The "Love" Article I Was Talking About In Our Last Class

This is the article that I was talking about that I saw in a movie. The first link is the article itself through JSTOR, and the second link is the little part from the movie I found on YouTube (it's pretty interesting what they say in the movie before the guy actually says his argument, but his "thesis" comes at one minute and five seconds....

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4104976

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9CaXPlzSbM

Check this out! NPR did a segment on Terkel's Working

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3892055

Precis for Studs Terkel's Working

In the introduction Studs Terkel states clearly that Working has one common "theme" in all of the accounts and episodes: all of them have within them some sort of violence, whether the violence is physically done against the characters in over-working them, or mentally by continually being put down. This could in a way be seen as the move that Keiji Nakazawa did in Barefoot Gen when he brought up the tidbit about the wheat in the introduction, but maybe not as obvious. It's sort of hard to miss that every single story in Working has in it some sort of violence, but a few other things might be overlooked without further examination; in a lot of ways I think that he's suggesting that this violence is in a way innate in our everyday lives, and to all of us, no matter where we work or what ethnic background we have or who we try to be or what class we're part of.

Although I obviously didn't relate with all of the stories, a few of the stories I was able to connect to really strongly, and for the majority of the others in which I didn't personally relate to, I was still interested in what the person was going to say and how the artist chose to convey their story. It seemed as though the entire book in general was pitched towards an all-inclusive audience of nearly all the people in America. I don't want to extend the audience to the whole entire world because every story was set in America, and whether one-time immigrants or not, all of the characters were "American". In a way it might be going to say that the connection between our working life and the violence we face in it might be part of our society in America and not per-say the way the working life is in other countries; an opposition to this could be said though for the fact that Studs Terkel didn't openly mention life in another country or how working conditions are in other places, so Working could be seen more as a criticism of just our society in and of itself rather than a comparison-type-of-criticism of America's working habits as opposed to other countries'.

I have noticed that others in their precis' went on to write long descriptions of their reading of the text in specific, but in my case I merely wanted to set up with my reading of the general arguments the text presents, and pose some questions that I hope will jump-start our conversation tomorrow....I have some answers of my own to the these questions, but I feel it would defeat the purpose if I just said what I think, so here goes nothing....

What do you guys think the purpose is that Harvey Pekar chose to get different artists for each of the stories? What is he trying to say by sketching each one of the stories in a different way? What was the reason for this stylistic choice in this graphic novel adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working?

Do you think there were forms of work and types of jobs and sorts of people that were not included in Working?

Do you think that there was anything that the people had in common throughout the stories (besides the given that they were all speaking of work, haha)?

In adapting Studs Terkel's Working into a graphic novel, what do you think has changed in the presentation? What has remained the same? Has the work remained true to its goal (the work's argument)? Has newer arguments been created? Has the graphic adaptation taken previous arguments further?

For what it's worth... my incredibly late thesis

Thesis: In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel recounts her relationship with her late father as a means of understanding her own identity through an analysis of her fathers.

Opposition: Fun Home follows the relationship between a father and daughter as a way of presenting two very different paths taken in the discovery of self hood.

Bacchanal

We've already arrived at our final week, incredible though that may seem. And since this has been quite a collegial and friendly little group I have mentioned before that I mean to bring round some refreshments for our final meeting, when papers are handed in, evaluations scribbled, lingering questions aired, and so on. If anybody else had the idea to bring anything that day, chips, crackers, veggies, cookies, cups, napkins, or what have you, the Virgo in me wanted to get the ball rolling in the comments section to this post so that it can be done in an organized rather than utterly haphazard sort of way, so here you go...

Thesis: Ethnography - Can't Stop Won't Stop

The Photographer, in all well meaning innocence, fabricates Afghani selfhood as that of an oriental other through the use of myth bound signs. It is a work of truth that tells a lie.

- counter -

Using actual photography as well as mostly first hand accounts gives as politicized a text as possible, the construction of myth is not done by the photographer but by the readers. To whit; myth making of narrative selfhood is an act of interpretation.

Theses...

A couple more to come, surely? Better late than never, now! So, how are you feeling about your writing processes? Did the thesis assignment help get you underway? Comments, problems, questions?

Thesis

I completely forgot to post but here it is: ( Im still work in progress, here are two finches and I was wondering which was more advanced in the evolutionary stage)

Duncan's ability to embody not only a ideology but a way of life in to a dance gave her the power to break the social constraints which silenced women, to become the catalyst and inspiration of many revolutionary thinkers.

Duncan's embodiment of her ideology and way of life into her dance gave her the power to make her voice echo in the minds of many revolutionary thinkers despite social constraints where a women's mind were almost non-existent .

(leaning more toward the first thesis)

Counter claim (Im not sure, I think I still need to work on my thesis to get a more solid one)- It Ducans love affairs that gave her the publicity to be heard as a woman in a society where females were silenced.

Deogratias Thesis & Opposition

Thesis Statement: Deogratias recurring flashback encounters interwoven (with the present) throughout the novel seem to take on a pedagogical slant/perspective that is unbounded by time and space (as portrayed by the unbounded boxes without lines).

Intelligent Opposition: Deogratias recurring flashback encounters interwoven (with the present) throughout the novel seem to not suggest a pedagogical slant because of the sexual themes, graphic violence and coarse language employed.

Palestine Thesis

Thesis:

Joe Sacco initially inhabits the outsider persona as a means of establishing a kind of distance from the plight of the Palestinians--one that could afford him a venue for escape--yet, he deliberately plunges himself into the folds of the Palestinian testimonies, becoming an ambassador of their history, closing the gap he originally constructed and shattering the Western preconceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Opposition:

Joe Sacco maintains this outsider persona and, though he does attempt to reveal the truth of the Palestinian conflict, he attempts to maintain his Journalistic objectivity by belittling some of the harsh realities of Palestinian life--never fully taking a stand on the conflict with the power to waver Western preconceptions.

Thesis For American Born Chinese (Franco)

Gene Luen Yang creates the identity and experience of the "American Born Chinese" as an "other" constantly dependent- being defined by the hegemonic forces of america.

Counter:

Gene Luen Yang creates the identity and experience of the "American Born Chinese" outside of American hegemonic forces and uses it to critique the one that is defined through American hegemonic forces.

-Franco

P.S: If this is the final essay thesis, it will be refined. Whatever I had at the 1st thesis workshop was much more refined and eloquent :)

Thesis For Final Paper

Thesis: In Deogratias, Stassen makes Deogratias turn into a dog to show that he saw himself as inadvertently put in the situation he ended up in as the dogs he saw when he came back for the girls. Just as the innocent dogs that were put in the situation they found themselves in, Deogratias wanted to be let go of his misery by be shot.

Opposition: Stassen merely wanted to show that Deogratias had gone mad just like how the dogs had gone "mad" and had begun to eat human flesh. No further special connection as to why Stassen chose dogs, but just because it was an image Deogratias had seen in the recent past.

Thesis for American-Born Chinese

Thesis: The three different narratives do not function as parallel stories to one another; instead, each permeate with their own unique struggles within different societal hierarchies beyond race, such as parental, capital, and religious, that meld together into a single story that exacerbates rather than resolves any conflict as the author originally intended.

Opposition: The three different narratives within American Born Chinese - one coming-of-age, one fantasy, and one sitcom-like - are parallel stories of self-acceptance that meet at a single point, woven together in order to emphasize the universal necessity for self-acceptance.

Goodbye Thesis

The contrasting representational economies of the photorealistic “furniture” and cartoonish inhabitants in Tatsumi’s Goodbye highlight the attempt of many characters to inhabit a certain fantasy, to no avail. This failure of escapist fare frames inhabits the struggle of post WWII Japan to cope with the aftermath of the bombs.

Opposition: the contrasting representational economies do not represent an effort inhabit a fantasy space in which the bombings did not occur; rather, the photorealism of the scenery is purely a means of contextualizing the various narratives that take place in the novel.

US Constitution Thesis and Opposition

Thesis:
In presenting the history of the U.S. Constitution through the eponymous graphic novel—by using figurative and formal devices to demonstrate the way in which the past interacts with the present and future, by drawing on important American symbolic representations, and by emphasizing the evolutionary and progressive nature of the document that the Framer’s intended for it to have—the reader sees the emergence of the self as the American identity and nationhood.

Opposition:
It is not the American identity and nationhood that emerges out of the graphic novel, but rather the character of the U.S. Constitution itself that is demonstrated by the fundamental nature of the document that remains constant irrespective of its external conditions in accordance with the original intent of the Framers and its determinative nature on the people of the United States.

American Born Chinese Thesis

In American Born Chinese, the author fuses western and Chinese tales and motifs to establish and explain the unique self of American born Chinese, and in doing so commits to the idea that self-hood is ultimately determined by heritage and cannot be shaped or modified by time or one's will.

Opposition: the author does not argue that heritage is the determinant factor in establishing one's self hood; a person can develop an individual self-hood that is not dependent on his or her cultural background.

Thesis Fun Home

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel utilizes texts, both fiction and non-fiction, as a channel through which she identifies not only with herself but with other people; however, the texts enable her to blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction regarding the events that occurred in her life.

Anti Thesis

The machine in "The Constitution" is a time machine because it functions as a metaphor for the timelessness of the constitution via the framers' in-temporal ideology and vision of the nation conveyed within.

The Time Machine is not a time machine; rather, a robot that serves as an anti-metaphor for the complicated issue of "tight rope walking" which itself is a metaphor for the complicated process the constitution and framers underwent creating the constitution itself.

Note: I do not think this is my final paper thesis.

Final Paper Thesis and Intelligent Opposition

Thesis: The repeated image of a wounded face in Barefoot Gen illustrates the failure of literal language in representing historical trauma.

Intelligent Opposition: Barefoot Gen's use of literal language to describe the events preceding Hiroshima's moment of trauma suggests an indispensability of literal language in accounting history.

The Photographer Thesis

Thesis:
Although the graphic novel The Photographer is filled with photographs of a war-torn country and courageous doctors mending said country, readers should not allow those photographs to divert their attention away from the novel's main focus: Didier Lefevre. Instead, the photographs and rendered images are a tool that allows readers to witness Lefevre's growth.

Opposition:
Through it's numerous photographs of a war-torn Afghanistan-from its barren landscape to the difficult day to day life of it's citizens, from the gruesome injuries that its citizens suffer to the courageous doctors seeking to mend those injuries-The Photographer seeks to educate it's audience of the Afghanistan condition.

08 is a graphic novel based almost entirely on images and sound bytes gathered from mass media sources. Some of the most memorable moments from the 2008 presidential campaigns of Barrack Obama, John McCain, Hilary Clinton, and Mitt Romney, among others, are vividly recreated in graphic illustrations. Since the novel is told almost exclusively through the lens of the media, however, it was difficult for me to pin down exactly what the book is arguing for or where the authorial voice is meant to be coming from. While I think it's fair to say 08 is Obamacentric, since the book really does seem to favor him over the other candidates, I don't think it was really arguing for a political ideology or Obama's message of hope and change. It feels as though it could go that way for a moment, but after Obama wins the election and gives his speech in which his “words were heard around the world”, the narrative shifts to a scene featuring the two reporters struggling to write a conclusion. As they decide to go big with their coverage of Obama's victory the two men are quickly transitioned into new coverage and the novel ends with: “And now we turn the page”. This ending leaves the narrative open and without a resolution, and it doesn't leave me with the impression that the novel is trying to align itself politically with Obama.

What seemed more important to the novel was the relationship between the media, politicians, and the public. What continually drives 08's narrative is exactly the same as what influences the vote, the media coverage. There's a ton of images which constantly remind the reader that the illustrations are meant to be seen through the media. There are microphones, boom mics, newspapers, and even familiar news personalities and political commentators, like Rachael Maddow and Rush Limbaugh, chiming in with their two cents. Like we discussed yesterday in class, the idea of our democracy is largely based on having as many ideas out in the open as possible. What 08 seems to capture is a moment from our recent past which demonstrates how much this democratic process has changed as mass media has evolved. Nowadays the population is inundated with information for months leading up to an election. What information is released and how it is conveyed plays a huge role in how politicians are perceived publicly. And with so much information being available to the public, opinions of politicians can change extremely quickly.

That being said, 08 does have an argument, I'm just not sure what it is.

SUPERMAJORITY

I recalled this episode from the Daily Show, and thought it perfectly exemplified the portrayal of the Supermajority as some sort of super hero.

The Daily Show - Democratic Super Majority
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The United States Constitution Precis

Jonathan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell truly bring the United States Constitution to life in their graphic adaptation. They present the document, among other things, laden with symbolic figures and through extensive personification. If anyone ever questioned how the Constitution could possibly be a living document, this graphic novel is a testament to its spirit.

The entire novel is a meta text, constantly referring to and reproducing the actual document of the Constitution. We also get a whole slew of other documents represented in their actual forms such as: stamps from various time-periods, drafts of the Articles of Confederation, monetary media, as well as published materials including the Federalist Papers and the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. The novel not only uses actual paraphernalia but also relies on heavily symbolic figures to represent various aspects of the story. One such example is the representation of the three branches of government. They are personified as corporal beings headed, literally, by their respective monumental symbols. The legislative branch is represented as a suited man with the U.S. Capital monument as its head, the executive branch is another suited figured topped with the White House, and the judicial branch is a robed figure (similar to the attire of a judge) crowned with the Supreme Court. This device effectively brings these government bodies to life displaying their tendency for action and their ability to act; but it could also serve to distance these “headless” (mindless?) bodies from the public. A curious feature is that sometimes the legislative branch is represented as a woman and at other times as a man, the other two branches are consistently distinctively male.

Another form of symbolism and perhaps personification is the use of birds to represent the various states. They are always a motley flock twittering their various opinions and stances on all matter of issues. It is almost aggrandizing that the Federal Government (and/or America) is portrayed as an eagle in comparison to the minute birds. The use of the birds gives the sense of fickleness and division, but it can also demonstrate a duality: the idea of a unified flock. Additions to the flock, that is new states, are depicted as the production of a new egg, laid in a systematic nest brought forth by Congress.

Greek columns are used once in the novel to represent the states during the ratification of the Constitution. Their particular line-up suggests the building blocks of our nation as well as a nod to the philosophies founded in ancient Greece. That same page also has an illustration of the three branches of government, their hands raised to the heavens, overshadowed by dark skies and lightening. Perhaps a reference to the Gods?

Overall, the graphic novel is a perfect example of a comic-book featuring dramatic action, superheroes (The Supermajority!), and the occasional villain. It animates documents and abstract ideas with such force and superhero strength, that no one can doubt their power.

Isadora Duncan Precis

Spend 0.37 seconds searching google images with keywords “Isadora+Duncan” and you’ll find 158,000 photographs, any number of which bear striking similarity to the rendered images in Jones’ biography of the same name. There are a whole host of pictures that are so immediately recognizable that you can literally toggle back and forth from screen to page and not only not lose your bearings, but also seriously delight in the dialectic space that emerges from taking the two media up together. Take, for example, this image, Isadora with wings.

Jones seems to have cut-copied-and-pasted this same image in at page 14, and captioned it with some variation on the tortured-artist-being-misunderstood-thought-bubble (an act that gets old, not cute, fast). No one is going to disagree that tinsel fairy wings are silly, but it is Isadora who insists that she could “suggest” wings with her movement. It’s no wonder Rodin nicknamed her “Sister of the Breezes.”

RODIN GALLERY

There are endless things to say about Rodin. The first is that a number of his sculptures are on display at the Rodin Gallery in the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco (the Spreckles gift to the city and the city’s gift to us, as in me and Birney who went to check it out this last weekend.

In Rodin's sculptures (excluding the thinker) I was looking for movement—what could be more fluid than Plaster?—and I found it in this triad: (from L to R) Eternal Idol, Baccantes Embracing, and Dance Movement B.

We have here two lovers embracing in sacred ecstasy and we have in the text Isadora telling us Dionysus, “sweet god of wine and earthly mysteries,” laid claim to her soul. Here also we have a dancer in the splits, turning toward us as if moving across a dance floor in the same way Isadora endlessly turns toward us as we turn pages. Now I might not have wanted to lose my virginity to the handsy and bearded Rodin who authored these pieces, but Isadora, right on.

NOT LITERALLY LOSING HER VIRGINITY TO RODIN BUT FETISHIZING IT INSTEAD

And, about the loss of her virginity, I’m not entirely convinced that Isadora didn’t give it up to Rodin. That’s not to say that they literally slept together—one bed on fire is enough beds on fire for any story—but Isadora tries (perhaps successfully) to re-capture “years later” in creepy and subversive ways the possibilities that inhere not only in the losing of one’s virginity, but in the losing of her virginity to Rodin in that particular moment. On p. 22, the final panel is a panel from the future, demarcated as such with the superimposition of “years later” at its head. But fast forward to p. 81, when it actually is years later, when that panel that gave us an ex-post-facto self-flagellation might actually appear in its rightful place in the chronology of her life story, and we are importantly at the chapter entitled “Revolt of the Isadorables.”

Isadora’s biological children have all already died (and are always still dying), Singer had just left her for the final time, and Isadora aspires to be the mother to those to whom she had always-only been a dance instructor. The period of intended adoption is short-lived, but before the conclusion of the episode, Isadora says something of those six women and what she says of them matters. At the top of p. 81: “Just as Rodin surrounds himself in his studio with slabs of marble, I need to surround myself with my marble—my pupils.” Isadora is certainly not subtle about the connection she’s forging here. She literally says Rodin’s name, she figuratively makes a brute equation of marble and her pupils, and she conjures up images on one side of her what would be Rodin’s slabs of marble and on the other what would be her own slabs of marble but grooved with silhouettes of the pupils she would presumably make into her children. (Creepy…)The way the image is rendered seems to suggest that Isadora is trapping her would-be children in the very marble from which they should be liberated. That is to say, if what Rodin does is preserve movement in bodies as carved from marble (and plaster and bronze and what have you), then what Isadora-as-mother would be doing as Isadora-as-sculptor is not preserving movement. She is just preserving living bodies, the disembodied heads of which litter what’s left of the page. It’s not that these heads couldn’t have bodies, it’s that they don’t yet have bodies, and something about the presence of the head and not of the body seems to conjure up stills from the process of giving birth and the way that in giving birth the head crowns first.

Or, we can take Isadora’s metaphor of pupils as marble (and necessarily marble as pupils) and glean from it that the making of children is a form of art. Perhaps we can take as support here the endless occasion Isadora has for saying of her children “I feel very near the mystery—the knowledge of life” (p 50), which could just as easily describe the way she feels about any of Rodin’s paintings, or about art more generally. While it doesn’t have to be Rodin, here it still does have to be Rodin, actually, because he is the one to whom she did not lose her virginity. He is the one with whom she was never able to father children. The potentiality of making of children with Rodin is a form of art that she was never able engage in, so instead she literally fantasizes about making children from the marble that Rodin touches instead of touching her. That is to say, there is a trafficking between “art as children” and “children as art.” To ask what art they could have made is to ask the exact same question as what children they would have borne.

At least we’ve seen Isadora’s other children, her real children, just as we’ve seen—however briefly—the lovers who have fathered them. Perhaps Rodin would have been just another of the postcard picture faces with names on page 117. Honestly, I think even absent his face he is still present as part of the lovers’ narrative. He is the winged skulls that float above her, especially if we think back to the way he suggests movement in his sculptures (like the one at the bottom of the page) and the way Isadora stubbornly asserts that she can suggest wings absent silly tinsel wings. But this narrative of her lovers that we get when Isadora is trying to publish a memoir for pay isn’t a narrative that is as distinct from her life story as she protests. The story of the lovers is not subsumed, it is not co-existing, it is instead as much a part of her narrative as her art is because the act that she engages in with them as lovers is not only an artful one (sex is like art), it is actually art itself (children are marble). Isadora gets the final word, even if we might call it a punch-line, though. At p. 111 Isadora, with an angry face, says to us from inside her memoir that is surely a memoir of art and lovers, “When I do publish, it will be a memoir of my art, not [of] my love affairs.”

The Prompt Problem

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm having trouble with the idea of providing you all with specific prompts for the final paper. Everything I come up with feels like it's spoon-feeding a topic or thesis and I strongly suspect it is going to inspire a rather robotic puppet performance. Let me proceed instead with a more general sort of discussion.

You will remember the thesis-building exercise we did for American Born Chinese… I've posted the thesis workshop worksheet here on the blog to walk you through that exercise as many times as you might like. May I propose that if you aren't yet sure what you want to write about, you simply ask yourself which of the texts we've read in the class you responded to most personally or about which you feel you have the most things to say?

The overall organization of the course itself may provide you with a general starting off point, since I began more or less with texts in which a fictional or autobiographical character/self was seen to emerge in the context of some historical event, usually a traumatic one. The always somewhat traumatic process of coming into selfhood through adolescence becomes in many of these texts a sort of perverse lens through which to think of history in the "larger" political or social sense.

Then, we read texts in which the narrated self in a story or memoir seemed instead to emerge out of the geography in which they find themselves, coming into selfhood was a matter of taking up a place in the world where "place" itself is determinative/ overdetermined/ ambivalent.

This week, we are taking up highly mediated subjects -- a celebrity, a text which embodies a national ethos/self, a clash of personas aspiring to occupy a subject-position that stands in a symbolic relationship to citizen-selves.

This is of course a very rough sketch -- other themes have also played out over the weeks and will continue to do so -- the enigmatic short stories of Good-Bye and the converging narrative frames of American Born Chinese and the weaving of autobiography with literary/mythological meta-texts in Fun Home cut across other ways I have organized the course, and that cross cutting continues on in the days ahead.

Also, looking back over our syllabus, I now realize that sometimes history has played out more centrally in texts I initially read instead as texts whose narrative selves were "placed," and vice versa.

Think about the kinds of relations posited here -- selves emerging out of historical trauma, out of determinative places, through formal experiments with narrative, and so on.

Do such relationships provide you with the initial glimmers of a thesis when you are thinking about the texts which most moved or provoked you from the class?

Without prejudicing your results too much by thinking things through in advance, why not start the thesis workshop sheet by brainstorming from such initial thoughts? What do you come up with?

Do you find yourself with a thesis that demands a close reading to support it? Can you anticipate an objection to the thesis worth responding to? Once you can answer those questions I suspect you are well on your way to writing a paper you will be proud of.

Once you come up with a thesis or two you think you can stand behind, feel free to e-mail me or talk to me (or your colleagues on the blog or at class-time!) about getting some feedback.

In my opinion, coming up with a strong thesis is the single most important part of any paper writing process.

You may feel impatient or lost as you struggle through it, you may despair that coming up with the thesis is preliminary to actually writing the paper itself, but the truth is that coming up with a good thesis, a thesis with an intelligent opposition that must be supported with a close textual reading is already to do the key organizational work of writing, to know where you are going from the beginning. To have a strong thesis is to be well on your way to completing a well-made paper about which you can feel real conviction.

We can talk about this stuff more in class tomorrow at the beginning if you like.

The Photographer

The Photographer was my most favorite graphic novels, it was account of a photographer that accompanied Doctors Without Borders to document their expedition and work in war torn Afghanistan. This is the first time we see photographs added to the novel and the addition of the photos just brought everything thing to life for me. The photographs gave the documentation more credibility than the documentations before it. Just the fact that real wounded people, some that even look like relatives make it that much more real .The photographs really helped what I experienced in my past and apply it and try to live and feel the moments Didier tried to portray. The combinations of the photographs with the comics were brilliant idea, it captures the conversations, the emotion and sometimes even the sounds are brought to life. What I found most impacting were the film strips that took multiple shots so it made little movie scenes, every micro second captured perfectly put myself in the persons place that was being portrayed.

The stories that were told were very sincere and I believe that after I read this graphic novel I came out with a better understanding of the Afghani culture and ways of life. It opened my mind to see what it meant to live a “normal life” in Afghanistan from little kids falling into ovens or men accidently hurting themselves with their gun.

Addendum to the Palestine Précis

Joe Sacco, is not the name of a Palestinian, it is not the name of an Israeli, it is not the name of one of the individuals who is interviewed for their stories in this graphic novel. It is the name of the outsider who comes into to the Palestinian territory to absorb and to observe the conditions of the Palestinian people. Joe Sacco is the author of Palestine, it is a graphic novel whose “gist” is to basically portray the conditions of the Palestinian people while providing room for a specific perspective of the Israeli people. The graphic novel is directed towards an audience that is not aware of the Palestinian state of mind, or state of body. It is a fair introduction into the Palestinian condition under “Israeli rule” for Joe Sacco treats the story of Palestine as more of a lesson in history then a people trying to tell its own story. We begin to sense the “historical” state of framing and absorbing material when on page 3 we see an image of a tank that has multiple years attached to it, signifying the historical nature of the story that we are delving into. Already through a historical lens of observing are we receiving an “alienated” story of Palestine. Our main character who is supposedly Joe Sacco himself draws himself with glasses, but these glasses are different, they are thick and not transparent to the audience. The “main character”, actually, let’s not call him the main character because the main character within this graphic novel is “Palestine” itself and Joe Sacco is simply a medium for the audience to experience and absorb the Palestinianian state- for having eyes that resemble blank slates sends a strong message that “we” the audience must lend our eyes to Joe Sacco, who is our navigator throughout the whole graphic novel. This graphic novel is never about him, it is never about developing him as a character- it is about the history of a people.

Joe Sacco’s graphic novel hasn’t been written to “liberate” the Palestinian people nor to persuade you to feel sympathy or empathy or to move you into a certain direction towards action. His graphic novel has simply been made to paint you a picture, to create a product that is just made for viewing, much like a museum. But as the novel progresses, the novel performs more like a capitalistic transaction of a book. For we begin to see that these stories, the Palestinians’ stories are not told by themselves but through an author, which begins to enforce a tone and feel of alienation. We begin to see this on pg. 50 when the narrator is concerned about the “taxi” which is a symbol that is constantly present in the novel, as a form of escapism for our narrator. For when confronted with strong imaginary of the reality that the Palestinians face- he doesn’t stay- he grabs a taxi. He also comments on how he begins telling a story of the Israeli soldier’s side of the story (he also omits part of the story) and admits that he isnt’ there to mediate between sides. It is at that point of the novel that we see that he is only there to absorb, to witness the events, not to move himself to action, which eliminates any possibility of the audience being moved to a certain action. There is a development to a certain extent, a change in the narrators depiction of the Palestinian people- he becomes numb to the stories- he starts to think that he knows all the stories- that they become generic and starts to just inhale stories like they’re products when he says in pg.77 “Man I wish I’d seen the soldiers firing tear gas”. But when he asks the a Palestinian man as to how it felt to be tortured and then the man demonstrates by almost hitting our narrator- he confesses that he’s just a suburban boy who lives off the small details that he isn’t for “living vicariously”. It is at this moment that we begin to depart from being given an “authentic story” of the Palestinian people. For an “authentic” story of the Palestinian people would be a story told from their own lens not from an outside agent, it wouldn't be our author trying to live the story vicariously- it would be us, the audience. Yet the whole graphic novel is introduced by Edward Said who is one of the key figures in post colonialism who speaks about graphic novels as a way of “freedom” but the novel that he introduces keeps the Palestinian people oppressed and keeps them silenced through the lens of an outsider, through the lens of a photojournalist. For journalism's goal is to be as objective as possible, but in terms of providing progress to the Palestinian people through his agency as a photographer- he fails. For as Bishop Desmond Tutu once said " If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor".

Palestine Précis

Joe Sacco’s story begins in Cairo, from where he moves on to Palestine shortly after. He juxtaposes the hectic, crowded and impersonal streets of Cairo with a personal conversation about love, money and politics—all things that the reader can relate to. Within this short conversation he addresses his identification with the West, letting the reader know that his is a Western perspective. For his whole life, as he states on page 256, he has “heard nothing but the Israeli side,” and so he has come as an impartial spectator looking to hear the other side for the first time in his life. By the end of this conversation, he is eager to leave Egypt and a few days later he departs for Israel.

After three weeks he is in Nablus where he begins a conversation with a Palestinian man. While many are skeptical of his intentions, most Palestinians are happy to talk with him in hope of him spreading their stories of the daily conditions and injustices they experience as Palestinians living and working in Israeli-occupied territory. Many are aware that Israeli intelligence officials often disguise themselves as journalists in order to find “terrorists.” And, so, Sacco knows that he doesn’t belong, but he knows what to say. He is “a perfect guest of Palestine,” and so he often finds Palestinians to be very gracious and hospitable. The scenes on pages four and five seem to be suggesting that Sacco’s manner of interaction is not what most Palestinians are used to encountering. As Edward Said states in his introduction: “Joe is there to find out why things are the way they are” and so “he moves and tarries among them, attentive, unaggressive, caring, ironic” unlike his imperialistic British and American compatriots, who aggressively disregard and mistreat them.

Throughout the rest of the novel, Sacco travels throughout the occupied territories, meeting and interviewing individuals and families. In hospitals, markets, refugee camps and occupied cities, Sacco finds that it is actually quite difficult to find someone who has not experienced some negative aspect of the occupation. Disproportionate harassment and beatings are everyday occurrences; nearly everyone has either been to jail or knows someone in jail; and unwarranted deaths are common. I find it interesting that the occupation of Palestine by Israel—the forced removal of civilians into camps, the issuance of identification cards, the creation of policies deliberately aimed at subordinating Palestinians, and the many civil and political rights violations—is very reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s policies towards the Jews and other targeted minority groups. While the depictions in this graphic novel are not of a wholesale extermination, the actions on behalf of Israel, by both the military and the civilians, have reduced Palestinians to the same level of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe: daily life for the Palestinian consists of fear, shame, violence, insecurity, and dwindling hope.

As suggested by an introduction by Edward Said and the appearance of his work Orientalism in one of the chapters, one could argue that this novel attempts to shed light on the way in which “the West’s” conception of Palestine and Israel is quite different from reality. The portrayal by the American media, e.g. the Chuck Norris film “The Delta Force” on page 46, has largely shaped the West’s understanding of Israel and Palestine. It begins by establishing an “us” and a “them” (a binary opposition that is at play in Israel, too). Through the various discourses operating at the local, national, and international levels, actions—both illegal and immoral—have gone unstopped and/or gained approval. I would venture to guess that Sacco’s reserved and nonparticipatory approach upon arriving in Palestine was intentional, then. As we see, however, the polite and observant character that he is at the beginning of his novel cannot remain that way throughout his experiences. As the people that he encounters become less of a story and more of a human to him, his actions become riskier—forcing him to change from observer to participant. Ultimately, his experiences in Palestine, along with the process of writing this graphic novel, have functioned as a transformative experience in which old conceptions were broken down and new ones were created.

Some questions that I had: 1. How do the varying styles (e.g. splash pages with smaller frames superimposed; diagonal, overlapping or messy frames) Sacco employs for framing his images affect his story and message? 2. How does he make use of "the face," and what do the characteristics of the character's faces (e.g. the accentuated teeth) emphasize or bring attention to? 3. How do some of the reoccurring things, such as the tea, the rocks, the keffiyeh, add to the story? 4. How does his use of photo-realistic backgrounds affect the impact his story has on the reader?

EDIT: the questions following the fourth paragraph