Ramsés: “Humanity is the only weapon against barbarism”
When I heard the news and saw the videos, it had the same effect on me as the twin towers. I was in shock, stunned… Without really understanding what had just happened. I knew two or three names in the list of victims. And seeing this terrorist finish off someone like that, in the middle of the street, made my blood run cold.
A few hours later, I sat down and started drawing on my phone my first drawing on Charlie Hebdo, which was later published in International mail. I still feel that adrenaline rush every time I see this drawing. It depicted a cartoonist throwing ink at a terrorist.
The drawing that I present today is a David, whose humanity is the only weapon against barbarism. It’s also a metaphor for my life.
Ramses Morales, born in 1970, graduated from the Trinidad Academy of Arts in 1996. Since February 2016 he has lived in Switzerland. His drawings are published in International mail and many foreign newspapers and magazines, as well as in Cuba.
Pierre Kroll: “The Islamists have won the war of images”
On January 7, 2015, I was called on TV to comment live on the 1 p.m. news on RTL in Belgium on the names of the victims, which were arriving in dribs and drabs. I knew each of the murdered cartoonists personally, every single one.
Even if everything is not precisely the consequence of this Islamist attack, January 7, 2015 marks the beginning of new times in my profession. Gone forever is the carelessness with which we sometimes drew. Humor is a matter of collusion, and we thought we knew who we were talking to. It’s over. It’s as if the Kouachi brothers had shown anyone who is shocked by anything that they have the right to have it banned or take revenge. The humor has been lost.
And besides, the Islamists, if they have not won the total war against the West, have won this war of images. What newspaper will publish, just to document the story, the drawings that supposedly started all of this?
Pierre Kroll was born in 1958 in Gwaka, in the former Belgian Congo. He graduated from the La Cambre school in Brussels in 1981. Official cartoonist for the daily newspaper The evening since 2002, his drawings have been reproduced in numerous international newspapers. He also regularly publishes albums of his drawings with Les Arènes.
Kichka: “I am Charlie more than ever”
Wednesday January 7, 2015, it was snowing in Jerusalem. The Bezalel Academy, where I teach, on Mount Scopus, remained closed. I took the opportunity to put some order on my work table when our son David called me from Tel Aviv. “Dad, turn on the news on France, something is happening Charlie Hebdo !” The channels looped a video filmed from a roof where two black figures brandishing a Kalashnikov were screaming “We have avenged the Prophet!” in the middle of the street of Paris. Impossible to know more.
I called my friend Plantu, who told me there would be deaths. I immediately wrote to my friend Tignous: “Tell me that you are safe and sound.” My email went unanswered. I felt like the world had turned upside down once again.
On January 11, the Place de la République, the streets of Paris and France were packed with people. “I am Charlie” had become a silent cry. This outpouring of solidarity from French people who had mostly never read Charlie touched me at that moment. Unfortunately, it was not the assassination of the four Jewish customers of the Hyper Cacher two days later that would have generated such momentum. Not in 2015. And even less in 2025.
I am Charlie more than ever. Each time I make a drawing, I feel it as a debt to my colleagues Cabu, Wolinski, Honoré, Tignous and Charb, and the entire newspaper team. Towards freedom and democracy, secularism and the right to blasphemy. I have no right to let my guard down, to give in to terror, to
