Tag Archives: Joe Sacco

“Punching down” versus “sinking to their level:” why choose?

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Everyone seems to love “On Satire,” Joe Sacco’s cartoon for the Guardian responding to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but some may not. Some may detest “On Satire” because the cartoon was reverent toward the victims. They may think Charlie Hebdo‘s Muhammad cartoons justified the attack, or were straightforwardly racist. On the other hand, some may detest Sacco’s cartoon because it portrays a mob chasing Muslims. Knowing that he made an earlier ethnographic comic about Palestine, they may suspect Sacco of trying to distract viewers from the real business of condemning Islam wholesale, stepping up drone attacks, and leveling Gaza.

For my part, however, I detest it for being so thoroughly middle-of-the-road and ambivalent even as it affects a seemingly bold, seemingly nuanced stance on an subject that is not simply abstract “issues,” but a messy, bloody conflict with a long history. Allow me a condensed close reading.
 

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First panel: Oh, Joe Sacco is passionate to be sure, but he is not hotheaded! He is sincere and reverent, and looks good in a loincloth.

Second panel: Pens made into crosses, how very poignant, yet so visually klunky. Hey, you know who kills lots of journalists? The U.S. But their victims mostly aren’t Christian, so you’d have to figure out how to make a laptop into a crescent and star, so never mind. And there were Muslim Charlie Hebdo victims too, but whatever.

Third panel: Walks away still musing metonymically on “the pen.” If only it were a clever reference to Le Pen, but it isn’t.

Fourth panel: Black man falling out of a tree with a banana but no loincloth, with a big branch suggestively hiding his indubitably endowed groin, equals not racist because aware of its racism! Why don’t you just burn one of those pen-crosses on his lawn? Oh, because he lives in a tree. Ooo, Joe Sacco is such a firebrand, I can’t wait to see an anthropomorphized Koran going down on a pig!

Fifth panel: “The More You Know,” the less you worry about offending Israel. France actually has laws on the books prohibiting hate speech, and it has recently used those laws to shut down anti-Semitic Twitter users. Now hundreds of French troops are deployed protecting Jewish sites. Where are the troops protecting Muslims? Why don’t you look THAT up?

Sixth panel: The professor plods on- remember anti-Semitism? Subtext: perhaps Muslims are anti-Semitic, perhaps? And by the way, what is this about the evil Jew preying on the “working class?” Stalin was a genocidal anti-Semite, but in the West the conflation of Jews and Communists should be so familiar as to be unworthy of mention. Get your hate straight. And of COURSE anti-Semitism matters in 2015, just like in 1933- France has had dozens of hate attacks against Jews in the last few years.

Seventh panel: More rambling prattle, but I’m getting distracted by Sacco’s face– are those eggs with eyelashes strapped to his head?

Eighth panel: Again, so brave! Martyred for his bold stance on reasoned meandering ambivalent equivocation. “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is…” So mature, so stoic, so profoundly deserving of the royal “we.” Sure talks a lot for a guy with a severed larynx.

Ninth panel: Abu-Ghraib Joe sez, “What is it about Muslims?” Wait, what is what about who? Who tortured who again? Traumatized prisoners say the darnedest things!

Last panel: Oh, I get it! “Drive them from their homes,” sort of like Israel right? He is part of an angry mob now– Israeli settlers? the IDF? Right-wing European nationalists? Well, there’s no hilarious stereotype to explicate that tragic-ish image- you just figure out that the woman being chased has a headscarf, the guy being chased has a beard and a taqiyah, and there’s Joe Sacco looking tough and angry again, this time holding a club while ironically continuing to mouth reasoned platitudes. But wouldn’t “sorting out how we fit in each others’ world” be illustrated better by the Prophet getting a back-door fist-bump from Gene Simmons of KISS—a Jew who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck who he offends?

But seriously, did Sacco say, “What is it about Muslims?” Not “some Muslims,” not “jihadi Muslims” or “fundamentalist Muslims” or whatever, but “Muslims in this time and place” (so qualified, yet so totalizing). The issue here is all about context. Explicit context: the jungle Negro and the hook-nosed moneylender are inoffensive because we are told not to be offended. Implicit context: the reader is not a Muslim, and can relate to crosses and complaints about those Muslims nowadays. Ignored context: radicalized Muslims are responding to a state of indiscriminate, cowardly, automated, endless imperial warfare. Arbitrary murder is answered by arbitrary murder.

And there is no reason to think that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were unaware of the threats made to the lives of American cartoonists drawing the Prophet, as well as of the infamous Danish Muhammad cartoon (which the CH staff can be seen discussing on video). They absolutely deserved to draw their cartoons and not lose their lives, BUT what if they deliberately took a risk based on principle? What if they chose a stance that put them in the line of fire? Is that foolish or brave? Are they martyrs or casualties of war? Don’t ask Joe Sacco.

Writing in Slate on French secularism, or laïcité, Rachel Levy points out that in French public schools, “Muslim girls can’t wear their veils, Jewish boys can’t wear their kippot, and Christians can’t draw attention to their crosses.” As a country that has always had religious fanatics and never, despite strenuous fantasizing, a substantial monoculture, Americans don’t readily identify with a political stance that curtails expression of personal beliefs. And yet, America has the enormously successful Family Guy, a show that I think tops South Park, Ed The Happy Clown, Angry Youth Comix, or any Ralph Bakshi movie for unfettered omnidirectional contempt and bile. In France, culture is taken seriously enough to enforce bans on clothing, whereas in the U.S., to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek, culture is what people believe in without taking it seriously.

This is where I come from in trying to explain my repulsion at Sacco’s nonspecific sanctimony. France embraced African-American expatriates, but seems committed to marginalization of religious minorities. America elected a black President, but also keeps imprisoning black men, or just executing them in the street, or in Wal-Mart (maybe they all just fell out of trees?). Plus Americans can’t make art about serious ethical issues without being mealy-mouthed and pompous, unless it’s just a TV show and is thus divorced from any larger meaning. Saudi Arabia, from which the Charlie Hebdo attacks (like the 9/11 attacks) may have been planned, is the country with the most repressive Islamist regime in the world, and is also our key Arab ally. These three seemingly distinct places share one philosophy: money talks. And if all you have to offer by way of protest are overexplained, hyperqualified, utterly trite faux-provocations, that bullshit walks.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Dystopia is a Jacuzzi You Never Want to Leave

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Here’s my pitch for a dystopian novel. It takes place in Wealthy Powerful Nation (WPN), a country that is secretly spying on its citizens. In fact, those citizens life in a state of near-total surveillance and don’t realize it. Or, at least, won’t admit it to themselves.

You see, that’s the weird thing about Wealthy Powerful Nation, it’s a dystopia that doesn’t look like one, because it has a number of mechanisms in place that help hide how dystopic it really is. The citizens know on some level that the world is a terrible place, but they’re also living through a time of abundant good-to-great art and entertainment available at little-to-no cost. The people live in perpetual debt to make it seem like they have a stable, middle-class life. The country supposedly has freedom of speech, but corporations own most of the venues for that speech. Freedom of assembly is guaranteed, but the government can track its citizen’s locations at all times, can turn on the cameras on their electronic devices without them knowing it and record them, and can use very powerful computers to sift through the patterns of their actions to determine what they’ll do next. There’s very little oversight for the Government of WPN, and this system of surveillance has completely coopted industry and banking. Meanwhile, WPN is able to kill pretty much anyone in the world any time it wants, using an army of flying robots.

One man, let’s call him Ed, works for the surveillance state, but he has doubts. He believes that total surveillance impacts freedom, and so he steals a vast archive of information about the system of domestic espionage that WPN employs. He flies halfway around the world to reveal this information to a team of journalists and then skips town.

When the information is finally revealed, the world responds by mocking Ed on twitter for weeks for some stupid things he says about Vladimir Putin. Gradually, opinion polls come to agree with Ed, but nothing of any consequence changes.

Not a great story, is it? Not likely to be turned into a four part movie franchise starring Chris Hemsworth. There’s a couple of reasons why it’s a lousy story. The first is that, well, there’s not a lot of hope in it, and if there’s one thing that sets apart modern day dystopian narratives from their spiritual grandfather 1984, it’s the presence of hope. Hope that the State can be defeated, hope in the future, hope in progress, and, perhaps most important of all, hope in your fellow humans.

Looking at the United States today, it’s hard to see a lot of reasons for hope, largely because there’s been so little change, despite our current President’s use of both of those words for his election campaign. For you see, unlike the characters in most dystopias, we are not exactly victims. We have chosen our leadership, whose prosecution of a global war on terror remains largely popular, except for when it can be demonstrated to harm us directly.

Lucky for us, we outsource our harm as much as possible. The people we kill live half a world away, destroyed by flying robots piloted by children in a dark room nowhere near their quarry. Our all-volunteer army pulls so heavily from specific demographic groups that many of us can go about our lives without seeing any consequence of our war if we don’t want to.

And we don’t want to, do we? Looking the demon jackal that we have summoned with our war on terror dead in the eyes would be unbearable, paralyzing. Certainly, the torture report’s breaching of my own person walls of denial was for me, even though I already knew what was in it. So we ignore the demon jackal even while feeding it ever more of our humanity, willfully joining the only conspiracy that really matters, the one of ignorance and complicity.

These are desperate, hopeless times. Desperate, hopeless times call for desperate, hopeless art forms. Perhaps this is why Joe Sacco, who has made a name for himself as a comic book journalist specializing in war reportage has turned to satire, that most desperate and hopeless of art forms, in Bumf #1, his response to America in the age of perpetual war.

Satire has lost a lot of its luster now that it’s regularly used by racists to excuse impolitic things they’ve said on twitter, but satire has performed a unique and important function since the ancient Greeks. No other genre can get as close to unspeakable truths, because satire rides there on the wings of excessive bad taste—seriously, you have no idea how cleaned up most translations of Lysistrata are— exaggeration, humor and irony.

Enough preamble. Joe Sacco’s Bumf #1, his first fictional work in what feels like forever, is the most necessary comic of 2014. A nightmare that pulls from his roots in underground comix and the work of contemporaries like Michael DeForge and Jim Woodring, Bumf #1 is grappling with American hegemony in a way that serves as a stark reminder of the freedom and possibility that comics allows.

It’s also, to put it mildly, unsubtle. The first two-page spread in the book features Bumf’s narrator telling us that after the Garden of Eden, “There’s been a serious fuck-up,” while surrounded by prostitutes, a woman smacking her child, a man having his brains blown out, a homeless man sitting in front of a garbage can with a human leg sticking out of it, a man hanging himself and the twin towers being hit by planes. Then we’re off to World War II to firebomb some Jerrys and WWI to stroll naked through the trenches while millions of young men die, before seguing into a present day White House where President Barack Obama (drawn as Richard Nixon) attends a meeting in a situation room like something out of Hieronymous Bosch:
 

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Fiction, then, isn’t Bumf’s only departure from Sacco’s previous major works (the brilliant Footntoes in Gaza, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde). In leaving the world of comics journalism, he’s also left behind realism entirely. Bumf #1 is a nightmare peopled by a set of symbolic characters pulled from the collective unconscious. First, there’s our narrator, a scummy, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, bestubbled human face on the body of tweety-bird. Then there’s Colonel Singo-Jingo, fat, British, and monocled, standing up for the old-fashioned values that the 37 million deaths in World War I couldn’t shake. There’s our eventual protagonist, Nixon/Obama. General Custer makes a cameo appearance. Finally, there’s Joe Sacco himself, hired to be the official propagandist of American Empire, composing a story that’s “boy meets girl meets the State.”

These various threads cohere as the United States opens a new “black site” in the form of a portal to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy, where neither the rules of physics, the ten commandments, nor the Geneva conventions apply:
 

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Once in Andromeda, everyone dons hoods, water-boards a few detainees, gets their kicks through drone warfare, and falls in some form of love. The nightmare becomes inescapable, the “black site” an infinite hellscape filled with demon jackals, unsuitable for human life. It is what the novelist and critic Charles Baxter has called a “wonderland,” a place where the character’s fugitive subjectivity has been made manifest in the world surrounding them. Or, as Baxter describes the wonderlands of HP Lovecraft, the environments become “inhospitable interiors, either simple or elaborate, [that] feel like private prisons disturbed by lunatic geometry. Their spaces present vistas of grief-stricken vastness, combined with a steadfast inanimate hostility to any human endeavor. They cannot be a home to anybody. Any effort at domesticity within them would be laughable. No one would want to be there.”

Yet, Sacco points out again and again, we do want to be there. He’s first recruited to join the war effort on the edges of a giant Jacuzzi. Gazing upon it, he remarks, “Wow. The press room sure has changed since I was last here. … this Jacuzzi of yours is serious business.”

“It’s not my Jacuzzi,” the chain-smoking tweety bird replies. “Think of it as the people’s Jacuzzi. Getting in?”

Complicity, in other words, is part of what Sacco’s after here. Bumf #1 essays our collective loss of humanity through the prosecution of an endless war against a series of ever-changing Kaisers stretching back to WWI. In one panel, Sacco recreates the infamous “Saigon Execution” photo, adding a WWI-era German helmet to Nguyen Van Lem’s head. “Killing the enemy is never enough,” Colonel Singo-Jingo intones, “We’d been killing them for years.” (His solution to this problem is rape, by the way, which is never quite shown in Bumf’s one act of tasteful restraint).
 

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This complicity is vast and all encompassing in Bumf. Religion, art, the legal system, love, all are powerless to resist the temptation of power and obedience. What sets Bumf #1 apart from other dystopian nightmares that the characters all want to be there. Whereas other dystopian narratives often revolve around either an epiphanic moment (Brazil) or an already existing discontent that finally finds a venue (The Hunger Games), in Bumf #1, the various characters discover an acceptance of their dehumanized, alien world. A torture victim falls in love with her torturer after he enrolls her in a sensible mobile plan. Sacco comes to enjoy the power and prestige of being the official State Graphic Novelist. Nixon/Obama realizes he’s the Messiah. Gradually, torturer and tortured alike don hoods and lose their clothes. By the final few panels, they are an anonymous collective mass of victor and victim, Sacco’s glasses the only distinguishing feature amidst the hairy bellies and sagging breasts. There’s no hope for us at any point in Bumf #1, which is part of why its humor is so savage, and, while it often adopts the structure of the short gag comic, the jokes are likely to stick in your throat. There’s no escape from the bed we’ve made. All that remains is to lie in it. Getting in?

Ethan on the Advantages of Comics Journalism

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My post on Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, and my skepticism about comics journalism, prompted several interesting responses from Ethan. I thought I’d highlight them below.

I can recall at least one specific, focused example Sacco has given in numerous interviews as to what benefit he sees in using comics: he can present environmental or visual details unobtrusively or repetitively in a way that other mediums cannot. He has spoke about how his drawings of the West Bank allow him to depict, for example, the ubiquitous presence of children and of mud without having to repeat at the end of every sentence “and the ground was muddy and there were kids everywhere.” You feel that impact through background drawings. On the other hand, were this a documentary, he would be entirely dependent on stock footage or b-roll of contemporary Gaza– and I imagine stock footage of 1956 Gaza is hard to come by, if it exists. Thus he is able to give his narrative much more visual impact than the “talking heads” would of a documentary. Plus, of course, he gains the ease of access and portability that a book has over a documentary, as well as the length and depth of the book (this documentary would be hours long if all the dialogue was read out loud). These are all relatively superficial advantages comics has. I’m sure you could come up with more.

Other reasons: Sacco has said he appreciates the necessary slowness of comics, which requires abandoning any sense of timeliness in favor of “slow journalism.” Carrying a sketchbook and pencil into a strange location is much less obtrusive and alienating (and much cheaper) than carrying expensive camera equipment. People react very differently when you put a camera on them.

“He was doing comics for years when almost nobody cared” — reminds me of more good reasons. Comics, especially when Sacco started, used to fly so far under the critical radar of wider society that you could get away with doing a book about Palestinians without any pushback, or, y’know, attention. On the other hand, the novelty of “Hey, it’s a comic about Palestine” probably got him a lot of readers and attention that he wouldn’t have gotten from (yet another) book or documentary. I mean, Edward Said wrote the introduction to the collected ‘Palestine’ volume.

 

Comics Journalism…Why?

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Reading Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, I kept coming back to the same question. Namely — journalism as comics? Why? Sacco’s project — interviewing individuals in the Gaza Strip who were witnesses to two different Israeli massacres in 1956 — could easily have been presented as an agitprop book or as an agitprop documentary film. His methodology — the careful documenting of atrocities, the humanizing of the enemy, the nuanced by firm advocacy for the powerless — are all familiar tropes and tactics of left-wing investigative print and film journalism. Given that the content is familiar, what exactly does the comics form add? Why bother with it?

It’s a question that’s likely to make comics fans bristle. After all, to turn the question around, why should comics have to justify itself while other forms do not? Shouldn’t the success of the endeavor be more important than the medium?

Perhaps. And yet the question persists…in part because when you’re doing Joe Sacco’s brand of journalistic advocacy, journalism in prose and journalism in video have some major, easily apparent advantages over journalism in comics. Prose is unobtrusive and easily distributed; a Human Rights Watch report, for example, can provide facts and talking points with minimal fuss, and can also be readily quoted, linked, and copied, spreading a targeted, clear, footnoted message to as broad a range of people as possible. Film, on the other hand, can provide a sense of presence and urgency which is difficult to duplicate, allowing witnesses to speak in their own words with an authority and resonance that is very difficult to duplicate.

The advantage of prose or of film can perhaps be summed up as “authenticity.” Journalism’s goal is to show truth, and so spur to action. Prose and film are, for historical and formal reasons, often seen as at least potentially transparent windows on truth. Comics, on the other hand, foregrounds its artifice; as Sacco mentions in his introduction, everything you see on the page is rendered by his hand. And this is, incidentally, why Sacco is seen as an artist, rather than just as a reporter. Certainly, nobody that I’m aware of has ever referred to an HRW report as the work of a mature artist who has found his own style and voice, which is what friend-of-the-blog Jared Gardner called Sacco in his review of Footnotes in Gaza.

One upshot of making journalism comics, then, is to make journalism art, and to make the journalist an artist. The downside of this is that you then end up in a situation where the genius and sensitivity and angst of the journalist ends up pushing to the side the suffering and injustice which is the journalism’s putative subject. Sacco is certainly aware of this danger, and makes moves to undercut it, or problematize it, as on this second-to-last-page of the graphic novel.
 

 
However, I don’t think these gestures are ultimately successful. In this case, for example, indicting himself for insensitivity and hubris ends up validating his sensitivity and honesty, and also makes the book as a whole about his psychodrama and growth — about his experiences in Gaza, rather than about the experiences of those who are stuck in the place on a more permanent basis. In this context, contrition for selfishness still ends up as a way for the self to take up more space. The comics form has allowed/impelled Sacco the journalist to become Sacco the genius.

But while the artifice of comics journalism has its downsides, it has some advantages as well. Most notably, Sacco’s narrative is in no small part about the uncertainty of memory and of history. Comics, precisely because of its unfamiliarity as journalism, is less transparent; it demonstrates, almost reflexively, that journalism is not “truth,” but an effort to reconstruct truth.

Again, precisely because comics is a less familiar form for journalism than film or prose, it ends up emphasizing its own artificiality. Everything you see in Footnotes in Gaza is created and represented by Joe Sacco. His account always has a built in asterix. What he shows you is not what happened, but a collage stitched out of the words and memories of his interviewees and the fabric of his own visual imagination.
 

 
Sacco uses comics, then, to emphasize subjectivity. But…do you need to use comics to do that? Writers have been exploring the wavering, difficult nature of truth and of history for hundreds of years in prose, surely. Joseph Conrad’s narratives within narratives within narratives, or Paul Celan’s bleak koans hovering on the edge of comprehensibility, to cite just two examples, seem like more challenging and more thoroughgoing efforts to wrestle with the intersections of meaning, subjectivity, and historical trauma. For that matter, those Human Rights Watch reports I mentioned are usually pretty good about discussing the difficulty of gathering evidence and the conflicting testimony of witnesses. Do we really need the comics form to tell us that human memory isn’t perfect?

Indeed, the use of comics seems in some ways like a epistemological shortcut. Subjectivity can be linked to, or summarized as, the comics form, which is shown as obscuring the objective truth of reason and trauma. Comics may serve to call reportage into question…but it also, at the same time, validates or stabilizes the reportage. Thus, in that page above, the images of the Israeli’s swinging clubs are imaginative, or unverified…and their unverifiedness contrasts, or highlights, the more vouched veracity of the portraits, which are (at least probably) photoreferenced. And the referenced images, in turn, highlight the even greater veracity of the words, taken down from (presumably taped) interviews. Thus, while the comics form may initially appear to highlight subjectivity, it could instead be said to create a fairly clear hierarchy of representation, in which Sacco’s deployment of his research materials and his illustration signals the reader what is “truth” and what is less so.

This isn’t necessarily a weakness. You could argue that comics’ strength as journalism lies not in its artificiality per se, but rather in the ease with which it can evoke differing degrees of artifice; in the resources it has available for signaling truth or falsehood, or different levels of both. For example, one of the most interesting aspects of Sacco’s book is the way that he shifts back and forth between the 1956 atrocities and the ongoing violence on the West Bank. For comics, where still images evoke time, it is relatively easy to make two times equally physical and equally present.

Comics’ ability to show bodies discontinuous in time is used here to show trauma across decades; the self from the past is as real as the self in the present. That is, it’s not entirely real, but is composed of representation and memory, the present self made of a past self, as the past is made of, or created out of, the present.

The problem is that Sacco’s manipulation of artifice and memory is not always so deft. In that page we looked at earlier, for instance:

 

 

The cartooning turns the Israeli soldiers into deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted (or entirely obscured) eyes. Is this how the Palestinian’s are supposed to have seen them? Or is it how Sacco sees them? And is the acknowledgedly subjective nature of comics supposed to make us question this demonization? Or is it supposed to excuse it? Or, as perhaps the most likely possibility, has the impetus for dramatic visuals been catalyzed by comics’ history of pulp representation to create a pleasing collage of villainy from which readers are encouraged to pleasurably recoil?

Or another example:
 

 
This is one of a number of times when Sacco zooms in on a grizzled Palestinian fighter, dramatically showing us his crazy eyes. As with the thuggish snarling Israelis, the formal contribution of comics here has to do less with emphasizing subjectivity and physicality, and more to do with the pleasures of pulp tropes. It’s Sacco’s own “Muslim Rage!” moment.

From this perspective, the advantage of comics as a form may be less the meta-questioning of the journalistic project, and more its unique ability to present itself as serious art while simultaneously coating its earnest reportage with a sugary dab of melodrama. One can debate whether this is ethically or aesthetically desirable, but either way it’s clear that Sacco’s comics provide something — a mix of high-art validation and accessible low-art hints of pulp — that is uavailable in prose or video long-form journalism. I don’t necessarily like Footnotes in Gaza that much, but I have to grudgingly admire its creator’s marketing instincts in finding and exploiting such an unlikely genre niche.

Joe Sacco’s Journalism

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Joe Sacco’s Journalism collects some of the author’s shorter work which first appeared in various magazines, newspapers, and books. Only those utterly devoted to Sacco’s output are likely to have seen every one of these stories and even in that instance, their compilation in one ready volume should be most welcome.

While Sacco isn’t exactly coasting, he seems to have settled into a certain groove over the past decade—a sure-footed method of attack and transcription that ensures a minimum level of quality. Despite the title of this new book, Sacco’s work here can be more precisely described as reportage which focuses on persons as opposed to the grand scheme of things. This label should not obscure the fact that he does steer his stories in fairly predictable directions while infrequently providing direct opinion (in contrast to the prose form afterwords found in this anthology). He almost never offers up solutions to the problems he encounters and purposefully shuns overt editorializing.

Sacco’s preface (“A Manifesto Anyone?”) clearly articulates the selling point of his comics: the personal touch; the tabletalk; the stray details which betray the messy art of journalism; the fulsome embrace of subjectivity. All these and more present themselves as essential parts of Sacco’s journalistic toolset; his art singling out telling moments in the course of an interview away from the oppressive and quieting glare of a video camera, adding to the stark description of mere prose.

Even so, the comics form presents a number of problems for would be cartoon journalists quite apart from their labor intensiveness and lengthy gestation periods. One of these problems is highlighted by Sacco in his preface:

“Aren’t drawings by their very nature subjective? The answer to this last question is yes…Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing.”

One might say that journalistic drawings inhabit that (un)happy land between the reader’s imagination (in pure prose) and concrete reality (in photography). The former can never be countermanded while the latter—a potent source of “easy” empathy—is beholden to Cartier Bresson’s Decisive Moment.

With comics, the abilities of the artist are paramount, and here far more than in most other cartooning genres. While the emotions in Sacco’s stories are communicated with skill and the faces of his characters reasonably distinct, they are still removed from the direct human connection of photo portraiture. What is often lost in translation is that sense of connection to reality and someone real, an affinity which cannot be adequately conveyed through his stylized cartooning which in the early days broached on caricature. Sacco compensates for this with various forms of artifice. Thus Zura and Raisa (from “Chechen War, Chechen Women”) though separated by 30 pages seem almost indistinguishable, the artist reinforcing that element of despair and the commonality in their suffering by means of repetition.

 

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That same tortured face is seen again on page 70 of the collection and a story about Chechen refugees. It is up to the reader to decide if this represents the artist’s persistence of vision or the limitations of his style.

Sacco is of course nothing if not self-critical, these feelings frequently manifesting themselves in the form of self-derision. In Journalism, Sacco can be seen prodding his mercenary journalistic instincts—that cultivated ambition which must surely be a part, however small, of every reporter’s motivation and which just as surely must be quashed in those who have any level of conscience. In “Trauma on Loan”, we find Sacco champing at the bit when he is almost denied an interview with two victims of torture:

“You brought them here to reopen their wounds. No point worrying about their feelings now.”

At other times, it is simply a case of a journalist’s bread and butter, the search for some “real action” to spice up a story. The kind of story which most soldiers want to avoid.

 

He is similarly unerring in pointing out his weakest stories. In this case, he singles out “Hebron: A Look Inside” (2001) which he describes as his “least successful piece of comics journalism.”

While Sacco’s tropes will be familiar to long time readers, his comics on Iraq do seem somewhat distinctive within the context of his oeuvre. Not because they are unquestionably the best stories in this anthology. Far from it—that accolade might be better directed at his deeply felt portraits of the most wretched peoples of this earth (his encounter with some Dalits in “Kushinagar” for example). The author is also quite right when he suggests that the first story in his Iraq triptych (“Complacency Kills”) doesn’t “[add] anything new to the immense literature of ‘men at war’.” That story does, however, stand out because of its novelty in tone: the journalist now no longer mining the same vein he’s been chipping at since the days of Palestine; no longer fleshing out the sympathetic and distorted faces filled with hunger and despair; no longer solemnly depicting the genocidaires and unremitting faces of evil but here presenting a more genial portrait of the brutalization of his fellow Americans assigned the task of patrolling the highway between Haditha and Hit.

The philosophical conflicts of these fighting men are put on display, their essential humanity conveyed, and their deaths filled with a sadness which is never maudlin. All this perhaps a side effect of embedded journalism—strangely forgiving of the tormentors but still finding a kind of balance in the middle of the rest of this collection. Sacco is patently opposed to the war, yet he gently skirts the immense futility of the soldiers’ deaths. The reader never gets that sense of waste littered throughout Tardi’s comics on the Great War; all that incipient fury held in check by the dictates of reportage which, in this instance, eschews the imagination (the piece was first published in The Guardian) and the even greater suffering of the resident non-combatants—the shadowy figures traversing the highways patrolled by the American forces.

These anonymous figures get names in the story that follows (“Down! Up!”). While aesthetically less impressive, this piece does suggests that Sacco’s skills are best demonstrated not by his stories of the tortured and maimed but by more mundane subjects. This is an extended piece on trainees attached to the Iraqi National Guard (ING) and their interaction with their liberator-colonizers; the captors and their captives secreted away to some mysterious training destination; the actors playing at master and slave in the comics equivalent of a confined space of undescribed backgrounds; the plot bending the knee to the dictates of human interaction, the faces of every individual contorted into extremes.

So much passion on display and yet, Sacco is clearly wrong in suggesting that it is the comics medium which hasn’t allowed him “make a virtue of dispassion.” This may be the case on a personal basis (and perhaps that is all he means) but it seems excessive to shower blessings on the “inherently interpretive medium” of comics. The truth is that comics are quite capable of conveying facts with dispassion as evidenced by the vast majority of comics non-fiction. Just like authors who cast their words firmly in the direction of human cost stories, it is Sacco’s personal proclivities (and not any comics essentialism) which is responsible for the shape and tone of his comics. The decisions in comics journalism are perhaps more obvious than those in video or photography, yet it should be clear from controversies like those surrounding the depictions of Bosnian Serb concentration camps that even photo journalism is also open to interpretation and partisanship.

“Another trap promoted in American journalism schools is the slavish adherence to “balance.” …Balance should not be an excuse for laziness. If there are two or more versions of events, a journalist needs to explore and consider each claim, but ultimately the journalist must get to the bottom of a contested account independently of those making the claims. As much as journalism is about “what they said they saw,” it is about “what I saw for myself.” The journalist must strive to find out what is going on and tell it, not neuter the truth in the name of equal time.” – Joe Sacco (from his preface)

Similarly, Sacco’s disavowal of “balance” seems overstated if not a deliberate misunderstanding. The pursuit of balance has little to do with not taking sides, coming down in the middle, or pissing off both sides as he caricatures in his preface. Rather it suggests a dedication to teasing out the intricacies of any given situation and recognizing the limitations in human understanding. His advocacy of the journalism of “what I saw myself” obscures the essential mystery of “truth.”

The clarity and concerted purpose of Sacco’s work often elides the complexities of each flashpoint he visits—the very reasons for the insolubility of their problems. Only in “The Unwanted”, his report on the Maltese-African immigration problem, do we get some sense of this intractability. While Sacco’s sympathies lie firmly with the political refugees, he describes keenly the Maltese sardine can of fear, economic hopelessness, and easy racism. The predicament presents itself as a microcosm of the problems faced by Europe as a whole.

In this sense, his extended examination of the African migrant issue can be seen as “balanced” (an insult in Sacco’s book), allowing us to apprehend the dilemmas while preserving his consistent sympathy for the downtrodden

Not so the familiar and lengthy reportage on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the former Yugoslavia. The stories from these war zones present us with an almost Manichean world of the oppressed and oppressors, a long tradition in comics as it happens. A mild-mannered challenge in the Hague by a Serb-American defense attorney fizzles out pretty quickly. The Israelis are represented by a recalcitrant Zionist in “Hebron: A Look Inside.” The powerful, as Sacco puts it, “are excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs.”

“I don’t feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful.”

A perfectly sensible view which only leaves the reader the task of deciding which side is the more powerful and which has the greater voice in the mainstream media.

Without any furrowing of the narrative, genuine understanding can hardly be realized. Where one approach might convince us of the righteousness of our aid, our charity, and perhaps our armed intervention, the alternative might give us reasonable pause to consider our moral reflexivity. The former approach lulls us into complacency, the latter challenges all received ideas and sympathies. Sacco’s frequent advocacy of an unwavering crystallized truth suggests that he is not primarily a journalist and reporter but a political activist; one who has consumed the facts, the scholarship, and the primary sources and sees himself as an evangelist, giving voice to those who have none and presenting himself and his works as one of several rallying points in the journalistic sphere.

Hence his protestations against journalistic “balance”, the practice of which must seem hollow and self-serving in the face of taking sides and championing the needy. This is a noble endeavor but like all messages from the pulpit, one that must be tested thoroughly before acted upon. And if we agree with Sacco when he holds to Robert Fisk’s adage that “reporters should be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer”, we should first consider being “neutral and unbiased” on the side of tangled truth.

 

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Further Reading

(1) Kathleen Dunn’s review at The Oregonian. This article contains a lot of basic background information on Sacco.

(2) David Ulin’s review at the LA Times.

“The rap on Sacco, of course, is that he is less a journalist than an advocate, who in such works as “Palestine” and “Footnotes in Gaza” blurs the line between observer and activist. That’s true, I suppose, in the narrowest sense, but it’s also reductive, and with “Journalism,” he convincingly refutes the argument.

Sacco is rigorous about telling both sides of the story, developing sympathy for the American soldiers even as he questions their presence in Iraq. The key is his attention to the human drama, which blows open in the final frames of the story, where he describes the fate of a river unit with whom he’d gone on patrol.”

 

Footnotes in Oral History

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Women in the IDF are, horrifying though this may seem to a young teenage boy torn between hormones and politics, quite attractive. That this merits a good half a page in Joe Sacco’s “Palestine” tells you that this is a man who knows his Holy Land. In fact Sacco knows it well enough to recognise the truth which overwhelms even the casual visitor to Palestine; everyone has a story. I can remember a lecture I once attended on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict where, after much deliberation, the relevant academic was forced to give two lectures on the same events, one in the persona of an Israeli settler, the other as a Palestinian militant. The point being, no single viewpoint or narrative could fully encompass the vast and polarised history of this country. This is obviously true of all countries, and all histories, but it is perhaps even more pertinent in Palestine, where history plays a disproportionately large role in shaping the attitudes of the now.

This is an idea that Sacco attempts to confront head on throughout his work in the region. He acknowledges how insufficient the single narrative is, and, as a journalist, how limited the dominant story that fills most of the media is. In “Footnotes in Gaza”, Sacco sets out to tell an alternative, to tell the story of the ‘footnotes to history’: the victims rather than the oppressors. In an exercise of oral history, the Palestinians are to be allowed to express their own voices, to speak in their own words about an event, the massacre of 111 Palestinians in the Gaza town of Rafah in 1956.

If “Palestine” is ‘graphic-journalism’, then “Footnotes” is arguably graphic-history, Sacco employs his enviable skills to bring to life not only the accounts themselves, but the process of collation. He scales down the expressionistic, Crumb-esque caricatures of ‘Palestine’ and exchanges them for a more realistic aesthetic, with some impressive detail and an especially sharp eye for landscape composition. The eye-witnesses whose testimony are portrayed are drawn as head and shoulders mugshots, speaking directly out of the page, in an evocative portrayal of the victims indeed speaking in their own words. There’s a lot of this direct portraiture, again and again eyes are directed out of the page at us, there’s rarely the experience of detached viewing.

Despite his commitment to allowing the victims to simply tell their story however, Sacco acknowledges, and engages with, the necessity of drawing narrative from memory. With as much of the text concerned with the modern day collection of the oral accounts as with the history itself, Sacco is able to express concerns and difficulties with the oral testimony. He complains about the weakness of memory, the conflating of events and the exaggeration and elaboration he finds as he compares accounts. In the memorable segment entitled “Memory and the Essential Truth”, Sacco takes several different testimonies of a single event, the killing of three brothers, and compares their omissions and deviations, before finally concluding that the only confirmable truth, and yet also the only one which matters, is that three brothers were killed. The sequence becomes a justification of the methodology of the entire history, from this point on events are narrated by a succession of witnesses, with Sacco demonstrating both the convergences, and the deviations between the accounts.

Another instance where Sacco steps outside of his simple historical narrative is in his comparison, and then conflation, of past and present. He notes the tendency of his subjects to prioritise the current over the past, to focus on the latest atrocity with no importance assigned to the past. He is slightly perturbed to realise there is little understanding of why he cares about 1956. So he shows us the importance, shows us the connections and repetitions of history, drawing visual parallels between militants past and present, as well as places and rhetoric. As Nina Mickwitz explains in a much more detailed reading of the panels than I’m capable of, the very composition of the page often seems to reinforce the cyclical nature of the conflict, where the past is repeatedly played out in the present.

An oft cited criticism of this book seems to be that it slows down in the middle, full of repeated, barely distinguished events of horror or death. Yet that is exactly the point, Sacco blurs the lines between time and place, and places his event within the ongoing conflict. Rather than simply a distinct position in the past, he demonstrates its relevance through to the present. Through our reading of the book then, we begin to experience the blurring of memory and confusing of events which afflicts its subjects, the elderly refugees themselves. Throughout the book in fact, Sacco uses his composition to express not simply the facts of a scene, but the impressions of its subjects. Take this page for instance, where the contradictory viewpoints of the panels reinforces the confusion and chaos of the moment.

There seems to be a conflict here though, between Sacco’s drive and demand for truth which he confronts in the ‘Memory and the Essential Truth’ section, and the aforementioned projection of the event through the lens of blurred memory and confused experience. In one instance Sacco is railing against his unreliable sources, and trying to define the true account of various events, on the other he depicts those events with the very vagaries which he condemns. Sacco seems caught between two ideals, between the historian’s desire to uncover and visualise the ‘truth’, and the more artistic drive to depict events from the perspective of the subjects, to allow them to speak directly. Throughout the book this remains an unresolved conflict between truth and memory, as central a presence as the Israel/Palestine conflict itself, until Sacco leaves Gaza, and muses:

“how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead,who didn’t remember the barbed wire at the gate or when the Mukhtars stood up, or where the Jeeps were parked, how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did”

The statement is followed by the final sequence of panels, without words, depicting flashes of the events depicted earlier. They are confused and fragmented, with only a faintly observable narrative running through them.

There is an acknowledgement here, that, for all that Sacco has become, as he says, “the worlds foremost expert” on the massacre of 1957, this book only constructs one narrative of many. That, despite the aim of writing the narrative of ‘the footnotes’, of the victims, Sacco’s book is simply his own narrative, his own interpretation of the collective memories of the victims. It’s an idea reinforced by one of the final panels, of Sacco staring, emotionless, across a boundary, at a grieving Palestinian man. The process of research for the book, the sifting and comparing of accounts, the search for the ‘definitive version’, ultimately separates us from the alternative narrative of the victims which Sacco originally intended. In the end Sacco has to some extent fallen into the same trap as the journalists and historians he rejects at the start of the book. His single narrative overpowers the individuals involved, and once again the Palestinian victims become footnotes to yet another (though admittedly more sympathetic), history.

Despite a conviction in his ‘essential truth’ idea, Sacco therefore seems to end by acknowledging his folly. He cannot combine an awareness of, and sympathy for, the individual with any kind of objective truth. Yet if the conclusion of a work of history is that history is subjective, then that only begs deeper questions. Aguably, Sacco’s commitment to his ‘essential truth’ causes an artificial distinction between history and empathy. Once we accept that we cannot draw an objective narrative from oral accounts of memory, once we accept that memory is not truth, then it seems a more interesting to ask, what is the actual relationship between memory and truth?

Halbwachs has argued that “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories”. The point being that a social context both shapes and is shaped by memory. Arguably, here is the more interesting aspect of Sacco’s project, hinted at yet never addressed, eclipsed by the pursuit of ‘history’; memory is constructed, not only by social interaction, but by current experience, and vice versa. Thus the memories of the Palestinian refugees are influenced by the dominant narrative of society. As Halbwachs puts it, “society provides the materials for memory”. This narrative is not constant, but continually developing, and events in the present prompt re-evaluations of the memories of the past.

Conversely, as Sacco takes at face value the assertions of young Palestinians that they have no interest in the past, he fails to engage with the idea that their anger in the present is not simply a product of current atrocities, but also an unconscious product of an ongoing narrative of conflict. Their inherent notions of ‘we’ and ‘they’ are shaped by the dominant discourse as much as by physical events. Thus the connections between past and present which Sacco draws so clearly are not merely symbolic of the circularity of the ongoing struggle, but are themselves a factor in the production and maintanence of paradigmatic perspectives which shape both memories of the past, and attitudes of the present.

In a sense, what Sacco does is position his event within history, within temporal continuity. What he ignores however is its position within a social environment, the way in which events of the past become reduced to myth, their complexities subsumed as simply another example of the ‘them vs us’ narrative. Of course, not all history is required to take this deeper analytical view, and it is perhaps churlish to expect this level of insight from Sacco. However the use and reliance on memory in his methodology means that throughout the book we are constantly confronted with the flaws of memory, yet without a deeper investigation of its nature. If the objective truth of the events of 1957 is difficult to ascertain through memory, that is only the superficial conclusion. The deeper mysteries lie in how those memories are formed, and how they engage with not simply the reality of the now, but its dominant discourse.

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Ben is an itinerant and easily distracted Arabic postgrad who blogs about culture and comics here, and summarises Middle Eastern news here.