Arab World in Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin : Making Visible the Idea of Terra Nullius

Introduction

This article is concerned with the idea of terra nullius (more pernicious than its legal and military implications) that the colonial agents relied on more than just wars, legal policies, and governmental practices in overseas territories. In the Arab world, the colonial ideology remains embedded as it was never applied as a legal term to justify the European occupation of certain parts of the Arab world and the subjugation of its indigenous peoples and their culture. The study, therefore, examines visual and textual contents in Hergé’s representations of the Arab world in The Crab with the Golden Claws (Hergé, 1958), The Red Sea Sharks (Hergé, 1960), Cigars of the Pharaoh (Hergé, 1971), and Land of Black Gold (Hergé, 1972) to identify traces of the idea of terra nullius. The idea fed the imaginations of European readers to travel/trade/settle/govern Arab lands. It also continues the rationalization of European occupation of the perceived empty and neglected Arab lands to the present day.

Several researchers have generally undertaken postcolonial readings of Tintinⁱ (Blair, 2019; Frey, 2004; Hind, 2010; Langford, 2008). However, the four graphic narratives on the Arab world need special critical attention, and Ziad Bentahar (2012) has made an exclusive study of the Arab world in Tintin, which is particularly significant in the context of Arab studies but (perhaps) needs a postcolonial commitment. This article, therefore, reads the four texts to make visible how the graphic contents carry forward the colonial idea of the Arab world as terra nullius. The first section situates the need to focus on Tintin graphic narratives on the Arab world from a postcolonial perspective, and the second section reads visual representations of Arab landscapes (which includes Arab oil mines, markets, and ports), textual contents including official signboards in “pseudo-Arabic” (Bentahar, 2012) with English translations, and arrangements of panels to identify if they bear the idea of terra nullius. The second section further examines if these ideas validate, idealize, and ideologize the colonial explorations/exploitations. In so doing, the article illustrates the possible impacts of the colonial model of the Arab world, as represented in Tintin, on present-day readers.

European colonial empire-building projects depended less on the might of armed forces and more on terra nullius. They used legal terms such as vacuum domicilium (assumed empty lands without fences or fixed habitations) in North America and terra nullius in Australia, insisting that the American or Australian lands they conquered were uninhabited and neglected. The legalization of European occupation of the empty lands in America or Australia was based on geographical and historical beliefs of Eurocentric diffusionism. The term “Eurocentric diffusionism” is used by J. M. Blaut (1993, p. 1) to theorize a cultural process that was floated from the European sector toward the non-European sector wherein Europe was conceived and projected as “Inside” and non-Europe as “Outside.” Within this context, European historical and geographical scholarship glamourized colonialism as the “receipt-by-diffusion of European civilization” (Blaut, 1993, p. 2). The principle supported the practices of vacuum domicilium in America or terra nullius in Australia that denied indigenous inhabitants their rightful claim to their lands and their presence. A similar idea of empty and neglected Arab lands, opines Ben Kiernan (2007, p. 367), were consolidated and confirmed by the European settlers while justifying the French conquest of Tocqueville (1805–1859) in Algeria. European colonial agents colonized various parts of the Arab world over hundred and forty years during 1820–1971 (Attar, 2010, pp. xv–xviii), wherein every colonial domination over the Arab lands was justified by the idea of Arab as terra nullius, insisting that the lands it had occupied belonged to no one.

Why Tintin?

Tintin, the Belgian reporter, undertakes his most extended expedition to the Arab world through four consecutive graphic narratives. In all four graphic narratives, Arab landscapes have attracted the European journalist/sailor/pilot/Egyptologist/salesman/naval intelligence agent/lieutenant/owner of international war profiteer companies/film crew to adventure into exoticized Arab towns and oases amidst racially portrayed Bedouins and confusing mirages. Tintin arrives in fighting planes or on ships and boats to the imagined Arab world “always already” permeable to the agents of empire-building projects.ⁱⁱ For the first time, he enters Port Saidⁱⁱⁱ in Cigars of the Pharaoh (initially published in the 1930s) to reveal an imagined history of a fictitious tomb to the target readers. His next ventures out into the Moroccan desert^iv in The Crab with the Golden Claws (initially published in the 1940s) to solve the mystery of illicit drug trafficking. Tintin, furthermore, returns to an imaginary projection of Khemed in Saudi Arabia^v in Land of Black Gold (initially published in the 1950s), wherein British and German oil traders compete against each other, instigating violence against the land and its people.

In The Red Sea Sharks (originally published in the 1950s), Tintin returns to Khemed to help Sheikh Bab El Ehr to defeat his rival Ben Kailash Ezab. It must be remembered that Europe colonized various parts of the Arab world from the nineteenth to the twentieth century (Attar, 2010). While Port Said in Egypt or Morocco was a victim of European imperialism, Saudi Arabia remained free from it. In this context, perceived and imagined spaces of colonized or/and uncolonized Arab lands in Tintin deny visual or textual representations as lived by the indigenous peoples of the Arab world. The perceived and imagined representations in Tintin need to be sufficiently problematized. Elleke Boehmer (2005) opines that the textuality of imperialism demands serious critical analysis: while empire was “a textual exercise” to a great extent, the present-day readers “experience Empire textually” through the medium of “nineteenth-and-twentieth-century novels and periodical, travel writings, scraps of doggerel” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 14). Imperialism was understood through text wherein cultural constructs of “self” and “other,” Inside and Outside, are strategically produced and reproduced to create images of “us” and “them” or Insider and Outsider. Agents of imperialism used texts as a vehicle of authority. Boehmer (2005) explains:

In diary descriptions of new lands or by carving their initials on trees and stone tablets, colonists declared their intention to make a home to begin a new history. Often, the effect of their descriptions was to erase, either wholly or in part, the signs of other lives which had unfolded in that particular space. (p. 14)

For this, it was necessary for the agents of European imperialism to decipher, interpret, and disseminate an assumed Outside world to European travelers and colonizers who “relied on and scattered about them the stock descriptions and authoritative symbols that lay to hand” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 15). They translated familiar metaphors to “unfamiliar and unlikely contexts” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 15). In this way, whatever was considered unknowable by them was transferred into knowable texts through “everyday” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 15) known signs and symbols. The graphic narratives of Tintin on the Arab world, in this context, offered the European readers a way of imagining the Outside as the Insider’s object of exploration or/and acquisition (literally or symbolically).

The everyday comprehensible representations of the Arab world in Tintin were injected with visual and textual images. According to Alastair Pennycook (1998), colonial images of the Outside were created and perpetuated beyond colonial origins into the everyday lives of the imperialists. The images were colonial constructs that posited broader implications: They colonized attitudes, practices, and critical thinking of the colonized people (Pennycook, 1998, pp. 34–35). Pennycook, therefore, seeks to expand the Saidian notion of imperialism (Culture and Imperialism, 1993) to problematize subordination through “material exploitation and control” (Pennycook, 1998, p. 34). In this context, Hergé’s texts on Arab landscapes are potent sites of cultural production. The imperialist ideas of terra nullius, here, offered (and validated) home audiences a way of thinking about the Arab world (here, Egypt, Morocco, or Saudi Arabia), which was anything but innocent. Furthermore, they have been carried forward to the present-day readers by offering (and even justifying) them participatory pleasure of unethical exploration and possession of Arab land for the benefit of the land. The four texts normalize and glamorize the imperialistic missions of possessing, civilizing, and educating the imagined lower race of Arab’s indigenous people, so much so that these texts can be looked at as the “globalization of the capitalist mode of production,” an idea introduced by Chrisman and Williams (1994, p. 2).

How Famous Is Tintin, and Why Is This Dangerous?

The 2015 Egmont publication of Tintin series informs that 23 albums of “The Adventures of Tintin Series” is one of the greatest comic series of all time with translations published in over 80 languages and copies sold over 230 million.^vi In this context, it is necessary to situate the four Tintin texts on the Arab world within the broader context of imperialism and textuality. The author of Tintin graphic narratives is a Belgian artist, the famous francophone cartoonist Georges Remi (Hergé). His graphic narratives were published in the early twentieth century as a weekly children’s supplement to the Belgium newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle. Assouline (1996) remarks about Hergé’s role as the creator of Tintin:

It was all undeniable, as was Hergé’s conformity with the dominant mores, especially as they coincided with Father Wallez’s ideology, whether about Christianity, anti-Communism, or colonialism. There was no hint of criticism or of reservation in his drawings. In fact, his talent was an anesthetic. …. At twenty-four, his priority was not to politically or morally reform the world; he wanted to succeed (pp. 29–30).

Records reveal that The Adventures of Tintin series has sold over 230 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 80 languages, comprising 24 albums of Tintin-led adventures (Moulinsart, 2008). Andersen et al. note, “in early 2019, Tintin was celebrated worldwide on his 90th birthday, marking one of the longest and still published comic book franchise” (Andersen et al., 2020, p. 185). Therefore, the present article might offer new insights to readers who find Tintin acceptable and intriguing.

Tintin strategically designs a space with conjured-up places to believe in to evoke imaginative anticipation among readers worldwide. Graphic literature, in general, is more compelling and recognizable compared to conventional forms of literature. Since graphic narrative form offers visual–verbal strategies, it is more easily decipherable. While colonial literature of European exploration and valor employs rhetorical and syntactical tools to interpret the assumed unknowable “other,” colonial graphic literature needs to use added tools (panels, color, gutter, thought bubble, etc.) to create vivid images (and thereby ideas) of the “other.” Royal points out how “comics are a heavily coded medium that rely on stereotyping to concentrate narrative effectiveness” (2007, p. 8). Graphiateur might express, overtly or through tacit implication, certain conscious or unconscious prejudices through graphic narratives. In graphic literature, there is always the all-too-real danger of negative stereotypes and caricatures of the unfamiliar of any unique identity. Such representations dehumanize the identity using reductive iconography—the bug noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse on the “other” (Royal, 2007, p. 8). The negative stereotypes, in graphic literature in general, when they become an act of representing the non-European world by a twentieth-century European graphiateur, reflect colonial intention. The symbolic gestures of the Arab world in Tintin, however are simple, create a viable landscape for European occupation. Boehmer explicates:

From the European point of view, colonialism was a metaphoric and cartographic—as well as a legalistic—undertaking. A country was ‘mapped’ or spatially conceived using figures which harked back to home ground. Travelers’ rough, rudimentary descriptions charted unknown lands in the same tentative and provisional way as did early maps. Classifications and codes imported from Europe were matched to peoples, cultures, and topographies that were entirely un-European. And having once done the work of interpretation, the imported symbols, even if entirely arbitrary, often stuck (Boehmer, 2005, pp. 17–18).

In Tintin, there are numerous graphical contents on the Arab world that must have fed the twentieth-century European readers’ imaginative anticipation of unreal lands with real treasure. The following segment, therefore, is a textual analysis of the colonial model of the Arab world as represented in Tintin. The model creates, confirms, justifies, and glorifies several forms of European migration and possession of Arab landscapes.

Tintin’s Model of the Arab World

As a twentieth-century graphic literature on European expansion, occupation, and artistic investment, Hergé’s Tintin played right into the hands of the European market that craved adventure into the mysterious unknown Outside. European knowledge seekers had exhausted the mysteries of nature or were on the verge of solving them by then. Meanwhile, early nationalists began questioning colonial texts with a political commitment to write back. In this context, the four Tintin narratives on the Arab world return to the central principle of imperialistic interpretation. Each text intends to fascinate the readers with perceived or imagined spaces to which the European characters rightfully belong. Cigars of the Pharaoh (Hergé, 1971) projects a vivid description of “the tomb of Kih-Oskh” (Hergé, 1971, p. 6) amidst the desert sands and the soaring pyramids to allow the readers to decipher the unknowable Arab land.

In the text, Tintin makes his way to Egypt via a ship and immediately begins his adventure without a moment’s thought to the land’s sovereign rights or its people’s legal claim to it. The first panel on page 6 creates and familiarizes the unfamiliar Arab land: “Later, somewhere near Cairo…” (Hergé, 1971, p. 6). The description is a projection of the European fascination with an ahistorical hangover of the exoticization of Egyptian monuments. Panels in the text feature dunes and oases before the monolithic pyramids (Hergé, 1971, p. 7). Hidden chambers here are designed with vivid, colorful, pseudo hieroglyphics, and facilitated with winding staircases and booby-trapped doors. This way, a sense of familiarity is transferred to an unfamiliar context. Here, the indigenous guide is portrayed in a long cloak with a brown skin tone. He is thinly shaped with a crooked nose (Hergé, 1971, p. 6). The unimpressive stock description serves the narrator’s purpose well. It keeps the indigenous stranger hidden from the main plot. Senhor Oliveira da Figueira, a harmless Portuguese salesman, offers a “solo supermarket” (Hergé, 1971, p. 14) somewhere by “the Arabian coast” (Hergé, 1971, p. 14) wherein he sells European commodities to the indigenous people. His marketing strategies allure them to engage in mindless demand for irrelevant products: One of the indigenous customers eats up a soap cake, mistaking it for a food product (Hergé, 1971, p. 14). Oliveira stands for the European merchants who set out to control the oriental markets with supplies impervious to the indigenous peoples’ basic needs. He resembles the European entrepreneurs displaying cultural self-confidence and profitmaking intentions. The indigenous people in the narrative are found to be vaguely antagonistic, hostile, and uninformed. The represented empty lands like rugged mountains and desert lands are mostly controlled by warlords who have kafirs (black face depictions of Africans) as servants (Hergé, 1971, pp. 24–31). Depictions of the indigenous people as the hooligan/antisocial entity are also projected in making a Superscope-Magnavista feature of Arabian Knights by Rastapopoulos. Here, he represents a “kind” film director of Arabian Knights in “the middle of the desert” (Hergé, 1971, p. 17). The panels on page 16 explain how he, as a European film director, portrays indigenous people as “ruffians” (Hergé, 1971, p. 16) of the Arab desert. There are descriptions of mirages (Hergé, 1971, p. 24) that have always appealed to European readers. They are a part of the exotic charm of Outside geography. The representation of random cities in the middle of vast deserts through the medium of 13 panels on one page (Hergé, 1971, p. 25) also contributes to this imagined charm, making the Arab landscape a humanly viable home for European travelers. The cities of sheiks and fierce mobs are depicted as already corrupted and at war (Hergé, 1971, p. 25).

In short, these cities are perfect targets for a European explorer who needs to establish immediate peace with guns and airplanes (Hergé, 1971, p. 31). Tintin hijacks an aircraft and miraculously lands in the middle of a jungle after a mid-air fight (Hergé, 1971, p. 32). Within minutes of this lucky accident, he befriends a wild elephant, meets another white Safari Man, and continues his adventure somewhere in India (Hergé, 1971, p. 33). Although the text is integral to the colonial cultural phenomenon, the graphic narrative has not aged at all when seen in retrospect.

Stereotypical depictions of Egyptian Bedouins and Arab land that is almost under the ambit of the Belgian reporter Tintin (who seems to treat it as his little playfield) help create a monolithic view of the “colonial ideology” (Dirks, 1996, p. xvi). The ideology captures generations of minds who are culturally influenced to relinquish decolonizing sensibilities or political urges to resist cultural hegemony’s cultural and intellectual impacts. The central principles of colonialist interpretation keep returning to serve and justify the empire-building projects. The European men (the British Egyptologist Sarcophagus, Greek-American millionaire film tycoon Rastapapoulous, British detective brothers Thomson and Thompson, Portuguese salesman Oliveira da Figueira, and the Belgian reporter Tintin) here treat the Arab world as another land wherein they can operate their dominance upon the indigenous people, animals, and environment. Indigenous people play minor roles in the narrative, only to provide a sense of thrill or to act as servile men whose sole duty is to obey their masters. All the help that counts comes from the European men in the story. Desert landscapes of disconnected images of pyramids, oases, and cities feature in numbered panels. These images are mostly arbitrary. For example, the signboard featuring a mirage alert in pseudo-Arabic and English translation “DANGER MIRAGE AHEAD” (Hergé, 1971, p. 23) amid human skeletons exhibits a new region wherein a migration is feasible. The adventure-filled fantasies of European travelers find a new way of expression and a sense of existence through the pages of this graphic narrative.

In The Crab with the Golden Claws (Hergé, 1958), Tintin and his companion Captain Haddock (also a white man, albeit a drunkard comic relief) crash-land in the middle of the Sahara Desert with no visible scratches—and once again accidentally (Hergé, 1958, p. 26). The imagined empty, merciless desert is shown through the eyes of the white pet Snowy (Hergé, 1958, p. 27). Snowy is the Belgian reporter’s most trusted companion, an independent character capable of deciphering human languages and thinking aloud through monologues. The white trio is highly optimistic about finding a “well” in the “middle of the Sahara Desert!” (Hergé, 1958, p. 28). This might be a possible repetition of European optimism projected by the lone shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. Like Crusoe, the trio wards off the anxiety of the unfamiliar with unyielding optimism, imperialist despotism, and race pride. Tropes of alcoholism subtly appear when Haddock refuses to budge without a sip of drink (Hergé, 1958, p. 29). Combined effects of alcoholism and mirage—underplayed for comic humor—underline the “business of colonization” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 14). Boehmer identifies this colonizing business as gambling and experimentation “with lives, with funds, above all with meanings” (2005, pp. 14–15).

The Desert Bedouins appear in the narrative to play second fiddle to European occupants. Their only mission is to save the European “heroes” while doing the bidding of an European lieutenant. The fort of Afghar in the middle of the Sahara Desert, guarded by a European Lieutenant named Delcourt (Hergé, 1958, p. 33), saves the Tintin-Snowy-Haddock trio. Tintin’s unyielding and true European mode of conduct grants him a savior from the providence. This savior, the European Lieutenant, is the good man here, bestowed with the honor of defending the land against barbarians (the indigenous warlords). Indigenous officers are made to speak in (im)proper English (full of grammatical and syntactical errors): When Lieutenant Delcourt enquires about his stock of wine bottles, Ahmed replies:

I not know, sir.

I not touch

Bottles, sir. (Hergé, 1958, p. 35)

The flawed English imposed in Ahmed’s voice underlines the graphiateur’s linguistic pride and cultural prowess—a typical trope for white men to deliberately portray indigenous people as “other.” The gun is the weapon of both the bad and the good men in this fight—that is, between “The Berbers” (Hergé, 1958, p. 36) and Tintin-and-Haddock (Hergé, 1958, p. 37). The gun familiarizes and normalizes the European military conflicts in the Arab landscape for commercial benefits and recreates the European might of armed forces in foreign lands. Haddock, in the first panel of page 41, litters a basket full of local fruits, considering the busy market area of Bagghar as “my way” (Hergé, 1958, p. 41). Filled with mostly comic instances, the use of Arab landscape in this graphic novel does little for the progression of the narrative. The prime concern of the narrative is perhaps to idealize the European hero, Tintin. In the text, he escapes his assassins, saves them later, abstains from intoxication, and is filled with hope/positivity. The narrative becomes an invasive medium to propagate the idea of a perfect hero among young readers across time and space. It idealizes colonial expeditions to unrecorded lands.

Inspired by reading, Boehmer notes that such colonial expeditions run the risk of colonial interpretation of equating colonial expeditions with “the quest for promised lands” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 16) through uncertain empty spaces. Tintin and Captain Haddock ride on camels to fit the stock description of the unfamiliar and unlikely contexts offered by European travelers (and colonizers) (Hergé, 1958, p. 35). The unforgiving nature and presence of providence also finds its way into the narrative, albeit quite intelligently. It normalizes misconceptions while doing nothing to sensitize the minds of its contemporary or present-day readers. Tintin’s detour brings him face to face with the predatory Arab landscape, which devours its indigenous animals (Hergé, 1958, p. 27). The text becomes the creator’s podium to show his hero’s selflessly heroic side at the cost of stereotyping the desert and criminalizing its indigenous people (except the ones under European leadership). The text is another strategic textualization of Tintin’s power to access, design plots, and control uncontrollable and inaccessible savage landscapes. The young detective, adventurous, serious, curious, and interested, along with a white fox terrier (a white one too) Snowy, signifies colonializing intention and investment by recreating imaginative cartographies of the desert space to the inheritors of European colonizing agents. Tintin’s heroic traits are pronounced when set against characters like Captain Haddock and the Thompson brothers. Captain Haddock’s absent-mindedness and foolery with a penchant for inviting trouble and fights, or the British detective brothers’ utter dumbness, diversify European classification and codes of the “Us.” Haddock is a drunkard seafarer with much to handle at that time because of hostile waters, international tensions, and collapsing global economies. The Merchant Marine Captain and the two Detective Agents represent another dangerous aspect of the colonizing travel narratives—the rationalization of the European military intervention. The idea is further developed in Land of Black Gold (Hergé, 1972).

Land of Black Gold (Hergé, 1972) plants Tintin and Snowy amidst a mystery involving the oil market that takes them to another Arabian desert—another different and yet same/familiar imaginative topography of colorful cities with minaret-adorned buildings and palm trees here and there (Hergé, 1972, p. 16). The Thompson brothers drive their red jeep through the desert like their home turf (Hergé, 1972, pp. 19, 33). The red jeep, driven by two whites on Arab desert and city roads, feeds and nurtures the aspiring explorers, cartographers, and colonizers to capture, control, or domesticate the empty desert space. Representation of the local military warlords, Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab or Bab El Ehr, with riches hoarded in tents, is a projection of European interpretation and fascination with influential Muslim Middle Eastern people. The pseudo-Arabic language (Hergé, 1972, p. 37) in the threat letter to Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, signed by Bab El Ehr, provides exotic content to the graphic narrative feigning polyphonic and polyvocal approaches. It demeans the indigenous language’s inherent nature and communicative purpose. The detective brothers’ collective gullibility in falling prey to a mirage (Hergé, 1972, p. 23) or a sandstorm (Hergé, 1972, p. 31) is played for laughs but has shades of territorial prejudice. The local pawns to the warlord are represented as ruthless criminals who torture Tintin (someone who seems to mean no harm to them) by leaving him to suffer and die in the middle of the stark desert (Hergé, 1972, p. 21). Tintin and the detective brothers miraculously come across water sources in the desert (Hergé, 1972, p. 23), reminding readers of Robinson Crusoe’s European optimism and offering future European explorers and cartographers a sense of moral assurance. European characters intervening in the politics of a sovereign and free land under the pretext of justice is not an innocent act.

In The Red Sea Sharks (Hergé, 1960), Tintin, Haddock, and Snowy land on the heart of darkness/action, WADESDAH AIRPORT (Hergé, 1960, p. 15) at the capital of Khemed. The team survives a “belly landing” (Hergé, 1960, p. 18) on a sandy shore, a “blast” (Hergé, 1960, p. 20), and a night patrol (Hergé, 1960, p. 21) at the coastline of Wadesdah before managing to get through the unguarded “small gateway” (Hergé, 1960, p. 22) to the city of Wadesdah. A series of panels project brown indigenous uniformed gunmen of Bab El Ehr, who have overthrown the Emir of Khemed (Mohammad Ben Kalish Ezab) and now guard Wadesdah.

Such familiar tools of representing the unfamiliar land infested with local criminal activities keep returning to Tintin. A similar projection of Khemed as Terra Nullius and Tintin and his team as the rightful occupants of the Arab world is projected through predictable visual tools. A unique panel layout is designed to depict Haddock and Tintin’s idea of indigenous people’s inhabitation of the Arab land at the entry point of Ben Kalish Ezab’s hideout:

Tintin: These holes in the rock? … Yes, I noticed them. They look like windows. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were people living inside.

Haddock: Nonsense! They couldn’t possibly. Still, we’ll soon find out …

…

Haddock: Living in there! That’s a good one!

…

Haddock: All right. People do live there … (Hergé, 1960, p. 28)

Considering the Arab people as unjust dwellers of the landscape is a colonial shock. Nevertheless, the deification of the innocent Emir with gunmen, enslaved Africans, and a pet tiger in a Roman temple in the same mountain city of Arab is not a mere projection of a benign Belgian-friendly Emir. The Emir’s contender is a mad terrorist called Bab El Ehr with an oversized nose and sneering teeth. The never-ending Middle Eastern conflict between the Emir and his “terrorist” rival is a part of the greater geopolitical schema.

It is strategically projected first in Land of Black Gold and then in The Red Sea Sharks. Furthermore, it is not for nothing. Hind sums up this conflict:

… Dr. Muller’s [the representative of the German oil company in Land of Black Gold] actions, including the sabotage of a British-controlled oil pipeline (Hergé, 2008, pp. 24–26), bear striking resemblance to the actions and affiliations of the real-life German Ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba (Nicosia, 1985; Time, 1941) … The real-life influences Hergé had used to create the fictional country of Khemed and the fictional characters of Dr. Muller, Bab El Ehr, and Prince Abdullah were bound up inextricably with Middle Eastern geopolitics. (Hind, 2010, p. 28)

The conflict is planted to disseminate Belgian colonial ideologies about the colonial rivalry between the German and the British oil companies (Belgium supporting the British-owned companies). The four graphic narratives project the Arab world as a place where European men can freely portray what they perceive of themselves and the “other.” They are free and the rightful occupants of the neglected, empty lands. Boehmer identifies the conjuring up of such spatial empire common in all colonializing explorer literature:

Most of what we are able to say about writing and empire keeps returning to this central principle of colonialist interpretation. The fascination with difference competed with a reliance on sameness and familiarity (Boehmer, 2005, p. 17).

This is dangerous. Boehmer (2005, p. 17) believes that metaphorical and cartographical forms of colonialism were not far removed from the legalistic form of colonial undertaking. The Tintin narratives triggered readers to think of traveling to an Arab world wherein indigenous peoples and their cultures are distant, savage, and barbarian. However, their lands promise real resources and need real people to organize the unfamiliar landscapes.

Conclusion

Writing at the dawn of the postmodern age (when texts became potent sites of colonial representations versus anticolonial resistances), Belgian Hergé sought to cement the dominance of the European migrants over the Arab world. Critical reading of Tintin’s graphical contents can help identify signs and symbols that are anything but innocent. Hergé created the four texts on Arab lands to quench the curiosity of European readers. Vivid graphic tools confirmed the idea of fantastical tales on Arab deserts but with an illusion of familiarity and authenticity. Colors, hues, and panel arrangements all go into the exoticization of a metaphorical and cartographical Arab land. Boehmer (2005) warns early on in his monograph that during nineteenth- or twentieth-century European imperialism, “rough, rudimental descriptions” (17) of “charted unknown lands” (17) from European point of view played significant roles in building empires not just metaphorically or cartographically but also legalistically. Tintin and his European friends with European ideas and tools normalized and perpetuated “the diffusionist myth of emptiness” (Blaut, 1993, p. 15) that aided the European empire-building projects. Blaut (1993) theorizes diffusionism as a myth wherein inventiveness is rare and certain places are fixed loci of invention. It is strategically disseminated to control knowledge and power.

The four graphic narratives follow a similar pattern of diffusionism: Arab landscapes and their people are reduced to mere settings with brainless indigenous subordinates. Although notes and several later additions acknowledge Hergé’s liberal decisions to include contemporary politics in his works, the graphic narratives keep returning to the imperialistic principles of interpreting and possessing the Outside. Serious acts of violence are sugar-coated and normalized, which condition young minds like wet clay in the hands of a potter. Hunt (2002) informs that in 1928, Priest Wallez decided to create a weekly supplement for children, Le Petit Vingtieme, “he put Hergé in charge” (pp. 91, 92). Hunt confirms Wallez’s act of colonial mission wherein Hergé’s Tintin narratives served the purpose of “marketing” (p. 92) the colonizing ideologies. In the context of graphic narratives, McCloud mentions how “words and pictures are popular as ever” (McCloud, 1993, p. 185). However, there is a widespread feeling that combining the two is simple, compelling, and, therefore, fit for children and young readers. In the context of Tintin in Congo, Hunt (2002) mentions how popular and successful Hergé’s caricatures and humor were with “crowds of children” (p. 92). The wide acceptance of the Belgian character has resulted in the translation of the adventures of Tintin in a wide array of languages and dialects.

Moreover, Tintin franchises enjoy enviable market penetration in the present day. Mountfort (2011, p. 35) notes that graphic literature remains a fixture of many children’s reading development and is frequently used for additional language acquisition skill-enhancing programs. Its iconography is so “ubiquitous” (Mountfort, 2011, p. 35) as to be instantaneously familiar around much of the world. Moreover, Tintin’s fanbase is not restricted to the readers of comic books (or bandes dessinees as they are called in French) alone; his appeal is visible in “Tintin posters, postcards, key-rings, T-shirts, and calendars” (Hunt, 2002, p. 93). In his discussions about the “writerly text,” Barthes describes the goal of literary work as “to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (Barthes, 1974, p. 4). Here, the producer means the reader who is put to work analyzing the text to unveil its embedded meaning and intentions. Therefore, however gripping the Arab adventures and escapades of Tintin are, they supply readers with a participatory experience and justification of the imperialistic quests of a young Belgian hero.

Tintin’s adventures constantly place him in dangerous and precarious positions. His being is always at stake, but the moment the adventure is over, and the danger has passed, the punchline evokes happiness in readers. Tintin is comfortable and easily everywhere, whether in an Arab desert, sea, or sky: “He is a boy for all occasions” (Marion & Syrotinski, 2017, p. 229). He is faceless (for there is nothing distinctive about his features or physical appearance) and has no history (no parents or memories, no psychological scars or flaws, no historical reference points, and no culture, belief, or faith). He sees the world, receives it, and serves as a reference point for readers worldwide. Despite being widely popular with children and adults alike, Tintin must be critically read and questioned. The political, cultural, and social constructions of Hergé’s Arab world(s) must be identified as serious problem areas. All four graphic narratives operate through compelling but problematic visual/textual discourses.

The discourses keep representing and reaffirming the European justifications for occupying Arab landscapes and insist that the European characters land on uninhabited or neglected Arab spaces. Apostolidès agrees with Althusser, who claimed that there is “no such thing as an innocent reading” (Althusser, 1968, p. 9) when he intends to show how “Tintinology today has permitted us to read Tintin in a very complex manner” (Apostolidès, 2010, p. 24). This is particularly true when we look at Hergé’s Arab world from a postcolonial perspective wherein Tintin’s graphic literature creates, familiarizes, sanctions (and perhaps legalizes), and most dangerously, justifies, the imperialistic act of territorial, political, social, racial, and environmental subordination of the Arab world by the European journalist/sailor/pilot/Egyptologist/salesman/naval intelligence agent/lieutenant/owner of international war profiteer companies/film crew.