Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Mafalda and the World – A Timeless Critique from a Twailer

[Maria Pilar Llorens holds a PhD in Law and Social Sciences and teaches International Public Law at the Faculty of Law of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. Dr Silvina Sánchez Mera teaches law and criminology at Robert Gordon University.]

In the early 1970s, when asked about Mafalda, writer Julio Cortázar answered: ‘That does not matter at all. What is important is what Mafalda thinks about me.’ Mafalda’s views on everyday issues matter because her inquiries help to challenge assumptions about the world we live in.

Watching the world through Mafalda means to engage with difficult questions about a variety of topics that ultimately focus on humanity’s humanity. Although Mafalda was born more than 60 years ago, (un)surprisingly many of her concerns remain valid today. As she once suggested, we still are living in a ‘round asylum’.

The post will draw on Mafalda’s critique on international issues regarding disarmament, the United Nations’s inability to effectively address international disputes, Global North centrism, and lack of humanity from a TWAIL perspective to draw parallels to today’s events regarding the Gaza situation. Ultimately, we argue that Mafalda’s critique remains relevant today as it was 60 years ago.

Who is Mafalda?

Mafalda is an Argentinean icon. This little, sassy and witty 5-year-old girl was born in 1962 and first published two years later as a political comic strip by Joaquin Salvador Lavado (drawing under the pen name Quino). She lives in Buenos Aires and is the daughter of a middle-class family. Although Mafalda is the main character of the comic strip, Mafalda would not be Mafalda without her friends: Felipe, Manolito, Susanita, Miguelito, and Libertad. Also, we cannot forget about her little brother Guille. Felipe is the dreamer of the group. Manolito, being the son of the grocer, is a capitalist. Susanita, the conservative egocentric, Miguelito, innocent and naive, and Libertad (Freedom) well, her name says it all. 

Mafalda is a very curious girl, often concerned with topics that are well beyond her age, such as politics and the state of the world. She and her friends discuss issues of everyday      political life in Argentina, Latin America, and beyond. They engage with a variety of international topics such as disarmament, the cold war, the Vietnam War, the role of the United Nations, racism, and broadly humanity.

This curiosity often causes sleepless nights and nervous breakdowns to her parents. Particularly to her dad who is unable to give her clear and definitive answers to her questions, such as when Mafalda asks why humanity works so bad. Also, her reflections make him challenge his assumptions about the world such as the time when Mafalda mentions that the world is ill, because it has ‘humanitis’, noting that we humans are the true causes of all the bad things happening. 

Mafalda is rebellious and she does not settle for the world as it is, yet she sees it as it is. She does not understand why there are so many conflicts in the world. In a letter to the United Nations Secretary General, she suggests that the problem may lie in the bed and not in politics as half of the world sleeps while the other half of the world is awake, highlighting that the issue is lack of communication. Throughout the strips, this issue is seen as one of the obstacles to the international community’s ability to reach consensus on international disputes. As a result, Mafalda wants to become a United Nations translator to help states communicate (and she also thinks that she should learn a bit of judo just in case).

Translation:

Mafalda: This is an important letter, Felipe, please write it for me!

Felipe: ok gimme here

Mafalda: “To the UN Secretary General: Considering that when in Washington and London it is day time…

Mafalda: in Moscow and Beijing it is nighttime, have you thought perhaps  that…

Mafalda: what divides the world is not politics, but bed time?”

Mafalda as a Twailer

A lot has been written about Mafalda’s social and political history in Argentina. Little, however, is said about Mafalda’s international theory stance. We argue that Mafalda looks at the world from a TWAIL perspective. She is TWAIL. She exposes the hierarchies underlying major events and the political landscape, as well as exposing Global North centrism, or in Mafalda’s terms the ‘developed world’. She is concerned with humanity’s humanity. She is conscious about being ‘the other’ and she exercises a form of resistance, one that invites us to challenge our understanding of the world and simplistic vision of the North/South.     

Mafalda’s TWAIL stance strikes from the beginning when she learns that Argentineans live far south. After this discovery on a terrestrial globe, she states that we live ‘heads down’ and as a result, we lose all our ideas because they fall from our heads. She also states that people living in the Northern Hemisphere are the developed countries because as a result of living ‘heads up’ their ideas do not fall from their heads. This is also restated when Felipe and Manolito try to rebut Mafalda’s ideas with an example of Manolito’s father grocery shop prosperity. Mafalda explains to them that the shop is prosperous because Manolito’s father was born in Spain (head up). Prosperity, development and intellectual ability then appear as characteristic of the ‘North’. North/South hierarchies are always present. 

Mafalda shows how little say developing and underdeveloped countries have in their own affairs and how their voices are not heard when calling for peace or the end of conflict. Subordination is all well present. The subordination is not just physical, like when Mafalda compares countries to boxing divisions: underdeveloped being ‘lightweight’ whereas developed countries being ‘heavyweight’ (these countries being the USA, UK, China and USSR); yet they do not play in their own division as they are all placed in the same boxing game. But also, intellectual. A conversation with Libertad sheds light on how our understanding of the world ‘reproduces and sustains the plunder and subordination of the Third World by the West’. Libertad affirms that the Earth is in space and has no ‘above’ and ‘below’. She also adds: ‘That idea that north hemisphere is ‘above’ is a psychological trick made up by those who believe they are above so those that believe they are below continue to believe we are below. The worst thing is that if we continue to believe we are below we will continue to be below. But from today, it is over!’. This is one of the greatest challenges to the North-centric status quo in the strip. Mafalda and Libertad invite us to rethink and question assumptions as well as our place in the world. By challenging this idea, they are rebelling against domination. 

Translation

Mafalda: But Libertad you are putting it upside down!

Libertad: upside down with regards to what? Earth is in space and space has no up or down

Libertad: That thing that the Norther Hemisphere is the one on top is a psychological trick invented by those who believe they are on top so that those of us who think we are beneath them continue to believe that we are beneath them. And the bad thing is that if we keep on believing that we are beneath them we will continue to be beneath them , but as of today, BAM! it’s over!

Mafalda’s Mom: Mafalda where where you?

Mafalda: I don’t know but something has just BAM overed itself

Mafalda’s Contemporaneity/Persistence and the Gaza Situation

While Mafalda responds to the context at the time, we keep knowing her and reading her well beyond her time. After all, Mafalda is timeless. International topics such as war, the United Nations’s role on international disputes and, overall, humanity, were constant concerns for Mafalda, as they are (or should be) for internationalists today. 

One reiterative topic is war. It is one of Mafalda’s main concerns. She does live, after all, during the Vietnam war. Although it is not the only conflict that appears in the strips, the ‘Arab/Israeli’ conflict features constantly in her conversations. Reading Mafalda today helps us understand that it is not, as the west wants us to believe, a ‘new’ or recent issue–     Mafalda was talking about it 60 years ago. The problem, to her, was lack of communication and the North intervention to hinder negotiations. To Mafalda, the ‘heavyweight’ countries dictate the rules, it is their voices the ones that matter. Thus, the world would only look to where they point. And these heavyweights did not point to Palestine. 

Similarly to today, where condemnation of Israeli actions came at first from ‘lightweight’ and ‘middle weight’ countries but not from ‘heavyweight’ ones. It is the latter the ones that are hindering stopping the atrocities committed, it is the latter the ones that are erasing Palestinian voices. As a ‘lightweight’ country, Palestine’s voice does not matter. 

Mafalda has a complicated relationship with the United Nations. She lives in this ‘double consciousness’, Mafalda wants a seat at the table while at the same time distrusting the table. She advocates for equality, real equality, in international relations. She sees the United Nations as the forum in which the ‘lightweight’ countries can have an opportunity, a forum that can serve to peacefully solve disputes. Yet, she is also quite critical of the United Nations role. She (also) sees the United Nations as an inefficient puppet of ‘heavyweight’ countries. 

Translation

Mom: So? how did your little brother behave?

Mafalda: good!

Mafalda: It’s just that I thought of removing his pacifier and oh boy you should have seen how he got

Mom: Oh great

Mom: You should be embarrassed! A big girl making a little defenceless baby. Where does one even see this kind of stuff!

Mafalda: At the UN?

This inefficiency is noted in the reiterated calls for peace and disarmament by the then Secretary General U-Thant, and by the constant veto (or threat to veto) by either the USA or USSR regarding disarmament or the end of (any) war. This leads Miguelito to refer to the United Nations as ‘the friendly useless/nice inoperative’ (los simpáticos inoperantes), 60 years on the nickname is still appropriate. The inability of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council, to put  an end to Israel’s actions in the Gaza strip given the USA veto contrasts the several calls to ceasefire by the Secretary General Guterres. The story repeats itself.

This idea is also reflected in several (ineffective) calls for peace made by Mafalda across the strips. She concludes that her own call has the same value as the calls made by the Pope or the United Nations as nobody pays attention to them. Similarly, today calls for peace, in the forms of the numerous protests in favour of the ceasefire, the United Nations Secretary General’s and the Pope’s seem to have no effect. They are worthless without ‘heavyweight’ countries’ engagement in the solution of the dispute.

Translation

Mafalda: Ehem

Mafalda: From this humble living room I issue an emotional call to world peace!

Mafalda: Bah! Looks like today the Vatican, the UN and my little chair have the same power of conviction!

Final Thoughts

As internationalists growing up reading Mafalda, it is difficult to think about the world from a different perspective. Little has changed in the last 60 years. Today, we are as depressed as Felipe was when he found out that humanity learned first how to kill faster than to write faster. As shown by the conflict in Gaza, we still are looking for ways to automate killing by using artificial intelligence to target people. Humanity has not evolved in the last 60 years.

The United Nations role in solving international disputes is as diluted as it was more than half a century ago. Sadly, Mafalda’s striking image pointing out that ‘Geneva is the capital of failure’ remains valid today. Once again, the United Nations is failing people in the Gaza strip. People are suffering and the world represented in the United Nations seems not to care as the organization is incapable of enforcing basic humanitarian rules and overall to address the violence in the Gaza strip.

Although ‘heavyweight’ countries have a predominant position in the international community and ‘lightweight’ voices are seldom heard, Mafalda taught us not to conform to this reality. Perhaps, as she discusses with Felipe, all we have to do is to start humanity over again to see if this time we can do better.