https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/war-on-gaza-w-joe-sacco-the-chris War on Gaza (w/ Joe Sacco) | The Chris Hedges Report
Mary Shelley, in the preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, writes, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” In the chaos of war and inequity, cartoonist Joe Sacco pioneered the first graphic illustration journalism. Sacco has covered some of the most devastating warzones such as in Bosnia, which gave birth to his book, “Safe Area Gorazde,” and Gaza, which inspired “Footnotes in Gaza,” a book host Chris Hedges calls, “A masterpiece… one of the finest books done on the Palestine-Israel conflict, hands down.” Sacco joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his continued journey through chaos and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza influenced the newest iteration of his invention, his book “War on Gaza.” Hedges quotes a question Sacco asks in the book, “Is it genocide or is it self-defense? Let's make everyone happy and say it is both. In that case, we'll need new terminology. I propose genocidal self-defense that should give both sides something to work with.” Through visual renderings, dark humor and objective reporting, Sacco is able evoke responses to events playing out in ways traditional media can never achieve. “You will find humor in places like Gaza, places like Bosnia, and it's always of the darkest sort. It's their way of sort of managing their own thoughts, being funny, but understanding the underlying darkness of their humor. And I think I picked that up and I'm reflecting it back,” Sacco tells Hedges. The two reference several parts of Sacco’s new book, touching on the different ways the genocide has altered life in the West, including academic censorship, the question of democracy and biblical interpretation. In the end, Sacco says it all comes back to his own personal life and the connection it has with such an atrocity. “I've always had this idea that whatever I'm paying in taxes really just adds up to one small piece of shrapnel. I mean, as a nightmare, I just imagine that all my money is funneled into a small part of a bomb that causes someone to lose their life in Gaza.” Chris Hedges I first met the cartoonist Joe Sacco in Bosnia shortly after the war in 1995 where I was reporting for The New York Times. I knew nothing about comics and was unfamiliar with his work. But I knew something about reporting. And as we worked together in the Bosnian town of Gorazde, where Joe was gathering material for what would become his book Safe Area Gorazde, I very swiftly realized that Joe was a brilliant and meticulous reporter. We later did a book together, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, where 50 pages were given over to his comics. Invariably, once what I thought was an exhaustive interview, often lasting a few hours, was done, Joe would quietly ask the half dozen or so questions I had missed, questions that were vital to the narrative. Joe invented nonfiction, graphic journalism. He not only reports his stories, he draws them out in cartoons, a labor intensive process that can take years. This marriage of graphic illustrations and panels give a visceral power to his reporting that we as writers often struggle to match. From 1993 to 1995 he published nine comics on the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, later collected in the book Palestine. His book educated a generation about the brutality of Israel’s settler colonial project and system of apartheid. Palestine won an American Book Award and is often included in college syllabuses. Edward Said, in the introduction to Palestine, wrote, “With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco.” I worked again with Joe on an article for Harper’s magazine called A Gaza Diary which chronicled the life of Palestinians in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in Gaza in 2001. During our reporting we interviewed survivors of the massacres carried out when Israel occupied the Gaza strip in 1956, massacres in which at least 275 men and boys executed by Israeli soldiers. The editors at Harper’s edited out this part of the story, arguing that it was irrelevant because it was history. This did not sit well with me. It certainly did not sit well with Joe, who spent the next six years making repeated trips to Gaza to doggedly track down victims and eyewitnesses of the massacre. The result was his masterpiece, Footnotes in Gaza, one of the finest books on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Joe is well aware that context is key, that those who do not understand the past do not understand the present. And now, he and I, who have spent considerable time in Gaza, watch the live-streamed genocide, one where familiar places in Gaza are reduced to rubble, Palestinians we know and care about are killed, disappear, no doubt buried under the rubble, or are forced into exile. We each have devoted considerable time and energy since the genocide began desperately trying to make the voices and the suffering of the Palestinians heard. The result, for Joe, is his new comic. “On Gaza” which we will be discussing today. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34785): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34785 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110764657/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
