Stefan Mesch on Travel Sketches from Algeria Seen with completely different eyes
In 2012, Reinhard Kleist won the prestigious award at the Algiers International Comics Festival for his graphic biography Castro. His travel sketches and watercolours can be viewed on the Goethe-Institut website and on his own website: 10 miniatures, almost all in colour. Sandy brown. Lots of vivid blue Alleyways full of steps and rows or networks of small balconies with colourful curtains billowing in the wind. Many market scenes and elderly people - and, between them, brilliant white: a flock of sheep being driven or led by children through the neighbourhood, up shady and narrow steps, in the midst of city life.
Algeria is the largest country in Africa - yet it was not until I was 16 or 17 that I could point it out on a map: Are Libya and Lebanon Arab countries? Liberia is……close to Nigeria? Tunisia and Indonesia do not share a border. Or? All my teachers, I think, would have been more disappointed and shocked had I mixed up the German cities of Koblenz and Konstanz. Or the actresses Senta Berger and Iris Berben. Hence, even today, it is still helpful (if not sorely needed!) that Kleist brings along his sketches of the countries he has travelled to for workshops, exhibitions and research, and makes them public to the extent possible. Half the world is invisible!
‘A comic book festival is held in Algiers every year. Cosplay competitions also take place, and I saw young Algerian boys dressed as (manga hero) Naruto running around, just as you see here,’ says Kleist in an interview. For me, the main appeal of Kleist’s drawings is to see what places looked like at a time that a German, born in 1970 near Cologne, knows at best from the media or from the outside. In 2019, when I had read five or six of his graphic novels (most are biographies, often of pop stars, almost always historical and/or based outside Germany), this was my impression: Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novels, striking faces, expressive gestures, pitch black shadows (super inkwork!) and images that often revolve around the outsider and alarmingly unpredictable success, around concepts of masculinity and an awareness that ‘You need to get out soon, out into the unknown world. Remaining in familiar surroundings can destroy you.’
For me, the highlight was (and still is), Kleist’s graphic biography, An Olympic Dream: The Story of Samia Yusuf Omar (2015), about a sprinter who represented Somalia at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing but drowns - at the age of 21 - when trying to flee across the Mediterranean to London in 2021. ‘I was afraid that, as a 40+ white European male, I would not have found the right tone for a story about a girl from Somalia.’
Kleist’s fear is justified - after all, there is a reason why the Algeria novels by Albert Camus were recommended to me very early in life yet I heard of Assia Djebar or Yasmina Khadra only much later. And there are reasons why a growing number of marginalised people ask of each story: Who is telling the story and for whom? Which characters are in the limelight, exhibited, and labelled ‘foreign’? Reinhard Kleist wants to show the world: dreary Australian suburbs in the 1970s, in the graphic novel about the pop star Nick Cave. Gay bars in the 60s in Knocked Out, the comic book about the New York boxer Emile Griffiths. In the Algeria drawings: elderly people begging or resting in the port and in the Casbah. (Does everyone know that Algiers has a port? Does everyone know what ‘Casbah’ means? I grew up in a Germany that told me: It’s a bit embarrassing if it becomes apparent that you don’t know what it means. But in most cases, it never comes out - because most countries and cultures are rarely discussed.)
In 2020, the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group had hoped to be able to promote a novel, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, about displacement and violence on the Mexico-US border, and make it a smash-hit bestseller (and: ‘This will teach you something!’ Tip for reading circles and book clubs). However, many Latinos and migrants found the plot and the tone of the narrative outlandish, sentimental, poorly researched - and typical that an author who said ‘I am white’ in her interviews was given a great deal of money and received a boost, thanks to mega PR campaigns.
I would have also been outraged in the case of Reinhard Kleist if he were to make expensive biography series such as The Queen, or if his (super, current) David Bowie graphic novel Starman were a movie, impeccably produced. Because why always go poaching in other eras, milieus, cultural circles for artistic work? Could all this not be narrated far more accurately by ‘OwnVoices’ artists?
Without a doubt! Yet regardless of how closely Kleist looks, maximum proximity, authenticity, documentation are not his concern. He is, instead, concerned about visual worlds, dream worlds, imaginary worlds, bringing him to the question of what people (sometimes an audience and fans, usually also painfully distanced family members or foreigners from completely different social classes and cultures) see in other, often well-known people (sportspersons, stars, Fidel Castro, Johnny Cash).
Kleist draws marginal figures and breakfast tables, sofa armrests and dashboards, fever dreams or the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva with a precision that tells me: ‘I’ve done my research.’ Yet always with the searching, open, very obviously provisional note: ‘When looking, don’t ever forget: this is not an objective camera. I am looking at my projections, my yearning look, at daydreams, at the unfamiliar. On this page of the graphic novel, I dream all that Nick Cage may have dreamt 40 or 50 years ago.’
Were Kleist’s graphic novels to come across like a movie or a docudrama in which each and every prop were to narcissistically claim, ‘That’s just the way it probably was, really!’ they would be unbearably presumptuous. Yesterday’s images, often about stars of yesteryear. But I do believe (especially in 2021, following Kleist’s splendid Bowie graphic novel) that we are at the start of an era in which much of our art will make far more radical, playful, provisional and personal statements, which the observer will distil, take along, read into and project in the other, the inaccessible, or in what is collectively half-visible and therefore half-understood. Catherine the Great in the TV satire The Great (2020), Emily Dickinson in the boldly invented Dickinson (2019), or the long since defeated tennis champion John McEnroe in Never Have I Ever (2020) as the daydream of a 15-year-old who only knows McEnroe as her dead father’s idol: the art of storytelling is increasingly shifting towards well-known personalities. And is brutally honest in pondering over just how vague, invasive or neurotic this process of putting yourself in the situation of the other can be.
Reinhard Kleist shows that the graphic novel is a magnificent medium that always allows modifications: ‘That’s how I see it’, ‘Only I see that’, ‘One imagines something’, ‘I choose the picture detail, the shadows, and the rough outline.’ A view that by no means has to be particularly recalcitrant to nevertheless leave no doubt: each and every view here is subjective - there is no objective view. In addition to the 10 vignettes from Algeria, there are also Kleist’s impressions from 10, 15 other countries. Only when comparing the drawings does one notice things about Algeria: the colour, the vast sky, the crowds, the splendour of the religious monuments in contrast to the walls and alleyways. Kleist has also had an Instagram account since 2017. The latest posts from the sketchbook are drawings of Sarajevo, Venice, Vicenza. And of Wriezen, a town in Brandenburg, Germany.
