22/05/2003

At the end of his graphic novel Palestine, Joe Sacco describes a scene he witnessed in Jerusalem: It is pouring with rain. A group of Israeli soldiers stop a Palestinian boy of about 12 or 13 on an otherwise deserted street.

“The soldiers take cover under an awning and they made the boy remove his keffiyeh and pointed to where he should stand in the rain …

“Perhaps for the boy it was one of dozens of humiliations, bad enough in his personal scheme of things, but no worse than others he’d experienced …

“I’d come for the occupation and I found what I’d come to find, and here it was again, and something else, too,” Sacco says.

The boy answers the soldiers’ questions and Sacco finds himself wondering what the boy is thinking. Is it that one day all will be OK and he will greet the soldiers as neighbors?

“Or was it simply, one day!

“And beyond the particular abuses of this time and place, beyond the really big questions the status of Jerusalem, the future of settlements, the return of the refugees … is something else a boy standing in the rain, and what is he thinking?

“And if I’d guessed before I got here, and found with little astonishment once I’d arrived, what can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power, what of this “What becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?”

The question is left hanging while the harsh black-and-white cartoon strip shows the boy flinching under the rain, the dry Israeli soldier growling down.

Among the mounting body of political and aesthetic work depicting life in Israel and the Occupied Territories, few leave such a lasting, effective and honest impression on the reader as Palestine.

Sacco, a Maltese-born American journalist and cartoonist, wrote a nine-issue comic book series after spending two months in the Occupied Territories during the first intifada in 1991-92. At the beginning of this year it was finally compiled into a single volume with an introduction by Edward Said, now available in Lebanon.

At another point Sacco shows an Israeli man who, during a debate on the Oslo peace process, makes the most coherent judgment on the situation. Peace is not about “whether there should be one state or two … (for) what is the point of two racist states or one racist state … or one racist state dominating another?

“The point is whether the two peoples can live side by side as equals.”

Sacco takes us on a journey, sometimes horrific, never funny though often ironic, never providing answers, simply depicting the life of Palestinians under occupation as he witnessed it.

It is a graphic reportage in the form of a series of encounters with Palestinians and Israelis, narrated through the eyes of an American journalist (Sacco) who seems to have wandered into a world with no obvious logic to it, but a continuing series of harrowing experiences and constant waiting.

It is tough, brutal reading. Sacco’s images are graphic and perfectly rendered, his drawings detailed and richly shaded. For a comic they are rarely cartoonish and incredibly lifelike which in no small part adds to the impact of the book.

When he is relating stories told to him he uses regular box grids rigid and ordered. When he is relating stories in which he is involved his images and words are all over the page in a far more fluid manner.

There is no obvious agenda or bias to his tale he simply gets into the souls of his fleeting characters and captures ultimately the collective anxiousness running through both Palestinian and Israeli life in scrupulous, revealing detail.

An accomplished piece of work by an huge talent, the series won an American Book Award in 1996, and was followed by a graphic novel about Sacco’s time in Bosnia, which won the 2001 Will Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel.

It is difficult to fault Palestine. There will perhaps be those who feel that a comic as such should follow an ordered narrative structure, or have a plot line, something which Palestine does not do. However, in that lies a further strength.

Like the conflict in Israel, the constant waiting, the fear or even belief that it will never be over, Sacco’s tale does not start from a beginning or end at an end, it just lands like plane in transit, stays for a while and departs while the life of the airport rolls inevitably on.

Describing Jerusalem, Sacco relates, “Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there’s parallel universes … Here? On the surface streets, traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards …

“And over the wall behind closed doors: other things people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss … Other things happening for ‘reasons of national security.’”

The book’s only humor comes from Sacco’s character when, for instance, very tongue-in-cheek and almost apologetically for the horrors and humiliations he is depicting, he tells the reader: “My comics blockbuster depends on conflict; peace won’t pay the rent.”

Or when he returns to the question of tea, for at each Palestinian household he visits he is offered tea, always without milk, but with spoonfuls of sugar, often in their happiness and pride at showing hospitality more sugar than tea.

It is funny only until it becomes sad, and you realize that the widowed veiled women talking of their dead or imprisoned husbands or sons seem to offer the sugar as if, because it is sweet, it represents sweetness and is the only sweetness they have in their lives.