Footnotes in Gaza
Sacco's graphic reconstruction of two 1956 massacres in Gaza, and of how hard it is to establish what happened.
Joe Sacco’s comics reportage on two mass killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces in Rafah and Khan Younis in November 1956, events that had almost vanished from the record. Sacco reconstructs them from the testimony of elderly survivors while drawing the Gaza of 2002-03 collapsing around him: house demolitions, incursions, the difficulty of getting anyone to care about half-century-old deaths amid current ones. The book is as much about the unreliability of memory as about what happened.
Recommended by 1 Person
Raja Shehadeh
This is an amazing, graphic and emotional book. Sacco writes about the massacres carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in 1956. He completed the book in 2003 so it resonates with the present. It’s really about memory: how it can fool you and change things. He sifts through the memories of the witnesses he meets in Gaza to get to the truth of the two atrocities – one in Rafah, the other in Khan Younis.
Interview · February 2011
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