Welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series. My name's Christina
Hamilton, I'm the director of the series and today we are thrilled to
present journalist and cartoonist
Joe Sacco, yeah.
And also thrilled that today is a co presentation
with the International Institute's Conflict and Peace Initiative.
A big thank you to them for embarking on this with us and
also a thank you to the
26 additional supporters as you will see, we are not going to read
through the list, but if you're all here in the house,
a big thank you to all of you;
tremendous
support, tremendous support. And a big thank you to Ashley Bates for bringing
them all together. And of course our series partners, Arts, Engine,
and Michigan Radio
91.7 FM. So a special welcome to you if you are joining us
today for the first time, because you are part of one of these
different groups, or you were brought in by CPI and had never been
to the Penny Stamps Series before. For those of you who have no
idea who we are, the Penny Stamps Series is a program through the
Stamps School of Art and Design. We look to present creators and innovators
like our distinguished guest today, as a way for our students to connect
with creative leaders of the day. And we are here,
at the Michigan Theater every Thursday at
5:10 PM, always free, and you can pick up, we have a new
calendar for our winter season that just came out. Pick one up on
your way out and plan to join us. You can find us online,
you can find us on Facebook, plan to join us, same time,
same place on
Thursdays. Our co presenter today, the Conflict and Peace Initiative was
just launched at the University of Michigan this September and this is its
first official event. The Initiative is dedicated to advancing a deeper
understanding of the root causes, dynamics and consequences of conflict
and peace. All of its projects will involve collaborative partnerships like
today across disciplines and ongoing engagement with anti violence and anti
discrimination and advocacy groups. So, look for more to come.
Please do remember to turn off your
cellphones. We are not going to have our regular Q&A today.
But we are going to have a book signing in the lobby,
so if you wanna say hello to Joe, you can join the book
signing. This is gonna happen directly after. And I have been asked by
the theater personnel that if you're going to be in line for the
book signing, they want to have the line going up the stairs and
around. And this would be fantastic for you because, we also have with
us today a very special musical concert out in the lobby with two
musicians from the Juthoor Ensemble of Amman, Jordan. They seek to revive
roots of Arabic music by developing the Middle East instrumental heritage
for contemporary appreciation. And their performance features the duo,
Abdul Wahab Kayyali on the
oud and Mohamad Tahboub on the violin. You may have heard them on
your way in. They are going to play during the book signing as
well. So you can catch them then and tomorrow evening they'll be playing
in Detroit at Trinosophes. So many opportunities. Now, to set the stage
for today. We will be presenting a conversation, which I'm sure you've figured
out and to lead the conversation, we have happened on just the right
guy and our partner today, Christian Davenport. Christian Davenport is a
professor of Political Science, he's also the director of the Conflict and
Peace Initiative at university's International Institute. His primary research
interest include political conflict, human rights, racism and popular culture.
He is the author of six books, most recently, 'How Social Movements Die'
and 'The Peace
Continuum'. One of Christian's current projects is a book called 'Pop Struggle'
which explores repression and descent in film, comics and graphic novels.
And joining him, of course, if our guest of honor today,
Joe Sacco. A little bit on Joe. Joe Sacco calls himself "a cartoonist
who makes comics" and he does not subscribe to the term widely used for
his work of "graphic novels" as he does not see his work as
novels. His work chronicles history through genocides, wars and injustices
in the US and around the world. He has been called "the moral
draftsman." Credited with producing two masterpieces of comics journalism
and praised for bringing the recent history of the Middle East and Bosnia
to life more vividly than most journalists and documentary makers. His books
includes 'Days of Destruction', 'Days of Revolt', 'Footnotes in Gaza', 'Safe
Area Gorazde' and 'The Great War'. All of these books I believe are,
all these titles I did see on the table outside
in the lobby. Sacco has received many awards for his pioneering work including
the 1996 American Book Award,
2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2001 Eisner Award, the 2010 Ridenhour Book Prize
and the 2012 Oregon Book Award. I don't know if you all saw,
reported last night in the Michigan Daily, there was a nice piece
premier... Talking about Joe coming here to speak today.
And
in it, it said, "When asked to describe his work in one sentence, Sacco
said, 'The reality I see it's completely subjective. I cannot be the monopoly
on the concept of truth.' Sacco's vantage is at the most important thing
for people to know when reading and observing his work is that journalism
is imperfect, but journalism in all its various mediums whether broadcast,
print, or radio has the ability to alter the world. Perhaps more now
than ever before, today's social climate demands that inquisitive and self
aware journalists like Joe Sacco remain critical in the work that they do
in order to preserve the integrity of the media and defend the notion
of truth." I thought that was great reporting in the Michigan Daily.
Please welcome to the stage Joe Sacco and Christian
Davenport. Hello. You all hear us? Call in response. You all hear us? Yeah.
Wow, seriously, you're gonna do like that?
Okay. Okay, so special thanks to Penny
Stamps. Special thanks to Penny Stamps in facilitating and co presenting
this event alongside with the International Institute's Conflict and Peace
Initiative, which I direct. Special thanks to our 26 plus co sponsors which
was an amazing
dynamic
once Joe had signed on and everyone was coming out the woodworks to
basically come here and that's a really amazing thing. And Joe, welcome
to the University of Michigan and to Michigan Theater. It's an honor to
have you here as I've said several times since you've been here.
You're actually the first conversation that CPI has had; there's many reasons
for that which we'll get to.
CPI seeks to engage individuals from different fields and subdisciplines
and orientations about the subject of conflict and violence and peace.
And trying to bring those people together is not the easiest thing to
do, so we actually seek out people who are unifiers in many respects.
People who
compel other individuals to come forward outside of your box and so your
work speaks to so many different people on so many different levels and
so this is one of the reasons for having you here so
I think the 26 sponsors and the Michigan Theater makes you kind of...
You should feel embraced by the U Event family basically is the point
and so please
feel free to do that. Today our conversation's gonna sound a little bit
like it's somewhere between This is Your Life, and anyone remembers that
old tv show, This is Your Life, you pull somebody out and you'd be
asking questions about their life and... My mom is backstage
I bet. Oh, you saw her already. I thought we hid that well.
Okay, my bad. And like Inside the Actors Studio, so it's like a
hybrid in between that. But it's really a moment to reflect about your work
as an artist, your work as an advocate for human rights,
your work as a peacemaker, and I will argue, your work as an
educator.
And so, we're really gonna jump in many respects and think about
what you're doing. You might wanna look back every now and then 'cause
we'll refer to some of your stuff. But
please begin with, tell us your personal story and your creative journey
of sorts into comic and graphic novel genre, how did you get started,
why did you get started, who got you started?
Okay. Well, first of all, thank you to all the people that you
thanked, and to the Michigan Theater. A lot of people had a hand
in having me come out and thanks to Christian.
I was drawing since I was a kid.
Basically, my sister and I would draw comics
and we'd both stolen a cartoon character from an English magazine.
I grew up in Australia and that's why it was English
and
we would fight over who had stolen it first.
And little by little,
I just kept going with it
but I never, not in a million years when I was in high
school or even in college, did I think that was a career path.
I didn't think on those terms. I studied journalism
and that's... I wanted to write
hard news. That's what interested me is like who, what, when,
where, why and how.
And my dream was to work on a newspaper.
But that dream didn't come to pass. After I graduated from the University
of Oregon, there were
no jobs for journalists really who just came out of school.
There were a lot of journalists coming out of school. Everyone had watched
All the President's Men and everyone wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein.
Who doesn't? Yeah. So,
I didn't like the journalism jobs I ended up getting and at some
point I got pretty frustrated and I just decided... I'm still drawing.
I've been drawing
continually but as an
offshoot artistic project for myself. And then I thought maybe I can make
a living at that. And
15 years later, I can make a
living out of it. It took a long time. It took a long
time.
If you wanna know how I got into journalism or how I got
into comics and journalism is that... Yeah, that kind of combo. Right. Well,
I started doing comics that was satire, funny stuff. That's why I got
into comics because I like to make people
laugh. But, I studied journalism and, of course, I cared about what was
going on in the world
and I cared a lot about what was going on in the Middle
East for whatever reasons. So, by the time I was
trying to scratch out a living doing comic books, I was living in
Berlin doing rock posters and album covers that's generally how I was able
to scrape by, I thought, "I'm just going to go the the Middle
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East and
spend time in the West Bank.
And
see if I can do a series of comics about this. Why'd you
pick the West Bank first?
Well, I was interested in the Palestinians.
Okay. That's another, that's another... We can get in to why
that particular reason, we can get into that.
Okay. I've seen a lot of comics and there's a lot of navel gazing
in comics. There are lot of comics I can't really relate to.
I wanted a comic that I would read.
And I wanted to read about something politically going on.
I would love to read something about the Middle East. And I thought well,
just go and do it. So it was just a matter of getting
up some courage. Saving up a little money and going.
And I didn't really know what I was doing to be quite frank.
I didn't have this vision in mind, I'm going to do comics in
journalism and comics form. It was more like I'm gonna go see what
my experiences are and just maybe do a travel log or
autobiographical stuff that has some political stuff. But when I got there,
right away, I just began asking those journalistic questions because that's
what I studied and that was kind of in my blood.
And that's where it began.
Like who
intrigued you or inspired artistically with regards to the initial kind
of comic form or no one?
Initially, it was the old Mad magazines. Mad comics, I should say.
Not Mad magazines. The comics from the 50s. They were so outrageous and
so wild and there was so much detail in them that I like
that stuff. And then later on it was Robert
Crumb. I love the old 60s underground comics. I love the freedom
of them.
And sometimes they had a political point, often they didn't. But there was
a freedom about them that I really appreciated.
I'm always... Anyone who's like into Robert Crumb? Everyone like Robert
Crumb? That I always found to be
a truly amazing experience. He's a ride that you just don't come off
of in many respects 'cause it goes so many different ways so that's... What's
the first Crumb one that you saw actually?
Well actually the first Crumb stuff I saw was really, I didn't like
from when I first saw him 'cause I think almost the first thing
I saw was Angelfood McSpade. Oh wow. And
I was like, "Very intense." I didn't get that at all.
And it's just, I mean it's racist.
It's hard to get around that.
Yeah. And
Crumb says, it's just lines on paper and I've never really subscribed to
that. But, I don't think deep down Robert Crumb is a racists. So
I've learned slowly. Eventually, I got back into his work and learn to
really appreciate who he was as an artist.
There you go. These are some images from Palestine.
One of your successes, I won't argue of your work,
has been your ability to expose,
social injustices to audiences, newer and perhaps maybe the same audience
but in a different way,
that would otherwise be ignorant or unsympathetic to the topic. I think
that's a powerful aspect of what it is that you do.
The role of narration and image and sequence seems to be crucial for
you achieving this. But can you talk a little bit about what
your, you don't wanna call it graphic journalism,
what your approach... Can you tackle a bit more about what your approach
is in the combinations of these elements? And why you think it is
particularly a useful medium for discussing social injustices?
Well, to be honest, I never thought of it as a particularly...
I didn't think of it as a particularly
great way of telling social injustice issues, to get into social injustice
issues. I was just a cartoonist. So truth be told, I think if
I were a film maker I would have gone to the same places.
So it's not as if,
I thought this will be a great way to tell these stories.
To be honest I wasn't sure too it was great way to tell
those stories. I was just trying to see where it would go.
And initially I thought, well, this is gonna be, this is where my
career ends trying to do this sort of thing. Because comics aren't generally
about those things.
I do think it's... I've learned to understand more about why it is
a good way to get to those sorts of things. But I think the
main reason I would say, is comics are just naturally subversive.
And...
Why is that? Well I think,
let's say you don't know anything about the Palestinian conflict.
And you see a very good book by someone who really knows that's
about the Palestinian conflict, and you think "Uh, mmm," There's either
that or is that there is this comic book. Yeah, yeah. And so,
it's strange because on a very
surface level, comics look easy. And that's part of the subversive nature
of them. They're appealing. They're visceral. And they're immediate. You
open up, I hope, you open up the comic book and right away
there you are in Rafa, in a refugee camp in Gaza. It's not this
explanation that gets you there. And of course, I have a great
admiration for prose and there's a lot I get out of prose, but
if you're looking at the particular
things about comics, it's just, they grab you right away.
You find yourself in a place and repeated images of that place allows something
about that place to sink in.
In a way they might not
within prose. In prose you might mention one time that
there was graffiti on the wall but when you're in these refugee camps,
everywhere you go there's graffiti on the wall and you can show that
in the background, repeated images over and over again in the background,
not even foregrounding it, but it's there always.
It follows the reader around like it follows you around when you're there.
That's a profound... I remember when I first went to Northern Ireland and
you go to Falls Road and it was this amazing kind of characterization
of...
You might have something in a newspaper or not but what you have
is this very detailed images on these walls, this graffiti. And someone
always told me that if you wanted to go to Northern Ireland and
figure out what is stirring the troubles, or the conflict I'm told is
actually the correct label, not the troubles, which was the British moniker,
but you'd go to the Falls Road and you look and see what
these images were to get a better sense of what was going on.
I think that graphic depiction, that kind of power, is something that's
there. But on
Gaza, Gaza is one of the most isolated places on the planet.
What do you want readers to come away with
feeling and understanding about Gaza from looking at your work?
Ultimately it's that people in Gaza are human beings.
If you wanted to say what it all boils down to...
These are people who are in a very difficult situation,
basically trapped,
living out history that never really ceases. As one guy told me,
"Events are continuous," meaning
they've never stopped for these people. They never have time to digest their
history because they're always living their history. They can't be nostalgic
about their history.
I wanna give people a sense of the history of what's happened to
the people in Gaza, a sense of them as people
and an understanding of
what it's like to be caged in.
What drives you to pick a topic?
Like some things that matter to folks, you're driven by... You're driven
by hatred, you're driven by fear, you come across a book that makes
you wanna explore it further, a painting, you meet somebody. What
gets you to pick the topics that you pick?
Anger, I would say. What got you to pick? Gaza got you... Yeah, we
can talk about...
It's a sense of anger, I'm angry at the way things are,
that feeling of unfairness or injustice, whatever that means, but you feel
something in your gut.
And I'm careful about how I pick topics because comics take a long
time to draw, so you have to think to yourself, "Okay,
five years from now when I'm still working on this book,
will it still matter to me?"
And we can talk about these cases specifically if you want.
If you wanna talk about
like what got me to go to Palestine in the first place,
we can do that. Yeah, definitely. It's the sense...
Growing up I began to slowly understand that I thought Palestinians were
terrorists
and that's how I looked at Palestinians. And it was a very long
process of education, and a lot was self education, that got me to
think something else. Because really, the only time the word Palestinian
was ever used in a news broadcast... And I'm not paying that much
attention to what's going on in the Middle East, but
the evening news is on and, "Palestinians launch Katyusha rockets into Northern
Israel. Palestinian commandos attacked a bus." All these things, objectively
true, but that was the only time I heard the word Palestinian and
there was never any context provided.
Eventually my critique began to... I began to understand that journalism,
the subject I loved, was partly responsible for this because objective style
reporting. And there was an anger at how I felt the wool had
been pulled over my eyes. And the first time I actually,
that began to change how I saw Palestinians, was the time of the
Sabra Shatila massacres in
Lebanon in the early
1980's. When Israel invaded Lebanon, they surrounded some Palestinian refugee
camps and
Lebanese Christian allies went in and, over a period of about two days,
killed hundreds of Palestinian men
and allowed it to happen. And that was in the news and was
obviously shocking and my first thought was, "I thought the Palestinians
were the terrorists."
I thought, "Something else is going on."
Then it was a question of picking up a few books like,
"What's going on?" and I happened to pick up 'The Fateful Triangle' by
Noam Chomsky which blew my mind. I remember reading it and then having
to put it down and walking around the room 'cause my stomach was
hurting.
I didn't realize how the culpability of the press in some of this
stuff and what the US was doing, I knew none of this stuff,
it was all new to me. And then I sought out a couple
of more books, then I lived in Europe for a while,
and in Europe, their view of what's going on there is much more
nuanced. But to be honest, it took me years
to get to that point
where I felt like I understood what was going on. Do you
find that you're, in a sense through the graphic novel, working out your
understanding or do you think after you come to a certain understanding
then you're doing the comic or graphic novel. I always think I have
a bit of understanding before I go there but when I get there,
that's when the understanding really happens. Often I go in with preconceived
ideas and some of them are played out and seem to be true.
But others you realize, "Oh, there's way more nuance here," or,
"I didn't consider this aspect of it." It's really being on the spot
that really gives you insight. It's very important to read all the stuff
you read beforehand,
and I do a lot of research before I go. But you realize
that's just... That's the tip of the iceberg and, "Oh actually,
what they're really talking about is this." I didn't know. I thought it
was like the Palestinians versus the Israelis before I went, and then you're
in the Palestinian communities and you see the factions. And the factions
are something that I didn't really read that much about, but then you
try to learn very quickly. And there's all kinds of nuances you never
get, until you go to place.
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In a sense though,
are you working out the... I'm trying to figure out the creative element
because you have the textual element and that kind of understanding,
but then you're fixing this with these images. And so are you
highly playful with both, as you're co creating the elements to fit together?
Are you affixed to a particular image and then you're finding that text?
Or do you have this kind of textual understanding? Some of the stuff
I showed, you're very clear with regards to your historic facts.
You have them down. You're using maps. You're using those references.
And then you'll see someone's face, or you'll see
a sequence of events that's leading you to see a particular event.
And then you're zeroing in on a part of it.
I'm wondering about, do you feel you have a sense of a commitment
more to a word, or description, or an image, or does that co
evolve as you're proceeding to create?
I'd say at this point I can't think of a one without the
other. Sometimes I think, "Should I write a prose book?" And then I think,
"You know I'd be a B minus
prose writer." I'm not sure about prose anymore.
I'm very committed to the word but I'm also very committed to the
image.
The way I work is I have... There's stages and in some ways
they're... I won't say exactly separate, but in a lot of ways maybe
that would be a good way of describing them. There's research
where I'll read about a place, then there's the field work where I
go and... I'm like one of those people who doesn't sketch.
I know a lot of cartoonists have great sketch pads and I'm always
jealous of looking at their sketch pads, but
I just don't make the time for that unless I have to do
something that it's not possible to take a photograph for various reasons.
And really what I'm interested in is talking to people. It's interviewing.
I'm very much interviewing people but thinking visually, like thinking,
"I'm gonna have to draw this person's story so let me ask the
visual questions that will help me draw that story later
on." Then I get back to
my home and I transcribe all my tape. I get all my notes
in order. I index them very... I'm very rigid about how I try
to get all that done. And then I start writing a script and
I try... In the best circumstances I write a complete script
and I never, with scripts I never know, It's gonna take me six
weeks or six months? I never know.
And then with drawing I always know. I always can sort of judge.
"Okay, I can get eight to ten pages done a month."
It's like digging a ditch. It's like you know how far you're gonna
get everyday.
And after I finish the script, I start drawing and I don't story
board at all. Because I want something spontaneous to happen
three, four years down the road when I bring out that script and
I say, "Okay, here's the script," "What will I draw today?"
I want something spontaneous to happen artistically that moment.
And so I allow myself that. And that's why it doesn't feel like
I've poured concrete on the story with story boards. And you know, a
lot of cartoonists storyboard, so if you storyboard that's... If you're
a cartoonist out there that storyboards that's fine, I just don't do it
myself. There's James
Carse, this professor from NYU I think, studies religion. He had this principle
of a... He wrote this book of Finite and Infinite Games,
and he argued there's two different kind of games, or ways of proceeding.
And the finite one was you went towards a particular end and that
was it. And the infinite game was trying to be constantly open for
play. But it's interesting to hear you describe it because it seems like
your work is a combination of both. There's some finite elements,
you like to finish at a certain point, but there's this openness to spontaneity
and creativity that you're overlaying with it, which is just fascinating.
Let me
comic geek out for a second.
You want to make this distinction between comics and graphics,
and I'm just like... You prefer comic journalism as opposed to graphic journalism.
I'm curious how you're characterizing or understanding these two, so I can
get a better sense for
that? Well, I never really liked the phrase,
the term, graphic novel. Because I thought maybe that fit other work.
But to me novel implies fiction.
I don't think a lot of my journalism work is, I don't think
of it as fiction so it felt like a... It didn't feel like
a proper fit. But the other the other thing is
I grew up with the word comics and it didn't seem problematic to
me, though I recognize for people just getting into it, it seems a
little more problematic. They think, "Well what's comical about it?" I mean
they could turn that around and also question that
terminology. The way look at it now is I'll call them comics,
but if I'm describing what I do to someone I don't know I'll
often say graphic novel 'cause they've heard that enough, and to me that's
a marketing term. They've heard it enough that they understand what that
means.
I think that battle is lost as far as I'm concerned,
it's called graphic novel now and I'll just live with that.
You get a section in a bookstore, it's not all bad right.
So I'm going to move to journalism a little bit and try to...
The book not the concept.
And part of what I found intriguing about this particular piece is
your ability to combine traditions of reporting with history,
memoir, imagery,
memorialization with the kind of running very subtle, inviting,
oral critique and awareness. That combination I find to be very,
very powerful and appears to be unique to your style.
Part of what I think of a Sacco like creation,
it's your ability to bring those things together.
How do you see the different elements from
these different mediums, right? So oral critique is one thing. Memorialization
is another; imagery is another; memoir is another. How do you see them
independently?
And do you see them as necessarily reinforcing one another? Do you take
an image and then you find memorialization? Are you guided from one to
the other? How do you combine them?
You know a lot of things happened really
instinctually. So
things feel right as I'm going along how I shift
from one of these elements to the other.
I'm often not theorizing about it as I'm doing it.
In fact,
I didn't theorize about myself at all until I first starting getting interviewed
and then it was, "Oh, you have to come up with explanations as
to why you do things." And I understand why people want that
and
I'm interested in process too on why people do what they do.
But I'd say for me I think and for lot of artists a
lot just comes from the gut. This feels like the right way to
approach this.
I will squash that immediately man, good comment. Yes, occasionally I think
we tend to try to fix individuals and
put them in a box. So I don't wanna put you in a
box, man. I'm not gonna do that so... I'm not feeling it,
don't worry. Okay, good. But
one of the pieces that I came across,
I think
late in many respects, because The Great War was
created and I'm missed it for a while until I went to
a friend's house and they had it pinned to their wall.
For those that haven't seen the piece, it's this
amazing
characterization of war across
the logistical dynamics from the front... How would you describe... The
piece is world but wordless, which I find to be phenomenal and that's
partly how I wanna start... I want to... What led you to make
it wordless?
Because you're historically minded at the same time. I could see prose and
things going along with it, but there's no words with this at all.
This one always struck me because you have the soldier smiling in the
middle of it and you wouldn't necessarily see it because it's in this
larger... I mean, it's this larger image, so you wouldn't necessarily see
that person smiling but that just struck out to me as catching the variability
of participation within a war context. And there might be someone whose
joyous about it. They're with their friends; they're there. So,
you get me going back to the images repeatedly and then seeing what's
there. Maybe that's the wordlessness. Maybe the words might distract me
from exploring the image the way that you're led you to do.
But what led you to the wordlessness of
The Great War? Okay, I can't really take credit for some of this
stuff because of what happened is a friend of mine,
he now is an editor at Norton, called me up and said,
"Hey remember once we talked about you doing a long image of the
Western Front?" And I remember, I do remember we once got drunk and
we were playing darts and we brought it up and, "Okay,
I think I remember that." He goes, "Well, now do wanna do it?"
And his model was a book called Manhattan...
I can't remember what its called. I thinks it called Manhattan Unfurled
or something like that? And it's the image of the Manhattan skyline accordion
level, accordion style, you just pull it out,
and it's really gorgeous and there's no words to it and he wanted
me to draw an image of an image of western front.
I had to wonder if I wanted to get involved in this project
at all, but
I've always been interested in the first World War since I was a
kid. I mean almost obsessed with it. So in some... Why? I grew
up in Australia and then Australia the first World War
is really part of their national psyche. Australia became Australia
at Gallipoli. When they invaded Gallipoli and fought the Turks there,
they shed blood and suddenly they could remove themselves from the British.
They had their defining moment. So we grew up. Australia really makes
a big deal about the first World War. I grew up with those
stories and that's why I could be interested in it.
I was always particularly interested in this battle. In the first day of
the battle of the Battle of the Somme where the British had 60,000 casualties
in the first day, and of those 60,000, 20,000 killed.
To put that into context, that is
way more... In the first hour, they lost more people than America lost in
Afghanistan and in Iraq combined. The first hour.
So this always impressed me as a kid, as it should impress everyone.
So
when he suggested it, I thought, maybe I should do pennants for this
little boy obsession with the first World War and actually draw something.
I didn't like the idea of a static drawing.
I thought I want an... Even though there's no words you can have
a narrative and I thought about the Bayeux Tapestry,
which shows the Norman Invasion of England
in 1066. You can read the Tapestry from left to right.
I think it goes on for more than 200 feet
and it tells a story and I felt, well
I can tell the story remove all the words and I thought,
"Okay," I'll start it with the general. General Haig, who organized this
battle and it'll end in the grave 'cause the very last at the
very end they're burying soldiers and I'll show everything in between
and because we in the West read from left to right,
I thought, well people are naturally gonna start with the left and just
move to the right and so you can tell the story of the
soldiers moving up.
The bombardment you can show the soldiers moving into the trenches going
over the top and then coming back from the battle and then the
wounded going to the casualty clearing stations. You could actually have
the narrative without words.
Truly, that's beautiful. How would you compare the challenges of writing
you're more journalistic pieces from the historical ones? Do you see them
as more or less being the same process that you engage in and do
approach them in the same way? To me history and journalism are really
interlinked. There are lot of techniques I've learned just interviewing
people about the present that you carry over to interviewing people about
the past. And in the book 'Footnotes in Gaza' in particular,
I want to show how the present and the past weave together.
What really interested me when I was there is that I would talk
to someone who was in their
70s, late 60s or 70s talking about what happened to them in
1956 'cause really that's what I was focusing on, two large scale
killings of Palestinian men in
1956. I would talk to them and often in these situations you're in
a room and a lot of people are inside the room,
it's not like you're just interviewing someone silently
by yourself. There's always other people listening in and often their sons
and grandsons had never heard these stories before
and
the question is why hadn't they heard those stories? And again it's because
events are continuous like, why talk about what happened in 1956 when your
house is being demolished now?
And often there were even
conflicts in a way, there's one scene in there where guys saying,
"Why do you care about what happened in 1956 when you go 100 meters
that way and see what the Israeli bulldozers are doing?" And it was
an interesting question, but to me it's all linked and history is kinda
the foundation upon which a lot of things are built obviously and it's
important to untangle that stuff and realize it's important to people who
live through it and you begin to... You have to understand the context,
"Why are people
resentful?" We talk about
incitement; well, history is an incitement. If you actually know your history,
it can incite you.
We tend to poo poo what happened in the past, you know, "Let's
just put that aside," and I think the past
is extremely important.
Someone made this comment once that they were...
To the Chinese, their culture, their back is to the future and their
front is towards the past. For Americans we are reverse, our back is to
the past and our boot pointing forwards... Well, Obama says that sort of
thing too and talking about, "Let's look ahead not behind"
and I think that's not always the right way to approach things.
I think you have to talk about the past. If you wanna know
why,
when I went back, I talked about the Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon
being killed. Well, why were they're in Lebanon? Why weren't the Palestinians
in their home villages? You have to trace it back to understand it.
Facts today don't give you the whole story. They're facts but let's not
pretend that's giving you the story.
What's interesting about that image is we then have this rotating figure
that is looking both forward and backward concurrently over time. I'm wondering
with regards to your work,
are you also reflective about your work and your path and the things
you've done before?
Do you rethink them? Do you think of alternative ways that you might
have done some stuff? Or is that infused into the stuff that you're
doing like presently or things that you're thinking about doing. Okay,
when I touch this topic I'll grab this element from this particular piece
or do this and so there's a constant evolution, I'm imagining,
of how you're rethinking your craft but are you also... Are you doing
the same thing with your own work that you just suggested that you're
looking back over what you've done and looking and reflecting in a present
and then thinking about, "Okay, I like that element of this particular piece.
Let me add that here," or do you just...
Each point is new. You clearly have a style but to what extent
is that reflective process about looking forward and looking backwards taking
place. Well let's say that... I mean, the easiest way to
answer your question is to say my questions have begun to change
because at some point I think it was while I was working on
the 'Footnotes in Gaza' book. I've worked on in these... About conflict.
I've drawn a lot people shooting other people
and at some point you go, you begin to think, "I'm not sure
if I understand what's going on here." I remember someone asking me
after I finished with 'Footnotes in Gaza'. He said,
"Why don't you ever draw the faces of the Israeli soldiers?"
I guess I hadn't realized that I wasn't drawing their faces but I
had to think it through and I realized I couldn't draw their faces
'cause I didn't understand what they were thinking
'cause I assume that
these are ordinary men doing this. I think all these situations you have
ordinary people
doing things that just seem extraordinarily violent and you begin to...
You have to question... At some point I ask myself,
if I cannot draw them because
I cannot understand what they're thinking so I have to get to that
point of what are they thinking so I began... Truthfully now I'm very
interested in human psychology in how crowds work in behavior in a way.
It's different from a journalistic question, journalism is not answering
all the questions I have, so truth be told it's like
I can explain they're fighting over this land and this is why this
happens and this happened in history. All that stuff is very,
very important but then there are other questions that have to do with
us as a species that are also being pulled into the mix.
So your transition from the kind of journalism gets me to this point
and then I kind of need something else that intersectionality, I think is
phenomenal. Do you know this guy Randal Collins? I don't. He's got
this work called 'Political Violence' and his whole argument is similar
to this guy Grossman who wrote this book
called 'On Violence' that we are genetically predisposed towards non violence.
There's something about human beings that we're actually
created in a way that leads us to not harm one another and
so for security force agents or people that want you to harm other
people, we need to figure out how to get you to that point.
And so this becomes this interesting point, how can you get people there?
So it turns out that 5% of the population is more than willing
to go there but the rest of these people are not and so
it's about mixing the five with the 95 and then breaking down other
people.
But similarly this issue of
at what point do you feel that you hit
the parameters or boundaries of what journalism could do and like what led
you to the of philosophical explorations of psychology? Did you
automatically go there or were you like, "Okay, I can't understand why this
person pulled this trigger. Psychology might take me there." How do you
get to that space?
Well, you realize that you don't know a lot of things
and you... What I'm doing now is just trying to accumulate
knowledge. I'm reading a lot, I'm... Not just psychology, I'm reading evolutionary
biology then I... And then you think, "Oh, I need to read philosophy."
There's a lot of things I didn't study when I was in school
and I'm trying to go back to those things now
and look at them and see what I can get out of them
so I'm interested in political science now. I'm interested in
what Thomas Hobbes said. Things that I didn't think about before.
I'm beginning to think maybe I need to know a little more theory,
but it's all an educational process, I certainly don't have any answers
now.
I'm curious also, so with the expansiveness that you have with regards to
fields and experiences and so forth, I'm wondering has that influenced your
artistic choices? Do you find that you're...
You've always been expansive? There's some amazing images you have in Palestine
that I could always go back to and see something new and so
there's this expansiveness that you have but also then you're able to zoom
into these amazing details. But I'm wondering now if you have this greater
sensitivity towards different disciplines and different kind of nuances,
so sociology is more about networks and psychology is more about how people
are thinking as individuals and so forth, but maybe connected to groups.
Has that infusion of new knowledge influenced how you think you now approach
drawing itself?
Out of question I admit but yeah. Yeah,
I'm not sure about that, to be honest.
I know that sometimes people say something about my work and I was, oh
I haven't thought really about it that way
but actually that's insightful because often when you're just instinctually
doing stuff, you're not aware of certain things and
they suggest something, so of course I'll take that into consideration.
But there've been times when people have said... Like someone wanted me
to do something for a magazine and said
I want it to be like your other work where
the landscape is one of the characters. I said, "Wow, I hadn't thought
of my work that way." But it made me think about landscape and
what that means to people and what it means in terms of art
and now I almost try to emphasize it.
I'm working on a long book now about
indigenous people in Northern territories in Canada and
land is very important to them so how do I
show
the land and how do I do it in a way that's different
from how I've shown it before because they have a very different way
of looking at the land and I came across this idea of
not using panels but letting the drawings run into each other
and not having these hard borders because they have such a more open
way of thinking of things and they don't think in terms of boxes,
I think. So that's one way I've tried to use the art itself
to
go,
kind of, with looking at a society and thinking about how would they
present themselves or how would they suggest, you sort of think about those
sorts of things. So as you suggested earlier, that
anger is quite frequently a motivating element to get you to a topic. What
got you to the Native American topic, if I may? Oh indigenous people,
this is Canada.
Uh okay. You know I'm thinking about the planet and I'm thinking about
climate change and it does feel like we are headed toward the cliff
and it just seems it's very well marked as a cliff
but we're gonna go anyway or someone's gonna drag us along and that
pisses me
off. And I thought okay,
in my head now, what I'm thinking is trying to look at different
indigenous groups, in different places and how they are responding to that.
And
indigenous people in Canada have
an ambivalent relationship with the oil extraction industry. I thought,
preconceived notion, that indigenous people are gonna be against resource
extraction and then you get there and you realize well these are the
only jobs they have, and then why they're the only jobs they have.
Then you realize actually 50 years ago they didn't think in terms of
jobs really, they were a lot of people living in the bush and
they were subsistence hunters. And so how they get from being subsistence
hunters to wage earners that depended on those oil jobs and suddenly
you're thinking about colonialism and you begin to think I've got to expand
this and you just naturally grow into it.
You just have to be open to not keep yourself in your original
idea of what you were gonna find and let it expand you,
I guess.
So
does this book go over a 500 or 1000 year period or you
establishing it as some more contemporariness element 'cause just listening
to you describe it you can see going back to when indigenous folks
were just there by themselves and this imposition of states comes
and then these distinct nations and then they're competing with one another
and they're destroying the indigenous communities. It could seem like it
could go back quite a ways. It can.
I'm trying to touch on...
Not to jump into your next topic. No, no, no, I'm trying to
touch on
how indigenous people got incorporated into the state because frankly the
state didn't
care. Northwest Territories, you can't really farm that land, it's freezing
and it's just not built for farming, it wasn't really good for settlers.
So the government didn't care about it but once they found resources then
the government cared about it. Then the government
which was
nominally in charge there began to actually figure it out,
now they have to take charge of the people and they have to
take charge of the land. So I go back into that but really
what I try to get from people is how do they live before
and they're people my age, would've grown up a lot of them would have grown
up in the bush or at least spent part of their lives in the
bush and it's really fascinating, completely different cosmology and world
view which is really interesting. We talked about this
a bit earlier but you clearly love Jim Scott's work.
The art of not being governed is about people who decide that they
purposely don't wish to live in states because of this imposition of power
and all the things that kinda follow from it so I think you'll
be a fan of that piece
immediately. There are quite a few young folks here today and many might
have an aspiration to continue in this genre that you're helping to create
and inspire and have blazed forward.
You
might have anticipated this one, but what suggestions do you have for some
young folks that might wish to get into comic and graphic art or
how would you speak to the younger you? What would you say to
the younger Joe Sacco regarding their development of the craft?
If he talked to you? Yeah, if you talk to me,
sometimes he does in my dreams.
I think perseverance is really important.
I know a lot of people who over the years dropped out because
it's difficult. I think I was 40 before I didn't worry about how
to pay next month's rent
and that's a long time and if you're too sane you'll drop out,
and you probably should. But if you're doing
comics
it takes a lot of work, you have to recognize that.
I
like people telling stories they know, where they really know things.
Fiction can be about what you know obviously,
so that's what I would recommend going forward, but
it's a lot of work and to do it right takes time and
you've gotta be in a space that allows you to do that or
you gotta be willing to sleep on the floor for a few years
that kind of thing. That's arts in general I think. The arts are
never easy.
So you mentioned the indigenous project,
as we have you,
do you work on multiple things simultaneously? I do.
Can you hint at what else you got? Well actually... And what led
you there? Okay this is up your ally in a
way. I'm doing a book about a riot that took place in India
in 2013, in a small district
called Muzaffarnagar in UP, Uttar Pradesh, and small by the standards of
riots,
maybe a few score people killed and 50 to 100 thousand people displaced.
And I specifically went there cause I was interested in
what people tell themselves about the riot a year later,
and
you can hear what people are telling you and then you could disprove
it because you could still find the people that are there that witnessed
it. But it was a riot, it took place between Hindus and Muslims
and both sides are using... You sit down with people and you just... You
know enough about the situation when you know you're hearing
things that
probably didn't happen quite that way,
and that's what it's about, it's about crowds and how crowds work
and it's not that I know about these things. I'm actually trying to
read about it now but I got a bit ahead of myself and
ended up looking at crowds, and how crowds can sometimes, I think,
pull
not just
people themselves but the leaders try to get out in front of a crowd.
It's not always about... Crowds can be manipulated and they are manipulated,
and they're manipulated for political
ends, but crowds also have a mind of their own in a way,
and I need to understand that a little more but I'm working on
that, and I'm working on some other things too.
I don't know if you'll go there but
there's this guy named Paul Brass, he got this book called 'Theft of an
Idol', which is really similar to yourself. He was doing some interesting
work on kind of cataloging riots and so forth in India,
and then he came across this one thing that,
by his definition would be a riot but it wasn't in his database
and he's just like, I wonder why. And so unlike most social scientists he
actually went to the place to figure out why it wasn't there and
he's talking to them and listening to people describe it and he's just
like, this should be a riot, but then he realized that the way
the people viewed it in their minds it didn't qualify what he was
designating it as, and there were these distinct...
It varied almost by the cast, how they were describing this particular event;
for some it was a misconception, others it was a mistake,
others it was just this unfortunate thing that took on this momentum of
its own and another one was a manipulation of one cast of another
and it just became this fascinating piece. Like one of my favorite movies
Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa, this similar dynamic, so that would be a cool
thing to think about. But I was wondering,
how you would deal with this
mass... Riots are interesting right we always have a sense of what they're
like,
but there's also an individualistic element to it, so you have individuals
amidst the crowd, I'm wondering you do this quite well, this is one
of my favorite images that you've done which is an interesting combination
of
crowd, context and individuals, you still get a sense of the individuals
at the same time. How do you find that balance? Do you find
it difficult to maintain that balance or this medium lends itself perfectly
towards, you can have a collective sense of having a lot of people
and you could still kind of depict people individually, just maintaining
that element.
I sort of have this... When I'm drawing huge crowds,
it's a lot of work obviously. I always think to myself,
okay slow down, everyone had a mother.
I kind of think in those terms, and
this person you're drawing you're inventing, and sometimes you're killing
them, like in that great war thing, you're killing them and you're drawing
this person it's not just like, "Oh bodies are like this"
you actually have to think about it. And so that's how I try
to think about it and it helps me
center on individuals even in those bigger scenes.
Wow,
that's
amazing. Part of
the awareness, this self awareness that you have of your work,
I also find to be intriguing,
do you find you at all able to be objective about any of
this? Like your creation is there, it's out in the world people read it
people respond to it,
how do you relate to the work? It's like are these your children
or
are they missiles that you're firing out,
how are you connected to this, 'cause it's so personal.
One of the reasons why I wanted to lead was some of the
images of your studio, is like... And we talked about this briefly before,
but you create in this bubble of sorts and then from that you
then release that to the world do you stop thinking about it at
that point? Do you maintain connections with it? How do you connect with
your work that's been distributed? Well, it's interesting 'cause probably
a lot of the connection comes through talks like this,
because then you bring up older works I've done, which
matter to me and I don't think of them as, "Oh,
I got rid of that now I'm... I only care about what I
did... "
What I'm doing now. I'm not quite like that. There is a part
of me though that does wanna keep moving, and you realize that
all those old books matter because
they're what is building you up towards something,
even the directions I'm taking. You have a direction because you didn't
quite answer those questions in the earliest book or those questions come
up because of the
earlier books.
But I think it's a good idea not to think about it too
much and just let it be what it is,
because you wanna keep moving forward too, and to think always about those
older books is going to sort of keep you there in a way.
That's fair.
What
does Joe Sacco struggle with? So it's kind of more of an issue
of what do you think is very hard to
capture graphically,
not that you're like superman you can handle all these topics but,
you've dealt with war, you've dealt with occupation, you've dealt with
riot policing, now you're gonna do with riots, so it's just like,
as you're dealing with these topics what elements of them do find to
be the hardest to capture
usually? I think depicting violence
has become more real to me in a way and thus much more
distasteful,
I actually don't like doing it and if we had this conversation about
four, five years ago I would have said
I'm never gonna do a story about conflict,
let's say violent conflict, again; because all stories are about conflict.
That's one of the reasons I wanted to do something about the indigenous
people but it's also one of the reasons that those questions I mentioned
that why do people do this. I still have this sort of tick
in my head just going off to saying, "You still need to figure
this out." But to be honest I don't enjoy
doing some of these books.
Earlier I... Like when I was working on the Palestine book,
there was this
wash my face in the morning and literally jump on the drawing table
and
I'd go until 11:00 and then I'd have breakfast. I don't... I'm not quite
like that anymore. Now it's like, I gotta draw those bodies,
I don't feel like doing that. It's like it just added up over
time. Do you think that...
That's actually hard to talk about.
What's...
You kind of forget in many respects that you have you as the
artist and then you have the subject and then what I love about
your work is you explicitly insert yourself into these spaces,
that conscious decision I think humanizes the topic. It helps the viewer
and reader go with you to these places.
But do you think that you're more conscientious about
not going in to the... Do you find that you balance that in
many respects? So sometimes you immerse yourself more like in Palestine
or pull yourself out a little bit more like in journalism,
it's like it seems to be kind of varied. It is varied.
A lot depends on who you're meeting. Sometimes you meet people and you
have this connection with them and you realize this person is gonna be
a friend of mine for life
and I allow that to happen. I'm not so dispassionate, the way we we're
taught in journalism school is just you know you've got to be...
And you do. To some extent you've got to be careful,
you've got to pull yourself out a bit. I think I'm able to
do that and establish human relationships with people. I don't think the
two things necessarily conflict.
So now we're talking about... I'm sorry, I might just lost the train
of thought there. What was the question? 'Cause I was getting to something.
No, we have this fluid kind of thing where I'm just like,
I'm now into the next question so I can't remember what I asked you. All
right, go on to the next question. No, no, no... You got a partial
answer. No, it's partly this issue of, it's intriguing to figure out exactly
how your mind works with regards to how you're thinking of the craft
and what elements you're piecing together and in what sequence and how fluid
that is in many respects and so I feel kind of...
I feel bad because I'm like... I feel like I'm adding this kind
of intrusive element. It's just like, let's stop your whole creative process
and let's dissect it on a table and slice it up a little
and like so now I'm stepping back from trying to do that and
think more organically and try to go where you're going.
It's like I have to know what these other topics are that you're
working on. I'm just like I find that to be kind of fascinating.
But do you walk around just finding yourself just getting pissed all the
time and like finding new topics and putting it in a drawer or
do you like save the anger, it needs to hit a certain threshold
before you're kind of like okay that's worth taking on? Because it seems
like you could take on so many topics simultaneously
that would be overburden and especially if you feel
about them the way you seem to care about these people and the ____. I mean
I come back to this piece on the kids because some of the
pieces that you illustrate are so visceral, they're so powerful and you're
just like, "I know that must have affected you." I mean for my
work on Rwanda, I remembered seeing like room full of dead bodies covered
in lye in these distorted positions and it's like I've never forgotten that
and I could still smell it every now and then and so clearly
when you're talking to people that have been in prison or people that
have lost body parts and seeing the physical spaces where they used to
live, it takes a toll so it's like it seems almost like human
that you would have this threshold. It's like, "Okay, I can only take
on so many of these things and still survive and still live."
So I'm just wondering about do you juggle multiple ones and you're like
that helps you deal with the power of any one of them or
do you do deep
immersion? Well,
one of the reasons I started taking on more than one project...
And the two I've mentioned to you are the journalistic hard ones.
But I also, I take on, I started to do satirical work
that will
make me want to draw again.
Like I mentioned before I got in it because I wanted to make
people laugh and with satire I think you can make people laugh but
also I can express some part of this anger that I seem to
have,
express it. I'm working on things now that are kind of
very dark but very delightful, if you know what I mean for me
personally as an artist. Like a life is beautiful kind of darking? No
'cause I don't think in those terms but drawing is beautiful.
I mean I can draw things that they're not beautiful drawings necessarily
but they kind of give me a kick, they sort of make me...
They provide, you know humor provides a filter
towards certain topics that I've already dealt with before.
I'm working on this one image now for one of my projects that
shows
probably a hundred different leaders from the beginning of time from Ur,
the city of Ur, to modern day just all of them in like a
parade and that comes out of a certain anger but it's really fun
to draw. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. And there's something about
journalism itself that has become more difficult for me because
it's actually okay to be in a place and to talk to people
and to get their story and to hear that story.
It's harder to draw that story 'cause it's so much more intimate,
strangely. So now I need to mix it up a bit,
it's out of necessity that I've learned to mix it up.
So
would you agree that your ability as an ethnographer... Your ability to
sit down...
So Joe has this element, if anyone knows an anthropologist, this is like
a good sign.
Joe's got this ability when you sit down with him, you feel automatically
calm, so I don't get the anger bit.
You sit down with him and your calm, it's like talking to a therapist
which is like talking to an anthropologist. Basically they get you to that
space where you're like, "Yes, I'll reveal all my of secrets to you".
And then you feel very comfortable in that space and so I can
see why
you're able to get there, because
you're aware, you're insightful, you're interested, you get the leaning
in, you get all of the engagement that is like so human.
And so at the same time it's interesting to hear you say that
you acknowledge that that is an intimacy but you make that creative choice
to characterize that visually and to share that. You don't feel...
Not in
a... So at university systems, we're occasionally hindered by
these IRB boards that tell you what you should do with your research
and how you protect individuals and so forth. You're in a sense,
not that you're not protecting individuals, but you're telling their story
for this political purpose. So
the sense of violation of intimacy weighed against this issue of telling
the story for the greater social good, do you feel that you feel
this tension between...
Do you feel that you're violating the intimacy by distributing it and/or
depicting it? Are there some stories that you don't draw because you're
just like, "I can't put that one in there?"
Because you just don't wanna go there or you're just like,
"Oh, you know what? I'm all in, I heard them all,
I'm telling them all." Well, I mean, comics works interesting ways,
you can lead person to violence in a story and then show it
or you could lead person to violence and not show it and then
the reader does the violence for you, which is in some ways worse,
I think for a reader.
It depends on what you're trying to do.
I wanna be careful, I realize when people give you their stories it's
something that you have to be very careful about and one thing
I'm always troubled about, and I don't know how to answer
this question myself, but I worry about... Someone tells me their story,
then I draw it, and I try to get visual references and I
try to draw it as best I can so it reflects something about
their experience but I think to myself "Am I pouring concrete on their
story? Are they gonna remember their story my way rather than how it
happened for them?" Because sometimes stories are told and they reinforce
other stories. Sometimes things didn't happen to you but you've heard it
enough that it did happen to you, so I worry that where I'm I in
that mix and it's not something I've answered for myself but I try
to be aware of it, I try to be aware that
there's a reason I'm telling these stories, because I think people should
know.
And I recognize that if I had to explain to you some of
the
work I've done like this, I would probably be very insufferable.
My frustration would show,
maybe my voice would get really high or something like that.
Comics and art is my way of putting in that filter to make
it so that
it's in
a product you can actually assimilate. And that's the whole point.
I don't think I would be good going on campus talking about what
I've seen in the West Bank or in Bosnia or something like that. I
wouldn't be good at it. This is how I do it,
it filters out the anger in a way. Because
the anger is making the work, that's where it goes, that's why it
doesn't exude out of me. I'm not actually a very angry person,
I'm not walking around like just boiling... No, I'm not like that,
when I say anger, to me it's
one of them most constructive and
human emotions there is and we're often told "Don't be angry", well maybe
you should be angry but just learn how to put that so it's
effective, put that anger somewhere, 'cause it's important to have that
anger. There are lot of reasons to be angry.
Given that today is Thursday and tomorrow is what it is,
I can't this of no way better to end. Thank You. Thank you.
