‘Productive Myopia’: Seeing Past History's Spectacle of Accuracy in Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza

Abstract

In disallowing the inaccuracies of memory to infiltrate stories of war, one condemns oneself to remain forever blinded by the obvious, shielded from the invisible violence that often lurks beneath the visible. Following Žižek, this article posits that invisible violence should be glimpsed indirectly, through aesthetic representations often excluded from the annals of the official history of war. The argument is made through a close reading of Joe Sacco's representation of the 1956 Khan Younis massacre as depicted in Footnotes in Gaza. In this text, Sacco himself and Omm Nafez – one of the protagonists of his story – express, in detail, their memories of the massacre, despite the initial reluctance of the media and publishing houses to publish their accounts. The position of Sacco and Omm Nafez is described as being that of ‘productive myopia’ because the inaccuracies and confusions that their accounts accommodate – instead of being limiting – are considered an avenue through which they may approach what has hitherto been invisible in other accounts of this massacre. Nora's validation of memory as way of producing knowledge and Žižek's notion of invisible/objective violence as an important driver of the visible/subjective cycle of violence are used to show how these memories may be inserted into the realm of history by embracing their shadows and complexities rather than disallowing them. It is conjectured that doing this may allow one to glimpse aspects of violence that have remained hitherto unseen.

Keywords:

• history
• memory
• Žižek
• Sacco
• Nora
• invisible
• violence
• shadow
• accuracy

Notes

1 Prof. Pal Ahluwalia, pro vice-chancellor (Research and Innovation) University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, is acknowledged for suggesting the notion of myopia in relation to Omm Nafez.

2 This consisted of the large-scale killing of civilians in the Palestinian village of Khan Younis in 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis ‘when Israeli forces briefly occupied the Egyptian-ruled Gaza strip’ (Sacco, 2009: ix).

3 Because of the difficulty in obtaining copyright to reproduce images from the graphic narrative, the relevant panels are described in detail in this article instead.

4 In 1956 there were on-going demolitions of Palestinian houses in Gaza to make way for new Jewish settlement in the area.

5 At this point it is pertinent to recall Žižek's definition of trauma as ‘meaningless brutal interruptions that destroy the symbolic texture of a subject's identity’ (Žižek, 2008b: n.p.) because it is the brutal interruption of Omm Nafez's identity as a person with an intact home and family that is so poignantly represented in her unrefined smears of ash.

6 Another reason is that the Khan Younis massacre is also referred to as the ‘greatest massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil’, a moment that was at first relegated to the margins of history, but struggles for exposure so that it will not be forgotten or repeated, much like the Shoah (Munayyer, 2010:1).

7 See for instance Isabel Bayrakdaraian's rendition of the Second Movement, recorded in Auschwitz for the film entitled Holocaust – A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz, with the Sinfonietta Cracovia conducted by John Axelrod. I am indebted to Dr Charl Schutte, retired chief researcher, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, for suggesting this.

8 Hirsch claims that different media can combine with each other to produce vast intricacies that alter the problematics of Holocaust representation, making what was before invisible, representable (Hirsch 1992–1993).

9 According to Schäuble (2011) aesthetic representations of violence that use non-realism as a code are able to uncover a hidden, more real truth, out of the opaque ambivalences and unseen different states of consciousness that constitute people's lives. In addition, Schäuble notes that graphic narrative artists Spiegelman and Sacco deliberately challenge the inadequacies of traditional historical representation and expose its inability to represent the actual obscenities of the Holocaust and warfare, by using only realism as a code.

10 Sobchack (1992) has long claimed that the medium of film provides a unique and particularly rich way to represent horror because it seems to induce the experience of reality whilst simultaneously being perceived as mediating reality.

11 Honess Roe states that ‘animated documentary broadens and deepens the range of what we can learn from documentaries’ because it shows what is not filmable – especially subjective states of mind – as if they were part of reality and thus is able to capture what is invisible to live-action films (Honess Roe, 2011: 217).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is an English Studies Lecturer at the University of South Africa and a PHD student at the International Centre of Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia. She does research on the ineffable and the ethical representation of violence and trauma in the fields of cultural, literary, and film and media studies.