(Photo by Nizam Uddin via Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)
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Joe Sacco’s Palestine is one of only a handful of books that fall into “graphic war reporting,” where “graphic” is not a content warning but a literary descriptor. The book is an anthology of nine comics about Palestine that Sacco composed following the first intifada against Israeli occupation. Although the first comic was released in 1993, the book was not published until 2001. Since then, Palestine has gone through dozens of printings, and it recently saw an unprecedented rise in backorders following the October 7th attacks and Israel’s following bombardment of Gaza.
Sacco has written much from conflict zones across the globe, continuing to uplift underrepresented stories in Western media through his career as a comic journalist. From his 2000 work, Safe Area Goražde, covering the Bosnian War, to his recent 2020 book, Paying the Land, detailing the effects of extractive industries on Dene communities in the Canadian North, Sacco has continued to spotlight the oppressed and created books that do not fit neatly into any one genre. One hesitates to call them “graphic novels” due to their factual basis. At the same time, it hardly seems appropriate to label Sacco’s books as “long-form journalism” due to their comic form.
To learn more about Sacco’s reporting style and landmark book on Palestine thirty years later, I spoke with Professor Adel Iskander, a media expert at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication. “Joe Sacco kind of has his own genre,” Iskander tells me. “I’m not suggesting he’s the only one doing it, but it’s an innovation. [The story is] two-dimensional in terms of [how] he drew [it], but multidimensional in terms of context, history, and background.”
The Power of a Word
Sacco’s Palestine is eye-catching — its sleek black cover with the single word “Palestine” inscribed in red ink. When published, the one-word title was a bold and brave statement. “Up until that particular point,” Iskander recalls, “I don’t think I’d ever encountered a book … available in mainstream bookstores that had the word Palestine on it.” It is a bleak reminder that even today, he adds, the word is made taboo to undermine Palestinian existence. “Palestine as a word in [the] Western context was anathema. There is no such place. There was never such a place.”
However, upon opening the book, the reader becomes absorbed in the reality of Sacco’s vivid and visceral Palestine. The late post-colonial scholar Edward W. Said, in his preface to the 2015 edition of Palestine, wrote that after opening the book, he “was plunged directly back into the world of the first great intifada.” The first few pages show Sacco’s arrival in Cairo en route to Jerusalem, which Iskander points out is a beautifully accurate depiction of his hometown’s turbulent nature. “As someone who grew up in the Middle East,” Iskander tells me, “I appreciated [how] he depicted publicness and life and how people go about existing in space and sound. It was exactly what you might expect from Joe Sacco, which is dense, rich, contextual, historic, heavy, emotional, [and] compassionate.”
Past the opening pages, it becomes clear quickly that Palestine is not your average comic book. Some pages are given almost entirely to text, such as an early description of the 1948 Nakba, while others use small boxes with dark black borders to emphasize a story of solitary confinement. And while the content style shifts from page to page, there is a recurring interest in history, in unpacking what led to the then-current catastrophe.
“What finally makes Sacco so unusual,” Said writes in his preface, “is that his true concern is […] history’s victims.” As Iskander describes, “[Sacco] had the time, the energy, and the commitment to sit with people and to sit with history long enough [to create] a multi-sensory depiction of a place […] a book that ventured to tell the story of Palestinian dispossession using a single person’s meandering walk through history.” With occasional narratorial interjections, Palestine shows a nuanced history and a timeless resource for those seeking to learn about the Palestinian struggle.
Journalist in Theory, Historian in Practice
Palestine occurs in real-time as Sacco wanders the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as a journalist, seeking stories and talking with Palestinians from all walks of life. When Sacco occasionally pulls himself in, he appears plain-dressed with glasses that hide his eyes — a contrast to all other individuals in the book whose eyes are often dramatically drawn. Readers will see the back of his head rather than his face, with the focus turned to those he is speaking with or the scene he is witnessing. Along these lines, Sacco portrays himself as an active listener rather than a passive narrator, allowing the Palestinians to tell their story and history.
In 2016, Professor Iskander interviewed Sacco to discuss Palestine in the context of his research on contemporary media representations of the Middle East. Iskander pointed out Sacco’s appearance as a somewhat conflicted narrator who was unsettled by what he saw. When I asked Iskander about this point, he said Sacco “is not content with the present.” Iskander tells me that Sacco is up to something larger here. “He was producing an archival draft of history that [considers] factors that a journalist typically wouldn’t.” He continued, “[Sacco is] very much thinking about how history has made the present possible and how the present can tell us about history. That dialogue between history and the present is a constant, and you see it almost on every page.”
Finding the Whole Story
Within Palestine, Sacco perfectly balances the fight to contextualize Palestinian history with contemporary struggles. “The battle to [make] journalism more informative,” Iskander states, “attempts to push it in the direction of historicizing the present.” Sacco upholds Palestinian history by encountering Palestinian lives, retelling their voices and stories, and allowing the reader, as Iskander puts it, “to revisit history as you interact with every one of the characters.” “That is,” as he continues, “a testament to someone who is committed to telling the stories not only with veracity but with an eye for verification.”
In his 2015 preface to Palestine, Said calls the book “a political and aesthetic work of extraordinary originality,” concluding “[w]ith the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” When I pushed Iskander on this quote, reading some of it aloud to prompt his reaction, he surprised me by pointing out the sadness and distress embedded in Said’s words. “I sense a real melancholy and a real sorrow in that quote,” he says, and “that’s a feeling that I have about the book as well because the book itself is deeply saddening and depressing. … Joe really goes to great lengths to document the immensity of Palestinian loss, suffering, and dispossession.”
While much of what Sacco documents in Palestine has reached a wider audience recently, the book is challenging to digest. But its detail and various points of view — past and present — offer a great crash course on Palestinian history up to the first intifada. “It is a work of history; a work of historical journalism,” Iskander says. “It very well is,” I must agree. And a strong one at that.
Edited by Isaac Code
