Book review: Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 19:02

Jonathan Cape, 387pp, £20

APART from Joe Sacco, the world hasn't got another full-time graphic novelist war correspondent. The rest of the breed, the ones who address us in front of their camera crews or directly on their satellite phones from the world's trouble spots, have a tendency towards portentousness. Mainlining on news – a car bomb here, an angry demonstration there – their priority seems only that they be there when the story breaks, file to the newsdesks back home, and move on, restless adrenaline junkies in search of more of the same.

Sacco, a Maltese American, is different on every count. He arrives on the scene years after the news event he is reporting on – in the case of his latest masterpiece, about the greatest massacre of Palestinians in Palestine – almost a half century afterwards. But as long as he is there, sketchbook in hand, what he delivers will stick in the mind far longer than any other warcorr's soundbite can. It will last. It will illuminate. And it will reveal everything that their formulaic reports leave out.

Take the sheer difficulty of finding out the main story in the first place. In Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco needs to corroborate Palestinian claims of a 1956 massacre committed by Israelis at the southern border town of Rafah. His "fixer" takes him to various houses where he will meet the by now aged parents of some of the massacre victims. Except, often there'll have been a mix-up. No, they'll tell him, their son was killed in 1957, not 1956. Or it was during the horrors of 1948. Or something that happened in the Six Day War. And in any case, they ask him indignantly, what's he doing investigating deaths that happened 50 years ago when, right now, just around the corner, Israeli army bulldozers are knocking down houses without caring too much whether there's anyone in them? Why bother with such things when, in their child's bedroom next door, they could show him the bulletholes in the wall from indiscriminate Israeli shooting only the other night?

Yet the acuity of Sacco's reportage lies precisely in his willingness to wander into those blind alleys. The path to truth is, after all, never straight, especially in a conflicted land in which violent death has become commonplace. So commonplace, in fact, that what he is in search of is just a "footnote" to history – the 111 Rafah men beaten and shot by the Israelis in 1956 after having been separated from their wives and children. These are deaths that never made anyone's news agenda, which at the time was tightly focused on the unravelling of the Suez debacle.

So Sacco's interviewees will talk instead about how they were kicked out of their homes in 1948 and herded south to a desert where they lived, first in shelters made with twigs, then in lice-ridden cities made from tents, then in a concreted, overcrowded strip of land that soon turned into a cesspit of unemployment and extremism. The way he draws it, you can see the hopelessness that was built into Gaza from the start.

But he'll show you so much more too, the small-scale pictures of everyday life as well as the broad-brush geopolitical background. Waiting in a queue of traffic for hours at checkpoints. Becoming exasperated by the aggressively listless Gaza teenagers who tell him that the only way to resist is to "Get close to God ... with bombs" and then ask, shyly, if he likes them. Getting to know the Hamas man, on the run from the Israelis for years and daily expecting assassination, and seeing the weariness in his eyes. Watching a householder shoo away extremists from his property, knowing that their presence is a standing invitation to the Israeli bulldozers. And, all the time, drawing.

Sacco puts himself in the picture a good deal of the time, a cartoonish geek with large and (significantly) impenetrable glasses, but it's the opposite of ego. He's there as our essentially trustworthy but morally confused Everyman – and that confusion is part of the picture too.

There are plenty of examples, but one will suffice. When, finally, he finds a witness to the Rafah school massacre, an old man who breaks down and tells the whole story, Sacco and his minder leave his house elated. At such moments of preying on the pain of others, journalism can't help but seem a morally reprehensible profession.

Yet there are other passages when it doesn't seem like that at all. For at its best journalism is an attempt to sort out truth from lies, to see through either false memory or propaganda. And this is precisely what Sacco is doing.

Again, an example. Before he moves on to the Rafah massacre, Sacco deals with another one a week earlier, on 3 November 1956, at the town of Khan Younis, a few miles to the north, at which 36 people were killed. Having pieced together a story of how it happened from eyewitness reports, Sacco then undermines it by pointing out how one man, who gave a convincing account of how he escaped the massacre, was, according to two other eyewitnesses, not there in the first place. The massacre happened all right – just not the way it was remembered.

Let's be clear about one thing. This isn't propaganda. Just as Israeli film-maker Ari Folman wasn't making propaganda when he wrote Waltz with Bashir, about Israeli complicity in the 1982 massacres at the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, neither is Sacco guilty of writing one-sided history in showing an even greater guilt here.

Nor is Sacco's focus as narrowly historical as one might think. As he works his way through Gaza talking to his aged eyewitnesses about these past massacres, the political temperature is rising in the present. An American protester against the bulldozing of Palestinian houses is herself killed (so is a young Palestinian boy, but you can guess at which of the two corpses in the morgue the press photographers turned their cameras). It's 2003, and the war against Saddam has just begun. Sacco catches a flavour of the present every bit as clearly and competently as he does the past.

But as he flits between past conflicts and present tensions, as he catches the stories of refugees and extremists and people just trying to muddle through, as he shows the perils of daily life in the pressure cooker that the Gaza Strip was deliberately set up to be, Sacco has constructed a portrait of its inhabitants that is not only a brilliant piece of reportage but an intensely moving work of art. Anyone even remotely interested in the Middle East, or with a passing interest in what journalism can do, should read this compelling, brilliant book.