On the death of 137 journalists during the Gaza conflict, Joe Sacco says, “Any journalist who really cares about journalism understands that this is a kind of morbid and special moment. I don’t think there has ever been a time when journalists have been targeted like this and have had to work under such horrifying conditions. For journalists in war, there are personal safety issues, but it’s different when you are targeted and I think it’s more different, it’s worse when your wives, your children, your husbands are targeted – that takes it into another realm. My hat is off to those journalists that they are sticking by it. To them, journalism is a vocation – it’s not about sitting in front of the camera and reading something handed to them to read out to an audience. I’m stunned by their bravery and their fortitude but they shouldn’t have to be going through that sort of thing.”
Comics journalist, graphic novelist, and author Joe Sacco took part in a conversation with Seema Chishti, editor of The Wire, on the Gaza conflict and the challenges faced by artists, journalists and cartoonists at the Jawahar Bhavan in New Delhi on 11 November 2024.
“Drawing a line means many things, apart from the fine art that Joe Sacco has deployed over his career, it also means taking a stand, that as citizens of the world, we say that enough’s enough,” Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor, The Wire said at the beginning of the event. He emphasized the importance of people in every part of the world and especially in India – a country that in spite of its historic support for independence movements including Palestine, has not registered its voice on the genocide in Gaza – that we draw this line.
“Joe Sacco is known for his graphic novels Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Gorazde, Playing the Land, The Fixer, and Days of Destruction, among others in which he has depicted the horror of the geopolitical and the devastation of life itself in which the necessity of the historical narrative is always supplemented with counter histories, experience, and memory. Emotion, humor, and the everyday also appear as evidence,” Vighnesh Hampapura, teaching fellow at Ashoka University, said.
Sacco, the creator of war reportage as graphic narrative, says he became a cartoonist as he wanted to make people laugh. However, over time, the cartoons became more and more serious and took on a journalistic aspect. On bridging the artistic and journalistic aspects of his work, he said despite a degree in journalism and considerable effort in trying to find a real newspaper job for two or three years, he decided to draw cartoons – something that he had been doing since he was a kid.
Eventually tuning into the Middle East and the Palestinian people, he decided to do a series of comics about traveling there. Initially planned as a travelogue, the comics turned into a journalistic project. Journalism was “in his blood” and he began asking questions like a journalist, behaving like a journalist, and hence the artistic and journalistic aspects came together.
“If you saw me in the field, I wouldn’t look different from an ordinary journalist, I would be taking notes and I would be recording conversations, and taking photographs for reference. What I tend not to do is sketch – I only sketch if it’s a situation where it might be dangerous to take a picture or you are told not to take a picture but you are not told that you can’t draw something. I tend to take the photographs because I want them for reference. I speak to people, ask them visual questions, and prefer to spend my time on the field in that manner. These visual questions help give me a picture of what a scene looked like,” Sacco talked about the process of recreating the scenes for the graphic narratives of his war reportage.
On the process of drawing himself in his books, he says, “That also developed accidentally without thinking too much about it. At that time, I had come out of the North American tradition of doing autobiographical comics, and when I went to the Palestinian territories without really understanding what I was doing in a sense, it just seemed it was carrying over my autobiographical work. I was just a figure in my comics, but over time I realized the journalistic advantages of it – having my figure in the panels sort of signals to the reader that you are seeing this through the eyes of one journalist and not some demigod authority about a subject – a living, breathing human being who is interacting with people and is subject to the forces of conversations and things that are going on around him.”
“I just want people to understand the seams of journalism, the borderlines of getting things done in contexts like that,” he says. “I don’t believe what I was taught about objective style journalism, and having my figure in the comic books suggests that this is a subjective experience that’s happening here.”
Sacco’s popular book Footnotes in Gaza is about the 1956 massacres in Rafah and Khan Yunis. “In the winter of 1991, my idea was to go and speak to older people about what happened in 1956 and their sons and grandsons were sitting in on these conversations and they would look at me and go like why are you talking about this historical event? Can’t you see what’s happening, just 200 meters from here – the Israeli army is bulldozing houses in rows.”
“I understood why they were saying those things,” he says, adding that it shows that events are continuous. “It’s not like that this event happened in 1956 and that’s something that everyone can digest and reflect on. There is no time for the Palestinians to digest a thing because something else is always coming at them. So, why would they talk about ‘56?”
In 2011, Sacco also reported on the lived experiences of Dalits in Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh. “My reportage in Kushinagar was about the different schemes that are meant to help the Dalits and how those end up in reality.” Already available in French, the work will be available in English ten months from now. Another project looks at the Muzzafarpur riots.
The event was held in Jawahar Bhavan since many venues opted out saying, “Police permission would be required.” In a similar vein, there has been very little mainstream media coverage of the event attended by more than 300, especially in print.
The question and answers following the conversation between Sacco and Seema Chisti brought to bear the substantial presence of young authors, cartoonists, and scholars in the audience who are widely familiar with Sacco’s work – also the subject of several PhD theses in local universities. At the end, Basem Hellis, counselor of the Embassy of the State of Palestine, said, “I would like to thank the people of India for their solidarity and support for the Palestinian people.”
Joe Sacco
Maltese-born Joe Sacco grew up in Australia where many European nations migrated after the Second World War and he heard many narratives of the war while growing up. He documented his mother Carmen Sacco’s experience of the intense bombing in Malta during the Second World War in More Women, More Children, More Quickly, Malta 1935-43and When Good Bombs Happen to Bad People. His work has received many awards, including the American Book Award in 1996, the British Eagle Award in 2001, the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2010, the Ridenhour Book Prize in 2010, Oregon Book Award for Graphic Literature in 2012. He has also won Time magazine’s Best Comic Book award in 2000.
The US-based graphic novelist is influenced by American cartoonist Robert Crumb and the North American underground press of the 1960s and 70s that at one time included 800 independent and non-profit periodicals that covered the movements for Afro-American freedom and the Vietnam War. He says Flemish painters from the 1400s and 1500s – especially Pieter Bruegel the Elder – have deeply impacted his art.
