Osama Bin Laden came out with a tape recently denouncing the reprinting of the controversial Mohammed cartoons in Denmark and stating that their publication is a worse crime than the killing of innocent civilians by American troops. What a crock! Those cartoons created an international incident when they were first published in 2005 leading to riots, death threats and dozens of murders. Religious thinking in its most extreme form nulls the brain, thus transubstantiating the individual into an unthinking zombie. What follows is an essay I wrote last year praising freedom of speech and denouncing the constraints of all religious zombie-thinking.
I love cartooning. There is a magical quality to this form of expression that has captured my imagination from my earliest memories. In fact, my family tells me (with a hint of facetious humor) that my first words were “Yabba Dabba Doo” in imitation of Fred Flintstone’s rallying cry. Elements of cartooning are incorporated into much of the art I create but a lot of my cartoon work is inspired by and reflective of a radical political view of the world with the goal of discovering the truth within an increasingly complex society. And what is the truth, you might ask? Cartooning and animation have been instrumental in guiding me towards a process of stripping away the lies, deceits and spins that we as subjects are continuously exposed to, a process that leads to a clearer perception of the machinations of our State Apparatus. Cartoons represent a simplified microcosm of our own real world. Archetypal characters in successful animated art consist primarily of what Norman M. Klein describes as “Nuisance… Over-reactor… Controller”. If viewed in the political context of our everyday life then we can say society consists of the Revolutionary (or Nuisance, e.g. Elmer Fudd), the Reactionary (or Over-reactor, e.g. Daffy Duck), and the Counter-Revolutionary (or Controller, e.g. Bugs Bunny). I am convinced we have a responsibility as artists to actively create as Controllers and expose the deceits of the Nuisances and pacify the Over-reactors.
A recent issue of the Georgia Straight published an insightful letter that stated: “Cartoonists have always struggled to be accepted as artists in their own right, when in reality, right or wrong, they have been fearless leaders of free thought and speech, voicing important issues in ways which no other medium can accomplish”.
In January 2006, when the media began reporting on violent protests by Muslims over cartoons published in a privately owned newspaper in Denmark, I was shocked and saddened. Parallels to Salman Rushdie, who was sentenced to death in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for writing The Satanic Verses (a novel considered blasphemous by some Muslims) and who is still in hiding nearly twenty years later, were evident when Islamic leaders called for the death of the Danish cartoonists, many of whom were forced to go into hiding in fear for their lives. To me this represented an issue of freedom of speech and censorship. Artists and writers in an enlightened and open society must be free to create works that are unencumbered by self-censorship or fear of violent reprisals.
A brief chronology of events is in order here. Early in 2005, Danish children’s author Kare Bluitgen told the Jyllands-Posten, one of Denmark’s daily papers, that he was unable to find an artist to illustrate the book he was writing on the life of Muhammad. Taking a rather reactionary stance, the paper held a cartoon contest and subsequently published twelve submissions, some banal and others insightful, depicting or commenting on aspects of Islam and its prophet Muhammad. Protests over the cartoons erupted around the world resulting in several deaths, numerous injuries and the burning and destruction of various western embassies and fast food restaurants. Much of the violence was incited by reactionary imams who “magnified the offence by circulating the Danish cartoons with three truly gross, but invented ones (e.g., Muhammad as a pig)” (“Culture War”). The violent protests were sparked by the publication and dissemination of the cartoons but as Art Spiegelman said:
even hateful (cartoons), are symptoms of a disease, not the cause. The cartoon insults were used as an excuse to add more very real injury to an already badly injured world…They polarized the West into viewing Muslims as the unassimilable Other; for True Believers, the insults were irrefutable proof of Muslim victimization, and served as recruiting posters for the Holy War (Spiegelman 43).
In Orientalism, Edward Said wrote that: “My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus”. This statement, which ties in nicely with the controversial cartoons, points to the observation that some of the drawings can be seen as over-reactions to the climate of localized fear in Europe regarding Islamic terrorists, and were dogmatically distorted by some imams to incite anger throughout various Muslim nations. But of the twelve cartoons, one really stands out for me as an honest plea for intelligent debate on the issue of freedom of speech. Cartoonist Arne Sorenson has drawn himself cowering over his drawing board, sweat pouring down his brow, and nervously looking over his shoulder as he draws a portrait of Muhammad. In his analysis of the drawings, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman wrote that Sorenson’s cartoon “illustrates the heart of the issue: stone cold fear. It’s the subtext of all these cartoons: the rancid emotion manipulated by xenophobes, by Middle Eastern tyrants, and by our own home grown American tyrants as well”. I can admire Sorenson for drawing the cartoon for he understands the danger he is getting himself into, but his active need to control a preposterous situation (meaning the ban on drawing Muhammad) by satirizing it through the medium of cartooning should inspire intelligent debate and not fear on his part of violent reprisal by nuisances and over-reactors.
Having been raised in Quebec under strict and stringent Catholic principles, as well as being educated in a Jesuit private school, I am fully aware of the repressive nature and history of Christian dogma. I rejected my faith at 15 when I came to the full realization of Christianity’s ridiculous nature and pompous self-righteousness. As I explored other venues of belief, most religions appeared to have the same underlying message of love and compassion but conflicted with each other: ironically different faiths insist that their particular way to the truth is the only way, to the (sometimes) violent exclusion of all others. This conflict of rituals and folk-tales has lead to innumerable wars. In his book The End of Faith, philosopher Sam Harris writes
whenever you hear that people have been killing non-combatants intentionally and indiscriminately, ask yourself what dogma stands at their backs. What do these freshly minted killers believe? You will find that it is always – always – preposterous.
I have been aware of the Muslim faith’s prohibition of pictorial representations of Muhammad for many years when the issue was raised in a book I read as a teenager listing some of the worst movies of all time. One film that was made in 1976 was entitled Mohammad: Messenger of God by director Moustapha Akkad. The film attempted to depict the history of Islam. But because of the ban on pictorial or filmic representations of the prophet Muhammad, Akkad could only indicate the prophet’s presence in a particular scene as a shadow cast on the ground. And yet despite the director’s attempt to avoid controversy, the London premiere of the film was marred by bomb threats from radicals who were insulted that the name Mohammad was used in the title. Distributors changed the title to The Message for US release, which still did not prevent African American Muslims from taking 134 people as hostages in Washington D.C., with one of their demands being the banning of the film.
Thirty years later, the cultural problem of depicting Muhammad is still with us. The belief that making a pictorial representation of Muhammad is punishable by death is as equally comic(?) as insisting that Santa Claus is a real person and that drawing him should result in capital punishment for the artist. Cartoons are a tool that can be used to inspire public debate and help lead society to the truth by stripping away the delusional dogma of religious reactionaries and the half-baked ideologies of political revolutionaries. Spiegelman says in an interview with The Nation that in order to do this
There has to be a right to insult. You can’t always have polite discourse… In 1897 politicians in New York State tried to make it a major offence to publish unflattering caricatures of politicians…they spent months trying to get a bill passed and to make it punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison… (The bill) got killed. We have this thing called the First Amendment that was in better shape, maybe, then than now.
Aijaz Ahmad paraphrases Said in his essay Orientalism and After: “‘The real issue is whether there can be a true representation of anything.’ In other words, is it possible to make true statements? …the line between a representation and a misrepresentation is always very thin”. By using this train of thought, Ahmad is able to render Said’s writings on Orientalism as being just as convoluted as the body of Orientalist documents already in existence. With this in mind, Orientalist view points and other specific beliefs are moot when it comes to investigating the Danish cartoon controversy. The truth is there is no truth other than people must accept people as people. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Jews, animists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Shintoists, Anarchists, Communists, Atheists, Sikhs, druids, Gnostics, etc. all maintain varying degrees of insistent monopoly on the truth, but once one of them achieves power as inevitably annoying revolutionary or hysterical reactionary, the artist as counter-revolutionary must keep things in check.
Some of the twelve drawings represent an effective use of the medium of cartooning as a functional tool in opening discourse because
…no Islamic country … will allow even closely argued intellectual public criticism of Islam of the kind that Christianity has had to withstand for hundreds of years…what we are seeing is the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking” .
And this is the true debate for
(c)artoons are, by their nature, caricatures – oversimplifications designed to make a forceful point and provoke debate. Editors know that one powerful cartoon can generate more furor than dozens of provocative articles…and benefits do not necessarily come without pain.
This benefit through pain is multifaceted: in order to preserve freedom of expression and free speech in an enlightened and humanistic world, artists such as Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoonists will be sentenced to death, and cultural products such as American photographer Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) and Chris Ofili’s Dung Madonna (1996) will raise the ire of Christian fundamentalists but an essential truism remains that creative individuals must be allowed to work unencumbered by the hegemonic prejudices various civilizations have conjured over the centuries. As Ahmad so succinctly summarized in his essay:
The continued American hostility towards the Arab world on the one hand, the sentencing of Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini on the other, combined with the failure of most people in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world to do combat on Rushdie’s behalf, seemed to have given rise to an extraordinary fury against West and non-West alike, with the figure of the lonely writer in the Western city – and the uncommitted reader of novels in the same city – eventually emerging as the only figures of redemption.
Animated cartoons, comic books, strips, anime, graphic novels, manga, are all important cultural products that function on a variety of levels. Whether as consumerist entertainment or insightful commentaries on the emperor’s new clothes, cartoons can enlighten and clarify issues of social concern due to their inherent ability to reduce a situation to its basic elements. Hopefully intelligent discourse can result from a cartoon’s point of view because a picture is worth a thousand words, and the pen is mightier than the sword.
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