Qui est cet Charlie Hebdo?
My first reaction to the events in Paris this week was, obviously, dismay, not just that this depressing drumbeat of the 21st century was still sounding, but that this time the target was a satirical magazine, an enterprise close to my heart. My only previous exposure to Charlie Hebdo had been seeing it at magazine stands in French-speaking countries, but I knew it was something like the French Private Eye, and that was enough to empathize with the French people’s reaction to, not just an act of terror, but an attack on a beloved national institution.
That afternoon I retweeted a photo from Agence France-Presse that was hard to bear. I reacted instinctively to the look in their eyes; I’ve met a good number of cartoonists, and recognised it. These were the gentle faces, it seemed to me, of people whose only aim in life was to draw laughs; meanwhile, those who only wanted to draw blood had hidden theirs. On my usual online hangout, Metafilter, I posted as much in the new thread about the massacre.
Another commenter replied that saying satirists “only” want to draw laughs is to diminish their aims, which are also to provoke thought; fair enough, I responded, and retracted the “only”. But first and foremost, their aim was drawing laughs, and drawing for laughs. Writers and performers can make people think, laugh, or both, but only cartoonists do both with a drawing. If all you’re interested in is getting the laugh or airing the point, tweeting it is easier.
But I hadn’t said they “only wanted to draw laughs” to dismiss it as some silly, trivial thing. I grew up drawing cartoons and comics, even tried to get somewhere as a cartoonist before life took me in other directions, and see it as an important and worthwhile way to spend a life. “Humor is so powerful it can dismantle empires,” another Mefite had added, and that’s true, but humour is even more powerful than that. Whether or not it brings down empires, it dismantles us as people. Every time we laugh, it’s at something unexpected, some new idea that challenges our existing ones. Whether jokes are satirical or not, they help us see ourselves and the world in new ways. (The German satirical magazine Titanic wrote something similar in response to the attacks.)
That Metafilter thread moved quickly overnight (European time), as the site’s predominantly American members looked further into Charlie Hebdo in an attempt to figure out who they were being asked to express solidarity with. Some were now worried: apart from the question of whether depicting the Prophet in cartoon form was respectful or wise, they’d found examples of other cartoons and covers that, on the face of it, appeared deliberately racist: Arabs with big noses! Africans with lips! A black woman’s head on the body of a monkey! Islamophobia! Mocking the victims of Boko Haram! Suddenly, a catalogue of Charlie Hebdo’s crimes was being compiled, as represented in this post by Jacob Canfield, which is still being cited and retweeted approvingly (and in disapproval of Charlie Hebdo) this Friday evening.
I read that article on Wednesday night, and it didn’t sit right. For one thing, Canfield seemed to have totally the wrong end of the stick about the response from the world’s cartoonists, or “hack cartoonists”, as he sneeringly called them. To highlight just one of his points:
A call “TO ARMS” is gross and inappropriate. To simplify the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices as “Good, Valiant Westerners vs. Evil, Savage Muslims” is not only racist, it’s dangerously overstated. Cartoonists (especially political cartoonists) generally reinforce the status quo, and they tend to be white men. Calling fellow cartoonists TO ARMS is calling other white men to arms against already marginalized people. The inevitable backlash against Muslims has begun in earnest.
Canfield was talking specifically about an image that I happened to retweet on Wednesday, by Chilean illustrator Francisco Javier Olea. There is nothing in Olea’s image that simplifies the attack as “Good, Valiant Westerners vs. Evil, Savage Muslims”. It’s an obvious call to fellow cartoonists to pick up their pens and pencils in response to armed violence, not Islam. It’s fundamentally a pacifist message, the entire point being that these “arms” aren’t arms. Miscontruing it as a racist call to physical violence felt deeply obnoxious. Did Canfield seriously want to suggest that cartoonists shouldn’t be speaking out in defence of their profession and the human right that makes it possible on this of all days?
Canfield similarly condemned the assassinated editor and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier (Charb) as a “racist asshole” for saying, in its quoted entirety, “Muhammad isn’t sacred to me. I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.”
Hang on: substituting UK law for French, I could say those same words. Canfield, assuming he isn’t Muslim and therefore doesn’t hold Muhammad as literally sacred, could say them too. I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at Charlie Hebdo’s drawings, and clearly neither does he. Canfield can only be suggesting that publishing them anyway, in the knowledge that some people wouldn’t laugh at them (and we can’t assume that all Muslims wouldn’t, just some), is proof of Charb’s racist assholery; that not respecting the taboos of Koranic law was racist, even when the law of his own land was different. Given that Charb was speaking after his offices had been firebombed by extremists, might there possibly have been a little more going on there? A determination to stand up to intimidation, perhaps? A commitment to a fundamental freedom—of expression—that’s bigger than all of us? I imagine a firebombing might focus one’s resolve on both counts.
Then there are the cartoons in question, which Canfield claims “are, by even the most generous assessment, incredibly racist”, a judgment he seems to have made entirely on their face value. Some other commenters on that Metafilter thread that evening concurred.
When people object that the figures on a Charlie Hebdo cover have big noses, I wonder if they’ve seen any Asterix, or many bandes dessinées at all. Certainly, there are problematic tropes in French cartooning, but the same is true of American cartooning, British cartooning, or really any cartooning; nobody comes out of caricature looking good.
But it’s more than that. Specific covers, such as the Boko Haram one, make no sense at all without knowing their context. Just as cartoons’ drawings often take on an entirely different meaning once you read their captions, the drawings and captions of political cartoons often take on an entirely different meaning when you know their context. A context that can be elusively fleeting and parochial, as anyone who has looked at historical political cartoons will know.
I didn’t know these cartoons’ context. Neither, it seemed clear, did Canfield. Fortunately, the French-resident members of Metafilter did, and told us: about the Boko Haram cover and the cartoon of a black politician as a monkey. In both cases, the context makes a literal reading as absurd as taking Swift’s Modest Proposal at face value. Others online, meanwhile, explained why Charlie Hebdo’s most famous cover shows what makes the magazine so important.
These explanations led me to reject Canfield’s take on the magazine completely, and to trust my initial instincts: that a cartoonist who gave the French language a new word to condemn racists was unlikely to be one himself, nor was another who was a member of a group called Cartooning for Peace, nor were an entire editorial team who on the morning of their deaths were discussing a conference on the fight against racism. Charlie Hebdo was exactly what its editor claimed it to be: left-wing, secular and atheist.
These, then, were the people assassinated on Wednesday. I use that word deliberately, when so many are focussing only on terrorism; this was certainly an act of terror, but it was also a political assassination. From what we’ve learned of the killers, they were angry, alienated young men itching for a fight, and had been edging towards extremism for years. It’s entirely possible that they chose Charlie Hebdo as their target opportunistically, as a softer one than blowing up the Gare du Nord or the like. But their target still has meaning; they didn’t storm through the offices of Paris Match, which would have been just as soft a target. They didn’t even shoot everyone they passed by in pursuit of their victims: they asked one poor woman for directions to specific individuals.
To me, knowing that the killers targeted them directly, and not randomly, underlines how inspiringly brave the Charlie Hebdo team were to stand up to the threats they knew they faced; and how important it was—and is—to defend the fundamental freedom of expression represented in their work. Work which was satirical, not racist, and needs no misattributed Voltaire quotes or allusions to Abu Ghraib to qualify its defence.
Charlie Hebdo weren’t “consistently aim[ing] to provoke Muslims”, as Canfield claims: their targets were extremists, Muslim and otherwise. They challenged those who purport to speak for billions in claiming that “Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression”. As a non-Muslim who does believe in that concept, I stand in solidarity with the many Muslims who also do, and with those who have just died for it. Je suis Charlie.
10 January 2015