Like Oskar Matzerath, the protagonist of Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, who refuses to grow up in the Germany that served as a breeding ground for Nazism, Handala decided to remain a child at the age of ten, the same age as his creator. , the cartoonist Nayi al-Ali, at the time of the Nakba, the catastrophe that in 1948 meant exodus and dispossession for the more than 700,000 Palestinians who had to leave their homes with the keys on, harassed by Israeli troops. Like a frozen representation of himself in the squalid refugee camp in southern Lebanon where Al-Ali ended up with his family, Handala appears in the vignettes barefoot and ragged, hands clasped behind his back, hair spiky, “ like a hedgehog that uses its quills as weapons.”
He named it after handal, the Arabic name for a plant with bitter fruits and enormous resistance, capable of sprouting again regardless of attempts to cut or eliminate it. The bitterness and resilience of the Palestinian people. “Handala is ten years old and will always be ten years old. Since his exile, the laws of nature have had no control over him. When he returns [to his land] he will still be ten years old and then he will begin to grow,” the cartoonist argued. The late political cartoonist, of formidable talent, died in 1987 in London after being shot in the face at point-blank range when he was on his way to the editorial office of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas for which he worked.
Before the crime (never solved: he was a radical and uncomfortable intellectual who had taken on Israel and US politics, corrupt Arab leaders and even Yasir Arafat’s PLO), Al-Ai predicted that Handala, the child who observes, condemns and rebels against all the atrocities perpetrated in the Middle East would survive him “because he is a witness to a generation that did not die, and will never leave life, it is eternal. He is a character who was born to live and has the challenge of continuing.” Four years after he was born, in 1969, the character turned his back on the reader. He promised not to show his face again until the inhumanity stopped.
His image is extraordinarily popular in the Arab world. He is everywhere, on the wall that separates Israelis and Palestinians, on key chains, t-shirts, pendants… and in recent weeks I have seen his innocent and painful little body walking the streets of Venice, Madrid or Paris alongside thousands of protesters ; or accompanying the students who camped in the gardens of Columbia University before the police stormed the campus, lighting the flames in dozens and dozens of universities.
Handala is still ten years old but it is much more than a symbol of Palestinian resistance and hope. It is like the global consciousness that refuses to surrender to this exhausted, cynical, indifferent, blood-crazed world.
