Joe Sacco, donning the signature detective-esque hat that you will not see him without, both in and out of his comics, came to the faculty lounge; as we waited. He greeted us with a warm smile while the microphones were being set up. Sacco is the author of several comic books including Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza and most recently, War on Gaza. In November, he spent a fortnight on the Ashoka University campus, interacting with faculty and students alike.
Sacco has been reporting from conflict zones for almost 30 years now. But for him, “war wasn’t an alien concept.” His family migrated to Australia, where he spent much of his childhood, after the Second World War. Seated in a blue sofa in the Faculty Lounge Sacco recounted that most of his friends at school were from Europe whose parents had experienced the war. At his friends’ homes and his own, Sacco began listening to stories of war and the impact that it had. “I was aware that those things can happen,” he said with a solemn expression.
During his childhood, “I did do a lot of drawing,” he chuckles, “but, from what my parents were talking about, I realized there was another world out there, almost like a parallel universe” to his typical suburban Australian childhood.
From an early age, Sacco began to inhabit the awareness of conflict and war, which later “drew him to that part of the world”. But, what does it take to occupy this space? What does it take to enter a conflict zone, report, and inhabit that world again through the visual medium?
Sacco admits that he chose to report from Palestine because what is considered “objective journalism” made “me think that Palestinians were terrorists and I had to interrogate that for myself.” He felt that there was a “serious injustice being done there.” But, for Sacco, reporting from Palestine was not about saying that the Palestinians are “historically wronged.” It was to show raw human emotions that readers generally recoil from.
In the comic book Palestine, politicians and historical facts about the Middle East or even the Palestinian Liberation Front do not occupy centre stage. The Six-Day War or the Balfour Declaration find mention in the text that surrounds the drawings. The narrative and sketches themselves are about the ordinary humans in the Occupied Territories of Palestine who struggle to live an ordinary life.
In Chapter One of the comic book, Sacco draws a hospital where children not more than twelve years old are injured, sustain life-threatening fractures and some even die. Bullet marks scar the bodies of Palestinians and children say, “I tried to throw a stone, but the soldiers were faster”.
For many readers of Palestine, these images of physical and bloody violence are not the world we generally inhabit. As Edward Said writes in the introduction to the book, Sacco’s images are “more graphic than anything you can either read or see on television”. Yet, the drawings encapsulate the tension of ordinary humans simply trying to exist—a battle for survival from forces that are beyond their control.
At times, the images in Palestine read like the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s prose in A Letter from Gaza. If Kanafani narrates the experiences of Gaza through language, Sacco narrates emotions through comics.
“Objectivity isn’t something that I am striving for. What I strive to be is honest,” says Sacco. He treats his interviewees not just as sources for a story but as humans with lived experiences that deserve to be told with honesty, care and compassion.
His stubbornness to get a story right and to be present for his sources humanises the art of journalism. Journalists hold the power to shape perception and cannot shy away from shouldering this responsibility.
As someone who has reported from Palestine and other war zones, Sacco believes honest journalism is to be deeply aware of one’s own biases as a journalist. “It is allowing yourself to say, well, I thought I was going to see this, but something else is there,” he reflects.
His motivation to report from Palestine to see for himself his reality of what is happening is a testament to what honest journalism can look like today.
In an interview with Cyrus Lyday, the comic journalist spoke of how he ‘sweats’ while he draws. When we asked him about this as we passed the microphone back and forth between the three of us, he laughingly said, “Well, I don’t really mean literal sweat. Maybe I pretended there were sweat drops”.
For Sacco, it is more about concentrating on the drawings. “That is when they [drawings] really matter,” he says. “You realize that in order to get a story correctly, you have to be somewhat detached at the time when you’re drawing,” he says with a smile. The stakes are high and his intention is to capture the experience of the person he is drawing as best as he can.
Sacco’s process involves intense periods of reflection and silence. He immerses himself more into the critical undertaking of telling someone else’s story through the visual medium. “It can get difficult,” admits Sacco, “there are times I’ll just walk away from the drawing board and there are weeks when I just don’t want to get up and work when I’m in those scenes.”
Even as the drawing gets difficult, the people he has spoken to and his readers matter to Sacco. At times, Sacco paints himself—the small, almost invisible figure travelling through zones of conflict—onto the pages of his books. Sacco’s ‘I’ and his journalism cannot be separated. His childhood, ethics of reporting and his experiences while reporting shine through his ‘I’, that is so faintly drawn into his books.
“I'm really glad that that happened accidentally in my case because I think it allows me to show interactions with people, which I think a lot of readers, a lot of writers will leave out, especially reporters will leave out of their stories,” Sacco says. More than that, it reminds the reader that what Sacco writes is his subjective experience, inviting us to question him and his ability to capture someone else’s story.
Sacco’s intense attention to detail and intentionality is evident to any and all of the readers of his works. However, a major part of his graphic novels–the fact that they are in black and white–was not intentional. “There was more money in comics and the publishers started to put more money into the book production, a lot of my peers transitioned into colour,” Sacco remarked. “I didn't, I was just either too lazy or it just took too much time to understand how to draw that, or I didn't want to learn the programmes, which is the truth”.
“I don't know how to use Photoshop, even the basic things,” he admitted. Still, he made the most of black and white, focusing on creating distinct textures with just the stroke of a pen. Now, he finds the use of colour almost lazy–while his peers can put brown in the background of a panel and call it a day, he etches each crevice of even a wall with great precision.
Sacco’s precision places the reader in a moment of violence. Using the form of the graphic, he prompts the readers to imagine and not engage passively. “With multi-panel work, there are a lot of gaps. There’s one image and another image and what happens between those images.” So, what happens between those images?
As our conversation was coming to a close, we asked Sacco a question that, in the midst of a period of violence and conflict, was hanging gloomily in the air—does he have hope? Should any of us hold out hope? His reply left us with a warmth that still lingers, “Well, I have hope in you, Siri, and you, Giya. I have hope in you because you seem interested, and it seems like it matters to you. And when I meet younger journalists or younger people who are aspiring to that sort of thing, that actually seem to care about the medium, I think, okay, there are people who still care.”
We, as the readers, are responsible for being the people who still engage, who still care. Just as Sacco reconstructs and draws these visual narratives from memory, we, the readers, are made to imagine what occurs before, during, and after the violence. It is as if we are walking hand-in-hand with Sacco, constructing with our minds what he does not with his pen allowing a multiplicity of responses and interpretations.
Listen to our full conversation with Joe Sacco here.
(Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Vishnu Prakash)
*Palestine in italics refers to Sacco’s book
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