Footnotes in Gaza

"Joe Sacco is the foremost figure in what he calls ‘comics journalism’ – he really established this category. He’s done several other really powerful and important works, like Palestine and another about Bosnia. But what’s so powerful to me about Footnotes in Gaza is the way it examines an event that happens in the past, and the way that event has affected the present and is affected by the present. The relationship is really on the surface. He conducted a lot of research about 1956, a lot of research into the massacres that happened then, and then he drew them. He makes his investigation really explicit, the business of both writing and drawing the past. So, for example, he includes passages where he’s tracking down the very few remaining survivors of these massacres and he fills out their testimonies with his own sense of what their accounts would actually have looked like. Spiegelman calls this ‘materialising the past’. In Maus, Art materialises his father’s and his own history. And in Footnotes in Gaza Joe Sacco is interviewing people and doing his own research and then very meticulously materialising this history."

"This is an amazing, graphic and emotional book. Sacco writes about the massacres carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in 1956. He completed the book in 2003 so it resonates with the present. It’s really about memory: how it can fool you and change things. He sifts through the memories of the witnesses he meets in Gaza to get to the truth of the two atrocities – one in Rafah, the other in Khan Younis. With the reporter Chris Hedges, Sacco co-wrote an article for Harper ’s magazine on the Khan Younis massacre. An important paragraph was deleted before publication. These ‘footnotes’, so casually dispensed with, meant a great deal to the victims. Sacco had his title and proceeded to write and illustrate this book. By looking at the past and present, he shows how events in Gaza are continuous. Palestinians never have the luxury, as he puts it, of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them. It’s a fascinating read, and his illustrations show the emotions on people’s faces as they narrate their stories. You really get involved in the scenery of Gaza, the chaos, bombing and courage. He is trying to ascertain the truth of what happened. Visually, it’s like seeing the movie while you’re reading the book."