Zine Review: London > Cairo

 

It is long overdue for me to do another zine review on here. What caught my eye this month is Elly Bazigos' Egyptian travelogue London > Cairo, which conveys the personal perspective of an artist with Greek heritage whose grandparents emigrated to Cairo, Egypt.

The experience of civil war in the late 1940s, and frequent military coups leading up to the 1970s, led to a weakened economy in mid-twentieth century Greece and large exodus of Greeks to many other countries, not least Australia and the countries of former Yugoslavia. I was less aware of those that went to north African countries like Egypt however, so this zine has expanded my awareness of the diaspora beyond what I previously knew.

The loose drawing style gives this 24 page creation the energetic immediacy of an on-the-spot sketchbook, while the contrasting sketches of the artists' grandmother and visits to local museums provide an interesting contrast between the personal lives that exist within an ancient and fascinating culture, and gives us pause to consider how many other people have found a home in Cairo from other European countries.

Her website is: https://www.ellybazigos.com although you can't order zines there so that means getting down to Gosh Comics in London, which has developed a significant section for zine makers.

London Music History Walks

This is part of a series of walking videos I have been making in which I visit significant locations in the musical history of London.

First up, I visited Eel Pie Island in Twickenham.

NEW COMIC STRIP

I have enjoyed a lot of the historical comics that have been published over the last decade immensely, whether it is Mary and Bryan Talbot's graphic novels about the French revolutionary Louise Michel, or Kate Evans' book about the Polish-German communist Rosa Luxembourg, or even the late, great Spain Rodriguez's graphic autobiography of the Argentine revolutionary, and honorary Cuban, Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

What more could a former bookseller, whose principle published comics have been a series of short strips consisting mainly of gags aimed at Scottish stoners a decade ago, possibly add to magnificent illustrated tomes of this nature? After all, there are many (non-illustrated) books about these revolutionaries and others in the English language.

If you have looked at this blog before you will know that I have a particular fascination with uncovering art (including comics, music and film) that lies outside the mainstream of western culture. The Cold War years certainly shut us off from a lot of art and culture which only cheaper travel and the Internet has made (theoretically) more accessible. Yet despite being able to travel freely to countries of the former Soviet Union for thirty years, most people in the west remain oblivious of the culture of the east, effectively shut out by the invisible barriers of language. Add to this the fact that if the entire culture of a civilisation is routinely written off for by western pundits and historians as mere propaganda for a century, you create a situation in which people in the west aren't even aware of what they are missing.

The first installment of Going East is about a Canadian musician who emigrated to East Germany, and seems to remain completely unknown in Canada and the wider western world because he sang in German and any books that have been written about him are only published in German. I hope it inspires some people to find out more art they may have missed out on. I assure you, its the merest tip of the iceberg.

 

An Englishman in the East

Born in London, England in 1910, and winning a scholarship to Chigwell School as a child, during his lifetime the British journalist and novelist Alan Winnington would travel the world.

As a young man, following a chance meeting with Harry Pollitt in a pub in 1934, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, and he soon became a branch secretary. His career in journalism began when he landed a job with a photo agency, and soon he was writing for socialist newspapers like the Daily Worker (as the Morning Star was known at the time) which he continued to write for from the 1940s up until the 1960s. For the first few years after WW2 he became “our man in Beijing”, when he reported on the early years of the newly independent People’s Republic of China for the Daily Worker, while also working as an advisor to the new Xinhua (New China) news agency.

Uncomfortable Truths

His location in Asia meant he was ideally placed to report on the Korean war when it broke out in June 1950, and he would anger his own government by reporting on both the Korean and later the Vietnam wars from the communist side. Along with his colleague, the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett (who was equally ostracized for his reporting by his own birth country), Winnington would expose the use of biological weapons against Koreans by the USA.

For this brave reporting both men had their passports removed for many years.

From China to Germany

By 1960 Winnington had learned to speak Chinese fluently, but had already become skeptical of Mao’s approach to building socialism at least two years earlier because of the "Great Leap Forward" and other campaigns, which he described as “stupidities.” He left China with his Sino-British wife Esther and their two children, settling in East Berlin while they attempted to negotiate the return of his British passport with the help of Lance Samson, a German Jew who also worked for the Star.

The British government were still considering a charge of treason or espionage, possibly with a death sentence, as punishment for his reporting during the Korean war, so even after the restoration of his passport he did not return permanently to his country of birth, choosing instead to remain in Berlin. Sadly, his wife wanted to return to Britain, and their marriage broke down when she decided to move with their two children back to Britain, where she married Samson with whom she had a third child. Their daughter Polly would subsequently grow up to become an author in her own right.

After making the decision to remain in the east, Winnington began a new family with a lady named Ursula Wittbrodt, who he had met in 1963 and who would become Ursula Winnington when they married in 1967. He did not receive his British passport until a year later. (Burchett had to wait until Gough Whitlam’s Labour government came to power in 1972 before his birthright was restored.)

Winnington continued to work as a correspondent for the Morning Star from his new home in the GDR, and also served at times as an Asia advisor to the East German government. During the Vietnam War he repeatedly had the opportunity to travel to the Far East where he reported from both China and Vietnam.

From Journalism to Crime Writing

Alongside his journalistic work however, Winnington was increasingly beginning to develop a career as a novelist and author of crime fiction, among them novels in German like Heart failure, Inspector Gullet and The Death Curve, The Presumed Dead Man and Angler's Alibi. He also wrote children's books, such as a fantasy novel in two volumes about a robot horse called "Silver hoof", which was set in the Himalayas. During his time in China, he had developed a considerable love and admiration for the people of Tibet, writing Tibet: Record of a Journey (1957), which these stories reflected.

He even had a very brief foray into acting, appearing in a small film role as a Chief of Intelligence Service in the 1967 East German film Die Gefrorenen Blitze (Frozen Flashes), although he seems to have enjoyed more success with writing. His crime novel Police Alibi was made into a film for East German television in 1971 (Tod in der Kurve), while Milliony Ferfaksa (Fairfax’s Millions) was turned into a feature film in 1980 by the Russian Dovzhenko Film Studios.

His autobiography Breakfast with Mao was first published in a small German print run, as he had still been writing it when he died on 26^th November 1983. Described by the historian Edwin Moise in the London Review of Books as “marvellously readable” it only appeared in English in 1986 when Lawrence and Wishart published it as From London to Beijing: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent 1914 to 1960.
Nine short novels, six of which belong to the crime and detective genre, the aforementioned two children's books and four travel books about China and Asia have also been published in English at some time or another. Yet despite this diverse oeuvre it appears that Slaves of the Cool Mountains remains the only one of his books currently still in print in the English language, and he currently has no English language Wikipedia entry.

Today Ursula Winnington is mainly known in Germany as an author of cookbooks, where she has been called the “Chef Queen of the East”, with some of her books reaching a total circulation of over one million copies, including her Kleines Kochbuch für Kinder (Small Cookbook for Children) (1977). Since 1992, Klatschmohn Verlag has reissued three of her most popular books, and in 2008 she published another book Liebe, Lust und Leckereien (Love, Lust and Treats). In 1995, long after Winnington’s death in 1983 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, she opened The Gecko in Berlin, a shop for exotic furniture and gifts from all over the world, and continues to make her home in Berlin.

Revival of Interest from Korea

Alan Winnington remains almost unknown in the country of his birth, and the English speaking world more broadly. Unlike Burchett, who is mainly remembered for his Daily Express article of 1945 which exposed the reality of nuclear radiation sickness following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Winnington does not even have an English language Wikipedia entry. He is remembered, it seems, only in Germany.

With this in mind it is therefore quite noteworthy that recently the media organisation Ahim and South Korean journalist Im Hyoin have been bringing Winnington’s revelations about US atrocities in Korea to light once more, if only in South Korea, among them Winnington’s work exposing the notoriously under-reported Sincheon massacre. This atrocity even inspired a painting by Picasso which sits in the Picasso Museum in Paris. It is a painting as stark and brutal as his earlier painting Guernica inspired by fascist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War but which still remains far less well known. 

This should give us pause to reflect upon how, thirty years after the Cold War ended, its logic continues to distort our own historical memory.

Notes:

https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/20/alan-winnington/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n20/edwin-moise/our-man-in-beijing

http://www.urbananxieties.org/blog/category/alan-winnington

A little bit of Arabia in the heart of Paris

Pictures taken at the Grand Mosque in Paris, France last September 2019.

I haven't been to Morocco since 1994, but for a brief moment in time it almost feels like I have left the streets of southern Paris behind and I am deep in the Casbah of Tangier.

According to Mrs McPherson, during WW2 this majestic building was used as a makeshift school for Jewish children, whose families were being sheltered from the Vichy government of Nazi collaborators by Algerian partisans involved in the French Resistance.

As a counter-balance to the intense history associated with the Grand Mosque is the cafe which occupies one corner of the site, where beautiful mint tea again transports me back to a Tangier of the mind.

I simply cannot do justice, at present, to the beautiful intricacy of Islamic design, so I am letting the photographs speak for themselves.

The Music and Movies of Independent Algeria

This article, like my other articles about the music or films of Venezuela or comic art around the world, is intended as an introduction, a brief overview, of the popular culture of a country that is all too frequently ignored in European countries like my own.

I begin by looking at Rai music.
“Rai” is a form of Algerian folk music which originated in 1920s Oran (in French colonial Algeria, Oran was sometimes known as “little Paris”). At that time the city in the west of the country was a cultural melting pot full of nightclubs, with a large Jewish, Spanish and (of course) French population living alongside the native Arab and Berber population.

Rai music is traditionally sung by the cheb, or shabab (“young”), and the style developed in the poorer, working class neighbourhoods of the city, out of traditional Berber folk styles.

Derb, the Jewish quarter, produced musicians like Reinette l'Oranaise (1918-1998) and Saoud l'Oranais (1886-1943), the latter being not just a band leader but also owner of the original Cafe Oran venue.

A popular female rai singer from the 1940s onwards was Cheikha Rimitti (1923-2006).

Sidi el Houari, the old quarter (like a Casbah) of Oran, sits out in the west of town beside the docks, in an area that used to be made up largely of Spanish fishermen, a population which vastly expanded after 1939 and the fascist victory in Spain. It remains a poor neighbourhood with few transport links even today.

Rachid Baba Ahmed (1946-1995), who often sang in a duo with his brother Fethi, and ran his own record store, was tragically assassinated by Salafi Islamists during the civil war that disrupted the country during the 1990s.

A younger rai musician, Cheb Hasni (1968-1994), whose song 'El Berraka' concerns an evening of drunken sex, like so much rai music a reflection of the lives and social conditions of the people, was killed by the same ultra conservative forces.

An Algerian singer with a far more mainstream pop sound was Freh Khodja, whose songs in the 1970s and 80s often dabbled in funk, disco and even reggae!

The most famous Algerian film in Europe and beyond is probably Z (1968), an Algerian-French joint production which was directed by the left-wing Greek director Costa-Gavras. The Battle of Algiers (1966), an Algerian-Italian documentary about the independence war, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, is also very well known.

I understand that the US military even organised screenings of this latter film for Pentagon officials prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, although it is hard to understand how a film about an indigenous guerrilla war bears any relation to a foreign-backed regime change invasion...

There are a few examples of films made exclusively in the Arab world around this time which still make good viewing today. 
Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1958 historical drama Jamila, the Algerian was produced in Nasser's Egypt, clearly out of solidarity with the cause of Pan-Arab national liberation, as the independence war against French colonialism in Algeria was still ongoing at the time this film appeared. 
Chahine's film, with its fast-paced dialogue, focuses on Djamila Bouhired, one of the most important female revolutionaries to emerge during the Algerian independence struggle. Born in 1935, she continues to make her home in Algiers, where she remains politically engaged in a number of different causes including the women's movement, which has sadly seen rather less success in Algeria than the cause of national independence did.

In the post-independence context, Chahine also directed the first Egyptian-Algerian co-production. Le Moineau (The Sparrow in English, or Al-Asfour in its native Arabic) is a political drama set during the Six Day War of 1967. It did not receive a UK release until 2007!

Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina won an award for Best First Work at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival for his war drama Le Vent des Aures (The Winds of Aures), and would follow it with the war comedy Hassan Terro (1968) and the epic Palme d'Or award-winning historical film Chronique des Annees de Braise (Chronicle of the Years of Fire) (1975).

I could go further, outlining the contemporary cultural scene in 21st century Algeria, in particular how the country was affected by endemic corruption and an uprising of ultra-conservative Salafi forces during the 90s, but I will save this for another article, in which I will also talk more about Algerian literature.

A recent book by the French historian Alain Ruscio (b.1947), a contributor to France's longest-running left-wing daily newspaper l'Humanite, may also add some useful context for those wanting to understand more of the country. Les communistes et l'Algerie. Des origines a la guerre d'Independance, 1920-1962 (published by La Decouverte in 2019), examines the role of leftist movements in Algeria in the decades preceding independence.

Historietas y Tebeos - Comics in Mexico

Since the Spanish-speaking world covers everything from Spain itself to the whole of South and Central America that isn't Brazil or French Guyana, I am going to focus on the comics of one country for starters: Mexico.

When looking for the roots of Mexican satirical cartoons one place to begin may someone like the nineteenth century political lithographer Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913). Posada's influence was of course not just confined to cartoonists but also extended to the wider culture, perhaps most notably to the muralists that emerged after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 

Figures like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Fernando Leal, not mention the iconic surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, often referenced some of the same cultural iconography that Posada had popularised years earlier, and they certainly shared similar politics. 

One of Posada's iconic characters

A later artist to draw upon the political radicalism of Posada and the muralists was the cartoonist Eduardo del Rio (better known by his pen name Rius) (1934-2017). "Rius" created satirical comic strips in the 1960s like 'Los Agachados' as well as many books that reflected his left-wing sympathies and critique of the Catholic church, of which he was a member for many years. His 1981 book El manual del perfecto ateo (The Handbook for the Perfect Atheist) even got him excommunicated, while his history of the Catholic Church probably didn't help things either. Its called Pope Puree (which I understand is a kind of play on words of the Spanish term for "mashed potatoes"). 
Rius also carries the curious distinction of being the first author outside of the Soviet bloc to be published by Izvestia.

"Drugs: The U.S.A's Big Business"

(a cover for Los Agochados de Rius)

One of his most widely read books is Marx para principiantes (Marx for Beginners) which helped launch the whole "for beginners" genre.
Rius remained active for most of his life, helping launch the magazine El Chamuco in 1996 with other creators like El Fisgon, although sadly this version of the magazine folded in 2000 before its eventual re-launch in 2007. 

Bandes-dessinees: the Rich World of French Comics

I have always been aware of the respect that the French hold for the arts. More to the point, since learning, in the mid-1990s, that the two most famous names of 1960s U.S. underground comix - Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton - had both chosen independently to emigrate to France, I have also been conscious that this high regard also extends to that form of graphic storytelling and social commentary so frequently dismissed in the English speaking world as "comics" or "cartoons" (I imagine this is because no one has yet coined a more succinct term, meaning the endless confusion with fields like animation and stand-up comedy persist).
Growing up in the UK I found that only a thin slice of French talent was ever translated and published in English. I had heard of the work of the science fiction illustrator Moebius (pen name of the late Jean Girard), for instance, or the humorous slice-of-life cartoons of Claire Bretecher, and of course books like Asterix and Iznogoud figured prominently in my reading habits from a young age (certainly as much as MAD magazine), but that was about it. 
As i grew up and found myself wanting to seek out newer or more different work I soon found that unless you read Heavy Metal magazine avidly (this being the US version of France's sci-fi/fantasy magazine Metal Hurlant, nothing to do with the music genre), there were very few opportunities to find work by French artists short of actually learning some French and going there.
One of the interesting things you find when you do go there is how mainstream the French love of comics and satirical magazines is. It extends well beyond the walls of comic shops, as here you will find that they grace the shelves of most newsagents in the country. It reminds me of that brief renaissance in the late 80s-early 90s when British newsagents's shelves were filled with VIZ imitators.

The reality for UK mass market comics aimed at a more mature audience has consisted for many years now primarily of VIZ and Private Eye (both of which are really humorous or satirical magazines that also happen to publish a lot of comic strips or gag cartoons). This figure at least doubles as soon as you cross the Channel. For every VIZ you have a Fluide Glacial and (periodically) l'Echo des Savanes. For every Private Eye you have papers printed on equally cheap looking newsprint with names like Le Canard enchaine, Sine Mensuel or Charlie Hebdo.
It also impressed me that within just one French comic magazine you find a much wider diversity of drawing styles than I am used to seeing in either VIZ or more kid friendly fare from DC/Thompson. (This is one area in which the long-running science fiction mag 2000ad bucks the trend at least.) 
Perhaps it is just because I grew up with MAD and US underground comics more than Marvel and DC that I feel more invigorated by publishers that do not cultivate a "house style"? 
In just one edition of Fluide Glacial, for instance, I have seen artists as diverse as those with the loose cartoon-style of Fabrice Erre or Edika, to those with the detailed realism of Dominique Bertail.
And that's just on the news-stands. There is of course an equally dedicated array of specialist comic shops catering for people that enjoy longer, graphic novels. Rue Dante, in the area known as the Latin Quarter (on the south side of the River Seine), has long maintained a collection of different comics and speciality stores. Over the years, we have even seen this unique market developed and catered to by a science fiction-themes creperie.  
Almost makes me wish I could speak French more fluently!