Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: A proposito di vignettisti in pericolo

Un'archivio delle vignette di Naji Al Ali e' disponibile a
http://www.najialali.com/drawings/
Il fatto che non si sappia se sia stato ucciso dal Mossad o dall'OLP
la dice tutta sulla sua qualita' di Vignettista.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&article_id=89875
LONDON: It has been just over 20 years since master political
cartoonist Naji al-Ali was assassinated in London. To commemorate this
sad anniversary, an exhibition of original artwork, "Shooting the
Witness: The cartoons of Naji al-Ali" opened here last week. The
venue, fittingly, is London's respected and alternately serious and
rollicking, Political Cartoon Gallery.
There are many elements that make Ali's work compelling but what is
initially striking is how contemporary his drawings remain, after 30
years. The Palestinian situation is possibly worse than ever, the US
and Israel continue to be military partners, oil is at the top of
everyone's agenda and some fear Lebanon's present political paralysis
will lapse back into chaos.
Ali, who left his Palestinian village in Galilee during the Nabka,
came of age in the refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh, then on the
outskirts of Sidon, in South Lebanon. As political awareness made its
way into the camps in the 1950s, Ali began to draw on the walls of the
camp and in Lebanese prisons, where he was confined for his political
activities.
In 1961, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani gave Ali his first break
by publishing his cartoons in "Al-Huria," the official magazine of the
Arab Nationalist Movement. Two years later, he moved to Kuwait where
he found work with the magazine Al-Talea (Avant-Garde).
It was in the wealthy Gulf state that Ali created his alter ego and
his guardian angel, the iconic 10-year-old character Hanthala, who
shares the cult-like status of his creator. The reason he introduced
Hanthala (literally "Bitter Desert Fruit") to his readers, Ali
explained, was that "the young, barefoot Hanthala was a symbol of my
childhood. He was the age I was when I left Palestine and, in a sense,
I am still that age today.
"Even though this all happened 35 years ago, the details of that phase
in my life are still fully present to my mind. I feel that I can
recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I
passed when I was a child in Palestine.
"The character of Hanthala was a sort of icon that protected my soul
from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That
child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to
attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the
compass, pointing steadily toward Palestine. Not just Palestine in
geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense - the
symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or
South Africa."
Ali's steadfast and lifelong commitment to championing the rights of
the underprivileged, and his portrayal of human suffering and the fat-
cat politicians and governments responsible for it, made him enemies
in all camps. Indeed, his assassination remains an open case for
Scotland Yard: while there has been much speculation that the PLO or
the Mossad was involved, the assassins were never captured.
Three months earlier, in what could be an eerie prediction of his own
murder, he'd published a drawing of Hanthala's death - face down with
an arrow in his heel. Ali's original cartoon is among those on display
at the Political Cartoon Gallery.
"My father used to say that his pen should be like the knife of the
surgeon, cutting through hypocrisy and rhetoric," says Khalid al-Ali,
the cartoonist's eldest son, who was in London to help organize the
show.
A mathematician who now lives in the Gulf, the younger Ali was born in
Ain al-Hilweh. As a 15-year-old boy, he accompanied his father to
inspect the devastated camp after the 1982 Israeli invasion and
occupation of Lebanon. He is actively keeping his father's work and
memory alive by organizing exhibitions and, most importantly for him,
the first of what he hopes will be a series of books of the political
cartoons, going back in time in chronological order.
Although Khalid al-Ali estimates that his father drew about 12,000
cartoons in his lifetime, he says that some 75 percent of them have
been lost. The family has collected the remaining drawings, most of
which are black-and-white, in pen and ink, although 50 or so exist in
color and some are painted.
Because of the nature of the cartoons and the power of his message,
his son says, Ali's artistic side has always been overlooked. Standing
in front of the original drawings, though, it is easy to see that
Ali's gestures were fluid yet precise, and some are decidedly
painterly, evoking expressionism and the social realism of the
Depression-era United States.
The ragged little boy Hanthala is in almost all his drawings, his back
to the observer, a silent witness to the horror and absurdity of the
region's politics. His hands, clasped behind him, have been read to
signify the dejection, or binding, of the Palestinians or the polite
voyeurism of non-Palestinians. In one particularly powerful drawing,
though, Hanthala's furrowed, anguished face is visible, turned toward
a couple of Palestinian peasants ploughing their occupied land with an
AK-47, while sowing it with heart-shaped seeds.
Hanthala occasionally participates in the action such as in one image,
published in the Kuwaiti paper, Al-Qabas in 1984, in which Ali
prophesized the intifada many years before it happened. Hanthala joins
a woman and a girl in throwing stones at both Israeli soldiers and
Arab politicians.
As time went on, Ali's drawings became increasingly critical of Arab
leaders, his son observes, and he portrayed them as ugly, misshapen,
and bottom-heavy figures.
Ali had returned to Lebanon in the 1970's to work for the recently
launched As-Safir newspaper and his drawings reflected his disgust
with what he felt was the corruption of Arab regimes selling out to
Western powers - a wealthy elite that ignored injustice and the
destitute, and the continuing brutality of the Israelis toward the
Palestinians.
In a 1999 documentary by Kasim Abid, an Iraqi filmmaker Academy-
Awards , Ali's wife, Widad, describes how in Lebanon he was receiving
death threats regularly and that she would wake up each morning to
start his car for him because she felt that, "if something were to
happen to me, it wouldn't make a big difference. But as for Naji, he
was irreplaceable."
In the end, something did happen, but his work endures and is,
unfortunately, just as timely. As Ali himself put it, "Hanthala,
[whom] I created, will not end after my end. I hope that this is not
an exaggeration when I say that I will continue to live with Hanthala,
even after I die."
"Shooting the Witness: The cartoons of Naji al-Ali" runs at London's
Political Cartoon Gallery until April 19, 2008. For more information
check out 
www.politicalcartoon.co.uk
When the cartoon is as cutting as the occupation
Exhibition of Naji al-Ali's work reveals that, 20 years on, it's still
eerily contemporary

 eerily contemporary
#_Ottimo articolo; grazie!
e grazie anche di questo link, per poterne vedere altre.
Giano