Joe Sacco’s Palestine

Palestine
Joe Sacco
(Jonathan Cape; £12.99)

The critical and popular success of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth has refocussed attention on the ‘graphic novel,’ the extended comics narrative which eschews fights-in-tights in favour of using the techniques of comics to tell stories far removed from run-of-the-mill comic-book stuff. From the 1980s onwards, the field has seen the publication of some extraordinary work, ranging from the innovative cutting-edge-of-the-mainstream work of Alan Moore to the Latino fabulism of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, culminating in the triumph of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which alchemically fused the story of his own Polish-Jewish family before, during and after the Holocaust with the tropes of the funny-animal strip, blending the monumental and the miniaturist to enormously powerful effect.

Now, from the same publisher who brought us Jimmy Corrigan comes Palestine, a 285-page work of ‘graphic reportage’ by the Maltese-born, American-raised cartoonist Joe Sacco. For two months during the winter of 1991-2, Sacco toured the occupied territories on a voyage of discovery, seeking to immerse himself in the day-to-day realities of Palestinian existence after having “heard nothing but the Israeli side most all of my life.” The fruit of his labours emerged as a mini-series of nine comics, now finally collected between a single set of covers for the first time, with an introduction by one of Sacco’s primary influences, Edward Said. “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets,” Said writes, “no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.”

Sacco is certainly formidably talented. He is a meticulous reporter, scrupulously interpreting the testimonies of dozens upon dozens of victims of the Israeli regime into cartoon form. He is also a highly gifted artist whose richly nuanced drawings, reminiscent of Gilbert Hernandez in their deceptively rough-hewn simplicity, tread an extremely delicate path between cartoonishness and naturalism. His layouts, too, shift in style to match the material: stories told to him tend to emerge in neatly symmetrical panel grids, whilst incidents in which he is personally involved, or which seriously engage his emotions, are rendered in a far looser style in which images and captions break out of their confinement and slide, seemingly haphazardly, across the page.

A powerful piece of work indeed, yet not without flaws. Tellingly, few of his Palestinian interviewees emerge as ‘characters:’ the same voice seems to issue from each and every body. By contrast, the Israelis, much as Sacco appears to dislike them, come alive on the page in a way that the Palestinians don’t, very possibly because the types they represent are far more familiar to the author, and posssibly because he is speaking to the majority of the Palestinians through an interpreter. That leaves Sacco himself as the main character, as well as the source of much of the book’s small leavening of humour.

The decidedly normal-looking Sacco depicted in the author photo on the inside back cover bears only a passing resemblance to the chin-free, liver-lipped self-caricature — whom we’ll call ‘Sacco’ — wandering through these pages alternately interviewing Palestinians and fourth-walling the reader with ironic, self-deprecating commentary. “A comic needs some bangbang and I’m praying Ramallah will deliver,” he tells us.“My comics blockbuster depends on conflict; peace won’t pay the rent.”

The other problem is that comics — be they fictional, autobiographical or, in this case, documentary – imply a strong narrative strand. Spiegelman’s Maus, with its vast range of mood and device, was strong on story: both the unfolding tale of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s struggle for survival, and its accompanying account of the author’s difficult relationship with Vladek. But Maus, after all, took Spiegelman thirteen years to complete, and both strans achieve closure: Vladek survives in the past, but dies in the present..

By contrast, the only narrative Sacco can offer is his pilgrimage from one prison camp or occupied town or village to another. We find ourselves bogged down in a numbing morass of horrors, from the most appalling of atrocities to the pettiest of mundane humilations, with no end in sight for any of the characters except for ‘Sacco.’ He can, after all, simply leave.

When ‘Sacco’ finally fetches up in Tel Aviv and starts chatting to Israeli locals, one woman exasperatedly tells him, “We just want to live our lives, okay? … we have jobs and families and we go out and live just like you do.” In other words, they simply want to lead a normal life, but everything Sacco has seen and shown us demonstrates the impossibility of anyone on the Palestinian side of the divide leading anything which would be recognisable as a normal life to an American or European.

Intriguingly, the book’s most cogent final summary comes from an Israeli, who tells ‘Sacco,’ “Ultimately, I don’t think peace is about whether there should be one state or two. Of course that issue is important. But what is the point of two racist states or one racist state … or one racist state dominating another? The point is whether two peoples can live side by side as equals.” In the decade-plus which has elapsed since Sacco’s Middle Eastern sojourn, nothing has changed except for the worse. There is no narrative closure because the story has not ended, and shows no signs of doing so this side of utter cataclysm.

“That’s the thing about coming to the Holy Land or Palestine or Israel or whatever you want to call it,” ‘Sacco’ tells us, “no-one who knows what he’s come here looking for leaves without it.” Except, of course, those who arrive seeking credible grounds for optimism concerning the genuine possibility of a just and lasting peace which short-changes no-one. Next year in Jerusalem? Only in dreams. And dreams, in occupied Palestine, are in very short supply indeed.

Independent, 2003

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