“Why the hell is a bourgeois publication interested in interviewing a pro-Palestinian cartoonist?” asks the skinny 40-something in a black and white keffiyeh. If it wasn’t Carlos Latuff, the now legendary Brazilian political cartoonist, we might have been offended. But for a man who has made a career championing a political cause some 15,000 kilometres away from the home he shares with his working class parents in Rio de Janeiro, a cup of tea is probably a means of capitalist oppression. And having avoided the temptation to question why being pro-Palestinian and bourgeois were somehow mutually exclusive – he might want to visit Abdoun to appreciate how many Palestinians have successfully graduated from the refugee camp – we managed to convince him that as Arabs, some of us actually Palestinian, the NOX staff does care rather a lot about the 40-year occupation. Maybe even as much as he does.
Bad first impressions aside, we moved to a comfortable spot in Darat al-Funun, the scene of an exhibition and talk, and he proved more than willing to discuss his career-long commitment to the cause. “I am an ordinary guy,” he says. “There is nothing special about me. The special thing in this whole formula is the Palestinian people. They transform ordinary people to pro-Palestinian activists – this is why I am here, this is why I am now displaying my art in Amman. It’s the Palestinians. Me, I am just ordinary.”
A crowd of well-over 500 people who attended the event would no doubt dispute his claims of “ordinariness”. Latuff, a cartoonist from Brazil, came to focus almost exclusively on Palestine after his visit to Hebron in 1998 and a conversation with a local man. “Khalid Idriss did not know me, neither knew what I did for a living,” he explained in the talk. “To him I was someone from the outside and his story can be echoed through me. So he invited me to his home. He took out his wallet and started pulling out broken teeth,” Latuff recounted passionately. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, what is this?’ And he said, ‘It’s all the teeth I lost to the butts of the M16s of both Israeli settlers and soldiers.’ He then brought his teenage daughter and lifted her shirt off her back to show me all the scars and wounds. So I promised him to get his story out. Today, I am still keeping my word.”
NOX: You were one of the top finishers in Iran’s 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Competition. Aren’t you afraid of being accused of being anti-Semitic?
Carlos Latuff: Of course, I was bashed as a racist and anti-Semite. But have you seen the cartoon that won? It does not deny the holocaust, but actually reaffirms it. Today, we are witnessing a whole new holocaust against the Palestinians, and yet you can’t even say that in the media. I don’t care if people call me anti-Semitic, and I don’t care about what people think of me; I care about the Palestinians. It’s really amazing that when the Western media heard about the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, they all cried “Rage!”. Just a few weeks earlier, they were defending “freedom of speech” over the Mohammad cartoon incident. Their double standards were exposed, and I saw a good a chance to make a point about the Palestinian cause.
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