Through His Looking Glass: Joe Sacco's Palestine

Palestine is a daring exploration of journalism and comics. Joe Sacco fills his pages with intense and quite human tales and tragedies using an exaggerated caricature-like style. Faces resemble shapes that vary from each other in distinct ways more than in real life (such as ovals vs rounded rectangles vs flat heads) and noses seem to crowd out the rest of the face so that the eyes are diminished and the mouth is sort of attached above the chin. His character is alien in comparison to the Palestinians, Jews, and Muslims he talks to and about, giving almost a Scott McCloud-esque sort of look with blank glasses and exaggerated but simple features. If you squint a bit, Sacco almost resembles a monkey, so amidst his varying, crazy stories of very real events and bloodshed and tragedy, Sacco stands out as The Foreigner™.

And why wouldn’t he? Sacco takes a very particular role in Palestine, he is the observer. While we say it’s “his” story because he drew it, we still have to consider: a) is it really a story? and b) he retells others’ stories. So is it a story? In a sense, no. It’s a collection of stories. There isn’t any overarching plot, instead we get a collection of Palestinian stories told to us through Sacco. But in a different sense, these stories that we get through him of refugees and soldiers and desperation are the story of Palestine. While Sacco is our correspondent throughout the story, he really takes a back seat to the real struggle of the region, and that’s a major aspect to the book. Take a look at the cover to Palestine, taken from the Refugeeland chapter:

(image from Amazon)

Sacco is only visible as a silhouette looking at the Palestinians through a window, probably of a bus. It’s almost symbolic of how he is seeing the story as an outsider, and how we as readers are seeing Palestine through his given window. You can even see his distinctive glasses.

Sacco utilizes his McCloudian glasses as a purposeful barrier between himself and us. Faithful to the craft of journalism, he is well aware of the effect his personal biases can have on the stories he’s been tasked at conveying to a more than likely ignorant audience. He distances himself from us without disappearing from the narrative completely. For example, through his numerous interviews, he deducts that a major reason the conflict has not made much progression is the passed down hatred and racism from each generation. At the same time, he doesn’t let his opinions as an outsider undermine his interviewees experiences and feelings. For example, when Ghassan recounts his brutal torture by the Israelis, Sacco refuses to sugarcoat in neither narration nor graphics.

His lack of sugarcoating makes for an interesting dilemma of how to portray his stories. He seems to resolve it quite appropriately by creating this unique format which reads like some mix between a journal and a TV news broadcast. It feels almost like an attempt by Sacco to be more faithful to his stories by being a sort of news reporter. To a point it works by letting him separate the image from the text, allowing the text to exist as an independent element much in the same way the audio of a standard news broadcast does. A great example of his style in action is the first page of the comic which almost feels like a camera gliding through the streets of Cairo picking up short bits of conversation on its journey.

(image from Fantagraphics)

Yet in some ways this style fails us. It feels almost too fast and too rushed. The text can often be hard to follow and hard to read while still trying to interpret his imagery. It overloads the reader with more information than they can possibly hope to process.

Although, it might be Sacco’s exact intentions to initiate this proverbial content bomb. When looking at his intentions as a whole in the book Sacco seems less like a reporter and more of an investigative journalist whose job is to find the facts and relay them. He has no regard for how much he is relaying to the reader his sole job is to find stories and collect perspectives, which is exactly what he does. While his biases can be obvious at times, it seems inevitable in his attempt to relay as best as possible his experience of what is happening in Palestine.