Re-appreciating the power of visual art

The invasion goes on—in Gaza, Palestine. The massacres being perpetrated in Gaza capture most of the headlines, but incursions into other parts of Palestine (such as the West Bank) are progressing steadily as well. I’m not talking about the past; this is something that is going on right now. Joe Sacco, a leading figure in the field of comics journalism, has been following the Israeli occupation of Palestine through his work since the early 1990s. His best-known book on the subject, Palestine, is available in Japanese translation (tr. Kosei Ono, Isop-sha, 2007; special annotated edition released in 2023).

Footnotes in Gaza (tr. Takanori Hayao, Type Slowly, 2024) is Sacco’s second book on Palestine. To give a bit of background, Joe Sacco was born on the island of Malta in 1960. As a journalist, he is known for his meticulously researched war-reportage comics. Sacco started planning Footnotes in Gaza in 2000, when the Second Intifada (a resistance movement by Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territories) broke out, and he based the book on research conducted from 2002 to 2003. Its focus, however, is not the Second Intifada, but an event that took place in 1956.

The event in question refers to the massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli military in Khan Younis and Rafah, which are located in the southern Gaza Strip. In the book, Sacco overlays this incident with the contemporary Israeli occupation of Palestine. For more on the similarities between the two and their relevance to the events occurring at the time of writing (2024), I recommend the translator’s notes and afterword by Takanori Hayao, a scholar of Palestine and Israel and the Japanese translator of Footnotes in Gaza, as well as Hayao’s article in the October 4, 2024 issue of Shukan Kinyobi, “Repeated massacres in the name of ‘purging terrorists’: A reading of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza.”

From my perspective as a researcher of visual culture, Footnotes in Gaza provides interesting insights. First of all, the book brings the power of visual art into sharp focus. The expressions of the people depicted, drawn in great detail, as well as the clothes they wear and the objects they use, sometimes speak more eloquently than words about the current situation in Palestine (the Gaza Strip). You don’t need to cite Sartre or Levinas to state that a face, the symbol of the individuality and uniqueness of a person, demands morality and responsibility from us. This book features countless different faces. Confronted with their expressions, we are beseeched to step forward, to take action.

At the same time, in scenes depicting massacres and oppression, Footnotes in Gaza provides a real sense of the horror that ensues when individuals, faces, are treated as mere objects without individuality. Seeing such injustices portrayed on a full-page spread in a large-format book, we are, paradoxically in a way, reminded of the power of the visual arts. Some things cannot be expressed in words, and I encourage readers to pick up this book and see these scenes for themselves.

Hayao is also the co-translator of Sara Roy’s The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development (tr. Mari Oka, Hiromu Odagiri, and Takanori Hayao, Seidosha, 2024), an important work that exposes the structural violence and persistent exclusion that the Palestinian people have been subjected to over more than 50 years of occupation and blockades. The translators’ commentary provided by Oka, Odagiri, and Hayao, who each have different areas of expertise and present different perspectives, is also highly instructive. Oka, who specializes in Arab literature, includes a testimony that is particularly interesting in the context of this book review. Recalling her visit to the Gaza Strip in 2014, she writes, “…Once I arrived, I realized that because the blockade is a case of truly structural violence, its violence does not exist in an immediately recognizable form; the blockade is ‘invisible violence’.” (page 312)

As Oka suggests, Israelis and Palestinians are not afforded the same level of visibility in Gaza. As numerous studies of visual culture have demonstrated, in the art world men have long been the subjects who see (and depict), while women have been thought of as objects who are seen (and depicted). The dominant (superior) side can see freely without being seen, while the dominated (inferior) side not only cannot see, but is forced into a situation where even being seen can be beyond its capabilities. In other words, visibility (its degree and accessibility to it) is intimately connected to relationships of power. Systems such as surveillance cameras and checkpoints, detailed throughout Footnotes in Gaza, are (part of) an apparatus intended precisely to control visibility.[1] The amount of information we can glean from Sacco’s book is vast indeed.

As scholars such as Edward Said and Ella Shohat have written, art and culture have the power to be means of resistance, and have in fact often been used to organize various forms of resistance against the powers that be. Said’s Culture and Imperialism (tr. Yoichi Ohashi, Misuzu Shobo, 1998) and Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (tr. Takanori Hayao, Rieko Uchida (Tadenuma), and Emi Kataoka, Hosei University Press, 2019) are available in Japanese. Footnotes in Gaza, too, is part of the culture constituting resistance to the ongoing aggression of settler colonialism (a form of colonialism that often involves violent incursions into lands inhabited by indigenous peoples and the seizure of their lands and resources).

Raymond Williams, one of the founding fathers of cultural studies, repeatedly emphasized that culture is essentially something ordinary. Therefore, it is something everyone has the right to enjoy. Such a broad understanding of culture includes aspects such as food culture, which are directly linked to activities that sustain life. This is why culture is so important: it is strongly connected to survival. In Gaza, however, culture is being permanently destroyed. Not only the right to visibility, but also the right to access culture, the right to preserve and enjoy one’s own culture, and even aspects of culture that are essential for survival, such as the cultures of food and daily life, are being taken away. We must all work together to protect culture as something “ordinary” for everyone.

Day by day, as the events in Gaza and Palestine seem to stretch the usefulness of the phrase “worst imaginable,” we are plunged into a state of helplessness. But I want to believe that there are still things we can do; that, in fact, is the only thing I can do. One way to keep the faith is to try to learn as much as you can about what is happening now and what has happened in the past. This is a means of resisting the violence of indifference, of giving up the privilege of turning a blind eye and pretending not to know. Footnotes in Gazahelps us understand history correctly while reaffirming the power of visuality in the visual arts and culture. This makes Sacco’s book a must-read for everyone involved in art and culture in diverse ways.

 [1] Gil Z. Hochberg’s Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is an important work that uses contemporary art and cinema as motifs to discuss how such control of visibility is conducted in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

Translated by Ilmari Saarinen