Palestine

 

Palestine by Joe Sacco (1996) 288 pages

I've had reporter and artist Sacco's The Fixer and Other Stories on my reading list for awhile. Then I saw he wrote this book of graphic journalism called Palestine. It is available on Hoopla. Considering current events I thought this was a great opportunity to learn more about the Palestinian perspective. This was written back in the 1990s. I was in high school and definitely not paying attention to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. There are nine chapters. It took some time to get used to the chaos of some of the comic panels. Narration and speech bubbles are at angles or follow an "S" curve. Eventually I did grow to enjoy the style of Sacco's black and white sketches. Joe Sacco (illustrated with prominent round glasses and lips) is there on the ground meeting and interviewing everyone he can. He shares the history with chapter 2 containing columns of text and smaller illustrations compared to the rest of the book. Sacco witnesses and hears dozens of stories about the Occupation, the colonial power of Israel taking land and homes and lives to control and reduce the Arab/Muslim presence of Palestinians. He visits multiple refugee camps. He encounters the red tape of the Israeli military. He experiences the hospitality of tea served in every Palestinian home. He hears prison stories and stories of violence. He hears how the court system works against Palestinians and the Israeli hospitals avoid treating serious injuries of refugees. He discovers the differences of opinion about peace talks from the different Palestinian factions. Chapter 8 contains an especially heartbreaking tragic story from a Palestinian mother. Old folks tell stories of this happening decades ago. Teenagers tell stories of it happening then in the '90s. The news shows it is still happening now. Joe Sacco talks to Israelis, who have come from other Western countries, too. It is a complicated political issue, but identifying which group Sacco sees as the colonizers and which are the oppressed is not hard.

Indelible City

 Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim, 319 pages.

Hong Kong's conflicting colonial pasts has led to a pattern of intentional story building that has largely buried the city's true history. It was in England's best interest to portray the region as a "barren rock" to justify their possession and development of the area. Meanwhile, it's more advantageous to the Chinese government to present Hong Kong as having always been unified with China, to justify its reintegration. Journalist Louisa Lim, who grew up and reported in Hong Kong, attempts to sort through these competing myths to arrive not only at the history of the city, but also it's identity. This search for identity also carries her through to the present, where the city is attempting to operate under "one country, two systems" after it's return to China, and failing so spectacularly that large scale protest movements made international news. 

Lim's background as a journalist is very clear throughout this book. She interviews former colonial officials, art curators, amateur historians and archaeologists, and local artists of all stripes in an attempt to find the spirit of Hong Kong. Centrally woven through the whole narrative is the King of Kowloon, a controversial street artist who claimed ancestral possession of Hong Kong and surrounding territories, and who for many became a key symbol of Hong Kong itself. Lim paints a picture of a people who have been regularly, in fact nearly constantly, erased from their own history and excluded from making decisions about their own lives and governance; and have nonetheless managed to maintain a very unique identity and strong protest culture. I found this history to be both accessible and thorough, which can be a difficult line to walk, and I definitely came away feeling like I learned quite a lot.

No Gods, No Monsters

No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull, 387 pages

When Laina hears that her brother has been shot by police, she assumes it's another case of police brutality against a black man. But when she gets a hold of the bodycam video, she learns that it's much more complex than that: Laina's brother was a werewolf, or something of the sort, and in monster form when he was gunned down. When Laina leaks the footage online, there's a visceral response across the country — but then the footage gets mysteriously edited to remove any proof of monsters, and the world has a collective moment of "did that actually happen? Nah..." and goes about its business. Well, except for the conspiracy theorists and the actual monsters that is.

With this novel, Turnbull has created a fantasy world full of monsters living among us, and as the story develops, it's hard to tell whether the monsters are really the ones who can shift bodies and breathe fire and manipulate technology and become invisible...or if they're the "regular everyday people" who lash out based on their fears and assumptions. It perfectly captures the zeitgeist of today's political situation and culture wars, and I cannot wait to see what Turnbull has up his sleeve for the next book in this series.