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By Mamoun Asfour During the 30 years since I started drawing, I feel I have been through every Arab prison and I ask myself: What is to come after all this? I was prepared to die defending just one drawing, because every drawing is like a drop of water which makes its way through the minds of people." Naji Al Ali. THROUGHOUT HISTORY, artists have faced the threat of violence when their work went up against the state or political elite. The late Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al Ali produced thousands of cartoons satirizing the powers that be in the Middle East and outside. In the end he paid the ultimate price for what he believed as the right to express himself. On 22 July 1987 he was shot in the head at point blank range as he left the London offices of the Kuwaiti Al Qabbas newspaper. He died after laying in a coma for five weeks. Though the exact date of his birth is uncertain, he was born in 1936 or 1937 in the village of Al-Shajara between Nazra and Tiberias in Galilee. During the 1948 Arab- Israeli war, he and his family, like many others, were forced to leave, dispersing throughout the Arab world. The Al Ali family's first stop was the Ein Al Hilweh camp in southern Lebanon. At the end of the 1950s, the late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani discovered Naji's talent for drawing while on a visit to the camp.
Naji Al Ali developed a stark and symbolic style during his 30-year campaign on behalf of the Palestinians. Not a member of any political party, he strove to speak to and for ordinary Arab people. His life was seamlessly interwoven with the trails of exiled Palestinians. Due to invasion, censorship and threats, he lived in exile most of his life. Naji Al-Ali was an uncompromising critic of a regressive Arab political culture and western intervention in Arab affairs. Interviews with leading Arab journalists and poets, former jail mates, and others point to his unrelenting commitment to his people, as do his subtle satirical cartoons that stirred the hearts of millions of refugees. The work of Naji Al Ali, an artist with a vision, examines the forces that shaped him as an artist, a human being, and shows how his experiences mirrored those of other exiled Palestinians. Known as the Palestinian Malcolm X, he is still the most popular artist in the Arab world, loved for his defense of ordinary people, and for his criticism of repression and despotism. His unrelenting cartoons exposed the brutality of the Israeli army and earned him many powerful enemies. Through his work, Naji Al Ali condemned the absence of human rights in the region. He believed his period of work in Beirut was the best of his career and his periods of exile in Kuwait and the UK restricted his creativity in ways he could not understand. He missed the inspiration he got from the reality of the refugee camps in southern Lebanon. Al Ali's philosophy can perhaps be best encapsulated in his explanation about Hanzalah, the little boy who appears as a spectator in each of his cartoons: "This child, as you can see, is neither beautiful, spoilt, nor even well-fed. He is barefoot like many children in refugee camps. He is actually ugly and no woman would wish to have a child like him. However, those who came to know 'Hanzalah', as I discovered, later adopted him because he is affectionate, honest, outspoken, and a bum. He is an icon that stands to keep me from slipping. And his hands behind his back are a symbol of rejection of all the present negative tides in our region." The memory of Naji Al Ali will live on through many generations. Today young cartoonists take their inspiration from this remarkable individual. These artists do an outstanding job of introducing the personality of Naji Al Ali by drawing on the most important events shaping his work, including thousands upon thousands of political drawings he published in his lifetime. Naji Al Ali was posthumously awarded the annual Golden Pen Award of the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers in 1988. This award is given to recognize outstanding actions in favor of freedom of expression and the jury was composed of publishers from 27 member countries. He died on 30 August 1987 at the age of 49. © 2001 The Star (Amman).
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