Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
There is something so dreadfully wrong with the world that it is only after the fact that we collectively feel the shame that should be felt by those entrusted to keep us safe, to provide justice, to deliver on the way we all want to live, without harm. When we learn of a single human being’s treatment at the hand of the government machine, we begin to see past the lies told, the fabrications dealt out and the sense of discrimination faced.
It is in the aftermath of the events of 9/11 that arguably the biggest deceit placed in the public’s mind was sown, and whilst the actions of that September day will forever be seared in the conscious of all who witnessed it happen, what came next was sanctioned by American law makers, and aided by numerous people in positions of great authority and power.
Whatever your own politics and thoughts on the so-called War on Terror, one cannot simply dismiss what happened to many men rounded up by the Pakistan police and then sold to the America military almost as if they were slaves. Detainees, suspects, accused of being part of al-Qaida, of being personal friends or followers of Osama Bin Laden, terrorists; the label was driven into the public’s mind and allowed to fester as the anger continued to ring out for what happened to 3,000 innocent human beings one morning in New York City.
It was a label pinned upon the soul of Mohammed El-Gharani, a 14-year-old boy, a poor boy whose crime if anything was to lie about his age to be able to fly to Pakistan and learn about computers and English, to see a way out of poverty. The label stuck for seven years, he suffered abuse, torture and cruelty, and this is despite him being a child, despite him being completely innocent as well as people at Guantanamo Bay knew.
Guantanamo Kid: The True Story Of Mohammed El-Gharani by Jerome Tubiana and Alexandre Franc’s is not only eye-opening, it is jaw-dropping in the incredulity shown by those in charge, having asserted that he was part of a dangerous and covert cell in London in the early 90s, regardless of the fact that he would have been six at the time. It is a graphic novel that shows how a small boy can take on a system when pushed to the extremes, how by the very fashion of continuous torture and alienation, he was able to begin to stand up to the very idea of such despicable inhumanity, and even begin to see redemption in the eyes of some of those who had inflicted such misery upon him, and in those by his side. It is the tale of a boy who became a leader.
What Jerome Tubiana and Alexandre Franc do though is turn the notion upon its head, the realisation that once he was finally freed, he was forever going to be a man without a country, he was now as much as a target for suspicion and distrust as he was whilst he was locked away, seemingly forgotten, in Cuba.
A truly remarkable graphic novel, one that dispenses with the otherwise enjoyment of what the genre normally supplies, but instead shows the reader that sometimes we have to take the worst of what humanity is capable of in which to show our best, that government has no right in which to treat any of us as non-people, as slaves to satisfy a foreign power. An extraordinary tale of courage hope and despair, one that awakens the anger in our soul!
Jerome Tubiana and Alexandre Franc’s Guantanamo Kid: The True Story Of Mohammed El-Gharani is released via SelfMadeHero on March 1st.
Ian D. Hall