We never all agreed
Salman Rushdie on the Je Reste Charlie project.
It is important that we take a stand. That we stand firm. That we say: This is the world in which we want to live. And in order to live in this world, it must be all right for these cartoons to exist. We must not try to apologize for them. We must also not try to excuse the attack on Charlie Hebdo, by showing understanding for the attackers. Stand firm! If we want to live in an open society, then the acceptance of such cartoons is part of this. What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form as such doesn’t exist. The form of a cartoon demands disrespect. Satire requires us to make fun of people, to laugh at them. Whoever they may be. The more powerful they are, the better. Stand firm! This is what it’s all about. It is important that we say today: This is the boundary line. It may not be erased.
However, there is a combination between a mood of appeasement and political correctness in the air currently, especially on the left. This was demonstrated recently, when the writers’ association PEN wanted to honor the Charlie Hebdo magazine for its courage in fighting for freedom of expression – and a number of writers protested. Many of them found the assassination in Paris terrible, but honoring the survivors they found to be self-righteous, moreover it would hurt the feelings of Muslims. There it was again – this but. I found it strange that this attitude had now been articulated by left-wing writers. I knew many of them, I was friends with some of them – Peter Carey or Michael Ondaatje for example. Following the publication of my novel “The Satanic Verses” and everything that followed, I had to listen to similar accusations to those which are today being expressed towards Charlie Hebdo. “Rushdie knew exactly what he was doing”, it was often suggested, “he was provoking deliberately.” Or: “He only did it to become rich and famous.” The bulk of these accusations at that time came from people who were politically on the right. Today, it is the left-wingers who are making almost the same allegations about the satirists at Charlie Hebdo. I think that this is a strange development.
The people at Charlie Hebdo didn’t and don’t like every single cartoon. They dislike some of them. Imagine that! Jean-Baptiste Thoret told Salman that at the PEN gala.
Jean-Baptiste Thoret told me something very significant that evening: “If people don’t like our cartoons, this is something we can discuss. Perhaps I don’t even like them myself. In our editorial office we were and are constantly arguing about what we should publish and what we shouldn’t. We never all agreed. Every one of us always disliked the half of what we published. It is not a question of whether or not you like the cartoons. If you don’t like them, then come here and tell us. On that one specific detail that you don’t like, perhaps I’m on your side. Or perhaps not.”
Every one of us always disliked the half of what we published. But they didn’t shun each other for liking or disliking half of what they published.
“Every one of us always disliked the half of what we published. But they didn’t shun each other for liking or disliking half of what they published.”
If one half of the office does not like what the other half does, they can always settle the matter with a well-placed bomb. Beats having discussions, which inevitably just turn into arguments; which can be incapable of resolution, especially if one half decides that the other half has blasphemed its icon, prophet, crackpot in a cave or whatever..
Free speech is always going to cause this debate. On one hand, X; on another hand Y. And we have several other hands.
Agree that calling out the egregious problems inherent in militant fundamental Islam is necessary.
Concerned about the racism experienced by Muslim people.
I have read 4 different articles explaining the dead-child-on-the-beach cartoon, and they have all been very persuasive. “If you were French, you would get it.” “Satire is meant to be confronting.” “It’s a comment on the Daily Mail.”
I keep thinking, if your satire is unintelligible to your audience, it’s not working as commentary.
I’m also thinking about how France was a mono-culture for centuries.
I live in Australia, where at different periods waves of new immigrants arrived to find deep, deep hostility to the changes they brought to our culture and society. New arrivals consistently experience hostility from the last wave as well as racist colonial stock. Yet we are a multicultural society, with a vibrant restaurant and music culture, where children are born to parents and families of diverse cultures. We have found an almost balance between rejecting and embracing difference. We still experience regular upsurges of racist insular groups seeking to punish indigenous people and reject other cultural groups: but there is always a strong upswell of support for the multicultural position.
Australia has always been a ragtail motley of cultures. For countries where national identity has been based on a single readily identifiable characteristic, multiculturalism is going to cause huge upheaval. In a country like France, where Algerian French citizens are struggling to be recognised as ‘French’, I see how Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons cause heated reactions. It’s all very well for me as a person who is not affected by the backlash from commentary perceived as hostile to my community to say “Free speech”.
Les Tanner, an Australian cartoonist, once drew a cartoon of our PM at the time as having long pockets and short arms. To those of us in the country, we knew the cartoon referenced a specific occurrence. Anyone else looking at the cartoon would have readily understood that the cartoonist was saying “What a cheap bastard.”
If people looking at your cartoon are saying “huh?” maybe you should consider your message.
I am not understanding the point being made by commenter No.1. I have conflicts with my colleagues, but I can’t say constructing a bomb has ever been my go-to position.
learie:
“I am not understanding the point being made by commenter No.1. I have conflicts with my colleagues, but I can’t say constructing a bomb has ever been my go-to position.”
Don’t apply to become an Islamist then. You would probably crash at the first hurdle.
;-)
Were cartoons featuring a drowned child pleasant? No. Confronting? Yes. Funny ha ha? No. A very bitter joke? Oh yes indeed. Deeply rooted in cynical despair, with just a dash of hope that maybe this will get people to act, but probably not? Almost certainly.
One thing those cartoons most certainly were was powerful satire. Satire in the west is most commonly used as a form of comedy designed to make one group laugh at another group (often with good reason), while making the targeted group look bad (often not very difficult). Hebdo seem to practice an altogether harsher form of satire. One where the pen is as sharp as a sword and there is more rage than laughter, which is bitter at best.
In short, they practice commentary, not comedy.
Hebdo are most certainly doing it right. I’m not comfortable with it at all, but how comfortable should you be with drowned infants washing up on a tourist beach?
Rob, I agree they are powerful, and satire. My concern is the difficulty reading who or what is being satirised. I repeat: if it takes several hundred words to explain your cartoon, it’s not effective as commentary. I’m not sure Hebdo are doing it right.
I hope that troll wanders back to the ‘Donald Trump for President’ site they came from, soon. I long for the day one of them will aim to be smarter and funnier than a two year old, but perhaps I am setting the bar too high.
But it doesn’t take several hundred words to explain it for French people. Their audience is, naturally, French. They have now become a lot more international, because of events, but the fact remains that they and their audience are French (including people from Algeria and Morocco etc).
Also it doesn’t actually take several hundred words to explain it even to non-French people. It can be done much more briefly than that. No amount of words can change the effect that habituation to a particular visual style has. We Anglophones can’t see CH cartoons the way Francophones do, because they’re not the custom for serious adult satire here. To us they look crude and retrograde before we even take in the content, but that’s because we have different customs.
Except not. They have become a lot more international. They may be French, but their audience isn’t. Heck, I (a dumb American) read them fairly regularly now, albeit with imperfect French and undoubtedly missing many things, both obvious and subtle.
Audience is especially relevant given continuing debate. Having Salman Rushdie and #JeResteCharlie coming to your defense pretty much precludes sinking back into local obscurity. That defense is necessary and warranted, in my opinion, but it keeps bringing CH back into the blinding spotlight. I think it’s quite valid to ask, as learie does, whether or not CH needs to re-evaluate their audience. I don’t presume to have the foggiest idea of what the answers are, but I do think the question is valid, and CH will have to figure out how they want to address it. Perhaps they can succeed in returning to being a French-specific periodical (at least, I think that’s what they’re trying to do, could easily be wrong), but it’s an open question of whether international attention will let them, especially when they’re commenting on international issues.
P.S. Want to stress: It is not at all my intention to imply criticism of CH here. It’s obviously not their fault that (1) they were thrust into the spotlight (via murders & subsequently PEN), and (2) their commenting on international affairs as a national periodical is so avidly monitored.
P.P.S. I’m very interested to see how Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje respond in coming days, given that Rushdie used them as examples of blinkered thinking and compared them to right-wing criticism directed at himself. That’s gotta sting.
The cartoon which depicted the dead child references the Daily Mail’s front page. Was that widely seen in France? Did everybody French go “aha!” when they saw it? Was it just foreigners who went “huh?”
I’ve got concerns Hebdo is punching down. Reading that the cartoons are always discussed and provoke disagreement among the staff alleviates my concerns somewhat.
I said “several hundred words” because it was only in the fourth article I read I found the explanation about the Daily Mail. All that reading was valuable, but I still think the point of a cartoon is universal recognition of its message.
Yes, it’s gotta sting, but I’m pretty sure it stung already during the controversy over the PEN gala. I don’t think Rushdie said anything very different just now. He certainly made the point that the anti-CH faction were doing exactly what the anti-Rushdie faction did to him in ’89.
I too am curious what they think about it all though. I have been all along – what are they thinking.
A picture tells a thousand words. I’m not French and I got that cartoon like a punch to the stomach. It might take a couple of hundred words to explain it. That’s why some people draw and others write.
@OB:
Granted I may have missed a lot of the back-and-forth, but I don’t recall Rushdie being quite so pointed in calling out particular people. Or at least, he may have called out large numbers of people, instead of singling out people for individual attention. That’s gotta sting MORE.
@ Rob:
Agreed. The couple of hundred words might be necessary to explain particular targets or context, but that cartoon really needed no explanation. Rather universal.
P.S. I’m sure you’ve heard this already, but please please please get rid of the ” – See more at: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2015/we-never-all-agreed/#sthash.0IBnnHJ4.dpuf” insertions every time you copy and paste from a comment. At least for when you’re copy and pasting here! :)
Sorry Patrick, I must be having a slow day, you’ve lost me.
Did I lose you with the few sentences directly beneath you, or the P.S.?
The P.S. was directed at Ophelia Benson, as every time I copy and paste from someone else’s comment, I get the track-back link I quoted. Technical issue, etc., and minor at that. If you thought that was directed at you, all I got is: my bad, can see how that would be confusing. Should have returned to @OB.
If it was the first stuff, just meant to say I completely agreed with you, and that further detail (via text) might provide expository detail, but is not necessary at all to the primary theme of the cartoon. Sure, it makes more sense if you reference the Daily Mail content more explicitly, but the criticism of European Christians walking on water (and getting two for the price of one!) while Muslims sink is impossible to not understand.
On another note, I’m really struck by the concept that the cartoon in question was supposed to be funny, e.g. this from Nabila Ramdani:
I’m just gobsmacked at how anybody could look at those cartoons as laughing at a dead boy, instead of devastating criticism of the people in power who failed to respond adequately to humanitarian crisis, under the moralizing banner of “protecting” their countries from dangerous immigrants. But no, it’s apparently Charlie Hebdo and its defenders who suggested:
What the actual fuck? Did I miss some entire other set of cartoons? I mean, this one seems to directly and specifically attack Christians in Europe for hypocrisy in the face of dead children. It’s like I’m taking crazy pills here.
Forgot to add this from that same opinion piece:
There is not one sentence in that piece that advocates for European governments to take a more active role in rescuing & sheltering desperate people fleeing political chaos, starvation, and brutality. In other words, the message Ramdani is sending is: Letting them drown is fine. Drawing cartoons about it isn’t.
Jesus Mohammed Fuck.
Patrick, I’m no longer lost – Thank you!
Yeah the Cartoon narrative is bleedingly obvious, to the point the blood is running out my ears as it fries my brain that some people just cannot get it. Then again the right will attack Hebdo because they know they are the target. Some will attack Hebdo because they (wrongly) perceive Muslims and refugees as the target, and some on the left will attack Hebdo because they are so fucking earnest they can’t perceive anything outside of a narrow range of projected guilt mixed with genuine pity. Doesn’t help if you haven’t developed a healthy sense of bitterness or anger as yet. Satire really is the humour of rage for the thinking person I reckon.
OK, I’m dumber than Rob and Patrick G, because though I definitely felt the gut punch of the cartoons, I didn’t immediately get them. Must not be a thinking person.
(The Muslims sinking, yes, obvious – but the Europeans walking on water? Umm? Where has that been happening lately?)
I was one of the people who was horrified to see that poor child on the front page. My first reaction was “it’s the ultimate click bait”. In Australia, we are not allowed to see the faces of the people who make it alive to be imprisoned by our government. The willingness of our papers to publish that poor child seemed like a horrible invasion of his privacy and lack of respect for his dignity. Also, he could have been any of the children I teach. Too, too awful. I understand that other people believe it has been an important thing to do. It made a difference to the people who were able to get into Europe before the doors were slammed shut again: not much help to the people still struggling to survive the trip.
Those are my feelings: my thoughts are I’m glad we are having a debate over Charlie Hebdo. Not so thrilled to have my intelligence denigrated while having it. Thanks Rob and Patrick!
@ learie:
Never my intention to make others feel stupid. Please note that I supported some of your comments above, and still do. I’m also on record in various other threads as being, um, undiplomatic. So yeah, please consider me a blustering asshole in general when reading my comments. I swear I’m working on it.
Please note also that I was subjected to Catholic indoctrination in school, and I tend to assume everyone has the same background. I’m trying to work on that, too.
Regarding the walking on water — the text of the first panel of the cartoon translates (more or less) to: “Proof Europe is Christian”, with a cartoon Jesus literally walking on water (New Testament biblical miracle), while non-Christian child drowns (and the Jesus don’t give a shit about the drowning child, hence the smile and the upturned eyes). In short: Christians get saved, Muslims not so much. Second panel uses a more obscure French construct, but is basically a “therefore” or “following from”, with the 2For1 special on dead children, which I read as mocking European governments’ basic indifference (even willingness, given all the fence crap) as to whether (presumably Muslim) migrants/refugees die.
Can you clarify this? On its face, this is horrific, and strikes me as exactly the target of satire from CH. Reminds me of George W. Bush’s administration censoring coverage of military coffins coming back from Iraq. See no evil…
I can’t read the cartoon as anything but criticism of the people who slammed the door shut. My interpretation is obviously correct, and cannot be argued. Ok, not so much. :)
All that explanatory material aside: I’ll again support your argument that if the general audience isn’t getting it, the satire isn’t working. If you’re a satirist, that’s obviously a problem. CH has an international audience now, and arguably they need to make their satire more broad. What frustrates me, however, is that I can’t see this cartoon as anything but blasting governments who aren’t saving predominantly Muslim refugees. And yet, CH gets tagged as anti-Muslim, and exploiting drowned kids for money/fame/whatever. I honestly don’t know what CH can do about this, given that cartoons are not exactly the most precise medium.
/end rambling post
P.S. learie, if there’s something I said that you thought was directed at you and your intelligence, could you draw my attention to that specific thing? Again, I was intending to support your point about satirist fail, and obviously failed mightily.
Learie, I did not mean to imply you were not a thinking person. I do disagree that satire, or any other form if criticism, is a fail if everyone doesn’t get it. People get different things and are more profoundly affected by different things that they get. For instance, I read well and have a pretty good vocabulary, but images and spoken word generally have a much deeper impact with me at an emotional level than writing.
Whatever the medium of communication, it’s worth keeping in mind (everyone, not just you) that just because you don’t get something it’s not necessarily wrong or inappropriate. In fact, as a rule, unless you actually get something it’s best not to pass judgement I feel. YMMV.
I don’t see that that changes a single thing. They are a group of people producing materials critical of contemporary events in French politics. The ideal, and most likely intended audience, is therefore French. If people that are ignorant of French politics have come to be interested, it is not on CH to change their material to cater to their new audience.
I think it would be more clear if we imagine a CH to be a musical group instead of a newspaper. One day, CH’s music pisses off some authoritarian arseholes, who then shoot several of the members. The world takes note, there is an outpouring of sympathy from some quarters (and an outpouring of ‘I don’t think people should be murdered for their free expression, but oh hey by the way I think you should change your free expression such that it is no longer free, you provoked it after all’ from others), and their audience swells. Imagine then, the stupidity if some of this new audience then said ‘eww you guys make indie rock? You chould change your music to reflect that there are now lots of non-indie rock fans listening to you!’
As far as I’m concerned, if a person is ‘asking questions’ or whatever about whether CH should ‘take into account’ their newly expanded audience, that person is very much equivalent to new listeners of a band complaining that the music that they are now supporting is of the ‘wrong’ genre. The idea that the new audience should have some claim or say in the material, that CH the newspaper (or CH the indie rock group) need to accomodate this influx by no longer being CH is ridiculous.
Is “I disagree with what you say but defend to death your right to say it” also appeasement and political correctness because it is not “I give you prizes for what you say and defend etc”? What is appeasement about making a distinction between legal rights and moral approval? On the contrary, the PEN situation reminds me of the Moazzam Beg/Amnesty situation — that it is tricky to find the line between fighting for someone’s rights (which they have regardless of who or what they are), and dignifying their beliefs..
I suspect that the point of the PEN protest was not to appease Islamists but to distinguish the writers politically from the likes of Salman (“If you’re yelling, we can’t hear you.”) Rushdie.
Charlie Hebdo reminds me of Vice in the habitual line-stepping dept. Olivier Cyran has an article on racism that is a bit more critical.
Patrick: our government makes sure we don’t see images of the people seeking asylum here, because we might start sympathising with them instead of demanding they be locked up. John Howard started the practice during the Tampa crisis, not allowing the media to get close enough to take photos. It’s very hard for journalists to get into the prisons on Nauru and Manus Island. The only photos we generally get to see are when riots or protests occur. It’s a deliberate policy meant to demonise refugees, enforced over several years now.
Rob and Patrick: I read your posts as saying “I can’t believe people are so stupid”. Thank you for your kind responses.
Holms, that might be the case for art, but cartoons are social commentary. They’re meant to be discussed.
Also, because the people who don’t get CH have spoken up, we get threads like this one explaining the message very clearly. That’s valuable. It’s well known now why CH uses confronting images and what their purpose is. Free speech without discussion of different views is just shouting.
Social commentary also requires context in order to be understood. If you don’t follow French news, you’re not going to “get” French news commentary.
(A number of cartoonists might take exception to your ouster of cartoons from the category “art.”)
Cartoons are an art form: but their purpose is more explicit and immediate than a painting or piece of music.
They are social commentary on current events. They are published in newspapers and magazines, meant to make an immediate impact. If I don’t get Andy Warhol ‘s pop art, my contribution to discussion of his works won’t really add to the discussion, as Rob points out. But if I don’t get a cartoon, if I think the images contained in them are racist or sexist, I’m contributing to an educative process in discussing that.
Discussed? Yes, but I was replying to the idea put forth in #7 by Patrick that CH need to change due to their expanded audience. My reply to that is No.
I agree, and, of course, that was the context for my comment.
Was traveling, so I’ll just briefly point out, Holms, that your analogy is terribly flawed:
* Music groups tend not to have mission statements
* Music groups tend not to explicitly aim to change social culture
* Music groups tend not to completely change their genre after they acquire a larger audience.
So yeah, great analogy, except for the part where’s totally inept.
Beyond that, could you possibly, maybe read what I said before setting that strawman on fire? I explicitly said that it’s up to CH to decide their future path. I explicitly said that given their mission, CH could choose to modify their current strategy. Nowhere did I say they had to, as you describe my position.
In short, “Need to change due to their expanded audience” is not what I said. Things I did say?
* Might want to consider broadening reach past local politics, if only because they have broader reach. That’s up to them.
* May want to evaluate how critics are exploiting their style, and evaluate whether that’s damaging their mission. That’s their strategy, their tactics, their call.
* Other actors are thrusting them into public scenarios; that’s not their fault, but they still have to deal with it. How they deal with it is up to them.
* An act of terrorism and subsequent clueless debate has put CH in a unique situation; they have options because of that. They’re the ones who will decide what to do with that opportunity.
Let’s reiterate once more: you clearly missed the approximately ninety-three thousand times where I said it’s up to CH to decide what they want their role to be. But saying they need to think about things post-murders, post-PEN, and post-the-rest is really not that controversial. Except to you, who apparently thinks the only possible course for CH is to do precisely what they were doing, with no changes (beyond dead colleagues), because otherwise they’re won’t be true to their “indy rock” background anymore. Yeesh.
@ learie:
Thanks for responding — I definitely have a problem when writing-while-absolutely-en-fucking-raged where I don’t quite make it clear who I’m actually angry with. Emotion/tone tends to spread to parts that probably don’t actually need it, particularly since I tend to the overly-verbose/stream-of-consciousness style of writing (something else I’ve made little progress on, as demonstrated by this comment!).
Rushdie: … there is a combination between a mood of appeasement and political correctness in the air currently, especially on the left.
Many progressives consider complaints about “political correctness” an automatic disqualifier for the complainant, and know “appeasement” as a right-wing dogwhistle; these days, at least in USAstan, “on the left” has radically different meanings to those who are and those who aren’t.
I cannot believe a writer as skilled as Rushie would use only RW-speak buzzwords like that accidentally. Has he joined the fraternity of Thinky Leaders Talking Tough™?
@PatrickG
1.
Except of these materially change the aptness of the analogy. An expanded, international audience does not have a claim on the work they do regardless of your red herrings.
2. You appear to have missed the part where I said “As far as I’m concerned, if a person is ‘asking questions’ or whatever about whether CH should ‘take into account’ their newly expanded audience[…]”. This is a direct reference to the main thrust of your post, and not at all a strawmannish “PatrickG said CH must change!!” which came from a single line and required you to ignore the body of my post in quoting it.
3. You are defensive and snide for some reason, relax.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Since you insist on misreading me as saying the audience has a claim on CH’s future work — and you can’t possibly claim you’re not — I’ll spell out my position in painful, agonizing detail and then give up.
Truism of the Day: Every artist has an obligation to consider their audience when creating their work.
If the audience has changed, the artist should take that into account. This is particularly relevant for organizations with a stated agenda of social change, and heightened by CH’s position in a space of public controversy with third parties churning the waters.
That is not saying the audience has claim. That is saying CH has an obligation to themselves to consider their audience. I am truly baffled by how apparently difficult this distinction is to grasp.
“I should change due to the new audience” is a legitimate course of action. “Change would be nice, but would distract from what I really want to do” is just as legitimate. So is “Fuck the audience, I don’t care”. It’s CH’s call, full stop. I might personally consider it counterproductive for CH to take the latter approach, because I don’t think that would be compatible with their stated agenda, but whatever, my opinion is obviously not binding on CH.
The point remains that an artist must consider their audience, or they will not achieve their goals (be that money, fame, social change, or just pissing off some particular group of people).
Do you see how blindingly obvious and trite this is? Do you get my frustration that you keep misrepresenting me?
Let’s illustrate this with a comparison. Ophelia Benson regularly reposts Leo Igwe and comments on witch hunts (among other things). One day, she finds she’s picked up hundreds of new Nigerian readers. Can they demand that Benson drop everything else and focus on issues local to them? Of course not. Does Benson have a responsibility to consider the new audience when moving forward? I would argue Yes, because of her stated goals of education and activism. Is that prescriptive in what she must do? No, because she’s the one who will have to decide:
(1) if changes are desirable,
(2) whether the new audience is worth making those changes, and
(3) what changes she is able to make.
It’s her call.
See that distinction now? Finally?
Of course, it should (but apparently doesn’t) go without saying that people speculating on whether she is going to alter her content given the influx of Nigerian readers aren’t asserting those readers have a claim on her work, or can demand she change.
One final comment:
This is demonstrably false. Yes, this is a primary activity of CH. It is not all they do. The whole reason I climbed on this soapbox is precisely because they do produce material on international events and politics, with obviously international reach, and so yes, the new international audience is highly relevant to their mission and should be considered.
I’ve beaten this dead horse so hard it’s liquified, so I’ll not be commenting further in this thread.
P.S. The truly bemusing thing here is that this was all started on a cartoon that I thought was pretty damn perfect, except perhaps for the overly specific reference to the Daily Mail, and even that was more of a, what, literary criticism than a substantive issue. Didn’t detract from the message at all.
P.P.S. Your passive-aggressive condescension in #3 is just so adorable. Have a cookie.
Wrong on point one, yeah we’re done here.
P.S.
How is it passive aggressive to openly give my impression of your attitude?