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
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