When thinking about comics, the first things that come to mind may be Marvel superheroes, comic strips in the Sunday newspaper like “Garfield” (1978-present) and "Peanuts” (1950-2000) or even the teeny-tiny Bazooka Joe comics on Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. These comics are forms of entertainment, but they are also forms of art. According to Associate Professor of Anthropology Amahl Bishara, comics allow one to imagine other worlds and to see how people manage the world or situations in which they find themselves. This is part of the reason guest speaker Paul Beran was particularly fascinated with Arab cartoons. This interest led him to co-edit the anthology book “Muqtatafat” (2015), which features the artwork from a variety of comics around the Arab world. He presented his work and discussed the importance of comics in the Arab world at the event "Creativity Against Crisis: Arab Political Cartoons," which was held Nov. 30 in the Crane Room.
The event was co-sponsored by Middle Eastern Studies, the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Department of Anthropology.
Beran recently joined Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program and is the executive director of the SHARIAsource Project, an online portal that provides resources on Islamic law. Before that, he was the director of the Outreach Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Beran’s areas of focus are civil society, social movements, Arab politics and U.S. foreign policy. He explained that, in addition to his interest in the Middle East, he has always had a passion for comics and especially enjoyed gory, violence-filled comics as a child.
Through frequent trips to Cairo, Beran got to know Magdy El Shafee, an Egyptian cartoonist whose graphic novel "Metro" (2008) had been banned there. In 2010, the two met for coffee and Beran started forming the idea for “Muqtatafat.” While he then asked El Shafee if he could try to feature some of his work, Beran clarified that at this point, there was no sound idea or plan in place.
“We just knew that [El Shafee was] teaching us something, and we really wanted to bring this to a much wider audience if we could, because [he was] helping us think,” Beran said.
According to Beran, El Shafee’s work is almost film noir-esque and focuses on a story of violence, corruption and classism in the later part of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. Beran also pointed out the importance of the fact that Mubarak and his regime were clearly threatened by this, which explains why "Metro" was banned.
After meeting with El Shafee, Beran and his colleagues met with other cartoonists at the Sharjah International Book Fair, one of the Persian Gulf's largest literary gatherings.
“It was such an honor to get to know these artists because I … learned so much from the depth of understanding that they had about their own art and what they wanted to do with it,” Beran said. "[Their work] was nuanced, it was contextualized, it was deep and it was funny.”
Beran explained that comics are a form of art and that art is incredibly important to study. When learning about a culture, art reveals certain truths about society's relation to power and values beyond just studying theory or historical documents. He explained that the way these values and social issues are understood and applied in society can be very hard to see, especially different social issues, and comics can wrestle with this.
“Sometimes we tend to approach [these issues] in black and white terms,” Beran said. “[But] comics are all gray. They’re all nuanced.”
Bishara also saw comics as providing a new lens through which to understand the Middle East.
“I learned about the Middle East primarily from news and, as an anthropologist, through ethnography,” Bishara said. “But, when I looked at [“Muqtatafat,”] I see sort of a whole new world opening, and I find that really exciting.”
Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies Alexandra Chreiteh also emphasized the importance of the versatility and nature of politics.
“All comics are political. And I don’t mean that in the sense that … every sort of text is political -- that it has an overt message … But there’s something more in comics. There seems to be something more related to their accessibility or the precise nature of their presenting their… stories or their narratives,” Chreiteh said.
“Muqtatafat” is filled with political comics from a variety of artists, from Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries. Beran explained how they put little images of many of the artists’ works on the front cover to demonstrate the plethora of artistic styles.
“We wanted to put them out in a format that we hoped would raise awareness about the art form and raise awareness of what these artists are doing in different parts of the Middle East,” Beran said.
Some of the artists featured are Barrack Rima (Lebanon, Belgium), Maya Zankoul (Lebanon),Mohamed El Shennawy (Egypt) and Omar Khouri (Lebanon). Khouri’s cartoon, “Anomaly,” has a particularly interesting style. In the first few frames, the black and white pictures are simplistic and made with thin, clean lines. In the next frames, which take place in a therapist’s office, the lines blur and the pictures almost appear to be done in watercolor. Beran explained that this exemplified Khouri’s interest in subjective views of reality.
Shennawy’s art focuses on simple middle-class characters set in Cairo who, according to Beran, are doing normal things, though the state's reaction to them is abnormal.
“He challenges us to kind of think about this place -- this urban setting -- in a new and different and deeper way,” Beran said.
The event then moved into a more open format with a question and answer session, where audience members shared their favorite comics -- “Calvin and Hobbes” (1985-1995) was a very popular choice -- and Beran explained the distinct merits of graphic novels compared to cartoons. According to him, novels have the space to be more nuanced, but few-frame comics are more accessible to a larger audience.
Beran also addressed why the Arab world was such a rich place to be studying comics right now. He credited it to the current political atmosphere.
“I think you have to have the societal … ripeness, to have things like art really make an impact,” Beran said. “There’s a lot of great art around all the time, but I think sometimes we’re all too busy doing our thing to really have it sink in, and then maybe there’s a crisis, or maybe there’s a poignant moment that you’re searching around for meaning or something to make sense of something that’s too big for you … all of a sudden art becomes really crucial.”
Paul Beran's 'Muqtatafat' shines a spotlight on comics in the Arab world
