There is no rating sufficient for this book. Five stars is the ceiling I have, and I am pressing against it with both hands. Footnotes on Gaza is the kind of work that makes you question what journalism is for, what history is for, what it means to bear witness to something the world has decided it would rather not remember. Joe Sacco spent years making this book. It shows on every single page, and the weight of that effort is something you carry long after you have put it down.
Footnotes on Gaza is a graphic memoir, a work of journalism, a historical document, and an act of moral insistence all at once. Sacco travels to Rafah and Khan Younis in Gaza to investigate two massacres that occurred in November 1956, events the historical record reduced to a pair of footnotes in a book about the Suez Crisis. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces during those weeks. The world moved on. Sacco decided not to.
He interviews survivors, elderly men and women carrying memories they have held for half a century, and he draws what they tell him. Not illustrates, draws. There is a difference. Every line in this book is a choice, a decision about what a face looks like when it holds fifty-year-old grief, what a street looks like when it holds the memory of what happened on it, what a hand looks like reaching back into 1956 from the present of 2002 and 2003 when Sacco is conducting his interviews, in a Gaza that is simultaneously being destroyed again.
Sacco's decision to tell this in comics form is not a concession or a simplification. It is the most precisely chosen form available for what he is doing. Photographs of these events do not exist. Footage does not exist. What exists is memory, carried in the bodies of people the world stopped caring about a long time ago, and the drawn image, constructed from testimony, is the only form honest enough to represent that. It cannot pretend to be objective. Every line admits that a human being drew it, made choices, interpreted. That admission of subjectivity is more truthful than any photograph's claim to neutrality.
The parallel timelines, 1956 and the early 2000s, operate not as contrast but as continuum. Sacco is not drawing a then and a now. He is showing you that there is no then. That the events of 1956 and the events he is witnessing in the present are not separate chapters. They are the same chapter, still being written, and the people living in it have never been allowed to leave.
What stays with me longest are the faces. Sacco draws the elderly survivors with a specificity that refuses generality. These are not representative faces, emblematic of suffering. They are particular people, with particular faces, remembering particular things. The woman who hid in a specific corner of a specific house. The man who saw something at a specific time on a specific street. That specificity is the whole moral point of the book. The massacres were footnotes because the people in them were made into a category rather than a collection of individuals. Sacco reverses that, one face at a time, one testimony at a time, drawn by hand.
His self-portraiture throughout, the unflattering, sometimes uncomfortable presence of himself in the work as the interviewer, the outsider, the person with the notebook and the questions, is one of the most honest things about the book. He does not disappear into the role of objective recorder. He shows you the recorder, shows you the limitations of the recording, shows you what gets lost in translation and what gets misunderstood and what cannot be asked because the question would be too much. That transparency is a form of integrity that most journalism never achieves.
This is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be. The violence Sacco depicts is drawn with a directness that sits in you uncomfortably, as it should. The accumulation of testimony across hundreds of pages creates a weight that becomes almost physical by the end. But Sacco is not exploiting suffering for effect. He is doing the opposite: insisting that suffering which has been made abstract and historical and forgettable be returned to the specific, the human, the unforgettable.
The final pages of this book arrive with the force of everything that has been building, not as a conclusion but as a refusal to conclude. History does not end. The footnote continues. The people in it are still there. And the question the book leaves you with, about what it means to record something the powerful would prefer remain forgotten, about what journalism owes the people it covers, about what all of us owe to the act of witnessing, is a question with no clean answer and every reason to keep asking.
Joe Sacco made something here that sits outside the usual categories. It is too personal to be called journalism, too factual to be called memoir, too immediate to be called history. It is all three at once and it is fully none of them, which means it occupies a space that only this particular book, made by this particular person in this particular form, could occupy.
Spellbound is the right word. You open it and the world it creates closes around you and you do not surface until the last page, and when you do the world you surface into looks different than it did before you went under.
That is what the best books do. This one does it completely.
Rating: ★★★★★ 5 / 5 stars
For readers drawn to: Maus by Art Spiegelman, Palestine by Joe Sacco, The Unwanted by Khaled Hosseini, Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, and anyone who believes that the act of witnessing is itself a form of resistance.