[Reader-list] Sketches of Palestine

[rehan ansari]

Sometimes I wish I could tell stories through a comic
book, like Joe Sacco. A page of a comic is a couple of
panels of pictures, each worth a thousand words.
Easier said than done. When I came across his comic
series called Palestine, the first thing I did was
give up on my drawing classes.

I was living in Portland, Oregon, which was my first
and only experience of living in the northwest of the
United States. It was also my first and only
experience of living in a city where the news of the
world seemed delusional. The news from Europe, Asia
and Africa, of Bosnia, Israel and Rwanda, which made
headlines that year, seemed irrelevant in that city
with the best coffee, chocolate cakes, the largest
park of any city in the world (Portland has a
rainforest for a park!), the oldest naturopathic
medicine teaching institute in the US, and bakeries
set up by ex-lawyers who have fled living in Chicago
and New York.

In that city, where it seemed modern problems had
solutions that were staring me in the face I came
across Palestine. 

Joe Sacco, born in Malta, living in Portland, spent
two months living, writing and drawing in the Occupied
Territories in the winter of 1991-2, the time of the
first intifada. Presently, 10 years later, his nine
comic book series have come out in one volume
(www.fantagraphics.com), with an introductory essay by
Edward Said. 

Joe shows his journey through his drawings. He begins
from living in Jerusalem and taking taxis spending
afternoons in Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus. In
Jerusalem he meets a young Jewish-American who is in
Israel to discover his roots, in Nablus he draws a
crowd of curious onlookers and among them someone
rolls up his sleeve to show a live ammunition bullet
wound, someone else has on his hairline the scar made
by a plastic bullet.

Whenever Joe encounters the intifada: a demonstration,
stone throwing, jeeps of soldiers pulling in he jumps
into a taxi and exits the scene. By the evening, he
lets off steam in a nightclub in the New City in
Jerusalem. This is Joe at the beginning of his
journey. 

The realities of the Occupation pile up around him. He
visits a hospital, where the bullet injuries for the
morning "are only four", and a female doctor tells him
a story of soldiers following ambulances in, entering
the emergency room and interrogating the wounded. As
he hears stories of a demolished home, or the cutting
down of olive trees by soldiers, the stories of the
living conditions of the inmates of the prison Ansar
Three (built to deal with the intifada overflow) he
draws the people who are telling these stories, their
homes where he is listening to them, along with the
story he is hearing. 

When Joe begins to live with people in refugee camps
in the West Bank and Gaza he arrives at his most
memorable images. Of Jabalia refugee camp the unpaved
alleys, the corrugated asbestos roofs held down by
bricks, the mud inside the homes, the watch towers of
the soldiers, the roadblocks are my first images of
the living conditions of the Palestinians. The last
time I have seen similar images are of Soweto and
other townships under the South African apartheid
regime. 

The book ends with an event that Joe witnessed, and he
tells it thus in the boxes that accompany the
images: "a group of Israeli soldiers stopped a
Palestinian youth of 12 or 13. The soldiers took cover
under an awning and they made the boy remove his
keffiyeh and pointed to where he should stand - in the
rain. Perhaps for the boy it was one of dozens of
humiliations, bad enough in his personal scheme of
things, but no worse than others he's experienced. I'd
come for the occupation, and I found what I'd come to
find, and here it was again, and something else,
too... The boy stood there and answered their
questions, and what choice did he have? But what was
he thinking? Was it, one day it will be a better world
and these soldiers and I will greet each other as
neighbours? Or was it simply: one day, ONE DAY! And
beyond the particular abuses of this time and place,
beyond the really big questions - the status of
Jerusalem, the future of the settlements, the return
of the refugees, et cetera - which must be raised and
then hurdled if there ever is to be peace here, is
something else - a boy standing in the rain and what
is he thinking? And if I'd guessed before I got here,
and found with little astonishment once I'd arrived,
what can happen to someone who thinks he has all the
power, what of this - what becomes of someone when he
believes to have none?" 

You should see the five panels of illustrations that
go with this.

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