Footnotes In Gaza
BOOK REVIEW
Reviewed by Bruce Benson
Early this summer my wife Sue and I went on a Independent Yarn Shop and Book Store tour of the Twin Cities. At Next Chapter Booksellers, near Macalester College, on a table labeled Gaza I found a 418 page graphic novel Footnotes In Gaza, publication date 2009. It was written by Joe Sacco a journalist and war reporter who is also a great comic book artist. His previous graphic novels were Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde.
The book concerns Sacco’s search for eye witnesses to the massacres in Gaza during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Israeli forces killed 275 Palestinians in Khan Yunis on November 3, 1956 and 111 in Rafah on November 12, 1956. His search took place in 2003 and throughout his efforts people wondered, especially young people, why he was concerned about something that happened so long ago.
The news of Khan Yunis and Rafah was censored in 1956. The U.N. reports on the incidents were questioned or ignored, this documentation is included in the Appendix. Sacco knows not all oral history is reliable and he works hard to keep things straight. In telling the story there are countless individuals giving testimony. The detailed rendering of the people and their stories is amazing. The architecture, the city streets, the taxis, the bulldozers, and the rubble are vividly drawn. The daily life in Gaza 2003 is part of every episode. In the border cities life includes bulldozed homes, armored fighting vehicles and watch towers, stray bullets night and day, curfews, and hopelessness. The emotions of the people are captured in the artwork.
Sacco’s time in Gaza ends around the time of Rachel Corrie’s death and the Invasion of Iraq. These events along with the 1967 War are part of the narrative. The 1956 story is done in epic detail. This and Sacco’s experiences getting the story in 2003 helped me to understand the Gaza situation more clearly than I had before.The story is harrowing at times. There were times I put the book down, but I always picked it up again. When the book came out in 2009 I was still working, there was no MICAH team, and I was as unaware as anyone in Northfield, in Minnesota, in the United States. I recommend Footnotes In Gaza if you have some catching up to do.
If you would like to read an epic comic book(Sacco’s preferred term)by a Great War reporter with documents and sources listed, I’d be happy to lend you my copy.