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)