The Art of Dismantling Taboos in Zainab Fasiki’s Artistic Activism

A few years ago, as I was conducting research for my book on Arab women’s revolutionary art, I learned about Zainab Fasiki, a talented young Moroccan artist who combines art and activism to cultivate awareness on topics related to women’s sexuality, agency, and empowerment among the general public (both in her home country, Morocco, and abroad) and to bring about social change. Back then a particular artwork of Fasiki’s grabbed my attention: a nude superheroine taller than the Twin Center towers of Casablanca in Morocco, as she describes her (fig. 1). I realized that this giant Venus figure, with her bright red lipstick and her short black hair, was Fasiki’s avatar, but what was more appealing to me was that this superwoman had a specific mission: to bring safety to the city while ending assaults against women and arresting the attackers.1 Depicting Fasiki as an iconic woman, resting her hand on the Casablanca skyscraper as a sign of empowerment, the image also brings to mind Kahina, or Dihya Tadmut, the Amazigh warrior queen who united the Maghreb and did her best to protect her country until her death in 703 CE.2 Instead of censuring her body or covering it to make it “acceptable” (by dressing the figure or changing her body language), Fasiki was using nudity and social media to normalize and desexualize women’s bodies in art and public spaces.Although Arab comics and graphic novels for adults have only started circulating more widely in the Arab region, political caricatures have been popular there for a long time. The latter have been all the more prevalent due to an inclination toward satire and caricature, even in a region where mocking authority can be dangerous (see Douglas and Malti-Douglas 1994; Al-Mousawi 2015). A new generation of Arab artists emerged at the end of the first decade of the 2000s who were largely connected through social media and influenced by international trends. They published versions of their work digitally and also through collectives that produced specialized magazines, which made them more accessible than ever.3 With the Arab uprisings, the comics renaissance prevailed, and artists from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere were galvanized by the events rocking their countries, while they faced severe censorship and often risked their lives. Jacob Høigilt (2019: 14) explains that a new generation of Arab artists focused on depicting their societies and cultures with effervescence from the inside: “This wave is part of a broader cultural resurgence among young people who were involved in the prelude to the Arab Uprisings. At the same time the political and social opportunities which opened up after 2011 made it easier to start and create interest in such creative projects.” In this way, these artists began to build a dynamic, inventive, and prolific Ninth Art scene in the region (since the 1960s comic books have been called “the Ninth Art”).As the Arab unrests inspired new sentiments of freedom and challenged the state of political affairs, artists took on the social problems facing their countries. Many comics magazines were devoted to women’s issues or introduced strong female characters. Although comic creation has generally been dominated by men in the region, a fair number of female artists and authors entered the comics world once the medium became more adult oriented, as can be seen in contemporary contributions to comics (see Ghaibeh 2015).4 Many female artists have confirmed that their determination to be part of the civil movement and their artistic drive were very much invigorated with the revolutionary momentum in their countries. As an example, the Lebanese graphic designer and illustrator Jana Traboulsi, who often looks at the devastating effects of the Lebanese civil war and the siege of Gaza in Palestine, cofounded Bidayat Magazine and Snoubar Bayrout Bookshop in the wake of the uprisings in 2014. In Algeria, Rym Mokhtari, Nawel Louerrad, and Kamal Zakour created platforms such as Comic4Syria and the blog 12tours. In Egypt in late 2014, the first feminist comics magazine, Shakmagia (The Jewelry Box), appeared. With the Arab uprisings, the world of comics was revitalized. The Tunisian painter and cartoonist Nadia Khairi declared that when deposed president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the country on January 14, 2011, and her cartoon cat named “Willis from Tunis” emerged as a vehicle for political satire, she felt like she was finally born: “For me as an artist, it was a true revolution, because from one day to the next I was able to express myself freely” (Africanews2020).5 Deena Mohamed created a webcomic in 2013 called Qahera (which plays cleverly on the word Qahira, meaning both Cairo and “the [female] conqueror”), depicting an independent and courageous superheroine who wears a hijab and an abaya and combats patriarchy, misogyny, and racism. The past ten years have seen a remarkable development of the field, especially in women’s productions, which carry demands for freedom, gender equality, and justice.Within this broader (and boiling) context, Zainab Fasiki, born in Fez in 1994, stands out as a pioneer in feminist comics in Morocco and is considered part of the emerging generation of Arab comics women creators, who are making themselves known in their societies. Fasiki has made a name for herself by adopting very provocative feminist positions. In 2017 she published her first feminist comic book, Omor (Things), through which she denounces the inequalities between men and women.Following a bout of depression at the age of nineteen, which she attributed to pervasive sexist discrimination in the field of mechanical engineering (her area of study) as well as to widespread street harassment and her family’s overbearing control, Fasiki used drawing as a means of escape.6 Although she has been criticized by members of her family and by conservatives, she views drawing as a therapeutic healing process and as a form of liberation, a kind of resistance, and, most important, an educational tool.In 2019 Fasiki published Hshouma: Corps et sexualité au Maroc (Hshouma: Body and Sexuality in Morocco), which earned her broad recognition in comics circles throughout Arab countries and beyond (fig. 2). Hshouma was published in Paris by Massot, as Fasiki could not find a publisher in Morocco who would accept such a daring book. Fasiki had initially wanted to write the book in Moroccan Darija, but, due to strict censorship and, as she points out in the book, a lack of technical words related to sexuality and the body’s sex organs in the colloquial dialect, she wrote the book in French, a language spoken widely among North Africans, particularly young people, who were her main target audience. Hshouma, which means “shame” in Arabic (and “shame” or “taboo” in Darija), challenges what Fasiki describes as Morocco’s patriarchal culture, which aims to instill shame in young girls about their bodies from the very beginning. Girls are taught to protect and even hide their bodies, as she explains in Hshouma: “In my country, norms around our bodies and our sexual relations are set by laws, but also by Islam, Moroccan culture, family traditions, and society” (Fasiki 2019: 2; my translation here and below).Moreover, Fasiki highlights the multiple social factors—economic, cultural, and religious—that contribute to women’s oppression, while applying the concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991). The book, at the crossroads of gender, race, ethnicity, and class, can be viewed as a space for educating readers and developing their awareness of intersectional identities in order to also defy the conventions of comics themselves. In this way, the book critiques all the factors that render Arab women servile, tackling sexism in Morocco and in the Arab world: “Living under a regime that punishes extramarital sex, other sexual orientations, marriage to non-Muslims, children born out of wedlock, and so on, means simply that fundamental rights are not respected, particularly for non-Muslim Moroccans, who are obliged to comply with these standards” (Fasiki 2019: 48).The book employs short sequences and simple yet provocative images. All these elements are essential to the narrative’s progression, making the message clear, direct, and strongly didactic. One of the most rudimentary yet most complex images depicts a childlike “doll”: Fasiki (2019: 12) has marked the brain, associated with one’s gender identity; the heart, responsible for sexual orientation; and finally, the genitals, which, according to the drawing, define nothing. Hshouma therefore presents itself as a sex education guide for girls, women, and the whole society, since Fasiki believes that sex education remains taboo in the Arab world in general and in her own Moroccan culture in particular. She views Moroccan culture as a “culture of shame,” arguing that “the problem is the lack of sex education in our society” (5).Moreover, the women are drawn in black and white and often wear superheroine costumes, a style that necessarily recalls Marjane Satrapi’s work (she confirms being deeply inspired by Satrapi), while the rest of her illustrations use combinations of bright colors. Women of all ages are illustrated in Hshouma as lovers, mothers, sisters, and friends from the collective imagination. One captivating element of these depictions is how they celebrate the female body in all its forms, with “physical flaws” and imperfections, a way to ridicule the beauty standards imposed by society. “Moral: let’s not hesitate to fall in love with our bodies, every time we are in front of a mirror” (Fasiki 2019: 39). The women appear in their natural state, sometimes unshaven, exposing their nudity without shame, as a rejection of beauty standards that have perfected the art of hair removal: “The media offers a representation of the body that is out of step with reality (models, social media influence, advertising, magazines, films, beauty products, etc.), and since speaking about our bodies is taboo, it is very hard to dismantle this representation” (37; see figs. 3–4).Women are also portrayed without makeup or artifice, elements often imposed by female beauty norms. They all stare at the reader defiantly and sometimes even sarcastically. The women are bold, while their bodies bear the marks of damage caused by patriarchal oppression. In other words, these women become subjects rather than objects of spectacle to be seen or “consumed” for pleasure within the spectator’s comfort zone. The idea of women as objects is reflected in Laura Mulvey’s (1975: 7) use of the term scopophilia, which involves dominant males “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.” Nude, in lingerie or wearing the veil, in the city or in the hammam, these women reject the hypocrisy of men and society, which, on the one hand, is obsessed with women’s bodies as objects of seduction and pleasure and, on the other, is afraid of them, forcing them to be covered up and controlled. This all gives rise to a certain unease, in particular regarding images of women, which are often hidden or embellished: “As soon as we are born, our body is labeled: it is female or male and marked with the color pink or blue” (Fasiki 2019: 19).Apart from the Moroccan publishers that refused to publish such an unconventional, shameless book, others asked her to make some changes to her text and to even remove the paragraph on the Amazigh language. Yet this aspect of language is very relevant to Fasiki’s struggle against the dominant group’s hegemony over not only a marginalized group but also a minority language. The Amazigh language has long been marginalized in Morocco, and political discourse, whether nationalist or Islamist, is hostile to it, since it is perceived as a threat to national cohesion.7 While Arabic is also divided between colloquial Arabic and classical written Arabic, the latter is considered more prestigious. In this regard, Høigilt (2019: 145) explains that comic books have provided a blatant example of broader trends in the Arab world, where writing in the familiar, oral language has been a way to break with formal family structures related to language: “When the written language becomes more informal, the threshold is also lowered, allowing young people to participate in the public debate.” Although Fasiki’s book is written in French to avoid censorship, Darija is often used in the image frames, bringing greater status to the Amazigh language and culture: “I will always put henna on my hands and feet, I will wear my caftans and listen to Gnawa music, I will never forget the beaches, mountains and deserts of Morocco” (Fasiki 2019: 105). In this way, Fasiki code-switches between languages, as many do in Morocco, forming a patchwork. The illustrations are accompanied by text in French, English, classical Arabic, and Darija, using both Arabic and Latin spelling and incorporating numbers for Arabic letters. The use of Darija puts taboo subjects within reach of the general population, but it is, by the same token, a transgressive act, because it gives them access to knowledge very often controlled by the elite. Moving from an informal to a formal language thus confers a new form of power, which Fasiki tries to share with her readers while depicting their contextual realities. This is why Fasiki begins Hshouma by postulating that male domination started with the Muslim conquest of North Africa. The Amazigh people, she explains, had great respect for women. When Arabs took control of the region, they defeated the warrior queen, Kahina, as she reminds us.Fasiki’s art and drawing style thus pave the way for timely political engagement in which race, gender, sex, culture, and ideologies intersect. Through her art, Fasiki seeks new ways to represent and celebrate nonnormative experiences surrounding stereotypes and problematic attitudes toward women, minorities, and LGBTQIA+ people, among others. She destabilizes the coherence of the subject by self-reflexively exploring complex nonbinary representations of gender and sexual identification, while creating a powerful call for gender equality. What is special about Fasiki is that sociopolitical mobilization is paired with her creativity in order to tackle collective issues while demystifying the many taboos around women and their bodies and, more important, bolstering civic participation

Agency (philosophy · Art · Comics · Empowerment · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Social media · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Gender Studies · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · North African History and Literature

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