1989. When I think back to my feelings and state of mind--how naïve and idealistic I was!--when I first learned of the popular uprising at Tiananmen S1989. When I think back to my feelings and state of mind--how naïve and idealistic I was!--when I first learned of the popular uprising at Tiananmen Square, I am impressed by the person I was, one who felt the world would never be the same. It was changing. For the better. But even with so much of what happened, even as we got glimpses of the brutal governmental crackdown, a better world, a more humane and rational world was definitely ahead of us. We were lulled with the fall the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain later that year. There was no questioning that the events in China gave others in the world courage. The events were related.
But reading this in 2021, as much as those events were pivotal in world history, it feels a bit empty. Is China really a better place? No question that the economy is better for hundreds of millions. But the events in Hong Kong, the ascendancy of fascist tendencies in places like Myanmar, Russia and the former Soviet states in the Caucuses and Central Asia, Israel, Brazil, and the United States somehow have me longing for the clear cut lines the Cold War created. OK, not really, but, then again, really.
Reading this skillfully crafted graphic comic recounting the events in Tiananmen Square, I realized, that although it was all about a particular historical event in China, it was about so much more. What occurred in China and the people whose lives ended in permanent exile, death, or debasement, the tragic consequences that came with actual engagement to stand up to a totalitarian state is sobering at best. It's a story about the fleeting nature of hope. It's a story that needs to be remembered and this short, intense book reminds us in just a few intense, tragic pages....more
An interesting comic book rendition of Dürrenmatt's novel done by a students of a Bern, Switzerland high school. They did a wonderful job of condensinAn interesting comic book rendition of Dürrenmatt's novel done by a students of a Bern, Switzerland high school. They did a wonderful job of condensing the text to stay true to the plot of the novel. Many of the full page panes pay homage to Dürrenmatt's own visual artistic style, full of austere fantasies. ...more
An A-Z of macabre ways different children die. As awful as that sounds, this is a fun, quick read. The highlight:(view spoiler)["N is for Neville who An A-Z of macabre ways different children die. As awful as that sounds, this is a fun, quick read. The highlight:(view spoiler)["N is for Neville who died of ennui." (hide spoiler)]...more
Perhaps better as an introduction for younger readers with little knowledge of WWI or racism. Not recommended for those looking for a detailed insightPerhaps better as an introduction for younger readers with little knowledge of WWI or racism. Not recommended for those looking for a detailed insight into the Harlem Hellfighters....more
A perfect introduction to Harvey Pekar for those unfamiliar with his work or just curious to learn what he was all about. Pekar wrote literature. He wA perfect introduction to Harvey Pekar for those unfamiliar with his work or just curious to learn what he was all about. Pekar wrote literature. He was the unofficial poet laureate of Cleveland, Ohio. A fabulous movie was made about his life. It features his narration and snippets of him, you can't help but become endeared. I first learned about him during the 1980s when he would appear on The David Letterman Show, which are also featured in the movie. He was such an odd character that I had to run out and get is comic books.
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He used comic artists to convey his work, so part of the charm of his work is the diversity of artists who make the pictures that go with his words. Make no mistake, he belongs in the pantheon of accomplished American writers. Let's hope that the Library of America will produce a volume or two of his work. He deserves it.
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His gravesite is one of the most important places in Cleveland. Worth a visit if you're ever in town.
This book is an intellectual investment that should be savored and valued as an heirloom to be passed on to future generations. Joe Sacco's accordion-This book is an intellectual investment that should be savored and valued as an heirloom to be passed on to future generations. Joe Sacco's accordion-style depiction of the Battle of the Somme is inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry as updated for the 21st century.
The format is unique. The art is stunning. The scope is amazing. And the lesson is timeless. Combined with Adam Hochschild's essay on the significance of the battle (which was adapted from his incredible book, To End All Wars), Sacco's vision can be studied for hours.
One of the most impressive works of history I have ever had the honor to experience and always worth revisiting at least once a year. Check out a wonderful write up in the New Yorker to get a nice overview....more
If you are interested in getting a visceral perspective from New Orleanians as the events associated with Hurricane Katrina were happening, this is a If you are interested in getting a visceral perspective from New Orleanians as the events associated with Hurricane Katrina were happening, this is a great starting point. A.D., short for “After the Deluge,” is a gripping graphic account. Josh Neufeld, who was one of the artists who worked with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor, demonstrates the power that drawings can have when accompanied by authentic dialogue.
I reread this as I watched the events of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and west Louisiana, which opened some wounds within me. We Americans like to rank things; this is better than that, this is far worse than that, this athlete of one generation is better than one of another. Some commentators and people affected by the rains of Harvey is “much worse that Katrina.” Absurd. Every disaster has its victims, and to try to claim that one person’s experiences are worse than those of one in another time or place seems to me useless at best and heartlessly cynical at worst. But it’s an American obsession. In coming months and years we will be inundated with statistics, costs, and facts comparing the two disasters as if it might lead to a profound conclusion. It won’t.
Here’s what I what I remembered as I read: often people underestimate the potential consequences of natural disasters; they think it can’t happen to them. No matter how much they think they are prepared, they never are. Poor people are always hit hardest and rich people will suffer, but they will recover and might even profit in the long run. Some people are more resilient than they ever would have imagined, others are far less so, no matter how much they had deluded themselves of their inner strength. It can be as hard or harder on people who have a connection to the places where natural disasters hit than those who experience it up close. And if you’re one of those, if you have a connection to the events, you’ll never be the same person that you were before they occurred.
I lived in New Orleans from my mid-teens through my early adulthood, moving away in 1991. I doubt many knew the geography of the city better than me. I understood what it was like in the parts of the city that were most affected and most spared even though I wasn’t there. As I was sitting at my computer—in late August and early September 2005, when video broadcasts on the internet were still fairly novel—more than a thousand miles from New Orleans, I experienced a feeling of emotional helplessness. I would much rather have been in the flooded city doing something. So to cope, I wrote an editorial on August 31 that was published on September 4 in my local newspaper:
I wasn’t born in New Orleans, but I’m a native.
I graduated from high school and college and began my professional career there. Seeing the devastation, knowing intimately where events are happening and understanding the culture of the people of the area, the frustration of not being able to do anything for the people of my old hometown is a special kind of torture.
This was more than an unimaginable catastrophe; this was personal.
Watching Katrina roar through New Orleans and the gulf coast and its aftermath brings back the shock, horror, and disbelief we all felt on the morning of September 11, 2001. It is a downhill roller coaster of emotion for which no one can prepare. But we, the people and the nation, can not give in to hopelessness. That would be fatal to those most in need and our national character.
Victims of Katrina will need an unprecedented amount of public resolve and support—financial, logistical, emotional, and so many other ways we have not yet envisioned. We will have to prevent further damage—now. We will have to build not-so-temporary refugee camps for perhaps hundreds of thousands of people—now. We will have to feed, clothe, and provide minimal levels of health care to them—now. We will have to rebuild destroyed cities, towns and critical infrastructure—now.
Refugees from the region destroyed by Katrina will be spread throughout the nation. If they are lucky, they will be with family, friends and loved ones. They will have few if any papers normally needed to make claims for aid, they will have no work for the mid- to long-term, and most will have lost all their worldly possessions and mementos. And far too many will have paid the ultimate price with their lives.
Our nation’s response to Katrina must be massive, coordinated, consistent, and compassionate. We should not judge this tragedy by its worst human elements. The looters do not represent anything about the people from New Orleans and the gulf. They are, however, symbols of the overwhelming poverty in New Orleans. Their actions—which need to be punished harshly and cannot be ignored—should not diminish the obvious desperation in the area.
So what are some things we should do? As we give our donations to our churches, synagogues, and organizations such as the Red Cross to provide relief to the people devastated by Katrina, let us make sure efforts are focused and accountable. Let us carry that over to support as much federal engagement as is possible because that is where the most effective resources are.
Katrina’s refugees will be stressed and challenged in ways very few of us can imagine. Congressional offices throughout the nation should treat the refugees living in their states and districts as constituents and assist anyone who needs help through the federal system of disaster relief.
People should demand that their senators, representatives, and the Bush administration provide timely aid to make sure all federal resources are brought to bear to assist the people as a great nation should. Demand that they make recovery of this region among the highest of national priorities.
The national impact of this disaster—gas prices, insurance rates, rising prices due to energy costs—will continue to be felt in the months and years to come. If we do too little, too late now, we will likely have seen the beginning of the long, agonizing death of one of the world’s greatest cities played out right in front of our eyes. We can’t let that happen.
As Americans, we will have to do it for the selfish reason that the longer the negative effects of this disaster linger, the longer it will weaken our national economy. More succinctly, we will have to do all we can to save one of the few truly distinct American cultures—and if we don’t do it now, we may well have lost it forever. If that happens, our nation will have lost an irreplaceable part of our identity.
Lastly, I suggest we all read John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces to help us laugh through our tears and to remind us of why, together, we must do all we can to make this tragedy a distant, bitter memory.
[For the ten year anniversary, the paper asked me to write another editorial.]
A.D. reminded me of the emotional intensity of that period. But it’s also important to understand that this book is not a comprehensive historical analysis. The people portrayed do not yet have an understanding that what happened to them was a man-made disaster. While Katrina’s winds and rains absolutely devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the adjacent areas in Louisiana and Alabama, they did not do so in New Orleans. The flooding and high death toll were the fault of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their neglect in planning, the poor construction of the levee system designed to protect the city, and the inability to mitigate their malfeasance was arguably the greatest dereliction of duty by a public agency in U.S. history, as an interactive video produced by the New Orleans Times-Picayune demonstrates.
The people in A.D. also don’t yet know that their city will never be same after the recovery efforts began. Many who were displaced didn’t return and an influx of new people came in who fundamentally changed the character and culture of the city. They didn’t yet know that predatory financial interests would come in to destroy the public school system by summarily firing 7,000 teachers only to replace it with a democratically unaccountable charter school system that prizes harsh, regimented discipline and profits over creative, vibrant, and accessible schools. They didn’t yet know that the city would undergo a long, painful path toward gentrification that would dramatically increase rents and limit available housing. Some will claim the city is better than it was before the Katrina-related disaster. I’m still not sure. But there’s no denying it is different.
In the past few days, a New Orleanian wrote an interesting article for the people impacted by Hurricane Harvey that is a warning about what they might expect and should guard against as they recover. It’s worth reading and it would have been a prescient warning to the people portrayed in A.D....more
Harvey Pekar taught me that comic books can be great literature. Joe Sacco taught me that a cartoonist with insight and passion can be one of the mostHarvey Pekar taught me that comic books can be great literature. Joe Sacco taught me that a cartoonist with insight and passion can be one of the most important journalists of our time. Start anywhere in Sacco's canon and you will be drawn to read everything he has produced.
Journalism features stunning lessons about human suffering in parts of the world we know little about—subcastes in remote parts of India, women and refugees in Chechnya, and African migrants in Malta—and even those places we thought we understood well—Iraq, Palestine, and war crime trials of Serbs in the Hague. Do yourself a favor and become a devotee of Sacco's work. And help spread the word about the stories he brings to life...the stories most journalists are unable or unwilling to report....more
The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son…
Ezekiel 18:20
“When the facts come home to roo
The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son…
Ezekiel 18:20
“When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome…to give due account for the sake of freedom to the best in men and to the worst.”
Hannah Arendt
But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem
And there'll be no barricades then There'll be no wire or walls And we can wash all this blood from our hands And all this hatred from our souls
And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem
Joe Sacco, to quote The New York Review of Books, “is legitimately unique.” He is a journalist, cartoonist, and historian. And he is, based on the books of his I’ve read, one hell of a Mensch. He focuses on the stories few journalists are willing to investigate. Footnotes in Gaza is his masterpiece. It tells the story of a little-known and mostly forgotten historical episode: the massacres of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah, two cities in the extreme southern part of the Gaza Strip, that took place in 1956. Forty-seven years after the events, in 2003, Sacco went to Gaza to find and interview people who lived at that time when, as he acknowledges throughout his book, memories were fragile and fallible. He examined historical records. He intertwined his account with the current events of 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were destroying houses in Rafah, which is on the Egyptian border, because of their suspected ties to terrorist activity. His cartoonist’s eye creates stunning images that make up for the lack of a visual record of the events he describes. Although his vantage point is, for the most part, from within Gaza, only the most cynical, ideological, and narrow-minded of critics could claim that Sacco’s telling of the story and conclusions are not judicious.
In 1956, British and French forces, supported by Israel, attempted to take control of the Suez Canal and oust the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was a failed fiasco that led to an American-brokered cease fire that strengthened Nasser’s standing in the Arab world. The Gaza Strip, which was part of Egypt, was controlled by the IDF in 1956 and they tried to quell any resistance efforts from the local Palestinian population. This set the stage for the events Sacco investigated.
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According to Sacco, this was a forgotten footnote in history, one that he first learned about as he worked on his book Palestine.
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The first incident took place in Khan Younis. According to the “Special Report of the Director of the United Nations Relief and Workers Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East,” (UNRWA):
The town of Khan Yunis and the Agency’s camp adjacent thereto were occupied by Israel troops on the morning of 3 November…The Israel authorities state that there was resistance to their occupation and that the Palestinian refugees formed part of that resistance. On the other hand, the refugees state that all resistance had ceased at the time of the incident and that many unarmed citizens were killed as the Israel troops went through the town and camp, seeking men in possession of arms. The exact number of dead and wounded are not known, but…trustworthy lists…of persons allegedly killed…[are] 275 individuals…
In conversations with people living at that time, Sacco describes how the men of Khan Younis were gathered together and lined up facing a wall. Indiscriminate shots were fired both at them and over their heads with the dead and wounded falling where they stood. Sacco himself acknowledges, “The U.N. report presents to incompatible versions of the Khan Younis ‘incident,’ and so in this case, as in many others, history-by-document drops us into a muddied soup of ‘on the other hands’ and ‘possibilities’ seasoned, perhaps, with a few ‘probables.’ But clearly the refugees’ claim in the U.N. report dovetails with the eyewitness testimony Abed and I gathered many nears later. Namely: the fighting had stopped; the men were unarmed; they did not resist.”
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According to the same UNRWA report quoted above, another raid took place, ostensibly to find more than 200 Egyptian soldiers suspected of hiding in Rafah:
On 12 November, a serious incident occurred in the Agency’s camp at Rafah. Both the Israel authorities and UNRWA’s other sources of information agree that a number of refugees were killed and wounded at that time by occupying forces. A difference of opinion exists as to how the incident happened and as to the numbers of killed and wounded. It is agreed, however, that the incident occurred during a screening operation conducted by Israel forces…The facts appear to be as follows: Rafah is a very large camp (more than 32,000 refugees) and the loudspeaker vans which called upon the men to gather at designated screening points were not heard by some of the refugee population…sufficient time was not allowed for men to walk to the screening points…In the confusion, a large number of refugees ran toward the screening points for fear of being late, and some Israel soldiers apparently panicked and opened fire on this running crowd…sources consider[ed] trustworthy lists…persons allegedly killed…numbering 111…
As with the Khan Younis incident, Sacco sorts through some conflicting accounts to conclude that some memories seem to have invented incidents, especially immediately after the shootings, and distorted time sequences.
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For example, “Without corroboration, Abed and I are about to file this story under ‘legend’ until, one day, someone tells us he had hear that the Israelis forced the director of the UN sanitation center to pick some workers to collect the bodies.”
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People’s ability to take impromptu videos has changed history, but even when video evidence exists, it does not necessarily change preconceived conclusions or lead to justice. For the events of 1956, for which no visual record exists, Sacco’s cartoons help us to visualize how these images might have horrified people around the world. Would contemporaneous photographs have changed the course of history? Could they have humanized Palestinians and Israelis? Would it have altered the public discussion about the Middle East?
What makes Sacco’s works so compelling, however, is not just his investigative historical research, it is also how he puts his own experiences in field research. We meet his guides and coworkers, who are locally based. He also ties in the events around him as they are happening. In this case, the destruction of houses along the Gaza-Sinai border, the daily violence, the cheering of Saddam Hussein during the onset of the Iraq War, the struggle to survive in Gaza, and the uncertainty of day-to-day life for the residents of Gaza who are innocent victims of geo-political conflict all become part of the narrative to find out about the history of 1956.
It took Sacco more than six years to write this book. As he said in his acceptance speech of the Ridenhour Prize, during that time, many of the people he interviewed had died; they did not live to see his work. I think it would have meant a great deal to them. This book proves that the aphorism attributed to George Berkeley—“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make sound?”—has an answer. If we are willing to learn about the causes of forgotten or hidden events, they can make a thunderous sound. But will the fact that we can now hear it make any difference in how we will act in the future?
Addendum: A great companion to Footnotes in Gaza is the Israeli film Lemon Tree....more
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