I was talking to a colleague about how I felt a little weird about teaching Palestine, because although it’s important in the history of graphic novels and the kinds of stories they can tell, it’s also 30 years old. Many of my students don’t really have a sense what has been happening in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians since, which is one problem, but another is that one could argue that the mainstream understanding of the conflict is very different from what it was back then (though I actually wonder how much it is).
Anyways, my colleague grabbed this off her shelf and said I might find it useful, or interesting. Though it’s from 2010, so also fairly dated! We are old! But at least it’s slightly closer. It’s from the perspective of a woman taking a birthright trip to Israel, but someone who is deeply critical of Israeli politics, and expecting that the trip will mostly be exposure to propaganda. It’s not quite the Israeli perspective that Sacco acknowledges is missing from Palestine; it’s a different American one, but it’s one that focuses on the Israeli side. Despite avowed sympathy for the Palestinian cause, Glidden doesn’t ultimately visit any Palestinian areas (she does try to, but her ride doesn’t show up). But what she does do is to try to dig into her mingled feelings of attachment and condemnation, and understand what Israel means to her, personally, which makes the book an interesting companion piece to Sacco’s.
What I enjoyed most about it was the artwork — it’s really lovely, visually. It actually hit me most in the final pages, when there are a few panels of famous sights in Istanbul, which gave my heart a pang. I miss Turkey. But I digress. Palestine is very self-consciously about the difference between drawings and photographs, in really interesting ways, but it really doesn’t make an effort to depict beauty. And so that was a really fascinating aspect of this book for me.
What’s also sort of notable to me about it, now that I think of it, is that it’s pretty earnest and sincere. Part of what my students are struggling with, first in Palestine and now with Maus, is having an author represent who represents himself as an unlikable, and more importantly, a deeply morally flawed, character, in a work that is otherwise full of a sense of moral urgency. I am tempted to say that Glidden’s book psychologizes that sense of moral conflict, and I guess individualizes it — you’re not supposed to judge her, you’re supposed to empathize with her. Maybe I’m projecting my assumptions about what contemporary literature is like onto the text, I dunno. But it does overall feel like it’s a book about her, and her experience, rather than a book about Israel. And I think that is symptomatic of the present-day idea that individual narratives are the best access point to an understanding of society, the world, etc — where Sacco and Spiegelman arguably struggle with their discomfort over how much they are in the text, and try to counteract it by distancing the reader from themselves as a character, this book really invites you to identify, and is much more restrained in the kinds of claims about the world that it aims to make.
Kasia Reads 