“The system of Guantanamo was a bad, absurd and kafkaesque, regardless of whether the prisoner was innocent or guilty.” This idea of the pointlessness of the brutality that the guardians americans exercised over the prisoners in the Detention Center of the american Naval Base in Cuba, where they arrived to be confined to 700 terrorism suspects, plans on the graphic novel Guantanamo Kid. The true story of Mohammed El-Gorani, journalist Jérôme Tubiana and illustrator Alexandre Franc. Tubiana account, in a direct language, adapted to the format of the comic, how a 14 year old boy who had never heard of Osama Bin Laden was detained in Pakistan and held for eight years, until he was judged and he was released in 2009.
MORE INFORMATION
released the ‘taliban american’, convicted of collaborating with Al-Qaeda In his final hours, Obama drops to 41 prisoners from Guantanamo bay
JérômeTubiana (Paris, 45 years), a freelancer tanning on the battlefield, met with Mohammed El-Gorani in n’djamena (Republic of Chad) in 2010. After convincing the young 23-year-old, “that she looked much more” of the need to tell their story and to publish in two journals arose to write a book. “I had four notebooks of which I had only used 10%, at a time when non-fiction began to be popular and I chose to do a graphic novel. The most complicated thing was to find an editor and an illustrator suited to the theme, because if I was a cartoonist very realistic result could be obscene, so rugged, and the torture and brutality; so that out of respect to Mohammed, we have opted for a style that is more child to tell this sad story,” he explained Tubiana the last Thursday in Seville, where he went to present his book, published in Spanish by Norma Editorial, in the Foundation Three Cultures of the Mediterranean.
The book, in black-and-white, with a certain air of Persepolis, the successful work of the cartoonist franco-iranian Marjane Satrapí, tells with a precision journalism the story of a black boy 10 years of age, son of immigrants chadians, who lives in Saudi Arabia and is a vendor to help his family. Account how to decide to go to study English in Karachi (Pakistan) to prosper and, shortly after the attacks of 11-S, is stopped by the police in pakistan on a Friday when I went out of the mosque because I have an accent of Saudi Arabia.
Jérôme Tubiana, in the headquarters of the Foundation Three Cultures of the Mediterranean, in Seville. paco bridges
The drawings with unrealistic Franc, author tanning in many histories of social protest and also in children’s books, dulcifican the stark reality of The-Gorani who came to the prison camp at Guantanamo bay in 2001 and, despite his 14 years, was tried and tortured as an adult. “He is a rebel, a person who, in spite of the place and the situation in which he was defending his dignity and that of their peers. He promoted many revolts in Guantanamo to get small improvements, despite knowing that each accomplishment will cost a lot of suffering because the punishments were brutal,” says Tubiana, who published this work in 2018 in French, which earlier this year was translated into five languages and will go out in Arabic, “in a few months”, he says.
“Mohammed, despite all he has suffered, is a very funny guy, with a fine sense of humor. I was a teenager and, as such, the fight for freedom. He never gave up, although his victories were pírricas. Even now, no country wants to admit, is a stateless person who lives in Africa, always moving from one country to another and trying to reunite with the family he has formed in these years, his wife and their three children,” has commented the journalist, author also of the photo-book Chroniques du Darfour.
Vignettes of ‘Guantanamo Kid. The true story of Mohammed El-Gorani’.
“he Is a hero of our time, a hero made to himself, that he fought until the last moment that he spent in Guantanamo to be treated as a person,” says Tubiana, who distributes the proceeds of the book with the protagonist of your story and the artist in three equal parts.
“The respect should be mutual”, he retorted El-Gorani a guard when, after a judge declared him innocent in January 2009 he was sent to camp Iguana, also in the base, but intended for the detainees who were expecting host country after their release, something that did not occur until June of 2009. An attitude which earned him the nickname of Sunbul (spike), as they called their “brothers” in prison to refer to his generosity, to sticks that are carried on for the benefit of all. The nickname comes from a quote from the Quran that speaks of a grain “of which are born seven ears, and each spike a hundred grains.”
