Noam Sacco's Footnotes In Gaza

In the present scenario in which visual representation politics, history and news circulating throughout the world has become a contentious field for political brawl, the budding genre of comics journalism acquires a special significance. Comics journalism is an innovative approach for commenting on, presenting and analyzing the news of the day through the amalgamation of the journalistic tradition of background research and on- the- ground reporting with the style of cartoon drawing which is more familiar to comic strips and graphic novels. This paper will be an observation on the importance that the visual culture has achieved in relation to typographic journalism in the recent times. This paper will further state how the comics medium, which

Sacco’s inspiration of writing Footnotes in Gaza was provided by a reference in Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle (1983) where Chomsky explored the affiliation between America, Israel and Palestine and arrived at the conclusion that American mass media always put forward a pro- Zionist bias (Venezia 58). According to the United Nations figures given in the book, the Israeli army killed 111 Palestinians in Rafah on November 12 1956 and 275 in Khan Younis on November 3, 1956 (Wikipedia). Sacco bases his book on the conversations he had with the Palestinians in Khan Younis and its neighboring town Rafah that revealed the unknown atrocities and weaves these past events of 1956 with the present events in Rafah- the bulldozing of the houses and buildings, the death of the American woman, Rachel Corrie and the reactions of the Palestinians to the sudden outbreak of the Iraq War and their hope in Saddam Husain. The fragmented episodes presented in the pages of this graphic novel portray the sense of disturbing relation between the past and the present as the graphic narrative oscillates from one temporal and spatial location to other throughout the text. Sacco’s episodic rendering of his narrative proceeds through amassing every details of the conflict that incorporates the narrative strategies of analepsis and prolepsis and

Sacco frames the narrative which is based on the collective memories of the survivors and also on the accounts of the women and children who partially witnessed the massacre of that day. In one early morning in Khan Younis, an announcement was made by the Israeli soldiers addressing all grown men to report to the School. The men were brutally treated on the streets and at the time of their entering through the school gates. These men were detained for the entire day- some were interrogated and left whereas the others were taken away and butchered to death. Sacco’s returning to Gaza with the intention of researching and documenting these events and conveys the truth to the world was mainly because Sacco was infuriated with this story of Khan Younis which was too poorly documented in the official reports of