Naji al-Ali grew up in the
Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in the south Lebanese city
of Sidon, where his gift for drawing was discovered by the
Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani in the late 1950s. Early the
following decade he left for Kuwait, embarking on a thirty-year
career that would see his cartoons published daily in newspapers from
Cairo to Beirut, London to Paris.
Resolutely
independent and unaligned to any political party, Naji al-Ali strove
to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people; the pointed satire of
his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. Through
his most celebrated creation, the witness-child Handala, al-Ali
criticized the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and
corruption of the regimes in the region, and the suffering of the
Palestinian people, earning him many powerful enemies and the
soubriquet “the Palestinian Malcolm X.”
For
the first time in book form, A Child in Palestine presents the work
of one of the Arab world’s greatest cartoonists, revered throughout
the region for his outspokenness, honesty and humanity.
“That
was when the character Handala was born. The young, barefoot Handala
was a symbol of my childhood. He was the age I was when I had left
Palestine and, in a sense, I am still that age today and I feel that
I can recall and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every
tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine. The character of
Handala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling
whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was
like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention
and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass,
pointing steadily towards Palestine. Not just Palestine in
geographical terms, but Palestine in its humanitarian sense—the
symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or
South Africa.”—Naji al-Ali, in conversation with Radwa Ashour