Joe Sacco. “It’s important to question your own mythology”

Considered the father of reportage comics, Joe Sacco is releasing two albums this fall. War in GazaAn outcry against the Biden administration, which he accuses of dehumanizing the Palestinians, and blow on fire past and future violence in Indiawhich takes us to Uttar Pradesh and the bloody conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, where we find all “shape” From Sacco. the author of Palestine He loves nothing more than to investigate in the field, to cross-reference the viewpoints of those he meets in order to help us understand the often brutal realities of modern history in all their complexity. Meeting.

Madame Figaro: War in Gaza not a report unlike most of your graphic work…

Joe Sacco: It is more evidence of desperation. A friend with whom I worked a lot wrote to me. I have published several books on the Palestinian situation (how Palestineeditor’s note), one of them, focuses exclusively on Gaza (Gaza 1956, On the Margins of History.editor’s note), and I stayed there with him. I know these places, these streets, and I have great affection for the people of Gaza. With the massacre of October 7 and the subsequent attacks on Gaza, it was difficult to gather my thoughts: so many people were killed, injured, brutalized… And in such situations, I am not immediately analyzing, I absorb it. events, I try to digest them. Except that it was impossible. I knew I had to do something, but reporting was impossible. the borders were closed, I couldn’t go there. So when I got this note asking me to raise my voice, it was kind of a wake-up call. I couldn’t wait any longer, I had to do something, and something War in Gaza.

Your graphic style is different in this album. it’s more on the satirical side…

Reporting is more my part. Go somewhere, see things with my eyes, ask the questions I want to ask, discover things you can’t discover from a distance by talking to people, listening to their stories… I do that, but there, as I said. , I hit a wall when I feel morally obligated to do something. And ultimately, I felt comfortable in the satire, with some caricature in the line, and then a little bit of black humor, but very black. I think it adds something substantial. I drew very quickly and more abstractly than usual, because I didn’t want to put floods of blood and violence in the comics. There were enough such images available to us via social media and the like, and I didn’t feel it was necessary to try to recreate the scenes of carnage that we already have access to every day.

Would you say that you paint because you want to understand what is happening or what happened?

It seems that if I sit down and put my hand on my chin, I can’t think straight. Meanwhile, when I have a pencil or a pen in my hand, thoughts come from everywhere, as if they jump out of the pen… This is what happened here once again. the main arc of War in Gazathis is America’s role, Joe Biden’s role, and my own role as well. Because if you live in a country that supports genocide, even though it calls itself democratic, you have a certain responsibility whether you like it or not. Obviously I don’t like it, but I’m aware of it, and that’s where my efforts were focused. I wanted to think about this. We can obviously be critical of Israel, but here I wanted to question my own country and the West in general; the perception that the West has of him, which differs greatly from reality.

I felt comfortable in the satire, some kind of caricature line, and then a little bit of black humor, but very black.

Joe Sacco

Did you want to present other perspectives, the other side of this story told by the winners?

I think it’s very important to question one’s own mythology. Every nation, every person must do this. People have their mythology, we have national myths, community mythologies, ethnic mythologies… We all have to study them more carefully, check their truth and lies. Take the Enlightenment. it has given us a lot, but if we read Kant and Hegel, we see that these brilliant philosophers are racist. Kant classifies and hierarchizes people, with northern Europeans at the top of the scale, while Hegel excludes Africa and Africans from his theories of History and Spirit, arguing that there is no place for them…

Another album comes out Blow on the fire. Can you tell me a few words about it?

I mainly discuss sectarian violence between Muslims and Hindus in Uttar Pradesh. I’m trying to see how electoral politics is one of the roots of this violence, because violence can be used to divide people. Basically, people respond to fear, and I think politicians know that and play on that. And if they can get people scared, they can get people to vote for them. So we’ll point the finger at immigrants, for example. About the foreigner who came to take your job, about the foreigner who came to eat your cat and dog, as Trump said about the Haitian refugees.

For this album, you actually went out there, met people and gave them a voice, and recorded. And we find violence and war… Would you say this is your favorite subject?

Rather, I will say that we had such an impression because my books take a lot of time. If I, for example, look at this or that aspect of violence, I ask myself what it is about the crowd, how they work, what people think about them. We go down a path, my books plow the furrow, they take time, and then thirty years go by and it’s become what you’re known for. But that was never my intention. You know what, I’d like to make people laugh. I actually got a little tired of journalism when everything that happened in Gaza happened. I would like to work on such works, which will be rather essays, philosophical reflections.

Still in drawn form

Absolutely. Now I think like a designer. Twenty years ago, I could have made the transition to writing. But today my brain works with images. This is what I see when I think of a story. Images that arise and must be collected. Although I love words, I read a lot of essays and novels, and hardly any comics…

war in gaza Joe Sacco, translated from English by Sidonie Van den Dries, Futuropolis Publications, 32 pages, €6.90.

Breathing Fire, Past and Future Violence in IndiaJoe Sacco, Futuropolis editions, 144 p., €22. It was released on November 6.