Tag Archives: Footnotes in Gaza

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.

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.