interview | joe sacco

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24/01/14 21:11Interview | Joe Sacco

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Notes from a Defeatist

by Joe Sacco

Published by Fantagraphics

216 pages, 2003

Comics have outgrown their superhero

underpants, and cartoonist Joe Sacco

specializes in one of their most dynamic young

subgenres: the political comic book. Maltese

by birth, Sacco grew up in Australia and the

US, and chose comics as the unusual medium

for putting his University of Oregon journalism

degree to use. In his award-winning books, he

unleashed the bad tidings he'd fetched from

some of the messier parts of the world: the

Occupied Territories during the first intifada, in

Palestine, and war-ravaged Eastern Bosnia, in

Safe Area: Gorazde. At this point, what's most

surprising about the endeavor is not the choice

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Palestine

by Joe Sacco


288 pages, 2002

Safe Area Gorazde: The

War in Eastern Bosnia

1992-95

by Joe Sacco


229 pages, 2000

o genre, ut ow wa op ng y power u t turns

out to be in Sacco's hands.

Like Art Spiegelman before him, Sacco uses comicsto deliver familiar content in an unfamiliar form,disarming us of our numbness to images of war andprivation. Visual novelty aside, Sacco's focus --

preferring the anecdotal to the panoramic --excavates details that seldom make it to the news orthe history books. In Palestine, for example, asquinting Palestinian boy hunches in the rain whileIsraeli soldiers, having made him take off hiskeffiyeh, interrogate him from the shelter of anawning. This is perhaps Sacco's most valuableservice: to spotlight the overlooked minutiae of oppression -- the humiliation, the tedium, and theinconveniences of all shapes and sizes -- in additionto the statistics-friendly horrors. On his trips, he talks

-- or really, listens -- to dozens of locals, and theirtestimony appears alongside his crisp narration. Forthe uninformed, these books offer a solid, palatableintroduction to the issues. For the well-informed,they humanize the stories in a way that a Timesarticle never could.

And the more you read, the clearer it becomes thatcomics are exquisitely well-qualified for the task.Drawings have the potential to be more faithful toreality than even photographs, since everything is

included -- or emphasized, or excluded -- for areason. For example, Sacco told me that drawings forhis next book, set in Gaza, will include elements thatcan be hard to unite on camera, such as the swirlingdust and airborne trash and swarming kids, whichwere crucial to the atmosphere of the place. Aremarkable visual economy results, distilling theessence of a place or scene. And this efficiency by nomeans equals stinginess with detail. A glance will tellyou enough, but a dwelling eye will find much more-- a dense richness of detail in which every gesture

and facial expression has been scrupulouslyrendered. Sacco reproduces the extraordinarily subtlenuances of facial expressions, and pulls off, again,something like a distillation: he seizes on the essenceof a given expression, and slathers it onto a face.

Imbuing every page is Sacco's respect for hissubjects, obvious in the way he draws them and the

way he lets them speak. This respect does not meanhe's shy of ugliness, nor does it rule out some gentlefun-poking. A spoonful of humor helps the history godown, saving it from self-righteousness andsentimentality on the way. And if he gently pokes fun

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, .a hilarious, self-mocking character in the books, abalding, slouching little man with his hands in hispockets, bumbling and innocently lecherous, full of self-doubt and feelings of guilty privilege. Beneathall that, there's his unstated outrage and sorrow onbehalf of, as Edward Said put it in his introduction toPalestine, "history's losers."

Sacco's most recent book, Notes from a Defeatist , is acollection of earlier material, some of which isequally political, some more autobiographical. Herecently spent several months in Gaza, and iscurrently working on a book based on that trip. Inperson, he doesn't seem like he could come fromeven the same side of the family as the guy in hisbooks. His calm, residually Australian-accentedvoice is a surprise after the crass vernacular thatpeppers his panels; and his confident composure outs

his graceless character as just that -- a character. Wemet in mid-town Manhattan recently to talk.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow: Okay, I have a fewquestions for you. First one -- maybe this'll helpme with the rest of the interview. I was curiousabout what you've learned about interviewing, because you've done a lot of it, and how you'vechanged or matured as an interviewer.

Joe Sacco: What I've learned is that people like totalk about themselves. And that's kind of theadvantage you have when you're asking peoplequestions. Unless they're really trying to hidesomething, they like the fact that someone's askingthem questions, and if you can ask them things theyhaven't been asked before, or ask stories that theyhave never told, they kind of really welcome it, andsome see it as a real release, is what I find. So as faras what I've learned, I mean, you know, I think just

with anything, experience helps you. You justbecome a little more subtle, and you learn how to, Iguess, not so much follow a script of questions, but,like if someone says something, you just sort of continue on that thought, and see where it goes.

And do you feel like it's helped you become abetter listener? Do you ever apply it to normalconversations?

I think I'm generally a good listener anyway. I mean,

that's maybe a preposterous thing for someone to say.I like listening to people, it's not even out of … I'mnot like a professional listener or anything like that,

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"... telling

about some

historical

incident,

who cares,ultimately?

Maybe it's

my pretense

that that's

interesting.

But a lot of

it has to dowith the fact

that I'm

interested,

and I'm sort

of writing

for myself.

And thenthere's the

hope that

other people

read it. If I

want to give

you another

answer I'llsay: People

read it and

maybe they

change their

ideas or they

get

interestedlike I got

ut en oy peop e s stor es.

You obviously travel a lot, so presumably you liketo travel. I was curious about how your professionaffects that, and whether it ever either enhancesor interferes with your experience of traveling, whether you always sort of feel like it's a means toan end, because you're going to turn it into

something later on.

It's not always a means to an end. I'm not a goodtourist, I don't like tourism. I don't often go to a place just to check out all the cultural sites of a city. Sonormally I like to go places where I know people, orwhere I'm going to work. And, in some ways I liketraveling, in other ways I'm sort of fed up by thewhole notion. I don't think it necessarily enhancesyour work, just traveling, just being in new places,because you always have to sort of change gears,learn a new place, and that takes time. I'm justrestless by nature, it doesn't mean I like traveling.And I think I find, I know a lot of people around, indifferent cities, and so it's not -- it might soundstrange -- but it's not that hard to say good-bye,because I know there's other people where I'm going.I can sort of fit in in a lot of places. I don't know if I'm answering your question.

Well, I mean, I was wondering, more about since, because of the nature of the work you do, aboutthese different places, travel is an inherent part of that…

Oh, it's essential. I mean, you have to -- if I'm writingabout the Middle East, I have to go there, and if possible, stay long enough to get a real feeling forwhat's going on. I don't like just traveling in for ashort time. I've done that before, because sometimesyou work for magazines and they have a budget, andif you're working for them, they want something by acertain time. I'd rather go to a place and spend acouple of months, get to know it, get to know thepeople.

Do you feel drawn to certain parts of the worldmore than others?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm drawn to the Middle East forwhatever reasons and I'm drawn to the Balkans.

And, what are your theories for the reasonsbehind that? Just because those are tumultuous

parts of the world?

It's not about that, because you can find other





interested."

tumu tuous parts o t e wor . t s t e act t at, orwhatever reasons, when I was younger I becameinterested, say, in the Middle East, and sort of suckedinto it. I went once and I did the book Palestine, andI wasn't really going to go back, I didn't really haveany intention to go back, but when the secondIntifada broke out, my interest was rekindled, and it'sback to that same feeling that I had, I used to feel,which is that I feel compelled to go and do somethingthere. I'll only go to a place I feel sort of compelledto go to. You know, that just pulls me in. I meanthere are other places that interest me, and I wouldn'tmind going if a magazine sort of made it easy for meto do it. The places I'm really sucked into, that I'mgoing to go out of my way to go to, there aren't thatmany of them, to tell you the truth.

You recently spent some more time in the MiddleEast? In the Occupied Territories?

Yeah, in particular Gaza. I was there in Novemberfor a couple of weeks, and then I was there Februaryand March, a couple months, and I just got back lessthan a week ago.

And how did it compare with the first time youwent there?

Very different, I felt that I was much more on theinside this time. And I actually rented a place in a

refugee camp. So I stayed in the camp. And I got toknow people that way, where I actually had someonewith me the whole time, because I don't speakArabic, and it's a place where you don't want to be just a random foreigner walking around becausethey'll be suspicious of you. For good reason. So, Ithink I was a bit more on the inside this time around,and I hope the book'll reflect it.

And so was that sort of more like your experience

in the other book, Safe Area: Gorazde?

Yeah, maybe a little more like that. I mean, Safe Area: Gorazde had some elements that won't be inthis book; I was staying with a family. But in Rafahthat was very difficult to organize, because peopleare so poor and because of the situation with women,where you can't really be in the same place that thewomen are in the household. It's very difficult foryou to stay at someone's house for an extendedperiod of time. You know, for a couple days OK, but,

ultimately, it's just a situation where it's very hard tobe in the same -- you know, you're not even reallysu osed to see the women in a lot of these

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households. So that wouldn't really have beenpractical for any extended period of time.

And how did the situation there compare to thelast time you were there?

It was just a lot harder, a lot more violent. You know,

life's pretty bad, pretty rough in certain parts. It's verydifferent in different parts of the OccupiedTerritories. Where I was was a refugee camp calledRafah, which is on the southern border of Gaza, withEgypt. And there were a lot of house demolitionsgoing on there, and there are just some sort of spookyparts of the town because they're basically under fire,or in zones where there's a lot of bullets flyingaround at different times, so it was just a differentsort of feeling from where I was before, where Icould just sort of travel, get in a taxi and go

anywhere. Getting down to Rafah was hard. Youknow, there are checkpoints, and you can get trappedthere. There's only one road out, basically. And if it'sclosed for three days or four days, you're stuck there.In the first intifada I was kind of going from oneplace to another, sort of doing a little tour. In thiscase I just wanted to be in one place, much like theGorazde book, I feel it was a better way of doing it,get to know some people well.

Have you found that most of the people that you

talk to have been very receptive to you? Theywant to get their stories out to you or throughyou?

In general that's true. See, I was researching anincident that took place in 1956. I'm going to bewriting about what's going on now. But so it doesn'tread like my last book, just like Palestine updated,

it's sort of centered around something that happenedin 1956, and I just tried to find some old men to findout what happened on that day, that time. And so thestory's about finding that story, and meeting these oldmen. And a lot of these old men were more thanhappy to talk .… Some of them, you begin to findthat they have problems with their memory, which isalso part of the story. But they were more than happyto talk. On the other hand, you'd come across peoplewho'd say: Why are you writing about something thathappened in 1956, why don't you write about what'sgoing on now? So some people just didn't understandwhat I was doing, or didn't see why they should be

talking to me.

Do you ever encounter distrust of you just as a

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Sure. I mean, it's to be expected. But I made sure Iwas with someone who was trusted by the people,and he made sure that I was kind of introduced to theguys, the local guys who were sort of running thatpart of the camp. And so, once people see mewalking around with those people, and they know

that they're visiting me in my flat all the time, thenpeople felt comfortable with me. I knew I had to bethere for a couple of months just to get to that pointwhere people really knew me by sight. In fact when Iwent back, people were, you know, waving -- peopleI didn't recognize at all obviously sort of knew who Iwas. It gets around, there are so few foreigners there.

There was a woman in, I think Palestine, whosaid: I've told other journalists, other foreigners, my story, and nothing happened as a result of

that. What's the point of talking to you?

It's a good question, it's one I've never been able togive a satisfactory answer. So I don't know how toanswer that question even now. I mean, telling aboutsome historical incident, who cares, ultimately?Maybe it's my pretense that that's interesting. But alot of it has to do with the fact that I'm interested, andI'm sort of writing for myself. And then there's thehope that other people read it. If I want to give youanother answer I'll say: People read it and maybe

they change their ideas or they get interested like Igot interested. That can happen too. But it's on asmall scale, I mean, what's my audience? It's a fewthousand people, probably.

Who do you think your audience is? How wouldyou describe what you think your audience is?

In some cases I think it's people who don't knowanything about the topic, but sort of want to know a

little bit, and they're just kind of intrigued by themedium as a way of telling it, or a way of gettinginside some topic: Oh, it's a comic book about that,OK, I'll read that. They don't want to read EdwardSaid or Noam Chomsky. That's part of it. But theother group is people who actually know the regionquite well, other journalists or UN people orwhatever. A lot of those people contact me.

Do you think your audience is primarilyAmerican?

It's primarily American. Well, the book's beentranslated into some other languages, so it's not just

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,audience, in a way. My goal is to make those topicsinteresting. I want people to be interested like I'minterested, and I think comics by their nature areentertaining, or they can be, or they should be, really.So, that's kind of the idea: I don't want to be boring, Iwant people to get that same thrill that I had.

The woman I mentioned who asked: What's thepoint of talking to you? I think it's interesting thatyou include her and other characters like her, andyour reaction to that is an example of theambivalence that you feel about theworthwhileness, or lack thereof, of your work, and the self-reflexiveness that appears in yourwork. Can you just talk a little bit about yourmotivation for including that? Is it sort of like acaveat?

I don't think it's up to me to tell people what to doabout it. I don't have grand illusions about whatpeople should do, or how I can affect their lives onthat level. My feeling is, all I want to do is be amedium of other people's stories. Just present them ina way the audience can digest. Not in a way that'sgoing to turn them off. And it's up to those peoplewhat they do with that information. Just pay a littlemore attention to the news, or just understand a littlemore from reading the book what's going on, or getinvolved in activism, or get involved in reading, youknow, really get involved in the subject itself. I'vehad all those reactions from people. So I don't really

feel like I have this goal of what I want to get. Youknow, it's sort of written for me too. I'm the onewho's curious. And it was just, in some ways, goingmyself to see, because I want to see what's going onin the world, and then not feeling like I'm just atourist. So I have to produce something. I have tohave a reason for being there, in a way. And thatreason is the book. Or I tell people I'm writing a

book. Why should people in Gorazde talk to me? Inthe end I have to say: Well, I'm going to dosomething about your lives. And they don't reallyunderstand what I'm talking about: OK, you want todo a book about us, that's fine. But that's ultimately,you know, I'm obligated to do it. You want to getsomething out of it.

So you feel like the book is just sort of abyproduct, incidentally, of your curiosity?

Not incidental, but I want to produce something, andI plan to do something. The major factor is that I'm just interested, I want to see. And then -- yeah -- I





want to do something. What can I do? I'm acartoonist. So I'll just do that. I'm not the kind whogoes to demonstrations or anything like that. I'm justdoing my bit, my very limited bit.

And can you talk about why you decided toinclude your doubts in your work?

Part of that has to do with where I came out of. Therewere a lot of autobiographical comics that started outin the late 1980s, and in some ways, because it'salmost the easiest thing for a cartoonist to do is writeabout his own life. So a lot of my early, early comics-- some are in Defeatist -- were autobiographical.And so, when I started to do my journalism, it was journalism, but that autobiographical thing gotcarried over with it. I just thought I'd do a comicabout my experiences in Palestine. The journalism

came because that's what I was trained to do. It justseemed to make sense to have myself in there. That'sbasically what you're asking, right? I mean, what wasyour original question, maybe I'm totally off the tracknow.

It was about -- you know, especially in Palestine --there's a lot about your guilty privilege, beingsomeone who can leave at any time, and yourdoubt about whether it's worth it to be doing whatyou're doing.

That's because those are real feelings, and…

And I was wondering whether part of theintention was to give American readers someoneto identify with?

It wasn't really the intention, although that makessense. I mean, that would be a fair reading of it. In away it's because I don't really believe the idea of objective journalism as it's portrayed. I find, a lot of the journalism that's written as if you're a fly on the

wall is really sort of phony. And it has this pretenseof being very fair-minded and removed, and that'snot true at all. I mean, an American reporter has allthe framework of an American person inside him orher. And it shows in the work whether they thinkthey're being objective or not. I'd rather just get rid of that completely and say: It's me, these are myprejudices, these are my doubts, and I'm writingabout this, and you're seeing it through my eyes. Andmaybe you identify with it because I'm a characterlike someone you know, but that's not the intention.

The intention is more to demonstrate that this is me,and it's my opinion. And I have my prejudices, and Ihave m reconceived notions. Like an one does





like any reporter does, but I'm just sort of 'fessing upto it.

I'm just much more taken with the journalism of someone like Hunter S. Thompson or George Orwell,who's my ultimate hero. I'm much more taken withtheir work, which was personal. It drives me crazy

sometimes to read American newspapers, the NewYork Times and "this reporter" -- it's just so phony.You know, tell me who you are, and then I'll knowhow to evaluate what your take is on it.

The British press is much more interesting, becauseyou get a feeling for the personality of the author,and it never gets in the way of the story, really. Youknow … you could even argue that my personalitygets in the way of the story in Palestine, I retreat alittle more in Gorazde, because I had strong

characters then, who could be the ones who weretelling the story. And I don't know exactly how I'll doit for the next book, where I'll be, as far as thecharacter goes.

I was wondering whether you identify as anAmerican, since you were born in Malta and grewup partly in Australia.

I guess that wouldn't really be accurate. I think I'vegot a lot of Americanness inside me, there's no doubtabout it, I'm more American than other things, butthere's a fair amount of European in me. So I'm notquite sure. I'd say I'm probably more transatlanticthan anything else.

And do you, just out of curiosity, as separate fromhow you identify with yourself as American ornot, do you feel like you have to downplay thatwhen you are in these situations, to avoidincurring anti-American sentiment?

Oh, I probably did more this time around. I mean, thewar with Iraq broke out when I was there, and Ialways basically said that I was a Maltese, but I'velived in the United States, and I know the UnitedStates well. And when people asked me, I'd say:Yeah, I feel more American in some ways thanMaltese. They'd ask me: Where are you mostcomfortable? And I'd say, I'm most comfortable inthe States, probably. So they knew that -- I didn't feellike I was misrepresenting myself.

I was curious about the culture of war reportersthat you refer to a little obliquely, especially inSafe Area: Gorazde? Do you feel like one of them,

'





that?

I don't really think of myself as a war reporter, to tellyou the truth.

What do you think of yourself as?

Just a cartoonist, I mean, doing journalism in comicsform. To me a war reporter is really anxious to getonto the war, and I'm not quite that way. I'm moreinterested in the effects. There doesn't have to beshooting around for me to get my story, I think. Likeanyone who gets used to a place, you get drawn togunfire, you want to see what's going on, but that's just more curiosity than being a war reporter. Andsome of those incidents will get told, but I don'treally consider myself a war reporter. Not that I'magainst it. Not that I feel like it's some sort of a

derogatory term. I know a lot of people who probablyyou could say they're war reporters and they're reallyinteresting people, fun to hang out with…

But those are the exceptions, or…

Well...

Or what is the scene like? Do all the war reporterscongregate?

You kind of do...

Is there a war reporter personality?

Well, I don't know if there's a war reporterpersonality. They're all interesting, they're all sort of eccentric, it seems, on some level. They docongregate, they do hang out with each other, butthat's important, you know, for safety reasons, youneed to know the other people around, you have tohelp other people out if they're in trouble. No onegoes out of their way for a war reporter like anotherwar reporter. So it's good to know them, and theywant to know you, they want to know what's goingon. They help each other out a lot. And in some waysit's a pretty tight group of people. You know, whenthey lose someone, everyone sort of knows theperson, everyone knows the risks. You can sort of separate also the war photographers, who to me areout of their minds, from the war reporters, who don't just write about war but the consequences, theeconomics. So, war photographers really push

themselves, they're trying to really get up there,whereas a war reporter can sort of stay back and dohis or her work.





I read Notes from a Defeatist , and a lot of that isvery different. How did you move from what youwere doing there to the more political stuff?

There is some political stuff in there. If you had readthe comics as they came out, you'd definitely get thefeeling that my work was shifting. That doesn't really

show it so much. But when I started doing comics,my main goal was to sort of just be funny and dosocial satire, political satire. I like making peoplelaugh but it's hard for me to make people laugh justfor the hell of it. Even though I've got nothing againstthat either. So I was doing social satire, and slowlybut surely my work became sort of more political, if you read How I Loved the War, the book about thefirst Gulf War, did you read that one? Where I'mbreaking up with my girlfriend, I'm living in Berlin…

Right, yeah.

That shows sort of a shift in my work, and also thestuff about bombing of civilians. I mean I've alwaysbeen pretty political anyway, so it didn't seem likesuch a hop, skip and a jump for my work to moveinto that sphere where autobiography and politics --you can write about yourself and politics at the sametime. I like that mix, I like the fact that you're not somuch a participant in world events, but you're

dragged along by them, and that's a valid topic forwriting about, or as a subject for art, it's a great thing.So by the time I did the book about Iraq -- the firstGulf War -- as soon as I finished that I went toPalestine. So you could sort of see this shift, and alsothe fact that it was autobiographical and thenPalestine is sort of autobiographical, so the transitionisn't that hard, in a way. The book about Gorazdebecomes much more journalistic, where I'm actuallytrying to tell the story of one place verymethodically. I think Palestine is more organic, and

Gorazde's a bit more methodical.

Do you see that as an evolution in your work thatwill continue in that direction, to be moremethodical?

Probably, yeah. I think this book is going be prettymethodical, for all it's good points and bad pointsthat's probably how it's going to end up. I think atsome point I'll go back to just doing funny stuff, getaway from that for awhile, just creatively to go some

other place.

Your work is different from just straight





journalism in many ways, but one is that it's morein-depth and there's more of a narrative, at leastthan newspaper journalism, and I was wonderingto what extent you consciously create charactersalmost in a literary way of yourself and of otherpeople?

Of other people I don't.

But of yourself?

Of myself -- it's not that I create a character, it's that Itake out parts of my character. It's not a fullcharacter. I think my character in Gorazde is morelike me. The character in Palestine is more apparent,more there, sort of part of the story, but I've cut outcertain aspects of my personality. The aspects thatare in there are accurate, but I leave out -- you know,

if I'm emotional about something, I leave that out. It just doesn't serve the story. I'd rather talk about thesarcasm or the cynicism, or the self-reflection thatyou were talking about before that has to do withcynicism.

It tends to be a very humorous, self-deprecatingkind of characterization.

Yeah, maybe, but I mean, I feel that way, it's not --you know especially when I was doing Palestine, I

was very unsure of myself, I wasn't sure if what Iwas doing had any -- not that it didn't have any value,but I didn't know how seriously people were going totake it, so in some ways I tried not to take it thatseriously on some level. That was almostsubconscious, I think. So, in Gorazde I decided: OK.I really didn't feel that sense of uncertainty aboutmyself, or about my work. I'd sort of proved tomyself that I could do it.

Because of the reception that Palestine had gotten,

or just because you were pleased with it?

Not so much the reception, but I felt like it worked.Yeah, I was pleased enough with it. So I didn't feellike that was a necessary, or even a legitimate part of my personality in Gorazde. And that's going to befairly absent, I bet, in this next work. I'm sure I'll bein it in some way -- you can't help but be in it whenyou're dealing with people, they're your friends, youwant to show the friendships.

But in terms of other people, you just try toportray them as accurately and straightforwardlyas you can?





Accurately and straightforwardly as possible.Honestly. I keep a pretty rigorous journal, so I wouldreconstruct everything that had happened that daythat was worth reconstructing, and so a lot of thestories that aren't interviews are based on that.Sometimes I would just take a little note here and

there, just so when I write in my journal I'd justremind myself of a certain situation or of whatsomeone said. I try to be as accurate as possible withthat sort of thing.

Is it ideal for you to be able to depict somethingvisually if possible? Is that sort of more succinct?

I'd rather do it that way. Yeah, I'm walking around inRafah and I'm thinking, I'm going to have to drawthis stuff. I'm always thinking -- like, making mentalreminders to myself, which I'll put right in my journal, I'll say, don't forget how many kids you haveto draw in the background, because there are kidseverywhere. So I'm thinking in those terms, it's likethe atmosphere -- sometimes you can't capture itexactly on film, but you're thinking about it, you'rethinking about the way the dust is swirling in the air,and bits of trash are flying up, all that stuff you canreally never capture unless you're a really goodphotographer. And I'm not, and I've got a cheapo

camera. But yeah, you don't need to write about theswirling dust and the sand that's blowing in youreyes, you can just draw that all the time. And if youdraw it over and over again, people get the message.

You talked before about how you prefer Britishnews sources to American, but more specifically Iwas wondering what news sources you like toread.

I like reading the Independent . And the Guardian.Those are great publications. There are journalistswho write in the first person, and I appreciate that.Because if you read someone like Robert Fisk, whois one of the Independent 's journalists, you know hispolitical viewpoints once you've read enough of him.So you can either trust, or read his work with a grainof salt, or swallow it fully, depending on what yourown inclinations are.

Are there any American sources that appeal toyou?

I'll read the New York Times, maybe to get somebasic facts down, but I would never read the New





what a place really feels like. It's useless. Absolutelyuseless, and most American journalists -- and Istudied American journalism -- it's just this tendencytowards uselessness as far as giving people a feel forwhat it's like.

I was wondering about influences. Whether you

have influences, whether they're journalists orcartoonists? If there's anybody out there who'sdoing more or less the same thing you are?

There's a cartoonist named Ted Rall who went to

Afghanistan and did some work about that. So youcould say he's doing it. I mean people likeSpiegelman are doing it. So, there've been a fewthings here and there. But I'm never quitecomfortable with that question because I don't really

know, exactly. I can mention a few people here andthere, but it's not -- I don't even read that manycomics myself. My main influences are writers, andin particular Orwell. But in my style, even fictionwriters will grab me and make me sort of think: Oh,that's a great way of writing. It's not like you writelike them, but you get sort of a thrill by their writing,and in some ways you want to infect your ownwriting with that.

Which of your books is your favorite?

I think the best comic I wrote is How I Loved the

War. And that I wrote a long time ago. But what Ilike about that book is it's not really journalistic, so itallowed me freedom just to write. And I always lookat that and think: God I want to write like that again,I want to write with that sort of freedom. But whenyou're writing journalistically you kind of have to --OK, you can write in a way that's interesting, butbasically, you're trying to move the story forward,that's the main thing. And great phrases you had, blah

blah blah, things that become your little jewels, youkind of have to get rid of. Because they just get in theway sometimes. So, I don't know if that's my bestwork, but it's the one I'm most attached to. ProbablyGorazde's the best work. But the one I'm mostattached to is that comic book.

So did you feel like that was more artistic, asopposed to journalistic?

Yeah. I'd like to get back to it, you know, if possible.

The journalism is -- you can be artistic in journalism,no doubt about it, but I really let myself go in thatone. I don't know if I have it in me anymore. I'm kind





o cur ous, e to try t.

What you're saying about journalism and aboutthe Times specifically and how it doesn't give youany sense of what it's like to be in a place, is kindof related to a question I wanted to ask…becausefor me, probably the most moving moment in Palestine -- and maybe in any of your books -- was

at the end, the boy in the rain. And even though itwas less dramatic than a lot of the other stories

the characters had to tell, it just gave me a senseof what it was like to live there probably morethan anything else did. I don't know if part of thatwas because I could relate to it more, as anAmerican, I could relate to this kind of minorincident of humiliation, more than I could relateto being tortured or killed…

Exactly. Right, right.

And I was wondering to what extent you'reconscious of that, and how much you think of your audience when focusing on anecdotal stuff like that.

I focus on anecdotal stuff, but it's not that I'm somuch conscious of the audience as I'm conscious of myself and what affects me. And I agree with you:you can find any number of hard, hard stories that

would fill an Amnesty report or a Human RightsWatch report that are terrible stories, and arecompelling in their way. And I'll tell some of those.But yeah, it's that little thing -- it's the little thingsthat break things down. I mean it's that sort of thingthat in some ways is the most telling because you canrelate to it. Torture is a hard thing to relate to. Theidea of standing in the rain because someone ismaking you do it, is something you can -- it almosteven harkens back to the schoolyard. And it'ssomething that -- yeah, it's small and that's what

makes it powerful, I think. I mean I agree with you100 per cent.

A lot of the stuff I'm going to do about Rafah is thesame way. You can say the Occupation is horrible onthe levels of the killings and the house demolitionsand all that sort of thing, but then you have to findout what all that stuff means, or what are the lesserthings that happen. Just not being able to go to yoursister's wedding because of a road block. That's thestuff that really affects people, because it wears them

down on that sort of hour-by-hour basis. And thatstuff is -- it's important to relate it. And it often getsmissed.





Yeah, definitely. It's not stuff that a Timesreporter will dwell on.

You're not going to report on the littlest humiliations,but it's the littlest humiliations that add up, I think.Maybe that kid will never be tortured. But that's

something that would stick in my mind if I was him. | June 2003

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer and teacher

living in Brooklyn.

http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/jsacco.html#top

mailto:[email protected]

interview | joe sacco

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