Tag Archives: Satire and Charlie Hebdo Roundtable

An Open Letter to Art Spiegelman

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Françoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Gerard Biard (CH editor in chief), Jean-Baptiste Thoret (CH film critic) and Salman Rushdie at the PEN awards. (photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

Dear Mr. Spiegelman,

I’m addressing this to you, not as an empty rhetorical ploy, but to emphasize the fact that what I’m writing is personal. It always is. I’ve seen a lot of impassioned opinions about Charlie Hebdo offered in the guise of irrefutable pronouncements. I’m tired of reading cultural commentary from writers who act as though the objective truth fell, fully formed, from the sky and into their laps, the function of their words being to simply describe it. Their strange bloodless certainty, the pretense of personal remove, is central to comics commentary and reporting today, and at best it’s a farce.

There is no such thing as objective criticism or journalism; like comics, these forms are always, first and finally, an extension of the self. That’s perfectly natural, but it’s also limiting. What drew me to comics, and what I admire about your work, is its ability to explore and even exploit these limitations, locating truth (or something close to it, anyway) in the very process of acknowledging the obstacles we face as we try to perceive it.

I found myself thinking about subjectivity as I read Laura Miller’s piece about how you rallied comics luminaries to stand in for the six writers who dropped out of the PEN gala in protest of the organization’s plan to honor Charlie Hebdo. Which first of all, let’s face it, was sort of a dick move not unlike crossing a picket line. In one corner of Miller’s story we have you, Alison Bechdel and Neil Gaiman—the trifecta of literary comics—serving as champions of free speech and protectors of a maligned art form; in the other we have hundreds of unnamed writer types hissing like they’re something less than human at the survivor of a mass shooting. It’s a classic story of heroes versus villains. The headline, a quote from Gaiman, frames the faceless hoard’s take as pro-murder: “For fuck’s sake, they drew somebody and they shot them, and you don’t get to do that.” The implication is of course that the PEN protestors think that you should ~totally~ get to do that.

(Of course they don’t think that. Literally no one does.)

I’m not writing in an effort to change your mind about what I obviously regard as a racist publication, or to debate the validity of that PEN award, though it straight up makes me want to barf. I disagree with your opinion, but I also respect its right to exist. I have even tried to make room in my heart for the possibility that there’s some truth in what you say. While I find myself skeptical about how much expertise is required to, say, parse an image of a black person who’s been drawn as a monkey—and the tendency of experts like you to characterize other people’s “inexpert” reactions to images like that as unintelligent—I freely admit that you’re better informed than I on almost any given cultural milieu in play, including comics, satire, and the (supposedly) inscrutable kingdom of France.

Despite those vast stores of knowledge, you’re plainly no expert on race. Frankly, I’m not either, though I’m savvy enough to have recognized how ironic it was when you criticized readers for lacking sophistication even as you rallied a bunch of famous white people behind a slogan you appropriated from an oppressed minority. I don’t even know where to start with your unfortunate riff on “Black lives matter,” a movement that was spawned in protest of the George Zimmerman verdict, and reignited after the death of Michael Brown. Like “All lives matter,” the racist rejoinder to the original slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” ignores one central fact: no one really thinks cartoonists’ lives are worthless except for their murderers, and they are all extremists who have been roundly denounced.

I really wish I could say the same for Eric Garner, or Tamir Rice, or Walter Scott, whose murders have been deemed, variously, as understandable and even warranted by public servants, the judicial system, people in my Facebook feed, and members of my own family. I don’t want to reduce our nation’s disregard for black lives to the deaths of those three people. It’s just that I’ve watched the indisputable evidence of their murders with my own two eyes, yet somehow still find them at the center of a bitter national debate. The “Black lives matter” slogan was borne in response to deep, appalling societal injustice, and my feeling watching you, a white man with uncommon privilege, adapt it in the name of propagating your opinion on the “bravery” of drawing Muhammad as a porn star lies somewhere far, far beyond my ability to articulate it to my satisfaction.

As a slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” draws a false equivalence between one universally criticized attack and what has become a veritable institution of state-sponsored murder in our country. Where you attempt to make a comparison, it’s far more instructive to contrast. The Hebdo massacre was understood instantaneously, implicitly, to be of universal significance, and that’s because the killers represented the most hated enemy of the Western world—militant Islamism—and most of the slain were white. No one has disputed the dead’s status as innocent victims, though that position is routinely invoked as a straw man. They have been mourned all around the world for the better part of 2015.

Back in January, in an article for the New Yorker, Teju Cole asked readers to consider how the victims of Charlie Hebdo became “mournable bodies” in a global landscape where so many other atrocities are barely remarked upon, much less condemned. “We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world,” he wrote, “but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.” As it happens, Cole was one of the six dissenting writers who you and your friends replaced as table hosts at the PEN gala. Were you thinking of him, I wonder, when you told Laura Miller that your “cohorts and brethren in PEN are really good misreaders”? Do you really imagine that Cole, who is an art historian, doesn’t have the “sophistication to grapple with” comics? Or what about Junot Díaz, who was one of the 200-some writers who undersigned Cole’s decision? Like you, Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winner. His work has been illustrated by Jamie Hernandez, one of his heroes. Do you think that Junot Díaz doesn’t have the chops to read comics, Mr. Spiegelman? With respect, who do you think you are?

When you framed the Charlie Hebdo controversy as a matter of your vaunted expertise vs. what you call inexpert readers, you weren’t speaking in the abstract. You directly insulted the six writers who started the protest, as well as hundreds of their peers—individuals who wrote their names at the bottom of a letter, just as I’ll sign off at the end of mine. You also indirectly insulted countless other people in comics who object, publicly or privately, to “equal-opportunity offense” that somehow always, always manages to offend the same people no matter how many times old white men try to tell us that we’re just not reading comics right.

How is it that you failed to extend the basic courtesy of assumed literacy to those who struggle with the legacy of Charlie Hebdo? What does it mean for a white cartoonist to appropriate “Black lives matter” and then describe the argument of people who disagree with him—many of whom are people of color—as a failure of reading comprehension? Does your own mastery of the form really preclude the possibility that, say, Cole and Díaz, two of our smartest and most lyrical writers on race, might discern something in those images that you can’t (or won’t?) see? Or hey, what about Jeet Heer, who says that arguments like yours ignore the fact that aesthetics matter as much as intent? Is it just possible that you’re the one who’s not reading these comics correctly?

Look around you, man. Of course cartoonists’ lives matter. I realize that comics still has a whole thing about legitimacy, but Françoise Mouly’s assertion that the PEN protesters are literary snobs simply doesn’t track with the reality of comics culture today. Maus is more or less required reading in high school and college curricula. Neil Gaiman has more than 2 million followers on Twitter. Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur genius with a Broadway musical about her life. Tell me, did you actually hear anyone hissing at the PEN gala? It’s my understanding that Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief received a standing ovation when he accepted that award.

I think of the work of you and Alison Bechdel and am flabbergasted that two people who built their careers on endlessly recursive autobiographies lack enough self-awareness to acknowledge the positions of privilege from which they speak. I don’t know what’s worse about “Cartoonists’ lives matter”—that it’s so masturbatory, that it represents such an egregious misunderstanding of the issues at hand, or that willfully misrepresents the positions of your opposition in lieu of engaging with them. You criticized the protest of the writers you glibly dubbed the “Sanctimonious Six” as “condescending and dismissive” even as you framed their argument as a fundamental failure of literacy. That’s not just hypocritical; it is demonstrably false. You leveraged your authority as the person who put comics on the map as a literary form to publicly smack down artists who are less famous than you simply because they objected to the valorization (not the existence) of Charlie Hebdo. That you chose to badmouth them in your capacity as Captain Comics (protecting a literary gala from evil, no less) is deeply embarrassing to many of us who care about this art form.

Unfortunately, it’s not just you. Your Hebdo comments follow a pattern I see all the time here on the bully beat at the Hooded Utilitarian: Comics calls for nuance when it’s in the service of understanding the transgressions of white men. But when it comes to the other side of the argument, opponents are characterized as unlearned, as uninitiated, as overreacting. Last week at TCJ Dan Nadel bemoaned how comics are still perceived as low culture by the ignorant masses. Increasingly I wonder if it’s the discourse surrounding comics that’s perceived as unsophisticated. It often caters to the sensibilities of white men who are forever foisting their racist sexist takes on comics onto the world under the noble guise of history. They actively alienate readers from other demographics, and routinely mock and celebrate that alienation. They (and you) dismiss people’s deeply felt reactions to comics’ trenchant racism and sexism as empty “political correctness,” stripping protesters of their very humanity, denying their capacity to think and feel in the genuine way that you do.

Your star shines brightly, Mr. Spiegelman, though I know you have a difficult relationship with fame. I often think about how, in a “corrective” book about Françoise Mouly’s many accomplishments, Jeet Heer chose to use your name twice (once more than Mouly’s) in the title. Heer’s shortcomings belong to him, not you, but I want to circle back on the point I began with: it’s impossible to extricate our individual experience from our work and beliefs. The things we find meaningful—what’s important to us, as well as what’s not—emanate from the place of deep personal bias on which we build a life. It’s always personal, an idea that Heer explores ably through the rest of that otherwise excellent book. But acknowledging those connections is a wholly different project than casting everything in their shadow.

The world is large, and each of us exists within it, not the other way around. It’s incumbent upon us to try to overcome our natural tendency to center everything on the self. Real criticism thrives in multiplicity. It can’t live in the certainty of a person who shoots down opposing points of view, whether it’s with bullets or rhetoric. It demands room for doubt.

Comics culture needs to face the uncomfortable truth that its faves are problematic, which is not to say they’re worthless or irredeemable. As the author of this letter, I can tell you it’s not a whole lot of fun. But I also believe that speaking honestly and openly about the flaws in the things we care about is even more important than celebrating an artist, promoting an art form, or defending a cause, however heartfelt our admiration may be.

Murderous terrorists have long been the known enemies of cartoonists everywhere. But the lack of empathy and cultural awareness you have demonstrated is a much more subtle, grave, and pervasive threat to the health of comics today. You’re in a unique position to promote meaningful conversation on a constellation of issues that matter to a lot of smart people. Take a long hard look at yourself, Mr. Spiegelman. You are failing.

Kim O’Connor
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All HU posts on satire and Charlie Hebdo are here.

Blasphemy and Charlie Hebdo

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The complete roundtable on Satire and Charlie Hebdo is here.
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The terror assault which killed twelve people, including many prominent cartoonists, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo occurred two weeks ago now. It has been largely replaced in the news, at least in the Anglophone press, by other atrocities and other controversies. The news cycle is brief and vicious, and old blood, no matter its quantity, soon gives way to new.

Still, the response to the tragedy has at least some lasting lessons for the comics community in general, and for comics scholars in particular. I’d point particularly to a piece by Mark McKinney, a professor at Miami University and co-editor of European Comics Art.

McKinney, in a clearly heartfelt piece, denounced those who responded to the cartoons without sufficient context or understanding. “[W]hen many analysts see the cartoons, they simply lack the artistic, cultural and linguistic frameworks for interpreting them,”he says. He then goes on to argue that the magazine was anti-racist, and to point out that it is a determinedly French, and “even Parisian” magazine. He discusses, in laudatory terms, its commitment to scandalous and offensive imagery. And then, after several paragraphs of general background, he presents his rich, contextualized conclusion.

Through their cartoons, comics and news articles, the journalists of Charlie Hebdo courageously carved out and defended a space for dissent from religious extremism and censorship. Their joyful mockery of religious dogmatism is viewed as insensitive at best, and even blasphemy, by some clerics and their followers, and, as we now know, by terrorist murderers.

The nuanced, scholarly conclusion is, in other words, exactly the same as the broad, knee-jerk, uninformed conclusion reached by large portions of Anglophone social media. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were free speech martyrs fighting against religious extremism. The only people who disagreed with their cartooning or editorial policies, were, in McKinney’s informed assessment, either “clerics” or their (blind? stupid?) followers, and terrorists.

“Scholarship on comics and cartoons can help us understand the meanings of Charlie Hebdo in important, vital ways that simply skimming over a few cover images from the magazine will never do. To the dead and the wounded, to the grieving survivors of those massacred, we owe at least this: a genuine attempt to understand what the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo did, and why,” McKinney declares in satisfaction. Fair enough; who can disagree with that? But his article is not such a genuine attempt. It analyzes no images. It discusses nothing in depth. Instead, it invokes the name of scholarship not in order to create more understanding, nor to perform a more subtle reading, but merely to lend the imprimatur of the academy to one side of a debate. There is no effort in McKinney’s piece to engage with French or Francophone critics of Charlie Hebdo, nor any effort to discuss the reasons why many French Muslims felt that the magazine targeted them. There is no recognition that there might be, not one context, but multiple contexts. There is no effort to think about the history of caricature and the history of racism, or to think about how intent and reception may diverge. McKinney’s piece is not scholarship. It is polemic.

I don’t have anything against polemic per se. It’s a venerable genre, and, like any aesthetic endeavor, can be done well or poorly. I find it troubling, though, that McKinney attempts to cloak his polemic in the mantle of academic rigor, and portrays those who disagrees with him as either ignorant or ill-intentioned. Poorly defended, entirely banal opinions are presented by McKinney as interesting and true simply because a comics scholar happened to put them forward.

Since McKinney urges context, I should say that the context of his own remarks is clear enough. At least since Frederic Wertham pointed out that comics were often racist, sexist, violent, and kind of crappy, the comics community has been exceedingly sensitive to any criticism that calls into question the moral or social content of cartooning. On top of that, comics have long been seen as childish, largely aesthetically worthless pulp crap; comics scholars have waged a long, difficult campaign to get them recognized as complex artistic expression, worthy of study. McKinney, then, is not really trying to add nuance to the Charlie Hebdo discussions, which is why he adds none. He is instead repeating (under the validating mantle of scholarship) the same arguments that comics has used for decades to defend itself against hostile critics. To wit, comics are complicated and moral, and if you disagree, you’re a Puritan thug and a fool.

The murderers of Charlie Hebdo prove that Puritan thugs (broadly defined) do in fact exist. However, this does not mean (contra McKinney and his supporters, educated and otherwise) that all those speaking out against Puritan thugs are beyond reproach. Nor does it place a seal forever upon the righteousness of comics creators or comics scholars. Is comics scholarship an academic field devoted to the understanding and discussion of comics, bringing a wide range of knowledge and approaches to a complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes flawed, sometimes undervalued, and perhaps sometimes overvalued medium? Or is comics scholarship to be devoted to boosterism, advocacy, and sacralization? If Charlie Hebdo’s accomplishment was to fight against all priesthoods, then surely it does them little honor to try to set up a priesthood in their name, handing down stern pronouncements about how their work must be read and understood. You can’t venerate blasphemy by venerating blasphemy. And comics scholarship, whatever its accomplishments and advantages, does itself no favors when it attempts to set itself up as an unquestionable authority in the name of free speech.
 

CH snow

A Year in the Merde

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Well, it’s been a long week. The hagiography has come and gone, the backlash has come and gone, balanced views have been proposed and interest is fading. What remains are protests in the Middle East against the caricature of the Prophet in Wednesday’s issue, and islamophobic violence in France (with one minor but heart-warming exception). One complicated answer that seems to remain, though, is “can an openly anti-racist magazine be racist at times, through carelessness and insensitivity ?” I am probably not in a position to say, but here is a look at one year of Charlie Hebdo covers.

52 pictures, then. From January 8th to december 31st 2014, Charlie Hebdo covered the news, with their now-(in)famous brand of vulgarity and cynicism. The hope is that, with a segment this size, we can investigate the techniques used to represent racial minorities, and especially the Muslim community. After all, they have been constantly under attack, haven’t they ?
 

OneYear

 
Well, not really. Out of these 52 covers, none is directly about Islam or the French Muslim community. In fact only one is about religion, it dates back to December and makes a joke about the far right trying to push Nativity Scenes in public buildings for Christmas. Eight, however, reference djihadism, but more on that later.

So what ARE the covers about, if they’re not about religion? Well top of the list, with eleven covers, is the Le Pen family, head of the far right party Front National. Clearly, they have been Charlie Hebdo’s most consistent targets over the years. The magazine has never stopped shedding light on their hypocrisy, racism and what they see as the self-hurting stupidity of their electorate (many of whom are very poor people who would suffer from the FN’s anti-welfare program). Second is president François Hollande who is also pictured eleven times, though often not as the main subject of the image. Then comes Prime Minister Manuel Valls and other members of his government, who total 8 covers. Former president Nicolas Sarkozy closes the top with seven covers. The rest are about current events, from plane crashes and ebola to Gerard Depardieu’s tax evasion and school reform. So what are we left with to assess the racism of Charlie Hebdo ? Mainly three groups: political figures who are not white, racial minorities among background characters, and the treatment of djihadism.
 
Political figures
 
Politicians

Left: Government reshuffle : they drop it all !
Right: Gender theory : should we cut Najat Belkacem’s balls ?

 
Only two non-white political figures appeared on the cover of Charlie Hebdo in 2014. Najat Belkacem and Christiane Taubira. Both are simple caricatures, without any racial stereotypes involved. But is the fact that only two non-white politicians are represented a sign of racism in itself? Since members of the government other than Prime Minister Valls only appear on three pictures, two is actually not that bad. And since their newsworthiness derives from being favorite targets of the right, their both being women and non-white says more about the French right than about Charlie Hebdo. Christiane Taubira, however, was the subject of a highly controversial cover back in 2013, so it’s probably worth looking into it.
 
Taubira, a radical leftist and former independentist from Guyana, is Hollande’s Justice Minister. As such, she was in charge, in 2013, of the bill that would open marriage rights to gay couples, which has made her the archenemy of the religious right. It doesn’t take long for the attacks to take on a racist “undertone”, culminating in a nauseating joke posted by a member of the Front National (FN) on her facebook page, showing two photos, one of a baby ape in a pink dress and one of Taubira, with the legend “At 18 months. Now.”

For years, Marine Le Pen, daughter of the infamous creator of the FN, has been working on her party’s image, superficially cutting ties with the most violent branches, and recentering her message on fighting the so-called islamification of France in the name of French secularism. At the heart of the rebranding is the use, on most of the communication, of the expression “Rassemblement Bleu Marine” (“Navy  Blue Union” or “Navy Blue Gathering”), instead of the FN name.
 
Taubira
 
When the scandal of the monkey joke broke, Charlie Hebdo immediately used it to point out that, despite all its rebranding efforts, the National Front was still at heart a violently racist movement, as they’d never stopped saying. Above the image of Taubira as an ape, they renamed the super-party “Racist Blue Gathering”. On the left, the red-white-blue flame of the FN served as a reminder that the ties with the movement’s past were far from cut.

Was the racist representation of the minister still a mistake, though ? Some time later, the far right magazine Minute created its own cover on Taubira. “Clever as a monkey, Taubira gets her banana back.” (“having the banana” or however one can translate it, is a French expression that means “to look happy”). When Minute was brought to justice for racial insult, and cited the Charlie Hebdo cover as a precedent, Charlie chief editor (and author of the cover) Charb responded : “[the difference is that] by repeatedly associating Ms. Taubira’s name with the words “banana” and “monkey”, the far right hopes to pass a racist slogan, a colonialist insult off as a popular joke.” It’s been pointed out that in a way, Charlie Hebdo’s image participates in the “repeated association”, and Charb’s explanation of the problem might be a sort of admittance of this. After all, as Charlie cartoonist Luz explained in this interview, in order to be able to push the envelope, the Charlie Hebdo staff has always allowed itself to make mistakes. There are laws in France against racial insult and pushing racial hatred. Unlike right-wing pundits who constantly turn their trials into publicity stunts and themselves into victims of political correctness, Charlie Hebdo has always accepted trials for racism as justice doing its work of sorting out whether they had gone too far this time or not. Which they were found to have, in a very few, but existing, cases.
 
Background characters
 
Background_characters

Left: French Suicide: they apply Zemmour’s book’s program
Middle:What do 25% of French voters want? A Joan of Ark who sends others to the fire
Right: Gestational surrogacy: it’s 2 parents. ‘And one slave…’”

 
Again, only three instances, but they do provide some controversial material. The most benign, by Cabu, shows Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen drilling holes in a small boat full of refugees. The people on the boat represent various origins, with some cultural and racial shorthand, but the general tone is one of empathy for the refugees. In the second one, interestingly also by Cabu, the “foreigner” (as his sign says) is represented in a manner much more reminiscent of openly racist caricature. The contrast with the previous image illustrates how Cabu uses racist imagery specifically to illustrate the racist nature of Le Pen’s program. “What do 25% of voters want?”, the legend asks. “A Joan of Ark who sends others to the fire.” The final image, by chief editor Charb, is by far the most shocking. The text explains the image, but doesn’t make it any easier to watch : “Gestational surrogacy : It’s 2 parents, 1 slave”. The subject is clear : is people renting other people’s bodies an ethical hazard? Still, the shock value of the image is unrivaled in 2014, even by the “Boko Haram sex slaves” cover. The reason it is so shocking, however, even to the casual Charlie reader, is because there’s only one like it.

In one of his twitter essays, Jeet Heer defined the risk of using racist imagery as satire. “I think what is true of Crumb is also true of Charlie Hebdo: the anti-racist intent of shocking images blunted & reversed by repetition.” The thing is, contrary to the impression given by small selections of the most offensive cartoons, such shocking images as the “2 parents, 1 slave” are not repeated at all. There is just a handful of really offensive material in a given year, and it’s not the same subject each time. They may value their irresponsibility, but they also know how to manage shock value.
 
Djihad : the great big joke

Here we are, then. The section where attacking extremists means attacking Islam, which means attacking Muslims, which means bullying minorities. First, let’s get rid of the ones that only mention djihadism to make jokes about Prime Minister Valls. That’s two.
 
Djihad1

Left: Government reshuffle : Should we show these images?
Right:French hostages : ‘I want a €50bn ransom’

Dominique Strauss Kahn holding a #BringBackOurGirls sign with a lecherous look, or the return of Nicolas Sarkozy compared to the threat posed by ISIS are also only incidentally about djihadism.
 
Djihad2

Left: Boko Haram : DSK expresses solidarity”
Right:The threat to France! Islamic State / Sarkozyk State”

 
A strange one is the Titeuf cover. School reforms have inspired to Luz a weird joke where the iconic haircut of the famous (in France) children’s comics character is used as an Islamist’s beard. It may reference child soldiers in war zones, or religion at school, but it’s most probably a purely visual, message-free joke. The second one also blends a favourite newspaper headline with terrorist imagery for a rather benign result.
 
Djihad3

Left: School reform : ‘Tomorrow, I have Djihad!’ ‘You’re lucky, I have maths!’”
Right: Those French chefs who find fame abroad”

 
And finally, there are the two covers of 2014 that have been featured in selections of racist Charlie covers. The first one is fairly straight-forward, and is only offensive as it features Mohammad. The joke itself is about how the djihadists have deformed His message so much they wouldn’t even recognize him if he came back today. Which seems far from islamophobic.
 
Djihad4

Left:If Mohammad came back: ‘I’m the Prophet, you moron!’ ‘Shut up, infidel!’
Right:Boko Haram’s sex slaves are angry: ‘don’t you touch our welfare!’

 
The second one is the hardest to explain to a foreign audience, because it features two specificities of the Charlie Hebdo humour that here blend awkwardly. The first is the conflagration of two pieces of news : the crimes of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the attacks on the welfare system in France. The second one is the use of racist imagery in pictures that denounce racism (as seen above with Cabu’s Joan of Ark cover). The French right (and the European right in general) often point the finger at immigrants to explain why the welfare system costs too much. It’s an easy rhetoric because everybody agrees that we spend too much on welfare, but nobody wants cuts to the help they themselves receive, so blaming the usual suspects is a popular choice. Therefore, as Terry Drinkwater summarized on Quora : “Fairly straightforward, innit?  The absurdity of raped and pregnant Boko Haram sex slaves acting out the welfare queen stereotype parodies the absurdity of the welfare queen stereotype.” What obviously didn’t help the cartoon to be understood as anything but racist is Riss’s rough and dirty style, which owes more to Reiser than to Cabu and Wollinsky. Little can be said about that, as it seems very much a matter of cultural taste. It does increase the insensitivity of the joke, though, admittedly.
 
Racism and Charlie Hebdo’s attacks on political Islam
A name that has been missing from most discussions is Zineb El Rhazoui. She certainly isn’t the only immigrant who has worked at Charlie Hebdo, from star cartoonist Riad Sattouf to their Kabyle copy editor Mustapha Ourrad, who was killed during the attack. She is however the magazine’s most virulent voice against political Islam. Looking again at the covers, here is a list of articles penned by El Rhazoui : “Tunisia, on the way to an atheist exodus”, “Morocco : the Islamists make the laws”, “Tunisia : quiet, the police is raping”, “Porn in Morocco : democratic transition through sex”, “When Muslims laugh at Islam”, “Mohammad, soon to be caricatured in Muslim countries?”…

Again, these are just a handful of articles among many that cover America, North Korea, Antisemitism in France, Islamophobia in Germany, etc. This list shouldn’t give the impression that Islam is the magazine’s favourite subject. As Luz, author of the “Charia Hebdo” and “All is forgiven” covers, explained a while back, “As atheists, it’s obvious that living in a traditionally catholic country, we’re going to attack Catholics more than Muslims, and the clergy more than God.” Similarly, Jul said : “It’s much easier to create violent cartoons about Christians, probably because we live in a Christian country. You can’t make fun of a minority religion the way you make fun of the majority one.”
 
Religion

Left: Private school : ‘If you’re nice to me… I’ll take you to the anti-gay protest!’
Right: God out of school : ‘So sick of parent-teacher meetings!’

 
As a leftist magazine, however, promoting the secularist fights for civil rights in the Muslim world is very much part of Charlie Hebdo’s mission. First, because they feel a connection to the minorities who fight theocratic tendencies in their countries. Unlike in the US, where civil rights were fought for by religious figures such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, in France they have always been fought for by secularists against the religious right. Just last year, the Catholic sphere organized an incredibly violent opposition to gay marriage, which inspired a flurry of Charlie Hebdo covers on Christianity and homosexuality (see the first image above). The second reason why secularists’ struggles in Muslim countries is an important subject is because it counters the “clash of civilization” narrative that the racist right is trying to impose in France. It is a way of showing that the real struggle does not oppose Christian and Muslim societies but rather civil liberties against theocratic instincts, in every society.

Zineb herself has explained as much in a long response to a Swiss newspaper which had accused Charlie Hebdo of racism back in 2011 (quoting articles she had written while not referencing her anywhere). What is racist, she proclaimed, is to consider that people in Muslim countries are somehow impervious to enlightenment. That holding Muslims to the same level of expectations as Western countries in terms of democracy is asking too much. Herself a civil rights activist who spent most of her life fighting the oligarchic and theocratic nature of the Moroccan monarchy, she certainly feels that the ostracized minority that fights for democratization in Arab and Middle-Eastern countries deserves more support than those who would try to have religion gain the same level of untouchability in France as it enjoys in more pious societies.

Zineb’s response is apparently only available in French, but Olivier Tonneau wrote a “Letter to my British Friends” that explains in length the French radical left’s position on Islam. Charb also wrote on the absurdity of giving religion too big a part in identifying members of French society: “I can’t stand people asking ‘moderate Muslims’ to express their disapproval of terrorism. There’s no such thing as ‘a moderate Muslim’, just citizens with a Muslim heritage, who fast during Ramadan like I celebrate Christmas. They do act: as citizens. They protest with us, vote against rightist idiots… It would be like asking me to respond ‘as a moderate catholic’ just because I was baptized. I’m not a moderate catholic. I’m not a catholic at all”. A statement in which a lot of religious people probably wouldn’t recognize themselves, but one that does explain a lot of Charlie Hebdo’s perceived insensitivity.

So… That’s it. Race – and religion – in Charlie Hebdo’s 2014 covers. It feels a little anti-climatic. Where are all the most offensive jokes? Naked Mohammad? The “Untouchables 2”? Well, they date back to 2013, 2012, and hide disseminated among hundreds of other pictures about DSK’s arrest in New York, Israel bombing Gaza and anti-semites reaping the benefits in France… More airplane crashes, more attacks on the Le Pens, a whole lot of penises and a whole lot of good and bad jokes. You can find them all here. And if you have a hard time finding the worst ones, well the truth is, they were also hard to find at the time. Because Charlie Hebdo, “a glorified zine” as Luz himself calls it, never had a large readership. And it’s perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about France and these cartoons : nobody ever gave a damn about them, unless they saw some political gain in having an opinion.

Lost in Translation

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We are halfway into the month of January, and already the year 2015 has unleashed unspeakable violence – whether we look to the horrific massacre of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, police officers, and Jewish hostages in Paris, France or to the unimaginable carnage that left 2,000 villagers dead in the northeastern region of Nigeria. Both attacks were fueled by radical Islamists, including the infamous Boko Haram, who kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls last year, an act that helped launch the widely popular #BringBackOurGirls hashtag on Twitter. Yet, international outrage has galvanized massive support for the Charlie Hebdo victims with a #JeSuisCharlie movement rising to protect freedom of speech and other beloved Western principles, while a lesser movement is struggling valiantly to promote #AfricanLivesMatter, politically connecting this sentiment to another popular hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.

While some may wish to de-racialize these narratives with the so-called colorblind #AllLivesMatter, the unequal attention to these world events simply reinforce that not all lives matter, least of all those who are not afforded the white privilege of the French journalists who were unjustly murdered – no matter what one may have thought about their questionable cartoons that seemed to racialize its French minority population of Muslims and people of color. Nonetheless, the memorialization of Charlie Hebdo reinforces how much more white lives are valued. That some took to Twitter to create #JeSuisAhmed, in memory of the Muslim police officer also killed in the attacks, is a gesture reminding us that the value of marginalized peoples is never taken for granted. As Noah Berlatsky noted, “Who is remembered and who is memorialized has everything to do with race, with class, with where you lived and who, in life, you were.”

Of course, we can rationalize inequalities in media coverage – why the “world” seems to care about France over Nigeria, or why English speakers are questioning whether or not the Charlie Hebdo cartoons are “racist” or not, or even if we should criticize murdered victims who can no longer speak for themselves. Perhaps the violence in Africa seems more “routine,” in comparison to what takes place in Europe, hence more focus on Paris. And perhaps English speakers are “misinterpreting” Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “racist” and “Islamaphobic” since we are not translating the French correctly. Yet, such reasons given seem to suggest an unequal flow of information, as if “African violence” and “Muslim irrationality” are the only acceptable explanations for why violence happens (and why we should care more about France than about Nigeria).

However, it is to these points that I want to take note of a particular cartoon featured in Charlie Hebdo, one that has drawn the most criticism for the publication’s racial politics. Here I refer to the cartoon depicting Boko Haram’s kidnapped girls in Nigeria.
 

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As French-speaking translators have informed us, the text reads: “Boko Haram’s sex slaves are angry,” while the visual depicts head-covered girls yelling “Don’t touch our welfare!” And as Max Fisher suggests, the cartoon functions on two layers: “What this cover actually says … is that the French political right is so monstrous when it comes to welfare for immigrants, that they want you [to] believe that even Nigerian migrants escaping Boko Haram sexual slavery are just here to steal welfare. Charlie Hebdo is actually lampooning the idea that Boko Haram sex slaves are welfare queens, not endorsing it.”

Such explanations may provide us with contexts and subtexts, but they are nonetheless steeped in apologia, conveniently overlooking the visually demeaning drawing of the girls or the racialized subtexts associated with African or Orientalist sexual savagery, coupled with a transnational narrative of black and immigrant women unfairly using the state’s resources (how interesting that conservatives here and abroad tend to speak the same racial language). Regardless of Charlie Hebdo’s own politics, the visual narrative recycles stereotypes and could easily be appropriated for white supremacist narratives.

Fisher juxtaposed this satire alongside another parody – the New Yorker’s satirical takedown of Republican fears of the Obamas’ “secret black nationalist Muslim” plans during the 2008 presidential campaign.
 

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Fisher then argued that “most Americans immediately recognized that the New Yorker was in fact satirizing Republican portrayals of the Obamas, and that the cover was lampooning rather than endorsing that portrayal.” This really highlights the problem of unspoken white privilege and power, as Fisher conveniently forgets that the New Yorker too came under attack – especially from communities of color who saw in the satire a failed use of racial imagery to poke fun at racism.

Why is it that the black or brown body becomes the vehicle for racial humor when the objects of ridicule – the white people presumably targeted for their racial bigotry – remain invisible in these satirical narratives? When recycling racial stereotypes – which both The New Yorker and Charlie Hebdo have done – do linguistic texts and subtexts hold the same equal power as the visual text, which holds heavier historical weight? Not all members of society (specifically communities of color who continue to feel their marginality in various social institutions) read these visual narratives in the same way. After all, if even in the U.S. certain Americans didn’t find the New Yorker cover funny – though we speak the same language and have access to the same cultural and political frames of reference – then what gets “lost in translation” when exposed to other local texts, contexts, and subtexts? Whose voices remain silent?

I specifically think of this when considering the actual creation of the Charlie Hebdo Boko Haram cartoon. I have a difficult time imagining a black woman cartoonist of any nationality – French, British, American, Nigerian – creating such a cartoon in jest. I also have a hard time seeing such a woman hired by the staff at Charlie Hebdo, and even if she were and found the courage – as the sole “token” black woman at the paper – to speak up to her colleagues and say, “Hey guys, this cartoon isn’t funny, and here’s why,” would her white male colleagues let her speak? Would they hear what she had to say? Would they drown her out with their insistence on “free speech” and “the right to offend,” or would they sincerely listen to suggestions on how their takedown of French political right racism could be, you know, clever (as racial stereotypes never are) and how the offense could be more effective in a “punch up” or “punch across” rather than “punch down” kind of way?

And therein lies the problem: the unequal flow of perspectives and unequal participation. Whether we point to white conservativism or white liberalism, these narratives hold cultural weight, even those that insist – because they may be on the “right” side of antiracism politics – that they could never get their racial politics wrong, even when they don’t interrogate the ways that they may hold or perpetuate racial privilege and power. The views of others remain in the margins, including our pain and suffering.

Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover features the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with a single tear rolling down his cheek as the text reads “All if forgiven”; the satire is quite apt and heartfelt and, most importantly, captures a kernel of truth in the moment.
 

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On the other hand, the Arab stereotyping of the prophet distorts truth and has reconstituted him as a French creation of the cartoonists’ own making, no longer connected to the religion or culture that prompted their satire in the first place. That is the nature of stereotypes, which have the effect of erasing altogether the very peoples and cultures they were intended to represent.

In closing I want to return to the scene of Nigeria, in particular Boko Haram’s alleged use of a ten-year-old girl to carry out a suicide-bombing attack. I can’t help but think this is the most cynical ploy and a deadly play on satire. What else is Boko Haram expressing but their utter contempt for and mockery of the West’s “Bring Back Our Girls” movement? They implicitly know that our rhetorics are empty and our raced and gendered messages constantly show our disregard for women and girls of color. They know that black girls’ bodies will only serve as mere objects of parodic visuals or Twitter hashtags without any real actions demonstrating that their lives matter. Somehow, these global understandings of whose lives matter don’t get lost in translation.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

“Punching down” versus “sinking to their level:” why choose?

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Everyone seems to love “On Satire,” Joe Sacco’s cartoon for the Guardian responding to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but some may not. Some may detest “On Satire” because the cartoon was reverent toward the victims. They may think Charlie Hebdo‘s Muhammad cartoons justified the attack, or were straightforwardly racist. On the other hand, some may detest Sacco’s cartoon because it portrays a mob chasing Muslims. Knowing that he made an earlier ethnographic comic about Palestine, they may suspect Sacco of trying to distract viewers from the real business of condemning Islam wholesale, stepping up drone attacks, and leveling Gaza.

For my part, however, I detest it for being so thoroughly middle-of-the-road and ambivalent even as it affects a seemingly bold, seemingly nuanced stance on an subject that is not simply abstract “issues,” but a messy, bloody conflict with a long history. Allow me a condensed close reading.
 

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First panel: Oh, Joe Sacco is passionate to be sure, but he is not hotheaded! He is sincere and reverent, and looks good in a loincloth.

Second panel: Pens made into crosses, how very poignant, yet so visually klunky. Hey, you know who kills lots of journalists? The U.S. But their victims mostly aren’t Christian, so you’d have to figure out how to make a laptop into a crescent and star, so never mind. And there were Muslim Charlie Hebdo victims too, but whatever.

Third panel: Walks away still musing metonymically on “the pen.” If only it were a clever reference to Le Pen, but it isn’t.

Fourth panel: Black man falling out of a tree with a banana but no loincloth, with a big branch suggestively hiding his indubitably endowed groin, equals not racist because aware of its racism! Why don’t you just burn one of those pen-crosses on his lawn? Oh, because he lives in a tree. Ooo, Joe Sacco is such a firebrand, I can’t wait to see an anthropomorphized Koran going down on a pig!

Fifth panel: “The More You Know,” the less you worry about offending Israel. France actually has laws on the books prohibiting hate speech, and it has recently used those laws to shut down anti-Semitic Twitter users. Now hundreds of French troops are deployed protecting Jewish sites. Where are the troops protecting Muslims? Why don’t you look THAT up?

Sixth panel: The professor plods on- remember anti-Semitism? Subtext: perhaps Muslims are anti-Semitic, perhaps? And by the way, what is this about the evil Jew preying on the “working class?” Stalin was a genocidal anti-Semite, but in the West the conflation of Jews and Communists should be so familiar as to be unworthy of mention. Get your hate straight. And of COURSE anti-Semitism matters in 2015, just like in 1933- France has had dozens of hate attacks against Jews in the last few years.

Seventh panel: More rambling prattle, but I’m getting distracted by Sacco’s face– are those eggs with eyelashes strapped to his head?

Eighth panel: Again, so brave! Martyred for his bold stance on reasoned meandering ambivalent equivocation. “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is…” So mature, so stoic, so profoundly deserving of the royal “we.” Sure talks a lot for a guy with a severed larynx.

Ninth panel: Abu-Ghraib Joe sez, “What is it about Muslims?” Wait, what is what about who? Who tortured who again? Traumatized prisoners say the darnedest things!

Last panel: Oh, I get it! “Drive them from their homes,” sort of like Israel right? He is part of an angry mob now– Israeli settlers? the IDF? Right-wing European nationalists? Well, there’s no hilarious stereotype to explicate that tragic-ish image- you just figure out that the woman being chased has a headscarf, the guy being chased has a beard and a taqiyah, and there’s Joe Sacco looking tough and angry again, this time holding a club while ironically continuing to mouth reasoned platitudes. But wouldn’t “sorting out how we fit in each others’ world” be illustrated better by the Prophet getting a back-door fist-bump from Gene Simmons of KISS—a Jew who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck who he offends?

But seriously, did Sacco say, “What is it about Muslims?” Not “some Muslims,” not “jihadi Muslims” or “fundamentalist Muslims” or whatever, but “Muslims in this time and place” (so qualified, yet so totalizing). The issue here is all about context. Explicit context: the jungle Negro and the hook-nosed moneylender are inoffensive because we are told not to be offended. Implicit context: the reader is not a Muslim, and can relate to crosses and complaints about those Muslims nowadays. Ignored context: radicalized Muslims are responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare. Arbitrary murder is answered by arbitrary murder.

And there is no reason to think that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were unaware of the threats made to the lives of American cartoonists drawing the Prophet, as well as of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoon (which the CH staff can be seen discussing on video). They absolutely deserved to draw their cartoons and not lose their lives, BUT what if they deliberately took a risk based on principle? What if they chose a stance that put them in the line of fire? Is that foolish or brave? Are they martyrs or casualties of war? Don’t ask Joe Sacco.

Writing in Slate on French secularism, or laïcité, Rachel Levy points out that in French public schools, “Muslim girls can’t wear their veils, Jewish boys can’t wear their kippot, and Christians can’t draw attention to their crosses.” As a country that has always had religious fanatics and never, despite strenuous fantasizing, a substantial monoculture, Americans don’t readily identify with a political stance that curtails expression of personal beliefs. And yet, America has the enormously successful Family Guy, a show that I think tops South Park, Ed The Happy Clown, Angry Youth Comix, or any Ralph Bakshi movie for unfettered omnidirectional contempt and bile. In France, culture is taken seriously enough to enforce bans on clothing, whereas in the U.S., to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, culture is what people believe in without taking it seriously.

This is where I come from in trying to explain my repulsion at Sacco’s nonspecific sanctimony. France embraced African-American expatriates, but seems committed to marginalization of religious minorities. America elected a black President, but also keeps imprisoning black men, or just executing them in the street, or in Wal-Mart (maybe they all just fell out of trees?). Plus Americans can’t make art about serious ethical issues without being mealy-mouthed and pompous, unless it’s just a TV show and is thus divorced from any larger meaning. Saudi Arabia, from which the Charlie Hebdo attacks (like the 9/11 attacks) may have been planned, is the country with the most repressive Islamist regime in the world, and is also our key Arab ally. These three seemingly distinct places share one philosophy: money talks. And if all you have to offer by way of protest are overexplained, hyperqualified, utterly trite faux-provocations, that bullshit walks.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Charlie Hebdo Is Not To Blame

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In the wake of the tragedies that have occurred in Paris over the last few days a number of commentators, some traditionally left-leaning and some more obviously right-wing, have suggested that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the climate of extremism that led to these attacks. The arguments often take the form of a double assertion: first, that the cartoons in question were flagrant or “unnecessary” violations of the Muslim prohibition against images of the Prophet; and second, that these violations were motivated by Islamophobia and racism. The conclusion, merely implicit in some commentaries and more explicit in others, is that because the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were also racist bullies they bear a degree of culpability for what happened; consequently, they also make poor martyrs for either the profession of satirical cartooning or the right to free speech.
 

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The cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo.

There are several problems with this argument, however. Most troublingly, to imply that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the radicalization of Muslims by repeatedly violating an important tenet of Islam reduces the wide range of Muslim opinions on this specific issue to the extreme position held by the terrorists themselves. To take up this position is to fail to understand that the so-called “prohibition against images of the prophet” is actually already a radical interpretation of Islamic doctrine. No such prohibition exists in The Qu’ran. In fact, significant numbers of Muslims do not hold to this supposed prohibition, and even among those who do, interpretations of the precise meaning and purpose of the relevant phrases in the hadith literature are diverse. (On this topic, see here.

But there are other reasons for resisting the argument that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were somehow responsible for creating the climate of extremism that led to this incident. The more I learn about the work at Charlie Hebdo (and I admit I have more research to do in this regard), the more I am convinced that this implication is unjust and unfair.

I am a British-born academic who has lived in the United States for over two decades; I am largely ignorant of contemporary French culture, and I confess I am only now becoming even superficially familiar with Charlie Hebdo (just like most of us, I suspect). But from what I have been able to ascertain in my preliminary investigations, while the cartoonists at the magazine were commenting satirically upon religious extremism, they were not creating it. The extremism was already there. They were calling it out — perhaps in a foolhardy way, perhaps courageously, and with varying degrees of mean and clever wit — but they were reacting to something that was already present in the culture, and that was being fostered by even more negative, reactionary, and ill-intentioned forces based outside France. (Indeed, no matter what one thinks of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, any role they could have played in radicalizing these particular terrorists is surely outweighed by Said Kouachi’s months of training in Yemen under a branch of Al Qaeda.)

Nor does it seem correct to accuse the editors at Charlie Hebdo of racism, as some have done. Experts who are better informed than me with regard to the history and culture of French comics (the brilliant Bart Beaty, for example) tell me that, on the contrary, the editorial position of the magazine was consistently anti-racist. This is not to say that a case against individual cartoons could never be made; caricature is an art-form built on principles of exaggeration and abstraction, and the point at which the visual “shorthand” of the cartoonist becomes a stereotyping technique cannot be fixed, but will vary from situation to situation and viewer to viewer. Nevertheless, any such case would have to be made within the larger anti-racist intentional context of the magazine, and nuanced accordingly. I’ve yet to read such context-sensitive work; it is not a feature of those denunciations of Hebdo as “racist” that I have seen. Nor does there appear to be any evidence that the editors at the magazine regarded the Muslim community in general with hostility. In fact, there appears to have been at least one person of Muslim heritage on the staff at Charlie Hebdo who was killed in the attacks: Mustapha Ourrad, a proofreader.

Yes, Charlie Hebdo published work that was profoundly hostile towards religious extremists within Islam; it was similarly hostile towards other religious authoritarians, too (which is probably why rightwing Catholics like Bill Donahue have been willing to suggest that the cartoonists were essentially asking for it). Indeed, the general stance of the magazine appears to have been one of gleeful contempt for religious and political hypocrites of all stripes. Certainly, the boost that explicitly racist politicos like Le Penn are currently seeing in the French polls in the wake of these events would have horrified Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier, a life-long left wing activist who was (according to the New York Times) raised in a family of French communists. In fact, I think Charb would be commissioning some bitterly ironic anti-fascist cartoons in the wake of the current xenophobic rightwing groundswell — if only he were here to do so.

In other words, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo seem to have been exactly what you might expect satirical cartoonists in the French tradition to be: mockers of pomposity and demagoguery of all kinds.

I think I understand the motivations of at least some of the critics of Charlie Hebdo, even if I do not agree with their assessment of the magazine. They are concerned, rightly, that Muslims of good will should not be held responsible for these crimes or bullied into silence; and they are concerned, rightly, that ongoing incidences of the victimization of Muslims in France, Britain, America, Palestine, and elsewhere should not be overlooked or worse yet, justified, in the wake of this outrage. And they are right because at a time like this it is obviously very important that Muslim voices (in particular) are heard, in all their diversity. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary that Muslims of good will should be welcomed to the table, so that we can repudiate vile, greedy fools like Rupert Murdoch when they spew their poison and ignorance into the world.

But surely it must be possible to include Muslim perspectives on this kind of violence without accusing the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo of political insensitivity (a criticism that seems to misunderstand the very point and purpose of satire), let alone deliberate racism (a charge that thus far appears to me unjustified)? Instead, and perhaps more productively, we could chose to emphasize that a man of Muslim heritage worked and died alongside the cartoonists at the magazine; that another Muslim man, a police officer named Ahmed Merabet, died defending the cartoonists at the magazine; and that yet another Muslim man, Lassana Bathily, saved several hostages from another terrorist at a Kosher grocery the next day. If we keep reminding people that members of the Muslim community were victimized here, and others also acted heroically, that will go some way towards making the reactions of people like Murdoch seem absurd, and make productive dialogue between social groups more possible.

In sum, and while there is no doubt much more that could be said, I think the suggestion that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are in any significant way culpable for the climate of extremism that led to these tragic events is unfair not only to those cartoonists but also to the many members of the Muslim community who would never in a million years respond to a cartoon — however offensive they deemed it — with a bullet. It also just puts the cart before the horse. After all, if a right wing Christian were to shoot Andreas Serrano for making “Piss Christ” I would not repudiate blasphemous artists for unnecessarily provoking radical Christians; instead I would ask what forces were at work to make some Christians feel that murdering artist-provocateurs was a necessary and acceptable defense of their faith. I wouldn’t think the act was somehow the responsibility of Christians everywhere, but neither would I blame Serrano himself — for all that “Piss Christ” is more readily legible as a desecration of a religious icon than any of the cartoons at Charlie Hebdo I’ve seen. (And I am aware that Serrano himself declares the work to be devotional.)

I write these remarks in the hope that they will be interpreted not as an attack upon those with whom I disagree, but in what I hold to be a spirit of fairness both to the dead and to the living, of all faiths and of none.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Outside Charlie Hebdo

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I’m really appreciative to all the Francophones on various sites who have taken the time to put Charlie Hebdo’s work in a rich cultural context, opening up the magazine’s visual aesthetic and clarifying their editorial and political vantage point with more nuance than most of our mainstream Anglophone sources. These people’s willingness to do the tedious work of translating image after image, kindly and with probably strained patience, has elevated a very stark conversation into a vastly more nuanced one.

Here we have a convergence of so many issues that compel our culture to debate: free speech, extremism, faith and fascism, violence, humor, bullying, mockery, racism, sexism, and art. And yet so many opinions seem to fall broadly into one of just two camps – the ones that just outright call CH racist, and the ones that cloak it in the venerable mantle of satire.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a long discussion with me on the subject of satire knows that I really just, generally, don’t find any aesthetic pleasure and only very limited intellectual pleasure in satirical work. Even when it’s very well done, it is a mode of discourse that relies on a spectrum ranging from discomfort to derision, and my response is almost always to turn away on purely emotional grounds. I’ve been very open about this opinion; it’s not new this week. It’s made me feel very awkward about adopting the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag, because I wouldn’t have said something like that before last Wednesday’s events. The hashtag makes the magazine a metonym for all the people killed – even the Muslim policeman. I respond strongly and decisively to those who were killed and wounded as people, with voices and rights and subjectivity. But I respond to the magazine and the cartoons with ambivalence – because even though I tend to agree with the politics, the aesthetics are beyond me.

Probably for that reason, my reactions are not substantially mitigated by actually understanding the satire, although it helps. The logic of Charlie Hebdo’s satire is certainly much clearer to me now that so many people have spoken patiently and eloquently to clarify it. In particular, the cover depicting the sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens appears much smarter and more complex when interpreted as “why do you care so much about these threatened and disadvantaged girls, but not about the threatened and disadvantaged girls right on your doorstep?” I am convinced that much of the work is indeed more complicated — and certainly contextually rich – than appears at first glance to readers who do not inhabit the immediate cultural context. These are political cartoons, and politics is always contextual.
 

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But I don’t think there’s any amount of context that will make me find that cartoon less viscerally off-putting. It’s just so ugly to represent those girls that way. The explanation makes sense, but it doesn’t change my aesthetic reaction. It doesn’t feel ok to use their horrifying experiences, even for some noble cause. The complicated reading makes my reactions more complicated too, but it doesn’t make the negative reaction go away.

And even if the explanation did actually make me like that one, not all the cartoons yield to complicated readings. Some of the work really does seem to be simply calling a stupid fig a stupid fig, nothing more than making a wrongheaded idea look sickly and unappealing by shining a puce limelight on it. Basically an intensified form of caricature, It’s a tactic embraced by a lot of contemporary satire. It’s popular – a lot of people really do like it. But I’m not one of them. I’m not sure that type of satire, whether it occurs relatively gently on the Daily Show or with poison incisors at Charlie Hebdo, is anything more than vulgar mockery – even if it’s not racist, sexist, imperialist or otherwise. I’m not convinced it’s a meaningful way to deal with stupidity and wrongheadedness – at least, it doesn’t really seem to be trying to change the wrongheadedness so much as it seems like gallows humor for people who see no possibility of change. It doesn’t recast the stupid thing in a way that raises questions and doubts among the community that believes it or even tolerates it; it doesn’t get inside the heads of the people who think the wrongheaded thing and challenge their motivation or logic; it just puts people on the defensive. The target doesn’t feel outsmarted; they just feel disrespected.

In what way does that serve a positive end or increase our overall intelligence? Doesn’t satire need to be effective at challenging and destabilizing stupid beliefs if it is intended to have political power? If it only reaches people who don’t hold the belief, isn’t it just mockery? Mockery just ends up creating a group identity among the people who collectively believe the stupid thing is stupid. I think that may be why people react so negatively to this kind of imagery – even if it doesn’t actually qualify as racist (and I will refrain from an opinion on that in this particular context that is not my context), it does alienate and separate, working against solidarity rather than increasing it.

So faced with the difficulty of feeling intense compassion and so much horror at Wednesday’s events, yet not quite feeling the identification with Charlie Hebdo that the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag implies, I am left with an intellectual’s inward-looking response, trying to explain to myself why it just doesn’t feel quite honest to use the tag. I know I am not Charlie Hebdo’s target audience. I struggle to appreciate satire even when it’s really obviously well done. I am stopped by the tone and the feel of the work. I cannot spend enough time with it to understand. But that means the nuances of my emotional and aesthetic responses to this kind of work are largely inaccessible to me – I can intellectually see why much of this work is satire, but I can’t experience it as anything other than raw and ugly and mean and sad.

Again, I am indebted to conversations that catch me up in ways I can’t do myself. In response to the original version of this comment on Facebook, a friend made a comment that struck me as important – “who are outsiders to presume to ‘cast doubt’ on someone else’s beliefs?” Outsiders don’t speak from a place of profound understanding. An outsider’s satire doesn’t know; it just knows better. And when I tried to think of satire that I like better than most, I noticed that Stephen Colbert and Jonathan Swift both rely very heavily on the first person, which is a way of “inhabiting” the person and ideas being satirized. I think the first person is a little sop to people like me, who are put off by how much emotional and critical separation is necessary to make satire work.

This is, perhaps, what makes Charlie Hebdo’s Boko Haram “welfare queen” cartoon so particularly hard for me. What am I supposed to do with the empathy and sadness I feel for the kidnapped girls? Just transfer it over to the welfare moms – as if empathy is generic and disconnected from each group of women’s real stories? The pregnant bodies in the cartoon are named as the “sex slaves of Boko Haram,” the cartoon asserts that they are speaking. But it’s not their voice and their story and their point of view – it’s the voice of the “welfare queens.” The reality of those girls being forced into sexual slavery is alluded to through the pregnancy, but it’s sidestepped and displaced into the significantly different resonance that pregnancy carries in discussions of welfare and indigence. Any identification with anybody here is uncomfortable and unsatisfying – to “get the joke”, to see how smart it is, everybody must be kept at emotional arms’ length.

Clearly I’m just not supposed to react to it this way. Is it even possible to simultaneously satirize and empathize? I don’t know that it is – it is certainly easier to avoid satire altogether than to find the hypothetical example that succeeds at this. And first-person does get very complicated very fast when the subject being satirized is “other” from the satirist in some palpable way – like race or ethnicity or religion. You bang quickly up against issues of authenticity.

And yet – I’m not typically much for authenticity so I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either. Surely it cannot be impossible to satirize someone different from you. That’s why I initially went with the “getting inside someone’s head” – surely the greatest satirists understand their subjects in some profoundly incisive way, not just knowing that they are wrong, but comprehending why they believe they are right.

Perhaps in all of this, I am just missing human nature. It is not human nature to inhabit the minds of people whose beliefs are anathema to us. And surely satire cannot be truly politically effective if it discounts human nature. So all this has brought me back to again concluding that I just don’t like satire, or appreciate it, or enjoy it.

I suppose it has to be said, in all of this, that the use of violence against speech is never anything other than brutal totalitarianism, regardless of the speech and regardless of the violence. But I think about mockery and judgment and how destructive and alienating they are. And I want to be able to understand what distinguishes, on one end of a spectrum, the great artistic and political tradition of satire from, on the other end, plain old bullies mocking people and ideas they don’t like because it makes them feel superior. Understanding is not as easy, I think, as I would like. Satire traffics in mockery and judgment, and the world already has too much of those things and too little connection and justice. I cannot be Charlie, because I am an outsider, and I do not understand. But perhaps I can be Charlie, since by their own logic, being an outsider is good enough.
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