Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory 9780813590998

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Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels Violence, Trauma, and Memory

EDITED BY TATIANA PROROKOVA AND NIMROD TAL

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Prorokova, Tatiana, editor. | Tal, Nimrod, 1980– editor. Title: Cultures of war in graphic novels : violence, trauma, and memory / edited by Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017054291 | ISBN 9780813590967 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813590950 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Graphic novels—History and criticism. | War in literature. | Violence in literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Collective memory in literature. Classification: LCC PN6714 .C85 2018 | DDC 741.5/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054291 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2018 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Introduction

1

TATIANA PROROKOVA AND NIMROD TAL

Part I 1

Representations

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered”: War, Chivalry, and the Hundred Years War in Le Trône d’Argile and Crécy

23

IAIN A. MACINNES

2

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror

41

KENT WORCESTER

3

War in the Bosnian Graphic Novel

58

EMIR PASANOVIC

Part II 4

Noncombatants’ Experiences

“The Sky Is Darkened by Gods”: Spirituality, Strength, and Violence in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints

75

HARRIET E. H. EARLE

5

Unseen Scars: Recalling Traumatic Moments in Individuals with PTSD in War Brothers

91

JAMES KELLEY

6

Nat Turner, Slave Revolts, and Child-Killing in U.S. Graphic Novels

105

JOE LOCKARD

v

vi • Contents

7

Sinne Fianna Fáil: Women, Irish Rebellions, and the Graphic Novels of Gerry Hunt

123

CHRISTINA M. KNOPF

8

“The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation”: Growing Up under Israeli Occupation and a Culture of Resistance in Joe Sacco’s Palestine

138

PETER C. VALENTI

Part III 9

Memories

The Malvinas War in Argentine Memory: Graphic Representations of Defeat and Nationalism, 1982–2015

165

SILVIA G. KURLAT ARES

10

The Haunting Power of War: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide in 99 Days

188

TATIANA PROROKOVA

11

Blogging in Times of War: The July 2006 War in Lebanon and Mazen Kerbaj Imaging the Unimaginable

204

YASMINE NACHABE TAAN

Notes on Contributors Index

225 229

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Introduction TATIANA PROROKOVA AND NIMROD TAL

Although the two world wars of the twentieth century have entered history as the defining wars of the modern era, today’s world has been shaped to no lesser degree by the myriad smaller conflicts that have been erupting continuously around the world in ever increasing numbers. Indeed, while “only” 940 conflicts took place between 1870 and 1945, 2,228 raged between 1946 and 2001.1 Considering that the global “War on Terror” since the early 2000s has manifested itself more as a series of local conflicts than as a full-scale multiplayer international war, it seems that limited wars have been shaping the world we live in and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. At the same time, media usage has gained a central place in present-day conflicts and arguably plays a greater role than ever before. Revolutionizing the battlefield, it has forced strategists to revise their doctrines and compelled armies to adjust to “hybrid warfare,” which features, inter alia, massive media usage. As NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe general Philip M. Breedlove argued, for example, the Russians demonstrated in Ukraine in 2014 the “most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of informational warfare.”2 Stories about military conflicts and the ways that they are told and spread through the media have plainly become part of the modern battlefield.3 And while digital media are usually the focus of both professionals and the public when considering this transformation, the role of the traditional media should by no means be downplayed. As was cruelly demonstrated when several artists of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo were shot dead by Islamist extremists in January 2015, comics have been integrated into modern warfare too. 1

2 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

It therefore seems a timely moment to present a volume that examines the connection between the graphic novel and conflicts that are limited and mostly local in scale and explores the representation of such conflicts in a medium that has received little attention in academic literature, which tends to focus on the few major conflicts of the last century. For this purpose, this collection brings together eleven chapters that address the representations of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), the Irish Troubles (c. 1916–1922), the Falklands War (1982), the Rwandan Genocide (1994), and the Lebanese-Israeli War (2006) in graphic novels, along with other conflicts that have taken place all over the world: from the Americas to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Indeed, the graphic novel is now a global phenomenon with deep historical roots, which largely explains how the present collection can discuss such an extensive and varied set of examples drawn from around the world. In a way, it also explains why such an analysis should be done. In South Africa, Australia, and North America, preliterate societies used basic forms of narrative art from as early as twenty-six thousand years ago. Literate societies from the Middle East to Central America, India, and South East Asia also used visual narratives from early on, with the Egyptians and Assyrians doing so already in the fourth millennium BC. Comprising series of several images, visual narratives developed considerably in India in the fourth century BC and from there spread to Sweden, Spain, Japan, and Indonesia.4 Prints from China appeared as early as in the ninth century AD, whereas in Europe, strips and graphic narratives that featured sequences and other early traits of modern comics could be identified already in the fourteenth century.5 As Karin Kukkonen has argued, these and other early forms of graphic communication can hardly be considered comics. However, they demonstrate that communication through images has been part of the human experience throughout the globe from very early on.6 Evidently, communication through images was not subdued even by later, more modern forms of communication, such as writing, and kept its central place in the social life. In fact, new forms of communication often allowed for the spreading and popularization of communicating through images. Printing, for example, which was instrumental in increasing literacy, especially in early modern Europe, allowed also for the mass production of graphic narratives and changed them to the degree that they could become a popular and diverse medium.7 As discussed below, the internet and digital communication also allowed, inter alia, the popularization of comics and graphic novels. And yet, notwithstanding its ancient and early modern roots, the graphic narrative in the medium of comics came into its modern form—that is, “dramatic sequential action organized into brief moments shown in panels across the page”8—in the nineteenth century, with the introduction of new printing technologies and the rise of cheap popular journalism.9 These took graphic

Introduction • 3

narratives to an ever-widening audience and enabled them to explore new themes, such as politics and social matters.10 Moving from the single panel, as Jerad Gardner has shown, graphic narratives could now tell more complex stories with the “combinations of text and image, dialogue balloons, recurring characters, and ongoing serial narratives.”11 By the early twentieth century, comics had become a regular feature in newspapers rather than only humoristic plots in illustrated magazines, especially in the United States. The popularity and profitability of illustrated magazines, such the British Punch, together with the works of European artists—such as the German Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), and the French Caran d’Ache (Emmanuel Poiré, [1858–1909])—and the works of American cartoonists like Richard Felton Outcault (1863–1928) led to the widespread appearance of comics across Europe, Britain, and the United States between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 And with European, British, and American imperialism, modern forms of comics and graphic narratives spread also to India, China, and Japan, where, as noted, traditional local forms of such narratives had already existed for centuries. Thus starting from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several centers of comics culture can be identified, such as France and Belgium in continental Europe, Britain, and later also Japan. Among these centers, throughout most of the twentieth century, the United States led the comics industry. Although in the 1950s the American comics industry entered a difficult period with rising criticism of the genre as offensive and unsuitable for teens, with the introduction of the Comics Code (1954) and with the subsequent narrowing of the comics market, the 1960s saw the spread of comics into new fields, such as pop art, as well as the emergence of the underground comix that challenged the Comics Code to an evident, if not full, success.13 In the 1960s, for example, the American underground comix industry heavily influenced Europe and led, inter alia, to the popularization of adult graphic narratives across the ocean. Thus, even in that time, the dominance of American comics tradition was tangible. Perhaps because of the dominance of these centers in shaping the global comics culture, the academic literature has focused mainly on their comics traditions. However, it would be misleading to look at these centers as autonomous and independent. To begin with, developments in the form and content of graphic narratives in Europe, Britain, and the United States have historically influenced each other. The mutual impact of the British and American industries on one another, in artistic terms as well as in terms of storytelling techniques and themes, is perhaps the clearest example.14 In the 1980s, Britain was a source of great influence on the American comics industry, challenging the limits of the genre. As Kukkonen writes, “under the influence of the British Invasion, English-language mainstream comics had become a medium for

4 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

social commentary, which is self-reflexive of its own involvements with ideology and full of artistic complexity.”15 The development of the modern Japanese comics tradition, by now a major comics center, is a key example of the mutual influence of western and Asian traditions on each other and of their interdependence. After more than two hundred years of isolation, in the mid-nineteenth century, Japan began to open to the world. This allowed for the entrance of Western culture to the country, which, in turn, brought about cultural innovations as well as criticism. The local comics tradition was not exempt. As Robert Petersen has noted on this historical moment, “Through that era of turmoil and transformation, the new comics industry, inspired by Western-style caricature and satirical prints, was a mix of Old World aesthetics and new modern forms.”16 Manga, more specifically, was influenced by the encounter between Western and local art traditions, drawing mainly upon the combination of American trends and the Japanese painting style. While Japanese manga stylized itself much in reaction to the American comics and in constant interaction with it and American culture more broadly, it was shortly to have an enormous influence on the American comics industry, on which it first relied and drew. Especially after World War II, Japanese narratives and the artistic style were translated into American features, such as the case of Disney’s Lion King, which drew on Japanese manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka’s work, himself heavily inspired by American works and artists.17 Since the 1980s, “once manga fans in America adopted the visual code, many began to learn to draw the manga way, creating hybrid comics called Amerimanga.”18 Furthermore, beyond the interdependence of the above comics centers on each other, the impact and influence of other, allegedly peripheral comics cultures on the development of comics and graphic novels should not be downplayed, even in those centers. In Europe, for example, the dominant Franco-Belgian comics industry has both influenced and been influenced by other continental comics industries and traditions.19 In the cross-cultural encounter between comics traditions, both the more dominant and the somewhat fringe comics cultures underwent changes. Moreover, despite the immense global influence of the United States and Japan, local traditions never succumbed to them completely, keeping artistic and thematic independence. For example, keeping in line with some of the Western characteristics of the comics, graphic narratives in Asia have dealt with domestic historical and contemporary events, including Western colonialism, and their own religious ideas, local politics, and domestic social processes. Wherever it arrived, the graphic narrative took a distinct shape, unique to the local society. In some way, then, it seems difficult to speak of a specific local comics tradition in a globalized world. As Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt have argued, “Questions such as ‘where did it all start?’ and ‘how did national traditions develop?’ are interesting but not decisive.”20

Introduction • 5

Therefore, discussing center and periphery in graphic narratives seems a bit misleading. It might be more helpful to consider the development of graphic narratives, especially in the interconnected modern world, in the spaces that were created between the places in which they appeared. In these spaces (e.g., the Atlantic arena or the inter-European area), cultural agents (from magazines to artists, businesspeople, and tourists) travel and enrich, inspire, merge, and mash local traditions with foreign ones. Alan Moore—one such cultural agent—is, for example, known for having been influenced by both British and American narrative strategies. Likewise, comics giants, such as DC and Marvel, employ creators from around the world.21 As scholars such as Thomas Bender, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, and Daniel Rodgers have shown in different contexts, cultural perceptions about contemporary and historical events develop in the spaces between cultures and by cultural agents that transmit ideas across geographical areas. In this light, Gienow-Hecht has stressed the importance of “decentering” the United States when examining modern international and transnational cultural processes. Instead, she suggests giving more room to nonAmerican societies, both in shaping their local cultures and in shaping American culture itself during the encounters between American and non-American cultures.22 In other words, the graphic narrative is and has always been a global and transcultural phenomenon, and it should be examined as such. Following in the footsteps of comics as well as the literary novel, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, graphic novels came to the fore. The graphic novel, a term that was popularized by Will Eisner in the late 1970s, has arguably developed as a new kind of literature, close to the novel. Monika Schmitz-Emans argues that “stemming from pulp magazines that were regarded as artistically inferior products of mass culture and as a kind of fast food for readers, the graphic novel is now broadly accepted in the circle of ‘respected’ literary art forms.” Numerous genres of graphic novels can be identified, such as nonfiction, autobiographic, and historical novels.23 From that period, graphic narratives began to resemble novels in their complex plot and developed characters. Leading the way of popular graphic narratives was Japan: “No nation at the start of the third millennium can compare with Japan in terms of the extent to which sequential art infiltrates and informs the everyday life of the populace.”24 However, in a globalized world and as web comics become more and more widespread, comics and graphic narratives are evidently more international than ever before.25 It thus seems more relevant than before to decenter Japan, the United States, France, Belgium, and Britain and their representations of the big wars and unearth graphic novels from other cultures that depict their wars. War has been a defining human experience, cutting across historical periods, places, and cultures much like graphic communication itself. As military

6 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

thinkers and intellectuals like Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, Basil Liddell Hart, and Michael Howard have argued, war has been a major agent of social and political transformation throughout history.26 Certainly since the rise of the so-called New Military History in the 1960s, which drew ever more connections linking warfare, society, and culture, war has become an increasingly popular subject of professional and popular inquiry.27 Moreover, war provides a good story, uniquely bringing together universal themes, such as the battle between good and evil, and offering tales of heroism and transcendence, tragedy and heightened drama. Unsurprisingly then, graphic novels and comics about war are perhaps the most established and most popular genre of graphic narratives. As Kees Ribbens has observed, such narratives seem to be popular even in countries with weak traditions of comics reading.28 While cultural studies scholars have not neglected comics and graphic novels about war, their research has been selective: the studies tend to focus on major conflicts, privileging those that were fought in the twentieth century and that involved western powers, such as the Great War (1914–1918), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Vietnam War (ca. 1955–ca. 1975), and above all, World War II (1939–1945).29 Accordingly, cultural studies tend to examine comics and graphic novels from the countries involved in those conflicts. These are mainly American, British, and Japanese works, such as DC Comics’ Enemy Ace (1965), All-American Men of War (1956–1966), and The Other Side (2006); Shueisha and Chuokoron-Shinsha’s Barefoot Gen (1973–1974); Charlton Comics’ Fightin’ Army (1956–1984); and IPC Magazines’ Battle Picture Weekly (1975–1988). In a way, this academic attention seems to correspond to the genre itself. To borrow from Ribbens, as a rule, “World War II functions as content or inspiration for [war] comics.”30 Focusing on the major wars of the twentieth century, scholars have contributed to the understanding of the ways in which the graphic novel represents war experiences as well as of the medium’s social, cultural, and political roles during a conflict. For example, in the introduction to their recent collection The 10 Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II (2016), James J. Kimble and Trischa Goodnow contend that comics “helped forge a united home front by cultivating a patriotic sensibility that celebrated both American triumphalism and virtue,” shrewdly underscoring the power of graphic narratives of the war not only as literary texts by their nature but also as political instruments.31 The abovementioned and many other graphic novels on the major wars of the previous century outline and solidify a tradition of the war graphic narrative that not only is symbolic of the time when the conflicts were still fresh in the memories of survivors and observers but also was crucial for the development of the war graphic narrative as a genre. Moreover, since numerous comics and graphic novels deal with major conflicts, studying such narratives has allowed people to explore the changing

Introduction • 7

relationship between comics and society. In Britain, for example, the Great War led to the emergence of comics that tackled serious issues related to the war, thus breaking out of the dominant humoristic and satirical framework for teens within which they had resided before.32 Instead, comics started to deal with different aspects of the British wartime experience and reflected the Great War’s impact on British society on the front and back at home. The war was thus an important turning point in the history of comics in Britain, after which it became a more central part of the country’s social, cultural, and political life and a more versatile tool of expression in all those spheres. Finally, the scale of these conflicts, and particularly the “totality” of the two world wars, have rendered them rich sources to explore war experiences in graphic narratives.33 The erasure of the clear-cut separation between the battlefront and the home front, for example, enabled the exploration of how comics not only re-created war events and experiences but also influenced the minds of those who remained away from the battle lines. The role of women in war; massive social, political, and economic mobilization; the turning of citizens into soldiers; and the impact of war on the home front are but a few examples of the experiences that the major conflicts of the twentieth century allowed graphic novels to explore from various new angles and on different levels.34 However, the uniquely large scale of these conflicts also limits the explanatory force of the graphic novels that explore them and subsequently also the scholarship on these novels. These wars were so particular and special that they and their representation in graphic novels do not tell us much about the more common and widespread human experience of war and its representation in graphic novels. After all, most wars were and are relatively limited and smallscale conflicts. Therefore, much can be gained by shifting the focus away from these major wars. For one thing, a deep, nuanced look at the periphery allows one to take a fresh look at the center. That is, examining the representations in graphic novels of relatively small-scale conflicts, such as the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli War, presents a new set of works through which to revisit the scholarship on the representations of large-scale wars. Furthermore, expanding the investigation to other wars, regions, and cultures sharpens the picture and thus our understanding of the representations of war in graphic novels worldwide. Voices from Africa, the Middle East, North and South America, and Asia are necessary for this purpose, especially when placed alongside new narratives from Europe and the United States. Additionally, as historians have shown, other conflicts, while of a lesser scale than World War II or the Vietnam War, nonetheless had important ramifications (certainly for those involved in them and their descendants) that can be traced and studied anew by exploring local comics. The Falklands War (1982), for example, though now largely forgotten outside Argentina, has left deep and lasting marks on Argentine society

8 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

and culture. As Silvia G. Kurlat Ares ably shows in her chapter, much can be learned about this impact from Argentine graphic novels. The same is true for the war in Bosnia (1992–1995), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1919–1922), and other wars that have influenced local history and culture in these specific cases, if not always those of the world. Finally, as noted above, the approach of the third decade of the twenty-first century makes it relevant to explore the connection between a major cultural medium and smaller-scale conflicts, which have been shaping our culture and discourse in recent decades and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Graphic narratives, of course, are hardly the only medium to tackle war. Film and literature, for instance, each have long traditions of depicting wars and their dreadful ramifications.35 Graphic novels have much in common with other media in the way they represent stories. As Robert Petersen has noted, for example, like melodramas, “graphic narratives rely on representing things in a way that is predicated on our cognition of how we make sense of our known world. In this respect, the visual elements in a graphic narrative are like objects on stage: they are animated with potential signification, adopting meanings beyond what they may simply represent in the everyday world.”36 Moreover, the visual-verbal peculiarity of graphic novels is conjoint: the verbal is not reduced to the text, and the visual is not merely about the image. However, the visual-verbal mode of representation is not characteristic of graphic novels only. Indeed, it has also defined the modality of rather “traditional” literary and visual texts, such as novels and films. For example, novels have incorporated various photographs, (excerpts of ) letters, graphs, maps, and so on, which has allowed scholars to talk about a noticeable transformation of the concept of narrative discourse from a “traditionally word-based genre of the novel” to a “multiliterate act.”37 The addition of such “semiotic resources” significantly contributes to the “processes of meaning making and communication.”38 The interdependency of verbal and visual components is striking in film too. However, the graphic novel also defers significantly to other visual media in its ability to represent a story. In one way, as Petersen has observed, “the drawings that make up the story are not at all dependent on being real objects in real space and real time to establish the story; rather, the images are compiled in the reader’s mind, and inferences are drawn from the similarities and differences between the available visual forms and how that information correlates to real experience.”39 As discussed later in greater detail, the role of the reader in de- and reconstructing the story in the graphic novel is of great importance to the understanding of the novel as a mediator between real or imagined historical events and the reader. In other words, the novel occupies the space between the active reader and the described events and mediates between them. That this mediator is not “neutral” and should be seen as an

Introduction • 9

independent agent in its own right makes both the novel and the mediation process important to understand. Moreover, graphic novels in a unique way combine the visual and verbal modes of representation. William Murray, for example, has pinpointed the peculiarity of blending “visual” and “written” forms in graphic novels and has noted that “the marrying of these two media allows for new and engaging ways of transmitting stories, and in graphic novels the visual and written components often work to create competing and contradictory narratives that complicate and challenge familiar stories.”40 In turn, Hillary L. Chute, whose recent work is devoted to the investigation of war comics as a documentary genre, writes, “Through their wide range of aesthetic experiments with word and image, mark and line, comics sets new terms for visual-verbal reports, accounts, and histories. Driven by the urgencies of re-seeing the war in acts of witness, comics proposes an ethics of looking and reading intent on defamiliarizing standard or received images of history while yet aiming at communicate and circulate.”41 What scholars have already acknowledged, then, is the power of the comics form to simultaneously narrate and visualize events in order to tell a war story from a unique vantage point and explore phenomena in ways that other media cannot. One might argue that the graphic novel’s power as a cultural medium to transmit its message both visually and verbally influences the perception of the audience by intensifying the process of consuming and interpreting the story on various levels. Thus visualization and narration complement each other equally and are inseparable within the comics medium. The way graphic novels or comics employ the visual-verbal mode of representation thus differs significantly from how a novel or film does it. To specify, while a novel can arguably still function as a complete narrative when deprived of intended visual means, this is not the case with graphic novels or comics. Furthermore, “if we often experience a film or novel as a kind of virtual reality in which we forget that we were, in fact, watching a movie or reading a book, such forgetting is never truly possible when reading a comic.”42 “Forgetting” is impossible because of the way graphic novels and comics employ the image and the text: while a novel and film offer their reader/viewer an opportunity for reading/watching a smooth and coherently organized narration, graphic novels and comics can never do that. The reader will always stumble upon the images and the text in juxtaposition. To support this claim, we would like to refer to Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, who argue the following: “As the reader follows the sequencing of panels and moves from one panel to the next, the element of juxtaposition comes into play. The reader performs an ongoing construction of meaning by considering each panel in direct relationship to the one immediately before it, as well as in the context of all previous panels. The understanding of the next panel can also be influenced by a number of the panels yet to come. . . . And each next panel has the potential to

10 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

provide new information . . . [to develop] the meaning of one or more previous panels.”43 Reading a graphic novel is, therefore, hard work. While graphic novels and comics possess both visual and verbal methods to convey the meaning, spatially and temporally they do not work in the same way as a novel or film. (Stating that, we by no means want to undermine the complexity of novels and films; moreover, it is significant to note that taken separately, a novel and a film work in modes distinct for each medium.) The visual-verbal peculiarity of graphic novels and comics is, in a sense, a very distinguished phenomenon and deserves to be examined in more detail. Here is a question that seems particularly relevant: To what extent are visual and verbal modes separable from and/or dependent on each other? Even though the predecessor of the graphic novel was the “wordless woodcut novel,” which allowed those who consider the graphic novel to be primarily a visual medium and secondarily a verbal one to praise the “muteness” of the medium and ultimately foreground its visuality,44 this view is blatantly superficial, as the verbal element in the graphic novel is just as important as the visual one. In our analysis, we support those scholars who claim that “there is no reason to radically distinguish between writing and the image” and that “images can now be ‘read’ as a form of writing (yet no longer within the framework of the Western alphabeticsemiotic systems) but also that written utterances should be analyzed as well as images (that is, as surfaces limited by screens and displaying visual relations to be interpreted by viewers in ways that are no longer linear or word-based).”45 While there are obviously graphic novels that employ more text (e.g., Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic [2006], where, along with the use of text in an “ordinary” way, the author incorporates it in some of the images too) and those that rely more on visuality (e.g., Hubert’s Adrian and the Tree of Secrets [2014]), in line with Achim Hescher, we contend that “the sheer quantity of text or the text/image ratio in a graphic novel is in no way a quality criterion nor a genre characteristic.”46 To quote Duncan and Smith, “it is the blend of pictures and printed words that make comic books a unique form of communication”;47 this uniqueness, however, can never be undermined by an occasional imbalance between visual and verbal elements in graphic narratives. Being able to present the message visually and verbally at the same time, both the text and the image convey the meaning. Thus visual aspects of images in comics are not distinct from the narrative quality of written text and vice versa. The narrative aspects of images (in and of themselves, as well as in sequence) are just as powerful as the visual aspects of written text. Both are used profusely to construct meaning in graphic novels and comics. In this regard, Duncan and Smith suggest paying attention to the “correspondence of the words to the action/scene.”48 The scholars contend that “balloons or captions can be synchronous, occurring at the same time as the action, or asynchronous with the picture.”49 This arguably creates the pace in which the story

Introduction • 11

is told. Yet along with that, there are other visually oriented means of signifying the time in which the action takes place as well as the scene’s importance. These are “size, sequence, and juxtaposition.”50 These parameters are, however, relevant not only to the visual organization of the image/panel but also to the text that accompanies the action or, crucially, lacks it. When considering, for example, an element such as sound, one can talk about the most apparent collaboration of visual and verbal elements in the recreation of acoustics. And although some scholars claim that sound is “visual”51 in a graphic novel, we are certain of its verbality too. In most cases, sound is represented either through the combination of a visual image (e.g., an explosion) and a short, one- or two-word accompanying phrase or through the visualization of the phrase itself, when the text literally becomes an image. This technique is employed particularly often to regulate volume: the bigger the letters, the “louder” the sound, and vice versa. Thus text is, indeed, an integral visual-verbal element in transmitting sound. (This, of course, excludes the cases when the sound is conveyed through the images of notes only.) To borrow from Duncan and Smith, “Comic book dialogue and narration is usually presented in neat, clearly printed lettering. Such lettering is easy to read, but it does little to convey the paralanguage (volume, emphasis, rate, vocal quality, etc.) of human speech. Less tidy, but more expressive lettering comes closer to representing qualities of the spoken word. Aspects of paralanguage can be suggested visually by varying the size, thickness, and shape of both the words and the balloons or boxes that contain them.”52 At the same time, appealing to the visual senses of the reader, an image becomes a language too. Linguists, for example, do not underestimate the visual power to communicate a message. Neil Cohn claims that “structured sequential sounds . . . [are] spoken languages of the world, structured sequential body motions . . . [are] sign languages, structured sequential images . . . [are] visual languages.”53 These languages can, indeed, vary from culture to culture, a fact that graphic novels and comics have overtly proven with examples such as manga, which arguably represents the visual language of Japan.54 Yet one can speak not only about the visual power of an image to convey meaning in general but also about the construction of meaning technically, through the specific choice and employment of various artistic techniques: “Such basic shapes like dots, lines, and spirals combine to form angles, squares, circles, etc., and create the basic shapes of various graphic iconographies, which are deployed in drawn representations.”55 Scholars divide the visual-verbal unities into “word-specific combinations” and “picture-specific combinations,” where in the first, text is a dominant component (not in terms of space but its contribution to the construction of meaning), whereas, in the second, the image is a dominant component.56 And it is exactly “when words and pictures go hand-in-hand to convey an idea that

12 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

neither could convey alone in an interdependent combination” that shows the uniqueness and advantage of the graphic novel as a medium.57 Despite such divisions and multiple interpretations of the role(s) the image and text play in a graphic narrative, as well as the existing debates on their intricate relationship, it is crucial to consider two things. First, the visual-verbal mode of this medium is enabled not by two separate means of representation but by the cohesion of the two. Second, the visual and verbal can operate independently of each other. The representation of war in graphic novels has a history, which accounts for this book’s selection of chapters as well as its thematic organization. The opening of the field of military history in the 1960s shifted focus away from the battlefield and enabled an array of new themes to be studied in warfare. The relations between war and gender, as well as class, civilian experience, education, memory, and many other subjects, have been rigorously studied ever since. This shift has been mirrored in graphic novels about war. As Chute has argued, “At every corner of its history, comics, or its antecedents, takes shape in conversation with war.”58 Thus while war comics focused almost exclusively at first on the depiction of the battlefield and the male soldier, graphic representations since the 1960s have addressed a panoply of issues, encompassing new types of protagonists (e.g., women), new aspects of war experience (e.g., the home front), and new themes (e.g., trauma and social justice). Perhaps the most famous examples in this regard are Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen (1973–1974) and Art Spiegelman’s Maus books (1980–1991).59 Today, accordingly, we have academic works on graphic war novels that focus on such themes as propaganda and recruitment, masculinity, education, humor and cartoonists, and more.60 The chapters in this volume touch upon the themes mentioned and many others. At the same time, the collection as a whole explores graphic narratives on war through three major trajectories that lie at the foundation of both the medium and war itself as broad and encompassing themes: mediation and representation, noncombatant experience, and memory.61 The graphic novel mediates between events and experiences—fictional or nonfictional—and their observers through time or space (or both) by using word-graphic representations. Mediation, in turn, makes important not just the events themselves but also the mediator and the consumer. As Katalin Orbán observes, “When graphic narratives mediate between a local atrocity and the global circulation of images and interpretations of war and organised violence, they tend to move from the material culture of violence towards our eventual distant act of consumption through acts of collaborative witnessing.”62 And as Jared Gardner puts it, “Comics chronicle the twilight world, the liminal space between past and present, text and image, creator and reader, [and] all comics necessarily leave their binary tensions unresolved. It is at heart a bifocal form,

Introduction • 13

requiring a double-vision on the part of reader and creator alike.”63 Moreover, in a graphic novel, the mediation apparatus—namely, its representations in their totality—is unique and thus also worth exploring. Considering how graphic novels mediate history, Chute identifies two main advantages of a graphic narrative that help it “express history”: its “form” (since it consists largely of illustrations) and the way the narrative is positioned on paper—that is, its “print medium” that engagingly works with space.64 Neither mediation nor representation, however, are ever neutral. As several scholars have recently argued, there is a structured gap between “the intense . . . need to record something and the seeming impossibility of representing it,” especially regarding war and trauma, which so often “exceeds experience and ‘cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge.’”65 Operating in the region between events and their observers, the graphic novel constructs and reconstructs these events into meaningful “facts” that are often politically, socially, and culturally usable. Thus, from the start, we suggest thinking of a graphic novel as a mosaic that with the help of various constituent parts—whether a verbal expression, a picture, a specific color or shade, or even an empty space—builds or creates a particular story, account, or event and eventually represents war in a meaningful and usable way that warrants exploration. Accordingly, the first section of this volume offers new perspectives on how graphic novels represent both historical and present-day conflicts as well as on how these representations might be put to use. Iain MacInnes’s chapter offers a unique demonstration of how graphic novels portray conflicts from far-off history by exploring the depiction of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) in Le Trône d’Argile (2006–2015) and Crécy (2007). MacInnes shows that temporal distance from a conflict neither negates its significance nor means that the issues raised by graphic novels about it are of little relevance to the contemporary reader. Kent Worcester, on the other hand, takes the reader to the early 2000s to unearth the role of the graphic representations of 9/11 in the contemporary American political debate about the “War on Terror.” His reflections are followed by Emir Pasanovic’s exploration of how graphic novels can reconstruct the meaning of war itself through his examination of the representation of the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in comics as a case study. Taking up noncombatants’ experience in a separate section, this volume furthers research on the representations in graphic novels of the broader meaning of war and its social impact. This section begins with two chapters that focus on the understudied subject of children’s experience of war. Harriet Earle considers Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints (2013), so as to explore childhood and spirituality during the Boxer Rebellion in China (1899–1901) through the story of a boy and a girl who find themselves on the opposing sides of the conflict. James Kelley approaches the subject of children and war from

14 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

another angle in a chapter on War Brothers: The Graphic Novel (2014), which recounts the atrocities of Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army in the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. Kelley investigates how the experiences of young victims during war are perceived, depicted, and remembered in graphic novels. Two additional chapters then widen the lens and tackle the subjects of race and gender to encompass the representations of war experiences of broader parts of society. Joe Lockard’s analysis of Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner series (2005) foregrounds the issues of race and everyday violence in the slavery-ridden society of the antebellum United States. Focusing on gender, Christina M. Knopf takes on the still-downplayed issue of women and war, especially in the context of the Anglo-Irish dispute between 1916 and 1922. Knopf uses narrative criticism to consider the portrayal of gender roles during the Irish Troubles as told in Gerry Hunt’s graphic novels and explores the contribution of these narratives to larger stories about gender, war, and nationalism. Finally, Peter C. Valenti scrutinizes a conflict in which civil society is often more central to the story than the military—namely, the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993–1995), Valenti explores the increase of intra- and intercommunal violence in the Israeli-Palestinian War and considers Sacco’s analysis of the impact of violence on Palestinian social organizations. Memory and its construction in graphic narratives of war provide the theme of this volume’s final section. Memory has become a central subject for scholarly investigation since the mid-1980s, largely because of the “cultural turn” in history and the challenges mounted to more traditional, mostly national, collective identities.66 In fact, scholars have been exploring the construction of memory and its political and social functions since Maurice Halbwachs published his works in the first half of the twentieth century, and this interest increased in the wake of Pierre Nora’s monumental publications of the 1980s and 1990s.67 This debate has focused attention on the role of cultural artifacts such as statues and of physical places such as cemeteries and museums in helping constitute society’s collective memories of past events.68 Graphic novels and comics, though they have not been as thoroughly explored from this angle, also partake in the formation of collective memory, as Jennifer Howell has shown in the case of the memory of the Algerian War in France, for example.69 Most of the graphic novels analyzed in this collection deal with past conflicts and thus, consciously or not, take part in the political and cultural debates about the memories of the conflicts they represent. And indeed, the graphic novels that deal with ongoing conflicts also participate, again consciously or not, in the constitution of their conflicts’ eventual remembrances. Properly, then, the closing section addresses the role of graphic novels in constructing memories of war. The section begins with Silvia G. Kurlat Ares’s exploration of how the Malvinas War (usually referred to as the Falklands War) was commemorated

Introduction • 15

in Argentina between 1982 and 2015. As Ares shows, unique narratives about the war have developed in Argentina, and this small but complex tradition has evolved mostly in graphic novels and films. The chapter shows how graphic novels enter an unstable ideological space when describing the contradictions among territorial aspiration, the military’s behavior during the war, and the conflict’s consequences. Through a discussion of Matteo Casali’s and Kristian Donaldson’s 99 Days (2011), Tatiana Prorokova delves into the nature of war memories and their psychological impact and shows that war as a cultural phenomenon cannot be forced into the frame of specific days or years as history—rather, it becomes everlasting. Finally, Yasmine Nachabe Taan examines Mazen Kerbaj’s online graphic novel that tells the story of the Lebanese comics artist’s experience during the Israeli-Lebanese War in 2006. Through an examination of visual representations as well as storytelling strategies, Taan explores the different ways Kerbaj uses comics not only as a medium to record history but also as a testimony of personal memory against silence and abuse in the context of war and instability. Naturally, the trajectories of mediation and representations, noncombatants’ experience, and memory mentioned above intersect, making graphic narratives about war the complex works on and of human history that they are. As J. Spencer Clark has recently argued, graphic novels “present complex historical events in a narrative form that is detailed and multilayered.”70 This, we hope, alongside our convening of a choir of less frequently heard voices, will allow a new, more global view of the relations between war and culture—relations that are becoming ever more present in our world.

Notes 1 Moreover, between 1870 and 1913, 7.8 wars have been fought every year on average,

whereas the average rose to 18.9 between 1914 and 1945 and to 38.3 between 1945 and 1990. Between 1990 and 2001, the average reached 45.8 wars per year. Mark Harrison and Nikolaus Wolf, “The Frequency of Wars,” Economic History Review 65, no. 3 (2012): 1064. 2 Quoted in Munich Security Report, 2015: Collapsing Order, Reluctant Guardians?, Fifty-First Munich Security Conference, Retrieved March 11, 2018, 34, https://www .securityconference.de/fileadmin/MunichSecurityReport/MunichSecurityReport _2015.pdf. 3 Ed Finn, the director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, recently went as far as using the term “weaponized fiction” in this context. See Peter W. Singer, “2016 Predictions: A Look Ahead at the Future of War,” Defense One, December 21, 2015, http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/12/ 2016-predictions-look-ahead/124668/. 4 Robert S. Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2011), 1–20.

16 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

5 David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the Euro-

pean Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

6 Karin Kukkonen, Studding Comics and Graphic Novels (Chichester: John Wiley &

Sons, 2013), 99–100.

7 David Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip, 100–102. 8 Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, 73. 9 Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, eds., From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contri-

butions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 5.

10 Kukkonen, Studding Comics and Graphic Novels, 99. 11 Jerad Gardner, “A History of the Narrative Comic Strip,” in From Comic Strips to

Graphic Novels, ed. Stein and Thon, 241.

12 Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, 92–93. 13 Julia Round, “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

23 24 25 26

27

Novels, ed. Stein and Thon, 337–342. Round, “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative,” 325–345. Kukkonen, Studding Comics and Graphic Novels, 118–119. Kukkonen, 126. Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, 176. Petersen, 185. Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt, “European Graphic Narratives: Toward a Cultural and Mediological History,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, ed. Stein and Thon, 347. Baetens and Surdiacourt, “European Graphic Narratives,” 348. Jaqueline Berndt, “Ghostly: ‘Asian Graphic Narratives,’ Nonnonba, and Manga on ‘Asian Graphic Narratives,’” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, ed. Stein and Thon, 363; Round, “Anglo-American Graphic Narrative,” 326. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Introduction: Decentering American History,” in Decentering America, ed. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 1–14; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). See also Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Graphic Narrative as World Literature,” in From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, ed. Stein and Thon, 391. Bart H. Beaty and Stephen Weiner, eds., Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Manga (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2013), xi. Gardner, “A History of the Narrative Comic Strip,” 251–252. On war in human history, see Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Clausewitz is of course famous for his saying that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Liddell Hart, Fuller, and other twentieth-century military thinkers who witnessed the transformational power of the two world wars likewise held the view that war was a powerful and pivotal historical agent. See, for example, Azar Gat, Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–33; Nimrod Tal, The American Civil War in British Culture: Representations and Responses, 1870s to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 60–62. Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 213–226; or Peter Paret, “The

Introduction • 17

28

29

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37

New Military History,” Parameters 31 (Fall 1991): 10–18. For an updated account of the field of military history and recent revision of the new military history, see M. Moyar, “The Current State of Military History,” Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 225–240. For a wonderful and detailed account of the important developments in military and war studies, see Deividas Šlekys, “More than Semantics: The Difference between the Concepts of ‘Military Revolution’ and ‘Revolution in Military Affairs,’” Lithuanian Political Science Yearbook, no. 1 (2007), 51–87. Kees Ribbens, “War Comics beyond the Battlefield: Anne Frank’s Transnational Representation in Sequential Art,” in Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale, ed. Jaqueline Berndt, Series Global Manga Studies, vol. 1 (International Manga Research Center, Kyoto Seika University, 2010), 220. Robert Kodosky noted that in the United States, war comics have become increasingly popular since the mid-1980s. See Kodosky, “Holy Tet Westy!: Graphic Novels and the Vietnam War,” Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (2011): 1048– 1050. “War comics [ . . . ] have met with success by both reflecting and reaffirming the American way of war,” Kodosky observed (1053). See, for example, Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 30–55; Chris York and Rafiel York, eds., Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946–1962: Essays on Graphic Treatment of Communism, the Code and Social Concerns ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2012), 45–54, 79–91; Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 111–196; Barry D. Rowland, Herbie and Friends: Cartoons in Wartime (Toronto: Natural Heritage/National History Inc., 1990), 15–17; Robert J. Weiner, ed., Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero: Critical Essays ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 15–23, 24–65, 104–115; Cord A. Scott, Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2014), chapter 4. Ribbens, “War Comics beyond the Battlefield,” 220. Trischa Goodnow and James J. Kimble, eds., The 10 Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 4; Matthew F. Rech, “Be Part of the Story: A Popular Geopolitics of War Comics Aesthetics and Royal Air Force Recruitment,” Political Geography 39 (2014): 36–47. Jane Chapman, Anna Hoyles, Andrew Kerr, and Adam Sherif, Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3–5. Chapman et al., Comics and the World Wars, 3. Chapman et al., 150–170. See, for example, J. David Slocum, ed., Hollywood and War: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006); Elizabeth Bronfen, “War Literature into War Film: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Violence of Aesthetics,” in Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music, ed. Gabriele Rippl (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 287–305; and Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout, eds., The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Petersen, Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, xvii. Wolfgang Hallet, “The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change and Its Narratological Implications,” in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 123.

18 • Tatiana Prorokova and Nimrod Tal

38 Hallet, “The Rise of the Multimodal Novel,” 124. 39 Hallet. 40 William Murray, “Reimagining Terror in the Graphic Novel: Kyle Baker’s Nat

Turner and the Cultural Imagination,” CEA Critic 77, no. 3 (2015): 329.

41 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 31. 42 Jared Gardner, “Film + Comics: A Multimodal Romance in the Age of Transmedial

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61

62

Convergence,” in Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 159. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 141. Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt, “How to ‘Read’ Images with Texts: The Graphic Novel Case,” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels (London: SAGE, 2011), 592. Baetens and Surdiacourt, “How to ‘Read’ Images with Texts,” 593. Achim Hescher, Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 64. Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 145. Duncan and Smith, 138. Duncan and Smith. Duncan and Smith. Duncan and Smith, 144. Duncan and Smith, 145. Neil Cohn, “Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field,” in Linguistics and the Study of Comics, ed. Frank Bramlett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 97. Emphasis in original. Cohn, “Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language,” 97–98. Cohn, 99. Duncan and Smith, The Power of Comics, 146. Emphasis in original. Duncan and Smith. Emphasis in original. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 11. Ribbens, “War Comics beyond the Battlefield,” 220–222. See also Scott, Comics and Conflict, chapter 1. Rech, “Be Part of the Story,” 36–47; Ross Laurie, “Masculinities and War Comics,” Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 60 (1999): 114–121; Alexander Clarkson, “Virtual Heroes: Boys, Masculinity and Historical Memory in War Comics, 1945–1995,” Journal of Boyhood Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 175–185; Lila L. Christensen, “Graphic Global Conflict: Graphic Novels in the High School Social Studies Classroom,” Social Studies 97, no. 6 (2006): 227–230; Christina M. Knopf, The Comic Art of War: A Critical Study of Military Cartoons, 1805–2014, with a Guide to Artists ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2015). Thus, we partially build upon the questions raised by Mitzi Myers, namely, “What counts as a representation of war? What kinds of war stories have found favor over time?” See Myers, “Storying War: A Capsule Overview,” Lion and the Unicorn 24, no. 3 (September 2000): 327. Katalin Orbán, “Mediating Distant Violence: Reports on Non-photographic Reporting in The Fixer and The Photographer,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6, no. 2 (2015): 122.

Introduction • 19 63 Jared Gardner, “Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics,” Mod-

ern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 801.

64 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 4. On graphic novels and historical representation, see also

65

66

67

68

69 70

Wright, Comic Book Nation, xiii–xix; Maheen Ahmed, “Historicizing in Graphic Novels: The Welcome Subjective G(l)aze,” in Graphic History Essays on Graphic Novels and/as History, ed. Richard Iadonisi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 184–202; Tony Venezia, “Archive of the Future: Alan Moore’s Watchmen as Historiographic Novel,” Peer English 4 (2009): 16–31. Vèronique Bragard, Christophe Dony, and Warren Rosenberg, “Introduction,” in Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre, ed. Bragard, Dony, and Rosenberg ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 1. The forerunner of this ongoing interest in memory was the French historian Pierre Nora, who in 1984 published the first volume of his monumental Les Lieux de Mémoire. See note 67 below. On memory, especially in relation to history, see Alon Confino, “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1386–1403; Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations, special issue, Grounds for Remembering, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 127–150; and Patrick Hutton, “Recent Scholarship on Memory and History,” History Teacher 33, no. 4 (August 2000): 533–548. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (Paris: F. Alcan, 1935); Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980 [1960]); Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). See also David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 2012 [1994]). See, for example, Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Terry Wyke and Harry Cocks, Public Sculptures of Greater Manchester (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004); Geoffrey Cubitt, “Lines of Resistance: Evoking and Configuring the Theme of Resistance in Museum Displays in Britain around the Bicentenary of 1807,” Museum and Society 8, no. 3 (2010): 143–164. Jennifer Howell, The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), xvii–xxxiii. J. Spencer Clark, “Encounters with Historical Agency: The Value of Nonfiction Graphic Novels in the Classroom,” History Teacher 46, no. 4 (2013): 489.

Chapter 1

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” War, Chivalry, and the Hundred Years War in Le Trône d’Argile and Crécy IAIN A. MACINNES

War has long been a central issue in comics and graphic novels, and the exploration of conflict in this medium has been subject to increasing academic study.1 This focus has mainly concentrated, however, on contemporary conflicts.2 While understandable, it is possible to argue that temporal distance from conflict does not negate its significance, nor does it mean that the issues raised by the graphic novel’s treatment of earlier periods are of little or no relevance to the contemporary reader. Indeed, medieval war is a potentially attractive subject for graphic novelists to depict due to it being easily recognizable to, and popular with, modern readers.3 The prevalence of medieval literary and historical warriors, such as King Arthur and Robin Hood, is obvious in modern culture.4 And depictions of such figures play on recognized tropes that are equally recognizable, such as the armored knight on horseback, the castle under siege, and the tournament.5 Parallel literary developments in the fantasy genre make such tropes even more common, based as they are on pseudomedieval worlds.6 At the same time, the medieval period also retains an element 23

24 • Iain A. MacInnes

of mystique, its chronological distance from the present making it appear something other and therefore furthering its appeal.7 While the medium has changed over time, war’s centrality has always been a key component in literature more widely, and medieval literature in particular focused on periods of conflict.8 Medieval chroniclers are recognized for their stylized descriptions of warriors and battle, and so the graphic novel would appear a natural successor to this literary form.9 As with any fictional rendering, however, historical veracity may at times cede to the demands of narrative or aesthetics. Readers and critics must bear in mind that modern depictions of the medieval are informed by the style, mores, and culture of the present day, and therefore they have the ability to also misrepresent medieval warfare, or at least to portray it through a modern lens.10 To consider the depiction of medieval war in recent graphic novels, this chapter will focus on two works, which both depict events during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453). The Hundred Years War commenced in 1337 when King Edward III of England claimed the throne of France by right of his French mother. The French ignored the English king’s claim and instead chose Phillip VI as their monarch. War broke out when Edward III, backed by continental allies, began to assert his claim through more than just words. Several English invasions of France followed, and one major campaign resulted in the Battle of Crécy (1346). War continued—punctuated by truces of varying lengths and major English battlefield victories at Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415)—throughout much of the remainder of the fourteenth and on into the fifteenth century. In the 1410s, King Henry V of England took up the English claim to the French throne once more and invaded France, conquering Normandy and threatening Paris. At the same time, France was convulsed by factional civil war as a result of the incapacity of King Charles VI, and the English were able to ally themselves with the French dukes of Burgundy for some time. Eventually, the French unified under King Charles VII and pushed the English out of the territories they had conquered, effectively ending the conflict by 1453.11 The sources for this chapter provide different perspectives of this period of conflict. Warren Ellis’s “graphic novella” Crécy provides a warts-and-all depiction of one of the pivotal battles of the war, focalized through a soldier who narrates his experiences to the reader.12 More than a simple account of the battle itself, the novella provides a depiction of medieval warfare from an English perspective. The soldier-narrator is an English archer, part of the campaign army marching through France toward Crécy. That Ellis is himself English provides a personal link from an author who, it has been argued, often embodies the author-narrator characters he creates as “authorial doppelgängers.”13 The second source, the series Le Trône d’Argile, is an example of French bande dessinée that focuses on the fifteenth-century phase of the conflict and in particular

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 25

on French medieval heroes such as Charles VII and Joan of Arc.14 Although graphic novels depicting the medieval period are relatively rare, their greatest concentration is in the French-language medium.15 This focus on the medieval reflects a wider French interest in a period that has been described as “a central battlefield in the ideological, political, and aesthetic confrontations over the status of history and the construction of the present of the French nation.”16 It is a battle that continues to be fought.17 Indeed, the Hundred Years War is particularly resonant in French historiography, where “the language of the nation and national identity has been strongly connected with the Hundred Years War.”18 A collaboration between fantasy author Nicolas Jarry and historian and artist France Richemond, Le Trône d’Argile arguably provides the French perspective on this period of warfare.19 Both texts draw upon historical sources and historical knowledge. Richemond’s historical training, in particular her interest in Joan of Arc’s military career, underpins the French work and provide the historical basis for the events depicted, even if some historical fiction is also evident in the series. At the same time, Ellis’s Crécy prominently draws on quotations and details from contemporary chronicles. Both texts also, however, reference modern political discourse in relation to their depictions of the past. Ellis’s common-man archer rails against the “superior” French nobility while serving in an army with English knights who had far more in common with their French counterparts than they did with their own foot soldiers. He is an “outsider figure” in terms of his political opinions, his social standing, and his general outlook and is imbued with the author’s own views about our present.20 Le Trône d’Argile largely eschews left-wing French “history from below” and instead focuses on the lives of kings and queens, nobles and knights. While the extent to which either work presents an accurate picture of medieval warfare is not the purpose of this chapter, it remains pertinent to consider in detail what these works say to a modern audience about the medieval past. To do so, this chapter will analyze the depiction of violence in medieval conflict as represented in these works. This will be done through a consideration of two main themes: medieval warfare and chivalry.

Medieval Warfare: The Ideal and the Reality In Crécy, the English army trudges through the forested French countryside. Throughout the long march toward the site of the battle, the rain steadily falls. Emphasizing the “war is hell” image, the unceasing downpour through which the English army slogs stresses the negative experience of the English soldier. This is particularly so for the infantry, forced to trek through the countryside on foot in all weather. The portrayal of war worsens for the soldier when the reader turns to depictions of combat. War’s effects on the individual soldier

26 • Iain A. MacInnes

are violent, bloody, and often fatal, although in both of these works, they are often felt more by the French than by the English. Throughout Crécy, French troops are depicted suffering arrow wounds, and fatal injuries as a result, to all parts of their anatomy (see figure 1.1).21 Similarly in Le Trône d’Argile, the archer and his arrows cause immense suffering on the battlefield, and both works depict the familiar picture of an arrow storm as thousands of English arrows take flight.22 Of particular interest are panels depicting the impact of such missile fire, in part because medieval sources are often insufficiently detailed to address such aspects directly. Medieval historians often presume the types of injury caused, and at times can even detect its aftereffects through archaeological evidence, but this remains detached from the bloody physical reality depicted here.23 There is also an almost comedic element to these deaths. The expressions on characters’ faces as they are struck depict shock, their eyes jutting almost out of their sockets, perhaps displaying pain, horror, or terror.24 They nonetheless appear to be faintly amusing as a result of their slightly extreme nature. This may be deliberate. Humor, when combined with violence, has been argued to “constitute a form of detachment from the events being narrated—yet at the same time, humor paradoxically involves forced recognition of an incongruous

FIGURE 1.1. English arrows impact on the French line (Ellis, Crécy).

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 27

(and often painful) reality.”25 Considering the number of casualties caused as a result of such warfare, the addition of humor here allows for recognition of the scale of the suffering represented, while still providing distance for the reader from a quite harrowing event. A more obviously deliberate comedic episode is depicted in relation to the English marching past the town of Caen. Taunted and spat on by Frenchmen from the apparent safety of the town’s battlements, the English archers respond by firing their arrows at the abusive locals. Two men receive arrows to the buttocks, having chosen, somewhat inadvisably, to hang over the battlements to taunt the English. As the narrator William of Stonham comments laconically, “Well, you’ve got to have a laugh, don’t you?”26 Where the portrayal of combat more clearly aligns with medieval literary description is in the depiction of one-to-one confrontations. In Le Trône d’Argile, Tanneguy du Châtel rides at an enemy Burgundian soldier and decapitates him with one swipe of his sword.27 In another fight, du Châtel cleaves an enemy’s arm off in similar fashion.28 These examples of almost superhuman strength parallel medieval literary depictions of similar episodes, used in particular to accentuate the strength and military prowess of specific heroes.29 Of note is an interesting crosscutting of two fights, mixing Tanneguy’s fight with the Burgundians through the streets of Paris with a desperate stand by Ambroise de Loré against odds of six to one. Both fights are resonant of medieval chronicle accounts that focus on the actions of a notable individual and recount such action almost blow-by-blow.30 De Loré’s fight in particular is a selfless act of chivalric heroism, where one man is left to fight against almost impossible odds. That de Loré is successful in defeating his opponents is reflective of his personal skill at arms. Its depiction suggests the possibility that the authors were aware of contemporary medieval accounts of similar clashes and sought to emulate such an episode here. In these vignettes, as with medieval descriptions of similar episodes, it is the individual hero who is the focus, and it is his success in winning against the odds that marks him out for special praise and remembrance. Of course, the depiction of violence in war is not restricted to its impact on the soldier—there is also the impact that it had on the civilian populace of medieval France. Although neither work spends particularly long focusing on the suffering of the French peasantry, one sequence does highlight the horrors of war. In Crécy, William comments that the English “[have] been a bit naughty whenever we’ve seen a village or town.”31 This sardonic comment is immediately followed by a silent panel that depicts a village in flames. In the foreground, a naked man, his arms behind his back, lies dead with four arrows protruding from his body. A dead baby, with an arrow impaled in its chest, lies in the middle foreground, and a grieving woman, her face covered by her hand, lies hunched against a tree to the panel’s left (see figure 1.2). The image provides a damning condemnation of medieval warfare. The focus on arrows as the weapons that reaped such slaughter fixes the reader’s

28 • Iain A. MacInnes

FIGURE 1.2. An English attack on a

French village (Ellis, Crécy).

judgment on the archers, of which our narrator is one. The silence in this panel, with the narrator’s voice absent, reinforces the fact that the reader is intended to take stock of this image and reflect. As Adler argues, “Silence functions . . . not only as a simple absence of speech . . . but also as a vehicle of a large variety of emotions and mental states connected to the protagonists. Moreover, the narrator may turn off the vocal channel in order to invite the reader to gain understanding through observation and deduction, and to decode the narrator’s (or the protagonist’s) intentions, to let symbols and icons ‘talk,’ to deliver information on the implicit level.”32 Following this panel, William feels the need to rationalize English behavior as “at this point, I suspect you don’t have much sympathy for us.”33 According to him, French behavior is worse. They are a constant threat, and their proximity to England leaves the English living in fear. As he argues, it is the English who “are the underdogs right now.”34 Of course, it is the English who have, in this instance, invaded France. Moreover, the innate ferocity of the French nobility does not explain English atrocities committed against the French peasantry. The panel depicting atrocity may, then, represent confirmation of a common modern conception that “medieval warfare [was] brutal, and its warriors unschooled.”35 In so doing, it may be drawing on “the ‘everyday’  .  .  . the nearest we have to a keyhole to the thoughts and values of the masses,” in this case the preconceptions of those who bought and read the novel.36 But this ignores the checks and limitations that were present in the prosecution of medieval warfare that ensured that such events were relatively rare. And while this example chooses to focus on the negative extreme, the fact that it is one of the few images of atrocity in these works may indicate acceptance of this reality. The depiction of war in Le Trône d’Argile is also relatively devoid of examples of atrocity. Most interestingly, there is a lack of obvious othering of the

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 29

English, which could have been used in such works to further notions of French identity in opposition to the enemy.37 This is particularly noticeable considering the frequent offensive othering of the French in Crécy. Considering that the period depicted was one when the armies of Henry V traversed France at will, it is notable that the novels lack depictions of French suffering at the hands of the English foe. For example, while the town of Caen is besieged by the English and reduced to flames, the bird’s-eye view of the city depicted in the accompanying panels ensures that the suffering of those within the town’s walls remains occluded.38 It is a direct contrast to Crécy’s piteous depiction of the destruction of a French village in the previous century. Where negative portrayal of the English is most evident is in the depiction of the notorious Siege of Rouen in the winter of 1418–1419. With the city encircled, the inhabitants are left to starve in the snow-laden streets. As a result, the French authorities round up the women and children and cast them out of the town to remove “useless mouths” (bouches inutiles).39 Rather than displaying clemency, Henry V orders that any of the people seeking to pass through the English siege lines are to be shot.40 At the siege’s resolution, the English are depicted riding through the open gates of Rouen past the corpses of those left to starve and freeze to death in the snow.41 However, even this example is not as negative as it could be. While the authors portray an English knight looking troubled at his king’s orders, there is no depiction of perhaps the most notorious episode of the siege, in which Henry V magnanimously allowed food to be brought to the people left in the ditch, but only for one day because it was Christmas.42 Omission of this episode leaves open the possibility for a more ambivalent reading of Henry V’s actions, especially as it is the French who are depicted evicting the elderly, women, and children from Rouen in the first place. The novel’s judgment seems far more damning, in contrast, in the depiction of events during the French civil war. Examples of franco-français violence are far more to the fore in Le Trône d’Argile, as the novels depict French nobles fighting each other instead of the English.43 Upon entering Paris on July  14, 1418, the duke and duchess of Burgundy complain of an overpowering smell. Upon investigation, the duke discovers that this is caused by a large number of bodies floating in the moat of the Louvre. This was the work of the executioner, Capeluche. He was something of a bogeyman figure during the Burgundian riots in Paris that preceded the events depicted.44 The Duke of Burgundy remonstrates with Capeluche for allowing this to happen, the dead very notably including a baby and women, with rats feasting on their corpses. He orders the bodies removed and threatens Capeluche that if he cannot control the activities of his “band of cutthroats” (bande d’égorgeurs), then he will be replaced.45 Later on, Capeluche and his men are depicted rampaging through the streets of Paris killing enemy supporters. Capeluche himself is

30 • Iain A. MacInnes

shown murdering the French constable Bernard D’Armgagnac while the latter is a prisoner in chains.46 All of this is too much for the Burgundian duke. He orders that “this corrupt and depraved creature” (cette creature perverse et deprave) be sent with his men to besiege the castle of Montlhéry and that the gates of Paris be locked behind them when they leave.47 The Duke of Burgundy does receive, then, some recognition for ridding Paris of a troublesome commander. But the fact that he does little more than banish Capeluche from his sight and move the problem elsewhere is to his detriment. Duke John of Burgundy, of course, receives his comeuppance later in the novels. His assassination at the bridge of Montereau in September 1419 is a good example of the extreme acts of the civil conflict that wracked France during this period. It is also, however, an interesting example of the French writers spinning the likely events of this episode in favor of a positive representation of the future Charles VII, the man who would ultimately lead the French to victory over the English. The Duke of Burgundy is killed at a prearranged meeting with the dauphin, supposedly intended to try to end the civil war. Le Trône d’Argile depicts hot words being exchanged by men on both sides before swords are drawn. In the ensuing fight, John the Fearless is killed, and Tanneguy du Châtel helps the young dauphin escape.48 This murder under trust is far from a heroic episode and quite obviously presents something of a problem for the French authors. Continuing the depiction from earlier in the work, the young Charles is shown as a youthful innocent. He remains under the influence of powerful French noblemen and is unable to stop the violence that ensues. Indeed, he is lucky to escape it himself. But this depiction flies in the face of modern interpretations of events. Du Châtel and Charles himself stand accused of having deliberately masterminded John the Fearless’s death in a preplanned assassination.49 Far from the boyish innocent, it is likely that Charles was at least advised of the necessity of this action and may have personally taken a role in its execution. The novel’s interpretation of French historical heroes is perhaps unsurprising, but it does challenge the overall tone of the series, which largely appears to offer a realistic depiction of history.50 It is interesting to note that Le Trône d’Argile does not take on the role that Miller ascribes to some bande dessinée, that of subverting “‘normative representations’ of national identity.”51 As already indicated, the series largely ignores the left-wing historiographical tradition of “history from below” and focuses instead on the elite of medieval France, a form that could be seen to represent the “monarchist” tradition in French history.52 It does, after all, appear to confirm “the dominant representations” of French history.53 In particular it reemphasizes the position of prominent figures as “sites of memory” for French national identity—in this case, the future Charles VII.54 But the form taken by Le Trône d’Argile is arguably not a politically motivated depiction of a monarchist ideal. Instead, it may be more representative of a comics tradition in France that focuses on “historical

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 31

adventures” as a popular genre.55 Though somewhat old fashioned, they represent a depiction of history that readers understand and to which there is an obvious and popular attraction.

Medieval Chivalry: The Reality and the Ideal Maurice Keen wrote that “chivalry cannot be divorced from the martial world of the mounted warrior: it cannot be divorced from aristocracy, because knights were commonly men of high lineage: and . . . it very frequently carries ethical or religious overtones.”56 Chivalry was the set of unwritten rules for medieval warfare that were intended to protect those of the elite military class in their endeavors. Beyond the battlefield, chivalry seeped into medieval culture. It became a way of life, a code of behavior that defined a good warrior. But it was a fluid concept. It was forever an ideal, something to aspire to, but not something that should interfere with the achievement of military success. In these graphic novels, where a more realistic portrayal of medieval warfare is often to the fore, depictions of chivalric actions are relatively few. Still, it is not completely absent. Despite Crécy being told from the perspective of the common man, the chivalric ethos receives some consideration, although it is largely condemned in negative terms. The narrator comments on Edward III’s personal interest in chivalry but also notes that “chivalry makes it hard to win a war. Because it imposes polite rules. And politeness has no place in war.”57 In reality, politeness had little relevance to medieval chivalry too. Such a link is a modern misconception based on eighteenth-century ideals of gentlemanly behavior.58 The panel that accompanies the narrator’s point is stylistically very different from the rest of the novella (see figure 1.3). Mimicking an image from a children’s book of fairy tales, it depicts one warrior with long flowing hair standing over a defeated opponent. This second knight’s shield and sword are both broken. He is on his knees, supplicant before the victor. He appears to be seeking surrender, which is seemingly accepted. The stylistic difference of this panel highlights the variance between the ideal and reality that was at the core of medieval chivalry. Knights often professed to follow the forms of chivalric knightly behavior, but in war they practiced something very different.59 Ellis appears to recognize this point, although instead of being an accepted part of chivalric warfare, he argues that the type of conflict depicted represents a deliberate rejection of chivalry in place of something far more violent. As the narrator relates, “Edward [III] has turned a 12,000-man army into a terrorist strike force.”60 The terminology itself is anachronistic, using modern allusions to terrorism as a comparison to the hit-and-run raiding of the English army moving through France. But more than this, the warfare that Ellis goes on to describe (“burning out villages. Loosing fire arrows from treelines and horseback, leaving a message and sweeping on”) was part and parcel of the

32 • Iain A. MacInnes

FIGURE 1.3. The depiction of chivalry (Ellis, Crécy).

reality of medieval warfare.61 This form of conflict was employed by men who thought of themselves as chivalric figures and were portrayed as such by contemporary writers. Men like Edward III and Henry V were epitomized as paragons of chivalric virtue.62 However, while atrocities of the type discussed above were often committed by the common soldier, they were often undertaken at the command of the chivalric elite. Indeed, as William points out, it was a deliberate strategic choice. For a raid was a challenge to enemy royal and lordly authority in their territories. In such circumstances, it was the individual with the power to cause devastation who was likely to win men to his side. Such a person showed his ability to unleash destruction and, in parallel, prevent its occurrence at the hands of the enemy.63 Again, Ellis acknowledges this, William of Stonham noting that “the frogs are out on the roads, yelling at Philip [VI] to stop being a cunt.”64 Their complaint was that the French king should protect them from English attack, something he was failing to do. Ultimately, the peasantry ended up being targeted because they were intrinsically linked to a territory’s economic production. From the raising of taxes to the supply of men, matériel, and food for medieval armies, peasant society was a vital part of the medieval war machine. In the depiction of war in Crécy, this is stressed throughout, even if the modern reader might have greater sympathy for the peasant than William of Stonham does. Ellis’s focus on a nonnoble as the narrator of his work emphasizes an inherent class issue, one that also aligns with the depiction of chivalry. The common soldier seldom received chivalric treatment at the hands of his knightly foe, and as a result, foot soldiers may have had less reason to spare enemy elites. Moreover, this was a period where the military elite struggled to keep itself separate from an increasingly professionalized soldiery that was often

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 33

composed of lower-born men who gained prestige and status as a result of wartime experience. The representation of two characters in these sources is notable in relation to this point: Capeluche and William of Stonham. The depictions of both underline their separateness, of their belonging to the nonnoble, nonchivalric class. They, or men like them, are held responsible for unacceptable behavior and atrocity. Capeluche’s wanton murder of prisoners, including women and children, shows him to be something far removed from the chivalric warrior. John the Fearless refers to Capeluche and his men as écorcheurs, those bands of mercenaries who ravaged the French landscape in the service of one lord or another.65 They are something removed from the knightly soldierly elite, at least in terms of how that elite saw itself. They are something apart, something lesser. In similar fashion, William of Stonham is depicted roaming around the battlefield in the evening after the Battle of Crécy, killing any wounded Frenchmen he comes across, regardless of class. While noting the medieval perception that common soldiers are not meant to behave in such a way toward aristocrats, William is unrepentant of the murders he commits. Indeed, in his narration, he emphasizes the dichotomy present in medieval warfare, where chivalry afforded the possibility of surrender and survival to the military elite but not to the rank and file. William quotes two French chroniclers who lamented the deaths of so many “flowers of French chivalry.” The lines from Froissart’s Chroniques66 and the Grandes Chroniques de  France67 provide contemporary medieval comment alongside the modern voice of the narrator. These quotes are utilized to stress the narrator’s view that the English victory at Crécy was the action of the common man defeating the French oppressor. Of course, things were far more complex, and William ignores the fact that the English king, prince, and nobles for whom he fought had far more in common with their French knightly adversaries than they did with their own foot soldiers. As indicated, the theme of a class war is redolent throughout Crécy, clashing with the dominant medieval perspective that class distinction was an accepted part of the fabric of medieval society. Still, the class divide is also highlighted in a particular episode in Le Trône d’Argile. Here, the young dauphin Charles wanders across a nameless battlefield at night. Resonant of Crécy’s depiction of knightly bodies littering the ground, someone else also roams the field. In this instance, it is a man who is robbing the dead and who has just cut the finger from a dead knight to acquire his ring. The man himself is portrayed as animalistic. He has only one eye and his only clothing is some coarse fur wrapped around this back and shoulders, with nothing hiding the nakedness of the rest of his body (see figure 1.4). Like a frightened animal, almost on all fours, he runs off at the dauphin’s approach.68 The episode, like the Crécy depiction, underlines the de-civilizing impact of war and the ultimately unheroic abandonment of knightly bodies on the field of battle. Their robbery at the hands of lower-class

34 • Iain A. MacInnes

FIGURE 1.4. A figure robs the battlefield dead ( Jarry, Le Trône d’Argile, vol. 2, Le Pont

de Montereau).

men reinforces that there was little chivalric glory related to death in such circumstances. It also reinforces the medieval elite view of the nonnoble as other. This creature appears simply as a more extreme example of the negative attitude toward men like Capeluche and William of Stonham in the Middle Ages. As for the knights themselves, chivalry should have ensured that they at least treated one another in a prescribed acceptable manner, although this did not always transpire. Crécy provides one example of knights finding little chance to surrender during or after battle. This is explained with reference to the French flying the Oriflamme banner, which meant “no quarter is going to be given, and no prisoners taken.”69 This is paralleled in Le Trône d’Argile’s depiction of the Battle of Verneuil (1424). Before battle commences, the Scottish commander Archibald Douglas orders that it is to be “a fight to the death, without quarter or prisoner” (combat à mort, sans quartier ni prisonnier).70 In the resulting FrancoScottish defeat, the Scots suffer most as a result of such a declaration. When after the battle the Duke of Bedford asks how many prisoners were taken, an English knight notes that it was a massacre (c’est une hécatombe).71 The Scots are prominent among the dead because, as he states, “we respected the rules

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 35

which the Scots themselves imposed on us.”72 This event appears to be based on reality, although recent analysis has argued that it was in fact the English who decided that no prisoners should be taken as punishment for perceived Scottish treason and as revenge for the English defeat at Baugé (1421).73 The depiction of this latter battle also contains the death of a prominent knightly individual. Tanneguy du Châtel tries to convince Thomas, Duke of Clarence, brother of Henry V, to surrender. While this exchange is taking place, however, the French knight Gilbert Motier de la Fayette rides up behind the English duke and cuts him down. The attack from behind, against a high-ranking Englishman who would have made an important prisoner, is condemned by du Châtel. Motier retorts that such was not the will of the dauphin and orders that the French should take no English prisoners (pas de quartier).74 These examples reflect the extreme violence possible on the medieval battlefield, though this was not the totality of medieval warfare. Knights would not have campaigned as often as they did if they were not afforded some chance to survive it.

Conclusion Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys write that graphic novels are not simply “a new set of historical sources to be mined by historians.”75 Instead, they suggest that “the graphic novel is a site where ‘history’ itself, or representations of history, are put into play: interrogated, challenged and even undermined.”76 The analysis provided here has attempted to offer some such consideration of these graphic novels and their depiction of medieval warfare during the period of the Hundred Years War. By its nature, the analysis is something of a survey of themes and the beginnings of further work on this topic. It also provides a good starting point for wider consideration of medieval warfare, the medieval period more generally, and how those topics are represented in this medium. The depiction of war aligns closely with the written accounts of the time, in part because these novels are based on historical sources. At the same time, the graphic novels are able to go far beyond the limitations of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles, providing the military historian with a visual representation of battle and its effects that is largely absent from medieval sources. This offers a wealth of possibilities for further exploration and reinterpretation of the main themes of medieval warfare. This is important not only for academic study but also because of the wealth of medieval and medieval-like images that are increasingly presented to modern mass audiences. While a television show such as Game of Thrones is set in a fantasy world, its debt to the medieval is unmistakable as a result of its aesthetic. Other shows, such as Vikings, depict the medieval far more directly. Both of these examples present images of medieval society and warfare that could convince an audience of their realism and “true” reflection of the past.77

36 • Iain A. MacInnes

Graphic novels present similar images, but both of the titles discussed here arguably contain greater attempts to present the appearance of historical reality. The use of historical sources, the depiction of “real war,” and the reflection of medieval attitudes toward the lower classes suggest an attempt to provide a representation of the medieval “as it was.” But any such portrayal is invariably altered by the modern lens through which it is presented and the voices of the modern authors who influence the narrative. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the depictions of chivalry in both works. The concept is, at various points, criticized as a meaningless frivolity that had little place in “real combat” or held up as an ideal that was responsible for violence more often than it prevented it. These views are in part a reflection of modern cynicism and the misunderstanding of what exactly chivalry was and its impact on the medieval battlefield. Chivalry itself went through numerous adaptations over the centuries, and modern understanding of medieval chivalry cannot help but be influenced by later definitions. The stock image of knightly warriors on horseback saving damsels in distress continues to dominate the popular consciousness, and images where the opposite occurs can only lead to criticism of the chivalric ideal. Still, its consideration demonstrates the enduring appeal of this period and the imagery of the Middle Ages, challenging us to consider the modern perception of such themes alongside that of the medieval. As Frey and Noys suggest, the graphic novel “is something good to think with and precisely where we might start to rethink history.”78 Examples such as these provide the perfect opportunity for historians to rethink the medieval period and offer new insights into the past, as well as interesting consideration of our present.

Notes 1 See, for example, Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds

History / Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon House, 1991); Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust, ed. D. R. Geis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003); Thomas Doherty, “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 69–84; James E. Young, “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (1998): 666–699. 2 See James F. Wurtz, “Representing the Great War: Violence, Memory, and Comic Form,” Pacific Coast Philology 44, no. 2 (2009): 205–215; Robert J. Kodosky, “Holy Tet Westy!: Graphic Novels and the Vietnam War,” Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (2011): 1047–1066; Stijn Vervaet, “A Different Kind of War Story: Alexander Zograf ’s Regards from Serbia and Tomaž Lavriĉ’s Bosnian Fables,” Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 2 (2011): 161–187; Edward C. Holland, “‘To Think and Imagine and See Differently’: Popular Geopolitics, Graphic Narrative, and Joe Sacco’s ‘Chechen War, Chechen Women,’” Geopolitics 17 (2012): 105–129. 3 Mónica A. W. Vadillo, “Comic Books Featuring the Middle Ages,” Itinéraires 2010- 3 (2010): 153–158.

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 37 4 Marcus G. Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages

5 6

7 8

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15

16 17

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–34; Vadillo, “Comic Books Featuring the Middle Ages,” 158–163. Bull, Thinking Medieval, 16. Kim Selling, “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism’: The Image of the Middle Ages in Popular Fantasy,” in Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds Centennial, Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. David Ketterer (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 211–218. David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 23–35; Bull, Thinking Medieval, 15–34. For consideration of the development of graphic narrative in historical sources, see Laurence Grove, Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinée in Context (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), chapters 4–7. For chronicles and the focus on military engagements, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004), chapter 5. For a consideration of the Middle Ages in modern graphic format, see Vadillo, “Comic Books Featuring the Middle Ages,” 153–163. For general histories of the Hundred Years War, see Eduard Perroy, The Hundred Years War (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965); Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300–c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres, Crécy (Rantoul: Avatar Press, 2010). Ellis himself has referred to this work as a graphic novella in more than one interview. See Crimespree Magazine 19 ( July/August 2007), http://crimespreemag.com/flashback -warren-ellis-interview/. Jochen Ecke, “Warren Ellis: Performing the Transnational Author in the American Comics Mainstream,” in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, ed. D. Stein, S. Denson, and C. Meyer (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 167–168. Nicolas Jarry, France Richemond, and Theo and Lorenzo Pieri, Le Trône d’Argile, 6 vols. (Paris: Delcourt, 2012). References here are to a collected edition of issues 1–4 and separately to individual releases of volumes 5 and 6. For other series, see Ils ont fait l’histoire (Grenoble: Glénat, 2014–2016); Les Reines de Sang (Paris: Delcourt, 2012–2016); Je Suis Cathare (Paris: Delcourt, 2007–2015); Hawkwood: Mercenarie de la Guerre de Cent Ans (Charnay-lès-Mâcon: Doki-Doki, 2016). For English-language medieval graphic novels, see Jordan Mechner, LeUyen Pham, and Alex Puvilland, Templar (New York: First Second, 2013); Fiona Watson and Conor Boyle, On Dangerous Ground: Bannockburn 1314 (Edinburgh: National Trust for Scotland, 2014); Will Gill, Graeme Howard, and Anne Curry, Agincourt 1415 (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015). Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 2. For recent debate regarding the portrayal of late medieval / early modern French history in graphic novel form, see Didier Pasamonik, “Lorànt Deutsch: ‘En matière d’Histoire, on reste tous profanes!,’” ActuaBD, http://www.actuabd.com/Lorant -Deutsch-En-matiere-d; Damien Boone and Frédéric Zalewski, “En bande dessinée aussi, Lorànt Deutsch écrit sa propre histoire,” ActuaBD, http://www.actuabd.com/ DAMIEN-BOONE-et-FREDERIC-ZALEWSKI.

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18 Duncan Hardy, “The Hundred Years War and the ‘Creation’ of National Identity

19

20 21 22

23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

and the Written English Vernacular: A Reassessment,” Marginalia 17 (2013): 18. As Hardy argues, English national identity is also closely aligned to the history of the Hundred Years War. For a relatively recent interview with Nicolas Jarry, see BSC News, October 4, 2014, http://bscnews.fr/201410044130/Rencontres/nicolas-jarry-un-specialiste-de-la-bd -d-heroic-fantasy-a-rencontrer.html. For a brief biography of France Richemond, see “France Richemond,” Gallery BD Artwork, http://www.bdartwork.com/en/ artists/france-richemond/12/. Ecke, “Warren Ellis,” 169. Ellis, Crécy. See, for example, Trône d’Argile, iii, 123; v, 20. For the arrow storm, see Ellis, Crécy; Trône d’Argile, v, 20. The efficacy of the English longbow has, however, been called into question, and one historian has argued that “it is difficult to see how arrows fired at long range could have impeded the advancing enemy—protected by armor and charged up with adrenaline for the attack” (Kelly DeVries and Robert D. Smith, Medieval Weapons: An Illustrated History of Their Impact [Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO, 2007], 194). For discussion of the archaeology of battlefield injury, see Robert C. Woosnam-Savage and Kelly DeVries, “Battle Trauma in Medieval Warfare: Wounds, Weapons and Armor,” in Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. L. Tracy and K. DeVries (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1–23; Mark R. Geldof, “‘And to Describe the Shapes of the Dead’: Making Sense of the Archaeology of Armed Violence,” in Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, ed. L. Tracy and K. DeVries (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 57–80. For discussion of facial expression and reading emotions in graphic novels, see Ed S. Tan, “The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel,” in The Graphic Novel, ed. J. Baetens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), 31–46. Janis Breckenridge, “No Laughing Matter: Violence and the Comic in Alicia Borinsky’s Mina cruel,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 39, no. 2 (2006): 94–95. Ellis, Crécy. Trône d’Argile, i, 31. Trône d’Argile, i, 21. See Iain A. MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes: Injury and Death in Anglo-Scottish Combat, c. 1296–c. 1403,” in Wounds and Wound Repair, 109–111. Trône d’Argile, i, 39–44; MacInnes, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” 110–111. Ellis, Crécy. Silvia Adler, “Silence in the Graphic Novel,” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011): 2278–2279. Ellis, Crécy. Ellis. Stephen J. Harris, “Introduction,” in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. S. J. Harris and B. L. Grigsby (New York: Routledge, 2008), 18. Grove, Comics in French, 260. Ann Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), 152. Trône d’Argile, i, 49. A more ominous undertone accompanies the image through the words of Henry V, who promises that “those who surrender to him will be spared, but those who defy him will die at the stake.”

“A Clash of Arms to Be Eternally Remembered” • 39 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63

64 65

66

Trône d’Argile, ii, 74–75. Trône d’Argile, ii, 75. Trône d’Argile, ii, 80. For the detailed account of this, see “The Siege of Rouen,” in The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. J. Gairdner (London: Camden Society, 1876), 21. Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée, 152. For discussion of Capeluche and the Parisian riots of 1418, see Bertrand Schnerb, “Caboche et Capeluche: Les insurrections parisiennes au debut du XVe siècle,” in Les Révolutions francaises, ed. F. Bluche and S. Rials (Paris: PUF, 1989), 13–130. Trône d’Argile, ii, 56–57. Trône d’Argile, ii, 66–67. Trône d’Argile, ii, 68. Trône d’Argile, ii, 95–96. Richard Vaughan, John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power, 2 vols. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 2:283–286. For brief discussion of the use of history as one of the main genres of bande dessinée, see Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée, 35–36. Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée, 152. Boone and Zalewski, “En bande dessinée aussi.” Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée, 152. Miller, 151–152. Boone and Zalewski, “En bande dessinée aussi.” Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 2. Ellis, Crécy. Michèle Cohen, “‘Manners’ Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 312–329. For discussion of the chivalric ideal versus the medieval reality, see Andy King, “A Helm with a Crest of Gold: The Order of Chivalry in Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica,” Fourteenth Century England 1 (2000): 21–35. Ellis, Crécy. Ellis. For discussion of these figures and chivalry, see Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and Its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1983); Craig Taylor, “Henry V, Flower of Chivalry,” in Henry V: New Interpretations, ed. G. Dodd (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013), 217–248. As William of Stonham argues, putting words into his own king’s mouth, “your king cannot protect you. Life would be better under English rule. If I’m mad enough to ride around France setting shit on fire, you know I’m mad enough to do anything to prevent it happening to my lands” (Ellis, Crécy). Ellis, Crécy. One historian describes them as the “worst of all . . . the anarchic bands associated with the revival of hostilities with England in the fifteenth century and the wars to displace them” (Helen Cooper, “Speaking for the Victim,” in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. C. Saunders, F. Le Saux, and N. Thomas [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004], 216). “Among the Englishmen there were certain rascals that went afoot with great knives, and they went in among the men of arms, and slew and murdered many as

40 • Iain A. MacInnes

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78

they lay on the ground, both earls, barons, knights, and esquire” (Ellis, Crécy). See also Chroniques de Jean Froissart, ed. S. Luce, 8 vols. (Paris, 1872), 3:187. “It is a shame that so many French noblemen fell to men of no value” (Ellis, Crécy). See also Grandes Chroniques de France, ed. P. Paris, 6 vols. (Paris, 1836), 1:1377–1378. Trône d’Argile, ii, 83–84. Ellis, Crécy. Trône d’Argile, v, 18. Trône d’Argile, v, 21. Trône d’Argile. Michael K. Jones, “The Battle of Verneuil (17 August 1424): Towards a History of Courage,” War in History 9, no. 4 (2002): 405–407. A few panels later, however, the novel does show some English captives, who are paraded before the dauphin during the celebration of the victory (Trône d’Argile, iv, 162–163). Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, “History in the Graphic Novel,” Rethinking History 6, no. 3 (2002): 258. Frey and Noys, “History in the Graphic Novel,” 258. U.S. rapper Snoop Dog said in a 2015 interview that he watched Game of Thrones “for historic reasons, to try to understand what this world was based on before I got here. I like to know how we got from there, to here, and the similarities between then and now” (Hardeep Phull, “Snoop Dogg Thinks ‘Game of Thrones’ Is Based on Real History,” New York Post, May 9, 2015, http://nypost.com/2015/05/09/ snoop -dogg-thinks-game-of-thrones-is-based-on-real-history). Frey and Noys, “History in the Graphic Novel,” 259.

Chapter 2

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror KENT WORCESTER

In recent decades, successive U.S. administrations have affixed the language of warfare to everything from poverty and inflation to cancer and illegal drugs. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration mounted a comparably ambitious “Global War on Terror” that eventually encompassed large-scale mobilizations against government and militia forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; smaller-scale military operations in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; and multispectral campaigns of propaganda, surveillance, and disruption in North America and Europe and on the internet. As Chris Gray has suggested, postmodern war on this scale unites “ideals, metals, chemicals, and people.” But as he also points out, contemporary warfare offers no “grounds for one totalizing vision . . . the confusion that has resulted sometimes seems like a suffocating void.”1 Cultural representations of the War on Terror have reflected and sometimes resisted the implications of “this collapse of totality,”2 and they range widely in terms of stance, tone, and methodology. While some are patriotic, others are skeptical, antagonistic, or even conspiratorial. What Dexter Filkins describes as the “forever war”3 has been feted, commemorated, lambasted, and parodied across all types of media, including comic strips, comic books, editorial cartoons, and long-form graphic narratives. But the dispersed, diffuse, and metaphor-soaked nature of postmodern warfare—of which the War on 41

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Terror is the paradigmatic example—renders it difficult to provide a persuasive account of the war as a whole. While the Reagan and Clinton administrations occasionally talked about waging war against terrorism,4 the shock of 9/11 lent a powerful sense of urgency to the Bush administration’s proactive stance vis-à-vis terror networks and alleged state sponsors. The events of 9/11 also provided a context for revisiting U.S. doctrine in such areas as preemptive intervention versus war as a last resort, ad hoc versus enduring alliances, and the applicability of international law to the fight against terrorism.5 Support for the administration’s antiterror agenda was pronounced after 9/11 but declined over time, as wiretapping, the Iraq war, and to some extent, even global war itself became subject to blunt criticism from diverse viewpoints—leftist, libertarian, and populist.6 The Obama administration inherited the War on Terror and in certain respects expanded it, even as it distanced itself from many of its predecessor’s policies. The administration opened negotiations with Iran and sharply reduced troop levels in Afghanistan and Iraq, and during his second term, Obama refrained from authorizing military strikes against the Assad regime in Syria. As the president told one reporter, he had become increasingly skeptical of what he termed the “Washington playbook.”7 However, by this point, his administration had already ramped up its use of drones, missile strikes, and covert forces against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), and militant groups in dozens of countries.8 The Obama administration also increased spending on the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and Homeland Security.9 Arguably, the result was an invigorated deep state.10 As of the time of writing, Donald Trump has been president for just over six months. His disorienting presidency has provoked an outpouring of visual-verbal commentary, mostly but not entirely in the form of memes and single-panel cartoons.11 In certain respects, Trump’s foreign policy represents a departure from his predecessors. In contrast to Obama and Bush, both Trump and his nationalist allies define border maintenance and immigration control as top priority security issues and place less emphasis on diplomacy and treaty making. Trump’s initial budget proposal included major increases for Defense, Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with deep cuts to the State Department. Yet even as the contours of U.S. foreign policy shift, the core premises of the War on Terror have been left untouched. Defined by President Obama as a “series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,”12 under the present administration, the War on Terror remains militaristic, transregional, and open-ended. Buttressed by support from the major political parties and the mainstream media, full-scale counterterrorism represents a constituent component of U.S. foreign policy in the early twenty-first century.

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This chapter is concerned with the diverse ways in which Anglophone graphic narrative has grappled with this complex topic. It is guided by the proposition that the medium offers hidden advantages when it comes to addressing political themes and controversies. Over the past couple of decades, a wave of freelance cartoonists, often but not always working with black-and-white imagery, have experimented with fresh ways of using comics to fashion socially relevant stories, from memoir and journalism to history and polemic. The rise of politically engaged long-form cartooning has coincidently overlapped with the War on Terror, and not surprisingly a growing number of cartoonists have turned their attention to various aspects of the war. In creating comics about terrorism, counterterrorism, and international relations, these cartoonists are utilizing the tools of the medium for investigative and political purposes. The comics medium offers three features that seem particularly advantageous in this context. First, it is an exceptionally democratic medium with few barriers to entry. Anyone with access to paper, ink, and either a photocopier or the internet can create comics and cartoons. No special qualifications are required. A compelling story and a willingness to take advantage of the medium’s visual properties can be sufficient. Finding an audience is never easy, but serious-minded comics is a newly popular retail category with an expanding readership base. Furthermore, printing a 32-page comic book is cheaper than printing a 196-page novel, and placing self-published work into comic book stores is easier than getting self-published books into bookstores (let alone self-produced films into movie theatres). In 2016, an entertainment journalist estimated that one out of ten comic book stores makes a point of keeping a sizable number of self-published comics in stock.13 That figure is undoubtedly lower in the retail book sector, since booksellers “mostly prefer not to deal with self-published authors” and “are wary of getting saddled with non-returnable inventory.”14 The low-stakes, low budget, and under-the-radar quality of the medium works to the advantage of highly motivated individuals who have interesting stories to share. Comics is an accessible, versatile, and reader-friendly medium that can present stories about individuals, communities, and perspectives that may not otherwise find an outlet in the storytelling marketplace. Second, the medium offers formal advantages when it comes to telling densely layered stories. For example, the comics page comfortably accommodates radical shifts in chronological and spatial location. Filmmakers and novelists often rely on relatively clumsy devices such as a sepia lens and dissolves, and italics, to denote flashbacks. With comics, readers absorb the most extreme temporal and geographical shifts via straightforward narrator boxes. Also, in comics, unlike film, elaborate set pieces are as inexpensive as talking heads. The term special effects does not really apply to a medium in which everything is sketched by hand. Any reasonably talented cartoonist seeking to

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juxtapose past and present on a single page, or to depict scenes of large-scale violence and devastation, can do so without confusing readers or breaking the bank. At the same time, comics is a permeable medium that can accommodate all manner of supplementary material, from maps, tables, and data sets to photographs, footnotes, and verbatim dialogue. These features allow cartoonists interested in complex subjects like the War on Terror to bring together pertinent information with compelling imagery. Finally, the medium’s reliance on formal presentation of sequential information makes it particularly well suited to the challenge of documenting contemporary history. As Hillary Chute has noted, “The essential form of comics—its collection of frames—is relevant to its inclination to document . . . In its succession of replete frames, comics calls attention to itself, specifically, as evidence. Comics makes a reader access the unfolding of evidence in the movement of its basic grammar, by aggregating and accumulating frames of information.”15 Panel-to-panel transitions effectively record the steps that creators take as they prepare arguments and arrive at conclusions. At a time when our collective confidence in historical objectivity has significantly eroded, the cartoonist creates work that by its very nature eschews any claim to objectivity and lays its methodological cards on the table. The subjectivity that is intrinsic to the act of making comics may play to the advantage of the cartoonist at a time when resources like photographs and legal documents that were once thought to constitute the truth have been deconstructed. The remainder of the chapter is organized into three sections—9/11 and its aftermath, graphic fiction and the War on Terror, and graphic nonfiction and the War on Terror. The chapter mainly focuses on longer form graphic narratives even though editorial cartoonists and comic strip creators have played an important role in responding to contemporary events. Given that the War on Terror is by definition unending, additional long-form narratives will no doubt materialize for years to come.

The Disruption of 9/11 The catastrophic violence of September 11, 2001, left a searing impression on U.S. politics and society. The tightly coordinated attacks on high-profile targets inspired a long wave of graphic commentary, memoir, and thinly disguised fiction from cartoonists and graphic artists who had, in many cases, watched the Twin Towers crumble with their own eyes. While individual filmmakers, playwrights, poets, and novelists have invoked 9/11, the event resonated in a singular way within an industry and subculture that remains anchored in New York City’s (NYC’s) five boroughs. The event’s “disruptive power”16 affected many cartoonists personally and in some cases motivated their best work. It also engendered cartoon kitsch. The profusion of 9/11-themed comics speaks

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 45

to the reassuring intimacy of the handcrafted text-image as well as to the longstanding connection between the country’s largest metropolis and commercial visual narrative. Cartoonists have embraced a variety of formats in responding to what one writer has referred to as “the shadow of ghostly absence.”17 Even as an outpouring of visual commentary appeared within hours and days of the events, the impact of 9/11 could be discerned in comics and cartoons that were published a full decade later. It is difficult to draw a sharp distinction between “9/11 and comics” and comics about the War on Terror. And apart from the two World Wars,18 it is hard to think of another historical episode that left such a powerful imprint on such a diversity of cartooning genres and styles. For many narrative artists, preparing a formal response constituted a kind of civic obligation. The scale and scope of the industry’s engagement are indicated not only by the plethora of superhero titles that placed their heroes at ground zero, but also by the fact that more than one hundred editorial cartoonists and comic strip artists used the tenth-year anniversary to commemorate the day’s victims.19 While numerous cartoonists generated single panels or short graphic stories in response to 9/11, the events sparked longer works that touched on the War on Terror itself. Three notable examples are The 9/11 Commission Report: A Graphic Adaptation and After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001–), both by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, and In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman. The first is a best-selling reworking of the official report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission). Deploying an array of comic book devices—from silhouettes, photomontages, and cinematic close-ups to timelines, splash pages, and a subdued color palette—Jacobson and Colón transformed the government’s carefully prepared study into a visually appealing text. The two friends first met while working at Harvey Comics in the 1960s and had never before worked together on a nonfictional project. Their account takes note of the 9/11 Commission’s criticisms of the federal bureaucracy, alludes to some of the problems with the build-up to the Iraq War, and closes with the commission’s 2005 “report card” that gave low marks to Congress, the White House, and public agencies in such areas as intelligence gathering, weapons proliferation, and homeland defense. At the same time, they hew closely to the commission’s metanarrative and depict the president and his advisors as honorable men and women who sought what was best for the country. They were not alone in giving the Bush administration the benefit of doubt during the longue durée of national mourning, and for a time, the book’s commercial and critical success transformed them into genuine celebrities. The comics subculture has probably underestimated the degree to which Jacobson and Colón’s widely reviewed “graphic adaptation” helped make the case for the medium among general readers and book retailers.

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Jacobson and Colón’s follow-up project After 9/11 failed to achieve a comparable degree of impact. It nevertheless offers a thoroughly researched, factually grounded, and relentless critique of U.S. foreign policy under the Bush administration. In tracing the impact of post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, Jacobson and Colón draw heavily on political speeches, official documents, and the New York Times. They revisited many of the same visual techniques as before, combining comic book layouts with graphs, charts, photographs, and caricatures of key players in the United States, the Middle East, and Central Asia. While their prose style conveyed a stance of studied neutrality, the accumulation of evidence makes it painfully clear that the Bush administration led the country into a foreign policy and humanitarian quagmire. By the epilogue, they make explicit what had already been implied—that the Iraq War is “the longest of all our wars, one of the least popular of all our wars, and, perhaps, the single most damaging war to the reputation of this nation.”20 While their book starts out with an even-handed emphasis on both Afghanistan and Iraq, by the book’s end, the Iraq debacle is the main story. Other aspects of the war—surveillance, drones, infowar, the geographically dispersed deployment of special forces, and so on—receive little attention in a book that effectively equates counterterrorism with the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers addresses both the visceral experience and the political metaphysics of 9/11. The book consists of ten poster-sized cartoon essays that explore the author’s horrified reaction to the collapse of the Twin Towers as well as Bush-era foreign policy, followed by seven equally massive reprints of early twentieth-century newspaper strips. Each essay constitutes a complex assemblage of strips, caricatures, digressions, and free-floating illustrations, and each plays with the idea that the boundary between nightmares and normality is more porous than we like to admit. Each features a “cartoonified” Spiegelman, who keeps saying things like, “The sky is falling!” and “I can no longer distinguish my own neurotic depression from well-founded despair!”21 As he explains in the book, in the aftermath of 9/11, Spiegelman found refuge in the innocent whimsy of century-old cartoons. “The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses,” he explained, “were old comic strips: vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the twentieth century. That they were made with so much skill and verve but never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper gave them poignancy: they were just right for an end-of-the-world moment.”22 He shares several of these forgotten treasures with readers, including a jingoistic Yellow Kid, a sweet Krazy Kat page, and a stunning page from Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, in which a sleepwalking Nemo climbs Manhattan’s steel-andglass canyons. Each selection touches in some way the contemporary anxieties that permeate In the Shadow of No Towers.

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 47

In the book’s introduction, Spiegelman reveals that he “never wanted to be a political cartoonist” and that he “hadn’t anticipated that the hijackings of September  11 would themselves be hijacked by the Bush cabal that reduced it all to a war recruitment poster.” All the “rage I’d suppressed after the 2000 election, all the paranoia I’d barely managed to squelch immediately after 9/11, returned with a vengeance.” As he began working on the book, he found that “mainstream publications that had actively solicited work from me  .  .  . fled when I offered these pages or excerpts from the series.”23 To his dismay, the only outlets willing to publish his work were left-leaning magazines and newspapers. The reason had less to do with his vivid imagery and more to do with his concerns about “nationalist and hawkish rhetoric” in “the political and cultural aftermath of 9/11.”24 After all, Spiegelman describes himself as “equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and by his own government” and complains about how an “unelected government began its war to begin all wars.” The problem, in other words, was his deep antagonism toward those he dubbed the “architects of Armageddon.”25 His early and vocal opposition to the War on Terror appears to have kept his work on 9/11 from appearing in the mainstream press. Numerous comics have crisscrossed the line between 9/11 and the War on Terror, a handful of which we will encounter in the following sections. What is intriguing from the standpoint of comics studies is the overlap between this broader historical conjuncture and the contemporary reevaluation of the medium. The War on Terror got under way just as an expanding cohort of freelance cartoonists were beginning to experiment with, and embrace the idea of, journalistic comics.26 One can point to politically engaged long-form comics that predate 9/11—such as Spiegelman’s Maus, Vol. 1 (1986), Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996), and Alan Moore’s Brought to Light (1988)—but their number pales in comparison to the more recent torrent of socially and historically aware longform cartooning. While it would be difficult to establish a causal link between these disparate developments, it is at least possible that the shock of 9/11, and the War on Terror itself, has fueled the contemporary fluorescence of comics journalism and other forms of serious-minded long-form comics.27

Graphic Fiction and the War on Terror This is not to say that every graphic response to 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror can be described as level-headed. “There’s a deadly menace,” revealed the back cover of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror in blood red letters. “Empire City is in peril . . . and a whole lot of folks need killing.”28 Pitched as a standalone “Batman versus al-Qaeda” graphic novel, Miller eventually decided to create a new character, “The Fixer,” who is “well adjusted in committing terrible acts of violence on very evil people.”29 The story opens with the Fixer and Cat Burglar fighting, and flirting, high above the streets of Empire City. Their playful

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banter is interrupted as multiple suicide bombers set off explosions that spew fire, nails, and razor blades all over the city. “The bastards,” exclaims Cat Burglar. “How many of my neighbors have they murdered?” Hundreds or possibly even thousands, it seems, judging from the rows of faded portraits and empty panels that follow. As the authorities dither, the Fixer goes on the offensive, claiming, “Every once in a long while, the whole world makes perfect sense. The world reveals itself. I am at peace. And at war.”30 After bashing a few skulls, the Fixer learns that an al-Qaeda cell intends to release a toxic chemical weapon that is intended to kill millions. With an assist from Cat Burglar, the Fixer snuffs out the cell leader and saves the day. Miller’s linework and page compositions are stylish, and stylized, and the book’s color scheme is inventive. But the story is relentlessly one-dimensional, and Miller’s script most definitely suggests that Islam itself is the problem rather than religiously inspired ideological fanaticism.31 The small press that published Miller’s retributive tract, Legendary, proved willing to take risks that major superhero publishers have mostly shied away from. The War on Terror regularly figured in costumed adventurer storytelling in the first decade and a half of the new century but typically took the form of scene-setting, rhetorical grandstanding, and loosely constructed allegories. In Marvel’s The Ultimates, first published in 2002, lower Manhattan was pulverized in a manner that was distinctly reminiscent of 9/11—but in this instance, infighting heroes, rather than external adversaries, inflict the damage. The series alludes to real-world terrorists, as well as the fictional terror network Hydra, but kept the focus on schisms within the superhero community. Even as the Norse god Thor angrily insists that he wasn’t “one of Bush’s little supercommandos,”32 Nick Fury trades quips with the president at a black-tie gala in order to ingratiate the Avengers with the new administration. The challenge of maintaining public order in the epoch of the “super-empowered individual”33 was similarly flagged by the high-profile series Civil War, which concentrates almost entirely on intrasuperhero conflict rather than on the multifaceted security challenges that the Superhero Registration Acts were ostensibly designed to address.34 As Matthew Costello notes in his book Secret Identity Crisis, projects like The Ultimates and Civil War assume that “an undefined but dangerous enemy confronts Americans” but leave “the sources of that threat and the proper means to respond to it . . . unclear.”35 For some writers, the War on Terror provided an occasion to affirm preexisting political commitments. One of many examples is the Vertigo/DC series Fables, which tells the story of the war between freedom-loving Fabletown and a vast Empire led by an unlikely tyrant— Geppetto from the Pinocchio stories. The two sides engage in what military theorists might call unconventional warfare, which in this context includes assassination, shapeshifting, and witchcraft. At one point, Fabletown’s Big Bad Wolf, who goes by the name of Bigby,

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 49

sneaks into the woodcarver’s cabin and explains to Geppetto that Fabletown “has decided to adopt the Israel template in whole . . . they stay alive by being a bunch of tough little bastards who make the other guys pay dearly every time they do anything against Israel.”36 It seems evident from interviews, and perhaps implied in Fables, that the author believes that this stance of returning fire with fire applies not only to Israeli self-defense but to the United States and the West more generally in the struggle against terrorism. “No sane society allows mad dogs to continue to live,” Willingham explained in an interview with The Comics Journal; “things like that” are “obvious points that should be made.” A few readers complained that Bigby’s speech was out of place in a modernday fairy tale, but Willingham insisted that “we’re certainly not going to create some fictional Israel substitute land so as not to overtly offend anyone.”37 The attacks of 9/11 and the War on Terror served as central plot elements for the Wildstorm/DC series Ex Machina (2004–2010). The series’ main character, Mitchell Hundred, prevents the second plane from slamming into the World Trade Center by using his alien-derived superpowers and then confronts an eclectic mix of villains—jihadists, disgruntled teenagers, animal rights activists, run-of-the-mill criminals, and former allies holding grudges—in his capacity as mayor of NYC. The story includes flashbacks to the days and weeks before and after 9/11, as well as a story arc in which a staff member is killed in a ricin attack on anti–Iraq War protesters. “No blood for oil!” chants the staffer, only moments before the toxin is released from its canister. Yet writer Brian Vaughan appeared to believe, as Hundred did, that the “only people in the country opposing an Iraq invasion” were peaceniks. “If you could see the intelligence I’ve read,” explains one of the good guys, a Homeland Security analyst, “you’d realize how deep the ties are between al- Qaeda and Saddam.” While Mayor Hundred defends the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters, the storyline implies that opposition to the Iraq War, and the country’s foreign policy, was foolish in the extreme. The series closes with Hundred becoming vice president on the GOP ticket with his good friend John McCain.38 Satirist David Rees offered a far more dyspeptic perspective on the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the War on Terror in general in a strip titled Get Your War On. Launched on the web, the clip art strip eventually found its way to the pages of Rolling Stone. For Matt Taibbi, Get Your War On was just about “the only thing about America that was funny” between late 2001 and “the middle of 2004.”39 The series opens with a white-collar employee telling his coworker that “this War on Terrorism is gonna rule! I can’t wait until the war is over and there’s no more terrorism!” “I know!” responds his friend. “Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War on Drugs, and now you can’t buy drugs anymore? It’ll be just like that!” “Right!” says the first guy. “God, if only that War on Drugs hadn’t been so effective! I

50 • Kent Worcester

could really use some fucking marijuana right now!”40 The series continues in this vein, using expletives, cardboard characters, and damning quotations from administration officials and newspaper articles to “resist dominant cultural narratives.”41 Clip art is uncommon in comics, but in this case, it cleverly funnels the reader’s attention toward the sardonic text. While many editorial cartoonists and comic strip artists have occasionally referred to the War on Terror in their work, Rees’s incendiary strip stands out for its single-minded focus on what the Bush administration dubbed “the Road Map to Peace.”

Graphic Nonfiction and the War on Terror Some of David Rees’s comic strips, such as those that incorporated verbatim text, collapse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Most responses to 9/11 and its aftermath, however, fall in one or the other category. One of the earliest nonfictional comics to address the War on Terror was Joel Andreas’s Addicted to War, a slender black-and-white volume that outlines the history of U.S. imperialism from Manifest Destiny to the twenty-first century. “Foreign wars,” Andreas argues, “bring bloody retaliation against the U.S. . . . most people in the Middle East share his [Bin Laden’s] anger at the United States . . . it would be naïve to think there would be no retaliation.”42 Stronger artwork in the service of a broadly comparable perspective could be found in the special issue of World War 3 (WW3) Illustrated that appeared a few short weeks after the fall of the towers (see figure 2.1). While some of the pieces in the WW3 Illustrated special issue paused to reflect on the day itself, several contributors, including Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, Seth Tobocman, and Tom Tomorrow, worried about the fact that, in Kuper’s words, “We live in a time of war with no end in sight . . . more innocent people will die in an endless cycle of revenge creating more hatred and more acts of terrorism.”43 Or as Tobocman sardonically observed in a piece titled “Not Enough People Have Died,” “Everyone who has ever purchased a tank of gas must stand trial; everyone who uses electricity must take responsibility.”44 In contrast to Andreas, the WW3 Illustrated editors found ways to advance their radical perspectives while allowing room for debate, ambiguity, and humor. Ted Rall also uses his pen to excoriate U.S. foreign policy in single-panel editorial cartoons as well as a series of books that combine caricatures, photography, graphic stories, and short essays. He has traveled extensively throughout Central Asia, including Afghanistan, and refers to himself as an “unembedded journalist.” “Under the embedding regime,” he notes, “the war reporting we get in U.S. newspapers and broadcast outlets obsesses over the experience of American soldiers. Meanwhile, the accounts of civilians and ‘enemy’ fighters go untold.”45 He is one of a handful of U.S. reporters to have spent any

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 51

FIGURE 2.1. Special issue of World War 3 Illustrated

length of time in countries like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and both his essays and his comics journalism are filled with informative details about daily life and attitudes in a region that U.S. policymakers only started paying attention to after the fall of Soviet Communism. He is also passionate about privacy issues, and his graphic biography of Edward Snowden is one of his most successful titles.46 Rall’s blunt style has occasionally landed him in hot water—in one cartoon, published in 2007, he said that “over time, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed

52 • Kent Worcester

up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared.”47 Rall has received numerous awards for his journalism and cartooning and enjoys a loyal following among some comics fans and general readers. He embraces the role of cultural provocateur but has had to walk back one or two comments when he took things a little too far.48 The list of comics journalists who have lived and worked in war zones is fairly short but includes David Axe, who has collaborated with two cartoonists, Matt Bors and Steven Olexa, in creating full-length graphic accounts of his adventures in Afghanistan, East Timor, Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia. In his first book, War Fix, he struggles with his “addiction” to “the chemical aspects of stress”49 and tries without much success to keep his personal life from falling apart. His second book, War Is Boring, focuses more on the soldiers and civilians he encounters on his travels. “The more of the world I see,” he confesses in the book’s afterword, “the less sense it makes . . . We are a world at war, sometimes quietly, often not. We are the cleverest monsters, and we deserve everything we’ve got coming.”50 In his introduction to War Is Boring, Ted Rall admits that he too wishes that “I was in the shit somewhere, miserable and scared and bored.”51 Their political philosophies, however, seem starkly divergent—Axe comes across as a bit of a nihilist, to be honest, whereas Rall is more of a traditional leftist who views U.S. policy rather than human nature as the primary engine of contemporary warfare. Other comics journalists have tackled the War on Terror. Joe Sacco, of course, has touched on the kinds of policies, regimes, and regions that David Axe and Ted Rall address in their graphic narratives and has probably done a better job than anyone of interrogating the assumption that neutral ground and objectivity exist in international relations. Websites such as Cartoon Movement, Graphic Journalism, and The Nib have all published pieces by younger cartoonists that are similarly concerned with the interplay of terrorism and counterterrorism.52 The contemporary War on Terror continues to provide a fulcrum for debate as well as a backdrop for experimental and autobiographical forms of visual storytelling. An ever-growing number of artists and writers are discovering that comics is an accessible and democratic medium that permits radical shifts in perspective and location, that can depict catastrophic violence as well as intimate conversations, and that can insert data, photographs, and other documentary resources into hand-drawn spaces. Writers and artists may find themselves using the comics art medium to think and talk about the “suffocating void” of transnational violence a century from now, if not beyond.

Conclusion The impacts of 9/11 and the War on Terror have been reflected in every cartoon genre, from satire and polemics to fantasy and superheroes. If I loosely date

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 53

the War on Terror to the first weeks and months after 9/11, then the curious fact is that the era of permanent war closely coincides with the period in which the comics medium has been reappraised and revalued by pretty much the entire cultural establishment—critics, curators, editors, publishers, and so on. The attacks of 9/11 were an epochal event from the standpoint of the comics industry and subculture, which remains based in NYC and the surrounding region. But while 9/11 mostly generated mournful visual-verbal commentary, the War on Terror has provoked varied responses from editorial cartoonists, alternative cartoonists, superhero creators, and comics journalists. Furthermore, the emergence of nonfiction comics as a bookstore staple dates to the aftermath of 9/11 and the efforts made by publishers, writers, and artists to use the medium to investigate the production, dissemination, and suppression of different forms of political violence. This chapter has explored only a small portion of a much larger literature. Numerous superhero titles published over the past decade and a half, for example, allude to the controversies surrounding the War on Terror. Whether the topic is extremism, religion, spycraft, low-intensity conflict, government conspiracies, or the United Nations, there is almost always a connection of some type between a current affairs–flavored storyline and the U.S.-led War on Terror. There is also an abundance of material on terrorism and counterterrorism in the one- and two-panel editorial cartoons published in the same period. Although no segment of the cartoon marketplace focused as consistently on the War on Terror as newspaper political cartoons, War on Terror–themed cartooning has also turned up in minicomics, web comics, magazine comics, comic strips, graphic novels, manga, and other cartoon formats. Comics of a diverse variety of shapes and sizes have applauded, documented, denounced, satirized, and vaguely gestured toward the War on Terror. The attitudes expressed by comics creators have ranged from strongly positive to fiercely negative, and there is no reason to believe that an industry consensus will take shape at some future date. The likelihood that any single cartoonist could produce a definitive treatment of the War on Terror is small. The topic is unmanageable in terms of both scope and scale. The bulk of published work will continue to focus on particular aspects of the larger war, from topical comedy and foreign policy exposé to comics reportage from different conflict zones. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is often salient, with the former allowing room for colorful costumes, revenge scenarios, and characters borrowed from fantasy and science fiction. There are, however, creators such as David Rees who have straddled or complicated the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy. Creative figures like David Rees, as well as David Axe, Ernie Colón and Sid Jacobson, Ted Rall, Joe Sacco, and Art Spiegelman, have all used the comics medium to reflect on, comment on, and even arouse public opinion about the limitations and

54 • Kent Worcester

shortcomings of mainstream approaches to issues of terrorism and counterterrorism. But creators of imaginary adventure stories are just as likely as comics journalists to address the meaning and legacy of the War on Terror. The war is the crucible within which contemporary serious-minded cartooning has been forged. But nonfiction comics are not the only avenue that is available to comics artists and writers interested in consequential political topics.

Notes 1 See Chris Hables Gray, Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict (New York:

Guilford Press, 1997), 8.

2 Gray. 3 See Dexter Filkins, The Forever War: Dispatches from the War on Terror (New York:

Vintage, 2009).

4 The White House’s 1987 National Security Strategy (NSS) document defined

terrorism as “a world-wide phenomenon that is becoming increasingly frequent, indiscriminant, and state-supported.” For the report’s authors, terrorism was a byproduct of Soviet policy: “The Soviets attempt to disguise such support by using middle men—radical governments such as Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria, and Libya, which deal directly with radical terrorists and insurgents . . . [but] the evidence of the relationship between the Soviet Union and growth of worldwide terrorism is now conclusive.” By contrast, the 1998 NSS document framed terrorism as a “transnational threat” and applauded the August 1998 airstrikes against “terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan” that contained “key elements of the bin Laden network’s infrastructure and [had] served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe.” The report called for “placing terrorism at the top of the diplomatic agenda” and vowed that the United States “remains determined to apprehend and bring to justice those who terrorize American citizens.” The War on Terror thus predates 9/11 and to a considerable extent builds on antecedents such as the Cold War and the Palmer raids of 1919–1920. See the White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House: 1987 and 1998), and David Cole, “The New McCarthyism: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 38 (2003). 5 “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.” The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: The White House: 2002), 5. 6 See “The War on Terror: Ten Years of Polls on American Attitudes,” AEI Political Report: A Monthly Poll Compilation, September 2011, https://www.aei.org/wp -content/uploads/2011/09/Political-Report-Sept-11.pdf. 7 “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 55

8 9

10

11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18

international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.” Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/. See Nick Turse, “U.S. Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries than You Can Imagine,” The Nation, January 20, 2015. “The Department of Homeland Security, which did not exist prior to 2001, gets $40 billion and employs 180,000; the intelligence agencies get an estimated $100 billion and employ 100,000; the FBI gets nearly $9.5 billion; and the Department of Defense gets $632 billion, which does not include a slush fund to cover the war in Afghanistan and other contingencies. In 2001, the Pentagon budget was $277 billion. When all the increases are added up and compared to the baseline of 2001, the War on Terror currently costs the American taxpayer directly more than $500 billion per year as part of an overall defense and national security budget that approaches $1 trillion.” Philip Giraldi, “Washington’s Terrorism as Usual,” American Conservative, May 6, 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative.com. The term “deep state” is Turkish in origin—derin devlit—and refers to powerful, behind-the-scenes actors who valorize the state, the national interest, and their own self-interest above democratic and constitutional norms. The term became popularized during the 2016 campaign when faceless actors in the intelligence community began leaking documents and rumors about the Trump campaign. The entire package—face, hair, bluster, and extended family—presents a field day for comedians, caricaturists, and cartoonists. A postmodern take on the Trump phenomenon is Robert Sikoryak’s The Unquotable Trump, a self-published pamphlet that places Trump at the center of sixteen iconic comic book covers, complete with verbatim rhetoric from the country’s forty-fifth president. Sikoryak takes Jerry Robinson’s boldly drawn cover of Detective Comics #69 from 1942, for example, and replaces the Joker with Donald Trump, who warns Batman and Robin that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters!” See Robert Sikoryak, The Unquotable Trump (New York: R. Sikoryak, 2016). The first in what will undoubtedly be a long line of Trump-themed graphic memoirs, histories, biographies, and polemics is Ted Rall’s Trump: A Graphic Biography (New York: Seven Stories, 1996). Quoted in Paul D. Shinkman, “Obama: ‘Global War on Terror’ Is Over,” U.S. News and World Report, May 23, 2013. Rich Johnson, “Seven Reasons Why You Should Self-Publish Your Comic Book,” Bleeding Cool, February 29, 2016, https://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/02/29/7 -reasons-why-you-should-self-publish-your-comic/. Brooke Warner, “Five Reasons Why Your Book Isn’t Being Carried in Bookstores,” Huffington Post, May 24, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brooke-warner/5 -reasons-why-your-book-i_b_6934314.html. Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 2. David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5. Karen Engle, Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination (Quebec: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009), 140. See, inter alia, Jane Chapman et al., Comics and the World Wars: A Cultural Record (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

56 • Kent Worcester

19 See “Cartoonists Remember 9/11,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Cartoonists_Remember_9/11.

20 Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (New York: Hill 21 22 23 24

25 26

27

28 29 30

31

32 33

34

35

and Wang, 2008), 149. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York, Pantheon, 2004), 8. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 11. Spiegelman, ii. See Ted Gournelos, “Trauma, Post-9/11 Politics: In the Shadow of No Towers,” in A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America, ed. Ted Gournelos and Viveca Greene ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 93. Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers, 2, 7, 9. See Kent Worcester, “Journalistic Comics,” in The Routledge Companion to Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin (New York: Routledge, 2016). Christina Knopf has more broadly argued that the “Vietnam War, the assisted suicide movement, Do Not Resuscitate rights, cancer, AIDS, changing cultural patterns of grief, and the War on Terror pushed death more centrally into graphic narratives, not only into the immortal world of superheroes . . . but also in the family funnies.” This is an interesting claim but a little sweeping for my tastes. See Christina M. Knopf, The Comic Art of War: A Critical Study of Military Cartoons, 1805–2014 ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), 128. Frank Miller, Holy Terror (Burbank: Legendary, 2011). See “Holy Terror (graphic novel),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy _Terror_%28graphic_novel%29. Miller, Holy Terror, n.p. The Fixer’s rhetoric harks back to what Christopher Hitchens said shortly after 9/11: “I wasn’t sure whether to trust myself with this but I actually have to admit it—a sort of sense of exhilaration coming from, ‘Okay, it’s everything I hate versus everything I love.’” See Paul Woodward, “Hitchens on 9/11,” War in Context (blog), November 19, 2010, http://warincontext.org/2010/11/ 19/hitchens-on-911/. As the writer Grant Morrison said in 2006, long before the book was published, “Batman vs. Al Qaeda! It might as well be Bin Laden vs. King Kong! Or how about the sinister Al Qaeda mastermind up against a hungry Hannibal Lecter! For all the good it’s likely to do. Cheering on a fictional character as he beats up fictionalized terrorists seems like a decadent indulgence when real terrorists are killing real people in the real world.” Quoted in “Holy Terror (graphic novel),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Terror_%28graphic_novel%29. See Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, The Ultimates, Vol. 1: Super-Human (New York: Marvel, 2003), n.p. Columnist Thomas Friedman may have been the first to coin this useful term. See Thomas Friedman, Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism (New York, Anchor, 2003). At one point, the Wasp suggests that “the only people who win when we’re fighting each other are the bad guys,” but it takes a long time for her compatriots to admit that she might be onto something. See Mark Millar et al., Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event (New York: Marvel, 2007), n.p. Matthew J. Costello, Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (New York: Continuum, 2009), 213.

Graphic Narrative and the War on Terror • 57 36 Bill Willingham, Fables: Wolves (New York: DC Comics, 2006), 76–77. 37 See Dirk Deppey, “The Bill Willingham Interview (part four of four),” Comics Jour-

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

nal, April 30, 2010, http://classic.tcj.com/interviews/the-bill-willingham-interview -part-four-of-four/2/. See Brian K. Vaughan et al., Ex Machina: March to War (New York: Wildstorm/ DC, 2006), n.p. Matt Taibbi, “Introduction” to David Rees, Get Your War On: The Definitive Account of the War on Terror, 2001–2008 (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008), i. Rees, Get Your War On, 1. Emphasis in original. Jeffrey Melnick, “Get Your War On: Teaching the Post 9/11,” Radical History Review 111 (Fall 2011): 221. Joel Andreas, Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 2, 30, 31. Peter Kuper, “Indomitable Human Spirit,” ed. Peter Kuper, Seth Tobocman, and Jordan Worley, World War 3 Illustrated 32 (Fall 2001): 61. Seth Tobocman, “Not Enough People Have Died,” World War 3 Illustrated 32 (August 2007): 32, 52. Ted Rall, After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014), x. Ted Rall, Snowden (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015). See “Ted Rall,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rall. In a 2004 cartoon about Pat Tillman, the professional football player who served in the U.S. Army Rangers before he was killed in Afghanistan, Rall had Tillman ask his army recruiter, “Will I get to kill Arabs?” When it became known that Tillman was killed by friendly fire and had developed serious reservations about the war, Rall backtracked and admitted that Tillman was “one hell of an interesting human being.” See “Ted Rall,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rall. David Axe and Steven Olexa, War Fix (New York: NBM, 2006), n.p. David Axe and Matt Bors, War Is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World’s Worst War Zones (New York: New American Library, 2010), 125. Rall, “Introduction,” to Axe and Bors, War Is Boring, viii. See Video Journalism (VJ) Movement, “Cartoons,” Cartoon Movement, 2010, http://www.cartoonmovement.com/comic; Comics Journalism, 2011, http://www .comicsjournalism.com; Medium, “The Nib,” https://medium.com/@thenib. See also Chute’s chapter on “New Locations, New Forms” in Disaster Drawn, 255–265.

Chapter 3

War in the Bosnian Graphic Novel EMIR PASANOVIC

Very little has been written about Bosnian comic books and graphic novels, perhaps due to a lack of visibility for a large part of their history. Whether because of war or general neglect, the information available about the development of this art form in Bosnia and Herzegovina is scarce.1 For most of the twentieth century, Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia (a larger federation of South Slavic states) and the publishers were mainly in Croatia and Serbia. This is why artists, if they decided to pursue comics (or to a large extent, caricature, illustration, graphic design, and animation), were doomed to draw for children’s magazines or to go abroad. Bosnian authors did not experience the international recognition of their comic book peers in Western Europe until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Before then, the only international star was Ahmet Muminovic, whose 1970s comic book about partisan resistance in WWII Sarajevo Walter Defends Sarajevo (Valter brani Sarajevo) was received with much acclaim in the Democratic Republic of China, together with the movie of the same title.2 The first, and so far only, Bosnian to receive the prominent Italian comic book prize, the Yellow Kid for the Best Foreign Editor (Yellow Kid e Gran Guinigi per l’editore straniero) is Ervin Rustemagic, who achieved the recognition in 1984.3 This came as a reward for years of work on his “Strip Art” magazine, where he decided not to develop domestic (then Yugoslav) talent but 58

War in the Bosnian Graphic Novel • 59

rather to publish only the best European comics of the time in an anthological magazine form. So popular was this venture that it brought him international success even after most of his studio in Sarajevo was destroyed in 1992.4 Indeed, his ability to secure rights to the works of such superstars as Hermann Hupen, Alfonso Font, and Joe Kubert early on led to the inception of the Platinum Studios entertainment company and more-or-less successful adaptations of comics to screen (ranging from Men in Black to Jeremiah the TV series and Cowboys and Aliens most recently). The second half of the 1990s brought the international trend of biographical stories presented in comic book form to Bosnia and Herzegovina, but maybe not surprisingly, the first book of this kind published here, Senad Mavric’s Mom, What Is War?, was written and drawn on the road between France and Sarajevo. Presented for the first time at the Multimedia Center Fnac in Le Mans at the beginning of 1998, it continued its exhibition life in Croatia, Switzerland, and Spain, and it was published by the Sarajevo publisher Buybook in Bosnian, English, and German in 2000. Mavric finished his education in Orleans at the Institute for Visual Arts communications department in 1996 and decided to return to Sarajevo quickly thereafter. Before the war, Mavric spent much of the 1980s working closely with Ervin Rustemagic on the Strip Art magazine. There he prepared pages and pages of comics for publication from some of the other artists mentioned below. I could say that Senad Mavric used Mom, What Is War? as an original approach to wartime storytelling to deal with the legacy of war and the destruction of his home city of Sarajevo and as closure for the time when he was happy drawing comics for fun and speaking with some of the greatest artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Mom, What Is War? shows the changes the city itself went through during the war due to changing social circumstances and the all-out, unrelenting destruction of everything that made it what it used to be. In this way, Mavric has Sarajevo become the main character of the comic, tying in different people and different stories from the 1,425-day-long siege. As far as I know, this is the first academic attempt to discuss a Bosnian graphic novel and Bosnian comics in general. I aim to compare and distill the powerful stories from domestic and international comic book authors who chose to set them in wartime Sarajevo for the same reason: strong, emotional bonds that they have to Sarajevans and what happened there over the period of nearly four years. The reader will notice the lack of domestic (Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin, but also Slovenian and Macedonian) printed resources and references used when researching it. The reason is that comic books and graphic novels are still rarely researched and analyzed in the academic circles of the Western Balkans, and even when they are, the focus tends to be on national comics and authors.5

60 • Emir Pasanovic

Comics in Wartime Sarajevo Comics were an important part of pop culture in former Yugoslavia, a country that was for a long time both multicultural and socialist, a Non-Aligned union of peoples that spent centuries under the rule of various empires that were fighting for resources in the Balkans. Once citizens finally fought for their right to self-determination, numerous publications of comics from across the world littered newsstands and shelves in nearly all households. However, the 1990s brought out the old animosities hidden away for decades, and Yugoslavia fell apart in a torrent of blood and destruction. As electricity shortages in surrounded cities like Sarajevo deprived people of any other sources of entertainment, comics again became the primary means of escape from the almost impossible circumstances in which a majority of the population found themselves. Under candlelight, young and old people could still travel to different countries, worlds, and universes created out of ink, paper, and imagination. For people suffering during the conflict, the need for escapism cannot be overstated. The only Bosnian comic book that was published in Sarajevo during the war was a propaganda comic that created the first Bosnian superhero. Bosman was envisioned as an ongoing story for young readers to bring them hope and a form of escape from their daily horror. Released in 1994, the thirty-page comic book was announced as the first of a monthly series that never came to fruition, but it was nevertheless a miracle that anything could be published in Sarajevo in those trying days.6 When one considers that the comic book’s artist, Ozren Pavlovic, worked in the propaganda and public relations office at the time, an office closely tied to the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH; one of the three “official” armies fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina), it is no great surprise that his comic book was made and supported primarily for the purposes of propaganda in the war-torn city. Bosman, the hero of the story, is “the first” in everything: his physical (and, implicitly, sexual) prowess knows no bounds, and his intelligence and observation skills set him apart from others. Due to his unemployment (and there is no suggestion that he might be a student), he is able to go on a half-naked run through the woods and observe the occupation forces moving around Sarajevo months before everyone else will admit there is a problem. When snipers start shooting, he is woken from his yoga rituals and is depicted as the only one who runs into buildings to stop the snipers from killing innocent people in the crowds protesting wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and elsewhere. For these courageous deeds, he is rewarded by the local wise man and some kind of a higher power with impenetrable armor and the promise of a magic sword in the episodes to come. It is not surprising that this comic book did not withstand the test of time. In fact, even at the moment of its publication, the art was considered

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“old-fashioned” and the script was called a “confusing mess.”7 Replete with references to old Bronze Age Batman comics (including almost exactly copying the image of Bruce Wayne), its closest resemblance can be found in Captain America comics, mainly due to the protagonist’s (the reader never learns his name, just the hero-name Bosman) inclination to use firearms against the sniper nests and the nationalistic insignia he starts wearing at the end of the comic. By using true events from the beginning of the war in 1992, the writer tried to evoke more nationalistic indoctrination, powerfully but subtly evident in the choice to mention only one of the snipers’ real-life victims on April  5, 1992. Suada Dilberovic’s (Muslim) name was appropriate for young Bosniak children to read about, but the first victim of the snipers, Olga Sucic, killed just moments before Suada, was for a long time deleted from memory due to her Orthodox Christian name.8 There are less subtle nationalistic ideas and images, to be sure. The “Old Grandfather” reads the future from a book surrounded by Islamic imagery in an Ottoman Empire–style interior that was repopularized in those years as the return to true values. He gives Bosman his armor (ornamented by the coat of arms of the medieval Bosnian royal family from the pre-Ottoman times) and promises him the sword of justice from God himself. Indeed, even the dialogue is rife with transparent and shallow descriptors such as “incredible hero, Bosnian hero, Bosman” and the evilest of evil plots to “crush them and that god damned city,” since Bosman is the hero “tied to the cosmos” that “determined him for the historic role.” Despite the attempt to use this comic as a means of propaganda, Bosman never saw large-scale distribution. It was printed in a limited run of only a few hundred copies, sold only in Sarajevo for what used to be a lot of money, and never saw enough interest to be continued as a series. The setting and the Sarajevo-specific tone of the book limited the already tiny potential readership from the Bosnian majority at home and abroad to only those who lived in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition, what used to be a goal in 1994—nationalistic resistance in Sarajevo during the war—quickly lost financial support from the government because of its reliance on foreign financial aid for the normal functioning. Foreign governments’ and organizations’ main interests were and still are reconciliation and reintegration of the segregated communities; comics like Bosman were definitely not something that could help achieve this.

Comic Book Reactions after the War in Bosnia The echoes of the Bosnian War were felt throughout the world, and like other media, comic books did not stay silent. Comic book professionals from Europe and the United States responded to the occupation of the capital city

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of Sarajevo and the destruction of its citizens and cultural monuments, but the books reached the stage of printing only after the war was ended in 1995. This is not meant to be a comprehensive historical overview;9 I will not discuss all the comics that deal with Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war from an outsider’s perspective.10 My focus is primarily on Sarajevo, as the center of the destruction of everything Bosnian, including the extensive loss of library funds, architecture, and cultural monuments, both from recent and ancient history, and as the setting for Mom, What Is War? I would like to set Senad Mavric’s book in the context of the broader narrative about the war that became, for some, the only recollection of the “unfortunate event.” I want to suggest that none of the other books analyzed below managed to encompass the despair of a city under siege at the turn of the twentieth century as well as Mavric’s did. First reactions to the devastation that befell the host city of the 1984 Winter Olympics and its citizens came from the international comic book and bande dessinée superstars who were closely connected with Ervin Rustemagic’s Strip Art Features (SAF). Having lost hundreds of their original pages in the fire that consumed Ervin’s studio in 1992 and as they continued to work with him closely while he was escaping the siege and establishing his business in Slovenia, it is no surprise that his story elicited the need to fashion their own takes on the topic. The first in print was Hermann Huppen’s book, Sarajevo Tango. Published by the (then reestablished) SAF in 1996, this is the third one-shot book Hermann produced beyond his magnum opuses, series Jeremiah and The Towers Of Bois-Maury, and it did not receive quite the reception the publisher might have hoped for. There was no doubt whose side of the conflict the story wanted to promote: Hermann helped Ervin escape Sarajevo and settle in and remained his friend for years to come. The simple smash-and-grab spy story was peppered with pro-Bosnian propaganda and the anti–United Nations (UN) hysteria that followed its inefficiency and the outright criminal responsibility for the Srebrenica genocide (and before that, the Rwandan genocide). Unfortunately, this was the main reason Sarajevo Tango became outdated so quickly. As the actors of the Bosnian War portrayed in the book (or, more accurately, their caricatures) fell from the public spotlight (due to losing their jobs, retiring, or dying), the work quickly lost its relevance. Without the understanding of how indolent and self-satisfied the administration of the UN general secretary Butros-Butros Ghali was,11 there is little to grasp from the appearances of such figures in the book. The straightforward plot leaves little to the reader’s imagination. The art is what Hermann was proudest of at the time, and it can be viewed as his most inspired work because of his closeness to the tragedy that he tried to depict and the people that he criticized. Nevertheless, the effort in BiH and the rest of the region moved away from accepting the cruel reality of

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what happened and toward finding common ground for peace and reconciliation. As a result, the book has not been published in the city where Hermann set it since 1996. Unlike his European colleague and friend, Joe Kubert decided to go with a more personal story that was first published by Carlsen in 1997. Fax from Sarajevo is a straight-up adaptation of the numerous faxes Ervin Rustemagic was able to send to his friends during the time he spent trying to escape the surrounded Sarajevo with his family. The biographical character of the graphic novel manages to track the occupiers, the Serbian forces that destroyed Rustemagic’s home, livelihood, and nearly his family’s lives. The personal tragedies and stories of his fellow Sarajevans all have names and were told to Rustemagic the way they are adapted in the comic. Piece by piece, everything Ervin Rustemagic knew about his city was taken away from him in blood and fire. Kubert shows this in vivid detail throughout the 190 pages filled with transcripts of the faxes themselves and photographs of the protagonists as well as people and friends they met along the way. The personal nature of the story and Kubert’s artistic mastery in translating brief messages and conversations with Rustemagic into graphic novel form led to this book receiving major awards in the United States and Europe.12 Yet despite the acclaim, just as quickly as Sarajevo Tango, it dropped out of print and is now rarely mentioned in Sarajevo and the region. Surprisingly, both of these books have not been published by Ervin Rustemagic himself, though he has reinitiated his publishing endeavors in Croatia and Slovenia in the past few years. A more recent book is mentioned more often than these two in the context of the Bosnian War. Joe Sacco’s The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo came out in 2003, three years after he attempted to portray the tragedy of Eastern Bosnia in Safe Area Gorazde. Although it did not receive the same critical acclaim as Gorazde, The Fixer does begin with a look at postwar Sarajevo, covering not only the evil that had been done but also the results of the war: Is the quiet of the people Sacco tries to find and talk to in his return trip to Sarajevo in 2001 unusual in some way or just the new status quo? How much did the city change, and how much truth is there in the stories he has collected from one source, a Serb named Neven? What do Sarajevans’ silence and ignorance about the crimes perpetrated in their city mean for the future of the country? So far, The Fixer is the only published graphic novel that deals with the crimes committed against Serbs in Sarajevo, and it also investigates the lives of Serbs that remained in the city, fighting on the side of the Bosnian army. The Fixer is an excellent document about the war and issues that Sarajevo and Bosnian society in general are still dealing with. Sacco uses his journalistic approach to discuss topics ranging from depression and poverty to hero cults of war leaders and questions of personal and national identity. The fact that

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this book saw a much wider distribution in Bosnia, both in English and Bosnian, from one of the major publishers in Sarajevo points to its importance.13 Many of the topics Sacco tackles are still being uncovered by some and covered up by many in power. Surprisingly, domestic comic book authors who decided to talk about the war are few and far between, not just in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also in Croatia and Serbia. As far as Sarajevo is concerned, I have seen two comic book adaptations of wartime stories in the twenty-first century. They were written by one of the most prolific and well-known comic book journalists and theoreticians from Sarajevo, Karim Zaimovic. Praised over and over in Sarajevo and the Balkans (Mom, What Is War? and Fax from Sarajevo were both dedicated to his memory), Zaimovic died from a grenade explosion in 1995, just a few months before the peace accord was signed. He was only twenty-four years old. Zaimovic’s legacy remains in only one finished book of short stories, The Secret of Raspberry Jam (Tajna dzema od malina), which was published several times over the years and even saw an onstage adaptation in one of Sarajevo’s theaters. Mainly due to his name being associated with comics, a younger generation of artists, led by the writer Aleksandar Brezar, decided to adapt this book into comic book form, with two stories published (in English only so far) by the Massachusetts Review (Brezar, 2015) and Asymptote (Brezar, 2016). Work is still ongoing to adapt the remaining three tales, which are nominally set during the Bosnian War, consisting mainly of stories about fictional men and creatures throughout Sarajevo’s history. But due to being written originally as radio dramas, they all begin from Zaimovic’s perspective as a wartime journalist in Sarajevo, and the comic book artist Enis Cisic has transcribed this atmosphere particularly well. The artist of the “Invisible Man from Sarajevo,” Boris Stapic on the other hand fails to capture the same feeling, since his story takes him across continents, and the cities of Sarajevo, Zagreb, and New York merge over the course of the twentieth century. These stories bring me to a different side of the war that I will discuss in further detail. Unlike other authors in the region at that time who tended to reflect the images of war in other media (sensationalist and ideologically driven),14 Karim Zaimovic, following the global storytelling trends of writing about “hidden” or “alternative” histories, decided to test himself by telling such stories with characters traveling to or from Sarajevo. More important than these stories’ content (interesting and inventive as it may be) are his reasons for making those narrative choices. Unlike Mom, What Is War?, where Senad Mavric showed the different ways people in Sarajevo tried to escape their cruel reality, The Secret of Raspberry Jam was a small part of that escape. In those rare times Sarajevans were allowed to have electricity, could afford batteries, or managed to buy gasoline for the electric generators, they were able to join

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Zaimovic in his exploration of an alternative twentieth-century Sarajevo, its better times before the incessant shelling, water shortages, and bitter winters. By touching so many people who had so very little left, Karim Zaimovic left a lasting impact.

So What Is War? Sometime between Fax from Sarajevo and The Fixer, Buybook, a publisher from Sarajevo, was approached by Senad Mavric to help him print his book of short stories in a comic book form. This collection was created over a period of a few years as Mavric was trying to come to terms with the consequences of the war and his life between Sarajevo and France. The topic and the authenticity of the material brought him some recognition, and Mom, What Is War? was seen in collective exhibitions in Croatia, Switzerland, France, and Spain. Due to this, it was finally published by Buybook in 2000 in German, English, and Bosnian, but like many examples already mentioned, it quickly dropped out of print and was never seen again (except by a lucky few).15 Mom, What Is War? consists of five rather different stories. The first, “Just Another Day,” is completely silent—that is, other than the sounds of explosions and alarm sirens. A father leaves his home to provide wood for his wife and son. He does not come back. The mother is left to serve her son cold food and endure, but for how long? Will the father eventually come back, or is he lost forever? Will she be able to take care of her son and hold onto her sanity in an insane situation? “Sniper Story” is the shortest and tackles one of the most difficult topics of the war: snipers spreading terror by targeting civilians and anyone who did not look foreign. Those were common, quotidian occurrences, and many children were killed by snipers because they were the most vulnerable. These “sniper alleys” tended to be well marked by UN Peace Corps insignia and barricades. Where there were gaps in the barricades through which passersby became visible from sniper nests, roads regularly turned into sprinting lanes for anyone who had no other choice but to take to the streets. In “Sniper Story,” Mavric tried to get into the head of someone doing the shooting, and he finished with an emotional image (see figure 3.1). Every story is meant to evoke strong emotions, to communicate the horrors of the Siege of Sarajevo, and the third one in particular does so without going into the realm of pathos. “Black Water of Limbo” was adapted from a short story written by Antonijo Zalica’s “Dragon Paw Track,” and it tackles the tragedy of unwanted pregnancies (and births), as well as the repercussions of the war on those who simply could not comprehend what was happening. In contrast to the other stories, the dialogue is quite good, and particular attention is paid to the details of a single bridge and the adjacent street. The foggy

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FIGURE 3.1. Who lives and who dies in “Sniper Story”?

night and the sniper fire turn this open area into a claustrophobic stage for the tragedy that unfolds. All of the characters are trapped by their own emotions, by what they need, or by what they have to do. The longest story in this book, “The Walk,” continues the motif of walking as the artist builds and describes the city and different people’s lives while following the protagonist. The reader follows another unnamed character through the motions of his daily routine, watching him attempt to create a semblance of normalcy in an insane world. With a few simple lyrics and shapes, the reader is immersed in the protagonist’s life and sees Mavric’s own experience of loss during the war. More than any other, this story is told from a single point of view. The young man likes the band the Police, hates the war, and mourns the girl he lost—as everyone around him loses everything that can be lost, including, of course, their lives. The reader sees more of Sarajevo as “The Walk” leads the protagonist through the streets and major elements of what this city became in wartime: sniper alleys, lines to get water and bread, and black-market vendors and the enormous sums they charged for even the basic things. Green areas in the middle of Sarajevo with broken tombstones from what people used to call “Turkish graveyards,” formerly public parks, now again became graveyards as the alternatives were either overflowing or too dangerous to consider. This all leads to a realization that the people in the background are also an integral part of that Sarajevo, and every loss is necessarily tied to those who live on. And how else can they keep going but by finding their own inner worlds and lives beyond that which is physical? Through these stories, they can construct lives that may be a bit more durable and through which they can (at least for a little while) regain what they have lost.

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The last story, “Smiling Biscuit,” is told from the perspective of a woman who does not display agency despite being the protagonist. She has to leave the house because the strong (assumed) husband is not at home to bring water. Her monologue is a tirade of complaints as the reader follows her and her two buckets overflowing with rainwater through the streets of a Sarajevo that has not been seen in previous stories. These streets are almost transparent; as raindrops shower the protagonist, they also mask the facades and streets that are only sketched on the page. The only real subjects, a man and a woman, have faces, though, and the reader sees the horror and desperation of realization on the protagonist’s face as she sees a smile for the first time after a long time in the most unlikely of places. From the first story, I notice some elements that are common in all of Mavric’s comics: a woman’s role is to stay in the kitchen; the only women in the comics are in the kitchen, are rushing home to the kitchen, or are looking for a man because they are still single. Men are the ones that have to go out and risk everything for their family, city, and country. Mothers are left to answer the questions their children ask, such as “What is war?” and “Where is my dad?” Women (and, primarily, single women) are the only ones who pay any outward attention to the way they look. They have to look presentable, even when there is no water to shower for weeks, because looking pretty (primarily for the men but also for themselves) is the only agency they have left in the war that leaves them with a single choice: live or die. The men in this war are, therefore, required to be inspired by this show of strength from their wives, sisters, girlfriends, and daughters. But if men do not want to do what is expected of them (probably because they oppose the war) or have no family left to protect, they are harassed by their neighbors for doing nothing while others sacrifice everything. Those neighbors are likely to be women because other men empathize. Because the protagonists change from story to story, the city of Sarajevo becomes a living being, filled with people who go about their business irrespective of the protagonist. When the protagonists are noticed by others, they are either scorned or pitied through the dialogue or silently. Each image is meant to evoke a reaction against everything that it shows: against bringing people to a position where they have no other choice but to do what they must. This is how the city becomes more than a setting and begins to tie the different narratives into a whole—narratives that happened in many different places over and over again and not just in the places that Mavric drew. Such events happened during the war, over and over, to men and women on all sides of the conflict. Senad Mavric looks at them from the position of an objective observer, from the position of the city itself, which “watches” its citizens die and every day dies a little with them. Like Sacco to a certain extent, Mavric takes a look at the war from a distance. In this way, he manages to give answers to the titular question: What is

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war? These answers can be applied to and portray any urban warfare, especially the twenty-first-century wars we are witnessing right now, but also the terrorist attacks that easily bring out elements of a siege mentality on a smaller scale. In all of these cases, civilians are prevented from leaving. Instead of living normal lives, they are sentenced to suffer other men’s greed and the complete absence of empathy. These kinds of destruction are often motivated by nationalism stemming from religion or a misunderstanding of history. But nationalism is the furthest thing from Mavric’s mind as he tries to tell stories that might have happened to anyone in war-torn Sarajevo and that might still be happening daily in many cities in Syria. The comic book offers a serious look at private conflicts and commonplace problems under the overarching destruction of warfare—destruction that no one who suffers it wanted or expected. But now these people must learn to live with it or die.

Conclusion As mentioned above, there are some answers to be found in response to the question Senad Mavric asks in the title of his graphic novel. What kind of an image of the modern war can be drawn after reading this forty-eight-page, black-and-white comic? Primarily I have to say that the book tells a story from the point of view of a young, lonely man in a devastated city. Even when Mavric concentrates on a female protagonist, she is quickly subsumed by male action and initiative. The focus is, therefore, primarily on young to middle-aged men whose way of life has been destroyed, its patterns and prospects effaced to the point where it is no longer recognizable. The streets they walk are no longer their streets; what tied them to the city and other people has been destroyed along with their identity. In “Sniper Story,” a father has to accommodate loving his son even as he takes the life of someone else’s. In the “Black Water of Limbo,” the protagonist is nonplussed when he sees a stranger (probably the father) dump a baby into the river. Both men know that it had to be that way; both men have to escape the sniper fire on their way home. This deadly game of hide and seek is all that matters in their new reality; there will be time for tears later. The war in Mavric’s stories destroys everything that constitutes living, not just biological life as it is narrowly understood. These men and women had to use the little that was left after years of siege to create the semblance of normalcy if they were to survive. Every loss, every realization that anything gone may not be easily replaced, is emotional for those old enough to understand. What color is this war? With all of the blood on the ground, one could expect the answer to be red, but since the recurring character is the city of Sarajevo itself with all of its buildings and the smoke and the dust of destruction covering everything, war becomes gray in these pages, as it was in the days

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of the siege. Its colors were as gray as the chalk used for insulation in the 1980s, which crumbled below impact holes in the sides of apartment buildings in neighborhoods built for the 1984 Winter Olympics. Gray as the water in the freezing winter of 1992–1993 when all of the trees in the city parks were cut down to heat rooms without windows for children with no food in their bellies and to make room for more gravestones to replace the old, broken “Turkish” memorials that were hiding and keeping the space free all these centuries. War includes not only all the dead and buried but all the people on their way there too. The main difference between the characters who look like civilians but are actually combatants and the real civilians in Senad Mavric’s war is demonstrated in the agency they have or have lost. Anyone who takes action—people in the background or the protagonists—has a role in the military. This is true whether that military belongs to the warring parties or, rarely, to the international Peace Corps. The only agency left to the civilians in these stories (as mentioned, usually young men) is to try to remove the most disturbing parts of the new reality from the public eye (dead and wounded people, unwanted babies) or to commit them to memory (international photographers, cameramen; see figure 3.2). These stories portray the war as the private evil it is; as people create evil privately, so do they use their agency to remove the remnants of destruction from their private lives (finding new batteries for the Walkman, setting up dishes for lunch as usual). Probably the most important conclusion one can draw from reading this comic book is that, by centering the storytelling on the imagery of the city, Mavric successfully portrayed the nature of modern warfare—warfare where civilians become legitimate (if immoral) targets and human rights violations are accompanied by the destruction of centuries-old urban areas and cultural monuments. While bringing context to what would otherwise be seen as just snippets of daily life under siege, he traps the protagonists in those pages and leaves no hope that both they and the city of Sarajevo can ever really leave them. All of the other comics discussed above have left Sarajevo, even Bosman who was to be the hero of the city. Rustemagic escaped to publish his faxes, and Hermann’s spy got what he came for and left only to continue watching those who were responsible for the war spout lies and empty promises on TV. Even Sacco leaves the topic of The Fixer behind and moves on to better things after seeing that the historical narrative has to take its course. Although the Siege of Sarajevo was the longest since the Siege of Leningrad, in the last two decades, it became a mere precursor to what is still happening throughout the Middle East and in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Madaya, in particular.16 Mavric does not extensively portray this merciless nature of war, instead going for the snapshots of carnage and destruction in the background. This way, Sarajevo is portrayed not just as the setting but also as a victim in the stories. It is no longer the city the author knew before 1992; this new Sarajevo

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FIGURE 3.2. Smiles in the unlikeliest of places: the story of the “Smiling Biscuit” in Mom,

What Is War?

is shaped by new memories and different people, as the author has no more agency and power to change things than the characters in his comics.

Notes 1 The texts that recount the endeavors of individuals and organizations who have

contributed to the development of comic books in Bosnia and Herzegovina are usually written by the people that participated in that development. They therefore tend to paint the events with their personal prejudices, animosities, and resentments. For examples, see Ahmed Hrapovic, “Strip Izdavastvo U BiH 1970–2016,” Daily Newspaper Oslobodjenje, September 9, 2016; Saida Mustajbegovic, “Ahmet Muminovic, Najstariji Crtac Stripa U BiH: ‘Male Novine’ Mu Otkazale Saradnju Zbog ‘Preporoda,’” Weekly Magazine Stav, December 24, 2015, http://www.faktor .ba/vijest/stav-ahmet-muminovic-najstariji-crtac-stripa-u-bih-male-novine-mu -otkazale-saradnju-zbog-preporoda-193146. 2 For more about the popularity of this story in film form, see Kaihao Wang, “Generation of Chinese Film Goers Took Yugoslav Drama into Its Heart,” China Daily, December 18, 2014, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014livisitkst/2014-12/ 18/content_19112061.htm.

War in the Bosnian Graphic Novel • 71 3 For the list of all of the 1984 winners at the Lucca Comics, Animation, and Illustra-

4

5

6 7 8 9

10

11

12

tion Salon (including the brothers Hernandez), see the online transcript of the Salon Catalog: Rinaldo Traini, ed. “16° Salone Internazionale Dei Comics, Del Film Di Animazione E Dell’Illustrazione” (1984), http://www.immaginecentrostudi .org/saloni/salone16.asp. For an emotional account of this tragic event at the very beginning of the Bosnian War (1992–1995), see Karim Zaimovic, “Pepeo Devete Umjetnosti,” Weekly Magazine Dani, December 1, 1992, http://media.ba/bs/magazin-novinarstvo/pepeo -devete-umjetnosti; international readers will also recognize it from the graphic novel Fax from Sarajevo; see Joe Kubert, Fax from Sarajevo (Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books, 1997). For examples of research on war narratives in comics (both academic and not), see Anica Tucakov, Strip U Srbiji: 1975–1995 (Belgrade: Biblioteca Academia, Zaduzbina Andrejevic, 2000); Zdravko Zupan, Vek Stripa U Srbiji (Samizdat: Serbia, 2007); Andrea Matosevic, “Croatian Comics in the 1990s: Ethnological Aspects,” Yearbook of the Croatian Ethnological Society 34/35 (2005): 77–90 and “Heroic Bricolage of Post-Yugoslav Comic Book Narration,” Conference Identities between the Reality and the Narrative: Multiplicity, Phases, Controversies (conference paper, 2015); Martina Topic, “Overcoming Nationalism: ‘Croatian’ Alan Ford as a CrossNational Bound in (Former) Yugoslavia,” Media and the Culture of Peace in the Balkans (2010), 263–281; Matko Vladanovic, Izdevetane domacice: Kriticki ogledi o hrvatskom stripu (Benkovac: Mentor d.o.o., 2013); Frano Dulibic, “Ideologije, karikature i stripovi u razdoblju Drugog svjetskog rata,” ed. Dragan Damjanovic, Art & Politics in Europe in the Modern Period (Zagreb, Croatia: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb, 2016). Filip Andronik, “Bosman u svoj svojoj,” 2009, accessed March 4, 2018, https:// stripopeka.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/bosman-u-svoj-svojoj/. Quotes from Karim Zaimovic, “Where Are You Now, Batman?,” Weekly Satiric Magazine Feral Tribune, December 1994. Olga Sucic was deleted from memory, at least until the bridge Vrbanja was renamed to include both her and Suada Dilberovic’s names in 1999. It is not too difficult to find books with an extensive look at the war in Bosnia from all the different perspectives; for example, on the life in Sarajevo during the siege, see Barbara Demick, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, reprint ed. (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2012). For Bosnian history in general, see Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996). This extended list would, of course, include Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde but also Tomaž Lavriĉ’s Bosnian Fables, Frano Petrusa’s Mostar Wishes [Meilleurs Voeux de Mostar], and Admir Delic’s Srebrenica: A Survivor’s Story. See Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–1995 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000); Tomaž Lavriĉ, Bosanske Basne [Bosnian Fairytales] (Zagreb: Fibra, 2006); Frano Petrusa, Mostarske Zelje [Mostar Wishes] (Zagreb: Fibra, 2013); Admir Delic and Samir Karic, Srebrenica: A Survivor’s Story (Morrisville: Lulu, 2016). Hermann portrayed in his book both the former UN troops commander in BiH General McKenzie and the former commander of the UN civil forces in BiH (UNPROFOR, the so called Smurfs) Yasushi Akashi. This included the Eisner Award (Best Graphic Novel, 1997), Harvey Award (Graphic Novel of Original Work, 1997), and Angouleme Festival Award (Best Foreign Album, 1998).

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13 Publishing house Sahinpasic printed The Fixer in Bosnian in 2015 after it was

constantly sold out in English for twelve years. The edition of Safe Area Gorazde published by Buybook in 2007 has been sold out for years. 14 In Croatia, comic book titles published during their war included the Croatian version of Bosman, Superhrvoje (Matosevic, “Croatian Comics in the 1990s,” 81–82), while on the Serbian side of that war, there was a comic book titled Knindze (inspired by real paramilitary forces that got their name via wordplay on the Japanese ninjas), based on the name of a Croatian city and a major war zone Knin; see Maria Vivod, “In the Shadow of the Serbian Paramilitary Units: Narrative Patterns about the Role of Paramilitary Units in Former Yugoslav Conflict,” Advances in Anthropology 3, no. 1 (2013): 23. 15 Senad Mavric has now published an updated edition of this comic book due to the resurgence of interest about Bosnian war comics in Sarajevo, mainly by foreign tourists and visitors. 16 For a graphic novel narrative about Madaya, see Dalibor Talajic, Dispatches from Madaya Mom, ABC News and Marvel Comics, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/ International/deepdive/madaya-mom-mother-struggle-survival-syria-civil-war -42362213.

Chapter 4

“The Sky Is Darkened by Gods” Spirituality, Strength, and Violence in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints HARRIET E. H. EARLE

By the summer of 1900, a conflict that had been bubbling under the surfaces for decades was raging across China. In two years, more than 100,000 lives1 would be lost; the Boxer Rebellion “tainted China’s relationship with the wider world, and continues to do so today.”2 Of the Boxers themselves, Diane Preston writes, “The Boxers themselves were an unlikely catalyst for such far-reaching effects. An obscure, ill-organised sect that claimed to possess supernatural powers, it drew its members from the poor and dispossessed of northern China. The foreigners called them ‘Boxers’ because of the ritualistic martial arts they practised.”3 Many years of drought, poor harvests, and ever-increasing poverty had ravaged the northern provinces; many millions of impoverished rural Chinese were desperate. That unrest had its origins in the arrival of large numbers of Christian missionaries following the Treaty of Tientsin (1860), which gave foreign missionaries the freedom to preach in China and to purchase land for the erection of churches. As China struggled to survive, they saw their government’s interest in foreigners as a smack in the 75

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face and were disgruntled. Additionally, an outbreak of bubonic plague that destroyed the continent from China to India in the latter half of the nineteenth century had left many problems for poorer communities. Not only did it kill as many as thirteen million people, but it also devastated livestock and farming communities. It was widely believed, especially in Shandong, that the influx of foreigners and their Christian converts were to blame, citing divine retribution from the traditional gods of the folk religions.4 By the turn of the nineteenth century, China was a pressure cooker of resentment and antiforeign feeling. Following defeat in several wars, foreign powers in China had been granted special privileges (including immunities from Chinese law), and it seemed as if the country would be carved up by a number of other powers, bringing an end to the Qing dynasty, which had ruled for more than two hundred years. To many people, it appeared the assault was led by an infiltrating unfamiliar religion, which aimed to convert the native people and steal the country from within. It was in this atmosphere of antiforeign feeling that the Boxers grew. Driven by both antiforeign and anti-Christian feeling, the Boxers (or the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist) would “call on a god to come down and possess them and then fall into a trance, whirling and dancing with their weapons in their hands, daring members of the crowd to attack them. The power of invulnerability offered by their rites must have been irresistible, particularly to those who felt they had little power over their daily lives.”5 In his 2013 comics Boxers and Saints, Gene Luen Yang traces the origin of two individuals caught in the conflict. Boxers follows Little Bao, a young man from Shandong province, who is inspired by Red Lantern Chu (a reworking of the historical figure Zhu Hongdeng) to create the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist, spurred on by the destruction of his village. Yang positions Little Bao as the “leader” of the Boxers, a characterization that is not rooted in fact but creates a clearer “origin story” for the group. Conversely, Saints focuses on Vibiana (née Four-Girl), a young woman from the same village who converts to Catholicism and is martyred by the Boxers. The two volumes represent a considerable amount of research on the part of Yang, who uses the space of the texts not only to discuss the conflict itself but to pose wider questions of China’s place in the modern world and how national and religious affiliations work in concert to create identity. It is worth noting here that Yang first came to critical attention with American Born Chinese (2006), a comic that considers similar themes to Boxers and Saints, including collective identities, mythology, and symbolism. The aim of this chapter is to consider two aspects of Yang’s representations of the importance of spirituality and faith. I begin by looking at how the rituals that were so central to both Boxer and Christian practice are rendered on the page; how the two are contrasted and related to the visions that were a central part of the Boxers’ beliefs forms a great deal of Vibiana’s story in Saints.

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I then consider the importance of narratives of spirituality and how these narratives give structure to the characters’ motivations and strength to act. Yang positions the uprising as a religious conflict. The initial moment of variance in the text occurs when Little Bao’s father is forced to give his produce to a man he has previously shamed for the man’s poor treatment of an elderly widow. Following his disgrace, the man had left the village but returned soon after, sporting a large crucifix, joined by a Western priest, and clad in monastic habit. The priest takes produce from Bao’s father without asking or explaining the reason. The priest, Father Bey, then smashes the village’s idol of the harvest god. This sows the seeds of discord and begins the process of what we may think of as radicalization. Yang is aware of the connections that can be drawn between the Boxers and contemporary terrorists; he notes that Boxers walks “a fine line” between sympathy for desperate characters and the condoning of terrorism.6 Many participants in (and commentators on) the uprising have suggested that the primary aim of the Boxers was not religious at all. Bishop Favier stated that “this religious persecution is only a façade; the ultimate aim is the extermination of all Europeans.”7 Others, like Paul Cohen, have suggested that Christianity played a large part in the conflict but not always for ideological reasons: “Christian communities grew, partly by absorbing people in need of protection from the law. The latter were attracted to the secure shield of the Catholic Church, with its legally immune (and convert-hungry) foreign missionary leadership.”8 These kinds of Christians are typified in the bullying character in the opening of Boxers. Although placed at opposite ends of the conflict, the main characters are engaged in a similar search for belonging and acceptance. However, Boxers is positioned as a story of revenge—with Little Bao and his followers taking arms against the invaders they held responsible for devastating droughts—whereas Saints is more inward-focused, following Vibiana’s desperate need to belong in the community of the Catholic Church. Both texts are concerned with the need to create and nurture one’s identity within a community and the ways in which the characters’ respective belief systems and communities allow them to do this. Religion is important not for the content of the teachings but for the comfort, community, and strength that it lends to its practitioners. Additionally, Yang divides the two characters across gender lines, presenting explicitly gendered views of the conflict. A simple analysis may suggest that this is how it actually was—that women did exist within these roles, and therefore, they are presented “truthfully.” The underlying question is that of the social positioning of women. Yang presents Little Bao as interacting within the public sphere of the conflict, while Vibiana remains within the domestic, private sphere. I discuss this issue in more detail in due course. The two texts sit alongside each other, and the two characters’ stories repeatedly cross. Both are presented in clear, bold artwork that is reminiscent of ligne

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claire, an artistic style commonly associated with the works of Hergé, “which eschews shading, gradation of colours and hatching in favour of clear outlines, flat colours and geometrical precision.”9 Elsewhere I have discussed ligne claire as an effective style for the rendering of traumatic narratives, describing it as “a lens through which the world attains some level of clarity and comprehensibility.”10 This is not a new interpretation; Bruno Lecigne suggests that “the ideological efficacy of the ligne claire lies not in what is chosen for depiction, but in the idea that the world is legible.”11 Laurence Grove cautions that many artists “reject ligne claire precisely to suggest that life is not always clear cut, and that the violent ambiguities of society can indeed be worthy of artistic portrayal.”12 It is precisely for this reason that Yang invokes this deceptively simple style: presenting his narrative in clear and uncluttered artwork contrasts boldly with the violence and bleakness of the story itself and jolts the reader into careful reading. It is for the reader to bridge the gap of representation between bold, clear artwork and cheerless, messy action. It is a misconception that ligne claire always involves bright, bold colors. While a great deal of the artwork in Boxers is vibrant, almost none of Saints is. Saints is presented entirely in shades of grey and brown, with the exception of the character of St Joan of Arc, who is always rendered in a golden halo of light; as with Joan’s vibrant light, it is the gods who are depicted brightest in Boxers. However, ligne claire is more than just an artistic style; it carries with it tremendous iconic weight, thanks to its associations with Hergé, and indeed the wider Franco-Belgian comics community. Gwen Tarbox makes the point that Yang “takes advantage of the deceptive simplicity of the clear line to provide commentary on violence against the backdrop of colonialism and its attendant ideologies.”13 She further notes that the voiceprints14 “that are most frequently associated with the depiction of violence within a geopolitical context” are often similar in their artistic presentation, including “jagged lines, crowded panels, and extensive shading within a black, white, and gray palette.”15 This traditional voiceprint for violence allows readers to “move quickly or even avert his or her eyes after the first apprehension of the violence image, with still apprehending the overall meaning of the scene.”16 The use of ligne claire undercuts this averted gaze and forces us to view. In choosing this style, Yang must be aware of the massive weight of symbolism and history bound up within it. The use of this style refers readers to the French Catholic presence in the Boxer Rebellion and sits as a quiet, uncontested comment on the European influence on modern China postrebellion.

Boxer Ritual versus Christian Sacrament As soon as news of the uprising broke in the 1890s, gossip about the curious rituals of the rebels began to spread. The Boxers were “heirs to a long tradition

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of sects and societies in northern China [who] fused religion, theatre, magic, and martial arts in their rituals.”17 Every religion and spiritual belief system will have its own rituals and sacraments, whether explicit and fixed in format or less rigid and governed by personal interpretation. They are often among the most theatrical and compelling aspects of religious praxis. The purposes of rituals differ across religions, but in theistic religions, such as Christianity, the aim is to create an opportunity for an experience of the divine. This may seem to be a vague description, but when considering the carefully constructed rituals (Christianity refers to these as “sacraments”), the basic similarities—and the overall attempt to connect to a divine or “higher” power—become apparent. Celtic Christian spirituality has popularized the concept of the “thin place.” According to Marcus Borg, “‘Thin places’ are places where the veil momentarily lives, and we behold God . . . a thin place is a sacrament, a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us.”18 It is through the practicing of rituals and the engagement with sacramental praxis that the individual experiences the divine. In Yang’s description, the purpose of the ritual is to prepare the Boxers to become gods (see figure 4.1). On the page, the imagery is unambiguous. After unsuccessfully attempting the ritual with Master Big Belly, Little Bao summons the gods of the opera in an initial confrontation following the death of Red Lantern Chu. Little Bao becomes a god on the page, his body morphing into a black-clad, heavily

FIGURE 4.1. Yang represents the transformation from man to god in bold, richly colored

artwork (Yang, Boxers, 113).

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beard god who slays the opposing troops with little difficulty. The gods were thought to be impervious to weapons; Little Bao/The Black- Clad God can move between bullets and weapons with ease. This victory over the troops gives him the power and courage to begin to teach others the ritual. In Yang’s version of the story, this ritual is the key to giving disenfranchised peasants the strength and courage to stand against foreign invading forces and their oppressive native counterparts. The Boxer rituals are especially compelling because there doesn’t appear to be any definitive description of what was involved. This is not necessarily surprising, given that “few of the Boxers were literate” and the vast majority of accounts of the rebellion were written by Westerners or anti-Boxer Chinese; it is not at all unusual for the finer nuances to be “lost in oral transmission,” and the lack of written record would easily allow for local variance on rituals. However, it jars with Yang’s very definite ritual, which he clearly describes as being taught to Bao by Master Big Belly. According to Yang, the ritual that calls down the gods and imbues the Boxers with tremendous strength and invulnerability has three distinct parts: First, they bow to the bean garden; then they write an incantation on paper, burn it, and eat it; finally, they exhale deeply. Bowing and incantations are present in many of the descriptions of the rituals, but the eating of the charm is not; it appears later in a description of the rebel group “Big Sword Society” circa 1930, who swallowed “magic pills made of herbs, cinnabar and the ashes of paper slips on which incantations had been written.”19 There is no clear reason for Yang to include this ingesting of charms into his ritual, as it is not present in any of the major studies of the Boxers. However, when considering this ritual in the wider setting of religion and sacrament, a second reading emerges. One of the most well-known and important examples of a sacrament or “thin place” is the Christian Eucharist (alternatively called “Holy Communion” or “The Lord’s Supper”). It is the Eucharist that offers the key to the second interpretative reading of Yang’s ritual. The Eucharist forms the central ritual of Christianity. The wording of the ritual (the liturgy) recalls the words of Jesus before his death when he commanded his followers to eat bread in remembrance of him. Though the theological interpretations of the Eucharist differ between the various branches of the Church, the basic ritual event is mostly consistent. The Eucharist is one of many religious rituals that involves “god-eating.” Frazer writes that “the custom of eating bread sacramentally as the body of a god was practised by the Aztecs before the discovery and conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards.”20 The practice of eating a substance that represents a god is present in religions and belief systems the world over and has a prominent place in many of them. However, there is no record of this being a part of the ritual that made the Boxer warriors distinctive. Why, then, does Yang place the eating of the charm—an act comparable to the god-eating of so many other religions—at the center of his rendering of

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the ritual? My question almost answers itself. Outside of China, knowledge of the Boxers and the events of the uprising is sparse, and in comparing the actions of the Boxers, Yang is able to draw on both the praxis of and the emotional connection to other known rituals already known to the readership. He is speaking first and foremost to Anglo-American readers, many of whom will be from Christian backgrounds or, at the least, will have a basic understanding of Christianity on which to hang their readings of these rituals. The eating of the charm links readers not only to god-eating rituals but also to a large number of scriptural references in the major Western faiths.21 Owing to its position as a central ritual of the Christian faith, the Eucharist holds tremendous religious and liturgical importance, as well as spiritual and emotional power; in tying the Boxers and the Christians together through this ritual, Yang not only brings opposing sides into dialogue with each other, he also allows the reader to draw comparisons between the belief structures and ideologies of the two groups. The Eucharist features only once in Saints, despite this being the story of Four-Girl’s conversion to Catholicism and “rebirth” as Vibiana. The Boxers encroach on the Catholic encampment as Father Bey is celebrating mass in the church. Two Boxers armed with bows and arrows kill Kong, a devoted convert and close friend of Vibiana as he tries to find a missionary’s missing little girl. They then burst into the church and take aim at Father Bey as he is blessing the bread and reciting the traditional communion liturgy; his life is temporarily saved when Dr. Won, a previously disgraced convert leaps in front of him and is shot. It is implied that Father Bey is shot while leaning over Won’s body. Though the whole episode only covers three pages, the message is unambiguous. There is no way to suggest that these “devils” (as the Boxers were quick to label all Christians, both foreign and native Chinese) are any different from the Boxers themselves. Kong risks (and loses) his life trying to save a child; Dr. Won throws himself into the path of an arrow to protect the priest. The communion liturgy provides a stunning counterpoint to the actions of these two individuals. If we position the communion wording as a precursor to great sacrifice, then it seems especially fitting. This short episode is rendered in the same dull coloration as the rest of Saints. The colors resemble a sepia photograph, and the lack of cross-hatching and shading is reminiscent of ligne claire without the boldness. However, what is most important in this section is the paneling. Each panel is a bandeau, spanning the whole page width and of equal height. The deaths of Kong and Dr. Won (and the implied death of Father Bey) all occur within these uniform panels, removing any suggestion of unequal importance. Each death is represented as an equal sacrifice. The fact that the deaths occur during the celebration of mass—and especially the Eucharistic blessing—makes the actions of the Boxers all the more vicious by adding a dimension of desecration. It is an ironic, religious coup de

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grace—the deaths of Chinese converts and a priest during the most important of rituals at the hands of those who abhor the religion despite its clear similarities to their own. Yang’s depiction of religious ritual in both Boxers and Saints is twofold. First, by tying his rendering of the Boxer ritual to a central aspect of Christianity, he creates a hook for his readers, an inkling of relatability between their experiences and Little Bao’s and between the experiences of Little Bao and Vibiana. Second, he positions the uprising as a conflict split along religious fault lines. The two sides are clearly defined in each text. For Little Bao in Boxers, the Boxers are fighting for their national and cultural identity against the invading Western influence of Christianity—the “foreign devil” missionaries and priests and the traitorous Chinese converts. For Vibiana, Christianity provides the sanctuary she was denied among her native community; her new community is threatened by the antiforeign, traditionalist Boxers and their particular brand of guerrilla warfare. Neither side is “in the right”; there is no Manichean demarcation of good and evil in this conflict. It is as nuanced and complex as those involved. The overarching message of the two texts is not only the devastation and futility of violent conflict but also the strength and sense of belonging that a collective religious or spiritual belief can provide.

Narratives of Faith, Culture, and Personhood One of the most crucial aspects of the Boxers’ ideological structures is that they were derived from and influenced by tales from traditional Chinese folklore and national history. The first volume opens with Little Bao’s annual visits to the operas and his strong personal connection to the stories being acted out. It doesn’t matter that he and a large proportion of his people are illiterate—for many of the Boxers (and indeed the whole of the peasant classes in nineteenthcentury China), narrative was not something to be read but something to be watched and engaged with on a deeply personal level through enactment. These narratives formed the bases of much Chinese cultural practice, and they would have been widely known across the country. Indeed, these narratives played a large part in the development of Chinese folk religion. Paul Cohen writes, “At the village level, the sharp boundaries between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred,’ to which modern Westerners are accustomed, simply did not exist. The gods of popular religion were everywhere and ordinary people were in constant contact with them. These gods were powerful (some, to be sure, more than others), but they were also very close and accessible. People depended on them for protection and assistance in time of need . . . It would be accurate, I believe to describe the fabric of Chinese social and cultural life as being permeated through and through with religious beliefs and practices.”22 The annual operas allowed the stories of the gods to be told and retold to successive

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generations of Chinese peasants and to maintain their importance within the cultural fabric of the people. It is no surprise, then, that it is these gods who are called on to provide both strength and protection during the uprising; it is no different to how they had been called on for centuries to provide succor and safety. Narratives of faith—and the participation in them—are of utmost importance in the creation, development, and perpetuation of religious, ideological, and spiritual engagement. Both Little Bao and Vibiana engage with narrative in different ways but with overarching similarities. Because both are illiterate, their engagement is largely performative—they experience narratives through theater and through the spoken word and visual image far more than other (literate) characters may. Vibiana’s conversion to Catholicism begins with stories, most importantly the story of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River and the Passion. These stories are read to her from the Bible by Dr. Won, and it becomes quickly apparent that she is more interested in his wife’s cookies than the Gospel. It is only when she begins to ponder what she has heard that she begins to have visions of St Joan of Arc.23 It is not clear if Vibiana had prior knowledge of Joan’s story, though it is strongly suggested that she did not, or if the visions are an encounter through divine (or possibly supernatural) intervention. Regardless, Vibiana’s spiritual growth develops through these meetings, and the two women are presented in parallel to each other. The strong and self-assured Joan provides a bold contrast to the scared and isolated Vibiana. Vibiana’s visions often allow her to witness specific events in Joan’s life, including her visions of St. Michael the Archangel (who Joan claimed gave her strength in battle), her audience with the French dauphin in 1429, and her death by burning in May 1431. Joan is a particularly fitting choice of “spiritual guide” for Vibiana. Not only are they roughly the same age, but they are from similar backgrounds and face similar pressures. As young women in societies that considered them weak and of limited social use, these two characters must overcome the strictures of their gender before attempting to interact with their world on a level equal to their male counterparts. Additionally, both women are from poor communities with limited access to education and opportunities outside of their immediate community and through their own choices and perseverance break out. The ideological fight of Joan and her soldiers is not so different from the struggle of the Boxers. Following many years of fighting in France, large swathes of the country were under English rule, and the rest of the country was divided between two factions. As Vibiana witnesses a vision of Joan at the coronation of Charles VII, Joan tells her that “foreign invaders seized our land and claimed them for their own! But with this coronation, God restores to us what is rightfully ours.”24 This appears to be similar to the motivations of the Boxers—the ridding of foreign forces—and so, in demonstrating her allegiances to both her native country and her faith, Joan allows

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Vibiana to understand the Boxers’ motives through her own experiences while also giving her the strength to develop as a Catholic and continue to work for the Church. The story of Joan of Arc becomes the most important narrative of Christianity to Vibiana, and it is through Joan’s experiences that she is able to frame her own. Vibiana’s story is one of domesticity in the face of conflict. Previously I mentioned that, while male characters are free to interact in “the world,” the female characters (especially Vibiana) are confined to the domestic sphere. It is not the text itself but socially influenced readings of it that suggest these roles are in some way “less than” the male, public role. By considering Vibiana’s story as a “female narrative,” we devalue the text. Yes, Vibiana is female, but that is not to say that her story has any less importance than that of men in similar situations. So often stories that deal with domesticity are labeled as “women’s texts”; it is rarely the case that narratives dealing with questions of masculinity are labeled “men’s texts.” These so-called women’s stories are not lesser in substance: narratives of the private sphere can and do tell us as much about the complexities of conflict as any other. Rather, we should consider these narratives two sides of the same coin, so to speak. In Boxers, Little Bao exists in the public sphere as the mediator between the conflict event and the community, whereas in Saints, Vibiana is representative of the domestic reality of the conflict. Women are tacked on the end as afterthoughts; they represent a separate dimension of conflict within the comic. Joan appears to span both issues within this conflict: She is both Christian and fighting against foreign influence; she exists in the private and public spheres. As such, she is ideally placed as a guiding figure for Vibiana. However, there are other narratives of faith that play considerable roles in Yang’s texts. On his travels through neighboring villages, Little Bao meets a young woman, Mei Wen, and her sister. It is Mei Wen who identifies the black-clad god avatar as Ch’in Shih-Huang, the first emperor of China; she recognizes him through his words, spoken from Bao’s mouth. Mei Wen is different to her fellow Boxers, not only because she is a woman, but also because she is literate. In this respect, she is not entirely contained by the private sphere, as the process of education is, by its nature, public.25 Her father taught her to read and gave her books as a child, instilling in her a deep respect for learning and narrative as a vehicle for culture and personal identity. There is a considerable amount of research within both psychology and sociology to suggest that the way a person constructs his or her personal identity—and moreover the way a community defines its identity—is bound up in narrative. Paul Ricœur is pithy in his suggestion that “it is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.”26 This interplay of narrative and identity goes much further: “People construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves or being located within a repertoire of emplotted stories; ‘experience’ is constituted

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through narratives. People make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives.”27 More than any of Yang’s other characters, Mei Wen is acutely aware of the importance of storytelling. Recognizing Little Bao’s fondness for the stories of the opera, she attempts to connect with him through this and use it as a way to explain to him the importance of narrative. Toward the end of Boxers, Little Bao and Mei Wen break into the Hanlin Academy library, part of an elite academic institution founded in the eighth century and home to many thousands of rare, valuable, and culturally important volumes on Chinese history and culture. Mei Wen reads Little Bao the story of Guan Yin, the goddess of compassion and unconditional love. In the story that Mei Wen reads, Guan Yin is a princess who wishes to live an ascetic life in a monastery but is denied this by her father. She endures a number of hardships, but her compassion and love prevail, and after sacrificing her hands and eyes so that her father’s may be restored, she is miraculously healed and granted eternal life. The final image of the story shows Guan Yin healed and backed with an image of an open palm with an eye in the center, a symbol reminiscent of the hamsa.28 Comparatively speaking, Guan Yin is closely related to the Holy Virgin Mary, but in Mei Wen’s rendering, readers see closer parallels to the sacrifices and compassion of Jesus Christ. Here Yang creates a further link between the Boxers and the Christians—though their narratives of faith are different, the underlying characters and messages are essentially the same. Both groups are building their own faith stories on overarching narratives of compassion, protection, and love. As Mei Wen reads, the artistic style changes subtly to suggest a change in the story being told. As she narrates, the action of Guan Yin’s story is presented in bold colors within frames with rounded corners; similarly, the caption boxes are shaded in pale green and the figures of Little Bao and Mei Wen sit outside of the panels at the bottom of each page to both remind the reader of their presence and also suggest that they sit at a different narrative level to Guan Yin’s story.29 This is different to the artistic techniques employed in Saints to represent Vibiana’s visions of Joan and Dr. Won’s readings of the Bible. While Dr. Won’s readings are also presented with rounded corners to denote a shift in narrative level, the coloration is of the same muted palette as the rest of the artwork; there is nothing to suggest that these stories are of any particular relevance to the listener; Vibiana is depicted outside the panels, asleep, snoring, and in some panels, drooling. The contrast between Mei Wen’s and Dr. Won’s readings is artistically stark, although both are narratives of compassion and have a central place in the cultural identities of their communities. For Mei Wen and Little Bao, the stories of Chinese saintly figures have had a profound impact on their personal and cultural identities; for Vibiana, it is not the Gospel that inspires her but the stories of St. Joan.

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Vibiana has one final encounter with the Gospel. In the concluding pages of Saints, as she kneels, awaiting martyrdom by Little Bao, Vibiana sees Joan’s death at the stake and is stricken at the meaninglessness of her own death. She then has a vision of Jesus. In contrast to the muted grays and blacks, Jesus is rendered in yellow, as Joan is. He recites the parable of the Good Samaritan.30 There are several points of similarity in the stories of the Samaritan and Guan Yin, as both are about the flourishing and importance of compassion. In Vibiana’s vision, another narrative is also being told, but it exists solely at the visual level. As the figure of Jesus speaks, he spreads his arms wide. Vibiana, with her back slightly to the reader, yells at him to speak clearly and give her a firm answer. On turning the page, the image shifts into Jesus’s crucifixion, with wounds at the feet and hands (see figure 4.2). The wounds in his hands become eyes, and he is then shown at the moment of resurrection against a background of the hand and eye symbol, creating a clear link to Guan Yin in Boxers. The narrative is of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and in the final panel, he states, “So please, Vibiana. Be mindful of others as I am mindful of you.”31 This visually encoded third narrative enforces the religious underpinning of Vibiana’s story and highlights a key understanding of Christianity—that Jesus sacrificed himself and that Christians are not exempt from suffering. It is for Vibiana to act in accordance with her beliefs and to remain faithful to the teachings she purported to live by. She does so, giving her name as “Vibiana” before dying. Mei Wen and Little Bao’s visit to the Hanlin Academy library has an unexpected additional use: it allows Little Bao to see just how close the library is to the foreign legation in Peking. In truth, there is much debate on what happened to the library in the 1900s. The Boxers claimed that the British started the fire, which raged through the academy, in order to force them back from the boundary with the Legation Quarter. However, the way in which the fire spread makes it far more likely that the Boxers were responsible. The library was not fortified because the Allies wrongly assumed that the Chinese would not risk destroying such a valuable and culturally important collection of texts. As I have previously stated, part of Yang’s task in creating these texts is to navigate the varied and often contradictory histories of the uprising. Here he subscribes to the generally held version of events and constructs the event as a tactical decision on the part of Little Bao as de facto leader of the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist. Mei Wen is devastated and attempts to save the books before the building collapses. The Boxers are confused to see foreign Christians standing by the newly created entrance to the Legation, laughing and cheering; the Boxers are gunned down by foreign troops. This is the final event of the text, and it carries immense weight. The Boxers are killed because of their own determination to win at all costs, even at the cost of their own cultural heritage, as represented by the library. In order to protect

FIGURE 4.2. The representations of Guan Yin and Jesus are linked in the use of the eye motif,

creating a connection between the two figures (Yang, Saints, 158).

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their cultural identity, they are prepared to destroy one of the most important facets of that same identity. As he lies dying, Little Bao sees the gods of the opera disappearing into the sky, a final sign that their fight has failed and they have lost the very things they were so desperately trying to retain. It is only Mei Wen who fully understands the magnitude of this loss (see figure 4.3). For Yang, this is the true tragedy of the uprising—that the motivations of the two opposing sides were at once similar and irreconcilable, and ultimately the Boxers lose that which they attempted to protect, much of it by their own hand. In highlighting the importance of religion to this conflict, he opens a dialogue between the two sides, represented in the figures of Little Bao and Vibiana, to negate any suggestion of glory and Manicheanism in conflict and instead allow the nuances and complications to be lucidly expressed. This desire for clarity is emphasized by Yang’s use of ligne claire, an artistic style ideally placed for conflict representation, as its simplicity and boldness allows the artwork to be richly evocative of the events while also creating a second level of reading that pushes the reader to consider the work’s simplicity as a smoke screen to conceal further depths and complexities. In her comprehensive history of the Boxers, Diana Preston states that “the Boxer Rebellion was an extraordinary event—heroic and farcical, tragic and shocking, brutal and ridiculous, with far-reaching implications. Yet it was also a richly human story.”32 Yang is able to plot a course through a discursive historical event, one

FIGURE 4.3. The image of the Boxers’ deaths mimics Yang’s earlier depiction of their moment of divine transformation, as the gods appear ghostlike against the sky (Yang, Boxers, 321).

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of many that have no clear sense of good and bad, and use the religious narrative to act as a motivation for the characters’ actions and a central conduit for the creation and development of communities of faith, strength, and violence.

Notes 1 Official death tolls vary but general statistics suggest that 2,500 foreign soldiers,

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

2,000 imperial troops, at least 100,000 civilians, and countless Boxers died between 1899 and 1901. Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion (New York: Berkeley, 2000), x. Preston, Boxer Rebellion, x. Preston, 24. Preston, 23. Dan Solomon, “One-Two Punch,” Austin Chronicle, September 20, 2013. Preston, Boxer Rebellion, 50. Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 19. Ann Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), 18. Harriet Earle, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 145. Bruno Lecigne, Les Héritiers d’Hergé (Brussels: Magic Strip, 1983), 40. Laurence Grove, Comics in French (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 183. Gwen Athene Tarbox, “Violence and the Tableau Vivant Effect,” The Comics of Hergé ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 144. Jared Gardner uses the term voiceprint to describe “not the ‘metaphorical’ voice of narrative theory, but the human voice of oral storytelling, of song, of performance.” The voiceprint of comics brings together “voice and writing, orality and print, performance and text.” See Jared Gardner, “Storylines,” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 66. Tarbox, “Violence and the Tableau Vivant Effect,” 145. Tarb ox. Preston, Boxer Rebellion, 22. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 156. Cohen, History in Three Keys, 101. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Mineola: Dover, 2003), 488. Two particular passages of note are Ezekiel 3:3 and Revelation 10:9. In both passages, the speaker is compelled to eat a parchment of scripture. The charm-eating of the Boxers is thus tied to both the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament revelation to St. John the Divine, key texts of at least two religious groups. Cohen, History in Three Keys, 102. Joan was officially beatified in 1909; she was canonized by Benedict XV on May 16, 1920. Gene Luen Yang, Saints (New York: First Second, 2013), 158. Mei Wen also ventures outside her gender and into the public, masculine sphere in his position as a Red Lantern. She becomes a warrior and engages with the male characters in the theater of violence. However, she retains her femininity in her role as caregiver and domestic protector. Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 148.

90 • Harriet E. H. Earle

27 Margaret Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Net-

work Approach,” Theory and Society 23 (1994): 614.

28 The hamsa is a symbol of protection and good fortune, common to the Middle East

and North Africa.

29 In his 1972 work Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette proposes that narrative occurs

in levels. The main plot of the story occurs at the extradiegetic level; the events within the story are intradiegetic. An embedded narrative, for example a character telling a story within the body of the main narrative, sits at the metadiegetic level. Shifting between two narrative levels is called “metalepsis,” and it generally involves playing with variations in narrative level in order to create an effect of illusion or disquietude. A metaleptical move within a text can occur between any narrative levels, but in the case of Mei Wen’s reading of the book in the library, the shift is from intradiegetic to metadiegetic. As Genette suggests, this can create unease within the narrative, because readers must reposition themselves within the text, but can also allow them to consider their own positions in relation to the narrative, in contrast to the differing positions of the characters. 30 Luke 10:25–37. 31 Gene Luen Yang, Boxers (New York: First Second, 2013), 158. 32 Preston, Boxer Rebellion, xiv.

Chapter 5

Unseen Scars Recalling Traumatic Moments in Individuals with PTSD in War Brothers JAMES KELLEY It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell. —General William Tecumseh Sherman, Memories of Gen. William T. Sherman (1891)

While serving in the military, I met many individuals who had deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan, and each person served in various capacities. Some of these individuals had moderate to mild experiences. They were there for their rotation, did their time, and came home. However, there were some who were a part of the platoons and squadrons who experienced combat firsthand. They felt the concussion of the explosions around them, heard the crack of bullets above their heads, and had the misfortune of seeing their friends die before their eyes. They carry those experiences with them throughout their life 91

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long after the fighting has ended. They carry those memories, and they relive them every day of their lives. Unfortunately, for those who have experienced war, the hell never ends for them—and not everyone who has been through war has been a combatant.1 At times, there are civilian victims of these wars and conflicts. Both fighter and civilian must relive the horrific moments of war that they experienced. At times, they may feel as if there is no end to their remembering of these events, no end to the reliving with each unexpected flashback or nightmare that keeps them from sleep. For these individuals who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), going to the store, spending time with loved ones, or other activities that are considered routine and day-to-day become almost daunting tasks to complete. They go through bouts of anxiety, depression, and at times suicidal thoughts, with some individuals following through on those thoughts. War is hell, and reliving that war is an even more insufferable hell for some. War has been depicted in various mediums: movies, TV shows, books, comic books, and graphic novels. Each medium has focused on and highlighted various aspects of war and those who fought in them. Aspects such as the camaraderie of the soldiers, the perseverance of soldiers and/or civilians, the heroism in war, the death and destruction, and/or the reasons the war began are a few examples of central themes that exist in the different mediums. Most of these examples serve to demonstrate the positives—if they can be called positives—that are found in war, and most occur in the middle of the war; however, the aftermath of war on the participants, such as the effects of PTSD, is rarely the emphasis of the portrayals in these different mediums. War Brothers is a graphic novel that not only depicts what it was like for the characters to experience war firsthand but also portrays the characters’ reconstruction of their lives once the war is over. War Brother utilizes different visual elements to illustrate the horrors of war that child soldiers in central Africa had to live through and continue to relive with each memory. This chapter will discuss how author Sharon E. McKay and artist Daniel Lafrance present the experiences of former child soldiers and victims in War Brothers: The Graphic Novel by examining in select scenes both the use of color2 in moments of distress and how visual elements such as distorted images are used as a rhetorical strategy3 to illustrate the way in which Jacob’s PTSD creates a struggle for him to recall clearly his time spent with the LRA. In this analysis of the novel, I hope to contribute to the continuing study of how the experiences of young victims during war are perceived, depicted, and/or remembered through the medium of comics and graphic novels.

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PTSD and War Brothers War Brothers: The Graphic Novel is a graphic adaptation of Canadian author Sharon E. McKay’s young adult novel of the same title and is illustrated by Canadian artist Daniel Lafrance.4 Both novels follow the fictitious story of a young Ugandan boy named Kitino Jacob, who is from the Acholi tribe in Gulu, Uganda.5 He, his schoolmates, and his close friends are kidnapped from their all-boys private Catholic school in Uganda and are conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to serve as child soldiers. In the story, Jacob and his friends suffer inhumane treatment, are exposed to the elements, and are even forced to kill other prisoners and civilians until they are able to eventually escape from the grasp of the LRA. Once returned to civilization and their families, the survivors must face the new challenge of reintegrating into a distrustful society. The medium of a graphic novel allows the author and illustrator to present to the reader the complexities of the emotional traumas that Jacob and his friends experienced as captives of the LRA. In the novel, it is clear that war is something that affects everyone in some way or another. For the characters, it directly affected them as they struggled to survive their time with the LRA and then to find their place back in society. They were forced to commit heinous acts against others or suffer death themselves. Through the abusive tactics of the LRA, these former child soldiers and victims, most around the age of ten, were given psychological and emotional scars that may never truly heal with time. They carry around the memories of the atrocities they have committed, seen, or been victims of. The memories serve as constant reminders of what these individuals have been through, and it is through memories that this story is told, in the perspective of the main character, Jacob. The story that Jacob shares in the novel is clearly a difficult story to tell, and his PTSD becomes another lens through which he recounts his story. The novel begins with a handwritten letter by Jacob to the reader. In his letter, he introduces himself and explains background information on Joseph Kony and the LRA.6 Jacob explains the tactics of the LRA: how they steal young boys and girls to serve in the army, how they raze and steal from small villages, and how they require young children to kill others as well as one another.7 He explains how the LRA has created great suffering for a number of individuals.8 Jacob warns the reader when he writes, “My story is not an easy one to tell, and it is not an easy one to read. The life of a child soldier is full of unthinkable violence and brutal death.” He continues to explain that his story is also about “hope, courage, friendship, and family” and that the reader will be presented with both the bad and good of his experience. He finishes the letter by giving the reader an “out,” declaring, “There is no shame in closing this book now.”9 This is the same letter that the reader notices Jacob writing after

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he has successfully escaped the clutches of the LRA and been safely returned to his home. This story is a retelling of his experience as a captive and child soldier of the LRA, and there are moments in the story in which color plays an important role in Jacob’s remembering.

Use of Color in Traumatic Moments Color plays a pivotal role in demonstrating Jacob’s PTSD. When Jacob is remembering traumatic events, color replaces the background of what he saw, highlighting only the event itself. This is clearly demonstrated in a scene that occurs early in the novel, when Jacob witnesses his friend Tony—a boy who desires to become a Catholic priest—being coerced into murdering another captive. In this scene, Tony joins two other boys in killing their ailing peer Adam with large wooden clubs. When Tony attempts to explain that his Catholic religion forbids murder, members of the LRA whisk Tony away to a large log and give him the choice of killing Adam or losing a portion of his arm. The commander of the camp explains to the distraught Tony that whether he decides to lose his arm for subordination or not, Adam will die regardless. Conflicted by his moral dilemma, Tony reluctantly and sorrowfully joins the other two boys in beating Adam to death. Before Tony is taken to the log where he was to lose his arm, the details of the scene were clear to the reader. The detail of the jungle background, the camp they were currently in, and the large group of abducted boys are clear. Jacob does not have difficulty in recalling these parts of the moment; however, as the event escalates, the details begin to blur and fade into each other. In the panel, the trees become a large green spot, which begins to meld with the ground. The guards begin to lose specific detailing in their clothes and facial features. Instead, they become silhouetted figures. The final panel of this page loses all semblance of a background as a large wall of a vibrant blood orange fills up the space (see figure 5.1). The use of different solid colors as a backdrop continues through the scene where Tony is threatened. It isn’t until the moment when Tony gives in and is released that the colored background is lifted to reveal a detailed background again. This alternating pattern of detailed imagery in less traumatic moments with the solid colors used during heightened moments of stress occurs frequently throughout the novel when Jacob and his friends are captives of the LRA. The loss of specific details, such as background imagery and aspects of individuals, are representative of Jacob’s struggle with PTSD when he recalls these horrific moments. According to researchers R. A. Bryant and Allison G. Harvey, those afflicted by traumatic events have difficulties visualizing imagery due to the possibility that the images may trigger their PTSD. In their study, they noted that those who suffer from nightmares and flashbacks of their traumatic event could not visualize as clearly as those who had not experienced a traumatic event. Also, those with PTSD avoided any

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FIGURE 5.1. Tony is forced to murder (McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 48).

form of visualization of the event altogether.10 In remembering, Jacob appears to be avoiding the violence when Tony and the other boys begin to beat the unconscious Adam to death (see figure 5.2). In the third row of the page, the action-to-action transitions11 of each panel progressively begin to alternate between the detailed image of Tony’s arms raised, his face streaming tears, and his teeth gritted in anguish and an image of his silhouetted body with his arms fully descended onto Adam’s motionless body, which is out of the frame. The panels end with a subject-to-subject transition, as the last panel in this row is filled with the shadowed face of the LRA lieutenant whose own malevolent smile mirrors Tony’s clenched mouth. The page concludes with a full-length single panel in which silhouetted images of the young boys continuously beat the unconscious boy into what can no longer be recognized as a human body. According to the color theory set forth by Faber Birren in his book Color Psychology and Color Theory: A Factual Study of the Influence of Color on Human Life, the colors that appear in this intense scene may represent Jacob’s associations of the emotions he experienced in this instance. In his book, Birren posits that color plays a role in the psychology of human beings and their associations with objects, persons, and/or events.12 Colors can represent an emotion or way of feeling for a person, or they can come to symbolize an event in the person’s life. Depending on the individual, color can be subjective and have various meanings and associations. Red is a color that can have positive associations, such as love, passion, Christmas, or St. Valentine’s Day. However, red is a color that can also have negative associations, such as violence, fear, intensity, and rage.13 Red also has the association

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FIGURE 5.2. The murder of Adam (McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 51)

of blood, and it is believed that the color red can have physiological effects and influence performance.14 As Jacob attempts to recall this moment in his retelling, vibrant hues of red frame the images within each panel and give a dynamic feeling of intensity, rage, and violence. These colors possibly present a negative embodiment for Jacob as he witnesses his friend’s loss of innocence—all he can see is red enveloping Tony. The shock of the experience blurs out the details and leaves Jacob with a memory of intense violence when he recalls the tragic event. Consequently, in witnessing Tony’s killing of Adam, Jacob may be presenting an associative aurora of guilt and sin around Tony.15 Murder is considered a severe sin in many religions and societies, and as a Catholic, Tony may believe that he committed a very heinous sin when he was forced

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to murder Adam. The red around Tony in this scene can be representative of the bloodshed. Likening the murder of Adam to Cain murdering his brother Abel in Genesis, the red that surrounds Tony may have a similar association in Jacob’s memory. From this moment on, Tony is now broken mentally and spiritually, and his friends become wary of him because he is shown more favor by LRA soldiers now that he has killed someone. Having been forced to murder another human being has, as Jacob observes later in the story, “changed [Tony].”16 In recalling this event, Jacob appears to be struggling to see his friend as the boy he used to be. Now Tony carries the identity of murderer around with him. The colored walls that Jacob puts up in his recalling of this memory are also representative of the guilt that he may be experiencing as a witness: a survivor’s guilt that many child soldiers felt, as they too had to witness the killing of others by the LRA. Researchers Klasen, Reissmann, Voss, and Okello conducted a study on former child soldiers of the LRA, and they discovered that child soldiers who were either victims or perpetrators of atrocities have high levels of guilt. They determined that this high level of guilt in former child soldiers leads to a higher rate of developing PTSD and other mental and emotional disorders.17 There is the possibility that Jacob is experiencing a similar guilt. The specific details surrounding the event are removed, as Jacob frames the event with an associative red wall when he recalls how the LRA forced him to watch. Unable to stop his friend from committing murder, and unable to help others escape from the LRA, color can be understood as symbolic of the possible guilt that Jacob might be feeling from his inaction. Jacob struggles in recalling the emotions that he felt and what he saw. Color allows him the ability to express this difficult moment in a way that can provide clarity and understanding of what he went through. However, color as a representation of these traumatic moments scratches just the surface of Jacob’s PTSD. The juxtaposition of distorted images along with very clear details provides a combination of psychological and physiological responses that many combat veterans and survivors of traumatic experiences have also demonstrated.

Visual Representations of Traumatic Moments and Remembering In understanding this story as a retelling by Jacob from his perspective, it can be seen that Jacob is trying to avoid remembering the graphic details of his experience with the LRA. Instead, he recalls the pain and turmoil that he and his friends experienced. There is a heightened awareness of specific elements in moments when Jacob or his friends are forced to kill for the LRA. One such example occurs when Jacob volunteers to go on a raiding party in order to get food for his friends to eat.18 This scene illustrates the possible interpretation that Jacob is struggling to remember what happened in this moment. As the raiding party waits for the unsuspecting cargo truck to come down the country road, the image of a dark-gray, cloudy sky and tall grass frames

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the scene in great detail. In the next successive panels, the large cargo truck slowly makes its way into the kill zone until the leader, Lizard, open fires on the unsuspecting driver. The details of these few panels are clear and defined. It isn’t until the attack occurs and the cargo truck has crashed onto its side that the clarity disappears and is once again replaced with solid colors for backgrounds. Jacob’s struggle to recall becomes most prominent in this scene when he is ordered to kill a mother who is desperately struggling to hold onto her young daughter to prevent her from being kidnapped (see figure 5.3). The panels move from straight-edged frames to jarring and jagged lines as the violence and intensity rise. The final panel depicts Jacob with his a machete-like blade in his hand as he stands before the silhouette of the mother holding her daughter. Large bold lettering in a speech balloon floating above his head reads, “Kill The Mother!!”19 This last panel serves as a rhetorical strategy to represent the culmination of the trauma that Jacob experienced and the difficulty that he appears to have in remembering this moment. The visual elements in this scene function to demonstrate what researchers Edna B. Foa and Michael J. Kozak would label as difficulty in recalling a traumatic moment. This is what is referred to as a “structure of fear memory,”20 which helps the reader understand that this is a memory that Jacob is possibly avoiding because of the fear and anxiety he associates with the memory. Applying research conducted by Bessel A. von der Kolk, Jacob’s cognitive defenses would be taking over to unconsciously protect him from reliving this horrific moment, shown in his loss of the ability to recall the greater details around him. As mentioned earlier, color becomes the backdrop for the violence,21 and the uneven jagged frames may be seen as a representation of Jacob’s recalling what psychology researchers Thomas Elbert and Maggie Schauer refer to as hot memories: memories that have strong emotional attachments and associations.22 These visual elements represent the possible physiological response that Jacob is experiencing as he remembers. PTSD sufferers have strong physiological responses when they remember their traumatic event or are exposed to stimuli associated with the event.23 The jagged panel frames suggest that one physiological response Jacob is experiencing may be surging adrenaline, which can cause blurring of the periphery. The vibrant red colors can be understood as blood pulsing through his body at an increased rate. Additionally, the bold lettering could be representative of the acute sensory processing that he is reexperiencing as a physiological response to this memory. Jacob struggles to recall details in this moment, offering the possible interpretation that the specific details he does present could be demonstrative of the hypermnesia he may be experiencing. Hypermnesia is a heightened or powerful memory or memory recollection.24 Hypermnesia has been documented in combatants on the battlefield or in individuals experiencing a stressful and/or traumatic event. Retired U.S. Army psychologist Lt.  Col.  Dave Grossman writes about this

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FIGURE 5.3. Jacob’s remembering (McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 90)

and the psychological and physiological effects that combat and other high stress–induced moments can have on an individual in his book On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace. He speaks at length about the “visual clarity” that soldiers and police officers have experienced during times of combat. These individuals report being able to see things with clear precision either during or after the moment. One such soldier reported having a low-lit room brighten up unexpectedly without the aid of a light source, while an officer reported seeing his partner’s spent handgun bullet casings as the size of beer cans and reading the small print on them while in a gunfight.25

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The same “visual clarity” could be said for Jacob when he is frozen with fear during the raid on the cargo truck. The fine detailing of the mother, daughter, soldier, and Jacob illustrates how his senses could be performing at a higher than normal function, especially in the close-ups that provide the most clarity in this moment. The juxtaposition of the broken panel frames alongside the closeup depictions of the daughter’s and Lizard’s faces depict similar disturbances of declarative memory that some PTSD sufferers have expressed during times of recollection of traumatic events.26 While Jacob may not be able to recall the details of the area surrounding him, the immediate details of the individuals involved in the ambush and kidnapping are clearly defined. It appears that he is struggling to force himself to remember and relive his traumatic experience, as he states later in the novel when he begins to write down his story at the behest of the character Oteka, a fellow survivor: “At first I tried to forget. Everyone worried about me, especially father. Over and over I asked myself, ‘What should I do?’ What is my purpose? Days . . . Nights . . . Weeks passed. Months passed. And then it got a little easier.”27 As Jacob slowly works to come to terms with the traumatic ordeal that he and his friends have gone through, the visual rhetoric of the graphic novel provides the possibility for readers to gain a better understanding of Jacob’s time with the LRA.

Visual Rhetoric of War Brothers The artistic elements examined so far in this chapter demonstrate the unimaginable pain and suffering Jacob experienced at the hands of the LRA and illustrate his journey of recovery after his escape. The use of color and visual representation allows for the reader to understand what Jacob did to survive and the memories he carries with him. In his retelling of his story, much of the violence that Jacob witnessed and experienced is removed so that he may better share his story with others. Through the use of color, the reader may gain an understanding of the emotions that Jacob may have felt in those instances, such as anger, anxiety, and guilt. The reader simultaneously becomes a part of the same moment and another member of the kidnapped group of individuals. Readers develop empathy for Jacob and grasp how using color is his mind’s way of helping him process these difficult memories. Additionally, the use of color helps to visually demonstrate Jacob’s possible PTSD by framing the more intense moments of the story. With the background replaced by a wall of color, the specific details, such as the turmoil that Jacob is experiencing or the struggle Tony has with his morals, are highlighted in order to demonstrate the atrocities the LRA forced the young boys to commit. The visual representations of Jacob’s experience do more than tell the story of him and his friends surviving the LRA; instead, they demonstrate for the reader the long-lasting effects of such trauma. Jacob must force himself to

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remember the fine details in order to present his experience with accuracy. The reader may come to view the jagged borders in the scene of the raiding party on the civilian transport truck as symbolic of not only Jacob living through the moment but also his struggle to forget it as well. Jacob lives with these memories, and when he shares his story, he must fight through the emotions that can be triggered by them. The visual rhetorical devices used in the graphic novel can help the reader to begin to understand the unseen physiological effects that Jacob may have experienced when he looked upon the horrors of killing and death as well as the grief that he may have felt when he contemplated what he had done in those moments and if he could be forgiven. The visual elements of the graphic novel depict the struggle that Jacob and his friends went through at the hands of the LRA as well as showing the reallife experiences of former child soldiers and victims in similar moments as authentically as possible. Used as a rhetorical device, the colors can be understood by the reader as symbolic of the guilt and fear that Jacob may have felt as well as the loss of innocence of his best friend. Not only does Tony have to live with the feeling of what it is like to kill another, he will forever be suspect to those around him. He faces the ostracism of his society’s judgment, as others remain untrusting due to what they assume to be his bloodlust. Color as a backdrop provides one way of understanding the struggle that Jacob faces when he tries to remember his past with the LRA and attempts to process what he went through and the fact that such atrocities were committed by even younger boys. At times in his remembering, he loses the bigger details like the setting around him, but the trauma of these moments has allowed him to remember the finer details such as expressions. Like others who have had improved recall when their adrenaline was up or they were in a stressful situation (sometimes explaining that all they could remember or see was the look on the person’s face), so too does it appear that Jacob has similar way of remembering.

Conclusion It is difficult for individuals who have not lived through a traumatic experience to understand the effect that continuously reliving such moments can have. They don’t understand how small day-to-day routines can become difficult to accomplish because something within that routine set off their PTSD. However, there are individuals out there who have faced such moments on and off the battlefield, and they often continue to relive those moments; they never truly leave the battlefield behind. But not all soldiers start off as soldiers. Sometimes they are created out of circumstance, training, or necessity. They face the worst that humankind can give them and bear the weight of the consequences of war. As I stated at the

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beginning of this chapter, not all who experience war are soldiers, but they are still fighters. They fight the curse of memory; they fight guilt of inaction or fear. They fight because they were forced into a situation in which they had to fight to survive, and now they must fight the guilt of surviving. Both soldier and bystander share the detriments of war together: they bear the unseen emotional, mental, and spiritual scars that war has left on them. They must go about their lives as if they had never had those experiences and nothing is wrong, as society is not always understanding of their situations. Sometimes they can fight no longer. To go back and relive horrifying experiences is a testament to the courage that individuals like Jacob in the novel—and those who have lived the experience firsthand—have inside of them. The estimated sixty-six thousand children who have been abducted throughout the years of Joseph Kony’s reign of terror are still fighting today. There are the ones who are literally still fighting for the LRA, who at this point may believe they are fighting for the “right” side or may be fighting to survive and escape. There are those who are fighting the unseen war within themselves as they figure out how to live among “normal” individuals who have not been through what they have been through. Although Kony and his army have been substantially reduced in number, power, and mobility in Uganda, they continue to terrorize the areas of northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and southern Sudan. In its wake, the LRA leaves nothing but death and destruction. It is important for those who have survived the LRA to tell their stories so that the world can learn about the atrocities that groups and individuals like Kony and the LRA commit, in hope that a time may come when someone or some group can put a stop to them.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank all those in the Armed Forces, especially those with whom I have had the pleasure to serve. I would also like to thank Dr. Antero Garcia for his guidance and input as I wrote this chapter. Thank you to my friends and loved ones as they supported me through the entire writing process. Lastly, I would like to thank the editors of this collection for giving me the opportunity to write about a profound graphic novel and subject.

Notes 1 The United States Department of Veteran’s Affair estimates 31 percent of Vietnam

veterans experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 10 percent of the first Iraq War veterans experience PTSD, 20 percent of returning veterans from the second Iraq War are experiencing PTSD, and about 11 percent of returning veterans from the

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2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

war in Afghanistan are experiencing PTSD. For further information and statistics about returning American combat veterans who have PTSD, see “PTSD: A Growing Epidemic,” NIH MedlinePlus 4, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 10–14, https://www.nlm.nih .gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pg10-14.html. See Faber Birren, Color Psychology and Color Therapy: A Factual Study of the Influence of Color on Human Life (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961). See Sonja K. Foss’s chapter “Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite H. Helmers (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). The graphic novel is geared toward young adults and is found on many suggested reading lists for school libraries around the country. Additionally, the graphic novel has been nominated for numerous awards such as an Eisner Award and Book of the Year Award. See Sharon E. McKay’s website at http://www.sharonmckay.ca/wbgn .html for further awards and nominations. In addition to reports and statements made by former LRA child soldiers and victims to larger human rights watch groups and aid organizations, author Sharon E. McKay went to Uganda to interview former lieutenants and low-ranking soldiers who were kidnapped and forced to fight in the LRA as research when composing her YA novel. See author’s website, http://www.sharonmckay.ca/wbgn.html. Joseph Kony’s reign of terror started in the late 1980s when he first developed his army, known as the Lord’s Resistance Army, to dispose the Yoweri Museveni government in Uganda. He believed himself to be a spiritual leader blessed by God and that he was destined to create a pure country for the Acholi people of northern Uganda called “Acholiland.” For further reading, see Human Rights Watch/Africa and Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Project, The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997). Human Rights Watch, The Scars of Death. Having new abductees kill other prisoners or escapees with wooden clubs is a common practice by the LRA. They use this method to set examples, develop courage in their soldiers, and/or to punish others. It is estimated that the LRA has kidnapped well over 66,000 children to serve as soldiers, servants, or wives to LRA commanders. It is also estimated that the war between the LRA and the Ugandan government has displaced 2 million Ugandans. See Jim McGovern, “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009,” H.R. 2478 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 2009). Sharon E. McKay and Daniel Lafrance, War Brothers: The Graphic Novel (Toronto: Annick Press, 2013), 1. R. A. Bryant and A. G. Harvey, “Visual Imagery in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” J Trauma Stress 9, no. 3 (1996): 613–619. For more on the different types of panel transitions, see Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 1st ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). Birren, Color Psychology and Color Therapy, 162–173. Birren, 143. In Birren’s work, he cites research findings by Gilbert Brighouse in which college students’ reaction times increased by 12 percent. Additionally, red is believed to increase heart rate and blood pressure. For more, see Birren, 144–146. In some cultures and religions, red is representative of sin and guilt. In the JudeoChristian religion, red being representative as sin in mentioned in Isaiah 1:18. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the scarlet A that Hester Prynne wears is a material representation of her adultery. For more on the association of the color red

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16 17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24 25

26

27

with sin and guilt, see University College London, “Red: Symbolic and Cultural Associations,” University College London, July 2016, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ museums-static/objectretrieval/node/277. McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 59. Klasen, Reissmann, Voss, and Okello have found in their research that many of the former child soldiers and victims of the LRA have developed either PTSD and/or traumatic guilt. This specific form of guilt is developed from experiencing constant exposure to a traumatic event. The researchers found that many of the participants also developed what they term as massive depression disorder in addition to PTSD and guilt. For further information, see Fiona Klasen et al., “The Guiltless Guilty: Trauma-Related Guilt and Psychopathology in Former Ugandan Child Soldiers,” Child Psychiatry and Human Development 46, no. 2 (2015): 180–193. The character Lizard, a high-ranking child soldier in this particular group, states in the novel that the LRA has a rule that if one does not kill, then one cannot eat the LRA’s food. Jacob volunteers to go on the raiding party to prevent him and his friends dying from starvation. McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 96. McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 91. In their research, Foa and Kozak posit that memory and stimuli are connected to each other. In this study, fear is associated with memory and is represented by three categories of information: the situation in which the specific fear is stimulated, the physiological and behavioral responses to the fear, and how the meaning of the responses and the stimuli are interpreted. Foa and Kozak examine and provide recommendations for courses of treatment in order to better understand how fear occurs in individuals as well as how to help with modifying fear and anxiety to specific situations. For more information, see E. B. Foa and M. J. Kozak, “Emotional Processing of Fear: Exposure to Corrective Information,” Psychol Bull 99, no. 1 (1986): 20–35. Psychiatrist Bessel A. van der Kolk notes in his research that individuals who are brought back to the same state-of-mind in which they first experienced a traumatic moment tend to have difficulty remembering all aspects of the moment. Some individuals have been documented as having whole or partial amnesia in their recall. See B. A. van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress,” Harv Rev Psychiatry 1, no. 5 (1994): 259. For more information on memory and memory association in PTSD patients, see T. Elbert and M. Schauer, “Burnt into Memory,” Nature 419, no. 6910 (2002): 883. Van der Kolk speaks at length about the psychophysiological responses that PTSD patients go through when they are remembering their traumatic event or are exposed to stimuli associated with the event. Many common responses are increases in heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure. For further information on the psychophysiological responses in PTSD patients, see van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score,” 254–258. For more on hypermnesia in PTSD sufferers, see van der Kolk, 253–265. Dave Grossman and Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 2nd ed. (Mascoutah: PPCT Research Publications, 2007). Van der Kolk mentions that trauma has an effect on declarative memory. PTSD suffers have difficulty remembering specific details of the traumatic event at times, but they can also have moments when specific details are clearer than the memory as a whole. See van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score,” 258. McKay and Lafrance, War Brothers, 160–161.

Chapter 6

Nat Turner, Slave Revolts, and Child-Killing in U.S. Graphic Novels JOE LOCKARD U.S. graphic literature has explored the history and issues of slavery throughout the past century. That representation has changed dramatically from the dime-a-copy 1943 Classics Illustrated comic book version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin filled with racial stereotypes to contemporary productions that focus on slave resistance and rebellion. This shift corresponds with fundamental changes in U.S. civic rhetoric following the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement and new understandings of history. Slaves were no longer pitiable and compliant subjects but instead constituted a source of resistance and outright rebellion. An ideological and aesthetic shift toward representing slavery not only as a scene of human objectification but as embodied resistance created a scene of heroic action. The representation of Nat Turner, the main protagonist of the 1831 Southampton Revolt, exemplifies this transformation. In the nineteenth century and to at least midpoint of the twentieth century, violent opposition to slavery—manifested by revolutionary figures such as Nat Turner and John Brown—received pervasive condemnation. White historians routinely denounced Turner as a fanatic, with one once-standard history attributing his “mental aberration” to the effects of a solar eclipse and speculating on “the effect of even ordinary solar phenomena on negro intelligence.”1 Even 105

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the African American community, while celebrating Turner, had hesitations. With a careful balancing of celebration and disapprobation, the black abolitionist and author William Wells Brown in 1867 described Turner as “a martyr to the freedom of his race, and a victim to his own fanaticism.”2 Brown pointed out a racial double standard in that, had insurrectionary slaves been white and in a foreign land, “the people of the United States would have been the first to recognize their claims. The efforts of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Madison Washington to strike the chains of slavery from their enslaved race will live in history, and will warn all tyrants to beware the wrath of God and the strong arm of man.”3 Any hesitation concerning Turner had disappeared a century later. In 1967, Bishop Spottswood, board chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), praised Turner as the forerunner of the urban violence during the 1960s. Since civil rights legislation and court decisions had not substantially altered life in U.S. cities for many blacks, Spottswood argued, “Just as the Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Prince Hall rebellions presaged the abolition of slavery, so the riots of the 1960’s assume the habiliments of prophecy, oracles of a new day of freedom!”4 Although praise for Turner might have been anticipated from black militant circles, the NAACP represented mainstream African American society. As a historical figure, Turner had become a legitimizer of violent response to social oppression. Graphic literature has echoed these historiographic and rhetorical shifts. Kyle Baker’s 2005–2008 work, the Nat Turner series, was an aesthetic and political milestone in the treatment of slavery in U.S. graphic novels and comics. The traditional representation of slavery in graphic editions of canonical literary texts, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn, largely elided issues of violence and African American resistance. Even where resistance appeared, often it was fictitious. In the notable example of the Classics Illustrated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, its front covers (1943–1969 editions) feature Tom fleeing from a pack of bloodhounds, a scene that never happens in the Stowe novel. Black heroism, to the extent that it even existed in these comics, functioned primarily through patient forbearance. Among history comics, such work as The War between the States (1961), one of the relatively few Civil War comics, avoided representation of slavery and depicted postwar Reconstruction as oppressive retribution by the victorious Northern states.5 Baker’s critically lauded Nat Turner, filled with images of Middle Passage death ships and infanticide, reframes the origins of violence and resistant responses. Nat Turner and slave revolts are no longer historical outliers but rather central protagonists and events. These changing terms of representation in comics and graphic novels parallel to a significant degree changes in American literature’s representation of African Americans. A near-hegemonic representation of blacks by whites was a predominant feature of twentieth-century U.S.

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literature, which shifted to the growth and development of African American cultural self-representation during the decades of the civil rights movement, including the first comics with black protagonists during the mid to late 1960s (Marvel introduced Black Panther in 1966).6 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, black agency alone no longer suffices, and themes of anticolonialism,7 resistance, and revolt resound deeply when slavery is addressed in both African American literature and comics. The present chapter aligns Kyle Baker and other artists within a broad contemporary stream of graphic novels that provide fresh fictional and historical interpretations of the violence of slaves and militant antislavery figures. This recent refiguration includes a broad swath of work such as DC Comics’ The Kents—Bleeding Kansas (1997–1998); Blaufarb and Clarke’s Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2014); the Lagos Brothers’ part-historical, part-surreal The Sons of Liberty series (2010–2012); and juvenile history comics such as Harriet Tubman (2005), John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry (2005), The Brave Escape of Ellen and William Craft (2006), and Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (2006). In mapping out changes in visual representation of slaves who revolted and armed opposition to slavery, this chapter engages with underlying shifts in U.S. cultural and philosophical beliefs relating to a particularized African American right to self-defense in the absence of freedom.

Bloody Retributions U.S. abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison wrote of black revolutionary violence with deep comprehension and sympathy despite his own principles as a Christian pacifist. Joining together the American Revolution and slave insurrections, Garrison spoke as follows at an 1838 Fourth of July oration: “Besides our own grand insurrection against the authority of the mother country, there have been many insurrections, during the last two hundred years, in various sections of the land, on the part of the victims of our tyranny, but without the success that attended our own struggle. The last was the memorable one in Southampton, Virginia, headed by a black patriot, nicknamed, in the contemptuous nomenclature of slavery, Nat Turner. . . . ‘Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,’ was our revolutionary motto. We acted upon that motto—what more did Nat Turner?”8 Garrison’s equation of a national and slave revolt posited the legitimacy of resistance to tyranny, a legitimacy derived from claimed divine sanction. Such rhetoric appealed to white public support in making the comparison but relied on a false equivalence. A heavy majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned or had owned slaves, and white antiroyalism in colonies such as Virginia and South Carolina owed significantly to widespread belief that Crown policies were encouraging slave

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insurrections and emancipation demands.9 The promises of the Declaration of Independence did not extend to African Americans, hollowing out Garrison’s attempted equation. Much modern and contemporary U.S. discussion of black slave revolts has relied on this facile and reductive comparison with the American Revolution. Kyle Baker breaks with the falseness of such too-common comparisons by rooting the origins of Nat Turner’s insurrection in Africa and the Middle Passage genocide. This violence dominates Baker’s novel, beginning with a front cover—possibly influenced by the militant artwork of Emory Douglas—featuring a black hand clutching an uplifted sword in the night against the background of a luminous moon. The first section of Nat Turner, titled “Home,” provides sepia images of village life interrupted by a slave raid.10 Succeeding wordless panels relate the story of Turner’s mother as a young woman who experiences the raid’s killings and captures,11 transport in a shackled coffle,12 attempted escape and resistance,13 branding with a hot iron,14 and embarkation onto a slave ship. As she lies chained in a rat-infested hold, the woman next to her dies and leaves an orphaned baby. After the crew pitches the dead woman’s body over the side to the sharks, Turner’s mother holds the baby and then decides that death would be preferable to slavery. There ensues a struggle on deck in which sailors attempt to save the child. She bites one of their arms and causes the baby to drop screaming into the mouth of an awaiting shark15 (see figure 6.1). This is a moment of visceral reaction, one that Baker relies on heavily in his visual argument. Baker said of this image that “politics are hard to draw. Babies being thrown to hungry sharks by their own mothers from slave ships is something visual and human, not political.”16 That same technique of shock value reappears throughout the book. Upon arrival in America, Nat Turner’s mother stands on an auction block, waiting to be sold.17 Over the course of the Middle Passage, humanity has been divided into useful and useless, valuable and valueless. This separation constitutes an African American foundation story. The story continues forward through preternatural transmission since, without hearing it from his mother, Nat Turner as a three- or four-year-old child is able to relate to other children how the baby dropped into a shark’s mouth.18 A prehistory of cultural destruction, genocide, human objectification, and one child’s horrific death establishes the first half of Baker’s equation between Africa and America. What emerges in the following sections is a story of fated response in kind, one where Nat Turner and his followers pursue a bloody course that is less about retribution than about a brief mirroring of the violent history of African enslavement. A second “Education” section relates the terms of oppression under slavery, including denial of communication by traditional drumming,19 prohibition of education, and cruel punishments for disobedience. Turner’s father resists by running away,20 and as an adult, Turner does

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FIGURE 6.1. Baker, Nat Turner, 55

too for a month before choosing to return.21 Baker weaves lengthy selections from Thomas Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner through frames describing Turner’s self-education,22 Bible-reading, and spiritual transformation.23 Of particular importance is the theme of family separation as an establishing cause of anguish and unstoppable anger. After the heartbreaking childhood

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loss of his own father, Turner loses his wife and child to a slave auction.24 At the level of individual history, this latter separation constitutes extratextual conjecture by Baker, but at the level of collective history, Turner represents the innumerable forced family separations that did occur. As Turner stands distraught—desolate and alone—and contemplates both the dirt floor drawings of his sold-off child and the secure, happy children of his master’s family,25 a second establishing cause for his rebellion becomes clear. Now that slavery has destroyed Turner’s family, with opportunity, he will destroy the families of slaveholders. Baker employs parallel visual and textual domains that interact to create an interpretive exegesis, one that “expands or even contradicts” Gray’s account.26 Although Gray’s text is of at least questionable reliability given its antagonism to Turner and ultimate description of him as a monster, its indirect and filtered testimony provides the only available approximation of Turner’s voice. The interaction of these textual and visual domains synthesizes the words of a nineteenth-century white attorney, an amanuensis writing a putative transcription, and the visual interpretation of a contemporary black artist. The result “seems to possess the occult ability to circulate in our time and in that of American plantation slavery.”27 Baker’s work is to convert the horror embedded in Gray’s narration into a source of enlightenment for readers who may remain alienated from the story’s scenes of violence. Interpreters of Gray’s narrative have long struggled with this difficulty, often manifesting an inability to comprehend such violence. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the most penetrating minds of the U.S. abolitionist movement, phrased the matter in an essay published in the early months of the Civil War, “The more remarkable the personal character of Nat Turner, the greater the amazement that he should not have appreciated the extreme felicity of his position as a slave. In all insurrections, the standing wonder seems to be that the slaves most trusted and best used should be most deeply involved.”28 Baker’s visual argument in the “Education” section is that not only did black society conceal the depth of its antagonism, but white society operated under illusions that denial of education29 and evangelical preaching30 had pacified an enslaved population. Like the slaveholding class, a contemporary reader’s assumptions need to be shattered. The term education applies not only to Turner’s autodidactic learning and spiritual awakening but to the graphic novel’s reader who is learning about slavery, resistance, the causes of insurrection, and its all-encompassing violence. In Baker’s retelling, Turner’s education reaches an apotheosis with the revelation of a new order of divine justice. Converting a critical moment in the Confessions into a unified splash panel spread across two pages,31 Baker draws a powerful portrait of Turner with arms and face uplifted toward a stormy heaven atop the text of his famous 1825 vision of blood on the corn. That

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symbolic invocation of the Christian Eucharist and its promise of a new covenant prophesies the 1831 Southampton revolt. Resonant with this prophetic vision of violence to come, the third “Freedom” section opens with images of a young white boy greeting and receiving a happy response from a large, muscled black slave chopping wood32 with an axe that he would soon use with revolutionary rage to chop off the boy’s head33 (see figure 6.2). Page after page is filled with drawings of the revolt’s killings as Baker works to capture the passion of these events, with muted coloring bringing focus to the emotions of the protagonists. The killing of innocents arises again when, after the first attack that slaughtered five members of the Travis family,34 Turner remembers that there was an infant and dispatches two men, Will and Henry, to return to the house and kill the child in its cradle.35 This is a moral balance point both in the Confessions and in Baker’s version of the narrative. If one deliberately returns to murder an overlooked child, what moral prohibitions remain? It is this line that separates commentary from nineteenth-century characterizations of these events as “indiscriminate murder”36 and “inhuman fanaticism”37 and Baker’s twenty-first-century comprehension of this choice as a wholehearted commitment to violent anticolonial struggle. As Turner mulls his decision in front of the Travis house, Baker adds two wordless thought bubbles with memories of black children being sold and pulled away from screaming parents. This is a conscious and conscientious choice rather than, as in the words of another 1830s observer, madness by Nat Turner and terror spread by “his deluded drunken handful of fellows.”38 Similar questions still trouble contemporary readers, as when Marc Singer wrote an appreciative review of Nat Turner but found “troubling ethical positions.” Singer asks, “Is this an admirable refusal to sugar-coat Turner’s rebellion, an insistence on showing the true cost of a futile revolt whose victims were mostly children? Is it a fair and balanced depiction of what really happened in Southampton in 1831? Or does the sheer graphic overkill leaven the image with a perverse undercurrent of joy?”39 Singer concludes with a wish that Nat Turner “had the courage to judge or condemn its hero as easily as it praises him,” a wish that ignores the power of Manichean rage where death is the foreknown price of revolt. A slave revolt in Virginia, where arms were entirely in the hands of white masters, was collective suicide. To look away from both the child-killing of the Southampton revolt and its origins—as does Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation (2016) in its account of the insurrection, a directorial decision likely made to preserve marketability—raises ethical questions about willful blindness. Nat Turner is not about revenge, a point on which Consuela Francis correctly contradicts Singer’s interpreted uncertainty,40 but about equalizing the pain and terms of death. The violation of a norm of protection afforded to the young and helpless constitutes a declaration of a total war, one fought for existence itself. Or,

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FIGURE 6.2. Baker, Nat Turner, 135

phrased differently, “Killing the children of oppressors is a desperate response from an underclass whose own children have no future of freedom, equality, and opportunity.”41 Nat Turner becomes the destroyer-prophet, the prophet of the Book of Joshua’s tenth chapter who commands and leads the destruction of all enemy lives. Or perhaps he is one of the avengers of the Babylonian

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exile in Psalm 139 who dash children against rocks. Those who have cut off the futures of so many children will see their own children die before them. There will be equality in child-killing, if nothing else. Adam Jones argues cogently that the subaltern rage manifested in slave revolts functions along a continuum from symbolic aggression to limited exhibitions of subaltern dominance, to local violence (riots, pogroms, massacres, revolts), and finally to mass atrocity and systematic genocidal campaigns.42 On this continuum, child-killing represents a point of equalization between enemy groups, one where massive pain and emotional devastation can be inflicted even if the insurrection fails. Baker’s graphic historiography drives readers toward an understanding of this cruel social equation. The narrative panels proceed through a long series of killings of white slaveholders and their families with crude weapons: swords, axes, clubs, and then firearms taken from ransacked houses. Bodies sprawl across floors; dismembered heads and body appendages litter domestic scenes. Slaveholders discover families killed in their absence; and alerted white families flee for their lives. At the same time, Baker emphasizes the conversion of a small band of insurgent slaves into a collective militia. The second of only two splash panels in the novel features Nat Turner atop a horse, framed by black arms waving seized rifles.43 Turner sits in the New World liberator pose of equestrian statues of Bolívar, San Martín, L’Ouverture, and Dessalines. By giving this scene equal weight with the previous “revelation” splash panel,44 Baker points toward the necessary partnership between insurrectionary inspiration and militant realization. This conceptual and graphic binary links Turner’s prophetic religious faith and his commitment to armed rebellion. Revolt witnesses the truth of Turner’s revelation. Even antebellum opponents of slavery who were horrified by the Southampton insurrection believed it was a sign of divine anger. Projecting such a belief, for example, Jacob Abbott, a conservative Massachusetts writer with conflicted feelings on slavery, suggested that the rebellion showed “that where there is oppression, the providence of God so orders it, that sorrows shall fall upon the oppressor as well as on the oppressed.”45 Baker provides his readers with a secular history of the rebellion and leaves them to decide such questions of providence. The revolt’s defeat arrives in scenes of drunkenness46 and disorganization by rebel slaves in the face of a mobilized white militia. Rebels die as the mounted militia sweeps through their ranks. Will, the child-killer, transforms into a figure of heroic defiance in the face of death,47 fighting with his massive bulk to bring down as many as possible before he also falls. Baker’s version of the Confessions seeks to redeem Will for his earlier acts, using the visual trope of a grim determined hero-giant battling for freedom to his last breath. He is the large, powerful black man that America has so long feared. Will, finally lying facedown, surrounded by militia, becomes representative of rebels whose defeat can be remembered as victory for the human spirit.

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Baker’s deep respect for the strength and fortitude of Nat Turner, Will, and the other slave rebels is summarized in “Triumph,” the fourth and final section. The already compelling wordlessness of the novel becomes eloquent in brief scenes of Nat Turner’s imprisonment, death walk, and public execution. Turner’s hanging body is not that of one man but of multitudes of lynched black people.48 The picnic-eating mob with their young children at the execution, arrived to watch another black man defeated and destroyed as a spectacle, instead watches with subdued awe the triumphant quiet with which Nat Turner dies. The hanging turns into a self-perpetuating transformative moment in which words and images convert to the power that will create more rebellions. It is a Christlike moment anticipated when Thomas Gray asks Turner, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” and Turner replies, “Was not Christ crucified?”49 It is a moment where, as Bruno suggests, “The image of Nat Turner-as-Christ now erases that of Turner-as ‘terrorist.’”50 As with Christ’s passion, the repetition of Turner’s story amplifies its power. Gray, having transcribed and published Turner’s words, becomes the unintentional means through which that revolutionary power finds transmission. In the book’s final scene, a black woman house slave picks up a copy of Confessions and steals away into the darkness to read Turner’s story. Nat Turner concludes with the transformation of violence into words, an essential ethic in converting injustice into justice. In the following section, I will consider representational strategies of falsification, ambiguity, and confrontation in U.S. graphic literature’s treatment of historical slavery and revolt.

Nat Turner and Representation Strategies Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner was the work of a white supremacist confronting black revolt and failing to understand. Baker’s Nat Turner converts the white supremacist premises that underlie Gray’s writing into a new visual text of liberation. Baker published this novel in the social context of a half century of confrontation with white supremacism since the post–World War II civil rights movement emerged. Integral to this political change has been the continuing revision of U.S. history in which a dominant EuroAmerican educational culture has framed white supremacy as part of an unfortunate past rather than a still-formative presence. Nat Turner directly responds to such negation, particularly in its challenge to popular representations of Turner as a disturbed religious maniac who caused unutterable and incomprehensible violence. Comics and graphic novels historically have been an expressive genre of U.S. and international modernism that engages heavily with questions of violence. That has been a persistent complaint against them from social conservatives,

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who allege that violence in comics makes them unfit for juvenile readers. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund frequently has been involved in censorship challenges against graphic novels for violent content, such as Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell’s The Graveyard Book, Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl series, and Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed Persepolis.51 As Alicia Decker has argued, graphic novels have a significant advantage in helping readers—especially students—grasp the realities of violence. Graphical depiction of violence becomes an ethical choice when many readers “are removed from the daily brutalities of violence, they imagine war as an abstraction of sorts—something that exists but is tangential to their daily lives.”52 This argument for ethical reading applies as much to the violence of historical slavery as to contemporary global militarization. The nexus of violence and racism in comics has been the subject of extensive discussion, together with comics as a source of antiracist response. While there are examples from among major mainstream productions, such as Marvel’s X-Men and Black Panther series, a comprehensive review of racism and antiracism in modern U.S. comics persuasively identifies underground comics as far more militantly engaged.53 Yet despite massive echoes of race slavery throughout the corpus of U.S. graphic literature, slavery remains far more likely to appear as a plot element or trope than as topical history. The marketwary mainstream comics industry has been slower to engage with the specifics of African American history and the experience of slavery. Compounding this lacuna, the graphic literature of slavery competes against implicit and explicit white supremacist comics that engage in historical falsification. Taking one very explicit example, Justin Murphy’s neo- Confederate graphic novel Cleburne (2008) spins a little-remembered proposal by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne to enlist black slaves into a revisionist historical imagining of black volunteers coming to the aid of the Confederacy54 (see figure 6.3). Beginning with a small kernel of history, the novel constructs a false history to support readers who wish to believe in the supposed participation of African Americans in the South’s fight to preserve slavery. Cleburne proposes a counterhistorical myth that reshapes the Confederate military elite as an unheeded source of racial enlightenment. Cleburne becomes a white race hero who dies because wisdom did not prevail on the battlefield or among Southern policymakers. Confederate violence appears as a shared white and black battle for freedom rather than as a struggle to maintain slavery and white supremacy. Where Nat Turner works to explain the violence of the Southampton revolt, Cleburne falsifies the historical record to suggest that blacks supported the Confederate cause. In short, the proposition that Cleburne represents is that, if given opportunity, enslaved African Americans would have preferred to join a white proslavery revolt to advance their own interests in self-determination.

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FIGURE 6.3. Justin Murphy, Cleburne, rear cover detail

Falsification remains a minor analytic chord. Matters do not devolve so much on historical falsification as on how themes and scenes of violence get interwoven into contemporary historical representations. Such questions of how to address the violence created by enslavement and racial subordination inhabit the graphic literature of U.S. slavery. Resistance and revolts exercise a magnetic fascination for graphic artists because of their potential for visualized action and energy. Cleburne, filled with glorified battlefield carnage from a white revolt, illustrates how that same attraction can be deployed for highly selective representation that refuses to recognize aggression against blacks. While Cleburne’s back cover blurb praises the “revolutionary concept” of enlisting African American soldiers and decries “racism,” this only serves as a thin facade for promoting the perversely contradicted notion that black slaves might have gained their freedom by fighting for the Confederacy, which sought to ensure their continued enslavement. Cleburne lacks what Nat Turner possesses abundantly, a clear logic for the use of violence as a response to dehumanization and deprivation of fundamental human rights. If racial selectivity, misrepresentation, and poor reasoning manifest themselves in such addresses to the violence of slavery, avoidance functions on more ambiguous terms. Craig Ross’s digital edition of Steal Away: The Visions of Nat Turner (2014) shares with Baker’s Nat Turner its near-wordlessness or silence. In Ross’s work, originally hand-painted woodcuts, there is even less text than Baker employs. Ross emphasizes the spiritual quest that Turner pursued in reaction to slavery. Repeated scenes of Turner at prayer, renderings of Turner’s haloed head that echo Orthodox hagiographic style, and the title choice— “Steal Away,” the long-popular African American gospel song—establish this

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spiritual dimension. Further, a series of panels in Steal Away pay interpretive attention to the signs Turner observed in nature and their transmutation into supernatural symbols.55 Ross includes one scene of attack against a white family but no more.56 In comparison with Baker’s Nat Turner, Steal Away places much less emphasis on insurrectionary violence. No children die on the pages of this comic. On the one hand, Ross does attend to the spiritual dimension of the Confessions, but at the same time, he skirts the unavoidable fact that the narrative describes a widespread massacre of whites and blacks. The integration of a religious call for prophetic justice and its attempted realization through civil insurrection, apparent in Baker’s version of Nat Turner, remains an unattended challenge in Steal Away. Another form of ambiguity occurs in the retelling of Nat Turner’s story as a juvenile book. Michael Burgan’s Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (2006) tries to moderate or evade representation of violence even as its front cover features a group of angry black men with curled fists and torches charging through a picket fence gate toward a home. This comic book, targeted at a third- to fourth-grade reading level, is one of a series dealing with U.S. history, which includes other slavery-related topics such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The visual problem that the comic seeks to solve concerns how to frame mass violence for a juvenile audience, especially the murder of children. Its solution is to depict fighting but avoid moments of bloodshed and injured or dead bodies. The first killings, those of the Travis family, happen entirely out of frame, but that avoidance becomes more difficult as the story continues. When Nat Turner kills young Margaret Whitehead, a racially stereotyped blonde, readers do not see the killing but only her crumpled body lying partially concealed in the corner of another frame.57 Another poignant panel just below features Margaret’s young sister peeping out from under a bed with tears in her eyes, hiding to save her own life58 (see figure 6.4). In choosing to illustrate this textual moment when one daughter dies and another lives, aided by one of the family’s slaves, Burgan offers young readers—many presumably white—the imagination of hope for survival. Avoiding explicit visualization of violence renders a juvenile-oriented comic more palatable (and presumably more acceptable to school librarians) while still representing the deaths involved. Both this comic and Jason Glaser’s John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry (2006), also from the Graphic Library series, conclude, unavoidably, with scenes of the hangings of Turner and Brown. They employ quite similar strategies to circumvent explicit figurations of slaughter, but historical accuracy does not allow them to avoid the reality of executions. John Hendrix’s John Brown: His Fight for Freedom (2009), designed for approximately the same juvenile reading level, uses much the same strategy. Its penultimate illustration features John Brown with a noose around his neck, delivering his famous final message: “If it is deemed necessary

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FIGURE 6.4. Detail, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, 12

that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in the slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments . . . so let it be done.”59 Brown’s invocation of the sacrifice of his own children prophesied the war dead to come shortly. The hangings of Turner and Brown in each of these texts point toward more violence and death to come in the absence of justice, and the artists’ narrative strategies act to balance ambiguous age-appropriate illustration with the evocative representation of these figures’ actual fate.

Conclusion I return finally to the issue of how visual interpretation can confront the historical realities of slave revolts and resistance. There has been a documentary turn in graphic treatments of slavery with such work as Zimmerman and Vansant’s excellent The Hammer and the Anvil: Frederick Douglass,

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Abraham Lincoln, and the End of Slavery in America (2012) and Trevor Getz’s prize-winning Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (2010), the latter being an exploration of intersections between Gold Coast traditional slavery and nineteenth-century British colonialism. Nat Turner has gained attention because “instead of easy answers, Baker gives us hard questions.”60 It challenges interpretations that have attempted to delimit Turner’s historical force by a frank illustration of the killing of entire families, especially the murder of infants. In doing so through visual confrontation, Baker contests a mono-racial specificity of concern for the murder of whites. The fear and upset caused by militant black resistance and slave revolts have deep roots in U.S. history. Writers of the day attributed Turner’s revolt to David Walker’s famous manifesto Address to the Coloured People of the World (1829) and northern abolitionists; later commentators were quick to attribute slave resistance and outright revolts to the spirit of Nat Turner.61 Aptheker’s argument concerning pervasive white fears of black rebellion has gained strength and historical evidence since he advanced the thesis nearly seventy-five years ago.62 These fears echoed throughout the Jim Crow system, twentieth-century urban mass violence in the United States, and reactions to the Civil Rights Movement, and they have not dissipated in the present day. The memory of such fears born under slavery contest still-extant social structures of white supremacy and ask on what terms these will change. Retelling a slave revolt history raises questions about the roles of violence and fear of violence in creating racial justice. Thomas Jefferson, with all his complex relationship to slavery, exemplified such white racial fear. Watching the revolts against slavery in Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean, with all their attendant killings of whites, Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1797 that a plan for emancipation needed to be pursued or the result would be the death of white children in slave uprisings: The sooner we put some plan under way, the greater hope there is that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably to its ultimate effect. But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children. The Murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos63 has already reached us; the revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us, and happy if we make timely provision to give it an easy passage over our land.64

If the problem of slavery was not solved, according to Jefferson, white Americans would become responsible for the deaths of their own children in the resulting bloody revolts. There was no general liberation of slaves, and over a generation later in 1831, Nat Turner and his fellow rebels enacted Jefferson’s prediction. In the confrontational graphic literature of slavery, we read an

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ethical charge to understand the legitimacy of demands for liberation and that responsibility for counterviolence cannot be placed upon the enslaved.

Notes 1 James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1902), 94.

2 William Wells Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His

Fidelity (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867), 24.

3 Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion, 36. 4 Stephen Gill Spottswood, “Signs of the Times,” The Crisis 74, no. 9 (November

1967): 453.

5 Jozef Pecina, “The American Civil War in Comics,” in From Theory to Practice 2014:

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Anglophone Studies, ed. Gregory Jason Bell and Katarína Nemčoková (Zlín, Czech Republic: Tomas Bata University, 2015), 175. Keith P. Feldman, “Review: Black Panther. Comic Book Series,” MELUS 32, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 255–258. Lysa Rivera, “Appropriate(d) Cyborgs: Diasporic Identities in Dwayne McDuffie’s Deathlok Comic Book Series,” MELUS 32, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 103–127. William Lloyd Garrison, An Address Delivered in Marlboro Chapel, July 4, 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 9–10. Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 15–30. Kyle Baker, Nat Turner (New York: Abrams, 2008), 11–19. Baker, Nat Turner, 20–28. Baker, 29–33. Baker, 34–35. Baker, 36–38. Baker, 55. Ed Matthews, “Interview: Kyle Baker,” Popimage.com, 2005, http://www.popimage .com/content/kylebaker2005.html. Baker, Nat Turner, 56. Baker, 57. Baker, 60–68. Baker, 76–84. Baker, 94–96. Baker, 85–89. Baker, 92–93. Baker, 98–99. Baker, 100–101. Andrew J. Kunka, “Intertextuality of the Historical Graphic Narrative: Kyle Baker’s ‘Nat Turner’ and the Styron Controversy,” College Literature 38, no. 3 (2011): 171. Michael A. Cheney, “Slave Memory without Words in Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner,” Callaloo 36, no. 2 (2013): 279–297. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” Atlantic Monthly 8, no. 46 (August 1861): 186. See also Higginson, Travellers and Outlaws: Episodes in American History (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1888), 321–322.

Nat Turner, Slave Revolts, and Child-Killing in U.S. Graphic Novels • 121 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54

55 56

Baker, Nat Turner, 89. Baker, 91. Baker, 102–103. Baker, 107–108. Baker, 135. Baker, 112–117. Baker, 118–121. Robert Reid Howison, A History of Virginia, from Its Discovery and Settlement by Europeans to the Present Time, vol. 2. (Richmond: Drinker and Morris, 1848), 440. Howison, History of Virginia, 444. Daniel R. Goodloe, Inquiry into the Causes Which Have Retarded the Accumulation of Wealth and Increase of Population in the Southern States: In Which the Question of Slavery Is Considered in a Politico-Economical Point of View (Washington, D.C.: W. Blanchard, 1846), 48. Marc Singer, “Kyle Baker, Nat Turner,” I Am Not the Beastmaster (blog), March 18, 2010, http://notthebeastmaster.typepad.com/weblog/2010/03/index.html. Consuela Francis, “Drawing the Unspeakable: Kyle Baker’s Slave Narrative,” in Comics and the US South, ed. Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 113–137. Joe Lockard, “Nat Turner and the Palestinians,” Souciant, July 12, 2016, http:// souciant.com/2016/07/nat-turner-and-the-palestinians/. Adam Jones, Genocides of the Oppressed, ed. Nicolas A. Robins and Adam Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 47–49, 185. Baker, Nat Turner, 140–141. Baker, 102–103. Jacob Abbott, New England, and Her Institutions (London: R. W. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1835), 113. Abbott, New England, 164–165. Abbott, 172–176. Abbott, 197. Abbott, 189. Tim Bruno, “Nat Turner after 9/11: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 4 (2016): 929. Betsy Gomez, “Barefoot Gen Ban Lifted,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, August 28, 2013, http://cbldf.org/2013/08/barefoot-gen-ban-lifted/. Alicia C. Decker and Mauricio Castro, “Teaching History with Comic Books: A Case Study of Violence, War, and the Graphic Novel,” History Teacher 45, no. 2 (February 2012): 178. Leonard Rifas, “Race and Comix,” in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 27–38. For the “black Confederate” myth and its development, see Kevin Levin, “Black Confederates: Out of the Attic and into the Mainstream,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 4 (December 2014): 627–635, and Bruce Levine, “In Search of a Usable Past: Neo-Confederates and Black Confederates,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 187–211. Craig E. Ross, Steal Away: The Visions of Nat Turner (Springfield: Dumpster Pizza Press, 2014), 7–12. Ross, Steal Away, 16–17.

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57 Michael Burgan, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (Mankato: Capstone Press, 2006), 12. 58 The Confessions gives two versions of the death of the Whitehead family. In the first,

59 60 61 62 63

64

probably accurate to Turner’s self-report, he killed Margaret Whitehead outside the house. In the second version provided by Gray, Turner killed Margaret inside the house. In the same room, her sister, who survived, listened while concealed under the bed. Burgan synthesizes these two versions. Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Baltimore: Thomas R. Gray, 1831), 13, 19. John Hendrix, John Brown: His Fight for Freedom (New York: Abrams, 2009), 34–35. William Murray, “Reimagining Terror in the Graphic Novel: Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner and the Cultural Imagination,” CEA Critic 77, no. 3 (2015): 330. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1993), 106–113. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 18–52. “As when the rising gales, pent in the woods, begin to mutter, and roll along soft whispers, that to the mariners betoken an approaching storm of wind.” Virgil, Aeneid 10, lines 98–99. See Benjamin Apthorp Gould, The Works of Virgil: Translated into English Prose, vol. 2. (London: Geo. B. Whittaker et al., 1826), 321. Barbara Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 29, 1 March 1796–31 December 1797 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 519–520.

Chapter 7

Sinne Fianna Fáil Women, Irish Rebellions, and the Graphic Novels of Gerry Hunt CHRISTINA M. KNOPF Gerry Hunt has been called “Ireland’s biggest selling graphic novelist,”1 with works geared to a growing adult audience for comics.2 Hunt is an advocate of Irish-created comics being Irish in content3 and has written, among other things, four historical graphic novels with O’Brien Press about periods of rebellion in Ireland: Blood upon the Rose: Easter 1916; The Rebellion That Set Ireland Free (2010) on the Easter Rising of 1916; At War with the Empire: Ireland’s Fight for Independence (2012) about the Irish War of Independence; 1913: Larkin’s Labour War (2013) about the 1913 Dublin Lockout; and Bobby Sands: Freedom Fighter (2016) about the Troubles and hunger strikes of 1980–1981. The popularity of his work reflects the prominence of the past as both an element and a subject of Irish culture.4 In the age of reconciliation, political art in Ireland is controversial,5 and Hunt’s commemorations of Irish rebels are no exception. Blood upon the Rose tells the story of the 1916 Easter Rising—an attempt by a small group of militant Irish republicans to win independence from England—from its early planning by Irish rebels to their final executions, with a focus on the tragic romance between Sinn Féin cartoonist Grace Gifford and Irish Republican Brotherhood 123

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leader Joseph Plunkett. Hunt’s own father was involved in the Rising and was active in the War of Independence, and Hunt is open in his sympathy for the volunteers.6 Correspondingly, he has been criticized for overly romanticized depictions of the rebellion in Blood upon the Rose7—which was developed from copious amounts of research and distilled into just forty-six pages of frames filled with architecturally accurate depictions of Dublin and photograph-based likenesses of historical figures.8 Bobby Sands brought O’Brien Press a £5,116-award from the Arts Council to fund the book, drawing complaints that public funds should not be used for political messages about which there is no consensus. Sands was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who led, and died on, a hunger strike in Her Majesty’s (HM) Prison Maze. The strikes and resulting deaths triggered a surge of Provisional IRA activity and international media attention, which drew positive and negative attention to the republican movement. Hunt’s graphic novel, the first of its kind, is designed to bring both the personal and political Bobby Sands story to life. Critics of the book, however, argue that it elevates terrorism to an art form9 and is republican propaganda that allows the Sinn Féin to rewrite history.10 Additional criticisms include that the book sends an inappropriate message to children in a youth-centered medium11 and depicts intimate scenes without the Sands family approval.12 Proponents on the other side, including Hunt, who has called the IRA advocate a personal hero, claim that the story is respectful of Sands,13 presents an accurate picture of events, and offers insight into other moments of Irish history.14 Hunt’s historical works At War with the Empire and Larkin’s Labour War lacked central martyr figures like Plunkett and Sands and correspondingly lacked controversy. At War with the Empire details the Declaration of Independence in 1919 and the subsequent guerrilla warfare across that country, which led to the contested Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Described on the O’Brien Press website as “accessible and informative,” critical reviews noted it only for its exciting and atmospheric yet confusingly abbreviated portrayal of the events of 1919–1921.15 Larkin’s Labour War, which recounts the efforts of “Big Jim Larkin” to organize low-paid workers who were crowded dangerously into tenement buildings and the subsequent hardships of being locked out of their jobs without pay, is lauded for its accurate and evenhanded portrayal of the labor leaders and the police.16 The interpretation of the past has long been at the heart of national conflict in Ireland,17 frequently with no consensus as to how even recent history should be remembered,18 which places acts of commemoration at the center of both dissension and reconciliation.19 One aspect of memory still being negotiated is the place of women in Irish rebellion. As Rosemary Sales explained, “The conflict in Northern Ireland is not merely about relations between the two communities within the state, it is about wider identification with territory and culture.”20 Not only were Catholics and women excluded from full citizenship in Northern Ireland, but

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both the Protestant and Catholic churches throughout Ireland have promoted conservative views on gender relations, including a division of labor that confines women primarily to subservient domestic roles. With national and sociopolitical identities based on community loyalties and religious affiliations, this has meant that women and women’s concerns have remained largely invisible.21 Women’s roles were not as glamorous nor as celebrated as their male coun­ terparts’, but the women who served in the Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen’s Council) with the IRA made critical, dangerous, and sometimes deadly con­ tributions to the war effort. Moreover, with little distinction between the battlefield and the home front, they were not the only women participating in the conflict.22 The republican women’s organization was formed in April 1914. Led by Countess Constance Markievicz, it became an auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers after the 1916 Rising, with the purpose of advancing “the cause of Irish liberty”23 through organizing women to assist in funding, arming, and equipping Irish men for the defense of Ireland and to take up arms themselves if necessary. Yet a century later, the extent of women’s role in the Irish War of Independence was only just being revealed,24 their history in the Anglo­Irish War having long been downplayed or ignored, subordinate to their portrayals as “peacemakers” separated from the conflict.25 Hunt has been praised for his “refreshing inclusion” of the active involve­ ment of women in the Rising,26 which has historically been neglected despite indications that up to ninety women participated.27 Recognizing the impor­ tance of storytelling form in nonfiction comics, goals and narrative choices in historical texts,28 and the interaction of narrative and public memory con­ struction,29 this chapter uses narrative criticism to consider the portrayal of women in Irish rebellion and revolution as told in Hunt’s graphic novels. Nar­ rative analysis focuses on structural elements of a story and how they accom­ plish a rhetorical purpose.30 These narrative elements include narrator, setting, characters, events, temporality, causality, theme, and genre.31 This analysis will, first, focus on the element of time because of the medium’s ability to spatially juxtapose the past, present, and future.32 In comics, narrative time is often of particular interest because of the intertwining of time and space, and many writers take advantage of the medium’s particular ability to distort chronolo­ gies for aesthetic and memorial purposes.33 Second, and predominately, the analysis will focus on the element of characters because of the contested gen­ der roles in the history of Irish revolution.34 Characters help shape not only the narrative itself but also the ideology of the story.35

Once Upon a Time: The Revelations of Temporal Relations Examination of a narrative’s temporal relations includes considering time frame, natural order, order of presentation, and pace.36 Hunt told his

126 • Christina M. Knopf

multivolume tale of Ireland’s struggles with England beginning with the Easter Rising of 1916 in Blood upon the Rose (published in 2010), followed by the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921 in At War with the Empire (published in 2012), continued in the Dublin Lockout of 1913 in Larkin’s Labour War (published in 2013), and finished with the prison protests of 1980–1981 in Bobby Sands (published in 2016). The Rising is considered the first armed action of the Irish revolutionary period, and so it is a fitting starting place to tell the story of Blood upon the Rose. Though the Easter Week rebellion was a military failure, it gave momentum to the republican movement, which led to the War of Independence, making At War with the Empire a logical follow-up publication. The blanket protests, dirty protests, and hunger strikes that began in 1980 were within the period of Irish history known as the Troubles, which were the ethno-nationalist conflicts in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1998. Hunt tells the story of Provisional IRA member Bobby Sands within the context of this period, including the “Bloody Sunday” Bogside Massacre of 1972 and the attempted assassination of former member of parliament (MP) Bernadette Devlin McAliskey in 1981. With regard to the publication timeline, the only event Hunt presented out of historical chronology was the labor dispute of 1913–1914. This is also the only rebellion about which Hunt has written that was not properly part of the revolution (though many key players in Ireland’s fight for independence rose to prominence during the strikes). Not only do Hunt’s publications begin with his telling of the 1916 Rising, but his other books are set against the backdrop of 1916, making Blood upon the Rose both the actual and the conceptual starting place for his narratives. The importance of the 1916 events is emphasized by the graphic novel’s subtitle of “The Rebellion That Set Ireland Free”37 and the pace of the book. Covering just a week and a half in forty-eight pages, Blood upon the Rose has a slower pace, giving more attention to fewer moments, than the decade covered in the sixty-four pages of At War with the Empire, the year retold in the fifty-seven pages of Larkin’s Labour War, or the more than fifteen years recounted in Bobby Sands’ sixty-two pages. Additionally, the events of 1916 are used as a reference point in the other graphic novels. The inside front cover of At War with the Empire calls on the 1916 Rising to frame the growing dissatisfaction with British rule by 1918.38 A “historical note” at the end of Larkin’s Labour War comments that 1913 marked the start of a turbulent decade and brought to prominence James Connolly, a leader “in the 1916 Rising, which [led] to the War of Independence, the Civil War, and eventually, the establishment of the Irish Free State.”39 The inside front cover of Bobby Sands also remarks on the 1916 Rising as the first of a series of events that led to the civil rights fights in Northern Ireland at the end of the century.40 Indeed, in Irish memory, the Easter Rising has taken on mythic proportions that reach past its immediate time and place,41 extending into a commemoration of sacrifices in the Great

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War and beyond.42 Additionally, the events of 1916, as well as those of 1981, are part of an overlapping, perpetually unresolved, mutually reinforcing contest of remembrance and revision.43 The special place of 1916 in Irish memory is reflected in Hunt’s version of the events, which is the only one of his stories of rebellion that departs at all from a near-perfect chronological format. Whereas the other books work through the historical events from early to late moments, Blood upon the Rose opens on May 3, 1916, as Grace Gifford prepares to marry rebel leader Joseph Plunkett just hours before he is executed.44 Through Plunkett’s jail-time reflections,45 the story restarts on April 23 and then moves forward chronologically, ending with Plunkett’s May 4, 1916, execution,46 just hours after his marriage that opened Hunt’s story. Where the straightforward timelines lend Hunt’s stories a documentarian’s sense of historical accuracy, the flashback of the Rising emphasizes how that particular moment in history shaped the destiny of Ireland and its people. The framing of the flashback within the brief and doomed marriage of Grace and Joseph Plunkett lends the Rising and its aftermath an air of tragedy, honor, and romance. Likewise, the role of Grace Gifford Plunkett in these events sets the stage for the place of women’s involvement in Hunt’s accounts (see figure 7.1).

From Widows to Warriors: Female Characters in the Rebellions Analyzing characters in a narrative involves not only identifying who, or even what, the main and supporting players are but also looking at their development, interactions, and traits.47 The first character Hunt introduces in his first graphic novel of Irish rebellion is Grace Gifford, Joseph Plunkett’s fiancée, soon to be his widow, who is preparing to marry Plunkett in jail prior to his execution. Opening the story of the Rising, which is so central to Hunt’s other historical works, with a woman’s valor in the face of misfortune points to why Hunt earned praise for his inclusion of women in the rebellion. Women actively appear throughout Blood upon the Rose in a variety of capacities: the sister of Patrick Pearse who tries to convince him not to go;48 dispatch carriers—including relations of the Volunteers—who ran messages between posts, negotiating the dangers of heavy fire and checkpoints;49 doctors and nurses who treated the wounded and covered for the Volunteers;50 the members of the Cumann na mBan, who were ordered home when defeat was inevitable;51 mothers and wives of civilians wrongly killed by crossfire or execution;52 and Elizabeth O’Farrell, who acted as nurse, dispatch, and diplomat;53 as well as bystanders who disagreed with the “shinners,” or Sinn Féin;54 poor mothers taking advantage of the opportunity to loot;55 and loyalist women who informed the British troops of rebel activity.56 Yet despite such inclusion of women in the narrative, Hunt excludes the activities of Countess Markievicz57—a remarkable omission

128 • Christina M. Knopf

FIGURE 7.1. The opening panel of

Blood upon the Rose introduces the tragic republican heroine Grace Giffords and sets the tone for the place of women in Gerry Hunt’s historical graphic novels of Irish rebellions.

given that she dominated press accounts of the Rising.58 Her absence is particularly noticeable on the inside covers of the book, where Hunt has noted the dead and executed, including the Countess Markievicz whose death sentence was commuted because of her gender. Though Hunt has also featured portraitures of the male leaders who died in Rising, the likeness of Countess Markievicz does not appear anywhere in the book.59 Countess Markievicz’s visage does, however, appear in Hunt’s next work, At War with the Empire, in a vignette illustration of the ministers of the Dáil Eireann,60 though her activities in the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil Wars are again omitted. The less glorified efforts of other republican women are, however, included, such as the espionage work of Dublin Castle typists Lily Merin and Nancy O’Brien,61 the informant activities of Bridie O’Keefe and other

Sinne Fianna Fáil • 129

local women,62 and the provisions of food and shelter for “flying columns” by the mistresses of sympathetic “safe” houses.63 The collateral involvement of women on both sides of the rebellion is also noted: The IRA persecuted women who socialized with unionists and violently punished those who were seen with soldiers;64 they also executed a frightened and elderly unionist woman, Mrs. Lindsey, who reported IRA activity to the police.65 Widows were randomly and suddenly created by baseless British executions of innocent men,66 and women were directly or indirectly victimized by the rampant violence of the auxiliaries, or “Black and Tans.”67 Significantly, Hunt dedicates this book to his mother, “who lived through it all especially the Black and Tan presence.”68 The most famous female operative in the War of Independence who was included in Hunt’s narrative is Eileen McGrane, a university lecturer and supporter of Michael Collins—though her only appearance in the story is when the British seize her papers to acquire intelligence on the IRA.69 The legendary Countess Markievicz gets her largest roll in Hunt’s Larkin’s Labour War when she shouts her support for Big Jim Larkin as he speaks to a crowd and gets punched by the DMP (Dublin Metropolitan Police) as a result.70 She is also shown later treating James Connolly after a hunger strike in prison.71 Other prominent women in the effort who appeared in Hunt’s pages include Delia Larkin, James Larkin’s sister and a columnist for the Irish Worker,72 and Dora Montefiore, a socialist feminist who worked on behalf of the union families.73 But again, Hunt’s story reveals more about the involvement of the common, rather than the famous, women swept into the events: the wives who struggled to feed their families on the poor salaries their husbands earned, who suffered without a say when their husbands went on strike, who pawned their only belongings and begged in the street in an effort to survive, and who banded together to help each other through;74 the women who worked as prostitutes to get money to feed their families and get medicine for their children and who drove back the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) that stormed demonstrating union members;75 the mothers who were berated by the church for wanting to send their children to better lives in England;76 and the volunteers of St. Vincent de Paul and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union who tried to offer relief to the women and children of the strikers.77 Much of the Bobby Sands graphic novel takes place in the male HM Prison Maze, and yet women continue to have a key presence in the story. The most prominent republican woman is activist and MP Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who is shown being criticized by head of the Free Presbyterian Church Reverend Ian Paisley, participating in street politics, demonstrating on behalf of the “blanket men” prison protestors, being shot by UDA (Ulster Defence Association) and UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) men, and supporting the MP campaign of Bobby Sands.78 Other nameless female activists and supporters

130 • Christina M. Knopf

are also shown,79 particularly the hundreds of women who took to the streets with whistles and dustbin lids upon the news of Bobby Sands’s death.80 On the other side of conflict, female members of Parliament,81 loyalist women demonstrators who attacked the car of hunger striker Francis Hughes’s sister,82 and most prominently, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher83 are all found in Hunt’s pages. In a brief look at what happened in the years after the hunger strikes, secretary of state for Northern Ireland Mo Mowlam is shown, agreeing to let Sinn Féin participate in the multiparty peace talks of 1998.84 Bobby’s mother Rosaleen,85 his sisters Marcella and Bernadette,86 and his wife Geraldine87 are naturally central players in the drama of Bobby Sands’s life. His mother is depicted as being supportive of the cause, or at least of her son88—slipping Bobby letters and cigarettes in prison89 and seeking intervention from the Commission on Human Rights.90 His wife, however, like many of the women in Hunt’s earlier works, is shown to be caught up in her circumstances. Pregnant, she marries Bobby while he is in prison,91 and after he is released, she begs him to give up his IRA involvement in order to better support his family.92 The victimhood of women is fully captured in a recounting of the death of Annie Maguire’s children in a car crash after the driver, IRA volunteer Danny Lennon, is shot by British soldiers.93 But victimhood becomes activism when Mrs. Maguire’s sister, Mairead Corrigan, and Corrigan’s friend Betty Williams start the Northern Ireland Peace Movement.94 The female relations of other imprisoned activists are also occasionally visible.95 Though women’s suffrage was a significant part of the revolutionary efforts during the decade of 1910,96 it is not until Hunt’s recounting of Irish rebellion during the latter half of the century that women’s equality factors into the story. When the Maze prisoners plan their first hunger strike, women prisoners want to participate, and republican leader Gerry Adams decides, “If they’re not involved they’ll see it as discrimination. I would say they should come in half way through.”97 Three republican prisoners in the Armagh women’s prison—Mary Doyle, Mairead Nugent, and Mairead Farrell—are also shown by Hunt as they make the decision to join the second hunger strike,98 an inclusion that is particularly notable given that the Armagh women have been called “the forgotten protestors” of the IRA.99 But the dialogue of Adams also suggests something of a patronizing attitude toward the IRA women, as if their efforts were tolerated more than welcomed—and indeed history indicates that the Armagh prison protests challenged not only loyalist rule but also sexism within the republican movement100 (see figure 7.2).

Men, Women, War, and Gerry Hunt’s Graphic Novels Stories of war are usually male-defined and dominated, emphasizing the bravery of young men.101 Militarized masculinities of warriors depend in part

Sinne Fianna Fáil • 131

FIGURE 7.2. The hunger strikers at Armagh women’s prison, depicted by Hunt in Bobby

Sands, are often forgotten participants in the IRA.

on views women as sexualized and weak. Beginning with the figure of Shan Van Vocht (Mother Ireland) in the nationalist ballads of the 1798 rebellion, the country of Ireland itself was feminized, allowing both the Irish and British alike to view themselves as “her” defender and the other as “her” attacker.102 Such gendered identities of the conflict worked to render women and their efforts invisible,103 and modern Ireland continues to struggle with making women and their issues visible and public.104 Hunt’s graphic novels contain traces of such sentiments. Male militarization is reinforced through the dominant depictions of women as being more passive than the men; for example, they do not hold the starring speaking roles in Hunt’s graphic novels. Additionally, their presence in the stories is most usually premised on their circumstances of poverty, geographic location, familial and romantic relationships, or gender rather than on their particular agency. This, however, is historically consistent with the varied and often contradictory ways women experienced sectarianism, violence, and activism in Northern Ireland.105 Hunt’s graphic novel commemorations of Irish history are commendable in the way they make visible the frequently overlooked and unacknowledged forms of women’s participation. Though the women of Ireland’s rebellions are not central characters of Hunt’s narratives, they are nonetheless key characters,

132 • Christina M. Knopf

without whom the stories would be less effective. For example, Hunt demonstrates a need for rebellion through the provocative suffering of mothers, including the poor forced into prostitution to care for their children, the fear of Rosaleen Sands for her son Bobby, and the trials of Hunt’s own mother, who lived through the Black and Tan occupation. He makes the extent of the rebels’ dedication to the republican cause poignantly visible through representations of familial sacrifices, such as the doomed marriage of Grace Gifford and Joseph Plunkett and the strained marriage of Bobby and Geraldine Sands. And he captures the spirit of the Cumann na mBan auxiliary through the depictions of women assisting the male defense of Ireland as runners for the military installments in 1916, as provisioners of the guerrilla fighters between 1919 and 1921, and as secret messengers for the prisoners of 1980. The male figures within the graphic novels present readers with the politics of rebellion, such as military strategy, deliberations, and declarations. The addition of the female characters allows readers to also see the personal effects of rebellion and how the fighting influenced the entire population and all facets of life.

Conclusion If Blood upon the Rose establishes the lens of memory through which to view acts of Irish rebellion, then Grace Gifford Plunkett’s opening appearance in that book also represents how women of the rebellion are remembered. Grace Gifford would become active in the rebellion and was elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917, but her own activities and even her cartooning career are repressed beneath her relationship with Joseph Plunkett. Such a depiction of women’s roles in the history of Ireland keeps with the very nature of their political involvement itself, which was vital to the efforts and yet kept on the periphery, separate from the men’s involvement.106 The Irish, and British, women of Hunt’s historical graphic novels of Ireland’s rebellions are not the central characters of his narratives, but they are vital players without whom his stories would be incomplete. Through the female figures, the male freedom fighters receive information and supplies, motivation and love—the elements that not only allow the story to move forward but made the rebellions themselves possible. As an Irish artist, Hunt believes his graphic narratives should reflect what he knows best—Ireland.107 The death tolls and the use of guerrilla warfare ensured that both men and women, willing or not, were not only touched by but also involved in the fight. To tell Ireland’s story is to tell the story of those men and women. Though Hunt’s works do not make modern Medbhs of Ireland’s revolutionary women, nor even raise them to the mythic status of their male compatriots, his graphic novels nonetheless make a significant move by giving them a place alongside the male legends. When women’s roles in the revolution are

Sinne Fianna Fáil • 133

remembered, it is often with such terms as “the other half ” and “the forgotten,”108 but Hunt makes no such distinct category and instead simply demonstrates their involvement as Irish persons rather than as Irish women, which arguably marks their contributions as part of, rather than separate from, those of Irish men. As contested participants in a contested history, the status of republican, and even loyalist, women in Irish memory has been complicated, but Hunt’s understated acknowledgement of their roles both as women (mothers, sisters, wives, lovers) and as warriors (medics, dispatches, fighters, protestors) in revolution helps to demonstrate their inextricable place in history.

Notes 1 David O’Leary, “Ennis Book Festival: Talking with Gerry Hunt,” Comic Related,

n.d., para. 1, http://www.comicrelated.com/news/6844/gerry-hunt.

2 “The Rising: Now with Speech Bubbles,” Irish Times, September 26, 2009, http://

www.irishtimes.com/news/the-rising-now-with-speech-bubbles-1.746000.

3 O’Leary, “Ennis Book Festival.” 4 Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary

Irish Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

5 Bill Rolston, “The War of the Walls: Political Murals in Northern Ireland,” Museum

56, no. 3 (2004): 38–45.

6 O’Leary, “Ennis Book Festival.” 7 Máiréad Casey, “Blood upon the Rose— Graphic Novel Review,” Girls Like Comics,

8 9

10

11

12

13

April 7, 2014, http://girlslikecomics.com/blood-upon-the-rose-easter-1916/#.V5uQ -6KhOHY. “The Rising.” Victoria Leonard, “Bobby Sands Comic is ‘One Side of Story,’” Larne Times, March 3, 2016, http://www.larnetimes.co.uk/news/larne-news/bobby-sands-comic -is-one-side-of-story-1-7243332. Eilis O’Hanlon, “Lotto Cash for Bobby Sands Comic Book Helps Sinn Fein Rewrite History,” Belfast Telegraph, February 25, 2016, http://www.belfasttelegraph .co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/lotto -cash-for-bobby-sands-comic-book-helps-sinn -fein-rewrite-history-34483014.html; David Young, “Unionists Fume Over Heroic Bobby Sands Portrayal in Comic Book Hunger Strike Story Funded National Lottery through Arts Council,” Belfast Telegraph, February 24, 2016, http://www .belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/unionists-fume-over-heroic-bobby -sands-portrayal-in-comic-book-hunger-strike-story-funded-national-lottery -through-arts-council-34480378.html. Bimpe Archer, “Bobby Sands ‘Comic-Strip’ Book Defended as ‘True, Important and Worthy,’” Irish News, February 24, 2016, http://www.irishnews.com/news/ 2016/02/24/news/bobby-sands-comic-strip -book-defended-as-true-important-and -worthy-428641/. Press Association, “Author Defends Bobby Sands Comic Book after It’s Slammed by Hunger Striker’s Family,” The Sun, March 19, 2016, http://www.thesun.ie/irishsol/ homepage/news/7013811/Author-defends-Bobby-Sands-comic-book-after-its -slammed-by-hunger-strikers-family.html. Press Association, “Author Defends Bobby Sands.”

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14 Archer, “Bobby Sands ‘Comic Strip.’” 15 Chris Stokes, “Review—At War with the Empire,” Inis Magazine, November 2012,

http://www.inismagazine.ie/reviews/book/at-war-with-the-empire.

16 Celia Keenan, “Review—1913, Larkin’s Labour War,” Inis Magazine. November

2013, http://www.inismagazine.ie/reviews/book/1913-larkins-labour-war.

17 Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in History and

18 19

20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27

28 29

Memory in Modern Ireland, ed. Ian McBride (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–42. Ann Rigney, “Divided Pasts: A Premature Memorial and the Dynamics of Collective Remembrance,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 89–97. Guy Beiner, “Between Trauma and Triumphalism: The Easer Rising, the Somme, and the Crux of Deep Memory in Modern Ireland,” Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 266–389. Rosemary Sales, Women Divided: Gender, Religion, and Politics in Northern Ireland (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. Sales, Women Divided. Cal McCarthy, Cumann na mBan and the Revolution (Wilton: Collins Press, 2007), Kindle; Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries (London: Pluto, 1989), Kindle; Louise Ryan, “Furies and Die-Hards: Women and Irish Republicanism in the Early Twentieth Century,” Gender and History 11, no. 2 (1999): 256–275. Also, Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Quoted in Niall Murray, “Women’s Role in War of Independence,” Irish Examiner, March 11, 2013, http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/womens-role-in-war-of -independence-revealed-225009.html; Anthea McTeirnan, “Women of Rebellion: How the Other Half Fought,” Irish Times, October 3, 2014, http://www.irishtimes .com/news/politics/women-of-rebellion-how-the-other-half-fought-1.1949969; and Anthea McTeirnan, “Women’s Role in Wartime Activities Revealed,” Irish Times, October 3, 2014, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/women-s-role -in-wartime-activities-revealed-1.1950169. Murray, “Women’s Role in War of Independence”; McTeirnan, “Women of Rebellion”; McTeirnan, “Women’s Role in Wartime Activities Revealed.” Sara McDowell, “Commemorating Dead ‘Men’: Gendering the Past and Present in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland,” Gender, Place and Culture 15, no. 4 (2008): 335–354; Lorraine Dowler, “‘And They Think I’m Just a Nice Old Lady’: Women and War in Belfast, Northern Ireland,” Gender, Place and Culture 5, no. 2 (1998): 159–176; Karyn Stapleton and John Wilson, “Conflicting Categories? Women, Conflict and Identity in Northern Ireland,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 11 (2014): 2071–2091; Sales, Women Divided. Casey, “Blood upon the Rose,” para. 2. Tom Clonan, “The Forgotten Role of Women Insurgents in the 1916 Rising,” Irish Times, March 20, 2006, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-forgotten-role-of -women-insurgents-in-the-1916-rising-1.1030426. Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989). Aaron Hess, “‘You Don’t Play, You Volunteer’: Narrative Public Memory Construction in Medal of Honor: Rising Sun,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 4 (2007): 339–356; Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), Kindle.

Sinne Fianna Fáil • 135 30 Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of

Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1–22.

31 Sonja K. Foss, “Narrative Criticism,” in Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Prac-

tice, 4th ed. (Long Grove: Waveland, 2009), 97–136.

32 Hillary L. Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123,

no. 2 (2008): 452–465.

33 Marc Singer, “Time and Narrative: Unity and Discontinuity in The Invisibles,”

34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

in Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, ed. Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan (New York: Routledge, 2012), 43–54; Chute, “Comics as Literature?” Louise Ryan, “‘Drunken Tans’: Representations of Sex and Violence in the AngloIrish War (1919–21),” Feminist Review 66, no. 1 (2000): 73–94; Ryan, “Furies and Die-Hards”; McDowell, “Commemorating Dead ‘Men’”; Fidelma Ashe, “Gendering War and Peace: Militarized Masculinities in Northern Ireland,” Men and Masculinities 15, no. 3 (2012): 230–248. James Phelan, ed., Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989). Foss, “Narrative Criticism.” Gerry Hunt, Blood upon the Rose: Easter 1916; The Rebellion That Set Ireland Free (Dublin: O’Brien, 2010). Gerry Hunt, At War with the Empire: Ireland’s Fight for Independence (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2012). Gerry Hunt, 1913: Larkin’s Labour War (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2013), 57. Gerry Hunt, Bobby Sands: Freedom Fighter (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2016). Gearóid Ó. Crualaoic, “Responding to the Rising,” in Revising the Rising, ed. Máirin Ní Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (Derry: Field Day, 1991), 50–70; Beiner, “Between Trauma and Triumphalism.” B. Graham and P. Shirlow, “The Battle of the Somme in Ulster Memory and Identity,” Political Geography 21 (2002): 881–904; Rigney, “Divided Pasts”; Beiner, “Between Trauma and Triumphalism.” Rebecca Graff-McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010). Hunt, Blood upon the Rose, 3. Hunt, 4. Hunt, 48. Foss, “Narrative Criticism.” Hunt, Blood upon the Rose, 9. Hunt, 16, 19, 27, 30. Hunt, 21, 23. Hunt, 38. Hunt, 39, 41. Hunt, 42. Hunt, 12. Hunt, 15, 18. Hunt, 37. See criticism in Michael Doorley, “Review—Blood upon the Rose,” Inis Magazine, Autumn 2009, http://www.inismagazine.ie/reviews/book/blood-upon-the-rose. BBC, “Countess Constance Markievicz,” Easter 1916: From Home Rule to Independence, n.d., http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/profiles/po10.shtml.

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100

Hunt, Blood upon the Rose. Hunt, At War with the Empire, 8. Hunt, 11. Hunt, 16. Hunt, 37, 40. Hunt, 14, 28. Hunt, 58. Hunt, 36. Hunt, 57. Hunt, 2. Hunt, 56. Hunt, Larkin’s Labour War, 11. Hunt, 23. Hunt, 24. Hunt, 34, 50. Hunt, 1, 5, 26, 55, 15, 52, 56, 33. Hunt, 6, 9–10. Hunt, 35–36. Hunt, 40, 50. Hunt, Bobby Sands, 1, 2, 35, 48, 51. Hunt, 20, 40, 52. Hunt, 55. Hunt, 19. Hunt, 58. Hunt, 38, 40, 46, 50, 52. Hunt, 62. Hunt, 3, 7, 28, for examples. Hunt, 6, 7, 28, 53, for examples. Hunt, 6, 15, 20, for examples. Hunt, 53, 55. Hunt, 32. Hunt, 54. Hunt, 11. Hunt, 22. Hunt, 21. Hunt. Corrigan and Williams would win the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, though this is not mentioned in the story. See “Mairead Corrigan—Facts,” Nobelprize.org, 2014, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ 1976/corrigan-facts.html; “Betty Williams—Facts,” Nobelprize.org, 2014, https:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1976/williams-facts.html. Hunt, Bobby Sands, 20, 58, 59. University of Limerick, “Women and History 1912–1922,” Commemorating Women in Irish History, n.d., http://www.ul.ie/wic/content/resources. Hunt, Bobby Sands, 43. Hunt, 44. Marina Cantacuzino, “The Forgotten Protesters,” Guardian, February 8, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/feb/09/northernireland.gender. Maria Power, “Second-Class Republicans? Sinn Féin, Feminism and the Women’s Hunger Strike,” Irish Times, December 18, 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/

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101 102

103 104 105

106 107 108

culture/books/second-class-republicans-sinn-f%C3%A9in-feminism-and-the -women-s-hunger-strike-1.2468581. See also Evelyn Mahon, “Women’s Rights and Catholicism in Ireland,” New Left Review 1, no. 166 (1987): 18–19. Ryan, “Drunken Tans”; McDowell, “Commemorating Dead ‘Men.’” Maria Pramaggiore, “‘Papa Don’t Preach’: Pregnancy and Performance in Contemporary Irish Cinema,” in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, ed. Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 110–129, Kindle; Ryan, “Furies and Die-Hards”; Ashe, “Gendering War and Peace”; McDowell, “Commemorating Dead ‘Men.’” Stapleton and Wilson, “Conflicting Categories.” Pat O’Connor, “Private Troubles, Public Issues: The Irish Sociological Imagination,” Irish Journal of Sociology 15, no. 2 (2006): 5–22. See Monica McWilliams, “Struggling for Peace and Justice: Reflections on Women’s Activism in Northern Ireland,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4 / 7, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1995): 13–39. University of Limerick, “Women and History 1912–1922.” O’Leary, “Ennis Book Festival.” McTeirnan, “Women of Rebellion”; Cantacuzino, “The Forgotten Protesters.”

Chapter 8

“The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation” Growing Up under Israeli Occupation and a Culture of Resistance in Joe Sacco’s Palestine PETER C. VALENTI

Joe Sacco’s Palestine displays a good deal of empathy, if not outright sympathy, with the Palestinian plight. Not only does he create an understanding and context of the sociopolitical conditions, but he provides a counternarrative to the dominant Israeli narrative about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, in the execution of these various goals, Sacco also includes a critical assessment of (what I will call) a “culture of resistance” among Palestinians. While this culture permeates many aspects of the conflict, in particular it is manifested among children and thus demonstrates an important generational divide. By way of his personal narration, the reported statement of his informants, and the visual clues in his illustrations, Sacco presents a sophisticated argument that regular print media can’t convey. The overall message of his depiction of this culture of resistance is that it results in both short-term 138

“The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation” • 139

and long-term negative consequences for Palestinian social organization and informs the cycle of violence and revenge in the conflict. In other words, what Sacco was depicting, and in a sense predicting, in the early 1990s in his book, can be adduced for the later increase of intra- and intercommunal violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Understanding Violence A common view in Israel is that “Arabs only understand violence.” Manifestations of this view have been promoted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no war.”1 In the context of his argument about terrorism, which according to Netanyahu includes Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, he rejects the idea that “violence is the direct result of certain ‘root causes,’ such as poverty, political oppression, [and] denial of national aspirations.” Rather, he emphatically proclaims that “the root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward unbridled violence.”2 The influential neoconservatives in George W. Bush’s administration also subscribed to this view.3 The view is still promoted today, in particular by think tanks and talking heads in the United States. Lee Smith, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, gives a sophisticated version in his recent book, which deserves to be quoted in extenso. For Arabs, according to Smith, history is a matter of one tribe, nation, or civilization dominating the others by force until it, too, is overthrown by force. And it is this, what I call the strong horse principle—not Western imperialism, nor Zionism, nor Washington policy makers—that has determined the fundamental character of the Arabicspeaking Middle East, where bin Ladenism [sic] is not drawn from the extremist fringe but represents the political and social norm. The war that Arabs are waging against the United States, some in deed as well as in word, is merely a massive projection of the same pattern of force . . . The Arabs hate us not because of what we do or who we are but because of what and who we are not: Arabs. . . . It is impossible to understand the region without recognizing the significance of violence, coercion, and repression. That doesn’t mean that I think the Arabs only understand force . . . it just means, I think, that force is at the core of the way most Arabs understand politics, and that therefore there is no way to understand how the Middle East works without understanding the concept of the strong horse. It is not a moral judgment but a description.4

Clearly, these above views presuppose that there is some innate characteristic, whether mental, cultural, or civilizational, that propels Arabs to

140 • Peter C. Valenti

violence. What is convenient about this type of argument is not only that it dismisses any role of outside factors for this supposed innate violent hostility but also that it justifies a militaristic approach to handle these violent people who do not understand peace. In other words, the subtext is “we have to be harsh because that is the language Arabs understand.” In the case of the ArabIsraeli conflict, there certainly seems to be plenty of evidence to support this contention—violence and militant/terrorist groups are a regular occurrence. In no way should we deny the sadly frequent reality that violence is used to promote particular agendas or solve problems in this conflict. However, as Netanyahu’s quote indicates, use of force is not exclusive to one side, as the various sides in this conflict have resorted to violence, and furthermore, this type of argument attempts to distract us from very substantial structural and historical processes at work.5 A scene in Joe Sacco’s Palestine underscores that indeed beneath the surface, there is much more at work (see figure 8.1). Sacco illustrates an encounter he witnessed in Jerusalem between Israeli soldiers and a twelve- or thirteen-yearold Palestinian boy. During a heavy rainstorm, the soldiers sheltered under an awning and forced him to stand in the rain and remove his headdress (keffiyeh); Sacco surmises that “perhaps for the boy it was one of dozens of humiliations.” The illustration brilliantly shows without telling: the power dynamic is very apparent, as all the panels feature a bottom-up perspective. The Israeli soldiers are drawn without individual features; they seem a monolithic, massproduced collective. Their faces project mistrust, disdain, or hostility. There is no dialogue, though we can assume what it would be. What is present are Sacco’s trenchant captions. In essence, Sacco is asking the reader: How would you feel in these circumstances? He also imagines what this boy must be thinking (see figure 8.2), in all probability a slowly building desire to have Israelis experience what he is feeling, or as Sacco puts it, “one day—one day!” Even though that encounter happens later in the book, it elucidates the motivations of the youths Sacco interviews on page 195. They explain, “Before the Intifada we had the idea that Israel had all the power, that there was no way we could push them out” and “We were afraid of the soldiers, we felt they were like Superman.” Sacco asks, “Why do you throw stones? What good does it do?” They respond, “We know when we throw stones we don’t have much chance of injuring the soldiers . . . But there is something inside us . . . we have to show what is inside us” and “Now, really, it’s become a habit to us.” Sacco then asks, “Aren’t you afraid of going to prison again?” A boy answers, “It’s not important if we go to prison or not. This is a prison for us.” Sacco’s use of the word “again” clearly indicates that imprisonment is not just a metaphor; large numbers of Palestinian youth are frequently imprisoned by Israeli authorities, and until 2011, Israeli military law considered Palestinian youth older than fifteen to be adults.6

FIGURE 8.1. Soldiers force a boy to stand in the rain (Sacco, Palestine, 282)

FIGURE 8.2. Message conveyed, lesson learned, future consequence? (Sacco, Palestine, 283)

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As can be seen in the juxtaposition of these two scenes, there is an important dialectic that occurs between Palestinians and Israelis. It is a mixture of the visible and invisible. It is didactic, whether words are exchanged or not. And just like the frequent references that characters make throughout Sacco’s Palestine to prison being a kind of “university” for Palestinians,7 life under Israeli occupation teaches certain values and inculcates particular lifestyles.

“Make the Invisible Visible”8 The particular examples often cited as evidence of the violent Arab tendency invoked by Netanyahu and Smith are suicide bombers and the intifada(s). These intifadas, which are uprisings featuring various violent episodes (that later began to include suicide bombings), seem to reoccur every decade. According to some observers, we are now in the early stages of another intifada, sometimes called the “Silent Intifada” or “Third Intifada.” Like the two intifadas preceding it, the actions of youth—adolescents, teenagers, and young adults—feature prominently. Sacco’s Palestine is quite useful for us to approach this phenomenon of recurring violence as a generational trend among Palestinian youth. Though his work is often lumped under the genre “graphic novel,” Sacco prefers “comics journalism.”9 Palestine covers his experiences during the First Intifada (see below). As a journalist, he constructs many of his stories by way of information collected from local informants, or as one author labeled his method, he “materialize[s] visually an archive of oral testimonies.”10 He is very open about this methodology. It certainly puts him closer to the subject matter but does open him up to criticism, with hostile views being that his “method results in a manipulation of the reader” and thus takes the form of “propaganda”11 and that he “relies entirely on his interviews with elderly Gazans, who regale him with gory (but often implausible or contradictory) tales.”12 Throughout his journalistic work, Sacco rejects the typical omniscient and absent narrator position and clearly depicts his subjective relationship to every story; he also positions himself as a foreign observer recording his thoughts and reactions (including critical comments), in a fashion not unlike Rhona Davies and Peter R. Johnson’s 1991 book The Uzi and the Stone, parts of which are journal entries. While there may be some methodological weaknesses in his use of oral narratives and a subjective positionality, this debate is not relevant for my purposes here. As a matter of fact, much of what is insightful in Palestine is incidental to the stories, and it is the nature of his genre, utilizing comics, that makes his approach so powerful and revealing. In mainstream journalism, Palestinians (or Arabs in general) are often depicted as a monolithic, faceless mass that “we” can’t identify with because they are so different, strange, and, of course, violent. To counter these themes, Sacco

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introduces us to individuals and their stories, but his illustrations also reveal what a traditional news story, even photography,13 cannot. As Jae Haley suggests, literally and figuratively in Sacco’s illustrations, “people who were previously unseen become visible, and the introduction of new subjects frees us to construct novel ‘relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective.’”14 Another author observes that in Sacco’s work, “we are asked to look beyond the surface to see the often hidden trauma of a people under occupation.”15 These above comments reveal that there are some epistemological questions explored by Sacco. In a connected fashion, scholars studying graphic novels note that one of the great byproducts (or goals) of these works is that they encourage a heightened sense of empathy.16 Sacco certainly encourages empathy with Palestinians and their plight as a people who are stateless, refugees, and/or living under Israeli occupation. However, the downside to when readers identify with Palestinian victims through Sacco is that they unfortunately never experience a “redemptive ending.”17 Yet empathy is not the same thing as sympathy; one can lead to the other but not necessarily so, and perhaps not even as the intended goal. In the case of Sacco’s empathy, he is also critical of violence, which is a feature of how Palestinians and Israelis interact. Furthermore, Sacco’s illustrations identify Palestinians engaged in violence as negative but also represent astute phenomenological and predictive statements in and of themselves.

Intifada: Cause or Symptom? This chapter is not solely about how violence is explored in Palestine. Doing so would relegate most of the focus to events that occurred more than twenty-six years ago, which may seem somewhat an “old story” in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rather, by way of Sacco, this chapter addresses questions of immediate relevance today, and these questions are pertinent to whichever “side” a person may take in the conflict, whether pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, or somewhere in between. Given the moribund state of the so-called peace process, if no definitive change occurs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, what are the long-term ramifications for the people of this region? If one were to take a robust proIsrael position and argue that Israel should retain control over most, if not all, of the Occupied Territories—and incorporate this territory into Israel, as some right-wing leaders have bluntly advocated18—what is to be done with the Palestinians living in these territories? If the answer is not mass expulsion19 and they are to remain in the territories, what will be their sociopolitical status? In the case of either the creation of a stunted, denuded rump “independent Palestinian state” or the Palestinians’ status remaining as-is (status quo; limited autonomy under the pseudogovernment Palestinian Authority [PA]),

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Israel would still have some level of control over the lives of these Palestinians. What would the lives of these Palestinians be like? What would be the sociocultural results? How would these impact the lives of Israelis? Despite writing on events that occurred twenty-six years ago, Sacco’s work answers these questions clearly. In a number of ways and without necessarily intending it, his work was prescient; as this chapter will trace, what he documented helps explain processes later in the 1990s and early 2000s and can also be a good indicator of what the future will hold. Sacco gives some context for the outbreak of the First Intifada; however, to underscore this theme of “generational legacies,” it is necessary to highlight a few more points. The outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987 manifested as both concrete activity and symbolism. First, this date was exactly twenty years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip (and Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula) in the 1967 war. In conformity with the creation of Israel in 1948, by 1987 Palestinians felt that the Israeli goal was to keep and integrate this occupied territory into Israel. Israel had already announced the annexation of East Jerusalem. In the 1980s, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon, the minister of industry, trade, and labor, made clear their desire to annex the West Bank. And as a very visible sign of Israeli intentions, Israeli settlements were being built in the Occupied Territories in ever-increasing numbers. These policies, “creating facts on the ground” to ensure Israeli control over the land, have been part of what Defense Minister Moshe Dayan once called “facts that will bind hands . . . and the hands of reality.”20 The Intifada was both a spontaneous uprising against the Israeli occupation as well as a protest of the ineffectiveness of Palestinian leaders (in the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], especially those in exile, such as Yasir Arafat). It was most famous for stone-throwing at Israeli soldiers and settlers. Another famous development was that the group Hamas, which later adopted the tactic of suicide bombing in 1994, was born in the Intifada.21 However, it is misleading to paint the Intifada as entirely violent. Numerous acts of civil disobedience, such as refusing to pay taxes to Israel, boycotting Israeli goods, peaceful demonstrations, and breaking Israeli curfews were common occurrences. The main energy for this uprising came from youths; this generation of youth rejected the Israeli occupation as well as the perceived kowtowed manner of their parents under that occupation. Sacco repeatedly highlights how initially these youth were mainly motivated by social aspects of life under occupation—daily confrontations and harassment from Israeli settlers and soldiers, beatings, and arrests. Later the Intifada became more politicized and largely co-opted by political leaders (Arafat eventually gaining control over many aspects of it).22 What needs to be underscored here is that these rebellious youth were born post-1967. In other words, the Intifada was

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initiated by the first generation of Palestinians to grow up under Israeli occupation; they were children of the occupation. The society they knew, the realities they lived, and the culture that those things produced were shaped by the context of Israeli occupation. Sacco literally frames Palestine with that understanding; as one author observes, Sacco’s “critique emphasizes the Israeli occupation of Palestinian spaces as a central element of constructing a Palestinian narrative.”23 Not only had the repression and violence of the Israeli occupation been a crucible for these youth, but the Israeli reaction to the Intifada further exacerbated the nature of the uprising. Israel responded with forceful measures; Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin viewed the Intifada as terrorism and thus ordered harsh measures, including shooting at demonstrators, collective punishment, mass arrests,24 and beatings that were part of a controversial “break the bones” policy—broken arms can’t throw stones, and broken legs can’t run. As well, Palestinian leaders advocating moderate actions or a two-state solution were arrested or assassinated. The Israeli government’s hope was to both eliminate the (youth) energy and leadership of the Intifada and preempt any possibility that the Intifada would force peace talks resulting in Israel relinquishing the Occupied Territories.25 Despite the hopes of Israeli leaders, the intensified violence of the Israeli response actually galvanized and unified Palestinians further. Violence begot more violence. Like the first, the Second Intifada, also called the al-Aqsa Intifada, was a spontaneous eruption in 200026 against both the continued Israeli occupation and the ineffectiveness of the PA, the pseudogovernment created to run autonomous zones in the Occupied Territories resulting from the 1990s peace process. This Intifada also came in the context of the collapse of the last great Israeli-Palestinian efforts to make a final peace deal. The levels of violence in this Intifada were much greater on both sides; in the first years, suicide bombing was a prominent tactic by Palestinian groups like Hamas, and Israeli forces used airstrikes and “targeted killings” of militant/terrorist leaders. High civilian casualties were a feature on both sides, though numbers were much higher among Palestinians.

Material and Emotional Realities of the Conflict “Desperation is a very powerful force—it’s not only negative. It propels people to actions or solutions that previously would have been unthinkable.”27 In Palestine, Sacco lavishes great detail in his illustrations on the wretched conditions and destruction in which many Palestinians live, what he calls a “Disneyland of refuse and squalor” (208). Pages 146–147 are his most evocative splash pages of such squalor, but sharp readers can catch other telling images like children playing in the mud and a destroyed car (175) and the

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ubiquity of people walking through unpaved, muddy, sewage- and garbagefilled streets. Those scenes were from the years 1991 to 1992; two more decades of conflict and the deepening of the Israeli occupation have made these conditions worse, especially in the Gaza Strip. These conditions today are directly linked to processes Sacco revealed in Palestine. In 2015 CNN reportage on the Gaza Strip, Nic Robertson observed Palestinian children practicing parkour “atop the crumpled concrete and angry twisted rebar wreckage of last summer’s war.” In both literal and figurative language, he observes that they were “committed to nothing more than the feeling of freedom in flight—however brief—and the hope that this sport could catapult them beyond Gaza’s borders to a better life.”28 Robertson also reports that this next generation of Palestinians is “unlike their parents, they have little understanding of the Israelis beyond the fence—because they have no connection with them.” Speaking with restaurateur Abdu Salim, Robertson adds ominously that “Abdu wasn’t the only person of his generation I talked to whose fears oscillate between anger at Israelis and frustration with their own leaders. They fear what the future holds for their children, whose estrangement from Israeli youth seems to be a one-way ticket to continued conflict.”29 Further damage to today’s generation of youth is evidenced when Robertson talks to Ehab Bakr, a Gazan fisherman who lost a son and grandson in Israeli shelling during the 2014 Gaza War.30 His other son, a thirteen-year-old, was still traumatized a year later and “has nightmares, doesn’t sleep, gets angry easily in a way he never did before, sometimes stiffens up and appears to choke on his own tongue.” Robertson adds that “nothing his father does, no doctor he takes him to, can help . . . if there were peace, [Bakr] says he could leave Gaza and get his son the treatment he needs.”31 If a child like that lived in the United States, he would probably be diagnosed with PTSD and receive appropriate treatment. In the Occupied Territories, there are humanitarian groups that attempt to help children and create safe places for them, but their scope and resources are extremely limited.32 So then, what are the life options for a boy like this? What is the likelihood that he will grow up to be a mentally healthy and successful man? One person who worked to answer these questions was Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, psychiatrist and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), whose studies were based on extensive work with Palestinian youth; due to this work, he received the Physicians for Human Rights Award (1997). El-Sarraj’s work underscores this theme of generational legacies. While being interviewed during the Second Intifada, he made a startling claim: “The people who are committing the suicide bombings in this intifada are the children of the first intifada—people who witnessed so much trauma as children. So as they grew up, their own identity merged with the national identity of

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humiliation and defeat, and they avenge that defeat at both the personal and national levels.”33 El-Sarraj is not exaggerating, and the example of the first Palestinian suicide attacker, nineteen-year-old ‘Ali Imawi from Gaza, who shot Israeli soldiers at a military bus stop in April 1994, is a case in point. Growing up, ‘Ali had witnessed three childhood friends being shot and killed in front of him, had been beaten by Israeli soldiers, and had been shot a total of seven times.34 El-Sarraj adds another important statistic: “During the first intifada, studies showed that 55 percent of the children had witnessed their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. The psychological impact of this is stunning. The father, normally the authority figure, comes to be seen as somebody who is helpless, who can’t even protect himself—let alone his children. So children became more militant, more violent . . . Children who have seen so much inhumanity—basically the Israeli occupation policies—inevitably come out with inhuman responses.”35 El-Sarraj also identifies a sociocultural element of life under occupation; he relates how in the First Intifada, Palestinian children played a game called “intifada.” He describes it as “a cowboys-and-indians-type game—more specifically, Israeli soldier versus Palestinian stone thrower, with the kids trading off between the role of the soldiers armed with sticks to represent guns and the Palestinians with kufiyyahs and stones. Many of the children at the time preferred to play the Jew, basically because the Jew with the guns represented power. This game has entirely disappeared.36 Today, the symbol of power is the martyr. If you ask a child in Gaza today what he wants to be when he grows up, he doesn’t say that he wants to be a doctor or a soldier or an engineer. He says he wants to be a martyr . . . they see the martyr as courageously sacrificing himself or herself for the sake of everyone, as a symbol of the struggle for freedom”37 In concluding his analysis, el-Sarraj clarifies that “suicide bombings and all these forms of violence—I’m talking as a doctor here—are only symptoms, the reaction to this chronic and systematic process of humiliating people in effort to destroy their hope and dignity. That is the illness, and unless it is resolved and treated, there will be more and more symptoms of the pathology.”38 It should be added that el-Sarraj did not see this pathology as exclusive to Palestinians; as he told visiting human rights activist and physician Alice Rothchild, it can affect children in any kind of war zone,39 and he also included Israeli children who were injured or exposed to violence. As a matter of fact, he connected harsh Israeli policies as a reaction to Jews’ historical experiences of persecution, which he called “victim psychology.”40 Years of reports from various international bodies have repeatedly pointed to “humanitarian vulnerabilities” of Palestinians due to the Israeli occupation wherein “Palestinians face a range of threats that undermine their ability to live selfsustaining lives and prevent the enjoyment of their rights.”41 Certainly a number of Jewish and Israeli human rights activists have observed

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the deleterious effects of the occupation on the psychological and social wellbeing of Palestinians. Rothchild is an example. Even former Israel Security Agency (Shabak) chief Ami Ayalon stated in a famous interview that there wasn’t a “military solution to terror.”42 On the other hand, from an Israeli political perspective, it is not conducive to dwell on the impact of militarysecurity policies. So even when Israeli counterterrorism researchers realize that there are psychological factors at work in the Arab-Israeli conflict, either they do not acknowledge the context and circumstances in which they are cultivated and reinforced, or they focus on overcoming psychological barriers that prevent Israeli soldiers from doing what needs to be done.43 The psychological ramifications of Israeli soldiers of dealing with the stress of the occupation are further demonstrated by Sacco: one of his Israeli informants related that her brother needed to see a psychologist after performing his military service in the Occupied Territories.44 Clearly, a traumatized person or population is vulnerable in many ways. As has been observed in another study, when a person undergoes an emotional overload due to trauma, “a psychological boundary is passed inside the individual in which he becomes in a sense already psychologically deadened and . . . extremely vulnerable to those who would encourage him to make terrorist acts.”45 There are some good reasons to introduce this issue of pathology in order to understand Palestine.46 However, we should not rely exclusively on this pathology argument to explain violence; critical scholarship advocates caution to avoid overemphasizing it.47 Some scholars feel psychosociological or psychopolitical approaches are more realistic.48 Unfortunately, in most of these studies, the focus is more on terrorists than on the general populace. Whatever the nature of Palestinians’ personal conditions, given the fact that the Israeli occupation has been ongoing since 1967, we must consider the long-term effects of constant feelings of inferiority, periods of intense fear, and the resultant hopelessness and depression these can bring. Add to these witnessing or being the target of violence, and there is no doubt that a high percentage of the population has PTSD.49 Yet collecting effective data on the mental state of many members of a given society is not possible, especially in the case of Palestinians. What is more measureable are cultural activities, which are expressed publically and are performative, thus visual (not internal). For this reason, Sacco is quite useful in pinpointing the development of what I call a “culture of resistance” among Palestinians.

The Culture of Resistance In both his illustrations and his text, Sacco records this culture of resistance. Like the traditional definitions of the word culture, this particular Palestinian

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culture manifests socially and is articulated through various practices, discourse, and ways of understanding existence. It has performative and didactic elements and can be normalized through everyday activities. While this culture of resistance can transform into violence, often it is located in a realm of symbols and meanings that represent and teach certain attitudes about life; these are imparted orally, behaviorally, or bodily (e.g., by demonstration of a wound or scar).50 This culture manifests when Sacco is invited to a wedding, which includes traditional dancing; afterward the participants burst into political songs (227–228). Another example is during a funeral when youths bravely hang the Palestinian flag and the crowd cheers (100). What are these social conditions that create this culture? In his introduction to Palestine, Edward Said summarizes the power of Sacco’s pen in depicting everyday life in Gaza as “the national Inferno.” Sacco’s illustrations record “the vacancy of time, the drabness not to say sordidness of everyday life in the refugee camps, the network of relief workers, bereaved mothers, unemployed young men, teachers, police, hangers-on, the ubiquitous tea or coffee circle, the sense of confinement, permanent muddiness and ugliness conveyed by the refugee camp which is so iconic to the whole Palestinian experience.”51 This vacant—or wasted—time heightens the anxiety caused by a sense of impermanence or “perpetual, timeless uncertainly” under occupation.52 Probably the most important locus of this culture of resistance is in Palestinians’ sitting rooms. Sacco frequently inserts himself into these sitting rooms and gathers much of his information in this setting; at first, it may be assumed that large clusters of people come to the sitting room because Sacco is there. However, we quickly understand that this is a regular activity. The first time we are introduced to it is early in the book when Sacco visits the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. A spread depicts the crowded room; a very large twopage caption curtails the size of the spread. The overall effect is a noisy, crowded room squeezed into a confined space. Sacco learns that there are no social outlets like cinema, parks, or the ability to play soccer; throughout the book, we hear of high unemployment, rejection of work permits by Israeli authorities, curfews, travel restrictions, and extremely limited community resources. Living in these conditions, his host Jabril explains, “So my friends visit my home. We drink tea. We drink coffee. We speak. This is my life” (44–45).53 In these rooms, Palestinians tell stories about the Israeli occupation, whether in the form of secondhand news, personal experiences, or bodily demonstrations by showing injuries and/or through reenactments. Visiting a room in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Sacco expounds, “Yes, yes, I’ve heard this before, Palestinians stewing in rooms like this one . . . Probably they’ve talked this through a hundred times before in Nuseirat, in other camps, in villages and towns, in rooms just like this one, with the tea coming and coming, year after year” (154–55; also see 173). Sacco’s metacommentary demonstrates the significance:

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“It’s cold, there’s six or seven men sitting around, the tea comes . . . That’s the Essence of Palestinian Room . . . this could be almost every room I’ve ever sat in in Palestine . . . These rooms . . . not even the talk changes” (152). The “talk” in these rooms that does relate life under occupation includes tense moments with Israeli military and settlers, stone-throwing, interrogations and prison time, being injured, or the killing of family or friends. One of the most famous sections of Palestine, called “Moderate Pressure,” has Ghassan relate his interrogation and imprisonment experiences to Sacco. With wounds still fresh on his body, Ghassan tells the story as his young children are in his lap. Sacco surmises, “Probably she’s too young to understand, or else she’s heard it all before” (102). We see many examples of very graphic stories being told in these sitting rooms while children are present, or children themselves tell the story.54 While listening to another story, Sacco observes the sleepy children in the room and informs us, “These refugees sons [sic] of a refugee’s sons are growing up knowing the score” (166–167). It may seem shocking to an outsider that children are exposed to these stories in the home,55 but as Ghassan’s story demonstrates, Palestinian children do not have the luxury of being shielded: Israeli forces burst into his home at night, then blindfolded and arrested him as his daughters screamed, “Father! Father!” (104). Similar examples of children dealing with life in a militarized setting include Israeli soldiers raiding a school administered by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency; 48); Sacco draws a schoolgirl strategizing her run home through an Israeli military zone (222), and another young girl later asked Sacco pointed questions about whether there are soldiers in the United States that shoot the people too (230). These children have obviously come to the conclusion that soldiers and militarization are a normal part of life; Sacco’s friend Sameh points out that it is impossible for children to avoid the presence of the occupation— “Soldiers won’t let anyone alone” (201). According to one observer in 1988, Israeli forces used a cynical rubric for the occupation: “For twenty years now officially there has been no childhood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The word ‘child’ is never used in military announcements: they refer to either an infant or a youth, but never a child. So a ten-year-old boy shot by the military forces is reported to be a ‘young man of ten.’”56 A recent manifestation of this is the law Israel passed in August 2016—the “Youth Bill”— which enables charging and imprisoning children younger than fourteen for terrorism.

“The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation”57 As Sacco shows, given the routine of children hearing about or witnessing violence and oppression while in the home, and the ubiquity of such events and

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signs of the occupation outside the home,58 it is understandable that news coverage of the Occupied Territories often reports youth involved in their own confrontations with Israeli forces. As mentioned, the First Intifada not only was against the Israeli occupation but was also a generational conflict, with youth rebelling against the older generations. Sacco does not explicitly convey this generational conflict, but one of his observations alludes exactly to what the younger generations wanted to counteract—the perceived defeatism or quietism of their parents (181). Sacco shares how his friend Sameh “would sit there, hunched up from cold, with that look I’d seen on so many Palestinians—like, ‘what can we do?’” Kowtowed literally or figuratively through Israeli victory in 1948 or mechanisms of occupation since 1967, older Palestinians maintained sumud, endurance or fortitude, some form of dignified determination to be. This is a survival method or coping mechanism. Some youth saw this as merely surviving and not protecting their rights or challenging the status quo; in an atmosphere of status quo, Israel could continue with its expansionist policies unabated. For young Palestinians, sumud wasn’t enough—hence the Intifada. And whether involved directly in the resistance or simply getting in the line of fire, youth are exposed at a young age: In Palestine, readers see episodes of children being beaten by Israeli forces.59 Firas was first shot at the age of fifteen, arrested three times, and began working for the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) at age thirteen.60 Rifat was also shot at age fifteen and partially paralyzed, and a fourteen-year-old girl was shot in the eye (202–205). Sacco learns of a number of youths shot and killed.61 As with Ghassan’s aforementioned story, a significant amount of the youth had witnessed physical abuse, humiliation, or the death of their parents, and this is a crucial element according to el-Sarraj.62 Various Palestinians tell Sacco of these stories,63 and one boy, Firas, explicitly justified his involvement in the Intifada because “I see how the soldiers treat my parents. They beat my brothers. One of my brothers is in jail” (196). The psychological effects of this treatment are evident for adults who go into shock, are fearful, and feel no sense of security (66, 71, 109–111, 155),64 but Sacco also reveals the impact on the youth. The section depicting Israeli soldiers beating Firas invokes the anguish and anxiety of the Palestinians, and Sacco’s placement of each panel and gutter is meant to “engender a visceral unease for his largely Western audience” (199–201).65 The culture of resistance is also explored through a critical assessment of its long-term effects on the youth. Sacco, representing himself as the archetypical Westerner, periodically expresses shock at what is occurring in these circumstances. However, he often expands upon criticism expressed by adults, in particular his friend Sameh (like Robertson’s conversation in 2015 with Abdu). For example, after talking with the boys, Sameh later shakes his head

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and laments, “You heard Mohammed say he’s never been to prison? That embarrasses him” (195). Sacco astutely catches a sociopolitical feature that has become, in a sense, a cultural “rite of passage.”66 In another story, a mother related how she didn’t want her son to go to school for fear of his being drawn into clashes with Israeli soldiers; her fears came true (238–241). Firas would also skip school to throw stones at soldiers. Israeli soldiers disrupt classes in the UNRWA school (48). Even when children are in school, the classroom is heavily politicized (201). Just these quick examples make the reader realize the detrimental effects on the education of Palestinian youth; if we add to this the frequent school closures by Israeli authorities that occurred during the Intifada and after, we must wonder as to the quality of an education in these circumstances. A decade later, we can find similar problems: One student describes five taxis, detours due to Israeli soldiers, and a helicopter shelling nearby as part of her round trip to school.67 A powerful episode from Sacco deftly reveals the negative impact of this culture of resistance. In “The Boys: Part Four,” Sacco focuses on Rifat, who narrates his experience of being shot by an undercover Israel intelligence unit when he was fifteen while throwing stones (202–205). Partially paralyzed now, he sits surrounded by other teenagers who witness Rifat’s story of resistance. Even though Sacco later verbalizes his suspicion of how Rifat represents his feelings, the three panels in the center of page 205 have already established the mutually reinforcing nature of this performance—a performance of action in the form of resistance and its didactic message in the form of storytelling. Sacco brilliantly captures Rifat’s eyes (see figure 8.3). In a sense, all of these examples are perfectly summed up by an exasperated Sameh. Reflecting on the damaging effects of this culture of resistance, Sameh asks rhetorically, “This is the childhood?” (201).

Conclusion “We just walked in front of the tanks. The tanks used to put its big muzzle towards us. Once I was on roller skates when they saw me and put the thing towards me, but instead of running away, I just stared at it, imagine!!! I don’t know why I did that!”68 This diary entry from an eighteen-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl in 2003 demonstrates not only the manner in which the abnormal becomes normal by way of internalizing the meaning of the occupation but also a semiconscious awareness that she displays the hallmarks of the culture of resistance. In May 2016, Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) published a report titled The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as

FIGURE 8.3. The social reinforcement of the culture of resistance (Sacco, Palestine, 205)

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a Whitewash Mechanism. By way of this report, B’Tselem announced that it would no longer participate in helping provide legal assistance to Palestinians in the West Bank because of both the ineffectiveness of that help and the realization that their presence within the Israeli military legal justice system seemed to credit that system as allowing due process. In reality, as the report’s definitive statement reads on the last page, “the experience we have gained . . . has brought us to the realization that there is no longer any point in pursuing justice and defending human rights by working with a system whose real function is measured by its ability to continue to successfully cover up unlawful acts and protect perpetrators.”69 The downside to B’Tselem’s decision is that Palestinians lose a valuable legal resource, and this concretely demonstrates that they are left with few options in life; as Sacco and other observers underscore, many Palestinians see themselves stuck in a dead end. Peaceful (nonviolent) initiatives have failed and been rebuffed, and the PA remains a toothless pseudoentity. Palestinians continue to live under an entrenched occupation in which Israeli settlements expand and usurp land and water and Israeli-only zones, bypass roads, and barriers proliferate. Palestinians live under a military legal system, and even Israeli human rights activists recognize “that the way in which the military law enforcement system functions precludes it from the very outset from achieving justice for the victims.”70 Furthermore, opportunities for personal improvement, whether education or jobs, are very limited. What then, it must be asked, is a Palestinian to do? What recourse is left? Certainly many Palestinians hope against hope that some resolution can be reached and a viable two-state solution implemented, but a significant number of Palestinians, especially disenfranchised and frustrated youth growing up in extremely constrained circumstances and surrounded by constant violence, will see violence as normal and as the only means of expressing resistance to the occupation. The dialectical relationship with Israelis in the Occupied Territories (nearly exclusively armed settlers and soldiers) teaches and reinforces this conclusion. “Lessons” are learned; a “culture” is cultivated. It is overly deterministic to ascribe the motivators of these youths or young adults solely to the violence of the early 1990s. The collapse of the peace process by 2000, the failure of the PA, and the accelerated pace of Israeli settlements and settler violence have certainly been exacerbating factors. However, the point to be made is that the Palestinian young adults of the early 2000s were inheritors of a cultural legacy; those of today inherit from the decade prior. What Sacco does is help us identify this culture and the forces that shape it—and thus how it operates. Sacco’s illustrations reveal how the failure and oppression of one generation in a world of unchanged sociopolitical conditions can stimulate the next generation to heightened action. The constancy and ineluctability of the occupation and its apparatus of control

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lead to a dialectical relationship that Timothy Mitchell invokes in another context: “These forms of opposition were not something external to the system of power but the product of techniques and tensions within it.”71 The Israeli occupation, with its limitations, restrictions, denial of rights, lack of services—a pressure cooker that actively subdues human dignity, thus stewing a toxic mix of trauma, anxiety, and hostility—produces in each successive generation newer and more extreme reactions. In other words, like the boy in the rain in Jerusalem, Sacco predicts how today’s policies and actions are shaping tomorrow’s reactions.

Notes 1 This is from a speech in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) on August 14, 2006. See

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“Olmert: We Will Continue to Pursue Hizbullah Leaders,” Globes, August 14, 2006. Benjamin Netanyahu, “Terrorism: How the West Can Win,” in Terrorism: How the West Can Win, ed. Benjamin Netanyahu (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 203–204. For example, see Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004. Hersh pointed to the popularity among neocons of Raphael Patai’s 1973 book The Arab Mind, which justified their views “one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.” Lee Smith, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 6, 11. Italics in original. While academics have derided The Strong Horse for its simplistic, anecdotal, and ideological character, it does represent (and justify) a widespread viewpoint. One such academic reviewer saluted Smith for supposedly debunking the idea that there is a negative impact “when Israel builds settlements in the West Bank or adds rooms in a Jerusalem neighborhood.” He concurs with Smith that the United States “wasted its strength on noble but unwise attempts to plan and promote democracy in a region where the concept has as much chance as planning to grow orchids in the desert” (93). The reviewer concludes that in order to deal with this violent mentality of Arabs, the United States and Israel “must reassert themselves and become the strong horse once more” (93). We can see how this ideological view, like the ouroboros, feeds on its own logic: “We” need to be violent because “they” are violent. See Michael Widlanski, “The Middle East without Illusions,” Jewish Political Studies Review 23, no. 1/2 (Spring 2011): 91–94. On the Palestinian side, there is an equivalent of this view, as found, for example, in Sacco: “The Israelis only understand force.” Joe Sacco, Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003), 154, 165. Israeli youth are considered adults at eighteen and are prosecuted in the (civil) penal justice system; Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are prosecuted under military law. Catherine Cook, Adam Hanieh, and Adah Kay, Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s Detention of Palestinian Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004). Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has tracked this issue for years; for their May

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2016 report titled “Statistics on Palestinian Minors in the Custody of the Israeli Security Forces,” see http://www.btselem.org/statistics/minors_in_custody. A student told Sacco that Ansar Prison was “our university” (88). Also see Palestine, chapter 4. Jae Haley, “Beyond the Boundaries of Maps: Methods of Dissensus in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza,” Studies in Popular Culture 37, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 61, 66. For interviews with Sacco, see “Media and the Middle East: Joe Sacco & Zachary Lockman,” NYU Journalism: Primary Sources (2010), http://nyuprimarysources .org/video -library/joe-sacco -and-zachary-lockman/; Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Joe Sacco,” January Magazine, n.d., http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/ jsacco.html. Also Tristram Walker, “Graphic Wounds: The Comic Journalism of Joe Sacco,” in Writing the Dark Side of Travel, ed. Jonathan Skinner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). For good biographical and bibliographical details, see Daniel Worden, “Introduction: Drawing Conflicts,” and Isabel Macdonald, “Drawing on the Facts: Comics Journalism and the Critique of Objectivity,” in The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 3–18. Hillary Chute, “Comics Forms and Narrating Lives,” Profession (2011): 114. Chantal Catherine Michel, “The Art of Persuasion and Propaganda: The IsraeliPalestinian Conflict in Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” in Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Derek Parker Royal (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 223–224. In this and the next endnote, the comments are generally about Sacco’s work but also specifically about Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza. Rafael Medoff, “A Cartoonist Urges Restraint—Except When It Comes to Israel,” Jewish News Service, January 19, 2015, http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2015/1/16/ a-cartoonist-urges-restraintexcept-when-it-comes-to -israel#.V1iPmvkrKUk. A more sophisticated critique, arguing that Sacco “equivocates,” is Marc Singer, “Views from Nowhere: Journalistic Detachment in Palestine,” in The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 67–81. Whereas photographs “document the existence of suffering,” the graphic novel format can “communicate the experience of pain.” See Rebecca Scherr, “Shaking Hands with Other People’s Pain: Joe Sacco’s Palestine,” Mosaic 46, no. 1 (March 2013): 27, 29–34. Haley, “Beyond the Boundaries of Maps,” 60. Walker, “Graphic Wounds,” 78. See Scherr, “Shaking Hands”; Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Kitchen Sink Press/Harper Perennial, 1994); Suzanne Keen, “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Novels,” SubStance 40, no. 1 (2011): 135–155; Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, “Image, Text, and Story: Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom,” Art Education 61, no. 6 (November 2008): 13–19; Maureen Bakis, The Graphic Novel Classroom: Powerful Teaching and Learning with Images (Thousand Oaks: Corwin, 2012). Rebecca Scherr, “Joe Sacco’s Comics of Performance,” in The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, ed. Daniel Worden ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 197. Among the more notable of the Israeli leaders are the following positions: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran for reelection in 2015 on a platform of no

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state for the Palestinians. Newly appointed defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, formerly minister of foreign affairs, the ultra-right wing leader of the Israel Is Our Home party, has promoted his “Populated-Area Exchange Plan” for years. Leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, who currently is minister of education and minister of diaspora affairs, and formerly was minister of economy, promotes a “Partial Annexation Plan.” This has long been a dream of ultra-right wing Israeli parties such as Moledet (now part of Jewish Home) and Kach (which was banned in 1994; its members later joined parties such as Herut [National Movement], Jewish National Front, and Our Land of Israel). Integration of Palestinians as citizens of Israel (as per a “one state solution”) is widely rejected in Israel because Jews will immediately become a minority. As cited in Hendrik Spruyt, Enduring Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 234. Hamas was initially a militant off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood but was only involved in low-level militancy. Hamas began suicide bombing after the February 1994 (suicide mission) massacre by Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein in Hebron. For background and analysis of the youth component, see Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation (Washington, D.C.: MERIP, 1989); Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock, eds., Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger, 1990); F. Robert Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Rose Brister, “Sounding the Occupation: Joe Sacco’s Palestine and the Uses of Graphic Narrative for (Post)Colonial Critique,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 45, no. 1–2 ( January–April 2014): 105. To hold all these newly arrested Palestinians, the Ansar 3 Prison was built, which is the subject of chapter 4 in Sacco, Palestine. Despite Israeli efforts, the Intifada did help lead to the 1993 Oslo peace talks between Israel and the PLO, ironically including the new prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Besides the abovementioned sources, for a general overview and sources on Israeli countermeasures during the Intifada, see Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 8th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 408–412. It erupted when then candidate for prime minister Ariel Sharon visited the alHaram al-Sharif / Temple Mount in Jerusalem (on which is located the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, hence the name of the intifada) on September 28, 2000, with more than 1,000 security forces; thus, like the First Intifada, it was a reaction to Israeli action. Like the First Intifada, there is no clear or “official” end date of this intifada—perhaps 2005. “Suicide Bombers: Dignity, Despair, and the Need for Hope. An Interview with Eyad El Sarraj,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 72. Nic Robertson, “The Gaza That You Didn’t Know,” CNN, June 2, 2015, http://www .cnn.com/2015/06/02/middleeast/gaza-war-rebuilding/. Robertson, “The Gaza That You Didn’t Know.” The same point can be made for those Israeli children who grow up in exclusive Jew-only neighborhoods or settlements in the Occupied Territories. The events that ignited this particular Gaza War were the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens followed by the kidnapping and murder of a Palestinian teen as retaliation. (All four of these youth were in the Occupied Territories.) This episode aptly demonstrates that children are on the frontline of this conflict.

“The Children Internalize the Meaning of the Occupation” • 159 31 Robertson, “The Gaza That You Didn’t Know.” 32 For example, the Middle East Children’s Alliance opened a program called “Let

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the Children Play and Heal” in Gaza. See Joshua Pringle, “Gaza: The Middle East Children’s Alliance,” World Press Review, July 21, 2014, http://www.worldpress.org/ Mideast/4021.cfm. “Suicide Bombers,” 71. One study reports 48.5 percent of Gazan adolescents witnessed a friend killed and 15.7 percent witnessed a family member killed, and in Jenin (West Bank), 38.5 percent witnessed Israeli soldiers killing a Palestinian. See also Jess Ghannam, “Palestine: A Nation Traumatized,” in Psycho-political Aspects of Suicide Warriors, Terrorism and Martyrdom, ed. Jamshid A. Marvasti (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publishers, 2008), 222–240. Ghannam says the result is “intense anxiety.” Lamis Andoni, “Searching for Answers: Gaza’s Suicide Bombers,” Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 36–40. “Suicide Bombers,” 72. Speaking in 2002, el-Sarraj may have been correct, but evidence of the game (and a photo) is covered by Gazan reporter Mohammed Omer, “Operation Cast Lead Is over, but the Nightmare Continues,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (December 2010): 18–19. One of the boys relates how his friend was blown to pieces by an Israeli missile. Sacco seems to show children playing the game (Sacco, Palestine, 224). “Suicide Bombers,” 72. “Suicide Bombers,” 73. Alice Rothchild, Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish & Palestinian Trauma & Resilience, 2nd ed. (New York: Pluto Press, 2010), 174–175, 179. Rothchild sits on the board of directors of the GCMHP; for details of its work, see pages 165–184. In this section, she explains how the children “exhibit epidemic levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms, especially bed-wetting.” The Mohammed Omer article repeats that point. A manifestation of this symptom can be seen in the iconic picture of photojournalist Evelyn Hockstein from spring 2001, which shows a stone-throwing Palestinian boy caught by Israeli soldiers wetting his pants. This victim psychology, caused by Jewish experiences in Europe creating Israeli feelings of being surrounded by hostility and necessitating a proactive tough attitude, is called the “ghetto mentality” and is studied by such Israeli scholars as Ezer Weizman, Efraim Inbar, and Myron Aronoff; Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, and Menachem Begin expressed this mentality. For example, see the most recent UN report from June 2016, “Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview 2015,” https://www.ochaopt.org/humanitarian-overview -2015. “Ayalon: Israeli Killings Create More Suicide Bombers,” Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2001; Amos Harel, “Security Brass: Targeted Killings Don’t Work; No Military Solution to Terror,” Haaretz, December 19, 2001. Michel Gottschalk and Simon Gottschalk, “Authoritarianism and Pathological Hatred: A Social Psychological Profile of the Middle Eastern Terrorist,” American Sociologist 35, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 38–59; Ophir Falk and Henry Morgenstern, eds., Suicide Terror: Understanding and Confronting the Threat (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 89, 145. This last attitude—a kind of “we need to get over it”—echoes the view of Lee Smith (and Widlanski) that Israel needs to get even harsher in order to deal with violence.

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44 Sacco, Palestine, 264. 45 Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova, “Talking to Terrorists,” Journal of Psycho-

history 33, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 130.

46 For example, see Jeet Heer, “The Line between Terrorism and Mental Illness,” New

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Yorker, October 25, 2014. Mental health issues arising from Israeli imprisonment are scrutinized in a detailed study by Clea McNeely et al., “Political Imprisonment and Adult Functioning: A Life Event History Analysis of Palestinians,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 28, no. 3 ( June 2015): 223–231. Sacco feels that in some instances mental health should be considered; remarking on an unlikely militant, he suggested that “his was a personal explosion, maybe he’d been dwelling on his friend, whose spine had been cut through by an Israeli bullet” (155). Ari Folman’s stunning 2008 animated film Waltz with Bashir expressly deals with the psychological trauma young adults experience during war (in this case Israeli soldiers in the 1982 Lebanon War) in a manner similar to U.S. Vietnam War films, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). Neil K. Aggarwal, “How Are Suicide Bombers Analysed in Mental Health Discourse? A Critical Anthropological Reading,” Asian Journal of Social Science 38, no. 3 (2010): 379–393. As some studies argue, it is too simplistic to ascribe psychological disorders for terrorism, and instead the role of peer influence and social standing, combined with negative experiences with the “other” (e.g., imprisonment, death of a loved one), are more important. See Jeff Victoroff, “The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 1 (February 2005): 3–42. See also S. Alexander Haslan and John C. Turner, “Extremism and Deviance: Beyond Taxonomy and Bias,” Social Research 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 435–448; Moises F. Salinas, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Westport: Praeger, 2007). Even someone deep in the Israeli security-academic nexus cautions about the “superficiality” of much personality data collection to indicate predilection for terrorism. See Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6–8. Psychosocial is the “result of the process of social interaction” and “accumulation of socialization process.” See Luis de la Corte Ibáñez, “Suicide Terrorism Explained: A Psychosocial Approach,” in Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Psychosocial Dynamics, ed. Updesh Kumar and Manas K. Mandal (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014). For psychopolitical aspects, see Ghannam, “Palestine: A Nation Traumatized.” The Journal of Traumatic Stress has a number of detailed studies. See Raija-Leena Punamäki et al., “Nature of Torture, PTSD, and Somatic Symptoms among Political Ex-Prisoners,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 23, no. 4 (Aug. 2010): 532–536; Eyad el-Sarraj et al., “Experiences of Torture and Ill-Treatment and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among Palestinian Political Prisoners,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 9, no. 3 ( July 1996): 595–606; Vwian Khamis, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among the Injured of the Intifada,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 6, no. 4 (Oct. 1993): 555–559. For trauma demonstrated through what is called “wounds culture,” see Walker, “Graphic Wounds.” Sacco, Palestine, iv–v. Jared Gardner, “Time under Siege,” in The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World , ed. Daniel Worden ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 33. The

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56 57 58

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full passage examines life under occupation: “When home, job, or even sleep are insecure, the present cannot be—as we experience it conventionally—a place from which one can move, inexorably, forward in time. The present is instead only a point of perpetual, timeless uncertainty.” One author points out the sense of a “dominated claustrophobic space” and “loss of agency” in this spread. Beatriz Pastor, “Diálogos desde el exilio: Goytisolo, Darwish, Said, Sacco,” Inti, no. 65/66 (Spring–Fall 2007): 22. Sacco, Palestine, 60–62, 75–76, 93–95, 129–130, 195–201, 202–204. An extreme example of this is found by Adoni, who interviewed the family of a teenage suicide bomber. As they played his message to them on cassette and discussed his attack of November 1994, the bomber’s young nephews sat in the room listening. A cousin later yelled at the cassette, “You are alive and we are dead! What life is it anyway? . . . We are prisoners in Gaza!” See Andoni, “Searching for Answers,” 40–41. Usually a home consists of one room, perhaps with an attached kitchen. The one room serves as sitting room, dining room, sleeping room, and social center; entire families or larger share this space. (In passing, Sacco mentions a family of seven people in a four-by-four meter room and thirty-five people in a ten-by-ten meter dwelling. See Sacco, Palestine, 186, 246.) Anton Shammas, “A Stone’s Throw,” New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988, 10. Rothchild, Broken Promises, 167. In the diaries of Palestinian schoolgirls, we see how the extremely abnormal has become the normal, or as one girl called it, “a usual day.” Thomas M. Ricks, “In Their Own Voices: Palestinian High School Girls and Their Memories of the Intifadas and Nonviolent Resistance to Israeli Occupation, 1987 to 2004,” NWSA Journal 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 96–97. Sacco, Palestine, 61, 196, 198–201. Sacco, 196–201; notice his recruitment session with adults. Sacco, 70, 153, 194, 228, 238–241. The Academy Award–nominated 2005 dramatic film Paradise Now emphasizes the centrality of such “father issues.” Viewers eventually realize that both main characters are motivated to become suicide bombers by what happened to their fathers. Sacco, Palestine, 62, 64, 173, 236, 241. Page 66 seems to connect a Palestinian woman’s numbness to pain to the psychological suffering she experiences at the hands of Israeli settlers. See Scherr, “Shaking Hands,” 23–24. As the mother of ‘Ali Imawi, the first Palestinian suicide attacker, said in an interview: “Sometimes I think that I have lost my ability to feel anything . . . I can no longer feel sad or happy. I guess I am numb to feelings.” Andoni, “Searching for Answers,” 40. Brister, “Sounding the Occupation,” 107–109. Confronting Israeli military and being arrested is a “rite of passage” into manhood according to Julia Peteet, “Male Gender and Rituals of Resistance in the Palestinian Intifada: A Cultural Politics of Violence,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 1 (February 1994): 31–49. See Ricks, “In Their Own Voices,” 96. This article has a plethora of such stories. Ricks, “In Their Own Voices,” 98. Page 80 in B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Law Enforcement System as a Whitewash Mechanism,” May 2016, http://www.btselem.org/ download/201605_occupations_fig_leaf_eng.pdf.

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70 B’Tselem, “The Occupation’s Fig Leaf,” 3. 71 He was speaking about the dialectic of Egyptian state repression and the radical-

ization of Islamist opposition. Quoted in Miriam Cooke, “Ayyam min hayati: The Prison Memoirs of a Muslim Sister,” Journal of Arabic Literature 26, no. 1/2 (March–June 1995), 148.

Chapter 9

The Malvinas War in Argentine Memory Graphic Representations of Defeat and Nationalism, 1982–2015 SILVIA G. KURLAT ARES

In the early morning hours of April 2, 1982, Argentinians woke up to an unexpected front page on their newspapers: the military had invaded the Malvinas Islands (also known as the Falklands Islands in the English-speaking world). Many morning newspapers published a second edition later in the day, and eventually, the de facto president of the country at the time, Lieutenant General Leopoldo F. Galtieri (1926–2003) would salute the more than 200,000 people who celebrated the seizure in Plaza de  Mayo. Two days earlier, the same town square in front of the Casa Rosada,1 where historically Argentinians have congregated to protest, celebrate, or commiserate about public events for almost two hundred years, had witnessed a massive march against the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (the official name of the dictatorship, 1976–1983). Organized by unions and political parties under the slogan “Paz, Pan y Trabajo” (Peace, Bread, and Work), the march was the final event of the first successful general strike in years. There were similar mass demonstrations in the main cities of the country, and all were brutally repressed, with at least 165

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one person dead, many injured, and more than 1,800 people arrested only in Buenos Aires. Contrary to the military junta’s expectations, the United Kingdom was not accommodating to what it saw as an infringement of its territorial integrity. The war would last until June 14, 1982, less than three months, when Argentina surrendered unconditionally. The confrontation started a multilayered process: it opened the doors for redemocratization but transformed the Malvinas cause into a very complex symbolic battlefield that still tests how history is perceived and how experience is enshrined. In this sense, Federico Lorenz remarked that “from a political perspective, the Falkland war is a political paradox because of its pivotal role in how and why the Armed Forces orchestrated the handover of power. Consequently, the analysis of this period cannot ‘avoid’ the Malvinas issue. Yet instead of relying on rigorous methodology, the war is often described through the lens of social myth.”2 Partly for this reason, Argentina has developed interesting narratives (literary and visual) about the Malvinas War. Comics and graphic novels about the war were among the first artistic depictions to be published during the conflict itself, as cartoon commentaries about the day-to-day events in the news, narratives about Argentina’s historical claims, or both. Just to provide some key examples, one can mention a series titled “April  2” by Mario and Claudio Morhaim published in the newspaper El Litoral (Santa Fe, 1918) during the war. Soon after, by September 1984, Ricardo Barreiro, Alberto Macagno, Carlos Pedrazzini, and Marcelo Pérez published the “La Batalla de las Malvinas [The Battle for the Falklands]” series in the magazine Fierro (1984–1992/2006),3 celebrated as one of the best graphic representations of the war. Graphic novels about the conflict have appeared sporadically since then. Most of these narratives attempt to reinstate the soldiers’ voice within the historical stream, as there was an increasing tension between the narratives of those harrowing experiences, the official history of the war as originally told by the military, and the history as told by democratic governments later. Following Lorenz’s observation, this chapter will argue that because of the war’s paradoxical nature in Argentine politics, graphic novels enter an unstable ideological space when describing Argentina’s territorial aspirations; the military’s role before, during, and after the war; and the conflict’s symbolic ideological meaning(s). In the pages that follow, I will discuss how this unsteady political perspective underpins graphic novels as different as Malouïnes, le Ciel Appartient aux Faucons (2010) by Walter Taborda and Néstor Barrón and Tortas Fritas de Polenta (2014) by Eduardo Martinelli and Adolfo Bayúgar. Graphic novels about the Malvinas conflict belong to a small but complex tradition that includes all sorts of artifacts from novels to movies and photographs to comics. It has often been said that, with the exception of a novel like Los Pichy Ciegos (1983) by Rodolfo Enrique Fogwil (1941–2010), Argentina

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has yet to produce a narrative about the conflict. In truth, there are a number of short stories and several novels that explore not only the impact of the war but also the roots of its ideology in Argentine politics. The war’s experiences are the common threads that unite novels and most comics and graphic novels (including issues of violence and alienation, authoritarianism, patriotism, and nationalism), even when few of the latter explore the role of militarism and the roots of nationalism in Argentine politics outside of their importance to the ideological development of the dictatorship. These issues appear more frequently in literature, although almost no text has the deep, raw cruelty of Fogwil’s foundational novel. Novels dealing with the Malvinas War include, among others, Las Islas (1998) by Carlos Gamerro (1962), Kelper (1999) by Raúl Vieytes (1961), Una Puta Mierda (2007) by Patricio Pron (1975), and Trasfondo (2012) by Patricia Ratto (1962). Most graphic novels, including the ones analyzed in this paper, inscribe the lived, subjective past of their main characters into the historical stream, not only supporting their narratives with a selection of historical facts for objective backing but also transforming the graphic novels themselves into something akin to documentaries or testimonial narratives. This characteristic is underlined by the aesthetic and thematic choices of many graphic novels, which operate in a similar fashion to documentaries and movies, whose imagery often percolates into the drawings. In many cases, graphic novels can be read in tandem with documentaries such as Hundan al Belgrano (1996) by Federico Urioste (1940) and movies like Los Chicos de la Guerra (1984) by Bebe Kamín (1943) and Daniel Kon (1956) or the award-winning Iluminados por el Fuego (2006) by Tristán Bauer (1959), which was based on the homonymous 1993 memoir by Edgardo Esteban (1962). Yet realism in graphic novels does not replace nor supplement historic narrative, for the comics do not discover new facts or record and analyze the real. Despite their clearly marked ideological takes on the war, none of these cultural artifacts return to the events in an objectively detached perspective. As we shall see, sometimes the narrators make mistakes or exaggerate events to make a political point. Memory (and particularly personal recollections) guides the visual narrative, turning it inward and staging a subjective view of the events as if they were historical experiences. In this sense, these artifacts are both proof of the lived experience and a point of view about the events. Guerin and Hallas discuss the limitations and contradictions posited by visual representations that attempt to bear witness to historical trauma and explain the coupled methodological and theoretical tensions that such images bring forward: Visual studies have taken up the task of historicising the role of the image and visual representation in modern regimes of truth and knowledge. Trauma studies have sought to redeem the category of the real by connecting it to the traumatic

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historical event, which presents itself precisely as a representational limit, and even a challenge to imagination itself. Trauma studies thus offer poststructuralist theory a means to reintroduce a political and ethical stake in the representation of the real without regressing to the very notions of mimetic transparency that it has striven to overturn. Trauma studies consistently return to an iconoclastic notion of the traumatic event as that which simultaneously demands urgent representation but shatters all potential frames of comprehension and reference. Likewise, in their elucidation of the power dynamics instantiated by the historical development of specific discursively constituted gazes, visual studies demonstrate an iconoclastic impulse to uncover and undo the image and the witness the power of the visual.4

Following this reasoning, we shall see how visual narratives about the Malvinas War are amended takes on how events unfolded (often according to memory) and how they retell what is already known. In turn, this operation allows the narratives to create something that blends testimony and fiction, interpretation and explanation. More often than not, this mix reveals a clear political agenda either as a stated or as an unsaid objective. Such is the case of a graphic novel like 52° Latitud Sur, 59° Longitud Oeste (2014) by Osvaldo Cascella and Javier P. Giliberti, which selects Argentine soldiers’ heroic acts during the war as a way to teach patriotism to young people and deploys its political aims both in the introduction and in the afterward of the graphic novel itself. The mass of memoirs and testimonial accounts, movies, exhibits, concerts, and so on far surpasses the brief corpus I have mentioned in the previous pages. In this chapter, I will only concentrate on graphic novels as cultural products that provide mediated narratives, visual or otherwise. I am interested in exploring the relationship between the visual and the narrative as well as the structure of graphic storytelling5 and its relationship to both historical events and ideological discourses of the nation-state. These narratives are also framed by the autobiographical and testimonial accounts they attempt to display in their pages. As the field of biographical comics has grown exponentially over the last decades, it has become increasingly clear that searching for the truth (or a truth) is a futile endeavor, whereas significance seems to be a better way to describe what the images are seeking. Hence critics find how images negotiate the relationship between aesthetics and trauma, between representation and affect, to be far more important to analyze than just plain scripts or narratives.6 The use of realistic or expressionistic aesthetics is not a matter of simple preference. The two styles carry their own political weight, which percolates and destabilizes the comics. In the case of Malouïnes, the use of realism seems to underline the truthfulness of the memory-narrative tie. In the case of Tortas Fritas, expressionism attempts to amplify the emotional experience of the soldiers. In both cases, however, the attempts are betrayed by what is not

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said, by the absent historical account. Hence in the following pages, I will contrast what is said and not said in these comics as a way to explain the complex interplay of elements that seem to vanish from the storylines. These graphic novels create a heavily marked reading of the war (including its causes and consequences, its political and ideological assumptions, etc.). They assume an Argentine reader who is quite familiar with the events and has a political and ideological position not only about the war but also about the social and cultural environment of the country in the eighties. For these reasons, first I will provide a brief, albeit detailed historical background that can serve as a reference for the discussion that will follow. In the next section, I will analyze Malouïnes and Tortas Fritas in tandem with the context of the Argentine production of the Malvinas graphic narratives and of memory narratives.7 I will address how the graphic novels’ multilayered approaches (biography, war report) participate and contradict national discourses about the conflict and its changing symbolic meaning(s) over the last thirty years. Finally, in conclusion, I will discuss some of the consequences of such readings.

The Malvinas/Falklands War: A Brief Context Thinking back, analysts have wondered frequently if the March 30th demonstrations triggered the war as a diversionary tactic.8 In truth, the war eclipsed the rally from collective memory, but both events are closely connected, albeit for very different reasons: although both were signs of the dictatorship’s political deterioration, they belonged to different series of events. The march was the result of and the answer to the economic crisis that had unfolded about two years prior to 1982, when the economy stalled and the dictatorship refused to take charge of its responsibilities regarding domestic debt. At this point, Argentina had changed its minister of economy three times since 1976 and would change who held the position twice more before 1983. The increased economic decline made clear the inability of the military to create social consensus regarding its own political legitimacy, and by the same token, it made it very difficult for the most powerful groups within the Proceso itself to generate a political party with any chance of continuing their ideological program should elections be called. The war was, in a sense, a much murkier ideological issue because, as Vicente Palermo has said, the Malvinas cause has an extraordinary symbolic value and identitary power.9 Since the United Kingdom invaded the islands in 1833, Argentina had claimed its rights over the archipelago both in London and in international courts, protesting the illegal occupation and exploitation. During the nineteenth century and for the most part of the last century, the United Kingdom was ambiguous and refused to establish any diplomatic dialogue with Argentina on this particular subject. The issue of Argentine

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sovereignty was brought up formally in several sessions of the United Nations (1964, 1965, 1971, 1973, 1976), and that body established that British control of the islands was a form of colonialism, that negotiations needed to take place, and that some form of cooperation needed to be established between the two nations.10 Fed by the different nationalist tendencies that developed in Argentina since the early twentieth century, national territory and national identity became an organic unit that manifested as a genuine popular longing for the islands to be incorporated within the frontiers of the country. News programs and papers often discuss Malvinas’ diplomatic claims and their implications, and such developments are always present in Argentine’s political imagination. Since 1973,11 several generations of schoolchildren12 have commemorated the 1829 arrival of Governor Luis Vernet (1791–1891) to the islands on every June 10, the Day of Argentine Sovereignty over the Malvinas, Sandwich, and South Atlantic Islands (Día de los Derechos Argentinos sobre las Islas Malvinas, Sandwich e Islas del  Atlántico Sur)13 while singing the “Marcha de Malvinas” (the Malvinas’ March), which states, “¿Quién nos habla aquí de olvido, / de renuncia, de perdón? / ¡Ningún suelo más querido, / de la patria en la extensión” [Who speaks here of oblivion, / of surrender, of forgiveness? / No other land more dearest / in the whole of the homeland].14 Since 1961, maps of the country have presented the desired complete political geography of the country as including not only the Malvinas but also the Sandwich, Georgias, and Orcadas Islands, as well as a swath of Antarctica. So it is not surprising that, after the war, when analyzing the behavior of the different branches of the military, the committee in charge of the investigation reserved its most severe indictment for the army: “Ultimately, the latent decision was influenced by specific political issues, such as, for example, whether to produce a significant event to revitalize the National Reorganization Process (without ethically judging this consideration) underlined also by the little negotiating vocation manifested by Great Britain.”15 The “latent decision” mentioned in the report refers to when and why the war was decided. By December of 1981, even though Great Britain was giving some faint signals of acquiescence, the Army had already made up its mind about the invasion, and plans for a quick military operation were already drawn. However, events were precipitated by an incident with Argentine metal scrap laborers who raised an Argentine flag in the Falkland Islands—it was illegal to do so—while working on the last leg of the liquidation of a whale processing plant.16 The diplomatic standoff that followed, as well as the increased military presence of both nations in the area, proved to be the first step of the war. If the Argentine military junta wanted to tap into patriotic and nationalist feelings in order to deviate attention from economic instability, human rights violations, and lack of civil and democratic rights, Margaret Thatcher’s

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(1925–2013) branch of the Conservative Party in power in the United Kingdom at the time also wanted to seize the opportunity to regain some legitimacy after a disastrous first term marred by inflation, unemployment, and economic recession.17 Although the United Kingdom was taken somewhat aback by the April 2 invasion, its answer came in full force. Since the March events, two submarines were headed to the islands, and a little later, they were followed by a task force that included two aircraft carriers. To sustain the war effort, a major media campaign was organized in the main cities of Argentina. Schoolgirls were compulsory “requested” to write letters to the soldiers at the front and become “war godmothers”; several fundraising and food collecting campaigns were organized and released on the main TV state channel; music that until the war was forbidden or not given airtime on the radio became part of the official programming all of the sudden, as music from the United Kingdom and later the United States became progressively banished; and reporters affiliated with the most important state news programs celebrated every little military advantage as a major victory in what was to be another major win in the epic history of the motherland (to this day, many Argentines are convinced that the country could have won the war). Despite some early Argentine military victories (due mostly to a combination of the element of surprise and the low manpower in the archipelago’s garrison), by the end of April, the war’s development started to make a clear turning point in favor of Great Britain. Before its surrender, the Argentine military had imagined the conflict to be something like a posturing show, an operation that required almost no preparation for a long conflict and would win them unconditional allies at the national level and in the international community. Unaccustomed to fighting a professional military force and biased and/or ignorant about the geopolitics of the Cold War, Argentina invaded the Malvinas Islands and surrounding archipelagoes with a military force that had limited and outdated weaponry and a troop of young conscripts no more than twenty years of age with almost no proper training. Defeat proved to be disastrous for the dictatorship. Some of the military that surrendered with almost no fight had been famously accused of outrageous human rights violations.18 Soldiers started to tell about their experiences early on, and any hope the junta had of recuperating political legitimacy evaporated within months. By December 1983, elections were called, and one of the most sinister chapters in Argentine history came to a close. In the years that followed, the war all but disappeared from the media. Malvinas veterans were ignored, and their needs (physical and mental health) were unheeded. In an effort to return to democratic life without any attachments to the dealings of the dictatorship, there was a conscientious attempt to desmalvinizar (“unmalvinize”) society.19 Soldiers were considered victims of

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the dictatorship by many, and they were further patronized by broad sectors of society, which labeled veterans “chicos de la guerra” (“war kids”). Any discussion about heroic feats during the war was understood as tantamount to support for the military regime. The patriotic sentiment that had made so many people subsidize and cheer for the invasion was resemanticized as a deceit from which people had now awakened. The feelings of fraud were not completely uncalled for: funds collected for the war effort in the “Fondo Patriótico” (Patriotic Fund) were misspent or misappropriated by different government agencies, and the troops never received the relief and supplies that the money was supposed to provide. Furthermore, the war consolidated the diplomatic stance of the United Kingdom against negotiations. It was only twenty years later under Kirchnerismo, with its revival and support of the revisionismo histórico historiographic tendency,20 that the so-called desmalvinización process started to recede.

The Malvinas War: Graphic Novels as Cultural Memory Graphic novels have approached the war on a steady basis since the start of the conflict, and the corpus that has emerged here is extremely complex. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, graphic narratives about the confrontation emerged during the transition period to democracy (1982–1989) and have always been marred by the ongoing political debates that were taking place at the time of publication. Federico Reggiani has observed that comic magazines during the transition period were trying to define a community around a specific common imaginary and adds, “The issue of values—I repeat that this is fundamental in the forging of a national identity after a period of terror—is overcome when the two main problems in the cultural field following the democratic transition are addressed: democracy and the problem of representation of the horrors of the dictatorship.”21 So initial representations of the war attempted to be many things at the same time: while celebratory and nationalistic in their adherence to the Malvinas cause, they also feebly tried to reorganize historical narratives by eroding the dictatorship’s control of public discourse. Hence references to the March 30 mass demonstrations, to police repression, or to social inequality appeared in many of the first graphic narratives about the conflict. In this sense, ever since the first representations of the war in graphic novels or comic strip form, reflections about the Malvinas War have attempted to address what society perceives as conflicting perspectives between memory and history, between perception and facts, and between nationalism and patriotism. The satirical magazine Humor (1978–1999) provides a good example of these early reflections. Its covers were often an immediate commentary on how international politics were understood by the vast majority of the population. In the case of Malvinas, for example, the perceived

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betrayal by the United States and its refusal to adhere to the Monroe Doctrine in order to protect its special relationship with Britain was portrayed as a cheating love scene, with Chancellor Nicanor Costa Méndez (the head of a department akin to the State Department in the United States) drawn as a wronged husband, who walks into his bedroom to find his significant other in bed with a lover. It is unclear who plays which role: both Alexander Haig and Margaret Thatcher are startled, and the ambiguity of the depiction accumulates political and social meanings. The scene also tells the end of Argentina’s political romance with the United Kingdom and its political and economic models. Executed as cartoons in bright watercolors, the cover is at the same time crude and grotesque, satirical and moralistic.22 In the magazine itself, the complex sentiments regarding the war and the dictatorship were depicted using a variety of visual languages where the military was simultaneously applauded for taking the islands and derided for its administration. The uneasy feeling regarding the war and its politics can also be seen through time. Two covers published by the famous Fierro magazine are among the most well-known visual examples of how binary constructions evolved and transformed through the years. When the magazine published its first take on the Malvinas War in 1984, the story opened with the brutal suppression of the March 30 protest, showing the clear antagonism between the military in power and the civil society. By 2012, the same magazine published a supplement called Malvinas 30 Años, which featured a series of short comics by some of the most famed draftsmen and scriptwriters in the business, but here the soldiers’ memories took over the narrative. Comparing the covers of those two Fierro, Mariela Acevedo said, On Chichoni’s 1984 cover, we see a soldier with a rifle in his hand and a fearful face walking forward with blood up to his knees and followed by a tank identified with an Argentine shield. In the second cover—recreated from the first one by Claudio Sagrera, better known as Scuzzo—we see the same soldier stepping outside the frame. “What did Scuzzo do?” asks Lautaro Ortiz . . . “He took the young ’84 soldier out of the sea of blood and made him step onto the firm ground of our day. More than a tribute, Scuzzo granted him memory.”23

The thirty years gap between these two takes on the war made the complex political change very visible. The change expressed itself not only in the diversified aesthetic choices and traditions at hand in those publications (realistic and expressionist drawings now accompanied by inked lines and flat graphic drawings) but also in the more layered view of the war and the soldiers, whose agency seemed to be recognized as the desmalvinización process receded. While comics designed for adults showed a nuanced evolution, the ones for children have stayed close to a form of nationalism that expresses itself in

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absolutes: the Malvinas have been usurped, and they are Argentine; to recover them is a moral imperative. For example, both a magazine like Billiken24 during the war and the chapter on Malvinas on the cartoon program Zamba on the Encuentro channel (which was funded by the last Kirchnerismo government) more than twenty years later generated a narrative devoid of any critical perspective and with a strong irredentista (the concept of full Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands and other islands in the South Atlantic) bend, which mirrored the military government’s perspective as much as broad sectors of the population’s nationalist yearnings. In recent years, the graphic novels about Malvinas have both contested and cemented militaristic and nationalistic perspectives on the war in memory, by reworking already existing narratives within the Argentine cultural field. Discussing how the Malvinas issue is addressed by Argentine culture, Vicente Palermo said, “To talk about Malvinas is to discuss not only the relationship between the archipelago and the nation, but also primarily our nationalism—a particular way of conceiving the nation, which has some imagined core values or a desired cultural and spiritual unity of the people, for the which the State is far more important than the Republic.”25 The relationship between state and republic and between state and territorial nation is often the hidden topic in some recent comics that have tried to rework original issues of nationalism and patriotism while narrating the experiences of officials and soldiers on the front. As I have mentioned before, these materials provide a covert subtext that resonates with Argentine readers. Hence reading these comics also requires an understanding of the narrative twists as much as of the visual structure that supports it. What is not said in the comics complements the visual universe deployed in the images; it is not simply a lack of “noise.” I would argue that without understanding how these invisible topics percolate into the visual narrative, the reading is at the very least incomplete. The relationship among visual vocabularies, aesthetics, and cultural and political traditions is not always cohesive. Hence the iconographic imbrications26 that should support the storytelling sometimes collapse and/or dispute the ideological and political assertions made on the discursive level of the comics. As examples of these issues, one can think of the 2010 Swiss publication of Malouïnes, le Ciel Appartient aux Faucons by Walter Taborda and Néstor Barrón, which earned the 2010 Grand Prix du Public and the Prix pour la Mise en Couleurs at the BD Prend L’Air fair in Le Bourget, France. Originally published in 2010 in four volumes,27 the French was reprinted in Spanish in 2015.28 It is probably one of the most visually stunning graphic representations of the war, with beautifully colored images, an almost cinematic composition of the plates, and a strongly dynamic distribution of the vignettes (see figure 9.1). Written and drawn by Argentine graphic artists and narrated from the perspective of the Pucará pilots of the Argentine Air Force (possibly the most professional branch of

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FIGURE 9.1. The image of a British air strike in Barrón’s and Taborda’s El Cielo Pertenece a los

Halcones, Volume 1 (p. 11, vignettes 1–3) showcases the authors’ realistic approach to historical material and the peculiar cinematic aesthetics.

the military), the graphic novel is intended to be sets of unitary fictionalized accounts, which take an epic heroic tone to better narrate what turned out to be a major if not surprising defeat. In an interview, Barrón has said that “there were few publications on the Falklands War; even less in comics. Part of the public expected a biased view, a more ‘nationalist’ take, but we prefer to tell a human story, showing the pilots’ experiences rather than political ideas. This is clearly an Argentine vision of this war, of course.”29 As we have seen, such a statement disregards the small but solid tradition that already existed around the topic of the war by 2011. This is not an uncommon perspective: narratives on the conflict often attempt to position themselves as a “definitive account,” generating, if not a voice of authority, a voice of imagined truth. In this case, such an attempt is underlined by the startling use of realistic images in full, vivid color and by the chronological presentation of the events, where even childhood memories seem to reinforce the testimonial accounts. Yet the purported attempt at objectivity is undone by the ideological underpinning of the comic. Despite all protests to the contrary and the stated appeal to the human side of the story and the making of the hero, the creators anchor this sense of truth by establishing a direct link with a concept of heroics that underlines not only a foundational narrative of leftist Peronista ideology, such as can be seen in the serialized sci-fi comic El Eternauta (1957–1959) by Hector G. Oesterheld (1919) and Francisco Solano López (1928–2011), but

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also a foundation of Argentine nationalist thought and a concept of leadership that was taken directly from Ortega y Gasset.30 In other words: the veritas of the subjective experience is clearly delineated with the vocabulary of realistic aesthetics; events become examples of Argentine exceptionalism and heroic representation, which in turn are organized as the very qualities that express the Argentine Being (el Ser Argentino) as the incarnations of nationhood that we will see below. Every single one these elements interferes with each other to create the comic’s perspective on the war. Malouïnes’ first volume opens with a short narrative introduction stating that the pilots became the British Navy’s nightmare despite their lack of equipment and experience. The Falcons (Halcones) is an air force unit that fought valiantly during the war. They became instant popular heroes in Argentine collective memory, earning the admiration of their enemies for their audacity and valor. Narrated with flashbacks by the now adult pilots, the narrative underlines the perspective of the young children who would become some of the main characters in each of the volumes in the series and eventually fight in the conflict. The comics are built as a counterpoint between the idyllic, sheltered childhoods of the 1950s and 1960s and the hard lives of the soldiers at war. The realism of the images seems to underline this approach. The depictions of the pilots’ childhood memories, with their naiveté and idealism, are often highlighted by brighter colors, while the images of the harsh realities of the barracks life and the war are often tainted by grays. Yet what the readers encounter is material of a very different nature than the clear-cut contrast it attempts to portray. Although the childhood memories are presented as a space of untainted potential, all the children are faced with some form of violence, racism, or authoritarianism, which are never questioned. Children who want to be pilots are teased and harassed by their peers; loving parents turn out to be absentee fathers or give facones (long gaucho knives) as gifts to very young children, and so on. What the adult pilots remember as simple and pleasant turns out to be complex and disquieting. The pilots’ childhood memories are intended as “origin stories”: they provide the necessary psychological background of the future heroes’ toughness, the scenes showcasing the construction of the desired qualities (altruism; dedication; passion; love of land, country, and family) of the true Argentine Being. In this sense, it is interesting to see how transitions between the remembered scenes and the barracks’ narratives operate. As an example, we can see the opening pages of the first volume of Malouïnes, where an imaginary air dogfight opens the comic. Despite being drawn in the realistic style that characterizes the series, the battle is clearly what a child imagines his future to be. The entire scene is framed by black gutters that do not reappear until the present day adult engages in a real dogfight over the South Atlantic sea. The dissolution of the gutters at the end of the scene gives way to the pilot’s story line in the open space of the motherland.

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The child and adult meld into a persona that embodies the values of those who defend the open, pristine space of the motherland. Yet other childhood scenes (with clear gutters) also show the seeds of a society in disarray, with embedded social evils (racism, violence, xenophobia, etc.) that are never addressed by institutions or figures of authority and, therefore, are left alone to proliferate and grow (even if not always discussed within the comics). In the second volume, for example, the main character is a pilot of Chinese descent who is often teased and whose patriotism is doubted until he fully proves his complete allegiance to the country in battle. Children dream of a military career as a concrete professional path and the romanticism of military heroic feats. Yet it is a heroism whose meaning lacks anchorage in Argentine history and/or experiences. By 1982, Argentina had not gone to war since the late nineteenth century, and since the 1930s, all real “war” activities had been involved with political repression.31 So the children’s imagery comes mostly from movies (or memoirs by national heroes of the previous century) or from praise of military values embedded in the nationalistic discourse, which had been naturalized in political discourse over the twentieth century. In all the stories, there are no references to the history of the Army or to its presence in everyday life in Argentina. Instead, what is shown of the children’s pasts reinforces the experiences that they will later seek. Children suffer from a lack of camaraderie and male-bonding experiences, which they will eventually gain through their friendships in the Air Force. Not surprisingly, the comic has been applauded in many military magazines and blogs, and its reading has been recommended not only because it praises military ideals and heroism but also because it tells the war from the perspective of the war’s fallen, forgotten heroes. Such identification is not unexpected: even in its visual perspective, the comic seems to anticipate ethnographic narratives by the Air Force pilots whose experiences were recently compiled by Rosana Gruber,32 although there are many other examples. However, as in the case of the children’s memories, military life is not exactly what it seems. Equipment does not work; information given to the pilots is erroneous and leads some to attack their own comrades; the pilots are not always psychologically ready for what is expected of them; and internal confrontations and miscommunications make their work increasingly more difficult. These hardships (like the teasing and cruelty of their childhoods) make them heroes, but such heroism is self-contained in the vacuum of the war without any other context, and therefore it is detached from the realities of the dictatorship. In a telling scene in the very first volume of the series, a young conscript, Luis, confronts the main character, a captain, because the young soldier cannot accept that the captain is a good person and is helping him cope with the horrors of war.33 Luis reveals that his brother is one of the missing (desparecidos) and that he cannot reconcile the idea of the military as repressor with the military as heroic.

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This is an oblique reference to the paradoxical place of the military within the Malvinas context in Argentine society. As was the case in the early depictions of the war I mentioned at the beginning of this section (but also in the lack of historical grounding of the entire series), the military both established a bloody dictatorship and fought in the “recovery” of Malvinas. Readers of the series (as much as Luis in the fiction) have a clear understanding of the military’s role in the kidnapping and disappearance of thousands of people.34 Yet as the series moves into showcasing one heroic action after another, this contradiction seems to be overshadowed by a barrage of epic feats. Luis’s fate is uncertain: he will be sent to the front as a result of his revelation, and once he arrives in the islands, it is not clear if he will survive. This uncertainty betrays the ideological construction of the graphic novel: its nationalistic faith and its attempt to portray the human side of the military collides with the realities of the postwar years, when trials and witness accounts revealed the depth of military involvement in the repression of society, making any political approach to the veterans very difficult. Historian Enzo Traverso argues that if history is to be a critical discourse, its writing will require not only sources but also a caesura; we need to create a level of distancing that allows us to distinguish the past from the present.35 In the case of Malouïnes, the realist aesthetic and the insistence on a quasidocumentarian perspective of the experience seem to work against the caesura and transform the comic into a form of critical hagiography, as the pilots are praised as individuals and the war effort’s management is criticized. All that is contradictory about the military or can be denounced about Argentine society disappears in the magnitude of the conflict. Because the heroism of war imposes its own gravitas on all other forms of experience, the political meaning of the war in 1982—and its importance to the fall of the dictatorship—dissolves. What was learned at the time as a social metaphor evaporates in the logic of the veterans’ memories and their nationalistic longings. The new metaphor that emerges (and that the comic narrates) is incarnated by the pilots, who justify the nationalist politics of the malvineros for whom the Malvinas are and always will be Argentine, and for whom the war veterans are heroes of equal importance to the Independence War soldiers of more than two centuries ago. In this context, memory and subjective experience become the anchor of the new hero and his telling of history. As Traverso might say, the representation of history with the direct words of the witnesses might allow for empathy but erases the hierarchical structure of historiography, and as such, it provides the scaffolding of a myth. Memory also plays a role in other graphic narratives about Malvinas, although the results are not always as striking. The events of the war are depicted in a graphic novel such as Tortas Fritas de  Polenta by Martinelli and Bayúgar. Originally published in Fierro in April 2013, it was eventually reprinted as a standalone book. This is Martinelli’s testimonial account of his

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experiences to Bayúgar, and it is narrated from the perspective of a foot soldier who enters the conflict with little or no information. Very far from the realistic aesthetics and epic tone of Taborda and Barrón’s graphic novel, here we have a testimonial account narrated with a completely different visual vocabulary: the entire graphic novel is built with an aesthetic that reminds us of caricatures, using black and white contrasting spaces in evenly distributed groups of three horizontal vignettes per plate, which creates a very sobering and somewhat ominous effect (see figure 9.2). The use of ink lines and negative and positive spaces underlines the impression of reading a subjective account, whereas in Malouïnes, the use of realistic drawings gave the graphic novel a documentary effect. As we will see, despite their striking visual differences, somehow both graphic narratives coincide in some of their ideological outcomes. Narrated from the perspective of a young conscript, who is recalled into the Army and sent to Malvinas without any training or preparation, the memoir seems to follow a pre-established path within similar Malvinas war narratives. Even though Martinelli does not want to occupy the space of the victim, it is very difficult to avoid this reading. Here again, Traverso’s discussion on issues of memory and history can provide some clarity. According to this historian, the search for justice for the victims of genocides and state violence gave memory narratives a central role in the reconstruction and interpretation of the past.36 In this sense, by following an already known path, the comic does not add anything new but carves a place for what needs to be said and remembered about the war. On this issue, Viviana Fridman noted, “The representation of the past’s memory is part of a power struggle over the legitimate meanings of what happened and what is worth remembering”37 What is worth remembering, therefore, is not the politics around the war or what happened during the democratization process when society saw the returning soldiers as the unpleasant reminders of the last adventure of a savage dictatorship. The “chicos de la guerra” label was a form of victimization that engulfed the veterans into a sort of collateral damage of the dictatorship, but it also generated an exceptional form of subjectivity when the soldiers finally narrated their experiences. What they had to say (even deformed by memory, as when Martinelli says that a battle lasted twenty nights instead of three38) underlined the significance of the experience itself rather than its truth and, by extension, the potency and legitimacy of a territorial claim paid in full with blood: what is told about the experience supports what cannot be uttered about politics. Whether by design or not, such stories became part of a larger national narrative about the meaning of the war, transforming the original understanding of the defeat. In this sense, Tortas Fritas is a particularly painful comic, since it narrates the horrors of the war and the social oblivion of the postwar years (including the misinformation about the soldiers’ families both during and after the conflict, the hunger and cold suffered by the troops, the lack of training, etc.).

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FIGURE 9.2. The image of another British air strike presents a very different tone in Bayúgar’s

expressionist perspective, as the battle scene recedes to showcase the horror and fear felt by the soldiers (Tortas Fritas, plate 24, vignettes 1–3).

The starting point of Tortas Fritas conjugates the elements that scaffold the Malvinas paradox in Argentine politics. The first chapters show the high level of repression the armed forces exercised over society—the opening scene shows the military taking over a high school while searching for political materials in students’ possessions without warrants, often a prelude for arresting

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and kidnapping young militants39—describing how young men understood the disparate treatment they received and perceived their forced participation in illegal repressive operations when they served in the compulsory military service. Yet when young soldiers are forced into reengagement, the tone becomes almost festive: instead of preparing for a counterattack, the conscripts consume pornography, develop a black market, and eat barbecue. By the time the British start bombarding them, it is clear that the Army is unprepared for what is to come and that its concept of war is painfully outdated, for the soldiers are confronting a modern war with trenches. Every single attack reveals the Argentine disadvantages, showcasing within the narrative memories that the two armies in the confrontation were decades apart technologically and organizationally. The British never appear in the graphic novel until the end, when they take care of the young conscript prisoners, who they clearly respect—a counterpoint to the prisoners’ own military brass. Contrary to Malouïnes (and despite a brief mention of the heroics of the pilots in Tortas Fritas), this graphic novel builds its heroism from the specificity of the privates. In a striking double spread,40 the fear and valor of the young soldiers and the sheer violence of the air raids are depicted by two overlaying strategies that accumulate over the increasingly dark expressionist and grotesque language of the comic. On the one hand, the sound effects of the bombardment take over the panels until they break into the gutters and make all human images disappear into a negative space. On the other hand, the normal distribution of three parallel panels per spread (which is common throughout the comic) is broken, creating an increased staccato that accelerates the reading of the second page of the spread, making it clear that fear has taken over. Yet as we turn the page to the next spread, we return to the already established distribution of the panels, where we see how soldiers are calmly getting together to listen to a soccer match on the radio.41 Whereas the brass and the priests that led the military are strongly criticized for their cowardice and violence against the soldiers under their command (most of them flee), all battle scenes depict the movements of the troops, their unwavering will to keep on fighting, their mutual support and understanding, and their alienation in the face of death. As examples in the graphic novel, one can mention scenes such as Martinelli’s reluctance to pray with comrades, so not to see them cry, or the sergeant’s apology to the soldiers (and the forgiveness he receives) before deserting.42 Memory builds a world whose sociability sways between the idealized virtues of nationalism that appear in Malouïnes and the abject detachment of survival. Hence what memory brings forward is the everyday of the battlefield. If in this sense Tortas Fritas is radically different than Malouïnes, both share the same need to restore the war’s historical symbolic space within the national debate. This search is problematic, to say the least. In both cases, the graphic novels are a mise-en-scène showing how an oral history is to be presented and

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how we attribute truthfulness to events.43 However, the Malvinas War is still awaiting a serious historiographic account that analyzes the myths around it with a clear, cold, detached perspective.44 The products of the cultural field might be able to contribute to such a debate, but in order to do so, the war experiences need to be understood on their own terms. Additionally, there is a need for a critical reflection on the naturalization of territorial nationalism in everyday politics. Neither comic addresses these issues. In both cases, unheeded territorial claims are narrated (and understood) as another form of victimization, and the pilots and privates’ heroism is an ode to the injured motherland. Hence the defeat remains an open wound in national memory as the comics come to a close.

Conclusion The 1980s opened a new era in the history of comics and graphic novels in Argentina. The magazine Fierro was instrumental in promulgating the work of Argentine and international comics creators, in generating a new aesthetic, and in reinforcing the quality of the scripts. Comics written in the years that followed carry some of that inheritance—in particular, comics that returned to history as its primary source material. Comics have become part of the cultural library of the medium’s creators, and therefore, their visual language is indebted to many sources from movies and high art to videos and graphic arts. This particular perspective broke from a strong Argentine tradition of realist documentation in the creation of (adventure) comics. Although graphic experimentation would become the main characteristic of those years, what was called “realist drawing” (in opposition to the more experimental magazines where art and comics melded) was developed as the scaffolding of “serious comics.” Questions regarding issues of truth and representation, transparency and subjectivity, which were ever present in realism, became even more urgent in comics that intended to create their own version of events and were confronted with historical narratives, memory, and/or documents. The question was not only how to narrate or show but also how to determine what was a legitimate appropriation of the national imagination. Ever since the war ended, nonfiction books have returned to diverse personal accounts and other new information in a tradition that was begun in 1983 with the extremely successful Malvinas, La Trama Secreta, published by the war correspondents of major Argentine newspapers.45 However, the lack of public debate and the secrecy around official reports, coupled with increased politically polarized interpretations of the war, turned the issue into a space of ideological entrenchments. Critical approaches to narratives either underline the role of the Air Force as an example of heroism in the military, as in the case on Malouïnes, or discuss the suffering of the troops as a way to justify postwar

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ideological positioning, as in the case of Tortas Fritas. More than thirty years after the conflict, narratives seemed to have crystallized while hovering between national pride and national identity, oral history and often incomplete historical reports, and interpretations of the war as a fascist adventure or as an epic effort. With the trials against the juntas incomplete and with little information on the role of the Air Force during the dictatorship, the part played by this force during the war reached an almost mythic status, partly supported by British comments. With little or no reflection about the conflict in the cultural field, and with almost no historiographic accounts, public assumptions about the war often suggest that foot soldiers were cannon fodder trapped in an amplified concentration camp where military brass were permitted to abuse and belittle them in a sort of ongoing metaphor of the dictatorship. Certainly, such readings have been sustained by a steady flow of publications, movies, exhibits, and so on that reflect the firsthand account of the soldiers’ experiences as well as some of the officials in different branches of the armed forces and consider how the population lived out the war in Argentina proper. Graphic novels about the war add to this multitude of subjective memories, increasing the national feeling about the islands. Yet the war still awaits a public debate that actually reviews not only the ideological basis for any territorial claims but also its consequences.

Notes 1 Casa Rosada, or Pink House, is the official seat of the executive branch of govern-

ment in Argentina. Presidents have had their offices in the building since 1886.

2 Federico Lorenz, “El malestar de Krimov. Malvinas, los estudios sobre la guerra y

3 4 5

6

7

8

la historia argentina reciente,” Estudios, Revista del Centro de Estudios Avanzados de la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, n. 25 (Enero–Junio 2011): 53, https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/restudios/article/view/471/440ñ. The series was published in the numbers 1 to 7 of Fierro. Although it was not the only one to appear in the magazine at the time, it was the most famous one. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 3–4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994); Thierry Groensteen, Système de la Bande Dessinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2016); Jane Tolmie, Drawing from Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013). Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Aubjetivo: Una Discusióz (Buenos Aires, República Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2005); Enzo Traverso, L’Histoire Comme Champ de Batail: Interpréter les Violences du XXe Siècle (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2011). Adolfo Gilly, “Las Malvinas, una Guerra del Capital,” Cuadernos Políticos Ediciones Era, México, D. F, n. 35 (Enero–Marzo 1983): 15–51; Andrés Fontana, “Fuerzas

184 • Silvia G. Kurlat Ares

9 10

11

12

13

14 15

Armadas, Partidos Políticos y Transición a la Democracia en Argentina” (working paper, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1984); Amy Oakes, “Diversionary War and Argentina’s Invasion of the Falkland Islands,” Security Studies 15 ( January 3, 2006): 431–463. Vicente Palermo, Sal en las Heridas: Las Malvinas en la cultura Argentina Contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2007), 4–7. Vicente Palermo, “Causa Malvinas, Diplomacia y Guerra: Una Mirada de la Historia a la Luz de Contribuciones Recientes,” Historia y Política, no. 16 ( Julio/ Diciembre 2006): 267–274; N. Aizenstatd, “A Treinta Años de la Guerra: Las Islas Malvinas (Falkland) y los Principios de Derecho Internacional / Thirty Years after the War: The Malvinas (Falklands) and Principles of International Law,” Estudios Internacionales 44, no. 173 (2012): 91–116, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24311810; Alejandro Simonoff, “Una Tabula Rasa con el Pasado: Las Estrategias Argentinas Hacia las Malvinas Desde la Recuperación de la Democracia (1983–2012),” Humania del Sur 7, no. 13 ( Julio–Diciembre 2012): 15–38. In 1957, a law also declared February 22 the Day of the Antarctic as a way to reaffirm Argentina’s claim over a vast portion of that territory. Military and scientific bases have been continually occupied since 1904 under Argentine flag. The march was penned in 1940 by Carlos Obligado and José Tieri and is part of the mandatory national music curriculum in Argentine schools. The song, as well as its incorporation in the national curriculum and in the official repertoire, are all examples of the implementation of the “irredentismo argentino” policy, a nationalist line of thought that states that the country had lost a number of its territories since independence, and hence the territory of the fatherland is “incomplete.” Territories like the Malvinas archipelago are to be recuperated so to protect the integrity of the nation. For more information on this matter, see Luis Alberto Romero’s work, including his 2008 contribution to the debate on curricular design. Luis Alberto Romero, “La Idea de Nación en los Libros de Texto de Historia Argentinos del Siglo XX,” in Seminario Internacional: Textos Escolares de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, ed. Ana María Saldaña (Santiago: Ministerio de Educación de Chile, 2008), 57–69. After the war, the day would be changed to April 2 and officially would also become Veterans Day in a country that, by 1982, had not waged military hostilities against foreign powers in more than one hundred years. “March de Malvinas” (1940), lyrics by Carlos Obligado and music by José Tieri. Section 247 of the famous Rattenbach Report, from which this quote has been taken, analyzes the political goals of the war. The Report also scrutinizes the poor preparation, lack of training and coordination, and the complete lack of understanding of geopolitical forces at play by the Argentine Junta before the start and during the conflict. The Report underlines the heroic actions of individuals as well as the Air Force. Because of its harsh criticism, the Report was kept secret for years, and when snippets were made public, they were adulterated. Made finally available by presidential decree in 2012, it became a confirmation of what reporters and historians had sustained for years. It also was an acknowledgment of the work of lieutenant general Benjamín Rattenbach (1898–1984) on the issue of the war. A documentary about the report was made for open-access TV by the end of that year. Benjamín Rattenbach et al., Informe Rattenbach: Investigación Confidencial Sobre La Conducción Política Y Estratégico-Militar De Las Fuerzas Armadas Argentinas En La Guerra De Malvinas (Buenos Aires: Casa Rosada–Presidencia de la Nación, 1983), http:// www.casarosada.gob.ar/informacion/archivo/25773-informe-rattenbach.

The Malvinas War in Argentine Memory • 185 16 The incident was orchestrated by Argentine intelligence officers who had infiltrated

17

18

19

20

21

22 23

24

the laborers group and took advantage of the opportunity given by the liquidation of the processing plant. David Sanders, Hugh Ward, David Marsh, and Tony Fletcher, “Government Popularity and the Falklands War: A Reassessment,” British Journal of Political Science 17, no. 3 (1987): 281–313; Heather Nunn, Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2002). Such was the case of Commander Alfredo Astiz (1951–), an intelligence officer who had infiltrated several human rights groups and was responsible, among others, for the deaths of French nuns Alice Domon and Leónie Duquet, as well as seventeen-year-old Dagmar Hagelin in 1977. Before the war, he was involved in the scrap metal workers incident in the Georgia Islands, and during the war, he was among the officers who quickly surrendered to British forces in the same location. He was dishonorably discharged and is currently serving time for his crimes during the dictatorship. In a famous interview with writer Osvaldo Soriano in 1983, sociologist Alain Rouquié pointed out that because of the strong nationalist bend of Argentine culture, it was important to undercut any possible avenue the military might have to claim a legitimate outcome to its rule, since such development could only extend its days in power and erase the memory of human rights violations or economic mismanagement. Hence the word desmalvinizar was coined. The interview has been quoted and misquoted often, and the word, over time, has become charged with different political meanings. Nowadays, it is considered increasingly negative because of the effects of the political process on the returning troops. See Osvaldo Soriano, “Entrevista con Alain Rouquié: ‘Desde París, Alain Rouquié,’” in Revista Humor, no. 105 (March 1983): 44–50. Defining itself as an alternative to the official liberal history, “revisionimo histórico,” or historical revisionism, is a nationalistic, conservative historiographic school, which posited among other core ideas, the sacred character of the national frontiers and hence the imperative to preserve them. From its perspective, one of the main identifiers of the motherland is the territory. Under President Cristina Kirchner, an Instituto Nacional de Revisionismo Histórico was created, causing a great intellectual scandal in 2011. Federico Reggiani, “‘La única verdad es la realidad’: Apuntes sobre la noción de ‘historieta realista,’” Cultura, lenguaje y representación: Revista de estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I 10 (2012): 129–137, http://www.raco.cat/index.php/CLR/ article/view/257188. Andrés Cascioli, “Nos Hiceron la Cama” (Cover Art), Revista Humor, no. 81, May 1982. Mariela Alejandra Acevedo, “Tras Su Manto de Neblina: Representaciones de la Guerra de Malvinas en Dos Momentos de la Revista Fierro (1984/85–2012),” (working paper, CLACSO, Buenos Aires, 2016), 11, http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/ clacso/becas/20160218053055/MACEVEDO_Clacso_2015_Malvinas.pdf. Founded in 1919 by Constancio C. Vigil (Uruguay, 1876–Argentina, 1954), the weekly magazine Billiken is one of the most popular children’s publications in Latin America, with a weekly print of more than fifty thousand copies. The magazine provides entertainment and visual materials that school age children can use in school projects during the Argentine academic calendar. The magazine has often been criticized because of its conservative stance and its Argentine-centered view of history.

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25 Palermo, “Introducción,” Sal en las heridas. 26 In his work on the semiotics of comics, Groensteen defines iconic solidarity as

27

28 29

30

31

32 33

34

35 36 37

38

the foundational principle that allows comics to enunciate and thus function as a medium. The relationship between multiple correlated images creates a panoptic field (the double page of the panels) that is itself a unit of meaning operating both by conjunction and spalling. These relations work as spatial and visual articulations that have to be both read and decoded. Groensteen, Système de la Bande Dessinée, 21–29. The comic was first published in France and Switzerland. This is not an unusual route for Argentine comics, which often are published in Europe early on (generally in Italy or France) and then in Argentina. Reasons vary, but the unstable nature of the Argentine press industry is generally one of the main causes. The Argentine comic market is very cosmopolitan and has strong ties with the European production at large. At the time of writing this chapter, only two of the volumes in the series were in print in Argentina. “Rencontre avec Néstor Barrón, Scénariste de la Série Malouïnes, Le Ciel Appartient aux Faucons,” interview by Les Éditions Paquet, Éditions Paquet, 2011, http:// www.paquet.li/bd/news/522-recontre-avec-nestor-barron-scenariste-de-la-serie -malouines-le-ciel-appartient-aux-faucons. This Spanish philosopher (1883–1955) was among the most influential thinkers for the development of Argentine nationalism, particularly his book The Revolt of the Masses (1930), where he argues the articulation between land and authenticity of life. Argentina’s last war before the Malvinas conflict was the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), in which the country formed an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay. Aside from its involvement in the civil wars that followed the independence process, the Army was also involved in the territorial expansion of the country in Patagonia with the Conquista del Desierto Campaign (1878–1885) as well as the Chaco exploration and conquest (1870–1917), which proved to be genocides against indigenous peoples. Later on, the Army was key in the repression of several strikes and social movements, starting in 1890 and continuing well into the 1920s, before the 1930 coup naturalized these practices within military governments. Rosana Gruber, Experiencia de Halcón: Ni Héroes ni Kamikazes, Pilotos de la A4B (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana Planeta, 2016). Néstor Barrón (writer), Walther Taborda (draftsman), and Wes Hartmann (colorist), Malvinas. El Cielo pertenece a los Halcones, Vol. 1 y 2 (Buenos Aires: El buen Libro, 2015), plate 33. The 1976–1983 dictatorship was the most brutally repressive in the country’s history. In 1985, the Juntas (and later on, ranked officers) were sent to trial for crimes of lesa humanidad, such as the kidnapping, torture, and murder of an estimated ten thousand to thirty thousand people, including women and children. Original witness accounts were collected in the Nunca Más! (1984) report. Traverso, L’Histoire, 256. Traverso, 253. Viviana Fridman, “El imaginario de la violencia en la ficción argentina sobre Malvinas,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, special issue, Imaginarios de la Violencia 34, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 23–43, 40. Adolfo Bayúgar and Eduardo A. Martinelli, Tortas Fritas de Polenta (Castalia, Alicante: Edicions de Ponent, 2014), plate 76.

The Malvinas War in Argentine Memory • 187 39 Bayúgar and Martinelli, Tortas Fritas de Polenta, plates 1–2. 40 Barrón, Taborda, and Hartmann, Malvinas. El Cielo pertenece a los Halcones, plates

33–34.

41 It can be said that the scene showcases the normalization of the violence of the war

42 43 44

45

experience within the young troops. However, since the narrative returns on several occasions to such accounts without seemingly bearing any immediate consequence on the soldiers, I would argue that these scenes and their apparent lack of impact provide the account of a different form of heroics: the heroics of the simple men, the everyday form of the Argentine Being. Bayúgar and Martinelli, Tortas Fritas de Polenta, plates 47–48. Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado, 130–132. In February 2012, as an answer to the increased nationalist rhetoric of the Cristina F. Kirchner government, a group of intellectuals (including Beatriz Sarlo Jorge Lanata, Juan José Sebreli, Emilio de Ípola, Pepe Eliaschev, Santiago Kovadloff, Luis Alberto Romero, and Hilda Sabato, among others) penned a document called “Malvinas: Una visión Alternativa” [Falkland: A different perspective]. Hotly contested by the so-called official intellectuals and dismissed by many, the document attempted to open the debate around Malvinas by discussing the legal place of the Kelpers, questioning the legality of both Argentine claims and the war itself, and pointing out the dangers of nationalism and populism. The debate had no issue. Beatriz Sarlo et al., “Malvinas. Una visión Alternativa,” Facebook Malvinas-una-visión-alternativa, March 2, 2012, https://es-la.facebook.com/malvinasunavisionalternativa/. Oscar R. Cardoso, Ricardo Kirschbaum, and Eduardo van der Kooy, Malvinas, la Trauma Secreta (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana Planeta, 1983).

Chapter 10

The Haunting Power of War Remembering the Rwandan Genocide in 99 Days TATIANA PROROKOVA

War in the Graphic Novel Comics and graphic novels, when dealing with an issue as complex as war, do not always exclusively focus on combat. Frequently they also address a whole panoply of problems related to war to varying extents. Among these concerns are the ramifications of war, particularly issues of trauma and memory that are especially salient to this chapter. War is frequently displayed as a memorable event—one that has power to change the lives of individuals and nations, to influence whole generations, to transform history not only during actual military actions but also in their aftermath. It comes as no surprise then that war never ends without leaving a trace. War continues living in collective memory, for its history (constructed out of collective and individual experiences alike) is transmitted from one generation to another. However, within a narrower scope, war also becomes part of the personal experience of those who live through it—experience that is then transformed into memories that take on an individualized cast.1 Such memories are arguably even more valuable and frequently more traumatic 188

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than the expressions of collective memory, since they are based on the stories of particular people—people for whom war is not only a generalized tale but also a specific story with a context that contains manifold experiences of pain, loss, struggle, and survival. War kills many, but it also spares many. Nevertheless, war’s survivors are forever changed because, inevitably, every war leaves a deep psychological imprint on everyone involved. For survivors, the cessation of war’s open hostilities does not signify the end of their personal war—which can be described as the struggle to forget and move forward—because war will always live in their memory and will continue living in the memory of their children, thus permanently haunting them. This is what I call the haunting power that every war possesses and eventually imposes on its survivors. There are a number of survivors who have chosen to share their deeply personal, traumatic experiences with a public audience, which only underscores the fact that war continues living in the hearts and minds of the participants long after its end. Significantly, this chapter does not consider surviving soldiers but focuses instead on civilians forcibly pulled into war who managed to survive. There are multiple examples of literary works—the most explicit of which fall into the memoir genre—that narrate various stories of survivors. Many war witnesses and survivors have chosen a visual-verbal technique to narrate their stories and have therefore created a whole thematic subgenre of comics and graphic novels. Among such narratives are Jean-Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile Through the Tears (2009), Josh Blaylock’s Operation Nemesis: A Story of Genocide and Revenge (2015), Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, a Survivor’s True Story (1982), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2000), Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986), and many others. As is already clear from this short list of survivors’ stories, all of them raise the problem of injustice and sometimes even the forced involvement in military actions experienced by civilian populations. The stories therefore tend to largely focus on the issue of loss: the actual physical loss of a family member or friend or the loss of the happier and safer life that one might have lived had war not interfered. There is also a considerable platform for comics and graphic novels about war that are not memoirs but whose plots are based on actual wars. Among them is Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson’s graphic novel 99 Days (2011). The novel tells the story of Antoine Davis, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has become a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. Although its central story is set in Los Angeles, the book has a subplot about the Rwandan civil war and genocide that not only becomes crucial to the main plotline but also allows one to classify 99 Days as a fictional story of a genocide survivor that reflects the real history of the war. The novel’s inclusion of a war story helps unfold the issue of the haunting power of war—that is, the ability of war

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to haunt survivors, living in their memories and thus torturing them psychologically. The question that arises in this connection is, How does war become indelible in one’s memory?

Persistence of Memory: Trauma, War, and the Graphic Novel War is one of the most traumatic experiences that a human being can endure, and it is apparent that it stays in the memory of a survivor forever. War experiences are overwhelmingly negative both for soldiers and civilians. The most destructive effect that war can have on its participants psychologically is its provocation of “stress and psychological dysfunction.”2 Speculating on which factors cause such considerable psychological mutilations, scholars agree on the following: “Exposure to combat involves many obvious experiences. Among the most important . . . are: threat to life and limb; physical discomfort from exposure to the elements; disease and deprivation; loss of friends; exposure to the death and dying of others; the requirement to kill and harm others resulting in moral and value conflicts; and the feeling of helplessness in the face of forces beyond the individual’s control.”3 Thus the physical and moral threats that war makes toward soldiers and civilians are so intense that they cannot wholly disappear once the war is over. Exposure to such stressful conditions inevitably changes one psychologically, as war continues to live in one’s memory. From a neurobiological perspective, our “memories [are] placed in their proper context in time and place” with the help of the hippocampus.4 Yet “trauma is registered and encoded in the brain in a different way from ordinary memory.”5 That eventually “results in amnesia for the specifics of traumatic experiences but not the feelings associated with them.”6 Therefore, while one might believe that the war is being slowly forgotten, one’s body will always remember it: the experiences and feelings one endured during war become literally imprinted physically. This only proves the validity of the haunting power of war, as war memories continue to pursue survivors with little regard for their conscious will. When dealing with the problem of memory, one has to carefully examine the relationship between the present (and the future) and the past. A memory is a resurrection of a past event in the present. What status, we might ask, does a particular memory achieve once it is activated in the present? One can speculate that while the basis of a memory is an event in the past, once it is being actively thought about, it becomes part of the present actuality. In other words, “if we spread a specious present so that it covers more events . . . taking in some of the past and conceivably some of the future, the events so included would belong, not to the past and the future, but to the present.”7 One can argue that while memories from the past are indeed part of our everyday reality

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and therefore help construct our present, the graphic novel (along with other cultural artifacts) facilitates the connection between the past and the present (and for that matter, the future), accumulating and presenting memories of war and history. Ron Eyerman’s argument aptly supports this speculation: “The past becomes present though symbolic interactions, through narrative and discourse, with memory itself being a product of both, ‘called upon to legitimate identity, to construct and reconstruct it.’”8 The concept of haunting that this chapter employs to discuss the traumatic events from one’s past is viewed as a complex psychological phenomenon that is tightly connected to the issues of trauma and memory. In line with Sinikka Grant, I consider haunting to be an intricate “structure where a trace of past violence intervenes in the present.”9 The feeling of déjà vu that one might associate with haunting is, significantly, always uncontrollable—that is, the person can never evoke or suppress such memories. It is the memories that have control over the person and not vice versa. This is the crucial aspect that defines haunting. Having fallen victim to war, over time the person involuntarily falls victim to his or her own memories. Significantly, haunting happens not only through one’s psychological connection to certain past events but also through material objects that were symbolic of or crucial for those events. In this respect, the machete that eventually resurrects the traumatic memories about the genocide in 99 Days is practically a voodoo attribute. It causes psychological mutilations of the main character during a peaceful time in present-day Los Angeles and connects the wartime from the past to the present, representing historical knowledge and a tool of historiography at the same time. Dealing with the problem of haunting, 99 Days arguably turns into a metanarrative. An intersection of traumatic historic narrative with fictional entertainment is achieved through the memories that haunt the main character, making the graphic novel a symbolic memorial that preserves the history and trauma of the Rwandan genocide for both the main character and the reader and conveying the history of the war beyond spatial and temporal boundaries. As can be seen in many documentary and fictional stories of war, graphic novels willingly take up the issues of war, trauma, and memory, making them central to their narrations. One possible explanation for such a pervasive presence of these issues in graphic novels is provided by Ari Folman, the director of the film and author of the graphic novel Waltz with Bashir: “War is such a surreal thing; it’s the most surreal thing on earth, and animation can do it. Surrealism is perfect for animation.”10 Andrea Greenbaum comments on Folman’s words, arguing that war’s “grotesque or improbable” events can indeed be “easily [placed] within the grammar of comics and sequential art,” which vividly illustrates why “the contemporary graphic novel has become a flexible medium for the portrayal of war and its bloody aftermath.”11 Hillary L. Chute’s claim that “the comics medium has evolved as an instrument for commenting on and

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re-visioning experience and history”12 also reinforces the idea that the graphic novel is a powerful medium for dealing with an issue as complex as war. Yet the representation of war in graphic novels—and here I refer to the specific representations of actual wars—can indeed pose serious questions with regard to how one combines the trauma of war with its representation so that the resulting work neither undermines nor exaggerates history. In this respect, Chute, discussing Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), raises fundamental questions: “What is the texture of narrative forms that are relevant to ethical representations of history? What are the current stakes surrounding the right to show and to tell history? What are the risks of representation? How do people understand their lives through narrative design and render the difficult processes of memory intelligible?”13 In line with Chute’s questions, one might also wonder how graphic novels of war are themselves transformed into memories of war. It seems plausible to claim that while war memories haunt survivors and later generations, comics and graphic novels (along with other literary and cultural artifacts) based on real wars either become actual memories (e.g., in the case of memoirs) or resurrect memories about real wars, thus reinforcing the power of war to haunt and be remembered. This also means that graphic novels of war contribute to a corpus of cultural representations that, speaking in Wendy Kozol’s terms, “tell us about obligations of remembrance.”14

The Present Shot Through with the Past: The Rwandan Genocide in 99 Days Often making the problem of war and its ramifications central to its plot, the graphic novel has gained the reputation of a serious literary genre. Many such novels, including 99 Days, successfully combine fiction with history. The graphic novel 99 Days centers its plot on the fictional story of detective Antoine Davis, who was adopted by an American family after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He continues living with the memories of the tragic events in his homeland, but these memories become intensified when, together with his partner Valeria Torres, Antoine has to find a serial killer whose style of murdering is very reminiscent of the way the mass killings were carried out during the Rwandan genocide. Before proceeding to analyze the graphic novel, a brief history of the Rwandan genocide—in which about 500,000–800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered from April to July 1994—should be provided.15 The slaughter that took place in April is now known as “one of the most concentrated acts of genocide in human history.”16 The genocide was the result of a confrontation between Hutu on one side and Tutsi and moderate Hutu

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on the other. It was based on ethnic hatred that arguably had been inflamed and cultivated during the colonial era by the Belgians, who privileged Tutsi over Hutu for their “biological” closeness to the white race, thus imposing an “absolute” hierarchy, where Tutsi were socially higher than Hutu.17 The genocide started after President Habyarimana (Hutu) was killed when his plane was shot down not far from Gregoire Kayibanda International Airport in Kigali on April 6, 1994. It is unknown whether Hutu or Tutsi were responsible for the act, but the assassination led to three months of slaughter, in which Hutu murdered 75  percent of the Tutsi population in Rwanda.18 The brutality of the mass murder was shocking, as the killings were very often committed by machete. Already on its first page, 99 Days transports its readers to Kigali in 1994, introducing two boys, one of whom stares in shock at the other. The face of the latter has brutally been cut several times, with blood running down; the caption reads “enemy.”19 Turning the page, readers are taken to Los Angeles in 2010 (the present), and they witness a man—Antoine—waking up from his bad dream, sweat running down his face. As the narration proceeds, one finds out that Antoine is a local police detective who, together with his partner Valeria, has been assigned to solve a string of rather ambiguous serial killings, striking in their severity. The first victim is a young African American woman. When the police find her naked corpse, they discover that her mouth, breasts, arms, legs, and back have been cut with what Antoine immediately recognizes as a machete (see figure 10.1). Valeria at once associates the killer with Jason Voorhees, a famous fictional character from Friday the 13th, who killed his victims with a machete. But for Antoine, the machete-wielding murderer is not a joke but resurrects memories from his troubled past. Thus while Valeria views the case as one more criminal mystery to be solved, for Antoine, it becomes more than just a work assignment. The resurrection of his memories and the close resemblance of the murders in Los Angeles to the ones in Kigali turn the events of the present into a matter of intense personal concern for Antoine. Questioning the first suspect, Antoine almost hits the man during the interrogation; Valeria has to pull him away. Soon they find another body—a man, whose body has severely been mutilated with a machete. And again, during the interrogation, Antoine attacks the suspect. Later, Antoine witnesses the third and final serial murder in the novel. He manages to get the victim to the hospital but fails to apprehend the killer. Antoine eventually finds both the man who ordered the killings and the one who carried them out. The investigation reminds Antoine not only of the tragic events that took place many years ago in Rwanda but also of his personal trauma and loss caused by the genocide. The graphic novel 99 Days celebrates the haunting power of war on visual and verbal levels. Visually, the novel is drawn in black and white. While Laurike in ‘t Veld has commented that such a color scheme “clearly incorporates

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FIGURE 10.1. The mutilated corpse of an African American woman (99 Days, 9)

the noir iconography”20—99 Days is obviously a noir detective story—I argue that the use of black and white helps juxtapose past and present. The novel combines the scenes from Antoine’s past during the Rwandan genocide and his present as a police detective. Yet while scenes depicted in black and white traditionally refer to the past, in contrast to the colored present, 99 Days does not use any color, thus merging past and present, revealing that the memories from Antoine’s past literally live in his present. It does not, of course, mean that every graphic novel drawn in black and white pursues this same goal; yet in the case of 99 Days, the argument seems very plausible. Additionally, one can speculate that the choice of black and white was made to create a dark story about the ethnic war and a case of personal trauma. Indeed, “the role of colour is exclusively to satisfy the eye.”21 Therefore, while bright colors usually make a narrative more approachable and “physically easier to read and see,”22 dark colors work in the other direction, arguably depriving the graphic novel of its “attractiveness to readers.”23

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It is worth noting that along with sight, hearing is another crucial sense that the graphic novel frequently appeals to,24 and 99 Days is relatively rich in sounds. During the genocide scenes, the reader witnesses the death of Antoine’s father to the accompaniment of the sound of a gunshot—“BLAA-MM.”25 While fighting the killers in Los Angeles, Antoine shoots a gun and uses a machete, which is audible as “BLAMBLAM BLAMM”26 and “THUNKK,”27 respectively; the reader hears “THUMP” as he beats up the man who ordered the killings.28 The scenes of fighting in Kigali and Los Angeles, therefore, parallel each other; the use of similar weapons and, consequently, the similar sounds accompanying the murders fuse the two events. While the reader clearly differentiates when 99 Days is describing the murders in Rwanda and when it is dealing with the killings in the United States, he or she is meant to see certain similarities in both the brutality of the acts and the choice of weapons—similarities that arguably transfer the war from Antoine’s past into his present. Moreover, the way the panels are organized invites an interpretation too. Barbara Postema contends, “The signifying functions in comics are not just based on the signs present as the content of the panels, but are very much dictated by how panels are arranged on the page and how (and whether) they are framed. The layout, and the gaps that are an integral part of it, are an essential part of comics signification.”29 Additionally, “comics panels participate in both a sequential narrative and the totality of the page layout.”30 In 99 Days, the reader is always informed about the particular geographical location that the action unfolds within. Yet it is significant that the panels that describe events in Kigali and Los Angeles are never intermingled on one page. That is, just as the United States and Africa belong to different spheres of the world, so too do the stories in the book have their own distinct spaces. Such a separation might seem to contradict my theory that 99 Days mixes the past with the present, since structurally the graphic novel draws a distinct line between the genocide in Rwanda and the murders in the United States. Yet by not mixing the events, the novel underscores the difference between them, implicitly claiming that the tragedy of Rwanda, where more than half a million people were slaughtered, cannot be compared to a small series of (fictional) killings in the United States. Yet such a juxtaposition only helps the reader contrast the events that Antoine has been an eyewitness to: we are meant to realize how deep his trauma is if even in 2010, many years after the genocide, the encounter with several murders carried out with a machete return him mentally to war-torn Kigali. Thus the way the panels are organized is aimed at contrasting, comparing, and eventually correlating the past with the present and vice versa. The haunting power of war is also manifested on the verbal level, specifically through the two plotlines that overlap multiple times in the novel. There are obvious parallels between Antoine’s life in Rwanda and his later life in the

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United States, which can be noticed in several episodes throughout the novel. In ‘t Veld claims that the text of an American radio commercial—“Ever dreamt of something like THIS? Well NOW you can HAVE IT! Change your LIFE . . . and for just 99 dollars a MONTH!”31—is reminiscent of radio propaganda against Tutsi broadcast in Rwanda before and during the genocide, which is also present in the novel—“And no matter WHO they were before LIBERATION DAY . . . Today they are our ENEMY. And therefore man or woman, old or young . . . we have to treat them AS ENEMY!”32 The scholar also accentuates the connection between several scenes: the scene when Antoine and Valeria agree to have a cup of coffee versus the episode when one of the Interahamwe pours a cup of coffee on Antoine, making him join their fight against Tutsi, and an exchange when Antoine and Valeria openly flirt with each other versus the incident when Antoine is forced to rape a Tutsi woman. Finally, there is a more general parallel between gang members in Los Angeles and extremist Hutu.33 While these details are indeed important to the understanding of the Rwandan genocide that is adopted in the context of this American noir fiction, perhaps helping make the war in Rwanda clearer to the audience, there are other scenes that create an atmosphere of haunting, transmitting the story of the Rwandan genocide to the United States. For example, one witnesses young Antoine together with his family members, sitting at the dinner table and listening to extremist slogans on the radio; on the next page, the scene shifts to the United States, where Antoine is spending an evening with his foster parents at home, having dinner. It is crucial that when Antoine visits his adoptive parents after he has helped the third victim, his mother is concerned that the girl could have transmitted some disease to him through her blood. Antoine responds, “Relax, mom. If I didn’t catch H.I.V. where I come from.”34 The scene overtly refers to the disastrous problem of AIDS that was killing the Rwandese as mercilessly as the genocide. Yet it also serves as a bridge that explicitly connects Antoine’s past with his present. Next, Antoine’s sister’s name was Valerie, whereas the name of his partner now is Valeria. Both the girl and the woman live through the genocide with Antoine—the former literally and the latter symbolically. The name therefore becomes an element that connects the episodes from Antoine’s life. Finally, the fact that the victims of the cases he is investigating in Los Angles are all African Americans stands for the murder of black people in Africa. The major event in Antoine’s life during the genocide was not, however, the war in his country, the death of his family members, or his eventual immigration (although undoubtedly all these issues caused him psychological trauma) but the murder of his Tutsi friend—which he himself was forced to commit under the orders of extremist Hutu. This episode from Antoine’s life is crucial for understanding his current psychological state, as the phantom of the murdered boy surfaces in Antoine’s dreams, and as soon as the serial killings

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begin, it starts to haunt the man obsessively. Scholars have made an interesting observation with regard to the war stress that soldiers experience: “Combat exposure and the concomitant stress were most prevalent and intensive along the front of confrontation with the enemy and declined as individuals moved to rear areas.”35 This remark can be also applied to Antoine, whose forced murder of his friend symbolically made him an Intarahamwe soldier and whose immigration to the United States metaphorically stands for his moving to a rear area. Yet despite the dramatic change of environment, the Rwandan genocide continues living in his memory. Anne Whitehead argues, “The ‘memory’ of trauma is  .  .  . not subject to the usual narrative or verbal mechanisms of recall, but is instead organized as bodily sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”36 It is precisely through Antoine’s nightmares and flashbacks that the reader finds out about the character’s traumatic experience. Antoine is clearly scared that events similar to those of the genocide might once again happen around him. He warns one of the gang members, “I WON’T let this happen AGAIN, you hear me?! You BLOODTHIRSTY ANIMALS won’t have it YOUR way, not THIS time! NOT AGAIN!”37 Understanding the power he has been given (by his status as a police officer as well as his age as a grown man), Antoine is determined to do everything to stop the killings of innocent people. Yet one can speculate that Antoine is not so much afraid of the murders themselves as he is scared that he will be involved again in killing. As he drives through the city and listens to the radio, his attention is caught by the words, “For the past ALWAYS comes back to bite us in the ass. What we DID and did NOT do is still here for us to see.”38 He soon envisions the boy whom he murdered years ago now angrily staring at him in Los Angeles, face mutilated by machete cuts (see figure 10.2). His war experience now explicitly and obsessively haunts Antoine everywhere. Yet what finally transforms Antoine is the sight of the machete during the rescue of the third victim. The reader observes the machete lying on the road, followed by a close-up of Antoine’s eyes; the next image shows the machete from a maximally close perspective, and then the reader again sees a—now larger—image of Antoine’s frightened eyes (see figure 10.3). Soon after the incident, Antoine is drunk in his apartment, envisioning the murdered Tutsi boy, weeping, apologizing for what he did; the machete lies on a table. Obviously having taken the machete from the crime scene, Antoine lies to his boss and Valeria and claims that the killer took the weapon with him. Significantly, the machete becomes the key element that triggers a psychological metamorphosis in Antoine: it provokes rage in him and makes him kill again. Having found out who murdered the innocent people, Antoine confronts him and fatally beats him. It is important, however, to see that the killer, to a certain extent, parallels Antoine in his childhood actions, since like Antoine he is just an executor—the difference is that Antoine was literally

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FIGURE 10.2. The vision of the boy who Antoine brutally murdered during the Rwandan genocide (99 Days, 72)

forced to kill, whereas the Los Angeles killer did it for money. Nevertheless, the fact that they both were given orders from above to kill apparently unites them. Having killed the murderer, Antoine has therefore symbolically killed his own self—the Hutu boy who could not object to orders and prevent the murder of the innocent Tutsi boy. Following his first killing so many years after the genocide, Antoine’s psychological state finally worsens to its very limit. The reader again encounters him in his apartment, holding the blood-drenched machete and seeing the Tutsi boy’s disfigured bloody face. Antoine eventually goes to the man who ordered the killings—to slaughter him with a machete: “For Estelle. For Shaela. For all the OTHERS. For my FAMILY.”39 Whereas he first enumerates the names of the victims who indeed were killed at the man’s orders, Antoine’s addition of his family to this list serves to prove that the murder of this man is another symbolic murder by the genocide survivor—now he figuratively kills the man who ordered him to slaughter the Tutsi boy. He therefore metaphorically avenges the death of the innocent Rwandese during the genocide. He also avenges the broken lives of those moderate Hutu who were either slaughtered (Antoine’s family) or forced to slaughter others (Antoine).

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FIGURE 10.3. The machete that resurrects the memory of the Rwandan genocide (99 Days, 93)

I’m what you MADE me. Nothing more. You wanted it all, and you TOOK it. It doesn’t matter if it’s Los Angeles or MY HOMETOWN. It makes no difference to you and the ones LIKE you. All those who get in the way must be KILLED. . . . I KNOW what a machete can do to a person. Do YOU? . . . You taught me, REMEMBER? A machete kills ONE, but scares hundreds more who fear THEY will suffer the SAME FATE. I’m sure you never heard of a place called KIGALI. But to me, it’s like you’ve been there ALL THE TIME. You brought me BACK there. And I DIDN’T WANT to go back.40

Antoine murders the man, which can be interpreted as an act of revenge. Yet since both men Antoine killed literally had nothing to do with the Rwandan genocide, Antoine’s deed only proves his status as a murderer. Although

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he was originally forced to be one, since in Kigali he was made to kill by a Hutu extremist, in Los Angeles he clearly becomes delusional, and the resurrected memories of the brutal war turn him into a killer again. He responds to Valeria’s words—“You act like you’re still THERE”—with “I know I’m not, Valeria. But those ONE HUNDRED DAYS are still with me.”41 Antoine’s words overtly prove that the war fought years ago in another country, in another hemisphere, still exercises its power over the survivor, driving him mad and turning him into an obsessed and cruel warrior-murderer, never letting him live a normal life again. Interestingly, the joke made by Antoine early in the novel in response to Valeria’s surprising reaction about how he knew that the first murder had been committed with a machete—“’Cause I’m your MAN, Valeria! ANTOINE BOSHOSO BOYD, the SOUTH CENTRAL RIPPER!”42—no longer sounds like a joke, since Antoine is indeed a ripper, even if a forced one. The novel finishes with UN forces finally stopping the genocide. The last pages of 99 Days are filled with brutal images of the genocide’s ramifications: thousands of refugees gather at a camp, a pile of machetes fully covers the ground, and an overwhelmingly endless number of human skulls, most of which are broken from savage machete cuts, completely fill the image (see figure 10.4). The final line of the novel is, however, rather equivocal. As Antoine runs through the refugee camp, the reader is informed that the boy will later be adopted. He gets “a second chance at LIFE.”43 But the line can hardly be interpreted in a positive way. Antoine indeed gets another chance to live a normal life in a country with no war. Yet as the novel explicitly demonstrates, he cannot use this second chance, since the memories of the brutal war in Rwanda and the actions he was forced to commit never stop haunting him. The second chance that Antoine gets, ironically, is to become a murderer again. It is important that even though the novel’s closing image shows the skulls, its final line is placed on the preceding image—on the one filled with machetes. The combination of the image of machetes (which become symbolic of the character’s transformation throughout the novel) and the words “a second chance at LIFE” therefore only reinforces the connection between Antoine’s past and present—both of which are guided by the experiences and memories of the Rwandan genocide.

Conclusion The graphic novel 99 Days narrates a fictional story, yet the presence of the Rwandan genocide—one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes not only in Africa but in the whole world—turns this story into a war testimony. While the novel recreates a bloody history of a particular place, it works well both as a narration of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath and as a story

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FIGURE 10.4. The brutal images of the Rwandan genocide ( 99 Days, 179)

that shows war as a devastating event that destroys the lives of those who are involved in it. Survival, therefore, does not become salvation, since, as 99 Days demonstrates, war will forever haunt its survivors. Significantly, war does so through memories that those who witness a conflict and its horrific episodes, including murders and other violence, will preserve within themselves, never to be rid of them. The narrative of 99 Days indeed foregrounds the haunting power of war but also pities those who were doomed to witness war’s brutality. The main message that this graphic novel sends to its readers is that the experience of war is perhaps the most traumatic experience a human being can endure, one that results in a deep psychological mutilation and an inability to be fully reintegrated into a peaceful society. The memories of war, indeed, never leave.

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Notes 1 For more on war and/in individual memory, see, for example, Gilly Carr and Keir

2

3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Reeves, eds., Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands (New York: Routledge, 2015); Hillary L. Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016); Andrea Greenbaum, The Tropes of War: Visual Hyperbole and Spectacular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Erin Martz, ed., Trauma Rehabilitation after War and Conflict: Community and Individual Perspectives (New York: Springer: Springer Science+Business Media, 2010); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Robert S. Laufer, M. S. Gallops, and Ellen Frey-Wouters, “War Stress and Trauma: The Vietnam Veteran Experience,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 25, no. 1 (1984): 66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2136705. Laufer, Gallops, and Frey-Wouters, “War Stress and Trauma,” 66. Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart quoted in Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2009), 115. Whitehead, Memory, 115. Van der Kolk and van der Hart quoted in Whitehead, Memory, 115. George Herbert Mead, “From ‘The Nature of the Past,’” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Serroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127. Ron Eyerman, “From ‘The Past in the Present: Culture and Transmission of Memory,’” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Olick, Vinitzky-Serroussi, and Levy, 305. Sinikka Grant, “‘Their Baggage a Long Line of Separation and Dispersement’: Haunting and Trans-Generational Trauma in ‘Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’” College Literature 36, no. 2 (2009): 99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20642024. Italics in original. Quoted in Greenbaum, The Tropes of War, 21. Greenbaum, 21. Chute, Disaster Drawn, 265. Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 462, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501865. Wendy Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 167. David E. Cunningham, Barriers to Peace in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 137. Mary Kayitesi-Blewitt, “Funding Development in Rwanda: The Survivors’ Perspective,” Development in Practice 16, no. 3/4 (2006): 316, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 4030061. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation after Genocide,” African Arts 38, no. 3 (2005): 37, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3345921. Cunningham, Barriers to Peace, 170. Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson, 99 Days (New York: Vertigo Crime, 2011), 5. Laurike in ‘t Veld, “Introducing the Rwandan Genocide from a Distance: American Noir and the Animal Metaphor in 99 Days,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 6, no. 2 (2015): 139, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2015.1027941.

The Haunting Power of War • 203 21 Charles Le Brun quoted in Ian Hague, Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (New York: Routledge, 2014), 44. Hague, Comics and the Senses, 43. Hague, 43. Hague, 63. Casali and Donaldson, 99 Days, 77. Casali and Donaldson, 139. Casali and Donaldson, 155. Casali and Donaldson, 158. Barbara Postema, Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments (Rochester: RIT Press, 2013), 30. Hannah Miodrag, Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 143. Casali and Donaldson, 99 Days, 6. Casali and Donaldson, 5. In ‘t Veld, “Introducing the Rwandan Genocide,” 142–143. Casali and Donaldson, 99 Days, 99. Laufer, Gallops, and Frey-Wouters, “War Stress and Trauma,” 66. Whitehead, Memory, 115. Casali and Donaldson, 99 Days, 65. Casali and Donaldson, 71. Casali and Donaldson, 158. Casali and Donaldson, 159–161. Casali and Donaldson, 175. Casali and Donaldson, 41. Casali and Donaldson, 179.

Chapter 11

Blogging in Times of War The July 2006 War in Lebanon and Mazen Kerbaj Imaging the Unimaginable YASMINE NACHABE TAAN “The word/image problem is ‘inside’ the problem of the image, and vice versa . . . the word as image, image as word; the word as limit for the image, and vice versa.”1 According to W. J. T. Mitchell, during situations of trauma, words and images fail to capture the density of lived experience. In wartime, we find ourselves unable and sometimes forbidden to make an image of what we cannot speak about.2 This chapter analyzes the drawings that Mazen Kerbaj posted on his blog since the outbreak of the July 2006 war in Lebanon.3 These drawings can be seen as part of a growing interest in war comics that offer visual witness while documenting lived experience in times of war. The paper examines the different ways Kerbaj used comics art as a medium not only to record history but also to provide testimony of personal memory, brought forth against silence in the context of war and instability. In his comics art, the artist first used strategies of visual representation and storytelling to explore certain sociocultural and political transformations in times of war; second, he used his drawings to engage with sociocultural issues involving coping with pervasive fear and a damaged sense of national identity; and third, through his blog, he provided 204

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a platform that afforded Lebanese citizens an opportunity to participate and become actively engaged in open debate and a process aimed at eventual social reforms.

Mazen Kerbaj’s Blog Born in 1975 in Beirut, Kerbaj graduated from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Lebanon. He is a contemporary author, illustrator, cartoonist, and musician. The drawings in the blog about the 2006 war have been published in two books: Beyrouth Juillet–Aout 2006 (2007) and Beirut Won’t Cry, A Diary of the July 2006 War (2016). Kerbaj’s blog on the July 2006 war consists of a series of stories that are both written and drawn documents in which the artist recounts his traumatic experience living through the thirty-three days of the July 2006 war in Lebanon. Inventing and expanding new aesthetics in comics, his work challenges readers in Lebanon and beyond. In his comics’ frames, he used a combination of Arabic, French, and English text, reflecting the common way of communication among a large community of Lebanese, whose French-derived education system is based on the learning of three languages. Kerbaj might well have opted for this trilingual blog as a strategy to open up to a wider audience.

The Absence of Narratives on the War in Lebanon Nearly sixteen years after the ratification of the Taif Agreement, marking the official end of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), another war broke out in Lebanon on July 12, 2006, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s killing of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two more on the northern Lebanon-Israel border.4 Conflicts in Lebanon, resulting from a series of unresolved internal and regional clashes, have become a taboo subject within the country and are often avoided in historical narratives for fear of confrontations and the possibility that another civil war will be ignited. Lebanon’s recent past is widely considered too contentious to examine in depth. No textbook has been written to address the civil war in Lebanon; no material about it has been added to history books in Lebanon.5 As a result, generations of young Lebanese are growing up with little formal education about armed conflicts in Lebanon over the last half century.6 Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, speaks about just such a vacant hole: a void in history textbooks and the utter absence of narratives on the Lebanese Civil War.7 The ministry of education in Lebanon is aware of the negative repercussions that result from avoiding confrontation with the past and negotiation and agreement on a historical narrative. Writing on the American war comics as a genre, Cord A. Scott claims that war comics can give historians much

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insight into how wars were perceived by the American public. They can show how enemies were denounced, heroes were created, and social ideals such as justice, democracy, and diligence were praised and often propagandized. Comics artists often reflect the views of their readers, which can also give historians insight into dissenting contemporary points of views.8 In his 2006 blog, Kerbaj is an interlocutor and a recorder. He serves as an authentication device, a complex tracing of connections between the comics artist’s personal activity and his gathering of other people’s tales. He has also turned his observing eyes on others, such as his mother and his son, as seen in the postdated entry for August 9, 2006, and solicited their stories. His blog can be considered an example of an autobiographical web comic. This autobiographical blog has the potential to shed light on issues of real political and cultural heft. The irony and self-reflexivity often used in his comics diary can be informative for historians. Autobiographical comics in particular often treat the author’s visible persona as an interlocutor. His views often represent the views and struggles of activist communities in Beirut. In this sense, Kerbaj’s 2006 blog can be considered a storytelling device, “a means for getting at, and shaping, the stories of other people’s lives,” and a historical account of the 2006 war in Lebanon.9 While historians in Lebanon have failed to address this issue by constructing a narrative that balances views of their history, a rising number of comics artists and illustrators have been actively involved in addressing the war from their own perspectives, producing challenging and inspiring works. In this respect, I argue that comics or sequential art—an art form that uses images deployed in sequence for graphic storytelling—can be considered an effective medium that not only enables a combination of visual and textual recording of war as it happens but also offers an opportunity to interpret and reflect on war situations. Several Lebanese comics artists, including Zeina Abirached, Mazen Kerbaj, and Lena Merhej, to name just a few, have turned to combining words and images in their comics to discover and express perspectives drawn from their own individual experiences of war. In doing so, they have thus developed their own versions of the history of recent conflicts in Lebanon. Works by Abirached, Kerbaj, Merhej, and the other illustrators in Lebanon who have engaged in documenting the events of war are important because they resist the dominant tendency of erasing the memories of war. In Lebanon, collective memory of the war often consists of “silence” at the heart of public discourse, conveying what people agree on and omitting a great deal. In Lebanon, one cannot say whatever one wants to, at least not about the war, for fear that one will be taken to be pointing fingers at a particular religious or political party, inciting sectarian strife, or denigrating a particular political party or its leader. The country may have the most liberal press in the Arab world, but given Lebanon’s diverse sectarian makeup and volatile politics, journalists and artists alike tend to treat the subject of war carefully.

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Sensitive subjects are commonly omitted; however, in comics, these sensitive topics can be addressed, using black humor to insert oneself into regional debates. For example, in Kerbaj’s drawing on July 27, 2006, the artist drew his father and shows him questioning himself about the United Nations’ role in putting an end to the war. The father asks ironically, “The United Nations are united with whom and against whom?”—implying here that the United Nations seems to support Israel against Lebanon in the conflict.

Censorship and Comics The combination of politics and art has made comics art an appealing medium for a growing number of artists and illustrators. Yet addressing sensitive topics related to the war might result in publishers being met with legal prosecution, as in the case of the Samandal comics magazine. In 2010, Samandal was hit with a heavy lawsuit, and a number of images deemed inappropriate were censored. However, Samandal remains determined to resist such actions and to assert itself as the leading publication in the region for comics art while circulating alternative and often provocative views about social issues.10 The Lebanese authorities continue to deny the Lebanese public—comics artists, writers, and film producers included—the right to put forth narratives of war or address such narratives. Several attempts to resist the Lebanese authorities in banning visual material deemed inappropriate have been initiated by local artists. For example, the Virtual Museum of Censorship, an online platform, has recently been launched for people to browse and search for artworks that have been censored in Lebanon since the 1950s. Its mission is to protect the basic freedoms of civil and creative expression.11 In an interview on May 1, 2015, Kerbaj explained that he had been censored by nearly all of the editors in chief that he worked with in Lebanon, except for Samir Kassir, who ran L’Orient Express in the 1990s, and Pierre Abi Saab, the influential critic and a founding editor of the Beirut newspaper Al-Akhbar. Unlike other artists, Kerbaj did not develop a self-censoring mechanism; he claims instead to know how to go around the censors.12 Part of the reason for Kerbaj to start his comics blog is to reach a wider audience and circumvent censorship restrictions. Using an appealing platform for political dissent, he voiced his opinion using humor and other metaphoric rhetoric strategies as a tool to get the message through while avoiding provocation. The internet offered new possibilities for blogging in times of war as counterpublic to challenge the social dynamics and engage in visual/verbal expression that might have otherwise called for censorship. For example, on July 27, 2006, Kerbaj posted “a nice chat.” Two men yelling at each other are depicted, and one yells “ALLAHU AKBAR,” referring to the pro-Hezbollah supporters, while the other yells “FREEDOM OF DEMOCRACY,” alluding

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to the U.S. supporters against the Hezbollah party. When circulating, this illustration might be subject to censorship as it directly addresses politicoreligious issues that can be understood as offensive. Arab media scholars see digital media as tools for new voices raising controversial issues or prompting public debate of existing political, religious, and economic power structures. Notions of counterpublicness have been invoked regarding identity positions within alternative or marginalized groups or cases when digital media users with different positions debate.13 Though Lebanon had a system of media censorship, sanctions for breaking rules were not systematic or consistently enforced.14 Reframing Lebanese bloggers as cultural citizens reveals that their different activities of social satire, advertising criticism, and activism stemmed from common values and similar critiques of Lebanese society.15 The notion of a counterpublic, as explained by Nancy Fraser, can be understood as a platform where “members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”16 In this sense, Kerbaj uses his blog to post images that define his own social realities, and as Dahlberg points out, digital media here is seen as enabling voices that would have been otherwise silenced and excluded from dominant discourse.17 The blog not only offers an opportunity to reach out to a wider audience and circumvent censorship of the formation of counterpublicness and counterdiscourses, it also facilitates the link with other excluded voices in developing representative, strategically effective counterdiscourses and subsequently contests the discursive boundaries of mainstream media.18 For instance, on July 28, 2006, Kerbaj challenges the mainstream media’s news broadcast when in his illustration, he draws himself between two screens—the window that is the real news and the TV screen that is the fabricated news. The notion of counterpublicness has been fruitful in cases where bloggers come together for a common cause or to share identity positions. Haugbolle supports the idea that in 2005 and 2006, Lebanese bloggers functioned as a counterpublic against the machinery of institutional politics in Lebanon by providing an alternative historical narrative for the 2006 war.19 Kerbaj’s blog can be seen as part of an alternative historical narrative; it provided spaces of interaction for opposing viewpoints, where new forms of political debate and reporting challenge the role of mainstream media as the main defender of civil liberties and social critique. When put online, this project displays the fragments presented and offers the possibility for their editing and remixing in an organized fashion that accounts for the units and the modes of graphic narratives but also would allow users to share their own fragments, thus widening the debate to a larger, online narrative of war.20 So far, I have addressed web comics in terms of publishing and circulation and have suggested that participation and interactivity

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constitute prominent features in discussions about the political and public sphere aspects of digital publishing. In addition to digital access and wider circulation, Kerbaj’s web comics engage a wider audience to interact with the author and create links with other blogs—for example, linking Kerbaj’s blog to the one run by Laure Ghorayeb, a prominent Lebanese artist and Kerbaj’s mother. Witnessing (Again) starts with an opening statement expressing Ghorayeb’s disappointment about art’s inability to fight war, which led her to create this blog as a witness to another war she has lived through. The incorporation of hyperlinks, in this case, allowed an extension of the spatially configured and already multidirectional, rather than linear, aspect of the comics narrative. On July  29, 2006, Kerbaj drew “LIFE” by depicting “40 wooden numbered boxes to move home from the city of Tyr to under the city of Tyr” to commemorate the deaths resulting from the Israeli airstrike on the south of Lebanon that day, while his mother posts, “Here lies the unknown victims, from Lebanon, the grateful motherland from the resident Lebanon, to the displaced Lebanon, the unknown victims: to you, a thousand excuses.”21 Here, Kerbaj and Ghorayeb explored the concept of hypercomics that enable enhanced interactivity, choice, and multiple narrative paths by means that are specific to their digital form. Like Kerbaj, Ghorayeb’s posts were later compiled and published in a limited-edition publication titled “témoignage” (testimony) in 1985. The live coverage creates an overly present war; however, the coverage is used as a strategy for the familiarization of war events, for the use of instructional strategies to disseminate knowledge of living in wars, and to open live debates over the internet, writes Merhej in her PhD thesis, Analysis of Graphic Narratives: War in Lebanese Comics in 2015.22

Comics Artists Witnessing Wars According to Hillary L. Chute, war comics artists—from Callot to Goya, al-Ali, Spiegelman, and Sacco, whose works focused on picturing war and death—grapple with visualizing suffering and trauma. Their graphic narratives have the potential to be powerful precisely because they intervene against a culture of invisibility.23 In this section, I analyze Kerbaj’s work by investigating the social and psychic pressures that impelled his comics and their circulation beyond national boundaries. Kerbaj’s work differs from Sacco’s and al-Ali’s in significant ways; the most evident is that Sacco’s and al-Ali’s works seem to be more realistic, whereas Kerbaj’s work tends to be more expressive. However, all three are about scenes of witness. Hanthala (perhaps representing alAli) is the Palestinian stateless refugee stuck in time, who is perpetually ten years old, barefoot, and homeless, unable to face the audience with his back is turned to us. Standing as he is, he forever watches the scene with us, the scene

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of his country being snatched from him. Kerbaj’s approach to drawing his own character, his own self-portrait, often broadly stylized, nonetheless captures nuances of expression and body language that reinforce his state of mind. His icon, as seen in his July 27, 2006, post and in most of his illustrations, is a desperate unshaven face with large black circles around his eyes, always looking at his audience as if looking at an empty space, baffled and confused by the absurd situation around him. Both icons are figures of witness; one helps us identify and/or understand the impact of the political situation shaping Palestinian lives, whereas the other helps us identify with the Lebanese daily experience during the 2006 war. Both are watching; both are recording.24 Another example is Kerbaj’s illustration posted on July 28, 2006, where we see him witnessing bombs falling down on Beirut through his window while watching the news on TV. He is sitting sideways, holding the remote control in his hand, his legs stretched, while in front of him sit a large number of empty whisky bottles, an ashtray full of smoked cigarettes, and a cup of Turkish coffee. The image is titled “DAY AFTER DAY.”

Comics Art in the Arab World Comics art is currently experiencing a revival in Arab countries. A new generation of comics artists is emerging in the region, and their work is appearing in a growing number of publications in Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, among other Arab countries. In March 2015, at the Lebanese American University, a series of panels was convened, and a large number of comics artists from the Middle East and North Africa were invited to discuss how comics art can be a medium used not only to record history but also to offer testimony of personal memory.25 This symposium was followed by another on comics and censorship that took place on April 7, 2016.26 Concluding remarks from this latter symposium focused on comics art being fertile ground that has yet to be explored, opening up opportunities for artists to visualize their lived experiences. It concluded with a heated and engaging open discussion that aimed at setting acceptable limits to free speech.27 In the end, it appears that the issue of free speech and expression is of great concern not only to artists but to many others in Lebanon.28 Comics artists, in circulating their point of views through comics art and through publications, can reach a growing community of comics readers. These artists believe that they can contribute to political change through their art. Joseph Kai, the editor of the latest issue of Samandal, a publication that promotes comics art in the Arab world, claims that comics art is not only a form of expression but an active political voice that has the power to offer up resistance, shift the dominant political directions, and even change history and modify the world map.29 Comics art has been a serious medium for engaging history and, in some cases, overcoming trauma.

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War leaves an open wound in people’s lives. Comics artists such as Abirached, Kerbaj, and Merhej attempt to “heal” this wound through their comics art.

Typographical Experiments to Reinforce Meaning Kerbaj developed a distinctive repertoire of techniques suited to his kind of stories, expressions, moods, mental emotions, and stressful being. Building up such a repertoire is what comics artists do to harness the tensions inherent in the form and turn them to advantage for better communication.30 Faced with the challenge of evoking a complex social world, the comics artist strives to ensure the harmony and mutual reinforcement of form and content.31 On the first days after the outbreak of the 2006 war, Kerbaj drew “silence” and started a blog in which he uploaded his graphic sketches and writings while documenting his daily experience of the war. Two days after the Israeli army heavily bombarded the airport in Beirut, Kerbaj, traumatized, hand lettered s i l e n c e with the thin tip of a black ink pen in the middle of a white page: a representation of emptiness, incomprehension, fear, and confusion. Silence represents the numbness of the artist now in shock, attempting to assimilate or make sense of the sudden war that he will now have to live through for the coming days. It took him a while to make sense of the situation and to realize that perhaps he was witnessing another war. On July 17, 2006, using small letters surrounded once again by empty space, he scribbles the words, “Silence here is horrible, more horrible than the sound of bombs.”32 Perhaps he meant the silence of the long, fraught intervals that preceded the explosions of bombs. This typographical manipulation to represent sound or the absence of sound using letter shapes and layout reminds me of the experimental typographic compositions of the Italian Futurist poet and art critic Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944), who used words in this way to imitate the sound of roaring artillery during the First Balkan War in 1912. When the artist is unable to draw or visually reproduce a horrifying scene or sound, he can use typography or text layout instead. In 1912, Marinetti created one of the most daringly experimental forms of typography in the early twentieth century when he published the first Futurist book, Zang Tumb Tumb. The title words, “zang tumb tumb,” are an example of Marinetti’s use of onomatopoeia, whereby the sound of the word indicates its meaning—in this case, the roar of the artillery on the battleground where Marinetti served as a reporter.33 In an attempt to visualize noise, Marinetti’s text layout consists of a jumble of different typefaces and sizes scattered across the page; the words going in different directions reproduce the battle’s chaotic situation and its unbearable noise. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) is another poet who used letters as a vehicle for meaning while they simultaneously functioned as graphic signifiers. In his poem, “Il Pleut,” he sets the letters vertically to show the raindrops

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falling vertically on the page.34 Words appearing as falling raindrops are meant to suggest Apollinaire’s state of mind. Rejecting all the conventional rules of grammar, punctuation, and syntax, Marinetti and Apollinaire creatively experimented with type, using words as images to reinforce the dynamism of the text. These attempts to use letters and words to complement a text’s meaning are widely used by Kerbaj in his drawings. For example, in his post on July 24, 2006, he vertically sets the letters of the sentence “we are tomorrow’s dead.” Like Apollinaire in “Il Pleut,” he wanted to express his state of mind, which as he feels downcast, is dropping downward. Once again, the shape and the layout of the letters are used to visually reinforce the effect of the war on the artist.

An Open-Ended War? In a presentation on “History Teaching and History Textbooks in Lebanon,” Professor Munir Bashur explains that what is basically needed in the field of teaching history in Lebanon is a shift away from an emphasis on memory and toward emphasis on inquiry and interpretation.35 The war in Lebanon is still “open for interpretation”; oral history and the recounting of older generations play an important role in recording history as it was lived.36 In their interpretations of the war, both Kerbaj and Merhej rely on older people, specifically their mothers, recounting the events of war. Merhej published a book on her German mother’s experience of moving to Beirut and her daily account of living through difficult and often challenging situations during the civil war in Lebanon.37 On July 21, 2006, Kerbaj drew his mother and asked her whether she would live to experience another war in Lebanon. In the caption for this frame, Kerbaj wrote, “My mum was 10 years old during World War II and 45 in the 1975 civil war. Today, she’s 75.” Both mothers, in their accounts of the Lebanese civil war, allude to the possibility of another war. Merhej ended her book on the 2006 war titled I Believe That We Will Be Calmer during the Next War . . . (2006) with an illustration in black ink on gray paper of the five main characters in the book turning their backs to the viewer as if they were waiting for the next war. The book ends with the sentence “I believe that we will be calmer during the next war.”38 Both comics artists were reflecting on the overall situation rather than indicating clear, set resolutions and agreements, showing that war lingers on. This clearly appears in Kerbaj and Merhej’s war narratives, which focus on war reporting and the passing on of war experience as a mechanism of resilience. The focal point often is irony but also outrage and pain.39 “One war leads to another . . .” reads the headline, set in large, bold black type, of Kerbaj’s drawing about the Lebanese war on July 23, 2006. For him, the only difference between the last two wars he had lived through was that he was no longer young. Kerbaj was not only physically but also mentally

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disturbed by the ongoing situation. Both Kerbaj and his mother were aware of the absence of closure due to unresolved conflicts and the absence of dialogue and negotiation. Kerbaj went further in developing the claim that there is an addiction to the state of war when, on August 16, 2006, he wrote in one of the frames of his comic “War Blues” that he missed drawing war aircraft, soldiers, tanks, cannons, and bombs (see figure 11.1). On August  7, 2006, Kerbaj uploaded an illustration that expressed his state of mind. The headline of this frame read, in thick, black, uppercase letters, “SCHYZOPHRENIA.” Below, two faces each look away; one says, “I am waiting for a resolution to stop the war,” while simultaneously the other, less optimistic, says, “I know deep inside that we are at the beginning of a long war.” Using irony and dark humor, Kerbaj expressed his concern for a community that seemed stuck in the cycle of war as a result of the incapacity to confront the past.40 Here, film theory provides an apt language for analysis notwithstanding the problems presented by importing the lingo of one discipline to another. Recent studies of comics have resisted the comparison to film so as to underline the specificity of the art form. Yet Robert C. Harvey has argued that the language of film can be a useful, albeit limited, tool for discussing the arrangement of elements within a comics panel.41 This comics-cinema analogy—admittedly inexact—has a special urgency in the case of Kerbaj. Like Spiegelman, Merhej, and many comics artists for whom layout, typography, and the physical design of books are important signifiers in themselves, he draws much of his inspiration from the language of movies.42 In “SCHYZOPHRENIA,” he drew a close-up of two characters looking sideways to stress the simultaneous yet controversial moment by giving equal emphasis to both parties. These strategies enable the author to capture his characters’ most intense emotions, with blank pages and silent panels revealing long intervals of time, unbearable long spans of time. The language of film inspires comics artists by serving as dramatic punctuations to the sequence of events.43 Kerbaj’s work appears to borrow from cinematics when using extreme close-ups, close two shots, and foreground framing to depict naturalism, intimacy, and movement.

Finding Refuge in Drawing Death On August 8, 2006, Kerbaj wrote that it was hard to get used to living in wartime. He appears in the foreground of the frame, turning his back to the TV screen and explaining to the viewer that no matter how bad the situation gets, people get used to it—that is, people become immune to living through and watching war atrocities. Comics art has been a serious medium for engaging history and, in the case of Kerbaj, overcoming trauma. For example, Joe Sacco’s recounting of

FIGURE 11.1. Mazen Kerbaj, War Blues, August 18, 2006, ink on paper. Images © 2017 Mazen Kerbaj, published by Fantagraphics Books.

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the ongoing unsettling situation in Palestine and the suffering of people under tragic situations of injustice in his Footnotes in Gaza is a journalistic reportage of traumatic events and war atrocities. Kerbaj’s account is different: an intimate, immediate personal diary of his state of mind, which fluctuates with intense emotions while experiencing the trauma of a war that he had not chosen to live through. Kerbaj seems to struggle to make sense of the situation of war while finding refuge in his illustrations. “A comics text has a different relationship to indexicality than, for instance, a photograph does,” claims Chute.44 Are Kerbaj’s comics considered “objective”? Can they be seen as documentation of the war? Or should they be understood as a personal account of the war? Kerbaj draws inspiration from daily life rather than from objects, media, and art forms, such as film. Yet a drawing’s connection to “reality” is perceived as immeasurably weaker than a photograph’s, which is often understood to be an index of a certain truth because it possesses mechanical objectivity. Sontag takes this on in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). Addressing staged photographs, she finds it odd that people are surprised and disappointed when they find out that photographs were staged. The question of staging is entirely eliminated in the case of Kerbaj’s comics, as he is transmitting the event on paper while it is happening in real life. However, Chute makes a claim that in the case of drawing comics, they are evidently staged, built, and made images as opposed to “taken” ones.45 Comics, according to Chute, “cannot but be political.”46 Like painting, comics evidently is not a duplicative form; its drawing may refer to reality, but it constitutes its own separate functioning model. Comics, in Kerbaj’s case, calls attention to images as material objects, not just representations. Comics diverges from the more common documentary mediums of both photography and film in its temporal dimension, it can also be therapeutic. “A photograph is static because it has stopped time. A drawing or painting is static because it encompasses time,” states Chute.47 Comics is characterized by its complex temporal and spatial features. Comics is about stillness and movement, capture and narrative motion. Kerbaj’s wandering, killing time, and the nonnarrativity occurring in some of his pages are intended to communicate the perception of time during war, the time that is lived differently. Other frames show the density of the moment, such as the scene of the Qana massacre posted on July 30, 2006. If Chute speaks about “Sacco’s investment in slowing readers down and asking them to grapple with producing meaning,” then Kerbaj is even slower on purpose, in order to provide space for reflection. He offers a view that is remote from the global media’s quickly consumed spectacles. I argue that Kerbaj synthetized a novel approach to comics storytelling. By using his intuitive mind and spontaneous drawing, he provides raw material for the viewer to make sense of. In most of his illustrations, it seems like putting ink on paper is a kind of therapeutic solution that helps him overcome the burden

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of coping with difficult times during war. For example, after staining a few illustrations with coffee, he kept the accidental stains as part of a reflection of his mood during this time. Then on July 21, 2006, he scribbled another illustration, writing all over the composition, bringing forth a text in which he attempted to make sense of the situation. Anger and despair are expressed in the scribbles and the black ink violently thrown on paper. Another example is the illustration posted on July 30, 2006, when Kerbaj, with his abundant black ink tears dropping vertically all over the page after nineteen days of war, starts to cry (see figure 11.2). However, there is a time when even his illustrations failed to help him make sense of the situation. Recounting his daily life during war became impossible. Mitchell’s words come to mind here: “The word as image, image as word; the word as limit for the image, and vice versa.” Words and images seem to fail to capture the density of signification in the image on July 26, 2006. Against a dark background, Kerbaj wrote in small and thinly drawn white letters, “How can I show what I feel?” Indeed, how can the artist express that which he cannot speak about or make sense of ? On August 6, 2006, the artist drew an empty face with inscriptions on it, asking “Where are we? Who are we?” to express pervasive fear and a sense of damaged national identity. On July 16, 2006, he drew Beirut on fire and wrote, “How can I show sound in a drawing?” He later fills a white sheet of paper with black ink, leaving no white area except for the space containing small words in the corner: “I hear Beirut erasing itself.” Kerbaj hears his drawings and sees the sounds of bombs. He combines his senses or blurs them in an attempt to understand his trauma. He later illustrated his anger using violent splashes of paint all over the page, a desperate ugly face (his own?) saying, “Fuck the world again.” Later on the same day, he drew another face, but this one was fading away. The artist used a different medium here than the sharp black ink on paper: now he used charcoal, a medium that better expresses the fading-away effect on paper. The artist illustrated himself in agony when he drew a self-portrait: “Today I feel like dying.” The medium of comics is not necessarily about “good drawing,” writes Chute.48 On July 16, Kerbaj drew his self-portrait, offering up a face with thick black circles around his eyes to emphasize his many sleepless nights. His lines look spontaneously drawn, with lots of accidental blurbs, coffee stains, and scribbles. These features increase his ability to communicate in the mode of autobiographical writing. The quirks of penmanship create a certain intimacy: in reading handwritten marks on the screen or the printed page, it is as if one is reading a personal diary. His lines are purposefully interrupted by large inkblots to express his anger. Kerbaj improvised in his drawings, sometimes drawing with both hands at the same time. In his artwork, it is the idea that follows the drawing and changes it, as according to him, the hand can move faster than the brain.49

FIGURE 11.2. Mazen Kerbaj, “After 19 Days I Started to Cry,” posted on July 30, 2006, ink on paper. Images © 2017 Mazen Kerbaj, published by Fantagraphics Books.

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A Drawing Can Encompass Time During the war, Kerbaj recorded around nine hours of music and the sound of bombing from his balcony. He used to go out with his trumpet and record music while the bombs were falling on Beirut. A small excerpt from these recordings is posted on his website under the title “Starry Night.”50 A musician and a cartoonist, Kerbaj possesses a multidisciplinary background, and he improvises in his music as much as he does in his drawings. When his drawings were uploaded on his blog, a new aesthetic emerged from Kerbaj’s representation of war. Unlike other established authors in the graphic narrative field who have documented traumatic situations during war, such as Spiegelman and Sacco, Kerbaj was not retracing, reviewing, or reimagining trauma; he was actually drawing it while it was happening. In these illustrations, we see improvised and spontaneous articulations of despair and symptoms of depression and trauma such as his temporarily losing the concept of time. An interesting example is when he made a palimpsest of past and present, telling stories about different experiences living through wars during different stages of life. His mother was living through war for the third time while Evan, his five-year-old son, was enduring his first war experience. Like Spiegelman in Maus, Kerbaj invoked the materiality of found objects (his son’s drawings) in order to stress the event of war being transmitted from generation to generation in his story. On August 9, 2006, Kerbaj posted his son’s colorful drawing of the Murr Tower, a monument in Beirut that has often been depicted by artists as the symbol of the war in Lebanon. However, in Evan’s eyes, unlike those of older artists including his father, the tower is depicted against a blue sky in a joyful spring setting of greenery, surrounded by trees and colorful flowers. In addition to his son’s drawings, Kerbaj included a number of his mother’s drawings to provide the viewer with another perspective on the war. This was a way to visually represent the tension between the narrating “I” who drew the stories and the “I” who was the child or the mother. Kerbaj used these voices through their words and images cross discursively to stage a dialogue among versions of different generations’ narratives about the war.

Narrative Writing and Simultaneity It is not “picture writing” as much as “narrative writing” in terms of the sequential nature that comes across in the way the frames are used to create the story on Kerbaj’s blog. Here, the sequential narrative, the relation between before and after, comes naturally as the artist’s life unfolds across the frames. The cartoonist’s time is shaped spatially on the frames. Although the frames do not follow the conventional horizontal sequence of comic strips, they are read through the vertical scrolling of the blog as comics. The syntactical operation of reading them

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is similar to that of comic strips, a vertical representation of “time as space.”51 In most of Kerbaj’s work, we notice the passing of time, how time moves between one frame and the other. And sometimes, in Kerbaj’s artwork, time becomes his very subject. By interlacing multiple temporalities on the same page, Kerbaj attempted to show simultaneous events occurring in parallel in one frame.

Circulation of Images: Blogging as a Tool for Activism Blogs and other social media have proved to be highly effective during times of war. In dangerous situations, during forced curfews, and at times when mobility is restricted due to the lack of security, a blog can be an effective way to reach out to people living under the same circumstances as well as people living in other countries. Kerbaj acknowledges that the power of images posted on the blog and other forms of digital social media lies in their mobility and circulation on the World Wide Web. Thus circulation is an aesthetic aspect at the core of Kerbaj’s artwork. To promote the blog and support the Lebanese cause, Kerbaj invites his followers to take action in the production of his art by disseminating it in all forms. He encourages his followers to upload his drawings and circulate them in the form of emails as well as flyers, posters, and other printed media. When the blog triggered a large amount of interest, authorship became part of the artist’s concern. As a reaction to the wide and uncontrollable appropriation of his drawings during the war, Kerbaj added restrictions for uploading his illustrations. According to the author, the illustrations can be uploaded only for noncommercial purposes, with resolution suitable for printing, without further editing, and without any cropping or other kind of image manipulation. The illustrations should be credited when in circulation. Kerbaj is aware of the benefits of the circulation of his artwork among a larger public. Yet at the end of the war, he felt he needed to protect his intellectual property rights and reappropriated his drawings. On the last day of the war, he added a post to inform his followers that circulating his illustrations without permission was no longer acceptable: “The copyright for all the drawings of this blog is the property of their author.” The wide circulation of his artwork allowed his local followers to share the artist’s experience and to feel that they were not alone in living through the war.

Kerbaj’s Blog Turns Political “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought,” claims Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics. “The notion of ‘narrative’ locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost. It is not a matter of claiming that everything is fiction. It is a matter of stating that the fiction of the aesthetic age defined models for

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connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction.”52 In this sense, would Kerbaj’s blog be considered fictional or historical? But Kerbaj in his blog is not creating a fictional character; he is not telling fabricated stories about the July 2006 war. He is recording significant moments, tragedies, and absurd and incomprehensible situations as they happen. His blog can be considered an archive in the making. The politics and art, to borrow from Rancière, comes into play like forms of knowledge and constructed “narratives”—that is to say, material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and what is said, and the way they are being narrated. In this case, Kerbaj’s blog is a combination of politics and artistic practice. It can be considered a historical account, since it reflects a collective living experience occurring at the same time, being lived in the same way by a large community. Rancière declares that “the clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history.”53 Kerbaj’s shuffling of images and text in making his point and the sudden changes of tone are signs that carry potential meaning in shaping the story or history. Kerbaj grappled with painful events in order to process his thoughts and draw. According the Marvin L. Kalb and Carol R. Saivetz, the live broadcast in 2006 was in the hands of bloggers who, for the first time, reported their own stories and covered the war. This blog presents the viewer with a new way of writing history as it happens. It is important to note here that reading it at the time carries an effect that is different than reading it after the passing of time, as a historical account. Kerbaj’s blog offers a platform, an artistic and political space, for his followers to interact with one another and to debate issues related to the July 2006 war. It creates productive counterpublics in cyberspace that extend to a mainstream audience that is open to discussion. But what started out as an expression of the everyday became something quite different, at least in part: it became a means to stimulate heated over-the-border discussions with Israeli citizens who unexpectedly intruded into the conversation by voicing their political opinions about the 2006 war. Despite the Lebanese government’s law that prohibits Lebanese citizens from interacting with Israeli citizens, there were repeated attempts from Israeli bloggers to interact with Kerbaj through his blog.54 As the moderator of the blog, Kerbaj immediately put an end to the Israeli intervention by making it clear that political discourses were not part of his agenda as an artist on his blog. However, Kerbaj’s blog cannot help but be political. His comics art can be used to assist people in comprehending political and social issues. By creating comics art that expresses concerns regarding specific social and political agendas, political artists are known to use their works as a form of propaganda. In this way, artists use their illustrations to show politicians whose decisions

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they disapprove of. Satire is another element of political art. Artists use satire to show people the funny side of politics by using humor in conjunction with serious political issues. Throughout his comics art, Kerbaj raises issues related to daily life in Beirut: the electricity cuts; the Lebanese, who gradually adapt to unbearable situations; the corruption; the submission to authorities; the appropriation of space; as well as issues of justice and the effects of the war. Although Kerbaj refused to post direct political statements, his comics art, when disseminated via his blog, could not avoid the sphere of politics. He tried, a little in vain, to separate his art from the politics of what was happening in Lebanon. The political dimension does not have to eliminate the aesthetic dimension; in fact, the political dimension can actually be the aesthetic dimension of the artwork itself. If the political is reconfigured as the concern for the other and an insistence on the human experience, as it is in Kerbaj’s art, then art may well be intrinsically political. Rather than pretending to solve the Middle East conflict by providing fake answers, as is often done in the international media, Kerbaj, through his art posted on his blog, has formulated questions that encourage people to reflect and interpret the events of war.

Conclusion During the war, Kerbaj received an average of five thousand comments per day from visitors. The blog, which was triggered by the war and became very popular in Lebanon and beyond its borders, added a new, participatory dimension to the drawings. The drawings that ran in Kerbaj’s artistic war journal posted on his blog were taken from his personal notebook. This blog can be considered an experimental “open laboratory” for the artist.55 The artwork posted on his blog did not go through a selection process. The pace of the story, the narrative in the blog as manifested in the images posted every day depended on the intensity of the situation and its impact on and significance to the artist: it could amount to more than twelve drawings per day. This particular aspect of Kerbaj’s work, which brings forward the artist’s representation of the war in its immediacy, provides a space for rethinking the war while it is happening. In her groundbreaking writing on photography, Sontag claims that “the person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.”56 Sontag’s critique of the photograph’s functioning does not apply to comics. It rather implicitly calls into question the efficacy of the comics artist recording while providing an active intervention in documenting the war. Kerbaj’s blog can be seen, following Sondag’s statement, as a window, a screen that offers a direct accessibility to Kerbaj’s living experience during the July 2006 war. Yet the strength of the art is that it allows accessibility not just to

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the interlocutor’s daily life account but also to his emotions. This accessibility challenges the viewer to think about the responsibilities of citizens of the world, prompting reactions and insurgencies while pressuring authorities to stop the war. It also encourages us to rethink the responsibilities of artists to the world they live in.57 The question of art’s political accountability stems from the inevitable conflict between activism and aestheticism. Kerbaj, in his blog, takes us through his journey not without voicing his opinion; he explicitly expresses his thoughts and opinions, sometimes by uploading an illustration and other times by the sound of the bombs falling on Beirut, thus acknowledging his social responsibilities and encouraging other artists to do the same.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Mazen Kerbaj for granting permission to use his illustrations in this chapter and the anonymous reviewers who gave invaluable comments and feedback on this text.

Notes 1 W. T. J. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2011), 56.

2 Mitchell. 3 Mazen Kerbaj, Kerblog, July 2006, http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com/2006_07

_01_archive.html.

4 Ellen Knickmeyer, “2006 War Called a ‘Failure’ for Israel,” Washington Post For-

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

eign Service, January 31, 2008. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel and Hezbollah engaged in a thirty-three-day war in which Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel and the Israelis bombed Lebanese towns. The war killed 119 Israeli soldiers, many of them in a final push into Lebanon, and more than 40 Israeli civilians. More than 1,000 Lebanese died over the course of the fighting, most of them civilians. Munir Bashur, “History Teaching and History Textbooks in Lebanon,” lecture, American University of Beirut, November 12, 2005. Bashur, “History Teaching.” Maha Yahya, “Let the Dead Be Dead: Memory, Urban Narratives and the PostCivil War Reconstitution of Beirut,” lecture at “Urban Traumas, the City and Disasters” conference, Barcelona, July 11, 2004. C. A. Scott, Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2014), 135. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 130. For more on the Samandal censorship case, see Elias Muhanna, “The Fate of a Joke in Lebanon,” New Yorker, September 26, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/the-fate-of-a-joke-in-lebanon. MARCH, The Virtual Museum of Censorship, October 2013, www .censorshiplebanon.org/Censorship -Monitor.

Blogging in Times of War • 223 12 Kaelen Wilson Goldie, “Neverending Story,” Artforum, April 7, 2015, http://

artforum.com/slant/id=51428.

13 K. Riegert, K. Ramsay, and G. Ramsay, “Activists, Individualists or Comics: The

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

Counter-Publicness of Lebanese Blogs,” Television and New Media 14, no. 4 (2013): 470. Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay, “Activists, Individualists or Comics.” Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay. Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay. Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay. Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay. Riegert, Ramsay, and Ramsay. Lena Merhej, I Believe That We Will Be Calmer during the Next War (Beirut: Dar Onboz, 2006), 287. N. Mickwitz, Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 148. Mickwitz, Documentary Comics. Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8. Chute, Graphic Women, 212. Lebanese American University (LAU) news and events, “Department of Design Hosts Arab Comics Art Symposium,” April 9, 2015, http://www.lau.edu.lb/news -events/news/archive/department_of_design_hosts_ara/. LAU School of Architecture and Design, “Comics and Censorship” symposium, April 7, 2016, http://sard.lau.edu.lb/events/event.php ?evt=20160407_symposium -comics-and-censorship. LAU news and events, “To Sketch or Not to Sketch: LAU Talks Comics and Censorship,” April 15, 2016, http://www.lau.edu.lb/news-events/news/archive/to _sketch_or_not_to_sketch_lau/. LAU news and events, “To Sketch or Not to Sketch.” Joseph Kai, editorial in “Géographie,” Samandal, October 2015, 6. Samandal is one of the first Arabic publications on comics’ art. It was launched in 2007. It has widely contributed to the growing interest in the development of comics within Arab culture. It offers an opportunity for artists to make their art visible and their opinions heard. Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 71. Hatfield. Mazen Kerbaj, “Double Trouble,” Kerblog, August 7, 2006, mazenkerblog.blogspot .com. Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 158. Eskilson, Graphic Design. Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes is a compilation of several works of concrete poetry, a type of poem in which the words’ visual structure and the typography are designed to complete the meaning of the text. Bashur, “History Teaching.” Yahya, “Let the Dead Be Dead.” Lena Merhej, Jam and Yogurt (Beirut: Samandal, 2010). Merhej, I Believe That We Will Be Calmer. Merhej, 229. Reina Sarkis et al., Le Printemps des Interrogations (Beirut: Mind the Gap, 2007).

224 • Yasmine Nachabe Taan

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56 57

Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 72. Hatfield. Hatfield. Chute, Graphic Women, 20. Chute, Graphic Women. Chute, 21. Chute. Chute, 6. Goldie, “Neverending Story.” An excerpt lasting six minutes and thirty-one seconds of a minimalistic improvisation by Mazen Kerbaj (trumpet) and the Israeli air force (bombs) recorded by Kerbaj in Beirut on the night of July 15–16, 2006, can be heard at http://www.muniak .com/mazen_kerbaj-starry_night.mp3. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 13. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 38. McCloud, 36. The 1943 Lebanese Criminal Code and the 1955 Lebanese Anti-Israeli Boycott Law both postulate that any Lebanese citizen who interacts with nationals of enemy states—Israelis anywhere in the world—can be legally prosecuted. Lebrecord.com is a website dedicated to the visual arts in Lebanon. See “Featured Artist: Mazen Kerbaj,” Lebanon Art Magazine, February 2007, http://lebrecord .com/?p=19. “Featured Artist: Mazen Kerbaj.” Hatfield, Alternative Comics, 81.

Notes on Contributors

HARRIET E.  H. EARLE is a lecturer in English and creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University and a researcher in American popular culture, trauma, and violence. She is the author of Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and has published across the field of comics and popular culture studies. She has recently published on Marjane Satrapi, American Horror Story, the contemporary serial killer comic, and Lars von Trier. Dr. Earle sits on the editorial board of Comics Forum. JAMES KELLEY earned his MA in English Education at Colorado State University. His thesis examined how using comic books and graphic novels in a secondary English language arts classroom can support interdisciplinary learning. He is a middle school teacher in Oregon and a veteran of the United States Air Force, in which he served six years in Security Forces. Kelley has been an avid comics fan since the second grade, and he continually looks for ways to further pursue his passion for comics and teaching. CHRISTINA M. KNOPF is currently an assistant professor and public speaking coordinator in the Communication Studies Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland. She earned her PhD in political communication and cultural sociology from the University at Albany in 2005. Knopf taught rhetoric and public address at SUNY Potsdam, 2006–2017. She is the author of The Comic Art of War: A Critical Study of Military Cartoons, 1805–2014, with a Guide to Artists (McFarland, 2015). She also has articles in several journals and multiple anthologies, including 10 Cent War: Comic Books, Propaganda, and World War II (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 225

226 • Notes on Contributors

The X-Men Films: A Cultural Analysis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), The Laughing Dead: The Comedy-Horror Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), and Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). SILVIA G. KURLAT ARES is an independent scholar specializing in Southern Cone literature, with an interest in the relationship between culture and politics. Kurlat Ares has been visiting professor at George Mason University and at Johns Hopkins University. From 2003 to 2006, she was associate director/ postdoctoral fellow in the Latin American Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. She published Para una Intelectualidad Sin Episteme (Corregidor, 2006) and has a forthcoming book under the title A Persistent Illusion: Sciencefiction in Argentina. She has also edited several dossiers and collective volumes for academic journals, such as Revista Iberoamericana and Alter-nativas. She was the chair and founder of the Latin American Studies Association’s Southern Cone Studies section (2000–2004) and the Mass Media and Popular Culture section (2012–2016), and she also chaired the Culture, Politics, and Power section (2011–2012). Her recent publications include “Rafael Pinedo’s Trilogy: Dystopian Visions and Populist Thought in Argentina’s Turn-of-theCentury Narrative” (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesía, May 2015); “From Darkness, Light: Reading Ilya Prigogine at the End of the World” (Interface between Literature and Science: Cross-disciplinary Approaches to Latin American Texts, 2016); “Borderline de Carlos Trillo y Eduardo Risso: una historieta distópica argentina en los ’90” (Hispamerica. Revista de  Literatura, August 2015); “Leer la cultura popular: desplazamientos desde los márgenes” (Revista Alter/nativas Spring 2015); “El futuro populista como tragedia en el comic argentino de ciencia ficción” (Iberoamericana. América Latina-España-Portugal Febrero 2015). JOE LOCKARD is associate professor of English at Arizona State University and is an affiliate of the African and African American Studies and Jewish Studies programs. His recent books include Iraq War Cultures (2011) with Cynthia Fuchs; Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports (2008); and Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet (2006) with Mark Pegrum. IAIN A. MACINNES is a lecturer and program leader in Scottish History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. His recent monograph (Scotland’s Second War of Independence, 1332–1357 [Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016]) provides a new consideration of this lesser-known and understudied period of Anglo-Scottish conflict. He has also written several articles and essays on the warfare of the Scottish Wars of Independence, including works on battlefield

Notes on Contributors • 227

injury, chivalry, the English occupation of Scotland, tactics and strategy, and chronicle representation of the war. He has also recently begun branching out into the related theme of depictions of medieval warfare in modern popular culture. This principally focuses on graphic novels but is intended to also encompass film, television, and other media. is associate professor and chair of the Department of Design at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. She holds a master’s in Visual Communication from Pratt Institute, New York, and a PhD in Art History and Communications Studies from McGill University. Her research focuses on gender representation, design, media, photography, comics art and visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa. She participated in a number of residencies and collective exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Cairo, Beirut, and Bratislava. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Communication Arts, New Middle Eastern Studies journal Altre Modernità, and other journals. She is also an illustrator for children’s books in Arabic. In 2013, she edited the Al-Raida journal special issue on women and photography in the Middle East. Her book Hilmi el-Tuni, Evoking Popular Arab Culture was published by Khatt Books in Amsterdam in 2014.

YASMINE NACHABE TAAN

is a comic book translator and editor. He has worked for several publishers in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. As part of the organization “Drugi ugao” (Second Angle), he has organized four comic book festivals in Sarajevo (STRIPITI Fest) and seven exhibitions of Bosnian comics. In 2015, in cooperation with Mrs.  Beate Wild from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, he coordinated and prepared the Bosnian part of the biggest regional exhibition of alternative comics “comiXconnection,” involving dozens of comic book authors from Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Romania. Parallel to his law career and administrative work in the NGO sector in Sarajevo, he has written a number of texts on graphic novels and comic books. Most of the texts in English can be found on the Bleeding Cool comics website. Most of the texts in Bosnian are available on the biggest regional comic book website Stripovi.com.

EMIR PASANOVIC

TATIANA PROROKOVA is currently working on her second book project, which examines representations of the environment and climate change in fiction since the Industrial Revolution (financed through the Equal Opportunity Scholarship for Outstanding Female Junior Scholars, MARA, the University of Marburg, Germany). She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany; a European join master’s degree in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg, Germany; and a teaching degree in English and German from Ryazan State University, Russia. In 2016,

228 • Notes on Contributors

she was a visiting scholar at the University of South Alabama (English Department and Center for the Study of War and Memory). Her research interests include ecocriticism, war studies, and gender studies and are reflected in her publications in academic journals and edited collections. is a lecturer in modern history at Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and Arts, Israel. He has a PhD in American and British History from the University of Oxford. His interest lies in the role of historical consciousness in constituting and shaping the modern western world. He is the author of The American Civil War in British Culture: Representations and Responses, 1870s to the Present (Palgrave 2015), and he published several academic articles on the impact of the memory of the Civil War on AngloAmerican relations in the modern era.

NIMROD TAL

is a specialist in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, with secondary fields of specialization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European political history and imperialism. He is faculty at New York University in the programs of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies, as well as associated faculty at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. His research and various types of publications have included work on Saudi socioeconomic history, the Ottoman Empire in Arabia, Islamist movements and ideologies, aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, state formation in the Persian Gulf, and literature from/on the Middle East. As a professor, he has integrated comics, graphic novels, and animated films in the classroom for more than twelve years, and his chapter in this book is a result of critiquing and utilizing Joe Sacco’s work with students for six years.

PETER C. VALENTI

teaches political theory at Marymount Manhattan College. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of ten books, including C. L. R. James: A Political Biography (1996), The Social Science Research Council, 1923–1998 (2001), and The Superhero Reader (2013), coedited with Charles Hatfield and Jeet Heer. His latest book is Silent Agitators: Cartoon Art from the Pages of New Politics (2016).

KENT WORCESTER

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History, 119 Abirached, Zeina, 206, 211 Abi Saab, Pierre, 207 accessibility, 43, 52, 221–222 Acevedo, Mariela, 173 Addicted to War, 50 Address to the Coloured People of the World , 119 Adrian and the Tree of Secrets, 10 Afghanistan, 41, 42, 50, 54n4, 57n48 Afghanistan War, 46, 49, 55n9, 102–103n1 Africa, 92, 108, 195, 196, 199, 210. See also Rwanda; Uganda After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001–), 46 “After 19 Days I Started to Cry,” 217 agency, 67, 69 Air Force: Argentine, 174–177, 182–183, 184n15; Israeli, 224n50 Al-Akhbar, 207 al-Aqsa Intifada. See Second Intifada Aleppo, Syria, 69 Algerian War, 14 al-Qaeda, 42, 47–48, 49 American Born Chinese, 76 Amerimanga, 4

Analysis of Graphic Narratives: War in Lebanese Comics in 2015, 209 Andreas, Joel, 50 antiracism, 115 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 211–212, 223n34 “April 2,” 166 Aptheker, Herbert, 119 Arab countries, 210 Arab-Israeli conflict. See IsraeliPalestinian conflict Arafat, Yasir, 145 Argentina, 165–167; territorial claims, 170, 182, 184n11; wars, 177, 186n31 Argentine Being, 176, 187n41 Asia, 4, 41. See also China; Japan Asymptote, 64 At War with the Empire: Ireland’s Fight for Independence, 123, 124, 126, 128–129 authentication, 206 authorship, 24, 219 autobiography, 206 Axe, David, 52 Ayalon, Ami, 149 Baker, Kyle, 106, 107, 108–111, 113–114, 119 Balkans, 59, 60, 64 balloons, 3, 10, 11, 98 229

230 • Index

bande dessinée, 24–25, 30, 62 Barefoot Gen, 12 Barreiro, Ricardo, 166 Barrón, Néstor, 166, 174–175 Bashur, Munir, 212 “Batalla de las Malvinas, La,” 166 “Battle for the Falklands, The.” See “Batalla de las Malvinas, La” Battle of Crécy, 24, 33 Battle of Verneuil, 34 Bayúgar, Adolfo, 166, 178–179 Bechdel, Alison, 10 Beirut Won’t Cry, A Diary of the July 2006 War, 205 Belgium, 3, 4, 193 Bender, Thomas, 5 Beyrouth Juillet–Aout 2006, 205 Bible, 112–113 BiH. See Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Billiken, 174, 185n24 bin Laden, Osama, 50, 54n4, 154 Birren, Faber, 95 Birth of a Nation, 111 black and white, 179, 193–194 Black Panther, 107 “Black Water of Limbo,” 65–66, 68 blogs, 219, 221 Blood upon the Rose: Easter 1916; The Rebellion That Set Ireland Free, 123–124, 126, 128, 132 Bobby Sands, 124, 126, 129–130, 131 Bobby Sands: Freedom Fighter, 123 Bors, Matt, 52 Bosman, 60–61 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), 58, 59 Bosnian War, 61–62, 63, 64, 71n4, 72n15 Boxer Rebellion, 75–76 Boxers. See Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist Boxers, 76–82, 79, 84–85, 88, 88 Breedlove, Philip M., 1 Brezar, Aleksandar, 64 Britain. See United Kingdom B’Tselem, 153, 155 Burgan, Michael, 117

Bush administration, 41, 42, 45–46, 139 Buybook, 59, 65 caesura, 178 captions, 10, 140 Carlsen Comics, 63 Cartoon Movement, 52 cartoons: editorial, 50, 53; television, 174 Casali, Matteo, 189 Casa Rosada, 165, 183n1 Cascella, Osvaldo, 168 Catholicism: in China, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84; in Ireland, 124–125; in Uganda, 94, 96–97 censorship, 115, 207–208 Charles VI, 24 Charles VII, 24, 25, 30, 83 Charlie Hebdo, 1 “chicos de la guerra,” 172, 179 Chicos de la Guerra, Los, 167 child-killing, 108, 111–113, 119 child soldiers, 92–94, 97 China, 75–76 chivalry, 31–35, 36 Christianity: in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 61; in China, 75–76, 77, 78–82, 84, 85, 86; and slavery, 107, 111. See also Catholicism Chute, Hillary L., 9, 12, 191–192, 215, 216; on comics form, 13, 44 Cielo Pertenece a los Halcones, El, 175 circulation, 208–209, 219 Cisic, Enis, 64 civilians, 65, 68, 69, 127, 189 civil rights movement, 105, 106, 107 Civil War, 106 Civil War, 48 class, 32–34, 36 Classics Illustrated, 105, 106 Cleburne, 115–116, 116 Clinton administration, 42 clip art, 49–50 Cold War, 54n4, 171 Colón, Ernie, 45–46

Index • 231

color, 68–69, 100, 194; as distinction, 85, 86, 94–97, 176; and ligne claire, 78, 81; and psychology, 95–96, 101, 103–104nn14–15; as symbolic, 97 Color Psychology and Color Theory: A Factual Study of the Influence of Color on Human Life, 95 color theory, 95 combinations, 11–12 comedy, 26–27 Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 115 comics: biographical, 168; as democratic, 52; history of, 2–5, 182; journalistic, 47, 215; nonfiction, 50–52, 53; as political, 6; production of, 43; self-published, 43; as therapeutic, 215; underground, 3; and violence, 114–115; and war, 6–7, 43 comics-cinema analogy, 213 Comics Code, 3 Comics Journal, The, 49 comics journalism, 143 comix, 3 communication, 2, 8, 10, 205, 211 Confessions of Nat Turner, The, 109, 110– 111, 114 Congo. See Democratic Republic of Congo Costello, Matthew, 48 counterdiscourse, 208 counterhistory, 115 counterpublic, 207–208, 220 counterterrorism, 42–43, 149 counterviolence, 120 Countess Markievicz. See Markievicz, Constance Cowboys and Aliens, 59 Crécy, 24, 25–29, 26, 28, 31–34, 32 Croatia, 72n14 culture of resistance, 149–151, 152–153 Cumann na mBan, 125, 132 DC Comics, 5, 48, 49 death, 56n27, 81–82, 111, 198–200; depictions of, 26–27, 94–95, 108, 113–114, 195 deep state, 42, 55n10

Democratic Republic of Congo, 102 desmalvinización, 172, 173 dialectic, 143 Dilberovic, Suada, 61, 71n8 documentation, 182, 215 Donaldson, Kristian, 189 DRC. See Democratic Republic of Congo Easter Rising, 123, 125, 126–128 Edward III, 24, 31, 32 Ellis, Warren, 24 el-Sarraj, Eyad, 147–148 empathy, 68, 100, 144 England. See United Kingdom Eternauta, El, 175–176 exceptionalism, 176 Ex Machina, 49 Fables, 48–49 faith, 84, 85 Falcons, 176 Falkland Islands, 165 Falklands War, 7–8, 165–167, 169–172, 184n15 falsification, 115–116 fantasy genre, 23 Favier, Alphonse (Bishop), 77 Fax from Sarajevo, 63 fictionalization, 219–220 Fierro, 166, 173, 182 52° latitud sur, 59° longitud oeste, 168 film, 8, 9–10, 43, 213 Finn, Ed, 15n3 First Intifada, 145–146, 147–148, 152 Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, The, 63–64, 69 flashbacks, 43, 49, 127, 197 Foa, Edna B., 98, 104n20 Footnotes in Gaza, 215 France, 24–25, 30, 33; and comics industry, 3, 4, 186n27 free speech, 210 French civil war, 29–30 Frey, Hugo, 35, 36 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, 10

232 • Index

Galtieri, Leopoldo F., 165 Game of Thrones, 35, 40n77 Gardner, Jared, 3, 12–13, 89n14 Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, 147 Gaza Strip, 144, 145, 147, 150, 151 gender, 67, 68, 83, 89n25 gendering, 77, 131 Genette, Gérard, 90n29 genocide, 62, 108, 186n31; Rwandan, 189, 192–193, 196, 200 Get Your War On, 49–50 ghetto mentality, 159n40 Ghorayeb, Laure, 209, 212, 218 Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E., 5 Gifford, Grace, 127, 132 Glaser, Jason, 118 Grant, Sinikka, 191 Graphic Journalism, 52 graphic narratives, 2–5 graphic novels: development of, 5; and empathy, 144; and history, 12, 35–36, 106–107; and ideology, 166–167; and mediation, 12–13; and memory, 172–174, 191; modes, 8–12; and violence, 114–115; and war, 6–8, 13, 43–44, 188, 191–192 Gray, Thomas, 109–110, 114 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great War. See World War I Guan Yin, 85, 86 gutters, 152, 176–177, 181 Habyarimana, Juvénal, 193 hagiography, 178 Halcones. See Falcons Hamas, 145, 158n21 Hammer and the Anvil: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the End of Slavery in America, The, 118–119 haunting power of war, 189, 190–191, 193, 195–196, 201 Hendrix, John, 118 Henry V, 29 Hergé (pseud. Georges Prosper Remi), 78

heroes, 27, 30, 176–177. See also superheroes heroics, 175–176, 187n41 heroism, 27, 106, 177, 178 Hezbollah, 205, 207–208, 222n4 historiography, 25, 113 history: collective, 110; contemporary, 44; individual, 110, 167; military, 12; oral, 181–182, 212; revision of, 114, 172, 185n20 Hitchens, Christopher, 56n30 Holy Terror, 47–48 hot memories, 98 Hubert, Marie Caillou, 10 humor, 26–27, 207, 213 Humor, 172 Hundan al Belgrano, 167 Hundred Years War, 24–25, 35 Hunt, Gerry, 123–133 Huppen, Hermann, 62–63, 69 Hutu, 192–193, 196, 198, 200 hypercomics, 209 hyperlinks, 209 hypermnesia, 98–99 I Believe That We Will Be Calmer during the Next War . . . , 212 iconic solidarity, 186n26 iconoclasticism, 168 “Il Pleut,” 211–212 Iluminados por el Fuego, 167 Imawi, ‘Ali, 148 improvisation, 216, 218 indexicality, 215 interdependent combinations, 12 interpretation, 124, 179, 182–183, 212, 221; personal, 79; visual, 118–119 In the Shadow of No Towers, 46–47 intifadas, 143, 145–146, 147–148 in ‘t Veld, Laurike, 193, 196 “Invisible Man from Sarajevo,” 64 IRA. See Irish Republican Army (IRA) Iraq War, 46, 49 Ireland, 123–127, 131–133 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 124, 125, 129

Index • 233

Irish Troubles, 126 Irish War of Independence, 129 Irishwomen’s Council. See Cumann na mBan irony, 206, 213 irredentista, 174 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), 42 Islas, Las, 167 Israel, 205, 220, 222n4 Israeli-Lebanese War. See Lebanese-Israeli War Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 138–140, 143–153, 155–156 Jacobson, Sid, 45–46 Japan, 4, 5 Jarry, Nicolas, 25 Jefferson, Thomas, 119 Jeremiah, 59, 62 Jesus Christ, 80, 83, 85–86, 114 jihadists, 49 Joan of Arc, 78, 83–84 John Brown: His Fight for Freedom, 118 John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry, 118 Johnson, Peter R., 143 journalism, 2–3, 64, 143 “Just Another Day,” 65 juxtaposition, 9–10 Keiji, Nakazawa, 12 Kelper, 167 Kerbaj, Evan, 218 Kerbaj, Mazen, 204–210, 211–213, 215–216, 218–222 Knindze, 72n14 Kony, Joseph, 102, 103n6 Korean War, 6 Kozak, Michael J., 98, 104n20 Krazy Kat, 46 Kubert, Joe, 63 Kukkonen, Karin, 2, 3–4 Lafrance, Daniel, 92–93 languages, 205; visual, 11, 173

layout. See gutters; paneling Lebanese Civil War, 205 Lebanese-Israeli War, 204, 205, 211, 222n4 Lebanon, 204–209, 212, 220–221, 222n4, 224n54 Lecigne, Bruno, 78 Legendary Comics, 48 Leningrad, Soviet Union, 69 lettering, 11, 98. See also typography “LIFE,” 209 ligne claire, 77–78, 81, 88 literature, 8, 24, 106–107, 167 Litoral, 166 Little Nemo in Slumberland, 46 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), 92, 102, 103n6 Lorenz, Federico, 166 L’Orient Express, 207 Los Angeles, California, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197–200 LRA. See Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Madaya, Syria, 69 magazines, 3, 5, 172, 173 mainstream media, 42, 208 Malouïnes, le Ciel Appartient aux Faucons, 166, 168–169, 174–178, 179, 182 Malvinas, La Trama Secreta, 182 Malvinas Islands. See Falkland Islands Malvinas 30 años, 173 Malvinas War. See Falklands War manga, 4 “Marcha de Malvinas,” 170, 184n12 Marinetti, Filippo, 211, 212 Markievicz, Constance, 125, 127–128, 129 Martinelli, Eduardo A., 166, 178–179 Marvel Comics, 5, 48 masculinity, 130–131 Massachusetts Review, 64 Maus, 12 Mavric, Senad, 59, 65–69 McAliskey, Bernadette Devlin, 129 McCain, John, 49 McKay, Sharon E., 92–93, 103n5 meaning, 9–10

234 • Index

mediation, 8–9, 12–13 medieval period, 23–24, 35–36 Men in Black, 59 memoirs, 189 memory, 98–99, 104nn20–21, 124, 181, 190–192, 201; collective, 176, 188–189; declarative, 100, 104n26; personal, 167, 188–189; and trauma, 190, 197 Merhej, Lena, 209, 212 metanarrative, 191 Middle Passage, 106, 108 militarization, 131 Mom, What Is War?, 59, 65–68, 66, 70 monarchism, 30 Monroe Doctrine, 173 Moore, Alan, 5 Muminovic, Ahmet, 58 Murphy, Justin, 115 NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) narrative, 9, 84–86, 174, 218; forms of, 192, 220; levels of, 85, 90n29; mediated, 168; online, 208 Narrative Discourse, 90n29 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 106 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 45 nationalism, 61, 68, 170, 173–174, 182 National Security Strategy (NSS), 54nn4–5 Nat Turner, 106, 109, 112, 119 Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, 117, 118 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 139 New Military History, 6. See also history: military New York City, New York, 44–45, 53 New York Times, 46 Nib, The, 52 9/11, 42, 44–47, 52–53 9/11 Commission. See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

9/11 Commission Report: A Graphic Adaptation, The, 45 1913: Larkin’s Labour War, 123, 124, 126, 129 99 Days, 189, 192–201, 194, 198, 199 noir, 193, 196 noncombatants. See civilians Nora, Pierre, 14, 19n66 Noys, Benjamin, 35, 36 NSS. See National Security Strategy (NSS) Obama administration, 42 objectivity, 175, 215 O’Brien Press, 123 Occupied Territories, 147, 149, 152, 154, 156n6, 158nn29–30; claims to, 144, 145, 146 On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 99 origin stories, 176 Ortega y Gasset, José, 176, 186n30 othering, 28–29 PA. See Palestinian Authority (PA) pace, 10–11, 126 Palestine, 215 Palestine, 138–140, 141, 142, 143–147, 151–152, 154 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 145 Palestinian Authority (PA), 144, 146, 155 paneling, 98, 152, 179; and meaning, 81, 101, 181, 195; splash, 110, 113 paralanguage, 11 participation, 221 patriotism, 172, 174 PFLD. See Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLD) Phillip VI, 24 photography, 157n13, 215, 221 Pichy Ciegos, Los, 166 picture-specific combinations, 11 Platinum Studios, 59

Index • 235

PLO. See Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Plunkett, Joseph, 127 political art, 220–221, 222 politics, 43, 108; in Argentina, 165–167, 169–172, 187n44; in Middle East, 139, 145–146, 149; in United Kingdom, 171; in United States, 44, 114 Politics of Aesthetics, The, 219–220 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLD), 152 positionality, 143 Postema, Barbara, 195 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 92–95, 97, 104n23, 147, 149; and memory, 98, 100, 104; statistics, 102–103n1 printing, 2 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, 165 propaganda, 60–61, 124, 143, 196, 220 PTSD. See post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Punch, 3 Rall, Ted, 50–52, 57n48 Rancière, Jacques, 219–220 Rattenbach Report, 184n15 readers, 43–44, 78, 81, 90n29, 206; challenging, 205, 215; juvenile, 115; role of, 8 Reagan administration, 42 realism, 167, 176, 182 realist drawing, 182 Rees, David, 49–50, 53 reflection, 35–36, 172, 182–183, 215–216, 221 Regarding the Pain of Others, 215 Reggiani, Federico, 172 reinterpretation, 35 religion, 61, 75–77, 79, 114; folk, 82–83 Remi, Georges Prosper. See Hergé representation, 12–14, 192 revenge, 35, 50, 77, 111, 139, 198–200 revisionism. See history: revision of Revolt of the Masses, The, 186n30 Richemond, France, 25 ritual, 78–82 Rolling Stone, 49

Ross, Craig, 116–117 Rustemagic, Ervin, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69 Rwanda, 189, 192–193, 200 Sacco, Joe, 52, 149–153; and Fixer, 63–64, 69; and Palestine, 138–139, 140, 143–147, 213, 215 SAF. See Strip Art Features (SAF) Safe Area Gorazde, 63 Said, Edward, 150 Saint Petersburg, Russia. See Leningrad, Soviet Union Saints, 76, 77–78, 81–86, 87 Samandal, 207, 210, 223n29 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 62, 63–65, 66–67; as character, 59, 67, 68–70 Sarajevo Tango, 62–63 satire, 221 Scuzzo, 173 Second Intifada, 146, 147, 158n26 Secret Identity Crisis, 48 Secret of Raspberry Jam, The, 64 self-reflexivity, 206 semiotic resources, 8 sequential art, 5, 191, 206 Ser Argentino. See Argentine Being shock value, 108 sieges, 29, 59, 62, 65, 68–69 silence, 28, 211 simultaneity, 9, 218–219 Singer, Marc, 111 slavery, 105–106, 108–109, 112–120; and religion, 107, 110–111 “Smiling Biscuit,” 67, 70 “Sniper Story,” 65, 66, 68 social media, 219 Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist, 75–76, 80, 82, 86 Sontag, Susan, 215, 221 sound, 11, 195, 211, 216 Southampton Revolt, 105, 111–113 Spiegelman, Art, 12, 46–47 spirituality, 76–77, 79, 117 splash panels. See paneling: splash Spottswood, Stephen Gill (Bishop), 106

236 • Index

Stapic, Boris, 64 “Starry Night,” 218 Steal Away: The Visions of Nat Turner, 117 Strip Art, 58, 59 Strip Art Features (SAF), 62 strong horse principle, 139, 156n4 subjectivity, 44, 143, 167, 179 Sudan, 102 superheroes, 45, 47–48, 60–61 Superhrvoje, 72n14 Surdiacourt, Steven, 4 surrealism, 191 symbols, 85, 86, 111, 117, 218 sympathy, 144 Tajna dzema od malina. See Secret of Raspberry Jam, The Taliban, 42 “témoignage,” 209 temporal relations, 125–127 terrorism, 42, 54nn4–5, 139, 149 testimonials, 167, 175, 178–179 testimony, 110, 143, 168, 200, 204 text/image ratio, 10 Thatcher, Margaret, 170–171 thin places, 79, 80 time, 213, 215, 218–219 time as space, 219 Tortas fritas de polenta, 166, 168–169, 178–181, 180, 183 total war, 111–112 Towers of Bois-Maury, The, 62 transitions, 44, 95 Trasfondo, 167 trauma, 190–192, 201, 204, 210–211, 215 trauma studies, 167–168 traumatic moments, 97–100, 104 Treaty of Tientsin, 75 Trône d’Argile, Le, 24–25, 26, 33–34, 34 Troubles. See Irish Troubles Trump, Donald, 42, 55n11 Turner, Nat, 105–114, 117, 119 Tutsi, 192–193, 196, 197–198 Twin Towers. See World Trade Center typography, 211–212. See also lettering

Uganda, 93, 102, 103n6 Ultimates, The, 48 UN. See United Nations (UN) Una Puta Mierda, 167 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 105, 106 United Kingdom, 7, 166, 169–172 United Nations (UN), 62, 170, 200 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), 151, 153 United States, 54nn4–5, 173; and comics industry, 3–5; foreign policy, 41–42, 46, 50–52, 54–55n7 UNRWA. See United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Uzi and the Stone, The, 143 Valter brani Sarajevo. See Walter Defends Sarajevo van der Kolk, Bessel A., 104n21, 104n23, 104n26 Vertigo Comics, 48 victim psychology, 148, 159n40 Vietnam War, 6, 7, 56n27, 160n46 Vikings, 35 violence, 139–140, 144, 146, 149–150; normalization, 155, 187n41, 213; state, 179 Virtual Museum of Censorship, 207 visions, 83, 85, 110–111 visual clarity, 99–100 visual narratives. See graphic narratives visual rhetoric, 100–101 visual studies, 167–168 visual-verbal mode, 8–12, 53 voiceprints, 78, 89n14 “Walk, The,” 66 Walter Defends Sarajevo, 58 Waltz with Bashir, 160, 191 War between the States, The, 106 War Blues, 217 War Brothers: The Graphic Novel, 92–102, 95, 96, 99

Index • 237

warfare: hybrid, 1; medieval, 23–36; modern, 69; postmodern, 41–42 War Fix, 52 War Is Boring, 52 War on Terror, 1, 41–54, 50–54, 54nn4–5, 55n9 “weaponized fiction,” 15n3 weapons, 26, 38n22, 113, 195 web comics, 208–209 websites, 52 Weekly Standard, 139 West Bank, 144, 145, 150, 151, 155, 156n4 Wildstorm Productions, 49 Winter Olympics (1984), 62, 69 witness, 209–210 women: and equality, 130, 133; marginalization, 130–131, 132; roles of, 67, 83–84, 124–125, 171; and war, 127–130, 132–133, 171

“wordless woodcut novel,” 10 word-specific combinations, 11 World Trade Center, 49 World War I, 6, 7 World War II, 6 World War 3 Illustrated, 50, 51 X-Men, 115 Yang, Gene Luen, 76–78, 80–81, 82, 86, 88–89 Yellow Kid, 46 Yugoslavia, 58, 60 Zaimovic, Karim, 64–65 Zalica, Antonijo, 65 Zamba, 174 Zang Tumb Tumb, 211