Considering the current turmoil in
Iran, I have
unearthed a piece I did last summer during the initial turbulence over the
presidential so-called election. Last July, Iranian cartoonist-in-exile
Nik Kowsar called the unrest then
"the uprising of the middle class." Talking with Michael Cavna at the
Washington Post’s Comic Riffs blog, Kowsar said:
"The silent majority hates [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. Former
supporters weren't supporting him. The Guard and the council and the interior
ministry didn't let the silent majority in on what was going on ... It's not
important who votes—it's important who counts the votes."
Kowsar
stays in touch with friends in Iran
through two Facebook pages, one with 500 friends; the other, 1,500. “When I
post a cartoon,” he told Cavna, “tens of thousands get it. My cartoons are
spread throughout the world. ... Now people in Tehran hold up their hands and show bypassers
my cartoons. I’ve seen a lot of people do that. That’s very touching to me.” In
a recent cartoon, he depicted Ahmadinejad wearing a mask like a thief, saying:
“Trust me! We counted the votes 20 days before the election!”
Once a
geology student, Kowsar started doing editorial cartoons in 1993. He decided to
become a cartoonist while still a student, working on student newspapers. “I
felt there was a need in Iran
to publish with a clear voice through the simplest cartoons that would connect
with the masses,” he said. “There is a tradition in Iran of philosophic cartoons — too
many symbols that might take minutes and minutes to decode and understand. I
thought: Here could be a way to translate the style of American editorial
cartoons — the style, the rhetoric — into Persian to show politics through humor.
When I saw the effect my cartoons had on people and how much mail I got, I
thought I was on the right path. ... My highly circulated work was
well-received by the public, especially in Tehran. They were attacking my cartoons on
national tv. I could see the effect of my cartoons.”
He was
convinced of his popularity when his first book collection of cartoons was
published in 2000 and sold 5,000 copies in each of five printings. Editorial
cartoonists enjoyed a certain freedom in Iran as long as they didn’t
satirize clerics and the military and judges, but Kowsar sometimes did and got
himself into trouble. Once he depicted Ahmadinejad dancing the tango with Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez. Such cartoons provoked the authorities. In February 2000, Kowsar
was arrested and imprisoned for six days. "I had drawn a cartoon with a
crocodile [strangling a cartoonist with its tail] that referred to a powerful
ayatollah," he said to Cavna. "Clergy students and ayatollahs asked
for my death ... They started with one cartoon but [suddenly] here were 168
cartoons. They [accused me and imprisoned me] for attacking Islam and defaming
prophets."
During the
Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI) dinner at the editorial
cartoonists convention in 2007, I sat next to Kowsar. (We took photos of each
other mugging at his behest; you can see mine of him to the right, and a sketch I’d
made of him earlier.) He made a good living as a cartoonist in Iran, he told me — the equivalent,
he said, of $100,000 a year. He drew for three different newspapers, going
every day from one office to another in succession. In 2002, he was arrested
again. Because of the views he expressed in his cartoons, he was suspected of
being in a cell of revolutionaries.
“Being
arrested in Iran
is not good,” he said, eyebrows raised quizzically. He was tortured to divulge
the names of the others in the dissident cell he was alleged to be a member of.
Since he wasn’t in such an organization, he could reveal nothing. But when he
was again at liberty, he was so fearful for his life that he fled the country,
and CRNI was instrumental (in some unspecified way) in getting him to Canada,
where he is now working on a newspaper and taking courses in journalism. Kowsar
received the CRNI Courage Award several years ago, and his story has, for the
moment, a happy ending: he was particularly jubilant during our conversation
because he and his family, his wife and children, have just been reunited in
Canada — “after four years,” he kept saying, holding up four fingers.
Kowsar has
an antic, playful sense of humor, almost whimsical; it showed in his initial
response to Cavna’s question about why he took the risk of cartooning in Iran:
“First of all,” Kowsar said (grinning no doubt), “as a cartoonist you must be
nuts to work in Iran. I think I was. ... But,” he continued in a more serious
vein, “I could see that domestic [-focus] cartoons have an effect on people who
are actually sympathetic with the cartoonist. You see cartoons under glass on
their desks or framed and in dorms."
“Kowsar
left Iran
in 2003,” Cavna writes, “after receiving a death threat. He settled in Toronto with his family.
He currently draws cartoons for Rooz, an online news site that publishes five
days a week. His work has appeared in The
New York Times as well as the Washington
Post, the Globe and Mail of Toronto, and The
Guardian in Britain.”
You can find all of his engaging and insightful interview with Cavna here.
Otherwise,
cartooning goes on in Iran.
According to presstv.ir, Iranian cartoonist Mohammad-Ali Khalaji has won the
first award of the 26th edition of Brazil's International Humor
Exhibition of Piaui. Khalaji was also a winner at the First International China
Olympic Cartoon Competition and the Fontanarrosa section of the 12th Buenos
Aires International Salon Diogenes Taborda (ISDT) Visual Arts Festival. Must be
something funny happening somewhere in Iran.
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