(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).
______________________
(To be continued, Part 3 of 4)
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.
(To be continued, Part 3 of 4)
No comments:
Post a Comment