Book Review - Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing

Reviewed by Adrienne Resha

Esra Mirze Santesso. Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing. Ohio State University Press, 2023. 220 pp, $149.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215418.html

     Words in the Arabic language often have three-consonant roots that convey meaning, such as sh-h-d (ش-ه-د): to witness. If you do not read or speak Arabic, then this may still look or sound familiar because shahada, the sincere declaration that one believes God is singular and accepts Muhammad as His prophet, is one of the five pillars of Islam. The root also appears in the noun shaheed (شهيد), which can be translated as witness or martyr. Whether translated, transliterated, or loaned to other languages, the word takes on different meanings in different contexts. Martyr, meaning one who sacrifices themself as a testament to their faith, overlaps with martyr, one who witnesses violence when murdered by a settler-colonial state. Esra Mirze Santesso’s Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing attends to different versions of witnessing and visions of witnesses in what she calls “Muslim Comics.”

Santesso’s Muslim Comics is a category that includes “any graphic narrative that features three-dimensional Muslim characters and foregrounds Muslim experiences in relation to various power structures inside and outside the Muslim homeland” (4-5). This definition is inclusive of comics produced by Muslim and non-Muslim creators, privileging character identity over those of cartoonists, writers, and artists. She employs warscape, “a civilian space in which different [political and military] factions are participating in asymmetrical struggles,” as a category that “underscores the prolonged effects of violence as opposed to the finality denoted by ‘war’” and includes the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, Iran, Kashmir, and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon (5). Through visualization and narration, witnessing in comics, Santesso argues, “offers a way to change vulnerability into resistance” and “reflects a desire to restore stability and certainty by creating permanent records of those who are erased from history and those whose voices are muted” (16). Following a history of Muslim characters in US American comics, she examines four kinds of warscape witnesses who appear in Muslim Comics: the reluctant witness, the false witness, the border witness, and the surrogate witness.

While the rest of the book focuses on “protagonists [who] are neither heroes nor villains… individuals with moral complexities who find themselves having to cope with warscape realities” (11), Chapter 1, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Muslim Comics,” is largely about Muslims in superhero comics. According to Santesso, Muslims in American comics in and outside of the superhero genre have historically fallen into three categories: the “Orientalized Other,” the “barbaric jihadi,” or the “hybrid token” like, she argues, Simon Baz (Green Lantern) and Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) (30). Santesso acknowledges Muslim Comics in the American tradition, namely graphic memoirs, and those coming out of Europe before turning her gaze to Muslim Comics set in warscapes in North America and Asia.

Chapter 2, “Reluctant Witnesses in Prison Camp Narratives,” contrasts the “barbaric jihadi” of American comics with the “abject Muslim prisoner” of Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison, and Aaron & Ahmed. Santesso asserts that the “abject Muslim prisoner” is not derivative of the “barbaric jihadi” but rather of the Muselmann, a German term for Muslim used by Jewish prisoners “to describe the ‘living-dead’ inhabitants of the concentration camp” (68). This chapter’s Muslim Comics illustrate how torture turned Guantanamo Bay prisoners into the living dead. The living dead are also reluctant witnesses who bear witness “by refusing to bear witness” (86-87), closing their eyes or looking away as they tell their stories to/for creators who will interpret them in comics form. The reluctant witness does not testify to recover their own humanity but to protect that of readers.

In Chapter 3, “Vulnerability, Resistance, and False Witnesses,” Santesso introduces what she calls the “vulnerability-resistance dialectic,” a cycle between resistance against vulnerability and vulnerability as a consequence of resistance, which produces false witnesses. False witnesses, such as those in Zahra’s Paradise and An Iranian Metamorphosis, dishonestly testify in service to the state, in these Muslim Comics, Iran. Santesso argues that the introduction of false witnesses, who escape the cycle by lying, illustrates how witnessing is not always liberatory, that it “can sustain and perpetuate oppressive power structures rather than unsettle them” (110). These comics, which differentiate between the witness who speaks on behalf of the powerful and the witness who speaks on behalf of the vulnerable, complicate the resistance-vulnerability dialectic.

Chapter 4, “Shaheed and Border Witnesses,” directly addresses the figure of the martyr in the specific context of Kashmir. Muslim Comics set in that liminal border zone – Kashmir Pending and Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir – challenge “the idea of border subjectivity as an inherently intuitive and productive negotiation between two or more cultures” through border witnessing (117). Border witnesses reject the necropolitical conditions of the warscape that may encourage martyrdom and, instead, affirm the value of other kinds of resistance. In these comics, Santesso continues, “the border witness… by reaffirming the vision of Kashmiri unity known as Kashmiriyat, uses the act of witnessing as an antidote to radicalization rather than an accelerant for it” (118-119).

Focusing on Palestinian refugee camps, Chapter 5, “Surrogate Witnesses and Memory,” diverges from previous chapters by pairing a Muslim Comic, Baddawi, with a non-Muslim comic, Waltz with Bashir. These comics both feature surrogate witnesses, their creators, who rely on eyewitness testimony as they use various focalization techniques to “record, document, and recontextualize the past” (147). Surrogate witnesses have “the license to substitute, embellish, and reenact the past” and can, in doing so, create “counter-histories that attend to the absence, silence, and erasure of victims” (168-169). The surrogate witness can double as a storyteller and an activist, inserting themself as an interlocutor via the medium of comics to illustrate the past and inspire different futures.

            In Santesso’s conclusion “The Future of Muslim Comics,” she looks away from the witness and back at the superhero. Santesso writes, “Muslim Comics, like Black Comics, have perhaps reached a place where they can push back against the universalization and fetishization of American whiteness and redefine what heroism is or what heroes look like” (174-175). They may even, she argues, “have the potential to pave the wave for Muslim futurism,” specifically “a more positive and less limiting model” that is more like Afrofuturism (176). However, each of these categories – Muslim Comics, Black Comics, Muslim futurism, and Afrofuturism – are already overlapping. Twenty years ago, writer Christopher Priest and artist Joe Bennett introduced the Black and Muslim American superhero Josiah al-hajj Saddiq (aka Josiah X) in The Crew (Marvel, 2003). Although Josiah X’s post-9/11 origin story (The Crew #5) is by no means perfect, it is still arguably a Muslim Comic because it is a graphic narrative about a complex Muslim character that foregrounds his experience in relation to structural racism in the US. Santesso’s Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on comics about and by Muslim people, but there is still more work – and work more reflective of the diversity of Muslim peoples across the globe – to be done.

Book Review: A History of Women Cartoonists by Mira Falardeau

 A History of Women Cartoonists. Mira Falardeau. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2020. 298 pp. ISBN 9781771613514. $24.99. http://www.mosaic-press.com/product/history-women-cartoonists/

 reviewed by Jean Sébastien, Professeur, Collège de Maisonneuve

Working in comics, cartooning, or animation was for a long time perceived as man’s work and this is slow in changing. In A History of Women Cartoonists, Mira Falardeau envisions how we can turn the tide. The title of the book shows that one of the ways in which change can be brought is by including more works by women in the canon and to do this by valuing work published by women from the early 20^th century up to the most current day. Even if the book is largely a history of women artists, the last chapters have a different tone.; they act as a call to action in order to get things to change!

In this book, Falardeau gives an overview of the work of creators from the United States, from English Canada and Quebec, from France, Belgium and Switzerland and from the Middle East and the Maghreb. The main portion of her book is structured according to these four regional cut-outs. In her general introduction, she acknowledges that her book, thus, limits itself to only a part of the world’s production by women artists. Such a project, by its very nature, can be celebratory, but deciding who should be included can always become an issue. Falardeau has chosen to reference a larger number of artists in the introductions she writes for each of the four sections that constitute the main content of the book. For example, in her section on the United States she refers briefly to some 60 authors; out of this number, Falardeau selected 15 for whom she has written a more detailed biography, while describing that author’s most important works.

Falardeau’s book is designed to bring forth the similarities in the obstacles that women are faced with, whether in cartooning, comics or animation. In her introduction, she makes a point of noting that these three mediums share elements of a common language. In animation as in comics, women have been less recognized than men and Falardeau’s book works to tilt the balance. This is especially important, for instance, if one is to have a proper historical view of the animation that came out in 1930-1960 period: among the women animators portrayed are two pioneers: American Mary Ellen Bute and Canadian Evelyn Lambart.

A most interesting aspect of the book is its comparative nature. If the section about the United States will not bring any new names to the attention of those who have read Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, or Trina Robbins’ follow-up works, including her more recent Pretty in Ink. Falardeau does a great job in comparing the general economic context and the prevalence of misogyny at different times in the four contexts that she has chosen to look at. For instance, Falardeau links the relative openness to women in newspaper illustration in the United States to the fact that America developed early on a very dynamic illustrated press and that the sheer number of positions opened some of them up to women. She notes that this was not the case in Canada, either English or French, where she finds that women only began to have a presence as major newspapers added women’s pages and children’s pages to their pages from the 1940’s on. In France, there were numerous girls’ magazines in the early 20^th century. However, very few illustrations in such publications were attributed, and even if it is likely that there were women illustrators, most worked in anonymity. Falardeau’s section on the Middle East and the Maghreb is the shortest of the four and she touches very lightly on the political situations in different countries only to point out that, if some women have found it easier to create as expatriates, others became professional illustrators  to work in their home country. Through this comparison of the history of the press, Falardeau compares feminisms within different national contexts finding more advances for women in the United States.

“Should we link this abundant production to freedom of expression generated, on the one side, by a fundamental tradition and on the other, by successive waves of immigration providing the most innovative ideas of feminist thought? Ultimately, the United States were at the forefront of comic’s innovations while the other countries remained a little more conservative.” (p. 154)

Falardeau also points to the differences as to how second-wave feminism entered comics. Whereas in the U. S., this was mostly in comic book form through counterculture publishers, in France, it was the publishers of the science-fiction magazine Métal hurlant who thought that there was a market for a feminist publication in the world of bande dessinée and developed Ah! Nana a quarterly that came out from 1976 to 1978. The title roughly translates to Hey! Gal, but is homonymous with the French word for “pineapple.” In the section about Quebec, Falardeau briefly situates herself in this. As women’s magazines were taking on feminism, one of them asked her to create a strip which she did for from 1976 to 1978. A few years later (1981-1987), Falardeau joined a specifically feminist monthly, La Vie en rose, covered political and social issues; it gave humor and cartooning an important place.

The small press movement of the early nineties embraced autobiography as an important genre in which quite a few women creators of the period found their niche. Falardeau points to the fact that there already was an important autobiographical strand in the work of many women artists before that and refers to Mary Fleener’s comics in the underground movement, Lynda Barry’s early work in alternative weeklies and Lynn Johnston’s syndicated strip For Better or Worse. Even if there have been some opportunities for women in the past decades, feminist criticism has highlighted the slowness in openings within the mainstream. For those who remember Robbins’ criticism of the closed doors for women at Marvel and DC in her 2001 book The Great Women Cartoonists (to which Falardeau refers), there is a sad resonance to be found in more recent criticisms in France against the Angouleme International Festival which has granted its Grand Prize to only three women since it was founded in 1974. One of the festival’s attempt to correct the situation was miserably sexist; in 2007, the festival had come under heavy fire for having named an event “the brothel”, “La maison close.” In 2016, a collective of women authors called for a boycott because that year there were no women at all in the list of thirty author candidates for the Grand Prize.

In accounting for current production by women, Falardeau takes into account the rise of webcomics. She duly notes issues that come with self-publication on the web, especially that of needing to monetize one’s work, and the fact that, especially for younger artists, webcomics have served as a springboard to get attention from traditional publishers. Here she brings to attention a few artists in each of the four geographical groupings she highlighted. Her book is a who’s who in this new medium, from Meredith Gran and her comedic Octopus Pie to the tidal wave of blogs in France (many of them by women in the early years of this century), to the more recent political use of Facebook posts by Nadia Khiari in which she drew, Willis from Tunis, a cat who commented about the Arab Spring.

Even if Falardeau’s book is mainly designed as a canon-making work, she has found it important to show how empowerment of women cartoonists has been possible over time. In a chapter titled “Three Examples of Positive Action,” she opens with a short history of the New Yorker magazine. Its liberal founders, Harold Ross and Jane Grant published a great number of women illustrators. Her brief overview of the less-than-great record of the magazine in the ‘50s and ‘60s in its openness to women is meant to show that there needs to be an awareness about patriarchy’s hold on the workplace, and on certain types of work at the decision-making level, if change is to be attained. She makes this even more clear with her next example. The National Film Board of Canada developed structures in the early 1980s that encouraged the development of a women’s cinema. However, it was only in 2016 that the organization gave itself the goal of getting to 50% of its productions directed by women. Political cartooning still is, by and large, a line of work in which the number of men is disproportionate.  The organization Cartooning for Peace, founded in 2006, has chosen to value the membership of women cartoonists in many of its activities.

A History of Women Cartoonists translates and updates Falardeau’s 2014 Femmes et humour published by the Presses de l’université Laval. In each of the contextual pieces that precede the portrayals, Falardeau added a new paragraph or two. Among the additions in the section discussing the United States are Lisa Hanawalt and Eleanor Davis. In the section about Canada, she features Emily Carroll’s innovative work with webcomics. The call to boycott the Angouleme festival in 2016 is one of the new additions in the contextual text about France. In the case of artists from the Arab world, she added references to a few political cartoonists, among them Samira Saeed and Menekse Cam. However, the editorial work on the book by Mosaic Press is subpar. There are words in which a letter is missing. Some names have not been checked. For instance, when referring to French academic Judith Stora-Sandor, her name is properly spelled on page 22, but misspelled twice on page 246 as Stora-Standor and Stora-Stantor.

Falardeau concludes her book by taking on a certain number of issues. For instance, in cartooning, how can a character be designed to represent humans in general? She notes that the use of characters identifiable as women will lead to an interpretation of the drawing as referring to women specifically. Can the universality of a situation only be represented by the inclusion of male characters? Then there is the issue of caricature --in exaggerating characteristics, one runs the risk of encouraging stereotypes. The situation is not much better in the work of academics who analyze the work of women, where the cliché is noting the ‘sensitivity’ of the work of a woman author. Falardeau closes this short chapter by noting “the obvious link […] between humor and power, and consequently, the difficulty for women […] to achieve recognition for themselves in the world of humour” (p. 247). Destroying stereotypes takes time. “This is the task that feminist women cartoonists have given to themselves. But which stereotypes? Those held by men? The way that they see women? Or the opposite? The way women see themselves?” (p. 258) The last words in her conclusion come as an answer: “Women cartoonists need to create their own mythology.” (p. 269)

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.