I'm being sent to Malaysia to be a part of this artist showcase.
Check out the official promo video
Yeah I'm in it. I need to work on this whole PR thing. Skill-sharing, anyone?
Anyway I'm mad excited to go to KL, meet all these wicked artists, and I plan on checking out the funky masajid and photographing them.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
Sometimes, there is beauty in pain
Thank you, man on the train.
Today something happened that was at once completely ordinary and yet also remarkable. Maybe it had something to do with the time of day, the time of the year, what the various observers are going through in their lives. Or maybe it was the song.
In NYC, several times a week while sitting on the train, buskers will come on the train - they are the people who play music and sing songs for money. After living here for a while one becomes so used to this activity that it barely registers.
Today after I watched the Hijabi Monologues at NYU and hung out with my soul friend Komal, who I hadn't seen at all this month so far, I got on the train and in Brooklyn, a man with a guitar got on the train.
As usual I continued to read my book, but then he started playing. And he played the Nirvana version of "The Man Who Sold the World." And he was really good. And he sang the song, and we could actually hear his voice loud and clear, as he had some sort of speaker device attached to him. The projection of his voice definitely got our attention.
Almost everyone was watching and listening to him, people from all sorts of backgrounds. This guy had something. He looked fairly disheveled; he was probably some sort of traveller. But clearly he had enough to afford a guitar, harmonica, and the curious speaker system that he had. But still, he grabbed our attention.
It was definitely an odd moment in time, all of us watching and listening to this man, singing this song, that is such a sad song, which was sung by a very sad man, Kurt Cobain. Again, maybe it was the time of the day, when its late and everyone just wants to go home and is tired and tired of thinking, maybe it was the time of year, an odd time when the weather is transitioning, maybe it was the things folks are going through in their lives - a combination of all those things and more that made that moment stand out for us.
I overheard two men sitting near me, remark that Stevie Wonder started out also playing music on the train. They appreciated what the guy was doing.
When the man was finished, instead of just the usual one or two people giving a busker some change, loads of folks pulled out dollar bills for him and thanked him. It was a sign of appreciation, for the moment that he had given us. Maybe we all needed it, for different reasons. It was meant to happen.
It was another example of how powerful and revolutionary music can be.
Today something happened that was at once completely ordinary and yet also remarkable. Maybe it had something to do with the time of day, the time of the year, what the various observers are going through in their lives. Or maybe it was the song.
In NYC, several times a week while sitting on the train, buskers will come on the train - they are the people who play music and sing songs for money. After living here for a while one becomes so used to this activity that it barely registers.
Today after I watched the Hijabi Monologues at NYU and hung out with my soul friend Komal, who I hadn't seen at all this month so far, I got on the train and in Brooklyn, a man with a guitar got on the train.
As usual I continued to read my book, but then he started playing. And he played the Nirvana version of "The Man Who Sold the World." And he was really good. And he sang the song, and we could actually hear his voice loud and clear, as he had some sort of speaker device attached to him. The projection of his voice definitely got our attention.
Almost everyone was watching and listening to him, people from all sorts of backgrounds. This guy had something. He looked fairly disheveled; he was probably some sort of traveller. But clearly he had enough to afford a guitar, harmonica, and the curious speaker system that he had. But still, he grabbed our attention.
It was definitely an odd moment in time, all of us watching and listening to this man, singing this song, that is such a sad song, which was sung by a very sad man, Kurt Cobain. Again, maybe it was the time of the day, when its late and everyone just wants to go home and is tired and tired of thinking, maybe it was the time of year, an odd time when the weather is transitioning, maybe it was the things folks are going through in their lives - a combination of all those things and more that made that moment stand out for us.
I overheard two men sitting near me, remark that Stevie Wonder started out also playing music on the train. They appreciated what the guy was doing.
When the man was finished, instead of just the usual one or two people giving a busker some change, loads of folks pulled out dollar bills for him and thanked him. It was a sign of appreciation, for the moment that he had given us. Maybe we all needed it, for different reasons. It was meant to happen.
It was another example of how powerful and revolutionary music can be.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thank you, Joe
Thank you Joe Sacco for doing what you do. I love this interview because its rare for someone to talk about how hard it actually is to do what you want to do. This guy has been through a lot.
I highly recommend his book Palestine - its one of the best books I've ever read on Palestine.
This is an interview from the Guardian on his latest work.
In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.
The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel.
Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn't in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you'll see that I didn't used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn't know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I've learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.
"But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief."
Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called "unique". But Sacco's work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.
Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).
"With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco," wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman's heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel.
Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren't there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?
He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh "compulsion" to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling "agitated". So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper's magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.
"We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town," says Sacco. "But when Chris's piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It's a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?"
In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah's men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply "panicked and opened fire on the running crowd"? Or was it more complicated than that?
Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?
In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.
"Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They're footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people's lives."
Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco's trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most "news" is.
Then there are the people he meets. Sacco's ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding).
But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it "sombre". It's not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or, perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: "Events are continuous."
You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself."
Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night's sleep for several years. In Sacco's drawings, Khaled's features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied.
Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. "In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life."
He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel.
It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. "I didn't have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It's so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can't just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn't even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who'd been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did."
Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? "I'll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That's when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn't get demoralised as I went along."
It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. "Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it'll be the book I'm remembered for."
In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper's about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.
When he's not travelling, he treats his work "exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don't story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It's all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way".
Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? "It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It's difficult to have a personal life when you're broke because you can't afford to go out, and it isn't that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly."
It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. "Well, I know I'm going to leave," he says. "If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That's not to say that my stomach doesn't get a little twisted up as I'm going in and as I'm leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn't say I see physical beauty in it. It's more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can't really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food." Still, for the "sake of my own sanity" he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones.
Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. "It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we've internalised all sorts of things about them.
"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."
As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last.
In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run.
The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel.
Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn't in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you'll see that I didn't used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn't know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I've learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling.
"But some people have told me that hiding my eyes makes it easier for them to put themselves in my shoes, so I've kind of stuck with it. I'm a nondescript figure; on some level, I'm a cipher. The thing is: I don't want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I'd rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let's say I'm shaking [with fear] more than the people I'm with – it's only ever to throw their situation into starker relief."
Thanks to publishing hyperbole, writers often get called "unique". But Sacco's work truly is, combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.
Twenty years on, though, and the American cartoonist is widely regarded as the author of two masterpieces: Palestine, in which he reported on the lives of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to 1948, the beginning of the first Intifada, and the first Gulf War; and Safe Area Gorazde, which describes his experiences in Bosnia in 1994-95. Palestine won an American Book Award, and has sold 30,000 copies in the UK alone (this is a huge figure for a comic book, let alone a political comic book).
"With the exception of one or two novelists and poets, no one has ever rendered this terrible state of affairs better than Joe Sacco," wrote Edward Said in his foreword to the complete edition of Palestine (it was originally published as a series of nine comics). Safe Area Gorazde, following ecstatic reviews in which Sacco was named Art Spiegelman's heir apparent and tipped to win a Pulitzer, won the 2001 Eisner Award for best original graphic novel.
Footnotes in Gaza, his new book and his first long narrative for six years, returns Sacco to Palestine and, being rooted as much in the past as in the present, is perhaps his most ambitious work to date. But why go back? Aren't there plenty of crises to report elsewhere?
He shrugs. All he knows is that, a few years ago, he felt a fresh "compulsion" to write about Gaza; events in the territory had left him feeling "agitated". So in 2001, he and journalist Chris Hedges travelled there on assignment for Harper's magazine. The idea was that they would go to one city and focus on its history alone. Sacco suggested Khan Younis. In the back of his mind, he dimly remembered something he had read in Noam Chomsky's book, The Fateful Triangle, about an incident during the Suez crisis in 1956 in which a large number of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israeli soldiers.
"We asked around, people confirmed the story, and we thought it important for the history of the town," says Sacco. "But when Chris's piece was published, they cut Khan Younis out. Well, that further agitated me. I know the big picture is important but the big picture is made up of a lot of smaller things. It's a shame when those things get lost. It seems… unfair. I wanted to look at it myself. According to the UN, 275 people died in Khan Younis: why did that figure deserve to return to obscurity?"
In 2003, he went back. But once there, Sacco found himself becoming increasingly interested in another incident that had occurred around the same time – November 1956 – in the neighbouring town of Rafah. According to a couple of sentences in a UN report, scores of Palestinian civilians had also been shot by Israeli forces there during a procedure that should have been standard (the Israeli soldiers were screening Rafah's men in the hope of finding terrorists). Sacco wanted to know what had happened. Had the Israelis, as the UN report surmised, simply "panicked and opened fire on the running crowd"? Or was it more complicated than that?
Moreover, what effect had this incident had on the collective memory of Rafah, now once again in brutal conflict with the Israeli army?
In Rafah, almost all men of military age had reputedly been caught up in the incident so there were likely to be survivors still living whom he could interview at length. As a result, Footnotes in Gaza is divided in two. A first, shorter section investigates the killings at Khan Younis, and a second, longer section is devoted to events in Rafah.
"Both towns stand in for all those places, all those things, that are more widely left out of history. They're footnotes, but these were also an important day in some people's lives."
Footnotes in Gaza features all Sacco's trademarks. For a start, there is the author himself, one minute infuriated beyond all endurance by checkpoint bureaucracy, the next delightedly scoffing honeyed Arab pastries; unlike many reporters, Sacco is as interested in the process of getting the story as in the story itself, a fact which only serves to remind you of how highly filtered and polished most "news" is.
Then there are the people he meets. Sacco's ear for the way Palestinian men talk is as sharp as ever (as Edward Said has put it, they exchange their tales of suffering the way fishermen compare the size of their catch). Ditto his nose for lies and embellishments. As usual, his fixer – this time, his right-hand man is called Abed – takes a starring role, his tenacity seeming to surprise even his employer at times. Best of all, there are the moments when Sacco covers a page with one or two large frames, these bigger, more panoramic drawings capturing not only the claustrophobic scrum of a single, 21st-century Rafah street, from aerials on corrugated tin roofs down, but also the way it might have looked when Palestinian refugees arrived there in 1948 (he used old photographs as the basis for these drawings and has rendered the land dry, empty and bleakly forbidding).
But Footnotes is also a darker, less humorous book than Palestine; Sacco calls it "sombre". It's not only that the old men and women he interviews are describing such painful events. Footnotes is punctuated by a sense of history repeating itself or, perhaps, of history failing ever to stop, not even for the merest breather. As someone in Gaza tells Sacco: "Events are continuous."
You look at his drawings of hundreds of men sitting in a pen one day in 1956, under armed guard, no food, no water, their hands on their heads, and you could be looking at an equivalent atrocity at almost any time before or since, and in any number of places. "There are only so many ways you can skin a cat when it comes to screening people so you can kill them," says Sacco. "It was a horrific incident in and of itself but it is also representative of any number of other incidents, even if I'm reluctant to make direct comparisons myself."
Meanwhile, life in present-day Gaza grinds on. We see Sacco and his room-mate, Abed, listening to mortar fire, braving the curfew (the book is set before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza) and witnessing the demolition of homes. The book is haunted by a ghostly presence called Khaled, a man wanted by the Israelis. Always on the move, he has not had a proper night's sleep for several years. In Sacco's drawings, Khaled's features – his hawkish nose and long chin – cast impossibly long shadows over the rest of his face, leaving the reader unnervingly unsure whether he is to be feared or pitied.
Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then, finally, to America when he was just a boy; his parents, who were socialists, were worried about the influence of the Catholic church on Maltese life. Sacco believes that the experiences of his parents had a big impact on his career. "In Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the war. You heard a lot about it. I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life."
He decided to be a reporter and did a journalism degree at the University of Oregon (he still lives in Portland). His early jobs, however, were so indescribably boring – he worked initially for the journal of the National Notary Association – that he soon decided he'd be better off working for himself. First, he set up his own comics magazine. Later, he had a staff job on the Comics Journal. As far as his own drawing and writing goes, his influences include George Orwell and – this makes such perfect sense – Bruegel.
It was in the early 1990s, while he was living in Berlin, that he became interested in the Middle East. "I didn't have some grand plan. I just felt like I needed to go there and see for myself. It's so under-reported in America. At the time, I was trying to make a living as a cartoonist. I thought to myself: I can't just be some adventure tourist but maybe it is conceivable that I could do a comic about it. But I didn't even know if I would have the guts to go into the West Bank! This is how naive I was: I was bumbling around in East Jerusalem for a few days and I met a tourist who'd been to Nablus in a taxi. Oh, I thought: I could just get a taxi! I was pretty sheepish about telling people what I was doing. If I met a journalist or someone from an NGO, I was always afraid they would laugh – and one or two did."
Did he seriously believe he could make a living from this kind of work? "I'll be honest. I thought it was commercial suicide, writing about Palestine. I was cutting my own throat! It came out in nine issues and each one sold progressively worse. The last one sold under 2,000 copies in the US. That's when I thought: OK, I really made a mistake. When I did the next book [Safe Area Gorazde], I decided to do it as a single volume, simply so I wouldn't get demoralised as I went along."
It was Safe Area Gorazde that changed his fortunes. "Most American journalists agreed with my position on Bosnia and it was incredibly warmly received. The New York Times named it a notable book of the year and I received a Guggenheim fellowship, which really helped me financially. So when Palestine came out in a single volume, it had a new life. It sold 60,000 copies in America and it was widely translated. It has long since outsold Safe Area Gorazde. I think it'll be the book I'm remembered for."
In the years since, Sacco has published several more tales from Bosnia, among them the brilliant The Fixer: A Story From Sarajevo, and he has reported from Iraq and Ingushetia for newspapers and magazines. He is now at work on two projects: a 48-page comic for the Virginia Quarterly Review about African migrants who attempt to get into Europe via Malta, and a story for Harper's about Camden, New Jersey, currently the poorest city in the US.
When he's not travelling, he treats his work "exactly like a proper job… I have to: Footnotes in Gaza took me four years. I have to produce at a certain rate and stick to a rigid two pages every five days. I don't story-board. I hardly even sketch anything out. I draw directly on to the board with my pencil. It's all hand-drawn. If I make a mistake, I cut out the panel and cut and paste the old-fashioned way".
Nevertheless, he is often away from home for long periods. In his books, he sometimes depicts himself gazing dreamily at a pretty girl in a bar. Has his career played havoc with his private life? "It played havoc with my life until I was almost 40. I have a girlfriend now and a mortgage, which feels pretty odd, but for about a 10-year period I was just so broke. I had to ask friends and my parents for money. It's difficult to have a personal life when you're broke because you can't afford to go out, and it isn't that attractive, either; people get fed up pretty quickly."
It seems to me, though, that Sacco must be quite tough; even when things are at their most difficult in Gaza or Bosnia, they never really seem to get him down. "Well, I know I'm going to leave," he says. "If I knew I was trapped the way people in Gaza are trapped, their lives simply closed down, maybe I would go insane. That's not to say that my stomach doesn't get a little twisted up as I'm going in and as I'm leaving. I love Gaza. I wouldn't say I see physical beauty in it. It's more to do with its people and my experiences with them: that physical closeness that you can't really avoid. Things are so hard there but – wow! – they always feed me the most amazing food." Still, for the "sake of my own sanity" he is planning on stepping away from war reporting in the near future. He is planning a graphic memoir about the Rolling Stones.
Will he one day return to Gaza for a third time? Or perhaps he could look at the conflict from Sderot or some other town on the Israeli side. "It depends on what I feel in my gut. There are lots of places in the world where things are pretty bad. When I read about them, though, I have to wait for the story to work on me. With Bosnia, it took a full year for that to happen. But I do feel Palestinians have been misrepresented in the America media over a long time; we've internalised all sorts of things about them.
"With Footnotes, I want people to appreciate the lost molecules of conflict: the details and sideshows that only exist until the people who remember them die. But I also want them to remember, when they're watching the news, that it comes to them out of context and that history always comes back to haunt you. An incident can resonate for a whole century or even longer."
As he considers the weight of all those years, his eyes narrow and I think to myself how good it is to be able to see them at last.
By Rachel Cooke
Monday, September 07, 2009
Roy and the Economist
Who is the reviewer? I've not been able to find out - isn't that interesting? I find it quite sad that the Economist published a review that undermines Roy's amazing and necessary work. I wonder what's going on...
From: Arundhati Roy
Hi folks
A letter to the Economist about their charming review of my book. No news from them, so feel free to post on websites/circulate.
To,
The Editor
The Economist 25 August 2009
Dear Sir
This is with regard to the review of my book “Listening to Grasshoppers” that appeared in the Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and incorrect analysis” the reviewer makes some extraordinary errors and leaps of logic:
1. “Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.”
Mr Tata did not merely praise Modi’s business policies, he endorsed him warmly and publicly as a future candidate for prime minister. In India the said Mr Modi is still being investigated for his role in the 2002 pogrom. In his successful election campaigns after the pogrom, Modi brazenly cultivated communal hatred. He is a member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) an organization that is proud of its fascist origins and counts both Hitler and Mussolini as its heroes. In addition to the massacres about 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes during the carnage. Even today, under Mr Modi’s administration, most continue to live in ghettos, socially and economically boycotted in a brutal system of communal apartheid, while the killers continue to live as free, respectable citizens. Incidentally, after considering the available information, the US government has denied Mr Modi a visa. A handicap, wouldn’t you say, for a potential prime -minister? Incidentally, for more on the Tata’s “ethical dealings” you could google “Kalinganagar” or “Singur”.
2. “…she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.”
I have never made such a claim. Nobody with an even passing acquaintance with Kashmir would (or should) say something so ridiculous. Given the intensity and violence of the fratricidal wars that Kashmiris have fought, and the thousands that have lost their lives over the Pakistan vs Freedom issue, and given that Kashmiri leadership is still unresolved about the question, it’s extraordinary that the reviewer can so casually and so glibly claim to know what the majority of people of Kashmir want. My essay on Kashmir is actually titled “Azadi”, which in Urdu means “Freedom”. Perhaps the reviewer is unfamiliar with the language?
3. “More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as ‘lounge notes’), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India's territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, ‘out of government control’.”
If the reviewer had cared to read the book instead of ransacking it, he/she would have come across a sentence that clarifies that several of the essays are “responses to the responses” about certain events. Given that much of my book is a critique of the disturbing role that a section of the corporate media has played in these events, is it surprising that media reports are frequently referred to? Most of the time this is in order to expose them for being false and motivated. To conclude from this that my “facts are gathered from newspapers” and that the articles are “lounge notes” is laughable.
The figure of 25 % of India’s territory being under Maoist insurgency is a figure advanced by the Indian security establishment and is probably a slight exaggeration. However, it is a fact that vast swathes of India’s territory are out of government control. It is for this reason that the Government has announced that in October, after the rains, there will be a military operation in states like Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand in which ground troops will be backed up with helicopter gunships and satellite mapping. A brigade headquarters is being established in Raipur (Chhattisgarh), and 26,000 paramilitary troops (the same Rashtriya Rifles who are deployed in Kashmir, and similar to the Assam Rifles deployed in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland) are being raised for this war. This is in addition the thousands of security personnel who are already deployed in these areas. Perhaps the reviewer has never visited Dantewara , seen the burned, empty villages, or crossed the Indravati into the territory that is called “Pakistan”, where police and security forces do not venture? Perhaps he/she hasn’t heard of Abujmaad?
4. “Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s ‘contemporary horrors’ are caused by America’s ‘new colonial interests’, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.”
My book is about India, not Africa, but yes, there is a paragraph about Africa. Here’s the sentence the reviewer refers to: “The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on— scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.” My mistake here is that I didn’t mention the new colonial interests of countries like China and India as well. Does your reviewer not know about the legacy of Shell Oil in Nigeria? Or the politics that surrounds the mining of a mineral called coltan? Or of how Belgium’s colonial regime structured the barriers of hatred between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda with their racist profiling and social engineering? As for the recommendation that I pay a visit to the continent…it’s a grand idea, but how does one visit an entire continent? I have visited parts of it. Plenty of times. But the reviewer should know that it is possible to know things about places even if you haven’t been to them, like historians know things about history without traveling back in time.
5. “For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, ‘High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting our social welfare objectives.’ Ms Roy should take note.”
Am I really being waved back into my seat with the finance ministry’s Economic Survey? I thought everybody knew that the cut back on public spending (social welfare objectives) is almost in direct proportion to the growth rate? It’s often a pre-requisite when loans from the World Bank, the ADB and the IMF are negotiated. Isn’t that what structural adjustment is all about? Or is this the old Trickle Down theory being re-cycled? I’ve always wondered about this. Some times they say the Free Market provides a level playing field – but then when questioned, they ask us to wait for Trickle Down. But things only Trickle Down slopes don’t they? Anyway, there is a school of thought, which believes that people actually do have rights. The right, for instance to resist the Government taking away their land and their livelihoods, often at gun point, and then ordering them to wait for the leftovers (if the gentlemen leave any) to trickle down after the feast.
Regardless of our obvious ideological differences I hope you agree that errors and innuendo of this nature undermine the real debate.
With best wishes
Arundhati Roy
2A Kautilya Marg
New Delhi 110021
***
Necessary, but wrong
Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. By Arundhati Roy. Hamish Hamilton; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America as “Field Notes on Democracy” by Haymarket Books in October. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
IT IS impossible not to admire Arundhati Roy. Despite her flawed reporting and analysis, her left-wing prejudices and one-sided portentous writing, the author who carried off the 1997 Man Booker prize for her novel, “The God of Small Things”, is just the sort of brave and energetic critic that India needs.
Not for her the national image projected by India’s smug elite, of a nascent superpower lifting off. Ms Roy’s India is a truer one—a poor, rural country beset by grave problems, where, notwithstanding the holding of regular elections, wretched injustices are perpetrated by a corrupt and often brutal state.
As prime evidence of democracy’s failure to protect Indians, in this collection of her recent journalism and other writings, Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.
The Hindu nationalists’ hateful tendencies are well-known. Perhaps less notorious is the weakness of India’s non-political institutions, and Ms Roy skewers most of them. In three deft articles, she examines the dubious methods of the police in securing the conviction of Muhammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri, for masterminding a 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building—allegedly by planting evidence and torturing him into confessing. Given that India’s police are often alleged to use torture, and have long enjoyed impunity in Kashmir, where Mr Guru was picked up, this would not be surprising. But neither India’s complacent judiciary nor its often-craven journalists shows much interest in reinvestigating his case. Mr Guru remains on death row.
Whether or not he is guilty, Ms Roy does laudable work in defending Mr Guru when others—including at times India’s legal fraternity, according to Ms Roy—would not. On other issues, however, she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.
But that faulty observation was at least noted by Ms Roy in the field. More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as “lounge notes”), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India’s territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, “out of government control”. Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s “contemporary horrors” are caused by America’s “new colonial interests”, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.
So entrenched is the anti-globalisation that informs her world view, she would be tough to dissuade. But what alternative strategies does she advocate for improving India? Hard to say. A rare suggestion for better governance—the formation of a shadow parliament “that keeps an
underground drumbeat”—does not seem terribly serious. On economic policy, Ms Roy has even less to offer—other than to slam recent governments for aspiring to rapid economic growth. This is a “project” she considers to be “encrypted with genocidal potential”. For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, “High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting oursocial welfare objectives.” Ms Roy should take note.
From: Arundhati Roy
Hi folks
A letter to the Economist about their charming review of my book. No news from them, so feel free to post on websites/circulate.
To,
The Editor
The Economist 25 August 2009
Dear Sir
This is with regard to the review of my book “Listening to Grasshoppers” that appeared in the Economist. If this letter is long, ironically it is because the factual errors in the review are so many. In an attempt to highlight my “flawed reporting and incorrect analysis” the reviewer makes some extraordinary errors and leaps of logic:
1. “Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.”
Mr Tata did not merely praise Modi’s business policies, he endorsed him warmly and publicly as a future candidate for prime minister. In India the said Mr Modi is still being investigated for his role in the 2002 pogrom. In his successful election campaigns after the pogrom, Modi brazenly cultivated communal hatred. He is a member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh) an organization that is proud of its fascist origins and counts both Hitler and Mussolini as its heroes. In addition to the massacres about 150,000 Muslims were driven from their homes during the carnage. Even today, under Mr Modi’s administration, most continue to live in ghettos, socially and economically boycotted in a brutal system of communal apartheid, while the killers continue to live as free, respectable citizens. Incidentally, after considering the available information, the US government has denied Mr Modi a visa. A handicap, wouldn’t you say, for a potential prime -minister? Incidentally, for more on the Tata’s “ethical dealings” you could google “Kalinganagar” or “Singur”.
2. “…she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.”
I have never made such a claim. Nobody with an even passing acquaintance with Kashmir would (or should) say something so ridiculous. Given the intensity and violence of the fratricidal wars that Kashmiris have fought, and the thousands that have lost their lives over the Pakistan vs Freedom issue, and given that Kashmiri leadership is still unresolved about the question, it’s extraordinary that the reviewer can so casually and so glibly claim to know what the majority of people of Kashmir want. My essay on Kashmir is actually titled “Azadi”, which in Urdu means “Freedom”. Perhaps the reviewer is unfamiliar with the language?
3. “More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as ‘lounge notes’), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India's territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, ‘out of government control’.”
If the reviewer had cared to read the book instead of ransacking it, he/she would have come across a sentence that clarifies that several of the essays are “responses to the responses” about certain events. Given that much of my book is a critique of the disturbing role that a section of the corporate media has played in these events, is it surprising that media reports are frequently referred to? Most of the time this is in order to expose them for being false and motivated. To conclude from this that my “facts are gathered from newspapers” and that the articles are “lounge notes” is laughable.
The figure of 25 % of India’s territory being under Maoist insurgency is a figure advanced by the Indian security establishment and is probably a slight exaggeration. However, it is a fact that vast swathes of India’s territory are out of government control. It is for this reason that the Government has announced that in October, after the rains, there will be a military operation in states like Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand in which ground troops will be backed up with helicopter gunships and satellite mapping. A brigade headquarters is being established in Raipur (Chhattisgarh), and 26,000 paramilitary troops (the same Rashtriya Rifles who are deployed in Kashmir, and similar to the Assam Rifles deployed in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland) are being raised for this war. This is in addition the thousands of security personnel who are already deployed in these areas. Perhaps the reviewer has never visited Dantewara , seen the burned, empty villages, or crossed the Indravati into the territory that is called “Pakistan”, where police and security forces do not venture? Perhaps he/she hasn’t heard of Abujmaad?
4. “Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s ‘contemporary horrors’ are caused by America’s ‘new colonial interests’, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.”
My book is about India, not Africa, but yes, there is a paragraph about Africa. Here’s the sentence the reviewer refers to: “The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on— scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.” My mistake here is that I didn’t mention the new colonial interests of countries like China and India as well. Does your reviewer not know about the legacy of Shell Oil in Nigeria? Or the politics that surrounds the mining of a mineral called coltan? Or of how Belgium’s colonial regime structured the barriers of hatred between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda with their racist profiling and social engineering? As for the recommendation that I pay a visit to the continent…it’s a grand idea, but how does one visit an entire continent? I have visited parts of it. Plenty of times. But the reviewer should know that it is possible to know things about places even if you haven’t been to them, like historians know things about history without traveling back in time.
5. “For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, ‘High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting our social welfare objectives.’ Ms Roy should take note.”
Am I really being waved back into my seat with the finance ministry’s Economic Survey? I thought everybody knew that the cut back on public spending (social welfare objectives) is almost in direct proportion to the growth rate? It’s often a pre-requisite when loans from the World Bank, the ADB and the IMF are negotiated. Isn’t that what structural adjustment is all about? Or is this the old Trickle Down theory being re-cycled? I’ve always wondered about this. Some times they say the Free Market provides a level playing field – but then when questioned, they ask us to wait for Trickle Down. But things only Trickle Down slopes don’t they? Anyway, there is a school of thought, which believes that people actually do have rights. The right, for instance to resist the Government taking away their land and their livelihoods, often at gun point, and then ordering them to wait for the leftovers (if the gentlemen leave any) to trickle down after the feast.
Regardless of our obvious ideological differences I hope you agree that errors and innuendo of this nature undermine the real debate.
With best wishes
Arundhati Roy
2A Kautilya Marg
New Delhi 110021
***
Necessary, but wrong
Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. By Arundhati Roy. Hamish Hamilton; 256 pages; £14.99. To be published in America as “Field Notes on Democracy” by Haymarket Books in October. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
IT IS impossible not to admire Arundhati Roy. Despite her flawed reporting and analysis, her left-wing prejudices and one-sided portentous writing, the author who carried off the 1997 Man Booker prize for her novel, “The God of Small Things”, is just the sort of brave and energetic critic that India needs.
Not for her the national image projected by India’s smug elite, of a nascent superpower lifting off. Ms Roy’s India is a truer one—a poor, rural country beset by grave problems, where, notwithstanding the holding of regular elections, wretched injustices are perpetrated by a corrupt and often brutal state.
As prime evidence of democracy’s failure to protect Indians, in this collection of her recent journalism and other writings, Ms Roy cites a massacre of perhaps 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, in which the state’s Hindu-nationalist government was allegedly complicit. Almost no senior official or Hinduist agitator has been prosecuted over the atrocity. And Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister then and now, is currently vying to take over the leadership of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, and one day India. Many of the country’s industrialists would approve of that; even Ratan Tata, the gentlemanly head of the vast Tata Group which prides itself on its ethical dealings, has praised Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies. Nothing annoys Ms Roy more.
The Hindu nationalists’ hateful tendencies are well-known. Perhaps less notorious is the weakness of India’s non-political institutions, and Ms Roy skewers most of them. In three deft articles, she examines the dubious methods of the police in securing the conviction of Muhammad Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri, for masterminding a 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building—allegedly by planting evidence and torturing him into confessing. Given that India’s police are often alleged to use torture, and have long enjoyed impunity in Kashmir, where Mr Guru was picked up, this would not be surprising. But neither India’s complacent judiciary nor its often-craven journalists shows much interest in reinvestigating his case. Mr Guru remains on death row.
Whether or not he is guilty, Ms Roy does laudable work in defending Mr Guru when others—including at times India’s legal fraternity, according to Ms Roy—would not. On other issues, however, she is not always a reliable witness. Her claim that in Kashmir last summer protesters were as likely to call for union with Pakistan as freedom from India is probably wrong; most seemed to want to be shot of both countries.
But that faulty observation was at least noted by Ms Roy in the field. More typically, she appears to gather her facts from newspapers (her articles strike the reader rather as “lounge notes”), before selectively arranging and then exaggerating them to suit her own ends. For example, about 25% of India’s territory is alleged to be affected by a Maoist insurgency, but that does not make it, as Ms Roy writes, “out of government control”. Beyond India, her grasp of her subject-matter gets looser. If Ms Roy believes, as she writes, that a good portion of Africa’s “contemporary horrors” are caused by America’s “new colonial interests”, she would do well to pay a visit to the continent.
So entrenched is the anti-globalisation that informs her world view, she would be tough to dissuade. But what alternative strategies does she advocate for improving India? Hard to say. A rare suggestion for better governance—the formation of a shadow parliament “that keeps an
underground drumbeat”—does not seem terribly serious. On economic policy, Ms Roy has even less to offer—other than to slam recent governments for aspiring to rapid economic growth. This is a “project” she considers to be “encrypted with genocidal potential”. For a more measured analysis, Ms Roy should perhaps turn to the finance ministry’s recently published Economic Survey. There she would read that, “High growth is critical to generate the revenues needed for meeting oursocial welfare objectives.” Ms Roy should take note.
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