciousness of the street, of
the people, and I do, and that gives my work value.”
As Ferzat and
the graffiti artists of Deraa, who sparked a revolution over a year
ago, have shown: Sharpie pens and spray paint can be the most effective
tools against a brutal regime.
