Child in Palestine
Regular price
€18.50
A Child in Palestine collects the work of one of the Arab world's greatest cartoonists, Naji al-Ali, known as 'the Palestinian Malcolm X'. Discovered in the 1950s, he was revered throughout the region for his outspokenness, honesty and humanity. Resolutely independent, al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people. The pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. His most celebrated creation, the child Hanthala, exposed the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the region's regimes, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Hanthala is today seen as a surrogate witness to ongoing horrors and a beacon for Palestinian resistance.
Naji al-Ali (1936-87) grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh in southern Lebanon. His gift for drawing was discovered by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani in the late 1950s. Early the following decade he moved to Kuwait, embarking on a thirty-year career that would see his cartoons published daily in newspapers from Cairo to Beirut, London to Paris. In 1987, he was assassinated in London. His killers have never been found.