While the news of the shootings at the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo shocked the world, the tragedy has cast a new light for many people on the power of satire and on freedom of speech, said editorial cartoonist Wendy Brown.
On January 7, gunmen entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and shot 12 staff, including four editorial cartoonists. Four hostages were later killed at a kosher market in the city along with a police officer.
Though not a political person, Brown has spent her career going after pomposity, attempting to let a little hot air out of public officials and trying to make people chuckle in the process.
Brown was at home when she first saw news of the attacks in Paris. She experienced a visceral reaction. She did not follow the French magazine, or necessarily even like the content, but the deliberate murder of four colleagues over their drawings “overwhelmed” her. “Tears were streaming down my face,” she said.
What is shocking is that they were doing the same job as her in another democratic country, one with a long history of publishing satirical comics, she said.
She grabbed a sheet of paper and her pencil and started to draw. What resulted was a rough sketch of a hand holding a pencil with the word “Solidarité” above it. “The very fact that cartoonists were deliberately killed, it was just overwhelming to me. I didn’t get over it for days,” she added. She drew several cartoons on the subject, posting them to social media.
Even though she may not have agreed with the content of the cartoons, she said standing up for freedom of speech is important. And too often it takes extreme examples, like Hebdo, standing up for it to push the conversation forward, she added.
“Everyone is talking about free speech, how far you should go and how dreadful it is that these people died,” she added. “At least the conversation is coming out of it and it is overdue.”
Brown is one of very few female editorial cartoonists in Canada and has drawn weekly for the Peak since its first issue.
She is no stranger to controversy herself, having drawn a couple cartoons over the years which have raised eyebrows. But she has never worried that her life may be on the line as a result.
“It’s a different situation every time,” she said of her process of where to draw the line. “I think mainly it depends on how [angry] I am. If I’m really outraged by something I’m going to push it as hard as I can, but if I’m not then I’ll just try to make it funny. That said, editorial cartoons are not always funny. Sometimes they are just a punch in the gut.”
