Or reading Joe Sacco’s Palestine in the pandemic
To those who still care, a very happy new year to you! :)
When asked how was the last year for you? by a friend, I launched into a long monologue. Midway into the monologue, I realized that I wasn’t ranting about this year for the first time. I’d done it before. And as my rant progressed, I came to the same conclusion that I had the first time.
As a reluctant member of this productivity-obsessed generation, I have this somewhere at the back of my head that I need to get better every year. Forget every year, I need to get better every month and every day. That I need to sleep in having accomplished something in the day. I need to sleep in a better version of myself than the one that had woken up.
And I genuinely do not know whether this is the right approach. But somewhere close to the mid of the pandemic, I started to feel that I was on a constant downward arc. And along the course of the year and a half, I’d somehow managed to convince myself that I had ended up a worse version of myself than the one I used to be before the pandemic.
So, that was the inevitable conclusion that my rant led me to. If nothing else, it at least made sense why I simultaneously craved and loathed listening to the music that I once used to listen to. It reminded me of who I used to be. And the fact that I had slipped.
Now, I have to imagine for my own sanity that I cannot be the only one feeling this way. The passage of time is harsh and indifferent to our dreams and hopes and ambitions.
But here’s the kicker. Even if I assume that majority of us do feel this way, even as a pandemic-ridden lost global generation, we can’t be the only ones that slipped.
In his graphic novel Palestine, Joe Sacco explores the streets of Palestine, going from one home to the other, understanding the pain and trauma that spreads across an entire people.
In doing so, he encounters so many of these stories where someone had been wrongfully captured and sent to prison, where people had been killed because they dared to rebel, stories that can shake one to one’s core.
One of the stories that he comes across is of Ghassan who woke up one night with the sounds of a raid. He was captured, blindfolded, and sent to a small cell without evidence. The next seven, ten, fifteen (who knows how many) days he was kept there as the big policemen and detectives tried to squeeze information about some rebel political group from him, a group that he was never a part of.
Make no mistake, Sacco writes, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there’s parallel universes… Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards… And over the wall behind closed doors: other things — people strapped to chairs, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss… other things happening for “reasons of national security”, for “security reasons”, to combat “terrorist activity”… they were happening to Ghassan a week and a half ago, he shows me his back and wrists, he’s still got the marks. He’s a fresh case, all right. Right off the rack.
Before I tell you why Ghassan’s story, obviously horrifying but essentially no different from any other in the book, caught my attention while reading, I’d like you to take a look at a few images. See if you can spot something interesting.
See a pattern? The trick is to look beyond the content, at the layout. Here, allow me -
Forgive the crudeness of the drawing. Let’s begin with page 103, the page that essentially marks the beginning of this arc. As Ghassan is captured by Israeli police, see how his world shrinks from full-width to half-width panels. As the story goes on and Ghassan is thrown into a small cell, the panels on the pages shrink further. From 3x2 panels on the page to 3x3 to 4x3 to 4x4 and eventually to 5x4 on the page.
When the page, which is a finite resource in terms of its space, goes from 6 panels to 20 panels progressively, the boxes not only contain more content, they also encroach and invade Ghassan’s personal space. His face barely fits into panels by the end. And even if it does, it feels too small. He feels too small. He is blindfolded and feels that there are other people in the cell, but the boxes around him do not allow him to make contact with them. It is almost claustrophobic.
This goes on for ten pages, till page 113 when he is finally let go. And the boxes relax and open up, from 5x4 to 2x3 on a half-page to finally a full-width panel on the later half of the page.
Exactly how we started on page 103.
Alright, so what? How does the tragic story of a Palestinian man relate to the pandemic?
Am I saying that as the lockdowns rage on around us, our lives become comparable to Ghassan’s? Lonely and surrounded via boxes made up of four walls? While that might sound good as hyperbole, that is not at all what I am suggesting here. There is obviously a difference. And that is — we, unlike Ghassan, are not being tortured for information and our boxes are much more comfortable.
But, there is a connection here.
The boxes that surround us are created by us. They are our viewpoints. They are the eco-chambers, the personal bubbles, the perspectives — whatever you want to call them. And these boxes, the same way they were around Ghassan on page 103, encompass a lot of things. They encompass our views on relationships. And they cover our views on politics, and our thoughts on business, and arts, and economy, and family, and culture, and society, and work, and so on.
One of the common factors with all of the things I’ve listed above is that they are all our perceptions of outward things. Things that exist beyond our self.
And yet, as the pandemic rages and the boxes continue to narrow, these external things, stuff that’s in the background phase away. And we’re left with ourselves inside these four walls. And now, the boxes that surround us are made up of our internal things. Our fears, our insecurities and anxieties, our loneliness, and self-appointed societal pressures. They take the center stage. These boxes bring out the worst in us. The same way they did with Ghassan.
Sacco writes,
Some of the world’s blackest holes are out in the open for anyone to see. For instance, you can tour a Palestinian refuge camp in the Gaza Strip. You call UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (Tel: 051–861195). They’ll set you up, drive you there themselves, admission is free… Probably they’ll want to add you to a group of Swedes or Japanese, but you’ll want your refugee camp experience to be an intimate thing.
Insist they take you out alone. Tell them you want to take pictures, tell them you want to talk to refugees. When you want them to stop, let them know.
The fact, though, is that even beyond the pandemic and the four walls, we are not immune to these boxes. We are always surrounded. When we are sitting and thinking, talking, running, exercising, eating, hiking, laughing, crying. And dreaming.
Look how Sacco depicts rebel kids as they are fighting against the police.
There is confusion in the air. As soon as they see the soldiers, the kids run ahead as planned. As they move ahead, they grab stones lying on the ground. The boxes around them tilt as their hands arc and the stones shoot out. Two steps further. A few steps further. A few more stones thrown. And then boxes stabilize as the kids pause. Realize they’ve done what they came to do. And then they rush back.
Boxes overlap over each other as the kids collide with each other and they skew to depict the movements and rush. And that makes sense. In a period of hyperactivity, that activity is pretty much all on our minds and our viewpoints seem to skew to that.
Don’t believe me? Try giving a lecture on your political beliefs the next time a bathroom is occupied and you really have to go.
The point is that the boxes that surround us take many shapes and are created in myriad ways. And they not only form around individuals. Just the way a graphic novel panel explores, boxes form around a family, around a crowd, and around an entire people. Our viewpoints both form and restrict these boxes. Our politics as people, our norms, our fears, and our insecurities. And they get passed on from generation to generation, tilting and twisting on their own.
Sacco writes,
Introductions, and we’re sitting in a room off to the side. It’s cold, there’s six or seven men sitting around, the tea comes. The cold, the men, the tea… That’s the Essence of Palestinian Room. This could be almost every room I’ve ever sat in in Palestine. They say the couch is new, though, arrived today.
Someone wants to know what I’m here for. I say I’ve come to see their lives under occupation… These rooms, not even the talk changes. The soldiers closed down the school, the soldiers imposed a curfew. The soldiers clubbed me on the head, the soldiers took me away. Over and over, the same stories, maybe with some bruises shuffled.
Who are these people anyway? I’ve been introduced, but I can’t remember any names. And where am I? Nuseirat camp. Nooz-er-ut? Noiz-er-ut?
We can’t be the only people that slipped. People have been in boxes far worse than ours. In Palestine, Sacco shows boxes that have encroached on people to an extent where their existence has become suffocating. Forget about getting better every day or month or year. There is no hope. There is just fight. A constant relentless fight just to prove that they exist.
So, I suppose the answer we are looking for is also the same. The only way to deal with these boxes that we have formed around ourselves during the pandemic and beyond is to be able to control them. To be able to push and pull and stretch and tear their boundaries as and when we want to. And while that sounds fantastic, we probably have less control over them than you might think.
Just take Sacco for example. Sacco roams the streets of Palestine over the course of the entire book and encounters dozens and dozens of the same stories. And these stories are about war and kidnappings and tortures and they are gruesome and horrifying. But they also get tiring and exhausting to listen to. Because as a western man in the warzone, it creates a depressing box around Sacco as well. A box that he is glad to shatter and get out of.
And I’m glad to be in Tel Aviv with Naomi and Paula, who wouldn’t let me off the hook and insisted I visit and experience something of Israel. And we’re chatting happily about this and that… about jobs, Jewish families, the latest Woody Allen, about relationships and boyfriends. And probably one or both of them have got the hots for me, and on a day like today, who can blame them? Yesterday I was wound up so tight. I was in Nablus, a town strung out on the occupation, and yesterday… Well, yesterday in Nablus was nothing unusual. Patrols, a stone or two flying, school kids bolting in the other direction. but tension is cumulative, and now, just the sight of patrols, just the sight-
And I couldn’t find the people I wanted. The young girl with the gunshot wound I’d come to visit was no longer at the hospital. And at the nearby Balata refugee camp, my pal Jabril wasn’t home either. I’d come to say my goodbyes. I’m leaving in less than a week. I’ll be back in Cairo, and then on to Berlin. Yeah, Berlin… But meanwhile, it’s pleasant enough to be in Tel Aviv, which seems familiar, somehow, to my Western ears and eyes. Naomi and Paula seem familiar too. Their day-to-day concerns remind me of the stuff that makes up the lives of people I know in Europe, the States…
After meeting the Palestinians, Sacco spends time with the Israeli Jews. And on one of those days, in order to change the opinion of an Israeli woman about Palestinians, he offers to walk her through an Arab market. The woman is hesitant, to which Sacco bravely responds by saying he’d spent a week in Gaza and nothing had happened to him. Walking through the market would only take fifteen minutes. Once they enter the market though…
Even Sacco is not immune to the boxes that he had created and drew people in. Despite spending a long time in Palestine, walking through an Arab market in Israel made him paranoid and the boxes tightened around his face as they finished their walk nervously.
Some boxes form around us because we consciously form them. Some form around us unknowingly. Some form because of the company we keep. Some we inherit from our family. Some are external. Others, internal. Some we share across a village, a city, a state, a nation, a culture, a people.
Some boxes are not harmful. Some lead us down a dark path that we might not want to.
So, yes, I had slipped. But when I recognized the box that had formed around me, it gave me an opportunity to acknowledge that it is not healthy being surrounded by one’s own self all the time. It magnifies our own flaws and masks our achievements. As the world would slowly open up again after the current wave, what better time than a new year to resolve to recognize these boxes and break free. In that sense, perhaps the way to deal with these boxes comes in the form of other boxes.
And if you, like me, feel that you also slipped, and you also feel inadequate and anxious against the onslaught of time, the only thing I can offer you is this — the boxes around you might be heavy and might be difficult to deal with. But in most cases, they are just a figment of your imagination. A story you tell yourself. And a great first step in shattering them is an acknowledgment that they are not real.
May we all survive the pandemic healthy and have a productive year ahead.
