Joe Sacco has been called the heir to Art Spiegelman (Maus) and his award shelf creaks under the weight of trophies (Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel, Ridenhour Book Prize, American Book Award, etc.). But the scale of achievements casts no shadow on the man himself. When hordes of fans turned up at his brief appearances in two Delhi bookstores last month, the response surprised the 64-year-old Maltese-American graphic novelist. Wearing an unfaltering smile under a black fedora, he gracefully shook hands, signed copies and obliged selfie requests. Sacco is known around the world for his comics journalism, a genre unique enough even without his choice of subjects—the Bosnian War, indigenous North America, Israel-Palestine relations. For many Indians, his two graphic novels on Palestine—released in the 1990s and the aughts—were the first accessible and immersive reports from the region that did not conform to the existing media narrative. In the wake of the current violence, Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza have acquired another lease of life, informing a whole new generation about the history of a besieged people. Sacco speaks to Lounge about the current situation. Edited excerpts:
Also read: Zara Chowdhary's ‘The Lucky Ones’: Living and dying as ‘second-class’ citizens
Amnesty International recently concluded that Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine. You spent a lot of time in Gaza to report your stories. Did you ever think that violence would take such a shape against the Palestinians?
I can’t say I thought there’d be a genocide. I thought what they (Israel) euphemistically call a “population transfer” might take place at some point. I thought the long-term goals of Israel might be to remove the Palestinians from various areas—whether it was Gaza or parts of the West Bank…. Though if you look back, you see the impunity with which Israel has behaved over decades, the people they have killed in their various assaults in Gaza, even my own research into the massacres of Palestinians in 1956, the logic of it was there.
Do you think something has shifted in the world’s perception of Israel and Palestine during this last year?
Younger people don’t have the romanticised view of Israel that people of my generation and older had: This scruffy little nation “besieged by the Arab world” and “making the desert bloom”. They saw the bloodshed and carnage on their phones and got it right away. … They started to examine the issue and see that there was a great unfairness historically. Younger people have a different narrative on Israel now, and we can see the power that narrative is developing—Western governments have started to feel incumbent upon themselves to throttle that (narrative), to threaten the people with that viewpoint, to expel them from schools, to say that they’ll never work after they’ve graduated. People are losing jobs over their viewpoint. That demonstrates how powerful this new narrative is.
Survivor accounts from Palestine in the form of photos and videos have been ignored and/or discredited by some media outlets. In this context, do you fear that comics journalism is even easier to discredit by someone so inclined?
No, I think it’s the opposite. We see a photo and we tend not to trust it. We think, “Oh, this can be manipulated.” Even voice can be manipulated. But with the drawn image, the reader knows straightaway that this is filtered through someone’s hand. It’s clear that it’s a subjective viewpoint…. because I’ve drawn this, people already know that they’re seeing this through my eyes.
You’ve mentioned before that your form of journalism takes time. Years, instead of hours or days or weeks. What does that kind of timeline lend to the narrative and what are the limitations of it?
Sometimes I wish that the books I’m working on could be done in an instant. What written journalism has over what I do is that you see something one day and a day or two later, people are reading about it. That’s the power of newspaper reporting. When I studied journalism, I wanted to be a reporter who worked quickly. I liked working under deadline pressure. But I’ve had to conform to the medium, and this medium requires time. I’m very interested in getting the details right, drawing the buildings accurately, and that requires time. So instead of saying that I’d like to do this quicker, I have decided to focus on the advantages of “slow journalism”. … The longer time I spend there, the more people get to know me, see me around asking questions, and understand why I’m there. ... I tend to look for universal sources of stories. What happened in 1956 was important to talk about because it’s a historical event. I’m also showing what’s happening now—that too is now a historic event. I think I practise journalism through a historical lens.
Given that you often represent people who are traditionally under-represented and oppressed, do you struggle with the question of realistic representation versus caricature in your comics?
When I first started doing the book Palestine, it was serialised. I was criticised for the first issue I did by a Jewish person I didn’t know and a Palestinian I didn’t know. Both said that I had drawn them as caricatures. I had to think about that. The truth is I never learnt to draw realistically. I always tended to draw everything in a grotesque fashion. It had its appeal. But I also realised that to do journalism, or something aspiring to a journalism standard, I had to learn to draw more realistically. So, over time I began to shift how I drew. I listened to those lessons and learned to draw more realistically, which is not natural to my hand.
Did this realistic style shift only impact your books on Palestine or has it affected all of your work since?
It’s seeped into all of my work. Even when I’m doing funnier stuff on the side, I try to get the realistic line out of my hand. But your hand tends to do what it’s trained to do. (Initially) I beat it up so that it could draw realistically. And now I beat it up when I need to draw more cartoon-y. My poor hand!
You’ve covered horrific stories of violence through your career and immersed yourself into these stories drawing them. How do you balance the demands of your work and your mental health?
Well, you should never think that I’m so experienced in all this that I’m not shocked. I never became inured to any of this stuff. It’s always unpleasant to see things, hear stories and draw them, especially to draw. Drawing is sometimes harder on you than being in the place, in the emotional toll it takes on you. The genocide in Gaza right now affects me like it affects everyone. It’s so horrific. There’s a part of me that really wants to turn away from it. Over decades of working with this sort of material I have recognised that because I haven’t become calloused to it, I want to shift away from it. ... For my own mental health, I do want to move away from it. But I should say that I have a pretty good home life, good friends, a couple of martinis over the weekend. There are ways everyone copes, and I’m lucky for the things that allow me to cope.
You say that you want to shift away from these stories. But as an artist who has reported on Gaza before, do you also feel compelled to respond to this event?
I did about 32 pages of comics (https://www.tcj.com/topic/the-war-on-gaza/) that wasn’t reporting but my pontificating about what was going on. One of my friends in Khan Younis managed to get out of Gaza after 60 days of bombardment and got in touch with me. He said, “Please lift up your voice.” So, I felt compelled to do something. It’s sort of a critique, maybe less so of Israel than of the US, and our complicity in this…. and there’s more in the works. If I wanted to think about my mental health I’d just go off and do my side projects that I have been dying to get to for decades but I also have obligations.
Any Palestinian writers or artists you’d like to recommend to our readers?
Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian-American historian who wrote The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine; Mohammad Sabaaneh, a Palestinian cartoonist—I particularly like his black-and-white work; Refaat Alareer, a Gazan poet whose work still resonates—he was killed with family members by an Israeli bomb a year ago.
Sumeet Keswani is an independent journalist.