For Joe Sacco, drawing is thinking
Joe Sacco, the much-celebrated comics journalist, listened deeply as I responded to his questions about my life journey, caste, social violence, and why I gave up my job in the US and returned to India to raise my kids. As we put away our dinner plates and settled back on the sofa, Joe quipped that he had a theory about why people lived where they did. He said: “You live where your shame is.” I was startled to hear that, but he later explained what he meant. He was raised a Catholic, but had moved away from his religion. However, whenever he heard the news about paedophilia and the Catholic church, he felt stung by shame. It is a reminder that a part of him continues to live in that religion.
This statement about shame as a dwelling place perhaps sums up Joe Sacco’s art, for it is a stark representation of places where the collective human shame resides. He depicts lives of people in what he terms the ‘sacrifice zones’ — Palestine, Gaza, Chechnya, Abu Ghraib, Sarajevo, Iraq, Serbia, Pine Ridge Reservation, Appalachian Coalfields, Kushinagar and Muzaffarnagar — places relinquished at the altar of capitalism, settler colonialism, international wars, and the hubris of hyper-nationalist states. For him, writing on places such as the Palestine is like doing ‘penance’ — an act of reparation for the sins of humanity.
Sacco sees his comics journalism as a ‘calling’, akin to priesthood. He fell in love with journalism in high school, where he began to enjoy the thrill of the deadlines that enforced a ‘quick distillation’ of who, what, when, where and how. However, as he grew into his profession, he also became disenchanted and turned to the more powerfully communicative comic graphic form for succour. With time, it evolved into what he calls ‘slow journalism’, requiring him to spend long hours at his desk. On an average, a book-length comic takes him about three to five years to illustrate.
According to Joan Didion, the American writer and journalist, ‘writing is thinking’, but for Sacco, ‘drawing is thinking’ — he thinks and reflects about the world around him as he draws it out. He confesses that the comic form comes more naturally to him as he finds himself unable to draw ‘realistically’. While in the field, Sacco takes extensive photographs that he later uses for an accurate recall of scenes, events and people. He begins by writing a script and avoids storyboarding, which allows him to draw spontaneously. His graphics are an interplay of text and images, all done in black and white. He first hand-writes all the speech/thought bubbles, pastes them on his panels and then draws around them. The arrangement of the text and the image in his panels is aimed at guiding the reader’s eye — to pause it and make it look deeply or to move it swiftly or to make it see things from a different perspective.
Despite his peers having moved on to more financially rewarding coloured and computer-generated graphics, Sacco continues to laboriously hand-draw everything and has remained loyal to black ink.
Sacco’s graphic documentary style arose out of ‘New Journalism’, an American literary reportage genre that became popular in the 1960s and ’70s. It involved immersion in the field, living with the people, doing interviews, following it up with research and then writing the reportage in a literary manner with characters, dialogues, scenes and a dramatic plotline. On similar lines, Sacco’s reportage is a blend of an objective description of events, scenes, conversations, and peoples intertwined with the subjective experience of the interviewees and the local interlocutors.
For instance, his aerial shots of dense cityscapes, detailed indoor scenes, busy street scenes full of action and confusion, intensely hatched backgrounds, dramatic facial expressions, and the bold outline of the story’s characters convey an objective sense of the context, but also capture the subjective experience of the world Sacco immerses himself in. The graphics carry a remarkable sonorous and visceral quality. They convey the cackling sounds of children’s laughter as they drive their carts down a bombed-out road, the mad laughter of the hell’s gatekeeper, the vacuous blaring of music in a bar and the mute sorrow of women as their truck crosses the border.
Sacco takes his journalism a step forward by integrating his own experience and subjectivity into his graphic narratives. He draws himself in all his stories. Reminiscent of RK Laxman, Sacco caricatures himself as an everyday guy with slightly puffy cheeks, protruding teeth, big lips and as wearing opaque glasses. Quite unlike his sharp-featured, good-humoured diminutive self. The presence of this figure invites the readers to identify with and inhabit the position of the narrator and, at the same time, stimulates a sense of critical distance from the scene unfolding on the page.
According to Sacco, his time in the field is so much about his presence that demonstrating to the reader ‘that you are seeing it through my eyes’ is an obvious thing to do. Leaving himself out of it would be like ‘draining the blood out’ of the story. For him, being objective is about being aware of one’s own subjectivity and allowing it to be challenged. A lesson that he subtly conveys to his readers.
For me, as a historian, what is most compelling about Sacco’s graphic form is that it allows us to ‘see’ the world politics from the vantage point of the dispossessed people robbed of their lives, lands, histories and their futures — people cast ‘out of time’ and therefore news-unworthy. Such as the Palestinian mother who waits for her disappeared son to return. For her, time does not move because she and several others like her have had their present stolen from them by war, riots, colonialism, neo-liberal policies, and greedy state systems. This is our collective shame. We either prevent it from ‘being seen’ or look away even if genocide is being livestreamed and Dalit men continue to die cleaning the gutters. The haunting quality of Sacco’s graphic narratives generates an urgency in their insistence that we ‘see’. And once you have seen it through Sacco’s opaque glasses, you cannot unsee it. By drawing people suspended in a temporal limbo, Sacco etches them back into time and thereby into history.
— The writer is professor of history at Ashoka University. Views are personal
