The satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo became notorious again this week as two of its cartoons spread across the Internet, filling social media with outrage and briefly reviving the hashtag #JeNeSuisPasCharlie. One cartoon subverted the iconic image of the drowned Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi by placing in its background an advertisement hoarding on which a clown promotes a two-for-one kids meal deal. The cartoon’s caption reads: “He was so close to the finish.” The other cartoon shows a man who resembles traditional depictions of Jesus splashing through shallow water, oblivious to the upturned feet of a child submerged close by. The image is glossed: “Proof That Europe Is Christian: Christians walk on water; Muslim children sink.”
Before trying to make sense of the images, it is worth considering how cartoonishly the religious and ethnic minorities that are its alleged targets are often perceived elsewhere. Another of the week’s ‘viral’ stories was the arrest of a Texas schoolchild whose teachers mistook his science project for a “hoax bomb”. When the 14-year-old boy was interviewed on PBS, he spoke geekily about his other science projects, and his hopes of going to MIT. He was evidently an utterly charming, intelligent and promising American teenager. Apart from his precocious intelligence, all that set him apart from his peers was his name, Ahmed Mohamed, and the fact that he was a nonwhite Muslim.
Any newspaper reader can immediately recall a dozen other stories of racial and religious stereotyping in America, including several in which appalling mistreatment, and occasionally murder, resulted from the dangerously prejudiced encounters such simplifications produce. In one recent incident, the athlete James Blake was assaulted in broad daylight by a policeman who mistook him for an identity-theft suspect. The officer made no effort to detain Mr Blake peacefully, he wrestled him to the ground and put him in handcuffs. Mr Blake is a famous tennis player, but because he is also a visible he is more immune to the assumptions of American law enforcement than Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, or thousands of other African Americans.
The xenophobia stirred up by Europe’s migrant crisis is no less incendiary than America’s racial and religious tensions. Why, then, would a cartoonist from a supposedly progressive French newspaper produce such provocative images? Many have concluded, often without viewing the cartoons or reflecting on them, that they mock the death of Alan Kurdi or laugh at those desperately seeking safety in Europe. On this reading, the images are of a piece with earlier Charlie Hebdo cartoons which are said to condescend towards Europe’s besieged minorities.
If one considers the matter more carefully, however, several facts stand against this interpretation. Shortly after the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo’s offices, Dominique Sopo, the Togolese-French president of SOS-Racisme, France’s leading anti-racist organization, praised the weekly for being the country’s “most anti-racist newspaper.” Sopo placed it in the vanguard of the fight “against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred” and accused those who said otherwise of stupidity or intellectual dishonesty. Another telling fact is that when they were murdered, the Charlie Hebdo staff were in a meeting that was scheduled to discuss their involvement in a forthcoming anti-racism conference.
If the anti-racist commitments of the Charlie Hebdo artists are taken into account, the images communicate quite different messages. Instead of the unconscionable mockery of a child, one notices a heartlessly materialistic Europe smirking at the deaths of innocents who drown on its shores. The caption suggests that Europe assumes foreigners are in a self-interested race (“so close to the finish”) and the gaudy advertisement which gives voice to this cynicism articulates the suspicion that they are probably after the easy life (two-for-one kids meals) rather than trying to escape a sanguinary civil war. As for the second image, what better symbol of the religious prejudices which inform Europe’s migration policy, than an anachronistic Christian man, congratulating himself for being able to walk through shallow water, while ignoring a foreign child he could easily have saved.
It hardly needs saying that such satire is deeply offensive to many people. But that, surely, is its point. When artists exercise their right to freedom of expression, there is no guarantee that we will approve of the ways that they choose to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Jen Sorensen, an award winning American cartoonist who recently visited the beach on which the drowned bodies of Alan Kurdi and other refuges were deposited, told the Washington Post that although she had reservations about other Charlie Hebdo cartoons, these seemed to mock Europe’s callousness rather than the child himself: “I believe the intention is to show sympathy for the plight of the refugees.”
Obscene injustices are taking place, on a daily basis, as hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Middle East and North Africa are prevented from landing on Europe’s coastline, or are herded like cattle from one part of the EU to another. The cringe-inducing awfulness of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons are meant to jolt us into seeing these obscenities for what they are. They should not be misread as something else.
