Thursday, April 26, 2018

What photojournalism can't do: a review on Palestine by Joe Sacco

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Review on Palestine by Joe Sacco

Palestine is a journalistic graphic novel that details the journey of Joe Sacco, a Maltese-American journalist, through Israel and Palestine in 1991-92. He sets out on this expedition in order to explore the Palestinian refugee crisis. In his journey, Sacco visits multiple refugee camps and hears the harrowing tales of Israeli soldier brutality towards the refugees. He interviews with a broad range of people, from children to women to the elderly. Afterwards, he travels to Tel Aviv to hear from the Israeli side of the conflict. He learns that many sympathize with the Palestinian refugees while also believing the Palestinian aggression propaganda created by the government.

Sacco acknowledges the complexities of the conflict in a way few others can-- he provides the detail necessary for a newcomer to the issue to understand the undercurrents of the conflict, while also providing the humanistic side of the conflict often overlooked by those even familiar with the topic. His outsider status allows him to view the complexity on both sides of the conflict. The conflict takes a toll on everyone involved -- this toll is seen in the news are merely statistics of life or death, without much consideration as to the character of life for the ones who continue living. Sacco, on the other hand, seeks out that extra layer of complexity to delve into the of course complicated lives of those embroiled within the conflict. Sacco’s outsider perspective also allows him to be fairly even-handed with the conflict as we see its inner complexities, which allows him to acknowledge the confusion, the anger, the sadness, and the hope ingrained in all sides of the conflict.

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Coming from the perspective of a Palestinian there is undoubtedly a bias towards the Palestinian side of the conflict in Israel. Joe Sacco entered high school just after the fall of Palestine in 1948, and his own personal beliefs and interests seem to be in line with the displaced Palestinian population as he searches for stories to tell and people to converse with in his travels. However, this perspective is a useful one, and helps to humanize this side of the conflict and help us understand through Joe’s eyes, at the ground level, what happened during those years. Sacco acknowledges this perspective, however, and in doing so is able to point out the implications of his own personal beliefs in regards to this story while still painting a vivid and emotional experience of the experience of himself and those around him.

Sacco’s style specifically utilizes very heavy lines and shading, along with a lack of shadows, to make Palestine resemble a newspaper in appearance-- it blends so well with newspaper that Sacco actually manages to integrate newspaper articles as panels in a few instances with little perceived disarray (Page 132).

The visual strategy of the omnipresent “narrative text box,” which pervades almost every panel, allows Sacco to keep an effective running narrative voice throughout the work that allows it to ring of a journalistic character rather than simply a graphic one. This narrative style allows Sacco to convey much more information about political issues than is possible through dialogue alone. Sacco’s style on the whole paints Palestine as half-diary, half-journalistic, and half-art.

One of the biggest benefits of using a cartoon as a tool of journalism is the incredible flexibility the author has in illustrating a scene. Unlike photojournalism, the visual representation of an event is entirely up to the author. This becomes a tremendous advantage when illustrating an interview. Photojournalism, because of the nature of photography and the extreme difficulty of finding relevant pictures, only features few or no picture that pertains to the content of the interview, and thus it pushes the readers to largely rely on their imagination. However, the Joe Sacco can provide an accurate and realistic portrayal of the incident of his interview. 
For example, from page 102 to 113, Ghassan tells his story of the unjustified interrogation and torture. During his interview, he mentions how, after four days without sleep, he started having hallucinations of his daughter and brother being dead in front of him. 

Just from an interview, it’s difficult to imagine what his hallucination entailed, but with the help from Sacco’s illustration, the readers are provided with a vivid image of what Ghassad experienced and therefore can comprehend his emotions much better.

Even after Sacco hears the horrific tales of Palestinian refugees, he still travels to Israel to get the other side of the story. We believe that Sacco intends for the readers to understand that there is no right side and wrong side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. He wants the readers to keep an open mind and to understand exactly how complex the argument is. He implies that there is fault on both sides. Furthermore, he mentions how the conflict was passed down by generation to generation on both sides. Sacco wants us to take a step back and see the actions that Israelis and Palestinians are taking towards each other. He doesn’t intend to condemn either side; he’s simply calling for reflection. 

Sacco’s first-person perspective in Palestine allows us as readers to see much about him, but more importantly than that, our proximity to him allows us proximity to the human side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sacco’s personal relationships with all of the Palestinian characters in the book allows us not to see them as items on the news, but instead as human beings with wishes, desires, dreams, and emotions. In Palestine, Sacco utilizes himself as a lens through which to tell the stories of others, and this plays an integral role in the humanization of a situation to which most readers would be outsiders. As we get to know Sacco better throughout the story, along with his personal side comes the more personal side of the world that he has enveloped himself in.

1 comment:

Michael Hancock said...

Your excellent review provides readers with a comprehensive overview of Sacco's groundbreaking work of graphic journalism. You capture well his journalistic approach and effectively describe his visual style. Your examples are thoughtfully chosen to illustrate specific aspects of his work as a whole. To me, Sacco seems much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis, which is a product of the amount of time he spends among them, but you suggest how he attempts to see the conflict from both sides.