The graphic novel Palestine, published by Maltan journalist Joe Sacco in the early ‘90s, is a journalistic piece that represents his recollections of two months spent talking to and living with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The casual narrative style, which some might say is too shallow for such heavy subject matter, in fact allows Sacco to avoid many of the pit falls that have made Western reporting on non-Western conflicts unhelpful at the very least and more often incredibly damaging. Sacco starts in Cairo with a dramatic conversation with some Egyptians about Palestine and Israel in which one of his conversation partners is depicted violently smashing his fist on the table in the middle of the second page and proclaiming “I
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Instead of trying to pretend he is a objective observer simply reporting the “truth,” Sacco is very up front about his own, not always pure, motives, his preconceived notions and his failings. He explains a choice of destination saying, “A comic needs some bang bang and I’m praying Ramallah will deliver," (118). And one of his first scenes describes how the rejection of a woman he was in love with in favor of a Palestinian man and the American media coverage of the murder of the American Jew Klinghoffer by the PLO while he was on a pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean turned him unreasonably against the Palestinian cause. He says, “sure I had sympathy for a homeland lost, but what were the problems of Palestinians to me next to Klinghoffer, who ate Brand X corn flakes and probably borrowed my ladder,” (8). This acknowledgement of his American-bred bias allows the novel to be situated within the context of his personal growth past these initial biases that are likely held by many of his readers. In this way Sacco serves as a guide for the Western reader, giving them a familiar feeling window into a space always portrayed as the epitome of the incomprehensible and chaotic ‘foreign’ by the news media. And yet he acknowledges too that he is no expert in Palestine. A full page …show more content…
The moment that sums up the overarching critique best comes at the end of an interview with an old woman in a refugee camp who as he is leaving asks through the translator, “what good is it to talk to you?” (242). She says she’s been interviewed many times before, even by Israeli TV, and yet nothing has changed, “we don’t want money, she says, we want our land, our humanity,” (242). She continues that any support Palestine has received from foreign peoples has been “with words only,” and has had no real effect (243). This is really the biggest critique of this work, and the field of journalism as a whole, and Sacco himself is presenting it. And it is incredibly valid, this work was published before I was born and the situation in Palestine is if anything worse. And I, like Sacco, am not sure what the answer, if there is one, to this critique is, except maybe that if the orientalist belief system, particularly it’s systematic dehumanization of the other, allowed and supported colonialists in their aims then seeking to rehumanize could add a little resistance to the underlying systems of colonialism still at work
Instead of trying to pretend he is a objective observer simply reporting the “truth,” Sacco is very up front about his own, not always pure, motives, his preconceived notions and his failings. He explains a choice of destination saying, “A comic needs some bang bang and I’m praying Ramallah will deliver," (118). And one of his first scenes describes how the rejection of a woman he was in love with in favor of a Palestinian man and the American media coverage of the murder of the American Jew Klinghoffer by the PLO while he was on a pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean turned him unreasonably against the Palestinian cause. He says, “sure I had sympathy for a homeland lost, but what were the problems of Palestinians to me next to Klinghoffer, who ate Brand X corn flakes and probably borrowed my ladder,” (8). This acknowledgement of his American-bred bias allows the novel to be situated within the context of his personal growth past these initial biases that are likely held by many of his readers. In this way Sacco serves as a guide for the Western reader, giving them a familiar feeling window into a space always portrayed as the epitome of the incomprehensible and chaotic ‘foreign’ by the news media. And yet he acknowledges too that he is no expert in Palestine. A full page …show more content…
The moment that sums up the overarching critique best comes at the end of an interview with an old woman in a refugee camp who as he is leaving asks through the translator, “what good is it to talk to you?” (242). She says she’s been interviewed many times before, even by Israeli TV, and yet nothing has changed, “we don’t want money, she says, we want our land, our humanity,” (242). She continues that any support Palestine has received from foreign peoples has been “with words only,” and has had no real effect (243). This is really the biggest critique of this work, and the field of journalism as a whole, and Sacco himself is presenting it. And it is incredibly valid, this work was published before I was born and the situation in Palestine is if anything worse. And I, like Sacco, am not sure what the answer, if there is one, to this critique is, except maybe that if the orientalist belief system, particularly it’s systematic dehumanization of the other, allowed and supported colonialists in their aims then seeking to rehumanize could add a little resistance to the underlying systems of colonialism still at work