Palestine. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2024. 288pp. $34.99.
Guest review by Paul Buhle
The name “Sacco” rings a curious bell in radical memory….from a century ago. I mean of course Sacco of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case—two avowed Italian-American anarchists Nicol Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, shoemaker and fish peddlar—put on trial, then executed in 1927, for a crime that could never be proven. Demonstrations took place in cities across the world, nowhere more than in Boston, site of the court verdict and deaths. It was in some ways a last historic moment of anarchism, whose star had faded with the rise of Communist parties. But it was also the beginning, in retrospect, of the grand mass movement of antifascism of the 1930-40s, a movement that urged forward the struggles for industrial unionism and racial equality along with the defeat of the Nazis and their allies.
Is the name more than a coincidence for today’s master narrator of war and suffering, Joe Sacco? Perhaps not. And then again, social movements come and go, while “martyrdom” remains high among the most appealing sentimental forces imaginable. Crowds around the world have for centuries marched in parades, carrying drawings or photos of their vanquished. The irony of Joe Sacco and also his artistic triumph is his unwillingness to accept the sentimental verdicts of history as the only possible narrative.
The reappearance of his most famous work, Palestine, just now, inevitably has a special significance. Apart from the truly beautiful production by Fantagraphics, what is most new here is a fresh Afterword by a journalist for the Israel daily newspaper (and source of major political dissent) Ha Aretz. Amira Hass, born in Jerusalem, lived in Gaza for a few years of the 1990s, now resides in El-Bireh, the West Bank. She wants us to know that on its original publication, the book captured the hopes of 1990-91, when she was a Jewish peace activist and not yet a journalist. The hope remains and cannot be extinguished, no matter the level of violence and the extent of destruction.
Thus a book of pain becomes a book of hope as well. Perhaps the martyrs on both sides, all sides, and all the martyrs of the twentieth century, will be redeemed in memory. It is a tall order but not an unimaginable one.
But there is much, much more to Sacco and this book, in comics terms alone. Consider that the genre of “underground” or “alternative” comics emerged in the Vietnam era. Rather suddenly, visualized sentiments forbidden in the pages of comic books or in comics, as well as sex acts, antiwar and environmental protests, not to mention Women’s Liberation, could be found on and around nearly every major campus. “Head Shops” of marijuana-use, themselves unimaginable earlier, carried these curious publications and the local underground newspapers that spread selected comic strips faster and further than comic books alone could.
Joe Sacco was not quite of an age to join the beginners. The Head Shops and the underground newspapers were long gone by his appearance in the 1980s. And for that matter, he did not (literally) draw upon the mainstream comic-art tradition as had most of the artists. And also for that matter, he thought of himself as a journalist, albeit a visual journalist, more than anything else. He secured a journalist’s credentials and implied promise of a living wage as a reason to place himself in Gaza of 1990.
The famed literary theorist and music critic Edward Said, writing an introduction to the second edition of Palestine in 2001, said most memorably that here, a new kind of witness to history had appeared. “The unhurried pace and the absence of a goal in his wanderings emphasizes that he is neither a journalist in search of a story nor an expert trying to nail down the facts in order to produce a policy.” (iii). Further, “Sacco seems to mistrust militancy, particularly of the collective sort that bursts out in slogans or verbal flag-waving.” (v).
Rather, Said suggests, Sacco is more like novelist Joseph Conrad, who invented the character Marlow because someone must investigate, explain to himself and to readers, those populations reduced to confinement and without realistic hopes of escape. It is not heroism he finds but human reality, good and bad, kindly and harsh, thus a reality not unlike that of the rest of us in vastly more fortunate circumstances.
Some critics have made a special point of the artist’s own upbringing in Malta, heavily bombed in the Second World War. A mother’s trauma years after the events would have been part of a child’s life, by extension of a child’s own experience. Sacco’s other books, it is important to say, include a depiction of a Balkan city, Gorzade, in the midst of the 1990s wars, and a sort of semi-book art work of connected images around the First World War, the “war to end all wars” that foreshadowed wars growing steadily worse, in one technological way or another into the threat of all-encompassing global destruction, ever since. Seeing into the illusions of wars-to-bring-peace, Sacco already saw All. Or so it seems to me. Sacco and Vanzetti, the lowly shoe clerk and fish-peddler in early twentieth century America, believed that wars would end only with the end of State Power everywhere. They surely had a point.
There is something more to be said about Joe Sacco in the history of comic art. The field is changing rapidly, its print form overwhelmed by comic art on the Web, or perhaps not. His work, unlike that of Justin Green (and followed by Art Spiegelman among others), did not set the pace for other artists, despite being highly personal. Even those literally drawing upon experiences of mass suffering do not approach the methods of the artist’s own painstaking personal presence. Sacco is not like those around him and yet he is not absent from their intimate attention, or they from his.
To risk an analogy that is closer to the opposite of an analogy: Sacco is more like the fabled Robert Crumb of Underground Comix history who, by imbibing LSD and recuperating the comic art styles of the 1910s-30s, found something that he could not have expected. Crumb (a long-distance friend of the reviewer) often suggested that he had been taken over, and drawn stories by instinct. Sacco is nearly the opposite in many ways. But he has also been taken in and overtaken, actually by the scenes before his eyes. And because he sees with new eyes, he allows us to do so, too.
He closes his own Foreword to this edition by asking “Has the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians become a zero sum game where there must be one emphatic winner and one subjugated—or eliminated —loser?…One can only pray that good people on each side will find each other, walk away from the brink, and seek a just path.” (Vi) To that, we can only add an Amen, in any religion or non-religion and any language. I am sure that the martyred, anti-religious anarchists Sacco—the other Sacco—and Vanzetti would have said the same.
Paul Buhle
