The cartoonist’s journey to the scene of the riots
Maltese-born Joe Sacco is the rare cartoonist with a journalism degree (and perhaps even rarer, a cartoonist with accomplished journalistic skills). Sako’s latest booksRiots once and futurereleased this month from Metropolitan Books, focuses on the aftermath of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. The book uses a cartoonist’s tools—visual details, captions, balloons, maps, and sequential narration—to tell the story of Sacco’s own reporting: his conversations with victims, village leaders, witnesses, and officials.
Sacco’s style, forged years ago in the tradition of independent comics, favors an autobiographical style, and he continued to operate in this mode even as his work began to take a journalistic turn. “I began to appreciate what my character suggested, that journalism is ‘shaped by the cultural and subjective biases of the journalist, shaped by a fallible individual who is trying – with varying degrees of success – to make sense of what is going on,’” he told us. His work places the reporter’s journey directly in front of the reader, capturing its intimacies, what Sacco calls “the rich interactions with other human beings that come when one makes oneself a guest.” In an unfamiliar world.
When Sacco set out to investigate the riots, in 2014, he was drawn to the tension between people’s memories of the experience, their justifications, and the coherence of each of the conflicting narratives. While conducting research, he became interested in the violence used to interfere with democratic processes – a topic that resonates around the world. “Most people just want to live their lives and are involved in traumatic events that are not of their making,” Sacco said. “Civilisation, order, waking up every morning to find the world as you left it the night before – I no longer take these things for granted.” In this stunning work, Sacco reveals intimate human stories that lie at the roots of sectarian violence. In the excerpt below, he depicts the scene in rural North India where he is pushed to meet some of his interviewees.
—By Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes