Cartoonist Naji al-Ali

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0:37Mona Chalabi:Today's guest is an illustrator and a data journalist. Skills that she's combined so successfully that she won the Pulitzer Prize. That was for a New York Times magazine piece called Nine Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos' Wealth. The mind boggles, but Jeff is not our great life today. Welcome, Mona Chilabi, to our show. Whom have you picked and why? I have picked Najee al-Ali, a great, great, great artist. Can you remember when you first became aware of his work?

1:09Martin Rowson:I think I was 20 or 21 and I saw a spray-painted drawing of a young child, the back of a young child, on the apartheid wall that separates Palestine from Israel. And then I saw it over and over again and I asked who the artist was and I was told that the artist was Najee al-Ali even though he himself hadn't done the work but other people had copied this illustration that is so iconic of his onto the wall and I'm sure we'll get into the reasons of why that drawing is so iconic.

1:41Mona Chalabi:We certainly will.

1:42Martin Rowson:So this child that appears throughout his work whose name is Handala is supposed to look like he's about 10 years of age and that's how old Najee was when he and his family were expelled from Palestine. but what's profound is that the child is most often shown from behind and this child seems like they're bearing witness to political corruption, to crimes and what's fascinating is to me there's such a connection between that and journalism. Most of Najee's work appeared in newspapers and to me to be a journalist is to bear witness.

2:16Mona Chalabi:Don't mind me, says Joe Sacco in an introduction to the work of Najee al-Ali. I'm off to the side watching, recording. The cartoonist as observer through the eyes of a child. You've just mentioned that child. But of course there's a message in his observations. I think that's brilliant.

2:36Martin Rowson:There's a naivety in the work, right? There's a kind of like a... In the way that children just kind of inquire, why is this so unjust? You see that as a kind of motif through so much of Najee's work. So I'm thinking of one illustration of just a man drowning in a sea of question marks while the character of Handler kind of looks on. Again, there's something very, very childlike about that, of just drowning in the why. Why are things the way that they are?

3:01Mona Chalabi:We're kind of doing a great lives on Handler, aren't we, in a way?

3:05Martin Rowson:He's inseparable from Najee. Describe him.

3:07Mona Chalabi:How does he look, this little boy?

3:09Martin Rowson:So he's seen from behind. He's dressed in clothes that appear as if they're rags. And he has kind of like short, spiky hair, just a few lines that kind of emerge from his head. and it's interesting because the very first time I saw him, I didn't know it was a young child at all. I actually thought it was kind of a short elderly man. He's barefoot, isn't he? He's barefoot. He has his hands behind his back in this way that almost looks quite calm and casual, but I think there's more to it than that.

3:34Mona Chalabi:We've had illustrators and cartoonists on this show before. Gerald Scarfe picked Walt Disney, for example, and the great Hogarth was Ian Hislop's selection back in 2008. Najee al-Ali is an altogether more dramatic choice, in part because of the ongoing uncertainty surrounding his assassination in London nearly 40 years ago now. He criticised everyone in his drawings, not just the Israelis but the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO, plus many of the oil-rich Arab regimes in the region where he lived. Take a listen to this. Scotland Yard's counter-terrorist command is reinvestigating the murder of a cartoonist who was shot in Knightsbridge 30 years ago.

4:19Mona Chalabi:Najee al-Ali was Palestinian and known for satirising Arab and Israeli politics. He'd already received death threats prior to the shooting, but as Dan Friedman reports, nobody has ever been convicted of his murder. Well, this is where the murder happened at around 5 o 'clock in the afternoon on the 22nd of July, 1987. What's really interesting is that, despite how long ago he was killed, The police have never been able to close the case. It's still open, as this Scotland Yard commander explained. This is the 30-year anniversary of Mr Ali's death. And over that period of time, 30 years, people's allegiances change.

4:58Mona Chalabi:People who might not have felt confident at the time in relation to coming forward, I'd encourage them now to actually speak to us. The police in particular do not close such inquiries. They're constantly reviewed. And as a result, if people feel that they can help us, then I'd encourage them to make contact. That's Commander Dean Hayden in 2017. So interesting, don't you think, but awful for his family that the case stays open.

5:25Martin Rowson:Yeah. I mean, he took aim at so many different people, as you say, so many different leaders who he felt let down the Palestinians, as well as the Lebanese as well. He spent a lot of time living in Beirut. And that was both his downforce, the reason why, you know, there are many different people that could have killed him. and it was also his source of strength. It's part of the reason for his popularity in the Arab world. He was an incredibly, incredibly beloved artist because he didn't take sides. He wasn't a firm PLO devotee who was going to just love the leadership no matter what and that actually garnered him a lot of respect.

6:00Mona Chalabi:From the introduction to a book published by his son, it says that Najee was born in Galilee in 1936 or 1937 and expelled with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians in the 1948 war, at which point his family settled in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon, hungry, dazed and barefoot, he said. Later, he began drawing.

6:25Martin Rowson:So Najil Ali lived in a refugee camp named Aim Nal Helwa, which can mean both beautiful spring or sweet spring and beautiful eye.

6:34Mona Chalabi:There was a Palestinian refugee camp.

6:36Martin Rowson:Yes, it was a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. By the way, the camp still exists today. The conditions remain awful. The camp was bombed last November by Israeli forces. It remains a place with awful sanitation, low levels of literacy. The fact that Najee emerged from there is a miracle in itself.

6:52Mona Chalabi:How about you? Tell us a little about your background, where you grew up and also about the work that you do now.

6:59Martin Rowson:Yeah.

7:00Mona Chalabi:You're obviously quite close to all of this.

7:02Martin Rowson:I grew up in East London to parents who are both Iraqi immigrants. It's interesting, again, that oil features so prominently in so much of his work as a source of trouble, for want of a better word, for Arabs. That has obviously been a theme growing up as an Iraqi as well. Art came relatively late to me, I would say. I wanted first and foremost to be a journalist and actually started to become a little bit frustrated, perhaps, and disenchanted with words and the way that they could be corrupted and manipulated. And so I began to practice data visualization. So taking data sets and finding ways to communicate them to the public, because I wanted to remind viewers that data actually is biased, that there is somebody who is responsible for making choices about which questions to ask, how to gather that data, and then how to represent it.

7:55Martin Rowson:And actually, much like Najee's work, I would say that there's a certain kind of crudeness in my illustrations. They're really not that beautiful, you know. They kind of look like a kid could have done them. I want people to look at my work and think, oh, I could have done that. That feels quite democratising in a way.

8:10Mona Chalabi:The character of Handela was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish, said Al Ali. Perhaps you could read the rest of that quote. Yes, of course, with pleasure. You'll find it just beneath the picture there.

8:26Martin Rowson:That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss.

8:32Mona Chalabi:Here from the Late Show on BBC2 back in 1992 is Al Ali's own son, Khalid, explaining his main character, Handala, followed by an actor voicing Al Ali's own words. Take a listen. Hanzala is the name of a very bitter plant found in the desert. And he says that when you have a child, you try to get him in a very nice name, to call him the name you like. He called him Hanzala, just to remind him of the bitterness of life and that, after all, truth is bitter.

9:15Mona Chalabi:My job, I felt, was to speak up for those people, my people, who are in the camps in Egypt, in Algeria, the simple Arabs all over the region, who have very few outlets to express their points of view. The words of our great life voiced by an actor five years after his death. Also joining us in the studio is the eminent satirist and cartoonist, Cartoonist, author, performer, broadcaster, it's a fine list, Martin Rosen. And I believe, Martin, that you were once involved in a pan-Arab cartoonist's convention, which gave Najee El Ali a posthumous award. Tell us about that, and then maybe afterwards we can talk about some of his work and what it means to you.

9:59Mona Chalabi:Well, I was a judge in 2018-2019 at the Mahmoud Kahil Award. Mahmoud Kahil was a Lebanese cartoonist who died in London of natural causes, I'm happy to say, about 10 years ago. I know his daughter very well, and she said, will you come along? We can't get any Westerners to come to help judge this. One of the things that I discovered during this process was the enormous wealth of cartooning talent in the Arab world. We have a very selective view of how the Arab world and Islam deal with cartoons, informed by, you know, things like the Charlie Hebdo massacre. It's got nothing to do with that at all.

10:37Mona Chalabi:I've always thought that satire is a universal human phenomenon to stop us going insane with existentialist horror at the prospect of our own deaths and the fact we're led by idiots. And, you know, this is something which people have observed for millennia. And we had to award an overall prize to somebody because of their influence and effect on Arabic cartoony. and obviously Najee Anali was the candidate, just went through on the nod. He's got this visceral power in these drawings which appear to be very simple and, of course, they're not. And any image, like everything else, if you can see, it floods into you.

11:19Mona Chalabi:And quite often the reason why I get death threats and have done, I don't think they're serious. I mean, it's part of the game. Really? Tell me more.

11:28Martin Rowson:Me too. All the time. All the time. Both of you. Well, not only death threats, also rape threats, which is part of the particular joys of being a woman. But, yeah.

11:36Mona Chalabi:And it's because there are idiots out there. Back in the day when I started... Who did they come from? How do you get them? They arrive by the joys of the digital media. Back in the day, they used to have to go out and find some green ink and buy a stamp. So I didn't get so many then. But, no, no, no, across the political spectrum, I had death threats and people who wanted to kill me. Does it upset you? Does it upset you, Mona?

11:58Martin Rowson:There's two things I'd say to you. If I could just respond really quickly to something that you said earlier, and then I'll come back to Desperates. I'm sorry. I would also say that part of the way that you reach the largest number of people possible is actually counterintuitively by using as few words as possible. And you see that in Najee's work. It's kind of shut. Yeah, there are very, very few words, even titles or whatever that appear within the work. And that's also something that I strive for. People are put off. I mean, in my work, people don't really like numbers, actually. If you put numbers on the charts, it turns people off.

12:25Martin Rowson:And similarly with words, there's something about words that can make things feel convoluted and you lose some of that directness. And then on death threats, I would say, yes, I have received many, particularly since October 2023. I don't want to compare those death threats, actually, to the threats that Najee experienced throughout his entire career. Najee was imprisoned several times. Najee always understood that those death threats were very, very real. His family understood that they were very real. There's this story about his wife who, honestly, his widow was just this most incredible woman who she would go down and start his car every morning just in case there were a bomb on the car because she felt that the world needs Najee more than it needs her and she was willing to risk her life.

13:12Martin Rowson:And that was very, very real, by the way. There was a real chance that she could have been killed in doing that. And the fact that his work was of such a level, he was considered worth killing is quite an accolade, honestly.

13:27Mona Chalabi:Here he is, in his own words. As soon as I was aware of what was going on, all the havoc in our region, I felt I had to do something to contribute somehow. And the way he did that was by drawing. There's a film by Qasim Abid which includes an interview with one of his friends who calls him poor but hard-working and describes the moment when they were arrested together and in prison for 25 days. he was always drawing, he said, on anything, even my trousers. It's a lovely detail.

14:00Martin Rowson:Well, there's another beautiful detail in that story, which is that the prison guards very often kept their doors closed and Najee wanted his door open. So he had this idea that what he would do was draw a beautiful naked woman for the prison guard to kind of tempt him. And what he did is he drew the naked woman from behind on one side of the sheet of paper. And if the prison guard wanted to, he could turn over the sheet of paper to see the woman from the front. And in fact, the drawing was so good that Najee's door was opened after he gifted this illustration of a naked woman. Wow.

14:33Mona Chalabi:Here's something else maybe that you'd like to read, Mona.