Ali Dorani: Iranian cartoonist on the drawings that saved his life

Cartoonist Ali Dorani fled Iran at the age of 21 before becoming trapped in Australia's controversial Manus Island detention camp for four years - but things changed after his artwork was posted online.

Here's his story - in his own words and drawings.

In 2013, I left Iran. I can't tell you why because it might affect my family's safety - but I knew my life was in danger.

I stayed in Indonesia for 40 days, and tried to get to Australia - I knew Australia was the best way for me to get to safety.

A people smuggler told me he could get us to Australia by boat.

When I saw the boat, I was afraid I would die. It was a fishing boat, not really well maintained, and there were about 150 of us. And I can't swim.

When the time came to get on the boat, I told myself: "This is it. If anything happens to that weak boat, I'm going to die."

The journey took us 52 hours - it was raining and the ocean wasn't normal. It was so scary.

The Australian navy intercepted us and took us to Christmas Island - a detention centre where Australia keeps asylum seekers who arrive by boat.

I had suffered from OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] for a number of years - but it got worse on Christmas Island.

I liked to keep my surroundings clean at all times - but I couldn't control it anymore because I was in a room with several other people.

At one point, I tried to wash my dictionary in the shower because I felt it was dirty. I kept telling myself I was going crazy - I was shaking and getting so nervous.

Doctors at the medical centre told me I had to take medication, or find some strategies to deal with my OCD.

I didn't want to take medication because I was worried the Australian government would call me crazy and blacklist me from entering.

But when I went back to my room I slowly remembered that I had a talent for drawing. So I started drawing again to deal with my OCD.

I've been drawing since I was five years old - it's one of my earliest memories.

I'd stopped a few years before I fled Iran, because I was so busy with work and life - but now I felt so sick that I started drawing again.

I didn't always have something to draw on. We could request materials from immigration officers, but they wouldn't always give us paper and pencils.

So I had to steal paper - I'd go into language classes, and take blank papers when the teacher was looking the other way.

Because I only had a limited supply of paper I couldn't make mistakes in my drawings - that also helped me improve my skills.

Drawing actually didn't help my OCD, which was still getting worse every day.

But I started showing my drawings to other detainees, and some of the immigration officers, and people got interested in my cartoons.

I drew about my life there - what happened when I lined up to get food, what it was like using dirty public toilets.

I remember the first time I realised people took my work seriously.

I drew a map of Australia on a white T-shirt, with two eyes crying, and the words "I am only a refugee".

Two immigration officers asked me why I drew on my T-shirt - they saw the drawing as a protest.

I hadn't meant it as a protest - I had no idea my drawing would be taken that seriously - but it made me realise that my drawings could affect others.

So I kept cartooning - drawing diaries about daily life in the detention centre - and getting lots of positive and negative comments.

I was afraid that my drawings could affect my asylum application - but I also thought there could be nothing worse than being kept in a detention centre. I was depressed and my OCD was really difficult - so I thought I was already in a nightmare, and there was nothing else to be afraid of.

In fact, Christmas Island was much nicer than where I went next.

I was moved to Manus Island after six months, in January 2014. They handcuffed us and I had five security officers around me.

It was my first time in a tropical country - it was really hot and it was difficult to breathe.

It didn't look like the detention centre on Christmas Island. It looked like somewhere where you would keep chickens, pigs or sheep.

We had tents, dirty rooms, dirty toilets, and horrible showers. There were hundreds of people crammed in a small camp.

Some of the guards tried to reassure me - they could see the shock on my face. They told me: "Don't worry, everything is going to be fine."

I felt I didn't have any choices left - I couldn't go home, couldn't stay in Australia, and didn't want to kill myself. I felt like a dead body who was forcing himself to stay alive.

I didn't have any pencils or paper when I arrived on Manus Island - they took away my pencils when I left Christmas Island - although I could keep my drawings.

At first, I didn't want to draw. When you're forced to live in a place, but don't know why you are there, or when it is going to end, you lose hope, you lose all motivation, and this, combined with the weather, the sun, the mosquitoes - all help to destroy you inside.

An incident happened on 17 February 2014 - some of the locals attacked the camp, smashing everything and beating people up. They killed one of the refugees as well.

For about a month after that, we didn't have access to much - no proper food, or services.

Then another company came to run the camp - they improved the dining room and brought different activities in the camp, including English classes and drawing activities.

I started drawing again, documenting life at the camp. I also drew the mosquitoes, the sun and the rain.

I chose EatenFish as my penname, because I was caught from the sea like a fish, "eaten" (processed) at an Australian detention camp, and then "thrown away" on Manus Island (the same way you throw fish bones into a rubbish bin).

In some of my pictures, I added graves for the refugees who had died.

Sexual harassment and sexual assault were serious problems on Manus Island.

It wasn't only me suffering from this - there were a lot of young people like me suffering.

I witnessed it a lot, but I couldn't do anything about it because I was already under too much pressure, suffering from OCD, panic attacks and anxiety.

We didn't have access to the internet at this time, and I didn't have any hope of sharing my drawings with the outside world.

However, the Australian government eventually decided we would each be allowed to use the internet for 45 minutes every week.

The connection was really slow, and was barely strong enough to get onto Facebook - but I started logging on, joining Australian humanitarian groups, and sending friend requests to each of the members.

I did that for 1.5 years - sending messages to thousands of strangers. No one replied.

However, it turns out a lot of the Australian workers and immigration officials at the camp were talking about my drawings, even when they got home.

An activist - Janet Galbraith - heard about my drawings and contacted me on Facebook - she said she was starting a gallery in Melbourne, and wanted to display one of my drawings.

It wasn't easy sending her my pictures because we didn't have access to a scanner, or cameras.

A few people had secretly kept their mobile phones, although most of the cameras weren't very high-quality.

Eventually, I managed to secretly take a photo of my drawing using a mobile phone, and sent it to her.

The drawing that was exhibited in Melbourne

After Janet displayed the photo in the gallery, one man working on Manus Island saw the picture, and told Janet he knew me and could help get my drawings out.

He was working for the government so I couldn't really trust him, but at the same time I didn't have many other choices.

He took photos of my drawings with his iPad and sent them to Janet - and then my drawings started getting published by news organisations.

In 2015, many of us went on hunger strike against Australia's policy, and conditions at the camp.

I ended up getting really sick - I had panic attacks, with muscle spasms, for almost 40 minutes. Sometimes I had panic attacks three times a day.

The doctors put me on different forms of medication, but there were days when I'd wake up and not be able to remember where I used to live or who I was. I was kept in isolation for almost one month.

After I got out of isolation, I contacted Janet again, and explained what happened to me. I also got in touch with Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI), and was put in touch with the Guardian cartoonist First Dog on the Moon.

The Guardian started publishing my work, and in 2016, CRNI gave me their Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award.

That got me a lot of publicity - but I didn't really realise it at the time, because my internet access was so limited.

I would hear from people that I'd been published, or get sent links to my work - but I'd have to wait to use the internet room each week, and often the connection wouldn't work well.

I didn't think the publicity would help me - I saw it as a chance to show my drawings to Australians, but I didn't see how it would get me out of detention.

In 2016, artists around the world started drawing cartoons to show their support for me.

When I was a child, one of my wishes was to become a cartoonist, because I would read cartoons in magazines and wish my cartoons could be published too.

So when I saw that all these cartoonists that I used to worship and see in magazines had drawn cartoons to save me, it was a big honour for me.

Cartoonists who had been published in the Washington Post, New Yorker, and New York Times, all drew cartoons about EatenFish.

I felt extremely grateful.

The International Cities of Refuge Network (Icorn), a Norwegian organisation that helps writers and artists, also started working on my case.

I didn't know anything about Icorn at the time - Janet just told me they were looking at my case - but I didn't believe they'd be able to help me.

I went on hunger strike in late 2016, because I was being harassed by other detainees, and workers on Manus Island.

The strike lasted around 22 days. I was already sick, but felt I didn't have any other choice - and by the end of the strike I weighed 43 kilos.

After my hunger strike, I was moved to a hospital in Papua New Guinea for almost three months. While I was there, I got a message from Norway's immigration department, welcoming me.

I couldn't believe it.

When I got onto the plane to Norway, Janet was there with me. I couldn't stop crying for a few hours - I don't normally cry easily, but this time I couldn't stop. All my years in detention came up in front of my eyes - and I couldn't believe that it was the end.

I was so excited and so scared when I arrived in Norway. A few people came to the airport to pick me up, showed me where I would be living, and told me about the support I'd get.

It wasn't easy at first. For the first six to eight months I was in a deep depression - even stronger than the one I had on Manus Island. It still affects me now.

But I got good support from the government, and help from refugee organisations, especially Icorn. I don't think it's possible to get better support than what I got in Norway.

Icorn gave me an office in a public library in Stavanger, so I can work on my projects. A lot of children visit the library, and sometimes I hold drawing courses.

I also go to different schools to talk about Australia's refugee policy. Icorn also helps me financially, and helps me interact with different artists around Norway.

A lot of people ask me if I feel happy now. It's complicated.

I didn't choose to come here - I didn't have any other choices. But now, I love the city that I live in.

I think Norway has the best support and services for refugees - there are detention camps for asylum seekers, but they are not locked in - they can go out, interact with people, and see children playing in parks.

Ali Dorani (centre) at an exhibition of his work in Norway . pic: Al Dorani

I always say that art saved me - it helped the Norwegian government find out about my situation.

While I was in detention on Christmas Island, and Manus Island, lots of people liked my drawings but told me they wouldn't get me anywhere. Some of the detainees asked me: "What are you going to achieve with this? You can't help get us out of here with these drawings."

But now, I think I have the right to say that art actually saved me. I started drawing cartoons in detention, to try and control my illness, and eventually, cartoons saved my life. I genuinely believe that art can help bring peace, and that I have to look after my art and respect that.

What is Australia's asylum policy?

• Australia has sent asylum seekers arriving by boat to processing and detention centres on Christmas Island, Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, and Nauru in the South Pacific. They are not given the option of settling in Australia.
• Australia argues its policy deters people from making the dangerous journey by sea. But doctors and the UN have criticised conditions on the islands.
• At least 12 asylum seekers have died in detention on Manus Island. That centre was closed in 2017 after PNG's supreme court ruled it was illegal.

(Source: BBC)

The hidden meaning of kids' shapes and scribbles

Your child’s quirky art isn’t just cute—science suggests that even the most bizarre depictions can have deep creative intention, writes Isabel Fattal in the Atlantic. Read on: 

High on the list of awkward social interactions is the moment when a dentist or a coworker shows off her young child’s nonsensical art. A bystander might think the art—or at least the fact of its existence—is cute. Or she might think it’s ridiculous or downright terrifying. In either case, a common reaction is to smile and ask, “What’s it supposed to be?”

After all, these creations rarely look like anything fully recognizable or “real.” I uncovered a host of idiosyncrasies after asking parents about their kids’ art. There was a sideways house (or was it a knife?); a giant tooth resembling candy corn; a supposed self-portrait consisting of an oval with some jagged lines in the middle. Observers tend to laugh these sorts of things off as a kid’s erratic artistic process. If the drawing seems angry or dark, they might worry about what it means.

A page out of a drawing "book" by a 3-year-old studen

But experts say these responses rely on an outdated understanding of children’s drawing. Starting in the 20th century, psychologists tended to assume that a kid had reached a high level of drawing development if she could depict something realistically. They argued that when a child drew something simple-looking, like a human figure in the “tadpole” style—a sort of circle-head with arms and legs jutting out of it (and, usually, no torso) that’s common in kids’ drawing—it was because of the child’s misconception of how, say, the human body is organized. A drawing with abstractions or quirks? That meant a child  didn’t quite understand the object she was trying to depict. Or, according to later theories, it simply meant she didn’t know how to represent things realistically (even if she did understand how the thing looked in the real world). But today, a growing number of psychologists suggest that it’s a mistake to see any drawing that doesn’t look “real” as inferior or wrong.

Theo, age 5

While observers tend to agree that there’s a stage at which most children strive for realistic depiction in their drawing, many psychologists argue that at their earlier stages of drawing, children aren’t thinking about realism. Take, for example, the way kids tend to scatter objects in awkward places in their drawings; they might draw a house on the left corner of the page and then a road that somehow stands above it. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand how these scenes look in the real world, some experts say; instead, the child is more concerned about achieving a kind of visual balance between the objects. Their goal, ultimately, is to create something that’ll make sense to the person they show it to.

“They are trying to draw a visual equivalent, something that is readable, something that somebody else will understand,” said Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College who also works with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, a research group that focuses on arts education.

In fact, sometimes children prefer to draw something a certain way even when they know it “should” look different, or even when they’re well able to draw the object more realistically. Winner once heard about a preschool-aged girl who was drawing a “tadpole” human figure; when her father asked her about it, she said something along the lines of “I know they don’t look like this, but this is the way I like to draw them.” David Pariser, a professor of art education at Concordia University in Montreal, added that sometimes children may draw tadpoles simply “because they’re in a hurry and want to do a bunch of them.”

Lily, age 3

In recent decades, scholars have found that children’s drawing development can lead toward myriad destinations—including forms of “non-realistic” depiction like maps, charts, and symbols. And these destinations can vary across cultures.

Pariser points to a 1930s account by the Australian anthropologist Charles P. Mountford of an Australian Aboriginal child who was raised by European settlers and grew up drawing culturally familiar objects like houses and trains; once he reunited with his Aboriginal community, though, he began drawing using symbols such as circles and squares, which were common cultural forms of expression in his community. If Mountford’s account is accurate, Pariser argues, then what might look to an observer like a move from more-sophisticated to less-sophisticated drawing is actually just a case of the child taking inspiration from a different set of cultural symbols, and perhaps also a different set of expectations from the adults in his life on what counted as good art. “There is nothing inevitable about either style as an endpoint to drawing development,” Pariser told me. In one culture, realistic depiction is the goal; in the other, it’s abstraction.

Theories as to just how culturally constructed kids’ drawing habits really are vary extensively, but experts agree that subtle cultural differences have been found in kids’ art across the world. Japanese children, for example, have been found to draw human figures with heart-shaped faces and big eyes in recent years, which some say is thanks to the influence of manga comics.

“Children’s art has its own logic.”
A parent might place his daughter’s tadpole drawing on the fridge out of a love for his child rather than for the funky-looking image, but for many people, that tadpole art is actually quite exquisite. In fact, adult abstract artists such as Robert Motherwell and Paul Klee were inspired by children’s drawing. Observers have found similar patterns in modern abstract art and kids’ drawing; one example is the “X-ray” drawing, or a drawing in which the “inside” of a person is made visible (like a baby shown inside a woman’s stomach). For the museum-goers out there who tend to point to a piece of modern art and say, “My kid could have made that!” it’s worth remembering that often, that’s actually just what the artist had in mind.

All this suggests that kids’ shapes and figures aren’t all that simplistic after all—what’s dismissed as simplicity may instead be a degree of mental freedom that many abstract artists long to recreate. Children might be more open to playing with representation of invisible things like sound and emotion, Concordia’s Pariser has argued, because they aren’t yet limited by the constraint of depicting only visible subjects that’s characteristic of traditional Western art.


Of course, young children’s artistic absurdities often come down to the fact that they are kids, that their technical abilities aren’t well-advanced. Many scholars warn against overestimating kids’ artistic sophistication; any similarities to the work of brilliant abstract artists are just lucky accidents, they say.

Edith, age 3

Lucky accident or artistic prodigy, acknowledging that young kids aren’t as intent on producing a realistic rendering  helps demonstrate what the drawing experience means to them. For many kids, drawing is exhilarating not because of the final product it leads to, but because they can live completely in the world of their drawing for a few minutes (and then promptly forget about it a few minutes later). Adults may find it hard to relate to this sort of full-body, fleeting experience. But the opportunities for self-expression that drawing provide have important, even therapeutic, value for kids.

Even simple scribbles are meaningful. While it was once thought that kids only scribbled to experience the physical sensation of moving their arm along the page, “now it’s been shown that when children are scribbling … they’re representing through action, not through pictures,” said Boston College’s Winner. “For example, a child might draw a truck by making a line fast across the page and going ‘zoom, zoom,’ and so it doesn’t look like a truck when the child is done, but if you watch the process, what the child says and the noises and motion he makes when he’s drawing, you can see that he is trying to represent a truck through action,” she said. “And in a way you have drawing fused with symbolic play.”

Liane Alves, a prekindergarten teacher at Inspired Teaching Demonstration Public Charter School in D.C., told me about a student who presented her with a drawing featuring a single straight line across the page. Alves assumed the child hadn’t given too much thought to the drawing until he proceeded to explain that the line was one of the mattresses from The Princess and the Pea, one of the fairy tales they read in class. The student, however, may have offered a different explanation at another point in time. Maureen Ingram, who’s a preschool teacher at the same school, said her students often tell different stories about a given piece of art depending on the day, perhaps because they weren’t sure what they intended to draw when they started the picture. “We as adults will often say, ‘I’m going to draw a horse,’ and we set out ... and get frustrated when we can’t do it,” Ingram said. “They seem to take a much more sane approach, where they just draw, and then they realize, ‘it is a horse.’”

Violet, age 5

Ultimately, what may be most revealing about kids’ art isn’t the art itself but what they say during the drawing process. They’re often telling stories that offer a much clearer window into their world than does the final product. Asking them what their drawing is “supposed to be” wouldn’t yield as many answers, either; some have even argued that kids might be naming their work because they’re used to the ritual of their teachers asking them to describe their drawing and then writing a short title on the piece of paper. Studies suggest that kids will create an elaborate narrative while drawing, but when telling adults about their work they’ll simply name the items or characters in the image.

And what about those odd or scary-looking drawings? Does that mean kids are telling themselves stories that are odd or scary?

It’s hard to say, but it’s rarely a good idea to over-interpret it. Winner pointed to parents who worry when their kid draws a child the same size as the adults, wondering whether she’s suffering from, say, a feeling of impotence—a desire to feel as powerful as older people. But the likely reason is that the child hasn’t yet learned how to differentiate size in his or her representation; the easiest solution is to just make all the figures the same size. As another example, Winner noted that psychologists used to try to match the use of particular colors to children’s personalities—until a study showed that kids were often using colors in the order in which they were laid out along the easel (from left to right or vice versa).

What’s most important to remember is that “children’s art has its own logic,” Winner said. “Children are not being crazy.”