Obviously, I knew that it would be very different to teach this book in September 2024 than it was in September 2023. But I didn’t exactly know how. What I hadn’t fully understood, a year ago, was how utterly foreign the Israel-Palestine conflicts was to my students. Most of them knew that there was some kind of ongoing dispute, and that it had been going on for a long time, but they didn’t know much else, nor did they feel all that emotionally invested in the situation. What I didn’t realize, or appreciate, at the time, was how much more carefully and attentively they read Sacco’s book as a result. They were curious, open — they wanted to learn more. And they read with open hearts, and struggled, therefore, with the book’s acrobatic operations of sympathy and distance.
Of course, there is no going back to such unknowing now. Even if they aren’t really familiar with the particulars of the history or the complexities of the situation — and most of them aren’t — they know that it’s controversial and urgent that that there is a “correct” opinion to have about it. And to my surprise, and dismay, this seemed to make them far less able to engage the text critically and to perceive what it was doing. Many, for example, taking it as a given that that text is pro-Palestinian, completely missed how negative the portrayal of them is in the first chapter.
This frustrated me, but I also get it — I think the enormity of the situation, and the continuous stream of unbearable images and information, has an effect of overwhelm. You become stunned, unable to take in information and process it carefully.
But I think there’s another element too perhaps, which is that at the time of its writing, the book was fairly atypical in presenting Palestinian stories and describing their lives under occupation, particularly for a broader audience. It very explicitly (near the end) positions itself as fairly one-sided, explaining that the other perspective is readily available; indeed, hard to avoid. This is less true now, sort of — at least, my students certainly seem more familiar with stories of Palestinian suffering (though not really aware of much else about the people or the culture). And I wonder if this makes the book less effective today than it was even a year ago.
In any case, whatever one’s feelings about the conflict (impossible though it seems to bracket them), Palestine remains a really fascinating work in terms of exploring the question of what the graphic novel allows one to do, formally and conceptually, and how an outsider tells the story of a community’s struggles and traumas.
Kasia Reads 