This is the ďŹ rst time I am asked to talk publicly about my own work. It is diďŹƒcult for me because I believe that an artist's work should speak for itself, and that if he or she has to explain it by other means then he or she has failed somehow. At the same time, I am also a researcher, and I do try to understand and explain the work of others through analysis, so I have to try and reconcile these two approaches.
Most of the time, my creative process is mainly unconscious. It may start with an "involuntary" idea or doodle, and from it a story emerges as I am drawing it. I do not think about it, or question it while drawing. It is only when the work is finished, sometimes months later, that I realize what it means, as if I was looking at the work of someone else, but from a privileged, insider point of view. That was the case for this short comic, «La plage»: I had no intention of making a comic. I drew the female character, then the male character, then I wanted to confront the two, and even then, while I partitioned the page, I didn't know what would happen next.
http://cawa-bel-cawcaw.over-blog.com/article-la-plage-103648421.html
The same thing happened for this story, «Epines». It started with a drawing of a spiky woman sleeping in a flowerpot. I liked the idea and later I drew this in a café. Again, I didn't know what the end would be like. Although, for an Algerian, it is natural the idea of eating it would occur: we have a fruit called "Barbary fig", which grows on a cactus plant. It has spikes and you have to peel it very carefully, otherwise you hurt yourself - and you have to keep that in mind when you think about the story. http://cawa-bel-cawcaw.over-blog.com/article-epines-103650454.html
For this one, «Avec des si», the creative process was a little different. With a group of comic artists friends, we decided to create a collective blog, "12 tours", where each month we would publish comics: each month, we would choose a simple word as a theme, and each of us would make an illustration or a short comic about it. The first theme was "bottle", and it could be understood either in French or Arabic. Here are a few examples: The word bottle could lead to alcohol, bottling things up, molotov cocktails, etc... I did a few interpretations, [Champagne, Berceuse, Avide], then I thought about the French expression: "Avec des si, on mettrait Paris en bouteille", which translates into "With if, you could put Paris in a bottle", and I thought of what it would mean to put someone in a bottle. Starting with this idea, I drew the whole story, an image after the other. http://cawa-bel-cawcaw.over-blog.com/article-avec-des-si-103649366.html http://12tours.over-blog.com/
Like I said, it is only much later afterwards that I question what I did, what it means, what were the underlying ideas. Sometimes I even discover things I disagree with. Weeks after I did Epines, I realized that I made two stories showing very small women confronted with much bigger men. And I also remembered one of the first stories I invented while I was in high school but which I never finished drawing. It was about a man finding some kind of winged elf-like creature. He cuts off its wings and locks it in a box, from fear it would escape. The creature, inevitably, dies. It wasn't supposed to live for more than a sunny season anyway. That makes it three stories with small women in the grip of bigger men. It was distressing for me, because it said something about feeling fragile and vulnerable, especially in relation to men. While I never thought of myself this way. Indeed, I firmly believe women are equal to men, and I have always been surrounded by strong and independent women.
I do not like to call myself a feminist: Since I consider men and women to be equal (except in strictly physical terms), I dislike to define women in function of their sex. To put it another way, for me, a woman is only a woman in specific situations, otherwise she's just another human being. That is why I dislike the term "feminist". I believe one should be a "humanist". Whether one cares for injustices done to women, or children, or minorities, one should do so because, as human beings, they deserve equal treatment, not because they belong to this or that category. And here I am. Drawing little helpless women. I kind of hate myself when I do that.
I resent it somewhat when people automatically assume that my stories are about "the feminine condition". My answer is that I drew stories about people. Doing this, my protagonist could be either male or female. And frankly, I put as much of myself in the male characters as in the female ones: I am also the one that wants to imprison and consume the one I love. In the beach story, if a part of me is the big, buoyant and carefree woman who gets taken away by a big black bird, which may be time or death or something else, I am also the depressing, withered old man that stays alone. I feel resentful because there is an injustice in the world of artistic creation: if a main character is male, everybody can feel free to identify with him, as a human. Whereas if it is female (especially if the author is too), it is usually dismissed as a symbol of feminine condition, with which women alone can identify with.
At the same time, I acknowledge that I chose, consciously or not, to "oversexualize" these characters. They are far from androgynous, and they are often naked. It is exactly as if I voluntarily draw attention to their sex. I could draw a male character if I wanted readers to understand that I am talking about humans in general. I do not want to feel forced to do that, I should be free to choose either sex. But the representation of gender is very strong in our minds. It will not let itself be ignored. And after all, all this is my consciousness talking. Maybe, deep down, I do want to talk about women. Art is not really about solving dilemmas.
And finally, I do not believe I drew these women as victims. My spiky character, for instance, I see as curious and adventurous. the story starts with her getting out of her flowerpot, eager to explore the unknown and take risks. She's the one who decides to get rid of her protective layers. And who's to say she didn't enjoy being consumed? Not me. In the same way, I never meant to describe the man as a victimizer. Looking at the way I drew him, I realize that, by making him so big, and representing only the parts of him that are "active", the hands and the mouth, he is depicted less as a character and more as a natural phenomenon, or an occurrence, an act of caressing, and an act of eating. From my point of view, this is far from a moralizing story, on the lines of "see what will happen to you if you don't take care", a kind of reinterpretation of the Red Riding Hood. I see it as an encouragement to take risks, and embrace the consequences, whatever they may be.
Then again... this may be all rationalization on my part. An attempt to reconcile what I think my work should mean with what it really shows. What I think I should be as a woman, and what I interiorized from my upbringing in a very macho society, where men are definitely viewed as having more value than women, while the latter are thought of as weak and needing protection. In the end, once finished, an artistic work doesn't belong to the artist anymore. It belongs in the minds of the viewers, who are free to interpret it as they want.
Here is another example of how my own work slips away from my grasp [Rapunzella]. As usual, it wasn't something I planned beforehand. I was sitting on a bus, and facing me was a veiled girl with just a strand of hair slipping out. She unconsciously pushed it back under her veil. By association of ideas, I thought of Rappunzel (she is called "Raiponce" in French, I don't know why I thought of the name in English or German, but it allowed a play on words with the word "zella", which is a slang term in Algeria for "beautiful girl"). I drew the page right there on the bus and I finalized it later on my computer. We were working on the first issue of "El Bendir Magazine" at that time, and I thought it would make a nice comic for it. Later in 2010, a group of us Algerian comic artists went to the Angoulême Comics Festival in France to present the magazine, and we attracted the attention of a journalist who was working on a special issue of "Books", a literary magazine. The special issue was about comic books worldwide, and they had a section about comics in the Arab world. They chose "Rapunzella" as an illustration of the article. I was very flattered. http://cawa-bel-cawcaw.over-blog.com/pages/Olde_Works-7399323.html
I moved on to other things: other stories, other projects, other styles of drawing. When I published my blog, I uploaded new stuff, and Rapunzella I put at the "back" of the blog, with my older work. In 2012, the Erlangen Comix Festival invited me and another Algerian comic artist. Here too was, among other things, a special exhibition about the new spring of comics in the Arab world, coinciding with the "Arab Spring". There were artists from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon etc, and magazines like Samandal and Toktok, debates and conferences about the role of the artist in the upheavals we were witnessing. The organizers asked me for some of my works, and I sent a selection of my most recent work, among which Rapunzella didn't figure. They emailed me back, asking for this story in particular. I refused, telling them that it was an old work, and too open for false interpretation. There were two occurrences since when my work was exhibited in European comic events, where the organizers asked specifically for Rapunzella, and I still refused on both occasions.
Now, with all humility, I believe that, graphically, it's quite a good page: well balanced, with good diagonals. It's pretty and clever I guess. But I cannot help suspecting ulterior motives in this insistence for this specific comic. I may be a little paranoid. I will explain why I refused to exhibit this in Europe. I did not have, while drawing it, a specific audience in mind. I did not think: I am doing this so that Algerians will read it (or Arabs, or Muslims for that matter). But when I received that first email, I distinctly thought: "I did not draw this for a European public". I thought that, in this context, it would be read as a critical expression on the oppressiveness of Islam in my society, coming from yet another woman-artist-of-the-Arab-world. A kind of appeal to the civilized elite of the "free world". And that is definitely not how I wanted it to be seen.
There is, though, resentment expressing itself here. It is obvious: the black veil of the girl is shown as a tower, a prison, excluding her from the world and the natural enjoyment of romance. There are the angry faces of a bearded man and a sour matron. An injunction. It is so caricatural it is laughable. It is one of the things I hate to see around me: nicely executed, eective yet somewhat poisonous discourse. It leads the reader to think of bearded, religious men as oppressors of women, and of veiled women as either victims or accomplices this oppression.
I do not mean to say that it is always the case, and even when it is, that these attitudes are always deliberate. After all, this is quite a good illustration. I believe that a responsible way to act for artists and intellectuals, is to question not only the works of others, but also their own, and to be conscious of the underlying meanings of what they say, of the context in which it is said, and of who it is addressed to. And to be extra careful of the discourse they may be encouraged to reproduce.
There is some truth in that. But there is also, mainly, gross generalization. These issues have to be addressed in our societies, but in the form of a debate inside these societies, between the actors involved. Even, why not, in unsubtle, caricatural forms. It may be a legitimate form of debate. But the way I see it, as it is, it is mainly a dialogue between modern, westernized cultural elites in these countries and cultural elites in the West, while the natural interlocutor is dismissed , mocked and antagonized.
NB: I use some terms with reluctance, but for ease of speech. When I say "the Arab world", I do not imply that it represents a unity. Each country has its speciďŹ c way of living its culture and its religion, even when it shares them with others. When I say that Algeria is an Arab country, I do not dismiss its other dimensions as a Berber, African and Mediterranean country. And when I say "the West", I do not mean to say that West and East are two separate cultural entities (such inappropriate words!). I believe that Algeria, like other countries, is part, whether one likes it or not, of what is called "Western civilisation", in the same way that it was once part of the Roman empire. The dierence lies mainly, I think, in who dictates what this civilisation is, and who is subjected to it.