When it comes to Arab comics, Tunisian graphic designer and comics artist Othman Selmi (born in 1977) is an invaluable guide, with his home-studio being a carnival for urban cultural production enthusiasts. Among French and Arabic books on literature and movies, I see collections of old comics from the Arab world, filling the shelves of a large bookcase covering an entire wall. This is where you find the first issues of Majid, a magazine for children that was established in 1979 in Abu Dhabi and still enjoys circulation in the Arab world. Plus stunning glimpses into the rich imaginative life of the Egyptian cartoonist and visual designer Mohieddine Ellabbad and of the Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat. I also notice stories from Tunisia by Moncef Elkateb or the style of Chedly Belkamsa when drawing in the popular children magazine Qaws Quzah (Rainbow), the first founded in Tunisia in 1984 by a private editor.

Holding a degree from the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Tunis, Othman Selmi has been enjoying some popularity abroad for his editorial illustrations, and was asked by the Italian weekly Internazionale to recount the Tunisian spring in a series of cartoline (literally postcards) using the comics medium.

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On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.

About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)

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