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The Arab Other in Turkish Political Cartoons, 1908—1939 Nadir’s cartoon is titled Manda’nin basina gelenler! (“What happened to the buffalo!’), accented by a literary form of exclamation commonly used when telling a story.‘ Similar to a story well told (that can make us laugh, weep, swell with pride, or fill with indignation), Nadir employs all the racially and culturally specific subject positions to produce the image of the Arab as the colonial Other. He sets his story on the shores of the Arabian desert, where the Mediterranean’s blue meets the yellow of the desert. The exact geographic location is unclear, but the symbolic colours accentuate the scenery as “Arab” lands. At the centre of the rectangular cartoon we see a giant manda (‘buffalo’), with unusually big blue eyes, lying on its side. It alternately huffs and puffs from its nostrils the contradictory words tavzih (‘evidence’) and tekzip (‘denial’). To underline the buffalo’s French identity, Nadir draws a tricolour flower on its head. Assaulting the manda from all sides are various Arab characters of similar physiognomies, eager to butcher it. The ethnicity of each figure can be surmised not by his physical features, but only by the slightly differentiating symbols in their attire, such as traditional robes and headgear (fezes for the Syrians and Egyptians—the latter also with a flag on his robe—and keffiyeh and turbans for the north Africans of Morocco and Tunisia, the Arabs of Iraq, and the Saudis of the Arabian deserts). The physiognomy in the portrayal of the Arabs is employed to form a biological reference to race and criminality (Sufian 2008). Nadir merely reproduces the archetype of Arabs, which evolved through decades of visual representations. He represents them as vicious savages, running barefoot toward the manda, swinging their swords in the air with rage, some already shredding the animal’s flesh with their knives and guns. With their fleshy red lips and the white teeth of black Africans, rounded, shifty eyes, black, thin moustaches, chunky body forms, and dark-skin combinations of north African and Middle Eastern Arabs, Nadir’s own Arab figures are portrayed as ape-like little monsters. The cartoon stresses the familiar rationalizations of post-Ottoman Arabs with the irrational conviction that the Arabs, as an inferior species, are by nature incapable of self-governance and unfit to benefit from national independence. Other stereotypes are depicted in the cartoon. A Jew with his hooknose and moneybag worriedly watches the Arabs from the bottom corner. A British man can be seen in the upper left gripping the buffalo’ tail from across the sea to aid in its slaughter. Next to him a German’s head with his Pickelhaube helmet’ peeks out to spy the scene from between the British and Turkish fronts. Finally, to the German's right we see a sturdy, well-equipped Turkish soldier manning the armed ramparts along the frontier pointing towards the main scene, the Middle East, where the * Manda has a dual meaning in Turkish. The most common is ‘buffalo’, but its secondary meaning as ‘mandate’ was added to Turkish as part of the postwar discourse. In the cartoon, Nadir ridicules France by comparing it to a buffalo symbolizing the entire mandate system. > The Pickelhaube, a general word for “headgear” in German, was a spiked helmet worn in the 19" and 20" centuries by the German military. It became a symbol of militaristic Germans in 19" and early to mid 20" century political and war cartoons. 105
