A Child in Palestine

This is a first collection by leading Palestinian political cartoonist, introduced by the author of Palestine. 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.

(Bookdata)

Bli först med att recensera och betygsätt boken A Child in Palestine - du kan vinna 200 kr varje månad i tävlingen "Månadens recension".

"Naji al-Ali on the creation of his most famous character, Handala: "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... 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)"

(Bookdata)

NAJI AL-ALI (c. 1936-1987) was born in the Palestinian village of al-Shajara, between Nazareth and Tiberias. He worked for, among others, the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir and the independent Kuwaiti daily al-Qabas. Constantly harassed and censored, Naji al-Ali moved to London; he was shot and killed in Chelsea on July 22 1987. He was posthumously awarded the Golden Pen Award of the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEJ).

(Bookdata)