Oum Cartoon أم كرتون

Caricature & Comics From Egypt, Mother of the World

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Happy Fourth from Mickey.

—Miki, Cairo: Dar El-Hilal, 1964.

More Disney in Arabic here here here here here and here.

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Events Around Town

June 12: Boston - Harvard Book Store

Molly Crabapple presents BROTHERS OF THE GUN: A Memoir of the Syrian War, in conversation with Jonathan Guyer. 

June 21: Aarhus, Denmark - NorthLit

A Short History of Cartoons & Comics: Between Art Practices and Satire

Writer and researcher Jonathan Guyer will introduce and moderate a conversation with comic artists Khalid Albaih (Sudan), Halfdan Pisket (Denmark), Joseph Kai (Lebanon), and Mohamed Andeel (Egypt).

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If you can’t make it, here are two recent lectures of mine that are available online.

On Soundcloud, you can listen to "Cartooning the Police: A Graphic History of Contemporary Egypt,” which I presented in April at at Harvard’s Kennedy School. 

And below, for a limited time only, watch my paper from Translating Destruction, a symposium convened by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. I kick off the third panel with "Antiquities with Agency: Gods and Kings in Recent Arab Cartoons."

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SEMINAR - Open to the Public

Cartooning the Police

 A Graphic History of Contemporary Egypt

Thu., Apr. 5, 2018 | 4:10pm - 5:30pm

Bell Hall, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA

Middle East Initiative Speaker Series

A seminar with Jonathan Guyer, Independent Journalist and Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Moderated by Melani Cammett, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University.

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(Cartoon by Makhlouf, n.d.)

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Inspired by Cairo

I did a Proust Questionnaire for the Harvard Gazette. Read it here.

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A Secret History of Arab Comics: The Case of the Egyptian Newspaper Al-Dostour During Mubarak's Twilight

Join me on Monday, March 5, for a presentation at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs as part of their Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives series. Details below.

(Top image by Walid Taher, Al-Dostour, 6 September 2006)

Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Date:

Monday, March 5, 2018, 4:30pm to 6:30pm

Location:

CGIS Knafel Building, 1737 Cambridge Street, Bowie-Vernon Room (K262)

"A Secret History of Arab Comics: The Case of the Egyptian Newspaper Al-Dostour During Mubarak's Twilight"

Speaker:

Jonathan Guyer, Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Independent Journalist.

Contact:

Ilana Freedman [email protected]

Chairs:

Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract:

Cartooning has long been a pillar of the public discourse in Egypt. Especially during authoritarian times, cartooning has often been where political critique is loudest, or most daring. But the inherently ironic logic of cartooning means that the volume and barb of this critique is never straightforward. In fact, its very meaning derives from the fact that it tacks closely—and ambiguously—to red lines. In Egypt, a prohibition on “insulting” the president had long restricted the press and by extension cartoonists. But in the mid-2000s, a rag-tag group of cartoonists began to draw President Hosni Mubarak.

Based on archival research and interviews with cartoonists who worked together at the opposition weekly newspaper Al-Dostour, I will focus on illustrated attacks on political authority, notably Mubarak, in five years leading up to of the 2011 uprising. During this period, they would also launch revolutionary comics publications (and garner cult followings). Today these cartoonists, along with others in Cairo and Arab capitals, constitute an emergent Arab alternative comics (or alt-comix) movement. Influenced by little-known, radical Arab cartoonists from the past half-century, these cartoonists have persevered as trenchant critics amid successive, repressive regimes.

Biography:

Jonathan Guyer is a journalist focused on the politics of art and literature in the Middle East. He is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. He has written for the Art Newspaper, Guernica, Harper’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Painters, Le Monde diplomatique, New Yorker, New York Review Daily, New York Times, Paris Review, and Rolling Stone, among others. His research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright (2012–2013) and the Institute of Current World Affairs (2015–2017). He blogs at Oum Cartoon and tweets: @mideastXmidwest.

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La Nouvelle bande dessinée arabe

Arab artists were the stars of this year’s Festival international de la bande dessinée d'Angoulême, Europe’s premier comic con.

This coterie of artists has long gathered at festivals in Algiers, Beirut, or Cairo. But now, they were treated to a grand welcoming in Angoulême, the city of comics. (French speakers, see coverage in Le Monde or VICE of a landmark exhibition of new comic art from the Middle East.)

I contributed an essay to book that launched at Angoulême. Simply titled La Nouvelle bande-dessinée arabe, it is just that: a richly illustrated assortment of Arab alt-comix.

It includes knock-out strips from acclaimed zines Lab619, Samandal, Skef-Kef, and Tok Tok and drawings by Mazen Kerbaj, Rym Mokhtari, Lena Merhej, Joseph Kaï, Ganzeer, Andeel, Tawfig, Golo, Migo, Twins Cartoon, Othman Selmi, and many others.

From my essay:

“What were or are the golden ages for caricature in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East?” asks veteran American journalist Victor S. Navasky in his 2013 book, The Controversial Art: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power. Here’s the thing: One needn’t venture very far to find the Middle East and North Africa’s comic renaissance. Just hop a flight to Cairo or Beirut or any Maghrebi capital, where over the past decade, a vanguard of Arab illustrators has come of age.

But for those who can’t spare the journey, the book is a rare tour of Arab comics in translation. The colorful format, a zine-like compendium of oodles of artists, brings out the best of the comics themselves.

From Algeria to Iraq, Jordan to Morocco, and everywhere in between, a new generation of comic artists is drawing upon this archive of graphic storytelling, caricature, and sequential art in the Arab world. That this book, the first collection to bring together a wide collection of Arab comics and translate them to French, would have the appearance of a zine—a mix and medley of voices that capture the cacophony of the quotidian and fantastical in the Middle East—is particularly apt. The most audacious Arab comics have first been published by independent collectives, launched at urban spaces, sold at art galleries and cafés, and devoured by young readers eager for the next edition.

What is also distinctive about Samandal and like-minded zines that have gained cult followings in Algeria, Egypt Iraq, Morocco, and Tunisia is that they are horizontal collectives motivated by art, not fame or profit.  Another thread that connects many of these comics is an urban sensibility. This is also an impetus behind Egypt’s comic ‘zine Tok Tok, a collaborative publication that has published 14 issues since 2011. The diversity 
of images from a multitude of artists
call on the reader to experience 
Cairo, to take a deep breath and look around, to sit in an open air ahwa (coffeehouse) and
drink a tea and talk to people. 

“I wanted to be in direct contact with the street,” says Tok Tok cofounder Mohamed Shennawy. In his narrative sequences, the reader can almost smell the megalopolis, a bustling city of noise and light pollution that is film never catches. The stories of Shennawy and his collaborators also capture the social inequalities and dynamics of a city in flux since the 2011 revolution. Tok Tok is a call to 
engage with its complicated history and to challenge censorship.

“Géographie”, Joseph Kaï. Samandal, Liban. 2015.

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Order La Nouvelle bande dessinée arabe here.

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The Strange Case of the Arab Whodunnit

Our radio doc is today's "seriously interesting story" on BBC Radio 4. Here’s the gist of it:

Journalist Jonathan Guyer examines the different forms of noir fiction addressing the failed revolutions, jihadism, and chaos in Egypt.

Away from caliphate building and sectarianism, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East, allowing artists and writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate. Jonathan meets the writers who are latching onto the adventure, despair and paranoia prevalent in genre fiction to tell stories that transcend the present. He looks at Ahmed Mourad's novel, Vertigo, and Magdy El-Shafee's graphic novel, Metro, which Egyptian authorities seized all copies of before release.

Drawing parallels with the golden age of noir in America, Jonathan argues that, while the Middle East offers an ethereal backdrop like that of post-war America, the Middle East's neo-noir revolution is anything but nostalgic, giving authors and scholars an opportunity to critique imported wars, local autocrats and arrested revolutions.

What's surprising, he finds, is not that detective fiction is showing a sudden popularity in Cairo and beyond but that the genre has been relatively dormant for the last several decades. Sorting through the discarded vintage dime novels in creaky Cairo bookstalls, he discovers that detective fiction has had a long relationship with Arab readers.

The program features interviews with Basma Abdel-Aziz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Ahmed Mourad, Magdy El-Shafee, Jonathan Smolin, and Ambassador M.M. Tawfik. 

Hitchcock and Scheherazade also make an appearance.

🕵🏻 🎙 Listen with a 🥃.. Neat.

The soundtrack behind the real-life noir is available on Spotify. 🎧 🎶 Special thanks to producers Sean Glynn and David Waters.

As the host says at the end of the program: ”It’s like Cairo is the new Chinatown.”

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Above: Tourist guide to Cairo circa 1970s (undated).

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Happy Early Halloween 

—from Al-Fareed Hitshkook

("Terrible Revenge," 1988)

For more Arab pulp see here here here here here and here.

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A video of my lecture at Radcliffe, in which I discuss Egyptian artists’ approaches to black humor, satire, and the city.

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Between Fine and Comic Art

Egyptian caricaturist Saroukhan graces the cover of IJOCA, along with a reprint of my Le Monde Diplomatque essay “On the Arab Page.” 

From that piece:

Many pivotal illustrators were fine artists too, like the painter Husein Bicar (1913-2002), who founded the popular Egyptian children’s magazine Sindibad in 1952. The One Thousand and One Nights and European folktales informed the aesthetic of proto-comics. Sindibad, which was reprinted in the 1990s, is still sold at old-fashioned bookshops. The classically trained Alexander Saroukhan (1898-1977) cartooned in top newspapers and magazines from the 1930s, where he drew the familiar pashas and recurring characters (some fictional, like Egypt’s everyman Al-Masri Effendi), loaded with symbolic meanings. Saroukhan skewered Egyptian leaders and statesman from the Arab world. His cartoon The Founding of the Arab League is more sequential than contemporary cartoons. (In his single-frame works, he anticipates the sequential narratives of later generations. Each illustration features whole worlds of politics, with casts of significant characters, useful to students of modern Egyptian history and eye-candy for art critics.)

Adham Wanly (1908-59), who with his brother Seif was closely associated with the emergence of modern art in Egypt, was better known for his art. He and Seif painted modernity: musicians, nudes, writers, the circus and ballet and other colourful milieus. The Egyptian ministry of culture has hundreds of his ink drawings in storage but only a few on display. The line that separates Adham’s caricature and his paintings is narrow: both contain exaggeration, humour and movement. His relationship to illustrations is straightforward: he started out as a newspaperman, drawing cartoons for Rose El-Yusuf, a mass-circulation weekly that launched in 1925 and continues to be published to this day, often with a caricature on the cover.

A special thanks to John Lent, longtime editor of the journal.

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“Cairo, 60 years from now. Nothing has changed.”

From the Harvard Crimson:

On Sept. 13, Radcliffe Institute Fellow Jonathan Guyer gave a lecture on the “Mad Cartoonists of Cairo.” A journalist and contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Guyer has lived in Cairo for the past five years, exploring and researching the new wave of comic art in the Middle East and North Africa for a book he is currently writing. Guyer presented a survey of comic art mainly from the turbulent city of Cairo, analyzing the medium’s ability both to critique and influence Middle Eastern society and culture.

Guyer began his lecture with the question that guided him through his studies: “What is the importance of this Arab comic movement?” He argued that comics are windows to the current social and political situation of the Middle East. He began to substantiate this thesis with a stylized cartoon drawing of Cairo by cartoonist Shennawy from the Cairo publication “Tok Tok.” The text in the corner of the image, translated from Arabic, reads “Cairo, 60 years from now, and nothing has changed,” a derisive statement that, as a recurring theme in the lecture, pervaded through each series of politically-charged cartoon he presented. For example, one of the cartoons— a hyperrealistic depiction of Cairo—comments on the city’s increasing urbanization while a sardonic drawing of a smiling Egyptian family, splattered in blood, criticises the violent rise of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the incumbent president of Egypt who came to power through a 2013 military coup. For Guyer, art and politics work in tandem, constantly fueling both creativity and policy.

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Keep reading: ‘The Mad Cartoonists of Cairo’ Reflect a Changing Middle East.

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Top image: Shennawy, Tok Tok #9 (Cairo: NP, May 2013).

More of his work here here and here.

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2017-2018 FELLOWS PRESENTATION SERIES

The Mad Cartoonists of Cairo

The Dangerous World of Middle East Censorship and the Emergence of Arab Comix

Jonathan Guyer

Wednesday, September 13 | 4 PM Sheerr Room, Fay House, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge

Jonathan Guyer is a journalist focused on the politics of art and literature in the Middle East. For the past five years, he has researched Arabic comics in Egypt, interviewing scores of artists and translating hundreds of cartoons from Arabic. He is also a contributing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, a policy journal published by the American University in Cairo.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Guyer is writing a book on the new wave of comic art that has electrified the Middle East and North Africa over the past decade. Through close examination of graphic narratives and conversations with artists, his project aims to address longstanding questions around the limits of free speech, the role of satire as a form of dissent, and the politics of art in authoritarian states.

Guyer has written for Guernica, Harper’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, The New Yorker, New York Review Daily, New York Times, The Paris Review, and Rolling Stone, and is also a regular contributor to Public Radio International’s The World. In 2015, he wrote widely about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, including a cover story for Nieman Reports, which was recognized by the Society for Features Journalism. His research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright (2012-2013) and the Institute of Current World Affairs (2015-2017).

This event is free and open to the public. 

(Top image: covers of issues 0 to 12 of Tok Tok, the Egyptian comix zine.)

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Naji Al-Ali, Thirty Years On

The London Metropolitan Police have reopened their investigation into the unsolved murder of Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali. 

I spoke to the New York Times about the iconic artist’s enduring legacy:

“He’s the only cartoonist whose work I’ve seen in Muslim Brotherhood newspapers and also in a famous communist bar in Beirut,” Mr. Guyer said. “He has this incredible crossover appeal because he was really an independent thinker and a staunch critic of all authority. Whoever you are, there is something in Naji al-Ali’s work for you.”

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I also wrote a post for Public Radio International about how Ali has influenced contemporary comic artists.

In death, Ali has inspired a new generation of bold political cartoonists across the Middle East who are carrying his legacy forward. Khalid Albaih, the Qatar-based cartoonist, cites Ali as a crucial inspiration, as do myriad illustrators in the Levant and North Africa — and of course in Palestine.

“My mother used the cartoons of Naji al-Ali to tell us what was happening in Palestine while we were living in Kuwait,” said Mohammad Sabaaneh, 38, a Ramallah-based political cartoonist who continues to see Ali as a reference. “It’s important to continue what he started.”

“Not all of the cartoonists at this time could criticize the Arab regimes,” said Sabaaneh of the late Ali. “He criticized all the Palestinian parties, all the Arab regimes, and he talked about the poor people, the people who want to go back to Palestine.” Unlike most cartoonists of the time, Ali was not affiliated with a particular political party or party newspaper. That’s why Sabaaneh says, “He represents all Palestinians.”

Keep reading—or listen to my comments on air— here. 

Original drawings by Naji Al-Ali, 1978, courtesy of the British Library and the Al-Ali family.

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Life Imitates Pulp

“Today, I decided to rob a bank. I don’t remember when I became so angry. All I know is… everyone was always going one way… and I was going the other. All I had on my side was my brain, So now my brain has a plan and I’m going to make it work…” 

So begins Magdy El-Shafee’s iconic and acclaimed graphic noir Metro, published and banned in 2007. It’s an opener that always sends shivers down my spine.

I found myself ruminating about Metro this morning while reading Yaroslav Trofimov’s dispatch from Cairo, “Egypt’s Leader Makes a Risky Bet on the Healing Power of Economic Pain.” He provides a scathing snapshot of the Great Recession on the Nile and how the government is responding to the ever-worsening crisis by cutting subsidies. 

But here was the section that made me jump:

In Cairo’s poorer Shubra neighborhood, Fatma Hassan, a 35-year-old mother of two, was just as angry. Her family’s income of around 4,500 Egyptian pounds a month, which provided a comfortable lifestyle a year ago, barely affords subsistence, she said.

“We used to have no restrictions on what we eat, where we go, what to wear,” Ms. Hassan said. “At the end of the year, we started omitting things we once could afford. Now, there is nothing left for us to do without.”

Recent increases in the price of subsidized cooking gas, oil and sugar risk putting the family over the edge, she said: “We don’t know what to do. Do they want us to rob a bank?”

Indeed it’s the desperation that El-Shafee captured so vividly in his comic. A decade later Metro retains its urgency as the situation in Cairo has only grown darker and darker.

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Watch: El-Shafee offers a glimpse “backstage” into his process in a lecture he delivered in 2015 at the American University of Beirut’s Symposium on Arabic Comics. 

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Vancouver Friends: I’m speaking at Simon Fraser University next week. Look forward to seeing you there.

Click here to RSVP.

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In May, on his first official trip overseas, President Donald J. Trump engaged in good-natured chinwag with Arab presidents and emirs, and even bobbed his head along to a traditional Saudi sword dance in Riyadh. Perhaps the most memorable image of his Mideast sojourn was a comical photo-op with the Saudi king, the Egyptian president, and a certain glowing orb as they announced the launch of joint counter-terrorism initiative.

Two weeks later, Washington found itself caught up in a Persian Gulf squabble when a coalition of seven countries, led by Saudi Arabia, severed diplomatic ties with neighboring Qatar. The move was allegedly prompted by the small, hyper-wealthy peninsular kingdom’s support for terrorists both at home and abroad, and its supposed alignment with Iran. As many have pointed out, Qatar’s foreign policy is nothing new; what is novel is that Trump’s vocal support of Saudi Arabia could have given license to Riyadh and the rest to punish Doha.

But these destabilizing events have proven a goldmine for political cartoonists in the Gulf, where most media outlets are affiliated with or owned by government officials. Each side of the crisis is rallying around the flag and painting the other as malicious, power-hungry, and reckless—resulting in a propaganda war between illustrators. Meanwhile, though, a handful of independent illustrators in the region are working to challenge skewed perceptions about this increasingly ridiculous imbroglio...

Keep reading at The Atlantic.

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2017 Excellence-in-Features Award 🥉

The Society for Features Journalism has awarded me third prize for arts and entertainment commentary in their 2017 Excellence in Features awards. Here are links to my award-winning portfolio of work:

Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Winter 2016.

Sattouf has started new conversations about Arab identity in France as well as across the Arab region... To write about the past is to finally part with it, to find meaning in it, and thus to shape one’s own future.”

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Los Angeles Review of Books, July 9, 2016.

In the past decade, and especially since the 2011 uprisings, talented Arab artists have traded comics for comix. Alternative zines, web strips, graphic novels, and other underground publications encompass a diversity of aesthetics, narrative techniques, and political messages. Today, Beirut, Cairo, and Casablanca each have their own Crumbs, Spiegelmans, and Moulys.

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The Art Newspaper, December 16, 2016

Over the past year, the Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla has made more than 60 mixed-media works that are fairy tales for adults from the hive mind of Eastern mythology. From afar, they are Pop art in pastels, but upon closer inspection his works synthesise collage and calligraphy, abstraction and tradition, the natural and the supernatural.

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(Top Image by Islam Gawish, the Egyptian cartoonist.)