Plenty of other places to look

If the London Blitz were still going on, asked Joe Sacco in an interview two years ago, where would what happened then stand in relation to what was going on today? Meaning: if the violence is continuous, how important can one 50-year-old atrocity still be?

The interview came on the heels of Sacco’s second book on Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, in which he goes to the Gaza Strip to learn about two atrocities committed in 1956, a half-century in the past. These are the massacres in the towns of Rafah and Khan Younis in which nearly 400 Palestinians (according to the UN) were killed by Israeli soldiers without real provocation.

 

Sacco, they say, is the world’s foremost “cartoon war correspondent”, a comic artist who spends time in conflict zones to observe, listen, ask, experience. He is best known for Palestine, his first book, published 10 years ago.

In both Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, the reader follows the bespectacled, close-cropped figure of Sacco around the towns and refugee camps. In the first book he bumbles, out of his depth in the alien environment of checkpoints, deprivation, fear, stress, anger and fatigue. His Palestinian informants take him around, tell him what they can, find him sources, and sometimes laugh over what they experience. Palestine is a superb account of life in occupied Palestine.

By the time of Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco is no longer bumbling. It is 2006 and he is in the Gaza Strip, the little piece of territory between Israel and Egypt on which 1.5 million Palestinians live. He works his way around Rafah and Khan Younis, trying to piece together the story of each of the two massacres. He interviews dozens of locals and survivors. He weighs their evidence, and it is chiefly experience that tells him how far to trust.

The result is very effective. His work is not photography, history or journalism. As a graphic artist he need not merely record, nor absent himself from the gathering and telling. He can show what he learns and, these being illustrations based on memories and observation, the reader is always in the peculiar position of wanting to believe but knowing not to trust.

Even so, there is truth here. It doesn’t matter that the Israelis are nearly all soldiers, nearly all faceless, heartless and uniformed. That is not the point. Ultimately, it does not even matter — though it does to some of his Palestinian sources — that he is digging up two half-century-old and crimes in the face of all the crimes of the present. They were still crimes. No historian or researcher could have retrieved them in the way that this “cartoonist” has.

The other day, after reading an article on the plight of Chin refugees from Burma who live in and around Uttam Nagar in west Delhi, I looked down on the area. That is, Google Earth. It is stunning, a 10 km swathe of houses on tiny plots 15 ft wide, divided by a dusty grid of narrow streets. The websites of the refugee organisations are filled with reports of beatings, exploitation and rape. Perhaps good news is not newsworthy, and perhaps the relatively small number of Burmese, Afghan and other refugees obscures the true picture of crime and unhappiness.

But there are plenty of other places to look, plenty of other uninvestigated and ill-recorded crimes against communities. Joe Sacco’s cartoon war correspondence offers one model for an Indian graphic artist and reporter. Mass displacement due to dams and mines, slum clearance, communal riots, caste killings, the scrum for low-level government jobs... So many old injustices waiting to be recovered.

rrishi.raote@bsmail.in