Some books arrive in your hands and you can feel right away that they were made under pressure. Not the pressure of a deadline. The pressure of a life. This is one of those books.
A Child in Palestine is the first book-length collection of work by the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali. Over a thirty-year career he drew more than 40,000 cartoons, published daily in Arabic newspapers from Cairo to Beirut to London. If you have ever seen Handala, the small barefoot boy with his back turned and his hands clasped behind him, you have seen al-Ali's work. Handala is everywhere now. T-shirts. Walls. Protest signs. Tattoos. The boy was born on a Kuwaiti newspaper page in 1969, and in over fifty years of public life he has never aged a day.
The premise of the book is simple. Verso pulled the cartoons together, originally drawn for daily papers and seen one at a time, into a single volume so you can read them as a body of work rather than a daily dispatch. Joe Sacco, the cartoonist behind Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, wrote the introduction. That alone tells you who this book is in conversation with.
The cartoons themselves are spare. Black ink. White space. A few figures, a line or two of dialogue, almost no shading. Al-Ali drew with a fixed cast. A thin, miserable-looking man stood in for the ordinary Palestinian. A fat man stood in for the regimes and politicians who built easy lives on the backs of the dispossessed. And Handala stood in the corner, back to us, watching. Al-Ali said the boy turned his back on us in 1973, and that he would not turn around until the refugees could return home. So far, he has not turned around.
About the character, al-Ali once said: "He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily towards Palestine." He did not mean only the geography. He meant Palestine as a stand-in for any just cause, anywhere, whether in Vietnam or South Africa or Egypt.
Here is what reviewers have said, in their words and not mine.
John Pilger called this "a ground-breaking book," and wrote that "Western readers are beckoned into Palestinian lives" through the work. He described Handala as "our witness and conscience."
Verso's own catalog copy names al-Ali "one of the Arab world's greatest cartoonists," and notes the nickname he carried in his lifetime: "the Palestinian Malcolm X."
One thing worth knowing before you open the book, because it sits behind every page. Al-Ali was shot outside the London offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas in July of 1987. He died in a hospital bed five weeks later. His killers were never definitively identified. He had many powerful enemies. He kept drawing anyway.
A Child in Palestine is short. You can read it in one sitting on a quiet afternoon. The drawings will not let you stay neutral, but the book will not bully you either. It hands you Handala and it asks you to look at what he is looking at. That is the whole project. Look. Notice. Do not turn away.