TODAY/YESTERDAY/TOMORROW?

Click on any image for a larger version

My last contact with a "graphic narrative", or the nearest thing in those days, the "graphic novel", would have been in the 1950s/60s when some of the acknowledged classics like Sir Walter Scott's novels were rendered comic-cut style for children. As an adult, it is not a medium that appeals to me.

Or should I say "appealed" to me?

So what changed my mind?

Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza.

While he was doing research in Gaza in 2001, Sacco first came across stories about massacres of Palestinians that had teken place in Rafah and Khan Younis in 1956. He was shocked to discover that, but for one brief mention, the incidents had never been fully investigated.

The resulting graphic narrative is a blow-by-blow retelling of how Sacco, on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, embedded himself in Gaza and set about interviewing every witness he could find who had been in the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah on those fateful days in 1956.

The graphic narrative is stunning.

Not only does it reveal what went on in Palestine while the rest of the world was distracted by the Suez crisis but it also reveals what was going on there while Sacco was undertaking his researches. And it's all of a pattern. In fact, he might as well have been writing about the last 6 months in Gaza and the West Bank, the ring is so familiar.

But what really comes across to you is that this has been going on solidly since the NAKBA in 1948.

Look closely at Sacco's depiction of grief above and then go to my account of the Fallen Leaves exhibition I encountered at the Berlin Jewish Museum a few years ago.

Same faces !