Joe Sacco's "Palestine"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am working my way through this comic book based on Joe Sacco's
encounters with various Palestinian individuals and families during
the first intafada. To call it a comic book hardly does it justice,
although in a technical sense that's what it is. Sacco, who I've
never heard of before this work, is using the comic book as a medium
to express some very intense ideas and feelings that perhaps can
never be captured by word alone. He is clearly influenced by Harvey
Pekar, who wrote a series of comic books in the 1980s about his life
as a low-paid hospital orderly in Cleveland. He wrote the stories
that a number of different artists illustrated, including R. Crumb
whose 1960s comic books defined the counter-culture for millions of
young people, including myself.

Sacco is more closely related to Pekar, since his work has a strong
social and political dimension as opposed to Crumb's nihilism. But
where Pekar's subject matter is his own foibles and the grit of
lower-class Cleveland life, Sacco chooses to write about global hot
spots in a manner typical of a John Reed.

He first gained critical acclaim through "Safe Area Goradze", a comic
book about the Bosnian catastrophe. Understandably, the NY Times and
other mainstream voices were unstinting in their praise since the
consensus was against Serbian nationalism, a view that Sacco shared
apparently.

His latest work has been ignored by the same book reviewers who made
Goradze a success--for obvious reasons. I stumbled across "Palestine"
at Labyrinth, a scholarly bookstore near Columbia. It has an
introduction by Edward Said, who writes:

"But what finally makes Sacco so unusual a portrayer of life in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories is that his true concern is finally
history's victims. Recall that most of the comics we read almost
routinely conclude with someone's victory, the triumph of good over
evil, or the routing of the unjust by the just, or even the marriage
of two young lovers. Superman's villains get thrown out and we hear
of and see them no more. Tarzan foils the plans of evil white men and
they are shipped out of Africa in disgrace. Sacco's Palestine is not
at all like that. The people he lives among are history's losers,
banished to the fringes where they seem so despondently to loiter,
without much hope or organization, except for their sheer
indomitability, their mostly unspoken will to go on, and their
willingness to cling to their story, to retell it, and to resist
designs to sweep them away altogether. Astutely, Sacco seems to
distrust militancy, particularly of the collective sort that bursts
out in slogans or verbal flag-waving. Neither does he try to provide
solutions of the kind that have made such a mockery of the Oslo peace
process. But his comics about Palestine furnish his readers with a
long enough sojourn among a people whose suffering and unjust fate
have been scanted for far too long and with too little humanitarian
and political attention. Sacco's art has the power to detain us, to
keep us from impatiently wandering off in order to follow a
catch-phrase or a lamentably predictable narrative of triumph and
fulfillment. And this is perhaps the greatest of his achievements."

Here is a page from "Palestine":

http://www.marxmail.org/sacco.jpg

The book is available from amazon.com

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/24/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org