Green monster

Nas wa Siyasa wa Iqtisad (People, Politics, Economics), Nabil Tag, Cairo: Al-Ahram (Kitab Al-Ahram Al-Iqtisadi), 2004. pp112

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The illustrations, cartoons and cover art making up this book, described privately by the author as "some toil of the years", were all made specifically for Al-Ahram Al-Iqtisadi, the weekly business and economy magazine with which he has been affiliated since the mid-1980s, when he returned from an extended sojourn in Switzerland. One consequence of this is that themes of wealth vs poverty, globalisation and the hegemony of "the difficult Green", a humorous reference to the US dollar, are by far the most predominant.

Selected and arranged by the graphic artist Mohieddin El-Labbad to celebrate the magazine's 200th edition, the book not only testifies to Tag's technical power, intellectual focus, passionate sense of national identity and abiding commitment to social (and international) equity, it also showcases some of Al-Ahram Al-Iqtisadi's most interesting topics, evidencing the bold, provocative tone in which they are discussed and in the process outlining the contours of a disturbing political and economic context.

Proposing to "tell, in drawings, the story of economic life in Egypt through many years full of motion, ascents and descents, problems and crises and reforms", as Essam Rifaat puts it in his brief introduction, the book is composed entirely of art -- an equivocal virtue, some might argue, since the illustrations and cartoons might have benefited from explanatory captions or commentary.

Yet it is to his ability to communicate a relatively specific, if always evocatively open-ended message without recourse to words that Tag's exceptional talent is due. His style is so simple and articulate, and so profoundly in touch with the subject matter he chooses to depict, it makes for a readily digestible meal.

In the cover cartoon, for example, the god Anubis is seen wrapping a giant dollar in mummification fabric -- a gesture that could interpreted as a comment on the modern Egyptian's worship of foreign currency, or else as a reference to the death of the Egyptian economy.

Many cartoons in the first section of the book, devoted wholly to the dollar, depict this symbol of American economic hegemony in similarly stimulating ways: the dollar as the barrel of a gun or the blade of a dagger; as a huge kite that upstages another, smaller one, the Egyptian pound, to which an Egyptian in tattered clothes hangs; as the cork that keeps an indignant giant -- perhaps a personification of the developing world -- locked up in a bottle; as a sorcerer's implement.

In the next eight sections -- also in colour -- equally current themes like population explosion, bureaucracy, the rhetoric of Arab glory and the influence of foreign parties on Arab life -- receive similar treatment. A camel decked out as a belly dancer, the Central Bank as a dying patient being fed money in liquid form, the Pyramids as Lego pieces or a mouth-watering meal, an Arab about to blow himself up as he straddles a US-made bomb and Uncle Sam admonishing the pharaoh who carries his suitcase: Tag's imagination, though seldom far-fetched or obscure, is never reductive or too easy. He combines the draughtsmanship of an artist with the humour of a cartoonist and the active imagination of the average citizen.

The book ends with 17 monochrome portraits of well-known figures that display the subtle power of Tag's line -- and reminding the reader that he started out as a highbrow artist, not a cartoonist. They not only conjure up an immediate physical likeness of such personalities as the statesman Boutros Ghali and the vernacular poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi, but also evoke the very spirit of their character and work, revealing a human connection and a vision as well as the power of observation and the ability to insinuate a startling amount of information with remarkable economy of means.

By Youssef Rakha