Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

1. Joe Sacco, Palestine: The Special Edition.

In 1991, aghast at what his U.S. tax dollars were financing and how poorly the U.S. media was covering it, journalist and comic artist Joe Sacco went to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to research material for a comic book (Sacco eschews the term "graphic novel") about the Israeli occupation. Palestine is a forthright documentation of that trip: a mix of stories of the Occupation, plus his own roller-coaster of emotions as a privileged outsider, alternately perceiving himself as champion and vampire. Many times he is challenged by the people who tell him stories: they have told these stories many times before; what is the point of telling them again, to him? Will his retelling be listened to any better than anyone who came before him? And more importantly, will anyone ever support them in anything more than words?

Sacco does not try to tell "both sides" in Palestine: as he points out in the introduction, he can safely assume that U.S. audiences are familiar with Israel's side. Instead, Sacco gives a short overview of the socio-political history of Palestine, 1917-1948, itemizes life under military occupation, and details the Catch-22 legal web of economic colonization. Sacco is correct: these are stories that are not often told by the U.S. mainstream media. But even though Sacco doesn't aim to tell both sides, both sides are there, but viewed against the context of the Occupation. As the pages went by, I began to hear the oft-repeated phrase from Israeli interviewees, "We just want peace," as not a desire for peace but a desire for the Palestinians to stop fighting back. At the end of Sacco's trip, two Tel Aviv women insist on telling Sacco the Israeli side of the story -- but my eye is distracted by the coiffures, the clean lines of their suits, the wealth of the Tel Aviv streetscape behind them.

Personally, I found this a very difficult book to read: the language of Zionism is the language of Manifest Destiny, right down to the rhetorical notion that Palestine was empty ("a land without a people"), just waiting for industrious "Pioneers" and "settlers" to make it blossom. (I would list more parallels -- they never seemed to end -- but gah.) Usually, I blow through a graphic novel in a few days. This one took months, just because it took that long to process the rage many of the details triggered. It's not like I didn't know that American contritition about Manifest Destiny was false; believe me, I knew. But that it's all playing out again, and with U.S. backing, as if not a damned thing had been learned... I wish someone else was writing this review, because I cannot find a center to write it from.

There's good stuff here. The introductory materials for the Special Edition are also strong, with Sacco discussing the pitfalls of what he tried to do in the comic, and some of the poor choices he made. (Early on, for example, Sacco drew in the Bigfoot style, with the effect of making everyone into highly racialized caricatures.) That introspection appears in the comic, too, as Sacco narrates his reactions to the stories he was hearing. Sometimes the in-comic meta seems tiresome; other times absolutely necessary. If nothing else, it keeps bringing the reader back to the questions: Why did you choose to listen to these stories? And now that you are hearing them, what do you intend to do?

The ending is heartbreaking and brilliant. The final spread:

The bus taking me away left Israel and entered the Gaza Strip on its way to the Rafah border crossing... We carefully skirted Palestinian population centers, but it soon became apparent and word spread -- the driver was lost... He stopped at a Jewish settlement for directions... But a few minutes later we were heading for what looked like a Palestinian refugee camp or town... You could see the kids in the distance taking cover on each side of the road... If we continued that way, we were going to get stoned... The driver backed the bus up and turned it around... He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...

And with that final ellipsis, the comic ends. He stopped at a small army post and asked for more directions...