“Educated into our freedom” – What We Talk About When We Talk About Charlie Hebdo

In the wake of Charlie Hebdo’s latest insult to people of color, The Comics Grid asked if I’d be interested in writing a commentary piece on the event. The end product was something more intensely personal than I expected—and not really in keeping with their academic tone (an assessment on my part, which led me not to submit the piece; these aren’t their words)—so I posted it on my personal site More Than Four Colours. As soon as I published it, though, I realized it would be a great fit for WWAC. A link to the initial post can be found here.

On 2 September 2015, three-year-old Aylan Kurdi and his family fled Syria as refugees.

He drowned during the crossing.

Read his name again; say it. Aylan—not Alan—Kurdi. That is the name of a boy who will never see his fourth birthday or see the new homeland his family was trying to reach. His parents will never hold him, hear him laugh, watch him grow up, introduce him to a world filled with something other than war and fear and wanton destruction.

That is the name of a boy whose body was used as a public spectacle of empathy in the West, because evidently Westerners needed to see pictures of a child’s corpse in order to summon up human emotion for refugees dying in transit. People of color aren’t really people, you see; we’re symbols onto which the white mainstream media can project its narratives, so passing around photos of a dead boy’s body is raising awareness rather than a grotesque act.

(Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw the corpse of a white child all over the news? The media knows, and rightly so, that it would be a gross ethical violation. When it comes to non-white children and non-white bodies, however …)

Charlie Hebdo seems to agree. Its recent cartoon combines the refugee crisis with the sexual assaults in Cologne to depict an adult Aylan Kurdi as a bestial “tripoteur de fesses en Allemagne”—an ass-fondler/sexual predator in Germany, complete with apelike features and an inset drawing of his drowned body.

Many pro-Charlie Hebdo voices have mounted the irony defense: “They’re trying to say that this is what racists think! The real racists are the ones who don’t see that it’s ironic.” (I’m reminded of comedian Hari Kondabolu’s description of the word “racist” as “like the N-word for white people.”)

Perhaps that is what the magazine intended, but why then did they not put these “racists” on trial rather than the legacy of a dead three-year-old boy? Why didn’t they depict the targets of their satire as misinformed buffoons?

“That’s not how French satire works. If you don’t speak the language/study the comics/have a PhD in these exact disciplines, you can’t understand.”

I admit that I don’t speak French, and that the satirical tradition carried on by Charlie Hebdo is one that I haven’t studied.

I am aware, though, that foregrounding visual elements tends to draw readers’ attention to the immediate meanings contained within those elements, not to the imagined targets of the satire that those elements may or may not intend to convey. By portraying the mature Aylan Kurdi in such a way, the magazine taps directly into stereotyped visual and verbal depictions of people of color as subhuman, leaving the ridicule of people who believe in such depictions implicit at best.

There’s also the fact that putting drawings of Middle Eastern men as animalistic sexual predators into mass circulation perpetuates these depictions, regardless of intent, and lends ammunition to the hatred of Muslims, immigrants, and non-white people that is increasingly condoned by official governments.

“But Charlie Hebdo makes fun of government and other major sociopolitical institutions! It’s very liberal!”

In terms of media (and also in less collective terms, but let’s not go into that now), “liberal” and “racist” aren’t mutually exclusive. From my own research, for instance, there’s Judge Dredd, which made its mark by satirizing right-wing British politics but featured—in the mid-80s—a cover where Dredd shouts “Look out! Nine-foot N*ps!” while giant samurai attack Mega-City One. More up-to-date is this execrable article by Slavoj Žižek which draws the following conclusion:

This is why the naive attempts to enlighten immigrants […] are examples of breath-taking stupidity – they know this and that’s why they are doing it. They are well aware that what they are doing is foreign to our predominant culture, but they are doing it precisely to wound our sensitivities. The task is to change this stance of envy and revengeful aggressiveness, not to teach them what they already know very well.

[…] it is not enough to simply give voice to the underdogs the way they are: in order to enact actual emancipation, they have to be educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom.

These are the values promulgated by major media outlets. Why is the current-affairs-related media outlet Charlie Hebdo somehow exempt from potentially sharing some of those values, as though claiming satire provides a free pass? In a climate where leading thinkers are echoing the language of hostile colonialism with calls for immigrants (often code for “past a certain shade on the Pantone chart”) to be “educated into their freedom”—remember that Westerners making non-white regions “free” led to atrocities such as the Congo Free State, where Congolese rubber workers had their hands cut off if they failed to meet quotas and punishments included forcing young men to sexually assault their own sisters and mothers—should we not be more wary?

I am not advocating legal censorship here, partially because I’m not wholly sure where and on what basis to draw the line.

What I am calling for is an evaluation, whether artistic, academic, or otherwise, that respects the humanity of people of color. We are not merely subjects of debate; we are people, and our voices need to be heard.

What I am calling for is an evaluation, whether artistic, academic, or otherwise, that respects the humanity of people of color. We are not merely subjects of debate; we are people, and our voices need to be heard.

We also live with fears and aggressions that white Westerners may not have experienced. Continually looking over your shoulder for fear of deportation just because you don’t make over £35,000 a year; being confronted with the ongoing fetishization of your racial body; being disproportionately targeted by police brutality, sexual assault, income thresholds, dress codes, and supposed anti-terrorism measures all due to the color of your skin: it’s indignity upon indignity, hate upon hate. In this context, that Charlie Hebdo cartoon—which, let us never forget, uses the dead body of a drowned three-year-old boy as a subject of derisive racialized caricature—adds to the morass of emotional and psychological ordure we face every day.

Current scholarly discourse regarding Charlie Hebdo isn’t much better, providing only two options: wholehearted support for the magazine’s cartoons or siding with freedom-hating censors who may condone murdering cartoonists. There’s no option for those of us who think murder is abhorrent, but also see the cartoons as attacks, who question the standard operating procedure of using racist caricature, or who see the Aylan Kurdi incident as rubbing salt into the wounds of a bereaved family. It’s all theoretical; it’s all academic. If you’re a person of color, it’s no use offering up your humanity as some kind of argument (and at any rate you’re not allowed humanity in the first place; don’t you read the news?). Let the white scholarly voices explain why you shouldn’t be upset, because they know better than you.

“But you have to look at it in context!”

This is the context: a world where non-white people are routinely attacked, brutalized, robbed by the state, persecuted, murdered, and then expected not to object when their pain is held up as a comedy spectacle for white majorities.

This is the context: sociopolitical and academic climates where “freedom” is equated not with a drive toward equal discourse, but with the mockery of a dead child. (I’m thinking of that youthfully on-the-nose Hellblazer story arc where Garth Ennis writes that “Liberty” is “a ho’ word.” The entire run was the opposite of subtle, but he had a point.)

This is the context: a family, fleeing war and devastation for the possibility of hope, lost part of that hope in the journey forever. Every media outlet invited the world to gaze at the body of their dead son, as though he were an object instead of a person. Now a cartoon invites us to laugh at him—the cutting laughter of ridicule, reinforcing the narrative that he, and all people of color, are less than human. And if we have been adequately educated into our freedom, we will join in, with laughter that cuts, and cuts, and cuts, and doesn’t stop until we are nothing.

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Kelly Kanayama

Kelly Kanayama

Staff Writer Kelly was born and raised in Honolulu but now lives in Scotland. She has has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing, and is currently pursuing a PhD (look! There it goes!) on transatlantic narratives in contemporary comics. As a half-Japanese, half-Filipina woman, she believes that white vinegar is the answer to most of life's problems.

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