Drawing Palestine

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.