Finding the Balance

There are many African authors, like Ngugi and Achebe, who held the belief that it was not possible to accurately describe the feelings, history, and experiences of a people, who had been colonized, by using the colonizer’s language. According to these two authors colonization was evil and could not co-exist with tradition, which they viewed as good. In some ways, those who hold this opinion are right and in other ways they are not. The problem is that there is no way to completely and entirely translate one language into another. For example, I lived in Taiwan for two years, the official language is Mandarin. I had to quickly learn the language, as I didn’t speak a word of it prior to moving there. I did not have the luxury of living in a big and populous city, where many people spoke English. After some time of being immersed into the culture and spending most of my time with people speaking Chinese around me, there are phrases that I heard a lot. I learned how to use them, but there is no English equivalent to them. If I were to put the characters in this blog, you could copy and paste them into a translator and it would translate it into English. The English given is such a bad translation, but even I, who knows what it means, couldn’t give you an English equivalent. I could only teach you how to use the phrase. It is essentially a phrase that perfectly describes a variety of emotions in a huge range of situations.

This is one of the problems that Ngugi and Achebe have with using the colonial language. Every language is so rich in their own way and it is not possible adequately translate and express every word or phrase. A graphic novel can solve this problem. One can write in any language they choose, but they always draw in their own language.

Johann Sfar addresses the problems of language and colonization in his graphic novel, The Rabbi’s Cat. The images are very detailed and contain so much information. I found myself reading and examining each image several times. Different shades of brown, red, and yellow are used to show tradition. This demonstrates the comfort associated with the goodness in tradition. The city of Paris, representing modernity, is drawn as gray, very dark, and rainy. It is dreary and ruins everything.


The main characters in this book are the rabbi, his daughter, and the cat. The cat can be seen as a little arrogant and opinionated; however, this cat has one thing the other characters don’t have, a confidence in knowing who he is. I loved the cat and found him to be quite hilarious! He questions everything. Ah! Something that people who numbly follow traditional religion hate, because they no answers outside of “That’s just the way we do it.” Growing up in a very conservative Baptist home, there were many things that I questioned. At first the questions just rumbled around in my head, once I was older I started to ask why. In many ways I was discouraged from asking why, but my mom encouraged me to find what it is that I believe and not just what she believes or what my church believed. In my personal opinion, traditions within religion often make it stale and stagnate. When the question “Why?” is answered with, “Because that’s how we’ve always done it” brings about a lack of realness and conviction within religion and often even a hatred of it. The rabbi and his daughter suffer from identity crisis after identity crisis.

Sfar also demonstrates the ability for people to live together, get along, even be friends and still believe differently from each other. There is a scene between a Jewish rabbi and an Arab imam. Together they laugh and joke and sing and enjoy each other’s company. The Jewish cat and Christian dog, in Paris, run through the city and have a great time. They even learn from each other. The graphic novel was originally written in French, but drawn in Algerian. Each of these are quite different from the other; however, they all agree to disagree on certain things. They respect each other’s beliefs and ways, without requiring the other to conform to their ways. There is one scene in which Sfar uses the rabbi’s cat and the imam’s donkey to show the reality of what people are like. First they argue about a name not being able to be both Arab and Jewish, then they argue about whose ancestor’s grave they are going to visit.




Sfar does not seem to support complete colonization, but he does point out that it is possible for one to have a balance of both tradition and colonization.