Samir Harb reflects on his graphic work, ‘Your silence is loud’, and the art and activism of comics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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1. On the artist in the academy 

Spending some considerable time in the anthropology department, Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin I found that there is a clear separation between two major issues – the idea of theorizing, which is very important, and practice.

I think it is also important to create a sort of studio. In the art world there is the concept of the studio where somebody in architecture or in art or in painting or in sculpture or whatever – in dance – perform art. There’s the dance floor where they go every morning for six hours, just dancing and trying moves, for example. You go in a studio just to build up this argument, this way of doing a particular art thing. This makes a substantial distinction between theorizing it or talking about it and doing it.

This is very important because the emergence of ideas comes along the way. This is a key thing which doesn’t exist currently in the pedagogy of the anthropology department, at least where I was, to start thinking about drawing as key to the emergence of ideas. Human geography, for example, where I am, or anthropology, are all text-based. But, in geography, as a field of colonial mapping, the image, the map, was always there, but it seems to be disappearing in practice. I think we in the social sciences only consider research articles valuable. Even if we want to theorize the value of multimodality, we fall into the same trap: we write an article about it. 

The fundamental problem is that the studio is not integrated as part of the research process. For example, I’m an anthropologist and I have an illustrator, and the illustrator draws for me what I say. In the end, all of the process is in the hands of the professor. There’s kind of a hierarchy or a power relationship there.  

If we want to really give the image a chance in an academic way, especially in the social sciences, we have to distinguish between research-making and the role of the graphic novel. So, if a student studies anthropology and is good at drawing and then combines the two, they have a new way of looking at concepts related to the social sciences, like climate change, environmental ecology, anthropology, environmental anthropology, power, social formation and social theory broadly, like military spaces, destruction of the earth. All of these concepts are beautiful and they’re really actually sometimes the reason why we just want to study, right? We want to go into the university because we love to talk about these things, and we want to engage in a society where we do these things.  

But then there is the professor who wants to share an idea in the same structure that has been used for so many years. In my opinion this will fail because it is going to perpetuate a Marxist way of reproducing the means of entanglement in a wider power structure, which is assumed to be the journal article. I have no problem with the journal article and there are beautiful articles and beautiful literature and amazing ideas and concepts. The issue here is that we’re talking of a different form of expression or way of creating. 

I studied Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, which was basically visual culture, and then I found myself interested in geography. I thought, okay, why don’t I go to the geography department? But this field uses a very traditional way of structuring a text. It was difficult for me to learn how to write in such a manner. It took me a really long time, but I started to be more aware about how comics emerge from a different place. I think it takes experience to play with the word and the image. You need to keep doing it until you have full control on the flow of it. So, you choose the moment where you start knowing how the frame works. 

In general, I’m interested when I hear of people looking at how to construct a particular narrative of this or that situation and the tools they used in order to express emotions, feeling, the senses, in different forms to tell something close to what they think or what they believe.  

With every story you live in a status in which you’re producing. I do other stuff, like I cook but I’m thinking in the background about why I am worried about something. I think some stories in the image haunt you and when it’s nagging there you just have to say okay, now I need to draw it. And for me, perhaps because I’m more trained now with comics, I know when it’s a comic and when it’s just an image.  

I advise all beginners to just try it. The more you do it and the more you try to draw, the better you can express what you feel. 

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2. On influences 
 

There is this very, very interesting Italian comic artist, Gipi. When I started comics I couldn’t afford them. They are often expensive and unavailable in Palestine and I couldn’t really buy his work. 

And it was only this year I remembered that, twenty years ago, I had really wanted it. I said to myself, oh, man, you know, you have money now to buy the books. So I went and bought a lot of books, most of his work. I like his style, I like the flow of the story. It’s cinematic. 

One of the books that isn’t mentioned much, but is an important reference for visual anthropology, is The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier, about a photographer with a Medecins sans Frontieres convoy in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

So, the photographer, Lefèvre, starts taking these photos whilst in Afghanistan. And he goes to a friend, who is the illustrator, And he says, this is my box of archival film. I want to tell a story about this.  

They start rebuilding the story. Wherever the image is missing, comics emerge. So the illustrator combines with the photographer and they combine to create this visually powerful journey in Afghanistan. 

Anthropology would need light years to get to this form and to do so, it has to not claim too much. 

But this is a power of comics: to shift the eye.  

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3. On the urgency of comics in a time of genocide 
 

Now, turning to this comic for OtherwiseMag. There are certain gaps of contradiction in which urgency emerges, and the gap of contradiction that I found was in the German institution when it comes to Palestine. The silence that has been there for two years – I’m talking about four years in that larger institution, and the two years I was in the institution when the events in Gaza started. I work on urban studies, right, urban geography is my field. For me the contradiction is that, with all of your knowledge of urbanism, you have positioned yourself as an academic and a professor for so many years and you’re proud about it. The contradiction starts to emerge for me is that, with all of that knowledge about urbanism, you can’t even formulate an opinion. 

Not to say that in German academia, there aren’t academics who are trying to speak up and address issues related to Palestine and Gaza. A small number of academics are trying hard, but they are silenced in all forms by the university administration, and they are frustrated too.

I don’t know. It’s not just because I’m Palestinian. I guess it would be frustrating for anybody. If you’re a climate activist and you go into academia, and you start saying people don’t care about how cement companies are exploiting the entire globe, every corner of it, in order to produce cement that we might not really use, but just because of forms of power. Then if somebody in environmental studies says, I don’t have an opinion about it, that will really actually become a contradiction.  

That was the thing about Gaza. It was like, wow, it’s off the map from an infrastructure perspective. Whether they want to call it a genocide or not wasn’t the point; it’s just that this high intellectual group of people sitting at a university couldn’t formulate an opinion. That’s a frustration and it accumulates through time and you just start to say, okay, I’m going to ignore it because it’s very emotionally exhausting to keep thinking about. But there’s a moment when all of this has to formulate in an image and a text. 

And I think this particular urge is where comics emerge, or emerged, in the history of underground comics. In the stories that emerged, from Maus by Art Spiegelman to Palestine by Joe Sacco, to Marjane Satrapi, to even earlier ones who were perhaps not the best reference. There is a particular thing about drawing comics. There is a radical urgency for it to emerge.  

This underground radical status of comics and graphics, if it goes into knowledge production and it’s too polished, that is something that shouldn’t happen. In my opinion, the medium itself shouldn’t be like ‘I draw comics because I’m transforming this knowledge into a representative item’. The process emerges from an urgency to speak when there is no way to express it otherwise.  

Maybe Palestine is an extreme case, but I think the process in comics themselves assumes an urgency to narrate something that is not obvious in other forms. I am here at the university when there is this silence, but elsewhere, I’m also thinking about reconnecting to Palestine through planting. 

Seeds, or the act of gardening or whatever you want to call it, brings life. Basically, it’s like Palestine is undergoing a genocide and the genocide is definitely in Gaza. It’s been built up as an event for a very long time. We all have traumas of the past. I grew up in Palestine and the images of destruction now are a thousand times more than what we have seen before. It’s extreme on the global level of war so there is no way to compare it to what was in the past. 

I’m not saying that the past situations were less, but it is from this urgency that images started to emerge.

Samir Harb is a human geographer who writes about cement. He was trained as an architect and uses comics when other forms of expression fail to convey personal and reflective accounts of his daily encounters.​

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Read Samir's work 'Your silence is loud' in the Graphic issue.