February 17, 2014
In times of political crisis, out comes the red pen.
Egyptian journalists have long labored under various forms of censorship, but
by most accounts, conditions have become worse after the overthrow of the Hosni
Mubarak regime. In the tumultuous three years since the Tahrir Square uprising,
a number of young Egyptian cartoonists have persevered to defend a crack of
space for free expression and dissent. Among their favorite slings: Tok Tok,
an alt-comic magazine.
Tok Tok is more preoccupied with the
country’s social issues than with the politicians of the day. Its narratives
range from wordless strips on corrupt government officials and
businessmen, to the misadventures of an antihero combating sexual
harassment. The quarterly’s illustrations depict an Egypt largely absent
in the mainstream press—downtown street corners, packed
minibuses, cramped apartments, and daily addictions such as coffee or
hashish. The artists challenge readers to attune themselves to the city
life around them. Variously drawing on the aesthetics of Mad
Magazine and Walt Disney, noir film and street art, Tok
Tok captures Cairo’s grit, and is always penned in colloquial dialects.
Mohammed Andeel, one of the magazine’s five co-founders, who goes only by his
last name in the tradition of Egyptian cartoonists, calls Tok Tok “an answer to censorship.”
Reading Tok Tok is like pitching up
at a downtown ahwa packed with artists, listening to the
conversations of passersby, witnessing the city breathing. Each issue
contains a bright centerfold, such as the one that depicts a typical scene from
Egypt’s difficult political transition: pedestrians, motorcycles, and taxis all
competing with a tank for space on a Cairo boulevard. The last page of Tok
Tok features “Made in Egypt,” profiles of real-life characters such as a
tea waiter at a Champollion Street café, the needle worker of sportswear
knock-offs (“Abibos” and “Njkf”), or a woman pushing a grocery cart.
The publication has turned the founders into minor
celebrities, winning financial backing from the European Union. In May, at
the Cairo launch of Tok Tok’s ninth issue, the queue for autographs
snaked through the Institut Français. Indie rock band Like Jelly
jammed while the artists sketched, their spontaneous lines projected live to a
packed theater of fellow cartoonists, journalists, and activists: the
in-crowd.
Speaking in November at an event hosted by the
Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at AUC, Andeel explained that one
of Tok Tok’s goals is to expand the boundaries of comics. “Unfortunately in
Egypt, comics have been just Mickey and Samir—things for kids,” he
said. In one issue of Tok Tok, for instance, he illustrated the first
chapter of Beer in the Snooker Club, Wagiuh Ghali’s bildungsroman
about Cairo after the 1952 Free Officers revolt. The
protagonist, caught between a repressive junta and his own subversive
politics, grapples with tragedy of national and personal proportions. That
revolution had gone awry—something cartoonists relate to these days.
Andeel honed his skills at the weekly Al-Dostour in
the 2000s, where editor Ibrahim Eissa, a tenacious Mubarak
critic, incubated the new vanguard of Egyptian caricature and
mentored the future creators of Tok Tok. Since 2010, Andeel has drawn
daily cartoons for Al-Masry Al-Youm, the country’s
largest-circulation independent newspaper. His doodles have targeted the
government, the Muslim Brotherhood, the military, and everyone else involved in
the political sphere, often to the discomfort of his editors.
In October, Andeel reported on his Facebook page that Al-Masry
Al-Youm’s editors had censored more of his cartoons since the July 3
military takeover than during the entire year of the Muslim Brotherhood leader
Mohammed Morsi’s presidency. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice newspaper, struggling amid a violent clampdown on the
organization, turned Andeel’s Facebook post into a story headlined: “Freedom of
Expression Declined After the Coup.” How comic that the Brotherhood would
embrace a cartoonist who had rendered Morsi standing in a pool of blood just
months earlier. For now, he has stopped submitting illustrations
to the newspaper. “If I criticize the military, they won’t put it in,” he
told me as we drove into downtown Cairo from the AUC campus. “They encourage me
to criticize the Brotherhood.”
Lately, Andeel has become a writer for comedian Bassem
Youssef, whose popular satire show has stirred repeated controversy for its
mocking of everyone from Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi, to Mohammed Morsi,
to fellow journalists and talkshow hosts. With a new iteration of Youssef’s
show scheduled to premier this year, Andeel has another opportunity to fight
the red lines.