Of Flogging in Broad Daylight

Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's latest film 'Sexy Durga' sheds light on the atrocities inflicted on women in a male-dominated society. This filmmaker from Thiruvananthapuram talks about how obsessiveness and worship can make a patriarchal society oppressive and abusive when it comes to power. He said the film had no religious connection, and explains if at all there's one, it's truly philosophical, analysing the reasons behind the atrocities against women in India.

However, the censor board has intervened in the following manner, preceding the film's screening at MAMI, in about two weeks time.

"As regards the film at S.No. 145 titted "Sexy Durga', this Ministry has been receiving several grievances against its title. Therefore, exemption is not being granted in respect of the said film. Ministry is of the view that, it may affect the law and order as it hurts the religious sentiments, 'Durga' being a principal Hindu Goddess. The applicant however, may approach the Central 'Board of Film Certification for certification of this film in normal course instead
of seeking exemption."

Sanal is upset and angry to the extent of calling India "a land that's becoming like Iran". He is justified to be so. 

In India, we have deified women and venerated her as Durga, Saraswati, Laxmi and others mellifluous names, but the veneration resides only in the nomenclature. As wrongdoings against the female, killing of girls, dowry deaths, sexual assaults do not show any indication to be on the decline in our country, naming of a film brings about the chagrin like nothing else. Is any of this benevolence on the part of the Censor Board directed towards developing, funding and appreciating woman-centric films, films which talk about the raging issues of sexual violence and raises awareness about relevant issues. Well, that might do some real good, in the manner cinema can do good to society.

As it happens, the film would be screened at MAMI, with the title suitable altered. This is probably the most direct instantiation of the unguarded censorship we have institutionalized and imbibed. Of course, trust hypocrisy to rule without impunity in the land where self-appointed guardians flog and scream and disturb every fabric of culture themselves.  

Edited poster of the film with the 'inappropriate' word censored for general consumption.

Frames and Gutters of Narrative and Retelling: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Part 4)

(Cont'd)

It is also valid to investigate the various diffused instances of ‘circular visuality’ and ‘literal coevalness’ in the manner of framing as indicated by Shay (2014). Though Abed and Ashraf take on the duty of navigating Sacco through the physical and memorial mazes of massacre victims, they are themselves personally tied to the similar non-descript fate of misfortune. There exists a certain circularity of fate in the contiguous placement of close-up frames: of Ashraf’s father’s lamentation on the loss of personal property, when he evokes – “A man without a home is a man without dignity” (Sacco, 2009, pp.251); and later Ashraf in a moment of introspection, asks – "Some people are happy they lost their homes. They lost a bad home and they got a replacement. But what about me?” (ibid, pp.330) Even the transference of the plight of violent atrocities between generations resonate in the full-page depictions of the horrifying assault by thick sticks, from arbitrariness and incoherence of state of affairs of 1956, (ibid, pp. 238) and the constant fear of being ravaged by the AFV and patrolling settlement guards of 2002-’03 (ibid, pp.187). Moshe Dayan’s retaliatory attacks on main street in Gaza city in April 1956 evoking anger from Jemal Abdel Nasser (ibid, pp.72) finds a tautological twin in Israeli attack on Jabalia refugee camp when suicide bombers killed Israelis in Haifa (ibid, pp.291). Violence is embedded as postmemory transferred in between kin, with the high contrast frontal portraitures of the ‘fedayeen’ and the ‘muratad’ aligned vertically in the manner of resistance across decades (ibid, pp.50). Even in the same generation, the ‘fedayeen’ directs spate of bile at Egyptian Nasser contained in the same frame (ibid, pp.73). These instances of circular visuality lend a notion of time as simultaneous and continuous, and violence being ever perpetrated.       
The internal focalization of the decades-old events eroded by ‘inevitable blurring of memory’ ultimately gets contained in the short snatches by a similar scene of transference from present back to the past (ibid, pp.385-389). The optically-opaque black non-spaces or gutter delineate the fixed-sized frames into a singular definitive retelling, bereft of psychodrama, multifarious testimonies, or opacities of memory, where they sink into the oblivion of black, merely as footnotes, ‘dropped to the bottom of history's pages’ lest ‘they trip up the greater narrative.’    


Works cited:
1. Kozol, Wendy. “Complicities of witnessing in Joe Sacco’s Palestine.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, edited by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, 165-179. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2012.
2. Scherr, Rebecca. “Framing human rights: Comics form and the politics of recognition in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza”, Textual Practice, 29:1 (2015), 111-131.
3. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2004.
4. Cohn, Neil. The visual language of comics: Introduction to the structure and cognition of sequential images. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2013.
5. Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Henry Holt & Company. 2009.
6. Sacco, Joe. Palestine: The Special Edition. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. 2001.
7. Shay, Maureen. “Framing refugee time: perpetuated regression in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:2 (2014), 202-215.
8. Davies, Dominic. “Joe Sacco: Representing Palestine.” oxonianreview.org December 23, 2013. http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/joe-sacco-representing-palestine/
9. Haley, Jae. “Beyond the Boundaries of Maps: Methods of Dissensus in Joe Sacco's ‘Footnotes in Gaza’." Studies in Popular Culture, 37:1 (2014), 57-73.
10. Hodapp, James. “The postcolonial Joe Sacco.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 6:4 (2015), 319-330. 
11. Vanderbeke, Dirk. “In the Art of the Beholder: Comics as Political Journalism.” In Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, 70-81. 1st Ed. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010.
12. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen. Starkville, MS: University of Mississippi Press. 2007.
13. Berlatsky, Noah. “Comics Journalism... Why?” October 22, 2012. http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/10/comics-journalism-why/
14. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. 
15. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009.
16. Rosenblatt, Adam; Lunsford, Andrea A. “Critique, Caricature and Compulsion in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” In The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, edited by Paul Williams and James Lyons, 68-87. 1st Ed. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
17. Hirsch, Marianne. "Editor's Column: Collateral Damage." PMLA, 119:5 (2004), 1209–1215.
18. Williams, Kristian. “The Case for Comics Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review March/April 2005. http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/2/ideas-essay-williams.asp. Republished at http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/archive-courses/spring07/engl102/e-texts/comics-journalism.htm
19. Cooke, Rachel. “Eyeless in Gaza” November 22, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/joe-sacco-interview-rachel-cooke 

Frames and Gutters of Narrative and Retelling: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Part 3)

(Cont'd)

Sacco calibrates the western reading of the colonial unfolding of events to focus correctly the blind spot of history, and introduce revelatory chapters which have long been relegated to footnote status. It would be interesting to observe the authorial decision towards the same which results in manipulation of the panel shapes and sizes, resulting in “patchwork narrative” (Haley, 2014). Sacco’s frames are spread in a discordant sphere of multiframe universe – the intermingled competing testimonies and diverging narrative voices jostle for agency. The narrative(s) of Rafah massacre assume durative nature with a structural deconstruction of the definition of panels as “attention units” (Cohn, 2013). The interplay of macro and micro group of panels attain a convergence construction, by alternating between characters and their viewpoints far back in history, so as to lend a global rhythm of individual testimonies, as observed for the women of the refugee households, namely Omm Awad El-Najeeli and Ta’ah Khalil Outhman (Sacco, 2009, pp.273); and similarly for the captured men of the houses, namely Abdul-Malik Mohammed Kullab, Mohammed Yousef Shaker Mousa and Mohammed Juma’ El-Ghoul (ibid, pp.306). As suggested by Groensteen (2007), any disposition of the word balloon different from the placement on the upper half of the panel will be anarchic and will substitute another logic, if such a placement is concerted. Sacco inverts the function of ‘obligatory passage’ by invoking the materiality of the words themselves – a sudden farrago inundates the listener with intercutting indexical speech bubble tail-ends (refer to Figure 2); literal dialogues denote actions and speech bubbles lose their relevance in a avalanche of emotions (refer to Figure 3); and the destructive force of an approaching Armoured Fighting Vehicle leaves engulfs the verbal text in topsy-turvy of mayhem (refer to Figure 4). 

Figure 2. The Fedayeen articulates various stances in a curious chiaroscuro.

Figure 3. Abed and Ashraf meet on the streets in a dramatic encounter.

Figure 4. Disarray and chaos (of the verbal) at a gathering of youngsters with an AFV in destructive, cautionary march.

Shay (2014) speaks of a space “where Palestine operates to an extent autonomously but is nonetheless embedded within the interventionist structure of the colonial power.” A certain degree of prototypicality is observed in the external narrative structure of the chapter titled ‘The Screening’, dealing with the events at Rafah. The episode, spread over 29 pages, employs a host of framing and panel techniques. The inter-panel transitions take place by a string of witness portraits, which short testimonies float in the multiframe space, each relaying to the next in a network of linkages between respective local narratives. In a particular instance, one feels the “hegemonic pressure of the image[s]” (Groensteen, 2007) as tail-ends of speech balloons create interstices through the dreary, hung-head insularity of submission. The consecutive loud instructions shouted by the reproachful Israeli soldiers cut through the surrender and trauma of the subjugated, who slowly raise their heads in apprehension. The sufferers, now occupying close-ups in the present-day frames, pause on a dramatically heightened note which intercut through both time and space. The Z-path of reading is punctured by the pseudo-gutters that permeate through eras. McCloud (1993) comments that it is “in the limbo of the gutter, [that] human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea."

Figure 5. Enactments of the army forces’ instructions alternate between eras, as the witnesses shout and pause for breaths.    

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(To be continued, Part 3 of 4)

Frames and Gutters of Narrative and Retelling: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Part 2)

(Cont'd)

Graphic reportage tends to be participatory and Sacco puts his shape of self-representation in the hand-drawn frame, not as chance accidents but by deliberation. He is seen straddling refugee colonies and conflict zones with his ‘fixers’, accomplices and friends by his side; or offering explanations to obtain testimonials, often sauntering along the periphery of the frame as his Palestinian friends try to navigate through occupational hazard of uncovering the story. From a postcolonial perspective, the autobiographical avatar is not an intermediary figure from the West with a sympathetic gaze through which the images are distilled, narratives and actors are simplified. He occupies a subtle space with the frame-designated panel of the oppressed, often comfortably cradled in their hospitality (Sacco, 2009, pp.19), noting the proceedings duly (ibid, pp.81), or observing the retellings by mediated by his accomplice (ibid, pp.249). His self-portraiture in such situations is of a timid figure in a turbulent geography, and is caricature-ish as compared to the multitude of Israelis and Palestinians depicted with discernable personalities and individualities. (It is to be noted that such a depiction is a notable departure from his earlier images (Sacco, 2001) from the same geographical and of similar ethnic groups, in which characters universally wore burlesque features, a la Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar. This can be attributed to his personal evolution in style and the differences in subject dealt in each case.) Sacco concedes:

“The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasize their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief." (Cooke, 2009)

The portraits of the testifiers appear to face directly to the frame, as if to a photographic lens, demanding authorial authenticity of their spoken words. The faces are not monolithic Third World figures but a careful representation that delineates and preserves distinct individual trajectories of personal narrative and “deconstructs and transcends the homogenising strategies of mass-media representation” (Davies, 2003). While recounting incidents and situations after a gap of around fifty years, the participant-witnesses have developed time-bestowed frailties of the skin, ably captured in Sacco’s lines, which ring true Sontag’s pronouncement: “Pictures of the ruin of faces will always testify to a great iniquity survived” (2004, pp.83). The imbalance in the power of representation finds redress in Sacco’s equitable ethics of representation by eroding otherness (Hodapp, 2015). The opaque glasses of his avatar subverts mass-media’s myopic perspectives, and confronts western rescue narratives (Kozol, 2012) with him being hapless spectator whose factual erudition can never comprehend the realities of quotidian on-ground suffering. When the same relentless cameras turn sharp back at the reader through the frame, while documenting the death of Rachel Corrie, the “criticism of the commodity-value of human rights photographs” (Kozol, 2012) attains perceptible satirical value.    

Figure 1. Sacco's avatar drowns in self-concocted barrage of futile explanations in the face of real danger.

Scherr (2015) notes that Butler’s frame theory calls attention to the significance of what has been excluded from the frame – the ‘discarded negatives of the official version’ which function as ‘the potential resources for resistance’ to official narratives. Sontag argues that the contemporary notion of atrocity requires photographic evidence: if there is no photographic evidence, there is no atrocity. It is under such praxis that Sacco tries to reconstruct incidents from the distant past - he takes recourse to consultation of Egyptian military records, UN/United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNRWA] reports, IDF archives, Israeli State archives, various Israeli newspapers, Israeli and Palestinian history textbooks, interviews with government officials, state letters and communiqués and hundreds of interviews with residents of Khan Younis and Rafah in Gaza. Cohn (2013) proposes that the comics artists draw not through perceptual information (in this case, UNRWA photographs, remnants of historical records) or the mind, but instead 'via the visual graphic-modality by means of patterned schematic knowledge stored in long-term memory' (pp.145-146). The interpretative and displacement initiatives provide impetus for dramatic visuals to attain a degree of visual abstraction. If the handcrafted quality of the photo-referenced images is a measure of factual evidence (there is only a single instance of historical artefact shown in actuality – the special report for UN General Assembly), then the reader faces sufficient dissonance at the accommodation of ‘The Legend of the Doves’ (Sacco, 2009, pp. 303) as a plausible testimony towards flow of events, along with the more verified rendering of, say, the detailed topography of the settlement lands (ibid, pp.160). Berlatsky (2012) raises questions on the nature of depiction of the Israeli troops – “deindividualized, snarling bad-guy tropes, all teeth and slitted” – with the author not providing at least a contesting view, coming from the armies deployed on either of the days of Rafah or Khan Younis massacres.

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(To be continued, Part 2 of 4)

Frames and Gutters of Narrative and Retelling: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Part 1)

“And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it”

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan.

The ground research phase that constituted the making of Footnotes in Gaza occurred roughly in the same continuum in history which witnessed the no-delay transmission of war visuals of devastation of Iraq and the subsequent horrors of the Abu-Ghraib prison atrocities. The dissemination of ground-zero actions, the acute visuality of personal and cultural trauma, “if it bleeds, it leads” mode of reportage shook up debates in social and academic circles – of the power of images to relay affect and invoke moral and ethical responsiveness in the viewer, of how to recognize the frames through which discourse and representation should proceed, and thus the very nature of visual and verbal studies in proscription of violence and terror. Sontag (2004) observed the momentary effectiveness of photographs to overpower the nascent sensitivities of the viewer; but doubted if they have the power and narrative coherence to build an interpretation or an alternative understanding. Photographs, which are empowered to “generate documents and create works of visual art” (Sontag, 2004), cater to global circulation, mediated consumption and translation (intercultural transformation of meaning). Butler (2009) remarked that the frames partake in picture-making by enforcing a prescriptive delimitation through their role of containment, and thus “the photograph itself becomes a structuring sense of interpretation”. The frame often fails to convey what it contains, and the expressivity of verbal-visual texts can act as a mediating modality to offer context. This shift and synthesis of representative modalities are sources of tension, as expressed by Sontag (2004, pp.20):  

“In contrast to a written account – which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership- a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.”

Journalistic practices of reportage rely on authenticity by “an emphasis of personal experience and artistic metaphorization [which] challenges the notions of accurate representation” (Vanderbeke, 2010) or bears the style of “newsroom’s dispassionate prose” which prefer plain language style “to protect the readers from the seductions of rhetoric, of art” (Williams, 2005). It is in this contention that the factual retelling in the verbal modality and image blocks in artistic imagery work in congruence in graphical narratives. As observed by Marianne Hirsch (2004), the intent, content and the context of representation in the comics form attains certain ‘biocularity’ as lent by “the visuality and thus the materiality of words and the discursivity and narrativity of image.” 

A discourse towards reading Joe Sacco assumes a logical starting point by analyzing the ontology of ‘frame’, from the war-conflict photographical considerations voiced by Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Marianne Hirsch et al. vis-a-vis framing theories as placed by comic book theorists such as Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen. The trajectory of comics journalism has had a major shift with the publication of Sacco’s accounts of Palestine in mid-1990s, and thereafter, the graphic narrative reportages from eastern Bosnia, post-industrial United States, Dalit hamlets of India and on the Israel-Palestine conundrum. This form of correspondence with its overlay of subjective and objective storytelling has since gained momentum and is widely observable in form of daily newspaper stories, investigative books and most recently, 360˚ sketch stories (Christoph Niemann’s “My Trip to the DMZ” for New York Times), the emergence of direct market for comic sales, and plethora of styles and genres. Sacco’s preponderance in the field merits critique for his employment of photographs as the basis of creation of comics frames. He has a specific mode of intervention in the lives of the interviewees or informants – his notebooks, audio recorder and camera working in unison to capture and pursue a story or memory. When he is not permitted to click photographs or the interviewed prefers not to appear before the lens, he sketches the scene so as to recreate it later in pen and ink. Thus, there occurs a process of mediated refraction – the immediacy of transmission of written words are checked by the process of rendering frames, as multifarious objects of vision, appearing stereoscopically and affecting organically. Rosenblatt and Lansford (2010) observed the following:

“Sacco’s most detailed drawings, particularly landscapes, often approach photography in their intense realism. Because they are not photographs, however, but rather drawings done painstakingly with pen and inkwell, they become as much a record of Sacco’s own obsession for getting as close to the truths of war as possible as they are of the wars and conflicts he has followed.” 

Here, the frames of photographs do not present themselves as singular moments of truth; the authority of freeze-frames as quick and compact mode of apprehension and memorization is lost. The complicity and responsibility of witnessing and interpreting events demands an ethical involvement of the ‘framer’. Sacco’s method ingrains an appeal to ethics by a method of delay, in reproduction of the artefacts in a mediated and conflated structure – a narrative, a comic story - thereby allowing a temporal distancing from the moment of the frame capture. A sense of contemplative development escapes the clutches of preconceived framing of photographic journalism and inclines towards attitudes where the snapshots are products of subjectivity and evolving point of view. This temporality allows context to seep in - the self-reflexivity of a distinct frame permeates through the aperture of the hyperframe. The author is able to define the verbal-visual conjunctions over paged multiframes braided in an organization of panels that “exists, potentially if not actually, in relation with each of the others” (Groensteen, 2007). The panoptical spread affords to capture greater landscape, for they “visually transmit the living conditions as background without having to use excessive descriptions” (Vanderbeke, 2010). 

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(To be continued, Part 1 of 4)

What's the day?

Scholars at a Lecture | William Hogarth | 1736/37

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"Wrong, do it again!"
"If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding/
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"
"You! Yes, you behind the bike sheds, stand still laddy!"

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave those kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave those kids alone
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall

Songwriter: Roger Waters
Performed by: Pink Floyd (Another Brick in the Wall Part 2)