Facing armies with art

A MAN lies prone on the ground, his hands tied with a rope made from his own umbilical cord.

An image of someone restrained and humiliated by what once nourished him has obvious resonances with the Palestinians' struggle for land and independence.

In this 60th anniversary year of Israel's foundation or, for Palestinians, the year of the Nakba or catastrophe, this exhibition of cartoons by Naji al-Ali is timely.

But it is also poignant, given the artist's fate and the continuing conflict and suffering in the Middle East.

Al-Ali was born in 1936 in Al-Shajara, a village in Galilee. Losing his home and country at the age of 11, he became a refugee child in the camps of southern Lebanon.

His first cartoons were drawn on walls - the walls of the camp and later the walls of his cell when he was imprisoned for a time by the Lebanese intelligence services, which were attempting to control political activism in the camps.

Eventually, al-Ali began to work for Al-Safir newspaper in Beirut where he "faced armies with cartoons."

Most of the original cartoons in this current exhibition at the Political Cartoon Gallery date from the early to mid-1980s, when al-Ali was working for the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas.

They are all highly critical of Israel, the US and Arab governments and, as a result of his political stance, al-Ali was forced to leave the Middle East for London, the city which turned out to be his last place of exile and the site of his murder in the summer of 1987.

Al-Ali's iconic cartoon creation is Hanthala, a small boy aged about 10, dressed in shabby, patched clothes with spiky hair standing out like a halo around his head. Hanthala means "bitter desert fruit" and, in many of these cartoons, he is witness to bitter scenes of conflict, suffering and betrayal.

Usually standing with his back to the viewer and with his hands clasped behind him, Hanthala adopts a pose that could indicate either judgement or captivity - or perhaps both. His strength is his ability to witness, his gaze a defence against oblivion.

Speaking to Dr Radwa Ashour in 1984, al-Ali described Hanthala as "the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily toward Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms but in its humanitarian sense - the symbol of a just cause."

During his peripatetic life, al-Ali developed a strong, graphic style, heightened by the use of symbols such as stars, crosses and crescents which appear again and again, representing not only identity but sometimes the very land itself, as in a drawing of Palestinian peasants ploughing earth which is fissured with cracks in the shape of the Star of David.

The symbols act as a form of shorthand, a way of distilling al-Ali's sprawling experiences of war and exile. It is easy to imagine these pictures bursting out of a refugee's suitcase.

One of the most memorable and telling symbols favoured by al-Ali is the key, a motif now indelibly associated with those Palestinian refugees who took the keys to their houses with them when forced to leave their homes in 1948.

In one drawing, a beautiful woman, probably too young to have been born in 1948, has tied a key to a lock of her hair and is crying, her tears turning into holes for the key.

This key motif recurs in a different context in an image of a US soldier parachuting into the Middle East, his legs transformed into a pair of keys. Whether these keys will fit any of the myriad holes in the ground beneath the soldier and what they will unlock if they do is open to question.

Looking at these cartoons, all of them over 20 years old, the viewer is struck by the continuing relevance of many of their themes. The influence of oil on the Middle East's economy and politics is graphically depicted in a cartoon where Hanthala, abandoning his stance as a witness, joins in with the Muslim pilgrimage ritual of stoning Satan.

Satan, usually represented by a pile of rocks, has become an oil drum marked "Devil No. 1."

Al-Ali's frustration with the Arab leadership and what he sees as their unwillingness to confront Israeli actions such as land confiscation is expressed in the evolution, or maybe regression, of a legion of shapeless, legless figures, an amphorous mass sinking in their own incompetence and corruption.

Occasionally, one of these leaders dons military fatigues and claims a success, as in the cartoon which shows Hanthala watching an Israeli soldier building a wall. One of the wall's stones has been replaced with a TV set, broadcasting the leader's triumphant speech. He waves his hand in a victory sign, his lies and delusion just as much a trap and a prison as the wall.

Running alongside the speeches and choreographed actions of the leadership is the parallel reality of life and death in the Palestinian refugee camps, a reality which gripped al-Ali's imagination and defined his beliefs, whether he was in Lebanon, Kuwait or London.

Anticipating the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, a cartoon published back in March 1984 shows a woman dressed in a traditional embroidered Palestinian dress gathering stones to throw at Israeli soldiers and Arab leaders.

A year later, a woman stands by "the martyr," an inscribed gravestone, a net of flowers falling from her dress to cover the earth like a floral shroud.

Despite their sombre subject matter, many of these cartoons seem to exude a defiant optimism. A bird pecks at a scaffold to bring down the hangman's noose and al-Ali's pencil takes on a life of its own and draws a field of Palestinian daisies, a flowering of all the land, not just the graveyards.

When Illias Nasrallah, a publisher and close friend of al-Ali's, opened this exhibition, he spoke of the artist's determination and his refusal to despair or stop working, even though he was receiving telephoned death threats.

Only days before he was shot in the head outside Al-Qabas's London office, al-Ali held a garden party at his house and discussed with Nasrallah the possibility of producing a book of his cartoons.

Susan Sontag, writing about Victor Serge, the great Russian writer and political activist, described him as living a life "determined by history rather than psychology, public rather than private crises."

This description could equally be applied to Naji al-Ali. Perhaps no other sort of life could have produced these vivid, haunting images.

Naji Al-Ali's cartoons are on display until April 19. More information available at www.politicalcartoon.co.uk